Nico and the Gaping Hole

Even as I love to deride Twilight and the anti-feminist, pro-chastity bent of it, I have to admit that I have read the entire series, gobbling it up like so much junk food. I get the appeal of being loved for having done absolutely nothing to be worthy of it – of finding that amazing Other who will just get you and love you for you. But that universal teenage girl desire is for another blog post.

The thing about it that I had the hardest time with was how helpless and lost Bella was without her Edward. How completely incapable she was of simply making her peace with it, valuing herself and moving on. Who among us hasn’t had their heart ripped out by someone for whom they were head over heels? Sure, you cry your eyes out for a while but then you have to get that he’s not coming back, pick yourself up, put away the Ben & Jerry’s and move on. The gaping hole Bella describes in her chest due to Edward’s absence doesn’t strike me as devoted and romantic but pathetic and self-absorbed. Her complete lack of a sense of worth or purpose – that need to define herself as valuable only in conjunction to him completely pissed me off as a feminist and someone who abhors co-dependence.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized how much the teen-angst-wired author had tapped into something. How much that hole hurts the first time you feel it and the work it takes to learn to close it.

After long and tortured high school years, I finally acquired my first boyfriend in college. His name was Nico. He was half Italian, half Vietnamese and in the real world far too short for me. But by god he was mine. I poured every Disney princess fantasy into our relationship. Like the velveteen rabbit, I finally felt real. I was worthy of existing because someone else finally saw my value and wanted it for himself. And so I prostrated myself before him. Cleaning his kitchen without being asked, spending hours making thoughtful gifts and mix-tapes (back when one made mix-tapes to prove one’s love), putting my schedule aside so that it worked with his. In disgusted retrospect, I completely lost myself in him.

To his credit, having a worshipper rather than a partner didn’t work for Nico and he dumped me. I completely broke apart. I couldn’t eat; I couldn’t smile or keep from crying for any length of time. I only listlessly dragged myself to classes because some part of me remembered why I was at college. I sat spacing out on campus benches oblivious to the beautiful spring days around me – even resentful of them. How dare they be so lovely when my whole world had collapsed into nothing? I was too young to realize that a relationship was not about giving yourself up.

One day as I was moping on a bench, Ayesha, the girlfriend of Nico’s roommate happened by. “Hey! How are you?”

I looked at her incredulously. How was I? I’d been crying for weeks. How could she even ask that?

She noticed my dour face. “Why are you so bummed out?”

“Nico!” I blurted, astounded at how thick she was. Didn’t she realize she was not looking at a fellow girl, but a gutted husk of a human? Didn’t she see the open chest wound I was harboring? The gaping hole that sapped my very life force?

“Really? You’re still hung up on him?”

Still? My life would never be the same. “Come with me,” she smiled and took my hand. She walked me into the library and while she made photocopies for a report, she told me all about the Nico I never saw. She told me he’d roll his eyes and deride me every time I left the room. That he and her boyfriend, made fun of all my homemade gifts and mix-tapes. That they’d purposely made bigger and bigger messes in the kitchen just to see how far they could push me. Her litany of denigration went on and on.

That did it. The thing in me that had broken fused together in a hot fire. Somehow hearing how much he’d disrespected me let me find the respect I’d lost for myself. I hugged Ayesha and walked back out into the warm spring sun feeling the kind breeze on my legs, the soft sway of my skirt, content with the proud blaze back in my eyes. I had poured myself into making his world a better place and he had ridiculed me. And why wouldn’t he? I had sold myself out in order to earn his love. I was embarrassed to see the desperate, simpering creature I’d become. I was furious with myself for being so spineless and with him for having been so cruel. I’d never been loved before; I didn’t know how it worked. At least now with what Ayesha had told me, I was pretty sure it didn’t work that way.

So when I dismiss Bella’s ridiculous crumble into worthlessness, I sheepishly remember my own. At first it saddened me to realize I could not hold myself above such foolish, self-loathing behavior but then that’s part of the series’ brilliance. Who among us has not known a weak moment? Because just like what I had with Nico was not real love, the impulses under Bella’s feelings for Edward are not love either, but obsession, and that desperate teen-age hope that we’ll find our value out there in his eyes.

We all have to go through that experience of learning how to close that gaping hole with our own hands. I learned how to have a therapeutic pity party, let all the pain out and move on. I learned that self-respect is about the sexiest quality one can have. I hope all the readers who idolize Bella will too.

The Ex Factor

My first engagement did not end well. Which is to say that it did and then it didn’t.

We’d both been afraid to admit we were growing apart but when we went to visit my family for Christmas the built up misery came crashing down on me and I knew I couldn’t get back on the plane to go home with him. What followed was a grey area of ‘are we or aren’t we’ during which we discussed ways we could keep the us alive; make that next step, maybe try Los Angeles, he came out and interviewed in my mountain town even. One week after a tearful profession of his love for me I agreed to give New York another try. The next day he admitted he cheated on me, in my bed. Her name was Erica. Needless to say I never went back to New York and after some quietly subdued negotiations he packed up our shoebox of an apartment and shipped me my stuff.

We kept in touch, always civil. Even friendly at times. I think we were a bit lost without each other. We’d been each other’s first real loves. We’d met on a cruise and been instantly smitten. As we were both vacationing with our families, the various parents and siblings met and it was like six months of dating condensed into a week. He flew out to visit me in California a month later. Two months after that I visited him in New York. We looked at apartments and I moved out that Spring.

We had originally planned to marry a year to the day that we met. We started looking at wedding cruises, I found a dress, picked out invitations, a caterer. But even though we pressed on, he never gave me a ring. I started to feel false about the whole thing as every woman I mentioned my wedding plans to inevitably looked at my finger and then I had to explain. It wasn’t really a money thing although he claimed it was. His sister in law had given us a diamond and his best friend was the scion of a diamond district jeweler. A ring would not have been difficult. I lost it when I discovered charges on his credit card to a strip club the day after the last money excuse. He’d left the statement open on my book and in a way I think he wanted me to find it. To see what was real for him.Still by the end, he’d been my best friend for three years and it hurt to just let go of that. I sat in the snow outside my mother’s house and cried my eyes out.

At the time I never thought it would be so long before I found my next Mr. Right.
As time passed we kept up a friendly contact. Loosely at least. He eventually started dating someone and moved to LA with her. When I decided to move to LA for the movie business he was supportive. Said he couldn’t wait for me to meet his girl, that I’d really like her. As several of my best friends were next girlfriends of exes I had no doubt I would. He even offered me help in finding a job when I landed. I was happy to have at least one trusted face in the sea of unkept promises that is LA.

But then I did land. He didn’t return my emails. Then he didn’t return my calls. I left an angry message with his assistant that his ex-fiance wanted to speak with him. I wasn’t just some acquaintance fluff to be brushed aside. I had been engaged to this man. Did not that confer a certain status of intimacy with him? Of entitlement to connection?

And then it dawned on me. It must have been her. She must have been uncomfortable with the idea of a friendly ex being back in his life. I got it and I felt for her. I wished I could tell her I was no threat but he’d have to do that. I wrote him a heartfelt letter saying I was sorry for not having gotten the clue earlier and understanding her point of view but hoping she’d understand. I really did need his help after all. I was running out of savings and still had no job on the horizon.

It was his response that was the truest moment of our break-up. Two years later. He was clearly upset with me and I don’t know if it was because I’d seen the uncomfortable truth of the matter or if he was frustrated with her attitude toward me and was taking it out on me, or if, like so many in Tinseltown, he was only paying me lip-service about being friends and helping me get a toehold here. Either way his tone was terse and cold. He informed me that I was wrong about his beloved and had no right to comment on the matter. He told me he had other priorities in life now and I was not one of them. I sat back from the keyboard stunned and hurt. We were broken up now for real and true.

I never responded to his email and have never spoken to him since.

