Now I See You (11 page)

“I mean, I could wait; I could spend a few more years auditioning in New York. But I’m at my peak now, and in LA, the younger you are, the better. It’s like dog years out there - twenty-four is really thirty-four.”

I pulled a meat tenderizer out of the bag.

“That’s for Nonny,” my mother said, looking up. “She broke hers.”

“I already found an agent out there and a sublet off Sunset Boulevard. I’m leaving in two weeks to be there in time for pilot season,” I explained, attempting to wrap the tenderizer neatly enough that my mother wouldn’t go off on a rant about my subpar wrapping skills.

“So the only question is,” I said, finally coming to my point, “can I have your car?”

My father, with a pepper grinder in his hand, piped up: “But you don’t drive.”

Oh for fuck’s sake,
I thought,
how did I know this would come up?

“That’s not exactly true,” I protested. “I have my license.”

I hadn’t gotten it the first time I tried, when I botched Driver’s Ed in high school. Once I was diagnosed with RP though, this mystery, like so many, was instantly cleared up. Of course I was a lousy driver; I had no peripheral vision. If I wasn’t looking directly at something—the streetlight, the car trying to merge in front of me, the person crossing the intersection—I would have no idea they were there. Unfortunately, while I was busy looking directly at something—say, the red light I missed the last time I took the car out—I’d miss something else, like the car that had come to a stop in front of me.

The sensible thing would’ve been to resign myself to never learning how to drive. I lived in New York after all, and plenty of my friends who could see just fine never got their licenses. It’s a point of pride for New Yorkers not to know how to drive. But I knew it would never be a point of pride for me.

So a year or so after my diagnosis, I decided to get my driver’s license. Now that I knew exactly what my driving deficiencies were, I could compensate for them. My father took me to a deserted parking lot a few times and there, with no living creatures to plow down in cold blood, I pioneered an innovative driving technique for the visually impaired. What it boiled down to was turning my head from side to side a lot. Though my head-swerving style of driving made me look a bit loopy, it was not grounds for denying me a license—at least that’s what the guy who’d administered the driving test had said.

“Just try to relax,” he advised me as he signed his paperwork. “Look out of the corner of your eye.”

“Oh definitely,” I promised him. “I will.”

Passing the eye exam wasn’t hard, since with turbo contact lenses in, my central acuity was still pretty decent and the test didn’t cover peripheral vision. So, with one-third the visual field of a normal person and totally night blind, I got my license—cause for celebration for me, and cause for widespread panic for the world at large.

But as my father was quick to point out, the fact that I’d duped some guy into giving me a license a bunch of years ago didn’t mean I knew how to drive.

“Oh, David will teach me as we drive cross-country,” I persuaded them. “I’ll have plenty of practice on the interstate.”

From his furrowed brow, it was clear that this was just what my father was afraid of. But he didn’t say anything and neither did my mother. This, I knew, was a testament to their love for me, because ordinarily my parents have zero ability to keep their ocean of negative opinions from pouring out. My mother likes to talk about how she bites her tongue until it bleeds and I like to point out that if you’re constantly communicating how much you’re biting your tongue, you’re probably not biting it hard enough. The subject of my eyes was the one area in which my family censored themselves and I knew they did it to spare me feeling upset or embarrassed. It was exactly the same reason I didn’t bring it up with them.

“So what do you think?” I pressed, collecting and balling up the extra scraps of wrapping paper. “You don’t need the car anymore since Marisa graduated and you won’t get much if you sell it. And I’ll be really careful.”

I carried the excess wrapping paper over to the kitchen garbage but halfway there, I found myself doubling over something hard at my waist.

“Shit,” I hissed. Looking down, I saw the metal handlebars of a step stool. Someone had been changing a lightbulb overhead.

“That was my fault!” My mother rushed over to fold up the stool. “I shouldn’t have left the goddamned thing in the middle of the living room. Are you—”

“I’m fine,” I barked, embarrassed. My hip bone stung from where I’d bashed it, but I straightened up and took the last few steps to deposit my garbage in the trash. When I looked up, I saw my father at the sink regarding me with sad eyes.

