Psyche Abandoned

Sunday

It’s two o’clock in the morning and I am dreaming something about eating a McDonald’s ice cream cone on what appears to be a spaceship when a pounding sound begins to shake and crack the walls of my dreamworld and wake me. I open my eyes and realize that the pounding sound is not a figment of my dream but something very real, so real that it is coming from the real front door of my real apartment in real life. I know who is standing on the other side and I feel afraid but I get up anyway, go to the door in my underwear, unlatch the lock and let Tom inside.

We sit across from each other at the kitchen nook in the warm lamplight and quickly split a lukewarm bottle of white wine. He apologizes and then I apologize too, kind of, and it’s nice between us for a little while, half an hour or so, until I say something he doesn’t like and we start to argue. We argue between the hours of three and six a.m., fall asleep, then wake up at nine, light a joint and argue again. Think: pointless, pointless, all of this, and wait… didn’t I break up with him?

At noon, we attempt to momentarily put our differences aside for the sake of getting a little sunlight and caffeine, but halfway down the Walk of Fame towards Intelligentsia, he says something that I don’t like and I’m sick of him anyway so I turn around and start walking back the other way. He doesn’t follow me. (And just because I’m sick of him doesn’t mean I don’t feel wounded when he doesn’t follow me… of course I feel wounded when he doesn’t follow me…)

I make it back to the apartment alone, spark a joint and call my mother. I ask her if I can come over with my laptop, lie around in the living room or the backyard or her room together while I finish editing. She says yes please. So I snuff the joint, shampoo my hair in the shower, dry off, get dressed and drive to Burbank. But when I arrive, there are all kinds of cars parked outside. I walk in and find my mother and my aunt and all three of her sons and all three of her son’s partners and children and my estranged uncle too and I feel so overwhelmed I could cry. I kiss my mother’s cheek and whisper I didn’t think it would be such a full house and she whispers back I know, pinching my arm. And then: let’s get out of here.

We sneak out through the kitchen door and get into her car and when I say I feel bad she says don’t. We drive to the Studio City Erewhon and buy four bags of tortilla chips and four clam shell containers of guacamole, three of which she takes for herself and one of which she sends home with me. She parks her car in front of my aunt’s house and squeezes me and tells me to go home and finish my work and not to worry. I nod and feel grateful and can’t look at her because for some reason tears start to crest in my eyes, and I feel embarrassed. The histrionics. I tell her I will see her in the morning and go. Drive off over the hill to Hollywood in the yellow evening sunlight. Think about Tom. Wonder what he’s doing.

And when I get back to my apartment, I don’t have to wonder what Tom is doing anymore because I know. He is sitting at the wooden table in the living room, waiting for me. I push open the front door and feel briefly alarmed at the unexpected sight of him before remembering the way I walked away from him this morning and went back to the apartment alone and left (with the door unlocked, so he could take his things) for Burbank without speaking to him, figuring he’d come in for his laptop and go home. But I guess he never went home. He stayed, and the way he looks up and smiles at me is so tender that it disarms me. Stupid, stupid girl. He picks me up and kisses me all over and carries me into bed.

Monday

I wake up at ten all alone in my dark bedroom with a pounding head and a poor grasp on reality. The curtains are shut and so is the bedroom door and I missed a call from my mother. A text, too: LACMA at eleven? I rub my eyes, light a joint, reply: yes! I crack open the bedroom door and find Tom at the kitchen nook, working on his laptop. I sit in his lap and say good morning and tell him that I am going to go to the LACMA with my mother, see The David Geffen Galleries. He stiffens a little and nods and doesn’t say anything except, and after that, when do you think you’ll be home?

