51/50: The Magical Adventures of a Single Life

by Kristen McGuiness

  “Are you insulted?” I threw back because as I stood there in my three-inch heels I was slightly taller than him, and it felt good. I tossed my recently highlighted hair behind my shoulder. I could feel him inhale. And as I smiled at him, my eyes going soft, I knew that he was going to be mine.

  But as I walk with Rob, my date for tonight, I almost don’t think about that. I think about the heat coming off of him as he leads us over to the small section available for us to sit.

  “What do you want to drink?” Rob asks.

  “I don’t drink.” I’m still not particularly skilled at informing people of this small detail.

  “At all?” he asks. “Not even water?”

  “I drink Red Bull.”

  “You got it.”

  Rob gets back from the bar, and I have made more room on the small booth we are forced to share. Normally, I find that my dates are either too intimidated or insecure or uninterested to get close to me off the bat, but Rob isn’t like that. He’s confident and cool and moves right in next to me. His hand falls on my leg accidentally, but he lets it linger and makes fun of himself for grabbing a thigh grope so quickly. He laughs at himself a lot, and at me. And I like him all the more.

  He explains his change in profession (breakup, mid-life crisis, father dying) and how much feeding his body right has shown him everything he hoped to once figure out through academia. “It’s always about systems of movement,” he explains. “The economics of nutrition. What keeps us healthy, societies healthy, and what poisons us from within, it’s all the same.”

  My secret dream in life is to run away to grad school and study political systems, so what Rob is describing is akin to intellectual porn for me. We begin to look around us, and we both laugh at the desperate scene in which so many of us single folk are forced to participate. These rituals of standing at the bar, making small talk with friends while our eyes slide to check out what’s walking by. We laugh at all the porkpie hats that guys are sporting these days, and the women standing around in the awkward hopes that they might be asked to dance. But we don’t dance anymore, and it’s too hard to go up to anyone without assuming it’s just for sex. Because that’s normally all you’re going to find on a Friday night in Hollywood. Rob has their number, and he also has mine, which means I can only be myself. And it feels nice.

  I sit back and try to decide if I find Rob attractive. He has a good body, strong forearms, and sexy hands, and though he’s forty, he has a nice, solid face, with just the right type of wrinkles. Ones that make him look sweet and almost endearingly younger than his age.

  He is also wearing the right shoes. Pull-up suede boots. He’s not that tall, but his personality is, and when he moves closer to me, he feels warm and sturdy next to me. God, I love that feeling. Of the human form against my own. Rob puts his arm around the back of the bench so that it graces my shoulders.

  “We should just start spooning right here,” he jokes.

  I love games like this, making up stories. “We could just lie down on the booth and pretend we’re watching TV.”

  Rob refers to the meat market we have been observing, “We are watching TV. It’s perfect. I would breathe in your shampoo, the smell of your neck…”

  I like that Rob knows the feeling so well that he can reference it here on this first date with ease. And I remember what that feels like. It’s been years since I spooned on a couch with a guy watching TV. Years. And I think I might visibly wince because just the thought of being able to do that with someone again makes me wish with all my heart that it will happen soon.

  I have to work at the stables in the morning, so I cut the date short. I look back around at all the single people on the make, and I feel for us. All of us alone and just wanting someone to lie on the couch with on rainy nights like this one. Some partner to call our own.

  I turn to Rob and say, “Aren’t humans funny?”

  And without missing a beat, he says, “Yes, they are.”

  And that’s why I like him, because I had begun to think that men didn’t see it anymore. That they had stopped observing how much our world has changed and how lost we all seem to be in this modern life.

  We walk out, and as I look to the corner where I shared three martinis and the beginning of love with Oliver, I feel that pang I had done so well to forget, and I remember that night quite clearly.

  As I sat across from Oliver, caught in his gaze, I remember thinking that I would never have to go hunting in a bar again. As we veered from one important conversation to the next, completing each other’s sentences, laughing at the same jokes, I saw, as clearly as the martini glass in front of me, the future that we would share.

  I saw us becoming creative as well as romantic partners. I saw our bright, sunny house in the hills filled with laughter and art and bowls of fresh fruit on our kitchen table. I saw us getting ready for one soiree or another—him pushing back a stray hair, me standing a sexy inch taller in my heels, and him telling me how much he loved me. I saw us at the Academy Awards because ever since I was eight, I saw myself there. I am accepting a screenwriting award for the film he produced, and I am smiling out at him as he sits in the audience, and I say, “I just want to thank my wonderful love, my savior, my beautiful Oliver. Thank you for finding me. Thank you.” Our friends and family cry at the moment because they know how hard we fought to make it there.

  “What are you looking for in a man?” Oliver asked me that night.

  “What we’re all looking for. Ourselves, of course.” I am young and naive and incredibly bold. Oliver looked past martini number two and straight into my being, and I knew he saw in me a brief flicker of his own reflection. I remember our hands brushing past one another, not knowing at the time that he was living with another woman, and feeling so much energy, it felt we might set the place on fire. I remember telling everything we could about ourselves and as the vodka settled in and over us, me relaxing into a state of love and discovery because I had found my reflection.

