As I was leaving, he still had on the kindly father-figure face.
He said, “Gideon tells me you’re getting married?”
“Yes,” I said. Gideon is his assistant, whom he makes pour his coffee and who secretly spits in it. “October nineteenth.”
“That’s great,” he said.
He smiled, but it was wrong. Like seeing bits of your safari guide’s clothes wedged between the lion’s teeth.
• • •
Ate lunch at the newest overpriced downtown restaurant with sponge-painted yellow walls and tiny wooden bowls of sea salt at a table the size of a laser disk. My wise friend Jill (who wrote the Calgon … Take Me Away campaign) and I were commiserating over Graham’s abandonment. I told her I felt depressed, that I had been assigned a new partner, but still felt bereft. She promised me that it would pass.
She said, “Nothing ever stays the same. That’s the good news …”
She formed a tiny Mona Lisa smile.
“… it’s also the bad news.”
Beth left her husband. It wasn’t working out. She tried for nine years, which seems to me more than enough; even derogatory credit stops after that.
When she was twenty-three and first met Robert, whose mother used to make him sit naked on the radiator when he was bad, Robert said that he never wanted to have children. This was fine, at first. Then she discovered midway through the marriage that she wanted kids after all.
When Beth tried to talk to him about it, he said, “We had a deal.” She said, “You’re right. OK.” A year or so went by; she started running. Casually at first and then in local marathons. She asked him again about the possibility of his reversing his decision.
He said, “What about our deal?”
Being a fair person, Beth nodded. A deal is a deal. She started running longer distances, getting up at five instead of six. Her periods ceased. Then, two years ago, in some sort of medical miracle, she became pregnant.
Robert was unenthusiastic. He said, “OK, but he’s your responsibility.” Beth was sure he would change his mind once the baby was born, but he never did. Every diaper was hers, every midnight feeding and ministration of justice.
After Max was born, they stopped having sex. That is also part of the deal.
Then yesterday, on her thirty-sixth birthday, she loaded the baby in the car, picked Robert up at his office at 6:10 as usual, told him she and Max were moving out to her sister’s house in Bolinas, then drove away.
She had put her suitcase in the trunk beforehand. I don’t worry about Beth.
I do however wish that people would at least stay together until the day after our wedding.
I was at the Marina library today and there was a woman about eighty years old, in navy-blue Converse skate shoes and a yellow rain slicker. I was at the S’s in fiction, when without preamble she said, “This Danielle Steel must write day and night. Rubbish.”
I offer, “She lives up on Broadway, in a big white Victorian.”
She answers without looking at me, as though we are old friends who need not look at each other. “Oh, yes. I’m sure it’s very … pastel. Full of froufrou beds. God help us.”
I thought about how people don’t get old, not really. They are their absolute selves until the last second when they die and go somewhere else, leaving their body like a tire on the side of the road.
I want to ask her what she thinks about marriage or partnerships in general. But I don’t want to wreck the moment, which is as perfect a one as I am likely to get, today.
Came home to a hallway full of feathers. The Cow had had his way with a small sparrow who had the misfortune to fly into the apartment. There were feathers everywhere, and a tiny bird head in the center of the hallway. The Cow felt great about it, you could tell. He was sitting there like Muammar Qaddafi, preening himself.
Even though he was working late, I left it for Michael. He came in at eleven, picked the bird’s head up with a paper towel, and then announced that feminism had a ways to go.
Clark, my newly assigned partner, is very excited to be working with me. He will be my art director for the new television spot next month, and possibly beyond. We’ve awarded the job to a French production company in order to fulfill our specific conceptual vision for this creative project. It’s called Work with a French Director, Get a Free Trip to France. Clark has spent time with Graham and me, so he understands the prime objectives.
Clark says France is fantastic. To Clark, everything is either fantastic or else it’s crap. Clark has green hair and graduated from the Parsons School of Design, after growing up on a hog farm.
“… ’s crap,” he’ll say, dismissing Herb Ritts or Mathew Ralston, or sometimes even an entire state. He once said Pennsylvania was crap.
Or else, “Fantastic,” as when he’s gazing at a photocopy of a fried chicken menu that he has run through an old fax machine backward, and then overexposed and blown up to poster size, having billed all this to General Agency, the job number he refers to as the Black Hole.
When he wandered into my office today, Clark and I consulted the Eight Ball about the Creative Director from L.A., who just had a whole spread in a large trade magazine in which his picture is shown next to a lot of work other people did.
We ask the Eight Ball,
Will the Creative Director from L.A. go back to L.A.?
You may rely on it
Will the next guy be an even worse bastard who fires everyone and brings in his own people?
It is certain
“Fantastic,” Clark says.
The Eight Ball is frighteningly accurate. But we can’t use it too much, or it will lose its potency.
I begin to think, for approximately the millionth time in my life, that even though things haven’t gone the way I planned, it’s possible that I will be fine.
Last night at 2 a.m., a taxi drove up outside our window and let out its passengers. A second later, a man shouted, “I buy you a shot and you hit me in the face. Why you wanna do that?”
No response from the other party. I know, because I waited.
