Chapter 5 #6
“That sounds right,” Susan says. “Though does it count as knowing each other? I’ve only see you once every…” She tries to calculate. “Five to ten years, ish.”
“I think it counts,” Eliza says. “We were such babies when we met, and now look at us.”
Susan is wearing black biking shorts and a big T-shirt that says CERTIFIED HOMO. She narrowly avoids slipping on some loose rocks, and then says, “Our heterosexual youth.”
“Neither of us were ever straight, but I know what you mean.”
“We both liked Kyle.” Susan has to stop herself from covering her mouth with her hands after the words spill out. She hadn’t meant to go there.
But Eliza seems okay with it. Maybe it’s the sunshine or the dramatic views or just the physical activity—or maybe it’s that Graham is here.
Either way, she doesn’t freak out. Instead, she says, “Compulsory heterosexuality is, like, a thing. He was easy to like. He checked all the boxes we were supposed to want.”
“I never thought of it like that,” Susan says, trying hard not to slide on the sandy incline. A dog runs by off-leash, way too close to the edge, followed by a sweaty man with an alarming amount of abs.
“How did you think of it?” Eliza asks, appearing to have no trouble at all navigating the terrain.
“I idolized him. I think I wanted to be him,” Susan says. “When I tried to get him to like me, I started dressing like him.”
“Aw, teen boy drag,” Eliza says.
Susan smiles, thinking of the skinny jeans, the band T-shirts, the thrifted men’s flannel shirts, the Converse sneakers, the white belt, the bangs swooped across her face. She must have looked, she realizes, like a perfect little baby dyke.
“You know,” she admits, “I think I probably looked pretty cute.”
The ground moves under Susan’s feet, and she skids a few paces down, her arms wheeling wildly as she tries to find her balance. She imagines herself careening off the edge of the cliff, falling onto a cactus, and bleeding out before the helicopter finds her.
Fortunately—or unfortunately—she’s saved by Graham, who grabs on to her just as she’s about to wipe out.
“You okay?” he asks, still holding her arm.
“Fine!” she says, pulling herself free of his grasp, thankful to have not fallen to her death and deeply embarrassed that Graham had to rescue her.
She shakes it off. “What are your thoughts on compulsory heterosexuality, Graham?”
Eliza says, “Susan, go easy on him.”
“No, I’m serious. If you liked Kyle because of comp-het”—she pauses, aware that she’s being a jerk but not really caring—“what does that mean for your marriage?”
Graham shrugs, unbothered. “I don’t think Eliza married me out of a compulsion to act straight. She would have gone for a much manlier man, if that was the goal.”
Susan considers this. It’s true; Graham is short, soft-spoken. He works in a caring profession.
“Have you always been into queer women?”
“Susan!” Eliza snaps.
“What?” Susan feigns ignorance. They pass a cluster of neon yellow wildflowers bending in the breeze.
Again, Graham doesn’t seem fazed. “I’m not sure how to answer that. Maybe I am usually into queer women, or maybe I’m just into the kind of women whose lives have been interesting enough to foster a sense of queerness.”
Susan laughs, but stops when she realizes he’s not kidding. “What now?”
“We’re all just the products of a series of circumstances. We could be anyone, depending on what we experience.”
Susan lowers her eyebrows. “So you’re saying I wouldn’t be a lesbian if I’d just met the right man?”
“Don’t be so literal,” Eliza says.
Susan sighs. If she’d never met Eliza, she would probably be a different person. But she’d still be gay. And maybe she would have just found someone else to imprint on, like a deranged baby bird.
The yellow wildflowers have given way to tangerine-colored California poppies and agave plants the size of dinosaurs. She resents how pretty LA is.
“Don’t you think there’s something kind of sad about that thinking?” Susan asks. “About the idea that you don’t have like … a self that’s independent of external factors?”
“It’s just a theory,” Graham says. “We’ll never truly know why we are who we are.”
So fucking pretentious, Susan thinks. The idea that she’s nothing but her circumstances threatens the importance of everything she’s gone through to get to this place where she doesn’t hate herself.
Maybe this theory works for Liz Cook, justifies her shape-shifting. But regardless of the circumstances, Susan remains herself. She’s just starting to realize that this might be a virtue.
Susan is quiet on the rest of the walk down the steep incline. She focuses on putting one foot in front of the other, not slipping.
It takes Susan five minutes to figure out how to open the door to Eliza’s Tesla, but there’s no way she’s about to ask for help, especially after Eliza said, “Promise not to crash it into a parked car or, like, let a tree fall on it,” when Susan asked to borrow it.
