My Hollywood (19 page)

Claire
ALL THE CHRISTMAS PARTIES

Will walked straight into school carrying his lunchbox, trying to do everything right. I lingered at drop-off, hoping for some warmth, maybe a new friend I didn’t find, but enjoying the fringes anyway, child-made pictures on the wall. When the teacher closed the door, I walked home past a high school and slipped into the back of the auditorium while the orchestra tuned. They were practicing
Firebird
that fall. “Okay, let’s take it from measure one thirty-six,” their patient conductor said.

At home, I made black coffee, carried it with me to my hot room, and stayed five hours. Even though I’d had Lola, the time when Will was at school felt different. My symphony eked out, measure by measure.

Finally, in November, I was down to fingerings. I sat at the kitchen table with a metronome and a laptop, notating the score. Quarter note 132. There were hundreds of details. Making sure the dynamics were correct in all the parts. I found a crescendo without a mark at the end. Then I went over all of the balances. One of my teachers in school told me, a wind instrument is balanced in weight by twelve to sixteen strings. Then I had a glitch and had to get the computer guy. After all that I changed the instrumentation with Finale. Finally, I pressed
PRINT PARTS
. It was amazing. You used to have to copy the parts yourself by hand. I carried my stack of paper to Kinko’s and faxed it in.

“You probably won’t hear until after the holidays,” Paul said as we strolled on our main street Saturday morning. We bought little treats—coffee for me, an ice blended for him, a chocolate spelt muffin for Will—and pushed the stroller in and out of shops.

“Stop doing that,” Paul said. My fingers were going on my other arm. Bach unaccompanied cello, which the guy in Australia thinks was written by his second wife. Anna Magdalena. Paul didn’t like Will to see. He thought it made me look crazy. I stopped when Paul was there, but I’d long ago given up on Will not knowing.

Marriage seemed a huge machine, plowing forward impervious to my flimsy bubbles of feeling. Every day, I woke up to Paul’s familiar noises in the kitchen. I kept the crush like a pill at the bottom of my bag.

We ran into Jeff and Helen on the street, and they came along into a store where Paul had seen a dress he wanted me to try on. They added romance to the day, I suppose, as did the high winter clouds. The friendship between the four of us made being grown-up calm and exciting at the same time, like a drink. My crush, which had once been alive, causing agitation, had stilled.

A dress. A frill. I was making progress. For a year, I’d run each day. A month ago, I told Lola to stop buying the twelve-packs. “Why, you do not need anymore? Good,” she said, with what felt like warmth, an oblong suspended in the air. I moved the last package to the upper part of the closet with the white breakfast-in-bed tray we’d gotten as a wedding present. Our son was three, in school already.

I slid on the dress, pulling my stomach in, rising a little on tiptoes. I saw Helen notice my feet, toenails just the color of toenails. Women here polished.

“What do you think?” I said. “Be honest.”

“Oh, it’s great,” she said, frowning. “Just take it in a little here.” She pinched the fabric with authority, then went to ask the salesgirl to pin it.

After she left, I asked Paul, “Are my feet okay?”

He looked at me. “Are you crazy?”

But I slipped on my clogs before stepping out.

“You can wear it to all the Christmas parties,” Helen said.

“You sound like an old holiday card.”

“That’s a dress that’ll make you feel like the prettiest girl in the room,” Jeff said.

“Not a feeling I’ve had.”

Helen had put on a watch. Jeff picked up her wrist and assessed it. What had ever happened to those earrings?

Paul extracted his credit card, taking the matter of payment seriously. I was better off with him. “See that woman,” I whispered. “My grandmother had that hair.
I’m a silverette
, she used to say.”

A happy afternoon in Los Angeles, 1994.

Tom brought me two bare-root roses, setting them on the porch. I asked my mother if she wanted to see the dress.

“Just great,” she said, when I came out in it, over jeans. “Wear it while you’ve still got the good arms.”

I asked her about the goose.

“He’s gone,” she said.

“Well, that’s good.”

“I suppose.”

“And you can always visit.”

“Not really,” she mumbled, as if talking to herself. “Not yet.”

