The Gift Bag Chronicles (19 page)

“Hey,” I say, trying not to mew.

“Hey,” he says. “Where’ve you been? I’ve been BlackBerrying you for the past hour.”

“Yeah, I went to yoga. The screening got canceled.”

“Oh yeah? I thought you hated yoga.”

I’m tempted to come clean. I do hate yoga, or at least the S & M way it’s taught here. But given how weird it’s been between us lately, how off our calls have been, I’m in no mood to concede anything. “No,” I say, easing back in the seat. “I love it. Why do you think I hate it?”

“Because it practically crippled you last time.”

“Well, I
love
it,” I say. “I just don’t get to do it often enough.”

“Okay, great,” he says. “I stand corrected. So anyway, put New York on your schedule for next week. Patrice will be in town, and we can get a jump on meeting with her and Andrew about the party.”

“Yeah, I spoke to Patrice,” I say, bending forward to rest my forehead on the steering wheel. “It’s not ideal from my end and I told her so, but—”

“Look, you can work it out,” he says, cutting me off. “I just think it’s a chance to get everyone face-to-face on this, and the sooner the better.”

Normally I’d put up a fight. List all the reasons why caving in to Patrice is so wrong on so many levels, how it will just send us down a road of pain. But given that I’m already well along a road of pain, I let it go.

“Yeah, okay.” I sigh. “Just let me look at my calendar tomorrow before you go setting this in stone.”

“Sure,” he says. “Are you okay? You sound tired or something.”

“No, I’m totally fine,” I say, pushing my head off the steering wheel. Out of the corner of my eye, I see someone heading across the parking lot. Oh no. It’s the coonhound heading right for the Mercedes. Oh,
shit
. I do not want a face-to-face with this woman, and given the look on her face, she’s spoiling for a fight. A
Zen
fight. I’m tempted to hang up, start the car, and just bolt. But given the precarious state of my back, any sudden moves are out of the question. “Hang on a sec,” I say to Charles. I switch the phone to my left hand, drop the emergency brake with my right, and carefully slide down across it — ow, ow,
ow!
— my head now in the passenger seat. “Yeah, okay,” I say, whispering now.

“Look, where are you?” Charles says.

“In the car. I just dropped my water bottle.”

“Why are you whispering?”

“I’m not,” I say, raising my voice a little. Outside I hear the coonhound’s car alarm chirp. In another minute she’ll be gone and I can get the hell out of here before my back totally freezes up.

“You sound like you’re in a cave,” Charles says.

“No, I’m just reaching under the seat for the water,” I say, trying to keep my voice casual. Suddenly, a light flashes outside the passenger window above me. Oh no, she’s getting in the
Range Rover
, not the Mercedes. There’s no way she won’t see me now. With its height, she’ll have a perfect sight line into the front seat of my car.

Okay, pain or no pain, there’s only so much humiliation I’m willing to take. “Let me call you back,” I say to Charles, clicking off and tossing the cell phone to the floor. I’m just pushing myself
upright when I hear a rap on the passenger window. I look up. The coonhound, looking like the woman in Grant Wood’s
American Gothic
. Minus pitchfork. I smile wanly, screw up all my strength, and reach across the car floor, grab the phone, and push myself up back into the driver’s seat in one move. The pain is beyond intense. I lean back in the seat and push the button for the passenger window down.

“Yes?” I say.

“You know that sign is up for a reason,” she says, not bothering to introduce herself.

“Polluting?” I say.

“What?” she says angrily.

“Polluting,” I say, again louder. “It’s all so” — I pause — “polluting.”

“It’s
distracting
,” she says. “And dangerous. Some of us get migraines.”

Migraines. From a whiff of perfume. I know everyone in L.A. is the star of their own movie, but this chick is in a class by herself. I’m tempted to ask her how the hell she gets through a day without coming into contact with any migraine-inducing scents. I mean, a red carpet event, the cleaning aisle of the grocery store, Saks cosmetic department—any of them would just lay her out. And I’d happily buy a ticket.