Not only did his look made me feel sad, it made me feel like a cause for sadness. Though I’d become pretty adept at tiptoeing around the landmine of The Look, occasionally I’d step right on it and then, it was as if all the things he kept himself from saying poured out of his eyes.

“My daughter,” he said wistfully. “My daughter wants to be a movie star.”

A week and a half later, the day after New Year’s, I was shutting the trunk of my parents’ Subaru Outback, or attempting to, since with all the boxes and suitcases and lamps and hot roller sets, it would barely close. I kissed my parents goodbye, looking over my dad’s shoulder to avoid his eyes.

Then I slid behind the wheel. As my mother would say, God help us all.

Tip #9: On pool parties

Avoid parties that take place around a body of water. If you must go, make sure there’s alcohol present, not for you to actually drink—unless you have a death wish—but to pretend you have drunk. That way, when you fall in the swimming pool fully clothed, it won’t look suspicious. It’ll still look idiotic, just not suspicious.

9. HELL ON WHEELS

It took me exactly three days in Los Angeles to realize I’d made a colossal mistake. It was at that point that I started crying.

David was incredibly sympathetic, in the beginning. He’d sit next to me on the paisley couch of our sublet off Sunset and hold me while I cried, assuring me I’d get used to California if I only gave it a chance. After a day or two, he took to smoking on the balcony and gently reminding me that it was
my
idea to come to LA. After a week, his empathy depleted, he tried Tough Talk.

“You remember that I quit my job, got rid of my apartment and packed all my shit up so we could come here, right? To realize your dream?”

“I know,” I wailed. “That’s what makes it so awful.”

“I just don’t understand how you can hate it so much already.”

“I have no friends,” I choked out, “and there’s no good pizza and”—I paused to catch my breath—“I’m trapped in this house because I don’t know how to driiiiiiiive.”

My father had been right: I couldn’t drive and it wasn’t as easy as I’d thought to learn. Though the idea of learning how to drive on our cross-country trip had sounded perfectly sensible when I explained it to my parents, it seemed considerably less so when I saw the eighteen-wheelers speeding beside us at eighty miles an hour. So I couldn’t drive my cowardly ass back to New York and I didn’t have enough money for a plane ticket. I was stuck in sunny, sweet-smelling, motherfucking California.

“Just give it time,” David sighed. “You’ll get used to it.”

Which I did, seeing as I had no choice. It took a while but eventually, I had fully furnished my life in Los Angeles; I had a cushy long-term temp job at an investment bank, a go-to acting coach, a respectable amount of TV auditions. I knew where to get a halfway-decent slice of pizza, though an edible bagel was still beyond reach. I even made a handful of friends; not enough to pack a stretch limo but enough to fill the available chairs in my living room during an Oscars party. Yes, I had gotten used to LA.

The thing was, what I’d gotten used to was feeling like I didn’t belong.

After two years, Los Angeles was thoroughly familiar to me but nothing like home. Home was the brick attached house in Bensonhurst with a Virgin Mary in the front garden where my grandmother could whip up homemade tagliatelle in fifteen minutes or less. Home was the long, bright expanse of Broadway, which was always blazing with light even in the wee hours, so I never had to stumble or even slow my step. Home was the rattling subway packed with all sorts of people—young, beautiful Hollywood types, sure, but unkempt homeless people, too, puking in grocery bags, and fat middle-aged ladies who took up two seats and full-grown men who only came up to my waist. People missing legs and arms and hair. People with long, spindly white canes. The subway was a land of misfit toys, and I belonged there, even though I was only a misfit in secret. The subway would take me wherever I wanted to go, whenever I wanted to go there. That was a freedom I’d lost, and I missed it desperately.

It’s not that I couldn’t drive. David had taught me how, once I’d finally stopped crying. We started out in the 99 Cents Store parking lot, then moved up to side streets, and finally, I graduated to the boulevards. After a month of daily practice, I was cruising down Santa Monica solo, singing along to the radio.

On the streets, I was an okay driver, below average maybe, but way better than someone who’d drunk a fifth of Jack Daniels, say, or a child. At the very least, I tried hard. Hence my idiosyncratic driving posture. When my sister Marisa came to visit from New York, she couldn’t help but notice.

