“I’m sitting at my desk looking at a picture of a beaming couple standing arm in arm before a magnificent windswept beach,” he wrote after our drive up the California coast. “What this picture really shows is a man smiling from deep within and the woman who inspires him with her happy confidence.”
The kids seemed to accept me, though they clung to Jim when we were together. I was warming up to the idea of being a stepmom, although I wasn’t fond of the term, which seemed so off the mark, with its negative connotations (thanks, Cinderella! You too, Snow White!). The Spanish word, madrastra, was worse. It sounded like a poisonous plant. But my ambivalence was not just about semantics. How do you relate to another woman’s children as another mom, “step” or not, when the mother is both alive and very much involved? Do you strive to be more of an adult friend and mentor, like a favorite teacher or a best friend’s mom, maybe? I didn’t know other stepmoms I could grill for answers. I had to go with my instincts. My immediate priority was to not overreach or cause any conflict, especially between Jim and his children.
So far, my gradual entry was going smoothly. During an outing to Disneyland, Arielle and I were the only ones eager to ride Space Mountain. The minute we got into our seats, she grabbed my arm and didn’t let go for the duration of the roller-coaster ride. It was sweet and eye-opening. I could love these kids, I realized. And I loved Jim even more for being their father.
I went camping in Big Sur for Jim. (Oh, yes, I did.) He went salsa dancing at the Village Vanguard for me. We spent a couple summer vacations with the whole Sterngold gang in Santa Barbara. Jim had two brothers, and all three siblings had two kids each of similar ages who got along swimmingly. There was also the sister, who was single, and the adorable patriarch, Hank, who kept calling me “a great gal.” In his eighties, he played tennis, had a girlfriend, and was a total flirt.
I kept the romance under wraps at the office, since any whiff that I was serious about a boyfriend on the West Coast would have prompted speculation about my career plans among certain people. I had no career plans to speak of. I had not gotten that far. But like Jim before me, the time would come when I had to decide between the paper and my personal life. With no children or attachments other than my job, I’d have to be the one to move.
The Times was no small attachment. I had been a Times reporter for fifteen years, happily so. Unless the paper found a spot for me in California, I’d have to quit if I moved there. The thought depressed me. Moving to California also meant moving farther away from family again. I consoled myself, thinking at least I’d be creating my own family. But none of this was anybody’s business at work, at least not yet. I was glad to have something else to occupy my mind: school. I enrolled in a mid-career program at Columbia University to finally get my master’s in journalism. I’d need it if I ever wanted to teach full-time. Between my job, night classes, and long-distance romance, I was happily distracted, holding all major decision making temporarily at bay.
After more than a year of idyllic back-and-forth, Jim and I found ourselves strolling on the broad marble plaza at the Getty Museum on a warm evening, not far from his town house in the Palisades. We stood on top of a hill looking out on the ocean and the burning sunset, standing off to one side of a terrace. We were holding hands and Jim started talking about the day we met. He recalled that day in New York when he failed to keep his job and we went to Orso for dinner.
“What was particularly striking was how inauspicious that day was when we started.”
I smiled and nodded, transfixed with the colors of the sky.
“I hadn’t planned to ask you out to have a drink. I just was having this miserable day and ran into you because your desk was strategically positioned near the elevator. And you said ‘Hi,’ and suddenly having a drink seemed like a really good idea. And I ended the day singing.”
~./’~./’~Willoooooooow~./’~Weeeeep~./’~ for~./’~Meeeeeeeeeee~./’~/’
I laughed as he sang with his eyes closed, earnestly shaking his head. I also loved it when he did his Bob Dylan. Jim stopped singing and looked at me. On one of the worst days of his life, he said, I had made him sing. He was suddenly serious, even emotional. And nervous! I blanched. Was he about to propose? But he kept talking and I thought, Silly me.
Just as my excitement had dampened, Jim said: “There’s no one else I’d rather spend my life with . . . Close your eyes.”
