Now I See You Page 9

  My father had been right: I couldn’t drive and it wasn’t as easy as I’d thought to learn. Though the idea of learning how to drive on our cross-country trip had sounded perfectly sensible when I explained it to my parents, it seemed considerably less so when I saw the eighteen-wheelers speeding beside us at eighty miles an hour. So I couldn’t drive my cowardly ass back to New York and I didn’t have enough money for a plane ticket. I was stuck in sunny, sweet-smelling, motherfucking California.

  “Just give it time,” David sighed. “You’ll get used to it.”

  Which I did, seeing as I had no choice. It took a while but eventually, I had fully furnished my life in Los Angeles; I had a cushy long-term temp job at an investment bank, a go-to acting coach, a respectable amount of TV auditions. I knew where to get a halfway-decent slice of pizza, though an edible bagel was still beyond reach. I even made a handful of friends; not enough to pack a stretch limo but enough to fill the available chairs in my living room during an Oscars party. Yes, I had gotten used to LA.

  The thing was, what I’d gotten used to was feeling like I didn’t belong.

  After two years, Los Angeles was thoroughly familiar to me but nothing like home. Home was the brick attached house in Bensonhurst with a Virgin Mary in the front garden where my grandmother could whip up homemade tagliatelle in fifteen minutes or less. Home was the long, bright expanse of Broadway, which was always blazing with light even in the wee hours, so I never had to stumble or even slow my step. Home was the rattling subway packed with all sorts of people—young, beautiful Hollywood types, sure, but unkempt homeless people, too, puking in grocery bags, and fat middle-aged ladies who took up two seats and full-grown men who only came up to my waist. People missing legs and arms and hair. People with long, spindly white canes. The subway was a land of misfit toys, and I belonged there, even though I was only a misfit in secret. The subway would take me wherever I wanted to go, whenever I wanted to go there. That was a freedom I’d lost, and I missed it desperately.

  It’s not that I couldn’t drive. David had taught me how, once I’d finally stopped crying. We started out in the 99 Cents Store parking lot, then moved up to side streets, and finally, I graduated to the boulevards. After a month of daily practice, I was cruising down Santa Monica solo, singing along to the radio.

  On the streets, I was an okay driver, below average maybe, but way better than someone who’d drunk a fifth of Jack Daniels, say, or a child. At the very least, I tried hard. Hence my idiosyncratic driving posture. When my sister Marisa came to visit from New York, she couldn’t help but notice.

  We hadn’t even made it out of the airport parking lot when she piped up.

  “Maybe—,” she ventured hesitantly, “maybe you want to lean back a little.”

  “What are you talking about?” I snapped, concentrating on my left turn.

  “You don’t notice how close your face is to the windshield?”

  It was true. My nose was almost touching the glass, my chest nearly pressing the wheel. Once or twice, my chest had pressed the wheel and honked the horn, which had the exact opposite effect of what I’d intended—to blend in. It looked like I’d been taught driving posture by an octogenarian.

  “There’s no law about sitting too close to the windshield,” I shot back. “Just sit back and enjoy the ride.”

  I couldn’t see my sister’s face but I bet she looked like she was enjoying the ride about as much as a turn on the Tilt-A-Whirl with a stomach full of corn dogs.

  My uncool driving style notwithstanding, I did a decent job of getting from point A to point B without dying or killing anyone. In general.

  Of course, certain restrictions did apply.

  There was a lot of fine print involved in my driving arrangement, lots of blackout dates. The gist of the arrangement I made with myself was: Yes, I could drive. But then there were a whole bunch of exceptions. Interstates, for instance, were out of the question. State highways were pretty dicey, too, though they were impossible to avoid. As a rule of thumb, I tried not to drive the car more than thirty miles an hour since I knew it was a matter of time before I sustained a head-on collision and I figured when that occurred, thirty miles an hour would do less damage than seventy. The big trouble with highways was the merging. Merging is one of those skills that require a lightning-fast synthesis of visual information that is impossible for someone who can’t look in front and to the side at the same time. Every time I picked up speed to approach the 101, I was making a Hail Mary pass.

