Storms (65 page)

I knew that he understood what I was talking about: the miscarriage, the decadence of our lifestyle, and the fights. I just couldn't deal with the fights any longer. He listened silently as I spoke. In a broken voice I finished by saying, “I know I might lose you but I have to take care of me right now, Lindsey. I'll call you when I feel ready to come home. I love you, and I hope that you'll wait, but if you can't, I understand.” I could tell that he was crying and I knew that both our hearts were breaking. But I couldn't do anything but pray that in the end, if we were meant to be together, then I would ultimately return to Bel-Air and a new life with Lindsey Buckingham.

I didn't see Lindsey over the next several months. I led a quiet life, coming and going from visits to video sets and my acting classes. At the beginning
of July I returned home to my house on Benedict and found a cassette propped up against my front door. It was Lindsey's new album. With a sense of excitement I rushed inside and opened the cellophane wrapping. I gasped in surprise when I saw the dedication “This album is for Carol Ann” on the liner notes. With trembling hands I put it into my cassette player and sat on the floor to listen. As one song after another blasted through my living room, I sat stunned.

Every single song on his album, except one, was about our relationship. Songs that were so full of vindictive rage, blame, love, and longing that by the end of the record I felt heartbroken, shattered, and enraged. The songs painted a picture of our relationship that was so inaccurate and so unfair that I was stunned. His anger was obvious. His unwillingness to even mention how his unfocused fury against me was the main reason I'd left seemed both cowardly and indefensible.

Half of the songs were of love and longing. And these I understood, for I felt the same as he in spite of the problems we had together. But the vitriolic blame and slanted truths of the rest of them were of such magnitude that I started throwing things against the wall in fury. I felt violated. The lyrics on “Bang the Drum” were taken from our last phone conversation when I told him that I couldn't see him for a while because of my shock, dismay, and fear over what my acting coach had said to me. “Play in the Rain” not only quoted my exact words the day I asked him to spend time with me, but also recounted how lonely he knew I felt. “I Must Go” made it seem as if I were the only person in the world of Fleetwood Mac who touched cocaine. In this song, he told the world that I left in the morning and that I didn't come back, which left him all alone. Over and over again he sang that I needed to leave the “little drug” alone.

As I listened to this song I thought about the days that I'd left him in the morning and hadn't returned until night: days that I'd spent at the production company learning about the film industry, and other days when I'd gone to a hotel room to literally hide from him after an explosion of anger forced me to. Yet, to the world—and our friends—I would be the one who was to blame for the end of our relationship. I'd told only Sara the truth about it. In the lyrics on this record (as in real life) no mention was made of his explosive rage or the fact that I had tried so hard to stay in spite of it. And no mention was made that when I did cocaine I did it
with the rest of the Fleetwood Mac family—and Lindsey himself. Although weed was his drug of choice, he snorted cocaine on and off the road, in the recording studio, and at almost all of the Fleetwood Mac gatherings just like every other member of the band and the inner circle. After listening to the cassette, it was obvious to me that Lindsey's fury over the fact that I'd left him had been poured into his music. And the truth behind the music was of little importance.

But after the first rush of anger my mind knew what my heart didn't want to accept. Lindsey was not a man who ever took no for an answer. Not from Stevie, not from the band, and certainly not from the woman he loved. The separation I'd asked for and the reasons I'd given to him he'd taken like a slap in the face. He was angry. And
Go Insane
was a message to me. He loved me—but I'd better do what he told me to. He was the one with the power. He was the one who got to call the shots, no matter what I might have needed or wanted.

But one thing he didn't seem or want to understand was this: I had a little power of my own. I could decide who I spent the rest of my life with—and as of that moment, no matter how much I still loved him, I could never forgive or forget this ultimate insult. He'd lost me.
Go Insane
was the epitaph for our relationship.

As the weeks passed my phone seemed to ring at all hours of the day and night. It was Lindsey, leaving messages for me to please call, please see him—but I just couldn't. Most of his calls I never returned. When I did pick up at the sound of his voice it was to tell him that he'd hurt me more than words could express and I was not ready to talk about us. I was just too hurt. The chain which had kept us together was now broken. “The Chain” and its lyrics that had long symbolized everlasting unity to us all now spoke to me in an entirely new way.

Down comes the night

Run in the shadows

Damn your love

Damn your lies

In August a reporter from
Rolling Stone
phoned. They were doing a four-page feature titled “Lindsey Buckingham: Lonely Guy.” It was about Lindsey's
Go Insane
album and our breakup. The reporter kept trying to goad me into telling “my side” of the story of why Lindsey and I split, but I wouldn't. I wasn't willing to disclose the intimate details of the real reasons I left: the truth behind our fights and my unhappiness with the life I'd found myself living.

As a joke, I told him that I still liked cocaine, and then quickly told him that I no longer did it. I didn't expound upon it—in my naivete I assumed that I didn't need to. I hadn't done cocaine in months. It had been hard at first to stop doing something that had, during my years with Fleetwood Mac, become such a “normal” part of my existence. With the help of my therapist, I now realized how self-destructive I'd become. It was much easier to do a line with Sara when I was feeling upset or depressed than to let myself feel the pain of what was behind it. Cocaine made me feel better—it made me forget just how much I hurt inside and I'd never realized before that I had to feel the pain or I could never move on or heal. Through therapy, I was being given the tools to leave it behind—and work was a very important part of my healing.

