To my poor neglected Literate in L.A. blog, I am thrilled to post a guest essay by my dear friend Janet Brown, who originally published this piece on her terrific blog, Tone Deaf in Thailand. There are few greater literary pleasures in the world than sharing a love of Laurie Colwin ... many thanks to Janet for doing so with such talent and affection:
Traveling with the Lone Pilgrim
by Janet Brown
I have no idea why this book has accompanied me through my life. For over forty years, when I first read it in a novella form in Redbook magazine, then when the longer novel emerged in 1978, I have loved Laurie Colwin's Happy All the Time with a fierce and unconditional passion. I have bought and given it away more times than I can count. When I have lived without it for a few years, I have to buy it again--most recently at the beautiful new site of Seattle's Elliott Bay Book Company. I knew it would be there, waiting for me, under a slant of sun from the store's skylight, and it was.
I've read it as a young mother in Fairbanks, Alaska, as a woman living out a long-delayed adolescence in her forties, and as a sixty-plus expat in Bangkok. It has always absorbed me and delighted me and I have never asked why--until now. I don't love romantic novels that sparkle on the surface and have very little plot. I don't usually cherish characters who speak in short, crisp, almost utilitarian sentences. And I would detest any one of the four central figures in this book should I ever meet them off the page.
Guido Morris, Vincent Cardworthy, Holly Sturgis and Misty Berkowitz are all in their own singular fashions, perfect. They are physically attractive, accomplished and they can cook. They love fine art--in fact their lives are works of fine art. Each of them could be a small jade figurine. They fall in love and they marry and they "keep the ugly, chaotic world at bay." Their Manhattan is one of charming little restaurants and dark, genteel bars and the occasional museum. Even parenthood is perfection. Why are they not absurd? Or at least very, very dull?
Perhaps because Misty and Holly are perfect but they are difficult--and proud of it. "I am the scourge of God," Misty tells Vincent. "I was made for Attila the Hun." Holly, Guido comes to understand, is "Genghis Khan in emotional matters." And so is Laurie Colwin.
This is a writer who takes as her territory an entire Great Lake of thin ice and skates on it with aplomb and complete enjoyment. Her plot is romantic, her men would like to be, her women never are. In what should be a paradise of happily ever after, her heroines are equipped with a detached and loving irony that pervades and eventually takes over the entire book.
So does a gentle and laser-beamed satire. Although never focused upon the two couples whose book this is, the peripheral figures in their lives are fleeting and unforgettable. They are skewered and examined and put aside, without cruelty or caricature. Alive and indelible, they glitter in some undiscovered universe, waiting for their own novel.
Laurie Colwin specialized in that. A short story would become two or three, all with the same characters, then a novella, then a novel. Her gift was to provide the full bodies for her characters within the first story. The details came later, and when they did, the people they embellished were remembered as old friends--"Now where have I met you before? You're the one who takes off your gloves with your teeth."
Her books sparkle and glisten and at first they seem all patina, no core. They're much like the novels of another woman who said of her own writing, "the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory." Yet hundreds of years later, Jane and Bingham, Elizabeth and Darcy, still pull readers to their pages again and again and again. So do Guido and Holly, Vincent and Misty, in a fairy tale with an edge, in a satire laced with deep and abiding love.
But there was a subversive side to Laurie Colwin. Six years after she idealized matrimony in Happy All the Time, she published a collection of short stories called The Lone Pilgrim. It's dangerous to speculate on any writer's life based upon their fictional output, but I think it's safe to say that only someone who was alive and young in the '60s could have written those stories.
These are dark little gems; they gleam; they do not sparkle. "The Achieve of, the Mastery of the Thing" is one of the funniest stories I have ever read; it's also the closest that Laurie Colwin ever came to cruelty. The page and a half that she allows for the speed-rap sales pitch of a drug dealer named Uncle Marv has the poetry and idiocy that many of us remember all too well from past lives. And as the narrator ends with "Suddenly I was full of optimism and hope for the future," Altamont and Kent State and Charles Manson peer out at her through that sentence.
