Geoffrey trains his gaze on the muscleman in the front row.
“Edward?” he says enticingly.
“I got nothing,” Edward says.
Geoffrey sighs theatrically. “I get it. You’re keeping your news to yourself in case someone in here tries to steal your booking. Or your date. I don’t blame you. This is a tough town.”
A ripple of agreement flutters through the room.
“This is a tough town,” Geoffrey repeats. He turns the twin bowling balls of his ass to us and punches a button. “I Will Survive” blasts into the room. Geoffrey drops to his back on a mat, links his fingers behind his shaved head, and starts pumping out bicycle crunches. “At first I was afraid, I was petrified . . .” he sings along.
I watch myself in the floor-to-ceiling mirror, doing my own version of Geoffrey’s moves. My body doesn’t have his defined, bulging muscles. My twists are impeded by a ridge of belly fat and a lifetime of lazy workouts. My pace is slower, slightly behind the beat.
But I see something new on my face, besides sweat. Determination. I like the look of it. If my body can get stronger, maybe my heart can, too.
“I will survive!” Geoffrey shouts. His thighs are pistons in the air.
Who knows? Maybe I will, too.
The next song blasts from the speakers. “It’s raining men, hallelujah,” Geoffrey shouts.
When the music stops, the men around me start toweling off their Botoxed faces, putting away their weights and mats and resistance bands, making Grindr dates on their phones. I imagine them enjoying the rest of their sunny Saturday: brunching, shopping, bionic booty calling.
“Good job, everyone,” Geoffrey says. “Give yourselves a hand.” My classmates ignore him, rushing off to their mani-pedis and fresh-pressed juiceries and porn shoots. I muster a smile. Geoffrey smiles back at me. The two of us give ourselves a hand.
—
ON MY WAY BACK to Karen’s, I call Joanne and sign up for personal training sessions, every Thursday at 7:30 a.m. Each session will cost eighty dollars—less, Joanne tells me, if she pairs me with another client. “You’re a social person. You’ll like that better than going solo anyway. And plus”—she laughs—“you’re cheap.”
I don’t know how Joanne intuited these things about me and I don’t care. From now on, every Thursday morning—without coercing any of my brand-new friends into seeing me regularly, and at a third the price of a shrink—I’ll have an hour with someone who will eventually get to know me.
“Right on both counts,” I tell Joanne. “Sure, double me up.”
—
AT MY FIRST SESSION Joanne introduces my workout buddy as Mike. I recognize him as Jimbo, a lead character on one of my favorite HBO shows. “Oh my God,” I blurt before my brain has time to stop my mouth, “I watch you every week. You’re such a good actor!”
Joanne inserts her body between Mike and me, a tiny referee. “Sorry. Meredith’s new in town,” she tells him. “Still starstruck. She’ll get over it.”
Highly unlikely. Unlike the locals, who manifest a studied indifference to the celebs who walk and work out among us, I refuse to play it cool. This is my fallback life, goddammit. I’m going to cherish every cheap thrill I can get.
“No worries,” Mike says to me over Joanne’s head, which comes up to his nipple. “I appreciate your appreciation.” A frisson of excitement runs through me. He’s just like his character! Such a sweet guy. And he’s my workout buddy!
Turns out, pain is a great equalizer. Once Mike and I are splayed side by side on our bellies, he on the hamstring machine and me on the butt-blaster, both of us grunting and cursing and slickening the black vinyl benches with sweat, he isn’t Jimbo anymore, and I’m not a starstruck Hollywood rookie. We are both, as our trainer keeps reminding us, “Joanne’s bitches.”
Halfway through our session Joanne sends Mike out on a run around the block and positions me in the shoulder-lift machine. “So what’s your story?” Joanne asks, head cocked, eyes locked on mine.
“What do you mean?” I say, shoving my arms out and over my head.
“Why’d you move to L.A.? And start a new job at an age when most people are retiring? And how come you’re so sad?”
I drop the handles with a deafening clank. “You can talk and work out at the same time,” Joanne says.
I’m in no position to turn down an interested listener. I give Joanne the brief version.
