Charmless

Sunday

Wake up at seven swimming in a pool of my own sweat. The illness-ravaged body fights back. Or tries its best. Still feel awful. Had chills all night, barely slept. Traversed the world of a bad dream I can’t remember. Reenter the real world all wet. Think: out of one nightmare and into another… my life! Tom feels me stir and wakes up too and we spend two hours lounging around the sweat soaked bed. Vile. But the mood is so good.

At noon, we walk the dog down Franklin to the car and take Sunset to the Silverlake Erewhon. It’s so warm and beautiful out that I feel emotional. Thank God for June. Tom gives the keys to the valet and we kiss in the elevator and order two cowboy brews and a turmeric crush smoothie to share. We walk around the produce section and purchase a carton of figs and a carton of apricots and pick up our drinks and drive back down Franklin to Hollywood. He pulls off at the 76 on the corner of Beachwood to fill his tires with air and I think about Cal and stare out the window at the intersection and feel paranoid every time a black car drives past.

Tom drops the dog and I off at the bungalow and leaves for a session on the west side. I sit alone in my bedroom with my cowboy brew and the curtains closed, smoking bowls and eating dry cereal like a dog and editing my diaries until seven, when he calls and says he’s on his way to pick me up and take me to dinner. Which is terrible news considering the amount of dry cereal I spent the afternoon consuming. But he parks out front and calls again so I put ballet flats on and zip a hoodie up over my slip skirt and bra and run out feeling happy to see him. He plays me the song he made and I tell him I am done with my diary for the week and feel so free and he says yes baby. The sky is still blue. But that will change soon.

For dinner, at Mel’s: cobb salad, fried chicken, onion rings, potato salad and mac and cheese.

And after dinner, Hollywood is clogged. There’s nowhere within a half-mile radius of my apartment to park. We circle around the hills and go way far up and find a precarious spot in front of a big house at the top of Whitley Heights and decide to leave the car there for the night. The winding walk down through the hills to Franklin is magic, sublime. I unlock my apartment and pull Tom into bed and flip the air conditioner on and say my ears have been clogged since this morning, it’s like I’ve spent the day on an international flight. We eat figs and apricots and sit next to each other and look at our laptops. I write and feel nauseous while he tweaks a song and we don’t fall sleep until midnight.

Monday

Mood upon waking is lethargic. My eyes are open before noon but not by much and then it’s another hour (of laying about and fucking and reading emails and blog comments on my phone and responding yes to the producer when she asks if I am okay with meeting for lunch on the lot) before Tom and I make it out of the house for coffee. While waiting to cross Hollywood Boulevard, I squint and sweat and feel overwhelmed by the sunshine. I watch a middle aged father wipe the sweat off of the back of his fat neck and turn to his frail daughter and say it’s really beating down, are you all right? But she doesn’t reply. I feel nauseous from the heat and maybe also from the familial scene I just witnessed. I consider the violence imbued within the phrase it’s really beating down and think yes, yes, that’s exactly how it feels. I am wearing very short shorts and a tank top with a big crewneck sweatshirt over top and ballet flats. Tom is in a black sweatsuit. I pull at his hood and say only you know how you are doing what you are doing right now.

Right before we make it inside Intelligentsia, Tom picks up a phone call and starts yelling into the receiver in a language I don’t understand. The dark grimy patio is full and so are most of the seats inside and there’s a line and Tom is talking too loud and he’s distracted and the dog is taking advantage. When it’s our turn to order, the dog puts both front paws up on the register and Tom doesn’t notice. The barista is upset. I order two hot dirty chais and a butter croissant and tap my card and then wait by the bar feeling oppressed by the environment and circumstances. My chest is still rattling and I haven’t taken a good clean deep breath in what feels like forever and I want to take my sweatshirt off and be free but I am wearing so little clothing underneath.

We survive the grueling walk uphill back to the apartment and revive the mood with air conditioning and a retreat to bed.

Later, I bite into a perfect looking apricot, find mold inside and feel like ending my life. Then I sit in bed with Tom till late, eight or nine, drinking espresso and eating dry cereal in the crypt. We talk about God. We talk about marriage and children and our families. We describe the personalities of the people we grew up with to each other and discuss destiny. He asks me if I want to go to his country’s embassy in Sacramento this week so that he can finalize his divorce and I say sure, why not. So he looks up the embassy online and makes an appointment for Friday and says let’s leave on Thursday night.

