RICKI

My tears didn’t last long. I forced myself to stop, thinking don’t be so weak! I didn’t even know why I was crying, exactly. Which made me think of something Axel had said about it being okay to just feel. Have a feeling, Ricki. It’s okay.

The next feeling I had, though, was a fresh wave of upset over the Sun-Lee photo.

The camera is the worst torture device ever invented, I thought. Dad patted me on the shoulder. “There, there.”

Whenever he came back from rehab he felt like a stranger at first. I shrugged away, trying to get myself together, trying to remember how to do this. Ask a polite but neutral question, right? “How was the drive?”

“Perfectly fine as always, Ricki.” He was wearing a peach-colored polo shirt and I could see he’d dripped coffee right where the bulge of his belly made it wrinkle. “I didn’t realize any of those photographs had survived.”

I turned it to face him, almost afraid to hear the answers to the questions I wanted to ask. But I had to ask. “When was this taken? Where?”

“The eagle used to be downstairs in the main room. These curtains on either side—they look black in the photo? Those are the red ones we still have.”

Thank goodness. This wasn’t a photo from the movie set. My mother apparently enjoyed rope bondage at other times, too. “This was at a party?”

“No, no, a camera would have been a scandal unto itself.” He plucked the picture out of my fingers and examined it.

“Who tied the ropes?”

He sighed. “Ricki, if you want to hear the whole story of this photograph I would be happy to tell it to you. But can we have a little food and some coffee? I haven’t had a decent cup of coffee in over a month.”

He’d be happy to tell me? That was not what I’d been expecting. Dad had always been evasive about both my mother and about bondage before. But maybe rehab had helped. Maybe knowing his father had put me in charge of the club helped, too. “I’ll have the staff bring us something.”

“Why don’t we go to the kitchen?”

Okay, maybe he hadn’t changed very much. “Dad, sit.” I pointed to the chair where Schmitt had sat when we’d met.

He sat. When I was done talking to the staff I took the chair Gwen had been in, leaving us both facing the eagle statue. I waited expectantly while he turned the photo this way and that, catching the light. The eagle loomed.

He eventually spoke. “This was shortly after we got back from our honeymoon. The photographer had some renown in the fashion and art world, but he did fetish photography on the side, under a fake name.”

It was certainly an artful photo. The only thing pornographic about it was the fact that it was a woman tied up and that implied something. “She looks so happy.”

“She was happy. Roesel, the photographer, was a rigger. Tied all the ropes himself, and then suspended her. If you look here—” His finger traced a faint line toward the top of the image. “You can see the support ropes that are anchored off to the side.”

“And she liked that?”

“She said it was like flying.” He put the photo down and looked around, as if hoping that would make Mina and a sandwich magically materialize.

“Please tell me you didn’t take this eagle with you to Italy,” I said, needing to be sure.

“What? Oh no, dear. The farthest this eagle has flown since this photo is to this office. God, no.” He put his hand over his eyes and I knew he was thinking what I had thought: that this was the piece of equipment my mother had died on. Thankfully not.

“Okay, but why is there a rope around her neck?”

He looked at the photo again. “Purely symbolic. You can see it’s slack.”

“You sound very defensive.”

“And you sound very accusatory.” He crossed his arms.

No one could make me angrier than my father. Not assholes at work, not Axel, nobody. “Well maybe the story you should be telling me isn’t about this photo but about how my mother died.”

“You told me you didn’t remember her!” he said, as if that absolved him of saying anything—as if it were my fault that he hadn’t already told me.

“I was a child who wanted her daddy to cry less and to pay more attention to her, so she told you what you wanted to hear.” I wanted to smack him. “It’s Gwen who doesn’t remember her. And why does that matter, anyway? If I don’t remember her I’m not allowed to know how she died?”

“What else did you find with that photo?”

“What else did you tell that Tinseltown Tab reporter that you never told me?” If he could answer a question with a question, so could I.

“What reporter?”

There was a knock at the door: the coffee and food. I got up to let them in and picked up the copy of TTT from my desk at the same time. I wheeled the cart over and handed the magazine to him.

He looked longingly at the coffeepot.

“You can have some coffee after you read this and explain it.”

