The Pretender

Sunday

Tom’s heavy arm lies across my ribs while he sleeps and I am starting to lose feeling in my abdomen. I get claustrophobic and sneak out of bed, bring my laptop to the kitchen nook and sit for two hours staring at my diaries until I decide that my willpower is mediocre tonight and resolve to finish the work in the morning. Give up, get back into bed.

At nine, Tom wakes up and kisses me all over and tells me that he wants to get coffee and take a drive to the west side but I am not so sure, feeling suffocated by all of the editing I have left to do. But there won’t be any traffic, he says. And his face gets a little tense at my resistance, so I put a hoodie on over my little dress and follow him outside and down the block to his car. June gloom continues. Sky thick and puffy with grey clouds. We stop at Intelligentsia and he orders us two hot triple shot dirty chais, a chocolate croissant and a chickpea curry puff. To split.

We walk the dog in an enormous square around Venice Boulevard under the tepid grey atmosphere. Feels nice. Like a cashmere sweater.

Back in Hollywood, I spend the hours between three and nine battling opportunity for distraction after opportunity for distraction while working on my diaries at the kitchen nook across from Tom. For example: an hour long conversation with him full of sentiments I’ve heard before at three p.m., the gardener leaf blowing in the yard at four, two king sized joints on the back steps at five, a sore back at six, a migraine at seven, and dinner (falafel, pita, chicken, hummus, pickled radish, grilled tomato, tzatziki, cucumber salad, cabbage salad and tabbouleh) ordered from Zankou, at eight. I don’t finish editing until half past nine, but when I do, it feels so fucking good. I am sleepy and my eyes are heavy and I ask Tom if nine thirty p.m. is an insane time to go to bed and he holds up another two king sized joints and says not after this.

Monday

The first thing Tom does after he opens his eyes is criticize the way I slept. He imitates the way I allegedly spent the night laying on my back and says never, not even for a second, were you turned towards me. He says he had ten dreams and I was in all of them and looked very pretty in each. I ask him for more details but he can’t remember any. Curious. Ten dreams. Sex and a joint regardless.

Intelligentisa at noon. “This Charming Man” is playing over the speaker system and I am reasonably provoked. Busy inside. I am wearing a white tank top with no bra and everybody loves me. The two short kings running the counter today are working slowly. Stoned maybe. It takes twenty minutes for the cuter of the two short kings to call out two dirty chais. Tom and I walk back uphill to the apartment. I take my sweatpants off and sit in my white tank top and baby rib thong in bed. Look at myself in the grey reflection of my laptop. Open up the curtains a little, let in some light. Look at expensive apartments available for rent on the internet for fun. For pretend. I am just playing pretend. Or at least I hope I am.

I spend the afternoon looking at the internet in my bedroom. I save the listings of about fifty different gorgeous vintage apartments. Just for fun. I smoke one joint in bed with my boyfriend at two, then another one at four. At five, Tom asks me if I would like to go take a look at a tiny two bedroom house for rent at the top of Topanga. I would. So I change out of my Brandy Melville pajama pants and into a tiny black skirt and big boots with metallic hardware. I put concealer on my cheeks and perfume oil on my neck and use the Mason Pearson brush on my blown out hair. Which is acquiring grease at an alarming speed. Stuff a handful of joints into my Corto Moltedo bag then follow Tom out through the courtyard and up the hill to where we parked his car. Blue skies over Hollywood.

We stop at the Gower Gulch for four shot hot americanos and a pumpkin loaf, to split. There are no parking spots so Tom idles. I run inside, feeling like an easy target in my tiny skirt. On my way out, holding both hot americanos and the pumpkin loaf in a bag, an old man with liver spots and a big bandage on his face looks at me in a way that feels like rape. And the look makes me so nervous that I grip one of the americanos too hard and the lid buckles and the liquid spills all over my white sweater, all over my tiny skirt and down my thighs. To the old pervert’s delight.

Tom speeds up the 101 North to the 27 up, up, up to Topanga. We smoke a joint in the car and drink our coffees and listen to Curren$y. The conditions are so nice and Tom’s mood is so good, but there’s this terrible little psychosomatic feeling in my stomach that I can’t quite describe. Probably something to do with all of the pretending I’ve been doing lately. Probably something to do with all of the pretending I am doing right now.

Luckily for me, the house at the top of Topanga is cursed. Strange landlord. One of the bedrooms is laughably small. Strange junkyard featuring three unkempt looking Great Danes barking in a fenced in pen out front. Well priced for the location but otherwise completely fucked up. I shake the strange landlord’s hand on our way back to the car and his hand is a little bit wet and I feel like I might throw up.

Tom and I do a long walk around the west side at sunset with the dog. The sky changes from blue to yellow to orange to pink. The cool tones blend into something warm. An impressionistic sunset and a full moon tonight. And in the car on the way back to Hollywood, “Skeletons” by Travis Scott plays and we stop at the In-N-Out by Hollywood High for cheeseburgers and fries. We sit parked outside of my apartment with our food for an hour, eating and talking and kissing and smoking and procrastinating going inside until we finally do, sometime around eleven. We collapse into bed and fall asleep quickly.

Tuesday

I wake up at seven to Tom’s alarm and immediately roll on top of him to avoid yesterday morning’s drama. Adapting my behaviors to bypass trouble. I am learning. Or like, better said: being trained. He gets out of bed and starts working in my living room. I stay in bed. Push open the curtains. Light a joint.

I spend the hours between eight and noon adding things to cart on various websites without ever pressing purchase. My mother calls and says that she found two huge boxes of photos from my childhood in my brother’s closet and wants to know if she should bring them with her when she drives in tomorrow. Should I pack them? Do you care? I tell her to pack them, that I care.