I wasn’t listening anymore as I opened my eyes and looked at the ring, a wide gold band with a large single diamond. I never thought I was a diamond girl until that moment. I couldn’t get over the beauty of that ring and the perfection of the man bestowing it.
“Oh my God! Oh my God! Yes!”
I was happy, bewildered, euphoric. I was the same person, only totally different. I now inhabited a different plane, one with Jim by my side. I loved him so. We hugged and kissed for a long time with the Pacific in our sights, its vastness serving as a fitting metaphor for our future. Eventually we walked to the museum restaurant with views of the Santa Monica Mountains for dinner, but I could not take my eyes off my engagement ring throwing off brilliant rays of light from the candles.
That night in bed, I went from ecstasy to dread. Was I really ready for marriage—specifically, for the drastic transition to wife and stepmother, for the responsibility of other people’s happiness? I quickly shoved the negative thoughts away. Of course I was. Jim and I were mature, intelligent adults. We could handle anything. He’d help me.
A more formal proposal came a few months later, when the next New Year’s Eve rolled around and Jim and I flew to Puerto Rico so he could ask my father for my hand in marriage the old-fashioned way. I knew that over the years my poor parents worried that I’d forever be alone. No husband, no kids, just my pen and reporter’s notebook. My father once—helpfully, he thought—suggested I fix a semi-crooked front tooth. I sometimes wondered if he thought I was a lesbian. But by now, my father had mellowed. For several years he had been dealing with cirrhosis and kidneys so battered he needed dialysis. He had been so sick that my mom held their fiftieth-anniversary party one year early, just in case.
But on this night of my visit with Jim, in the sit-in kitchen that served as the gathering point in the house and where my father sat in a favorite chair by the window, he was all smiles as Jim stood, nervous again, holding a piece of paper. My sister had put out chairs for herself, the kids, and a girlfriend, who happened to be visiting, to witness the occasion. They sat with giggles and smiles, waiting for this real-life telenovela moment. Jim’s bilingual college buddy Alan had translated his presentation into Spanish and, with surprisingly good pronunciation, my fiancé made his intentions clear.
“I fell in love with a truly wonderful woman,” he said, enunciating every word. “Each day I spend with her I feel like a winner at the racetrack.”
Nice touch! My horse-gambling father was moved and couldn’t give me away fast enough. Jim would forever remember the occasion as a scene from a Gabriel García Márquez novel—asking for my hand while half of Lorenzo Noa Street gathered to watch, unnerving him even as they enveloped him in congratulations and good wishes.
We still needed to figure out how we could be together, though. I halfheartedly looked around for other job possibilities on the West Coast, but I couldn’t imagine not working for the Times. At the moment, I was covering sex and nightlife, a beat concocted out of the Metro desk’s imagination. After so many years as a newswoman, I loved the change of pace and the challenge of trying to write about tawdry subjects without tawdriness. After all, my first front page story for the paper—the one I got on a metal plate from the printing plant per Times tradition—was about the “nuisance” of men “urinating in public.”
Just as I was losing heart that the paper would accommodate me, the top editors cleared the way for my move. I was relieved and grateful when the paper transferred me to the L.A. bureau as the West Coast correspondent
for the Sunday Styles section. At least my professional life would stay the course while my personal life shifted entirely.
Before my move, I went to Florida to report on the lingering phenomenon of Girls Gone Wild, the video series featuring college girls and young women inexplicably willing to flash their breasts on the street or the beach for the cameras. The story was pegged to the series’ newer incarnation—Guys Gone Wild, which featured college boys and young guys baring their crotches. As I spent one night trailing cameramen through spring-break hotels and bars in Daytona Beach, my father went to the hospital in Puerto Rico in a catatonic state. Not long after I had gone to bed, my mom called with the grave news. He may not make it, she said. In a fog of sleeplessness and worry, I found a flight from Miami, and Bill, the publicist for GGW creator Joe Francis, drove me to the airport when it was still dark. He took care of my rental car as I rushed to catch my plane. One minute I was hanging out with naked drunks, the next I was racing death. Death won. My mom and her cousin Lydia were waiting for me when I stepped out of baggage claim, and they didn’t have to say anything. My mom and I hugged and cried for Rafael Navarro Gonzalez, husband of fifty-one years, father and Korean War veteran, dead at seventy-six.
