What nice thing can I say about my friend’s reduced circumstances, the price of her emancipation? Like mine, Emily’s post-divorce dwelling is a steep comedown from her marital home. Like my wife and me, Emily and her husband had spent a decade restoring their three-story Victorian to its turn-of-the-century glory. As a heterosexual divorcée in 1983, I memorized the stats about men’s versus women’s post-divorce finances: ex-husbands get richer; ex-wives, poorer. According to recent reports, nothing much has changed: in the first year after divorce, the wife’s standard of living drops more than 25 percent; the husband’s may increase by as much as 10 percent. As my husband did when we split up, Emily’s ex will go on living in the family home.
Emily and I spend the weekend rearranging furniture, creating a writing nook in her living room, hanging drapes, and assembling bookshelves, talking and laughing and eating and drinking. We cook dinner together at night and cuddle in Emily’s new bed in the mornings, smoothing the edges of our bodies’ jagged need for touch. Saying good-bye on Sunday night is wrenching, but our history reassures us that we’ll always end up in the same room at the same time when we really need to be.
Maybe I don’t need to give up everything, I think, greeted by no one at Bob Hope Airport at midnight, dragging my suitcase off the baggage carousel and out into the dark night, past the shuttered rental car kiosks, across a four-lane street to the cheapo airport parking lot, where my car is still another unlit quarter-mile walk away. I don’t have a wife to pick me up at the airport, but I can still hold and be held, comfort and be comforted.
As much as I’ve ached to end the months of couch-surfing, I’ve dreaded the thought of making a home alone. But maybe if I can feel good feathering a nest for Emily, I can feel good—or at least, survive—feathering a nest for myself.
—
UNTIL I STARTED LOOKING for a place to rent, I’d managed to ignore the panicky headlines about Los Angeles’ affordable-housing crisis. Looking for a place I can afford snaps me out of denial. The reality is not pretty.
The average price of a single-family home in Los Angeles is nearly $800,000, so the rental market is flooded with would-be buyers turned renters. Meanwhile, the number of rentals has been shrinking, thanks in part to landlords turning whole apartment buildings into hyper-profitable Airbnb “hotels.” Google’s new Westside campus set hordes of house-hunting employees loose on neighborhoods already stretched beyond capacity. East Coast transplants are arriving in droves, weary of climate-changed winters, drawn by the promise of jobs in “new TV.” The average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles is $2,591—$500 more than the mortgage on my three-story house in Oakland, and $500 more than I can afford.
Celia comes down from San Francisco to help navigate the search. We check out a “cute, cozy Hollywood cottage” for $1,450—perfect if not for three little problems: no kitchen, no windows, and a homeless man camped in the doorway. A $1,300 “updated studio” in a gloomy Koreatown apartment building does have a kitchen and two grime-encrusted windows overlooking a strip mall, but no stove.
As I scour the listings on my phone, Celia drives us toward Mount Washington, an outlying neighborhood where hipsters have only just begun their rent-inflating influx. “It’ll take you an hour to get to work from here,” Celia says. She knows I had to move to L.A., and she knows I have to stay in L.A. at least until my financial picture improves, but she doesn’t have to like it. This up-close-and-personal tour of L.A.’s housing crisis isn’t helping.
I decide to look for a “share situation” in a safer, more central neighborhood. Craigslist sends us to a “suite” in the Silver Lake home of a self-described “old Hollywood queen.”
“Steps need work,” Celia says, the railing rattling in our grip. A deeply tanned, deeply wrinkled eightysomething man in a gold lamé bathrobe and gold slippers shows us to the “suite”: a single large room adjoining his bedroom. “Only the best!” Queenie beams proudly at the splintery gold-painted wood floor, gold-painted walls, and gold-painted ceiling.
Celia and I retreat to her car. She turns on the AC and we sit silently staring out at the smoggy sky. “You could come home and live with me,” she says. “I’ll support both of us till you get a job.”
“You know I have to do this.” I glance down at the phone in my lap. “The next place looks much better.”
