This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage (21 page)

After the opportunity to learn, the best thing about going to college is all the friends you're going to make. You may be feeling a little lonely at the moment, but that's about to change. There are people in this room today you've never met who will become some of the most important people in your lives, and long after you've forgotten the papers you wrote or the grades that you made, you'll still have your friends. It was my friends I turned to when I needed to sort through the things I wanted to say to you today. I was especially sorry that I couldn't give Lucy a call. In light of everything that's happened, I found myself losing sight of the fact that I was invited here to talk about the book I wrote about my best friend—dear, sweet, scandalous Lucy. She would have thought all of this was hilarious. She did not take her critics to heart. She had cut her teeth on criticism so virulent and vile that it would make what I have come up against seem like a walk in the park.

The ability to have a friend, and be a friend, is not unlike the ability to learn. Both are rooted in being accepting and open-minded with a talent for hard work. If you are willing to stretch yourself, to risk yourself, if you are willing to love and honor and cherish the people who are important to you until one of you dies, then there will be great heartaches and even greater rewards.

I am glad that I was able to give this controversy so much thought, and I'm glad that I've come to the conclusion that the objection was to the assignment of my book and not the actions of my friend. If you do judge Lucy, then I suggest you go to bed tonight and pray that what happened to her will never happen to you or anyone you love. She was judged plenty in her life. She was judged every single time she walked out the door. I think that would be judgment enough.

In the opening pages of that scandalous classic
The Great Gatsby
, the narrator, Nick Carraway, says, “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,' he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages you've had.' ”

I was twelve years old the first time I read that book. I remember because I took it with me to Girl Scout camp. It was a grown-up novel about a young man who longed to fit in with everybody else. I'm sure there were parts of it I didn't understand, but I got most of it. Certainly I understood what he was talking about in that quote. I've read the book probably a dozen times since then, and every time it's meant more to me. I've come back often to the advice Nick Carraway got from his father, and it's helped me find compassion when I didn't think I had any. I will tell you I am leaning on it heavily today, because I have felt like criticizing, and then I stop and remind myself that maybe other people haven't had the advantages that I've had. I had the chance to learn from Lucy, from her failures and her successes, from her enormous capacity to love and be loved in return. I'm glad that no one took my book away from you, because now you've had the chance to learn from her too. Thank you for your time and attention, and no matter what anyone tells you, keep reading.

(
South Carolina Review
, Spring 2007)

Do Not Disturb

A
S A CHILD
I was slight and had a remarkable ability to hold still. These two features, coupled with a good imagination, meant that I was pretty much unbeatable at hide-and-seek. I could just stick a pillow in the closet, climb into the bed in its place, fold the bedspread neatly over my back, and stay there in a pillow shape for hours while other children called my name. All these years later it is appalling how much of my fantasy life has to do with hiding. I'm sure the witness protection program would be a terrible thing, and yet, when life threatens to overwhelm me, I find myself wondering if there isn't some mobster I could rat out in exchange for a false identity. The same goes for prison: dreadful, horrifying, surely, but the phone would never ring, and couldn't you get an awful lot of reading done? None of this is to say that I do not love my life; I do. But all those splendid guests who come for dinner, and then come back to stay for long visits (because they love you, because you love them) had turned my life into an overpopulated Russian novel. Sometimes it is the wonderful life, the life of abundant friends and extended family and true love, that makes you want to run screaming for the hills.

This is the point at which I become very clearly of two minds. One mind rejoices,
How rich I am to have the pleasure of a full house!
While the other laments:
If I am ever going to get anything accomplished, I'd better start packing.

And so, feeling the end of my wits approaching, I am driven out of my home by the company, the laundry, the mail and the e-mail, and by my own stupid and compulsive need to keep baking the apple pie out of
The Pie and Pastry Bible
, even though it is labor-intensive beyond belief and only guarantees that everyone who drops by will drop by again. I make a couple of phone calls, drag the suitcases out of the basement, and offer some brief words of explanation to my husband, who knows me well enough to know that when it's time for me to go, it's better just to stand aside.

Then I fly to Los Angeles and check into the Hotel Bel-Air.