“Goodness me, when did you grow up to be so bossy?”

Crown on my fucking head. I looked down my nose at him. “Read.”

He stopped arguing and started reading.

Once he had been reading for a little while, I decided to pour the coffee. I poured for both of us and added a drop of milk the way he liked it. And a spoonful of vanilla sugar. The spoon clinked against the mug.

He looked up. “I have no idea where this story came from.”

“Are you saying the reporter made up the quotes from you?”

He folded the paper up and plopped it down on the table between us. “Well, no. I mean, they sound like things I’ve said.”

“To whom? When?”

“I don’t know. But I will say this: everything I say in there is true.”

“Why don’t you say it to me, then?” I pushed the coffee mug in his direction.

He took it and burned himself on the first sip he was so eager to drink it. When his tongue had recovered from the scalding, though, he started to talk. “Understand, Ricki, I wasn’t keeping any of this from you. But when you were little, you were too young, and I never knew the right time to bring it up.”

“Well, it’s the twentieth anniversary,” I said. “I’d say now’s well past the right time.”

“And it’s hard to know where to start,” he hedged.

I wasn’t about to let him weasel away, though, no matter how hard or painful this was for both of us. “How about why you went to Italy?”

“Well, that’s in the article, isn’t it? We went there with Mossimo to visit his film set and see the sights. Rome, Tuscany … we had no real agenda. We didn’t even know Mossimo was planning his film to be some kind of kinky thing, but you know, this was shortly after Mapplethorpe’s death, and he wanted it to be some kind of homage.”

“Mapplethorpe? Robert Mapplethorpe?”

“Yes; is there another one?”

“You tell me.” I had a vague notion that Mapplethorpe was a photographer whose works had been censored. “His photos were kind of racy?”

My father chuckled. “Robert Mapplethorpe was … Oh, just Google him sometime, but in a nutshell, he was gay, and a big art celebrity, and he was also lovers with the publisher of the biggest gay BDSM magazine in the country, but I guess a lot of people in the art world didn’t know that, or didn’t care. You know, he did all these high art photos of flowers and such. But he also took gay BDSM photos and some museums and the government had tizzies about that right when he was dying of AIDS. He died right around the time your mother and I met.”

Which would have been in 1989, I knew. “But the trip to Italy wasn’t until nineteen ninety-five.”

“I know. Mossimo had been working on the concept for a couple of years. He went to Italy to film because well, first he tried to film it here and that didn’t work out, and then he started filming in New York and the police stopped him.”

“Why?”

“Because they thought he was filming a porno, which he wasn’t, but try explaining the difference between artistic nude and porn to a cop.” He shook his head.

“Okay, wait, but when you say ‘film here’ did you mean LA or here here?”

My father coughed uncomfortably. Were men allergic to talking? First Schmitt and now him with the throat clearing and sniffling. “I mean LA, but, well, your grandfather didn’t approve of any public depictions of bondage, especially not right in his backyard, if you know what I mean.”

I did. Grandpa Cy considered all of Southern California his domain.

“At any rate, Moss had been in Italy for a month or so when we went. And we toured around a bit before we met up with his crew. They had taken over a palatial estate, a huge old mansion.”

“Did the film ever get made? Did it ever come out?”

“Alas, no. After Anna’s death, they shut down production.”

“Because of the accident?” I prompted.

He had drained his mug and he set it down. “Ricki, I need you to understand that there aren’t any easy answers.”

“Obviously, or you wouldn’t have waited twenty years to tell me.”

He winced like I’d slapped him. I poured some more coffee into his mug to encourage him.

“This isn’t easy to talk about,” he said. “I mean, for me.”

It wasn’t easy to hear, either, but I needed to know. I nodded encouragingly and sweetened his coffee. “Go on.”

“It was late one night. Your mother and I had argued earlier that day, but not seriously. Typical little lovers’ spat. I … I should add that the idea to go spend time on the film set was your mother’s, and I went along with it since it was a good opportunity to defy Papa, which I was interested in doing at the time. I should also add that that photograph? That was your mother’s idea, too. Your mother was far more interested in such things than I was.”

“What do you mean by ‘such things’?”

