The Unspeakable

by Meghan Daum

  I need to pause now to say a few things about Nicole Kidman. First of all, she is stunningly beautiful. She is beautiful in a nonhuman way. She is an ethereal willow tree of a woman, with skin by Vermeer and hair by Botticelli. The other celebrities were of course also much better-looking than normal people. Arianna Huffington was tall and sleek in jeans and a crisp shirt. David Geffen, who I couldn’t think of as anything but the “Free Man in Paris,” after the song Joni Mitchell wrote about him, was fit and tan and affable-looking. But Nicole Kidman was in another league entirely. Her flawless skin was dusted with flawlessly applied makeup, her hair a cascade of shiny blondness that managed to be at once tousled and perfectly in place. If she didn’t also happen to look very real, you’d think she must be fake—she was that gorgeous.

  The second thing I need to say about Nicole Kidman is that I actually had a connection to her. I actually had business with her. The novel I’d published based on my prairie adventure, the one for which I’d written the screenplay, had been sent to various actresses to gauge their interest in attaching themselves to the project. Nicole Kidman, apparently, was among those actresses and apparently she liked the book. In fact, she didn’t just like it. She was, I’d been told, “madly in love” with it, not least of all because the narrator’s relationship with a soulful if substance-abusing redneck “resonated” with her vis-à-vis her marriage to a certain country star who’d entered drug rehab not long after their wedding. Though the project had been on the usual Hollywood stop-and-go course for more than a year, my agent regularly placated me with assurances along the lines of “Nicole wants to meet you” and “Nicole feels a kinship with you” and even, mind-blowingly, “Nicole wants to play you in the movie.” By “you” they meant the character in the novel that was loosely based on me, a character who happened not to be anything close to a willowy Vermeer. But all that could be worked out later.

  And now here we were. And as confused as I was about how to comport myself at this party, one unspoken rule seemed crystal clear: Do not talk about business. Even though, I was beginning to realize, this was in many ways a business party—Nora was directing Bewitched, which Nicole Kidman was starring in—I had not heard a single word exchanged about deals or pitches or award contenders or agents. It was clearly uncouth to so much as ask someone about his job, much less try to get them to play you in a movie.

  So, excruciating as it was, there was no way I could walk up to Nicole Kidman and tell her who I was (clearly my name alone had not rung a bell). Such a move, at the very least, would have been disrespectful to Nora, who by inviting me to this party was showing she trusted me not to behave like a starstruck careerist. At the worst, it would have produced the awkward moment to trump all other awkward moments of the night. Nicole Kidman would have looked down at me, a stranger easily six inches shorter with cropped hair and skin splotched in the places the sunscreen missed, and thought, I’m going to play you?

  So, I said nothing. As the evening wore on I said less and less to anyone, not out of insecurity but actually out of a strange peace. I entered a kind of zen space, a pact with my ego in which I realized that, as bizarre and slightly awful as this evening was, it was also a dream come true. I was, in effect, invisible. I was the human embodiment of a fly on the wall. Who among us has not wished for that experience? How many of us wonder what it would be like, if only for an hour or two, to observe a situation both in person and at a vast distance? A situation, no less, involving movie stars waving their hands around while people shouted, “The French Lieutenant’s Woman!” “Grease!” “Schindler’s List!”

  One problem with the charades game, at least among our team, was that no one listened to anyone and therefore when someone did call out the right answer it often went unrecognized. This happened to me as I yelled “Gorky Park” at least three times until Steve Martin spoke on my behalf and the message was received. The event dragged on and on, Rob Reiner and Larry David growing so impatient with many of the players that they finally gave in and assumed the bulk of the evening’s remaining pantomime duties.

  “I don’t know what this is!” Larry David said, looking at a clue and throwing up his hands as if it were written in hieroglyphics. I thought for a moment that he’d gotten my list and didn’t know where to start with the Yardbirds, but that was impossible since we were only using lists supplied by members of other teams.

  Larry David began jumping around, stomping on the floor and covering his ears as though shielding them from a loud noise.

