Max leads me into the bedroom, where floor-to-ceiling French doors wash the room with more of that uplifting light. The doors open onto a long, narrow balcony that wraps around the back of the house. I’ve lived through four seasons in Los Angeles now, so I know I can put a daybed or a chaise on that balcony and spend weekends writing in the sun all year round.
“Wait till you see the best part!” Max leads me through the kitchen door and down a long outdoor stairway to a huge wooden deck shaded by the orange tree that welcomed me from the front.
“This space is a party waiting to happen.” Max opens a door off the deck. “Bonus! Here’s your guest room. Just needs a little work.”
Inside another set of French doors is every writing-studio fantasy I’ve ever had: a small bathroom, a tiny galley kitchen, a bright bedroom with windows at eye level with the orange tree.
“What do you think?” Max asks me.
“I think I’m in love.”
I’ve read a lot of L.A. real estate ads in the in this past year. I’ve been to lots of open houses with Clara, my decorator friend. With Clara’s approval, I put in a couple of offers. I was more relieved than disappointed when the deals fell through. Although the houses were bigger, flashier, fancier than this one, I wasn’t in love.
“Here’s the craziest thing. Follow me.” Max leads me up the stairs and through the kitchen and into the attached garage. Its walls are painted shocking pink and lined with industrial shelving. “The last renter was a set designer,” Max says distractedly. “But check this out.”
He points to a painting hanging on the garage wall. It’s a smaller replica of the painting I’m still carrying, the one I bought at the art sale up the street a few minutes ago. The style is a bit different, but the message is the same: hearts in happiness, hearts in sorrow.
“I’m a painter. I did this one a year ago,” Max says. “I put it up this morning. It’s just like the one you’re carrying! How cosmic is that?”
I put down my painting and I call Clara and then I call my realtor, Tina, and I ask them both to come over right now.
—
TWENTY MINUTES LATER I’m following Clara and Tina through the bungalow. Their faces tell me all I need to know.
“Wow,” Tina says. “The light in here is incredible.”
“It’s small. And it needs some work,” Clara says carefully. “But it’s got good bones.”
When I fall, I fall fast and hard. “Sold,” I tell Max. “How soon can I move in?”
—
TWO WEEKS LATER, Tina meets me after work in the Bellissima parking lot. She hands me a cold bottle of Moët, a ring of keys, and an invitation to her birthday party next week, at a hot West Hollywood bar. “Cute girls,” she promises with an exaggerated wink, and drives off.
I sit in my car with the two sets of keys in my hand. I only need one. I pull myself out of that thought, start my car, and drive fifteen minutes east to the bungalow—my bungalow. I open the front door and step into the living room and my heart sprouts wings. I’m home.
I sit on the living room floor, gazing out at the view. Behind the downtown L.A. skyline, the fiery sun melts into the horizon. The sky goes electric blue, smeared with finger-paint pink. Show-off, I scold God.
In the bedroom I pull open the tall casement windows, sit cross-legged on the splintery oak floor. The tallest branches of the orange tree brush the bottoms of the window frame, their sweet-tart scent perfuming the air. In the center of the vista, a red light atop a deco spire blinks rhythmically against the night. Through the palm trees to my left, office buildings are outlined in twinkling white lights. The thrill I’ve felt since the day I arrived in this city bubbles up inside me. If I can make it here, I can make it anywhere.
And I am. I am making it here.
—
AS IF TO REINFORCE this rare moment of Zen, there’s a knock on the front door. It’s Clara! My first visitor, dwarfed by an enormous wildflower bouquet.
She sets the vase down on the kitchen counter and hugs me. “Happy?” she asks.
Happy? Me? “I love this place so much,” I say. It was good to be here alone. It’s even better, sharing my excitement with a friend from my old life who’s also a friend in my new life. “Have a seat,” I say, offering her a prime spot on the floor.
“What are you thinking, decor-wise?” Clara asks, looking around.
