03.She.Wanted.It.All.2005 (12 page)

That year, Davenport Village I, the first stage of the shopping center Steve bankrolled, opened. In stone and stucco, with tile roofs, it soon boasted a pharmacy, a travel agency, a small restaurant, professional offices, and a shipping store named PakMail. At Koslow’s, a tony furrier, Celeste bought furs, having only
Celeste
with no last name embroidered inside. “That way I won’t have to change it when he dies,” she told the girls.

After Studio 29, a posh second-floor salon opened, Celeste often went there to Joseph Prete, a tall man with extravagant gestures. Throughout her appointments, they gossiped, providing entertainment for the rest of the clientele, many residents of the surrounding hills. One day a manicurist overheard Celeste and Joseph chortling about Steve. “I thought that old man would be dead by now,” she said.

The month after the China trip, things moved quickly in Celeste’s life. That fall, she and Dawn went to Katz’s, a downtown
eatery with a sprawling bar. About ten that night Celeste called Jimmy Martinez, her last husband, who rarely minded going out at the drop of an invitation, and asked him to join them. Celeste and Jimmy flirted, the fire between them reigniting. He took her to his house and they made love. From then on she disappeared more often from Toro Canyon. She laughed about the affair with the teens, telling them, when Kristina asked why her knees were raw with scratches, that “sex with Jimmy got wild last night.”

The affair presented a conflict for the twins. They’d grown up knowing they needed to look the other way with their mother. They’d kept their mouths shut—as ordered—about the sleeping pills and Everclear. Now, Celeste was being openly unfaithful. Still, Kristina and Jennifer said nothing. “We’d talk with our friends about it, how screwed up life with Celeste was,” says Jennifer. “But we’d grown up with her always having some other guy on the side. We knew not to tell Steve. We knew it would only make our lives worse.”

Experience had taught Celeste that her daughters knew how to keep their mouths shut, and she flaunted the affair, not even attempting to hide it from them. Yet, they’d both grown to love Steve. “We’d grown up knowing not to let anyone into our hearts, because they always left,” says Kristina. “But Steve passed every test. We knew he loved us.”

The girls, it seemed, lived in two worlds—one with Steve and the other with Celeste’s secret life, where nothing was out of bounds. One night she took Justin and Kristina to a concert given by Jerry Jeff Walker, an aging rocker from Austin’s cosmic cowboy days. Celeste drank and became belligerent, screaming at the stage, attempting to get Walker’s attention. Justin thought she seemed determined to hook up with the artist, who ignored her. Afterward, she drove to Jimmy’s house. When he didn’t answer the door, she said a car parked on the street meant he was occupied
with another woman. In front of the teens, she raised her skirt and peed on his grass.

That same month, in California, Celeste’s adoptive mother, Nancy, and her husband, Al, were talking about moving. “Al and I wanted to live somewhere less expensive,” says Nancy. “Celeste said, ‘Why not live in the lake house for the winter?’”

Before Thanksgiving, the twins drove to California with Celeste to pick up the grandmother they’d once been told was dead. Although she’d played no part in their lives, Nancy fawned over them, telling Jennifer, “You’re my favorite grandchild.”

“She was strange,” says Kristina. “She kept talking about how she loved us.”

The girls took turns driving Nancy in one car while Celeste, Al, and the other twin drove a second car and a rental truck heavy with Nancy and Al’s possessions. The girls took advantage of the time alone with the woman who’d raised their mother to ask questions. Kristina wanted to know what Celeste was like as a girl, if she’d had problems growing up. Jennifer asked if Celeste had really graduated from high school early and gone to Pepperdine. Nancy snapped at them and said it was none of their business.

In Austin, Nancy and Al moved into the lake house while they looked for a home, and they spent the holidays with Celeste, Steve, and the twins at the Toro Canyon house. But Celeste quickly tired of them, complaining to friends that she wished Nancy had never come. At Tramps she told Denise, “I hate that she’s here. I just want her to leave.”

