The Unspeakable (23 page)

What I'm saying is that contentment is a tall order. Not impossible, but formidable enough to elude most of us most of the time. But there's a trick to it, a master key to all the dead bolts that lock us out of our inner peace. The key to contentment is to live life to the fullest
within the confines of your comfort zone
. Stay in safe waters but plunge as deeply into them as possible. If you're good at something, do it a lot. If you're bad at something, just don't do it. If you can't cook and refuse to learn, don't beat yourself up about it. Celebrate it. Be the best noncook you can be. When asked to bring a side dish to a dinner party, go to the supermarket and get the nicest prepared dish you can afford. If you're feeling poor, get macaroni salad. If you're feeling rich, get a balsamic roasted beet salad or some butternut squash risotto from a gourmet deli, put it in an elegant ceramic serving dish, and present it to the hostess with head held high. If she says, “This is wonderful, did you make it?” you can say, “I made the money to buy it,” or “I made the five-mile trip from my house to the store.” Or you can lie and say you made it, though that comes with the risk of being asked for the recipe.

Of course, for some people, being outside their comfort zone is itself the comfort zone. I'm talking about people who backpack around developing countries with hardly any money, journalists who become addicted to covering wars, and soldiers who become addicted to fighting them. I'm talking about base jumpers who put on “wingsuits” and jump from mountainsides and even helicopters so that they can glide around like flying squirrels for a few minutes and then very possibly crash to their deaths at 120 miles per hour.

Every so often, my husband will call me into the room where he's lying on the couch with his laptop and insist that I watch a YouTube video of “wingmen” soaring around the Swiss Alps.

“How awesome is that?” he will ask.

Ours is a mixed marriage. He says fresh tomato. I say canned tomato paste. He bakes pies from scratch. I am someone who, if I could pick one food to undergo some magical process wherein all calories, sodium, and preservatives were irradiated like tumors, would pick prepackaged cookie dough. Not homemade cookie dough, but the kind that comes in a sausage-shaped roll and has a slight chemical aftertaste. I love that taste. I love eating it raw, never cooked. I love that distant note of polysorbate 60.

Possibly until my early twenties, I thought “baking from scratch” referred merely to baking something at home yourself. If you had asked me, for instance, what cake was made out of I would have said cake mix. The thought of baking a cake without the primary ingredient coming from Duncan Hines was unfathomable. The idea of making frosting with butter and powered sugar instead of buying cans into which you can furtively stick your finger while waiting for the cake to cool seemed to defeat the purpose entirely.

Past a certain age, it becomes tiresome to blame one's deficits on one's parents. The fact that my parents eschewed just about every activity that was not related to the arts—“Just consider yourself lucky you weren't born into a family that goes
camping
,” my mother reminded me more than once—doesn't mean I couldn't have devoted some part of my adult life to seeing past their biases and trying new things. Now in my mid-forties, I've been independent of my parents for more than a quarter century. That's considerably longer than the eighteen years I lived under their jurisdiction. I've had plenty of time to learn the difference between braising vegetables and blanching them. I've had plenty of time to learn how to make risotto or even carve a turkey. That I choose not to says less about my upbringing than it does about my innate recalcitrance. That I have found myself in the prime of life (which is to say early middle age, that evanescent period where relative youth intersects with relative prosperity) in an era of Cronuts and artisanal pickles is both sadly ironic and kind of sweetly perfect.

One of the great pleasures of trends is the option of sitting them out. Being a nonfoodie in a world of heirloom tomato ketchup and chanterelle mushroom omelets means saving time and money that could be spent elsewhere, for instance on Heinz ketchup slathered on greasy diner omelets. Being a nonfoodie isn't necessarily the same as being a picky eater. In many ways, it's the opposite. It's about not being discriminating. It's about being willing to eat pretty much anything. It's about being just as glad to dine on Lipton onion soup casserole in Southern Illinois as raw octopus in Tokyo. It means it's not necessarily a tragedy if you die before making it to Italy (not that it wouldn't be very sad). It means knowing your spouse didn't marry you for your cooking or your ability to pick restaurants. It means respecting food items that are too often denigrated and mocked: Miracle Whip, butter-flavored margarine, baking mixes of all kinds.

