My Hollywood

  “This makes a hundred twenty-seven!” Helen said, opening an envelope. “Jeff says pretension is the cardinal sin in the TV world.”

  “And there’s the difference,” Jeff said himself, opening the refrigerator and grabbing a kefir, “between network television and the movies.” He took a Hanukkah card out of my hand (three boys, in identical white turtlenecks), assessed, and discarded it. “Why bother,” came his verdict, meaning not Why bother at all? but Why bother if you can’t do a better job than this? Which pretty much summed up my feelings too. We didn’t do holiday cards. But Jeff had Helen. And she’d bought a small masterpiece.

  She probably would have trooped off to Sears too, if she’d married someone else. But she’d squatted, a hot day in October, on a Silverlake photographer’s cement floor, shaking her keys, making faces, then begging and finally bribing Bing to sit still in his reindeer cap. In the black-and-white photo, embedded in construction paper, the photographer had captured Bing, hat aslant, in an expression of awe.

  I ran my finger over the seam where construction paper met photo. “How’d they embed it like that?”

  “Took me a long time.”

  She’d made them herself! I stared at the card. I wanted one like this of Will.

  “First, I glued the photo on a piece of green paper. And then, with a straight edge …”

  Jeff walked out while she was talking. Lucy stood at the sink, sticking eucalyptus branches, buttons still on, among red leaves and hydrangeas. Why didn’t Lola make flowers? She had time now. Will was in school until two. Chest up, belly high, Lucy carried her vase into the living room. I complimented her and she giggled. “In our place, Claire, we learn that in school. Flower arrangement!”

  Helen continued to open mail. She and Jeff did things in front of people that most of us do alone. Maybe that was a sign of success. A photograph fell out of an envelope, Helen, age 5 penciled on the white border. Girls stood at a ballet barre, Helen, age 5 concentrating so hard her tongue stuck out. Tummies, flat feet, legs like isosceles triangles: none of those little girls would become ballerinas. The room eclipsed them; an old scarred floor, a tin ceiling, and huge windows. The kids’ tuition probably helped real dancers pay the rent.

  “I went every Saturday morning for like ten years.” She’d had lessons and tutors. Now she crumpled the picture in a ball, after her mother saved it. She didn’t want him to see those thighs. “Why ballet? Those Upper West Side moms couldn’t have imagined us actually growing up to be dancers while they sat sipping their Zabar’s to-go’s.”

  We drank nonfat lattes, ice blendeds, a dozen small consolations. But for what, exactly, were mothers always being consoled?

  Those women must have hoped that dance would teach their daughters poise.

  “From the gypsies they learned grace and speed,” Helen said.

  “Grace and Speed, a love story,” Jeff added, passing to the refrigerator.

  “At the end of the hour, one by one, we had to chaîné across the room, spotting.”

  “What’s that?” I’d never taken.

  “You look at a spot until the very last moment, then you whip your head around to find it again, so you almost never lose it, or for just a blink. I was screaming at Bing and Simon when they ran ahead of me in two different directions at the Farmers Market, and I realized that’s what it was for. Training. For never losing them.”

  Bing and Simon. Bing liked Simon better now. Better than our Will.

  Helen wore a black dress with a scalloped neckline and Jeff had on jeans. When we’d first moved here, I’d made the mistake of assuming that if the guys wore jeans, I could too. I stepped onto the porch in my new dress. Will ran to me and hung on my knees. I lost my hands in his curls. That night, I wouldn’t have traded anything.

  “No, Mommy, no, please!” His voice arched over the still, bluish lawn when I handed him to Lola and headed for the car. She carried him overshoulder like a log—I watched them as we drove up the palm-lined street, to the mountains. The palms tilted toward the beach. Every time I drove up our street, I felt like straightening them as they ticked by.

  “Who’s going to be there?” I tried to forget Will’s cry.

  “I think it’ll be big,” Paul said.

  “Not just the hamburger-and-hot-dog crowd?” That’s what I called the TV people; their lack of pretension extended to party food.

  “She’s actually supposed to be a great cook,” Helen said.