  So, judicious highway usage. Zero drinking and driving; that was just pressing my luck. No driving precious cargo, like kids or pregnant women, because there was no way to ensure I wouldn’t kill them. But that was all really pretty easy, little stuff.

  And then there was: no night driving.

  This was an absolute deal breaker. This was: eat anything in the garden you want, but leave that apple tree alone. In my world of partial-sight there was a lot that was negotiable, a lot of borderline situations. But this was black and white. If I wanted to avoid bloodshed, to say nothing of having my secret outed, sundown was my deadline. Full stop.

  At first, it didn’t seem so hard a deal to stick to, but neither did forgoing that one lousy apple tree. It soon became clear that not being able to drive after dark would make life complicated—at the least robbing me of independence, at the worst leading to entanglements that were, well, compromising. Like ending up in the hot tub with the King of Candy.

  It was one of those situations for which there is a perfectly reasonable explanation that ends up sounding a lot like an excuse, one of those situations where you find yourself blaming everyone and everything except for yourself.

  In a way, it was LA’s fault.

  It goes like this: there are an unreasonable number of swimming pools in LA. People who live in homes with pools feel compelled to throw parties centered around them. These parties, like most, take place at night. As an actress, I had no choice but to go; that’s half the job, the other half being split evenly between Botox and dieting. Unfortunately, as a night-blind person, I didn’t belong around deep bodies of water, especially in four-inch heels which, let’s face it, are mandatory in Hollywood. On a penumbral pool deck, one of the safest places for a girl like me is sitting inside the hot tub. Unless you’re sitting with an octopus-armed guy who won’t take “no” for an answer.

  So in a way, it was the fault of Los Angeles. In another way, it was Kat’s fault for running off to schmooze with that hot, young casting director and then disappearing into the crowd.

  Kat was my best friend in Los Angeles, a rare beauty of ambiguous ethnic origins, which was useful casting-wise because she could audition for everything from Sacagawea to a Bangkok hooker. Her lips were so supersized, more than one woman on the street had begged her for the number of the genius who’d done her collagen, only to discover that her lips were, like almost nothing in Hollywood, 100% real. Her lustrous, ebony mane bounced around so dynamically, it looked like it had its own blood supply. Most maddening of all was that Kat was as smart as she was telegenic. She’d graduated summa cum laude from Yale, where I’d met her years before we ran into each other again in Los Angeles, and her fallback career if acting didn’t pan out was high-risk corporate finance. Besides being smart and connected, she was loyal and funny, all of which made her a great friend, even though standing next to her in public frequently made me want to kill myself.

  Not only had Kat been my ride to and from the party, she’d also been my ticket in; she knew a guy who knew the guy who was housesitting at the exquisite home overlooking Sunset that was packed with industry people—mostly actors with a few agents, directors, and casting people tossed in to start a feeding frenzy. The house was massive; the pool deck alone was bigger than the three-bedroom apartment I’d shared in Brooklyn. Chateau Marmont was just up the street and I overhead someone pointing out that you could see Tobey Maguire’s deck from the bar.

  I’d guessed what kind of a crowd it
would be, which is why it had taken me nigh on two hours to get ready. After painstaking deliberation, I’d settled on wearing a pair of tight jeans and heels with a shirt so insubstantial it would be better characterized as a handkerchief. Despite its size, and the fact that I’d found it on the half-off rack, the shirt had cost a pretty penny at the Robertson boutique where I’d purchased it a few weeks before. I didn’t want to ruin a shirt like that. So, naturally I took it off when I got in the hot tub.

  It didn’t seem like such a big deal. Which is to say, everyone else was doing it. After two years in LA, I’d come to see this as a perfectly legitimate defense, a fact that’s not surprising when you recall that trying to make it as an actress in Los Angeles is exactly like trying to survive high school. I could almost hear my mother inveighing, “If everyone else jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you?” but I’d left my mother, along with my good judgment, in New York. Checking your self-worth and decency at the door wasn’t just an occupational hazard as an actress in LA; it was an occupational necessity.

