Literacy and Longing in L. A. (10 page)

The Morning After

“No girl was ever ruined by a book.”

~
James J. Walker, mayor of New York (1881–1946)
~

M
y eyes are bloodshot and I have bruised blue circles beneath them. My matted hair is sticking up in clumps and my eyebrows look like someone combed them with a whisk. I am surrounded by the wreckage of my apartment, where heaps of discarded clothes lie where they were thrown in last night’s frenzy of trying to find the right thing to wear. There is the lingering stench of perfume and cigarettes emanating from my body and my breath reeks of beer and fish. I hang on the doorjamb, as I let my sister in.

She gives me the once-over. “God, what happened to you? Are you sick? Because I can’t catch a cold…
Camille gets it and then Andy and it costs me a whole month.”

She is carrying a box filled with files, manila envelopes, labels, an assortment of writing instruments, and 24-lb. inkjet paper that is so bright it hurts my eyes.

“No, I’m not sick. What time is it?” I do vaguely remember asking her to come over and help me with my résumé.

“Dora, it’s twelve noon.” I hate it when people rub it in like that. Twelve noon.

“I have to pick up Camille in exactly two hours, so pull yourself together and let’s do it,” she says, as she opens the blinds and sliding doors in my living room and lets in a rush of blinding sunlight and sea air.

“Don’t you want to hear about my date?”

“Oh. Sure.” She’s distracted, laying out all the supplies on my desk.

“Okay. He’s interesting, I had a great time, and no, I didn’t sleep with him.” I was one drink away from fucking his brains out, but no need to mention that here.

“What does he do, anyway?” Virginia asks, predictably. Why is that the first thing everyone asks?

“He works at McKenzie’s.”

Virginia raises her eyebrows.

“He’s a writer and he’s brilliant, he’s working on a play.”

“And my babysitter is a screenwriter. And that waiter we like at Morton’s is a director. It’s that L.A. hyphenate thing—no one is really what they’re doing. Everything is just temporary until their real career starts.”

“You’re a snob.”

“Well, you are too. Just think about whether you’d even so much as have a cup of coffee with him if he were selling socks at Bloomingdale’s. It’s your whole book thing.”

“Like you don’t have one.”

“Okay. Enough. We’ve been through this too many times.” I hand her my rough draft.

“Jesus. This is a mess. It looks like you spent ten minutes on it.”

“Well, I got a little sidetracked…” And I don’t mean with Thomas Pynchon.

Virginia gives me an indulgent smile. “You’re impossible, Dora.”

She looks at her watch. Now she’s all business. We spend the next two hours putting together a tight, professional-looking résumé and attaching some of my better articles. After ten years of helping Andy apply for different fellowships and grants, Virginia is a pro.

Now comes the issue of driving it downtown. Shit. Virginia looks at me pointedly on her way out and says, “Why don’t you just call a messenger?”

It’s four o’clock. The city is gridlocked. Sounds like a good idea to me. I walk her to the door. The résumé looks great. I’d hire me. “Thank you, Ratty. You saved me. If only I had your head. You’re a wonder, a real wonder.”

Virginia starts laughing. We used to compare ourselves to Rat and Mole. She, of course, was Rat, the clever, enterprising survivor. I, alas, was always Mole, holed up underground.

Years ago, when our mother first gave us
The Wind in
the Willows,
she said that one had to be worthy to read Kenneth Grahame’s masterpiece and that it was a test of character. I did like the story, but at eight years old, I thought it was about animals and what was the big deal. It was only years later that I realized the book was right up there with
The Odyssey
and
Huck Finn
and included Homeric descriptions of nature and images of divine discontent and longing.

As she walks out the door, Virginia kisses me good-bye and says, “By the way, your stuff is really good, Dora. Don’t give up. Call me if you need me.” So now, here we are, twenty years later, Ratty helping the still awkward Mole safely ashore.

You Can Leave Your Hat On

“I’m re-reading it with a slow, deliberate carelessness.”

