Chapter 6 #4
It’s been a long time since she’s looked. Women in LA terrify her, if she’s being honest. Everybody here is somebody, or at least adjacent to a somebody.
But really, she thinks, as she downloads Hinge and Tinder and Raya and Lex, her phone growing warm with the effort, maybe it wasn’t the other women she was afraid of.
Maybe it was that she felt like she had nothing to offer them in comparison to every other super-accomplished person in this town of high achievers.
She knows that’s not true now. If someone asked her what was going on in her life, she’d have interesting, potentially impressive things to say.
Not that it comes down to what she’s doing professionally—she knows better than that.
It more has to do with how confident she’s become, how comfortable in her own skin.
She’d very much like to share these new feelings with someone else.
She is happy to have Cashew to keep her company. A dog is a warm body in bed, and that counts for a lot. But Cashew doesn’t speak English beyond the words breakfast, dinner, treat, and walk. She’s given up on sit and stay.
She wants someone to talk to who will actually talk back. Someone she can trust with the most secret, most tender parts of her.
Someone who will meet her now—successful and self-assured—and at first not believe Susan when she tries to describe how awkward and nervous she used to be.
Who will laugh in disbelief when Susan tells her that she’s only had one serious girlfriend.
Who will demand to see old photos and then look at them and say: “I wish I could go back in time and give this little girl a hug.”
Or something to that effect.
She’s also trying not to put expectations on this future person, whose face she hasn’t even memorized yet, whose specific laugh she can’t yet locate in a crowded room.
She uploads a profile photo from the red carpet of the premiere. Susan, 37, she writes, filling out the bio questions. City: Los Angeles. Height: Five foot six. Profession: Producer.
In the About Me section, she hesitates. Then she adds: Reformed music snob.
She quickly deletes it. There’s no need to be sarcastic. That’s not the kind of energy she wants to put out into the world—or rather, it’s not the energy she wants to get back.
Instead, she writes: Loves music, movies, and trying new things. She’s learned it’s the small moments between the big ones where real happiness lives, and she knows this makes her kind of basic, but she doesn’t care.
She wonders what she should do with herself now that the film is out, the press cycle coming to an end.
She doesn’t want to rush into the next job, though there’s always that fear between projects of never working again.
Maybe this will be the only documentary she ever makes.
Maybe it’s just the first one. But she’s too burned-out to really scramble for more work, not yet.
Instead, she’s been toying with the idea of taking herself to Paris, or even Lisbon, or maybe both.
Regardless, she knows she should probably find time to go back east and see her parents, spend time with Katie and Jake and Allen, maybe try to be there when their second kid, a girl this time, is born.
She hopes Jonny will agree to watch Cashew.
She had no idea having a dog would create such a tether to this place that is slowly becoming her home.
She misses all her Long Island people something fierce, even while she loves her new life in LA, land of palm trees and promise.
Cashew starts pressing her nose into Susan’s legs, whining.
“I know, I know,” she says. “Let’s go for a walk.”
Outside, she savors the sun on her face and the breeze on her neck. They take their time walking down the street. She has nowhere to be. A luxury, to be bored like this.
Cashew starts sniffing a bush and then pounces on something just out of view.
“Oh, fuck, Cashew, don’t eat that.” She groans, bending down to wrench what appears to be a decaying mouse corpse out of the dog’s mouth. She tosses it into the bushes and tries not to gag. “You’re disgusting, my dude.”
The dog looks up at her adoringly, drippy pink tongue lolling, and then pulls her farther down the block.
A red-tailed hawk swoops across the cloudless sapphire sky overhead. A Prius coasts by and the driver, a neighbor who recently left a brown paper bag of backyard oranges at Susan’s doorstep, waves at her.
Cashew’s long tail is wagging like a metronome as they pass a lush pink trumpet tree filled with black-capped chickadees performing a symphony of chirps.
A delivery truck is backing up nearby, adding its beep beep beep to the chorus.
On a balcony overlooking the street, a woman is talking loudly into her phone, her voice rising and falling with urgency and excitement, intonations swinging like jazz.
Incredible that Susan once thought this was a quiet neighborhood.
On the contrary, it’s filled to the brim with its own wild, ever-changing song.