That Christmas, Celeste told Steve she wanted a new diamond solitaire, like a ring she’d seen on a woman at the country club, a flawless eight-carat stone. “Buy it for me,” she cajoled. Under the tree Celeste had professionally decorated for $3,000, waited a small box with her name on it. But it held a gold necklace, not the diamond ring.

“That fat fuck is going to regret this,” she told the twins.

While she fumed about the ring, Celeste seemed unconcerned about something else that happened late that year: Steve was diagnosed with Type II diabetes. His risk factors were climbing. His mother had died of heart disease at sixty-seven, his father at seventy-five, and he was following quickly in their footsteps. Dr. Handley questioned him about his drinking habits. Steve said that he drank only two or three cocktails a night. Of course, he had no way of knowing that the drinks Celeste served him contained pure grain alcohol. On his chart, Dr. Handley noted the troubling results of Steve’s blood tests: His kidney function was decreasing, often a result of high alcohol consumption.

One evening late that year, Becky called from Dallas and Steve got on the telephone. “He didn’t make sense, like he’d had too much to drink,” she’d say later. “I never even considered the possibility that he was drugged.”

After he passed out at night, Celeste threw off her bathrobe. Underneath she wore her clothes for the evening, either something to wear out with friends or to meet Jimmy. One day she talked with the girls’ friend, Amy, raving about the sex. Suddenly she looked worried. “Steve and I have a prenup,” she said. “If he divorces me, I won’t get any money. If he asks if I’m having an affair, will you lie for me?”

Amy didn’t hesitate. “No,” she said. “I don’t lie for anyone.”

Celeste became suddenly silent.

The possibility that Steve might ask didn’t seem out of the realm of possibility. He’d begun acting suspicious about Celeste’s whereabouts, asking her where she was off to, dressed up to go out. “To get my hair done,” or “Just out with friends,” she’d say, pausing to peck him on the cheek on her way out the door.

Despite Amy’s insistence that she wouldn’t lie for her, Celeste continued to confide in all the teens, and didn’t appear
worried that she’d lose control over them. Amy was there the day Celeste ordered Kristina to grind up sleeping pills and mix them into Steve’s food. For one of the few times in her life, Kristina refused. Celeste then insisted Amy do it. “I wouldn’t do it, either,” she says. “So Celeste did it. The whole time, she was cackling, like she thought it was really amusing.”

That same month, Celeste, the teens, and a group of her friends from Tramps—including Denise and Terry Meyer, Celeste’s manicurist—drove to Houston on an antiquing trip. When they arrived at the Doubletree Hotel across from the city’s Galleria shopping complex, Celeste plopped down her credit card and paid for the rooms. When the charge was rejected by the credit card company, she said, “Try this one,” and rattled off another number. That credit card was accepted. On the way to the room, she laughed and told the teens, “That’s Steve’s. It always works.”

At a large warehouse complex dedicated to antique dealers, the women shopped. Many collected antique pickle jars, and Celeste bought the most expensive one they found that day, made out of cranberry glass, for $950. That night, the twins went to the Galleria to eat at the food court, while Celeste, Denise, and the others had reservations at Café Annie, a rosewood-paneled restaurant that caters to Houstonians who make the society column. At dinner, Celeste rattled on about Jimmy.

“Are you having an affair with him?” Denise asked.

“No,” Celeste lied. “Don’t be ridiculous. We’re divorced.”

At the bar, Celeste struck up a conversation with two well-heeled men in business suits. The men followed them to a disco, where the women drank and Celeste danced with both. Before long she told Denise they were taking her back to the hotel, but that night she didn’t return to the room the two women shared. In the morning, Celeste arrived at the
room she’d booked for the twins and their friends. “It’s too embarrassing to show up in the same clothes I had on last night,” she said, laughing. “Tell Denise I slept here.”

She never asked if they’d go along with the ruse, and they did as they were told.

Still, the twins struggled with lying, especially to Steve. Months earlier Celeste had told them that he wanted to adopt them but he wanted them to ask him to do it, to be certain it was what they wanted. That day, Jennifer and Kristina walked outside and sat down next to him. “We’d like you to adopt us,” Jennifer said. “We love you.”

