My cousin said it was possible for her to “just put things out of my mind”; these days, that it was a technique she had come to through practice and willpower. “Whenever something really awful is going on,” she told me when I spoke about jealousy to her, “I just put it out of my mind and go about doing what I’m supposed to be doing.”

  “But what about being wracked by doubts?” I asked.

  “I don’t allow that,” she said. “I’ve practiced for over a year now. It’s not simple, you know, it’s a technique—you have to practice. And sometimes as I’m mailing a letter in the post office, I’ll notice this tugging in my stomach and I’ll remember that something’s wrong, but I won’t allow myself to think about what’s wrong; I simply work on undoing the knot in my stomach. And I relax. It’s the most difficult thing I’ve ever learned how to do,” she added.

  “Did you practice because someone told you, or what?” I asked.

  “It’s a group I go to called Recovery. The whole idea of this system is that you don’t do deep analysis on the cause, you just work on the symptoms. Like for obsessions, a wife who’s jealous of her husband and who calls him twenty-five times a day at work? Well, in Recovery she’d be encouraged to call him only fifteen times a day. And then ten times and then three until finally the obsession will have nothing to feed on because an obsession needs to be nourished with acts and deeds.”

  “It does?” I asked.

  “It seems to,” she said, “because things like jealous obsession, if you don’t give in to them, if you try not to give in to them and succeed even a little bit, well, sooner or later you begin succeeding more and more, and what takes their place is self-esteem. So that the lady who only calls her husband three times a day can’t call him twenty-five times anymore because she’s got so much self-esteem that it makes her feel too good to jeopardize it.”

  “And this works?” I asked, although it sounded as if it would; it sounded as if it was hard enough to do that it was probably good for you. Anything difficult, as far as I’ve been able to determine, seems to work, and anything easy is just kidding yourself. Not giving in to an obsession, not driving past the darkened window five times a night but only three, has the sensible, difficult ring to it of something that works.

  In our romantic lives, these moments of jealousy, which scorch our lover’s initials into our flesh and seem to brand us, often vanish into thin air sooner or later. But maybe, if we don’t cave in to them, they’ll vanish sooner, and we’ll be able sooner to try to describe what happened with phrases that fall apart in our hands, meaningless descriptions in voices clouded with scraps of holocaust, memorized episodes that have no context unless you’re inside the story trying to live through it. Once you’re out, all there are are empty spaces strewn in the past where the pain was too great and red-hot jealousy tore through our rooms, or why else would we have painted them all black? Nothing remains, as we look back, but a smile, and “Oh, yes, one night I crouched under a window . . .” But it’s a window too dark to peer through, and you find yourself saying, “I never knew real jealousy. . . .” It elapses into long ago.

  Slumming at the Rodeo Gardens

  It seems that the only people on TV who don’t dye their hair these days are recently released captives. Of course, hostages are supposed to look tormented, but everyone else on TV from senators seems unable to stop at anything. This mentality, alas, is really bad in L.A., where the light is so pitiless.

  If you want to see all this striving against the ravages of being human in state-of-the-art proportions, go to the Rodeo Gardens on any Saturday afternoon; it is there that body lifts, skin peels, fat suctioning, teeth bonds, and collagen flourish in the gracious noonday shade.

  It would almost look corrupt, except to be corrupt you have to have once not been, and nobody in this place was ever that.

  (Except the busboys, maybe.)

  Perhaps I’m being too personal about this exterior flaunting of wealth—those watches, that jewelry, those clothes from Rodeo Drive to wear shopping for clothes on Rodeo Drive. But if you’re not used to this, it’s truly a scare to see women with Ann Blyth–young faces on bodies that, if you brush against them, don’t spring back.

  Anyway, it’s gotten me down lately because what everyone says nowadays is true—all people talk about or do anymore is money. And it’s not just my friend Warren, who married for money and now never reads a book or laughs or helps anyone but only tells you how much things cost, and who spent his engagement celebration sequestered in the Rodeo Gardens so his ex-girlfriend wouldn’t find out until it was too late.

  I kept telling her he was like that. I told her, “Deep down, he’s really shallow.”

  “Deep down,” she laughed, “we’re all a little shallow.”

  “But he’s not kidding,” I insisted. And he wasn’t. Deep down he was seriously shallow.

  And when he returned from his honeymoon (the woman he married was twelve years his senior and took along her Yorkies), he left a message on the ex-girlfriend’s machine saying in a strangled gasp, “I still love you.”

  “Does this mean we can look forward to a divorce, Warren?” I asked when I saw him a week later, looking like he woke up screaming. But he just said, “No, no, no, I’m getting used to her.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  What has nearly happened to him is the exact replica of what happens to those twenty-three-year-old manicurists who marry fifty-five-year-old TV stars—those bouncy youthful brunettes who become frozen coral-colored women with chipless beige nail polish and take on all the outer trappings of the women their husband’s age who frequent the Rodeo Gardens. One woman I met there that day gave me the actual willies when she spoke; she was so listless and shaky.

  “Who is that poor lady?” I asked my friend Monica, the baby-shower honoree.

