Literacy and Longing in L. A.
Read Literacy and Longing in L. A. Online
Authors: Jennifer Kaufman
Contents
Stray Dogs and Other Companions
Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before
No Reliable Sense of Propriety
The Woman with Phenomenal Tresses
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
We would like to thank
our families who inspire us
and
Molly Friedrich, Frances Jalet-Miller,
and Danielle Perez,
who believed in us.
A Happy Birthday
This evening, I sat by an open window
and read till the light was gone and the book
was no more than a part of the darkness.
I could easily have switched on a lamp,
but I wanted to ride this day down into night,
to sit alone and smooth the unreadable page
with the pale gray ghost of my hand.
—T
ED
K
OOSER
, P
OET
L
AUREATE OF
THE
U
NITED
S
TATES
Preface
“I have always imagined that Paradise
will be a kind of library.”
~ Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) ~
W
hen I was seven, my mother drove the family car off a thirty-foot bridge. My sister and I were in the backseat and after the dive, the sky-blue Cadillac Seville flipped over into the craggy ravine and landed on its roof. There wasn’t much water in the river below and the upside-down car sank slowly in the muck, its headlights streaming through the fog. I don’t remember being scared exactly, just too dumbfounded to speak. Then my mother said in a perfectly calm voice, “Do you think you girls can push open the doors?” It was as if she was asking us to turn down the television or put the dishes back on the shelves. She was very matter-of-fact. The radio was still playing as we tumbled over each other, somersaulting out into the shadowy gloom, and I remember thinking that this was just like the Tunnel of Love at Willow Grove’s
amusement park that had recently been bulldozed and turned into a suburban shopping mall.
“Okay, let’s pull ourselves together here,” my mother announced over the incongruous sounds of background music. The dark water was gurgling away, our voices echoed when we talked, and I imagined us huddled together in a little wooden rowboat, magically floating down an ersatz river on some weird joyride gone slightly amiss.
“Smile,” my mother said abruptly to my sister, Virginia, when she saw her sucking on her lip. Virginia chipped one of her two front teeth in the accident but, other than that, we were both unharmed.
“Wider. I can’t see.”
“Do I have to? I don’t feel like smiling,” Virginia said, and stomped her foot in the gunk.
“She doesn’t mean smile, like ‘BE HAPPY,’ stupid,” I scoffed. “She means open your mouth so she can see if you’re bleeding. Geez!”
“Well, I’m not,” she retorted, but I could see she was now in tears, rubbing her nose and eyes with her mud-stained sweatshirt.
“Does it hurt?” I asked sheepishly.
“No, it doesn’t hurt, Dora. I just don’t like it here. It’s creepy and I want to go home.” She was scared, my mother was dazed, and I, as usual, was completely detached—a knack I have since perfected in order to deal with life’s crushing disappointments or precarious entanglements.
“We’re okay,” I told her. (I was always telling her
that.) “Anyway, Mom’s the one who should be upset. Dad is going to kill her.”
“No, he’s not,” my sister replied. “Maybe we don’t even have to tell him.”
“Are you kidding? Look at the car! This is the second one she’s ruined this year.”
Meanwhile, my mother was standing behind our belly-up, bashed-in, virtually unrecognizable vehicle. “Oh my lord,” she suddenly exclaimed. “Your father’s new clubs are in the trunk. Now, did he tell me to take them out this morning?…I can’t remember….”
When the police finally arrived with a tow truck and an ambulance, my sister and I clambered up from the muddy riverbed and bundled into a squad car while my mother stood outside wrapping her long mohair coat around her. Her tone was shaky as she ran her hands through her matted, blood-soaked hair and I suddenly realized she had hit her head. The idea that we had been involved in a near-fatal accident never entered my mind.
