But I didn’t ask. There seemed to be an implicit etiquette to those early conversations. Each of us spoke about what we wanted the other to know. And each of us listened and accepted and didn’t probe. It worked. A sense of shelter grew, a sense of being heard but not challenged.
When we sat in that quiet dining room in the early afternoon, the sun coming in through the westward-facing windows, I felt safe enough to talk about the work I had done that morning at my desk or even the struggle I’d put up with nothing to show for it. Owen was the only person in my life then who knew about my writing.
My parents, who lived in Pleasanton, in Northern California, would call dutifully every Sunday night and, from time to time, carefully raise the question of what I was planning on doing with my life. It was my mother who would always preface her inquiry with “I know the first few years after graduation are for figuring out what you want to do,” and then my father, on the extension, would jump in and remind me of how expensive my UCLA education had been. There was no way I could ameliorate the fact that their college-educated daughter was spending her days taking dogs for a walk and picking up poop without telling them about the writing. And I wasn’t ready to do that. My father, who was a scientist and worked at the neighboring Lawrence Liver-more National Laboratory doing something with national defense contracts that he couldn’t ever completely explain to us, would have dismissed a literary career as a pipe dream. My mother, who had spent her career as a middle-school counselor in the Alameda County School System, would have worried about the amount of rejection I would have to suffer.
But with Owen, the words rushed out of my mouth. “I had a good morning!” I would say as we sat down. And he would put the two mugs of coffee on the table, sit down across from me, and say, “Tell me,” as if he hadn’t anywhere else to be or anything else to do. “Tell me everything”—as if my progress made him personally happy, as if he had a stake in it. And so I would. I have never had a traditional mentor in my life, but those early afternoons with Owen were as close as I ever got.
That’s where things rested for months. I walked Bandit five days a week. Owen and I had our midday coffee in his dining room when he was home. He listened eagerly and because I was so hungry to share my early morning secret, I was the one who talked and talked. Over those months I learned very little about his life until late one Thursday night, after midnight, when my phone rang, startling me awake. Owen sounded frantic.
“Bandit’s gone” were his first words. I wasn’t fully awake. I didn’t quite understand.
“Gone where?”
“I just got home and he’s not here and the backyard gate is open.”
“I’m sure I didn’t—” I started to say.
“No, of course not,” he cut me off, “I didn’t mean to imply. I just picked up the phone without thinking.” I heard him take a deep breath and then another. “I woke you,” he said, sounding only minimally calmer. “I’m sorry, Anna. What can you do? Please, go back to sleep.”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
WHEN I PULLED UP TO OWEN’S HOUSE, the kitchen and dining room lights were blazing. I could see him pacing as I let myself in through the back door.
“I walked the streets calling him but it’s dark and he’s black and …” He sat down at the table. “Nothing.”
“Has he done this before? Gotten out?”
“Never.”
“Let’s try again. We’ll take the car. You drive and I’ll look—we can cover more area that way.”
Slowly Owen drove the dark streets of his neighborhood. The streetlights were dim and far apart, yielding only modest pools of amber light here and there. Most of the small houses were dark by now as well. It was close to one in the morning.
“Try the dog park,” I said, and Owen turned left and then left again and there was the shuttered gate of the park, padlocked for the night.
We got out of the car and walked the perimeter, calling the dog’s name into the empty air. He would have come if he had heard us. I knew that. He wasn’t there.
“I’m so sorry,” Owen said.
I shook my head.
“This is my problem and I woke you up. I don’t know what I thought.…”
We were back at his car, our eyes still searching the blackness with the hope of somehow seeing a large black dog come loping out of the gloom toward us.
“I love this dog, too,” I told him, and it was true. This furry, ill-trained, exuberant dog had gathered in a piece of my heart. I put my hand on Owen’s arm and he took my hand in his without looking at me.
“I don’t know what I’ll do if he’s gone for good,” he said. “I didn’t want him, that’s the truth, and I certainly didn’t want to love him, but here we are.”
“Let’s drive the streets again.”
And we did, only this time Owen drove with one hand and held my hand with his other. I scanned the sidewalks and front yards for a hint of motion, any motion, and called Bandit’s name as Owen inched the car down street after street. And then, when we were very close to his house, I saw a man—he seemed quite young, maybe early twenties—standing under one of the streetlights, his long blond hair bright against the darkness. Bandit sat by his side, calmly, a leash attached to his collar. It looked like they were waiting to be found.
Owen was looking to his left, his eyes scanning the opposite side of the street, so he didn’t see the man smile and then spread his arms out as if to say, Here I am. His blond hair fell over his shoulders and shimmered in the light. He looked like an angel.
“Owen, look!”
I was watching the man and Bandit, so I didn’t see Owen’s face when he saw the pair, but I felt the car jolt to a stop and heard him swear, “Of all the fucking idiotic—”
The blond man ambled over to Owen’s window and looked in. His eyes did a swift sweep of me before smiling at Owen.
“I found your dog,” he said.
“None of this is the least bit amusing, you know.”
The man shrugged and then grinned. He was beautiful. He knew he was beautiful.
“Put the dog in the car,” Owen said without a trace of civility in his voice.
