So. I’m moving back to Los Angeles and my married boyfriend is picking me up, I thought to myself, smudging the plastic window with my forehead.
Flying into LAX triggered feelings of possession for the endless turquoise-studded grids that reach toward the San Gabriel Mountains. The grid like an outdated network of cells, a massive failure in urban planning, a city built not for humans but for cars. Only a prodigal daughter could see beauty in this sprawl, could look fondly at the yellow banks of smog racked up against the mountains. That daunting Pacific. And there it was, Love for the Monster, for this city, a feeling old-fashioned like salvation, like a narcotic uncoiling. Yes, for us as for so many settlers before us, California would be the golden frontier. Also our homecoming. As the plane descended, I felt dangerously close to healing, a sensation I also refused to recognize as a bad omen.
Laurel Canyon, California
I’m in the middle of a home-improvement project with the cottage, pulling up vomit-green carpet squares and scraping the cottage cheese off the ceilings. The house that Stevie Nicks may-or-may-not-have-lived-in is a mess.
This place is about to fall off the hill, Eli says. I’m covered in spider bites. The windows don’t lock…No garbage disposal! Why even leave New York?
He’s right: vinyl flooring coming up warped in the bathroom, mold on the ceilings, raccoon nests under the house, and a sloping foundation that will set a water bottle rolling toward the street. Eli says it makes him seasick. But I’m fixated on improving the floors and ceilings, and to my shock my landlord agreed to renovations. All day my mattress lies on the floor wrapped in plastic and at night I sleep in dust.
My suitcases have erupted onto the floor. Carly comes over and comments on it. Remember how you never unpacked the entire time we were in Rome? Carly has a pitiless memory. She’s talking about our semester abroad in Rome during college, where I lived out of a tangle of clothes on the floor though an empty closet sat above it.
I guess my eyes are immune, I say to her. I’ve been traveling for so long I don’t consider putting my clothes away. I’m writing, I explain to her, as if it makes me exempt. And I am writing. I pitched a national magazine a piece about lost jewelry, thinking it a perfect fit. They asked for alternatives and I mentioned offhandedly that I had something about my father. That’s the piece they want, though I said I wasn’t ready. I don’t really talk about that stuff, I said to the editor. But then why did I mention it to a stranger? Because it’s coming, unplanned and fevered. With the words come the memories, once dormant, now exposed. They pile up in my sleep. I told the magazine I would try.
It’s been two weeks of this writing and I don’t leave the house beyond walking to the Laurel Canyon Country Store to buy heads of cabbage or bulbs of fennel. I simmer and smother them with parmesan and butter, then eat it for days. My solitude only feels enterable when Eli tells me he’s on the 5:30 p.m. flight to LA. There’s a concert and we will be on a list.
You love being on a list, I tell him, stalling.
Like you don’t? Come out, come out, wherever you are!
Carly asked me earlier how the writing was going. I responded, If you find my body first, please turn off the Adele. Now she calls me: Go to the concert.
That’s what leads me to my first night out in Los Angeles, where I’m bored. I know I should be dating, meeting people, connecting. I know that my reluctance is considered unhealthy. But as I look around the rooftop of the Fonda Theatre where an after-party has landed, this circle of affluent art-adjacent people feels stifling. In New York, LA, Paris, I see people I’ve waited on. They don’t recognize me, but I know them inside and out: they take comfort in a web of references to restaurants, artists and filmmakers, obscure vacation spots that aren’t too obscure since they all seem to be going there, while drinking bottles of natural wine so flawed they taste like kombucha. I see the same faces in Mexico City, Barcelona, Joshua Tree. While I was finishing my first book, living on a tiny Greek island in the off-season, I ran into a New York academic who regularly publishes in The New York Review of Books. The world of my adulthood is tiny, and on this evening where, a stranger in my hometown, I asked it to expand, it appears to be shrinking. I’ve even been to this same Beach House concert before. And the truth nagging at me all evening is this: I’m one of them now.
