Happily Ali After (2 page)

YOU CAN’T HAVE EVERYTHING.
WHERE WOULD YOU PUT IT?

—STEVEN WRIGHT

TODAY I CHOOSE TO FORGIVE INSTEAD OF HOLDING
ON TO RESENTMENTS. TODAY I CHOOSE TO SEE
EVERYONE WITH THE EYES OF LOVE.

—
UNKNOWN

T
here are very few times in my life when I have truly lived an inspirational quote. And by very few, I mean only once. We can’t all be Deepak Chopra, but if we strive for at least one spiritual incentive we may not need Ambien to sleep or chew off nail polish with our teeth. I can’t profess to always be able to see people with
the eyes of love. Well, maybe John Stamos circa 1992. There have been people I wished unholy harm to—facial disfigurement and genital boils, those sorts of things. I’m not proud of it. But I also don’t think I’m alone here; everyone has their pipe dreams. As you’re reading this, take stock of the times you considered slashing your boss’s tires or putting laxatives in the birthday cake of your diabolical sixth-grade math teacher. In high school did I ponder hiring a prostitute with chlamydia to sip from the same Sprite bottle as the woman who cheated on my father and embezzled all his money? Yes, I did. But I didn’t execute it. Mostly because I didn’t know how to find a hooker (I hope there’s now an app for that) and I had about forty bucks.

But of all the many people who have emotionally harmed me, failed me, or not cast me in a movie of the week, there is one who remained my arch foe for years. I didn’t actually know her, but that didn’t deter me from eating every crumb of beastly gossip that was handed to me by a third person twice removed.

Daphne was an actress in Los Angeles. Although she and I were the same age, we were different “types”—she was statuesque, brunette, and fetching to my slight, pale, and nonoffensive sex appeal. We didn’t run in the same circles. My circle was a bowl of incestuous improv actors who ate their feelings and were encased in insecurity and sexual ambiguity. Daphne’s circle was a halo of meticulously
scrubbed thespians who were gently kissing success on the lips. On any given weeknight I could be found eating cold enchiladas with my three-legged dog, Racer, while Daphne enjoyed inebriants and giddiness about on-set mishaps with the cast of
Friends
.

And months later she too heard the trumpeting horns of the marching band of fame heading right for her. She was cast in a hit sitcom! You have to understand that being a twenty-year-old actor in L.A. is much like being part of a flock of hungry, begrimed pigeons in the park, and once in a blue moon someone walks by and throws three sunflower seeds. There is a vicious skirmish, an explosion of feathers, and out of the frenzy one bird ascends up to a ranch-style house in the hills with a small infinity pool and their own (leased) BMW and a photo shoot for
InStyle
magazine (back page). The other pigeons yearn for the seed-carrying bird to be decapitated by a telephone wire.

Wait, this story is making me look bad, not Daphne. Did I mention she had big boobs? I suppose that’s not an atrocious characteristic. Let’s just assume, for the sake of my story, that she bit the heads off kittens. And screamed at babies. The sick ones in the hospital with sad eyes. Orphan babies.

As luck would have it, Daphne worked on a show with my then boyfriend. A writer who, in his youth, went to an all-boys school and would have given a finger
if someone like the divine Daphne from the Catholic girls’ school even looked at him. So there she was with her lithe body prancing on set with her script and her nefarious boobs. Nefarious boobs. Nefarious boobs. Right, I said that. My boyfriend decided to use her as chum in the bloodied waters of my own insecurity. “Daphne is so needy, she’s always coming on to me,” or “Daphne sleeps with all the writers so she gets a better story line,” he would tell me. Well, as a dignified and unemployed actor, I was horrified by the cunning tricks of this minx. She was a slut who bit off kittens’ heads! How dare she sully the reputation of all the other refined actresses who were horizontal on casting agents’ shag rugs with their legs up in the air, doing their best to gain employment in Hollywood?

I would catch explicit images of her on magazine covers (clutching her exposed breasts with a surprised look as if to say, “I didn’t realize there was a crew, hair and makeup, lighting, and a photographer here?”). And walking the red carpet? Well, she did fill out a dress and she was a walking advertisement for doing Tae Bo. But as my mother would say, “She leaves nothing to the imagination!” And I’m not saying that just because she was a teenage model in Paris and I was an overweight gal in gunnysack dresses and jelly sandals.