  I sank down in the dark red leather of the convertible. “Let’s keep driving. Antelope Valley.” Grass Valley, Apple Valley. Such pretty California names.

  Jeff pulled to a stop in front of what you’d have to call a mansion; it was too wide to be a house. He turned off the ignition. “You guys ever get scared right before you walk in?” I kind of fell in love with him all over again.

  Paul had a raring-to-go look. “You believe people our age own this?” With his pilot scheduled to shoot, Paul would finally be somebody to these people.

  Kids darted through a huge room. Oh, I thought, we could have brought Will.

  Paul and I walked over to the fireplace, where three guys from his show stood, hands in their pockets, looking daunted under the oversized mantel. They wrote comedy, but you’d never know it now. They all wanted to write for TV; they hadn’t failed as screenwriters or New Yorker cartoonists. They thought the funniest stuff written now aired on prime-time television and felt aggrieved that the New York Times and their parents still thought Art meant movies. Nonetheless, they peeked over at Jeff, standing with Buck Price and Andy North. The directors did seem cooler than the TV guys, whose pants looked too distinctly pressed. Buck Price had on a vintage bowling shirt; Andy North slouched in a Patagonia jacket and looked like his wife cut his hair. They were guys who’d had girlfriends in high school; as if to prove it, Andy had married his—Alison North, who was a foot shorter and tucked under his long arm. “You married her before you knew you were going to be Andrew North,” I overheard Jeff say once, meaning before you could get actresses. But they had four kids and stood laughing together. Buck had married Sky Tucci, the fine-boned actress who’d found her ring in the sand and wouldn’t cook, but I didn’t see her here.

  The TV guys felt the movie people snubbed them and maybe they did. The movie directors thought their work was more important but the big TV writers lived in mansions. “Wow,” Andy said, about the built-in stereo, as if we were in somebody’s parents’ house. The TV guys worked together thirteen hours a day in a run-down trailer on the Lot that had stained carpeting and lavish quantities of Snackwells, but they looked awkward here. The homes, you got the feeling, were all the wives’ doing.

  Jack, the highest-paid joke writer in television, ambled over, bald and frowning. He had a wincing quality I liked. I tried to nudge Paul into a conversation with him.

  Paul began a story about his grandmother. When Jack relented a smile, I looked around. I’d cooked one meal for quite a few people here. Across the room, Jeff’s fingers absentmindedly riffled a fern. He plucked off a frond, stuck it in his mouth, and gulped. I laughed, making Paul and Jack look up. Jeff could still thrill me. That was kind of a relief.

  The hostess stir-fried at an enormous stove. Not counting her maid, she was the only woman in the kitchen who had a job. She was president of Fox TV. Everyone knew, though, that she had to work; her husband made experimental films. Barefoot, her hair tied back, wearing what used to be called a muumuu, she seemed to have given up on looks. Could I?

  “Can we just give up on looks?” I whispered to Helen.

  “No,” she said back. “We’re too old.”

  “Like this, Esmeralda,” the hostess said, in the particular tone of bosses, scooping the contents of a white yam into the bowl of a food processor. I was hungry.

  Several wives leaned so close they ran the risk of getting splattered. TV wives weren’t dorky. One wore turquoise loafers thin as a sock. Brownish calves, like two-by-fours, stuck out of cowboy boots next to red pum
ps on the kitchen floor. These women understood shopping. I suppose I was staring at the ground.

  Two women compared architects. “Which stove?” one asked the other. “Do you care about convection?”

  “I don’t know, should I? I like those red knobs on the Wolf.”

  Copper pipes? Yes. Wool sisal for the kids’ rooms or something synthetic? Synthetic cleaned better, but was it just too icky? They concurred on gas tankless water heaters. They’d learned these names, features, potentials for durability. They spoke in burdened tones of complaint but underneath ran straight lines of pride. These young women assumed so much: a house and kids. One-two-three.

  A redhead we’d once had over to dinner said, “Hey, where’re you guys now? Didn’t I see you in that open house on Latimer?”

  “Oh, we’re still in the same place.” I looked down at my pumps. I’d bought three pairs of them almost a decade ago with Lil. I’d thought they were classic, but here they looked dowdy, too dressed up. I’d loved that shingled house on Latimer. In a narrow room with a straw crucifix over the bed, a daughter had lived all her life until college, the Realtor had told me.