At the time of the crash, we were in east central Pennsylvania, ninety miles northwest of Philadelphia. It was an area known as the coal country of Schuylkill County, where rolling green pastures were blighted by deep brown scars, heaps of piled-up slag, and decaying railroad tracks. Even the billboards were battered with peeling, unintelligible messages from a bygone era. We were headed for Pottsville to visit the dilapidated childhood home of John O’Hara and I remember feeling relieved that we probably wouldn’t be touring this author’s home anytime soon. I’ve since learned that O’Hara called
Pottsville a “god-awful town” and couldn’t wait to get out.
My mother told the police that she was looking down at the map from the Philadelphia Historical Society, and when she looked up we were plunging into the dark, swirling waters of the Schuylkill River. I guess they believed her, because the cop pointed out that we were a few hours from the spot in Chadds Ford where Andrew Wyeth’s father, N. C. Wyeth, drove his car onto a railroad track with his four-year-old grandson in the backseat. The car was smashed to smithereens by an oncoming train and no one ever knew whether it was suicide or just a freak accident. Why he insisted on telling this story in front of us, I will never understand. But it sure cheered my mother right up, with her penchant for literary legends, and she subsequently peppered him with questions.
Later that night, my father joined us at a nearby motel and her mood darkened as she argued with him about her drinking. “The girls are fine. I was just distracted.” We knew her distraction was in a neat little silver flask. She gave more of the usual denials, and my father responded with patronizing disdain and exasperation. He left home for the first time shortly afterwards.
Life after that deteriorated into a series of dramatic comings and goings, yelling and screaming, doors slamming in the night, and then silence. The mornings after always felt like a hangover, my sister and I staring numbly at each other, avoiding the unmentionable.
My mother stuck it out, however, always the martyr. She was part of that upper-middle-class Northeastern generation of women who believed life offered them no decent alternative to marriage, motherhood, or homemaking. In the coming tumultuous years, she and her circle of friends survived divorce, widowhood, disease, children who disappeared or disappointed them, and children like my sister and me, who chose careers and moved away.
In those early days, though, this was just one of many literary tours that filled my childhood. While other kids were spending July at the shore and August at summer camp or in the Poconos, we squandered all our free time visiting the family homes and haunts of famous writers. We trekked through their gardens (they always had gardens), had drinks at their local taverns, peeked into their bedrooms, and bought souvenirs and postcards from whoever was hawking them nearby. My mother always quoted extensively from their works while my sister and I huddled bleary-eyed in the backseat and played with smuggled Barbies.
Such lofty-minded trips generally culminated in long, uneventful weekends at secluded B&Bs that backed up onto cornfields or auto salvage lots. Most of the time, my sister and I were at such loose ends we’d resort to reading the dusty, yellow-paged Penguin Classics or
Reader’s Digest
condensed books that filled the shelves in the main living room, occasionally ripping out the pages and making paper hats, boats, or spitballs. When
we did venture out, we’d generally wind up walking through deserted towns, past vacant shops and abandoned gas stations.
My mother was always searching for something that would give her life weight, that would take her away from her life of desperation and domesticity. I spent years buried in books, trying to avoid a similar fate. Then, all at once, there was this flash of certainty and the fuzziness disappeared. Robert Frost said, “What you want, what you’re hanging around in the world waiting for, is for something to occur to you.” That’s what happened. All of a sudden, something occurred to me.
Master of the Universe
“All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality, the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.”
~
Arthur Christopher Benson (1862–1925)
~
W
omen do different things when they’re depressed. Some smoke, others drink, some call their therapists, some eat. My mother used to go ballistic when she and my father had a fight, then she’d booze for days on end and vanish into her bedroom. My sister was more into the global chill mode; give ’em the silent treatment and, in the meantime, gorge on frozen Sara Lee banana cake. And I do what I have always done—go off on a book bender that can last for days.
I fall into this state for different reasons. Sometimes it’s after an “I hate your fucking guts” fight. Other times it’s symptomatic of my state of mind, ennui up to my
ears, my life gone awry, and that feeling of dread whenever I’m asked what I’m doing. How can anyone sort all this out? All things considered, I’d rather read. It’s the perfect escape.
