Literacy and Longing in L. A. (5 page)

“Fuck Andy. Go home. You’re late.”

Virginia’s mouth curls up in a mock petulant scowl as she leans over to kiss me good-bye. “Okay, Dora, but you really should meet his friend. He’s nice and he reads.”

“Big deal. No. I love you. Good-bye.”

Virginia gathers all her stuff, gently picks up Camille, who is now sleeping soundly, and she’s gone.

I wish people would stop trying to fix me up. It never works out and things are always strained. From the moment we say “hello” and I start listening to his life story, I’m waiting for a chance to escape. I think back to my conversation with Fred at the bookstore. He’s a flirt, no doubt about it. Not really my type. If I saw him on the street, chances are I’d walk right past him. Still, I’m definitely attracted to him. I bet right now he’s fucking some Brentwood housewife in her faux English Tudor mansion while her husband, the dermatologist, is at Men’s Week at the Golden Door. What’s the matter with me? We had a three-minute conversation. He’s probably one of those moody, dysfunctional guys who’s critical of everything and doesn’t even like the sound of the surf.

I turn on my goofy garage-sale radio and grab my latest tome. I always feel best about myself when I’m engrossed in a good book. Then I don’t worry that I’m in limbo, living in a place that’s not really my home, spending my days floating around from one thing to the next. Tomorrow is a big day. I’m interviewing for a writing position at my old newspaper. I’m going to try not to think about it.

So now it’s three a.m. and tonight, like so many others, I’m wide awake. I look out the window. The world is dark and deserted. All the normal, well-adjusted people are asleep. Insomnia. Why do I feel that I’m the only one that suffers from this affliction? I give up. Turning on the light and opening my book once again is generally the only alternative to this misery. Although Dorothy Parker would definitely disagree. In her philosophy, the whole institution of reading was responsible for her sleepless nights. She joked that all the best minds had been “anti-reading” for years.
^*
She even said, “I wish I’d never learned to read…then I wouldn’t have been mucking about with a lot of French authors at this hour…”
^*

That leaves the question, what to do if you don’t want to read to get yourself to sleep? Sheep are out. Dorothy Parker hated sheep. “I can tell the minute there’s one in the room. They needn’t think I’m going to lie here in the dark and count their unpleasant little faces for them.”
^*

I can make lists of things I need to do. No, that would only stress me out. I could get up and make a glass of warm milk. I could organize my closet. Or my desk. I could call the 1-800 number for the Bank of America and check my balance. No, that’s another stomach-churning exercise.

People don’t realize how serious a problem this is. There was a case last year in the Valley where a man with insomnia would go into his garage in the middle of the night and use his power saw. His woodworking was the only thing that gave him solace. And the neighbors were suing. This doesn’t help me.

I grab a book on my bedside table that my sister gave me a few weeks ago.
How Proust Can Change Your Life
by Alain de Botton. It says here it’s a “self-help manual for the intelligent person.” I could use some help right now.

Interview with Miss Piggy

“The best effect of any book is that it

excites the reader to self activity.”

~
Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)
~

G
etting dressed is a lot trickier than I imagined. What an ordeal. All these things I used to take for granted, like putting on an outfit and rushing out the door without worrying what I looked like, are so much more difficult now. Plus, it’s been a long time since I wore “work clothes,” whatever that means. I have already put on and taken off a couple of Gucci suits, thinking they were too trendy, one Banana Republic outfit, thinking it was too suburban, and a sweater and shortish pleated skirt that gave me that “trying to look too young” look. By the end of it all, I’m sweating, harassed, late, and thoroughly discouraged. I finally settle on a simple black suit I pur
chased three years ago at Bloomingdale’s for the funeral of my brother-in-law’s mother, who died of dementia and everyone said it was a blessing. Okay, I’m ready. I hate the way I look. Ordinary.

I get in the car and head downtown. Here’s the thing: I do not drive on the freeway. That’s not something I admit to anyone except my closest friends, because in this city it’s like having a debilitating disease or being bipolar. When I first moved here, the intricate network of concrete and steel was daunting, to say the least. Anybody’s vision of automotive hell, right down to the banshee-screaming sirens and thunderous din that assault your consciousness as you brave the elements, strapped to your seat. Like a fighter pilot. Driving in this town is certainly not for the fainthearted. When you factor in road rage and all those zoned-out bizarros and angry people who are just on the edge of insanity, it’s even more frightening. Nevertheless, I always managed to motor up and down the ramps like any other normal commuter on the 101 or the 10 and to dutifully yield to the zooming traffic that was muscling down on top of me.