  “Flashdance,” we cried out. “Footloose!”

  “All That Jazz!” Rob Reiner roared. “Arthur! My Left Foot, Close Encounters of the Third Kind! Come on, people! Just keep them coming! Let’s go!”

  Finally, someone got “thunder.”

  Blue Thunder? Rolling Thunder? Thunder Heart? Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome?

  Then, at last, Days of Thunder.

  “Yes!” said Larry David. “Though I don’t know what that is.”

  “Yeah, really, Days of Thunder?” said Rob Reiner.

  “What the hell is that?” said Larry David. “Is that a movie? I never heard of it.”

  There was murmuring in the crowd. Evidently no one else had heard of the movie either. In the corner, Nicole Kidman sat quietly staring at the rug. Though it hardly seemed possible, no one realized that this was a movie Nicole herself had starred in, back in 1990, with her then-husband Tom Cruise. It was set in the world of NASCAR and for some reason I remember there was a single associated with it called “Show Me Heaven,” performed by the singer Maria McKee, formerly of the cowpunk country rock band Lone Justice.

  Finally, the Vermeer spoke.

  “It’s a race car movie,” she said.

  Actually she said, “It’s a race cah movie,” in her Australian accent.

  Not everyone heard her, but those who did were still unable to place it.

  “A race car movie?” said Larry David. “You mean like Cannonball Run?”

  “No, more like … whatever,” said Nicole, waving her hand in dismissal. She pronounced whatever as “whateever.”

  “Well, it’s the first I’ve heard of it,” said Larry David.

  * * *

  I never saw Nicole Kidman again. My novel was never made into a movie. I never did a project with the producer Nora introduced me to at Fred Segal, most likely because I never bothered to call him. Instead I kept doing essays and journalism and eventually became a columnist at the Los Angeles Times. The screenwriting world was lively and seductive in ways, but it also felt desperate and slightly sad, as though it were made up of all the people you knew in high school who were pretty smart but not the smartest.

  “You know what?” said Nora, who’d once been a columnist herself. “You’re not a screenwriter, you’re a columnist.”

  It was the highest compliment she could have paid me.

  As whatever relationship I’d had with the entertainment business drifted into a passing acquaintanceship, the map of my particular L.A. took on new contours. I’d lived on the west side in the beginning, first in Topanga Canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains, where I might have subconsciously thought I could replicate some version of that photo of the Dunne family in Malibu. Later I rented a cottage in funky, pricey Venice. But I migrated farther east as the years went on, finally settling among the print journalists and poetry professors who gravitate toward the less breezy, more affordable enclaves near downtown and Pasadena. Here I was among my own kind. My neighbors weren’t just creative types but also schoolteachers and union organizers and carpenters and city councilmen. Movie stars did not turn up at the supermarket or anywhere else. People threw backyard barbecues and stood around and mostly talked about what people anywhere talk about: their kids’ schools, their kitchen remodels, the price of gas.

  I bought a house with lemon and orange trees in the yard and bougainvillea climbing up the fence. At night, police helicopters buzzed overhead, their searchlights slicing through the darkness while coyotes s
hrieked in the canyons. For the first time in a very long time, I had the sense of being in exactly the right place. For all the ways that I still hadn’t shaken New York City out of myself and for all the ways that I missed the broken-down yet good-natured soul of the prairie, I felt oddly, embarrassingly, exhilaratingly Angelino. I planted myself down and felt roots spread out under me like a net. I met people and made friends. I got married. I met even more people and made even more friends, so many that along the way I even picked up a few enemies—or, if not enemies, people who’d rather avoid my company (the feeling is nearly always mutual). I actually see this as an accomplishment, since accruing adversaries is a sure sign that you’re a bona fide member of your community. You can’t be disliked without being known, and you can’t be known without having been around for a while. Los Angeles, if nothing else, is the place I’ve been hanging around the longest.

