Literacy and Longing in L. A.

by Jennifer Kaufman

  I pad back into the bathroom with an armful of books and sink back into the tub. I add more hot water. Okay. I’m ready for my period of forlorn contemplation and occasional outbursts of exhilaration prompted by a particularly brilliant passage. What an insufferable lunatic I have become.

  Over the next few days I read and I read. Days blur into nights. I snack on anything in my cupboard that doesn’t require cooking. The Domino’s guy and I have become close friends. He thinks I have agoraphobia. My red wine runs out and I start on the dessert wine. But I don’t start before five. Even in my pathetic condition, I do have my standards.

  My god, it’s Wednesday afternoon already. I’ve got to get out of here. Where’s my robe? Geez, this place is a mess. Should I clean up first? No. It’ll kill the rest of the day. Maybe I’ll buy a book. My mother would be appalled to learn that none of my friends go to the library anymore. If you want a book, you just go to the bookstore that’s closest to your house and buy it. Hardcover, trade paperback, mass market, it doesn’t make any difference. People who pay twenty dollars for parking don’t quibble over the price of a book.

  I live four blocks from McKenzie’s, a small local bookstore on San Vicente, one of those dinosaurs that doesn’t exist anymore except in affluent neighborhoods. It’s a place where the salespeople actually read and can tell you where you can locate books by Evelyn Waugh or Michael Frayn. They’ll also give you a list of other books by the same author, quote some of their favorite passages, and then add some completely random piece of information, such as the fact that Mark Twain’s brilliant The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn went through seventeen hundred revisions, and the most recent draft was unearthed in a Hollywood attic some years ago.

  There isn’t a reason in the world for me to hit that damn bookstore again this week. I have four brand-new books by my bedside and two more on the kitchen counter. Then there are the three Booker Prize winners that are still in the bag in the trunk of my car and one new nonfiction literary history of Henry James in my purse, which I plan to start when I go to the hairdresser’s next week.

  I collect new books the way my girlfriends buy designer handbags. Sometimes, I just like to know I have them and actually reading them is beside the point. Not that I don’t eventually end up reading them one by one. I do. But the mere act of buying them makes me happy—the world is more promising, more fulfilling. It’s hard to explain, but I feel, somehow, more optimistic. The whole act just cheers me up.

  I pull into the parking lot, turn off the motor, and rummage through my purse for lip gloss and concealer. I flip down the mirror and take a good look at my bare, unmade-up face. Terrible, just terrible. Even worse than I thought. That’s it for me. No more book binges.

  My hair is nice, though. It used to be “dirty blonde,” but Franck, my brilliant Belgian hairdresser, has fixed all that. I now have that natural, sun-kissed California look that no one can get without a lot of money and a cauldron of chemicals.

  I smear on some Nars cherry lip gloss, decide to bag the rest of the makeup, and head in. McKenzie’s is like no other bookstore. It is a complex of three white, cottage-like buildings situated around a small tree-lined plaza with benches for customers to sit and read, nurse a cappuccino, or just hang out. There is a small café that sells newspapers and magazines, and a big sign over the cash register reads “No Cell Phones.” Other buildings house history, psychology, fiction, and nonfiction. I always start off in the fiction building, where there are long tables laden with the latest hardbacks. And occasionally, when I have time, I’ll wander briefly through the other buildings. Each one has the same basic feel of being in someone’s messy library or living room, an ambiance that appeals to someone who is obviously a bookworm or an intellectual and who compulsively owns and collects countless numbers of books. Even though there is some semblance of order, books are always stacked high in every corner, on the brick floor, on window ledges, even on the cash register table, where one has to literally shove them on the floor before making a purchase.

  I always feel a little put out in the beginning at the mess and disarray, but then the subliminal message takes over, that this is the place for the true book lover, a person who, naturally, is oblivious to order in the outside world. The fantasy is carried out right down to the employees and the rap they give you when you buy a book. “Are you a member of KUSC?” they ask kindly. That’s one of two classical cultural radio stations in L.A. and if you know what’s good for you, you say yes and get a 10 percent discount.