  “Why doesn’t he buy you a house?” the hostess asked, turning from her stove.

  Then they were all looking at me. Every wife in that kitchen had a house. They nodded, defending my rights. But I felt exposed, as if Paul hadn’t given me a ring.

  “Your place is great,” Helen said. “And you have an incredible deal.”

  “Too bad they won’t sell you that house,” the redhead said.

  But we could never afford it. These were the women I’d expected to be impressed by Paul’s pilot order. I had too little kick in me. “Excuse,” I said, without the “me,” a little homage to Lola.

  I locked myself in the bathroom. I had a small yellow Anna Karenina in my purse. In long-ago Russia, Kitty dressed for a ball. I sat on the floor. According to Tolstoy, there was a time in a woman’s life for parties. For me, that time had passed. I slowed down, not wanting Kitty’s happiness to turn. Once, my friends and I talked about people in books as much as we talked about our parents, more than we talked about ourselves. Startled by a knock, I shoved up. Kitty was giving away dresses—the brown, the violet—to her maid.

  The redhead slipped in. “When we get settled, I want to have you guys over. I still remember that pudding you made. Was it warm?”

  I found myself in a hall, hearing the cymbal shimmer of pans from the kitchen, then roamed into what I later learned was called the library. There were no books. Shelves displayed casted figures from Star Wars and a spotlit artifact labeled LUKE SKYWALKER’S LIGHT SABER. William would love this, I thought. So would Lola. There were big chairs, an Oriental rug, ottomans. I wanted to sit and read. But I made myself go back in, passing narcissus sprouting in crates. Next to the Tolstoy, a notebook rested in my purse; I penciled in narcissus below the number of a woman on Camden Drive who did movie stars’ eyebrows. I promise you, Helen had told me, there’s nothing that makes that big a difference on a face.

  I stood in line for the bar. How did you talk to people at parties? I couldn’t remember. I spoke to children more than grown-ups. And to Lola, whose first language was Tagalog.

  I scanned the room. Paul coaxed a group into laughter like a conductor, bringing up the percussion.

  “I’m their postmistress,” the woman in front of me said.

  “In my kid’s school, they gossip about the children,” someone said. “This one cheats, that one bites. I’m more interested in the parents’ cheating.”

  “The parents’ biting.”

  These women had large glasses, large noses, and interesting jewelry: style, in other words. Working moms. The stay-at-home moms tended to be better looking; they did their tinkering internally, their bodies tight from workouts, their skin from God knows what. They maintained regimens strict as those of actresses.

  I sat down next to Helen.

  “The tennis coach, the band leader, the math tutor, the speech therapist,” said a woman whose pants ended in fringe. “They all have to be birthdayed and Christmased.”

  Suddenly, invisible lashes from the fire touching me, I was happy. I had Lola’s gift in my desk drawer. I’d found a beautiful pair of old diamond earrings at Jack’s Jewelry, set in white gold from the fifties. A little bit, I wanted them myself.

  “You can tell she’d be beautiful,” a man behind us said, “if she wasn’t pregnant.”

  Helen’s hand went to her tummy. “Bing and I made wrapping paper this afternoon. Potato prints. And I sent off my out-of-state packages, so that’s all done, and after, I asked the parking attendant if he’d like a cup of coffee. He’s just cooped up in that little booth all day. I still had to pick up brandy and check Fred Segal for my mom, but I drove and got two fresh coffees. He was so surprised when I came back. I haven’t gotten that much gratitude from anyone for years.”

  When I thought of Christmas, I thought of women alone in cars.

  “For me, it was from nursing my dad before he died,” someone behind me said.

  The woman had freckles, which seemed to clash with her pumps and sheer stockings. Her face had a symmetry I caught glimpses of but then lost again. Freckles. Maybe she’s only half black, I thought.

  “Tuesday, Thursdays, I see patients without health insurance. I can do that without jeopardizing my kids’ tuitions, because of my husband. I want to work more than I did ten years ago.”

