Dawn #2
I’d had enough of adventure going to Columbia for college.
My time in New York had started well enough.
I loved walking around the city and just looking up at the gleaming buildings and bright lights of midtown, and getting cheap tickets for Broadway plays, thrifting in the East Village, and spending afternoons seeing double features at the Angelika.
Audrey and I hit it off in the dorms right away.
She was one of the few people who’d ever gotten me to take risks, some of which had been utterly, perfectly outrageous but made for great stories at parties, like the time we snuck into the Met Gala wearing two slinky Narciso Rodriguez gowns Audrey had bought at Barneys off the rack that very morning, fueled by bagels and mimosas.
Audrey always fit in at those scenes, and no one questioned her appearance anywhere, since she was the Oscar-winning child star of The Violinist and Invaders who was taking time off from Hollywood to get a degree in psychology from New York City’s Ivy.
She gave me confidence to say exactly who I was.
“Just tell people ‘I’m from Napa.’ It’s like saying ‘I’m from Paris,’ ” she told me, “and everyone will want to know more.”
She was right. Everyone was curious about the legendary California wine country, and just about everyone in Audrey’s milieu knew Hartley Vineyard.
For a little while, when I got up the courage to wear the dress and talk the talk, I felt a part of something bigger, bolder, and far more glamorous than the papers I was writing for my art history and film classes.
The pinnacle of this stage of my life was at a penthouse in the East 70s, where I managed to keep Ethan Hawke entertained for a full twenty minutes.
I never let on that the truth of Napa, for those who actually lived there, was much hotter and dustier than the liquid jewels in handblown glasses indicated. Wine kept all the secrets.
No one knew that better than Audrey, even then.
By the time we met, she had already done one stint in rehab for amphetamine use.
She smoked French cigarettes and drank exclusively European wine, which she claimed didn’t give anyone hangovers.
She’d seemed impossibly grown up to me at the time.
I might have grown up in California wine country with enough money to be perfectly comfortable and even attend an Ivy League university without scholarship or debt, but when I’d turned sixteen Mom gave me a practical, used VW Golf with brand-new tires so I’d stay safe in the rain on Spring Mountain.
Audrey’s mother, on the other hand, had given her a cherry red convertible BMW like the one Kelly drove in Beverly Hills, 90210.
Still, we had an amazing time together, and my anxiety abated with her—it was almost like I could borrow some of her confidence and use it to do things I would have otherwise talked myself out of.
Audrey was the one who told me to “stop second-guessing yourself and take the film-editing class” or “just ask him out, already” after hearing me moon over the shy history major I’d been flirting with at the library.
Josh. My first serious relationship, then my first real heartache, which Audrey also got me through with more glittering parties and hangover cures.
We used to stay up late talking and dreaming about our futures—my favorite was the one where I directed movies that Audrey would star in.
And then we got that apartment in the East Village senior year, and it was like the two of us became the path that diverged in the woods.
I couldn’t handle the constant parties that were suddenly always in our home, the coke dust on the kitchen counter, the strange men I’d find in our living room, sometimes partially clothed on the couch, where all I wanted to do was watch the latest episodes of Friends that had piled up on our video recorder.
After I’d finally broken down in tears on the phone, Mom swooped in and fixed things, flying to New York that same night to pay Audrey the rest of my share of the year’s rent, then get me settled in a tiny place closer to campus where I could finish senior year.
To cheer me up, she’d taken us to see an amazing revival of Chicago that starred Bebe Neuwirth, whom we’d loved watching together on Frasier.
Clark had probably left for reasons similar to those that made me leave that apartment with Audrey.
God, I hated that thought, which was always there at the back of my mind, festering, waiting to leak out in weak moments.
How many of his triathlons had I missed because I was hungover?
How many embarrassing things had I said at cocktail parties and his work events, and how many picnics and other events had I skipped because there wouldn’t be alcohol?
Not that he was perfect; fortunately, I wasn’t under that illusion.
He could be exacting and rigid; he had to run and swim and bike for hours every day just to feel human.