“Wow,” she says.
Mike returns from his run, red-faced and dripping. “Wow, what?” he says.
“Meredith was just telling me why she just moved to L.A. She’s been through a lot.”
I’m half horrified, half delighted by Joanne’s disclosures. I guess personal trainers aren’t bound by confidentiality rules.
“I’m sorry.” Mike reaches out and squeezes my arm.
“Okay, you two,” Joanne says. “Follow me to the boys’ room.”
“We’re working out in the men’s bathroom?” I sputter.
Joanne laughs and leads us to the back of the gym, where the free weights and the boys are. Big boys. Boys with arms the size of Virginia hams and chests like refrigerators and waists like Golden Age starlets’. Joanne gives me a set of ten-pound hand weights. Mike gets thirties. The two of us stand facing the mirror, his young TV-star face and my geriatric face both so scrunched up with effort, they almost look alike.
I’m dying to ask Mike about his costars and the plot for the coming season. But despite Joanne’s optimism, I can’t lift weights and talk at the same time. While we do our rows and presses and bicep curls, I eavesdrop on the men around us instead.
“Three studios have Marvel products coming out soon. They’ve all been overdeveloped. I’m taking mine back to Universal.”
“Dude. Where are my notes?”
“I know, I know. I was up all night. I promise I’ll get them to you tomorrow.”
“I’d do him in a heartbeat. Wouldn’t you?”
“My contractor’s smokin’ hot, but the renovation is taking for-fucking-ever.”
“I hear he’s up for something big.”
“I hear he is something big.”
Apparently Mike has been eavesdropping, too. “Men.” He sighs.
—
“I HAVE A SURPRISE FOR YOU,” Joanne says when I arrive for my second session. “I’m pairing you up with a lesbian. And she’s single.”
She grins at me, clearly pleased with herself. Trainer, therapist, and yenta. Not bad for sixty bucks a week. “Thanks. But I’m not—”
“Shhh!” Joanne waves to a shorthaired, stocky woman in track shorts and a Walk to End Breast Cancer T-shirt.
“Hey,” the woman says, glancing at me, then at Joanne.
“Andrea, Meredith,” Joanne says. “Meredith, Andrea. Okay, you two. Take a run around the block. Get to know each other.”
As we set off Joanne yells after us, “Andrea! Meredith’s a lazy-ass! Make her keep up.”
Andrea and I jog toward Santa Monica Boulevard in silence. Even if I could talk and run at the same time, we wouldn’t be conversing. Andrea looks angry, locked into herself.
“Andrea, sit-ups,” Joanne barks as we run back into Silverado. “Meredith, come with me.”
“So?” Joanne links her arm with mine, half dragging me to the butt-blaster. “What do you think?”
“Not my type,” I say. “But thanks for trying.”
Joanne stops fussing with the weight plates and looks across the gym at Andrea, who’s doing crunches on a slant board. “There’s a reason I put you two together,” Joanne says quietly. “Andrea lost her wife, too.”
“How long ago did they break up?”
“They didn’t.”
Joanne pauses for dramatic emphasis. “Oh,” I say. “Cancer?”
Joanne shakes her head. “Th
ey were camping in Yosemite, celebrating their fifteenth anniversary. They went for a hike. Her wife slipped and fell off the side of the hill.”
“Oh, God. Did she . . . ?”
Joanne nods. “The last thing Andrea saw was her wife’s terrified face before she lost her grip. There was nothing she could do but watch her wife fall to her death.”
“Oh my God,” I say. “How is Andrea even walking and talking?”
“Same way you are.”
“I’m going through a breakup. She watched her wife die.”
“What happened to you is worse, in a way,” Joanne says. “She lost her wife in an instant. You lost your wife over and over again. Every day. For years.”
My stomach rumbles.
“You’re still losing your wife,” Joanne adds. “And you don’t even know why.”
I taste the hot sting of vomit in my throat.
“Are you okay?” Joanne asks. “You look kind of green.”
I nod, then run to the bathroom, stand over the toilet, retching, thinking, I don’t even know why.
