Literacy and Longing in L. A. (2 page)

The people who work here are an essential part of the whole mystique. The women all have the same “I don’t care what I look like” attitude, the kind of thing you’d see in photo essays about the seventies when Ivy League radical coeds had wild flyaway hair and wore faded bell-bottoms and no makeup. The girls at McKenzie’s look this way, with their pale faces, unmanicured hands, those round-toed black canvas Mary Janes, long skirts, and bagged-out sweaters with fuzzy textures. They do, however, wear bras and obviously love a good literary conversation. They also know their authors in an impressive but smug sort of way.

It doesn’t seem as if any of them are all that busy except the lean, scrawny guy in an apron who runs the café in the back. At the moment he’s making a latte as he carries on an animated conversation with a customer about an obscure poet who he says has Neruda-esque leanings. His name is Ken and he has spiky red hair, a face covered with an explosion of freckles, and a sparse iodine-red goatee. If he were a woman, the red-hair thing would probably work, but on Ken, it’s somehow geeky and unfortunate, as if he were an alien from the red planet. He has odd pinkish, translucent skin with haunting puffy, watery blue eyes, and his eyelashes and eyebrows are so pale they seem invisible. As I glance in his direction, he zones out into a calm, fogged-over gaze like a narcoleptic.

And then there is Fred. He is looking me over, inspecting me. And in truth, that’s why I am here. One of the
girls told me he has a degree in comparative literature and he did his thesis on heterogeneous space in postmodern literature. What does that mean?

Virginia would probably say he looks like a bum, but there is something engaging about him in a disheveled kind of way. He has the stance of an aging ex-football player who’s put on a few pounds, yet he still possesses the thick strong neck and prominent Adam’s apple of a former athlete. When you look straight at him, his face is nice. But from the side, you can tell his nose has been broken a couple of times and his chin is sharp and jutting. I watch him stride around the shop with a certain air of unconscious grandeur, even though he’s too tall and bearish to be navigating the narrow straits of the place.

Right now, he’s helping a woman and her friend choose the next selection for their book club. He gives them an evasive half smile and looks away, sweeping back his shaggy bangs in a distracted kind of way. Why is it women always seem to fall for men who divert their attention elsewhere and focus anywhere but on their face? They dig the absentmindedness and inattentiveness when, in fact, the pose is often calculated to make an impression. Nevertheless, Fred is appealing in an untrustworthy, Southern gentleman sort of way. He has a slight drawl, although I could be imagining that. But he does seem like the kind of guy who could sit on his veranda with his big black retriever, smoking a stogy and watching the sun set over his cotton fields. The look, however, is strictly L.A.—jeans, a faded gray Gap
T-shirt under a stretched-out, old V-necked sweater, and red-rimmed eyes as if he’s been up all night doing god knows what.

The overall effect is disconcerting. The energy in the air around him amps up the molecular composition of the place, compelling housewives, students, and literary losers to seek his counsel. The man knows his effect on people and uses it.

I see the women close in on him. The prettier of the two is dressed in what has become the young, affluent Brentwood housewife uniform—Juicy sweats. The designer outfit consists of tight, body-hugging velour pants that sit ultra-low on the hips and matching sweatshirts that are purposely unzipped just down to the cleavage. A friend of mine read in the Jacksonville paper that the city council was about to pass a “butt crack” law, which would label this kind of attire “lewd exhibitionism.” But this is L.A., and no one seems to be complaining. It’s kind of the opposite of what sweats are all about—relaxed, comfortable, with no hint of forced sex appeal. Remember putting on sweats when you felt fat or bloated? Well, forget it. The figure has to be absolutely perfect, and if it isn’t, there’s no way to camouflage anything. So now, schlepping around in any old comfortable pair of sweats to run an errand is passé.

All this runs through my mind as I watch them talk to Fred about a few options. They finally request twenty copies of
Tuesdays with Morrie,
and I see someone breeze past them sneering under her breath, “That figures.”