I broke up with the writer boyfriend for reasons you’ll find in my first book,
Ali in Wonderland
(
New
York Times
best-seller, still available on Amazon.com) and rented a bungalow in Santa Monica. Okay, so here’s where Daphne radiates in all her deviltry. The day after I left my boyfriend, she showed up at our house (well, now only his house) in a Superman T-shirt WITHOUT A BRA! Not even twenty-four hours and she drives over to seduce my (once) man who was still facedown on the sofa! She didn’t even allow him a grieving period! Plus, everyone knows, you don’t pinch a guy whose ex-girlfriend is jealous of you. Yes, I left him . . . but what a strumpet! Even if her intention was to drop by to console a man who was supposedly devastated and impotent, you can’t go braless! It’s like going commando to sit shiva.

Apparently she was very good at “making him feel better” because within hours they were together every night. And then he took her to the Bahamas. Granted, it was summer and nobody goes to the Bahamas in July, but it was a vacation. And when people vacation together they either return as enemies or hire a wedding planner. This is just my own personal philosophy. When I discovered they were rolling around (hopefully on a nest of sand fleas) together, I had the epiphany that I had made a grave mistake and wanted to reconcile with the writer. I also wanted back in my house. I wanted back in my life. I wanted Daphne gone (gone like
Gone Girl
gone). He took me back, mostly to punish me for leaving
him in the first place, and Daphne drove off in her black Lexus. She did leave a silver charm bracelet in a drawer on the bedside table. I threw it in the fire and watched it melt and bubble over a Duraflame log. The dollop of metal is probably still stuck to the side of the hearth.

I moved back into our house (taking care to urinate around the property line) and life went on.

Unfortunately, my rage against the Daphne machine also went on. I mean, I did win! So why was I so fixated on her eradication? The very mention of her name or the word “Newport” (that’s where she was born) churned my stomach. Even my closest friends were militarily taught to see her as the enemy. I had gained something I’d only read about in books and seen in James Bond movies: a real nemesis!

I assumed I was as much an antagonist to her. I had thwarted her happiness? Destroyed her life? You know, the shit nemeses do without crushing the person with pythons or using a grenade launcher from a helicopter.

A year later Daphne was getting married to a handsome, athletic, and successful real estate broker. And she was pregnant. This is not the plight of the villain? She was supposed to have her face melt off down to her jawbone or be harpooned under water by a poisonous spear gun! One afternoon I was driving up Coldwater Canyon and screeched to a halt moments before hitting
a woman in her forest green sweats and scruffy ponytail. It was Daphne. And she looked blissful hiking with her virile husband and panting dogs. I realized the irony of almost running her over. And more important, of how fast I would be whisked off to prison after my friends’ anemic defenses betrayed me on the stand with, “She always hated Daphne! I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner! I think Ali even had an unregistered gun!”

Y
ears later, I was married with babies and living in D.C. I’m not proud of all this preceding disclosure, but I do it in the name of a life lesson I’m providing for you the reader. Occasionally I would catch Daphne on a talk show or in a home magazine, showing off a captivating, classic, spacious, light-filled two-story home with an adjoining stone patio surrounded by a bucolic perennial garden. The ten-foot ceilings boasted a formal powder room, a grand dining room with a subsequent butler’s pantry for staging gracious entertaining, a state-of-the-art gourmet eat-in kitchen, and an exquisite master suite with his and hers marble baths complete with sunken tubs. I would badger my husband with photos of her in magazines looking dewy on an exercise bike or flushed on the cover of some pregnancy magazine and I would say to him, “She’s so weird looking! Isn’t she weird looking?” To which he would have to reply robotically,
“Why yes, honey, she is weird looking.” Never once looking up from his book,
Lyndon B. Johnson and the Transformation of American Politics
.

If you, dear reader, have never experienced those feelings or had similar appalling fixations, please keep reading! I redeem myself in the end!