Tom shook his head, hands in pockets, looking at the ground as he usually did. His feet shuffled, in the same shoes he always wore.

“Which place did you choose?”

She looked up, her mouth peculiar. “None, really.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, he’s in heaven now!”

“She had him put down,” Tom said. “She didn’t tell me either.”

“But you had those three places. Why not the farm?”

She shook her head, wincing. “They seemed nice at first. But then when I really saw the way they treated the animals, I wouldn’t have left him there. I think they would have eaten him.”

She’d once talked about giving me away. She’d described the families she was considering. They’d sounded great.

The goose had never acquired a name. It remained only The Goose.

“We’ve got to go now—Bromeliad Society meeting. And then we’re going to eat at Twin Dragons. Do you want me to leave them here?” Tom had dragged the two roses up to the door. I was still wearing my new dress.

“Just don’t plant them in front,” my mother said. “People will steal the blooms.” Tom and I looked at each other. She carried a scissors in her bag when we walked. She clipped roses and hid them in the bottom of Will’s stroller.

I got up at five and baked blueberry corn muffins from a recipe I’d scribbled in my twenties on the flyleaf of the
Tassajara Bread Book
. I was taking Willie over to play at Helen’s, and I had to be careful now; Bing was his only friend in the class. Holiday cards cluttered their table, photographs with scrolly
Season’s Greetings, Merry Christmas
, or
Happy Hanukkah
printed at the bottom.

“This makes a hundred twenty-seven!” Helen said, opening an envelope. “Jeff says pretension is the cardinal sin in the TV world.”

“And there’s the difference,” Jeff said himself, opening the refrigerator and grabbing a kefir, “between network television and the movies.” He took a Hanukkah card out of my hand (three boys, in identical white turtlenecks), assessed, and discarded it. “Why bother,” came his verdict, meaning not
Why bother at all?
but
Why bother if you can’t do a better job than this?
Which pretty much summed up my feelings too. We didn’t do holiday cards. But Jeff had Helen. And she’d bought a small masterpiece.

She probably would have trooped off to Sears too, if she’d married someone else. But she’d squatted, a hot day in October, on a Silverlake photographer’s cement floor, shaking her keys, making faces, then begging and finally bribing Bing to sit still in his reindeer cap. In the black-and-white photo, embedded in construction paper, the photographer had captured Bing, hat aslant, in an expression of awe.

I ran my finger over the seam where construction paper met photo. “How’d they embed it like that?”

“Took me a long time.”

She’d made them herself! I stared at the card. I wanted one like this of Will.

“First, I glued the photo on a piece of green paper. And then, with a straight edge …”

Jeff walked out while she was talking. Lucy stood at the sink, sticking eucalyptus branches, buttons still on, among red leaves and hydrangeas. Why didn’t Lola make flowers? She had time now. Will was in school until two. Chest up, belly high, Lucy carried her vase into the living room. I complimented her and she giggled. “In our place, Claire, we learn that in school. Flower arrangement!”

Helen continued to open mail. She and Jeff did things in front of people that most of us do alone. Maybe that was a sign of success. A photograph fell out of an envelope,
Helen, age 5
penciled on the white border. Girls stood at a ballet barre, Helen, age 5 concentrating so hard her tongue stuck out. Tummies, flat feet, legs like isosceles triangles: none of those little girls would become ballerinas. The room eclipsed them; an old scarred floor, a tin ceiling, and huge windows. The kids’ tuition probably helped real dancers pay the rent.

“I went every Saturday morning for like ten years.” She’d had lessons and tutors. Now she crumpled the picture in a ball, after her mother saved it. She didn’t want
him
to see those thighs. “Why ballet? Those Upper West Side moms couldn’t have imagined us actually growing up to be dancers while they sat sipping their Zabar’s to-go’s.”

We drank nonfat lattes, ice blendeds, a dozen small consolations. But for what, exactly, were mothers always being consoled?

Those women must have hoped that dance would teach their daughters poise.

“From the gypsies they learned grace and speed,” Helen said.

“Grace and Speed
, a love story,” Jeff added, passing to the refrigerator.

“At the end of the hour, one by one, we had to
chaîné
across the room, spotting.”

