From the Vault

I first started this elsewhere.

THURSDAY, MAY 15, 2008

New York in May (but thinking of LA)

Dawn’s apartment has a great small room for keeping jade plants and writing letters by the window, though not for reading, since the chair is bare and stiff. It is spring in New York and within the frame of the dirty window two maple trees nearly block the brick facade of the school building, and there is a good feeling of space and vegetation. These small deceptions belong to cities and make me feel that I belong to cities, too, since I have always loved to find a hidden courtyard or a garden on a rooftop.

I have been re-reading A Moveable Feast, to get to Pound.

“When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.”

I think I would say now the only thing that spoils these days is the awful technology. People are welcome. Any minute Simon will call to say he is down on the street. Then he will come up and we will make a salad and talk about the last three years, which is how long it’s been since we last saw each other. People on the street below have small, efficient shoulder bags. A city for walking makes for light travelers, and this elicits a moderate degree of envy. I brought too much for two weeks, and anyway I have been wearing the same pair of jeans and the tee shirt with the title of Dan’s novel in green felt letters.

I asked Whit for bad ideas; he said cocktails at 4:30 on a sidewalk with a view of walkers. I didn’t ask for good ideas, but he said “If you carry a camera make it a mini digital. And if it’s a day out and about wear comfy quiet shoes.” But my camera is large and my red boots make the sound I couldn’t wait to make when I was a little girl. The click clack of a woman’s heels on the sidewalk. Walking back late from the subway last night, I carried that rhythm somewhat painfully and woke up at 6 this morning with a charlie horse.

I’ve been looking at maps of Montana once every two or three weeks. Two hours from Dillon to Missoula, four from Dillon to Red Lodge. Surely there will be time to put something aside and plan a trip. Coffin is going to see his old friend and Sam will be tending the middle cow camp from June to November. For me it is a question of the season, maybe a little of courage, because I have been dreaming for a long time and it takes courage to give up a dream.

But I am drifting. The window is open now, and I have Richard Goode playing Bach, and although I’d like to be comfortable in a tee shirt, I’ve become vulnerable to the Northeastern chill, which maybe means I’ve hit the peak of my days in Southern California and am gearing for the long descent.

Simon made an album and it sounds like this: clean out my heart before you leave.

SUNDAY, MAY 18, 2008

Arlo & Esme

From Dan Chazin’s Trip on the Amtrak Lake Shore Limited New York-Chicago.

“In the meantime, I went back to the lounge car to see what was doing there. I was greeted by a young man with the unlikely name of Gage Pray, who was in the process of moving from Mystic, Conn. to San Francisco. He had a miniature tape recorder with him, and asked everyone to speak into the recorder, giving their name and making any other comments they desired. He also took a number of pictures with a throwaway camera, including several of me. Gage told me that he would be writing a story of the trip, so I gave him my address and asked him to send a copy of the story to me. There were a number of other people hanging out there (including a man who lived in Hackensack), and I was not really tired, so I decided to remain in the lounge car for awhile. Gage had taken a number of trips around the country on Amtrak, and loved the experience of traveling by train and meeting new people.”

The fact that those stories and recordings are gone, stolen in the car that was stolen, makes it all the more marvelous somehow and I am thinking of the rolls of film in the camera bag that was stolen from my Sentra on the first day I had it in 2002, when I didn’t know you have to hold the handle to lock it. There were three or four rolls, exposed, unprocessed, most particularly photographs I had taken with Adam in a field near the Gorge. I was naked, doing cartwheels; I would love to have such a ridiculous record of my body at that time, now. But the images that have gone missing, those in Poughkeepsie, the Beck show at Brixton, Derek Mahon standing on the sidewalk near the Groucho Club (the one time in my life I took a whole roll of photographs with no roll of film inside the camera) left an imprint like a palm slap on my brain. There are some faces from grade school, David Grobin, Jamie Salvietti; later, when I was already back in Romania escaping a sensible career, medication and a certain kind of spiritual demise, Kroon died in his sleep in New Haven. No matter how much time passes, I can’t quite believe that light isn’t hitting those faces somewhere in the world.

But I had meant to write about this place, about the step next to the wrought iron gate, about the glasses of gin in the planter and about the way being in a bar in a big city, after hours, anchors you into the heart of that city, in the way that maybe only receiving mail in the post can anchor you, saying gently YOU ARE HERE… I meant to write about all that and not about people who were marked for death.