I have a whole mantra for my book binges. First of all, I open a bottle of good red wine. Then I turn off my cell phone, turn on my answering machine, and gather all the books I’ve been meaning to read or reread and haven’t. Finally, I fill up the tub with thirty-dollar bubble bath, fold a little towel at the end of the tub so it just fits in the crick of my neck, and turn on my music. I have an old powder-blue plastic Deco radio near the tub that I bought at a garage sale in Hollywood a few years ago. The oddest thing: the radio only receives one AM radio station, which plays jazz standards from the forties and fifties, and it suits me just fine.
Within my bathroom walls is a self-contained field of dreams and I am in total control, the master of my own elegantly devised universe. The outside world disappears and here, there is only peace and a profound sense of well-being.
Most of the people in my life take a dim view of this…what would you call it? Monomania? Eccentricity? My sister is perhaps the most diplomatic. We both know that I have a tendency to lose my tether to reality when I close myself off like this. But then she’ll joke that I’m really just another boring bibliomaniac and what I really need is a little fresh air. She always was a whiz with words. She actually informed me that a book she read by Nicholas Basbanes (appropriately called
Among
the Gently Mad
) states that the first documented use of the word
bibliomania
came in 1750 when the fourth earl of Chesterfield sent a letter to his illegitimate son warning him that this consuming diversion with books should be avoided like “the bubonic plague.” Ho hum.
I peel off my clothes and throw them on the floor. As I’m walking to the tub, I glance at the floor-to-ceiling mirror that covers the south wall of my bathroom. Oh god. Wait a minute. You know how you look in the mirror and you look the same and you look the same and all of a sudden you look ten years older? It’s fitting that at age thirty-five I should notice this. My waist is thicker, my breasts saggier, the beginnings of—shit, is that cellulite on the backs of my thighs? Why is it that you think this age thing won’t happen to you? Oh, and look at the backs of my elbows! They look like old-lady wrinkled elbows with a sharp, bony protrusion.
I’ve never been able to figure out my looks. I’ve been told I’m striking. But what does that mean? It’s something people say when they can’t give you the usual compliments, like “you’re beautiful.” It could be my height that puts them off. I’m almost five foot ten, which has only recently become fashionable. I also have enormous feet. Size 10 on a good day.
When I was young, I hated my tall, too-thin, sticklike figure, which my mother described as willowy. She’d argue that my looks were special and would be appreciated when I got older. Just give yourself time, she’d say. You’ll see. You’ll outshine all those other girls with hourglass figures. I felt like Frankie in
The Member of
the Wedding
: “a big freak…legs too long…shoulders too narrow…belonging to no club and a member of nothing in the world.”
It wasn’t just my appearance. I always felt like an oddball, the exception in a world where I imagined other families were normal and happy. Virginia and I endured the secrets and shame of an absent father and an alcoholic mother, and the few friends I had, I kept at a distance, always relieved when they didn’t come over. The fact of the matter was that I was embarrassed that my mother couldn’t cope, and in some ways, she passed that on to me.
I shut my eyes as I get into the tub. I have purposely made the water scalding hot and when I dip my foot in, my toes turn red and start to sting. Too hot. I add a little cold, letting the water run through my fingers as I listen to a tinny version of Coltrane blasting out “Love Supreme.” Paul Desmond once said that listening to late-night jazz is like having a very dry martini. I think he’s right.
I stick my foot back in and then ease my body into the water. Still too hot. I twist the spigot with my toes, adding more cold. There. Perfect. I pick up
The Transit of Venus,
an obscure novel by Shirley Hazzard, whose newest book,
The Great Fire,
has become a favorite among book clubs. The premise is fascinating. It’s about two beautiful orphaned sisters whose lives are as predestined as the rotation of the planets. I try to concentrate. The prose is dense and complex; I have to keep rereading paragraphs. I start to daydream and lose my
place. This isn’t working for me. Basically, I’m still depressed.