In many ways this is not the best choice: I know a lot of people in the Los Angeles area, many of whom are related to me, and none of them will be pleased to learn that I was hiding in their general vicinity without coming to visit. I simply decide not to tell them while temporarily deluding myself into believing that they'll never read this. For a fraction of what I'm spending on my stylish seclusion I could just as easily have booked into a Best Western in Omaha or Toledo, cities where I know not one single soul whose feelings I could hurt. Seeing as how my goal is to soak up some quiet and get a massive amount of work done, what difference would it have made?

A Best Western? The Hotel Bel-Air? I'm no fool. Life affords us very few opportunities to run away, and so if I'm going to do it I might as well do it up right. Besides, I love L.A., and even though I didn't grow up here, it is the city of my birth. I love the palm trees and the bougainvillea and the bright blue light of the late afternoons. I find the ways that it is exotic both comforting and familiar. Besides, I've been rereading all of Joan Didion's books lately and she always makes me want to go west. Checking into the Bel-Air for a while seems like exactly what she would have done in the face of too many houseguests.

Because I have no plans to go anywhere, I do not rent a car. I have no desire to sightsee or shop. For one brief moment I think it would be nice to go to the Getty again, and then I put it out of my mind. I am the guest editor for this year's
Best American Short Stories
, and so I have arrived with a suitcase full of fiction needing to be read and a laptop computer containing a half-written novel that should be a fully completed novel by now. My idea of a vacation is getting my work done with privacy and quiet, not driving around. Whatever diversions I require will be provided by the sweet gum trees on the patio outside my room.

Californians are never comfortable with the idea of not having transportation. When the desk clerk checks me in, he tells me all the places the hotel car will gladly take me for free, over to Wilshire or down Rodeo Drive, where movie stars drink lattes with shivering Chihuahuas on their knees. I shake my head. “I don't want to go out,” I tell him. “I've come to work.”

“
Work
isn't a word we use at the Hotel Bel-Air,” he tells me.

I make a mental note not to mention it again.

I haven't come to the Bel-Air because I'd stayed here before, but because my father had once brought my sister and me here for lunch when we were girls. I remembered how the grounds were like an overgrown jungle where steep ravines fell into streams and vines twisted up over every available surface. I remembered the swans, enormous floating ottomans with slender white necks that we watched from our table as we ate. It is where Marilyn Monroe used to come, and later Nancy Reagan, and in between them, many, many others who wanted to be left alone.

Upon my arrival, the Hotel Bel-Air sends over a pot of tea and a lovely fruit plate. My friend Jeanette, who stayed here once fifteen years ago, told me they brought the guests cookies and a glass of milk every night at bedtime. The cookies were so beautiful she took their picture. But times change. There are no cookie-eaters left in the Bel-Air now.

On my first morning I hit the ground running, which is to say I roll over in bed and start right in on the pile of short stories. I eat the fruit for breakfast and drink the cold leftover tea and it's fine. The silence in the room is so intoxicating that I can't bear to leave it. At noon I take a swim in the pool, which is kept at a considerate eighty-two degrees. There is no one else in sight, and so, in accordance with the posted warning, I swim at my own risk.

After unpacking, I discover I have devoted much too much of my luggage space to short stories and not nearly enough to my wardrobe. When I turn up at the hotel's restaurant for lunch, looking neat and presentable but not the least bit stylish, the hostess wants to know about my reservation, which I do not have. It is late. People coming for lunch later than this must be very hip indeed. The terrace has half a dozen empty tables, but she seats me indoors, where I have the entire place to myself. I could complain, but I figure if I've come to be alone then I might as well be alone. From my table inside I watch the glamorous women outside lunching on spa Cobb salads with neither blue cheese nor dressing. The man with the bread basket wanders from table to table, lonesome as a cloud. When he comes to me his basket is full and perfectly arranged. He gives me a smile of deep and sincere pleasure when I tell him I will take both a sourdough roll and a cheese stick.

