Inside Out(42)

I started thinking about the good in her. She was so creative. She was resourceful. She could be very loving and generous, always taking people in. She had so much more to her than just what she was able to live out in her fifty-four years. She died on July 2, 1998.

Bruce was there with the kids, so we had all stayed at a hotel the previous night. When the phone rang at six a.m., I sat up in bed, knowing what I was about to be told. “Please hold the phone up to her ear,” I asked Aunt Carolyn. I whispered what I needed to tell my mother into the phone: “I love you.” I did. I still do.

Then I drove back to Carolyn’s house, where Ginny had stopped breathing in her hospital bed, and I took a few minutes alone with her, holding her hand. I didn’t cry then, and I didn’t cry when I went into the little bathroom off her room and closed the door. I had a rush of clarity as I stood absolutely still. All of the emotions that I felt toward Ginny—my anger, my pain, my hurt—were mine. The vessel for them was gone now. Whatever her issues were, and God knows there were plenty, she’d taken them with her. It was a liberating moment. I was flooded with compassion for the pain she had held all her life and had no way to work through or overcome. I felt sad for this wounded child who had never developed beyond the emotional level of a teenager. That understanding freed me to start to be more forgiving toward myself, and to quit working so hard not to be my mother.

I was only in the bathroom for three or four minutes, but when I opened the door, I felt very calm about entering whatever the next phase of my life would be. I had shed such a heavy load, I felt almost light-headed.


IT IS NOT unusual, from what I hear, to go from feeling like your spouse’s lover and best friend to feeling, over time, like he is just someone with whom you negotiate logistics. That’s basically what happened with Bruce and me. Only we barely had time to be a couple before we became parents. We had a whirlwind, truncated infatuation that morphed into a full-on family all in our very first year. When reality set in, I don’t know if we really knew each other. Soon it was just a life of coordinating details, trying to sync our schedules.

In some ways, I think our marriage was prolonged by our frequent, extended separations. In the first two years of Tallulah’s life, I was in eight films, and so was Bruce. My production company, Moving Pictures, was in full swing. And we had three little girls under the age of ten, who were our first priority. It’s not surprising we barely had time for each other.

With each of us going full tilt on our careers, we had a perfect kind of distraction for our energy. When we were together, we had the kids in common, and we focused on them. Bruce was tormented, I think, by his ambivalence about being married throughout our time together—at least that’s where I felt he was during our entire marriage. I felt pain for him and frustration for me and then, eventually, deep hurt. We’re all longing to be wanted, to be reassured, and he couldn’t give me that because he really didn’t know what he wanted. Honestly, I think both of us from the outset were more passionate about having kids than we were about being married, and in the end, the kids were—and always will be—what we have together.

Of course, his ambivalence wasn’t our only problem. There were elements of Bruce’s personality that were similar to my mother’s: they were both unpredictable and sometimes impulsive, and that made me feel unsure of my footing. I never knew what mood he’d be in or whether his feelings for me would have changed since the day before. I was used to this from growing up with Ginny, and I recycled my coping mechanism on Bruce, by becoming completely self-sufficient. Same dance, different partner.

I always maintained a kind of emotional buffer, like a moat around a castle, so that I wouldn’t be dependent on him or get too wounded when he shifted from hot to cold. It never occurred to me that strength and independence could be a weakness until the day Bruce came into my office, the retired gym in Hailey, and told me, “You know, I feel like if I wasn’t here, you could just go on without skipping a beat.”

He’s right, I thought. The defensive armor I’d become accustomed to wearing was so ironclad, there was no room inside it for someone else. And I realized—too late—that this was a limitation as well as a protection. I recognized how my inability to express need was cheating him out of the chance to fulfill mine. By maintaining my childhood resolve not to be a burden on anyone, what I was really doing was avoiding exposing any vulnerability. When he would ask, “Do you mind if I go do this?”—an overnight trip with the boys to Vegas, for instance, or another gig with his band—and I’d always say, without a moment’s hesitation, “Go ahead—we’ll be fine,” part of him was glad he’d married someone so accommodating. But part of him was hearing, on the deepest level, that his presence didn’t matter. That I didn’t need him.

So Bruce and I were trapped in our dance. He felt locked out by my self-reliance, which hurt him in ways he couldn’t face and fed his ambivalence about our marriage. My response to his uncertainty was hurt of my own that I couldn’t face, which fed my self-protective independence. And on and on, toward infinity.

While I was caring for my mom, Bruce and I decided to separate. We made the decision together while he was with me in New Mexico, visiting with the girls. We wanted to wait to announce it publicly until after my mother passed, so that her funeral would be focused solely on her, as it ought to be, and there wouldn’t be the distraction of the media onslaught that would inevitably follow any word of our split. We knew the tabloids would be all over us no matter how the information came out, but we figured that releasing the story ourselves, together, when we were ready as a family, would create a different kind of energy.