All This Heavenly Glory (13 page)

When are you planning to tell him? What about counseling? Something.

No, we’ve tried that. He goes but he just thinks we need to “move on.” He doesn’t want to really hear me. I’ll tell him as
soon as I get everything set up.

Mom, don’t ask me to lie to him.

I’m not asking you to lie, I’m asking you not to mention it.

Please tell him soon.

Charlotte’s mother writes the check and hands it over.
This is just a loan. I want this money back.

Okay, Mom. Thanks.

Charlotte’s mother pushes away the half-eaten bowl of edamame.
I think I have a little bit of an eating disorder,
she confides with her cute-guilty look.

I think so, Mom.

I’ll be fine.

2.

Charlotte’s mother rents a midsize U-Haul, drives to their country house in Vermont, loads everything she owns into the U-Haul,
drives back to the city, loads everything she owns into the U-Haul minus a minimum of home furnishings for her husband, and
drives herself to Arizona. Charlotte gets on a $99 Tower Air flight to L.A. with one suitcase and a laptop.

3.

There isn’t that much to say about what happens while Charlotte is in Los Angeles, at least not anything that can be said
to further illuminate the troublesome single-mindedness of the city of L.A. that would explain why Charlotte’s plans are not
long-term, but for the purposes of wrapping up: Charlotte exchanges numerous bizarre phone calls with both her stepfather
and her mother in which her stepdad speculates that her mother is having an affair in Arizona, in which her mother continues
to blame her stepfather, in which Charlotte has flashbacks to inappropriate confidences made twenty-five years earlier about
her real father, in which it becomes more and more clear that her mother is not having an affair in Arizona but is rather
experiencing whatever kind of low-level breakdown allows a person to still walk around and possibly find employment. Charlotte
does get a job on the aforementioned series, buys a thirty-year-old muscle car primarily because it is available and in the
price range her father has donated to the cause, drives from Venice to Burbank and back every day, has any number of driving-related
freak-outs/auto maintenance—related financial setbacks that will ultimately eat up about everything she earns while she is
in Los Angeles, is suddenly very romantic about changes in weather and the noise and crowds of the subway on her drive from
Venice to Burbank every day, flies back to New York about every obscure holiday for the duration of the nine months that she
is in L.A., except for Thanksgiving, when she goes by way of Chicago to see her dad in Iowa, which if you know even a little
about geography you know is about three hundred miles west of Chicago and therefore six hundred miles out of the way. Charlotte
had worked on a movie in Chicago as a script supervisor two years earlier and has some unfinished business there, which is
mostly that she just likes the place. It seems like a place to live. It seems like a place she might not come back from. It’s
hard for Charlotte to pinpoint the pull she feels to Chicago considering its obvious similarities to New York, e.g., tall
buildings, museums, theater, shopping. She doesn’t really even know what the people are like, which is of some concern, because
she has a disproportionately large fear of guys who wear baseball hats and read
Stuff or Maxim
and have modern apartments with six remotes and possibly an étagère from IKEA and nothing hanging on the walls except for
maybe a bike, and she has the same sort of fear of women in cropped khakis and Rachel haircuts who seem healthy and happy,
and feels Chicago may have an abundance of these healthy and happy men and women, which is not something she really relates
to at this point, the health and happiness, but it’s not about that either. And there’s a big lake, of course, New York doesn’t
have a big lake, and it’s a very big lake and that counts for a lot, and there are also garage sales, you don’t get a lot
of garage sales in New York, and there’s Casimir Pulaski Day and Sweetest Day, she’s not exactly sure what either of these
are except for they’re two more holidays, and Jesse Jackson, he lives in Chicago, and on Saint Patrick’s Day the river is
green, you don’t have that in New York, but for Charlotte it’s not exactly any or even all of these things together. In a
way it’s not unlike attraction, like why one guy and not another? Charlotte can’t really explain it. It’s the melancholy feeling
she gets watching
ER
and they mention someplace she’s been, like the Oak Street Beach, or a cafe in Wicker Park. In Chicago she stays at a hotel
that overlooks the lake and when she looks over the lake she has some deep thoughts about life and god that escape her the
next morning and when her credit card won’t cover the second night she leaves early for Iowa.

