I knew I was hurting my friends, my wife, my marriage, myself. My wife and I should have talked about it—fought about it, probably—but that would have broken our unspoken peace-at-all-costs rule. Instead of asking me what it would take to make me a happy—happier, at least—hostess to her friends, my wife glared at me and went out drinking with them. Instead of apologizing to my wife for my awful behavior, which might have forced me to actually change it, I made like a cheating husband and kissed up to her till she forgave me. Or seemed to.
Maybe if my wife had pitched a fit or I’d woman’d up and grown up, we’d still be married. But she didn’t and I didn’t, and we’re not. And so now I’m living in a room of my own for the first time in my sixty-two years, without parents, boyfriend, husband, kids, girlfriend, or wife—but with a guest studio of my own. I won’t know if that’s a denial-driven setup for disaster or an opportunity for redemption until someone asks to use it.
It’s bound to happen soon. At sixty-two I have a striped past: lots of “geographics” pulled and therefore, lots of friends in lots of places. Now I live in a city that many people—writers and artists, especially—have reason to visit. As Hannah told me soon after my move to L.A., when I was worrying about staying connected to my Bay Area friends, “Everyone comes to L.A. eventually. Just sit here and wait. They’ll all show up.”
The past two years proved Hannah correct. Even when I was renting my itsy-bitsy apartment with only my couch to offer, I entertained a steady stream of visitors from the East Coast, the Bay Area, and places in between. My friends were happy to have an L.A. place to crash, and—miracle of miracles—I was happy to host them.
—
SURE ENOUGH, a few weeks after I move into the Bungalito, a Brooklyn friend, Dana, e-mails to ask if she can stay with me while she writes a TV pilot based on her novel. Proposed duration of her visit: six weeks.
Instead of filling me with dread, Dana’s e-mail thrills me. I’ve adored Dana since we met at an artists’ colony ten years ago. We bonded instantly, went halfies on a blender and an industrial-size bottle of tequila, and spent a month of evenings drinking margaritas in her studio, telling each other everything. Dana never made it to the Bay Area, but I see her whenever I go to New York, which isn’t nearly often enough. For some margarita-related reason neither of us remembers, Dana and I call each other Chiquita or, in extra-affectionate moments, Chica.
“Come for as long as you can stay,” I write back, noting how good it feels good to say that and mean it.
—
WHEN DANA and her multiple suitcases appear at my front door, I’m a bit trepidatious, willing the Monster not to breathe fire on her. But no. I’m thrilled to see her. We take the five-minute, four-room Bungalito tour. “A writing balcony!” Dana says. “So much light!”
Dana follows me down the stairs to the deck. “Wow,” she says. “Look at that garden. You have a fountain!”
I open the French doors to the casita. Dana and I step inside.
“It’s fantastic, Chiquita.” Dana sinks into a chair at the kitchen table and regards me thoughtfully. “Last time I saw you, your whole life was falling apart. And now look at what you’ve created. I’m so impressed.”
I’m getting used to people coming here and saying that. But it never fails to make me teary grateful.
“If you could do this . . .” Dana’s voice trails off. We sit in silence for a moment. Past experience with visiting friends tells me what Dana’s about to say, and she says it. “It makes me wonder what I could do. What I should do.”
“Are you kidding?” I argue. “HBO bought your novel! And they’re paying you to turn it into a screenplay. I’d kill for that to happen to me.”
“I’m living in a gigantic house full of all kinds of pre-divorce crap I don’t even want. Not because I like it. Just because of inertia.”
“Inertia’s a powerful thing.”
“Do you ever miss your stuff?” Dana asks me.
“Not really.”
“Amazing. God, I’d love to live in a cozy little place like this.”
“With two kids?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah. I do.” But being envied, especially by someone as accomplished as Dana, feels weird. “Wine?”
Dana nods and we traipse back upstairs to my kitchen. “What smells so good?” she asks.