Now a decade since our breakup and my snowy cry I have returned to the state of engagement. And now the shoe is on the other foot. My fiancé has an ex who is out here and lonely and looking for help getting her toehold. I should be inclined to be generous but I find I’m not. Not that I have any fear of him going back to her or her turning his head. Trust me when I say it is not possible. But I find her desperation repugnant. Like a fly circling our calm spring day. She is a nuisance I don’t want to deal with and he’s happy to use my irritation as his buttress for his No.

I’ll never know what really went on between my ex and his next regarding my presence in LA. But at least now I understand the state he was in when I came beseeching. Despite the love he once had for me and the promises once made, a new love simply doesn’t leave room. You can only create one life at a time and by rights it’s the one you’re creating together.

I’ve been so angry at him for so many years. I’ve laughed at my cousin when she says she’s seen him at work things and he’s asked after me. He hates me, clearly, I counter. If he’d cared he could have lifted a finger. Since the day of his last email I’ve held a big ‘screw you too’ in the space in my heart where his love once lived. Now I see I was off base. For him it was never hate. It was just the view from a different state.

The Ring's the Thing

For most of my adult life I longed for a significant relationship with an amazing boyfriend that would eventually lead to engagement and then marriage. But most importantly, and let’s be honest, girls, I longed for engagement with that all-important accessory: the diamond ring. That ring which legitimizes your membership in the “I am loved” club. That ring which tells all those would-be suitors “sorry boys, you waited too long to realize I was fabulous.” That ring which signals to all the singletons that you have finally left their sorry ranks and are on your way to becoming a smug married.

I’ve been engaged once before and oddly the ring was sort of the undoing of it. He’d proposed on one of our early dates and we’d moved in together quickly. I should add that ‘moving in’ involved me quitting my job in San Francisco, packing up my life and moving to New York. Ah the folly of youth. The thing was, we thought of ourselves as engaged, we were even picking out caterers and venues, but he’d somehow never gotten around to giving me a ring.

I let it go for a while but after a year I started to get cranky about it. When I mentioned my fiancée, women’s eyes would inevitably dart to my left hand and I got tired of explaining. I unengaged us and insisted we refer to each other as boyfriend/girlfriend until he got off his ass and officially bejeweled my finger.

He pled money concerns but I didn’t buy it. His sister-in-law had given us a diamond from an old ring of hers and his best friend was the son of a diamond district family. He could have gotten a ring together if he’d really wanted to. It would only have been at most a few hundred for a wholesale setting. One day he inadvertently (I assume) left his credit card bill unfolded on my desk and I noticed a charge for several hundred dollars at a local strip club. Suffice it to say, that was the beginning of the end. I had to face the fact that he just wasn’t that into me or he would have made more committal use of that g-string tip money.

I left that coast and that chapter of my life with a broken heart and an unsated hunger for a diamond ring. Luckily, in the ensuing years, I got my grandmother’s depression-era engagement ring that had a round diamond and all the silver filigree an antique-fixated girl could want. I was happy. So it seems New York and I didn’t work out for myriad reasons. Maybe I didn’t really want to be married to him after all. I had just wanted the damn ring.

So now, older and wiser, I faced engagement with a more pragmatic, less ring-centric outlook. Let’s see if this guy loves me for me and wants to spend his life with said me - how’s that for a litmus test? When the ring conversation came up, I told him I didn’t want a diamond, I already had one. Maybe something low-key with our birthstones. And as I was newly into gold, maybe not silver.

Let it be said that I have never been a generic Tiffany’s platinum solitaire girl. I was once given one of those Tiffany’s ID bracelets that every trendy cheerleader wears and insisted on exchanging it for something I’d never seen on anyone. I have a beautiful necklace now that I wear proudly as its giver intended and have, to date, never seen anyone else with it.

My point is I’ve always been that girl who, if everyone else is wearing black, will show up in pink polka-dots just ‘cause. My fiancée wisely knows this. When it came time to pop the question, he did and then as he nervously held out a closed ring box begged me to remember I’d said no diamonds.

“Of course, honey,” I murmured.

“No seriously, when your friends look at it funny you have to tell them you said no diamonds.”

“Okaaaaaaaaaaaay…” Now I was nervous.

I am now very proud to report that look at it funny they do. I opened that little ring box to see a crazy whopper of a ring. Over one hundred years old and once owned by a daughter of one of Milan’s ruling families, it features an emerald flanked by two pink rubies in a massive gold setting that can only be described as two barrel vaults edged with filigree. It came from my fiancée’s mother who was obliquely related to said ruling family. It’s got everything that’s right for me: family history, antiquity, gold, color, and has unique out the ying yang. I can’t believe I get the honor of wearing it both for the fact that it was my fiancée’s mother’s and for the fact that it represents the actual real commitment a wonderful man is making to me.

My favorite sport is now watching the reaction when I mention my fiancée. As before, the eyes flick to my left hand. They usually go wide. Then there is either a gasp and squeal of recognition of the ring’s outright fabulousness, or a delayed “Ooooooh,” as the viewer scrambles to fabricate an appreciative comment. It takes people off guard and I love that. I also love that it’s definitely not for everyone’s liking. There will be no knock-off at Tiffany’s!

Turns out I was never missing a diamond ring. I was missing the guy who understood what I wanted was the life that goes with the ring - and wanted it with me.

Enamored of an Ass

As a young writer, I identified most with Shakespeare’s romantic characters. Viola, Rosalind, Helena; the girls with pluck and moxie who had great adventures and won the handsome protagonist too. They fit with my world view of how my life would go. As I get older, I find instead, I resonate most often with Titania. Not just because she’s queen of the faeries. Of course any title helps. But because, after a too-long night lavishing her royal attention on the donkey-head-transformed Bottom the Weaver, the spell is broken and she comes to her senses, puzzled as to why on earth she would sink so low. Out of sorts, she murmurs to Oberon, her king, that “I dreamt I was enamored of an ass.”

I am not the best judge of character as last summer’s subletter debacle can attest along with countless questionable choices of boyfriends. With my Pollyanna heart in full force, I take people at face value too often buying into their knight-in-shining-armor acts until I wake up one day, rather embarrassed and a tad horrified wondering why the truth wasn’t so obvious before.

The funny artist who turned out to be a broken child, the suave producer who turned out to be a selfish and cruel lay-about, the regal cook who turned out to be an uptight asshole… Oh ‘Tania, I feel you.

It’s not just in love either. It’s friendships too. Early in film school, I became fast friends with a girl who was always up for life’s adventures. We soon agreed to carpool to campus. It actually took me months before I realized she had never once offered to drive and I was the one going twenty miles out of my way for her on a weekly basis with nary an offer of gas money. But desperate for a good girlfriend in my new Tinseltown life, I clung to her.

We excitedly planned a girls’ night out and when we walked into the bar of her choice, I recoiled. It was filled with frat boys and plastic piñatas. Not the classy, low-key wine bar I had in mind. “Isn’t this great?” she gushed. Wake up call! A mutual friend later told me that this girl had once imposed on friend to drive to another state to bail her out of jail. On the way home they made a highway fast-food pit stop and she hadn’t even offered to buy the girl’s Big Mac.

My lack of people radar extends to my business life as well. I once bought so completely into a new friend’s business consultant act I set my best friend up with her for a consultation. My friend had taken precious time off her day job to have a half-hour lunch with this woman and get key guidance for the business she was launching. Instead of being the grand business match up I had imagined, the woman kept my friend tangled up for a two hour “meeting” that was garbled by email, and text interruptions and other clients needing “just a minute of her time.” The woman was actually rude enough to field several phone calls while my friend sat there, watching the minutes tick by and imagining her boss’ face getting redder by the minute as she wondered how to explain her quadruple-time lunch absence to him. To top it off, the woman later emailed expecting payment for her pearls of wisdom which had never been part of the discussion. I was mortified that I put my friend in this position and that I had been foolish enough to think highly of the woman’s business skill in the first place.

It doesn’t stop there. I once brought another new friend into my business. Dazzled by his professional talents as well as his smile, I bought his act hook line and sinker. We all did. Well, most of us did. Several of the other guys at work grumbled about all the flash and dazzle but I put off their comments. I actually thought “I can’t be wrong again, surely.” Of course I can, and don’t call me Shirley.

