The doctor prescribed me Depakote for my mood swings but I took it and I gained three pounds in two weeks so I’m throwing the rest in the trash. Anyways most days I am fine except for the ones when I just want to erase myself from the world. So maybe I should be taking the pills on those days, or as an example to Benny—to be a good mother to him!—but I’m afraid getting fat might also make me feel depressed; so what’s the point? Anyway William thinks I’m taking them and I just keep telling him that I’m fine because that’s what he wants to believe and God knows we are used to pretending.
And later:
I thought I smelled pot on Benny’s clothes the other day and so I looked in his room when he was at school and there was a baggie of marijuana under his bed and I don’t know what to do because the drugs are so bad for his condition, that’s what the doctors say, and I want to absolutely kill that Nina girl for feeding drugs to him (because God knows that must be where he got it). This is not what he needs, not right now when he seemed to finally be doing so much better. I told Benny he is not allowed to see Nina anymore and he told me he hates me and now he’s not talking to me, which hurts so much but I can bear it because it’s for his own health even if he doesn’t see that now.
After that, a gap of three months—when she was at the spa in Malibu, presumably—and then just two more entries. First, a short, terrible one:
Benny is back from Italy and he is not well and I think it might be too late to fix it.
And finally (oh, I knew I shouldn’t read it, not this entry, but I couldn’t stop myself) an even more terrible long one:
As if life couldn’t get any more unbearable it turns out that William has been having an affair. An envelope arrived at Stonehaven addressed to him and when I saw that it was a woman’s handwriting I knew. It’s not the first time, of course. So I opened it and it’s a blackmail letter from some woman saying if we don’t pay her a half-million dollars she will expose him (us!) to the tabloids. And she’s included some ghastly photos of the two of them, naked, doing things—I ran to the sink and vomited as soon as I saw them. The worst of it is I figured out who the woman is—it’s the horrible mother of that horrible girl who Benny was palling around with last spring. Lily Ross, a cocktail waitress at one of the casinos where William has been frittering away our fortune. How could William be so stupid to get involved with a scam artist like that?? Meanwhile Benny is still in a downward spiral because of the druggie daughter and I want to kill them both, mother and daughter. The two of them are singlehandedly RUINING US and I don’t understand why they have it in for the Lieblings. William isn’t even here to clean up the mess so it’s all on me, and anyway there’s nothing I can do because we don’t have that kind of cash sitting around to pay the blackmail because William’s been so reckless. I am so humiliated. What has been the point of all this? Coming up here and pretending things can be fixed when in fact it’s all so broken, more broken now than ever. If those photos end up in the papers—it will kill me, I’ll be the laughingstock of the West Coast, of the whole country. I might as well end it all before Lily Ross does it for me because God knows I am not doing any good here and even Vanessa and Benny are better off without me.
And then—nothing.
I couldn’t breathe. I closed the diary and threw it away from me, hands shaking. Lily Ross. Not some San Francisco trophy wife after all, but a local cocktail waitress—a con woman? The mother of Benny’s amour fou? And—my God, blackmail. No wonder my mother had been so distraught. Public exposure was one thing my mother could not handle: the whole world knowing how messy her marriage really was, how cheap the tart