This is a writer who refuses to believe in innocence, "that witless spontaneous affection, that hungry purposeless availability." For Laurie Colwin, there are people who plunge into the world straight on and others who approach it in baby steps; some girls have "money instead of imagination and complete self-confidence" and some, even in childhood, recognize the polished and seductive charm described in "Delia's Father." "One false move and you lose everything," says the girl who, with one kiss, "crosses over to my side of the street forever." And in "A Girl Skating," a poet mercilessly deflowers the child he loves without ever needing to touch her. "I was the child he loved best. There was no escaping him," but it was "the infant seriousness" that froze that girl into place in poems. Without her intelligence, she would never have understood that this attention kept her from having a life that was "entirely unremarkable and happy."
Happy is a word that Laurie Colwin uses a lot and as she shows who is truly happy in her fiction, Misty and Vincent, Holly and Guido take on an almost sinister luster. They are abandoned to what kind of a future, at the end of their novel when they "raised their glasses and, by the light of the candles, they drank to a truly wonderful life." The candles are beeswax, the glasses hold champagne and when it is gone, "they were suddenly sad." Thank heaven Vincent has an extra bottle--but will there always be enough champagne?
The final story in The Lone Pilgrim, "Family Happiness" shows what happens to smart people in happy marriages. So does "A Mythological Subject" and "Intimacy" and "A Sentimental Memory." Nobody has ever written so rationally about infidelity than Laurie Colwin. Her characters, with the fine emotional geiger counters that they have within their hearts, negotiate the hazards of adultery without damage and with few tears. An affair, Laurie Colwin suggests over and over, in short stories and in novels, is the secret to a successful marriage. It is simply another kind of love. It is not "full of the misery and loneliness that romantic people suffer in love."
Well-stocked pantries, well-ordered lives, well-placed objects, well-enjoyed meals: yet at the base of this glorious celebration of domestic living is a bullet aimed straight at the heart of monogamy. While making marriage look desirable, Laurie Colwin as much as anybody and more than most transformed it into an altered state, "a dark forest" filled with "a little chapel, a stand of birches, wolves, snakes, the worst you can imagine, or the best."
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Waxing Nostalgic
I have always been a nostalgic person. Even when I was a little kid, I was nostalgic. For my grandpa’s days as a sailor in the Orient in the 1930s. For my parents’ sock-hop-letterman-jacket-1950s-youth in rural, small-town America. My friend Connie says that when she was a teen, all she could do was look forward into the future. When I was a teenager in the 1980s, I listened to Simon & Garfunkel and wrote poems about wearing flowers in my hair, or about my own childhood, which was, in my own words, about lilacs, kittens, and love.
Simply put, I have a thing for lost worlds, for what was, and this year the nostalgia is worse than ever. (I am not even counting how St. Elmo’s Fire, which I own, makes me cry, or my latest obsession with Thirtysomething.) This dangerous nostalgia started innocently enough, with picking up yet another Richard Yates’ novel. Then I discovered Mad Men and rented three discs at a time from Netflix so I could watch the episodes back to back. Finally, used book hunting in Tucson with my dad, I found Mary Cantwell, whose memoir, Manhattan, When I Was Young, is the true life version of “the good old days.” Cantwell was Mad Men’s Betty and Peggy all rolled into one.
In her job as an assistant at Mademoiselle in the late 1950s (a magazine, keep in mind, that once published the greatest literary writers in America), Cantwell wrote that all she ever did for her boss was “order theater tickets, make restaurant reservations, and type the occasional letter. The letters were personal, not professional.” And of her coworkers at lunchtime: “The copywriters and other literary types were eating saucisson at the French Shack, unless they were at Barney’s knocking back martinis.” The things that we think of now as clichés—martini lunches, cigarette smoking in offices and airplanes—were nothing remarkable. They were just part of daily life.