At noon, Tom rushes me out of the house for coffee and a cinnamon roll at Solar before a penthouse apartment viewing on Hollywood Boulevard. I am in a mood because I am in a terrible outfit. Big ugly creamy sweater over a short skirt with big boots. Greasy hair. Didn’t get the chance to really consider my face in the mirror, which is maybe a good thing. Mentally. Feel like I want to crawl out my skin anyway.

On the way to the apartment viewing, nothing goes right. I spill coffee all over my ugly sweater, just like I did yesterday before the Topanga house. (God?) We witness an Asian woman trip and fall over a homeless man lying supine on the boulevard. The cinnamon roll makes a mess and doesn’t taste very good. The only close parking spot requires a one-hundred point turn. And when we finally do make it inside, the building is historic and gorgeous and the views are so expensive but the unit is a total bust. The leasing agent, a thirty-year old Slavic woman wearing an ill fitting suit with filthy white tennis shoes, is a little bit of a bitch. She tells us that there is no air conditioning, no laundry, no parking, and no utilities included in the rent. We tell her thank you but no thank you and take the old elevator back down to ground level and sip the last of our cappuccinos in disappointment. Although I, the liar, the pretender, am a bit glad to be disappointed of course. Because if the apartment had been perfect...

Tom leaves for the west side and I drive to the Trader Joe’s on Hollywood and Vine. I buy: dates, rosemary crackers, five kiwis, four nectarines, two honeycrisp apples, a wedge of brie, two bags of trail mix of two different ilks and a bag of sea salt chips. The cashier winks at me and tells me that my total is fifty dollars. I try to feel something about fifty dollars and can’t.

I get home from the grocery store and immediately undress and return to bed. I get stoned, talk to the cat, pick and eat all of the dried pineapple out of my new trail mix and agree to meet Tom on the west side in an hour or two.

Five p.m in Venice. Sex, then a joint, then a nectarine shared over the kitchen sink.

“Summer Madness” by Kool and The Gang plays in the car, loud, while Tom speeds up the Santa Monica Freeway toward Hollywood. The sunset is bright orange in the rearview mirror and when Tom asks me how I am feeling about my mother’s impending couple of weeks in LA, which begin tomorrow, I feel dread. Couple of weeks. Feel the urge to clutch at my neck. Feel suffocated. And nothing has even happened yet. I tell him that, and then I tell him that feeling that way makes me hate myself, feel worse, like a bad daughter and generally a wretched bitch. He says no, no, I feel that way too, and then I drop her off at the airport and feel depressed.

We eat leftover Zankou pita and hummus and tzatziki and falafel for dinner in my bed and fall asleep early, before eleven.

Wednesday

Awake at six. In and out of sleep till seven. Sex and then a joint. I look at my phone and monitor my mother’s location and find her little dot in the middle of the desert, Newberry Springs, CA, wherever the hell that is. She is two and a half hours from LA and my mood is a mess.

At ten, Tom leaves for the west side. My mother calls and tells me that she’s passing Pasadena and should make it to my aunt’s house within the hour. She says just come over whenever you can and I say okay and then hangup and smoke two bowls and start running the bath to cleanse myself and stew in my dread.

I don’t leave Hollywood for Burbank until noon, and I don’t feel good about it when I do. My hair is greasy because I was too lethargic to shampoo it in the shower. Exfoliated everywhere and shaved and put concealer on and dressed myself in a bad (short shorts, long sleeve top, moto boots) outfit and left instead. Got into my car and drove it over the hill. Felt nice to drive my car a distance farther than down the street for the first time in weeks.

I kiss my mother and her dogs and my aunt hello and then sit in the living room by the big window for an hour, looking out through the glass at the shimmer pool and palm trees and orange awnings. We talk and drink coffee. Topics of discussion include: my uncle, quitting my job, my mother’s miraculous promotion, my cousin’s wife’s gestational diabetes, Fourth of July, and my crazy new boyfriend. I have a lovely time and feel terrible about all of that dread I felt before.

At three, my mother and I leave Burbank for Miracle Mile because she tells me that she’s been dreaming about the Swedish candy store on a consistent basis since the last time she was in LA. We go into Sockerbit and fill two paper bags with one hundred dollars worth of organic candy. My mother taps her card and I kiss her on the cheek and then follow her across the street to Sidecar, where she buys a dozen old fashioned donuts, and Trader Joe’s, where she buys watermelon and peaches for my aunt and a bottle of sparkling water for me.

On the drive back over the hill to my aunt’s, my mother and I eat Swedish marshmallows and I listen numbly while she turns down the Electric Light Orchestra song that is playing to tell me that she thinks she heard God whisper to her I sent him. Him being Tom. But it might have just been an intrusive thought, she sighs. I’m excited to see what you think, I say. And do not mean.

But dinner goes swimmingly. My mother and I make it to Superba right on time and Tom is already there, sitting in a big booth in the back of the mostly empty dining room. He stands up and he’s wearing this navy blue button down and his hair is combed back and my mother presses her elbow into my side and says I love him before we’ve even finished crossing the room. Jesus Christ. The two of them do ninety nine percent of the conversational heavy lifting and leave me sitting in the middle to watch and nervously pick at the bread.

After dinner, instead of letting me drive my mother back to Burbank, Tom insists. So he lets her into the passenger seat of his car and I get in the back and it’s so surreal, this moment, sitting behind two of my worlds, watching them collide. When we hug goodbye for the night, my mother whispers he is obsessed with you.

Thursday