In A Moveable Feast, the time of the telling is already going off somehow, and even without the greedy fingers of the narrator reaching back from a later present, you can tell that things turned rotten. It is a heartbreaking device, the way Hemingway holds his love for Hadley in suspense, as if writing could retrieve it.

The perfect last days in New York were poised to spill over in more obvious ways, but I could wait and write about that later. I walked from Bar 6 to the Strand to get a new copy of A Moveable Feast, to replace the one I’d finished and left that morning at Arlo & Esme. The day was clear and bright and I was a little drunk already and bracing myself through a sweet, unconquerable exhaustion. I was going to meet Danica at her office in the Flatiron Building, but first I had to go to the Strand. I love the Strand because the books are reasonably priced but mostly because of its name, which makes me think of public swimming pools in Europe. They have the same name, pronounced “shtrand,” which is a beautiful word, shallow as the shallow end is shallow, and painted in primary colors. You can’t compare the strand to the sea, though people have tried to take the depth out of the sea in places such as Brighton and Mamaia and Metaponto. But there is an urban bliss about the strand and its diving boards and beach balls and peals of laughter not drowned out by the sound of waves. Some even have manufactured waves and those are the best.

The best kind of solitude is walking in New York, tipsy in the afternoon, having left the side of someone you love as much as you can in the moment and given the circumstances, then spending only what you have in your pocket, on only what you need, in a good bookstore that is as bright and bustling as a public swimming pool.

THURSDAY, JUNE 19, 2008

Home is Someone Else’s

My walking/running route takes me up Vermont into Griffith Park, up the sandy slope towards the Observatory, trespassing around property Gage believed for many years belonged to Alex Trebek, then down through the hills along Glendower and Bonvue, cutting down to Berendo and Los Feliz. I walk when I know I’d be running against myself, and yesterday I walked. I’d been cooped up with sun poisoning, and when I stepped out of my building the neighborhood boomed around me, the traffic, the jasmine, the wet warmth gathering between my new and old skin, a taste of stale death/boredom/bacteria, I knew I’d been putting myself through some kind of purification.

The video I made is rendering as I am writing this. It runs methodically through each frame and each transition, and I wait to be amazed if it goes through.

I wasn’t expecting the commotion at Griffith Park, which was being flooded by hipsters in cars and on foot, as if on some pilgrimage to the Greek Theater, where, I found out at the top, Rilo Kiley was playing. I was wearing one of my new Goodwill finds, a cream colored t-shirt that says “ROCK ON” in a script meant to look like rocks; I was carrying electrolyte-enhanced water. The young woman climbing the sidewalk in front of me had the whitest, longest legs I’d ever seen, and I video taped her striding ostrich gait for a few minutes until I lost her among the other concert-goers. For a while I toyed with the idea of melting into the crowd, slipping through the gaps in the fence, bounding over the ticket-collectors, flying down from the nose-bleeder aisles to the front row and listening to the well-meaning suggestion written on my t-shirt. I settled in the parking lot behind the stands, next to a motorcycle that said “EAT SHIT” on the back. The sound was good and free and all mine.

I sat on the curb listening to a couple of songs by Benji Hughes before getting on with my walk. Already I’d be getting home after sunset. A couple of weeks ago, I was there skimming over the surface of the vast galaxy of bulbs below; for every one of them there was a word to which I no longer had access, because that is the way things are when you are sitting in the dark next to someone you’ve partly invented, but love, nevertheless — or therefore. There were coyotes of course and it sounded like a real fiesta at Alex Trebek’s house ’til a voice came on the loudspeaker and said “Attention: The Griffith Observatory is now closed,” and I knew the park service would neither be held responsible nor rescue us were we to be attacked by mountain lions. The gate next to the billionaire’s house on Glendower said “NO PARKING ANYTIME,” and “NO TRESPASSING” and “CONTINUE TO DREAM AT YOUR OWN RISK.” I did, and since then, something has been falling down that hill hitting every cactus on the way down, tumbling noiselessly into private swimming pools.