I watched waitresses melt for him when we had our business meetings out and I felt twinges of jealousy as he returned their smiles. I didn’t have a personal interest in him, not in that way, but I still wanted to be the girl he was focused on. What can I say, I’m a Leo, I need the spotlight. I listened to him tell me things that in any dating scenario would have been huge red flags: past bad break ups, low opinions of women in various parts of his life, a tendency to use people. It’s OK, I thought, I’m not a girl in his life in that way. Whew.

One day, some part of his pedestal slipped. I saw his self-admitted user tendencies as draining and selfish rather than starving artist bohemian, his righteousness as insecurity rather than maturity, his unresponsiveness as flakey rather than mysterious. At a certain moment I watched him with a date and thought “thank god that’s not me.” At least he was good at his job.

Despite this relief, I found myself as angry with him as I have been with any ex, former friend or evil subletter. For weeks I stewed in my anger until my boyfriend, ever the wise one, pointed out that I was angry because I was embarrassed. I was embarrassed that I defended him to people who had seen more clearly than I, embarrassed that I had been fished in yet again by someone unworthy of my heart and my esteem. Donkey heads!

Unfolding from there, I finally saw clearly why I hadn’t been able to let go of other angers. It wasn’t that I hadn’t forgiven the exes for their assorted transgressions and cruelties. It was that I hadn’t forgiven myself for having chosen them in the first place.

That realization made waking up next to my real life Oberon all the sweeter. The irony is that for all these months as I reminded myself of these past judgment failures, I subjected him to a vetting of presidential proportions. Sure, he seemed like a fabulous boyfriend but I’m probably wrong again. Better poke and prod as much as I can to be sure.

He bore it all with grace and patience; far more than I deserved. The one person I have been the most suspicious of is the one person who didn’t merit my doubts. Figures I would turn the Spanish Inquisition on the wrong guy. I’m just lucky that he stuck around through it, waited till I washed the last of those faerie dust dreams away and laughed with me at the sight of all those donkey-headed former lovers, flushed friends and current folk.

Could it be? Could Pollyanna at long last be tempered by some real clarity and on-target intuition? Dare to dream.

In Honor Of

We are in the midst of a strange phase it seems. I have lost more friends, had friends who've lost someone, or heard crazy stories about death and loss in the last few months than I can ever recall. I just found out that the girl who replaced me at my big Hollywood Studio job died falling out a window at the Cannes Film Festival. I am not sure what's going on but I hope it stops now.

As Monday is the jewish holiday of Shavout, I wanted to take a post to remember my friend Aidel and the strange and special Shavout I spent with her. This post originally appeared after her death in January of 06.

A Guardian Butterfly

Part of moving to a big city like L.A. is having a more diverse community, meeting people you just wouldn’t have access to at home. People besides Brad Pitt. I have lived in a lot of places and have met all kinds of people. Even living in New York and being engaged to a Jewish man did not prepare me for Aidel.

During my first month here, I spent one of my pre-employment days of leisure at the DMV switching my license and my plates to the California variety. I was thumbing through a friend’s script in the waiting area when a soft voice at my side asked “what’s that?” Surprised to meet someone in this town who didn’t recognize a script at fifty paces, I spent the next two hours discussing life with this tiny, orthodox Jewish Israeli woman with the impish glint in her eyes.

Only a few years older than me, she told me about her four children and her American husband. She told me about the crazy way her parents had met in London high society and fled to Israel during the war. She told me about some cousin or other that was supposedly a big deal producer in town.For some reason I felt completely at home with her. I told her about everything. She seemed genuinely delighted to get inside my life and not in the “what can you do for me?” way of LA. But in the way a child listens to you read a story because you are giving her access to a new world.

After that day at the DMV, we’d meet every month or so and sit and talk. It was always at her house.“I need time with my friend,” she’d shoo her kids out of the room.It was early in these meetings that I began to realize Aidel was different from me in ways other than her Jewishness. I’d tell her I’d spoken with my mom about my latest script idea and she’d tell me that my mother was about to go through a big change and that she’d make a move that would surprise us. Later that year my mom went through a divorce, radiation, and then moved to New York City, a place she’d professed too big a fear of to visit when I’d lived there just a few years earlier.

I hate to use the word ‘psychic,’ especially in conjunction with the word ‘friend’ as that conjures up visions of Dionne Warwick. Later, when I finally met her sister, she referred to it as Aidel’s gift. Whatever it was, it was at times unsettling and always accurate.Usually the first thing she’d ask me about was my love life. I had told her about my Jewish ex, the Agent Man, and my time in New York.“I was his shickza” I laughed.Her face clouded. “Don’t use that word. It’s not kind.” For as much as I’d learned about Judaism, I knew so little about Jewishness.

I remember later reporting excitedly to her about a man I was dating. He was European - always a source of points with me - and from a very rigidly ethical background.She sighed and without ceremony said “No, he’s not the one for you.”I sputtered and protested that yes, I thought he was. She calmly waited until I was done and then proceeded to tell me why he wasn’t the right one.“He doesn’t appreciate your humor or your sense of life.”I got quiet and we talked about other things. I felt like a petulant teenager.

I stopped calling or coming by so often. I told myself it was because I felt like such an outsider in her world and I didn’t want to upset things by calling on a day I didn’t know was a Jewish holiday or come by not dressed conservatively enough. But really, I didn’t want her to be right anymore.One day this boyfriend and I were driving and, as usual, I was singing along to every song and doing goofy car-dance moves. I thought it would make him laugh. My sister and I always cracked each other up this way. Instead, he reached over and slammed the radio off. I froze and heard Aidel’s voice in my head. He may as well have told me to stop being me. The relationship held on for a few more months but I think I knew it was over right then. I called Aidel and she told me she couldn’t see me, she was sick.

It was a while before she called me again. Finally, she was well enough and wanted to see me. I came over and told her she’d been right about the boyfriend. She smiled quietly. She was bony and rail thin and I worried my hug hurt her. She never spoke to me of cancer. For as much as she wanted to delve into my life, it seemed she felt there were parts of hers she needed to keep from me. She dodged my questions after her well-being and asked about my life. I said my sister had met a guy. Aidel told me she’d move somewhere hot. A week later, my sister called to tell me she was moving to Arizona for this guy.

I saw Aidel less after that. It depended if she was well enough. I would never have minded to see her in any health but I think it embarrassed her to be seen so frail when she’d been so vivacious. She never wanted to need help.

She called me one Monday. She needed to go to her doctor. It was a Jewish holiday: Shavuot. This meant no one but a non-Jew could drive her. When I pulled up to the door, I was greeted by looks of distrust by the neighbors. It had only been about a month since I’d last seen her but the Aidel that emerged from the building made my voice catch in my throat. Her husband did not smile at me as he helped her into my low sports car. I wondered if it was from his own distress watching his wife waste away or the same distrust of outsiders I’d read on the neighbors’ faces.

As we drove to her doctor’s clinic she explained that they’d disagreed about her even going to the doctor or riding in a car on the holiday but she felt her life was more important than the holiday. God would understand. I cursed my sport suspension which jounced her birdlike body over every bump.

“It’s fine,” she soothed, “with the morphine I don’t feel it.”

She would not let me carry her up the stairs to the clinic though she could not have weighed more than eighty-five pounds. She insisted she could do it herself. I steadied her and she did a sideways shuffle up the wheelchair ramp since she couldn’t get her legs to lift forwards. I watched them inject her with an experimental stem cell potion. After, she seemed to walk more steadily, clinging to my arm as we made our way back to the car.

At this point in our friendship, I saw no point in sugar-coating anything.

“Are you scared to die?”

“No.”

“Are your kids scared?”

“They are prepared.”

There was so much I wanted to understand about her life and her spirituality. So much I wanted to apologize for in my absences. How could I tell her how much I valued her when I’d never really shown it?