I lift the lid on the pot that’s simmering on the stove. “Pot roast. For our dinner tonight.” I beam at Dana, anticipating her delight and her praise. No more Locked-Nest Monster. Who could be a more mostest hostess than I?
“That’s so sweet of you,” Dana says. “But I made dinner plans for tonight. Sorry, Chica. I didn’t know . . .”
“No prob,” I say around a mouthful of disappointment. “We’ll have dinner another time.”
“Tomorrow night?”
“You don’t have to commit,” I say. “I know you’re going to be super busy while you’re here.”
“Chiquita! You’re being weird! I want to have dinner with you.”
I glance at Dana. She looks sincere, not pitying. “Okay,” I say. “The pot roast will be better tomorrow, anyway.”
“I’m going to get some great work done here. I can feel it.” Dana grabs me and hugs me. “Thanks for understanding. You’re the best.”
Not the best, I think. But getting better.
—
HOSTING A FELLOW NEW YORKER, showing her the secret corners of L.A. that my friends have shown me, makes me fall even more in love with this town. And that’s how it feels: like a passionate romance. It’s not just my brain that reacts when I’m driving east on the 101 and the Hollywood skyline comes into view. My body reacts to the sight of the thirteen-story Capitol Records Building, where Frank Sinatra and the Beach Boys recorded on vinyl. The giant neon Patrón tequila bottle that lights the streets of Hollywood at night. The Roosevelt Hotel, built by Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Louis B. Mayer; home to the first Academy Awards in 1929; crash pad for Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, and my girl, Marilyn Monroe.
Same when I’m driving north on PCH and the Pacific comes into view, dotted with bobbing surfers and seals and, sometimes, porpoises and whales. Same when I hike up to the Griffith Observatory and lean over the railing like a tourist, captivated by the Hollywood sign. Same when I’m taking Melrose home and I glimpse the neon Western Exterminator sign that was my beacon when I was new in town, relentlessly disoriented, as dependent on my iPhone as my babies were on my breasts.
Forget Texas. Everything’s big in L.A., where “flea market” means the Rose Bowl Flea Market, 2,500 booths full of lamps and jewelry and martini shakers that might have belonged to Cary Grant or—who knows?—Marilyn Monroe.
The Hollywood Farmers’ Market means a year-round hundred-ring circus, where every species of fruit and vegetable and flower is offered, every hue of green juice is pressed, every genre of street musician plays while the children of rock stars and movie stars and ordinary people squint into the sunshine, petting baby goats and having their faces painted while their parents navigate the throng, their famous faces quasi-hidden by huge wildflower bouquets.
The meaning of “going to the movies” depends on the time of year and, as in all things L.A., the amount of money one is prepared to pay for the level of experience one can afford to have. In this industry town, where the home screening room is as common in certain zip codes as the microwave is in others, luxury multiplexes are furnished with real leather recliners, and guests are served icy martinis and steak frites and local artisan hot fudge sundaes in their cushy seats.
Between November and February, the question “How can you tell when it’s winter in L.A.?” is answerable in two words: awards season. At Christmastime, instead of snow and tinsel, L.A. is blanketed by free DVDs of the current year’s TV shows and films. Studios seeking nominations send out thousands of t
heir top contenders for the Screen Actors’ Guild Awards, the Emmys, the Golden Globes, and the brass ring, the Oscars. During my first winter in L.A., I was telling a friend about a movie I’d just seen at my local theater. “You paid to see a movie during awards season?” she howled.
How can I be so besotted by a city? Journalist Melody Warnick wrote a book on the subject: This Is Where You Belong: The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live.
“People are on a search to find their place the same way they’re on a search to find a partner or spouse,” Warnick writes, quoting place consultant Katherine Loflin.
“Feeling connected, engaged, a little bit in love with our city? That’s the kind of place attachment whose effects . . . [make us] less anxious, less likely to suffer heart attacks or strokes, and less likely to complain about ailments.