And at eleven, I run out through the courtyard to the curb in a tiny striped halter dress and beat up black ballet flats with a long sleeve black top tucked in my bag, in case the museum is cold, and get into my mother’s car. At the ticket office, she asks the goth teenage girl behind the glass for two tickets and then says wait, no, one ticket, and for my daughter, one annual pass. The goth teenage girl nods and hands me a thick museum booklet called WANDER: Exploring LACMA’s David Geffen Galleries with a picture of The Artist’s Garden by Monet on the cover. My mother and I put our entry stickers on and walk to the miniature Erewhon. It’s tiny and crowded and very dark inside, like an airport kiosk. There is a shallow refrigerator stocked with the tofu I like and a variety of prepared sandwiches and puddings and slices of cake. There is a full service tonic bar too, and a glass case full of pastries. Cute. My mother purchases two bottles of pink coconut water, tofu, a banana muffin, a piece of zucchini bread and two four shot cappuccinos from a gay guy in a bad mood.

We sit at a big metallic table in the shade in front of the Pavilion for Japanese Art and pick at our food while discussing the aesthetics of the enormous, barren concrete building we are about to enter post-breakfasting.

So gray, my mother says. It’s like a freeway overpass or something.

I know, I thought that too. Like a freeway overpass, so LA. Also a little bit like a tomb.

Do you like it? She asks.

I do. Very masculine. Do you?

Not really. But I like that you do.

We decide that the pastries aren’t worth the calories, finish our drinks and ascend an endless staircase up into the sculpture of a building. Inside, the gallery is a pathless maze of concrete and glass, designed to be roamed leisurely without direction or aim. Think: only in Los Angeles could a museum this meandering exist. And the gallery really never lets you forget about Los Angeles. All of those floor to ceiling windows, looking out over the LACMA campus and the hills and the traffic on Wilshire Boulevard. Benches and labels are sparse.

The collection is strange and beautiful, and a few pieces move me so deeply in an aesthetic sense that I have no choice but to capture them on my iPhone 17. Run Up, 2002 by Ken Gonzales-Day. Rose-Marie Ormond Reading In a Cashmere Shawl, 1908 by John Singer Sargent. Psyche Abandoned, 1796 by Augustin Pajou. The Magdalen with the Smoking Flame, 1635-37 by Georges de La Tour. Altar Cross (Cruz de altar), c. 1560 by Pedro Hernández Atenciano. Otahi, 1893 by Paul Gaugin. Nude on a Chair, 1904 by Édouard Vuillard. Tea, 1919 by Henri Matisse. L’Écureuil (The Squirrel), conceived 1960, editioned 1969 by Meret Oppenheim. Still Life with Cheeses, Artichoke, and Cherries, c. 1625 by Clara Peeters.

My mother and I spend an hour and a half circumambulating. She hates Fernando Leger but loves Pablo Picasso, even the Picassos that could maybe, from a distance, pass as Legers. She stands in front of Coney Island, 1934 by Paul Cadmus and cringes viscerally. Disgusting, she sneers. She is bored by Jackson Pollock, the dadaists, and everything archaic. She likes Diego Rivera very much, especially Flower Day, 1925, which is the first work we see after ascending that endless concrete staircase. She likes Giacometti and, generally, any and all depictions of Christ. She records the entirety of the Model Lives in Baroque Italy exhibition on video. She loves the impressionists, especially Cassatt, Gaugin and Pissarro. But most of all she loves Amedeo Modigliani, and when we round a corner and find Young Woman of The People, 1918, she gasps. When I see her, I see my mother, she says, tearing up. And after I’m gone, when you see her, you will see me.

In traffic on the way back to Burbank, I play “My Sweet Lord” and my mother knows every word and loudly sings along, except for the parts where George Harrison says Hare Krishna, during which she hums instead. And back at my aunt’s, we spend two hours laying side by side on two chaises by the swimming pool, talking about whatever, looking up at the fig tree and lamenting the lack of ripe options until I start dreaming about getting high in my bed with my boyfriend. Or whoever he is.

And by eight, I am getting high in my bed with my boyfriend, or whoever he is, just like I dreamed about. We lay around and talk and have sex and for dinner, at eleven p.m., eat one sungold kiwi each and share the rest of my pink coconut water in bed.