Today was Graham’s last day. I don’t know what to add to that.
I got through it pretty well. Wrote him a nice one-page letter, left it on his chair. He was out somewhere.
At the end of the day as I walked to the garage, I started choking, involuntarily, a dry little cough from way deep. I couldn’t figure it out; I wanted to laugh. Then I let myself into my car and sobbed into my hands.
I notice that, as the wedding date approaches, some doors are opening and others are closing. I have no control.
Beth got a nice ten-page letter from her husband, soon to be ex. She read it to me over the phone. When they were married, he went days without speaking.
I listened to her as she read it through to the last page, as he spoke about his deep regrets, how he knew his innate damage had caused the destruction of their marriage. How he was cracked, like an ice tray. Beth was obviously trying not to cry, reading it like a newspaper article, but then at the end she just laughed for a long time and said, “Christ. Now I have to think about him.”
Went to Graham’s flat in Russian Hill for his Going out of Business party. He had orderly price tags on each item in his home. A lesbian art director got there before me and swooped on the best lamp. Though I arrived quite early, I hadn’t counted on the lesbian art director factor.
I smoked cigarettes sitting out on the balcony with Jesus, who is Graham’s dog and who did not have a price tag on him. I bought a small chest of drawers, painted with red roses. His friend Craig is going to take over the apartment, which makes me happy. Craig has a business card that says “Craig Debora Taylor, Opulent Superstar” on it, alongside a color photograph of him with sequins pasted on his head and full harlequin makeup.
Craig arrived around midnight and announced excitedly that the optometrist had phoned; his red contact lenses were ready, and so were the black ones. When I left the party was in full swing. I
never want to see things end.
When I went back to Graham’s flat today, everything was white and bare. Graham said that after the drag queens arrived at 2 a.m., they pretty much cleaned it out. Then he gave me a brown paper bag of items that didn’t get sold the night before. As I walked to the kitchen to get some water, I saw a long row of bags meticulously lined up, military style. He had a bag for each of his friends.
I looked inside my bag when I got home. My name was written across it, in Graham’s perfectly square handwriting. Inside was a small gold tray that his father had brought back from Italy after World War II, a blue vase, and two books. One of them was You Can’t Go Home Again. There exists an angel in heaven whose one and only assignment is to fuck with me.
When we first became partners, working on regional television ads at a small agency south of Market, his parents came out to visit, and I met his father. He sat through the whole lunch at Fringale and said almost nothing, just two ice-blue eyes buried in an old mountain face, while Graham’s mother talked. I had forgotten he was there when suddenly he spoke, an unexpected, slicing truthful remark, tossed like diamonds on the table. And I realized that he had heard every word. Just like Graham. He waited, like a copperhead.
Graham’s father had a seizure last year in his London home while we were both in Los Angeles on a Pringles Potato Chip shoot for their new product, Pringles Sour Cream n’ Onion Lite. He had immediate and successful surgery, and then quietly and unexpectedly died. Before Graham could make it back.
On his trip across country, Graham will make his way to upstate New York, to see his mother, who lives there now and is sixty-nine.
“I want to see my mom,” is what he says.
We look at each other for a moment, in the empty whiteness of his old life.
I nod, not saying anything. As always, a separate, more complete dialogue passes between us, in the space just above our heads.
This afternoon I saw Reuben. I told him about my elves dream, where I am flying with Graham.
Reuben is a Jungian; at the start of our sessions, whenever I hesitate for more than a few seconds, he asks me about my dreams and I have to tell him. It’s either tell him the dreams or tell him the reality.
“In the dream,” I tell him, “the elves had come and then we were able to fly. We flew for a long time.”
Reuben asks me what I think it represents.
I say, “Ascending.”
“What else?” he asks.
I fidget in my chair. All at once, I feel too tired to talk. But I tell him.
“Trying to do the best work I can. To keep going in the face of all the shit. Of which there’s a lot.”
“What else?”
“Magic. They represent the magic in life, that you can’t know about.”
He looks satisfied. Then he says, “There are two realms of importance in existence. There is the outer world and the inner world. In the outer world you do very well. In the inner world, I sense you may feel that you are a second-class citizen …”
This is as close as he has ever come to a diagnosis.
“… it’s my job to help you with the inner world …”
I think he is finished, when out of the silence he says, “… where the elves live.”
Drinking coffee, I think about how Graham and I have the same car. Both Saabs, both procured when we did our first big television campaign.
I remember after the favorable review in Adbuzz came out Graham said, “You know what this means?” I looked at him blankly.
He said, “You ain’t got to worry ’bout goin’ hungry no mo’.”
To celebrate, we bought cars. We didn’t decide together; we just both liked the same kind. Mine was black; his was white. He got his first, and had it painted from its original color to a bright green.
My license plate is special ordered. It reads KLUUNAD, which is a planet we invented.
Another art director once asked Graham, in front of me, if he knew what Kluunad meant. Graham looked at me. Graham frequently looked at me while he spoke to others.
“Kluunad is where we go sometimes …,” Graham said.