Tears filled his eyes. “I love you both, too,” he said.

Weeks later they officially became his daughters.

In February the twins celebrated their eighteenth birthday. That night the teens, Celeste, Steve, and Al and Nancy had dinner at the country club, then gathered at the Toro Canyon house to open presents. As Celeste handed them to the girls, she told Steve who’d sent them. More than once she lied, about gifts from Jimmy, saying they were from Dawn or another friend.

The following night she rented a private dining room at Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, an upscale TGI Friday’s type restaurant, and hired a disc jockey for a surprise party. Fifty of Celeste’s friends, a few of the girls’, and even some of Steve’s attended. He wasn’t there, but Jimmy was.

To the guests, Celeste bragged that just the flowers— fresh-cut centerpieces—cost her $5,000. Music filled the room, the bartender poured liberally, and male dancers in G-strings gave the embarrassed twins lap dances. Steve’s former secretary, Lisa, was there that night. “Steve didn’t want to come,” Celeste told her. Nuzzling Jimmy, she added, “Isn’t he cute? I don’t know why I ever divorced him.”

Later the teens would say Steve hadn’t known about the
party and that they were ordered not to tell him. On that day in the family planner, the one Steve had access to, Celeste had written: “Girls spending night at Amy’s.” Weeks later, however, Celeste’s double life came into focus. Even if he wanted to, Steve could no longer ignore it. First he discovered $10,000 in bills from the party. It must have stung when he realized his wife hadn’t wanted him there. Then Chuck Fuqua called from Bank of America. Steve’s account had a $50,000 overdraft. When he investigated, Steve discovered that in a matter of months Celeste had gone through $300,000. When he demanded an explanation, she had no answers.

“I don’t care about the money. I won’t be mad. Just tell me what you did with it. Show me that you got something for the money,” he pleaded.

“I bought stuff,” she said, laughing. “Just stuff.”

Seething, Steve soon discovered something else. Somehow he learned about her affair with Jimmy. Hurt and angry, Steve called Kuperman and again discussed divorce. Friends say he was sick about the turn of his marriage, but determined that it was time for his life with Celeste to end. He said little to the girls about the conflict, except one day, when he and Jennifer took one of their car rides. “Your mother’s upsetting me,” he said.

Days later Kristina walked into the kitchen and found Celeste holding a pistol to her head. “I’m going to kill myself!” she screamed. “You don’t love me, nobody loves me!”

“I love you,” Kristina pleaded, crying. “Jen loves you, Steve loves you. We all do.”

“No, none of you love me,” Celeste insisted.

Terrified, Kristina called 911.

A squad car and an ambulance screeched through the gates at the Gardens of Westlake and pulled up in front of the beautiful house with the man-made stream. Two deputies
ran inside followed by EMS workers. They talked calmly to Celeste, asking for the gun. Finally, she handed it to them.

Just then Steve pulled up the long tree-lined driveway and parked off to the side. He rushed toward the house in time to see Celeste put in a squad car and driven away.

Inside, he talked to a deputy who explained what had happened. He comforted Kristina as the deputy wrote down a case number.

“You’ll need this to get your gun back,” he said.

But as soon as the deputy left, Kristina begged him, “Please don’t pick the gun up. Don’t bring it back into the house.”

As she cried and he held her, Steve agreed. Later, Kristina would regret convincing her father to get rid of the gun, which he kept next to his bed.

Meanwhile, Celeste traveled through Austin’s downtown traffic on her way to St. David’s Pavilion, a critical care psychiatric unit. There she’d meet Tracey Tarlton, a smart, intense, and deeply troubled woman. From the first, Tracey felt drawn to the tall blond woman with the deep blue eyes. Later, after it was too late, she’d rethink that day and believe Celeste was already luring her into what would become a deadly dance.

“T
he first time I remember seeing Celeste, she
was smiling at me,” says Tracey, shaking her head sadly. “It was like instantly there was something between us.”