~
T. E. Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia (1888–1935)
~

I
’ve often thought that a passionate affair happens once or twice in a lifetime. The kind of affair I’m thinking of is of the sex-all-night-long kind—sex in the car, on the kitchen counter, in the hallway, in an alley, whenever and whatever with none of the mundane thoughts of how he earns a living or where he lives or whether he calls his mother, or even if he gambles or plays around. All those considerations come afterwards, after you stop eating yogurt at two a.m. so you can muster the energy to have one more round before dawn, or after that giddy, dazed feeling of exhilaration gives way to routine, or maybe even after you reach thirty-five
and realize the libido is expendable but a decent lifestyle is not.

All of this leads me to the night I went home with Fred. We had been to the requisite Thai restaurant where he dazzled me with his knowledge of
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby;
we had driven to the beach and discussed Tennyson’s poetical works and Tom Stoppard’s newest play. We had just come from a tiresome coffee-klatsch with Ken and Sara, and I thought if I listened to any more competitive literary bantering I’d explode, so I was delighted and more than agreeable when Fred took my hand, led me out into the moonlight, and whispered, “Let’s go to my place.” He stroked my head and neck as if I were a child, and suddenly I was so aroused I almost stumbled off the curb. It’s been a while since I felt like this. A long while.

Fred lives on the third floor of a nondescript, slightly run-down apartment building near UCLA. The building houses people on their way up and on their way down, a mix of grad students, young marrieds, and a Pakistani family whose cooking permeates the hallways with smells of curry, cumin, and stale incense. The elevator is out of order so Fred stands behind me, plants his broad hands on my back, and pushes me up the stairs. When we finally get to his apartment my heart is pounding, I’m out of breath, and my upper thighs are screaming with pain. We laugh, but I’m having second thoughts. Nothing like an arduous trek up three flights to drum home the fact that you are no spring chicken.

Things get worse as we step inside. It could be a grad
student’s pad, complete with books piled all over, an unkempt bedroom with a pile of laundry in the corner, a bicycle that takes up half the living room, and a plasma TV on the wall. There is no art, no frills. Then again, there’s a Bose stereo system. It’s a far cry from the gleaming steel and glass, critically hip Bel Air house I visited just a few weeks ago when Pamela thoughtfully fixed me up with a business associate of her husband’s. We had dinner at her house, which consisted of four soup courses, a shrimp and mussel salad that I poked at with a mother-of-pearl cocktail fork, and a saucy little chardonnay with, as her husband put it, “just a hint of presumption.” Meanwhile, Pamela carried on this chirpy, albeit somewhat forced, conversation, well aware that the fix-up was a bust. Dessert was a fig confit finished off with a mint and peach brandy sauce.

When the fix-up first started talking, I tried to act interested, even though he looked suspiciously like an old fogey in hip clothing—starchy, custom-made Turnbull and Asser shirt with big collar, and a huge, elaborate black titanium sport watch with a shocking array of dials and knobs, sort of like a Hummer for the wrist. This look was finished off with a brisk slap of Dior’s Eau Savage and when, at one point, he called Pamela’s husband “darling,” I wanted to bag it right there.

After dinner, we all piled into his Range Rover and drove up the ficus-tree-lined driveway to his swanky new house which was “just in the finishing stages,” as he put it. He apparently had the same art consultant as Pamela and he showed us his latest acquisition from a group of
Cuban artists who did installations dealing with censored literature around the world. The piece consisted of fifty banner-like strips of paper lined up one above the other on a stark white wall in the living room. Each banner was printed with lines from famous novels that had been censored, including works by Dante, Ginsberg, Maurice Sendak, Neruda, and Orwell. “I call it my nifty fifty,” said my date, to which none of us responded. I actually loved his scarlet Barcelona chairs and limestone slabbed kitchen with all its stunning, pristine, German techno-stainless hardware and self-closing, soundless cabinets, but I still couldn’t bring myself to even shake his hand good-night. He was pretty much of a cretin.