Tuesday

Tom’s alarm goes off at seven. He touches me and kisses my shoulders and fingers me until I orgasm and then fucks me and when he says are you enjoying this morning that I designed for us? I ask him what he means by designed and he explains that he set the alarm an hour before it needed to be set explicitly for sex. And at seven-fifty eight, another alarm goes off and he gets up and goes into the living room with his laptop. I light a joint and smoke half of it before remembering that I parked my car at a meter last night. I put ballet flats on and walk down the hill and a few blocks east in the warm morning sun to my meter, which is right by Solar. I go inside and order two cappuccinos and fix my tangled hair in a big mirror hung on one of the walls. I wait on the patio beneath a lemon tree and call my mother, who says come over whenever, and bring your scanner. So I deliver one of the cappuccinos to Tom at the living room table and put a long white cotton nightgown on and roll perfume oil all over to get rid of the smell of that half of a joint I smoked and walk out into the living room with the scanner in my arms. I lean over to kiss Tom and he doesn’t lean back. I tell him that I will see him later and he doesn’t look so happy with me, maybe, but I leave anyway, say love you, pretend not to notice anything.

I spend the hours between noon and five sitting at my aunt’s palatial dining room table with my mother, scanning the hundreds of childhood pictures she brought with her from Las Vegas onto my laptop. Some of the images make me cry. There’s this one of my father and I. I’m only one and he’s only twenty nine and we are standing in the snow with our red cheeks pressed together and my father is smiling but there’s this haunting expression spread across my little face, like something in the distance only I can see has just gone terribly awry.

I leave my aunt’s house just before dinner is served and nobody is mad at me. Feel nauseous and vaguely guilty about choosing to spend the evening with my boyfriend despite nobody being mad at me. I listen to “Crush” by Tahiti 80 in the car, and as I’m waiting at the red light to cross Pilgrimage Bridge, Tom calls and tells me in a kind of manic tone that he is ten minutes away from my apartment. Think: fuck. Say: perfect timing, baby.

Tom shows up to my apartment a few minutes after I do, and he shows up in a decidedly shit mood. When I inquire after his shit mood, all he says is I’m hungry. So I light a joint and put it in his mouth and tell him to come sit in the kitchen nook and eat leftover Zankou with me. I ask him innocuous questions about his day and he replies to me with the interest and energy levels of a teenage boy replying to his mother in a movie. So I give up on my good mood and slip into a bad one too. Think: exhausting, what’s wrong with me, should’ve just eaten arroz con pollo with my fucking family. I look out the window and don’t touch the food while he eats. And once the plate is empty, he stands up and goes into the bedroom without saying anything and I follow him, watch him lie down and nod while he says I just need thirty minutes of rest. And it’s only 8:30 p.m. but I pull the blackout curtains shut for him anyway. I pick my laptop up off of the bed and before leaving the bedroom to work in the kitchen, turn back towards Tom and say I love you. But he doesn’t say it back. So I pause in the doorway. Ask him if everything is alright, to which he does not reply. So I set my laptop down in the kitchen and return to the bedroom, crawl into bed and lie, sleepless, beside him. Forty minutes pass like that until I can’t take it anymore, turn to him and whisper I am going to get into the bath. He nods a little and then sighs.

I lock the bathroom door and spend an hour in the bath, soaking and exfoliating and shaving my legs and vaping and looking at shoes on my phone and, at the end, once the water drains, bending over on all fours until the water flowing out of the faucet over my clitoris makes me orgasm. I dry off and escape the steam and go into the bedroom feeling faint. I crouch in my towel beside my unconscious boyfriend’s sleeping body and drink half a bottle of Essentia without taking my mouth off of the bottle. Then I lie on top of him, touch his face until he wakes up, but he just groans and rolls over again. So I light a joint and look out the window and sit there smoking and crying silently until I feel like I can’t stop. I get worried that the silent crying will turn into loud crying, so I climb over Tom and leave him sleeping in the middle of my bed. Put on a big sweatshirt and take my cheetah print bathrobe off of its hook on the back of the bathroom door and lie it across the one of the kitchen nook benches like a cushion. I lie down and relight my joint and plug my headphones into my laptop and start to cry. Think of Cal. Think: how many nights have I spent precisely this way, lying on top of this very robe on this very bench in the dark while a man with whom I am in a contentious relationship sleeps peacefully in the middle of my/our bed?

