Chapter Thirteen Julie
Chapter Thirteen
Julie
J ane stared at the blank page of her diary.
Her head felt like it was stuffed with alcohol-soaked cotton balls.
She’d been out with Anna the night before and drank a lot.
Too much, in fact. A rare instance of overindulgence that she probably needed, but this morning, her thoughts were muddled and she was reluctant to write anything in her diary, where it would exist for posterity.
The nagging thought—what if anyone ever read it?
—kept surfacing. Then again, who would, unless she died without destroying her diaries, and someone was really, really bored?
Jane was struggling with her goal to approach the new year and new decade with gusto, with joie de vivre. As usual, all the words for living well came from Italian and French. All English had to offer was the consonant, harsh-sounding zest .
It was a presidential election year, and already there was hyperbolic wall-to-wall coverage.
Jane was still so appalled by the last presidential election that the idea of enduring another one was stressful and exhausting.
She was determined not to let this anxiety bleed over into the rest of her life.
She was going to do her best to ignore it all: in the name of good mental hygiene, politics needed to be put in a secure lockbox, then stowed in a remote location.
But a part of her felt guilty, like she was evading her responsibility as a citizen in a democratic republic.
Still, there was so much noise, so much misinformation, so much stupidity, that at least rigorously filtering it, if not opting for the draconian lockbox, seemed both sane and responsible.
When they met for dinner at their favorite Mexican restaurant, which was homey and—by LA standards—old enough to be an institution, Jane and Anna were both in the same apprehensive, unsettled mood.
“Work is getting nuts with pilot season. Everything becomes an emergency because all these people are making it impossible for me to just do my job. There are four layers of approvals for even a day player, it’s beyond ridiculous,” Anna said with an exasperated eye roll.
“I don’t know how you deal with all that and still manage to do such great work.”
“Well, thank you for noticing, I feel like I rarely get any credit.”
“I watch everything you cast, and you always find such amazing people.”
“Thank you, Jane. I appreciate that so much. When I’m dealing with all the bullshit, I try to remind myself that the work should be its own reward.
I love putting together a great cast; I love giving a talented actor their first break—especially if they actually acknowledge your support, which of course they rarely do.
...” A heap of guacamole slid off the tortilla chip Anna held and splatted on the table.
Undeterred, she popped the bare chip into her mouth, grabbing another to shovel up the errant glob.
“I really wish all of it were easier. It doesn’t need to be so complicated. ”
Jane sighed. “Everything is overcomplicated now.”
“Beyond. How’s your work?”
“Fine. It’s the new year, so lots of getting-organized resolutions, lots of hopelessly messy people vowing to change their ways....”
Anna chortled. “I don’t know how you, of all people, deal with that.”
“What do you mean, ‘of all people’?”
“Oh come on, Jane. You don’t have much patience for messiness... or entitlement or vapidity.”
“And that’s a bad thing?”
“No! That’s what I love about you, but for your job? I don’t know so much.”
“Well, I’m learning to love messiness, entitlement, and vapidity. It’s, like, my personal growth journey,” Jane replied, tingeing the word journey with plenty of irony.
“Who are you?”
“I’m rebranding myself, Anna.”
“I’m all for personal growth journeys. I hope you’re going to post all about it on Insta!”
As Jane cut into her enchilada with her fork, it oozed molten cheese.
“Ha, yes, no—it’s more like a tiny pivot.
You know, I do like my job, maybe it’s perverse, but I do.
I meet interesting people, different people every day.
It’s in and out, so—I do my job, and whatever happens is then in the client’s hands.
If they fuck it all up, at least I don’t have to bear witness to it.
And when my workday ends, the work doesn’t follow me home. ...”
“I probably shouldn’t ask you for any juicy gossip because you’re so uptight about your NDA,” Anna remarked, clearly hoping Jane would spill some secrets.
“Well, I did sign the thing.”
“I have to sign those stupid things more and more myself, because god knows you need top secret security clearance to work on a TV show that Paul Rudd is in.” Anna took a slug of her margarita.
“Whatever, at least I am usually dealing with the devils I know, whereas you deal with new kinds of insanity every day.”
“Yeah, every day is a brand-new freak show. But everyone is also basically pretty much the same.”
“Everyone the same? No. What do you mean? I strongly disagree, but go on.”