Instead, Susan pulls out her phone and googles, tesla door open how to.
Once she’s behind the wheel, Susan feels like she’s commandeered a spaceship.
It takes only a few minutes to realize that driving in LA is stupid.
For one, the freeways are wider than any highway has the right to be.
Also, everyone she passes is staring at their phones.
People are swerving around not looking. It’s total madness.
She brings the seat all the way forward so she can clutch the wheel like a terrified old woman.
The Tesla shows her the cars around her as though she’s playing a video game, and she has to force herself to stare at the actual road, not the road the computer is showing her.
When Heather suggested they meet for lunch on the west side, Susan texted back: “I’ll go wherever!”
In return, Heather said, “oh my god really???? thank you so much,” which is when Susan first suspected she might have made a mistake.
Heather’s office is in a place called Culver City. It’s farther than Susan can fathom. LA feels less like a city and more like its own little nation.
When she finally gets there, Susan pays twenty dollars to leave the Tesla with the valet in front of a restaurant made to resemble an Italian villa.
She finds Heather in the garden, at a table overlooking a swimming pool. Heather is dressed in all cream and her hair is longer. She looks happier, fitter, tanner. Susan wonders if being hot is a requirement to live here, or if living here somehow makes you hotter.
Heather stands to give Susan a hug. “You look so good,” Heather says.
“Oh please,” Susan says. “You look good. I look like a middle-aged woman who lives in my parents’ house.”
Heather laughs. “We just need to get some sunlight on you.”
They order sparkling water and salads and bread and a side of fruit.
“So what do you think of LA?” Heather asks.
“It’s beautiful,” Susan says. “I forgot that people could, like, live in a beautiful place. I thought that was what vacation is for.”
Heather smiles in a way that strikes Susan as patient. “It’s definitely pretty.”
“It just feels like, how could you ever feel bad here?”
Heather laughs. “The depression just hits different. Sometimes all I want is a good snow day to feel like shit on the couch and we can’t even have that. The sunshine can be obnoxious.”
There’s a famous person at the next table. Susan can’t remember his name or what she knows him from, but she knows he’s someone. She has to force herself to stop staring.
“Okay,” Susan says, her elbows on the table, leaning forward. “Tell me everything. How is HBO?”
“It’s really different,” Heather says. “Don’t you find the entertainment industry to be such a different world from music?”
“Yeah. I mean, I’m only just now wading into it, but I hate how social climb-y it feels. It almost makes me want to go back to digital media.”
“But you can’t do that,” Heather says forcefully. “You’re so much better than that world. Dream bigger for yourself.”
“I know,” Susan says, allowing herself to feel flattered by these extremely LA self-empowerment mantras. “I’m only moving forward from now on.”
“What you’ve done is really impressive,” Heather presses, and reaches across the table to give Susan’s arm a warm squeeze. “You made a total pivot and you’re succeeding. Look, it brought you here. People dream of coming here to work. You made it happen in just a couple of years.”
“Thank you,” Susan says. “That means a lot. I am actually proud of myself, which is kind of a new feeling.”
“Good. I’m so happy to hear that. And anyway,” Heather says, “I do still want to poach you. I can find you a job with me whenever you’re ready.”
“That is so nice of you,” Susan says, overwhelmed with Heather’s kindness, though she doesn’t want another full-time job. The freedom of freelance work is too good to give up.
“It’s not.” Heather smiles. “Bringing someone with your talent in would look really good for me.”
Susan laughs and relaxes a little. She’s more comfortable with ambitious Heather than generous Heather.
“Wait,” Susan says. “I just realized you got out of telling me how work is for you. I really want to know. Is it a dream job?”
Heather grins at her. “My dream is to retire early and move to Tuscany. But until I win the lottery, it’ll do.”
Susan doesn’t want to go back to Eliza’s house just yet.
Having a little space from her and Graham has been nice; her head feels clearer.
She has the urge to explore, and Eliza didn’t ask her to bring the car back at any specific time.
Zooming in and out of the map on her phone, Susan picks a spot called Point Dume in Malibu, because it sounds familiar.
She feels like someone once recommended it, but she can’t totally remember.
The drive there is so beautiful, her mouth hangs open. It looks a little bit like Jurassic Park, complete with verdant mountains and yellow wildflower fields and then, around the bend, the sparkling blue Pacific Ocean in the distance.
Susan has to force her eyes back on the road in front of her.