“They are having fun, aren’t they?” I say.
“It’s nice that age to have a friend,” he replies.
Mike still maintains ties with many of his childhood friends from South Dakota. He used to walk home from kindergarten with Vicki, wife of his best friend, Dave. They’ve all known one another more than forty years and, unbelievably, still like one another. In Sioux Falls, apparently people remain friends for life. What’s the secret? Perhaps unlike in Los Angeles, one’s old friends don’t seize one’s wrist across the table and ask you what school district you’re in, gibber on about a wild string of charter schools, and then suddenly reveal that their children have Asperger’s.
As far as I know, South Dakotan children do not have Asperger’s.
Mike says, “I almost REMEMBER being four…”
“They ARE enjoying it!” I enthuse.
“I remember being that little. How uncomplicated everything was…”
“Hannah and Cal?” I shake my head with telling sadness. “Well…They have to get their time in now…”
And I let it portentously hang.
Mike frowns as he lines up two trays in the fish smoker…
“Where is Cal going to kindergarten? Do they know yet?”
I do not tell him about the Blue Ribbon, the tote bag, the yellow-highlit MapQuest. And the fact that I have already put in the application, and paid the two-hundred-dollar fee…
Because that might seem not “delegatory” and not “trusting”…
I say vaguely, “Oh, I think…you know, I think…Oh wait, it’s coming to me! But don’t mock,” I warn, stern. I fold my arms across my chest. I put two smoker’s fingers up. “Because it’s a decision they’re really happy about.”
“I won’t mock!”
“It’s just that Brenda’s older kid goes there, and they just love it.”
“Okay…”
“And it’s not expensive, and of course for their family, saving money is—”
“What’s the school?” Mike asks, a little hysterical.
“Hannah—no!” I suddenly yell.
She has dropped trou and is…peeing! A great stream. While standing up!
“Hannah, no! Wait!” Cal picks up a beach towel and runs over to shield her with it. The picture of a gallant young cavalier, he holds the towel up like a wall, discreetly averting his eyes. (The young Joseph Fiennes, in …Luther!)
Crisis handled, I turn back to my husband. “I know how against organized religion you are, so don’t mock. It’s actually…a Lutheran school. Luther Hall. Cal’s family is Lutheran.”
“I think that’s great!” Mike says in surprise, and in interest…And just as I knew he would, Mike falls in love with the idea of Luther Hall.
Because here’s the thing. Although we grew up in different parts of the country, by coincidence, because of his Midwestern background and my German mother, both Mike and I were actually raised Lutheran. And though our church membership has long lapsed, in the crazy patchwork that is Los Angeles, what with all the Lindsay Lohans falling out of limos without underpants, it’s nice to be able to scratch out…a little familiar solid ground. To go home again. To get a little LUTHER back into our lives.
Squinting ahead, envisioning the future of his little girl—a girl who at four is already a bit too brassy in the nudity department—Mike soon realizes he loves the idea of semi-uniforms, a little bit of structure, and a whole lot of chapel. To L.A. adolescence and beyond, it is, if you will, the Lutheran Solution.
“But if it’s a private school…I don’t know,” he worries. “Do you think we’d have to kiss ass to get in?”
“Are you kidding?” I reply. “They don’t know from ass…They’re Lutheran!
He calls Brenda, who, with a nudge and a wink to me, manages everything. Paperwork is in process, space is no problem, acceptance letters will be mailed after fifteen-minute meetings with the children, which are just a formality…
It will be Mike, the dad, who takes Hannah to the meeting, because as he tells me:
“You need to take that vacation. Go.”
4
Auberge du Fenouil
The thing is, I would still have my best girlfriend today—she whose name cannot be uttered—if it weren’t for the Ocean of Money. The Ocean of Money separating us. Or at least that has been my theory.
I am talking, of course, about my ex–best friend of fifteen years. Celeste.
Celeste and I were best friends in grad school, we were housemates, we were aspiring sister writers, we were fellow Joni Mitchell travelers…
And then we became separated by the O. of M.