“Any new men?” she asked as her head lolled on my passenger seat.

“No.” Then I told her about letting go of my delusions with the Director.

“He’s British,” she smiled, “and tall, yes?”

“Yes, 6’4”

I held my breath. I hadn’t wanted to bring him up. I didn’t want to have her tell me what I already knew: move on.

“He is the one for you. It will be a good life together. Just give him space”

My vision blurred and I had to focus on gripping the steering wheel. A few months before, that news would have been welcome but now it was like a punch in the stomach. Dreaming of him had suffocated me. Was I supposed to open back up to that hope and hurt? I concentrated on the road.We arrived at her door and I wanted to tell her I loved her. But I didn’t. She brought me inside and insisted on peeling me a grapefruit for helping her. I cried all the way back to work.

The next phone call I got was not from Aidel. A month later I turned my phone on as my flight from New York landed. I’d been visiting my mom in her improbable new life. A voice I didn’t know told me that Aidel had passed away and there was a memorial that night if I could make it.

Not knowing what else to do, I grabbed a large scarf out of my suitcase and wrapped it around my head and shoulders. I stood in the back of the Yeshiva and listened to the soothing sounds of the Hebrew prayers. I really had believed that she would get better and always be there to talk to as I grew my Hollywood life. I was in shock.

Later, a woman I’d met at the memorial called to tell me when the family was planning to sit Shiva. I panicked and called all my Jewish friends. What do I bring? What do I wear? How do I act at an orthodox Shiva? Even my least reformed Jewish friend didn’t know. I worried I’d offend the family by showing up as an outsider. Then I decided I had to go just out of love for Aidel.

The only death ritual I know is the Catholic wake where everyone needs to eat. I bring a bag of fresh fruit with me, the only thing I can be sure is kosher. I enter their modest house and find the men and women gathered in separate rooms. I sit with the women, awkwardly holding my fruit until someone takes it and puts it on a table.We are silent for a while until Aidel’s sister sits on the couch facing me. She looks at me with the same wide grey eyes as Aidel; still and glinting at the same time. I introduce myself.

“Oh, you are Heidi.”

She explains to me that when they asked Aidel to make a list of who she wanted at her Shiva, mine was the first name she had said. Me. Why? What had I given her? Not half of what she had given me. I breathe through my mouth to keep from crying.

We sit for a while longer before another friend prompts Aidel’s oldest, a twelve year old daughter, to ask me about her mother. The girl takes up a pad and pen.“I’m making a memory book,” she explains. She looks like she’s tired of people waiting for her tears.

I tell her about how I’d met her mother in the DMV and the unique friendship she’d brought to my life.I talk about Aidel always lending me books she wanted me to read. Most had been about Jewish history. She’d been torn about lending me one because “the narrator had some anger at the Germans he escaped from.” She knew I had a German background.

“I think he had a right to be angry,” I’d told her.

Aidel had lent me the book, laughing about all the Germans in her life now and how she never would have imagined she would have Germans as friends; people who helped her family’s well-being rather than hurt it.The women laugh as I come to a stop. How could I explain to this girl what her mother had given me? How Aidel’s gift terrified me, challenged me and thrilled me all at once? Her earnest grey eyes fix on me, pen poised.

“She was a butterfly,” I finally say. “She was a beautiful soul that flew into my life for little while.”

She nods and writes. How can I tell her I feel just as lost without her mother as she does?

Her sister watches me watching Aidel’s daughter write.“Did you know her Hebrew name?”I shake my head.“Schlomit,” the sister tells me. “It means ‘Complete’.”I start crying.

As the months have passed I have thought of Aidel on nearly a daily basis. I wonder how her family is managing without her. No doubt they’ve been embraced by their community and though they surely miss her, they are managing. Selfishly, I wonder how Aidel could have left me with so many questions unanswered. The most burning of them: how could she have been wrong about the Director? I tell myself the morphine must have scrambled her reception.

Sometimes I talk to her. I ask her if she sees things I see. I tell her I miss her. I ask her what I should do about whatever is going on today. Last night, I watched a fluffy love story where the lovers loved passionately but had to go through trials of fire to finally be together. It was silly overall but I was inspired by the main idea of a love like that…that does not alter when it alteration finds. Later, I turned off my bedside lamp and asked Aidel if she was there. I asked her what fires I have to go through to find that love. In the next moment I heard a faint but clear whisper:

“You are burning now.”

The Complete Woman

Artists since Virginia Woolf have mourned the impossibility of being both an artist and a wife. I’ve always been a firm believer in having it all. But it seems maybe Virginia was onto something.

As our film moves into the festival circuit and another moves into pre-production my days are slammed from the minute I wake at five A.M. until I crash and burn at ten P.M. This week my boyfriend lamented being the last priority on my list. And he’s right. Not because of any lack of wanting to be with him but because the business of my life demands so much attention. I confess: most nights I drag my ass into bed and would rather just drop off to sleep than have a meaningful conversation with him. Or even a basic check-in. This business takes its toll on home life.

I can’t pretend it’s accidental. When I have to make a wish on a cake candle or a penny in a fountain the first two thoughts in my head are: 1) movie success and 2) marry a man who loves me. But it’s a wish, you know. Just one. And since I moved here, despite the fact that I’ve wanted to find a loving partner since I can remember, I always wish for movie success. I figured the love part would handle itself. I need to work at the work part, right? At a certain point it dawned on me that as much as I hate to admit it, I do put career before love.

My friend is pregnant and thrilled. And soon to be staying home. Since we were single girls together we talked about finding life partners. She has always wanted to be a mom and will be an amazing one I know. And she looks at my life and wonders about her own professional course. She’s a mom in the making and that will always be a priority now.

It’s like she has the home life we both wanted and I have the career (at least the seed of it). Between us we are a complete modern woman. I still want to believe it is possible to have both. But I look at the time commitments she and I manage and wonder how it would be possible for one person to do all of both. Finding a balance may be possible but Virginia’s point sinks in ever deeper.

Leaving Home

This is for the empty bar stool in Hendo's corner.

And the pint of Stella that sits there.

The Drugs Don't Work

“Who would want to take this on?” Jon shrugged as if it were a foregone conclusion that the idea of a girl wanting to date him was absurd.

“You are being completely selfish.”

Our friends from the bar gasped at me. How dare I talk to the guy with cancer that way?

“No, you are. Just ‘cause you think you know your expiration date. I could get hit by a bus tomorrow.”

Jon had been given a six-month diagnosis. Five years before.

The Verve’s “The Drugs Don’t Work” was on the stereo. A song about watching a beloved friend die. I gracelessly forwarded to the next song.

“I mean I’d rather be with a great guy like you for six weeks than with some schmuck for sixty years.” I’d meant it as a hypothetical in the moment. And it was true. All of it. He was being selfish not sharing himself with someone. He was one of the most extraordinary men I knew. And I did want to be with someone great. Like him. But him?

I met Jon a year earlier when my dot com went bust and I started waiting tables with all the other over-educated who got hit in the post 9-11 upheaval. I thought working at the local Irish pub would give me – newly single – a safe place to hang out and meet people. Jon was a regular. He wasn’t hot, or tall, or even age-appropriate. He was just always there with his caustic wit at the end of the bar. I thought it was odd that someone so young could spend all his days at a bar but I didn’t wonder why.

Jon organized the music for the pub and he and his brothers had a band that would play on our small stage from time to time. My favorite though was Sunday afternoons. Jon would bring a song book and his acoustic and we’d all loll around on the back patio of the bar picking songs for him to play and us to sing.

At some point, I realized he was brilliant. One of the most intelligent people I’d ever met. It must have been around then that he made a song mine. “There She Goes” by the La's. I’d ask him to sing it and he always did, his bright tenor unfailingly hitting the chorus high notes.

It must have been not long after that that I’d found out. Wendy, the bartender, was on a break with me in the back alley.

“I’m so relieved to hear his new treatment’s going well. Think they’re onto something.”

“Whose treatment?”