Wednesday

And when my laptop dies at midnight, I feel stoned and sedated enough to leave the kitchen and go into the bedroom and crawl under the duvet and lie beside my control freak boyfriend. I feel capable of putting my bad feelings and our blatantly doomed fate aside for the night. I feel capable of being tender. So I pad into the bedroom as quietly as possible with the intention to do just that. But right as I come in, he sits up and stretches his neck and looks at me coldly in the dark without saying anything, gets up and walks past me to go into the kitchen and sit where I spent the last few hours sitting. I hear him light a joint and feel enraged but follow him anyway. I sit beside him instead of across from him and say hi but he does not say hi back. And then neither of us say anything at all for a very long time. The silence makes me crazy but I can’t think of anything to say, what is there to say? So sleepy. So sick of being in trouble all of the time.

And just as I begin to accept the possibility that the silence between us will stretch on past sunrise, he clears his throat and starts in. I spend two hours at the dark kitchen nook, staring blankly into the backyard next door through the window and sometimes vaguely nodding while Tom critiques my desires, habits, beliefs, values, intentions and personality. He keeps saying I can’t believe it, you got out of bed when I wanted to take a nap without saying anything at all, who does that? And I keep saying but I didn’t even do that, I drew the curtains for you and told you that I loved you and when you didn’t say it back I understood that you were upset, so I lied back down, never left. But he doesn’t see it that way. He doesn’t see it the way it is. I become overwhelmed by the absurdity of it all and at some point, an hour or so in, this sensation arrives that I am not myself, but an actress in a scene. This sensation is a relief.

Tom’s alarm goes off at eight and the temperature of his mood is, once again, ice cold. And dear God, I am so fucking over it. He goes into the living room and starts to work. Think: go home, go home, go home, if you hate me so much why don’t you just go home. I light a joint and it summons him. He asks how are you in an accusatory tone and I say well, today is complex and he says how so and I say it’s my brother’s birthday, the one I loved, the one that died, and also… well, you know… everything going on with you, between us…. I trail off. I do not reciprocate the question because I already know his answer. Bad. Or something close.

I lock myself into the bathroom and call my mother. I describe the events of last night and this morning to her in a whisper. I tell her about Tom, say I think he’s like, a crazy person, and apologize for not being all that honest with her about him before. She screams on the other end of the line that he’s totally out of his mind, a control freak, like your father but on steroids! She says if you can, run away fast and don’t look back. Which makes me laugh. I ask her to come pick me up soon, come save me, and she says she will, but not until noon.

And at noon, I run out through the living room in a little brown dress and tell Tom that my mother is outside and that we are going to go find something to eat and then touch the ground where my brother died and then maybe go shopping. He looks at me blankly. I ask, is that alright? and he shrugs and looks away. I ask, will we see each other tonight? and he nods, eyes on his laptop. I touch my hand to his shoulder and he stiffens, so I turn to walk away. And only then does he reach for me.

My mother drives us up Franklin to Sqirl. We sit across from each other at a tiny metallic table in the little concrete courtyard and drink cappuccinos and share the new pancake, which is life changing. My mother says I can’t believe this, I really can’t. We eat until the plate is clean and talk about Tom, Tom, Tom. Afterward, next door at the market, we buy two bags of Kolsvaart elderflower fish and I recognize the woman at the cash register as the owner. She looks deeply into my eyes and strokes the Kolsvaart bags in a strangely sensual way and says these are my favorite. In the car, I tell my mother that the woman who checked us out was the owner and she says she was looking at you like you were naked.

My mother asks me if I know a good thrift store and so I route us to St. Vincent de Paul. We go inside and spend half an hour pacing around the big warehouse. She leaves with a heavy silver serving tray with little angels lining the edges and I leave with an armload of short dresses, each of which I tried on in front of the big mirror in the far back corner of the store, slipping in and out of my own dress without ever being nude. My mother said I think you learned that from me and I said true.