But I like to walk there. I like to say “This house is great,” to friends when they come with me for the first time, and we are passing the house that is all stilts and wire and the lightest-looking concrete you have ever imagined, or the house that is all windows, or the “Mayan Temple” (Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House). I like less to say, but do, “These houses make me sick,” when passing by one of those other horrors. It isn’t size that bothers me, although grand scale and poor taste seem to be inextricably linked in these parts. But… spoil the reader, spare the moralizing. I walk through this neighborhood like a street urchin in a free national museum, allowed to enter but kept at a remove, and that ever-imminent alienation may be one of the reasons I love Los Angles. At least, why it suits me right now: I can’t get lost.

And sometimes I can even feel at home. Take for example the little house I passed at twilight as I was climbing up Glendower. Jared once pointed it out because it belonged to family friends. I noticed in the following order: the pink flamingo, the ubiquitous floodlights, the heavy-handed landscaping, the pleasant window above the garage (I imagined it to be pleasant, from the inside), light spilling onto the street from the garage, in which there were paintings on the far wall, and a man with silver hair (presumably the family friend) was working at a table saw– and then, in perfect sequence, I HEARD Beethoven’s 7th coming from somewhere inside the garage.

The video is writing to the disk now, and I worry that the whole first half is missing, and it’s much too late to start all over.

It’s so quiet in the hills that I could hear the Beethoven for a long time. I was already too far down the hill, and it was really getting dark, before I realized that in the stupor of reactions triggered by that scene — a slow, expanding joy; the distinct pleasure that comes from feeding but not over-sating the senses; the bloom of a narrative thread, a beautiful and purely cinematic shot — I had failed to extend a neighborly greeting to the silver-headed man who had unknowingly stirred up such a fuss in my imagination. After all, I had a vague entry, I could have mentioned Jared, or not at all, I could have just stopped, as people do, and said, “Hello.” Next thing I knew I was running down the secret steps from Bonvue. I don’t know why not talking to the man in the garage blasting Beethoven’s 7th was causing me pain, but I wanted to put as much physical distance between him and me so that it really would be too far to turn back in such a late hour. I distinctly felt that I had failed to rise to some small, but secretly grand occasion. Perhaps because that scene had been conceived deliberately to make me feel at home.

MONDAY, JUNE 30, 2008

LA Sunday Approaches Perfection

The perfection of yesterday came with no warning. I’d gone to sleep with the sound of Doris Day’s voice belting “Che Sara, Sara” at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, echoing across the gravestones where the stars lie “asleep in Jesus,” then in my head. I’d woken up at 1, 4 and 6:30 AM. My sleep has been bad for weeks, interrupted either by telephone calls from across the country or by their lack thereof. I wake definitively at 7, biting the outer lip of a dream, in which I am pulling an elongated, glowing cyst from my left breast.

The translation of the first three chapters of Dan’s novel is nearly done; we go over the final revisions over instant messenger, but at 9 o’clock I call Jacob. “We are going to the beach.”

Lately, if I can help it, I drive West on the 10 late at night, flying, the way Alexandra and I flew a few months ago, blasting The Knife and Depeche Mode. Only now it’s Feist or The National, and it’s a little different on a Sunday morning, the buzz is missing and and the music can’t surround me in all that brightness the way it does in the dark, but it is nearly as good, still flying West, then up the PCH, to El Matador! Jacob, whose voice and laughing and manner remind me of Gage’s, pulls out an unexpected bag of baby carrots.

I laugh in my sleep, people tell me. How could I not? Everything is funny.

At El Matador Jacob and I talk about the years in between, turn the pages to a book with Indian circus photographs, admiring those dark, glistening eyes, marveling at the contorted appendages, the gentle light. The water is warm now and so the kelp forests flourish and draw nearer to the land and when we come up from under a wave we are garlanded and tangled in the grass. Jacob is very white and boney. He breaks the surface, and he has something of that rock, its bleached head shining in the soft focus behind him. I get rolled a couple of times, and when I try to release the pressure by holding my nose and blowing into it, there is a sound of dolphins in both ears.

