Bon Appetempt: A Coming-of-Age Story (with Recipes!) (18 page)

By the time I’ve taken my orange polenta cake out of the oven and given it fifteen minutes to cool in the pan, it’s almost midnight. All I have left to do is flip it out onto a plate. By now, Alison is home from her date and standing by for moral support. I place a plate on top of the cake pan and tell her everything I’ve done wrong so that we can be on the same level, expectations-wise.

But when I flip the pan, I can feel the weight of the cake shift in one fluid movement. And when I pull the pan away, a round cake with parchment attached remains on the plate. I peel back the shiny brown paper and there are my orange slices, embedded into this circular frame. I look up at Alison. Both of our faces reveal the same level of disbelief.

“A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity,” Rilke writes in
Letters to a Young Poet
.

And while it seems a bit strange to refer to my orange polenta cake as a work of art, in a sense, it does feel that way. At the very least, it feels necessary, important. It shouldn’t have worked out, but it did. And though I may not realize it at the time, in this way, it becomes a subtle testament against cynicism and for hope; that you can go about everything wrong and still end up with something beautiful.

At the next meeting with Disney in May, the energy has shifted. They’re not going to buy the show. It’s still too off-brand.

But, hey, they like Matt and Geordie and would love it if the two of them could come up with some more ideas for other shows, some ones with the Disney brand more in mind.

“Sure,” they say. “We’d be happy to.”

M
y first time shucking an oyster is a thrilling experience. I’ve got my plastic-handled oyster knife embedded into the hinge of the oyster and am applying a steady pressure. Before I started, I was most concerned about slipping and stabbing the palm of my other hand—the one holding the oyster—but a few YouTube tutorial videos later, I realize that brute force isn’t what’s going to open this thing up; what’s more important is the leverage-gaining, twisting motion, like jiggling a key out of a lock, only the lock is horizontal and my grip is a bit stronger. And then, just when I think I’m not going to get it, there’s a satisfying release and clicking sound, like that of a heavy cast-iron trunk popping open.

I continue the same jiggling motion with the knife going around the circumference of the oyster until the top shell comes completely off. And there it is—the glimmering white and gray, translucent and opaque, oblong-shaped being surrounded by its own clear liquor. I bring my nose down to it and breathe in the familiar smell of seawater, or what Alice Waters calls “the vitality of the ocean.”

And yet, before I tilt my head back and gulp it down, I suddenly have a moment’s panic that it’s a bad one, that I could
very well get food poisoning and end up sick for the rest of the night.

It’s strange, because just a few weeks ago, I ate oysters on the half shell at a restaurant and experienced zero moments of panic; not even a nanosecond of worry that the shucker of the oyster hadn’t washed his or her hands recently.

So what gives? Don’t I inherently have my own interests at heart much more than a complete stranger would? Wouldn’t it be much more natural for someone who shucks oysters all night, five days a week, to let a bad one slip through the cracks than for me, someone who is shucking a dozen for herself by herself, to do the same?

Why then do I suddenly doubt myself?

Matt’s and my second westward drive across the country is similar in route (I-40 for most of it) and destination (Los Angeles) but different in the feel of it. This time the trunk and backseats are full of stuff. This time we stick to the highway. We don’t stop off in Vegas. We don’t smoke cigarettes. This time it’s not a joyride. It’s better to keep moving, lest we leave ourselves enough time to stop and consider that once we arrive, we are going to be exactly where we started four years ago—namely, two more unemployed aspiring writers living in Los Angeles.

Matt has officially been jobless for a year now. The money saved from his well-paying gig at the Internet start-up is gone. We’re now surviving on his unemployment checks, sporadic assignments from his temp agency, what’s left of my student-loan money, and the occasional eBay sale of a designer purse or clothing item my mom bought me and I never wore. For
the past four months, he’s been volunteering at Cedars-Sinai, the nearby hospital, with the notion of possibly going back to school to become a physician’s assistant or registered nurse, but apart from that and the occasional meeting with Disney to discuss new show ideas, Matt has nowhere he needs to report. As for me, once I’ve settled back in town, my only respite from our 1920s, basically un-air-conditioned apartment comes in the form of long hikes up into the Hollywood Hills.

In my yearlong absence, our apartment has become a bit cluttered and a bit bachelor-y. And when you’re spending twenty-one to twenty-two hours of your day in your home, it’s difficult not to want to
fix
it. (And if you’re a writer procrastinating writing, well, there’s no better time than the present!) So, in an effort to de-clutter our apartment and with the promise of Swedish meatballs for lunch, I convince Matt to go to IKEA with me to pick up some storage boxes.

Only before we actually leave, I overhear Matt on the phone with his dad engrossed in a discussion about launching an online pet/baby supply store. The theme I’m picking up on is that this is a good idea because people spare no expense when it comes to both their pets and their children.