My parents were not religious, but we did celebrate Christmas. And every Christmas morning my mother served a marbled coffee cake that had somehow been dubbed “Baby Jesus's birthday cake.” She'd make it the night before and my brother and I would decorate it with plastic Nativity figures, placing Mary and Joseph in the center to suggest a kind of holy wedding cake topper. I'm not sure how many generations back the cake went, but the recipe my mother worked from was in my grandmother's handwriting, where it was called Jewish coffee cake (my grandmother, who probably knew fewer than five Jews throughout her entire life, must have seen it as an exotic delicacy). Later, I worked from a recipe my mother had written out for me, though now I know it by heart. I can't give it away, but I can tell you that it calls for white cake mix, vanilla instant pudding, and a carton of sour cream, among other ingredients available not just at your local supermarket but also probably at your local 7-Eleven. I can also tell you that everyone I've ever made it for has said it's the best coffee cake they've ever tasted. They're right. It's really the best thing in the world.

 

INVISIBLE CITY

It's now been more than a decade since I moved to Los Angeles and I still sometimes feel, as I did back then, vaguely embarrassed about it. The very act of coming here seems like the ultimate cliché. Even if you arrive for the most mundane, non-Hollywood reason—to go to Cal Tech or to open a dental practice or because your pharmaceutical sales job has transferred you to Torrance—people will still think you've come in order to join the “industry.” Or at least make industrial-size sums of money. People will ask if you've run into celebrities in the supermarket. If they're from New York they will be too cool to ask that question but not too embarrassed to fall back on the reliable chestnuts. How bad is the air? How much time do you spend in traffic? Have you gotten Botox yet? Chelation therapy? A colonic? How long did it take you to start calling everyone “dude”? (Actually, they might not know about chelation therapy—and neither should you.)

These refrains aren't offensive as much as boring, “too
on the nose
,” as they say in television writers' rooms. They're like equating Texas with cowboy boots or New Jersey with hirsute wannabe (or actual) thugs in gold chains. Not that regional stereotypes aren't among the most accurate stereotypes out there. As easy as it is to find surprises in a particular locality (who knew Salt Lake City voted for Obama over Romney in 2012?), the nonsurprises usually keep a steadier pace. And this is perhaps more true of Southern California than of most places. From the gag reflex that is the expression “La La Land” (and its cousin, the equally odious “SoCal”) to the predictable iconography of palm trees and luxury cars and fake boobs and Scientologists and pot dispensaries and illegal immigrants and “healers” of every possible sort, there are a million obvious things to say about Los Angeles. Many are just plain wrong, for instance the fallacy that no one reads or is interested in books. (It happens that L.A. has more independent bookstores than the brainy, twee Bay Area around San Francisco.)

But many of those obvious observations are right. There are a shocking number of people here who feel compelled to drive cars that cost more than, say, your average well-appointed suburban house in Dallas. There was for many years in the aughts a yoga teacher, beloved in studios throughout the city, who made a point of reminding “ladies with implants” to “be mindful of brushing too hard against your mat when moving through
chaturanga
.” There is a vast amount of real estate in Hollywood owned by a church that believes its members are descended from space aliens. The surreal effects of watching these clichés play out before you in real life and in real time can make your head spin. They can make you feel like the one live person in an animated children's show.

I was born in California—in Palo Alto, where my father was working toward a Ph.D. that he'd never really need and my mother was effectively ruining herself for every other location in the world because nowhere else would ever be quite as perfect as the Stanford campus in 1970. I've been told that as a baby and toddler I was as much a part of the flora and fauna of the place as any native plant. I was blond and tanned (a tan baby! Can you imagine such a thing now?) and resistant to wearing shoes. Other than faint swatches of memory—a houseplant in a window, a giant sandbox in the married-student housing complex called Escondido Village, faculty mommies wearing Jackie O–style headscarves and hoop earrings—I have no meaningful recollection of the place. But I can say without hyperbole that when I arrived in Los Angeles nearly thirty years later there was a part of me that wasn't so much forging new territory as reclaiming an original stake. It felt like home even though there was no reason for it to. Moments of déjà vu would pop up in unexpected corners, as though traces of a past life were living inside the walls.