“I thought I’d start by buying a bed. Then maybe a couch . . .”
“Want help?” Clara asks.
I’ve admired and copied Clara’s design style as long as I’ve known her. “You know I can’t afford you.”
“I’ll do it for cost. As a learning experience. Small houses are huge right now.” Clara laughs. “If you don’t mind being my guinea pig, it could work for both of us.”
My heart lifts. “You have to let me pay you,” I say. “My dad left me some money for exactly this purpose, to make sure I have a place to write. Also, for once in my life, I have a job.”
“Whatever.” Clara fishes a leather-bound graph pad and a silver pen out of her tote. “Tell me what you have in mind.”
—
THE NEXT THREE WEEKS are a whirlwind of shopping and returning and repurchasing, before work and during work and after work and on weekends.
Mostly what I’m doing is saying yes to Clara. Yes to painting the living room walls a warm gray with white trim, and yes to painting the oak floors white to bounce all that sunlight around and make the Bungalito feel bigger. Yes to replacing the hollow-core doors with heavy oak French doors. Yes to making a bathroom vanity out of an old farm table, and yes to jumping into Clara’s truck to cruise the used-furniture store for the table.
In my first marriage, my husband let me make all the decorating decisions. My first girlfriend and I, contentious in all matters, tried to decorate together, which translated to compromises that half-satisfied both of us. My wife and I moved through each renovation like a purring, beauty-making machine.
My collaboration with Clara is a different kind of partnership. The best and the saddest thing about it is that only one of us will end up living with the choices we’re making together. We argue, but our arguments make us laugh. At a thrift store across the street from Bellissima, without Clara’s approval, I find a red Formica coffee table in the shape of the state of California. I’m thrilled with my purchase. Clara, not so much.
“But it’s California,” I argue.
“I’m guessing your guests will know where they are without it.”
“But it’s handmade.”
“So’s the ashtray my kid made for me when she was seven,” Clara says. “But I don’t keep it in the middle of my living room.”
“It’s great for eating on. In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s no room for a dining table in here.”
“Two words,” Clara says. “Nesting tables.”
The next day I come home from work to find the table in my driveway with a sign taped to it that says “Take me to the dump.” I carry the table back to its rightful place in the living room. After work the next day I find it in the driveway again.
I tell Clara I love the table. Clara tells me how awful it is. We name the table “the battleground state.”
Finally we reach a compromise. Clara agrees to let me keep the table if I’ll move it to the deck, “where it’ll rot long before I can convince you to get rid of it.” Helena helps me carry the battleground state table to the deck, and Googles “nesting tables.” The nicest ones she finds happen to be at a used Danish modern furniture store a few blocks away. “We can carry them home with our own little hands,” she says, and so we do.
Incredibly, the work that needs to be finished before I move in—the painting of the walls and floors, the conversion of the garage, the installation of salvaged windows where walls once blocked views and light—is completed in exactly
the allotted time for exactly the allotted budget. I relegate the improvements that can be done later—the design and installation of my dream garden, the new roof, the exterior paint, the purchasing of furniture—to a to-do list that isn’t mine alone. Despite the paltry fee I’m paying her and the far more lucrative clients clamoring for her time, Clara promises to stick with me until every table and chair and lamp has been procured. I’m not a scrappy freelancer anymore; there’s a paycheck replenishing my checking account every two weeks, so I can actually afford to buy them. All of this—the partnership with Clara, the salvage yards that offer up the perfect windows, the privilege of paying retail when retail is what’s called for—seems nothing short of miraculous to me.
On my first night in my new home, I make my new bed with crisp new white sheets, a new, Los Angeles–weight duvet, and new goose-down pillows, and I lie in the middle of my bed and I watch the lights of downtown Los Angeles twinkling outside my windows until I fall into a fluffy sleep.
A call from Clara wakes me at dawn. “Look outside, quick!” she says.