We leave the bungalow and walk to Playboy Liquor to buy Juul pods. Perfect out. Warm breeze, white sky, clouds flooded with moonlight. We walk back up the hill and go inside and I drink orange juice and ask him what he feels like having for dinner while he fixes my living room blinds. Superba? He asks. And in that moment I love him so much.

The food arrives a little before ten. Bread with butter and cheese and brussel sprouts and kale salad with grilled chicken and rigatoni bolognese. We feast in bed.

Tuesday

Seven-thirty a.m. Wake up naturally. Sex and then laze around in the blackout-curtain induced synthetic dark talking till ten. Shower together. Which is romantic and takes forever. I draw on an invisible amount of eyeliner for the first time in weeks and put on a white babydoll dress that makes me feel like a child. I turn to Tom. Does this babydoll dress make me look like a baby? He assesses. No. Actually, maybe. But like it’s hot.

At noon, we leave the bungalow for the west side. We talk about fate in the car and then I get a text from Amy, asking me to please clarify my state of employment. A long and overly formal message that could have just been: are you quitting or what. I show Tom and ask him what he thinks I should do and he says quitting my job is not a decision that he can make for me. He tells me I should really think so I try to really think but there’s nothing in my head but static.

At his apartment, I sit on the black leather couch in my babydoll dress and make MacBook Photo Booth movies of myself smoking weed and eating overnight oats while he showers for his meeting and gets dressed. As per, by the time he’s ready to go we are running late. He sprints downstairs in his navy blue suit and I rush behind him and we get into his car and I quietly do the sign of the cross as he accelerates. We make it to Glendale five minutes late, which is miraculous considering the time the GPS told us we would arrive. We kiss and he hands me the car keys and I watch him enter the high rise and think: seems right. I get into the driver’s seat and wonder what to do and then drive five minutes up the boulevard to Erewhon. I go inside and vape in the dark bathroom and then wander around. I buy two seeded bars, a little mesh sack of perfect kumquats, a shot of Liquid Gold (ginger, lemon, turmeric, cayenne) and a pint bottle of sparkling Mountain Valley.

I take my haul to one of the little metal tables out front and sit and look around and consider taking my laptop out of my bag but ultimately don’t. Ultimately just sit on my phone. Sip my Mountain Valley and drink my Liquid Gold and nearly choke. I smile at a really chic older woman wearing a perfect outfit and she does not smile back. I think: bitch. And then, after a briefly wounded second or two: good for her.

Twenty or thirty minutes pass like that until then I get restless and decide to drive back to Brand Boulevard and wait there. There’s a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf across the street and coffee sounds nice so I go in and stare at the unfamiliar menu without processing the words and can’t decide what to get and feel pressured by the bored teenage boy at the register’s bad attitude and order a Vietnamese cold brew without knowing what Vietnamese cold brew consists of exactly. I tap my card and wait by the trash can and feel vaguely uncomfortable and look up at the menu and find that the stupid Vietnamese cold brew is going to cost me like three hundred calories. Feel disgusted by this information and decide that I will permit myself no more than like, five sips and then feed the rest to Tom. I take the stupid drink with me back into the car and park in front of a big church and wonder if the doors are open and think about going inside. But then my phone rings and it’s Tom and he’s finished so I speed up the block and pick him up and he tells me that they offered him the job on the spot and I think thank God.

We make it back to Hollywood a little after four p.m. Ben calls Tom to see what’s going on. He asks if we want to smoke a joint and go for a walk and we do so we tell him we will meet him around Sunset and Doheny in an hour. But we pack and smoke a couple of bowls and then lie around stoned, talking, fantasizing, and don’t end up leaving the bungalow till half past five.

In the car on Sunset Boulevard, the sun shines so brightly through the windshield that it makes me sick to my stomach. I put my sunglasses on and look at my phone and remember that my mother’s sixty-ninth birthday is tomorrow and begin to feel guilty about having left finding her a gift to the last minute. I spend the whole drive trying to come up with something perfect and by the time we’re at Doheny, I am charging my credit card two-hundred dollars for a gift card to the massage place in Vegas she likes.