After Palo Alto, I grew up a little bit in Austin, Texas, and a lot in northern New Jersey. After college, I moved to New York City to live out the only cliché that's worse than the California cliché, the odyssey of the struggling young writer harboring naïve fantasies of bohemia. I stayed there through my twenties and then moved to the Great Plains, where I lived out an odd little prairie fantasy that mostly entailed drinking cheap wine and sitting on the front porch of my farmhouse watching hallucinatory lightning storms. This was something I could have done forever. Recognizing that fact, I knew it was time to leave. I could have moved back to New York, but I'd grown fond of my car and even fonder of my large dog.

It made sense to keep moving west, to find a good spot in the vast parking lot that is Los Angeles. I was, coincidentally enough, working on a movie script. During my time in big sky country I'd written a novel largely about drinking wine and watching lightning storms and it was now not only being published but also possibly being turned into a film. Somehow I'd convinced the producers to pay me to write the script, less because I wanted to be a screenwriter than because I wanted Writers' Guild health insurance. Though this transaction had required a trip “to the coast” (there's another cloying L.A.-ism; is the east coast not also a “coast”?) for a series of meetings and a heady stay at an Ian Schrager hotel, the job in no way required that I live there. I'm fairly certain I could have fashioned myself into a far hotter, or at least more intriguing, property had I stayed on that porch. But I came anyway.

How many young essayists/aspiring screenwriters/literary people of any stripe have come to Los Angeles because of that famous photo of Joan Didion with her family on the deck of their house in Malibu? If there is a west coast equivalent of those seminal Woody Allen movies, if L.A. has an
Annie Hall
or a
Manhattan
, which is to say if it has a fantastical, hyperaestheticized symbol of its appeal, it has to be that image. Taken in 1976, it shows a sideways-glancing Didion, winsome and tiny in a flowing dress, with perfunctory cigarette in hand and perfunctory gin and tonic (or something thereabouts) perched on the railing. Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, leans into the camera as though he's about to disclose a secret to a friend sitting across from him at a bar table. Their blond daughter wears a polka-dot dress and a wary expression. Decades later we will learn from Didion herself that these years were not all they seemed. But for now the cliffs tumble idyllically beneath them and the Pacific Ocean seems to lie patiently in wait, a tableau to be either noticed or not noticed depending on the comings and goings of the day. The house looks modest, though it probably isn't. The deck wood looks salted and ragged, possibly unsafe for standing on. The photograph is in black and white. That's really the main thing about it. These people are living elegantly and (as is always said about Didion)
coolly
in black and white in a part of the world that often seems exhausted by its own colors. These people have it both ways, which is to say they have it all ways. Or at least that's the myth.

You could say I moved to Los Angeles in order to try to have a lot of things at once. I used to call L.A. “New York City with yards” but that doesn't really cover it. It's more that it's a place where wildness and domestication are forever running into each other. It's a place where coyotes sleep on lawn chairs and cross Sunset Boulevard in broad daylight. It's a place where bears dip into swimming pools in the foothills. I love that about it, just as I love that it's a place of invisibility. It's a place of tall hedges and private pools and driving alone in your car, where no one knows if you're crying. Los Angeles is where I learned that your ability to see is sometimes only as good as your willingness to go unseen.

*   *   *

Here is an L.A. story. Given some of the characters involved I suppose it could also be a New York story. But at the end of it I get in my car and drive home, which is pretty much the way every L.A. story ends. It's a story very much in color and also very name-droppy—in fact, it is in many ways a string of names and nothing more—and for a long time I was reluctant to tell it publicly. But the person responsible for it is, sadly, no longer alive to scold me for indiscretion. Not that she probably would have. She's the one whose motto (actually it was her mother's motto) was “Everything is copy.”