"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."