When I emailed my best book friend Janet to tell her I was reading Cantwell (and how much I was loving her), she replied, “When you are in NYC, do you feel the Manhattan of Mary Cantwell? I don't anymore but I did so strongly up until the mid-70's. Now I feel a huge surge of loss when I am there—but whether that's for the city or my younger self that loved it so, I won't know until I go back for more than a couple of days—whenever that might be.”
This reminded me of something I read in the memoir Leap Days, in which the author describes moving to New York in 2004, when she was in her forties: “Change is such a constant here that people have to become accustomed to it, if not inured. Novelist Colson Whitehead was thinking of the transitory nature of the storefronts and corners when he wrote that you become a New Yorker ‘when what was there before is more solid and real than what is here now.’ That fine newspaperman of the old school, Pete Hamill, calls New York the Capital of Nostalgia. In his book Downtown: My Manhattan, he tells us that the New York version of nostaligia isn’t just about buildings and the people who live in them: ‘It involves an almost fatalistic acceptance of the permanent presence of loss. Nothing will ever stay the same. Tuesday turns into Wednesday and something valuable is behind you forever. An is has become a was.’”
Something valuable, behind you forever. Our younger selves. The crux of it. Because my nostalgia is about more than just some romantic vision of a long ago New York that I never knew. That just happened to be the trigger, setting the stage for the very real losses that have overtaken me this year. When I heard that Gourmet magazine is shutting down next month, I sat alone in my apartment and sobbed. Then I received the news that my precious Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, where I worked—and lived, and grew up—during most of my twenties, is the latest casualty of the economic downturn, diabolic predatory tactics of superstores, and people who will waste their money on so much crap but not pay full price for a book (and therefore keep quality alive). Chances are in January the bookstore will be leaving the city’s historic Pioneer Square, where it has reigned, serving as a landmark, defining Seattle as a literary city, and reminding the world that words and personal service do matter, for more than thirty years.
Naturally, I’m feeling very selfish. Not only do these two losses gouge out great pieces of my past, they also intrude on the beauty of my future. My Vietnam food book, Communion, will be published in February 2010, and it will never know the pages of Gourmet, a magazine whose thoughtful commentary and literary tone put it in a class of its own. My novel, In Yellow Babylon, which I have faith will be published soon, may never be purchased from Elliott Bay—and I may never read from it there, an event I have dreamed of for years.
Am I a Luddite? No. Do I hate newfangled things? Nope. Do I wish we could return to a time when a female engineer or advertising executive was more than just a anomaly? She was dreaded and even loathed. Absolutely not. And in any case, I am not talking about the social changes the last few decades have given us. Those are another essay altogether. My kind of nostalgia may be rose-tinted, but I am a realist at the same time. What I miss, and see going away, and feel is the most tragic loss in all of this (beyond my own personal sense of loss), is a respect for tradition and quality. In an article about the end of Gourmet in The New York Times, Christopher Kimball (publisher of Cook’s Illustrated magazine) wrote:
“The shuttering of Gourmet reminds us that in a click-or-die advertising marketplace, one ruled by a million instant pundits, where an anonymous Twitter comment might be seen to pack more resonance and useful content than an article that reflects a lifetime of experience, experts are not created from the top down but from the bottom up. They can no longer be coronated; their voices have to be deemed essential to the lives of their customers. That leaves, I think, little room for the thoughtful, considered editorial with which Gourmet delighted its readers for almost seven decades.”
I miss the thoughtful. I miss the considered. I want more than one sentence at a time. I want ideas that are thought through (thank God for The New York Review of Books.) I want a world in which patience still is a virtue, rather than some outdated fuddy-duddy quality like manners or personal responsibility (AIG et al still blow my mind). Yes, the clerk at Whole Foods really did snap at me, “What, don’t you know how to read?”, when I forgot to push the “yes” button on the debit card machine. Clearly, patience and manners were not part of her makeup, as seems to be the case with so many these days.