Celia sighs and drives me there. And yes, the “Writer’s Villa” is a gorgeous, sprawling, terraced, and turreted Spanish-style mansion built into a Los Feliz hillside. The Villa is listed as a “writer’s community,” common areas shared, rooms rented to working writers by the week, month, or year.
Ruth, a screenwriter and the resident “house mother,” gives us a tour of the lush jungle gardens, quaint tiled bathrooms, luxurious kitchen, and spacious Mission-styled living room with leather couches, TV, sound system, printers, and built-in bookshelves overflowing with award statuettes and books. We follow her up a winding wrought-iron staircase to the room that was recently vacated, she tells us, by a writer who switched from NCIS: Los Angeles to CSI: Las Vegas. My excitement evaporates as I look around the small, dark, drably furnished $2,700-a-month room. The view of Griffith Park is stunning, but the small window is north-facing, passed over by the sun. “You get to share the upstairs terrace,” Ruth says. “And the people who live here are great. The dinner conversations alone are worth the rent.”
I glance at Celia, who’s staring at the twin bed. “I’ll think about it and get back to you,” I say. Celia nearly runs me over on our way down the stairs.
“I need a place of my own,” I say as she and I are polishing off a plate of fish tacos at Ricky’s, a local dive that Celia frequented during her L.A. years.
Celia glances at her phone. “My flight’s in two hours,” she says. She drives me back to Karen’s house, hugs me good-bye across the front seat.
“It helped so much to have you with me,” I say.
Through gritted teeth she says, “Remember, you can always come home.”
“No, I can’t,” I say. “But thanks.”
Two weeks later I find a listing for a 500-square-foot furnished cottage in Silver Lake, “the hippest neighborhood in America,” the neighborhood Berkeley would be if only Berkeley more willingly embraced the passage of time.
I rush to meet Bob, the landlord, at the cottage. The tour doesn’t take long. There’s a decent-sized living room, a dining area, a funky but serviceable kitchen, a tiny bathroom, and a small, sunny bedroom with a peekaboo view, as Bob calls it, of the Silver Lake hills. Best of all, the cottage is secluded, enclosed by a tall fence lashed with grapevines, and the shady little patio is outfitted with a resin Adirondack chair, so I can write outside. On the downside, it’s across a narrow alley from a 7-Eleven store, which will situate my head exactly twelve feet from a rooftop air compressor that sounds like ten jets taking off at the same time. Bargain-priced at $2,200 a month, the cottage is a fifteen-minute drive from my job.
“I’ll take it,” I say. And then I remember from thirty years ago, the last time I rented a place, the way this game works. This isn’t powerful me, choosing a house to rent. This is supplicant me, hoping to be chosen. “If you’ll rent it to me,” I add.
Bob sits down next to me on the beige Ikea couch, lays out copies of the rental agreement, and hands me a pen. As I’m printing my name next to my new address, my hand freezes.
I can’t have a different address from my wife’s.
Bob peers at me impatiently. I read him loud and clear. If I’m not ready to take the place, there are about a zillion people who are.
I sign the lease. I hand Bob a check for $4,400. He hands me the keys to my new home.
—
HAVING MY OWN PLACE to live is so much better than couch-surfing. Having a door to close. Plucking my underwear from drawers instead of suitcases. Leaving my shampoo and my toothpaste in the bathroom instead of packing
them in and out each time. Finding only my own clothes in the closet, my own food in the fridge.
My cottage is tiny, but in this climate, my space isn’t. I buy a backpack chair and spend writing days at the Silver Lake reservoir park, cell phone in hand, laptop in lap, bare feet in moist, cool grass. At night I throw the cottage windows open, inhaling the twin Silver Lake scents of pot and skunk, dancing with myself to the music blasting from the indie rock club a block away.
Having my own place is also excruciating. My name on the mailbox, alone. My tea mug in the sink, alone. Nothing changes in the cottage unless I change it. If I forget to turn the TV off at night, it’s still on when I wake up in the morning. No one makes the bed, helps use up the half-and-half before it sours, hangs her jeans over mine on the hook. If I want to put up curtains, replace the coffee table, buy firewood although the local weather calls for air-conditioning, that’s up to me and me alone.
