* * *
It was after five when Maggie finally grabbed her garment bag and her makeup case and my hand, and pulled me into the bathroom, locking the door behind us.
“The LA Times guy told me the entire LA art world is turning out for this,” Maggie said excitedly. “David Hockney, Catherine Opie, Barbara Kruger. Barbara Kruger, Liza!”
“I am so thrilled for you,” I said.
I had been with Maggie every step of the way, from fourth grade art class where she was the only kid not making paper airplanes, through her cutting school in tenth grade to sit on the floor drawing at the Museum of Modern Art, through the scholarship to Cooper Union she won after her parents told her they would pay for her to study something practical like accounting, but not frivolous like art.
Maggie had lived without heat, she’d subsisted on rice and beans, she’d worked endless crap jobs, and she’d never compromised on her art. When I’d quit my publishing job to write full-time, Maggie was my role model. She showed me that you get up and start working every morning whether you feel like it or not, because you usually won’t. That you had to be vulnerable enough to invest your tenderest emotions in your work, and tough enough to keep going when people rejected you.
Nobody wants you to be an artist or a writer, Maggie said. Not only did the world not care if you ever painted a picture or wrote a book, the world kind of wished you wouldn’t. Your challenge was to do it anyway.
“How does it feel?” I asked her.
“Exciting,” she said. “Unreal. The good thing about not being successful until you’re fifty is that you know that, as wonderful as tonight is, the clock’s going to strike midnight and what matters is what’s waiting for you at home.”
That was another thing Maggie had sacrificed to her art for years: a committed relationship. She had plenty of sex, but she always said she didn’t have time to be in love. She had refused to even consider children. She’d always believed she could have a serious career or a family, but not both. After all, growing up in the New Jersey suburbs, we didn’t see women who had both. And you know which one they had and which one they gave up.
“It’s too bad Frankie couldn’t be here,” I said.
Although, much as I loved Frankie, I was glad they weren’t here so I could have LA Maggie to myself. Well, to myself and the entire art world.
“You heard how Frankie feels about LA,” Maggie said. “Plus we didn’t want to drag the kids across the country or both be on this coast, leaving them on the other, especially with you out here too.”
I didn’t think she was trying to make me feel guilty, but I felt it anyway.
“I’ll be your date tonight,” I told her. “I’m excited about showing you LA. We’re invited to a party later at Stella’s.”
It was Hugo who’d invited us, after I’d invited him to Maggie’s opening. He said he’d love to meet Maggie, but he’d promised Stella he would help her set up her party, then urged me to bring Maggie to Malibu.
“I have to see what’s happening here,” Maggie said.
“Of course,” I told her. “But Hugo will be there. He’s looking forward to meeting you.”
Maggie was by this point wearing a familiar-looking gold dress, the very one the stylist had tried to foist upon me the night of my book party. She was leaning over a sink, filling in her eyebrows.
“Remember when they used to call me CroMaggie in school because my brows were so thick?” Maggie said. “Now I have to paint on the individual hairs.”
“Stella thinks I should have a face-lift.”
“Don’t you dare have a fucking face-lift,” Maggie said.
“I won’t,” I assured her. “Maybe some filler…”
“Will you listen to yourself!” Maggie cried. “You’ve been kidnapped by the California pod people.”
“When in Los Angeles,” I said.
I reached into my purse and took out a tin of mints. I’d made my first trip to the weed dispensary that afternoon especially for this occasion. Maggie and I had smoked our way through high school and college, and then occasionally resumed the practice when we lived together during my second turn through my twenties.
But that was nothing like living in a city where there were billboards advertising weed delivery services and dispensaries that looked like Apple stores. Deciding between one artfully packaged edible and another was more like hand-selecting bonbons than silently exchanging cash for a baggy from some dude on a mountain bike. I thought Maggie would appreciate being able to partake without shivering on a street corner, hoping your kids (kids were the new parents) didn’t catch you.
“I brought you a treat,” I said to Maggie, holding out the tin.
“What’s that?”
“Marijuana mints.”
She looked at me as if I’d turned blue and started speaking in tongues.
“I’ll pass,” she said.
Ouch. She opened the bathroom door. The place was already pulsing. Before I stepped into the gallery, I slipped the mint under my tongue. I had the feeling I would have more fun if I was someone looser and more outgoing than myself.
* * *
Very quickly, the room was thrumming with people and noise and laughter. Maggie was swept away to meet this person and take a picture with that person, and I entertained myself with a glass of champagne and as many short rib mini tacos as I could inhale. Edible marijuana is the ultimate middle-aged high, requiring patience and delayed gratification. It would be at least another hour before I was high, and I was really wishing I’d taken that mint earlier.
This was a different crowd than I usually encountered in LA, not surprising given that I rarely ventured outside our writing cave at Kelsey’s house or Stella’s Malibu compound, a universe unto itself. The LA I’d come to know was a casual town—I was wearing a flowing satin blouse over ripped jeans and red suede booties, feeling like I was finally getting the LA dressing thing right—and this was a very un-casual event.