  The people who work here are an essential part of the whole mystique. The women all have the same “I don’t care what I look like” attitude, the kind of thing you’d see in photo essays about the seventies when Ivy League radical coeds had wild flyaway hair and wore faded bell-bottoms and no makeup. The girls at McKenzie’s look this way, with their pale faces, unmanicured hands, those round-toed black canvas Mary Janes, long skirts, and bagged-out sweaters with fuzzy textures. They do, however, wear bras and obviously love a good literary conversation. They also know their authors in an impressive but smug sort of way.

  It doesn’t seem as if any of them are all that busy except the lean, scrawny guy in an apron who runs the café in the back. At the moment he’s making a latte as he carries on an animated conversation with a customer about an obscure poet who he says has Neruda-esque leanings. His name is Ken and he has spiky red hair, a face covered with an explosion of freckles, and a sparse iodine-red goatee. If he were a woman, the red-hair thing would probably work, but on Ken, it’s somehow geeky and unfortunate, as if he were an alien from the red planet. He has odd pinkish, translucent skin with haunting puffy, watery blue eyes, and his eyelashes and eyebrows are so pale they seem invisible. As I glance in his direction, he zones out into a calm, fogged-over gaze like a narcoleptic.

  And then there is Fred. He is looking me over, inspecting me. And in truth, that’s why I am here. One of the girls told me he has a degree in comparative literature and he did his thesis on heterogeneous space in postmodern literature. What does that mean?

  Virginia would probably say he looks like a bum, but there is something engaging about him in a disheveled kind of way. He has the stance of an aging ex-football player who’s put on a few pounds, yet he still possesses the thick strong neck and prominent Adam’s apple of a former athlete. When you look straight at him, his face is nice. But from the side, you can tell his nose has been broken a couple of times and his chin is sharp and jutting. I watch him stride around the shop with a certain air of unconscious grandeur, even though he’s too tall and bearish to be navigating the narrow straits of the place.

  Right now, he’s helping a woman and her friend choose the next selection for their book club. He gives them an evasive half smile and looks away, sweeping back his shaggy bangs in a distracted kind of way. Why is it women always seem to fall for men who divert their attention elsewhere and focus anywhere but on their face? They dig the absentmindedness and inattentiveness when, in fact, the pose is often calculated to make an impression. Nevertheless, Fred is appealing in an untrustworthy, Southern gentleman sort of way. He has a slight drawl, although I could be imagining that. But he does seem like the kind of guy who could sit on his veranda with his big black retriever, smoking a stogy and watching the sun set over his cotton fields. The look, however, is strictly L.A.—jeans, a faded gray Gap T-shirt under a stretched-out, old V-necked sweater, and red-rimmed eyes as if he’s been up all night doing god knows what.

  The overall effect is disconcerting. The energy in the air around him amps up the molecular composition of the place, compelling housewives, students, and literary losers to seek his counsel. The man knows his effect on people and uses it.

  I see the women close in on him. The prettier of the two is dressed in what has become the young, affluent Brentwood housewife uniform—Juicy sweats. The designer outfit consists of tight, body-hugging velour pants that sit ultra-low on the hips and matching sweatshirts that are purposely unzipped just do
wn to the cleavage. A friend of mine read in the Jacksonville paper that the city council was about to pass a “butt crack” law, which would label this kind of attire “lewd exhibitionism.” But this is L.A., and no one seems to be complaining. It’s kind of the opposite of what sweats are all about—relaxed, comfortable, with no hint of forced sex appeal. Remember putting on sweats when you felt fat or bloated? Well, forget it. The figure has to be absolutely perfect, and if it isn’t, there’s no way to camouflage anything. So now, schlepping around in any old comfortable pair of sweats to run an errand is passé.

