Chapter 5 #3
“Yay,” Eliza says. “Oh, I hope you say yes. I would love to see you.”
“You would?”
“Of course I would,” Eliza says, like it’s obvious. “Okay, gotta go. Talk soon!” She hangs up, and Susan is alone in the Zoom call, staring at her own dumbfounded reflection.
Susan goes to Liz Cook’s LinkedIn page. Her profile photo shows a woman on a red carpet, holding a gold award statue over her face, obscuring it completely. Her biographical details are vague—a list of production companies she’s worked at, mostly.
Liz Cook is a commercial producer turned screenwriter.
It takes only a few minutes to discover that Liz Cook, whose own social media profiles are set to private, follows Susan on every platform. Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Spotify, Snapchat, Pinterest, even Goodreads, which Susan hardly uses.
She knows what she’s going to find before she hits search on Google, but the images still take her breath away.
In the photos, Liz Cook’s hair is long and straight and softly streaked with blond, and her skin is glowing, dewy, and tan, as though she’s been given a wet kiss by the sun. She’s thin. Her bottom teeth are crooked.
She’s a fun house version of Eliza: Eliza stripped of queer signifiers and replaced with a bland body double, like an alien’s interpretation of a woman, someone they abducted and swapped with a look-alike.
It’s her but not her.
But it is her.
Eliza at parties, Eliza on panels, Eliza’s beauty routine featured in blogs.
As Eliza Klein, she’s a ghost: no social media presence, hardly any Google search results. But as Liz Cook, she has a heavy digital footprint. At least, within a specific corner of the internet. Susan has been siloed away in a totally separate algorithmic prison.
With her stomach in knots, Susan clicks deeper into the rabbit hole, where she finds that Liz Cook is married.
To a man.
Don’t be biphobic, Susan tells herself. This doesn’t mean she’s straight.
Still, it’s a shock to see the man Eliza chose.
Graham Cook is a psychiatrist. He has a private practice that looks robust. He wrote a book called The Psychodynamics of Polyamory.
Whatever that means, Susan thinks.
He’s a real functioning adult, a productive member of society with several degrees and predictable income. Definitely a WASP, too.
Susan feels like throwing up. She should stop looking, but she’s in it now.
Together, Dr. and Mrs. Cook are golden and godlike. Radiant.
Susan finds photos of their elopement that ran in Brides magazine (chic, downtown, Eliza wore pants).
The couple is in red-carpet photos all over Getty Images.
Eliza is a little bit taller than Graham, and it seems she’s taken to emphasizing their height difference by wearing stiletto heels.
Graham looks unbothered by this. If anything, he seems stoked.
Susan scrolls through her IMDb. Liz Cook has been in countless writers’ rooms for hit TV shows, shows that Susan has binged, never knowing that Eliza was probably responsible for the very same dialogue that made her laugh or cry, sitting on her parents’ couch through the worst months in recent memory.
As though Eliza’s hands have reached across time and space and through the TV to touch her, or maybe strangle her.
Long Island, 2005 is Eliza’s first feature film.
Susan thinks about Eliza less than she used to, but she wouldn’t go so far as to say she ever really got over her.
She’s not sure what to do with the fact that Eliza has found her, has hired her to work on a film she wrote about her life.
It’s too much. She wants to scream, break things.
She wishes she suffered from some sort of mania so she could justify going on a self-destructive spree of buying designer clothes and doing club drugs and sleeping with strangers and getting a horrible tattoo. But that’s not her. It never was.
She pulls out her phone and unblocks Eliza.
Susan closes her laptop and goes downstairs to talk to her parents about her potential trip to California, but when she gets to the kitchen, she finds her dad sitting on the ground looking confused and her mom crouching next to him. There’s a puddle of coffee and a broken mug on the floor.
Her heart immediately starts to pound. “What happened?” She gasps. “Should I call 911?”
They look up at her. “I’m fine,” her dad says, but he looks pale.
“Dad fell,” her mom says.
“You fell?” Susan repeats. She sits on the floor next to him, taking one of his hands in both of hers. It feels cold and clammy, rough and ancient. “Why did you fall?”
“Just lost track of my feet,” he says. “I’m fine, honey.”
Susan looks at her mom. “Mom?”
“If he says he’s fine, he’s fine.” She sighs.
“Did you need something?” her dad asks.
“I was going to let you know I might be traveling to LA soon, but if you need me, I can just stay here.”