Another great loss in my life this year was Cook’s Library, a decades old cookbook store here in LA. In this store, I sampled the most amazing pine nut tart and bought the least pretty of all the tapas cookbooks because Tim who worked there assured me it was the best—he was right. I met famous chefs, and also one of my dearest friends, Ann Le, when we were both scanning the shelves doing research. Without this intimate, neighborhood shop, we never would have encountered one another, and our lives would be less rich for it. That is another thing I feel nostalgic for. Human interaction. The real deal, not just Facebook quips, as much as I enjoy reading them.
It’s not that I want the new to go away. I just don’t want the old to disappear—how sad I was in recent years when my neighborhood lost Irna’s Corsetorium to a trendy shop selling $400 boots, and the eighty-year-old Hungarian baker at the Farmer’s Market, whose kalachi recipe came from his own family, shut down his shop, which was replaced by a chain that doesn’t bake a single loaf of bread on the premises. I’m glad people no longer smoke in restaurants, but it still makes me smile when a man opens a door for me, or my friend Pete walks on the outside when we’re on a busy street.
And so, just a few years past forty, I am becoming one of those people who clings to the “old ways.” To my fountain pen, and to the shortwave radio my dad gave me that pulls in the blues station from San Diego (even though I could just as easily listen to that station online). To those funny ads in the back columns of the New Yorker, for books by the foot and the $14 beret from John Helmer, est. 1921. I cling to hope (thank you, President Obama, for bringing that back) that integrity and independent bookstores and the ability (and desire) to discriminate are not one day twittered away. And as far as Twitter is concerned, I wonder if there will come a day when today's twenty year olds turn forty and find themselves longing for a simpler time of texting and tweeting and the iPod Touch. Remember all those crazy things we used to post on our Facebook walls! Man, those were the days ... So life goes on.
Simply put, I have a thing for lost worlds, for what was, and this year the nostalgia is worse than ever. (I am not even counting how St. Elmo’s Fire, which I own, makes me cry, or my latest obsession with Thirtysomething.) This dangerous nostalgia started innocently enough, with picking up yet another Richard Yates’ novel. Then I discovered Mad Men and rented three discs at a time from Netflix so I could watch the episodes back to back. Finally, used book hunting in Tucson with my dad, I found Mary Cantwell, whose memoir, Manhattan, When I Was Young, is the true life version of “the good old days.” Cantwell was Mad Men’s Betty and Peggy all rolled into one.
In her job as an assistant at Mademoiselle in the late 1950s (a magazine, keep in mind, that once published the greatest literary writers in America), Cantwell wrote that all she ever did for her boss was “order theater tickets, make restaurant reservations, and type the occasional letter. The letters were personal, not professional.” And of her coworkers at lunchtime: “The copywriters and other literary types were eating saucisson at the French Shack, unless they were at Barney’s knocking back martinis.” The things that we think of now as clichés—martini lunches, cigarette smoking in offices and airplanes—were nothing remarkable. They were just part of daily life.
When I emailed my best book friend Janet to tell her I was reading Cantwell (and how much I was loving her), she replied, “When you are in NYC, do you feel the Manhattan of Mary Cantwell? I don't anymore but I did so strongly up until the mid-70's. Now I feel a huge surge of loss when I am there—but whether that's for the city or my younger self that loved it so, I won't know until I go back for more than a couple of days—whenever that might be.”
This reminded me of something I read in the memoir Leap Days, in which the author describes moving to New York in 2004, when she was in her forties: “Change is such a constant here that people have to become accustomed to it, if not inured. Novelist Colson Whitehead was thinking of the transitory nature of the storefronts and corners when he wrote that you become a New Yorker ‘when what was there before is more solid and real than what is here now.’ That fine newspaperman of the old school, Pete Hamill, calls New York the Capital of Nostalgia. In his book Downtown: My Manhattan, he tells us that the New York version of nostaligia isn’t just about buildings and the people who live in them: ‘It involves an almost fatalistic acceptance of the permanent presence of loss. Nothing will ever stay the same. Tuesday turns into Wednesday and something valuable is behind you forever. An is has become a was.’”