  All this runs through my mind as I watch them talk to Fred about a few options. They finally request twenty copies of Tuesdays with Morrie, and I see someone breeze past them sneering under her breath, “That figures.”

  Her name is Sara, a childlike Goth girl who looks like she’s in her early twenties. She has shoe-polish black hair, chewed-off fingernails, multiple piercings in her ears and left nostril, and cracked, peeling, kewpie-doll lips that glisten with a fine film of strawberry-tinged ChapStick. Her face has the plush, rounded innocence of a child and yet there is an air of intimidating self-sufficiency about her. Today she’s wearing an incredibly short miniskirt over her petite but shapely legs that are so white you know she could care less that L.A. is a beach town. The rest of her ensemble includes scuffed white leatherette sixties go-go boots with a kitten heel, a midriff-revealing crepe blouse, and a heavy, metal dragon on a long, frayed shoelace around her neck. There is an innocence about her that belies her appearance and her breathy little girl voice is punctuated with expletives like “asshole” and “fuck you.” Such a demeanor is particularly jarring in a setting like McKenzie’s, but her coworkers clearly regard her with respect, and I’ve heard she knows every female writer who has written anything of note in the last two hundred years.

  I can’t tell if this fetching social misfit has rebellion on her mind or she just doesn’t want to reveal how adorable she is beneath all that black smudged kohl and bare skin. This girl definitely has a past, but she giggles like a kid with a wad of Bazooka in her mouth, and it is hard not to follow her around with my eyes. If she asked my opinion, I’d tell her to comb her hair, but that would probably be it. Her hair is the only thing that bothers me, oddly enough. I guess it’s “the look,” but it’s all messy and tangled in teased, rat’s-nest clumps and soft, mushy, wadded fluff. It seems as if she has purposely gelled it to have the appearance of “I just slept in a Greyhound bus station and was attacked by a band of homeless men who clawed at my clothes and completely ruined my hair.” You couldn’t get a comb through it if you tried, and then it would be an extremely painful process.

  Maybe that’s the point that girls like Sara are tacitly addressing. Hair is beside the point—a time-consuming, unfulfilling way to go off on another fucking tangent, rather than getting on with your life, which leads me right back to where I am at the moment, roaming around the bookstore on a dead afternoon wondering how to approach Fred.

  He is now busy with a frazzled-looking businessman who asks in a tense voice where the CliffsNotes section is located. Fred points toward the rear of the store and then asks him, “Which book?”

  “The Scarlet Letter,” the man replies. “My kid’s hysterical. He just wrote a five-page paper and then somehow deleted it and it’s due tomorrow.”

  Sara gives the guy a commiserating look. “Tell your son that Thomas Carlyle gave his only copy of The French Revolution to his friend to read and the guy’s maid thought it was garbage and lit the fire with it. Carlyle had a few rotten nights, but then he wrote the thing all over again.”

  Fred looks at her in amusement. “Sara, I’m sure that’s going to make the kid feel much better.”

  Then he turns to me and smiles. “Oh, hey, how are you? What can I help you with today?”

  The first thing that pops into my head is that he recognizes me. The second thing is that the man who barbecued Carlyle’s manuscript was the writer and critic John Stuart Mill, and he ended up giving the book a rave review. However, instead of belaboring the point, I consider telling him I’ve just finished a 675-page historical thriller on seventeenth-century Oxford, England, by Iain Pears called An Instance of the Fingerpost and that I have been totally unsuccessful in getting anyone else in my life to read it. The book is a kind of Dickensian whodunit set in Restoration England that begins with an unexplained death in a small college town and builds up into a revelation that has to do with grand events in England and the world. It is intellectual, original, and chock-full of smoke and mirrors, but, unfortunately, has quotes by Cicero and Francis Bacon in the beginning, which definitely put off several of my less esoteric friends. It also has a cast of twenty-seven characters in the back that went on for several pages and includes names like Charles II, Christopher Wren, and John Locke. Even the name of the novel seems to be a deterrent, although I once explained to my sister that the title was a delicious part of the whole mystery.