  Besides, I justified to myself, it wasn’t like I was going to do anything stupid, like sleep around on David, who was waiting at our place in West Hollywood. He refused to come along to these industry parties, found the whole racket deplorable, and nothing I said—or wore—could persuade him to trade in a night of beer, peanuts, and zombie movies for shameless networking. David wasn’t prone to jealousy and he felt reassured when I went out with Kat because she, too, had a serious boyfriend who she’d never cheat on, no matter how much she flirted. Yes, Kat and I served as expert cock blocks, swooping in to save one another before push came to shove.

  So where the hell is she? I wondered as I steeped in the hot tub, squirming away from the King of Candy’s arm.

  He wasn’t the King, in point of fact, but the Prince, heir to the kingdom. His father owned the company whose chocolates were responsible for my freshman fifteen back in college. The King of Candy belonged to the only other category of people who came to these parties apart from Industry People, and that was Filthy Rich People who Know Industry People. I’d met him in the gazebo, where I’d taken refuge after Kat wandered off, because it was the only spot on the deck that was at all illuminated. I’d almost fallen into the pool a few times already and though I’d prepared an excuse should that occur—Shit, I should’ve stopped after the third drink—it would really be better if I didn’t.

  So I’d taken my chardonnay over to the gazebo and arranged myself carefully on a stack of silk pillows there, hoping I’d look Too Cool for School rather than Too Blind to Party. It must have worked because a few minutes later, the King of Candy introduced himself and ever since, I’d been asking him detailed questions about candy production and laughing my head off like an idiot. It wasn’t that he could advance my career or anything, like Kat’s catch, but talking to him kept me from being a wallflower and I’d pay any price to avoid looking like I had no one to hang out with. Including following him into the hot tub.

  There were a dozen of us in the Jacuzzi and the Candy King kept creeping closer and closer, even though I’d told him a few times I had a serious boyfriend. The flirtation had turned from flattering to bothersome to an SOS situation.

  Come on Kat, I thought, help a lady out.

  I’d spotted her a little while ago next to the bar, tilting her head to the side and cocking one hip down, which is a trick we both used to make our midsections look thinner. Then I’d looked away to deal with the hand on my leg and now she’d disappeared.

  I could call a car service but I didn’t have the phone number of one and, as I’d learned, no one at LA parties ever knew the number for a car, though from the look of how fast the liquor bottles were emptying, they really should’ve. But even if I’d had the number, I’d need to locate my phone first, which required me to locate my purse which I’d abandoned somewhere in the vast, dim universe of the pool deck. It’d take forever to find it and in the process I’d almost definitely do something dangerous or humiliating, like step on someone’s Manolo Blahniks or knock over an invaluable orchid. Kat could help me find it because Kat knew about my eyes—I’d told her back in college, before I’d taken a vow of silence about the subject. But in order for Kat to find my purse, I’d have to find Kat. Which brought me back to square one.

  The thing to do, I concluded, was just stay put. Kat would come looking for me eventually, and since I was in public, I wasn’t in any serious danger with the Candy King, though he had just taken the liberty of putting his arm around my waist.

  “I really have to go,” I protested, squirming away, but even as I said it, I knew he’d be thinking that if I really had to go, I would, simple as that.

  He leaned over to whisper something in my ear, something about caramel. The whole thing had gotten real old, real fast. I wasn’t laughing anymore.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “I have a boyfriend.”

  “I don’t mind,” he replied.

  I’ll tell him I’m gay, I brainstormed, though he probably won’t mind that either. I’ll tell him I have a VD. Herpes? No, syphilis. You can’t argue with syphilis.

  Why confessing to fabricated syphilis was preferable than a retinal disease was beyond me. Mine was not to reason why. Mine was not to reason at all.

  Just then, I felt a small, soft hand on my shoulder.

  “What are you doing in there, crazy lady?” Kat was laughing behind me. “C’mon, I have your purse; let’s get out of here.”

  “Thank God,” I muttered, stepping out of the hot tub.

  Within fifteen minutes, we were pulling up to the front door of my apartment building, with its Spanish-style roof tiles. Inside, I found David sitting on the couch, watching The Twilight Zone and eating pistachios.