My father’s long illnesses had given my mom, my sister, and me a chance to love him without recrimination. He was a different man sick and sober. My mom, especially, took solace in having sacrificed her quality of life doing everything she could to take care of him until the end. As for me, any leftover anger, any sense of shame, dissipated as if by magic the more vulnerable he became. His illness gave me a chance to get reacquainted with my real father. By the time my father left us, he and I had made our peace. After he died, all I felt was tenderness, all I could remember was the good. My father listening to Jim’s proposal with a look of amusement and wonder in equal parts. My father joyously holding his newborn grandsons. My father driving me to my seven a.m. physics class at the University of Puerto Rico in his clunky blue Datsun. My father asking me to pick the horses in his papeleta during my trips home because he said I brought him luck. My father and I dancing salsa like pros at our extended family’s house parties.
One day not long after we buried him in the family plot with his parents, a long-forgotten moment pushed forth. I was sitting on my father’s lap as a little girl not yet old enough to read, listening to him read the Blondie comic strip in the newspaper. It was a Sunday ritual. I caught him making stuff up as a joke and told him to stop it in a scolding tone and to read the real thing. I kept a close eye on Dagwood and Blondie, who in the Spanish version were Lorenzo y Pepita, to make sure his words matched the drawings. And I caught him again fooling around! I protested until he finally gave up and read the words, which felt right but were not as satisfying as the belated love they would inspire decades later.
My sister and I initially worried about my mother, but she was eager to resume her life—as a woman in her seventies with a zest for a new, it’s-all-about-me chapter. She traveled, she shopped, she hung out with Las Muchachas. And above all, she now could devote herself full-time to being a grandmother. My sister, by now separated from her husband, and her kids lived above our family house in their own apartment. My mother watched the kids after school, until my sister came home from work. With my dad gone, my mom was terrified of facing the nights alone. She bribed her grandsons with treats, whatever it took, so that one of them always stayed downstairs with her overnight.
I returned to the States to write about Joe Francis’s soft-porn empire and to plan my move. Bill, the publicist with a heart, became a lifelong friend. Good-bye again, New York! Hello again, California!
Six
Evil Stepmother, Here I Come
My move to California was relatively painless. Jim and I agreed that I should keep my apartment in New York, since we were certain we would end up back there at some point. My place—our place—would be an anchor. In the New York real estate market, once you’re out, you’re likely to be priced out when you come back and try to find similar digs. That’s how I ended up on the upper tip of Manhattan after I came back from Miami in the late 1990s. Five years later, I couldn’t afford to buy or rent in my old Upper West Side neighborhood. But Miami’s dirt-cheap prices had allowed me to buy my first home—a condo on Biscayne Bay, overlooking South Beach—and I swore I’d never throw my money away on a monthly rental.
So to upstate Manhattan I went. I landed in historic Washington Heights, the area at the eastern end of the George Washington Bridge that connects the city to New Jersey. The highest point in all of Manhattan island, my neighborhood’s hills were turned into forts during the American Revolutionary War. General George Washington lost the Battle of Fort Washington to the British just around the corner from our local Starbucks. Two and a half centuries later, the area was largely a mix of immigrants from the Dominican Republic and the descendants of earlier newcomers from Ireland, Eastern Europe, Germany, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, with contingents of Russian Jews and African Americans. I was able to buy what I didn’t even know existed in the city for a single working girl—a financially doable one-bedroom with views of the Hudson River. The apartment and its gorgeous roof looked out to the Palisades cliffs on the other side of the river in New Jersey. It was within walking distance of two beautiful parks—the scenic Fort Washington Park and Fort Tryon Park, home to the Cloisters (the Met’s medieval museum branch). Inevitably, gentrification would come and real estate agents would begin calling the area Hudson Heights to signal “upscale.” There was no question I’d be priced out of my own place if I sold, so I found a colleague willing to take the apartment with her husband. A bit nervously, I left my one-bedroom with clanking pipes, holding a copy of Landlording: A Handymanual for Scrupulous Landlords and Landladies Who Do It Themselves.