Except for one tiny thing: I have a love that doesn’t rest on platitudes or convenience but thrives on its obstacles. I keep one hand on the phone in my pocket. I think of the Monster, probably at a party like this in his city, weary but looking at the sky. Whenever I look at the moon, he says, I’m talking to you. I shiver when I know he’s thinking of me. We often text each other at the same instant. That won’t happen now, because he’s with his wife, but I can’t stop touching my phone anyway.
The temperature on this night is in the low sixties. I’m introduced to a friend of a close friend, a handsome man wearing a wool cap. I know he’s from California. He’s not new exactly, but he’s refreshing. I see what he’s not: rich, entitled, cynical. He’s not the Monster.
The Bay, he says when I peg him as a native son.
That’s exotic, I say, I’ve never been.
That’s not technically true, I go on to tell him. I stopped there once on a road trip when I was in high school. I drove from Boulder, Colorado, to visit a friend attending the University of San Francisco. I arrived in the afternoon. I took a hit of ecstasy at four p.m., spent all night at a warehouse rave in Oakland, then drove down to see my sister in LA, my eyes still rolling back in my head.
So, I do know San Francisco, I joke. It’s very sunny.
There’s nothing more radiant than a woman with a secret. This man sees the heat coming off me but has no idea of its source. Is he simply a visual creature, he likes the way I look? I don’t know why men are charmed by this shit. But they mostly are, a performance of derision and confidence, abrasive edges smoothed out with self-deprecation that hints at vulnerability. I don’t know why they love that I’m divorced, why a thousand red flags don’t shoot off in their brains when I tell them—eventually—that I’ve cheated on everyone I’ve ever been with. I don’t say it with pride. It’s shame and honesty. A warning. I never say, It will be different, but I must shimmer with promises. I’m doing it now, it feels like I’m yawning, stretching up out of a confined space, my hand unclasping my phone, coming out of my pocket, I gesture, I pull my hair back behind my ears. The man smiles at me, and there is a loose thread in that smile I want to tug; his eyes look like he wants to play. He turns to introduce me to his girlfriend and I, also, smile.
* * *
There was a story my mother told me about her childhood, an afternoon with her father, my grandfather, back in the sixties. They had parked on the bluffs of the South Bay and were walking down a trail to picnic. Down beach, something caught my mother’s eye. The cliffs of Palos Verdes are continuously disintegrating. The Portuguese Bend, miles of coastline on the edge of the peninsula, remains undeveloped only because it’s too geologically unstable to build upon. As you drive the long, pockmarked and tar-scarred coastal road in the evenings, you can see it: the road particulating, waves evaporating as they crash below the bluffs, the ice plants and coastal sage leaning off their ledges. Elsewhere in Palos Verdes there are Mediterranean-style mansions, manicured gardens, roads winding into the hills where horses stand at attention in oak fields. But what I remember is the dark pull of this coastline, relatively isolated in the middle of Los Angeles.
A car flew from the cliff, as if on cue, as if a prop, and sailed down in an arc, whistling, until it crashed nose-first into the ocean. My mother and grandfather stayed as the police arrived, but he took her home before the driver was fished out of the water. The man was, certainly, my grandfather assured her, DOA.
Why did he do that? I was a child asking her. I already thought the area was haunted. My sister and I were often left with my grandparents in Palos
Verdes on weekends. Sometimes we stayed weeks. Every time I saw a car parked, admiring the view, I felt that vertiginous pull.
The driver had had enough, she said.
Enough of what? I wondered but didn’t ask.
I remember this story when I wake up in Laurel Canyon with a view of an empty hillside where there was once a house. It sailed down in the rains, all the way down Laurel Canyon Boulevard, my aunt says.
They’ve cemented the hillside to prevent further erosion. Around the cement, greens have come, unexpectedly. It’s been a wet autumn. Neon-green grasses, moonlight aloes with orange and yellow blossoms. Cacti exploding with green stretch marks. Every morning the same lunatic chores: I wake up, every day, to texts from the Monster. He is sometimes in my time zone, more often not. He has texting hours, as most married men do, but I do not. I am always open, available, flexible.