“Perhaps you should study privately,” I say. “That might be safer. For everyone.”

She looks as if I’d struck her. “There are such things as
rules
, you know. And
courtesy.”

Courtesy. Now there’s a concept. I can’t think of the last act of courtesy or, God forbid, kindness I’ve seen. Not in L.A. It’s all about needs and wants and power and who has the ability to make who do what. No one has the time, or the inclination, to think of others.

“You know, you’re right,” I say, reaching for the window button and pushing it up. “Apology accepted.”

“You know you’re making a big mistake?”

“Keep it up, big guy, and you’re going to seriously make me cry. Besides, I’m about to board,” I say, hustling down the jetway.

Actually
hustle
isn’t exactly it, given that I’ve got my handbag, a bulging tote bag holding my laptop, the trades, and my raincoat, which is already spilling toward the floor in one hand, my cell in the other, trying to talk to Oscar while boarding American’s 8:00
A.M.
flight to JFK — which is now a 9:00
A.M.
flight due to some delay somewhere — for my big lunch meeting with
C
magazine. I’m exhausted, up since 5:30, forced to abandon my time zone plan, and the capper, I have a lower back that after a week of hot baths, a massage, plenty of sauvignon blanc, and whatever over-the-counter painkillers I can get my hands on remains on the disabled list.

“You’re saying my advice is too little, too late?” Oscar says.

“Look,” I say, dropping my voice, as I pull up behind a Paris
Hilton wannabe in a plaid miniskirt, headphones, and holding a pink pet carrier idling in the line in front of me. “It’s a command performance, and there’s nothing you or I can do about it. My only hope is to act like my schedule opened up so I could make the meeting.
Surprise!
Here I am!”

“Yeah, well, good luck faking out Patrice with that act, although Charlie boy is under no such illusions, since he insisted you show,” Oscar says, raising his voice. In the background I hear shouting and metal crashing.

“Where are you, the fights?” I say, hiking my bags higher up on my shoulder, trying not to wince at the pain. My long day is looking even longer if this line doesn’t get moving.

“At the fish market with Hot Fat. We’re getting salmon for that two-hundred-person dinner tonight.”

“Wild or farm-raised?”

“Please, it’s some fund-raiser for Schwarzenegger. They can all eat red dye number two for all I care.”

“That’s the spirit,” I say, peering down the line in front of me. Suddenly the idea of spending the morning with Oscar and Hot Fat wading through slimy chum picking out salmon seems a lot more fun than getting on this plane and having lunch at Michael’s tomorrow with the inmates at
C
. Whatever weirdness I felt toward Oscar after spending that Sunday with him has long since departed, overtaken by work, back pain, and pragmatism. A girl can be on the outs with only so many people at one time. Besides, given the all-hands-on-deck mode that happens at the agency every fall, when we’re juggling more than a dozen events and parties, there’s no time to waste being pissed at anyone. Except the clients, of course.

“Well, my offer still stands,” Oscar says. “I can catch the redeye tonight and make the lunch meeting tomorrow.”

“That’s sweet, but no, I don’t want this meeting to look any more official than it has to,” I say as the line starts to inch forward.
The wannabe and I shuffle around the curve of the jetway and come to a stop. My coat slithers toward the floor. I feel like joining it. Up ahead I spot an empty wheelchair. How pathetic would it be if I just went and collapsed in it?

“Well, think it over and I’ll call you later,” he says. “My offer is good until tonight.”

I hang up, and am just trying to check my messages while attempting to pluck my coat from the floor when the wannabe turns and burbles in my direction.

“I’m sorry?” I say.

“This sucks,” she says, scowling and sticking her pinkie in her mouth. “I mean, what do they think, like, we have all day?”

“We’re cargo,” I say, hoisting my bags and my coat higher on my shoulder. The wheelchair is looking better by the minute.

“What?” she says, pulling the headphones from her ears.

“I said, we’re
cargo
. We could be handicapped for all they care. As long as we’re not carrying a gun. Or scissors. Or nail scissors.”