They may have been drawn together by a similar history, painful childhoods that left scars so deep they could never heal. Or perhaps it was something else Celeste recognized in Tracey that day. Some said Celeste had a talent for understanding the intrinsic traits that defined a person, then using them to her advantage. In Tracey, she’d discovered a woman who was her polar opposite and, in a strange way, her perfect match.

As a child, Tracey had been horribly violated, and someone she should have been able to count on to protect her did nothing to save her. The experience shaped her, leaving her as jagged inside as shards of glass from a shattered mirror. Her pain defined how she saw the world: as a collage of predators and victims. In the parlance of psychiatry, Tracey became what she’d most needed but never had as a child—a caretaker. Celeste had spent her life looking for someone to
take care of her. Tracey cared more about those she loved than about herself, and she would do anything, absolutely anything, to protect them.

“I grew up in a beautiful house, and, from the outside, it looked like a good life. My father was successful, and we lived well. I loved my father. He was a kind, gentle person. My mother … my mother was …” she says pausing. “My mother was the problem.”

The road that led Tracey at the age of forty-one to St. David’s Pavilion and Celeste was a long and tortuous one, beginning when she was growing up in what should have been a privileged world, as the only daughter of a successful attorney, who specialized in international tax law, and his sociable and seemingly carefree wife. When Tracey was born, in May 1957, Kenneth and Mickey Tarlton lived in Ridglea, a posh Fort Worth golf course/country club community, and already had two other children, both boys, eight and ten years old. “I was an afterthought,” Tracey says. “A surprise.”

Of her parents, Mickey was the more gregarious, playing cards with friends, often at the country club, where she dangled a Herbert Taryton cigarette from one hand and held a drink in the other. A stocky blonde with a poodle cut and a craggy face, she resembled Rosemarie on the old
Dick Van Dyke Show.
In some ways, Mickey was like Celeste, a mom who treated the neighborhood teens like friends. She wanted the teenagers to like her and often slipped them cigarettes, a drink, or the keys to her car.

At the country club, she told the bartender, “George, I want some sour mash. My doctor says I can have all the sour mash I want, but only sour mash.”

“Mickey was an alcoholic,” says Tracey. “And a mean drunk.”

Later, Mickey would be diagnosed as manic depressive. Self-medicating with alcohol, she spiraled from euphoria to
the deepest of depression. At times she couldn’t lift her head from the pillow, at other times she was giddy with happiness, and in between there were horrific outbursts of anger that cowered not only her children but her husband. “She’d yell and scream, just shriek at us,” says Tracey. “She verbally abused us, telling us we were nothing, that we would never be any good.”

With her daughter, Mickey did something else: She sexually abused her.

“Sometimes, I think the verbal abuse was worse,” says Tracey. “But the other is, just, well, something I still find it difficult to talk about.”

Whether or not her father knew of the sexual abuse, he knew about the constant verbal battering Mickey administered to his children, and he did nothing to stop it. In fact, he, too, was one of Mickey’s favorite targets. “Mickey would be drunk by the time Dad got home,” says Tracey. “She would just lay into him, and instead of making her stop, doing something, he’d go into the den and read.”

With an abusive mother and a vacant father, home became a place Tracey dreaded. She escaped in books, spending every moment she could reading in her room. Mickey cooked dinner early and then was too drunk to manage the stove. Tracey ate it cold and left the house by four-thirty to play with the boys in the neighborhood. When they played baseball, Mickey screamed at her, calling her names in front of her friends. As night fell, the other children went home. Tracey hid in the darkness until she judged she could stay out no longer. When she entered the house, it was always the same. Her father had secluded himself in the den, and her mother was on a rampage. At times she even pounded with her fists on her husband’s chest. Passive, he endured it until she stopped.

Later, Tracey would be unable to find family photos of
herself in her mother’s arms, as if even that were a comfort she’d been denied. Most of the time, her care was left to the maid or her father. But he stopped holding Tracey by the time she reached ten, when Mickey falsely accused him of incest. “Even then, he never stood up to her,” says Tracey.