“Bondage in particular. I mean, I liked spanking pretty girls and all, but I wouldn’t have met her at all if your grandfather hadn’t hired her as a hostess.”

I set my mug down before I could drop it. “Wait. You never told me that.”

“I thought you knew that.”

“No. No one’s ever mentioned it to me before!” That was a major piece of my parents’ story and I’d had no idea. “I knew you met at a dungeon party, but that’s all.”

“Well, you know, I hadn’t made much headway in settling down, but then he hired this sweet little dancer right out of college to work the monthly parties, and she and I hit it off.”

I felt like my world had been flipped on its side. I don’t know why knowing that affected me so much. My mother had been like Chita or Madison? And then my father married her? I was surprised my grandfather had approved of that. But maybe by then he was worried my father would never get around to marrying at all. I couldn’t imagine he hadn’t tried to fix him up with other girls of his class and stature. But then again he’d tried to fix him up with various jobs and none of them had stuck, either. It was hard to reconcile. In my mind my mother was a queen, the stately figure whose portrait looked lovingly down on us from the wall halfway up the spiral staircase in the foyer. Now to find out she was more of a Cinderella figure, plucked from anonymity …?

My father was still talking. “What I’m trying to say, Ricki, is that your mother was the kinkier one of the two of us. She loved rope bondage and being tied up, but my God, rope tying is so time-consuming, so complicated! Roesel tried to teach me. I learned a lot, but I always found it tedious. The only reason I did it was because she loved it so much.”

“Okay.” I swallowed, wondering what he was going to tell me next. The article had described her cause of death as strangulation and implied that she might have hung herself, as opposed to it being a bondage-related accident. But my skin prickled. Was he about to tell me it was his fault for not tying things right? “How does that relate to … what we’re talking about?”

“We can’t be sure it does,” he said. “We don’t know if she was alone or if someone helped her and was irresponsible. Was it autoerotic asphyxiation? Was it a scene gone wrong? Or was it suicide? All I know is what they told me: when she was cut free of the rope around her neck, she was dead.”

“Wait. Weren’t you there?”

“I was … incapacitated at the time,” he said, his face reddening for the first time in the conversation. “And I know you hate me for it, Ricki. But they teach us in rehab to be truthful and frank about these things. I had drunk myself into a stupor after she and I had argued. So I wasn’t awake when it happened. All I know is what Mossimo and the others told me when I came around.”

My mouth hung open a little and I closed it, trying to keep my dignity. The story I’d always been told was that after my mother’s death my father had descended into alcoholism. There was a kind of romanticism to that: his broken heart drove him to drink. But now he was telling me he was already a terrible alcoholic before then.

“Understand me, darling. I regret every day of my life what happened. I miss her every day and I will never stop. And I regret that if I had been different, if I had been a more enthusiastic lover, maybe, if I’d been the one tying the ropes for her or if I’d been more emotionally there for her, maybe things would have worked out differently. No matter the situation, I blame myself. But I did not put that rope around her neck myself, if that’s what you wanted to know.” He delivered this last bit like a classic Hollywood leading man, a Clark Gable or Cary Grant, coolly defensive. But the façade didn’t last. He covered his eyes with one hand. “God. Why did she abandon me?”

“Abandon you!”

He looked up suddenly. “Sorry. Sorry, Ricki. These are the rantings of a sorry old man. She didn’t abandon me on purpose, of course. There’s no way your mother killed herself. She loved life more than anything. But I felt abandoned when she went where I could not follow.”

He coughed then, as if that would stop him from crying. Maybe it did.

“Could I …?” He reached tentatively toward me. “Could I have that photograph?”

I picked it up and looked at it again. It was one of the only photos I had seen where she looked truly happy. Not wearing a showgirl smile, nor the prim “look how nice we look” grin she had in our family photos. She looked elated. Free. “Were there others like this one? I found it locked away in the safe.”