We drive back to Santa Monica, where I meet up with Blake and Conor for our first workshop on script analysis. I’d like to take it seriously, but something in Conor’s metered exposition makes me want to throw spit-balls and pass notes and screw around in the back of the class. I want to make him laugh. We go to a screening of an Irish film, well-written, good “craic,” as they’d say, but it’s not cinema. Afterwards, I am racing home on Wilshire, the feeling is real and sweet, I like my skin and salty exhaustion, and there is a half a pack of menthols in the pocket of a coat I haven’t worn since I was in New York.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

Sleepers and Boys Throwing Snowballs

“Of all the epiphenomena, you were my favorite.” This is a line — or the title of a poem written by a young man named Flynn, who, I found at some point from Kamran, had died. I have been trying today, without much success, to recover his other name; all I’ve got is Flynn, and I don’t know if that’s his first or last. But I do remember that the poems I’d read of his were very good, and had lines that stuck like ice picks in Trotsky’s head, the one about the epiphenomena, or “Isn’t that wildebeest coming too near us father…?” Which made me think of other ice picks, too: “maybe I’d like to take a good whack at the pinata,” a line from a poem written by a Westover student whose name I don’t recall at all. My memory may have taken some liberties with the exact word choices, but the poetic facts are there, intact. And if a bullet plowed through the playground of my synapses, as it does through Anders’ in the Tobias Wolff story, what would be the phrase that I’d remember? It might be “Are you speaking French?” what the French girl asked after I had tried to explain to her, at the request of the flight attendant, why our plane was going back to Heathrow instead of continuing on to New York. It was September 11, 2001, and we were misinformed and terrified, releasing fuel into the atmosphere so we could land, and I knew even at that moment what I’d remember most vividly about that day would be the way her face soured at the offensive broken French coming out of my mouth, and my humiliation. Later, I read an article in the New York Times and found another phrase that seemed a likely contender for permanence — and I wasn’t wrong — written by someone who’d been sitting in a cafe in the East Village that morning. He wrote, “Then suddenly, all the pigeons in the street flew up.”

Poetic facts lodge themselves rather unassumingly into the wrinkles of my brain also as images, and I have to wonder what effect my compulsive photograph-taking has on my ability to access them freely out of my imagination. Some photographs feel as if they were my own projections. Gage and Jacob sleeping, no more than 45 minutes after Gage’s arrival from New York, Jacob in his T-shirt and jeans, bundled in disheveled sheets on the bed, Gage relegated awkwardly to a corner of the couch, although the whole thing was free, the entropy around them almost visibly in motion in the diffuse afternoon light. And that red spare gas tank. What does it mean, sitting there bright as a lollipop, its phallic spout pointing…

Maybe because he inspires mischief and play, Gage excites my poetic brain, and proximity is a powerful aphrodisiac. This time the three of us sat under Alex Trebek’s house, and I got sicker as Gage and Jacob went on endlessly about the differences between New York and Los Angeles. We’d just been peeling around downtown at 2 o’clock in the morning, screaming through the 2nd St. tunnel in Jacob’s pick-up truck. Once. Twice. Three times. Gage and I went sliding down the railings of all the escalators around Hope and Grand, with Jacob and the majestic bronze nude watching over us like some complicit chaperons. Los Angeles is a vortex of lost pairs of Ray Ban sunglasses, and “different” is a euphemism — the woman with the LED-rimmed sunglasses at the H.M.S. Bounty is “different,” the ever-bare-chested-daisy-duked Vietnam vet cruising Sunset Junction with his chihuahua is “different,” yes — but why compare it all to New York? Unless to define both cities in the juxtaposition.

Sitting between Gage and Jacob, I meant to define something else: boys throwing snowballs. It’s become a short-hand phrase I use to describe a childhood angst of mine, the feeling I used to have watching boys hurling snowballs at each other, and especially if it was at night. There always arose an indescribable yearning to participate in what felt to me like a secret language, brutish, playful, free. My aim was good, and once in a while I could throw as far. Never as hard. But if a boy threw one at me, he couldn’t win; if it was as hard as he would throw it at another boy, he’d catch hell for “hitting a girl,” and if he lobbed it or missed deliberately… well, I might be relieved, but the purpose, and I, would be left defeated. Sitting between the two boys in Griffith Park, or in the truck, my head on Jacob’s shoulder and my arm woven under Gage’s, passing beers and cigarettes between us, I was a fool to think I could define my childhood angst. All I could do was relive it.

Fitting, somehow, that the photographs Gage took of me were lost. In fact, they never existed. I am the camera.