Her name is Sara, a childlike Goth girl who looks like
she’s in her early twenties. She has shoe-polish black hair, chewed-off fingernails, multiple piercings in her ears and left nostril, and cracked, peeling, kewpie-doll lips that glisten with a fine film of strawberry-tinged ChapStick. Her face has the plush, rounded innocence of a child and yet there is an air of intimidating self-sufficiency about her. Today she’s wearing an incredibly short miniskirt over her petite but shapely legs that are so white you know she could care less that L.A. is a beach town. The rest of her ensemble includes scuffed white leatherette sixties go-go boots with a kitten heel, a midriff-revealing crepe blouse, and a heavy, metal dragon on a long, frayed shoelace around her neck. There is an innocence about her that belies her appearance and her breathy little girl voice is punctuated with expletives like “asshole” and “fuck you.” Such a demeanor is particularly jarring in a setting like McKenzie’s, but her coworkers clearly regard her with respect, and I’ve heard she knows every female writer who has written anything of note in the last two hundred years.

I can’t tell if this fetching social misfit has rebellion on her mind or she just doesn’t want to reveal how adorable she is beneath all that black smudged kohl and bare skin. This girl definitely has a past, but she giggles like a kid with a wad of Bazooka in her mouth, and it is hard not to follow her around with my eyes. If she asked my opinion, I’d tell her to comb her hair, but that would probably be it. Her hair is the only thing that bothers me, oddly enough. I guess it’s “the look,” but it’s all messy and tangled in teased, rat’s-nest clumps and soft, mushy, wadded
fluff. It seems as if she has purposely gelled it to have the appearance of “I just slept in a Greyhound bus station and was attacked by a band of homeless men who clawed at my clothes and completely ruined my hair.” You couldn’t get a comb through it if you tried, and then it would be an extremely painful process.

Maybe that’s the point that girls like Sara are tacitly addressing. Hair is beside the point—a time-consuming, unfulfilling way to go off on another fucking tangent, rather than getting on with your life, which leads me right back to where I am at the moment, roaming around the bookstore on a dead afternoon wondering how to approach Fred.

He is now busy with a frazzled-looking businessman who asks in a tense voice where the CliffsNotes section is located. Fred points toward the rear of the store and then asks him, “Which book?”

“
The Scarlet Letter,
” the man replies. “My kid’s hysterical. He just wrote a five-page paper and then somehow deleted it and it’s due tomorrow.”

Sara gives the guy a commiserating look. “Tell your son that Thomas Carlyle gave his only copy of
The French Revolution
to his friend to read and the guy’s maid thought it was garbage and lit the fire with it. Carlyle had a few rotten nights, but then he wrote the thing all over again.”

Fred looks at her in amusement. “Sara, I’m sure that’s going to make the kid feel much better.”

Then he turns to me and smiles. “Oh, hey, how are you? What can I help you with today?”

The first thing that pops into my head is that he recognizes me. The second thing is that the man who barbecued Carlyle’s manuscript was the writer and critic John Stuart Mill, and he ended up giving the book a rave review. However, instead of belaboring the point, I consider telling him I’ve just finished a 675-page historical thriller on seventeenth-century Oxford, England, by Iain Pears called
An Instance of the Fingerpost
and that I have been totally unsuccessful in getting anyone else in my life to read it. The book is a kind of Dickensian whodunit set in Restoration England that begins with an unexplained death in a small college town and builds up into a revelation that has to do with grand events in England and the world. It is intellectual, original, and chock-full of smoke and mirrors, but, unfortunately, has quotes by Cicero and Francis Bacon in the beginning, which definitely put off several of my less esoteric friends. It also has a cast of twenty-seven characters in the back that went on for several pages and includes names like Charles II, Christopher Wren, and John Locke. Even the name of the novel seems to be a deterrent, although I once explained to my sister that the title was a delicious part of the whole mystery.

“Delicious?” she sniffed. She actually was somewhat interested until I told her that the narrator seems clear-minded and sympathetic at first, until three hundred or so pages later when you learn that he’s fucking bonkers and is writing from the seventeenth-century English version of the booby hatch. She gave me a pained look and
responded, “Who has time to read books like that?” implying, of course, that I do.

