by Rachel Cline
“Did you ever try going back to Al-Anon?” Denise said, after the silence had become uncomfortably long.
Annabeth’s exasperation became audible in the form of a hissed breath. Getting fired from Trouble Doll was not anything she’d gotten herself into by making stupid choices. She didn’t doubt that the children of alcoholics tended to be irresponsible or prone to addiction themselves, but she had been hardworking, and thorough, and loyal to the point of humiliation. “I don’t see the connection,” she said.
“I think you might, though—I mean, if you went. That whole thing of putting people on pedestals, especially these people you work with. And then they betray you and you get so abandoned and despairing. I mean, yeah, it’s Hollywood, but it’s also typical Al-Anon stuff and you don’t have to be so alone with it.”
The word Hollywood had once conjured so much. Annabeth recognized the freight of those illusions in Denise’s comment—how could she understand? In Annabeth’s Hollywood there were no klieg-lighted premieres among colossal sphinxes or cocktail parties held inside buildings shaped like derby hats. It was all different, and worse, and as impossible to explain as it was to conform to. She could taste the dry residue of the city air in the back of her throat. The telephone receiver felt hot and greasy and suddenly so heavy she wanted to throw it across the room.
“Annabeth?” said Denise, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I just never thought my life would be like this.”
Annabeth remembered how blue the sky sometimes looked outside the window of her childhood bedroom, the color of Lake Superior reflected back to her from the other side of the hill. She used to lie on her bed telling herself that something as beautiful as that blue would happen to her if she could just get out, get away.
“Yeah,” said Denise, “I know. No one ever does.”
After four months of steady employment, Annabeth had plenty of money in the bank, but her underlying sense of imminent poverty had kicked in as soon as the doors of Big Time had closed behind her. The days were unbearably long and she had no use whatsoever for David’s companionship. She took herself to her first Los Angeles Al-Anon meeting mostly, she told herself, to get out of the house without having to spend any money. She chose the meeting at the Brentwood Presbyterian Church because she knew where it was, and because the recorded message told her there was a meeting there within a few hours of her decision to go, but also because she assumed that in that well-watered enclave she would be spared contact with the desperate types she imagined attending meetings in the church basements of Venice.
She got to the corner of Bundy and San Vicente five minutes before the meeting was supposed to begin but dawdled as she walked from the parking meter to the church. Once upstairs, she was surprised and relieved to find a folding chair at the end of the second-to-last row. No one even glanced in her direction as she sat down. The meeting came to order almost immediately, chaired by a mousy thirtyish woman with a nervous smile. During the preliminaries, she asked if there was anyone new present who wished to introduce themselves, but Annabeth pretended not to hear.
The meeting began in earnest with the twenty-minute testimony of an overweight white man in his forties who was wearing track pants and a T-shirt emblazoned with the name of a pharmaceutical product. At first, this outfit made Annabeth fear that he was crazy or homeless—the clothes looked like thrift-store finds—but as he continued to speak, it became apparent that he was in fact a physician of some sort. “In my line of work, you’re supposed to think you’re God,” he said, which got a huge laugh from everyone but Annabeth.
“It never ceases to amaze me,” he went on, “that I could get all this way, do all the things my mother always said she wanted me to do—the job, the marriage, the grandchildren—and still feel like a pathetic, fat little boy pleading with her to get off the couch and make dinner.”
Ick, thought Annabeth, picturing this scene all too vividly taking place in the living room of her own childhood home, where her mother had certainly never passed out—Annabeth had never even seen anyone lying down there, at all, that she could remember. And then she recollected something she had long forgotten: sitting next to her father on that couch and watching On the Waterfront on television with the living room lights all turned off. She had been too young to follow the story of the movie, but so delighted to be alone with her dad that she had nestled into the couch cushions just to watch the expressions on his face. He had frowned and scowled and smiled and laughed and only turned to look at her once. He must have realized I was too young to understand that movie, she thought, trying desperately to hold on to the image of her father’s face looking at her with love and concern, but it was chased away by the enthusiastic applause following the fat physician’s testimony.
