“On Highway Five. Passing that disgusting cattle ranch.”
“So you did it,” Celia says.
“I’m doing it,” I say.
—
THREE HOURS LATER my phone rings again. My wife?
“Where are you?” asks my friend Emily.
“In a smelly rest-stop bathroom. About halfway there.”
“So you did it,” Emily says.
“I’m doing it,” I say.
—
SIRI GUIDES ME OFF the freeway and into the steep switchback streets of Laurel Canyon. I wind through twisty, narrow streets beaded with pink and purple bougainvillea and towering, fuzzy phallic cacti, under a sky so blue and a sun so yellow they look like a first-grader’s rendering of sky and sun.
I feel like I’m in another country, not the southern half of the same state. The houses and gardens and stone paths I drive by are labyrinthine, lush, boho mysterious, yet oddly familiar. Maybe I’m having memories of Laurel Canyon, one of my all-time-favorite movies. Or maybe my kind of people, with my kind of funky style, live here.
I’ve been so focused on what I’m losing, moving to Los Angeles, that I haven’t considered what, besides a paycheck, I might gain. I realize now that I’m not just leaving someplace familiar. I’m also landing someplace new. The place that turned fairy tales into talkies and orange groves into the film factory for the world. The place where Norma Jean became Marilyn Monroe.
Driving more slowly now, I turn left onto Lookout Mountain Avenue. “Your destination is on the right,” Siri says. I stop in front of a fairy-tale cottage draped in lime-green grapevines, its arched door peeling teal paint, its front garden a jungle of overgrown lemon trees and sky-high agave spires and artichoke plants gone mad. I imagine Joni Mitchell, lady of this canyon, living here with Graham Nash; Crosby and Stills dropping by to jam.
I maneuver my car into a parking space the shape of a fusilli, unfold my stiff, fusilli-shaped body, and step out into blinding sunlight. Like Marilyn Monroe and Joni Mitchell and legions of desperate dreamers before me, I’ve arrived.
TWO
Jules answers my knock with a distracted hug and a tinfoil-covered cardboard box under his arm. His face is kind and gentle and unmoved by the sight of me, and no wonder. We barely know each other. Clara’s the one who offered me their couch. And Clara’s away for a month, visiting friends back east. “Jules gets lonely when I’m gone,” she’d said when I called to beg the favor. “He’ll be happy to have your company.”
“That’ll make one of us,” I’d said, and Clara had sighed, with empathy or with compassion fatigue.
Until this moment, I haven’t considered the reality of my new lifestyle. I’d be sharing a house with a guy I barely know. I’ve done that before, but never without sex involved.
“Oh. Hello. You’re just in time.” Jules steps out of his house, closing the door behind him.
“Hello,” I say. “In time for what?”
“We’ll unload your car when we get back,” he says. “Follow me.”
I’m a hiker, but I have trouble keeping Jules’s pace. “Thanks for letting me stay with you,” I say.
“Of course, of course,” Jules says without inflection. It occurs to me that Clara might have overstated his willingness to have me around.
Trotting to Jules’s walk, I wonder if every hike I take for the rest of my life will remind me of my favorite-ever hiking buddy, Patricia. She and I were the same age, both writers, moms, wives, and underbudgeted fashionistas. We had our differences, too. I didn’t quite graduate high school. Patricia was a Chinese scholar, fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese. Brilliant, bitingly witty, and beautiful, she was chemo-bald the day we met at a writer’s retreat, shocked to find each other wearing the same fleece jacket from the same obscure French line. Mine was black; Patricia’s was a rich shade of olive green.
“I almost bought it in that color,” I said. “It’s beautiful.”
“The black is easier to wear,” she said. “You made a good call.”
Over dinner that night Patricia told me calmly that she was several years past the life expectancy for her metastasized breast cancer. But her fourteen-year-old daughter, Maya, needed her, and so did her husband, Mark, and she had a book to finish. As long as she could, Patricia said, she was simply going to refuse to die.