Fred is waiting for my response and I hesitate. I don’t usually have the desire, as so many pious, voracious readers do, to show off how inherently superior my literary tastes are, but I weigh whether I will make an exception in this case. Then I change my mind. I quickly ask if he knows of a sequel to the Pears book. He tells me that one just came out and it’s quite good.

“Not as good as the earlier book but an easier read. I’ll go get it.”

He returns empty-handed and says, “We must be all out.” I decide to order it (a reason to give him my name and phone number), and as I’m heading out the door, feeling pretty good about our encounter, he calls my name. “Hey, Dora,” he teases. I turn back expectantly and he says, “Do you want to pay for those or what?”

I realize that I’m clutching a bunch of books that I meant to purchase along with the Iain Pears. Shit. Shit. Shit. I’m an idiot. I blurt out, “I bet you think I’m one of those screwed-up kleptomaniac housewives who steals T-shirts to get her husband’s attention.” I give him a big lip-glossy smile. He looks at me like I’m insane. Nice, Dora.

The Stakeout

“It is with books as with men; a very small number play a great part.”

~
Voltaire (1694–1778)
~

N
ormally in my neighborhood it’s gridlock at this hour. There are five exclusive private schools within a four-block radius and Sunset Boulevard is jammed with Range Rovers, BMWs, Mercedeses, and Hummers, many sporting vanity license plates that say things like “US2BHIS.” In between, people in exercise clothes and leather Pumas hang out in the local Starbucks, power walk, bike along San Vicente Boulevard’s tree-lined bike path, or shop in specialized boutiques that sell hundred-dollar tie-dyed T-shirts. Palmer used to marvel at the large numbers of people who spend their days with no visible
means of support. “We could be in Florida,” he said, “except nobody’s old.”

I’m heading home when I get a second wind and decide to take a slight detour. It’s one of those spur-of-the-moment things that you can’t seem to explain. Especially after what can only be described as a seriously awkward moment. No.
Inept
would be a better word. I think about what I said to Fred and then what I should have said. Then I go over it again in a different scenario. It turns over and over in my mind like an annoying melody that I can’t get out of my head. First I say this, then he says that. Oh, this is so ludicrous I have to stop. It’s a comment on my state of mind that I’m even analyzing this at all.

So, instead, here I am, sitting in my car like an undercover agent, while I wait for Palmer, my second husband, to emerge from the gated house that he and I shared for five years. This was our oasis, at least for a while. The house is one of those hybrid architectural buildings reminiscent of Old Hollywood. Part Italian villa, part Spanish hacienda. When we first moved in, I had it painted a faded terra-cotta, which is just now starting to look authentic. The driveway is lush with impatiens and lined with the requisite palm trees. I park on the narrow windy road in front of our house, my car wedged between a crisp navy van advertising Bel Air Plumbing and a battered wooden gardener’s truck. In Bel Air, you’re either a guest and you’re parked inside the gates, or you’re service personnel and you’re outside the gates, an L.A. version of
Upstairs, Downstairs
.

Then there’s that in-between category: personal trainers, yoga instructors, dog walkers, and masseuses. These people are often privy to the codes of their clients’ alarm systems and a few end up living gratis in the guesthouse. I remember right before I moved out last year, my neighbor’s masseuse, a rather sensitive young man named Roy, was held up at gunpoint by the now-infamous Bel Air Burglar as he entered their gate. Their dog, an imported German shepherd, sat immobile on his bed as the robbery was taking place. The dog was trained in Frankfurt and only understood commands like
sitzen
and
attacke
!