The gallery goers all seemed to be wearing eyeglasses that matched their outfits. Jewelry that they’d designed themselves. Their clothes telegraphed their wealth and rarified taste, but only to other rich people with equally rarefied taste. If you didn’t know that shirt had cost $5,900 in Tokyo, you might think its wearer had made it himself using brown paper bags and mylar.
“Hey, baby,” said a voice at my ear. It was Kelsey. “What’s going on?”
Kelsey, at least, was dressed for the same party I was, though instead of a black satin shirt she was wearing an embroidered kimono over her torn jeans, and her booties were leopard print instead of red suede.
“I’m silently practicing my snarkiness,” I told her. “Training for my return to New York.”
“Angelenos practice plenty of silent snark,” Kelsey said. “We just wrap it inside a smile, whereas you New Yorkers actually blurt it out.”
“We’re candid,” I said.
“Harsh.”
“Warm.”
“Out of your fucking minds.”
“Speaking of which,” I said, “are you going to Stella’s tonight?”
“No,” Kelsey said. “Are you?”
“Maybe.”
“I have a feeling it’s going to be some kind of ’shroom fest,” said Kelsey.
“Nobody told me that,” I said.
Though that undeniably made the party more appealing to me rather than less, especially now that I was feeling the sparks from my magic mint starting to light up my brain.
“Whatever. I can’t actually relax and have a good time around those people,” she said. “It always feels like work.”
“Maggie really wants to meet Hugo,” I told Kelsey. “And I know she’d love seeing Stella’s place.”
“Be careful up there,” said Kelsey. “Those things can get out of control.”
“I don’t even know if we’ll go,” I said. “I have to talk to Maggie.”
“I’m going to find her and say hi, then I’m going home,” said Kelsey
. “Let me know what you end up doing later, okay?”
* * *
The rest of the event consisted of speeches, toasts, and standing alone pretending to be fascinated by the sculptures—which I was, especially since my mint had kicked in—while people crowded around Maggie, asking her to sign their catalogs.
And then they turned up the lights and the caterers started packing up everything, and it was just me and Maggie and the gallery directors and assorted famous artists and rich collectors, or at least people who were doing a good imitation of them.
“So, should we go to the party at Stella’s?” I asked Maggie.
“Where is it?” she said.
“It’s in Malibu.”
“I have no idea what that means. Can we walk?”
What a New York question. Her acolytes were standing behind her, hungrily waiting to snatch her away. Or hey, maybe the weed was making me paranoid.
“We’d have to take an Uber,” I said. “It’d take maybe an hour.”
“An hour? What’s there that’s worth driving an hour for?”
“Hugo Fielding,” I reminded her. “And according to Kelsey, there might be magic mushrooms.”
I thought that might be an inducement. It was a night on mushroom tea in Jamaica that had first given Maggie the idea for her egg sculptures.
“I’m too old to do that kind of thing,” Maggie said. “And so are you.”
“It led to your biggest creative breakthrough!” I said. “Come on, this might be our last chance ever to do something like this.”
Maggie opened her mouth, closed it again and shook her head in seeming exasperation, then opened it again.
“What’s next?” she said. “Colonics? Scientology?”
“It’s supposed to be like ten years of therapy in one night,” I told her.
“That sounds like my version of hell,” Maggie said. “When are you coming back to New York?”
“We have to finish writing the script and cast the other principal roles.”
“This baby is not going to wait forever.”
“A couple more weeks at the most.”
She leveled a look at me that was at once disapproving and questioning. Part Why are you doing this? and part WTF? “Bottom-line truth, Liza: I’m worried about you. I’ve done this stuff. Don’t take it lightly.”
Her acolytes had begun to move away.
“We’re going to Manuela’s,” the gallery director called.
“You’re welcome to come with us,” Maggie said to me.
“I thought we were going to spend tonight together,” I said.
“Going to some celebrity party is not spending the evening together,” said Maggie.
“Neither is going to an art world dinner.”
I was hurt, but at the same time I got it. For her, this was work. She was being wined and dined by wealthy collectors and influential people in her field. Of course that’s what she should do.
But I, I was high and primed to have some fun, yet sure I wasn’t going to have any at the art dinner. I wanted to see Hugo. Possibly, I wanted to try those mushrooms.
The art world people were doing me a favor by making plain their disinterest. I didn’t have to please anybody but myself now. I could do exactly what I wanted to do.
“This is my big night in LA,” said Maggie. “Why can’t you come support me? What’s going on with you with the drugs and the guys and—what the fuck, Liza?”
I felt like a teenager. Partly because I was stoned, sure. And partly because Maggie sounded like my mother, telling me how bad I was to want to have fun with my friends instead of going to visit Grandma. Back then, when my mother yelled, I’d feel terrible and agree with her that I was a bad person and I’d do whatever she wanted.
But was that really true this time?
“You know, Maggie, I’ve been here for almost seven hours now. Most of that time I’ve been hanging around, supporting you, feeling proud of you, being happy just to be in your presence. I kept thinking we’d get some real time alone together, that we’d get to do something that was just about you and me.”
“You knew I had all these work people to see.”
