Live Fast Die Hot (11 page)

That night I made my way up the long, treacherous staircase at the private, members-only Soho House in West Hollywood. After fighting my way through the line at the valet, I was confronted by the cunty sphinxes guarding the elevator.

“I'm meeting Ms. Arthur. She's expecting me,” I said, hoping it might be that simple.

“There's no reservation under that name. Do you have another?” A tall brunette with two nostrils where her pre-Bat-Mitzvahed nose used to be smiled down at me from a mahogany lectern.

I tried Joan's first name, my last name, then a random series of numbers, exclamation points, and ampersands until finally the sphinx beamed proudly.

“Found it,” she said. “It was under Joan Arthur.”

“I said that.”

“You did?” She leaned back and feigned ignorance, overly confident in her kitten heels.

When I finally reached the rooftop garden, I was escorted to a table where a chic lesbian with an expensive, choppy blond haircut and mirrored Ray-Bans sat on a sofa, checking her phone.

“Honnnneeeeey,” she said, as if reuniting with a long-lost lover. As she brushed her bangs to the side, I could see she was older than me, but her body looked roughly fourteen. She threw her phone at her Balenciaga motorcycle bag and started talking.

“The food is horrible here, but I love the ambience. You're not really into food, are you?” She picked a piece of focaccia out of the bread basket and sniffed it. “Feel my abs. I was a swimmer and I never had children.” I dutifully touched her abs. They were rock hard, like a loaf of French bread that had been left out overnight. “You're not planning on having children, are you, honey? It'd be kind of pointless to become friends with you if you are. People with infants make the worst friends.”

“I…Not anytime soon,” I said with confidence.

Three months later, I was pregnant. Joan wasn't thrilled with the idea of me turning into a real-life Russian doll, but she accepted it so long as there was only ever going to be one mini-doll inside me. “You aren't going to have more than one kid, are you, honey? One is kind of chic but two is a fucking nightmare,” she texted me. I imagined she was speeding down Sunset Boulevard in her black Mercedes G wagon with bulletproofed windows.

“Of course not,” I lied.

After that first foodless dinner, where we bonded over being left-handed Geminis with boozy mothers, Joan and I were spiritually inseparable. No matter how many babushkas popped out of me, I knew Joan wasn't going anywhere. We texted and spoke on the phone eight times a day, sometimes saying little more than “Honnnnnneeeeey” and then hanging up. The other players in my life were jealous at first and probably even a little threatened, but, like all my obsessions, they assumed this one would pass. It didn't. Joan was the kind of woman I'd been looking for all my life. In her, I found not only a friend but a mentor. She looked after me. She remembered dates of things. She sent flowers and wrote cards. She threatened to kill people who didn't help my career. She was the mother I always wanted—only better, because unlike my real mother, I was never going to lose her to a man.

If my real mom wasn't willing to indulge my haunted-house notions, I knew Joan Arthur would.

“And finally,
this
is the room that I think it lives in,” I said, slowly leading Joan into Sid's nursery bathroom.

“Hmm…Honey?” Joan walked up to the antique mirror hanging above the sink and stared into it.

“Yeah?” I replied, worried she was going to ask if I also saw a young Gold Rush widow in mourning attire staring back at us.

“Do you think I look like Garth from
Wayne's World
?” Joan teased her bangs in the mirror and cocked her head to the side. “I think I might need to grow out my hair because people are commenting on all my photos that I look like him.”

Joan's vanity didn't faze me. I'm the daughter of a man who asked for head shots for his birthday; if anything, it felt like home. In that moment, actually, it came as a great relief. If Joan felt comfortable enough in my haunted bathroom to fixate on her hair, there probably weren't any ghosts trying to use my mirror as a portal to hell. Soothed, I bid her farewell and we didn't speak again until five minutes later.

“So I never even asked what your feelings were about the house,” I said, sitting at my computer and avoiding writing by googling pictures of myself with dark hair.

“Oh. It's definitely haunted,” Joan said. “I couldn't wait to get out of there.”

“What?” I slammed the keyboard.

“Medium Coke,” she replied.

“Are you talking to me?”

“No, girl, I'm at McDonald's.”

“Can you refocus? What about the ghost? Do I really have one?”

“Yeah, honey. I smelled him as soon as I walked in,” she said nonchalantly.

“Him?” I asked, looking around the room, panicked.

“I've always had a nose for ghosts. I had this angry queen living in my Studio City house. Think he was a writer on some Aaron Spelling show. Clearly threatened. He used to try to break my Emmys while I was sleeping.”