—
MY LABOR DAY ANXIETY is starting to build when I get an e-mail from Carol, a member of Donna and Nichole’s extended family of friends. Carol and I have gone to the movies and out for happy hour a few times, just the two of us. She’s tall and stylish and smart, with a quirky sense of humor that matches mine.
Hi, Meredith! We have seats at the Bowl on Saturday to hear Ziggy Marley. If you don’t have plans, like reggae music, and don’t mind the last-minute invite, please come and join us as our guest.
I count to twenty, my hedge against appearing overeager, and write back telling Carol that the Hollywood Bowl is at the top of my to-see list. “What can I bring?” I ask.
“Just your beautiful self,” she answers.
My heart soars. Friends.
At the designated meeting time I walk to Donna and Nichole’s, carrying a tin of homemade pecan sandies, warm from my borrowed oven. I find the women packing picnic baskets and canvas totes and coolers into Carol’s Audi.
“Naughty girl.” Carol mock-scowls at the tin in my hands. “Which part of ‘Don’t bring anything’ didn’t you understand?”
Seventy-five minutes later, we’ve made it through the Saturday night logjam on the 101 to Hollywood, and the red-lights-for-miles crawl into the Bowl parking lot, and the loop-the-loop in the lot, looking for a spot that won’t leave us trapped in a long line of cars when it’s time to leave. Schlepping grocery bags and baskets and pulling a rolling cooler, we file into the Hollywood Bowl—the Hollywood Bowl!—bobbing along in a river of people carrying similar things. I follow my friends to our seats. Our seats are actually a box. In the second row. Twenty feet from the stage.
“Wow,” I say. “You girls know how to live.”
“What else is there?” Nichole says.
I shake off a wave of envy of Nichole and Donna’s thirty-five-year, seemingly solid relationship, a wave of longing to be sharing this evening with my wife. I look around, taking it all in. The amphitheater is cut into the curve of the hill, ringed with rows of benches like a terraced vineyard. The rainbow-arched bandstand collides softly with the sky. I realize that some of my favorite TV shows and movies were shot here. A Star Is Born, the original 1937 version. Beaches. Seinfeld. Californication. My heart trills the way it does in these moments of recognition, falling a bit more in love with L.A.
“I’ll be back,” I say. I climb the wide stone steps past the front rows, where mostly white, middle-aged boxholders are pouring wine and setting out cheese platters. I pass the mixed crowd of the middle ground, where partyers are drinking Red Stripe beer. In the nosebleed seats, a younger, darker-skinned crowd in dreadlocks and crocheted Rastafarian caps are dancing to the piped-in reggae, passing spliffs, creating their own weather, a cloud of pot smoke hanging heavy in the hot night air.
From the uppermost ledge of the Bowl, I look down at the eating, drinking, smoking, swaying masses. Beyond the band shell, the parched Hollywood Hills squat on the horizon. As I watch, the sun sinks an inch. Maybe it’s the contact high, but the last shafts of daylight seem to light up the Hollywood sign.
How did I get to be here, in this beautiful place with these beautiful people? My chest swells with a feeling I remember. Happiness. Freewheeling, free-floating joy.
If I can have one good moment, I tell myself, I can have two. If I can have two good moments, maybe I can build a pile of good moments, good hours, good days.
The warm-up band struts onto the stage. I give myself a homework assignment for the evening. I won’t go home till I’ve had at least one more good moment. As is true of the Rastas and wannabe-Rastas around me, the odds of that seem high.
“Where you been, M&M’s?” Carol sings out to me.
“Checking out the lay of the land.”
“Laid? You should get so lucky,” Donna says, and we share a laugh.
Clearly this isn’t my hosts’ first Bowl rodeo; they’re a well-oiled picnic machine. Carol shakes out a multicolored woven tablecloth, smooths it over the table, sets out blue paper plates and blue cloth napkins that pick up the color in the weave. Donna adds slender flutes and a tiny bud vase, inserts a perfect yellow rose. Nichole sets out a bowl of Mediterranean chicken with couscous. Carol opens a Tupperware container of Greek salad, her specialty.