4.

Charlotte’s mother calls when she gets back to L.A. She is back in New York.

We bought a house in Jersey
, she says.

Who is we?
Charlotte asks.

Me and your stepfather, Charlotte.

Oh. Well, great.

He loves me.

I know.

I’m not very good on my own,
her mother says quietly.

I’m too good on my own, Charlotte thinks. Charlotte thinks many things at the moment, from relief that this lapse is over,
to relief that she will not have to endure either of their separate love lives, to doubt that things will ever be the same,
to doubt that things really should be the same, to hope that her mother will be happy in New Jersey, to hope that her mother
will be happy somewhere, to hope that she will be happy somewhere, to hope that she’ll decide on an Oscar category, at the
very least.

It isn’t discussed again. A year later there is a big twenty-fifth-anniversary party where friends come from all around, where
silver gifts are given, where catered food is served, where it is not discussed again.

By then, Charlotte is in Chicago.

5.

One of the many reasons she’s never left New York for long is because of the driving thing, which is multilayered in scope
and often debilitating. And she does, after she gets back from L.A., have an unprecedented moment in the subway in which her
appreciation for New York is accelerated, when, in spite of her ongoing New York—related problems (in no small part a matter
of crowd control/personal-space maintenance), she thinks, This is great, the subway, the subway is
cool,
driving is
lame,
the subway is for
real
people. Look at the tile, the tile is so great, there’s no tile on the freeway, there’s nothing but Fatburgers and short
pink buildings and more freeways on the freeway, you’re not out among the people on the freeway. It has always seemed to her
that the so-called freedom associated with cars heavily promoted in most of the U.S., or, you know, all of the U.S.
but
New York, is a lie, that this ongoing falsehood is perpetuated in, among other things, every car ad ever made (whereby freedom
is allegedly flat-out unavailable without car ownership), and that the truth is that to live in a city such as New York where
mass transportation is so abundant and where walking, whether as a matter of preference or if need be, is a legitimate means
of travel, to be unburdened by car ownership, by auto maintenance and insurance (what is liability anyway, shouldn’t it be
non-liability?) and titles and payments and traffic and
parking,
to name, seriously, just a few—that, Charlotte thinks, is the real freedom.

This subway-related enthusiasm lasts about a day and ends when someone trying to get off the train gives her a flat tire without
apology. There are so many people squashed up next to her that she cannot even bend down to fix the flattened sneaker and
spends the next three stops concerned that she will lose the sneaker altogether in the process of getting off the train, which
in fact does almost happen. Someone steps on the loosened laces and the shoe is almost abandoned in between the train and
the platform until it is finally recovered with a lucky jerk, which results in an accidental shove to the girl trying to board
the train at the same time, which results in Charlotte yelling at the girl for trying to board the train before everyone else
disembarks the train, which results in the girl calling Charlotte “Bee-otch,” all of which results in Charlotte remembering
what is wrong with the subway and the entire city of New York. Were this just an isolated incident, Charlotte would have no
beef, but the memory that such incidents are rather daily, often hourly, in a city where there is no physical room for such
incidents not to happen, Charlotte’s best solution to this problem, most of the time and unfortunately, is to stay in.

