A Complicated Marriage (44 page)

I was four blocks up the hill from Hollywood Boulevard and Musso and Franks, my favorite restaurant, where I could indulge in my favorite dinner—a martini, jellied consommé, and creamed spinach—and five blocks from Judy Garland's footprints at Grauman's Chinese Theatre.
I looked out the windows, open wide to the hum of Hollywood and the scent of jasmine. Three banks of windows, each with its own slice of hills and sky, palm trees, and crimson splotches of bougainvillea. A Technicolor world. I looked at my azure blue canvas duffel draped across a chair. I had bought it at Bloomingdale's early in my magazine days. I loved its adventurous color at first sight, its buttery leather straps, and its magical ability to shrink and expand at will. I had a few special things that I treasured; the blue duffel was one of them. The rest were just things. Russ was downstairs. Suddenly, music filled the house. “Welcome to the Hotel California . . . ” All was well.

Awaiting me were the promises of a new life: a playmate eager to introduce me to the secrets of the city he loved and knew so well; the light, airy house; new people, and a few old friends, including Debby Katz, from my Bennington days, and her husband, Norman, who had been with me the night I had met Clem, and, of course, Beverly. And, front and center, sweet Charlie, Russ's black cockapoo, the first dog I ever bonded with.

Mostly, we were on the go. Museums, art galleries, architectural wonders, beaches—we hit them all. Restaurants, bars, movies, lots of movies. And when we had canvassed the home front, we made side trips, from Santa Barbara to San Diego and its zoo at twilight. We went to Palm Springs and discovered “our place,” Two Bunch Palms, where I became addicted to massages. We played Scrabble in the sun, by the fire, and in bed. We went to parties and gave parties.

Then one day we went to the supermarket together for the first time. It was an outing I had only fantasized about during my life with Clem. Here I was with someone who pushed a grocery cart with me. By the time we reached the produce department, my fantasies bit the dust. Seems I hadn't a clue about how to choose a tomato or a peach, much less thump a melon. Everything I chose went back on the shelf. Never before having had to account for anything to anyone, I hadn't mastered the art of collaboration and saw everything as criticism. I fumed and kicked the cart, and thanked God for having bestowed on me the precious gift of Clem's indifference to such things. At my advanced age, I had butted heads with a tough lesson—to live in a true partnership means not always assuming
you're right. And so, to protect my thin skin from future criticism, I soloed in supermarkets and ducked duets in the kitchen, that breeding ground of resentments.

That said, the getting-to-know-you skirmishes were few, considering we were two people in our forties who were set in our ways and used to being in control. Besides, they were far outweighed by the good stuff. I marveled at Russ's boundless energy and creativity. A currently unemployed art director for movies and TV, he had a passion for painting, music, and theater and was a formidable tap dancer. And who could resist a man who took such pleasure in making room for me in his closet, bureaus, medicine cabinet, and his life? I was so happy to join, for once, a ready-made domesticity, all the tchotchkes already in place. Best of all, we liked and loved each other.

As much as I enjoyed our playtime, I intermittently began to feel the familiar tug of aimlessness that I had felt after I left the magazine. The flip side of the ready-made house and a domestically adept partner was that it was a house that didn't need me. At forty-six, I knew from experience that if I wanted to give myself and our 24/7 relationship a chance, I needed not only to excise the aimlessness, but also to outwit the lure of losing myself in a man. That cozy exclusivity—how seductive to feel like gods on the wings of love and expectations. From there, I knew how easy it was to slip into petty dissatisfaction and eroding self-esteem.

I made a plan. I would stake out the time in a day and space in the house that I could call my own. What I would do in that time and space, I had no idea. I hadn't been able to commit to such a plan after leaving the magazine. Now, not only did I have motivation, but I had a witness. There would be a person on the other side of the closed door while I was doing lord knows what, a person who would welcome me when I opened the door, who might even be proud of my industry.

My solution may have been simple and obvious, but the fact was, I had never learned how to bring balance to the man-woman push-pull. What began with the closed-door plan was as close as I would ever get. Russ made it possible. He was supportive and helped set me up. The room was large, with a day bed, a chair, a hooked rug, and a big library table placed next to windows that opened into the branches of an apple tree
and an empty lot beyond, both rarities in L.A. I opened up the typewriter that I had optimistically packed in the trunk I had shipped out from New York and closed the door. I decided I would write.

But what? Poetry? That's where I had started, with all those passionately innocent poems that had gushed out of me the first fall at Bennington. Poems that had become increasingly tight-assed over the next four years, until they were second-guessed stutterings squeezed dry by critical methodology and unabashed emulation of William Carlos Williams, Auden, Macniece, et al. In the past months I had written some poems for Russ about L.A., our house, our life. They had heart, an innocence reclaimed. As glad as I was to have tapped back into my poet self, that was my private voice, much like the journal writing that had been part of me for years. Besides, poems were too small, just as novels were too big. I had no appetite for the vast scale. I wanted something I could metaphorically hold in my hand. Short stories? I didn't like reading them—well, except for Henry James, with whom nothing came up short—so why would I want to write them? But what about plays? I had come to believe that life had a way of recycling experience. Playwriting might be just the thing. And so, with years of theater improvisation in mind, I jumped in. It went something like this:

Kitchen. A phone rings, a woman rushes in through one of several French doors, dumping packages on a long butcher-block table downstage. Phone stops as she picks up. She puts away groceries. Phone rings again. She grabs it, angry.