Donna pops the cork on a bottle of Moët. The four of us let out a cheer.
“To music and friendship, the perfect concert.” Nichole raises her flute. We toast one another, swaying to the reggae from the stage.
Hallelujah: Joy! I drink to it. I welcome it. I tell it to come on in.
“Thanks for inviting me,” I say, spooning couscous, chicken, salad onto my plate.
“No thanks required,” Donna says, half-full flute in hand. “You’re part of the family now.”
EIGHT
It’s finally over, Mer.” My friend Emily weeps into the phone. “We’re getting divorced.”
“Oh, honey,” I say. “I wish I was there to hold you right now.”
“I wish that, too.”
When Emily and I met at an artists’ colony in 2006, it was loathing at first sight. That night, Emily told me later, she called her soon-to-be ex-husband, complaining about the boundaryless stalker (that would be me) who’d asked to use the bathtub in her room. That same night I called my wife, complaining about the arrogant snob who wouldn’t let me borrow her tub. The next afternoon Emily and I shared a ride to town and actually spoke to each other and fell madly in friendship love.
The immediate intense intimacy between us outlived our residencies, as many colony friendships do not. Over the next decade there were rescue missions undertaken on a few days’ notice, back when book advances supported impulsive air travel. There were late-night 911 calls when a publisher or a spouse or a therapist or a friend let one of us down, and shared vacations with our families, and hikes in the Northwest rain forest and in the Oakland hills.
Seven hundred fifty miles and fourteen years apart, we found our crises and triumphs eerily synchronistic. My menopausal breakdown, her perimenopausal paroxysm. The delights and stresses of renovating a hundred-year-old, three-story house—hers on a broad, leafy Olympia street, mine in the Oakland flats. Our trials and errors with the meds and the sexual side effects of the meds and the weight gain with the meds and the adjusting of the meds and the ambivalence about the meds: If antidepressants pull us two steps back from our suffering, we worried, do they also distance us from the emotions that make us who we are, the emotions that fuel our work? Are Wellbutrin and Zoloft the modern equivalent of our mothers’ Miltown and Valium, keeping us well adjusted to people and institutions that should be adjusting to us?
As I struggled to salvage my marriage, Emily struggled to breathe life into hers. Each of us knew that the other one’s marriage couldn’t last, long before we coul
d quite face that truth about our own.
“I’m coming to be with you,” I say.
“Honey. You have a job. And you’re broke.” Emily blows her nose. “I’d buy you a ticket, but I’m broke, too.”
“I’ll use miles,” I say. “I’ll come for a long weekend.” Over Emily’s protests, I book a ticket and go.
—
“SO MUCH BETTER THAN FACETIME,” Emily says, clinging to me.
“We need the bodies, you and me,” I agree, kissing her face.
“While you’re here,” Emily says, driving, “I want us to make a place for me to write in my new place.”
“Easy,” I say.
“On no money.”
“Who needs money?”
“I want to talk about everything,” Emily says. “But not now.”
“Who’s asking questions?” I say. “Let’s get to work.”
—
ON THE LONG LIST of happinesses that being married brought me, nest-feathering was very near the top.
Nothing says “I’m one with you” like picking out a mattress together, or going cross-eyed holding paint chip after paint chip up to a kitchen wall. The domestic projects my wife and I did together—hunting down period fixtures for our Victorian bathroom, hanging found objects in our backyard trees, shopping for champagne flutes at the Crate & Barrel outlet store, all while holding hands—made my heart melty. Each jointly chosen plate and rug became the living embodiment of the “we,” the “us,” the “ours” that I thought would save me, and did save me, for a time.
At the Spokane Target, helping Emily fill a shopping cart with cheap unassembled bookshelves and curtain rods and picture frames, I’m surprised to feel that familiar happiness. As we drive to Emily’s new apartment, decide where to put each new purchase and which problem each new item will solve, my chest swells with belongingness and love.
Emily parks in front of a beige-brick apartment building. Her face goes glum. “This is it,” she says. “It’s horrible.”
The New Old Me Page 8