Then one night, I lost my nerve. I was driving to USC on assignment to interview a seventeen-year-old freshman who had just sold a screenplay for a million dollars when my car stalled in the fast lane of the Santa Monica freeway. It was black-dark, impossible to see anything but a blaze of out-of-focus exploding nebulas that enveloped my car. Semis blasted their horns as they swerved to avoid hitting me. And I remember praying that I would wake up from this nightmare and the burning,
white-coal core of panic would subside. I was shivering and drenched in sweat as I kept turning on the ignition only to hear weak clicks and then silence. Just as a truck pulled up behind me and stopped (maybe a good Samaritan, maybe Ted Bundy’s brother), I turned the key and the car miraculously started. I had enough power to creep along at five miles an hour across four lanes of traffic to the nearest off-ramp. I coasted down to a gas station in the middle of Watts, where an unflappable Korean attendant called a cab and waited with me until it arrived.

Remember that old saying, “When you fall off a horse you should get right back on”? Well, I didn’t. I kept avoiding the freeway and now, every time I even consider it, my palms sweat and my vision blurs, and I feel like I’m going to hyperventilate so I go home and have a glass of wine. I heard about a therapist who specializes in freeway disorders but I was afraid of all the other stuff she might dig up, so I never went to see her. So now, in a city where there is no public transportation, I am relegated to only those areas of L.A. served by Sepulveda and Olympic. I pull into the
Times
building after an hour and a half—a trip that should have taken thirty minutes.

It’s a little disorienting going back to a place where I once worked. My instinct is to pull into the same parking space, but instead I take a parking ticket that needs to be validated and pull into the visitor’s lot. Trying to act like I belong, I ask the burly security guy where Al is, the kindly, bespectacled guard I used to bring lattes to
from the corner café, which isn’t there anymore. He informs me curtly that Al retired four years ago. “Check your purse, ma’am?”

The newsroom is the same, thank god, with rows of reporter cubicles outfitted with computers and bulletin boards overflowing with cartoons, irreverent slogans, daily assignments, and bizarre photos of attack dogs, creepy over-the-hill actresses, and bloody crime scenes. The same thirtysomething, greasy-haired reporters hunch over their telephones and laptops, blotting out everything around them and pounding away at one story or another. No one looks up when people pass by. No one registers any reaction. That’s the way I used to be, completely absorbed in whatever assignment I was working on, jaws clenched in concentration. I wonder if I can even do that anymore. I approach the assistant Metro editor’s office and knock. God, is she ever young. She can’t be more than twenty-five and she seems vaguely distracted. Her only redeeming feature is that she’s fat. She greets me the way you would greet a bad blind date, trying to be polite but keeping it as short as possible. I give her my résumé. She barely glances at it.

Her office is a pretty good size but the air is close and stuffy, the window firmly shut. There’s a half-eaten piece of pastry smeared on a napkin by the phone, a couple of empty, dirty coffee cups with lipstick stains on the rims, and picked-through copies of the
New York Times
and the
Wall Street Journal
strewn in a messy pile on the floor. Well, she’s an editor.

I’m always amazed when people describe this job as
glamorous. It’s not. It’s a job in an office. You eat, you talk on the phone, you read, you make decisions. You rarely meet anybody except for other editors and reporters. And you don’t even get to go to fun events. There are rewards, naturally. But they are mostly internal and abstract. Like in any art, I suppose. And the pace is relentless—a constant struggle to stay hot and new and on top of everything all the time. The whole process can drive you nuts if you let it. I guess that’s why this woman’s here. She seems all business and boy, is she a grump.

She looks at me skeptically and scowls. “So, you worked here. When? Seven years ago?” The scourge of irrelevance clings to me like flakes of dandruff.

“Well, almost.” Might as well be twenty. She’s waiting for more. What to say? Do I tell her the truth? That the
Times
was my dream job. That I’d just had an enormous run of luck—a few breaking stories had attracted attention, one of which culminated in the resignation of some key figures in the mayor’s office. That the senior editor had called me in and given me a plum beat. That I felt privileged, part of the inner circle. And that when my father became ill, I left abruptly and then failed to return.

My mother proved incapable of caring for him. Just changing a dressing or giving him his medication on time was more than she could handle. She’d disappear for hours at a time and when she returned, drifting in, a cloud of cashmere, her cheeks flushed with the cold and the booze, she’d attempt a conversation, a few inquiries into his health. Then she’d fall asleep on the living room
sofa, the lights blazing, her reading glasses halfway down her nose and a book perched precariously on her lap.

My sister was newly married and Andy had just accepted a position at UCLA. My father would’ve never asked Virginia to leave her husband to care for him. But I was single, my job was expendable, and he didn’t protest when I told him I was moving home to help. Regardless, I wanted to be with him. Palmer was very understanding. We hadn’t been dating that long.

I drove my father to his office every day until he was too sick to continue. Then I cared for him until the end. He never asked me about my job or if I missed it, and I never brought it up.

After he died, months later, when my sister and I were cleaning out his old mahogany desk, I found a blue file folder labeled “Dora.” It was filled with every article I’d ever written, neatly cut out with the date printed in blue ink on top. As far as I knew, he didn’t even have a subscription to the
Times
. He must have bought it at the newsstand near his office, which sold out-of-state papers and magazines.