We hadn’t even made it out of the airport parking lot when she piped up.

“Maybe—,” she ventured hesitantly, “maybe you want to lean back a little.”

“What are you talking about?” I snapped, concentrating on my left turn.

“You don’t notice how close your face is to the windshield?”

It was true. My nose was almost touching the glass, my chest nearly pressing the wheel. Once or twice, my chest
had
pressed the wheel and honked the horn, which had the exact opposite effect of what I’d intended—to blend in. It looked like I’d been taught driving posture by an octogenarian.

“There’s no law about sitting too close to the windshield,” I shot back. “Just sit back and enjoy the ride.”

I couldn’t see my sister’s face but I bet she looked like she was enjoying the ride about as much as a turn on the Tilt-A-Whirl with a stomach full of corn dogs.

My uncool driving style notwithstanding, I did a decent job of getting from point A to point B without dying or killing anyone. In general.

Of course, certain restrictions did apply.

There was a lot of fine print involved in my driving arrangement, lots of blackout dates. The gist of the arrangement I made with myself was: Yes, I could drive. But then there were a whole bunch of exceptions. Interstates, for instance, were out of the question. State highways were pretty dicey, too, though they were impossible to avoid. As a rule of thumb, I tried not to drive the car more than thirty miles an hour since I knew it was a matter of time before I sustained a head-on collision and I figured when that occurred, thirty miles an hour would do less damage than seventy. The big trouble with highways was the merging. Merging is one of those skills that require a lightning-fast synthesis of visual information that is impossible for someone who can’t look in front and to the side at the same time. Every time I picked up speed to approach the 101, I was making a Hail Mary pass.

So, judicious highway usage. Zero drinking and driving; that was just pressing my luck. No driving precious cargo, like kids or pregnant women, because there was no way to ensure I wouldn’t kill them. But that was all really pretty easy, little stuff.

And then there was: no night driving.

This was an absolute deal breaker. This was: eat anything in the garden you want, but leave that apple tree alone. In my world of partial-sight there was a lot that was negotiable, a lot of borderline situations. But this was black and white. If I wanted to avoid bloodshed, to say nothing of having my secret outed, sundown was my deadline. Full stop.

At first, it didn’t seem so hard a deal to stick to, but neither did forgoing that one lousy apple tree. It soon became clear that not being able to drive after dark would make life complicated—at the least robbing me of independence, at the worst leading to entanglements that were, well, compromising. Like ending up in the hot tub with the King of Candy.

It was one of those situations for which there is a perfectly reasonable explanation that ends up sounding a lot like an excuse, one of those situations where you find yourself blaming everyone and everything except for yourself.

In a way, it was LA’s fault.

It goes like this: there are an unreasonable number of swimming pools in LA. People who live in homes with pools feel compelled to throw parties centered around them. These parties, like most, take place at night. As an actress, I had no choice but to go; that’s half the job, the other half being split evenly between Botox and dieting. Unfortunately, as a night-blind person, I didn’t belong around deep bodies of water, especially in four-inch heels which, let’s face it, are mandatory in Hollywood. On a penumbral pool deck, one of the safest places for a girl like me is sitting inside the hot tub. Unless you’re sitting with an octopus-armed guy who won’t take “no” for an answer.

So in a way, it was the fault of Los Angeles. In another way, it was Kat’s fault for running off to schmooze with that hot, young casting director and then disappearing into the crowd.

Kat was my best friend in Los Angeles, a rare beauty of ambiguous ethnic origins, which was useful casting-wise because she could audition for everything from Sacagawea to a Bangkok hooker. Her lips were so supersized, more than one woman on the street had begged her for the number of the genius who’d done her collagen, only to discover that her lips were, like almost nothing in Hollywood, 100% real. Her lustrous, ebony mane bounced around so dynamically, it looked like it had its own blood supply. Most maddening of all was that Kat was as smart as she was telegenic. She’d graduated summa cum laude from Yale, where I’d met her years before we ran into each other again in Los Angeles, and her fallback career if acting didn’t pan out was high-risk corporate finance. Besides being smart and connected, she was loyal and funny, all of which made her a great friend, even though standing next to her in public frequently made me want to kill myself.