In Los Angeles, I was adamant about getting our own place. This would be a fresh start for everyone, not just me. I didn’t want to move into the town house, where I’d be disturbing the status quo. The dog had already declared me an intruder and I didn’t want the kiddies following his lead. I found temporary quarters while we house hunted in Santa Monica, only a ten-minute drive on the Pacific Coast Highway from Jim’s place. I could walk to the pier with the Ferris wheel and the Third Street Promenade, a pedestrian street with the feel of an open-air mall with restaurants, shops, and movie theaters.
I moved to California just in time for Arielle’s bat mitzvah. Jim had been immersed in party planning and making sure she was ready after the rigors of studying the Torah, learning to read the Sabbath prayers for the Saturday-morning service, and writing a sermon about what her bat mitzvah meant to her. Is there anything more intimidating in the life of a thirteen-year-old? On the appointed day, I watched with admiration as she pulled it off beautifully in front of an audience of hundreds, including her school friends, family—many from out of town—and the congregation. In Hebrew! (Henry would be as successful in his own bar mitzvah two years later.) Jim was religious enough to raise his kids Jewish and light Shabbat candles on Friday evenings. I partook of the weekly ritual and had already celebrated Passover and the Jewish high holy days with his father and siblings. In L.A., Jim belonged to a Reconstructionist temple off Sunset Boulevard that was as beautiful as it was welcoming of this gentile woman.
As I settled into my new job, I mostly relied on Jim to look for our new home. As an avid walker, I didn’t particularly enjoy driving. Los Angeles had walkable neighborhoods where a slice of pizza or a container of milk were only steps away, but we needed to stay in the Palisades, preferably in the Highlands, where Jim already lived, because of the kids’ schools and a fifty-fifty custody arrangement. I’d have to drive for the milk and pizza. But where I lived was not a priority for me at that moment. The Palisades came with my strapping future husband, and that was all I cared about.
The Highlands was a planned community in upper Santa Ynez Canyon, surrounded by Topanga State Park. It was beautiful and quiet. About two miles
up the canyon, it felt relaxing and separate from the cares of the city. We were definitely above the hustle and bustle of Los Angeles, and far, far away from New York. No more honking, sirens, train horns, and shouts of “Move it!”
“It’s like going to the Hamptons,” Jim said.
The houses were certainly almost as humongous and expensive. Jim was selling his charming town house for an absurd amount of money, so we could afford more absurd. As we looked at houses built in the 1970s, Jim was keeping his eyes peeled for nice office space. I focused on the backyard. I yearned for sun and fresh air and a yard big enough for dinners, for reading and sunbathing. As a bonus, the yard could also keep Eddie out of my hair. Maybe he’d like it well enough to stay outside most of the time?
“You can’t leave dogs out in the canyon,” Jim informed me. “Coyotes.”
Oh.
It took a few months and a bidding war, but we found our love nest. I was pretty sure it would be the biggest home I’d ever have—a 1975, 3,200-square-foot house within walking distance of Jim’s former town house. It was a typical California-style, open-plan, two-story house, L-shaped, around a small enclosed backyard with a lawn and a brick patio under a pergola covered with vines. The bedrooms and Jim’s office—which would do double duty as a den/TV room—were upstairs. I planned to turn a downstairs bedroom into my office, and the family room off the kitchen would become a big dining room. It had a fireplace. I envisioned many happy dinners in that dining room.
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