When they are relevant, he tells me about his dreams: Last night we were driving, there were redwoods. You were talking in the front seat next to me, but I couldn’t hear you. I don’t know if this is supposed to make me feel better about our situation. He thinks I should take comfort in the fact that he never forgets me.
I check the weather in New York City. I test out some statements about myself to start the day: I wrote a novel and it will be published. I stopped waiting tables. I can afford to live by myself (something, at thirty-one, I’ve never done). The Monster and I are in love. I’m in love! I try to say to myself. I can never deliver that exclamation point. I’m not twenty anymore.
It’s in the forties back in New York, a day when the drizzle and gray won’t lift. I seem to have survived some test the city gave me, though I do not feel victorious or even that clever. What I’ve purchased, with the working till four a.m., back at it again at nine a.m., the debt, the divorce, the minute and massive sacrifices, is not the book, but an absurd freedom. No mortgage, no marriage, nowhere to clock in and tie on an apron. I have my friends on both coasts, my sister, Polaroid photos from countless sparkling parties, meals so decadent and rarified they were unrepeatable. I also have the potential for more. This should be the happiest time of my life.
I tell myself this each morning. But the truth is that I’m stalked by this exposed feeling of failure. A belief that being here is admitting defeat, that the ground is too unsteady to walk on, the air too dry to breathe. I think my aunt is right, I should put curtains up. But then I wouldn’t see the coyote that comes and eats the cat food I leave out for the stray cat. The coyote is so close to me while he eats that he sometimes bumps his nose into the glass not five inches from my face. I watch him, not blinking, not knowing that the stray is another thing that by feeding I am close to killing. Every morning I refill the dish with cat food, encouraging prey toward predator, conflating care with threat.
I rinse the coffee cup, a tannic brown residue left from yesterday. I clean things and they become dirty again. In New York I never had the kind of life that created small clusters of dirty dishes. I could use every plate in the house for entertaining. And I created garbage, with iced coffee cups and take-out containers. But I worked odd hours, ate at least twice a day at whatever restaurant employed me. I feel new to the rhythms of inhabiting a home.
Now every morning the kettle, the blooming grinds, the hum of traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, the squirrels stealing pomelos from the tree. While I drink coffee, I stare at a map from the Thomas Guide I have tacked up on the wall. It’s the Thomas Guide I used to study in the back seat of my grandparents’ Cadillac. I can see the pastel-pink south peninsula, the bourgeois Palos Verdes my mother came from, the blue-collar San Pedro my father came from. All of it seeming to be important, though I feel nothing.
What about your parents? the guy from the concert asks, holding a coffee cup and toast. A few weeks ago we spent the night together and he made me laugh the next morning. I purposely didn’t take down his phone number or his last name (Look at you! my sister texted), but when a text arrived from him a day later, I was—to my own surprise—relieved.
Now I make breakfast for him occasionally. Nothing too elaborate. He’s in an open relationship with the girlfriend I met at the Fonda Theatre—his use of the term makes me laugh out loud, but I don’t ask for further explanation. I’m not available, even if I wanted to be. He’s curious about me, seems fueled by a restless curiosity in general. He’s a landscape architect who knows more about my birth city than I do. The way he inspects the cottage, you can tell he loves to fix things. He’s not your type, Eli says dryly after that night at the Fonda. That comment is meant to be mean and reductive, like this guy is nice and I’m not. Accordingly, I roll my eyes when I talk about him.
Not close, is all I say to him about my parents. That’s what I’ve always said, from the minute I got away from them. That’s not so surprising, is it? If he presses, I’ll say my mother lives down the 405 freeway in Long Beach. I’ll say I don’t know where my father lives, but I believe him to be in Washington. If he’s surprised that I don’t know where my father lives, I’ll shrug. Like I said, not close.
This has worked for me for a decade. People I’ve worked side by side with for years, whose weddings I’ve attended, whose heartbreak I’ve nursed, know nothing about where I come from. I arrived in New York City from school in Ohio, and I wanted to start over. Tabula rasa. That’s something I miss about my restaurant friends: they didn’t ask why I never went home for the holidays, only cared if I could pick up their shift. I miss that shared understanding of evasion.