Which is to say I went into prose and theater. Celeste went into television, and it consumed her whole. Oh, her career began, in her twenties, like mine. She was writing things, submitting things, getting close calls, nothing big, then rounding thirty, she sells a pilot! I whoop for her! At first I get daily updates…! Then things enter this second phase where there’s no regular phone contact, only the occasional e-mail full of up-and-down emotions: “It’s horrible. They’re changing everything. But did I tell you? James L. Brooks, who as you know has been my hero all my life? Well, he said…”
Then things went dark. I left a few messages…Then I finally got a return call one Thursday night, after eleven.
Celeste’s voice had changed. It was a breathy croak. It was as though her blood had all been sucked out by a—a Nosferatu.
“I don’t think I can go on,” she whispered. “I think I’m going insane. I’ve been there seventy-four straight hours. I really feel I might…hurt myself.”
In panic, I called our mutual friend and Celeste’s neighbor Kim, sent her over to to knock on the door. But unbelievably, like the hypnotized virgin of Klaus Kinski, Celeste had already actually driven BACK to the studio, to the heinous beast masters she so loathed, who she said were killing her, killing her, killing her!
The next week, cue the enormous gift basket—like something sent from a tropical jungle—from Celeste, with a polite two-line thank-you note saying that things were much better.
A gift basket? I have to admit, the cheeses were fabulous, things I’d never tasted, but…a gift basket?
It was the very opposite of intimacy.
Who were we?
The answer would come six years later in the form of a wedding announcement.
I am used to having friends in Los Angeles who make more money than I do. I’m used to visiting the homes of those who live just one class bumped up from us. I remember a barbecue at my writer friend Tom’s where I was surprised to find not just one Hispanic lady busily washing wineglasses but an actual crew. My feeling is, if you have enough Hispanic women in your kitchen that they could play pinochle together, you are Rich. Ish.
But then you open an invite—like Celeste’s, one saying she had eloped, and now to share their joy, she, her new husband, Bran, and his five-year-old daughter, Skyler, were inviting us all to a housewarming party (“No gifts. We mean it. No gifts”)—
And here comes the classic L.A. moment where out of the invite falls a map. A very complicated map.
It’s not just that they have moved from the corner of Higgledy Avenue and Yucca (or as my friend Roger used to say, “from the corner of Crack and Liquor”) to some place like Canyonview Terrace, Bluebird Circle, or Ravenna Lane (as in the Palisades, where winding avenues sound suddenly Tuscan and Lake Como–like).
It’s that this folded-up map is no simple MapQuest. MapQuest won’t help you here. Nor anything tawdry and common and yahoo.
The map…Well, it’s a bunch of wildly squiggling lines in remote canyons labeled with references to things you wouldn’t even expect to find in Los Angeles. “Go 8.3 miles into canyon,” then make left at “old railroad car,” “miner’s cabin,” “flamingo preserve,” “Trappist monastery”…
That’s when you know you’re really into Money. When the only signposts indicating the whereabouts of your friends’ vast, rolling, private acre
age are fire roads, water tanks, or perhaps a capsized model of the original Hindenburg.
(You live WHERE, Mr. Darcy? Pemberloo. Pemberleaugh. Pember-what?)
The only thing I can tell you about the location of Celeste and Bran’s house was it was somewhere near Santa Barbara. Montecito looks to me like just a tiny town, and yet within Montecito they had a property the size of San Pedro. Is that even possible? Or maybe it was ABOVE Montecito.
All I can say is after you drive 8.3 miles up a canyon, everything totally unmarked, at the eleventh hairpin turn, out leaps a small army of red-vested Hispanic valet parkers, like a paramilitary junta. Not only could this number of valet parkers play pinochle together, I imagine they could get together a rousing game of cricket, perhaps even form a modest national league.
After shrugging off your car, you follow a winding set of stone stairs down, down, down…You’re vaguely aware of natural moss, on all sides, enclosing…
Then all at once it opens before you.
Bright sunshine.
Oh my God!