Maybe it’s just the time of year. It’s Christmas, I’m alone, and my social prospects are nonexistent. This is the season to be somewhere else, and for the majority of my friends, that means packing up the kids and maybe a few of their best friends and migrating to second homes in Maui, Aspen, Cabo, Sun Valley, and the second tier, Palm Springs and Las Vegas.
Being in West L.A. in December is like being banished to an isolated retreat or even a rehab center where parties and other forms of merriment are verboten. Not that I’m complaining. If you come from the east, the weather here in December is glorious. Right up until the El Niño rains in late January and February, the world is temperate, mild, and forgiving. Natural disasters like fires, floods, landslides, and earthquakes don’t happen in West L.A.
This year I have no plans to go anywhere and I am occasionally nagged by that insidious feeling of “missing out.” When I was with Palmer, we used to go to the Four Seasons on Maui every year. We’d get the corner suite and even bribe a beachboy to reserve our lounges every day to avoid getting up at five a.m. like everyone else. (In truth, most of our friends just had their nannies do it.) Now I hear Palmer is going to St. Barts. He thinks it’s “younger, hipper, and more fun,” unlike being with me. I used to sit by the pool in the shade and read all day.
The phone rings. It’s my sister, Virginia. She sounds worried. “I know you’re there, Dora. Why haven’t you
returned my calls? If you don’t pick up I’m coming over…” I pick up.
“I’m okay,” I say.
“You don’t sound okay. Are you doing another one of your book-hermit things?” Nobody knows me like Virginia.
“I’ve been a little upset.”
“A little, like twenty-four hours little or a little, like three days little?”
“Like three days little.”
“Doesn’t sound little to me. Do you want me to come over?”
I look around. My place is a shambles. “No. Really. I’m fine. I was just going out.”
I convince her that I’m simply marvelous and she buys it. She just doesn’t get it. She has a husband and a baby. Who can blame her?
I pick up the Hazzard book and try again. This is so depressing. I have just finished an early chapter about Ted Tice, Paul Ivory, and Caro, and I can already tell they are all eventually doomed to lives of unspeakable loss and tragedy. For one thing, Paul is gay, or at the very least bisexual, and for another—oh forget it.
I get out of the tub, grab a robe, and go back to the bookshelf, leaving wet footprints in my wake. It’s not really intentional, but generally speaking I gravitate toward a certain theme for these lost weekends and, at the moment, I am set on choosing books about relationships that don’t work out. Since most of the world’s
greatest classics deal with this subject, I have lots of options. Also, for some strange reason, my books are loosely organized into categories so it’s easy to make a selection based on my mood. Let’s see, do I want to steep myself in obsessive love…something like
Wuthering Heights,
where Heathcliff never did get it on with Cathy…unrequited love, dysfunctional love, adulterous love…Oh, here’s Dorothy Parker…the brilliant cynic with deadpan wit alternating with fits of spiteful alcoholic rage (hmmmm) and Austen, the optimist. Her love affairs always work out. Not interested. Over here are the dysfunctional family books, including my mother’s dog-eared copy of
The Optimist’s Daughter,
and on the shelf below, the functional family books, mostly fantasies, sci-fi, or adventure classics that I have treasured since my childhood. I finally gather up the following:
Sentimental Education
by Flaubert (I lent Virginia my copy of
Madame Bovary,
which should be right beside it, and she never returned it. You see? That’s why I don’t lend books. It fucks up my whole library.),
Anna Karenina, The End of the Affair
(miracles and horrid disfigurements),
Wuthering Heights
(all right, I feel like wallowing), and
A Farewell to Arms
. God, what a dreary bunch of bathmates. Perfect for my grim, listless state of mind. That’ll do for now. Oh well, I’ll throw in Parker too. What the hell, a little comic relief.
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.