  In certain moments—driving on the 405 freeway through the brown, flower-flecked hills of the Sepulveda Pass; preparing to dive into the ginlike waters of the pool at the Rosebowl Aquatic Center, where the San Gabriel Valley heat roils off the concrete and my skin gets too tan and my hair bleaches out and some part of me morphs back into the sun-dried child I was in the very beginning—I have to ask myself why it all feels so familiar. Is it a sign that I have truly transformed, that I have become not just a Californian but, in a general sense, Californian? Or is it simply a resetting of the bones of the Californian I’ve always been?

  I used to have a theory as to why I’ve suffered fewer moments of existential uncertainty in California than anywhere else I’ve lived as an adult and even as a child. It isn’t just that the place is celebrated—again, to the point of cliché and often unfairly—for its culture of transience and a certain disregard for history. It isn’t even that the person I’ve been as a Californian has been older, slightly wiser, and less panicked about paying the rent than the person I was as a New Yorker and a wannabe Plainswoman. Instead, I’d decided that the reason the west coast was a place in which I didn’t feel the weight of my inadequacies pressing down as hard on my sinuses was, quite literally, the weightlessness of the air itself.

  In most places in the United States, the air is the main event. In summer in just about every region, it’s thick and soupy and choked with bugs. In winter in the northern states, the air can be so cold as to shock the system. It’s a knife pressed permanently to your cheek, a constant reminder that these lands were settled by people who had to eat each other to stay alive in winter. But in California, particularly in the waterless, would-be wasteland of the southern half, air is negligible. The temperature is frequently 78 degrees and remains so whether you’re on a street corner waiting for a traffic light to change or in your living room sorting through the mail. It is possible to go an entire day without realizing that your back door has been ajar since morning. In that sense, the line between indoors and outdoors is blurred. The metaphor then extends to social climates, where being an insider doesn’t have to mean you grew up here or have even been here very long. It just means you’re here right now. It means you’re “present in the moment,” as a yoga teacher would say. It means you can step between insiderness and outsiderness as easily as walking through a door no one remembers to close.

  At least that used to be my theory. Now I just think that L.A. is a place that’s hard to see close up. You can’t capture it from the street. It’s an aerial-view kind of city, best photographed from a helicopter or a hillside. There are people everywhere, but they are hidden in their cars and houses, they are tiny specks hiking on the canyon trails, their dogs even tinier specks beside them, the wildlife crouched in the sagebrush unnoticed. L.A. is a place that will leave you alone if you need it to. It will let you cry in your car. It will give you your space.

  A few years after the party at Nora’s house, I found myself at a party at Arianna Huffington’s house. This time, it was a huge gathering with easily a hundred guests, few if any of whom were famous actors as far as I could tell. I’d been writing my newspaper column for a year or so at that point and though I’d met Arianna in passing since the charades party she’d never really registered who I was or what I did. But now a mutual friend brought me into her circle, where a flock of reporters and bloggers and other columnists were cackling away.

  “Actually, we played charades together at Nora’s,” I said when the friend introduced us.

  “Meghan’s a columnist at the L.A. Times,” the friend said. “I’m sure you’ve read her.”

  “Oh, yes!” said Arianna. “You’re really good! One of the best.”

  It was a savor-the-moment kind of moment. Like when Nora told me I was not a screenwriter but a columnist. Eventually everything comes together, I thought. Eventually we all shake out into the thing we were supposed to be all along. Los Angeles is my home. I am not in the movie business but I live in L.A. and it is my home.

  “Oh my,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “I mean it’s not easy,” she said, “playing that kind of charades.”

  DIARY OF A COMA

  October 27, 2010

  4:04 p.m.

  GENERAL: This is an ill-appearing Caucasian woman.

  TYPE OF CONSULTATION: Infectious Disease

  PHYSICAL EXAMINATION:

  Vital signs: Currently she is afebrile at 36.6 C, pulse 103, respiratory rate 18, and blood pressure 90/60. She is awake and oriented but is a little addled at times and has difficulty finding words.