She sat through the whole meeting feeling variously bored, annoyed, frightened, and trapped, but also fascinated. When a slight, darkly tanned woman told a convoluted story about a conflict with a coworker who had threatened to have her fired, Annabeth felt sure that the woman had really stolen her coworker’s commission, in spite of all her talk of being a victim. A burly handsome man who wittily and insightfully described his difficulties with an apparently schizophrenic son began, toward the end of his four-minute “share,” to seem to Annabeth like a manipulative bastard who forced his wife to make all the difficult decisions. This became a pattern as the meeting went on. She would start out thinking a person was normal enough but after three minutes realize that he or she was self-deluding, controlling, dishonest, or just pathetic—except in cases where that was what she thought of them in the first place. When the chairperson announced that the time for sharing was up, Annabeth was relieved to get away.
Driving home, she argued with herself about what she had just witnessed. Sure, she had some of the same feelings as the so-called Al-Anonics. Their sense of worthlessness, their unbearable anxiety, their certainty that they would screw everything up eventually and so why not just get it over with and at least have control of that much—this was all unpleasantly familiar. But there was also a self-indulgent, narcissistic quality in these people that she actively despised. The way they went on and on about their stupid injuries and paranoias, the way they let themselves complain and blame and whine was disgusting. Annabeth would never say the words “I almost lost everything!” as had a blond woman wearing an immense diamond ring. Annabeth had never had everything. She was pretty sure she’d never even wanted it. These people seemed to believe their special version of God liked them better than they liked themselves. Annabeth’s God hated his own mistakes the same way she did, the way any sane person does, she thought.
Driving south on Lincoln Boulevard, she passed one of a chain of local stores called Smart & Final Iris. She’d passed it hundreds of times but had never been inside, despite wondering for ten years what a store with such a name might sell. She never saw the sign without thinking of the silent-film device that meant the story was over: the encroaching circle of blackness that swallowed what had come before. “Final iris” was a perfect description for this, and a final iris that was also “smart” made the featureless concrete box look like the perfect antidote to the roiling confusion of the Al-Anon meeting.
As it turned out, the place was a catering-supplies discount store, inexplicably named. She watched shoppers load up on immense canisters of Coffee-mate, stainless steel bowls as big as tractor-trailer tires, and rolls of plastic film sufficient to prepare a whole house for refrigeration, a whole life. Annabeth bought a gallon-sized measuring cup made of Pyrex for $4.99. It was the only thing in the store of monster-sized cookware that she could imagine being able to use.
27
One summer night in a parking garage in Century City, David asked Annabeth to marry him.
“Are you insane?” she asked back.
“Maybe,” he said, “but that’s not why I think we should get married.”
They were in his car, seven or eight levels underneath the Avco theater, where they had go
ne to see a midnight show of Natural Born Killers, and they were stuck in traffic. It was far too soon after the Northridge quake to be creeping along at less than five miles an hour that far below street level, and David’s offer had been an act of desperation, although a sincere one. The only way out would have been to abandon the car and walk home—obviously not an option—so they persisted in their glacial progress upward, feeling scared and foolish and mad at Oliver Stone, all at the same time.
Annabeth regretted her response the moment it left her mouth, but despite her regret she remained speechless, trapped in a state of tremendous anxiety and sorrow for which neither the movie nor the traffic jam were entirely to blame. “That came out wrong,” she tried, finally. “I just don’t understand how you could think that was a good question to ask at this particular moment.”