  “Why is your hair wet?” he asked.

  “Why do you care?” I snarled back, storming into the bedroom. Because, of course, right along with the city of Los Angeles and Kat, David was fully to blame for the hot tub fiasco. If he’d come to the party, like I’d asked him, I wouldn’t have ended up trapped in a hot tub with some lecherous moneybags; I would’ve had someone to talk to and a ready-when-you-are ride.

  David was my default nighttime driver and it worked well enough when it was just the two of us going to dinner or a movie or visiting friends, something low-key that David liked to do. Whenever it was something he didn’t like to do, there was usually a fight involved, or at least toxic levels of resentment on one side. Because there is a subtle but crucial difference between, “Hey, do you want to come to my agent’s Christmas party?” and “Hey, do you want to come to my agent’s Christmas party? And also, you don’t have a choice.”

  In New York, David and I had had our own apartments, our own social circles; we were together sometimes but we were often apart. We acted as guardians of each other’s solitude just like Rilke recommended. But as soon as we moved to LA, that changed. I no longer had the luxury of asking David to protect my solitude—he had to protect my nightlife instead. He still needed a solitude guardian but tough shit. I certainly wasn’t going to start feeling sorry that he’d lost a bit of his freedom when I’d lost all of it. Who was the unfortunate one anyway?

  Besides, it wasn’t like I was inviting him to a root canal. This was exciting stuff; this was cocktails at the Standard, concerts at the Hollywood Bowl. Would it kill him to stop being such a homebody and start living his life, in the process making it possible for me to live mine, too?

  “You know I hate this stuff,” he said when I “invited” him to the birthday party of a USC director I’d recently struck up a friendship with.

  “But you can pitch our movie to him,” I told him, flatironing my hair in the bathroom. “I think Finn knows someone at Sundance.”

  “Don’t pretend this is in my best interests,” he replied. “If you need me to drive you, just ask me.”

  That knocked the wind out of me. I turned to him, wanting more than anything to press his balls between my flatiron. I hated him. And though
I wasn’t honest about my motives for inviting him places, I was honest about this.

  “I hate you,” I told him, turning back to the mirror. “I’d like to flatiron your stupid balls.”

  “Good,” he said, “then you don’t want me to come.”

  “No, I don’t,” I said, fingering gel through the ends of my hair to eliminate flyaways. “And I don’t need you either.”

  “Just call a car,” he suggested, turning on the TV.

  “You know how much it’ll cost to take a car to Silver Lake?” I shot back.

  “What about Kat?”

  “She’s out of town.”

  “So, ask Finn to give you a ride,” he said. “He won’t mind.”

  “Just don’t worry about it. I can take care of myself,” I snapped, slipping on my Via Spiga sling backs.

  “You still didn’t tell him about your eyes, did you?” David said, looking at me over the tops of his glasses.

  I ignored him. He just didn’t get it. I was in the business of pretending to be better than I was. I’d just spent an hour making myself appear thinner, more buxom, and taller, with clearer skin, fuller hair and longer lashes. If I couldn’t tell Finn, or any of the other acquaintances who were turning into friends, what my real weight was, I wasn’t about to tell them I was half blind.

  I dialed Finn’s number anyway and asked if he’d give me a ride.

  “My stupid car won’t start,” I explained.

  “You need to bring that car in,” he said. “It did the same thing last week.”

  “Yeah, it’s a good-for-nothing piece of shit,” I said, glaring at David. “You can’t rely on it.”

  My dependence on David, which I refused to admit and he refused to ignore, was poisoning what was, in all other respects, a blossoming love. Needing someone to drive me places made me feel like a kid at best, a cripple at worst. It wasn’t how I wanted to think of myself and it wasn’t how I wanted him to think of me. Of course, as David tried to explain, that wasn’t how he thought of me. Everyone needs help with some things, he said. And if I would only tell people about my limitations, they’d be glad to help, which would make him feel less hemmed-in and probably be a huge relief to me. It was easy for him to say. He could drive himself to In-N-Out whenever he felt like a burger.