“You know, when you’re away on a shoot and the phone rings for the wake-up call and it’s 5 a.m. and you don’t know where you are. That’s Kluunad.…”
He continues to look at me. As if I don’t already know. As if I am a conduit to some new, fourth person.
“Or when you call people and they ask ‘Where are you?’ and you’re standing with a cellular phone in the desert, surrounded by production trucks, and you look around and say, ‘I don’t know.’
“That’s Kluunad.”
Thinking of these things is magical to me. Graham and I were definitely on some very weird trip, for a special, limited time.
I knew nothing when I met Graham. He never seemed to notice. He just quietly taught me which directors were cool, which designers understood. He brought in The Medium Is the Message and Barbara Kruger’s Love for Sale and Larry Clark and Howard Gossage and Jenny Holzer books.
Then we did that big television campaign for athletic shoes, twenty-five million. Television, print, billboards, radio, bus shelters, phone kiosks, postcards, buttons. All with Jasper Lyne the crazy British designer who drove an old school bus and who truly believed that Kluunad was a real place. And every day we’d go up to the top of the Filbert steps and drink Guiness and chain smoke and think of new headlines.
And then it came out and Adbuzz and the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek named it one of the ten best of the year. And somehow we won an Emmy, and began fielding calls from various newspapers and magazines for interviews, which is what we mostly did all day long. Work the power.
And that was it. There was nowhere else to go.
What comforts me mostly are the secrets. The fact that we got away with so much, a lot more than anyone will ever know. The trips to Paris, New York, New Mexico, London. The spa weeks in L.A., editing and going back to our beachfront rooms in Santa Monica and ordering popcorn shrimp and Pouilly-Fuissé. Expensing everything and exchanging blank taxi receipts like baseball cards.
They can never take Kluunad away. I made it up, the word. Kluunad. Two U’s. It was one of the first times I ever saw Graham laugh.
It may be that I said it just so that he would.
Coleman Barks, the poet, says perhaps that’s what God is. The urge to laugh.
April
Great loves too, must be endured.
COCO CHANEL
Last week was Phoebe’s birthday. She’s fourteen now. Michael is in one of his low-grade depressions where he wanders around like Macbeth. His appetite is shot and after work he just sits around with a warm beer, murmuring to himself, “I don’t get to watch her grow up.
“My fault,” he says, staring at his nails.
I never noticed before how hard it is to deal with his depressions in addition to my own spiraling moods; now of course I hear the Chinese gong and FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE and I almost can’t stand it. Suddenly he is not the person I thought he was. He is a much lesser person, shorter and sadder and infinitely more damaged.
I look at photographs from last month and he is seemingly the same Michael, so I don’t know how this has happened. I can only hope that when I come home tonight the old Michael will be there, and the other one will be gone.
He’s not getting better.
His weekly call to Phoebe went badly; she was watching television while they spoke, and when another call came in, she took it.
I tell him to call Phoebe again and tell her that he misses her, but he says, “She doesn’t want to talk to me.
“She’s dating,” he says hollowly. I have no answer for that, nothing to mitigate the horror of that.
I go so far as to make brisket, but he doesn’t eat it. He can’t. His pants are beginning to hang on him, a white flag.
I consider copping some Prozac and mashing it into his toothpaste. What would it taste like? is the thing to worry about. Detection.
<
br /> There should be a long poem devoted only to the names of antidepressant drugs; Lewis Carroll should write it.
Elavil, Prozac, Wellbutrin, Zoloft.
Zoloft sounds like a very wise wizard who once was tempted to go over to the dark side but never did. His coat would be purple, I think, and his long staff studded with amethyst. He’d have a bird. A white bird.
My friend Jill insists I am wrong.
Zoloft, she says, is a wizened old woman with a black velvet bag that closes with a golden cord and has stars and moons all over it. Her empty-headed daughter is Elavil, who always wears white and ballet slippers. Whose hair looks beautiful from a distance but is actually quite thin. Elavil powders her face with rice flour and is engaged to Prozac, a magician who performs for royalty in silver tights. They will never marry, says Jill. Tragedy will avert it.
Wellbutrin is a place just south of New Orleans. According to Jill.
I feel despondent and hopeless. I thought being engaged would transform me. Instead I feel inadequate, unsure, deeply tired, and as though I will certainly fail.
Most of them do fail. Sixty-eight percent. I know all the figures now.
No one talks about this feeling. I may be the only one who has ever felt it.
I used to dream about being married to Michael, how ideal it would be. Both of us serenely independent yet madly in love, supporting our meteoric careers with a steady stream of great sex and European vacations. This is not going to happen, I realize, with a sudden weariness. We’re going to be like everyone else, lucky to survive without one of us murdering the other, like the farmer in Oregon who killed his wife with a frozen squirrel.
We haven’t even gotten married yet, and already I can quite clearly ascertain what Morley Safer would call the burning issues, just waiting to be fanned. His messiness, my impulsiveness, his moodiness, who spends more money.
We haven’t even gotten married yet, and already I feel I’ve been married for several years. Is this what engagement is like? Or do I have the trick engagement? The kind that only happens to people who should never get married in the first place.
Otherwise Engaged: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) Page 9