“I cannot believe you left me in my house alone when you knew there was a ghost,” I wailed. I was hurt. I was also disappointed in myself for fusing with yet another nonmaternal mother.

“Honey, he's a friendly ghost, he's Jewish.”

Unappeased, I hung up and ran out of the house. I called Jason and told him that Joan confirmed the ghost and that we needed to get in touch with our realtor immediately.

“ ‘Confirmed the ghost'?” Jason's voice hit an octave I'd heard only once, on our honeymoon, when I bit the tip of his penis as a joke.

I covered my mouth with my hand as I spoke so as not to make the ghost aware of my plans. “Baby. Why are you already so wound up? We just need to relist the house and move back into our old place.”

Due to its unique specifications—namely, a driveway that looked like an X Games half-pipe—our old house was still sitting dormant on the market. If I moved swiftly, I could be packed up and back in it by the weekend.

“YOLO,” I declared proudly.

“I'm gonna kill Joan,” Jason mumbled. “This isn't like an undisclosed mold problem or something. If you call the realtor, he's gonna think you're nuts.”

“He already thinks I'm nuts.” I reminded Jason of how I refused to go into escrow until I camped out at our new home overnight to make sure it didn't feel like the scene of the Tate/LaBianca murders. Standing outside and looking around the pool, I was now pretty certain it looked
EXACTLY
like the scene of the Tate/LaBianca murders.

“Yes, and you said you felt fine.”

“That's because I was pregnant and full of hormones. Now my womb is empty and I'm back to operating from a place of constant fear and distrust.” I walked back inside into the living room to make sure my housekeeper Lita wasn't shaking Sid uncontrollably.

“We aren't moving.” He hung up.

I was embarrassed as I explained to Lita why I needed her to sit with me in the bathroom while I washed my hair.

“You don't sense anything?” I asked, shampoo in my eyes.

“No.” Lita bounced Sid up and down on her lap while sitting on the toilet and trying to avoid staring at the stream of breast milk trailing down my chest.

It was a Tuesday and I was already running late for our Mommy and Me class in Santa Monica. I was excited to get Sid out of the house, but more excited to get myself out of the house. Sid didn't seem too bothered by the ghost, which meant one of two things: the spirit was benevolent or his soul had already been captured and I was living with a demon seed.

I felt bad about leaving Lita alone in the house, but not bad enough to interfere with my skinny jeans getting washed. I told her to take her time with the laundry, but to feel no obligation to finish the dishes if they started flying around the kitchen.

Baby's First Session in Santa Monica was one of those super-obnoxious classes you had to sign up for a year before you even planned on being pregnant, so obviously I had to rely on my sister's connections to get me in at the last minute.

“If you don't know somebody, you might get in, but you'd never get in with Abby. And if you don't get in with Abby, you might as well kill yourself,” she'd said. My sister was never one to mince words.

Apparently there was another Mommy and Me class in the Valley, but if you told people you were in the Valley class, they assumed you were over forty, single, and a casting director.

I agreed to take the Santa Monica class mainly because I felt pressured by society to do so. In the past, I'd never been one to cave to convention, but that was before I had someone I really needed to impress: Sid. I knew he wouldn't remember it one way or the other (until he was old enough for my sister to get him alone and give a detailed account of all my shortcomings), but I wanted to be perfect for him. And according to my peers and strangers I followed on Instagram, being perfect meant socializing with other moms and babies.

I pounded the intercom to get in the locked glass doors of Saint Vincent's east wing. The introductory e-mail probably included a code I was supposed to memorize, but I don't read e-mails with the words “Mommy,” “Group activity,” or “Children” in the subject. After sneaking in behind a more responsible parent, Sid and I made our way to the third-floor classroom.

Class had already started. I unbuckled Sid from his stroller, took my shoes off, and tiptoed in. The class turned and looked at me like I was Satan. I double-checked Sid's forehead to make sure there wasn't an emblazoned
666.
I then placed him in the circle next to a little girl wearing a Missoni turban. Eight women between the ages of thirty and thirty-five sat cross-legged on the spongy, checkered floor. Some breast-fed and bitched about their bodies. Some bragged about their kids sleeping through the night. One mom that I found particularly fucking irritating was this blond chick, Mirial, who translated everything anyone said into sign language. All of the babies were under six months old, even though two looked like middle-aged Jewish accountants. I was pretty sure none of them understood sign language.