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The first time Claudia walked a red carpet with Lestat, it was at the Teen Choice Awards and she was eleven.
Lestat did a line of coke in the limo before they got there. Claudia was old enough to know what it was, and young enough to feel grown-up and trustworthy when he winked and said, “Don’t tell Daddy.” She nodded sombrely, and he said, “I’ve got something for you.”
Lestat reached into one of the high-end store bags that always seemed to surround both of her shopaholic parents. This one was from Tiffany. He handed her a box, which Claudia opened to reveal a delicate tiara, sparkling in the light that filtered through the tinted windows. She gasped, and Lestat grinned. He always loved a dramatic reaction, whether his own or someone else’s.
“Put it on, ma belle.” She did, setting it onto the intricate curls Daddy had spent over an hour fixing up. “Beautiful.” Lestat sighed. She felt beautiful. She felt like a princess.
Everyone wanted to take their picture. Whenever someone with a microphone asked Lestat who he had with him, he said, “This is my daughter.” He didn't call her “Claudia” or “stepdaughter” or, as he did most commonly, “Jesus Christ, can't you find someone else to bother?” but daughter. It wasn’t something she’d wanted from him before, but every time Claudia heard it, her heart soared.
Claudia couldn’t remember Lestat going onstage that night, either as a presenter or as an award winner. She could remember him leaving her alone for twenty minutes in the middle of the show, his place taken by a seat-filler who smelled powerfully of Axe body spray. When Lestat returned, his shirt was untucked and his hair was a mess. Claudia never asked him who he fucked that night. Her childhood was ruined enough already.
By the time the show ended, Claudia was exhausted and up way past her bedtime. Daddy would have gone straight home, but Lestat had his chauffeur take the limo through a McDonald’s drive through. They went up to the top of a cliff, far enough outside the city that they could see the stars, and sat on the hood with their Big Macs and their extra-large sodas. Lestat smoked, which he wasn’t allowed to do in the house because Daddy was under the impression they had both quit, and told her the stories of the constellations. Told stories, anyway. Looking back, Claudia doubted they were entirely accurate.
It was the best night of Claudia’s young life. When they got back into the car, Claudia looked at Lestat and said something she’d never felt inspired to say, even though Lestat had been living with them off and on since she was five years old. “I love you, Uncle Les.”
Lestat kissed her on the forehead. “Je t’aime aussi, chaton.”
Daddy was waiting for them when they got home, at around four in the morning. Claudia was sent right to bed, but that didn’t keep her from hearing the blazing fight between them. At first it was a fight about staying out so late, but it quickly turned into a fight about drugs, cheating, jealousy, disordered eating, sex. Their greatest hits.
The next day, Daddy threw all of Lestat’s clothes onto the driveway. There were a lot of clothes, but it was a big driveway. Lestat moved out again. He didn't say goodbye to Claudia. She put her tiara back in its box, storing it up on the highest shelf of her closet where Daddy didn’t have to see it every time he tucked her into bed.
***
The second time Claudia walked a red carpet with Lestat, she was twenty-six and did it for the money.
At first, when Lestat asked her to appear in public with him to “help his image”, she laughed until she was nearly sick.
“Since when do you give a fuck about your image?” She asked when she could breathe again. Lestat hadn't hung up, which must mean he was really desperate.
“Since your father saw fit to publish a book of lies about me.”
Claudia scowled. “Which ‘lie’ has your people the most riled up? The one where you pushed him down the stairs and I spent weeks looking after him?”
“Strangely, he neglects to mention he broke my nose immediately before this incident, and also threatened to kill me numerous times.” Lestat sighed. “I will always be sorry for what I did that night.” Claudia believed that. It didn't matter. She was the one who'd had to call the ambulance; she was the one who had to clean Daddy's blood off the stairs and Lestat's blood off the landing. She was thirteen. She would never forgive them.
“A hundred grand,” she said, impulsively. “And a Mercedes.”
She can hear Lestat's disgusted expression. “Do you recall who paid for your college degree? Who purchased your condo for you? Who invested in your girlfriend's business?”
“Two hundred grand,” Claudia shot back. “The Mercedes, and we both wear Madeleine's designs and mention her name every time we talk to anybody.”
Silence. Claudia waited. Finally, he snapped, “Fine. But if it's going to cost me that much, you're coming to the Grammys. And you have to call me Papa.”
“Gross,” Claudia replied, already planning how she was going to tell Madeleine to prepare for a lot of new orders.
***
The last time Claudia walked a red carpet with Lestat, she was fifty-seven and she did it for her father. Both her fathers.
The two of them were together at the end. They were together for the last twenty-two years before the end, since Daddy's first battle with cancer.
Daddy was married to someone else for a while. Armand, a Broadway director and professional pretentious prick. Claudia hated him, so she was glad her father started fucking Lestat on the side the day he came back from his honeymoon. She didn't say anything to Armand about it, but she couldn't imagine he didn't know. He had his own thing going on with Claudia's AP English teacher anyway. It was around this time Claudia started spending a lot of her time out of the house.
When Daddy was diagnosed with testicular cancer, he wanted Lestat with him, and Lestat, to Claudia's eternal shock, stepped up. They moved back in together yet again and Lestat went to all of Daddy's appointments until he was banned from the hospital. Even after Daddy went into remission, Lestat stayed. They went to therapy separately and together. They got the prescriptions for the various psychiatric medications they should probably have been taking for decades. They romantically took their meds together every day, drinking them down with their arms linked like they were having champagne and sealing it with a kiss.