“Jon’s cancer.” She must have seen the stricken look on my face. “You didn’t know? Everyone knows. It’s not like it’s a secret.” His long days at the bar made sense.

She finished her cigarette and went back in. I bent double and hugged my knees. How could this amazing man have cancer? How could this friend of mine be dying? Why did this news hurt so much? I realized then that I loved him. I just didn’t know how. I mean, he was fifteen years my senior. Shorter than me. A bit pudgy. Nothing I said I was looking for in a mate. So maybe it wasn’t romantic love. But it wasn’t like an older brother either. I stared at the pavement and ached.

Over the next year we were part of the same circle. I wanted to be close to him but I thought he’d laugh at me – just a silly girl. When I had an art gallery opening, he charged in, swept over my pieces with one glance, pointed at one and handed me his credit card. “You can bring it and the card to me later at the pub.” And he was gone again. At the time, I think that was as much love as he could allow himself.

I made my decision to move to LA and a few nights before my departure, Jon and a few friends from the bar were sitting around my packed-up living room. And there he sat, denying wanting any more love in his life than he already had. It was clear that the opposite was true but he would never admit it. I packed my u-Haul and left.

In LA I wrote my first screenplay about him. It was trite and melodramatic. About an artist who finally opens himself to love although he’s dying. Home on my first visit, I found Jon in the bar and told him about it. I felt silly offering him this tribute. He seemed unsure of how to take it. I promised to let him read it but I never sent it. I couldn’t bear to disappoint him with my first thin effort. I didn’t know what to say about the fact that in my script, his character died.

The years went by and Jon had ups and downs but more or less kept up his fight. He started an annual benefit concert at the bar for cancer research. I couldn’t afford a plane ticket but I promised to come next year.

He and his brothers recorded and album called “The Big C” about his experience living with cancer. Not satisfied with that, he created an in-home editing suite and made a documentary about people dealing with cancer called “The Cancer Journey.” Proceeds from both went to cancer research.

I stopped going home so much as more of my family moved away. My email contact with Jon was spotty at best. I always wanted to matter to him more than I did. I was always scared somewhere he’d say “Why does this girl keep writing me? Why does she think we’re such good friends?” I didn’t want to bother him.

Last month I went home to help my mom pack her house up for sale. I got a few hours’ break from the boxes to go see Jon. He wasn’t well enough to meet me at the bar. Something about a treatment he’d had that morning. So I went to his house.

He was on permanent oxygen assist now. But the sores he’d had on my last visit had healed and his eyes were bright and his hair thick and brown. I told him he looked good. He did.

“Hair. It’s like some sick consolation prize with cancer,” he quipped. He told me that it was in his lungs and his brain now.

He went to his room for pills and I looked around. Pictures of him when he was young, holding a baby nephew, smiling with his brothers – never with a woman, nothing romantic. It dawned on me I never knew if he’d had a great love. A marriage. Kids. Had be been left? Anything. I knew so little. He shuffled back into the room.

“Snooping around on me, eh?”

I wanted to know everything.

“Jon, is there anyone, you know, here with you?”

He talked about his brother across town and otherwise evaded the question. It ate at me that no one was there with him full-time taking care of him. We kept chatting about our lives.

After half an hour he sighed.

“Time for me to go?”

He nodded wearily. “I’m sorry.”

“I’ll be back in September for my cousin’s wedding. I’ll see you then… if not before.”

He nodded and opened his arms to hug me.

I squeezed him as hard as I dared. “I love you, Jon.” I still didn’t know what it meant but I’d said it.

“I love you too.”

I cried all the way back to my mom’s house.

It gnawed at me that he was alone. I felt a pang in my heart that I couldn’t just let this be. I got home and started working it out: Would he be OK with my dog in the house too? What about my cat? My school year was almost over and I could finish teaching and go spend the summer with him and after that we’d see. My professional life wasn’t working anyway so what was I really giving up? I thought all these things but was afraid to tell him. What if he rejected me? What if he didn’t want help and I was just being over-dramatic? What if I was just running away from my own failure? Was that still altruistic? Did I just have a Florence Nightingale fixation? What if taking care of someone dying of cancer was really hard?

For two weeks I tried to work all this out on my own and I finally gave up. I emailed Jon. I said I knew it was a crazy idea but I hated the thought of him alone and I didn’t know if me helping him was a terrible idea nor did I know how to work out all the logistics but there were my thoughts and he was welcome to them.

A day passed. Then: an email that he was trying to digest everything I said. I said I knew it was a crazy idea and not to worry. I comforted myself by talking to my friend Kim. She had just lost a friend to cancer and she said to help someone you care about is never crazy.

He emailed me back that he’d kept the art piece of mine in his room. It was a black and white photo of a rock jetty in Ireland reaching out to an empty, bright sea. He told me it gave him peace to look at it.

The next day another email came. He said he was scared half to death by the whole thing. The idea of opening himself up to another person. Being vulnerable. And he was ready. Maybe, he suggested, I could come and just hang out with him for a week or two and we’d see how things went. That let us both off the hook.

I wrote back that I was leaving town for the weekend but I couldn’t wait to talk more about it with him on Monday.

The next morning Bridget, the pub manager, called. My heart thudded heavy. My ears rang and I missed most of the details. Just that he’d passed away in the night.

It was Coachella Music Festival weekend and there were plans. I hung up, cried for a while and we went to the concert. That evening, the Verve came on for their set. When they hit the opening chords of “The Drugs Don’t Work” I sobbed and thanked goodness it was dark already. A few verses in I suddenly remembered “There She Goes” and I could only hear Jon’s voice singing it to me. What would I do the next time I heard it? I clamped my hand over my mouth and sank to the grass in the swaying crowd.

I wept for the loss of a friend and the loss of what that time would have been like. It was like I was finally going to get to know someone I’d made up in my writing and my mind forever - this amazing, beautiful man. I cried for the five years we’d known each other that could have been so much more than the six weeks I’d scolded him with before I moved to LA. I still don’t understand if it was romantic or platonic love. It was just love. Is.

As I sat crouched on the dark grass listening to the Verve, something else hit me. His unwillingness to let love in was what I’d harassed him for that night before I left. His last message to me was that he was finally willing to be open, as much as it scared him, he was ready. Maybe that was the last thing his soul needed to do here.

It seems Jon had gone to the pub after he’d finished emailing. It was the first time in a while he’d been up for it and no doubt everyone was glad to see him. He’d had a few beers with the crew there. Early in the evening, he walked out to his car in the alley and had a seizure. Someone found him and called the paramedics but they were never able to revive him. He died in the hospital that night.

The thought of spending a few weeks with him next month never quite had seemed real to me. Now it fades to another scene in a script. I am grateful that he went quickly and painlessly after being surrounded by friends who love him. I am so thankful I said ‘I love you’ while I had the chance. I am so honored that his life touched mine for a while. I am so sorry that I didn’t give more.

Miss you, Jon.

love, h

Casey and the Unicorn

We were snuggled together in a quiet corner. It was a stolen moment. One of those times that you’ll know you look back on and remember as one of those relationship turning points in your life.

“Do you love me?” I asked.

He looked at me for a long moment. His brown eyes boring into my green ones that I think were blue at the time.

“If you love me.”

He was the love of my life. And it was my first taste of conditional love. We were in second grade in the choo-choo train on the play ground.

Casey was an asthmatic and had lots of brown freckles. I recall that he tasted vaguely salty as I had once licked his arm and decided that’s what freckles tasted like. Salt.

Turns out, twenty five years later not much has changed in finding a viable relationship in Hollywood. I don’t go around licking boys’ arms. Or any parts of them for that matter. But they seem pretty salty here as a rule. And no one is willing to risk his heart until he knows it’s safe. Some not even then.

Meanwhile, my innate Pollyanna leads me to risk my heart continually. I’m a leap-before-I-look kind of girl and I always have been. The problem is that the ability to see the special, overlooked qualities in a sickly seven year old doesn’t really have the same cache when applied to a famous director or an upwardly mobile digital artist. The key, it seems, is in holding out for the guy who realizes that same specialness in me is something worth his while. Worth the risk.