I reach behind me and grab one of the six books I had thrown into the car. One thing I’m glad about: I’m never bored and I never mind waiting—anywhere. Unless, of course, I’ve forgotten my book, in which case I just run off and buy another one. I read at the DMV, in movie lines, in bank teller lines, or when the shuttle from L.A. to San Francisco is four hours late. Layovers in unfamiliar airports are a treat, as are jury notices that arrive at my home and give me license to sit around and read all day, knowing that I’m doing my civic duty. On my last jury duty, I was rejected from two trials, one because I told the judge in voir dire that I thought the defendant, a skinhead with tattoos, looked guilty, and the other because the attorneys got a load of the hostile jury pool and settled the case. That day, I actually got to finish Jonathan Franzen’s
The Corrections
.

What to read now? Maybe Alice Munro’s
Lives of Girls and Women
. A quote on the back talks about the
dark side of womanhood. Maybe something lighter. How about Kate Braverman’s
Lithium for Medea
? Oh god, forget it. This is even more depressing. A woman who has a terrible relationship with her mother as well as every man in her life.

I burrow through the trunk of my fifteen-year-old cobalt-blue Mercedes 280, a graduation gift from my father. It is still a lovely old coach with faulty wiring and a broken windshield wiper that I’ve been meaning to fix for the last five years. Every time it rains, which isn’t very often, I vow to take the thing in and then immediately lose interest when the sun comes out.

It’s a sad commentary that I’ve been with my car longer than any man in my life. I’m not one of those people who affectionately bestows a name upon their car, but I can understand the inclination to do so.

The gates to the long sloping driveway slowly begin to open and I dive behind my car as a grim-looking plumber carrying his toolbox emerges. We were always having trouble with the water system, which belched greenish-looking water no matter how many experts we called in. I used to joke that our house was West L.A.’s version of the Love Canal. I do have some sense of pleasure that this problem has not been resolved and that my replacement will have to deal with the endless stream of aeroscopic engineers, construction supervisors, and plumbers.

Palmer is now living with an elegant, beautifully put-together woman named Kimberly, who he thinks will be the next domestic diva. She first came to Palmer for legal
advice regarding a line of cookware she wanted to sell on the Home Shopping Network. Already the host of a cheery little show on the Food Network, she had just signed a multimedia deal that included her own magazine. She uses phrases on the air such as “Ladies, we can make our families happy without working our tushies off,” and includes tricks like turning old bed linens into junky tablecloths.

Last year, the top job at Sony Pictures opened up, and in a surprise move, the Sony brass named Palmer to replace the retiring studio head. His latest string of movies has been financially successful, and now he has a house on the Vineyard, another in Cabo, and I see his name on the letterhead of a dozen charities.

I’ve spent the last year trying to figure out how I feel about all this. I thought back to the times when I’d toss and turn all night worrying about something, and in the morning, when I’d wake up bleary-eyed and conflicted, he’d get that look on his face and effortlessly work it all out. There was this calm brilliance about him that had nothing to do with money. I think I loved him. I certainly admired him. But not for his success. That just seemed to get in the way.

One day, shortly before the breakup, I found him arranging his neckties according to color and pattern. He used to collect Hermès ties with their endless whimsical micro patterns—sailboats, penguins, golf clubs, whales, baseball bats, hot air balloons, beach umbrellas, trotters, fox hunters, Labradors, and so on, ad nauseam. I scanned the array of expensive patterned silks that cov
ered the entire king-size bed—a sea of ties. “You must have five hundred of these, and look at them,” I said with disdain, “they all look alike. Wait! You’re missing the one with the dollar bills all over it.”

He picked up a tie and threw it at me. “How come you’re always such a downer, Dora?” That’s me, Dora the Downer.

For a while, Palmer and I tried the marriage counselor route. I remember the therapist took a look at us and said, “Couples shouldn’t divorce unless one of you clearly doesn’t like the other.” It was good advice and I went with it for a while, but eventually he found solace in his work and his new girlfriend. A friend of mine says that I have deficient wiring because I’ve never been dumped. What she doesn’t realize is this: I always manage to extricate myself first, before things get too dramatic. It’s easier that way. But now I’m thinking maybe I should have tried harder. Oh god, it’s all so confusing. I do wish him well, although it wouldn’t make me unhappy if his next movie is skewered by the critics and flops at the box office. No. I don’t mean that.