“So all it took was Daddy losing a nut for y’all to act like reasonable human adults?” Claudia asked, incredulous. “For a given value of ‘reasonable’ I mean.”
“Don't be vulgar,” Daddy told her, as if she hadn't heard some really atrocious shit coming out of his mouth over the years, mostly directed at Lestat.
“You have a wife, Claudia,” Lestat said, at the same time. “You know true love can be a thorny rose.”
She didn't. She and Madeleine argued from time to time, but they’d never thrown each other's belongings out of windows or against walls. They’d never cheated on or with each other, never lied about anything important, never been violent. Compared to the way she’d grown up, Claudia's marriage was blissfully relaxing.
She resented her fathers for waiting until she was in her thirties to achieve a healthy relationship. She would have loved to have these consistently balanced, fun, reliable men in her life when she was a child, as opposed to the shitshow she got. She resented them even more for waiting until they were in their fifties to have that for themselves. A large part of her would always believe it was a choice they made, that they got off on playing up the stormy romance of it until it seemed like Daddy might die without them ever resolving their issues.
He died anyway, twenty-two years later, but Claudia still had Lestat. “Like,” she told Madeleine, “a really bad case of hereditary herpes.”
Herpes which griped, “I don’t need a wheelchair,” as the limousine pulled up to the curb.
“You really do,” Claudia assured him. They’d dragged his favourite chair on a commercial flight all the way from LA for that reason. Whoever banned private planes really hadn’t considered the needs of ageing stars getting inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in fucking Cleveland. “But Madeleine and I will help you walk inside, if you’d rather do that.” Claudia smiled at her long-suffering wife, sitting across from them and looking beautiful as always.
“I don’t mind your Uncle Les, darling,” Madeleine always said, when Claudia apologised for something Lestat had said or done, or was likely to say or do in the immediate future. “He is such an interesting character. And he has an extensive will, does he not?”
There was a reason Claudia had been married to her for thirty years. Many reasons, actually.
“That’s better,” Lestat agreed. “With the two of you on my arm, people will think I’m still able to pick up sexy young women.”
“That’s disgusting,” Claudia replied reflexively, then remembered how long it had been since anyone called her “young” in any context.
When they got to the Hall of Fame, a crowd had already gathered on either side of the long red carpet. They started to cheer as a man in a valet uniform opened the limousine door. Even though he was crippled by arthritis, Claudia expected Lestat to jump out like a gazelle to greet his beloved fans. He didn’t move. “A moment, Claudia?” He said, instead. Madeleine caught her eye, a question in her expression. Claudia nodded, and Madeleine stepped out first.
“Are you okay?” Claudia asked, trying not to sound concerned. This was how it had started with Daddy, nearly three years ago now. He’d slowed down, and slowed down, then he’d stopped.
Lestat looked at her. “When I first met your father,” he said, at last, “I loved him at once.”
“I know. You saw him fighting with Uncle Paul at a bar, it got you horny.” She’d heard that story a thousand times. “Are you sure you don’t want the wheelchair? It’s in the back.”
“He said to me he had a little daughter, and her mother was not around.” Lestat had sounded more American than French for years. Now, his old accent started to surface. “At once, I was very afraid. I never wanted children. I knew I would be the most terrible father. But I wanted him, so I agreed to meet you. Do you remember? You came up to me and said, ‘Uncle Les, sing me a song.’ I don’t know why you called me that, Daddy said he hadn’t told you to. So I sang you my latest hit.”
“And I went to school the next day and told everybody my new uncle likes sucking cocks and fucking jocks.” Claudia remembered it well. “You got me suspended from kindergarten.”
“Not for the song, if I recall, but for punching a child who expressed musical criticism.” Lestat smiled fondly. “Your father broke up with me for the first time over that. But I knew then you and I had a special bond.”
Claudia scoffed. “That what you want to call it?”
As much as she hated to think it, he was right. Lestat screamed at her so much, she recorded it and used it as his designated ringtone when she was a teenager. He was also the one who played a strangely compelling version of “Karma is My Kink” on the piano, drunk off his ass with an unlit cigarette in his mouth, when Charlie dumped her. He was the one who taught her to drive in his Maserati. He was the one who convinced Daddy not to follow her when she decided to go to college out of state.
He was the one who, when she came home in the middle of her junior year and wouldn’t say why, told her about being raped by his manager at the age of nineteen. Not even Daddy knew that. Claudia couldn’t be sure, but when her college friends texted her a month later and told her fucking Bruce had been attacked by a gang in the park and could no longer walk, talk or execute higher brain functions, she thought that was probably thanks to Lestat, too.
“I was never a good father,” Lestat said, an understatement of unfathomable magnitude. “But I always loved you, chaton. Very much. I hope you know that.”
The hell of it was, Claudia did know. She sighed. “I love you too, motherfucker.”
Lestat’s eyes shone with tears, and Claudia got out of the car before things got any worse.
When the ceremony was finished, to Madeleine's horror and Lestat's delight, Claudia had the driver stop for Big Macs and extra-large sodas and took them to look at the Ohio stars. Uncle Les fell asleep on the way back to the hotel. When Claudia helped him into bed, he called her Louis. She didn't bother correcting him.