I watch Fred’s muscular back and neck as he moves some stuff from the sofa and then motions for me to sit down. There’s always this moment just before you start an affair when you can either move forward or not. Sometimes it feels as if you are standing in a darkened subway station, edging closer and closer to the tracks, and you suddenly get this irrational impulse to fling yourself off the platform and into the path of a speeding train. There’s a psychological term for this kind of fatal urge that, apparently, a lot of New Yorkers who ride the subway have experienced. But the point is, once you go to bed with someone, things change and you can’t go back. When you’re younger, you tend not to think about the consequences. You meet a guy, you’re attracted, you make love, and he calls or he doesn’t. Life goes on and you deal with it. But now I’m at an age where balance is important and one can’t be too serious or too frivolous,
and there’s this slightly skewed, ever-present vertigo relating to how precarious it all can be.

Fred, on the other hand, acts like he’s on autopilot. He goes to the stereo and turns on Randy Newman singing “You Can Leave Your Hat On.” The song is a slow striptease:

“Baby, take off your dress.

Yes, Yes, Yes.”

That’s subtle. Then he strides to the makeshift bar, grabs a bottle of tequila, two shot glasses, and sits down on the couch beside me. He takes a swig and hands me the bottle. I stare for a moment at the empty glasses and dutifully take a gulp. A big one.

There’s this jittery, inept feeling of dread as the alcohol burns through my upper scalp and behind my earlobes and sears all the way down to my gut. Then I feel a rush of warmth in my body as I silently watch him kick off one boot, then the other, slump down into the pillows, and stretch out his legs. I’m not comfortable. I decide I can still get out of this. I’m about to say something glib and then he surprises me.

He puts his arms around me and pulls me toward him in a forceful way. I thought I had more time. I thought we were going to discuss this. God, does it feel good. I’d forgotten about his drop-dead, Southern charm, take-no-prisoners sex appeal. His arms feel powerful and he keeps moving, pushing fabric aside, and tumbling pillows off the couch until he finally touches me. His hands stroke
my head and slide down my neck and I can hear him breathing and smell the detergent on his skin as he gently brushes his lips over mine and then leans in and kisses me on the neck. I can’t stand it. I’m awash with lust.

He pulls back and gives me an amused grin. “You like this, huh?” he says. “You changed your mind?”

So he’s known all along. I laugh. “Just shut up,” I say. I clearly want more. I start to unbutton my blouse.

“Not yet,” he says. “What’s the rush? Let’s talk.”

“God, Fred, are you serious?”

“Yes. Let’s talk about why I like you.”

“If you tell me I’m your soul mate, I’m leaving.”

Fred doesn’t respond, so I fall silent as he slips his hand under my blouse, gently presses in on my ribs, and starts to trace invisible circles around my breasts.

“I like your long, graceful neck and the way your ankles bend right here on your lovely legs and I like your teenage, firm little chest and the way you pant when I touch you. You have a magnificent mouth. It’s soft and wet when I kiss you and your back has a curve that shows through your clothes when you walk.”

His hands are moving down my legs now and he starts caressing the inside of my thighs. “I like the way you walk. Your shoulders are square and straight and I always know it’s you, even from a distance, because no one I know moves the way you do.”

I am far, far away now, his voice is all around me, and I hear myself moan. I let him take over. I’ll let him do anything. It’s like falling off a bridge. Here I go again.

House of Mirth

“Lily prided herself on her broad-minded recognition
of literature and always carried an Omar Khayyam in her
travelling-bag.”

~
Edith Wharton (1862–1937),
The House of Mirth ~

P
amela’s birthday invitation arrived in a pink, pig-shaped envelope and said, “Come western and pig out.” It was, apparently, some party planner’s idea of different. Personally, I wouldn’t send out a pig-shaped invitation for my birthday. Most of the people seem to be older, friends of Pamela’s semi-retired husband, William, and the outfits incorporate every endangered species that ever existed—ostrich, crocodile, snakeskin. Luckily, no one’s picketing.