  I pull back as I see Rob leading the way out, and I shake the vision off. I am no longer that girl. I probably couldn’t tell you now what I wore on my date with Rob, and I long stopped putting myself in a wedding dress the minute I meet someone of interest. And if asked now what I am looking for in a man, well, I don’t think it would be my own reflection.

  Rob and I run across the street to my car, dodging traffic and laughing, my hand caught in his. And though I feel the heat, it’s not the A-bomb that exploded at that same bar when I was twenty-six and found my savior.

  Rob leans against my car and smiles, “Now’s the part where I try to kiss you.”

  And as much as I have enjoyed the evening, I can’t. I don’t know why. I don’t know if it’s that I’m still looking for a nuclear reaction or if I just want to get to know people a little more before I begin handing pieces of myself over to what we can be.

  I try to joke, “Don’t, Rob. I will just have to fend you off, and it will be embarrassing, and we’ve had such a lovely evening.”

  “So why wouldn’t we end with a kiss?” he asks.

  “Maybe we will next time.” A car pulls up to take the parking spot I am about to vacate, interrupting the conversation.

  “Okay, fine,” he relents. “But I will call you tomorrow.” And I know he will. I get in my car, and I drive away, and I do not think of Oliver, or even Rob. I just turn on the windshield wipers, light a cigarette, and go home.

  19

  Date Nineteen: Ladies Angeles

  And just like that, my friend Siren announces that she is leaving L.A. She is leaving me. My closest single friend, my confidante, my Siren. And here she is nonchalantly breaking the news that she is giving up on the Hollywood dream and going home. The great irony of my dear friend is that for as much as we both make fun of CHAs (Cheesy Hollywood Actors), Siren has been trying to become one for the better part of the last decade. And though there have been a few hopeful moments of a national commercial or the part of a waitress in a
major motion picture, the fame train just ain’t showing up at her door.

  “I’m tired of waiting, Kristen,” she tells me, and I understand. I would be too. Siren’s family is a bunch of loud, drunk Greeks back in Philadelphia, and I know that leaving here and going home is not an easy choice.

  “I want to get my master’s degree. I want it more than an Oscar. And I’ve tried to do it here. You know that. But if I go home, I can live for free; I can focus on school. I just can’t do the CHA race anymore,” she explains to me one night on the phone.

  Siren is one of the few people with whom I can share my Academy Award-winning dream without feeling like a complete ass. And I wonder whether at some point, an advanced degree will be all I want too. Maybe the Hollywood dream comes to a close for all of us who still haven’t made it by thirty, and we realize that the pie in the sky doesn’t taste very good anyway.

  Siren tells me that before she leaves L.A., she wants to visit Marilyn Monroe’s tomb and see the house in which Marilyn died. I think that’s a great idea and add that we should do so dressed up in 1960s funeral attire. So we do just that. I go to her house in the afternoon, and we do our makeup together in her bathroom. I am standing next to her in her dingy Hollywood boudoir, watching her curl her hair in the mirror.

  “It’s so weird we’ve never done this before,” I tell her.

  “Do what?” Siren asks.

  “Get ready together. I guess we don’t really get ready with friends at this age anymore. I mean it’s not like high school.”

  “That’s true.”

  “But doesn’t it feel like we’ve been friends since high school?”

  Siren’s reflection smiles at me, “It does.”

  Because the better part of our relationship has taken place in the two-hour phone conversations we have many nights a week, I realize that in a way it’s like we’re already in a long distance relationship, and this is just one of our rare in-person visits. Siren and I look beautiful. Her with her thick red hair and me with my big blonde bun, and we head down Sunset Boulevard in her car, listening to Frank Sinatra. I go to slide the CD in when she tells me, “Oh don’t bother, the CD player hasn’t worked in years.”

  But the disc is in, and Frank is singing.

  We get to the cemetery, and the day is perfect. It feels like spring, though it’s just the beginning of February. Marilyn’s tomb is set in a small memorial in Westwood. Dean Martin, Natalie Wood, and Merv Griffin are also buried there. Merv’s headstone reads, “We will not be back after these messages,” and you gotta love a man who takes the joke into eternity. It’s a special place because the patron saint of our dear town holds court over all of them.

  We go to the catacomb and take out the camera. We pose as though Marilyn has just been enshrined, and we are at the service. We look sad, we look confused, we pretend that Bobby Kennedy is standing in the distance, and we look reservedly flirtatious. We hold the camera out and take pictures of the two of us together. We make funny faces, and if not for the fine lines, we could be any two high school kids up to some sort of merry mischief. We apply our lipstick doubly thick, and we press our lips against her tomb, and we let her know that though we might have never known her, we understand. Because we too have sold so much of who we are to get the things we want, and we too have paid a price. And we have found ourselves at alternating points in our lives, lying naked by the pool, wishing for it to end. But unlike our legend, we got out.