Something valuable, behind you forever. Our younger selves. The crux of it. Because my nostalgia is about more than just some romantic vision of a long ago New York that I never knew. That just happened to be the trigger, setting the stage for the very real losses that have overtaken me this year. When I heard that Gourmet magazine is shutting down next month, I sat alone in my apartment and sobbed. Then I received the news that my precious Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, where I worked—and lived, and grew up—during most of my twenties, is the latest casualty of the economic downturn, diabolic predatory tactics of superstores, and people who will waste their money on so much crap but not pay full price for a book (and therefore keep quality alive). Chances are in January the bookstore will be leaving the city’s historic Pioneer Square, where it has reigned, serving as a landmark, defining Seattle as a literary city, and reminding the world that words and personal service do matter, for more than thirty years.
Naturally, I’m feeling very selfish. Not only do these two losses gouge out great pieces of my past, they also intrude on the beauty of my future. My Vietnam food book, Communion, will be published in February 2010, and it will never know the pages of Gourmet, a magazine whose thoughtful commentary and literary tone put it in a class of its own. My novel, In Yellow Babylon, which I have faith will be published soon, may never be purchased from Elliott Bay—and I may never read from it there, an event I have dreamed of for years.
Am I a Luddite? No. Do I hate newfangled things? Nope. Do I wish we could return to a time when a female engineer or advertising executive was more than just a anomaly? She was dreaded and even loathed. Absolutely not. And in any case, I am not talking about the social changes the last few decades have given us. Those are another essay altogether. My kind of nostalgia may be rose-tinted, but I am a realist at the same time. What I miss, and see going away, and feel is the most tragic loss in all of this (beyond my own personal sense of loss), is a respect for tradition and quality. In an article about the end of Gourmet in The New York Times, Christopher Kimball (publisher of Cook’s Illustrated magazine) wrote:
“The shuttering of Gourmet reminds us that in a click-or-die advertising marketplace, one ruled by a million instant pundits, where an anonymous Twitter comment might be seen to pack more resonance and useful content than an article that reflects a lifetime of experience, experts are not created from the top down but from the bottom up. They can no longer be coronated; their voices have to be deemed essential to the lives of their customers. That leaves, I think, little room for the thoughtful, considered editorial with which Gourmet delighted its readers for almost seven decades.”
I miss the thoughtful. I miss the considered. I want more than one sentence at a time. I want ideas that are thought through (thank God for The New York Review of Books.) I want a world in which patience still is a virtue, rather than some outdated fuddy-duddy quality like manners or personal responsibility (AIG et al still blow my mind). Yes, the clerk at Whole Foods really did snap at me, “What, don’t you know how to read?”, when I forgot to push the “yes” button on the debit card machine. Clearly, patience and manners were not part of her makeup, as seems to be the case with so many these days.
Another great loss in my life this year was Cook’s Library, a decades old cookbook store here in LA. In this store, I sampled the most amazing pine nut tart and bought the least pretty of all the tapas cookbooks because Tim who worked there assured me it was the best—he was right. I met famous chefs, and also one of my dearest friends, Ann Le, when we were both scanning the shelves doing research. Without this intimate, neighborhood shop, we never would have encountered one another, and our lives would be less rich for it. That is another thing I feel nostalgic for. Human interaction. The real deal, not just Facebook quips, as much as I enjoy reading them.
It’s not that I want the new to go away. I just don’t want the old to disappear—how sad I was in recent years when my neighborhood lost Irna’s Corsetorium to a trendy shop selling $400 boots, and the eighty-year-old Hungarian baker at the Farmer’s Market, whose kalachi recipe came from his own family, shut down his shop, which was replaced by a chain that doesn’t bake a single loaf of bread on the premises. I’m glad people no longer smoke in restaurants, but it still makes me smile when a man opens a door for me, or my friend Pete walks on the outside when we’re on a busy street.