  “Delicious?” she sniffed. She actually was somewhat interested until I told her that the narrator seems clear-minded and sympathetic at first, until three hundred or so pages later when you learn that he’s fucking bonkers and is writing from the seventeenth-century English version of the booby hatch. She gave me a pained look and responded, “Who has time to read books like that?” implying, of course, that I do.

  Fred is waiting for my response and I hesitate. I don’t usually have the desire, as so many pious, voracious readers do, to show off how inherently superior my literary tastes are, but I weigh whether I will make an exception in this case. Then I change my mind. I quickly ask if he knows of a sequel to the Pears book. He tells me that one just came out and it’s quite good.

  “Not as good as the earlier book but an easier read. I’ll go get it.”

  He returns empty-handed and says, “We must be all out.” I decide to order it (a reason to give him my name and phone number), and as I’m heading out the door, feeling pretty good about our encounter, he calls my name. “Hey, Dora,” he teases. I turn back expectantly and he says, “Do you want to pay for those or what?”

  I realize that I’m clutching a bunch of books that I meant to purchase along with the Iain Pears. Shit. Shit. Shit. I’m an idiot. I blurt out, “I bet you think I’m one of those screwed-up kleptomaniac housewives who steals T-shirts to get her husband’s attention.” I give him a big lip-glossy smile. He looks at me like I’m insane. Nice, Dora.

  The Stakeout

  “It is with books as with men; a very small number play a great part.”

  ~ Voltaire (1694–1778) ~

  Normally in my neighborhood it’s gridlock at this hour. There are five exclusive private schools within a four-block radius and Sunset Boulevard is jammed with Range Rovers, BMWs, Mercedeses, and Hummers, many sporting vanity license plates that say things like “US2BHIS.” In between, people in exercise clothes and leather Pumas hang out in the local Starbucks, power walk, bike along San Vicente Boulevard’s tree-lined bike path, or shop in specialized boutiques that sell hundred-dollar tie-dyed T-shirts. Palmer used to marvel at the large numbers of people who spend their days with no visible means of support. “We could be in Florida,” he said, “except nobody’s old.”

  I’m heading home when I get a second wind and decide to take a slight detour. It’s one of those spur-of-the-moment things that you can’t seem to explain. Especially after what can only be described as a seriously awkward moment. No. Inept would be a better word. I think about what I said to Fred and then what I should have said. Then I go over it again in a different scenario. It turns over and over in my mind like an annoying melody that I can’t get out of my head. First I say this, then he says that. Oh, this is so ludicrous I have to stop. It’s a comment on my state of mind that I’m even analyzing this at all.

  So, instead, here I am, sitting in my car like an undercover agent, while I wait for Palmer, my second husband, to emerge from the gated house that he and I shared for five years. This was our oa
sis, at least for a while. The house is one of those hybrid architectural buildings reminiscent of Old Hollywood. Part Italian villa, part Spanish hacienda. When we first moved in, I had it painted a faded terra-cotta, which is just now starting to look authentic. The driveway is lush with impatiens and lined with the requisite palm trees. I park on the narrow windy road in front of our house, my car wedged between a crisp navy van advertising Bel Air Plumbing and a battered wooden gardener’s truck. In Bel Air, you’re either a guest and you’re parked inside the gates, or you’re service personnel and you’re outside the gates, an L.A. version of Upstairs, Downstairs.

  Then there’s that in-between category: personal trainers, yoga instructors, dog walkers, and masseuses. These people are often privy to the codes of their clients’ alarm systems and a few end up living gratis in the guesthouse. I remember right before I moved out last year, my neighbor’s masseuse, a rather sensitive young man named Roy, was held up at gunpoint by the now-infamous Bel Air Burglar as he entered their gate. Their dog, an imported German shepherd, sat immobile on his bed as the robbery was taking place. The dog was trained in Frankfurt and only understood commands like sitzen and attacke!