I sit up in bed and see the cityscape through my south-facing windows, a tangle of jungle greenery and quirky Silver Lake cottages spilling down the hillside. The entire vista is doused in crimson light.
“This is the most beautiful sunrise I’ve ever seen,” Clara says, “and it’s happening just for you. Welcome home.”
“I don’t know how to thank you,” I say.
“Be happy there,” Clara says.
“I will,” I say.
FOURTEEN
My L.A. friends declare my marital mourning period over and start dispensing Dr. Phil–style advice. “Move on with your life.” “Put the past behind you.” “Find someone new.”
Find someone new? That’s what I did the last time I was single. I was forty-five then. I’m past sixty now. What I need is someone old. Or someone willing to take a walk with someone old. For me, moving on means crossing a bridge away from my wife: leaving the land of us, pulling myself up onto a different shore. And crossing that bridge means making love—having sex, at least—with someone who isn’t my wife.
Since I discovered sex, it’s been everything to me. I started young and hope to stop never. Sex is where I connect with the body and the heart of the person I’m making love with. It’s where I connect with the innermost essence of me. In lust, more than anywhere else, I find myself. Lose myself. Share myself. Am myself.
In non-sexual moments, when I’m pinballing around in my head, I can be anyone—wandering, spiraling, slipping on identities and shedding them. When I’m in my head I paint pretty pictures, spin scenarios real and imaginary, string together pretty words. But when I surrender to my animal hunger, when I lie down and reach deeply into another person, when I open myself to being reached, there’s no mistaking me for anyone else.
As long as my wife remains the last person who touched me, the last person I touched, there will be no moving on. So I do what there is to do to change that. I join a dating site. I swallow my sadness—how did this happen?—and revulsion—I’m too old and too smart for this shit—and tackle the profile questions.
The first one stops me. Who am I and who am I looking for?
Lesbian, seeking a woman?
Straight, seeking a man?
Bi, seeking animal/vegetable/mineral?
Generally I prefer women. Generally I find them softer, silkier, stronger-hearted. But for me, right now, women are too close to the fire. My heart is still covered with third-degree woman-burns. Also, it’s hard to imagine a sizable pool of sixtysomething lesbians who are kind enough to be gentle with me and adventurous enough to be into recreational sex. So I list myself as a bisexual woman who’s seeking a man for “short-term dating” or “casual sex.”
This brings me to profile question two. My age.
I’d planned to include “honest” on my list of winning traits. “What you see is what you get.” “Self-aware and direct.” “No games, except the fun kind.” “Photos are current.” Like that. But when a woman is looking for a little reparative nooky, could there be a less sexy number than sixty-two? It’s no big deal to shave off a couple of years, is it? Anyway, everyone says I look younger than I am. Anyway, I can keep up with any actual fiftysomething, male or female.
Anyway, according to my research—a five-minute shallow dive into a 2010 OKCupid study fittingly called “The Big Lies People Tell in Online Dating”—everyone lies about everything on these sites. Men add two inches (to their height, that is; the study doesn’t mention more intimate measurements). Women add an inch of height and deduct pounds from their weight. Both genders add 20 percent or more to their incomes. Two-thirds of profile photos are three or more years old. Also, apparently I’m not the only bisexual of the opportunist variety: 75 percent of bisexuals are fronting, actually dating only one gender. “Like bi men,” the report concludes, “most bi women are, for whatever reason, not observably bi. The primacy of America’s most popular threesome, two dudes and an Xbox, is safe.”
With a few keystrokes, I transform myself into a fifty-eight-year-old. Approximately three seconds after I hit save, my e-mail inbox lights up like an amygdala mainlining dopamine.
Hello pretty how are you doing today and am billy by name what about you?
How are you doing today sweet Damsel?
Hi dear, good evening and how r u doing. like your profile n will like to get close n know more about u.