  “What poor lady?” she asked. “Oh, Celia? What do you mean poor? She’s rich. Very very rich.”

  “But she’s so old!” I cried.

  “She’s not old; she’s thirty-four.”

  “Younger than me?”

  “Oh, well.” My friend squinted, observing her friend closely. “She’s married to this man in his eighties. Maybe she’s just polite.”

  I was glad I wasn’t seated next to Celia, because what is there to say to someone younger than you who marries for money, except “How do you like your money?”

  Warren is becoming frozen, too. All the life’s going out of him; it might almost be okay if the life going out of him were channeling into his new bride’s bloodstream and making her look well rested. But instead, she looks worse.

  That day, on my way into the room where the shower was being catered, I caught a glimpse of Wanda, the woman Warren married, and it was like being squirted with ammonia, she looked so miserable. Of course, Warren was miserable too, sitting beside her, but he was too bent on not looking married to look quite so unhappy. He looked, as Monica pointed out, like he was wearing a FOR SALE sign. Still.

  It was the “still” that made me laugh, since he had always looked as if he were for sale—at least until he fell in love with Emily, the one he called the minute he got off the plane from this honeymoon. With Emily, Warren convinced lots of people that he actually didn’t care about worldly booty and liked having fun instead. They spent a lot of time eating hot dogs on the French beach in Malibu, taking long drives downtown to hear mariachi bands, and having dinners together with too much cream and butter on the pasta and pecan pie for dessert. (They both got fatter, but since they weren’t at the Rodeo, where everyone is in fear for their lives about arteries, no one noticed.) He was much kinder then, and I almost forgot my first impression, that he was for sale.

  I remember the day they met. It was raining in May at this May Day solidarity beatnik party in West Hollywood, with lots of Miles Davis and lots of people who were going to OD or knew someone who recently had. Except poor Warren, who was from Boston and looked like Prince Charming.

  Warren was six-foot-three, and whenever they needed someone who looked like a tennis lay, he’d audition. In fact, he looked more like Robert Redford than Robert Redford, who’s only about five-foot-ten at best. And if it weren’t for the fact that even after years of acting classes, Warren was unable to do a bit on a soap without looking like an in-the-way bystander making the other actors nervous, he would have been a perfect Great Gatsby—lay star.

  Warren had asked me to help him with his career, like all actors will do the minute they bare their souls, so I was taking him slumming, hoping that character would rub off by osmosis. Besides which, I liked him because he read everything, could laugh in panic-stricken situations, and he paid for the smog test on my car—or loaned me the money in the most graceful way. He had noblesse oblige. I tried not to be in love with him, which was only possible because I was already heart-broken over someone else. So we were just friends. It was fun having him at this party because he was so . . . tall.

  Warren and I were talking to two writers from New York who were exercising their brilliance over how stupid L.A. was, when suddenly the door opened and I saw Emily, closing a red umbrella, sprinkling raindrops on the cringing beatniks.

  Emily was too much.

  I mean, for one thing, her body. . . .

  She was almost always too much in any situation, and today was no exception. It took a moment just getting over how spectacular she looked. One bitchy lawyer girl always said, “Emily dresses like an incipient bag lady.” But she was obviously jealous. To me, Emily looked like a Lartigue photograph of one of those beauties in the 1920s from the French Riviera. She wore huge baggy white sailor-y pants, a tiny clingy-tight powder-blue T-shirt, wedgies that made her six feet tall, and her hair was tousled and wet from the rain. A lot of men had lewd conversations about Emily because they were so afraid of her.

  “Emily!” Our host Gary leered, because her nipples showed from the cold. “You came.”

  “But I can’t stay,” she said, looking around until she saw Warren, whom she turned away from, and then, unable to stop herself, looked back at, suddenly going all girlish and idiotic—in a cute way, of course—and she added, “. . . unless you made chili.”

  “Just for you,” Gary said.

  I remembered Warren telling me that his mother was almost six feet tall, so maybe that’s why he wasn’t afraid of her. But the next thing I knew, Emily came up to us, ignoring him with a vengeance, and said, “Eve, my God, thank God, thank heavens you’re here, can you give me a ride home, my car . . .”

  (She was not looking at Warren.)

  “You’re Emily Bower, aren’t you?” Warren asked politely.

  “Yes, I . . .”

  “I remember you, we met ten years ago in New York, you were with those Warhol people and I wanted to talk to you, but I was too corny.”

  “Oh . . .” She looked at him, observed his Brooks Brothers posture—tried to hide the cardiac arrest his physical presence was doing to her—and said, “But I like things that are too corny.”

  “Maybe I still am,” he replied, and I could feel him rise to the occasion; fun-fun-fun was beginning to fill his heart and soul. And, at that moment, I realized that maybe Warren wasn’t so shallow, if he could see the point of Emily.

  “I read all your restaurant pieces,” Warren said, trying not to lean right into her, though she was having trouble keeping a civilized distance herself. “They always make me laugh.”

  “Oh,” she said, unable to think up anything brilliant—or more brilliant than “Thanks.”