The man opened the back door and Bandit happily leapt in, but the man wasn’t done. He kept his hand on Owen’s door through the open window.
“Very nice, Owen,” he said, looking at me.
“Go home, Tony.” And the man stepped back, raised his hands in surrender.
For the two blocks it took to get Bandit home, Owen said nothing and his eyes never left the road. I watched his profile, waiting for him to speak, willing him to explain—who was this Tony?—but I said nothing. I remember feeling, as we drove home, that Owen’s anger put up an impenetrable shield. It’s what I told myself at the time.
BOTH OF US STOOD IN OWEN’S KITCHEN and watched Bandit drink from his water bowl as if he had just returned from a forced march through the Sahara—loud slurping noises and water spraying half the laundry room floor.
“I really thought he was gone,” Owen said.
We stood close together. I nodded. I was afraid of that, too. “Did that man, that Tony, find him, do you think?”
“No,” Owen said, “he took him.”
“And broke into your house,” I suddenly knew.
“Yes.”
“Not the best friend to have.”
Owen turned and looked at me then. He took my hand again. “I’m trying, Anna,” he said and then put his other hand on the side of my face.
When he leaned in to kiss me, the certainty leapt up within me that I had been waiting since the day I met him to move into his arms, to feel his body against mine. We stood in the brightly lit kitchen kissing softly until Owen turned off the light and led me into his bedroom, the one that contained a single bed. That night it was all that we needed.
Feeling Owen’s naked body against mine was a revelation. There was none of the awkwardness of the first time, that fumbling discovery of a new body that feels
, at first, like a foreign country. Not with Owen. Our bodies knew each other—that’s the only way I can describe it. Touching Owen, moving with Owen, looking up into his face—it felt like coming home.
“Finally,” Owen whispered into the darkness as we lay beside each other afterward.
I turned to face him. I’d had sex with enough men to know that something else entirely had happened here. “Owen, what is this?”
“Shhh …” he said and he pulled the sheet over us and drew me so close to him that I no longer knew where my skin ended and his began.
I woke just as the sky was lightening through his uncurtained windows. Owen slept on his stomach, sprawled across the bed with the same unself-conscious abandon I associated with his laugh.
In the morning light I distrusted my own sense of what had happened the night before. I needed to be back in my apartment, at my desk, anchored to my small and tidy life, not swept away into this confusing territory. Who was this man? What was I doing? There was something tugging at a corner of my consciousness that told me to step back. I wasn’t sure if it was my natural caution or something more. I should leave, I told myself, while he’s sleeping. I got up and put my clothes on quietly.
But I couldn’t go without touching him. It was impossible. I leaned down and kissed him lightly on the side of his face. He smiled without opening his eyes. “You going?”
“Work,” I said.
“Mmmm, so glad I’m your work,” he said, “I get to see you later.”
And then I couldn’t leave at all. I sat down next to him and he gathered me into his arms. “Stay,” he said. And I did.
WHEN WE WERE ALONE IN HIS HOUSE or sometimes in my tiny apartment, we were both happy. Of that I am sure. And for a while, that was all we needed. The two of us, with time carved out of the rest of our lives, filled to the brim with the other’s presence. Owen would joke that we should find some small but fertile island somewhere in the Pacific or Caribbean and make a break for it. We could live out the rest of our days there, he said, supremely happy with each other.
“You are the love of my life,” he told me one day while we were preparing dinner together at his house. Owen had put some music on, the jazz he liked that I was struggling to understand, and had poured us each a glass of wine. For some reason I remember that on his refrigerator door along with the picture of his niece holding the starfish was a picture he had snapped of me running with a joyful Bandit across the grass of the dog park. I remember thinking that we were beginning to invade each other’s lives just a little.
While I chopped and he sautéed the vegetables for the soup we were making, he was telling me about a workshop he’d observed that afternoon. A young poet, female, black, was working with a group of fourth graders who’d never read a poem in their lives.
“Every time she got to the end of a line, this one kid would pipe up, ‘That don’t make no sense.’ Then she’d read the next line and he’d say the same thing. ‘That one don’t make no sense, either.’ ”
Owen was laughing as he told me the story and I began to laugh with him. We got the giggles in his kitchen as he mimicked the child’s voice and then the poet’s stern “Wait a minute …” whenever the child interrupted.
I was leaning against the kitchen counter, knife still in hand, wiping tears of laughter from the corners of my eyes when Owen just fell silent, mid-story, and the silence hung between us.
“What?” I said.
And that’s when he said it. “You are the love of my life, Anna.”
I heard my intake of breath in the quiet kitchen. I was staggered. I couldn’t say a word.
He grinned at me. “That’s a good thing.”
“I know,” I said, overwhelmed with the wonder that we had found each other. Owen, understanding without another word being said, gathered me into his arms.
I LOOK BACK NOW AND THINK, If only, if only we had been able to keep the world at bay. But that’s the dream of any woman newly in love. We all have pasts. We all have secrets waiting for the right time to tell. There is no way for the now not to be contaminated by the lives we’d lived before.