Which brings us to the matter of Charlotte’s apartment, which is not the ideal place to stay in for periods of time extending
beyond sleep, wardrobe changes, matters of personal hygiene, and the occasional mail check. Which of course is not how much
time Charlotte spends there. It’s a confusing matter, because again, there is this concept, much like the freedom thing, a
New York version of the car/freedom thing, a propaganda, Charlotte feels, whereby if you hold the lease to any apartment of
any size at any location in the borough of Manhattan that is under a thousand dollars, you should uphold the following rules/laws/principles/
beliefs and/or feelings:

a) under no circumstances shall the Lease Holder (hereafter referred to as LH) relinquish the lease of the apartment, for
a period no less than
all of time

b) LH shall at all times feel privileged to hold said lease, in spite of any evidence to the contrary such as but not limited
to: comparable or significantly larger apartments in other cities that rent for some small fraction of what LH’s apartment
rents for; issues related to building maintenance such as security, plumbing, and any depression apparently resulting from
residency in said apartment

c) LH shall brag whenever possible

and

d) should it become necessary for LH to vacate the apartment for any reason such as work, marriage, or other, LH shall sublet
said apartment for anywhere upward of double what LH is paying

and maintains the right to

1.) charge an exorbitant “finder’s fee”

2.) include requirements in a “sublease” specific to meeting LH’s personal needs such as mail-forwarding, plant-watering,
ex-boyfriend management, landlord/across-the-hall neighbor management (supposing that either LH or sub-LH might ever actually
run into them), e.g., that you are LH’s lesbian lover, dog walker, or personal trainer (applicable where size of apartment
warrants).

Should LH at any time be in violation of these rules, he or she shall be considered in noncompliance, shall risk being called
crazy, shall risk status as true “New Yorker,” and shall relinquish all hope and/or chances of ever finding a deal like this
again.

(The word
deal,
Charlotte thinks, being used far too liberally.)

This propaganda, widely held within the confines of New York City and coupled with the whole New York—as-capital-of-the world
thing, is extremely difficult to debate, particularly when one is from this particular place. Because inside of the particular
head of Charlotte are certain thoughts that, whether true or unfounded, cause a certain paralysis with regard to ever leaving,
putting aside the apartment issue briefly, certain aforementioned and admittedly snobby thoughts about how everyone outside
of Manhattan conforms to the khaki and baseball-hat culture, a generic culture where people seem happy with the same rotating-cast
romantic comedies, not because they really are but because they think they’re supposed to be, how there cannot possibly be
book-reading, interesting people she might want to spend any significant amount of time with in any of the outer boroughs
much less outside the tristate area, certain thoughts that render her unable to leave the dark, cluttered, $978-a-month, single-3’x2’-closeted,
painted-shut-other-window-facing-windowed, walk-like-a-crab-narrow-no-sink-in-the-bathroom, only-sink-in-kitchen, must-brush-teeth-in-kitchen-sink-where-there-are-frequently-still-dishes-present,
overpriced-custom-built-floor-to-ceiling-can’t-take-it-with-you-shelved studio apartment (so especially wrong for a person
who has a habit of never getting rid of anything; Charlotte’s read more than one article about some elderly eccentric who
collects this or that, sometimes it’s newspapers, sometimes it’s suitcases or TV sets, so many suitcases or TV sets that they
pile up to the ceiling and the elderly eccentric has to move around the apartment through tunnels of suitcases or TV sets
until somehow
the authorities
find out about it and declare it a fire hazard and the elderly eccentric has to get rid of most of the suitcases or TV sets
but instead of feeling unburdened feels sad and torn about what to let go of, like it’s the
Sophie’s Choice
of suitcases and TV sets, a scenario Charlotte can easily envision in her own future), which apartment-not-leaving results
in more apartment-not-leaving.

6.

Naturally, under these conditions the idea of any kind of employment, relocation, or dating becomes difficult, and so when
Charlotte’s friend Jenna proposes that she must come out and meet her friend Todd, she is less than enthusiastic about the
proposition for numerous reasons, including:

a) it involves going out

b) it involves going farther than the Korean market up the street

c) she has no money

d) literally no money

e) it sounds like a fix-up, which is something like a date, which is something she is now against, for all the same reasons
anyone loses interest in dating, because it is understood that in spite of the potential for brief moments of rapture characteristic
of the beginning of such entanglements, it is widely known that such rapture has a way of holding one’s normally rational
mind hostage long enough to convince them that it will work out, which as far as Charlotte is concerned is a cruel, cruel
joke.