Guys are spoiled and lazy here. They seem to think that because a majority of the population is botoxed and siliconed that they are somehow entitled to that Barbie perfection in every girl. On top of that, guys who wouldn’t get a second thought in Minnesota are head turners here even with their beer guts because they have industry power.

I could get pissed but really it’s just a stronger filter. The guys who will see through all that fluff and choose a strong woman who will cause them to become better men: those are the guys that are worth my time. Those are the guys that will make me a better woman. The whole point is growing together, isn’t it?

“I’m going to have to be a better man to be with you, aren’t I?” sighed the artist formerly known as Mr. Wonderful.

Yes, I told him, You will. Lucky you. Turns out he wasn’t up for the personal growth and the loss of that guy is both of ours. Instead, he’s back out there, looking for the easy fix. Looking for a tolerant woman who won't mind with his “quirks” (read: emotional baggage and unresolved issues.) While I’m stinging over the fact that he’s back out there so quickly as though we meant nothing, bless him, I hope he finds Her. Meanwhile, I’ll be over here cocooning for a while. Break my heart once, shame on you. Break it twice…clearly I have some growing of my own to do.

I think of Casey from time to time. How funny we must have looked to the yard duty; two seven-year olds holding hands and grinning. I wonder where he is now. Probably married. Hopefully happy. I like to imagine he’s found someone who he can grow with, someone with whom the love is not conditional. That, it seems, is the holy grail of relationships. The mythic creature. The unicorn that I have to believe I’ll find. Someday. Perhaps hiding in a choo choo train. Where does one find unicorns these days?

The Terror Writer

Few words in the English language conjure such abject fear - such extreme reactions. It’s right up there with War, Murder, Mother-in-law. Yes of course I’m talking about Love. Every relationship gets to that point where you feel it. You want to say it. But then what? By now you’ve been around the block a few times and you know the sometimes unpleasant results confessing your love can have.

For us girls especially it gets drummed into our brains early. The quickest way to send a man running for the hills is to tell him you love him. If you’re like me, you have been fortunate enough to have someone run screaming from the room never to speak to you again all because you said the L word. Pure theatre, I highly recommend it. Actually, it’s amazing I even got to that point considering my anti L word training started in first grade.

I was madly in love with Gary. His big brother played on the Denver Nuggets so he was cool. He also insisted on wearing a belt buckle with our Catholic School uniform that said Tuffy. Only now do I see the absurdity of an eight-year old proclaiming his toughness but at the time, Gary was heaven in plaid wool.

As a child of divorce I was sent to a therapist which was the hip thing to do with your kid at the time. I didn’t understand it but I knew it was significant so I shared this with Gary. Surely such heart-to-hearts would forge a bond that would last us a lifetime. He seemed interested so I chattered away to him about the Lincoln Logs and the Battleship game I got to play with at the therapist’s. I felt Gary and I were really clicking. I wanted to take it to the next level.

He’d mentioned his love for the T-rex. Not to me but I was getting good at eavesdropping. I labored one night on a dinosaur drawing for him. I wrote his name at the top and “I love you” in proud crayon letters across the bottom. I marched into class the next morning puffed up and happy. I was going to deliver to Gary the most important dinosaur doodle of his life.

When I gave him the drawing, he looked at it blankly and mumbled a thanks. I thought to myself that this was fine. He just needed some time to process the enormity of this declaration. Later, at the pencil sharpener, I found my drawing in the trash can. Surely this was a mistake. You don’t just disregard something of this magnitude. Do you?

It turned out Gary wasn’t content just to trash my sentiments. He wanted to be sure his friends knew that he wasn’t about to get reeled in by all that horrendous love stuff. As we formed our neat Catholic School single file lunch line, Gary stepped out of the front and turned back to face everyone.

“Guess what everybody?” Everybody was ready to guess. My heart leapt. Is he going to tell them we’re going out? That we’re in love?

“Heidi has to go to a shrink ‘cause she can’t make friends.”

All eyes swiveled to me. Was that why I had to go? If not before, it was now. No one wanted to hang out with the therapy freak kid. Thankfully the teacher who somehow hadn’t heard this deflation of my heart herded us into the cafeteria and I didn’t have to actively address Gary’s claim.

Needless to say, that pretty much killed that. I moved on to Mike who was taller that Gary and in truth seemed tougher. Mike never spoke two words to me but later stole my book bag. It was a positive relationship as near as I could tell. I sure as hell never said the L word to Mike. It was far better to love from afar and not have to deal with public humiliation.

So we grow up. We learn our lessons. Despite occasionally sending someone running for the hills, we still love. We can’t help it. We fall hard and we dance around the subject while our heart does flip flops every time he smiles: “I like you,” “I’m crazy about you.” We may even venture a tentative “I love being with you,” which uses the L word in a more indirect way but at least we got to use it in a sentence because it was just driving us nuts.

So what do you do? How do you know when it’s time to say IT? Well first I’ve learned there should be something more than a single conversation and a dino drawing. I have also learned to listen. Not for him saying it, but for him being it with me. And even then, when I’m sure it’s a safe space, sure he feels the same way, I snap from being the self-assured, lion-hearted woman that I am back to being a little girl holding a picture of a T-rex. So I guess my best answer is take the plunge, trust and just say it.

Or, alternately make him a lovely drawing and hope he’ll say it first.

Flying Home

In the waiting area of gate B58 a beautiful man holds a long, narrow hand over the vacant seat beside him. He looks like an English poet. He tells the man who asked to sit that he is saving the seat for his wife. I watch him and wonder what woman inspired him to love. She returns with Starbucks and I am surprised. She has a long face, a prominent nose and tiny, close eyes that seem too far up her forehead. She reminds me of a troll. I want to ask him, “why her?” Who can say what it is that brings people together? Or, more importantly, what keeps them together?

I went home for my brother’s wedding this weekend. It was beautiful to see the threads of this family come together from all over the country. The tapestry that binds us together. In my urban life I think I am fine. I don’t need anything. And then I am with family like this and I am brought face to face with how acutely lonely the modern career pursuit can be. I find myself wondering why we are all so far apart. Why we live our daily lives without the benefit of each other.

At the reception, I see what keeps my brother and his bride together. She always has a smile for him. He goes out of his way to tell her he loves her. I watch them greet the wedding guests and wonder what that would be like. To find someone who went out of his way. My family indulges me as I offer a poorly thought-out toast to the happy couple. Still they tell me it was moving and made them cry. Maybe it did.

On the plane, the beautiful man now sits across the aisle. He smiles at me once. I smile back. He looks away. As he should. He touches his wife’s back. She does not respond. No warming to his hand, curling into his touch. I imagine the marriage is not turning out the way the beautiful man once hoped.

I took the back roads out to my brother’s rehearsal. “I remember the way,” I’d cavalierly told him. “See you there.” The wedding was taking place at an outdoor amphitheater where we’d grown up seeing concerts. As I rolled out of our mountain town I realized I had no idea about the right streets. I drove into the open scrub land flanked by towering rocks and lit by dramatic storm clouds. I felt a stab of that exquisite pain that comes from knowing you’ll never have enough time with beauty. This is the land that made me, I thought. I’d forgotten how beautiful it was. How could I forget? Lost in the reverie of home, I arrived at the rehearsal without a single false turn.

I lean my head back into the plane seat and feel the poke of bobby pins from the day-old up-do I wear like a badge of honor. I have been to a place of love, it says. I know people who love truly and they are part of me. It dawns on me I am never as alone as I pretend with so much love just a phone call away. I look at the bridal bouquet that I caught. Squashed into my carry-on. I try to believe in it.

The small plane banks over LA. It’s golden hour. Everything is flush with the veneer of perfection and possibility. I look back across the aisle at the beautiful man and the troll wife. Together they are watching the city grow larger beneath us. She nods and speaks softly as he points out landmarks. It hits me. Marriage is simply deciding yes, no matter what. And re-deciding every day.