For the next few years, once or twice a week, Patricia and her Irish setter, Blue, and I would meet at the trailhead, often exchanging some item of clothing that one thought the other would like. After our brief parking-lot fashion show, we’d huff and puff up and down the redwood mountains together, Blue gamboling, Patricia and I dissecting the high-stakes struggles we shared: troubled childhoods, troubled marriages, troubled kids, troubled manuscripts.
When my wife and I were at the start of our free fall, my wife joked to Patricia that if she ever broke a hiking date with me, our marriage would be over by the end of the day. It wasn’t really a joke. My wife knew that Patricia spent hours explaining and defending my wife to me, because Patricia loved my wife, and she loved the way our marriage had been before it went bad, and, I realized later, Patricia probably knew she was dying and she didn’t want me to be alone when she did. Week after week, mile after mile, Patricia counseled me to be patient, to hear the love as well as the anger in the things my wife said to me, to find compassion in myself even when my wife couldn’t find it in herself or in me.
The day after our hike one Tuesday in November 2011, Patricia landed in the hospital. “Your friend has the strongest will I’ve ever seen,” her nurse told me when I took her aside to ask about Patricia’s prognosis. “But at some point, the body wins.” Two months later, Patricia came home to die.
I left Patricia’s deathbed and I got into bed in our guest room and I didn’t get up for a week. During that week my wife never came into my room to comfort me, and I never sought her comfort, and after that it was no longer possible to deny or ignore how broken our marriage was. Looking back at it now, I see that the start of my life without Patricia was also the start of my single life.
At Patricia’s memorial, a musician friend played her favorite song, Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” and in his voice I heard Patricia’s, her rare blend of brilliance and tenderness and rage, and I doubled over in my chair, sobbing. My wife put her hand on my back and the gesture felt jarring to me, a habit or a public performance or a last shot of her love, a purge that would free her to rid herself of me.
After Patricia died I tried hiking alone. I tried hiking our trails with our mutual friends, wonderful writer-women who missed her, too. Conversations with these not-Patricias made my ears ache for the special language she and I spoke together, the soothing sound of her voice.
In case I thought it couldn’t get any worse, here I am in a strange place on some strange mission, hiking with a stranger.
“Where are we going?” I ask Jules.
“You don’t know what’s happening tonight?”
I shake my head.
“Tonight we’ll see an annular eclipse from Earth for the first time in twenty years.” Jules stops walking and pulls a phone out of his crumpled cargo shorts. He taps a few keys and shows me a photograph of a black moon encircled by a gold band of sun.
“This was the last annular eclipse,” he says. “Makes the sun look like a wedding ring, doesn’t it.”
I follow Jules onto a rocky outcropping that juts over the canyon. Along its edge, people are gathered in clumps, parents holding kids’ hands, couples with their arms around each other, groups of people in lawn chairs with beers in their cup holders. Many of them are peering into tinfoil boxes like Jules’s, pointed up at the sky.
Jules puts his eye to his box. “Nothing yet,” he reports.
I’m sixty years old, I think. I don’t have this kind of time to waste.
Actually, it occurs to me, I have nothing bu
t time and nothing to do but waste it.
The tumble starts, ears ringing, throat tight. Be here now, I tell myself. Looking for distraction, I scan the canyon in front of me, dotted with houses clinging to dry, golden hillsides. Some are funky, teetering on wooden stilts, faithful to their Laurel Canyon legacy. Others are glassy, modern, post-Joni-era mansions, squatting on massive cement piers. Beyond the iconic skyline of downtown L.A., the Pacific is a glint of silver, lavender smog blanketing the wild swirl of serpentine streets. As I watch, the hot orange orb of the sun sinks to meet the horizon, setting the skyscrapers on fire.
Here I am, someplace new and different. A pulse of excitement flits through me, hummingbird wings beating back my grief.
Days ago I was riding my bike through Berkeley neighborhoods that had long lost their mystery, turning corners, knowing exactly what I would find. I close my eyes now and let the soft breeze warm me. Even since climate change, the Bay Area was never balmy enough for me. Maybe I’ve accidentally come to exactly the right place.
