More important, I still believed in my ability to believe. I had to: how else to justify my decision to stick with my writing, seventeen years after my first fiction class? Yes, I made my living as a writer, but whether it was as a journalist or a ghostwriter, I was still telling other people’s stories, when I wanted very much to be telling my own.
Being in Los Angeles was both wonderful and maddening for all of this. On the one hand, unlikely discoveries did happen: writers who’d been reduced to living in their cars did go on to sell scripts that launched lifelong careers. It gave me hope. But on the other hand, it also made me wonder when, if ever, my time would come. It only seemed fitting that my always troubled relationship with my father might bear some sweeter fruit. I had friends whose fathers had helped them with their down payments. My version of the story might look different than the norm, but that suited me just fine anyhow. I was sometimes irked at the thought of him saving enough to place a big bet, but I believed in him enough to stay loyal. And yet, the day of the derby came and went, and my dad never even said a word.
Meanwhile, my financial situation was still so perilous that I couldn’t afford to rent my own studio apartment. But I did land my second ghostwriting job that fall, to write a book with the actor Todd Bridges, who had played Willis on Diff’rent Strokes.
As soon as I had my first payment in the bank, I took care of some necessities I’d been putting off due to lack of funds. One of these was an appointment with a gynecologist. Since moving to California, I’d been exposed to more holistic approaches to health and well-being and met women who’d also been living with PCOS. Several of them had chosen to go off birth control pills because of concern about the long-term effects of being on hormones. Given the fact that I had never completely managed to quit smoking, I figured this was probably something I should look into. Because I’d regularly had my period since going on the pill, I assumed it had cured my PCOS, but I wanted to be sure. I sprung for an ultrasound.
I was surprised to see what looked like hundreds of tiny pearls all over both of my ovaries. There was, apparently, a big difference between masking symptoms and curing a chronic condition. I told the doctor I wanted to go off the pill.
“Oh, you shouldn’t go off the pill, especially if you want to have kids,” she said.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said.
“Your cycle will get so out of whack without the hormones to regulate it that you’ll never be able to conceive.”
“But won’t I have to go off the pill to get pregnant? What then?”
“We’ll give you drugs to help you conceive.”
The idea of putting extra drugs into my system along with a tiny fetus concerned me. It was clear that this doctor was not going to be supportive of my attempts to take control of my condition, and I’ve always hated being spoken to like that. I was my father’s daughter, so I decided to prove her wrong.
I went off the pill around the holidays. Based on collected advice from friends with PCOS and other chronic conditions, I did a cleanse in January that was twenty-one days of no booze, no cigarettes, no caffeine, no sugar, and for the final week, all liquid foods, including endless meals of what was called “energy soup.” At the same time, I attempted to repair any damage that had been done to my system by years of birth control and the antibiotics I’d taken to clear up my skin, and I adopted the Body Ecology Diet, which involves specific food pairings and eating almost no sugar—even from fruits.
The first few days were really hard. I was groggy, and the cup of hot water with lemon I had in the place of my coffee was a weak alternative. Luckily, I was in the habit of running in the morning, and that helped to wake me up. By midafternoon, I was craving some sugar, anything, even just a piece of fruit. I was allowed fresh cranberries, which at least reminded me of my childhood in Maine, and dried currants.
Many people in my life thought I was crazy, but I knew it was something I needed to do. At least I got compliments, not just about the weight I’d lost but about my skin, which was perfectly clear and radiant, as it hadn’t been since I was twelve years old.
“What did you do?” friends asked me.
“I went on a cleanse,” I said.
They all wanted to try it, until they learned what was involved, and that was even without my telling them about the colonics.
My dad’s support was crucial. He was a devotee of fasts and juice cleanses, not just for their physical benefits but also for their mental and spiritual advantages. He was very sympathetic to both how difficult the experience was and how unwilling I was to quit before I’d reached my twenty-one-day goal. While I still had a bit of the teenager’s desire to find things for myself rather than learn from my parents, I appreciated my dad’s knowledge of these subjects and didn’t allow myself to question how successful they had really been for him.
Even after the end of my cleanse, when I started reintroducing some items, I stuck to a strict diet designed specifically for women with PCOS. Because the condition causes insulin resistance and an inability to process sugar, this meant restricting anything that might turn to sugar in my system, including all grains, dairy, beans, soy, and corn.
I continued to drink very little, as alcohol is full of sugar. I was amused, though, by one health care provider who said it was a good idea to eliminate most alcohol but also noted that because most women with PCOS have type-A personalities, it might actually be beneficial for them to occasionally have a glass of wine to help them relax.
For me, the possibility of drinking a little bit here and there was a total revelation. I knew I had been a lush in Boston and my early days in Los Angeles, and because of my dad’s family history, I’d always known there was a possibility I was an alcoholic and would have to eventually stop drinking. When I cut out drinking temporarily, I made a breakthrough almost immediately. Often, when I was out, I was bored. I didn’t like small talk. I craved the transcendent. Because such extreme experiences were not always possible, in their absence I often drank a lot to make things wild and fun. Now, when I wasn’t turned on by what was happening, I just went home.