  “I want to too,” I said, “but I don’t.”

  The front door opened and a man ushered in two girls in ballet costumes and a nanny wearing dirty running shoes and a parka. “Melissa’s in Connecticut,” he offered, by way of explanation.

  Jeff walked toward us. Helen’s spine straightened, breasts perking. I felt my hips unmold too.

  “How’d you decide on ob-gyn?” I made myself ask the freckled doctor.

  “One night I was in ER, and we lost every single person. I decided I wanted life.”

  Jeff could change a conversation; I’d seen it often enough to recognize the sudden lidding of fun. But the woman in the fringed pants stood with her back to the fire, recounting a series of disastrous presents from her mother-in-law. A sweater stretcher. An errant cotton-candy maker. “Her next gift was alive …”

  Jeff assessed her, looking down her front with a flat glance, like a blade separating peel from a fruit. “Anyone know where I can get a Santa suit?”

  “I do,” she said, facing him. Then he touched her chest with the back of his hand. Helen looked down. In front of us, her husband was enjoying this woman’s body.

  Now I understood: he just did this. It wasn’t me. It probably wasn’t ever me.

  Paul came up and started rubbing my shoulders. The fire still shifted, murmuring.

  “Hey, what about you?” Jeff asked the freckled doctor. “You work Christmas?”

  “A big day in maternity. Lot of little Jesuses.”

  Across the room, girls in tutus minced out, arms tuliped above their heads.

  “A long long time ago, in a place where it snowed,” a girl stood reading, “the Queen ran away. Her daughters went to find her.”

  Two Asian girls titied out on point, their legs so even they looked as if they’d been turned on lathes.

  “We should have brought Will,” I whispered.

  “No, we shouldn’t have,” Paul said.

  Jeff sat on the arm of Helen’s chair. “‘In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo.’”

  “You wish,” I said.

  “The King didn’t have time to find his wife. But he gave his daughters money and their nanny packed lunch.”

  A man behind us said, “Eight o’clock was up sixteen percent in eighteen-to-thirty-four, but dipped at nine in eighteen-to-forty-nine.”

  “Lost how much of the demo lead-in?”

  “The head of Sony,” Paul whispered. “And my agent’s boss.”

  One small girl strayed out into the audience to find her mother (
who turned out to be the freckled doctor). Oh. The Chinese Adopteds. The hostess stood and clapped. “I’ll feed the kids now in the kitchen. They can take their plates to the library and we’ll put on The Sound of Music.”

  Around the room, sharp whispered conversations ensued.

  Alison North stood adamant, hands on hips. Soon, Andy carried the kids out to the car. “I’m a sleep Nazi,” Alison said. “And we have a twice-a-week video policy.” None of the directors’ wives allowed their kids to watch TV.

  “I’m easy,” the freckled doctor said.

  Before I lived here, if I’d heard the words Hollywood party, I’d have pictured ball gowns and men in tuxedos. If I’d imagined servants at all, they’d have been in black and white too. But the men here turned their baseball caps backward. The nannies wore everyday clothes. Aleph Sargent, the only movie star I recognized, had on jeans.

  In the kitchen, nannies hovered around the table where the kids ate. I thought I recognized the one with the adopted Chinese girls.

  “When they’re done, serve yourselves,” the hostess called over to the nannies. Mothers stood near the stove, too, excitedly discussing a cooking teacher for their help. This took place in front of Esmeralda, who removed dirty pans from under the hostess’s ministrations and washed them, so that the elaborate dishes, being carried out on platters by college kids in white smocks, seemed to come from a clean, dry kitchen.

  “Count me in,” said the woman in turquoise loafers.

  “My housekeeper just tears. I’d like things to be a little more seemly. Once she’s done with a chicken—” The redhead stopped and shuddered.

  “My nanny cuts great,” Helen blurted. Lucy arranged their takeout food on platters, added lemon slices and parsley.

  Just so it’s a little pretty, I’d heard Lucy say.

  Lights lowered in the dining room, and people found their seats.

  A man to the right of the hostess had seen a civil war in Africa with real slaves. He had the footage—“Well, a third of it, anyway”—for a documentary.