My aha! moment struck one spring afternoon as I was perfecting the art of the homemade cinnamon bun and watching TV. As a child I was allowed only one hour of TV a week so, consequently, in my adulthood I keep the TV on all the time. Much the same way the children who aren’t allowed sugar at their home come over to our house and choke on mini marshmallows and finish all my coffee ice cream. A rerun of a show Daphne was guest-starring on suddenly appeared on the screen and I just stopped (mid twisting dough that began dripping through my fingers) and stared in a way I hadn’t since the verdict of the O.J. trial. It suddenly hit me: I loathed that woman with more discipline and determination than I had applied to any other endeavor in my life. And yet I met her maybe twice in my life. Had I fabricated the idea of an evil adversary and projected it on to her? Was I just looking for any prey on which to unleash my venom? She dated a guy I had severed ties with, it’s not like she drowned my dog or stole my identity. And it was in this moment that I decided to see Daphne through the eyes of love.

I even took it a step further. I got her e-mail address from a mutual friend and wrote to her. A simple note about how funny and beautiful she was in the show I was watching. I unleashed it into the cyber universe. I didn’t need to get a response, the cathartic act was enough. However, after I sent the e-mail, I ate most of the raw dough and took a two-hour nap.

Daphne responded later that day with an innocuous, but kind thank you. An Internet relationship had been sparked. We wrote back and forth for a couple of weeks and when my family scheduled a trip to Los Angeles, Daphne invited us over to her home. This is a huge move in the foreplay of friendship.

The drive to her house was as winding emotionally as the coastal curves we hugged. My husband was profoundly confused, as he had been programmed to detest her and now he was being lectured on how to seem merry and blithe. I kept repeating to him, “Don’t say anything about anything,” which was as lucid as I could be in that moment.

Keep in mind, this was not one-sided. Daphne told me later she considered me equally psychotic and repugnant. As we careened into her driveway, I had a fleeting sense of what the invasion of Normandy must have felt like, “where ignorant armies clash by night.”

If you had been her Chihuahua mix, you’d have thought we were long-lost friends, perhaps even sisters.
Later in the afternoon, she and I took a stroll and exchanged tidbits of gossip we had heard about each other (and chose to believe) and the seething malevolence we harbored. When in your life do you get to face the (former) enemy and say, “I loathed you with such intensity, you skanky whore”? Obviously this excludes anyone going through puberty.

I inquired as to why she felt compelled to cruise over to my house—braless no less!—the second my car was out of the driveway! Daphne laughed hysterically. “I don’t own a Superman T-shirt and I never go braless; my boobs are uneven!” (A couple of months later Daphne sent me a Superman T-shirt in the mail that I still wear.) I changed tactics and peppered her with questions like, “How could you go to the Bahamas with him?” She answered coolly, “I was the one going, he followed me! He didn’t spend a dime on me.” Okay, okay . . . “Why leave your silver charm bracelet in the bedside table for me to find?” She looked confused, and said, “I don’t wear silver; it didn’t belong to me!” And, with the feeling of an EpiPen being jabbed in my thigh, I remembered that the bracelet was actually mine! It was given to me at my high school graduation and I put it away because the charms kept scratching my wrist. Oh my God! I melted my own jewelry!

Daphne had invited her only other Greek friend to
be padding for the afternoon in case things got out of hand. Did she envision a chicken fight? Each of us on the shoulders of a Greek, like in a chariot race? While the two of us walked on the beach and exhaled all of our festering resentments, my husband and the Greek friend talked about the Los Angeles Saint Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral renovation and what town their grandparents were born in (on the off chance they might be related, as all Greek people believe they are). And, like burning a bundle of sage, the demons evaporated.

D
aphne is now one of my closest friends. Our families spend summers together. I’ve taught her children to paint clamshells and they have taught us the art of boogie boarding and how to eat macro greens. I know all of Daphne’s secrets. I know what irritates her (and the list is long). I know when she’s ready to leave a party just by a raised eyebrow. I know her shoe size and the name of her dermatologist. I’ve seen her naked physically and emotionally. I know the names of every boy she’s ever kissed. Again the list is long. I know what her fears are. I know what her dreams are.

I’m often nostalgic about the period of my life when I had a nemesis, but I would trade the knotted stomach and heinous thoughts for this enlightened friendship any day. I can’t say I see EVERYONE through the eyes
of love now. Steady on. I mean, if you steal my parking space, I’m going to flip you the bird. But I won’t fantasize about lowering you into reactor coolant and watching you boil to death. Live and let live, that’s my new motto.