On the one hand, I was profoundly grateful. I had seen too many friends and lovers struggle with substance abuse to take it lightly. I was relieved I wouldn’t have to tow the line that way, and that I would still be able to have a champagne toast when I sold my first book and at my wedding. But on the other hand, just as I’d been a little miffed when I’d found out I wasn’t depressed, there was a part of me that was disappointed. If I wasn’t depressed and I wasn’t an alcoholic, why was I so unhappy? What was wrong with me? And if I never got diagnosed with anything, then how would I ever get cured?
I was meditating regularly and taking yoga classes at my gym. Some change was evident, at least. A less-than-tactful yoga teacher who had grown up speaking Korean and did not have the English vocabulary to soften her message came up to me one day.
“I don’t know what happen to you, maybe you have bad husband, but you unhappy person before,” she said. “You change. You softer now.”
I couldn’t help but laugh, but I was moved as I thanked her.
I kept it up. I started going to an acupuncture school, where a Chinese doctor who specialized in reproductive health treated me. I had my period twice in a row—with a month skipped in between—but still, that was the most regular it had ever been.
And then it stopped. And we had no idea why. I was sticking to my diet without any cheats. I was running and meditating and doing yoga. I was monitoring my temperature and cervical fluid and charting it for the doctor. I was getting acupuncture done every week and taking the herbal formulas the doctor had mixed up for me.
In fact, it felt as if everything was getting worse. I didn’t have any of the buffers I’d had before: booze, or cigarettes, or journalism deadlines, or boys, or the bars where I was a regular and could pop in for a distraction every night of the week.
Without all of that, I felt everything, and it was awful, horrible, bl
ack. Maybe I wasn’t clinically depressed, but I felt as dark as ever in a lifetime of bouts of feeling bad. Looking back over my life, it seemed as if every temporary safety I’d ever found had been wrenched away from me in the most painful way: I had a family, and then my dad had chosen gambling; I had Simon’s Rock, and then Wayne Lo had gotten a gun; I had Scott, and then he didn’t love me enough to make it work; I had Anthony and Judah, but they had gone on to other women, other cities, other pleasures.
And still I didn’t get my period. Thirty days became sixty days.
I began seeing a homeopathic doctor who gave me the few blood tests I could afford and started prescribing me her own herbal remedies.
Sixty days became ninety days.
I tried harder to be good, to be better, but nothing helped. Even though running in the morning made me feel awake and alert all day, I preferred running in the evening when the air was cool and smelled like jasmine, and the palm trees cast pretty shadows in the deepening dusk. I ran up into the lush green foothills on the edge of Pasadena and soaked in all of that beauty and affluence, hearing the sprinklers kick on just beyond the sound of the music in my headphones. It was so beautiful, but the beauty couldn’t touch me.
My entire body and soul felt like one dark bruise, a blood blister, with sick black deposits of hurt visible beneath the skin. As I ran, I began to sob, choking as I tried to catch my breath. I ran harder, but I could never run fast enough.
I was out at a local Mexican restaurant for an early dinner with a girlfriend when I saw a familiar car in the parking lot. She happened to live on the same street as Judah and had pointed out his black Jaguar on several occasions. Here, now, was a black Jag just a few blocks from where they both lived. The skin at the back of my neck prickled in a satisfying, familiar way. He was here.
He and his guitarist were seated against the far wall. My friend looked at me, her eyes wide. I managed to get into the bathroom to put on some face powder and lipstick without his seeing me. When I emerged, I drew up to his table and cocked a hip.
“Why, hello, Judah,” I said.
“Why, hello, Sarah Tomlinson,” he said. “How’ve you been?”
“Great,” I said. “And you?”
“I’m still here,” he said. “You live in LA now?”
“Yeah, I’m a celebrity ghostwriter,” I said. “Actually I’m working on a book you’d love. He’s explaining how to run girls, you know, like working girls.”
He started to laugh.
“Oh, is he?” he said.
I fished into my bag and held out my new business card.
“So we can stay in touch,” I said.
He took the other end of the card, and for a long moment we were both holding one end of it, our fingers nearly touching, just as we had on that long-ago Boston night.
“We’re in touch right now, aren’t we?” He chuckled.
A few days later, I was in my room writing when a familiar e-mail address suddenly appeared on my BlackBerry.
“Was there something you wanted me to read?” he wrote.
We flirted back and forth for a few days. And later that week I found myself once again walking up the steps to his house around eleven o’clock at night, wearing a short green dress and my mom’s Frye boots from the seventies. He kissed me on the lips.
“Water?” he asked.
“Sure, that’d be great, thanks,” I said.
I laughed to myself about how much had changed since my last visit there, now more than five years ago, as we sipped bottled water. We’d both quit smoking. It didn’t take long for us to move downstairs to a new lounge he’d put in, where he opened a nice bottle of wine. And it didn’t take much longer for me to find myself in just my bra and underwear. “Leave your boots on,” he said.
During all of our many late-night phone sessions, we had talked at length about almost every sex act, and I knew exactly what he liked.
