Au Contraire
Sunday
How much chaos do I need in order to feel alive? It’s three in the morning and Tom and I are sitting in his parked car on my street beneath a rotten palm tree and the silver moonlight. We are eating ginger and looking at Postmates and feeling dissatisfied with each and every available option despite just having spent the past five hours arguing on two empty stomachs. The emotional climate is delicate. A sad song is playing and I’ve got my knees tucked up under my chin and my eyes are getting heavy and eventually we look at each other and give up on finding food. Tom puts the car in drive and speeds us to the west side. I fall asleep on the 101 and wake up on the 405. We take the stairs up to his apartment in silence. I unzip my hoodie and slip my ballet flats off and tuck them into my bag and wonder where my kitten heels are until this ugly vision of them sitting on the floor mat of my passenger seat caked in vomit arrives.
Sunday morning. Ten a.m. Tom’s bed. He’s late for work and rushing and I’m lying flat on my back beneath the duvet, smoking a roach and taking hot plastic puffs from the Juul and lamenting the fact that the final pod is nearly empty. I want to cross the street and go into the liquor store and purchase some more, but Tom thinks we’re quitting so I have to wait till he leaves.
And when he leaves, I do it first thing. I put my ballet flats on and leash the dog and enter the liquor store and purchase a bottle of coconut water and a four pack of five percent Virginia tobacco Juul pods and feel nothing but pure levity. I click a fresh pod into the battery and inhale and feel healed, perfect, reborn, brand new. And then I cross the street and go back upstairs and pack a bowl and smoke it and then pack another bowl and smoke that one too and open up my laptop and write.
At one o’clock, I cut the hem off of my midi dress to make it a mini and leave Tom’s apartment for work. I’ve got half of my hair piled up on top of my head in a French pin and I feel beautiful despite being all out of perfume. I arrive late and nobody minds. The manager is out and the afternoon is smooth. I drink my liquor store coconut water and publish my diaries to the blog from my desk and feel light. The photographer asks me if I’m high and I say not really, why and he says there’s something about your eyes. Tom brings me a Sweetfin spicy tuna bowl for lunch and I put it in the fridge and forget about it. I take my break at five and drive up Wilshire to Erewhon and purchase: truffle plantain chips, dried mango, two seeded bars, two cans of Canyon Coffee cold brew, a bottle of heavenly greens and two sachets of liposomal vitamin c. I sit on the second floor courtyard bench and stare out at the palm trees. I rip my vape. The night runs late, drags on and on, but the temperature of my mood is so nice that I don’t mind. I sit alone at my desk with my laptop, reading Joan Didion and shopping for shoes on therealreal.com to replace my puke encrusted Manolos. At a quarter to ten, I go into the empty break room and eat seven bites of my spicy tuna bowl and bury the remains deep in the trash. The guilt is complex.
Work wraps at a quarter to eleven. And by eleven, Tom and I are going at it over nothing again. We argue with theatrical indignation all the way back to his apartment and by the time we arrive, I am so full of rage that I slam the car door and storm upstairs ahead of him. He stays put for two or three minutes and then follows me. And when he finally makes it upstairs, he unlocks the door and keeps right at it. I sit on his black leather couch with my face pinched, taking it until I can’t anymore.
I’m fucking leaving.
Go!
So I go. Or try to. I run out into the night with my phone and bad attitude, resigned to my dramatic exit until a little clarity breaks through the indignation and I suddenly remember that my bag and laptop and keys are sitting trapped inside of his car. So I sigh and start walking a square around the dark block and make it about halfway around before I hear the hard little clicks of his dress shoes approaching from behind.
Monday
It’s a few minutes after midnight on the Harbor Freeway and I am in the passenger seat of Tom’s car, crying quietly and watching Downtown glitter and disappear in the rearview mirror. Tom is driving fast and somehow his speed creates the illusion of progression while our emotional reality remains circular. He parks in the red on my Hollywood block and pulls a warm bottle of champagne from the backseat and we sit together with the engine off, passing the bottle back and forth and taking big swigs in silence.
I dream something about eating soft-serve ice cream with my friend Jack in a Japanese hotel room and don’t fully arrive back to consciousness or Los Angeles until noon. I leave Tom snoring in my bed and close myself into the bathroom. I stare into the mirror and feel physically and psychologically debased by my sensual, lonely, intoxicating, unsustainable, aesthetically rich, emotionally evasive and deeply contemporary life. I am dehydrated and congested and anxious and a little bit hungover and a little bit stoned and my hair is so dry and the pores around my nose disgust me and I decide that I’ve got no choice but to bathe. So I run the water very hot and sink myself in deep and it feels like purification. I exfoliate. I shave my legs. I shampoo my hair. I sit in the drained basin wrapped up in my fluffy white towel for a very long time. I apply perfume oil. I moisturize. I feel better. These moments feel ceremonial almost. When I emerge from the bathroom, I have soft skin and a restored sense of selfhood. Vanity functions medicinally. The body is a manageable surface. Sexualized, stylized, monitored, neglected, exhausted and aestheticized.