Unfortunately, while she had been formulating this statement, David had begun to weep. It was a sight Annabeth could not bear. She averted her eyes, but the image was intractable. He turned on the radio in an attempt to provide cover, only there was no radio reception in the underground garage. Annabeth then foraged on the floor of the car for a cassette and came up with In Utero. But by the time their ticket had been read and the gate had swung up, she could tell she’d made a terrible error of some sort and ejected the tape. The radio was preset to KROQ—certainly it would be safe from tragedy at that hour on a Saturday night. Sure enough, it was broadcasting talk: a giggly actress was speaking about the party she’d been to earlier and entertaining the possibility that her skirt was too short. Stupid but harmless.
David steered the Aries out onto the Avenue of the Stars and followed it through the empty canyon of skyscrapers to the freeway entrance. Once they were enveloped by the relief of normal freeway speed, the mood in the car shifted enough for him to reclaim some dignity. He even laughed at the antics on the radio. They were almost home when a segment with a familiar call-in voice came on. They were listening to LoveLine, and it was a rerun.
“Doesn’t that sound like Laura’s husband?” said David.
“Greg?” said Annabeth, feeling suddenly sick. “How do you know what Greg sounds like?”
“I met him when I came by the cutting room for lunch, remember? He told me he listens to my show.”
Annabeth returned her attention to the radio broadcast, becoming increasingly alarmed.
What does my wife think? She doesn’t. All she thinks about is her work and what restaurant to go to, said the man called Paul. It was absolutely Greg. She remembered watching Laura’s profile that afternoon in the sushi bar and she knew that Laura had made the connection then. Everything that had followed had really followed from that.
Annabeth couldn’t sleep that night, or the next, or the one after. In the moments when she was able to get herself off the hamster wheel of self-flagellation about her behavior with Laura, it was only to recall the terrible look of shame and rejection on David’s face as they crept through the parking structure. She tried to picture what it would have been like to be living by herself during this horrible moment in her life—she would have stayed in bed all day with the shades drawn, living on peanut butter and tuna fish, occasionally making her way out to that horrible Vons supermarket where everyone looked like an extra from a Fellini movie. She was eventually going to have to apologize, or something, but there seemed to be no right thing to say or right moment to try.
There are sometimes “famous” conversations in the early days of a relationship. Remarks that the partners mythologize and that come to represent something about their couplehood that they couldn’t otherwise express. For Annabeth and David, it had been a conversation about the architectural decorations called dingbats—the metal doodads one sees affixed to the front of the same kind of boxy L.A. apartment buildings that also often have names inscribed on them: “Debby Do,” “Esplanade,” “Quo Vadis.” One day, Annabeth had said to David that the dingbats looked to her like “malignant hubcaps” and David had said “more like decorative gunshot wounds” and then they both had laughed so hard their cheeks ached. What was so hilarious about it was not just that it was possible to have formed an articulate opinion about these ridiculous things, but that David and Annabeth—the two lone Linnaeuses of dingbatdom—had managed to find each other and share their thoughts on the subject. Much later, it occurred to Annabeth that this was not the first time she had mistaken this kind of coincidence for true love.
Annabeth really had no idea how lost and desperate a gesture David’s proposal had been. She had been so mired in her own drama that she had entirely stopped monitoring his. Or perhaps that was the invisible design of their relationship from the beginning: he watched her, she watched herself, no one watched him.
In spite of his radio show, or perhaps because of it, David had been struggling desperately since the earthquake. He remembered Greg’s voice so distinctly because he remembered everything about Annabeth’s world—he was memorizing it in the hope that he might annex it, somehow, as a way out of his own. If he could put names to all the faces and voices and key facts (Greg = Harvard, artist, eyelid tremor), Annabeth would not realize what a disaster he really was. His proposal of marriage was a bid to freeze their relationship, not to grow it. And her response had hurt him, but not because he perceived it as a personal rejection. He’d wept because by refusing him, she’d busted him. He would have to find another imaginary life to inhabit, and he was too exhausted to do so.
28
In the weeks that followed, Annabeth surrendered to her black mood. And in the midst of this came her thirty-fifth birthday. It seemed unbearable. David, helpless in the face of her depression, which looked to him nothing like his own, purchased her a healing treatment at a spa in Koreatown, the suggestion of one of the interns at the station.