Matt and his dad are very close—talking to each other daily—and very similar. They both come up with big ideas and are not afraid to delve into them with optimism, enthusiasm, and exhaustive detail. They discuss everything: books, stocks, the Pittsburgh Steelers, and yes, speculative ventures. Of course, the main difference between the two of them is that Matt’s dad is a lawyer and can theoretically afford to embark on potential side businesses, whereas if Matt wanted to truly go into the online pet business, it would be a major career decision and making our rent would depend on its short- and long-term success.

Usually I love Matt’s enthusiasm, but this morning, I don’t. This morning, I’m pissed off that he hasn’t been able to find a job for
a year
now and because our apartment is so small that when he has these animated conversations, I can hear every word. This morning, I’m wondering if this is how he spent his days while we were living apart. This morning, I’m convinced we’re not even living in the same reality. I mean, am I the only one of us actually looking for a job?

The fight that ensues is the biggest of our entire relationship. It starts in our apartment, moves location to the sidewalks of West Hollywood, takes a brief intermission, is rekindled on the drive to IKEA, keeps going for the entire winding floor plan of IKEA, including, of course, the marketplace section downstairs, and persists for the duration of the drive home. Topics discussed include the idea that Disney or any other company may
never
pay him for writing; that if that’s the case, he needs to decide what he wants his day job to be, realistically and in both the short and long term; and if that’s nursing, then he needs to look into applying to
actual
programs instead of continuing to volunteer blindly once a week; and if it’s not nursing, well, what? And last but not least, that maybe we shouldn’t have gotten married after all!

That night, still upset, I exile myself to the living room. Matt tries to give me the bedroom, but I am dead set on depriving myself and hurting him as much as possible in the process.

But by the middle of the night, my anger has finally subsided. I crawl into bed and tell him I’m sorry for everything I said.

“No, I’m sorry,” he says. “I get it. I’ve let everyone down.”

And for the first time ever, I see Matt cry.

It’s a horrible feeling, to know that you’ve made the most optimistic, cheerful, joyful, and sweetest man in the world cry.

And yet at the same time, I feel like I’ve been heard. At the same time, even if it’s only for a moment, I see through Matt’s optimism. For a brief moment, I see that he’s just as scared as I am. I see how this past year has affected him, how I wasn’t here to bear witness to his struggle to find work and, consequently, his slow loss of faith in his ability to do so, and how all of this led to the kind of low-probability schemes I overheard him discuss with his dad that morning.

But mostly I feel like we’re finally on the same page—that he agrees the last thing we need are more big ideas. Between the two of us, we now have two completed short films, three feature-length scripts, one script for a kids’ show, one shot, edited, and produced pilot episode of a narrative urban fishing show, five short stories, three nonfiction essays, a manuscript for a coffee-table book, an almost-finished novel, and a trunk filled of unsold I-stomach-LA T-shirts. We need fewer ideas and more
jobs
, preferably ones with health insurance.

Beginning when I was a kid and continuing well into my college years, whenever I told my mom and grandma that I was going to do something differently when I grew up that potentially required having more money, e.g., “When I grow up, I’m not going to drive two miles out of my way to save three cents per gallon on gas,” and/or, “When I grow up, I’m not going to buy twelve cartons of Philadelphia cream cheese just because they’re having a buy-one-get-one sale at the grocery
store,” the two of them always responded with the same three words: “Marry well, Amelia,” typically followed by deep-belly laughter. The older I got, the more sexist and annoying I found it.

“You know, maybe I won’t
have
to marry well. Maybe I’ll enjoy a lifestyle that affords me the ability to purchase full-priced cream cheese on an as-needed basis all on my own. Did you ever think of that, ladies?”

Yet it isn’t until this summer, the summer of Matt’s and my second round of dual unemployment in Los Angeles, the summer I make Matt cry, that I realize how much I’d bought into the
marry-well
mentality.

Ever since we moved to Los Angeles, I had been relying on Matt to succeed. I had been
waiting
for his writing career to bloom so that I’d have the time and money for
my
writing career to bloom. While we were living on separate coasts, I barely inquired about his job search, because to be honest, I didn’t want him to get a real job. I wanted him to sell his monster script or the kids’ TV show. I wanted the big ideas. And what’s worse is that I didn’t just want his writing, his
art
, to save him, I wanted it to save me too.

Like the difference between trusting a professional to shuck my oysters and shucking my own oysters, it was easier for me to believe in Matt’s talent than my own. It was easier to put the pressure on Matt to carry the family than to put that pressure on myself.

That summer was one of the hottest and worst of my life. And yet I’m so thankful for it. Because afterward, once we’d taken the pressure off Matt’s art to save us, we realized we could save ourselves.