As an adult, she asked her father why he hadn’t stopped Mickey. Her father grew angry and told her that it wasn’t her place to question his actions. But she did. Perhaps it was harder because she truly loved him.

Her best times were spent with her brothers and father in the Texas wilderness, hunting and fishing. Her father taught her to shoot, and in the early 1970s he gifted her with a .20 gauge shotgun, a Franchi, lightweight and easy to shoot. For a few years she shot small animals, squirrels and rabbits. “But I didn’t like killing,” she says. “So I stopped and used it to shoot skeet.”

From early on, Tracey’s life revolved around animals. She had dogs and cats and adored them. They offered her the unconditional love she never received from her mother. “Tracey was dog crazy early on,” says Pat Brooks, a friend whose father was also in the law firm. “She lived and breathed for her animals.”

In many ways Tracey, despite the long brown hair she wore down to her waist, looked like her brothers, stocky and big boned. She idolized them. “They were there with me, I guess, in the trenches,” she says. Once, when she was about ten, she talked to them about taking things into their own hands, by hiring someone to kill her mother. “It was never serious,” she says. “Just one of those things you kick around when you’re with someone else who understands how truly awful it is.”

Tracey went to good schools, did well, and her summers were spent at Camp Longhorn on the Guadalupe River, a prestigious establishment whose campers have included the
pampered scions of wealthy Texas families for generations. It was there that as children President George W. Bush and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison swam, played tennis, golfed, and earned “attawaytogos”—kudos for jobs well done. “It’s one of the top camps in the state,” says one ex-camper. “Campers have to have a legacy—a mother or father who attended—to go there.”

By adolescence, Tracey was an athletic tomboy, with shaggy brown hair. “From the beginning, she wasn’t what you would describe as feminine,” says Brooks. “She was always a burly girl.” She became a popular camper, and was asked to be a counselor. “Tracey loved the outdoors, and she was just fun to be around, enthusiastic and good to talk to,” says a former camper. “She loved books and animals, and treated people well. Tracey was the counselor you could count on to stand up for the kids who didn’t fit in.”

Looking back, Tracey would estimate that she took her first drink sometime before she turned fourteen. From that point on she drank nearly every day. It eased her feelings of being separate from the other girls. From early on she felt as if she didn’t belong, not at home and not with the girls who raved about boys and clothes. Later, she’d think about that and believe the other girls saw a masculinity about her that she didn’t yet realize. “I always felt out of place,” she says. “Drinking was a crutch. It took the edge off.”

In high school Tracey dated a football player. “It was what you were supposed to do,” she says. “But my heart was never in it. I never did the boy crazy thing.” That was the year she read
Going Down with Janis,
a book on Janis Joplin written by her woman lover. Tracey was fascinated with it, especially the love scenes. She read them over and over, until the pages were worn and dog-eared. Yet, she never thought about what that said about her or where her interests lay. “I didn’t see myself in it,” she says.

The “voice” first made its appearance in high school. When she drank, a man’s soft voice belittled her, inside her head. She never thought it was real, always understanding that it was something inside of her that called to her, and from the very beginning it said the things she’d heard from her mother, that she was bad and worthless. “It told me that I should kill myself, that that was my destiny. I think I thought that was what my mother wanted,” she says. Over the years, the voice left, then inexplicably returned.

After she left Fort Worth for Austin and the University of Texas, Tracey began to understand why she felt so distant from other young girls. As a freshman in the mid-seventies, she walked into a salon owned by Alice, a beautiful gay woman. Alice took one look at Tracey and recognized something Tracey hadn’t yet realized about herself—a kinship and a mutual interest.

The next day, Alice sat with a group of friends outside a friend’s rented house near the university. She’d invited Tracey to join them, and when Tracey walked up, it took her a few minutes to realize the attractive, bright women laughing and bantering between each other in lawn chairs were all lesbians. “It was like a light went on,” says Tracey. “It was like suddenly I realized, hey, I’m like they are.”