The afternoon passes languidly. Nothing much happens. We lie in bed. We light joints. We talk about money. At six, I put on a tiny white dress and a baby pink mohair sweater and a pair of Miu-Miu dupe boots. We take the dog for a walk down Sunset to Superba and sit alone together at a big table in the corner of the low-lit garden. Six o’clock is early for dinner in LA and the place is empty. This is our backyard, I say to Tom. We sit for three hours, drinking cappuccinos and eating bread with butter and cheese and brussel sprouts and kale salad and chicken schnitzel, watching the restaurant fill up and then empty out again. The dog lies at our feet and sniffs the waitress’s ass and scares the bus boy and eats every scrap.
We get back to my apartment late. The bedroom windows are open and the lights inside are all set to red and Tom and I are in our underwear, looking at our laptops in bed. I am singing along to a Phoenix song and Tom looks up at me and says I will remember this moment forever. And when I turn towards him, my eyes glance past the open window and panic arises immediately because there’s Bunny, sitting in the planter on the wrong side of the screen. For a second it’s difficult to reconcile the image with reality. Then I realize he’s done the impossible, squeezed his little body through the tiny hole in the screen. Green eyes gleaming. I freeze. I slowly crouch by the window and try coaxing him back inside, but the planter starts wobbling and all of the sudden it’s tilting forward completely and I’m screaming and Bunny drops out of the window and falls down into the night. I run downstairs into the backyard wearing Tom’s shoes in a fugue state and when I find Bunny alive and well amongst the tangle of palm fronds, I say thank you God about one hundred times. But the second I move towards him, he bolts. Then Tom appears and all three of us are running. Through bushes and flowerbeds and three or four neighboring yards. We hop fence after fence and the scenario begins to feel nightmarish, unreal. The night is warm. The neighbors are asleep. We search and search and search and eventually there is nothing left to do but go back upstairs, give up for the night, cry, decide to try again in the morning. I keep picturing Bunny somewhere alone in the darkness. I keep crying. Tom says maybe he’s been desperate to run away and I say, through streaming tears, maybe, but he didn’t mean to fall.
Tuesday
Wake at noon. Morning sex. Lie around. Feel awful about Bunny. Cry. Tell Tom that I think I dreamt of Bunny, that there’s this lingering image of him lying in a patch of grass somewhere in my mind, and Tom says I think I had the same dream.
The afternoon drifts by. We lie around smoking weed and talking and looking at our phones and listening to “Superstar” by Curren$y on repeat. At three, we run out of Juul pods. And before we leave the bungalow to forage for more, I put on my cloth Sorrel rain boots and Tom considers them carefully and says these are like the boots my grandma puts on to feed the chickens in the village of my country. We run into James on the way to the smoke shop and I tell him about Bunny and he says poor thing. And then at the smoke shop it’s that old man I like behind the counter, and when he asks me how I am I say not so good, my cat fell out of a window. And then my mother calls and I pick up and immediately say Bunny ran away and she says who is Bunny and I say my fucking cat, he fell out of the window and she screams HE’S DEAD? Which makes me laugh.
At four, we take Highland to 6th to Fairfax for Tom’s haircut. A Freddie Gibbs song is playing in the car and I am wearing jeans with kitten heels and a Brandy Melville tank top and my hair looks lush and my skin looks smooth and the sun is shining and my God, in this singularly perfect and fleeting moment, I feel like the luckiest girl alive. Two minutes from now, who knows.
I am sitting in a giant cheetah print plush lounge chair at a hair salon on Fairfax, feeling fantastic. The windows are barred and there are these very Charlie-Brown-Christmas-Tree style chandeliers hanging from the ceiling and every surface inside of the space is mirrored or steel or white. I look around and think: kind of pornographic. The salon is nearly empty. It’s just Tom and me and the hairdresser, a middle aged Swedish woman with strong arms and blunt cut bangs, and one other client. This elderly blonde in a faux Chanel tweed dress. She’s trying to get cash out of the ATM but there’s a malfunction and her hair is done up in this big poofy coif. Tom asks her if she’s going to an event and she says yes, a wedding on a weekday because the bride is CHEAP! And none of us laugh, especially not her. The hairdresser is talking to someone on speakerphone about the malfunctioning ATM and neither of them can hear each other because the connection is so bad. Say that again? Say that again? She’s a little bit disheveled and very sweet. When we first walked in, she kissed Tom on the cheek and then looked at me and then back at him and said and who is this pretty girl? A Stevie Wonder song plays and then a Blondie song plays and I sink deep into the cheetah print cushion and sigh. The hairdresser takes her scissors to Tom’s locks and complains about her children. My son, he turned eighteen last week and all he ever does is watch Netflix and invite stupid girls over to my house. And my daughter, she says, twenty years old and doing nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. She shrugs. Screw my them both.