  We get in Siren’s car and drive to Brentwood—to the house where the candle burned out and to the neighborhood where women like Marilyn and Nicole Simpson met their fates. It is a neighborhood filled with charming homes and good schools and BMW SUVs, and by the looks of it, you would never know celebrity blood had been shed there. Siren and I drive down Wilshire, and we watch as the clean-cut, well-educated, high-salaried residents go for their evening runs. We sit, stopped at a light, and Siren says, “I don’t think I could ever be one of them.”

  She’s right. Siren has the edgy style and the Greek attitude and a love for vintage that might never make this feel quite like home, but I have posed here before. I have enough J. Crew, Ralph Lauren, and Tiffany’s in my closet to pull it off on command. I know the restaurants and vacation spots and what series of German vehicle one should get, in order to seem as though I have always had it. But the truth is, it would be just as big of a lie for me as it would be for Siren.

  I love Silver Lake. I like going to the Food for Less, where I am the only white person in the market. And I like that though I might be more preppy than most on my side of town, my quirks are easily accepted and completely understood. Whenever I am with people of the Westside mentality, I always find that they look at me much like the kids did growing up, replying to my sense of humor with the statement, “You’re so funny,” but really, what they’re saying is, “You’re so weird.” On my side of town, they just all agree or laugh, and not at me, with me. Because that’s the thing, though we might want the perks of the Hollywood dream, neither Siren nor I are capable of fitting into the Brentwood life.

  We leave and drive home down Santa Monica Boulevard. As much as this day has been about Siren, it has also been about the city in which we live—our great, beautiful Lady Angeles. I look out at the sun setting in my passenger side window, at the hills in the distance, and I roll down my window, and I whisper, “I love you, Los Angeles.”

  Siren follows suit, except she yells it, and then I am yelling it, and so we go in our 1960s funeral garb, driving through Century City, hollering into Beverly Hills, hollering so that others can hear us, hollering so that L.A. knows, “We love you, Los Angeles!”

  We love you, Los Angeles.

  We are driving through West Hollywood when Siren asks me if we can go to the Normandy Room. The Normandy Room was the lesbian bar where I drank for my last two years in L.A. It was filled with butch dykes and the gay men who were my best friends at the time, and when there were probably few places in the city where disaster wasn’t around my every corner, the Normandy Room was the safest place I knew. I went home with my gay friends every night. I played pool with the lesbians. The coke dealer felt safe meeting us there. Every good alcoholic needs a place like that.

  Siren and I walk up to the bar, and Madonna is blasting from within. We smile at each other. Fucking perfect. We order our Red Bull and Cran mocktails, and I lean over and kiss Siren on the cheek. “This is my best date yet.”

  She returns the kiss. “It’s not forever you know. I’ll be back.”

  “Before I moved to Dallas,” I tell her, “I used to say L.A. was trying to kick me out, but I don’t feel that way anymore. I think she likes me here.”

  Siren thinks about it before saying, “I actually don’t feel like L.A. is kicking me out. Maybe in the past, but not now. I kinda feel like she is giving me a chance to date other people, knowing that I need that freedom right now. I need something more than what she can give me.”

  I watch Siren as she sips her mocktail and wonder whether she will. I wonder sometimes how long I will stay with Lady Angeles. Because as much as I love her, I fear we might only live once, and I need to see more than just Los Angeles. I am afraid I can’t commit like that, no matter how beautiful I might find her—her hills so lovely, her people so strange and lost and found. The town where I found Siren, and now, the one she must lose.

  20

  Date Twenty: If It Fits

  I talk to William on the phone for an hour and a half before we meet. I try to avoid this with most of my dates because I don’t want us using up all of our material before we’re actually mano a mano. And I find that most people feel the same way. But somehow William and I start talking, and the conversation doesn’t end. And that’s how I find out that William builds things—with his hands.

  “Like what things?” I worry I might be coming off as annoying, but I am truly interested, and William seems to like talking about his work. William works for two very famous artists, managing the design and constru
ction of their large-scale art installations. He also built a tree house in Massachusetts in which he once lived. William grew up outside of Boston and went to a small liberal arts college like mine. He lives in Eagle Rock, which is a burgeoning artistic neighborhood near my established artistic neighborhood. He’s funny, and we make jokes about going out to eat at some horrible corporate establishment like Chili’s or Friday’s or Applebee’s. But then we realize we live in L.A.

  I laugh. “L.A. is too cool for Chili’s. There is a Grand Lux though.”

  “Would that work?”

  I think about it. “Naw, not really, too upscale.”

  Instead, we agree to go see a midnight showing of Cool as Ice, the early nineties film starring Vanilla himself. I spent the better part of my freshman year in high school watching that film with my best friends at the time. We memorized every line and then repeated them back to each other ad nauseam through fits of adolescent laughter. So when William asks if I’d be interested, I tell him immediately, “I’m in,” because though it is only a movie, going to see a midnight show on a first date still feels slightly adventurous.