But you’re from Los Angeles? the Love Interest clarifies. Yes, he’s the Love Interest. He’s shirtless and barefoot. He has been digging in my garden—though I never asked him or invited him to, he’s there all the same. Every time he leaves, I assume it will be the last time, but then he’s back and I’m only sometimes annoyed. He smells like health but cleans the dirt out from under his fingernails before he touches me. All the windows are open, and he’s looking over the map with me. I point to Laurel Canyon, then to the south peninsula.
Not really. I wouldn’t know how to get from here to there if you paid me.
Long Beach, California
The children who stayed at day care until dark had stories to tell, but not the voices to tell them. It was a Catholic school, so divorces weren’t as common as the national statistics of the 1980s reported, and those of us coming from “broken homes” were acutely aware of how different we were. Most of the other moms didn’t work. The staff handled all of us who stayed until dinnertime gently.
A car door would slam, and I would lose focus on whatever I was drawing or painting or gluing, my entire body a satellite searching for her high heels on the asphalt. She would appear in the doorway, nothing like the other moms with their smudged faces, skewed ponytails, sweats, minivans, packed lunch sets. Her legs shimmered in her nylons, which she shed like snakeskin when we landed back home. She hemmed her skirts an extra inch, because I’m short but my legs are long, she informed me. Those legs appeared, then the rest of her, in silk skirts, blazers, camisoles or button-down blouses. Then the eyes, bright (my eyes, she would say while considering my own), and her youth, wafting off her like Chanel No. 5. She never looked tired to me, but I can see it now, how her posture had wilted by day’s end, how she still had to feed us, bathe us, read to us, sing to us, sleep with us. She never intended on being a single mother of two by the time she was twenty-nine, or a barely glorified secretary to a judge, clerking her way through a thoughtless, uninspired forty-hour workweek. But when she arrived at day care in her professional regalia, other left-behind children stared at her, jealous.
I already knew she was fragile. I don’t know many single mothers who are able to hide their pain from their children. There isn’t enough space. Crying while she balanced the checkbook. Panic attacks while driving us. Crying on the phone with her mother, berating our absent father on his answering machine. One night she fell chasing him out of the
house. She twisted her ankle. He didn’t come back. She sat on the lawn crying and my sister and I ran to her. I remember my fear. I remember exactly how she tried to get back up quickly. How she gripped her ankle and sat down on the lawn, defeated, curling into herself to weep. Shortly thereafter I went through a phase where I practiced calling 911, hanging up when I heard the passive voice.
When my mother and aunt asked me to explain my actions, I said, When you don’t have a father, and you have a baby sister, you have to be in charge when your mom falls down.
After your dad left, you wouldn’t let her go to the mailbox alone, my aunt remembers. It’s gross and total, the way I can feel the tug of my love for her. My protectiveness. Her skirt hems, her Chanel purses, the cigarettes and hairspray. Clutching at her, shrieking for her if she disappeared for even a moment, running to her when she came into any room, done pretending that I was strong, independent, or cared about anything else. I know what it’s like to be claimed by the most beautiful woman in the world. She was mine.
* * *
My father told me they met as undergraduates at the foreign kids table during lunch at Loyola Marymount University. My mother was fluent in French and Italian, my father fluent in nothing. I can’t quite piece together what they were both doing at that specific table. Were they loners? Were they trying to escape the South Bay where they grew up?
There is, unfortunately, another likelier story. My aunt says they met at my mother’s boyfriend’s apartment in Manhattan Beach. My mother’s boyfriend being a very well-established coke dealer in Los Angeles in the seventies. The last I heard of that boyfriend, my aunt recalls, he was serving a twenty-year sentence. The apartment—I imagine—had views of the ocean. Mirrored surfaces that made cocaine shine. A terrace where my mother could smoke and stare at the horizon, which is what—I imagine—she’s doing that day when my father comes out for some air. Tall, dark, and handsome. The two of them brushed powder from their noses, ran tongues over gums, introduced themselves, chattered in a fast-forwarded, intimate way.
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