One might question the wisdom of bringing Fred to an event like this. We’ve only been dating a few weeks. Dorothy Parker once said that she wanted printed on her tombstone “Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.” I should have taken her advice and stayed home, but it is Pamela’s birthday and I did want Fred to meet my friends.

It’s raining as we drive up and down obscure side streets in West Hollywood looking for the address. We finally spot it—a warehouse, which has been redone to resemble a barn. In front of the building are life-size statues of heifers and horses standing on soggy bales of hay and a big hand-painted wooden sign over the entrance that says “Pamela’s Double D Corral.” The rain is coming down in sheets now as we pull up to the valet.

Pamela greets us at the door ebullient in leather chaps and a turquoise silk shirt.

“Hey! Look who the cat dragged in.”

“Pamela, this is Fred. Sorry we’re late.”

William, who has whiskey on his breath and wears a tin sheriff’s badge, hugs me and says, “We thought maybe Dora was driving.”

He gives me a good-natured wink and a nudge. I shoot Pamela a look and try to divert the conversation elsewhere. I glance around at the scene. The sad truth about most parties is if you’re not slightly inebriated, they’re just not that much fun.

“Hi, Fred. We’ve heard so much about you,” Pamela says. I hate when people say that. Then the person in question is always wondering what they’ve heard and what you’ve told them. And it has only been a few weeks.

Fred looks at me and says, “Well, all good I hope.” Lame laughter.

“So, Dora, hear anything about the job yet?” Leave it to Pamela to bring up this cheery subject. “She used to be a crack reporter at the
Times
.” She pushes my shoulder. “Did you tell him about all the awards you won?”

“Pamela, that was a while ago.” Perfect. Let’s just focus on my nonexistent career.

I see my old friend Heather by the bar motioning for us to come over. She’s standing with her latest date, who, I’ve heard, is a successful young turk in the movie business.

She gives me a big hug. “Heather, you look gorgeous.” Heather is one of those women who always looks good no matter what she’s wearing. She’s tall and has perfect peachy cream skin and exudes a kind of midwestern warmth and normalcy, although she is prone to overdosing on Ambien and sleepwalking through the neighborhood in her nightgown. In fact, one night, I heard there was a big misunderstanding with a cop who thought she had been abducted from somewhere else and dumped into her Brentwood neighborhood. Her husband had to straighten out the whole mess and that might have been the turning point in their relationship. She’s been single for a couple years now.

She’s wearing expensive Indian jewelry and a sterling silver conch belt. She seems to have an endless supply of cash from her ex-husband, who imports something from China, but nobody knows what.

As Fred and I start to order a drink, a twangy voice over the loudspeaker announces, “Howdy, folks, please find your tables, it’s time to chow down.”

We are seated at Pamela’s table, which is a yee-haw oak-planked slab with benches. At each place setting there are bobble-head cowgirl dolls in Pamela’s likeness and giant lethal bottles of 100-proof Patron tequila with shot glasses. There are also red bandanas, Wet-Naps, and plastic bibs, all of which give me a bad feeling about the food. That feeling is justified when, to the rollicking tune of “Friends in Low Places,” choreographed cowboy waiters bring out huge platters of ribs dripping with viscous black barbecue sauce, behemoth bowls of baked beans with ladles, corn bread the size of bricks, and coleslaw swimming in a sea of mayonnaise.

Everyone is currently in an animated conversation about the weather. Two days of rain in L.A. and it becomes the center of conversation, like, say, a presidential election. Half of my friends just sit around the house and brood, waiting for the smother of black clouds to lift, like a bout of depression.

Pamela is grumbling about how dim and gloomy it is, too much rain and fog and she even canceled her dentist appointment, which is unusual for her because she loves him—he’s this high-tech dentist with plasma TVs installed over each chair, first-run movies, and Bose earphones. He also caters to all the neurotic germ freaks in the city. Everything is covered with sterile plastic and there are motion sensors that open all the doors.