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 2008

Galatea East and West

I live in a rear apartment of a 1920′s New York style apartment building, behind which is an elementary school. At 10:30 in the morning, children are screaming in the courtyard. I remember recess. Today, I realized it was raining (rain in Los Angeles! pure magic) because the pitch of the screaming suddenly jumped a few decibels. I heard that first, and then I heard the rain drops. In the past, I’ve mistaken certain sounds for rain drops, but it always turns out to be something else, window fans, someone rummaging through plastic bottles in the alley; I’d given up on rain, but the heightened screaming in the schoolyard could mean no other thing. It must be exciting to be a child in sudden rain during recess at a grade school in Los Angeles.

I know the kind of stubbornness required here, plodding forward without considering whether it is any good. Bulldoggedness. The rest is vanity. Who is waiting at the other end of this line, tapping her fingers…? I am.

The atmosphere of this place that feels closest to home than anywhere I’ve lived before is made up of these things: the schoolyard screamers in the late morning — and this is why they make their way into the textured folds of daydreaming — the chatter of the birds in the afternoon, the chatter and bad music of the Italian guy whenever he is home, the cricket frogs at night. It’s the rumbling and the smell of laundry from below, the flat light peeling off the brick face opposite my window. I could use another window. One curtain hangs in the window; a matching one hangs from the heating pipe, where a window should be, if not for earthquake reinforcements. I can’t stand to see that wall from outside, my phantom second window bricked up as if to keep the gypsies of Madrid from squatting. I would have welcomed that gypsy sun every afternoon and would have bought whatever it was selling. Ack! Afternoon to late afternoon, my favorite light, my favorite time, save Sundays, all day, and I want to be back in the New York City of my brain, standing on the sidewalk outside Bar 6, smoking with a girl named Aiden. That hour, that city, that sidewalk, that girl, unbeknownst to all of them, have come to represent a minor paradise before a minor fall.

I spent the afternoon banging away on my powder blue Webster XL-500 — grace be to the proliferation of makes and models — bounding back and forth between it and the electric robot, checking facts, definitions, spellings, checking my temperature and the temperature in Bakersfield. It is a worthwhile experiment, alternating between the two machines; I can actually feel the doors to the other world closing, to the sound of sand draining through the waistline of an hourglass. Quickly! Leave the robot and resume the tapping, return to the impression of ink as a consequence of tapping. Is it the action of the keys? Is it the sound? That sound is like a zip code 90027 YOU ARE TYPING IN LOS FELIZ.

What is relevant to LA, to elections and financial crises? We could start with definitions. Or the correct pronunciation of Aeschylus. Or favorite aphorisms by Sam. Let’s do it backwards: “Poetry is an amazingly courageous thing. To be sitting down at a table, still as engaged as you’d be in bed with your muse — very hard.” ES-kyuh-luss. Haptic: adj. 1. relating to or based on the sense of touch 2. characterized by a predilection for the sense of touch.

I pulled off the covers and moved into the pathway of the sun. The books in my friend’s room were stacked, it seemed, in no particular order, and yet their order had the effect of a kind of meditation. Gogol resting on a volume of Richard Feynman lectures. Rachel Carson and Chico Buarque — who knew he writes fiction — Italo Calvino and Alexis de Tocqueville. One gets the point. Since I can’t endow the sun with fingers, much less curiosity, I’ll say that other fingers in their haptic curiosity ran coolly from a shoulder to the back of a thigh, a line that, had it been drawn in graphite, would have been a soft, even-weighted contour of human topography. Shoulder, spine, buttock, thigh. I felt like Galatea. Not the original, loved by Pygmalion, who lost her name among the rubble. The Galatea who claimed her milkwhite definition, rewriting her own story: her name has always been there, alongside Pygmalion’s. Sunlight traced a continuous vein in the marble; the touch quickened the stone, which arched like a spring-pole, snapped and came to. Voila. Good morning. Santa Monica.

I like those stacked books, that light, that room on 10th St., free of complication, chantage and cliche, free of little notes on mirrors saying, “The truth is we’re afraid to look into the pools of each others’ beings.” Bah.

I asked Jacob, “Are you afraid to look into the pool of my being?”

“You don’t scare ME,” he said.

Leave a Comment so far
Leave a comment

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Hollywood Trembles on the Verge of Tears

Recent Posts

Pages

Categories

Archives

Blogroll