  “Can I get you . . . ?” By this time, Warren seemed to have melted into her wavelength, and they broke away from everyone else, wandering out of the house—even though it was still drizzling—and for the next hour or so, every time I looked outside, there were Emily and Warren standing under a Jean Cocteau-y sad-looking rose arbor, looking into each other’s eyes, talking. Emily, who always looked interesting, today looked like Dominique Sanda from The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. They both looked out of that movie, so far away and long ago.

  Their romance began. It broke into full swing in June when we all went windsurfing in Malibu every Sunday—or at least they did. I sat on the beach reading Italian Vogue, getting over my broken heart in the midst of their overflowing generosity. By July, I was able to plow right into another doomed flirtation with one of those French guys in Malibu, but this time I had the feeling that nothing could go really wrong again—or at least not that summer.

  They used to go for walks at sunset and scare the movie stars—they were so much more radiant.

  Warren actually started getting acting jobs. At first they were just bit parts, but by September he got a week’s work on a sitcom, and Emily and I helped him learn his lines as I watched her infuse him with pride or charm or whatever it is you need if you’re an actor and can’t act and are getting by on star quality.

  And people who had always thought he was a terrible phony suddenly saw that he was sensitive and kind—which, when a guy is six-foot-three and arrogant, is a nice change.

  And Emily, who people had always thought was crazier than a loon, suddenly seemed merely merrily eccentric—a view Warren was positive was true. Emily’s magazine pieces became wise and cosmic, and Vogue asked her to do a big piece on all the restaurants in L.A. and become their West Coast correspondent.

  In the balm of those sunshine days, in a land where winter never raises ugly questions about survival and canning vegetables, fun was all the truth we needed.

  “You are the two most beautiful people in all of Malibu,” I would say as we drove home from the beach, stopping somewhere new each time for dinner, all tan and blond and too L.A. for words.

  “Where’s the Noxzema?” Warren would ask in a panic, unwilling to leave the car without rubbing a lot in, since he was positive it made tans last longer. Camphor filled our hearts, long ago and far away.

  What Emily refers to as The Accident happened when Warren was invited to a cast party for one of those TV shows and there met this rolling-in-dough widow of the executive producer—the woman with the Yorkies, face-lifts, collagen, and skin that had been peeled but not enough—Wanda Lacks.

  Emily and Warren had a fight a couple of weeks after The Accident and didn’t speak to each other for a few days, which must have been why she was so sad when she stopped by my place for dinner. It was the first fight of their romance, and she had no idea how it happened.

  That night got cold all of a sudden—too cold even for October. It was as though summer had ended overnight without so much as a kiss good-bye. So we sat around all bundled up watching TV, when there, on the eleven o’clock news, we saw this horrible publicity thing about a charity event at the Rodeo Gardens, and there was Warren. Warren in a black tuxedo we didn’t know he had, with . . . that woman.

  “But she’s so hideous, so horrible, so ghastly,” Emily moaned, although she and Warren were my age, and really Wanda wasn’t that old; she was just so patched together it made it worse than she was. If it had been Georgia O’Keeffe, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But there was Wanda, coming in from the cold with a lynx cape and Warren. Maybe she came across as so decrepit because her husband, the late one, had been so much her elder. Anyway, the whole thing looked like she had gotten Warren to go with her earrings.

  “You know,” Emily said, “he didn’t just go with her at the last minute. You don’t go to things like that at the last minute; he was invited before. And he knew he was going. He picked a fight with me so it’d look like he just happened to have this tuxedo sitting around waiting to go to this . . . engraved-invitation event.”

  “Do you really . . . ?” I doubted at first.

  But I could see her point. These people had taken weeks to get ready to be dressed up enough; those charity things take months to organize. Warren knew.

  “Oh,” Emily cried, “I’ll never forgive him. Ever.”

  “Why would he do a thing like this?” I wondered, but from the cold winds blowing outside around my apartment, I knew. It was winter now, and fun was a childish consideration. You had to come inside eventually, and it might as well be the Rodeo Gardens.

  November came, and whenever Emily called Warren, he said, “I’m busy.”

  It got colder and colder. It rained. Electricity and phones and cable TV, even regular TV and schools, went out of commission. Cars slid into ravines. People were forced to go to movies or read books by candlelight. The Auto Club Emergency Road Repair Service phone number was busy, busy, busy.

  Emily wept on my couch, her tears mingling with the wet rain on her hair, her jacket, her red umbrella.

  “He’s coming here for my Christmas party,” I told her. “I invited him, he said he’d come.”

  “Oooooo,” she said. Then she thought for a moment. “What’ll I wear?”

  She had lost fifteen pounds over this—which I always envied in a person, someone who got a broken heart and lost weight instead of mainlining See’s semisweet Bordeaux.

  I always thought she was gorgeous, anyway, but now, so fragile and all, she looked like some kind of lily. She was pale from indoor life and moved much more sadly, and the joy Warren had mingled into her blood was drained into the past. Her friend Marika Contompasis (a designer) gave her an incredible sweater, ecru with pale colors woven through it and little pieces of old ribbon, lace, and fabric. Marika gave her a long pleated skirt, off-white, too. Emily had old white shoes, so when she got all dressed for the party, she looked just like a faded photograph of some Henry James croquet virgin.

 

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