There’s a question I ask myself at times like this, when my “acting as if” needs a boost. What would a normal person do when she moves into a new apartment?
She’d throw a housewarming party, that’s what.
I can’t throw a party. Parties are what my wife and I do together. But if I don’t throw parties without my wife, I’ll never throw a party again.
I call my new friend Hannah, who gives great dinners at her Santa Monica house. “I want to have a housewarming party,” I tell her. “I was wondering—”
“Great idea,” she says. “How can I help?”
—
HANNAH ARRIVES TWO HOURS BEFORE the guests, toting Whole Foods bags fragrant with the chickens and garlic potatoes she roasted and the bruschetta ingredients she prepped, and an extravagant bouquet of white lilies in a vintage glass vase. “Welcome home.” She hands me the flowers and unpacks the trays, platters, and flutes she brought from home.
People come. Charlotte and her new boyfriend, Brian, and Donna and Nichole and their friends David and George. Michelle, my redheaded happy hour date, can’t make it up from Orange County, so she sends two writer friends she says I need to know—Darcy, who lives up the street, and Molly, who drives all the way from the Westside.
My next-door neighbor Geneen, who restores vintage clothing. Rodolfo, the shucker from the oyster bar across the street, where I eat or drink a few times a week, just to hear him greet me by name.
Hannah’s friends come, too. Our editor, Todd. A novelist who used to write for Seinfeld. A humor writer who, it turns out, wrote the Sex and the City episode in which Aidan leaves Carrie for cheating on him with Mister Big.
Music plays on borrowed speakers. People talk and laugh, eat and drink. Hannah helps me keep the wineglasses and platters filled and the dirty plates cleared. Everyone seems happy to be here and reluctant to leave.
Hannah insists on helping me clean up. It’s near midnight when she packs her platters and glasses and brushes off my thanks and drives back across town.
Now is when my wife and I hug and high-five each other: another fabulous party thrown, another set of fabulous people introduced to each other, another abundance of delicious food served, more proof that we’re so much bigger and better as a couple than either of us would be alone.
That was then. Now is when my empty house rings with silence. Now is when I find out what I can do and who I can be, alone.
Housewarming party, not pity party, I scold myself. I didn’t throw it alone. I threw it with Hannah, my new friend.
I dry my landlord’s pots and pans and put them where I want them to go, not necessarily where he left them, and mop the kitchen floor at one in the morning, grateful that I can bang around without waking the person whose couch I’m borrowing. My grief fights it out with that fragile shadow dancer, hope.
I don’t have nearly as much time left as I did the last time I started over, at age forty-five, when I made a home with my wife. Time doesn’t care. Healing isn’t a moment, an epiphany, a turning point without reversals or twists. It’s a process, and it’s not up to me how long it takes or how it feels along the way.
It took a long time for all the good things I had—marriage, friends nearby, money—to fall into place. It’s going to take a long time to get over losing them. Like it or not (not), this healing will be a wall I build solo, one brick laid down upon another brick and another.
In the interim I’m living my booby-prize life, wringing every drop of delight from the tiniest things. “Little victories,” Kenny Loggins sang to me, “are all a heart needs.” They’re not all I need, but they help. Finding the perfect nightstand in my neighbor’s bulky pickup pile. Treating myself to a po’ boy at the oyster bar, to a day of window-shopping in Beverly Hills.
This wasn’t the life I wanted. It isn’t the life I want. But I’m here now, doing what I came to this tough, thrilling town to do. Slowly, sometimes agonizingly, I’m restoring myself to financial, emotional, and spiritual health.
Like it or not (mostly not), I’m living my Plan B life here now.
I’m living here now.
I’m here now.
I’m here.
PART TWO
HALF-EMPTY
NINE
I’m in a three o’clock meeting at Bellissima, brainstorming product names for the summer collection, when my phone vibrates in my pocket. It’s my stepmother’s ring.
My heart thuds. Lina e-mails; she never calls. I slip into the hallway to phone her back.