“When you boil it down, all people are quite simple: they want to be loved, and to be comfortable. Even the very wealthy, the very famous, who have way too much—that’s all they want. It’s very universal, very primal.”
“Love and comfort. Actually, you’re right, Jane, I think that covers most of what I want from life. Maybe also to be appreciated, instead of or in addition to being loved? I like it when my work is valued.”
“I categorize appreciation as a subset of love: appreciation, admiration, it’s all covered by that.”
“Oh, of course you have it all categorized! You kill me, Jane....”
“Occupational hazard.”
“ ‘Love’ is a pretty high bar, though, right? Maybe the appreciation and admiration, when you can get it, should be enough.”
“I don’t know, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool romantic. I want to find love.”
Anna put down her taco and stared at Jane. “Are you joking?”
“No.”
“Jane, I love you, but you are, like, one of the most cynical people I know.”
“If you were a true romantic, wouldn’t the world we live in make you cynical?”
“Okay, yes, I can see that.”
“Maybe I’m more of a fantasist than a romantic, I don’t know,” Jane mused, poking at the rivulets of cheese congealing on her plate. “I probably have unrealistic expectations about, well, pretty much everything.”
“Like Teddy?” Anna asked, gently.
“Maybe. I don’t know.... That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
“You never know for sure, do you? Until maybe you just do? I just had a date with this guy, and he is, like—a whole new paradigm. His name is Joey and get this, he’s not an actor, he’s a dog trainer!”
“I love that! Where’d you meet him?”
“On the set of that moronic show I cast about the family of geniuses. There was a dog in one scene—this beautiful German shepherd named Pepper—and he was the handler. He was so good with the dog, it seemed auspicious.”
“Good with animals is very auspicious.”
“Well, I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but I like hanging out with him. And his dog. How is it going with Teddy?”
Jane groaned. “Honestly, I have no idea. He got another tattoo.”
“You must hate that.”
“No, I don’t really. I mean, it’s a little cheesy....”
“What does it say?”
“ ‘To thine own self be true,’ ” Jane recited, trying to sound neutral.
“Okay. Well, Shakespeare, right...?”
“Right, so one could say that it is literate.”
“What does it mean to Teddy?”
“I think that he wants to be true to himself?”
“That’s the obvious read, Jane, and therefore, probably the correct one.”
“The question is, what does being true to yourself mean to Teddy?” Jane wondered aloud.
“Maybe it’s a little ego boost. Like, if you aren’t getting what you want from the world, fuck it, because being myself is more important anyway?”
“Maybe... Anna, he’s making noise about moving back to St. Louis.”
“Really? Why?”
“To be with his family, to have that support, to settle down—to leave behind all the hassles of trying to make it in LA.”
“Do you want him to move back to St. Louis?”
“No,” Jane answered without hesitation. “But—I also don’t want to ask him to stay.”
“Why not?”
“Because that’s asking a lot. And implying a lot.”
“You can ask him to stay, Jane—it’s not the same as a marriage proposal.”
“Are you sure? It’s a big move, and—I have no idea what is best for him, or for me.... What do you think I should do?”
Anna gave Jane an incredulous look. “Are you kidding? I have no clue.”
Jane was grateful that Anna hadn’t presumed to have the answer. It wasn’t math; there wasn’t one correct solution.
This morning, staring at the blank page of her diary, she was musing about To thine own self be true again. What if one were sort of a mess—dyspeptic, surly, anhedonic? Why would you want to be true to that?
Jane took a hearty slug of coffee. She was feeling increasingly frustrated. She had all these resolutions to get her new year kicked off, but she felt thwarted, indecisive, even afraid. She sighed, then wrote in her diary:
HAVE A NICE DAY.
That seemed like a very good objective, less onerous than To thine own self be true.
Maybe the tattoo meant Teddy was drowning in self-regard, and if so, good for him.
That was probably why he was so innately kind and generous.
For herself, she needed an attainable goal, something she could control.
If only she could figure out what a nice day was, and how to have one.
Benedict Canyon, another jumbled Los Angeles neighborhood, was snaky and furtive, out of the way yet in the middle of everything, sprawling in the hills above the mostly flat, meretriciously named Beverly Hills.
It was one part stately old Hollywood, one part gauche Beverly Hills bourgeois, with a dash of Laurel Canyon funk.