“Do you want to get fucked or do you want to come back?” he asked.
I wanted nothing more than to, finally, after all of these years, be taken upstairs to his bed. But I also didn’t want this newest incarnation of our affair to end so soon, especially because there was something comforting about reconnecting with someone who had known me for so long and who still seemed to have answers I continued to seek. Although I had changed and grown in some ways, I still valued the intensity of the experience over everything else. “I want to come back,” I said.
After he came, I went into the bathroom, still in my bra and underwear and boots. I looked in the mirror. My collarbones jutted out like a model’s. I was maybe a little too skinny, but I knew as long as I still had hips and breasts, men found skinny sexy, and so I shook out my hair, seeing myself through his eyes, not my own.
When I left with the sun rising over the freeway, I put in a CD of classical music he’d made for me and felt my mood brightening along with the sky. I sent Judah a flirty e-mail thanking him for our night together. And, once again, I waited.
I was spending that spring working on a final revision of my first novel. Now that I was regularly working with a literary agent on ghostwriting projects, I hoped he’d like it enough to help me realize my nearly twenty-year dream of having my own book published. In order to have quiet time, I’d taken on a variety of pet-sitting gigs. I bounced from house to house, trying to focus. Instead, I composed e-mails to Judah that I never sent. On nights I felt particularly angsty about his silence, I drank red wine.
It was a relief to let myself go, to let the edges become blurry and give up on my constant bid for perfection. But I wasn’t the drinker I’d once been, and in the morning I felt foggy and sick, and guilty, for possibly diminishing all of the good work I’d done—and the money I’d spent—toward trying to heal myself.
In the aftermath of my temporary, tipsy escape, the blues came back worse than ever. It felt as if everything I did was pressing on the bruise, and it hurt. I was tired of the hurting, tired of feeling crazy and sad and fucked-up.
I began to have a new fantasy that was much more pleasurable than anything involving Judah, or even selling my novel.
In the fantasy, I was in an elegant hotel room. Everything was clean and quiet and dim. I stretched out on the bed. No one knew where I was. I was alone, and this solitude made me feel safe to do what I needed to do next. I took a handful of pills, and then another. I washed them all down with expensive bourbon. As I started to drift, I lay and sipped bourbon, for the pleasure of it, until I stopped breathing, and everything was silent.
No more pain of my unending, bottomless lack.
I was filled with relief. The image made me feel light in a way I hadn’t in so long, maybe not exactly happy, but the next best thing, and far better than I’d felt in months, years, even, maybe in as long as I could remember.
I didn’t tell anyone about my fantasy because I knew they would try to stop me. The first step was the pills. I didn’t have a regular doctor. But I knew I could convince a doctor I needed some sleeping pills, just enough to get me through a temporary anxiety about writing deadlines, and blah-blah-blah. I would supplement those with over-the-counter sleeping pills. The booze was easy. That would be a treat.
The hotel room was a safe place I went to every day in my mind. The reality of my daily existence became the background noise to this necessary escape. Even developments that would have pleased me a few months before no longer did. Judah called me from a recording session, wanting me to have phone sex with him while his band went out to get dinner, as we had done so many times before.
“I should get a thank-you on this album,” I joked. “I’ve given you ‘creative inspiration’ on what, three or four albums now?”
He chuckled his great, deep laugh.
“That you have,” he said. “Maybe if we do a vinyl edition.”
I sighed. I was tired of the conditional maybes that never came true. What interested me more was our talk about a female musician who’d been recording strings for his new albu
m a few weeks earlier. When she hadn’t turned up for a session one day, he’d called a mutual friend. They’d gained entrance to her apartment and found her dead.
He went on to describe how he’d known she was troubled, and because they were fellow night owls, he’d gone over to her house late a few times, just to listen to music and keep her company. As he talked, I grew jealous, not because he had shown her more care than he’d shown me. Instead, I was jealous because she was dead and I was not.
I pictured the tranquillity of her apartment, the finality of the scene, and how when the intruders had entered, they no longer had any power over her. It made me more determined than ever to claim my own moment of peace. But I didn’t tell him any of this. I was sure he wouldn’t care. I was sure I wasn’t worth even a late-night record-listening session. And so, instead, I moaned when he said moan. And when he didn’t come over later that night, I cared less than I ever had before. I had a solution. It was a relief, too, because after a hundred days, I’d gotten my period, but it hadn’t changed the way I felt.
Before I could put my plan into motion, I had one more dog-sitting gig in one of my favorite neighborhoods, Mount Washington, a wild snarl of narrow winding roads clotted with overgrown vegetation. I particularly loved to run there in the evening, breathing in the smell of eucalyptus, and watching the whole city twinkle and pulse below me when I crested the highest hill at dusk. The house was a great Spanish colonial mess filled with the clutter of a single mom and her young son. It was hot that summer, and only the son’s room had AC, so I sweated all day, nearly hallucinating with the hazy deluge of the afternoon heat, amplified by my laptop, which cooked on my lap, and then after my run, I slept in his narrow bed amid stuffed animals in the artificial icebox chill.
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