The pitch of the party is rising in direct proportion to the massive amounts of tequila that the guests are distractedly swigging. I notice that two women who I happen to know haven’t talked for four years are now in a cozy conversation in the corner.

Meanwhile, William is yelling across the table to Heather’s date about the new Viacom acquisition and how his partners figured it out a few months ago and “made a few mil on that one.” The other guy starts talking about all the consolidations, even in the agency business. William’s radar perks up as he tries to figure out where the next big merger is and whether the latest public offerings are already too expensive. The conversation drifts to real estate, which is where it always drifts in Los Angeles. William talks shopping centers and anchor stores and adds that his partners are looking into some deals in Texas, Louisiana, and Tennessee.

Fred keeps excusing himself to escape outside to the Giddy-Up Saloon, where he belts down something else on the rocks and chats for an oh-so-long period of time with the bartender, who, by the end of the evening, is his newest best buddy.

He looks cute, though, more than cute. He made a point of not wearing anything that could even remotely be called western. In fact, he looks suspiciously preppy. It doesn’t matter. When we first sit down, Pamela gives Fred a broad, open smile, and says, “I really love wandering through bookstores. It’s such a feast.” A feast? Fred does have that effect on women. He hands me a shot glass filled with tequila and says, “Bottoms up, baby.”

Meanwhile, Heather, whose lot in life is to make everyone feel comfortable, looks up at Fred with her dolce vita face and asks, “So, what are the latest books…What do you recommend?”

He smiles at her. “What kinds of books do you like?”

“I don’t like anything depressing. I like reading happy books.”

I see the mocking and slightly flirtatious glint in Fred’s eye. The minute you say something like this to a serious reader they think you’re a complete lightweight. You might as well tell them you want to be a Laker Girl.

“Nothing depressing, eh? There are some new novels…” And he offers up some featherlight, frivolous fluff.

“You might like these,” he says disingenuously.

Then he gives me a knowing, complicit nod. This is beginning to feel like something out of an Edith Wharton novel. Snobby men toying with women they think are beneath them. Heather doesn’t get it. She thanks him and they continue talking, but I am annoyed.

Later on, during dinner, Pamela’s husband, William (who we all put up with because he’s so kind to Pamela), starts regaling everyone about their trip to Florence. They stayed at the Grand, of course, had a great
paglia e fieno
at this restaurant and scored an exquisite bottle of fourteen-dollar Chianti at that restaurant (forget about the fact that they’re paying six hundred dollars a night for the room). He went on in a buoyant, booming voice about their tour guide who was a university art history professor and conspiratorially whispered the name of the fabulous shop where you can get leather purses made in the same factory as Prada for half the price.

Fred stifles a yawn, at which point Heather asks him in a sweet honey bunny sort of way, “Have you been there, Fred?”

“No, I don’t much like traveling. I think it’s a lot like golf or tennis. There are certain activities that people feel obligated to engage in when they reach a certain status in life. I’d rather just sit home and read
Death in Venice
.”

After a moment of awkward silence, I try to gloss things over and keep the conversation going. “Sort of like that book
The Accidental Tourist
. Remember, the guy who wrote travel books for people who didn’t like to travel? He advised his readers on how to avoid human contact, where to find American food, and how to convince themselves they haven’t really left home.” I look around. No one’s buying it. Everyone knows that’s not what Fred meant.

Everyone except Heather. “Oh, was that a book? I thought it was an old movie. Didn’t what’s-her-name star in that? You know…”

“Maybe Annette Bening?” says another guest.

“No. No. It definitely wasn’t Annette Bening. It was, you know, that girl from
Thelma and Louise
.”

Now the whole table’s involved.

“Susan Sarandon?”

“No. The other one.”

“I can just picture her. She’s a big girl, dark hair. Really tall.”

“Wasn’t that guy from
Body Heat,
what’s his name, William Hurt, in it?”

“Yes. Is he deaf?”