“I expect if you found that in Papa’s safe, then he burned the rest. He was so angry when he found out about the photo shoot!” My father glanced around the office as if Cy’s ghost might still be eavesdropping. “That was when he had the eagle moved up here, and he called Roesel in … I wasn’t in the meeting but I think he paid him off for all the prints and negatives. He was so livid. “Can you imagine if one of our people sees this in a magazine or a museum?” he raged. He shook his fist in a perfect imitation of my grandfather. “I tried to explain that we’d never bring the camera to an actual party but no, he said just seeing the photo would freak people out. Plus it was so recognizably Anna. He swore I was going to bring the press and ruination down on our heads.”

I silently agreed with Grandpa Cy on that.

“I thought he was being paranoid.” My father tapped the edge of the tea cart with his hands—restless, nervous despite how nonchalant he tried to sound: “The Mapplethorpe controversy proved that so many people were open to changing ideas.”

“I thought it proved people weren’t open to it,” I said.

“Eh, glass half-empty, glass half-full,” he said with a shrug. “I never understood quite what the big deal was. I liked the parties, but they seemed like innocent enough fun. So people like to play dress-up—in Hollywood that’s business as usual. So people like to get spanked or led around like a pony by the reins. I cannot understand why anyone would judge someone based on that.”

That’s because you’re a spoiled brat, I thought. Did he really not realize how people felt and how they might judge us? Or how that judgment might hurt us? Then again, how could a privileged man with lots of money and no job ever understand the ways that everyone else in the world relied on reputation and the esteem of others to achieve anything? My father had no aspirations and nothing to lose. He’d already lost the one thing in life he’d loved.

“Ricki,” he asked again, one hand reaching toward me, “could I have the photograph?”

I tucked it into my blazer pocket. “No, Dad, I don’t think it’s a good idea when it could fall into the wrong hands.” He might “forget” he gave it to someone the same way he forgot he gave the TTT interview. “I’ll keep it safe.” I reached out and took his hand instead.

That was the point where he started to cry. I went around to his chair and hugged him. My poor, damaged, lonely father. He’d never fallen in love again so far as I knew. “I’m so sorry, Dad.”

“Ricki!”

“Hush, hush, thank you for telling me.” I didn’t feel like crying, oddly enough. Maybe I just hadn’t taken it all in yet. Or maybe he was doing the crying for both of us.

He stood up and kept hugging me, and we rocked gently from side to side.

“Life is very hard when you’re alone,” he murmured, as he got his tears under control.

“You’re not alone, Dad. You’ve got me and Gwen.” I felt a little bad saying that when so often the feeling we had when he jetted off to St. Maarten or Paris for months at a time wasn’t that we missed him; it was relief. Did that make us bad daughters?

“Life is hard,” he repeated. “I thought she was my soul mate, you know. The person who made me feel fully alive just because she was alive. She wanted to live life to the fullest. I supported that. I supported the idea that if what she wanted, what she needed, to feel fulfilled was to fly on the end of a rope, she should go for it. But look at the price she paid, at the price we both paid, at the price this whole family paid.”

By the time he finished saying that, I was crying, too.

“I’ve spent the past twenty years in a stupor because drinking my way to numbness was the only way to keep myself from railing against the truth. That your grandfather considered his business connections more important than me, than my feelings. Knowing how Anna died, how could he keep running The Governor’s Club? How could he expect I wouldn’t find it an affront to her memory and a constant reminder to me of her death?”

I felt a terrible chill crawl over my skin. “You think that’s why it’s in the will that we have to keep it going?”

“He knew I’d shut it down if I got my head out of my ass.” He let go of me but kept holding my hands. “Make me a promise, Ricki. I know you have to uphold the will. But promise me you won’t get involved.”

I stared at him in confusion. What did he mean by “get involved”?

“I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if something happened to you, too.” He pulled me close again, clinging to me desperately. “Promise me you’ll never do bondage. Promise me you’ll stay away from ropes and from cocky, strutting doms who think they’re infallible!”

What could I do? It was the most connected I’d felt to him in years and years, the first real conversation I’d had with him as an adult, the first time I’d dared hope I might get my “real” dad back again. What would any good daughter do? “I promise, Daddy,” I whispered, my throat harsh with heartbreak and doubt.

AXEL

I got a bad feeling when we landed at JFK. The first thing I did was text Ricki and got no reply. My layover there was two hours long and nothing came during that whole stretch.