“In a study conducted in Tokyo,” Warnick writes, “elderly Japanese women who were attached to [their neighborhoods] were more likely to be alive five years down the road than women who didn’t care one way or the other.”
Warnick includes a place attachment scale developed by researchers—a series of statements used to gauge respondents’ connection to where they live. I take the quiz, and my agreement with statements like “I feel like I belong in this community,” “If I could live anywhere in the world, I would live here,” and “The people who live here are my kind of people” tells me what I already know: at least geographically, I’m happy where I am.
This Is Where You Belong opens with a quote from Joan Didion, a formerly ambivalent Angeleno. “A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in its own image.”
I don’t know how much I’ve shaped Los Angeles or remade it in my own image, but the opposite is definitely true. I belong to Los Angeles because it has claimed me hard, wrenched me out of myself, shaped me. All the lucky breaks I’ve had since I came to L.A. make me feel that the city loves me so radically that it has, at least partially, remade me in its own sunshiny image.
I feel matched by this showy, kaleidoscopic, overblown, electric, drama-queen city. Like L.A., I’ve been so down it looked like up to me. Like L.A., I’m making a comeback. Like L.A., I am at once old and new. Joni Mitchell asked L.A. to “take me as I am,” and L.A. is saying to me what it said to her: Bring it, baby. Bring it all.
Since New York, I’ve never been surrounded by so many people like me, so many of the kinds of people I like: writers, artists, bohos, leftists, hikers, style freaks, foodies, bigmouths, world travelers, self-reinventors, and, it must be said, Jews.
Two years in, I’ve gathered a small but sturdy stable of truly trustable friends. When I need a place to sleep because I’m lonely, or a place to write where the chores staring at me aren’t mine, I spend a weekend in Santa Monica at Hannah and Michael’s. For Thanksgiving feasts, New Year’s Day black-eyed peas, July Fourth barbecues, or emotional emergencies, I always have a home and a cocktail waiting at Donna and Nichole’s. For little-kid-time, I have options: a pool party with Charlotte and Brian’s spunky boys, or a game of “Name That Mammal” at the dinner table with Darcy, Bruce, and their bright-eyed eight-year-old, Zakiyah. Every Sunday morning I walk into a room full of fellow Al-Anon members, many of whose names I don’t know, but whose presence in the same seat, week after week, makes me feel like there is some sort of order in my world.
Every few nights, Dana knocks on my kitchen door with a bottle of wine and a bar of dark Belgian chocolate. I light the candles and we sit at my table and eat my food and drink her wine and we talk and talk about our books, her script, our aging bodies, my new friends, our mutual friends, our mutual friends’ books, the fifteen pounds we’ve both wanted to lose since we were teenagers, our breakups, our love lives and lack thereof.
I watch Dana’s flashing blue eyes as she talks, and I listen to the fascinating things she has to say about what happened today in the writers’ room on the Paramount lot, and my chest feels like a balloon inflated to bursting, and I think, This is actually my life now.
There’s a trick to giving, and I’m getting it. I’m getting that Dana was put on this earth to be Dana, not to make up for everything and everyone I’ve ever wanted and do not have. The wonders of Dana, the deficits of Dana, the way being with her makes me feel smart and loving and alive, the way being with her makes me feel needy and desperate: I get to choose which of my feelings to pay attention to. And I get to choose which parts to discuss with Dana (the good stuff) and which parts to wrestle with on my own or with my therapist or sponsor (the rest).
Halfway through Dana’s stay, Hannah and I invite a dozen of our L.A. writer friends to a brunch for Dana at Hannah’s grown-up Westside house. We sit around Hannah’s long dinner table drinking mimosas and eating Hannah’s homemade quiche and talking about character development and whose book is on the New York Times bestseller list and why no one can live on a writer’s income anymore and how Obamacare and Airbnb might help.
And while I’m eating and drinking and arguing and laughing, I’m also asking myself: what’s not to love about this life?