V-Day

And so once again, it’s the much-vaunted holiday of love: St. Valentine’s Day. The day where long single women like myself wear black and gather to piss a moan over a pint about why beautiful, intelligent, cultured women such as ourselves are still single and damn the happy couple at the next table. Yes, nothing reels the men folk in like a hardened, bitter shell.

People bitch about Valentine’s Day being a manufactured Hallmark holiday. Maybe. But I don’t even really think it’s the couples that push it. Most of my couple friends have forgotten about it. Or love each other enough to make it clear everyday. I think it’s all of us singletons who see the day as a howling reminder of our failure to be a wanted half of a couple. Quick, find a date, push the romance, create everything to look as we imagine it should.

Well my friends, that is what we do in this town. We create images and realities and some people get paid a lot of money for it. And everyone else pays their ticket price to believe in it for two hours.

I almost had a Valentine’s date. I think. There’s this guy I’ve been flirting with. I’ve not been sure if he’s a friend or potentially more. I got the sense he was interested in moving our friendship along. So I asked him over for Valentine’s dinner. I misread his diplomatic ‘no’ as a coy ‘maybe’ and pushed the issue only to get a definitive ‘no’. Fine. Good. I hate guesswork.

Why exactly did I get to the point of thinking he was interested? Again, I’d like to blame it on the movies. Up on the big screen, lives are told in shorthand. When a guy and girl fall, there’ll be some iconic event meant to represent the progress from friend to lover. We see John Cusack share a dog walk with a girl and we know he’s saying he wants to love her for the rest of his life. She stops and smiles and we know they’ll love happily ever after. We see John Cusack holding a boom-box aloft and blasting a Peter Gabriel love song and we know he is stating his undying devotion.

So my problem is I tend to read the small things normal people do as the shorthand to relationships. I forget that people do things – I myself do things – because life is small moments and not every one is a metaphor for something else. At times the grammar of screen relationships I work on overtakes my reality. Oh that time you changed your plane tickets to stay with me? Clearly, the next scene is us sharing a tender hopelessly-devoted-to-you moment. That time I cried and you said you’d do anything to help me? A definitive moment to cut to our happy relationship.

Hey, I’m the first one to say I am naive and hopeful, am I not? So misread potential date aside, why is it that Valentine’s Day is the enemy of single women everywhere? Why is it that the fact of not being in a relationship is seen as a failure? Perhaps it’s success. Perhaps it means we didn’t get caught up in the world of a guy who didn’t deserve us. We didn’t give up our own dreams to support someone else’s. Perhaps it means we have more to offer the world at the moment as a singular force.

I am not wearing black today. In fact I’m wearing white. I’m taking today to pamper myself solely for me. Not in order to please or impress anyone else. That feels new. And nice. I’m taking time today to remember all my fabulous single friends who I know will change the world. I know my world is better for them being in it. Tonight, I’ll light a candle to celebrate my friends who’ve found love. I’ll pour myself a cabernet, cuddle with my big dog and watch Love Actually again imagining what finding love would feel like.

Meanwhile, does anyone have John Cusack’s number?

Instinct

Sparrows don’t have to worry about freezing to death. They have a little cue in their primitive brains that tells them it’s time to head south for the winter. I can’t tell you if it’s triggered by wind direction, falling leaves or a dropping barometer. Maybe a little birdie tells them...

We, on the other hand, live in places like Greenland, Siberia and the Yukon. We defeat the problem of it being too darn cold with our big brains. We invent things like engine block heaters, down coats, and electric foot warmers. In effect, we circumvent any instinct that may be asking us “Have you thought about Hawaii this time of year?”

In “Who Moved My Cheese?” the author is basically saying that our human ability to get hung up on the way we think things should be derails us from making the most of life. In his novel, “Galapagos,” Vonnegut takes it one further asserting that our big brains will be the cause of our evolutionary undoing. I think he may be on to something. Without the ability to daydream, expectations would never be unmet. Without the ability to pine for someone, a relationship failure could never hurt. We’d just move along, finding the next cheese. For better or for worse though this, along with the opposable thumbs, is what makes us human.

I believe a happy life rests somewhere in between animal instinct and heady reasoning. The trick is finding the right balance.

As a young woman I always heard married women talk about finding him. “You just know he’s the right one.”

How? You just know didn’t seem like much empirical data to go on. I was a geek and an outcast and tried to learn life from watching the cool kids. Give me behavior patterns to research, popularity to track. Telling me I’d just know gave me nothing. A boyfriend remained the ultimate unattainable cheese. Through college, I would hold my crushes up to this rubric. Is this knowing? Is this flutter in my belly love? Or just the Snickers I had for lunch? Instinct seemed furthest from my dating failures. I looked for guys who fit lists I’d made or who seemed, based on observed behavior, to be boyfriend material. I once dated a sweet guy who had recently lost a lot of weight. “He still thinks of himself as fat and therefore undesirable,” I reasoned, “I have to get to him before he realizes he’s a commodity.” I think the President would have approved of my strategery. But it still didn’t work. What sounded logical in my big brain didn’t touch my confused heart.

Then one day it happened. I met I guy I hadn’t planned on and I just knew. I became one of those super-annoying happy people that goes around spouting platitudes such as “when it’s right, you just know.” I got obsessed with trying to fix up all my single friends with all of his single friends while we planned our wedding. Reason was out the window. I was basking in just knowing.

But in the end, it wasn’t right. It didn’t last. I didn’t know. And then a whole new terrifying chasm of doubt yawned before me. If I couldn’t reason a love and I couldn’t rely in instinct to know one when I found him, how on the Sam Hill am I supposed to not be alone forever?

I know women are supposed to have great intuition. And I work on honing mine, I do. I knew John Kerry was going to win the election. I felt it. I knew John Taylor was going to be my new best friend. I saw the planets aligning. I knew that last script was going to be the flawlessly hilarious one that had the studios in a bidding war. The pages spoke to me.

“Learn to listen to your intuition” my girlfriends tell me. Why would I keep listening to someone who keeps getting me in trouble? Unless you’re trapped in Leave It To Beaver, you eventually learn your lesson and stop listening to Eddie Haskell.

So now what?

“The Universe is just getting him ready for you, and you for him,” one friend tells me.
“More will be revealed,” says my yoga teacher.
“God has a plan for you and a love for you,” my sister says.
“There’s a lid for every pot,” philosophizes my Irish aunt.

But I want someone to love. Someone who loves me.

"You can't push a wet noodle," intones my dad.

OK. Forget the noodles. Back to the cheese. So if the cheese book holds any water, I should eschew emotional entrapment and just putter on my merry way and I’ll get to my cheese sooner rather than later. Meanwhile I’m focusing on relishing my singleton-hood as much as possible. Much to my big brain’s annoyance I can’t explain it but I feel that someday I’ll look back and think “I can’t believe I was ever worried about this. I just should have known.”

To Birmingham With Love

Five years ago I adopted Simon and he is the love of my life. No, he’s not a Cambodian refugee child. He’s a giant Shepard/Collie mix. His name wasn’t Simon at the pound. It was Levi. No offense to the jean company but I was not having a dog named Levi. As a writer, I wasn’t about to be denied the privilege of naming this character. Especially not when I’d had a name in mind for years.

When I tell people my dog is named after one of my favorite Brits, they say “You like Simon Cowell? American Idol is so annoying.” I shake my head. Then, especially if they are children of the 80’s, a light of comprehension spreads over their face. “Simon LeBon?” I smile and they either laugh, groan or hum “The Reflex” for me.

I fell madly in love with Duran Duran back in 1984 with the Seven and the Ragged Tiger album. Dreamy John Taylor was my first hardcore celebrity crush after Bo Duke. He started a lifelong obsession with all things British. I liked John because he seemed like the sweetest one, the good heart. He’d endured a childhood of being the odd kid, being teased. I could relate. He seemed really close to his family according to 16 Magazine. Plus he was the tallest and it was clear from a young age I’d hit six feet. I read everything I could about him, saved all the Tiger Beats that had the slightest mention of the band and watched MTV for hours on end just hoping they would play “Rio” AKA, “Ohmygod, they’re wearing Speedos!”