When I close my eyes, I can still see him in his prime, roaring into the living room, fresh from the office, wearing his dark pin-striped suit despite the September heat, regaling us with his adventures in the fabric trade, making the intricacies of his business sound as intriguing as national security. And then I see him frail, giving me a soft smile as I helped him into his office building. I feel tears welling up inside of me and I want him back,
robust, handsome, looking at me expectantly, waiting for my answers.

“So, the reasons you left?” I look at this girl who is impatiently fidgeting with the papers on her desk, spraying her glasses with a pocket-size bottle of Optimetrix lens cleaner and swiping them with a miniature chamois. Her cell phone rings and she holds up her finger like “this will just be a minute” and then proceeds to have a five-minute conversation while I am sitting immobile staring at her. She hangs up. “Sorry, what were you saying?”

“I had some opportunities in Philadelphia, so I moved back for a year,” I answer. Now she’s meticulously cleaning her keyboard with a small paintbrush. How rude. Wouldn’t it be great if some disgruntled employee burst through the door with a gun and blew her head off?
Pow!
What a satisfying vision. The only one who would be disappointed would be her twin sister, the hunchback.

And when she asks what I’ve been doing since then, a fine film of perspiration collects on my upper lip. What
have
I been doing for the past five years, that’s a good question. I had rehearsed what I thought was a reasonable answer, but it now sounds lame and unprofessional, nothing that a twenty-five-year-old hotshot would understand. Telling her I got married was my first mistake, the nagging banality of becoming just another housewife in a ho-hum marriage. It went downhill from there. It was all blah, blah, blah, I did volunteer work, yadda, yadda, yadda, I set up my husband’s office, blah, blah, blah. Just as I’m about to roll into what made me such a
good reporter, she looks at her watch and says, “Well, I’ll get back to you soon.”

I want to bolt but I compose myself, acting as though it’s been a thoroughly pleasant meeting, and make my way to the elevator. What would make her want to hire me? Anything? Okay, let’s be fair about this. I screwed up. I should have told her right away about my journalistic awards. I should have offered to freelance, I should have taken it upon myself to tell her about some of my more interesting angles on a run-of-the-mill news story. My forte was finding an unusual slant and running with it. The editors I worked with liked that. She might have liked that too, if I had bothered to tell her. Which I didn’t. I got nervous and went on too long about stupid stuff, which she clearly had no interest in. This just confirms my theory that things usually wind up worse than you expect them to be.

I decide to see if my old friend Brooke is still working in Style. She was an assistant editor when I left and even though we haven’t kept in touch, I know she’ll be happy to see me.

The Style section has an entirely different feel than downstairs. Still the cubicles and concentrated energy, but there are metal racks of designer samples blocking the aisles, boxes of shoes and bags stacked along the hallways, artsy fashion black-and-white blowups covering the walls. I find Brooke on the phone arguing with an editor. She’s beginning to get that overworked, harried look that creeps up on you if you don’t watch it. She
slams down the receiver. “What a jerk!” she mutters, then sees me and smiles.

“Hey! What are you doing here, girl? God, you look so elegant. How are you? Let’s go outside for a smoke.”

We walk around to the back of the building and Brooke lights up. I’d forgotten about the smoking. It’s been years since I’ve been around people that smoked. In West L.A. you’re considered a pariah if you smoke. People look at you like you’re killing them and there’s this immediate hostile reaction that’s akin to road rage. But like most people under thirty, Brooke is oblivious to all this, and I sit there inhaling her smoke while I tell her my story.

“I’m trying to maybe go back to work because I’m separated and I’m kind of at odds, but not really.”

“God, Dora, I’m sorry to hear that, but why would you want to come back here?” she says with obvious reference to that phone call. “Honestly, I know it sounds strange but I think I get more and more antisocial every year. I’m even beginning to dread interviewing people about their problems,” she confessed, adding that she spends her weekends meditating with a yogi and staying away from crowds.

“I just realized one day that I could care less what sources have to tell me for these stories and when they call me back to elaborate or give me more quotes I find it so annoying. Pretty grim, hey, for someone in the news business.”

I feel better talking to her. The old misery-loves-
company axiom, but I still know that, in my heart, I would trade places with her in a minute.

She can tell I’m discouraged. “Listen, Dora, if you really want to come back, I’ll talk to Eddie, who still has a lot of clout around here, and I know he always liked you. In fact, why didn’t you go to see him?”

I tell her that his office had sent me to that editor in Metro who couldn’t wait to get rid of me.

“You mean Miss Piggy? Everyone hates her. She’s so rude. Don’t worry about it. Maybe it’s the air in her office. It’s suffocating. Do you still have a copy of your résumé? I’ll make some calls, okay?”

As I walk out, I remember how I used to feel a combination of pity and disdain when older writers tried to make a comeback. Being in your thirties is not that old, but in the news business it might as well be. And now here I am trying to do something with my life and ending up exactly where I thought I would end up, which is why I dreaded doing this in the first place.