And so, just a few years past forty, I am becoming one of those people who clings to the “old ways.” To my fountain pen, and to the shortwave radio my dad gave me that pulls in the blues station from San Diego (even though I could just as easily listen to that station online). To those funny ads in the back columns of the New Yorker, for books by the foot and the $14 beret from John Helmer, est. 1921. I cling to hope (thank you, President Obama, for bringing that back) that integrity and independent bookstores and the ability (and desire) to discriminate are not one day twittered away. And as far as Twitter is concerned, I wonder if there will come a day when today's twenty year olds turn forty and find themselves longing for a simpler time of texting and tweeting and the iPod Touch. Remember all those crazy things we used to post on our Facebook walls! Man, those were the days ... So life goes on.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
My Life as a Fake
It has been one of those months. The purple petals are fading on the jacaranda trees, which means summer is officially here, and I can’t read without growing restless. I have a rigid schedule these days: up at five to work on my novel, an hour break around eleven, and then to work editing until six. When I’m done, I eat dinner, and then reach for something to read. But nothing is working. Half a dozen books are sitting half-read (or less, or more) on my nightstand. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. The Elegance of the Hedgehog. An Illuminated Life. Main Street. The Easter Parade. The Golden Notebook (just two chapters to go, and somehow I can’t do it). I open each book, read a paragraph or two, and then flip on my computer to watch an episode of Barney Miller on Hulu before going to bed, just so I can get up and start all over again.
I missed being devoured whole by a book, and so on Saturday I decided to walk to the new Goodwill on Beverly and buy a book that would consume me. I put my trust in serendipity. I walked in, got distracted by the racks of jeans, and wasted time searching for old Levi’s for a while before making my way to the bookshelf. I scanned the volumes. Lovely Bones came as no surprise. When does it not show up in a thrift shop? Imagining Argentina did. What a powerful story. But I had already read it. I was distracted for a moment by the realization that Goodwill’s are where Reader’s Digest condensed books go to die.
Then I found, side by side, two editions of Peter Carey’s My Life as a Fake. A British version and an American version. I know of his books. I have always been meaning to read him, though I assumed it would be something more obvious, like Oscar and Lucinda or True History of the Kelly Gang. But these paired paperbacks seemed like a sign, especially since the book was about literary folly and Asia, two of my favorite subjects. I liked the cover of the British version better, but I didn’t like its paper and typeface. The American version had a slight tear in its back cover, but the paper felt nicer, and the type was bigger. I chose the American version.
Back outside, I walked to the post office, and to the library to return three of the partially read books. From there I headed up First toward Starbucks to get an iced green tea. I opened My Life as a Fake and read the first paragraph. I read the second. I read the third. Reading and walking in the dead heat of midday, passing in and out of the shade of the magnolia trees. It was one of those bluest of blue days when shadows feel like pools of cool water. I was beyond the noise of the main streets. I could hear the breeze in the palms high above as words like “territorial enthusiasm” drifted from the page.
It was the kind of book that leapt right in. Just what I needed. I read on until I hit Starbucks, and held my place with my thumb as I ordered my iced tea. The barista asked me what I was up to that day.
“Walking and reading,” I told him.
He considered this and seemed confused. He said, “Good thing you’re doing it in this neighborhood. You couldn’t do that in just any neighborhood in L.A.”
This was true, for more than one reason. I most likely wouldn’t get mugged here (although I have been mugged in a better neighborhood than this one), and the sidewalks were relatively smooth. Very little tripping as I read and walked. Past the New Beverly Cinema. Past the medieval crenellations of Lloyd Klein Couture, with its turtle pond out front. I marked my place again to take a moment to watch the turtles, necks arched, little pointed faces arched toward the sun. As I read about a prank involving a poet called Bruno Hat, I overheard two homeless men in a bus shelter discussing whether or not Michael Jackson had been abused as a child. I walked home, book in hand, took out the dog, book in hand, and then perched on the arm of my sofa, book in hand, still reading.