As I got older I became obsessed with another Brit: Shakespeare. As my literary tastes matured and expanded, I decided it made more sense to crave Simon since he wrote all the lyrics and recites part of Queen Mab’s speech at the beginning of the “Night Boat” video. Besides, as a girl gets older, she moves away from the square-jawed sweetness of the good guy and gravitates more toward the impish danger of the bad boy. And to my good girl upbringing, Simon was plenty bad boy for me.

As my life has moved through phases of grunge, acid jazz, techno, shoe gazer and back to Brit rock by way of indie, the fab five were there going through breakups, career obscurity, retro cool, reunion and genuine resurgence.

As the teen need to rebel faded, my pendulum swung back to John. Of course I am a grownup so I call it a fondness rather than a crush these days. I do feel Simon makes a better dog name though.

Now as my LA life unfolds, it turns out one of friends actually knows John Taylor. He got her tickets and back stage passes to the Duran Duran tour this summer and like my fairy godmother, she made my dreams come true and took me.

Like any good rabid fan, I smuggled my digital camera in my bra and shot away during the concert and then back stage after. Yes, I really thought it would just be a handful of us special friends and maybe some family with the band. My poor friend must have seen my face fall as she walked me into the 200 plus crowd in the green room.

After chatting with some other people she knew, my friend said she’d introduce me to John and I tried to breathe. I asked her if I could get a picture with him but she looked at the swarm of star-fuckers John’s wife was fending off and hissed a quick no. His wife blocking me? She’d known him, what, maybe five years? I’d known and loved this man for two thirds of my life. But not wanting to embarrass my friend, I pocketed my camera. And, after a mere twenty one years I was shaking hands with my lovely, square jawed John Taylor. Determined to make a good impression, I sweated, stuttered and finally said something completely inane about him being my fairy godmother.

Later, my friend guided me in my post-John haze to the car. “Let down?” She asked. It wasn’t fair. Here was a relatively new friend who had gone out of her way to make a dream come true for me. I had no right to be anything but ecstatic. I realized there was nothing the poor man could have done to live up to the combined pressure of twenty one years of day dreams. Anything…short of falling on one knee and declaring me his long lost soul mate and true love. Yes, I really had hoped to make an impression on him, make just a tiny difference in his life for the huge one he’d made in mine. Yes, I really thought we’d laugh over the fact I’d named my dog after Simon. I’d get to tell him how I’d spent my thirteenth summer with my ear pressed to my boom box dutifully transcribing every single Duran Duran song because I needed the lyrics and there was no internet back then.

I had read bits to my mom who murmured “That’s some lovely poetry, dear.”

“It’s Duran Duran, mom. I told you they were the best.” I’d sneered.

“It’s not like he’s going to remember you from in there.” My friend comforted me. I knew she felt responsible for my let down. In the green room he was not John-her-friend, he’d been John-the-rock-star who was as much of an alien being to her as to me.

But this is Hollywood and everything is possible. Last week, I smooshed into a packed elevator and turned to face the closing doors.

“We can make this one,” said a smooth British voice as a tall, beautifully square-jawed man appeared less than three feet from me. He stopped, seeing the capacity crowd and for a moment we locked eyes. I smiled and the slightest cloud of “Do I know you?” passed over his face.

I willed myself to remain silently smiling at him as the doors closed while my inner eleven year old jumped up and down yelling “Ohmygod it’s John! Ohmygod it’s John!”

Romantic Comedy or Drama?

Way back in the misty epoch of January, I had the good fortune to go to Mexico for a company conference. While there I met this Big Deal Director. I thought he was engaged to one of my favorite models so I blithely chatted away with him till the wee hours, happy to be utterly myself. Since he was taken, there was no need to impress or strategize.

The next day however, my intrepid (read: nosy) colleagues Googled everything they could think of about him and came up with the surprising revelation that he was in fact not engaged, hadn’t been for months, and IMDB doesn’t update its facts very often.

Subsequently, I turned into a complete fluffy dork around him. He was after all gorgeous, intelligent, witty, successful, well-mannered, everything-on-dream-list and OhMyGod what if he fell in love with little-old-me? Adding fuel to the fire, when I coyly suggested he change his travel plans to stay till the end of the week like I was, he did. After all, things had started with Agent Man on a vacation. Maybe this was The Next One. Ooo! Maybe this was The One! Delusions of grand relationship beginnings danced in my head. Poor man thought he was just having himself a fling.

“Silly girl! What would your boss think?” You ask.
“Not just boss,” I correct you, “whole department.”

I knew there were possible job damning politics afoot but I figured everyone would forgive if it was “real.” Don’t we put everything aside for that which is “real?” We do in movies. Despite my protestations that I’m a good girl I’m pretty sure that’s why I’m not on the list for this year’s company trip.

The funny thing is I honestly did have a bout of morality at the time. Believe me, I was tempted. The man is very skilled. And gorgeous and witty and…But at the last minute, it hit me that I didn’t want to be just another notch on his infamous bedpost. I wanted to matter to him. I would distinguish myself by not sleeping with him. It was beautiful Mexico after all and after my twelve hour work days (who needs sleep?) there were entire nights to talk and share with each other and build that romantic base of friendship that would undoubtedly sustain us on our life of love. Cue violins…

Despite all evidence to the contrary, I am not delusional. After the Hollywood pretense fell away, he actually shared something of himself with me. I wonder now if he meant to. Beneath all the name and money crap was just a nice guy with a heart like anyone else. A pretty likable heart at that.

We did have fun together. We laughed a lot and I don’t think he minded my chastity too terribly. But when I gave him my number at the airport, he reciprocated with his assistant’s number and a look of “Oh God please don’t ever call me.” So I didn’t. Nope, I thought, I’m gonna be the girl who didn’t sleep with you and didn’t call you. Clever strategy, no?

After a few weeks of radio silence I got a text from him and my heart stopped. When I could again breathe, I texted back something deliciously witty in the moment for which I slapped my forehead the next moment. And so on. For months he’d text or call when ever he was in town. I’d think Ooooo! Maybe he sees something here after all. And I’d get all excited. And then get all heartbroken again, when he didn’t call again. Or when I found out again that he was instead with the latest shiny object (model/starlet) on whatever shoot he’d gone off to. I’d wonder what I was doing wrong. I found myself being exceedingly careful to be fabulous around him. It’s a fun cycle: hope, self-doubt and heartbreak. I highly recommend it to anyone looking to get some meat to draw on for real emotion in your writing.

It dawned on me that if we truly were meant to be, there was nothing I could do to mess it up so I might as well be myself. He still didn’t call and I figured it was time to listen to the message the Universe was giving me. I sent back a sweater I’d poached (oh but it smells like him! – gag) and I finally let go of my daydreams of an amazing romance.

My boss asked me “Did you really think something serious was going to work out with this guy?”
I smiled and told him that “Yes, yes I had.”

I had believed that he might like the idea of being with someone who valued him for him, not for who he has to be for Hollywood.

Then I realized the funny thing about dream guy lists. I had left the kicker off mine: must be crazy in love with me. The fact that the Director is missing that vital item pretty much negates the rest of the list and it took me a while to see that. I guess I was blinded by the Hollywood stuff after all. In the end I’m relieved things are as they are now. The gossamer treacle of daydreams can only sustain you for so long. After a while some good hearty living-in-the-now is much more satisfying.

I’m sure the Director laughed plenty at my naiveté’. But though I would have been hurt to know that before, he’s not wrong. It’s much easier when you can laugh at yourself. A silly, lovelorn girl who crazily believes her own Cinderella story is pretty funny. Especially if she’s a flawed but loveable protagonist. Now if I could just find some talking mice who know how to sew.

And just for the record IMDB still lists the Director as engaged. That’s probably for the best.