It is as if you are flying over the giant, scooped-out blue bowl of the Pacific Ocean. Below you, holding you almost aloft, is what looks like a crashed starship, a massive rock pile of slate-colored wings, shearing geometrically away from one another. When you look closer you realize the wings are, unbelievably, roofs of many buildings, each roof individually nubbled with discretely and artfully broken stone. Each sheared roof nestles amid floating islands of frosted glass.
I look down and realize…
This is no housewarming party, where Celeste and I are going to reunite. It is a house COLDING party…The frosted glass and slate THING—the crashed starship? It is the ice sculpture centerpiece of a bon voyage party to our friendship, a memorial, if you will, a wake. It is the glacier Celeste will be sailing irrevocably off on. I should smack a champagne bottle against its prow.
Mike pushes our two kids off in the double-stroller while I wander alone through the compound, and…No wonder there were no gifts. I can’t imagine an object a civilian could bring to this house. There is not a single conventional or even conventionally sized item on display. The vases are, I want to say, fifth-century Egyptian granite, the toilet paper rolls hammered steel, the art is…important. And…archaeological. Turning along charcoal-colored slate, I pass a Balinese gargoyle…A Thai snarling goddess waving two fistfuls of twisting snakes…A giant bowl that is…Etruscan? A pop-eyed head, with an ear missing, that is…Mayan?
And there, at the end of a berber-carpeted hall…Celeste’s office. It has to be. There’s a silver iMac, piles of scripts, and just beyond, on a long wooden table huddles a menagerie of photos. Large ones, small ones, in frames of gold, brass, silver, probably Tiffany, and then, at the very end…Could it be?
I gasp.
“Aw,” I breathe out, caught unexpectedly by emotion.
It is a small, circular blue-and-yellow daisy frame, reminiscent of the late eighties. It cradles a faded Polaroid showing a tiny Celeste and myself crashed together on a sleeping bag, hysterically laughing. Celeste and myself, ages twenty-seven, forever caught in time. But it is so small, so half-hidden, clinging to the edge, as though Celeste is embarrassed about this tchotchke, artifact, relic from that ancient, faraway time when Celeste was poor.
Feeling like a rather elderly, distressed, and weathered artifact myself now, I locate the child area, easily visible via its large pink Princess bouncy house. Perhaps half a dozen children, presumably including Celeste’s new stepdaughter, Skyler, are jumping, in safety, cordoned off from cliffs and ravines that plunge dramatically away.
I grab myself a glass of wine and make myself a plate from the buffet—the good thing with Celeste being that she has always believed in feeding people. I must say, I’ve often been startled by the experience of going to rich people’s houses and there is either Domino’s pizza or a Costco vegetable tray or some really bland pasta ordered in from the local strange canyon trattoria. There really shouldn’t BE trattorias in canyons. One mega-wealthy screenwriter friend of mine is, if you can believe this, a vegan. We drove forty minutes up a canyon past haunted goldfields to his house only to discover this. Honestly, to have to listen to his pompous movie monologues and not see a tray of sushi or paper-thin prosciutto for our pains—it was really NOT WORTH IT. Because Greg will never throw any work anyone’s way—he’s really consistent about that.
So I approach the bouncy house with my globe of wine and my plate of food, my plan being to perch on the nearby low wall and enjoy my feast while keeping an eye on my girls, when out of the Princess bouncy castle, a snub-nosed girl with blond ringlets pokes her freckled nose.
She says to me, flatly: “You can go away.”
“Well, maybe I don’t WANT to go away!” I respond, pertly.
The girl waves a small hand. “No comida.”
“Wha—?” I say.
To clarify, the girl says three amazing words, which I have never forgotten:
“Skyler isn’t hungry.”
Of Chinese-German extraction, I could be said to look Hispanic. And with my two blond daughters…? We’re the polar opposite of the white forty-something mothers you see in parks, pushing, in strollers, their adorable Chinese girl babies. From a racial point of view, it looks like either I’m their Third World nanny or I stole my white babies.