“Help me up,” her dad says, and she rises to her feet and then uses all her weight to pull him up with her. He steadies himself on the counter. “Don’t cancel your plans on account of us,” he says.
“Are you sure?” Part of her wants them to tell her not to go.
“Of course,” her mom says. “You know, we managed without you for a long time. We’ll be fine.”
“But can we at least talk about why, or how, Dad fell?”
“Because I’m old,” he says.
Her mom hits him on the arm. “If you’re old, what does that make me?”
“Older.” He winks.
“Oy,” Susan mutters.
On the flight to Los Angeles a few weeks later, once she’s sure her parents will really be okay without her for several days, Susan can sense pimples forming under her mask.
Her ears are starting to ache from being pulled forward under the straps.
She knows by the time she gets to LA, she’s going to look nothing short of monstrous, but her fear of COVID is greater than her fear of looking ugly.
Like most people from New York City, she knows a handful of people who died.
No one close enough to her to warrant a grieving process, but the kind of acquaintances whose absences she’d notice, if she still lived in the city.
Her pandemic trauma is like a low-grade fever that never really goes away.
Outside of LAX, Susan stands on the sidewalk for a few minutes to feel the sun on her face. She can’t believe there are palm trees around the airport. She’s starting to feel as though the picture of the world she got from living in New York her whole life is very narrow.
In Arrivals, Susan learns she can take a bus to the Lyft lot or pay one hundred dollars extra to get an Uber right to where she stands—a preposterous amount to spend on convenience.
But Eliza had said she’d cover her travel expenses, so Susan opts for the latter.
While she waits for her car, she texts her parents to tell them she landed, sends Jonny a picture of the palm trees, and then pulls up Twitter and scrolls aimlessly. She refreshes her email several times.
She tries not to think about the fact that she’s in Eliza’s city.
It’s easier to think about Eliza as Liz Cook: a married woman she doesn’t know, has never known.
Otherwise, Susan is not sure what she thinks she’s doing here.
Trying to reunite with a long-lost love who is still not interested in her?
It’s pathetic, if she thinks about it too hard, so she opts out of thinking about it at all.
The car pulls up and Susan heaves her bag into the back.
Once they’re on the freeway, the driver looks back at her and says, “So what do you do?”
“Social media,” she says. “You?” She realizes after she asks that it might be a faux pas to assume he does something outside of driving for Uber.
“I’m an actor,” he says.
She notices his headshot and résumé hanging on the back of the seat. He looks clean-cut and tan, like a manufactured Ken doll sort of attractiveness, cooked up in a lab or a doctor’s office.
“Cool,” she says, and smiles.
She’s amused to find this stereotype about LA to be true.
The driver gets off the freeway and turns onto Silver Lake Boulevard.
There are a few streets covered in encampments where, she assumes, unhoused people live.
It’s disturbing to look at: shacks made of garbage clustered densely together.
She catches a glimpse of a fully naked man around the side of a tent.
Susan had thought she’d seen it all in New York City, but the truth is she’s never encountered poverty like this before. The driver meets her eyes in the rearview mirror and says, “It’s gotten really bad over here. The problem is that it’s also a mental illness thing.”
But then, a few blocks in, everything explodes around her with green and orange and yellow. The houses are small but pristinely kept, mid-century modern and Spanish Colonial, painted white and pink and teal. The obvious inequality is jarring.
The driver makes a left, and all of a sudden they’re driving around a sparkling reservoir.
She didn’t realize there was an actual body of water here and feels like an idiot.
Silver Lake. There’s a metal fence around it, and some concrete at its edge, but other than that she thinks it’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen; it looks enchanted, made of glitter, surrounded by green hills dotted with houses and palm trees, and then she looks up and she can see huge blue and pink mountains looming in the distance.
There’s a big green field where people are lying on towels, dogs running about.
Flowers are exploding everywhere, bushes and trees dense with red and orange and lavender, like candy, like something out of a Dr. Seuss book, or an acid trip.
“Oh my god,” she says.
“Everyone knows Beverly Hills, but Silver Lake is LA’s real crown jewel,” he says. “Rich folks only, though.”
“That tracks,” she says.
“You know, they used to call this area the Swish Alps,” he says.
“Wait.” Susan laughs. “Why?”
“Fancy gay men,” he says. “It’s mostly just yuppies now, though. Where are you from?”
“New York.”
“You know what they say,” he says. “New York is fun hell, and LA is shitty heaven.”
“That’s kind of perfect.”