Hello beautiful, I just joined some mins ago . . . I must confess that your profile really caught my attention, and i must say you are beautiful
Wow, what a beauty you are, i never come across a beauty before were your parents a Greek god because it takes two gods to make a goddess like you, are you single?
hello dear nice to ready from you am so happy to hear this from you this my phone number (xxx) xxx-xxxx. just to make a good friend to each other so that we can be text each other or to call each other ok. or can i have your e-mail so that we can have a nice chat to each other time to time. bcos am a widow man and looking for a loyal woman to chat with to make me happy and i will also make you happy as well. best regard Michael smith
Just as I’m realizing why my therapist warned me that I might find the online dating world more injurious than curative, a different kind of message catches my eye.
I’m a writer too; based in Malibu but otherwise stunned by our statistical compatibility. I would very much like to test the algorithm that has paired us like chocolate and peanut butter, Champagne and rose petals, Kavalier & Clay. Hope you find that an interesting proposition. Thomas
A semicolon, a capital C for Champagne, intelligent flirting, and a literary reference, all in one message? How can I resist? I write back. Thomas writes back, a bit more cleverly. I write back, more cleverly still. We’re writers, after all, jazz riffing from the West Side to the East. I check Thomas’s profile page. His photos aren’t bad. He says he’s fifty-five, and he actually looks it.
As our online conversation continues over the next few days, I start to feel hopeful. With a woman this might come to nothing sexier than a cup of chamomile tea in a Wi-Fi café. But this is a man I’m jousting with. Last time I checked—admittedly, a couple of decades ago—when it comes to the pursuit of sex, men don’t fuck around.
Thomas invites me to join him for dinner on Friday night at Lucques, a West Hollywood hot spot with a James Beard–winning chef and eyebrow-raising prices. I call Hannah, my longest happily married heterosexual friend, for a consult.
“I haven’t slept with a man in twenty years,” I tell her. “Anything I need to know?”
“Lingerie,” Hannah says. “They love that. The tackier, the better.”
“Check. I have exactly one set of matching red lace undies. From Ross Dress for Less. Anything else?”
“Condoms. Promise me you’ll use condoms.”
“God, men are a pain. But okay,
I promise.”
“Speaking of pain, if you’re seeing him this weekend, you’d better get started on your hormone cream now. It takes a few days to work.”
“You mean lube?”
“No, darling,” Hannah says. “Estrogen cream. So you can get that thing of his into that thing of yours without feeling like you’re being ripped open with a knife.”
“What?”
Hannah sighs. “Welcome to postmenopausal heterosexuality. Every time Michael and I want to have sex, we have to decide days ahead of time, so I can get my body ready and he can get his little blue pills. It’s like planning a military operation. I’d give sex up entirely, but he loves it. And I love him. So I do what makes him happy.”
Jesus. Hannah’s a brilliant, successful, powerful sixty-four-year-old woman. And she doesn’t like sex? And she does it anyway?
“You’re lucky. You have the option of skipping the whole mess and sticking with women,” Hannah suggests. “That’s what I’d do if I were you.”
“I’d love to,” I say, “if I could find a woman to do it with.”
“You could, if you were willing to wait,” Hannah points out.
Of course she’s right. And of course I’m not willing to wait. For one thing, I never have been, and it seems a little late to start now.
For another thing, I need a distraction from a growing sense of unease about my job. I’ve been getting a weird vibe from Isabel lately—nothing I can name, and therefore nothing I can do anything about, just a sense of impending trouble.
—
WHEN I ARRIVE at ivy-draped Lucques, Thomas is seated at the best booth in the house, his evenly planed face lit by the fireplace’s glow. He stands to greet me, kisses me on one cheek, then the other. He smells good. Okay, so he’s a couple of inches shorter than his stated height. But his face is actually more handsome in person, his body tight and trim, his V-neck sweater cashmere, his shoes elegant yet hip.
The New Old Me Page 14