We find Ben waiting for us on Sunset in dark sunglasses with half a joint in his mouth. We smoke the rest of what he has and then walk to a dispensary pas the plaza for more. But I forgot my wallet and can’t get in and Tom doesn’t want to leave me outside so Ben goes in alone and comes out with some fucked up preroll that’s THC level reads 60%. We light it up and it tastes and feels like a dab, a bit nostalgic, and my eyes get heavy in way that they haven’t in a long time. I pick up a fallen magnolia and carry it down Fox Street.

On the way back to Hollywood, Tom and I eat kumquats in the car. The roof is open and “Let’s Kick His Ass” by Zack Fox is playing on a loop and at the long light on Outpost Drive, facing the big church on Highland, the trees are shimmering and the sky is lilac.

For dinner, foraged from my empty kitchen and eaten post-coital in bed: plain tortilla chips and more kumquats.

Wednesday

Wake up at eight a.m. to the alarm I set last night in an effort to not forget and/or sleep through the majority of my mother’s birthday. I forward her the stupid massage gift certificate I purchased yesterday. Felt good about the certificate yesterday, feel stupid about it today. Not good enough. But what would be? I leave Tom in bed and wander out into the courtyard and call my mother twice and twice she doesn’t pick up. I do not leave a voicemail.

I call my mother for a third time around nine and she picks up. I say happy birthday and ask her if she got the certificate I sent. She says no and then hold on and then mumbles into the phone for two or three long minutes before screaming and thanking me and telling me that she’s going to see if the spa has any openings this afternoon. I ask her how it feels to be sixty-nine and she tells me that she simply can’t believe it, that she still feels nineteen inside. I believe her. She says that she spent all week thinking I might show up to surprise her this morning. I tell her I wish and then hang up and go into the bedroom and tell Tom what she said, that she’d been hoping for me to surprise her in Vegas, and he says let’s go. And I say no. And he says no? And I say no. And he says should we go this weekend, after Sacramento and San Francisco? And I say I don’t think so and he asks why not and I spend the next hour explaining to him about my brother, the love letters, the sexually charged poems, pictures of me he printed out off of the internet taped up by his bed, my mother’s inability to acknowledge the situation, my inability to sleep soundly under the same roof as him until my mother acknowledges the situation, etc.

Tom and I walk the dog to Intelligentsia and purchase two hot dirty chais, a vegan brownie cookie, a ham and cheese croissant and two turmeric shots. We knock back the turmeric shots at a little golden table by the big window facing Cahuenga while a trans barista wearing a leather daddy cap and camo short steams the whole milk for our chais. We walk uphill back to the bungalow and reenter my bedroom and talk about money and the trip to Sacramento. He calls his lawyer again and the lawyer tells him that there is actually no need to go to Sacramento. He hangs up the phone and relays this information to me. Are you disappointed? He asks. I contemplate. No, not really, I don’t think so. And he seems wounded by that answer. But why should he be wounded by that answer? I take a bite of the ham and cheese croissant and open my laptop.

I get a text from Amy saying that she would very much like for me to come back to work, but if I don’t respond to her by tomorrow at noon, she will process my final check and consider me gone. I type Hi Amy and then delete Hi Amy and turn my notifications off.

Tom leaves the bungalow for a music session on the west side around two and I am left alone with the dog and the cats and my diaries and filthy apartment. I eat dry cereal and crackers with sauerkraut and look at myself in the mirror and sit on the floor of the bedroom closet with my pipe and vape and laptop and stay there for the entirety of the afternoon. I try on clothes and edit my diaries and make MacBook Photo Booth movies of myself smoking weed and listening to music. I lie down with my back against the hardwood to masturbate twice, both times with my eyes closed under the red lights, both times imagining Tom fucking other girls, girls I know he’s fucked before. Both times I orgasm and both times, after the orgasm is over, I feel sad inside.

And when he arrives back to the bungalow with pizza from Joe’s, I feel too fat and full of self-loathing to eat it. We sit in my bed and I listen with a tight chest while he says he thinks we should probably move in together soon. I provide a touch of resistance to which he does not respond well and then the whole thing blows up into something heated and we fall asleep with our backs turned to each other a few minutes before midnight.

Thursday