The wannabe looks startled. “You can carry a gun if you’re handicapped? Don’t they think terrorists could, like, figure that out? I mean, they could just get wheelchairs or crutches or something.”

And they say global warming will be our undoing.

“Yeah, I know,” I say, nodding at the wheelchair up ahead. “Like, who was in that chair a minute ago? I didn’t see them, did you?”

“Oh, my
god!”
she says, swiveling to look first at the chair and then back at me.

I’m about to say something more, if only for the amusement factor, which, granted, is on the pulling-wings-from-a-fly level, when the line starts to move again and the wannabe and I surge forward.

“Boarding passes?” the flight attendant says, holding out her hand.

“I just showed it to the gate agent,” I say, juggling my bags and coat. Of course, that was ten minutes ago. I could have morphed into a terrorist since then.

She smiles a bored smile, her hand still extended. I fumble in my bag — where is the damn thing? — and produce the stub. “Thank you,” she says, glancing at it and waving me on. I stumble toward 8A, a packhorse heading for its stall.

By the time we break through the clouds over Manhattan, rain has begun spattering the window. I gaze down on my former hometown. In the rain, it looks gray, dismal, worn. I lived here for ten years, but after five years in L.A., five autumns of season-defying searing heat and light, I feel like I’m landing in a foreign country where I no longer speak the language.

And it’s not just the weather but all the little things you don’t even notice anymore. Like how having the right handbag — the Fendi baguette! the Mombasa! anything from Marc Jacobs! — is so important in New York, but in L.A., you can carry any kind of nice bag because your car — a hybrid! a Hummer! a BMWer! — is what people really notice about you. Or how it’s more important to have killer abs in L.A. than anything from, say, the Chanel sample sale. How New York is about looking like you have money even if you don’t but L.A. is about having money and looking like you don’t.

The pilot clicks on — “Folks, we’re sorry about our delay today, and we sure do want to thank you for your patience” — and everyone lurches into that stupor-to-frenzy mode, tossing blankets to the floor, shoving magazines into the seat pockets, retrieving jackets and coats from the overhead bins. I lean my head against the window, gaze out at the rain, and try to get my head into New York mode. That back-to-school feeling, the dark that comes earlier and earlier, the town houses glowing like jack-o’-lanterns in the dusk. A collective turning inward.

If I loved that so much, how did I wind up living in the desert, working at a job where I have no routine, where I’m hardly ever home or even in the same place twice unless you count all the red carpets I’ve worked?

Maybe if I was still in my twenties, it would seem exotic. God knows, people who don’t work in Hollywood think that everyone who does has it made. Or needs their head examined. In either case, that we have no business complaining about it. I mean, even I used to think being a Hollywood publicist was one big fat road trip, all expenses paid, the prize for having survived one failed marriage and seven years in a fluorescent-lit cubicle editing magazine copy about postpartum depression, low-fat apple pies, and ten ways to make him beg for more.

But now that I’m starting to lose my balance on that teeter-totter of being in my thirties, sliding closer to my forties than my twenties, the idea of living my life on planes, on my cell, on the red carpet — on
call
24/7 — seems more like penance than like reward. A running away rather than a running toward. If only I had time to stop and figure it out.

“Folks, we should have you on the ground in just a few minutes.”

I turn from the window and check my watch. Heading toward 3:00
P.M.
I pull out the stem and spiral forward. For once, I don’t feel sorry to lose three hours. I’m ready for evening, for rest. To stop.

“Ma’am, please put your seat back up, we’re about to land.”

I look up, fatigue hurtling toward annoyance. I
know
I need to bring my seat back up. But the flight attendant looks even more tired than I do in her ill-fitting, stained uniform, wisps of gray-blond hair escaping from the clip at the base of her neck. She wears a beige carpal tunnel bandage on her wrist and hand. I don’t need to tell her about living life in multiple time zones.

“Thank you,” I say, reaching to adjust my seat back. “Thanks.”