“It’s starting!” Jules hands me the cardboard box. “Look!”
I don’t know what an annular eclipse is and I don’t care. I lift the box to my eye. Oh, great. As promised, the moon has turned the sun into a gold wedding band.
“Isn’t it incredible?” Jules crows.
I swallow hard. “I’m sure it is. I guess I’m just not into astrology.”
“Astronomy,” Jules corrects me.
“Case in point.” Jeez, I chastise myself. This guy’s sharing his home with me, trying to share an eclipse with me, and I don’t appreciate any of it.
No wonder I’m sixty and sleeping on a stranger’s couch.
If I opened my mouth right now and said the truest thing in the truest way, I’d wail like the six-year-old I am inside, exiled to summer camp, sobbing on the phone to my parents, begging them to let me come home.
But this isn’t summer camp. This is my actual life.
Also, I’m not six.
Also, there’s no one to call.
Also, I don’t have a home.
“So beautiful.” Jules sighs. At least he didn’t let me ruin this for him. I envy him his unfettered delight.
—
THE SKY GOES INKY. The skyscrapers fade into the night. Jules pulls out a flashlight and the two of us follow the pale yellow circle of light down the hill.
Except for the faint whoosh of cars on Hollywood Boulevard, the night sounds are nature’s. Since I left my Taos hippie mountaintop in the 1970s, I’ve missed hearing crickets and birds chirping their small-town sunset songs. How strange that Los Angeles is the place I get to hear them again.
“Home sweet home.” Jules pushes through the unlocked front door.
Across the large living room, a wall of casement windows and French doors opens to the view to the canyon. Multi-patterned dhurrie rugs crisscross the gleaming oak floor. Vintage velvet easy chairs cozy up to a white Spanish fireplace. In front of the windows, a long wooden farm table is set with Provençal linens and charmingly mismatched plates. The kitchen is what every housewares catalogue cover wants to be, wicker baskets and copper bowls hanging from wrought-iron hooks, marble countertops dotted with chunky wooden cutting boards and apothecary jars. Stoveside, a skyline of olive oils, sea salts, and pepper mills awaits a cook.
“It’s gorgeous,” I say. “Pure Clara.”
“She’s amazing, isn’t she?” I follow Jules’s eyes to a daybed near the front windows, surrounded on three sides by massive painted wooden screens.
“Clara put the screens up before she left,” he says. “For your privacy.”
I stare at the screens, willing my face not to show my disappointment. When Clara said I could sleep on their couch, I’d envisioned that couch in a room with a door. Now I envision Jules walking by me when I’m sleeping, averting his eyes to avoid the sight of me dreaming and drooling. I envision myself pretending to be asleep so I won’t see him walking past me in his briefs or his boxers, or whatever the hell men are wearing under their jeans these days.
“Those screens are beautiful,” I manage.
“Chinese antiques.” Jules beams. “Clara’s pride and joy.”
It stabs me, remembering my wife lighting up that way when she talked about me.
“Clara told me to make space in the garage so you can use it as your dressing room.”
I follow Jules through the kitchen to the garage. We stand silently regarding the stacks of paintings and overflowing cardboard boxes and gardening tools and old chairs and tables in various stages of repair. There isn’t room for a dress in here, let alone a dressing room.
“Sorry.” Jules shakes his head. “We have so much junk.”
“I’ll make it work,” I say. “It’s so nice of you to put up with me.” If my first few hours in Los Angeles are any indication, I’m going to be doing a whole lot of pretending to be the positive person I am not.
Jules bushwhacks his way through the piles and emerges pushing a half-full rolling garment rack. He shoves the clothes on the rack to one side, leaving a few inches of space on the rod for me.
“Want help unpacking?” he asks.
“Thanks. I’ll handle it.”
“Holler if you need anything.”