“What’s that?” I’d never taken.

“You look at a spot until the very last moment, then you whip your head around to find it again, so you almost never lose it, or for just a blink. I was screaming at Bing and Simon when they ran ahead of me in two different directions at the Farmers Market, and I realized
that’s what it was for
. Training. For never losing them.”

Bing and Simon
. Bing liked Simon better now. Better than our Will.

Helen wore a black dress with a scalloped neckline and Jeff had on jeans. When we’d first moved here, I’d made the mistake of assuming that if the guys wore jeans, I could too. I stepped onto the porch in my new dress. Will ran to me and hung on my knees. I lost my hands in his curls. That night, I wouldn’t have traded anything.

“No, Mommy, no, please!” His voice arched over the still, bluish lawn when I handed him to Lola and headed for the car. She carried him overshoulder like a log—I watched them as we drove up the palm-lined street, to the mountains. The palms tilted toward the beach. Every time I drove up our street, I felt like straightening them as they ticked by.

“Who’s going to be there?” I tried to forget Will’s cry.

“I think it’ll be big,” Paul said.

“Not just the hamburger-and-hot-dog crowd?” That’s what I called the TV people; their lack of pretension extended to party food.

“She’s actually supposed to be a great cook,” Helen said.

I sank down in the dark red leather of the convertible. “Let’s keep driving. Antelope Valley.” Grass Valley, Apple Valley. Such pretty California names.

Jeff pulled to a stop in front of what you’d have to call a mansion; it was too wide to be a house. He turned off the ignition. “You guys ever get scared right before you walk in?” I kind of fell in love with him all over again.

Paul had a raring-to-go look. “You believe people our age own this?” With his pilot scheduled to shoot, Paul would finally be somebody to these people.

Kids darted through a huge room. Oh, I thought, we could have brought Will.

Paul and I walked over to the fireplace, where three guys from his show stood, hands in their pockets, looking daunted under the oversized mantel. They wrote comedy, but you’d never know it now. They all
wanted
to write for TV; they hadn’t failed as screenwriters or
New Yorker
cartoonists. They thought the funniest stuff written now aired on prime-time television and felt aggrieved that the
New York Times
and their parents still thought Art meant movies. Nonetheless, they peeked over at Jeff, standing with Buck Price and Andy North. The directors
did
seem cooler than the TV guys, whose pants looked too distinctly pressed. Buck Price had on a vintage bowling shirt; Andy North slouched in a Patagonia jacket and looked like his wife cut his hair. They were guys who’d had girlfriends in high school; as if to prove it, Andy had married his—Alison North, who was a foot shorter and tucked under his long arm. “You married her before you knew you were going to be Andrew North,” I overheard Jeff say once, meaning
before you could get actresses
. But they had four kids and stood laughing together. Buck had married Sky Tucci, the fine-boned actress who’d found her ring in the sand and wouldn’t cook, but I didn’t see her here.

The TV guys felt the movie people snubbed them and maybe they did. The movie directors thought their work was more important but the big TV writers lived in mansions. “Wow,” Andy said, about the built-in stereo, as if we were in somebody’s parents’ house. The TV guys worked together thirteen hours a day in a run-down trailer on the Lot that had stained carpeting and lavish quantities of Snackwells, but they looked awkward here. The homes, you got the feeling, were all the wives’ doing.

Jack, the highest-paid joke writer in television, ambled over, bald and frowning. He had a wincing quality I liked. I tried to nudge Paul into a conversation with him.

Paul began a story about his grandmother. When Jack relented a smile, I looked around. I’d cooked one meal for quite a few people here. Across the room, Jeff’s fingers absentmindedly riffled a fern. He plucked off a frond, stuck it in his mouth, and gulped. I laughed, making Paul and Jack look up. Jeff could still thrill me. That was kind of a relief.

The hostess stir-fried at an enormous stove. Not counting her maid, she was the only woman in the kitchen who had a job. She was president of Fox TV. Everyone knew, though, that she
had to work;
her husband made experimental films. Barefoot, her hair tied back, wearing what used to be called a muumuu, she seemed to have given up on looks. Could I?

“Can we just give up on looks?” I whispered to Helen.