I
t doesn't take long to catch on to the fact that coming to this particular hotel for anonymity reflects a level of genius that I never knew I possessed. It is a hotel whose reputation was built on catering to people who are hiding, but those people hide in a much flashier manner than I do. They hide beneath hair extensions and giant Chanel sunglasses. The windows of their Jaguars are tinted. It is the kind of hiding that demands and receives a great deal of attention, in contrast to my kind of hiding, which basically constitutes staying in my room and frustrating the housekeeping staff. The hostess at the restaurant gives me the word that if I want to eat there again tomorrow I'm really going to need a reservation, and so I make one, but when tomorrow comes I find that I don't have the energy for it. I stay at the pool and swim and read stories. The guy who brings the towels lets me eat all the fruit I want from the gorgeous basket beside the bottles of Evian. I'm still a little hungry but certainly not hungry enough to do anything about it. After a while a blonde who is somewhere in her late fifties takes up residence on the chaise longue next to mine. Even though there are probably forty empty chaises around the pool, these are the only two that bask in a slight shimmer of sunlight. The plant life at the Bel-Air is so teeming and lush, Tasmanian tree ferns and giant palms, towering camellias and gardenias, that the entire place is locked in shadow. The woman beside me is very beautiful, rather like an aging Elke Sommer or any of John Derek's wives. She has pretty legs and a soft middle and wears a tiny pink bikini that is trimmed in what appear to be closely placed pink carnations. Every fifteen minutes or so we pick up our towels and move two lounge chairs down, following the sun as best we can. “It is cold,” she says to me in a Russian accent, and then returns to her sudoku puzzle. These are the only words any non-staff person has spoken to me. For a moment I imagine that she and I have come to the Bel-Air in hopes the air will strengthen our fragile nerves, or that we are guests at the tuberculosis sanatorium in
The Magic Mountain
, wrapped up in fur blankets and waiting to have our temperatures taken.

There are two sides to the Hotel Bel-Air. On one side is the busy restaurant, where well-groomed people have discussions, loudly and with great seriousness, about television shows. To make a sweeping generalization based on several days of captive observation, I would say that men have breakfast meetings and women have lunch meetings and everybody talks about the Golden Globes, Ray Romano, and episodes of
Lost
and
CSI
—or at least those are the words I hear repeated continually while I butter my toast (“toast” being another word that is bandied around a great deal, as in “No toast” and “Egg whites, no toast”). After several days of being forced into the role of passive audience for everyone else's star turn, I decide I want a little attention of my own. If I were embracing my solitude as fully as I claimed to be, I would order the vegetable frittata, but I am so wild, such a spontaneous fool I am practically Anita Ekberg wading into the Trevi fountain. I tell the waiter I'll have the pancakes. This proves a mistake; they are bricklike and slightly sour. It is never wise to order the meal that no one else would touch. Still, there are plenty of wonderful things to eat at the Bel-Air. At dinner, the food is best when it is at its heaviest and most formal; the scallop fondue and the poached Maine lobster are as delicious as they are expensive. If you don't feel up to a very fancy meal you can slip off to the bar, where the waiters are friendly, the pianist is charming, and the food is very bad. If you accidently slip up and order the chicken pot pie do not, under any circumstances, eat it.

On the other side of the Bel-Air—you will know it when you see the sign that reads “Guests Only Beyond This Point”—are the hotel's guest rooms. Over there everything is perfectly quiet, so quiet that I sometimes wonder if I am the only person who is sleeping over. (I never see my friend in the pink bikini again.) One night, when I am returning to my room from dinner alone, a man in a suit hurriedly follows me towards this demarcation. “May I assist you with something?” he says pointedly. I feel a little bad about this, because I have gone out of my way to dress up for dinner and I believe I bear a remarkable resemblance to a guest, but I must be wrong. I explain that I am staying at the hotel, that I've been staying at the hotel for a while now, and while he doesn't look completely convinced, he allows me to cross over. Here the scent of the purple saucer magnolias blends with the whiff of chlorine coming from the burbling fountains. It is a smell I have always associated with Southern California, and one that I dearly love.

What we want out of a vacation changes as we age. It changes from vacation to vacation. There was a time when it was all about culture for me. My idea of a real break was to stay in museums until my legs ached and then go stand in line to get tickets for an opera or a play. Later I became a disciple of relaxation and looked for words like
beach
and
massage
when making my plans. I found those little paper umbrellas that balanced on the side of rum drinks to be deeply charming then. Now I strive for transcendent invisibility and the chance to accomplish the things I can't get done at home. But as I pack up my room at the Hotel Bel-Air, I think the best vacation is the one that relieves me of my own life for a while and then makes me long for it again. I am deeply ready to be seen, thrilled at the thought of my own beloved civilization. I have done a month's worth of work in five days. I have filled up to the gills on solitude. I am insanely grateful at the thought of going home.

(
Gourmet
, August 2006)