In my new world, none of my industry friends used cocaine—5
A.M.
call times and sixteen-hour shoots made it very difficult to party and still be successful as a member of a video crew. And, like them, I wanted to be successful very, very badly. With this as yet another motivation, I'd been determined to remain completely sober. I now understood the insidious danger of it and I was determined to do my best to leave it behind.

But of course, when the article came out, the reporter wrote that I said I still loved it without bothering to print that I
also
said that I no longer used it. I shook my head wearily as I read it. In the next issue of
Rolling Stone
there were five letters to the editors where the public wrote that they didn't understand how any woman could live with anyone with as big an ego as Lindsey's—and I couldn't believe it. What did the world expect from a rock star? Of course he had an ego—he deserved to—and his accomplishments spoke for themselves. I sighed as I thought to myself,
I guess Lindsey's not too thrilled with this interview either.

The last letter made me cringe—it was from a woman who said that she would
love
to be Lindsey's girlfriend and suggestively said that maybe she could show him just how much sometime.
OK, that's a bit creepy
, I thought as I gazed at the magazine,
now he's going to get stalked!

I went on with the new life I'd started to build for myself, spending time now as a wardrobe assistant to one of my new friends. And I found the work both grueling and exhilarating. Three months after starting as her assistant, I was ready to become a costume designer with an assistant of my own. The music video shoots that I was hired for were more stressful and more exciting than anything I'd ever known. And with the support of the new friends I was making in the “real world”, the aching loneliness I felt whenever I thought of Lindsey became tolerable.

For there were nights, nights when I ached for him so much that I actually doubled over in pain. Nights when I cried so hard and so long that the dawn would creep over the hillside accompanied by my sobs. But no matter how much pain I was in, how much I wanted to go home to Lindsey, I knew that I couldn't. I saw clearly now what I would be returning to: a life where betrayal was as commonplace as that day's joint, line of cocaine, or vodka tonic. A life where the love between the members of Fleetwood Mac had become simmering rage and that rage tainted everything and everyone around it. The love was still there, but oh, it had been so long since they'd shown it—and I wondered if they would ever show it again.

I believed for so many years that the love I shared with Lindsey would survive anything and everything within the world of Fleetwood Mac. But now I knew that that only happened in fairy tales. And while Fleetwood Mac had indeed created its own fantasy existence, it was no longer one in which I wished to live. I made a choice. I didn't want to live in a kingdom where the inhabitants were unhappy and lonely. That world had numbed us all to the fact that beneath the fame and despite the wealth, we would never be happy unless somehow our own value as people could be based on more than record sales and the designer clothes we wore.

Almost a year from the time of my phone call to Lindsey telling him that I wouldn't be coming home, he arrived unannounced at my door. There was a white Porsche sitting in the driveway and he told me he'd rented it just for this “special” day. There was something he wanted to ask me, he said, and gestured for me to get into the car. Without saying anything,
I climbed inside. I knew that Lindsey was now living with another woman, and I, in turn, had been dating an art director.

So I was stunned when he took my hand and once again asked me to marry him. He told me that he loved me and that he wanted to produce an album where I would be the artist and he my producer. That way, he said, I'd have my own money and everything in our world would be perfect. I closed my eyes for a second and remembered the last time he'd proposed to me so many years before. I remembered my joy and excitement—and I remembered how as the years passed and the fights between us shattered me time and time again, I kept putting off our wedding until finally neither of us spoke of it. I sat silent as I listened to his new plans, and when he was done speaking I gave him my answer: no.

“It's too late, Lindsey. I have a new life now and I'm happy.” Seeing the hurt look on his face, I gently continued, “I'm not a singer. I'm a costume designer and I'm really good at my job. Lindsey, I'll always love and care for you, but I can't go back to living in a world where nothing matters but music. It was so bad at the end—you weren't happy and neither was I—and I can't go back to that, baby. I'm sorry, Lindsey.”

I kissed him one last time before I climbed out of the car and walked through the fading daylight to the shadowy entrance of my home. As I opened the door and stepped inside, I knew I was walking away from Fleetwood Mac and Lindsey forever. And I knew that I'd made the right decision.

Nine years before, a young girl had fallen in love with a man who turned out to be a prince in the kingdom of Fleetwood Mac. Overnight her life had been transformed. She'd lived in Lear jets, five-star hotels, and mansions. She had material wealth beyond her wildest dreams. But unlike the fairy tales of her childhood, it was a world where love could not triumph over darkness. And in the end that girl felt lost, lonely, and afraid. In real life, sometimes the girl doesn't marry the prince. Sometimes she walks away from the castle and off into the sunset alone … finding true happiness in the real world beyond.

Three years later, in 1987, I was sitting on an airplane reading a copy of
Rolling Stone
when I came across a review of
Tango in the Night
, Lindsey's fifth album with Fleetwood Mac. In it they spoke at length about Lindsey's songs “Caroline” and “Tango in the Night.” The reviewer wrote that these two songs were about a past love and were brilliant, angry, and poignant. I knew, of course, that both songs were written about and to me. But it would take me months to find the courage to listen to them. And when I did I was struck by the anger and longing in Lindsey's song “Caroline”, as well as the love expressed for me in “Tango in the Night”, from a man who had once been the center of my universe. And I cried. For the love I'd shared with Lindsey came back to me with the force and fury of a hurricane. I knew then that Lindsey's voice would always speak to me through his songs.