As I blow dried my hair, I wandered through Kampong Baru market. As I ate dinner, I listened to a man named Christopher Chubb try to convince the editor of a literary journal of the authenticity of a particular poem. I like hiding away from the world and reading for hours. I also like living while a book is living. Not just to be absorbed by it, but to live with it, as it lives, as I did as a child, cleaning my room with Little Women propped open, dirty socks and Jo’s dreams of being a great writer and chaotic school papers and Beth’s dying all one. As evening came, I was only a third of the way through My Life as a Fake, but I had plenty more to do before bedtime. I would water my plants, I would dust, and I would take the dog for another walk. Reading all the while.
I missed being devoured whole by a book, and so on Saturday I decided to walk to the new Goodwill on Beverly and buy a book that would consume me. I put my trust in serendipity. I walked in, got distracted by the racks of jeans, and wasted time searching for old Levi’s for a while before making my way to the bookshelf. I scanned the volumes. Lovely Bones came as no surprise. When does it not show up in a thrift shop? Imagining Argentina did. What a powerful story. But I had already read it. I was distracted for a moment by the realization that Goodwill’s are where Reader’s Digest condensed books go to die.
Then I found, side by side, two editions of Peter Carey’s My Life as a Fake. A British version and an American version. I know of his books. I have always been meaning to read him, though I assumed it would be something more obvious, like Oscar and Lucinda or True History of the Kelly Gang. But these paired paperbacks seemed like a sign, especially since the book was about literary folly and Asia, two of my favorite subjects. I liked the cover of the British version better, but I didn’t like its paper and typeface. The American version had a slight tear in its back cover, but the paper felt nicer, and the type was bigger. I chose the American version.
Back outside, I walked to the post office, and to the library to return three of the partially read books. From there I headed up First toward Starbucks to get an iced green tea. I opened My Life as a Fake and read the first paragraph. I read the second. I read the third. Reading and walking in the dead heat of midday, passing in and out of the shade of the magnolia trees. It was one of those bluest of blue days when shadows feel like pools of cool water. I was beyond the noise of the main streets. I could hear the breeze in the palms high above as words like “territorial enthusiasm” drifted from the page.
It was the kind of book that leapt right in. Just what I needed. I read on until I hit Starbucks, and held my place with my thumb as I ordered my iced tea. The barista asked me what I was up to that day.
“Walking and reading,” I told him.
He considered this and seemed confused. He said, “Good thing you’re doing it in this neighborhood. You couldn’t do that in just any neighborhood in L.A.”
This was true, for more than one reason. I most likely wouldn’t get mugged here (although I have been mugged in a better neighborhood than this one), and the sidewalks were relatively smooth. Very little tripping as I read and walked. Past the New Beverly Cinema. Past the medieval crenellations of Lloyd Klein Couture, with its turtle pond out front. I marked my place again to take a moment to watch the turtles, necks arched, little pointed faces arched toward the sun. As I read about a prank involving a poet called Bruno Hat, I overheard two homeless men in a bus shelter discussing whether or not Michael Jackson had been abused as a child. I walked home, book in hand, took out the dog, book in hand, and then perched on the arm of my sofa, book in hand, still reading.
As I blow dried my hair, I wandered through Kampong Baru market. As I ate dinner, I listened to a man named Christopher Chubb try to convince the editor of a literary journal of the authenticity of a particular poem. I like hiding away from the world and reading for hours. I also like living while a book is living. Not just to be absorbed by it, but to live with it, as it lives, as I did as a child, cleaning my room with Little Women propped open, dirty socks and Jo’s dreams of being a great writer and chaotic school papers and Beth’s dying all one. As evening came, I was only a third of the way through My Life as a Fake, but I had plenty more to do before bedtime. I would water my plants, I would dust, and I would take the dog for another walk. Reading all the while.
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