  Acute viral hepatitis is a possibility. Acute hepatitis A is a possibility as is an Epstein-Barr virus (mononucleosis syndrome). An enteroviral process such as aseptic meningoencephalitis is another consideration and the patient herself has also raised the possibility of West Nile virus infection. It would be unusual for Herpes meningoencephalitis to be present with rash, transaminitis, and thrombocytopenia. Primary HIV infection can present in this manner although it seems less likely here. An atypical condition such as murine typhus—especially given her history of prior fleabites—and leptospirosis is to be considered. I doubt this is a bacterial process, but meningococcemia remains on the differential.

  First I lost my words. At least that’s the first thing I remember when I think about this story, insofar as I can think about it, which I try to avoid doing despite the permanent residence it’s now taken up in my brain. To experience aphasia is to feel your mind breaking off into pieces, to hear sentences crumbling into useless particles. It is to be so stunned by the fragility of human cognitive function that whatever came before seems almost irrelevant. But of course it’s completely relevant.

  In the fall of 2010, I was staying at a friend’s place in Brooklyn when I got hit with flu symptoms that felt like a truck had driven through the apartment and parked on my head. One minute I felt reasonably okay, if a little sniffly, the next minute I was shivering almost too violently to hold a cup of tea. Still, I assumed it was the flu, as did a doctor friend and the various pharmacists I consulted when I could drag myself out to the drugstore. After three days of trying to keep the fever down with aspirin I flew home to Los Angeles, vomiting once on the plane and becoming so sweaty and overheated that I had to dig through my bag in the overhead compartment to find a T-shirt, a task that depleted so much energy it was another half hour before I could make it to the lavatory to change clothes. The following morning I went to an urgent-care clinic, where I was put on an IV for hydration and told to come back the next day if I wasn’t better.

  The next day, I could barely walk. My husband took me back to the clinic. In the waiting room, he noticed that the whites of my eyes were yellow. He filled out my registration form because I was too weak to hold a pen. Then he had to leave. He had an interview with a crucial source for a newspaper article he was writing. He’d been trying to set it up for months; there was no rescheduling it.

  “Just try to avoid going to the hospital,” he said. “People get sick in hospitals.”

  I was put in an exam room, where I lay on a table getting sal
ine from an IV bag. An hour or more passed. Every so often I pried myself up and took a step across the room, where a Dixie cup sat on the counter. I’d turn on the faucet and fill it with water, knocking it back in one gulp. Then I’d collapse back onto the exam table. This sequence of movements felt equivalent to lifting a car off the ground. But I was thirsty in a way I did not know it was possible to be thirsty. It was as if all the moisture in my body was evaporating. My head was throbbing. My urine was the color of tea. When my mother was dying, “urine the color of tea” was one of the things the hospice workers told me to look out for as a sign of “imminent passing.” But I didn’t think I was dying. What I was thinking was that the clinic doctor had said I might have hepatitis but that maybe that wasn’t the worst thing in the world because, after all, Pamela Anderson has it and she’s basically walking around like a normal person.

  After a few hours on the saline drip, a nurse came into the room and told me I was being admitted to the hospital down the street. I said I didn’t care where I went as long as I didn’t have to get up.

  * * *

  An ambulance took me from the urgent-care clinic to the hospital, a trip of approximately two blocks for which my insurance company would later be billed $860 (and for which it would decline to pay). Though I could already feel myself shrinking back from the world, I tried hard to appear normal, joking around with the paramedics until suddenly I couldn’t remember exactly where they said we were going. In the emergency room, I met with an intake nurse who sat by my gurney and took note of every personal item I had with me. Purse, wallet, phone, keys—also my clothes, which had somehow been removed from my body and swapped for a hospital gown, though, like a drunk girl taken home and put to bed by kindly friends after a party, I didn’t notice it happening. There was much about the situation that was like being very, very drunk. Far drunker than I’d actually ever been, though I seemed to be following some hardwired personal protocol for saving face, as if I’d been in this predicament before and knew the drill. It took every ounce of concentration to appear coherent. I didn’t want to look stupid.