I needed more sleep and more couch time than he did.
But…there were some memories of my drinking that I couldn’t look at fully, like all the times I’d driven buzzed or the girls’ weekend in Tahoe when I’d been blackout drunk and a friend told me I’d nearly cheated on Clark by going home with a guy I’d been flirting with at Gar Woods after too many Wet Woodies.
The things I’d said when my filter came off. The Incident.
I shook my head. This isn’t helping.
Thankfully, my phone dinged. Audrey, saying she was ready to order dinner and asking where I was.
Saved from my own thoughts. For the moment.
—
The dinner we ordered arrived incredibly fast, and we piled large shallow bowls with vegetarian pad thai, plus green curry with copious vegetables and tofu. It smelled hot and bright, and I couldn’t wait to dig in.
“Let’s get comfy,” Audrey said, waving us out of the kitchen and under the archway into a big living room with an enormous oatmeal-colored sectional covered in pillows with pink-and-blue embroidery.
There were plants and poufs and furry blankets adding warmth and texture and color, in addition to a large wall of built-in bookshelves exploding with books.
Another wall was all windows that looked out on the Hollywood Hills, which right now were studded with lights from other houses.
Audrey flopped into the corner of the deep sectional and tucked her feet underneath her while I sat one large cushion down, cross-legged, with my bowl nestled between my legs.
I used my chopsticks to pull a huge bite of noodles into my mouth.
Audrey did the same, and we sat stuffing our faces for a few minutes.
“I’m excited for our road trip,” Audrey said halfway through her bowl. “And I have to admit, I have a selfish reason for wanting to do it, too.”
I cocked an eyebrow. Say more.
“Okay. So. Well…as you know, I’ve been trying to get back into acting, but I am totally blocked.
I get parts, and they go nowhere, or I get offered reality TV gigs that I don’t want.
I was even offered a podcast. But I want to be in movies again.
Or a really great show like Athens—but that actually stays on for a few seasons,” she said, referring to a cable TV drama she’d done that had only lasted one season despite critical acclaim.
“I want to be creative, but something is in my way. I’m in therapy, and I’ve done retreats and burned sage and redecorated for flow and donated ridiculous sums of money to charities.
I’ve been to coaches and agents and had meetings galore, but I think I finally have to face something: The reason I keep going back to Jed has to be the same thing that’s blocking my career. ”
“Do you know why you keep going back?”
“Oh sure, there are plenty of things I can point to. My dad was in and out of my life on his whim, so I never had a stable father figure. My mom was addicted to pain pills and was the first one to offer me speed to get me through the exhaustion of being on movie sets when I was ten years old. I have a deep fear of abandonment, fueled by the fact that I’ve become the person to push most people away first—like I did to you back in college, like I’ve done to anyone who’s ever been good for me.
Instead, I cozy up to all the people who are bad for me, like Jed. ”
“Wow. That is a ton of self-awareness. What’s left for you to figure out?”
“That’s what I don’t know. Understanding my past, and even seeing the way it impacts my present, hasn’t helped me make better choices. It just makes me more aware of when I’m making bad ones.”
“Well…Is that entirely true? You’ve been sober for seven years!
Your life looks totally different now than it did when you were younger because you’ve been making better choices.
What about the amends you made to me and to some of the other people you pushed away and now keep close?
” When she’d written me an email three years ago apologizing for her behavior in college and asking if we could connect again, I’d been overjoyed and continued to be grateful for our renewed connection.
I, too, had missed my friend. Over the years, I’d googled Audrey, which had yielded surprisingly little information: her short marriage to another actor in the early aughts, a DUI in the Hamptons, an appearance at the party of some rising star.
Then there was the People magazine cover from 2010 that had stopped me in my tracks at Safeway with its declaration that the former child star “Is Back.” Two years sober and quite willing to speak publicly about her drug-and-alcohol abuse, Audrey was the absolute picture of wellness, on her way to a starring role in a show about ancient Greece.
When Athens was canceled, she’d dropped off the grid again. And then one day she’d emailed me.