At the same time, I suddenly realize that even with my LIGHT mocha-colored skin, I am by far the brownest person at the party! Which is to say, the brownest person not washing glasses, hefting trays, or parking cars. And looking around, it dawns on me that Celeste and Bran’s guests, here in Santa Barbara…The tall blond women and their short, bald, homunculus husbands? They aren’t just white, they are iridescent! They have that kind of bluish look you get from spending every day in dark screening rooms or in endless film-scoring sessions.
And in the meantime, stop the presses:
Skyler isn’t hungry!
After that, it is true that I don’t try hard.
I eat my food. I take seconds. I drain a second glass of exquisite wine. I slip off my sandals. I enjoy my view of the Pacific.
Then I round the family up, locate Celeste in her half-mile-long kitchen, and lob back, like a sock of poo, my own version of the coldly luxurious tropical gift basket:
“Congratulations, sweetie, the house is so fantastic happy marriage Bran seems wonderful oh my God the view this is amazing! WE ARE LEAVING.”
“Oh no!” Celeste exclaims in alarm, clinging to me. “You just got here! I wanted to show you what we’ve done in the study, where I have a whole shelf of your—”
“Long drive back,” I say, “lo-o-o-ng. But congratulations. Really. Wonderful!”
When, the next day, Celeste sends me an e-mail, this time it is I who doesn’t respond. Really? What can one say? No gifts. Really. We mean it. No gifts. (No! We REALLY mean it! Our architect will KILL us!)
But now, two years later, Celeste has written me a letter.
A long letter.
S—
I’ve started writing this letter so many times so many different ways and then I thought, fuck it, I’ll just rip the bandaid off.
You know and I know that these past few years we have not been close.
In many ways I know I have disappeared, into my career, into the WB, into that hell train called Everlywood, which destroyed the lives of just about everyone—
What on earth was Everlywood? It was a mark of how MUCH Celeste had disappeared that even the major signposts of her life made absolutely no sense to me. (“Go 8.3 miles and make right at Balinese mongoose farm.”)
Anyway:
Taking stock upon turning 40, surveying the major ups and downs of my thirties, a clear mistake I made was placing too much faith in that feckless weasel Bran, his not-so-covert affair with my 22 year old assistant Kayla being just the tip of an iceberg so big it should be its own Arctic sub-continent penguins included.
In that run-on sentence, particularly when I hi
t the penguins, I actually felt I could hear the faintest lilt, the faintest familiar melody of the old Celeste I knew so long, long ago.
Then last January, my mother died.
Oh no! LOVED her mother!
Emotionally burnt in every way, I went down alone to our beach house in Isla V. and took stock.
I am now emotionally invested in this letter, but once again, “Isla V.”? A blank.
S—I don’t know if we can ever be the friends we were. I don’t know if we can even be the people we were. But I honestly love you, and have missed you, and wonder if perhaps there is some new version of our friendship we can try in our forties…
“Auberge de Feneuil?” Kaitlin exclaims on the phone. “For three days? That’s like the most expensive spa in Napa!”
“Apparently she got this huge divorce settlement! And I think…I honestly think…divorce has brought her down a peg.”
“Down a peg?”
“Well, there was something in the tone of the letter where I saw a flash of the old Celeste, when she’d let you see right down into the core. As opposed to how she became after she entered TV land. Where she always seemed oddly stressed, jangly, harsh…impatient with anyone not successful in TV. One time I was complaining about one thing or another and she said, ‘Liquidate some stock!’ Just like that. She actually snapped her fingers. ‘Liquidate some stock!’”
“Maybe she’s just the same…but it’s you who’ve changed.” There is a crunching sound. Kaitlin seems to be at her computer, eating. “Celeste was always a bit fabulous. Even when she wasn’t rich she was fabulous. You always liked that. You couldn’t wait to rush to her house and eat all those gourmet cheeses.”
I hadn’t remembered that…But it was true!
Kaitlin continues: “You guys were always strong on the wine and cheese. And you’re going to Napa, all expenses paid. Wine and cheese. Just stick with that—focus on that.”
Mother on Fire: A True Motherf%#$@ Story About Parenting! Page 8