“No. He’s not deaf. It was that role he played in
God’s Children
.”

“It wasn’t called
God’s Children
. It was
Children of a Lesser God
and it was like thirty years ago.”

Oh god. They need to stop. Where’s Fred going? Back to the bar. At which point Pamela says triumphantly…

“Geena Davis! That’s who it was. Effing Geena Davis!” (Pamela can’t quite ever bring herself to curse. She also whispers the names of diseases.)

At this point, one of the band members grabs the mike and yells, “Cowboys and cowgals, now is the time to change pardners. I want all the cowpokes to take their napkins and glasses and move to the right three seats.” Everyone is laughing as the men get up and move three seats clockwise.

William is now seated next to me and Pamela, the birthday girl, has a conspicuously empty seat to her right. I quickly say, “Oh, I think Fred went outside to make a phone call. I’ll be right back.”

Where the hell is he? I smile confidently as I whisk by the blur of guests and head for the bar. No Fred. Shit. I swing around and look out toward the parking lot. Maybe he left. Not that I can blame him. This party is truly over the top.

I finally spot him seated on a brick wall behind the kitchen entrance. He and the bartender are having a smoke. The storm seems to have eased a bit, but, there is a dark gray smear of fog out in the horizon and I can feel my hair frizzing up. When I finally reach him, he gives me a transparent smile and introduces his new buddy, Chad, a loose-limbed, dopey-looking guy with frosted-tipped hair who’s studying to be an actor.

“Hi!” I say nonchalantly, attempting to at least keep up a veneer of “hey, we’re all having fun here.” “Everyone’s changed seats for the cake and you’re seated next to the hostess. Would you mind coming back in?”

“Yeah. In a minute.” There is a chill in the air as I register his rebuff. A fine film of rain sifts down on my face and I absently untie my bandana and begin mopping my brow.

“Fred, they’re all sitting there and it’s kind of embarrassing.” The bartender gives Fred a look that, I know, means “Jesus, is this chick uptight.”

“Dora, I’ve tried but I have nothing to say to these people. Why don’t we just sneak out the back, Jack?” he kids as he slides his arm around me and tries to give me an inebriated nuzzle. I am not in the mood. This is really not very nice.

“What’s wrong with you, Dora? Lighten up.”

“Okay. Never mind,” I throw back. The bartender is now smirking.

“Catch you later,” Fred says to the bartender, obviously changing his mind. He grudgingly squashes his cigarette butt into the wall and follows me back in about five steps behind, like a chastened schoolboy.

We get back to the table just as the lights are dimming. A cart pulled by a dwarf pony and bearing a fancy tiered cake is dramatically closing in on Pamela’s seat.

“Oh, we all thought you guys had left,” Heather blurts out in a treacly, well-meaning tone as a round of long-winded, drunken, teary toasts begins.

We sit down and Fred barely speaks. I should have let him sit outside. This is so bad. But he could try just a little. In the bookstore, he has an effortless grace with every stranger that walks in the door—a literary wonder with a dashing streak of charm and an uncanny ability to quote verbatim relevant passages. Now I watch him fidget with the bobble-head doll and then blankly stare into space. Is it only obvious to me or does everyone realize he doesn’t want to be here?

Pamela is currently in a conversation with the woman across the table about preschools. Pamela tells the woman that Madison’s school is very conscious of building self-esteem and has banned games that are hurtful to feelings. In fact, she proudly tells her, they don’t play tag, instead they play Circle of Children, where no one is “out.” It seems that even dodgeball is under a cloud. She goes on to elaborate that there are no red marks on tests because that too is stressful to children…lavender is much more calming.
^*
Fred gives me a look.

Pamela, oblivious, leans into him and says, “So I hear you’re a playwright?”

“Yes.”

“What’s your play about?”

“It’s kind of complicated.”

“Oh. How long have you been working on it?”

“A few years.”

Pamela is struggling here to engage him.

“So, is it really true what they say about the death of the novel?”

He looks at her incredulously.