“Your father . . .” Lina can’t talk because she’s crying. Lina never cries. “He fell. He fell and I couldn’t—”
“Lina,” I interrupt her. “Is he alive?”
“Oh! Oh, yes. I’m sorry.” She inhales an uneven breath. “But he is not good.”
“Not good how?”
“He fainted. I could not wake him up.” Lina’s Swiss accent is thicker than usual, the way it gets when she’s exhausted or upset.
I see my father on the floor in their San Francisco apartment, my stepmother trying to hoist him into bed.
It wouldn’t be the first time. In the ten years since my father’s diagnoses with Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and heart disease, we’ve been lucky. For most of that decade he’s been able to get himself to the bathroom, remember his children’s names, and push a cart around Costco, his greatest pleasure once he could no longer manage a Giants game or Dollar Day at the track.
But for the past year he’s been declining rapidly. Too proud to use a walker or a scooter, he gradually lost the ability to walk, discern day from night, or eat more than a few bites. The irony is painful: my chronically overweight father, who spent most of his life alternately researching new restaurants and new diet pills, had lost his interest in food.
“I called 911,” Lina says. “They took him to the hospital. They say he’s dehydrated. They’re giving him fluids. Your brother and I are here with him now.”
“Should I come?” I ask.
“When I was trying to get him off the floor,” Lina chokes out, “he told me, ‘I wish I could ride with you into the sunset.’”
“I’ll be on the next flight,” I say.
I call the airline and book a seat, then beckon Heather out of the meeting. How could she possibly understand what I’m about to tell her? Her parents are younger than I am. Her grandparents are all alive.
“My father’s in the hospital in San Francisco.” Saying the words makes my eyes burn. “I have to go.”
“Of course you do. I’m so sorry,” Heather says. “Anything we can do? Do you need a ride to LAX?”
I shake my head, hug her quickly, and head for the door. My flight takes off at 4:20. It’s 3:05 now. It’s going to be tight, but I have to make it. The next flight isn’t until seven tonight.
I steer my car through the thickening rush-hour traffic, willing the hands on my dashboard clock to stop moving, eyes glued to the rearview mirror in case I cross pat
hs with a cop. I remember Isabel talking about a special airport valet service she uses when she’s “really, seriously” late for a flight. Of course LAX offers an option for the rich. It must cost a fortune, but in this moment I’d mortgage my house to get to my dad.
Siri guides me to the airport valet. Before I’ve quite come to a stop, a young man in a black uniform runs up to my car, waves me into the passenger seat, and jumps behind the wheel. Two minutes later he drops me at the Southwest terminal, gives me a number to text my return flight number to, and drives away in my car.
I race up to the ticket counter, slap down my credit card. “The 4:20 to San Francisco,” I say.
The ticket agent frowns, shakes her head. “They just locked the doors on that flight. I can get you onto the 7:04.”
“That won’t work,” I open my mouth to say. Instead, I burst into tears. “My dad is in San Francisco, and he’s dying,” I choke out. “I have to get there now.”
The agent bites her lip and starts typing furiously. “You’re on the next United flight to SFO. It leaves in twenty minutes.” She yanks a boarding pass out of the printer, hands it to me. “They’re giving you the bereavement fare. Run.”
“Thank you,” I say to her and to God, and then I run. I run and run across the vast expanse of the LAX domestic terminal and I make it onto the plane just as the flight attendant is closing the door. I spend the hour-long flight leaning forward, as if that will get me there sooner.
Racing out of the cab and into the hospital lobby, punching the elevator button again and again, I imagine my father on a gurney in one of these hallways, seeing what I’m seeing, smelling what I’m smelling, thinking what I’m thinking—but flat on his back, helpless, exposed. Like his father before him, my dad breathes fear the way calmer people breathe air. For most of his adult life, my father’s time belonged to the corporations that paid our rent. Since he retired, he’s been happily marooned on his gray leather recliner, the pleasure center from which he enjoys his baseball games and black-and-white movies, his privacy, his creature comforts, his time with his cherished wife.
The New Old Me Page 9