Jules goes back into the house, and I start hauling armloads of hangers from my car to the garage. It feels like a week ago that I carried these clothes out of the closet I shared, until a few hours ago, with my wife.
Jules reappears. “How you doing out here?”
“All done.”
“Glass of wine?” Jules asks.
Right now I’d give a vineyard to be able to walk into a room with a door that closes and close the door. I need to be alone to cry the way a person with diarrhea needs a bathroom. But I owe Jules. There’s only one answer to anything he offers me.
“Sounds good,” I lie. “Thanks.”
I follow Jules to a turquoise metal bistro table on the deck off the kitchen. The stars of Hollywood twinkle below us, a nighttime skyscape turned upside down. Determined to show Jules and myself that I’m not too strangled by my own story to be interested in someone else’s, I pepper him with questions, imitating my former, genuinely curious self. Jules tells me about his job as a physics professor, his brother’s upcoming marriage, how much he misses his wife.
Jules sips his wine. “What about you?” he asks.
If I answer him honestly I might feel better, but he’ll know he has a needy, unstable head case on his hands. If I don’t . . .
I don’t know what will happen if I don’t spill my feelings, because I’ve never not done that. Wouldn’t that be withholding from a guy who’s being generous and open with me? Covering up my embarrassing situation? Concealing the real me?
“It’s a long story,” I say.
Is that relief or fatigue on Jules’s face? “Another time, then,” he says. He outlines his morning routine: when and where he shaves and showers, reads his Los Angeles Times, eats his oatmeal, drinks his tea.
“Clara told me you like your solitude in the morning,” I say. I stand up and take my half-full wineglass to the sink. If this were my house, I’d leave it there until my wife drank it or washed it. I pour out the wine, wash the glass, dry it, open cabinet doors until I find its mates, and make room for it on the shelf.
“I’ll try not to get in your way.”
“Mornings can be hectic,” Jules says.
“I can only imagine,” I say, speaking literally. Mornings, afternoons, weekdays, weekends have been all the same to me. I haven’t had a day job since 1992.
“Don’t let me keep you.” Jules gives me an awkward hug. “If I don’t see you before you leave, break a leg.”
But he does see me. Right from where he’s sitting. He sees me going to the garage to get undressed, and he sees me padding across the living
room in my pink-and-green pineapple-print pajamas. He sees me rearranging Clara’s wooden screens so he can’t see me climb onto the mattress and turn my back to him and pretend to sleep.
I’ve never understood why some people choose to live alone. I get it now. What a luxury to be able to sleep in one’s own home when grief and exhaustion demand it; to be able to speak only when and with whom one wants to speak.
As soon as I hear Jules go downstairs and close the door to his and Clara’s bedroom, I reach into the small suitcase I’ve shoved under the daybed and pull out my itty-bitty book light and my copy of A Three Dog Life by Abigail Thomas, a memoir about the end of her happy marriage.
In most books I’ve found on the subject of marital heartbreak, including Thomas’s, the wrenching apart comes with illness or death, not the unexpected, inexplicable dissolution that took down my wife and me. But Abigail Thomas is one of the few writers I’ve found who’s both older than I am and writing about it with utterly believable candor. When my marriage started coming undone, reading Thomas’s memoirs one by one became my research project, investigating the possibility of hope.
“I put a life together,” Thomas writes of the period following the accident that broke her husband’s brain and their life together. “I learned to make use of the solitude I now had aplenty . . . I made new friends, I learned to knit, I met other writers, and we began to get together to share our work.”
I close the book and close my eyes, trying to visualize myself making new friends or knitting or meeting other writers. I used to knit, but I can’t imagine growing a lapful of wool or wearing anything made of wool in this climate. I used to share my work with other writers, but I can’t imagine having the emotional wherewithal to go out and meet writers, let alone write, let alone share my writing.
Footsteps from downstairs make my eyes fly open, jerk my body into full alert. Everything around me is strange: the shadows, the scents, the sounds. That damn six-year-old inside me is wailing I just want to go home.
The New Old Me Page 2