PART THREE
HALF-FULL
SIXTEEN
My Plan B life feels a lot like Plan A, except for one thing. I’m still single. And I’d still prefer not to be. After my last foray into the dating fray, I’m hesitant to dive back in. But that singleness isn’t going to fix itself.
I pull up some dating sites, contemplate the pages and pages of questions. I should be good at this. I’ve been writing marketing copy since I could hold a pen. My Don Draper dad had my brother and me naming sodas at the dinner table, brainstorming Pepsi taglines in the car. Decades later, between book deals, I farmed myself out to various socially responsible businesses, writing ads and newsletters and catalogue copy to pay the bills.
If I can sell Mountain Dew to Pepsi drinkers and Ben & Jerry’s politics to its shareholders and Bellissima’s hemp dresses to its eco-demographic, surely I can sell myself to that one brilliant, beautiful, gregarious, witty, left-leaning, adventurous, curious, outdoorsy, upbeat but not chirpy, deep but not morose, well-traveled, book-reading, stylish but not superficial lesbian who lives within twenty miles of me.
Browsing the thumbnail shots of my “matches” is not encouraging. A theme emerges, and it is not encouraging, either: women French-kissing their dogs. How is this anyone’s idea of seduction? Also, when did lesbians get dogs? While I was happily married through the nineties and 00s, what happened to lesbians and cats?
Subthemes reveal themselves. Big women posing on big motorcycles. Heavily made-up women slugging drinks in bars. Butches seeking femmes, Christians seeking Christians, straight married women plagued by bi-curiosity.
One woman stands out from the rest. She’s pretty, and the smile in her eyes has a distinct spark of irony. Unlike all the others’, her profile shot is black-and-white, but the buttons on her shirt are turquoise, the only spots of color in the shot.
I click the heart icon next to her picture and send her a message: “Are you black and white in person, or do you come (so to speak) in colors?—Meredith.”
Five seconds later, her answer: “Meredith . . . why don’t you see for yourself? Call me and we’ll find a slice of time to say hi. Helena.”
Procrastinating won’t help. I take a deep breath and dial her number.
“I like your pace,” Helena answers.
“I like your buttons,” I say.
We fall into an awkward silence, which I attempt to fill by asking the crucial Los Angeles relationship-potential question. “I live in Silver Lake. What about you?”
“Sherman Oaks,” Helena says.
I’ve never heard of Sherman Oaks. But my craigslist purchasing has introduced me to dozens of cities I’d never heard of, all of which proved to be within dating proximity of L.A. “How far is that?” I ask.
“What do you do in Beverly Hills at seven on Sunday mornings?” Please God, I pray silently, don’t let it be church.
“SoulCycle. I ride five or six times a week. It’s my spinogogue.”
I laugh, and Helena laughs, and then we’re talking and laughing and it’s good. It’s not an instant cosmic connection, but by the time Helena and I hang up, we’re teasing each other with the familiarity of old friends, and we’ve made a dinner date for Friday night. Helena says she’ll pick the place and book a table and get back to me.
I like the way Helena takes charge. I allow myself to imagine having a competent partner again, to sit in the passenger seat every now and then. How nice it would be to be treated to a meal or an Uber ride, to be a tiny bit spoiled, a tiny bit taken care of.
I know when I need some adult supervision. I call Celia and get her voice mail. Hannah, as usual, answers on the first ring. “You’re futurizing,” she says, a favorite word of hers. “Stay in the present. Just go out with her and see how you feel.”
“Clearly the way I feel is not to be trusted,” I say.
“That’s because you’re dating with a broken heart. Kudos for getting out there. But you’re bound to have a negative reaction to meeting someone.”
“You think it’s too soon?”
Hannah sighs. “Why don’t you have dinner with this person? All will be revealed in good time.”
“Right,” I say, and start planning my outfit. Am I going for sophisticated? Sexy? Thrift-store high-end designer, or thrift-store boho? Who do I want this Helena person to think I am? Who do I want to be?
The New Old Me Page 16