We drive up La Cienega to Melrose Place and go into Alfred Coffee and order vanilla lattes and talk about how we both used to work shitty jobs on this street. We discuss the strangeness of the synchronicity and try to think up somewhere nice to have dinner, somewhere with a view, and just as we decide on The Sun Rose, James calls and I pick up and he says I think I’ve got eyes on Bunny. So we speed back to the bungalow and when we arrive, there he is: Bunny, sitting happily on my doorstep as though he hadn’t just fallen out of a window and taken off for the hills last night.
And later, we sit for dinner at Lemon Grove on Vine. We drink sparkling water with lemon and gin with dill and share pasta and Caesar salad and fried potatoes and hummus with cucumber and pita bread. The restaurant is set on the rooftop of The Aster and the view is so nice that it almost makes up for the bizarre service. The hostess asks too many questions and then apologizes too many times for asking too many questions. The waitress makes us uncomfortable for reasons neither of us can specifically identify. A nervous busboy comes over to our little two-top with a slice of apple cake and says did you guys order apple cake and we say no and he says are you sure and we look at each other and then back at him and say no, again, and he sighs and rolls his eyes.
Tom pays the bill and then drifts the car up Mulholland in the dark. We smoke a joint and listen to old Kanye and pull off at a viewpoint way up high and look out over the Valley and kiss and say wow and then take Laurel Canyon all the way back to Hollywood. We take all of our clothes off and turn all of the lights out and draw the blackout curtains closed and I flip the TV to HBO and put on No Reservations. The Venice episode. Tom has never seen or heard of Anthony Bourdain before. He watches him eat fried sardines with a fisherman and says I like this guy, I really like this guy.
Wednesday
“This Charming Man” rings out at six-thirty a.m. and the sound of Morrissey’s baritone voice brutalizes me. I shoot out of bed immediately and Tom says only you know how you’re doing what you’re doing right now and I agree and then lock myself into the bathroom and wash my face and brush my teeth and pat Saie concealer into my sleepy cheeks and massage Kerastase oil into the ends of my hair. I dress myself in ballet flats and an oversized sweater and a long black LA Apparel skirt that should have been washed two or three wears ago and feel pretty good, considering. We leave the bungalow and the early morning light is biblical. It’s raining a little and the sky can’t decide its mood. There are these great big patches of bright light cutting through the blanket of grey and I think to myself: looks like a Joseph Turner painting. Or something. Tom speeds me down Melrose and even though I am running late, when he asks if we should stop for coffee I say definitely.
At one, I sneak out of the office and run out through the front gates in my flats to meet Tom. We drive up Wilshire to Erewhon and order one cococcino and one cowboy brew from the tonic bar and then select a sandwich from the refrigerator to split for lunch. We look at the map and find out that it’ll take an hour and a half to get back to Hollywood and feel depressed and decide to bide time at his place instead. I follow him upstairs and watch him draw the blackout curtains closed. I sit on the couch and write a story and he sits at the desk and writes a song. Four or five hours pass like that until I start to get all nauseous from the blue light and looping music. I tell him that I need some air and go downstairs alone and do a lap around the block in the evening sunlight and my work clothes. And then I come back up and sit down again and decide that I don’t feel any better than I did before. So I go back out and walk to the liquor store and buy four single-pill packets of Claritin, two double-pill packets of Tylenol and a liter bottle of sparkling Mountain Valley. And just as I am settling back in on the black leather couch, determined to push through my nausea and stay put, Simon calls and it feels like a gift from God. Haven’t heard from him in something like two months. I pick up and wander back outside into the last of the sunlight and listen while he tells me that he misses me and that he’s four days sober from ketamine and currently filing for bankruptcy. He says he’s lost thirty pounds in the past two months, an unintentional side effect of his addiction and poverty, and that everybody keeps complimenting his hot new suffering body. We spend an hour and fifteen minutes talking and before we hang up, I tell him that I’ll come over some time next week. Wonder if I mean it.
We don’t leave the west side for Hollywood until late, sometime around ten. We’re halfway down Ventura Boulevard when Tom asks out of the blue if we should take mushrooms tonight. I say yes without thinking and he spins a u-turn and merges back onto the 101-North and before long, we are back at that strange little strip mall off of the Canoga Park exit, purchasing five grams. And I feel vaguely excited, but there’s this nervous pit in my stomach that I don’t know what to do with. All I’ve had to eat today is half of an Erewhon sandwich and I am worried the shrooms might hit me like a truck. But so what?
Thursday