The other women recognized immediately that Tracey belonged. “She was like a young, handsome Kurt Russell,” says a woman who was part of the clique. “Tracey wasn’t trying to be a boy, it was just the way she was. She seemed to have an overload of testosterone. She had a husky voice, wore khaki pants, Ralph Lauren shirts, and Top-Siders. She carried herself and had the attitude of an adolescent boy, a splash of machismo.” The women soon noticed that Tracey and her mother had a strained relationship. When she talked
about her family, Tracey always referred to her mother as Mickey. “It was like she couldn’t bring herself to say the word mother,” says a friend.

Most of the women were UT students, and it was a time in Austin when gay men and women were coming out, acknowledging their sexuality and looking for others who shared their lifestyle. For a while Tracey lived a double life. Sororities ruled at UT, and Tracey belonged to Kappa Alpha Theta—the Thetas—which boasted girls from the wealthiest families in the state. “We called the gay sorority girls the Tah Tah’s,” says a woman who attended UT. “They were flighty and cute with lots of money.”

One friend, Nancy Pierson, brought Tracey onto her team and taught her to be a goalie in the Austin Soccer League. She’d often tell Tracey that she was good because she was just crazy enough not to worry about getting hurt. “She was a star on the team, strong and athletic,” says a friend.

Looking back, Tracey would say she never regretted coming out, but it did cost her dearly. She was drummed out of her sorority for “consorting with undesirables,” which she translated to mean the clique of women she circulated the gay bars with at night. The day after she was kicked out, she saw a friend on the street, a woman she’d known since camp. Tracey said hello, but the woman walked by without acknowledging her. “That’s the way it works,” she says. “People pretend they don’t know you.”

In the rush of coming out, Tracey flitted from one relationship to another. While many of the women preferred to look androgynous, Tracey liked feminine lovers. “Tracey was a cute young thing, butch. She was into girlie girls,” says a friend. “She liked them with curves, hips, and in dresses.”

It was a fluid and lighthearted time in Austin’s gay community, after centuries of living in the shadows and before the devastation of AIDS. “We weren’t coming out making a
statement. We didn’t care,” says Becky Odom, an artist and one of the original group. “People experimented, multiple partners, wild scenes. It was just the way it was.”

Despite the new freedom, there was still an undercurrent of pain, of not fitting in, that many within the community didn’t even like to acknowledge. “It’s tough being gay. Most people wouldn’t willingly put themselves outside the norm,” says Odom. “We had a lot of abuse in the community, drugs and alcohol.”

For Tracey, it was alcohol. And when she drank, like her mother, she became aggressive. “Alcohol made her cocky,” says Odom. “We had similar personalities. We’d get loud and alienate people when we were drinking. We’d play pool at the gay bar and tell people to fuck off. Tracey and I were bad news drunks together.”

There were bar fights, and Tracey had one car wreck after another. In the early years, she stayed with a lover briefly and then moved on. “She was like wow, so excited to be out there,” says Odom. The women went skinny dipping at Canyon Rim, a favorite spot in Barton Creek, and rented a cabin where they sunbathed nude. All from prosperous families, they didn’t flaunt or hide their sexuality. “Here were all these women out of the closet,” Tracey remembers. “It was wild, and at the same time family.”

The first of Tracey’s true loves was a beautiful young blonde named Joan, wildly feminine and straight. “It was an unusual thing. Tracey would make friends with straight women and they’d become attracted to her,” says Christie Bourgeois, a San Antonio professor and longtime friend. “They’d pursue her. They could make the leap with Tracey because she had a masculine quality.”

While she never announced her sexuality to her parents, she brought her lovers home. Her father treated them well, going so far as to tell Tracey he particularly liked one
woman. “You have good taste,” he said. A few years later he died of leukemia. “He stayed with Mickey right until the end,” she says. “He loved her.”

When Mickey was sober, she was fun and lighthearted with Tracey’s partners. When she was drunk, she became malicious. After Tracey and her lover went to bed, the phone rang in her bedroom. “I know what you’re doing up there, and it’s sick,” her mother whispered in a raspy, drunk voice. “Lesbians,” she hissed. “You’re lesbians.”