Annabeth made her way there on a searingly brilliant Tuesday afternoon. At the front desk, potted palms cast shadows on the green marble counter, and Annabeth detected the faint smell of sulfur. At the towel window, a young woman handed her a towel, a robe, a pink shower cap, a pair of flip-flops, and a brass locker key and told her to change and wait by the pool. It occurred to Annabeth that this was probably what it would feel like to be sent to one’s death in a seemingly beneficent totalitarian society. On the way to her locker she stopped in the bathroom, where the water in the toilet bowl was so warm it felt like breath on her buttocks when she sat down. The banal office building was, in fact, built on top of a thermal spring.
In the pool area, where rock formations built out of spray-on concrete had gained a plausibly ancient patina, there were two pools: one large and hot, the other small and cold. When Annabeth entered the room in her scratchy white bathrobe, she saw a slight, dark-haired woman, quite naked, at the far side of the hot one. The woman sauntered through the thigh-deep water and then crouched, submerging herself to the shoulders and gazing implacably past Annabeth. She didn’t really look like Laura, but the sight of her had nevertheless stopped Annabeth’s heart. Lately, she could picture Laura’s face only in two of its myriad moods, skeptical intensity or annoyed disinterest, but it was like tonguing the site of a missing tooth; she couldn’t leave the hurt alone for long. And every time she launched a memory, she told herself that this time she would simply choose to end it differently, at least in fantasy. The blond woman at the Al-Anon meeting said she’d wasted half her life “waiting for the past to change,” but this was different. Annabeth just needed to relocate the sense of promise she had felt so profoundly before things began to go wrong.
When her moment of panic had passed, Annabeth trod the rubber safety matting to the hot pool’s edge and stuck her toes in the water. A few orange traffic cones were scattered about to prevent mishap, but other than herself and the crouching woman, the gymnasium-sized room was empty. She was shyly hanging her bathrobe on a poolside hook when she heard an approximation of her name called: “Annbeth?” A very beautiful young Korean woman dressed in highly unflattering black underwear was beckoning from the other s
ide of the pool. She made a hand gesture that indicated that Annabeth should leave her robe behind.
So, naked except for her flip-flops, Annabeth followed the woman into the next room. It looked like a greenhouse, with long tables topped by shiny blue polyurethane pads that resembled pool toys. The woman patted one of these and Annabeth hopped up onto it, lay down, and soon felt a cold washcloth draped over her eyes. Then, several buckets full of warm water splashed over the length of her body. The woman scrubbed Annabeth’s calves and feet with long strokes, her scourge lubricated with something cool and cucumber-scented. Crumbs of dead skin, sebum, lymph, and God knew what else rolled off her by the handful. Her scalp was scraped, her ears were purged, the space between each individual toe freed of any loose cell. For sixty minutes, she was made new.
Returned to the blinding brightness of the parking lot after this experience, Annabeth felt raw—she was still unused to being outside in the bright center of the day. As she drove between giant hedges, feeling clean and empty, she did something like praying—fervent wishing that the momentary sense of lightness she felt would last beyond La Brea Boulevard, would become something she could mentally re-create inside the dark house on Nowita Court. She found herself driving aimlessly, avoiding going home, and being flooded anew by memories of the “before” phase of her friendship with Laura.
After meeting Laura at the party with the elephant, Annabeth had wound up staying there much longer than she had expected to. She hadn’t wanted to tag along too overtly, so she’d made a hapless tour of other rooms and drunk another plastic cup of wine before returning to the patio. She then found Laura dangling her legs in the neon-blue water at the shallow end of the pool, surrounded by avid young men—Laura was not giggling or splashing or tossing her hair but holding forth, and they were listening to her. Annabeth inserted herself beside a young man in a bowling shirt to listen to what later turned out to be one of Laura’s set pieces, her theory of why the movie Chinatown was so universally revered in Hollywood.