She: What! [
Pause
.] I can't hear you! [
Pause
.] Oh my God, Willy?

Seems “She” has just arrived from N.Y. to live in L.A. with someone she barely knows, when her bad-news brother, Willy, shows up needing a place to crash, and so on, right up to “Lights fade to black.”

The best I could say about it was that it had a beginning, middle, and end, and that it had taken only a week of my life. Beyond that, it sat there, misshapen and leaden as cold oatmeal. Fortunately, I knew that
First Play
, for so I dubbed it, belonged in the back of my closet, where no one would ever see it. I also knew what to do with the next one: ease back, lighten up, and listen to the voices rather than some so-called “plot.”

Over the years I would stay in L.A., the plays would get better: more
intricate, the needs and dilemmas sharper, the moments funny or angry, usually both. Words—to play with them, their resonance, the rhythms; that would always be my fun. A place, a line, a face, an object—plays would bloom in my mind in wondrous ways, and always I would be led by the voices of women. Some of the lines and images still call to me:

Within a few months after shelving
First Play
, I finished
12 Chatham Road
, a marginally improved, full-length play. Soon after, at a party, I met a young actress who belonged to the Ensemble Studio Theater, a branch of EST in New York. The large group of actors, writers, and directors worked out of a theater space in downtown L.A. The actress took my play, and someone must have thought it passable, because I got a call to join the group. By that time, with Russ's sage guidance, I had bought a Volvo. Not quite the pizzazz of a Mustang, but it was sure and steady. I was ready to open the sun roof and hit the freeways.

The Ensemble was unlike
Madison Avenue
, where beneath the joy of meeting a challenge there had always lurked the quicksand of my ignorance. Now, I was a one-play playwright—a ho-hum play at that—but I knew theater. The high energy, the infighting, the fellowship, the power plays were all mother's milk to me. I had lived it all in my theater days. All I had to do was keep writing. Hell, the plays couldn't get worse.

That fall of 1982, the Ensemble scheduled a ten-minute-play festival. Everyone jumped in the pool; actors, directors, writers all competed for the twelve spots. I wrote
Will You See Me When I Wave?
over a weekend. Though a transparent paean to Pinter, it was dead-on. Here was a play I could hold in my hand, all the economy of a poem and the immediacy of theater. I had stumbled on a short form I would often return to, with pleasure and success.

One noon-to-night Saturday, everyone who had signed up read their playlets for the jury and the full-membership. The actor in me paid off; I had timed it and rehearsed it. The play was chosen. The icing was that John Randolph and Sarah Cunningham signed on to do it. Long-married,
well-established actors, they were also the co-founders of the Ensemble. Not so sweet, I also learned that they were old-school actors, pragmatic, and stubborn. They wanted the sentences completed, what did this and that mean, and the silences, that would not do. I was the new kid, and the director knew where his bread was buttered; nonetheless, I stood firm. Of course, smiling all the way, they did exactly as they pleased. In the name of “honoring the text,” they “picked up the pace,” and effectively turned my filigree into a chunk of metal. But they were charming, and the play was enjoyed and was featured in the
Los Angeles Times
review, picture and all.

Because my plays would continue to be driven by the rhythms and patterns of the characters' voices, I would invariably run into hassles with directors and actors. I understood the seduction of going for “real,” rather than style, but I also hoped they would have the faith to at least try to achieve both. Thinking that clear signposts might help, starting with my next play,
Legacy
, a full-length with a cast of eight, I incorporated slashes into the dialogue to indicate when the next actor should begin speaking her line. Sadly, actors are courteous people, programmed not to “step on” someone else's line. I explained that half of most sentences, onstage and off, were throwaways. But the audience, they wailed, they won't get the point. They'll understand exactly as much as they need to, I assured.
And they'll hear the music
, I didn't say, because I knew that would be a hard sell. I also knew that actors—not the best—are driven by two things: not to make fools of themselves, and to make their characters likable—two things antipathetic to playwrights. And oh, the joy on those occasions when during a performance I would hear two trios or quartets simultaneously ride the wave to a crescendo.

By the beginning of 1983, Russ's acrimonious divorce was finalized and we downsized to Broadlawn Terrace in the hills overlooking the Valley and spitting distance above Universal Studios. A small house with a small pool, a cottage coziness. Russ set up his studio in the one-car garage, and I worked upstairs in a room just big enough for me and my table.

Russ was now working at Universal as art director of the new series
Knight Rider
. Our togetherness shifted dramatically into “see you when I see you” mode. His long hours, stress, and drinking to “unwind” strained
our relationship at times. In the whirl of my feelings for Russ and my excitement about a new start, I had glossed over the impact his drinking might have. With insouciance, I had assumed I could handle it, and I did. I never considered leaving; I wanted to be with Russ and I wanted to be where I was. In any case, it was soon clear that our good times would outnumber the difficult times. It took diligence not to get swept up into the whirlpool of the drinker, but I was motivated. So it was that on the “bad days” I would dust off the drill learned as a teenager: sidestep, disengage, and, most important, keep a firm grip on my own life.