Maybe she’s in a screening, I told myself. Nothing to worry about.

I sent her one more before we took off, telling her I was about to be in the air for six hours but to text me any time if she wanted to and I’d see it when I got to LAX.

I should have tried to sleep on the flight. But jet lag and anxiousness are a bad mix and I ended up writing crappy angst-ridden lyrics for about a dozen songs. What if something had happened to her? Someone would have called to tell me, right? Well, if they knew. Who knew about her and me? The guys, Sakura, Christina, and her sister, Gwen. That was everyone I could think of. I imagined she had been in an accident and gave myself nightmares when I did fall asleep for a short while.

The thing was, I was distracting myself from my true worry, which was that she had shut down again. That she had taken my broken date with her the wrong way, or as a sign that I wasn’t relationship material. That my not being there when she needed me had doomed the relationship before it had even started. Maybe it was even true: maybe someone who was going to be traveling the world chasing fame and fortune wasn’t the best relationship material.

Mal slept most of the way and I let him. No need to burden him with my angst-y shit. But whatever might have caused her silence, it made me think: if tragedy befell the woman I loved, would that change the whole trajectory of my life? The whole trajectory for the band? Of course it would.

It drove home how hard I had fallen for her. I convinced myself she was fine and her phone was out of battery. I fantasized about bringing her home to meet my mother. No, bringing my mother to Hollywood to meet her. That was better.

Please, Ricki, let everything be all right.

“Mal, what am I going to do if something’s happened to Ricki?”

“Do?” My best friend cracked open one eye slowly, like a dragon waking up to find a tasty-looking knight on his doorstep. “I suppose that’ll depend on what that ‘something’ is.”

“She didn’t answer a text.”

“Sometimes people don’t, you know.”

“True. But theoretically speaking …”

“In theory if something bad happened, presumably you’d get over the heartbreak eventually.” Mal cracked his knuckles and pushed his long black hair out of his face. “Assuming you don’t get addicted to something as a result.”

“I get the feeling you’d kick my ass from here to Trafalgar Square and back if I did.”

“I certainly would. Now, seriously, Ax. Try again to explain to me why you are so into this woman.”

I imagined my mother asking the same question. “Look, does there have to be a reason? Doesn’t anyone believe in love at first sight anymore?”

“Love at first sight doesn’t stick unless there’s something for it to stick to,” Mal said. “I met her too briefly to get much of an impression, but she clearly left a deep impression on you. Deep enough that you skipped out of two separate rehearsals early.”

I’d wondered when he was going to call me on that. “I know.”

“She’s hardly the first woman you fucked before you talked to her.”

“That is not true. I mean, we did talk first. We were stuck in a limo for almost an hour before the awards.”

Mal didn’t pull punches. “And this means you’re not merely thinking with your dick? Because you liked her face before her pussy?”

“Mal!”

“Are you outraged because I might be right? Or because I’m wrong?”

“You’re wrong!”

“Convince me.”

“First of all, just because I was so successful in seducing her does not mean she’s an easy lay. She’s completely not.”

“So you like her because it suits your ego to know you seduced her.”

“No. She fits me so well, Mal. She’s so real. And she’s a sub: she needs a dom. She needs me.”

“You’re not convincing me that this is about your heart and not your dick,” Mal said with a bored-sounding yawn.

“Okay, how’s this? I just fantasized about her for an hour. Know what I fantasized about? Introducing her to my mother.”

“Oh?” Mal sat up a little. Apparently I had his attention now.

“This is serious. I can barely sleep because I lie awake thinking about her. Wishing she was here.” Well, and because of jet lag, but I didn’t mention that. “Not being with her physically hurts.”

“Hurts in what way?”

“My chest and skin where her body would touch mine when we hug? They just kind of ache when we’re apart.”

“That sounds terrible,” he said with a frown. “Are you sure that’s love and not some kind of neurological condition?”

“It’s love,” I said with a confident nod.

“Isn’t that what I’ve been telling you for how long?” he said with a frustrated snort. “When were you planning to tell her?”

That was an excellent question. “Um, as soon as she answers my text? I hope?”

But when we landed, there was still no answer from her.