“You’re right, I did. I assumed I’d go along with you like I have lots of other times. But you know what, Maggie, I didn’t have fun those times. You don’t talk to me, you don’t even really notice that I’m here. I’m not saying I want you to change. I’m saying I’ve changed. I love you, but I don’t want to go to the damn dinner.”
Maggie stood there, almost frozen, for a long minute. We stared at each other, gauging, I think, how solid we felt about each other, and about the collective us. All our other relationships, including with spouses and children and parents and siblings, had morphed over time and sometimes fell away. Our friendship was always at the center of everything, solid and stable as the earth beneath our feet.
But in California the earth could start shaking at any moment, I remembered, toppling bridges and cracking concrete and steel. Maggie and I gave each other a reassuring hug and kiss and moved in opposite directions, both turning at the same moment to wave. But I couldn’t shake the unsettled feeling that the next time Maggie and I met, everything would have changed. Maybe it already had.
twelve
When I arrived at Stella’s, it was dark and fog was rolling in from the ocean. It always surprised me that no matter how hot it had been during the day, it was freezing at night in LA, as if the sun were the only source of warmth.
Shadowy figures moved around the lawn, illuminated with strings of Edison bulbs looped from one palm tree to the next. Dotted around the grass were Moroccan lanterns filled with candles. As I stood there alone, wondering how I’d neglected to bring a sweater, someone broke apart from the crowd and moved toward me.
“You’re here,” Hugo said. “I was worried you wouldn’t make it.”
“I’m here,” I said, but I felt more nervous and uncertain about being there than I’d expected. I’d been so sure I wanted to come, and now I didn’t know why. Maybe because it was stoned me who wanted to go to the party and straight me who was actually here.
Straight me also felt terrible about the skirmish with Maggie. I wished I were sitting in the restaurant at the edge of the booth, smiling and nodding and pretending I knew what the fuck anybody was talking about.
Hugo put his arm around me, but lightly, the way a brother might.
“You must be freezing,” he said. “Let’s get you one of these cashmeres.”
He indicated three tall African baskets, one filled with black cashmere shawls, one with cream, and one with white.
“Where’s Maggie?” Hugo asked, draping a white shawl over my shoulders.
“Out with her fans.”
People were standing, chatting, all seemingly drinking the same clear liquid from heavy-looking crystal glasses. A young person as beautiful as a goddess appeared, a wine bottle in each hand, and asked whether I’d like oxygenated water or water collected from melted icebergs. She was dressed in a perfectly fitted white tee shirt and white jeans like a hot angel. At her elbow was another white-clad beauty, possibly male, bearing a silver tray holding crystal glasses.
“I’d go with the oxygenated,” said Hugo.
“Very healing for the gum tissue,” said the hot angel, smiling approvingly as I took a sip.
A third figure in white appeared bearing shot glasses full of smoothies containing, we were told, no salt, sugar, spices, gluten, legumes, or pork.
“What else is there?” I said, laughing.
While the server was pondering, Stella materialized, dressed in a long white satin gown that looked like something the Virgin Mary might wear to the Oscars.
“Welcome, traveler!” She leaned forward and kissed me on each cheek, and then did it again. “Are you ready for an amazing experience?”
In the distance the waves crashed and swished, in and out, in rhythm with the musicians playing near the pool: bongos, a ukulele, and a giant golden harp
. It took me a minute to realize she was talking about the magic mushrooms.
“So the mushrooms are really happening?” I said, in a voice that sounded much more solid than I felt.
Stoned me had felt both relaxed and excited about trying new experiences. Straight me had kind of been hoping for white wine and a cheese plate and perhaps some discreet and strictly optional mushroom action down in the golf cart garage.
Stella clapped her hands three times and from somewhere a gong sounded. The white-outfitted wait staff stepped forward in unison, now bearing not bottles of iceberg water, but rough wooden crates of the kind expensive champagne comes in. A woman with long frizzy white hair, dressed in a white-and-silver kimono, appeared from the shadows behind Stella.
“That’s Neoluna: New Moon,” Hugo whispered. “She’s the shaman.”
Neoluna lifted her arms and tilted her face upward and implored the spirits to help guide our journeys, to show us everything that was good and protect us from evil.
I was from the generation that screamed and hid our eyes when the Wicked Witch came on the screen during the annual airing of The Wizard of Oz. Just hearing the word evil made me anxious.
Stella took one of the boxes from a waiter and held it out to Neoluna, who closed her eyes and hovered her cupped hands over the pale wood.
“What’s she doing?” I whispered.
“Reiki,” he whispered back.
One of the waiters in white appeared, proffering a wooden box in our direction. It was lined with a purple satin cloth and filled with crystals, rough yet shimmery, a bed of them in sizes from baby carrot to jagged hot dog, white and pink and purple. And nestled in the crystals was a collection of long-stemmed, pale-colored desiccated mushrooms.
“What do you do with them?” I asked.
“You haven’t done this before, have you?” asked Hugo.
“Not really.”
He hesitated. “Are you sure you want to do it?”
Was I sure? Of course not. But soon enough I’d be back in New York, spending my days alone in a little apartment, typing from morning to night. If I felt really daring, I’d drink a Diet Coke after four p.m. Fuck yes, I was going to do this.
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