WE WERE VERY CAREFUL AT FIRST. I continued to write in the early morning hours, even if it meant leaving Owen’s bed at first light. I continued to walk Bandit and Huey and Dewey and my other clients’ dogs. Most days Owen was home when I got there to pick up Bandit but not always. We made dates. We didn’t willy-nilly overrun each other’s life within days or even weeks of sleeping together. Neither of us, it seemed, wanted to rush things. I understood my natural reticence to plunge headlong into any new thing. I wasn’t sure why Owen felt the same way, “reticent” not being an adjective I would ever associate with him. At the time I thought he was respecting my pace, not pushing for more time, more of me, because he understood I would have been uncomfortable.
And then we had the opportunity to go public. The head of Owen’s nonprofit, Christina Johar, was hosting a party to welcome two new photographers into the fold. “We should go,” Owen said one day as we sat in his dining room, having our mid-afternoon coffee, Bandit snoring at our feet, and I readily agreed. I was more than curious about this other world of Owen’s, his professional life. I was hungry for more of him.
We drove into the Hollywood Hills, east of Vine Street, “Old Hollywood” as it was known because when the film industry was in its infancy, this was where all the talent lived. As we climbed higher and higher on streets that narrowed and bent in hairpin turns around themselves, Owen told me a little about his boss. She was married to an Indian doctor, hence the “Johar,” but had grown up outside Atlanta on a sort of plantation. “Minus the slaves, of course,” he added and I shook my head, smiling, as he knew I would.
She had impeccable manners coupled with a steely sense of purpose and therefore managed to accomplish a myriad of things while retaining the affection of almost everyone she dealt with. Owen adored her.
When the iconic Hollywood sign—enormous white letters blazingly lit and spread across a hillside—popped into view, Owen pulled the car over to the curb and let one of the parking valets whisk it away. In front of us was a long and very steep set of stairs that led, presumably, to the house.
We climbed hand in hand, our breath becoming more ragged the higher we got until finally we crested on a flat pad of land that held the house. The view was spectacular. We could see the few tall buildings that made up the downtown skyline. This was 1976 and the major downtown building boom of the 1990s was fifteen years away. When we turned west, we could see straight to the setting sun, pink and orange tendrils gripping the horizon line at the Pacific Ocean. A 180-degree vista.
And then there was the house. I’m sure it had been designed by some mid-century architect, although I couldn’t have told you who. But someone had had an idiosyncratic vision and built a structure that seemed to float on air, out over the hillside, anchored by massive steel beams plunged into the rock. Through the floor-to-ceiling panels of glass that stood in for the front walls, we could see groups of people holding drinks and milling about. Floating out of the house was the forced laughter and busy chatter of cocktail party talk.
Instantly I regretted my decision to come. I was never much good at small talk or glib conversation, and the scene in front of us seemed like an obstacle course I was ill prepared to navigate. I said nothing, but that didn’t stop Owen from answering me anyway. “We don’t have to stay long.”
I rested my chin on his shoulder and we both took in the brightly colored scene in front of us. “Is there a safe harbor in there?”
“I’ll find you one.”
And we walked in.
Christina greeted us at the door. She was a woman somewhere around forty, I guessed, who looked like she spent a great deal of her life making sure she was beautiful. Even I, who wallowed comfortably most days in sweats, could tell how expensive her clothes and jewelry were and marvel at the amazing cut of her blond hair, which swung with every movement of her head and settled right back i
nto place.
She embraced Owen briefly and then turned her considerable scrutiny on me. “Anna,” she said, “we must talk,” and grabbed my hand and led me through the crowded living room and out the enormous glass doors onto the terrace. Looking backward as we traversed the living room, I mouthed to Owen, “Safe harbor?” and he shrugged, as if to say, Maybe, maybe not.
“I’ve wanted to meet you for months,” she said as she led me to a corner of the terrace where the view was even more spectacular.
“Really?” I was genuinely surprised. Owen had talked about me at work?
“Well, we’re all mad about Owen, you know. I’ve known him for years and years. Did he tell you that?”
I shook my head. He hadn’t.
“From his days in New York. When I was single and he was single, of course, and we …” She trailed off.
“Had a relationship?”
“Oh no, no,” and she laughed. “I was going to say when we helped each other through, but that makes it sound like we were in trouble when really we were in that section of life when nothing makes sense. The beginning of your twenties—oh, so confusing.”
I nodded. I was in the beginning of my twenties and she was confusing me. My eyes sought out Owen through the open terrace doors, and as Christina continued on about how she had met Owen—at a gallery opening—and how coincidental it was that they lived within three blocks of each other, and how they’d meet at a restaurant halfway between their apartments at least twice a week, I saw him standing in front of a wall of bookshelves talking to a man who, even from this distance, seemed intense and brooding. The other man was doing all the talking, gesturing as he spoke, touching Owen’s chest to make a point. There was something about what I was witnessing that made me uncomfortable, but I couldn’t have named it then.
At a certain point Owen looked up and saw me watching, and the expression that flashed across his face made no sense to me. It looked like grief. I shook my head at him and instantly he smiled, said something to the man, and moved across the living room toward me.
Tell Me One Thing Page 23