We drive back to Silverlake and pull into the parking lot of the strip mall where my brother died four years ago. My mother cries a little, pressing her palms against the asphalt he died on. I put my head on her shoulder and try to feel anything other than guilty for not feeling anything. After a little while, my mother wipes her face and exhales dramatically, laughs a little and looks at me and says, how far away is that amazing mall in Century City?

On the long drive to Century City, my mother drives twenty miles per hour, rides every lane line, breaks for confounding amounts of time at every four way intersection, answers texts and emails with her foot on the gas and even plays a round or two of internet scrabble. She refuses to read the map directions on her giant dashboard screen, preferring to ask me where am I going? every three or four minutes instead. I pray for patience and grit my teeth. And when we make it to the mall, it’s such a relief. We go into Nordstrom and never leave. My mother purchases me six (six!) pairs of shoes and a pair of AGOLDE jeans that fit like they were tailored for me personally. It’s like Christmas morning.

On the curb outside of my apartment, I kiss my mother’s cheek goodbye and squeal while struggling to carry all three big bags full of pretty new things inside with me. I set the bags down on the hardwood floor of my closet, open up the bedroom windows, take off my shoes and lie down.

Cal texts: I am having the worst day, only feeling better when remembering you. So I call him for the first time in a long time and tell him that I was just thinking of him. And at first the sound of his familiar voice is so nice, so warm, but then he launches into one of his self-aggrandizing, high-decibel rants about how everybody is retarded and he is a genius. I shut my eyes and sink deeper into my pillow and think: what a mistake it would be to spend even one more second of my life commiserating with this bottomless pit of a man.

I get stoned and start to feel paranoid and lonely and when Tom calls at seven, I answer. His voice is cold, a little bit put on and withdrawn, but I try to ignore it and when he asks me what I’m doing I say nothing, come over. We hang up and he texts me that he can’t wait to see me, that he is in the car and will be here soon, and I begin to dread and cry, regret inviting him. There is something very wrong with me. I know this.

To destress, during the half hour it takes for Tom to make it from the west side to mine, I:

1. Finger myself to orgasm in bed, imagining lesbian sex

2. Remember the tequila in my freezer and take a shot (chased with a date and refrigerated bite of pita)

3. Listen to “Hard To Say Goodbye” by Washed Out on a loop

4. Smoke a bowl

And at eight, he’s at my doorstep in a frighteningly balanced mood. I feel nervous, following him out of my apartment and into his passenger seat. He lights a joint and passes it to me and I inhale and try to fix my face into something that will convey comfort and normalcy. I am wearing the little brown dress I’ve been wearing all day with the wedge sandals my mother bought me this afternoon and the sky is beautiful and Tom is playing “Hard To Say Goodbye,” loud, just like I was at home, and we are on the 101-North heading fast to who knows where. It doesn’t matter, really, so I figure why ask.

Tom parks the car on Vineland Avenue and guides me across the street into The Front Yard, a restaurant with a big menu and lots of string lights hanging overhead. It belongs to a hotel called The Garland and so everybody around us is a tourist. The hostess seats us at a big table by the unlit fireplace. To my left, a sunburnt eighty year old man staring at me with a gaping mouth. And to my right, a sunburnt eight year old boy staring at me with a gaping mouth. Tom orders two tequila sodas, French fries, a terrible salad, brussel sprouts with freeze dried strawberries (what an irrational and blasphemous culinary concept), and an assortment of charcuterie. I eat three crackers, one dried fig and nothing else. I drink my tequila soda quickly and once it’s drained, I reach for Tom’s and drink that one quickly too. I apologize and order two more and when the waitress sets them down, Tom pushes his towards me and smiles and says both, for you. And by the time dinner is over, I feel like Paz de la Huerta. Wasted in public with unbrushed hair, wearing naked wedges and a tiny wrinkled dress.

Thursday