with me one afternoon. “Your metabolism is bound to catch up with you, and you’re going to gain two hundred pounds.”
And so I started jogging. Another concession to the L.A. lifestyle. I’d never really worked out before. In New York, walking around the city and running after cabs was enough exercise. But it was hard to live near the Venice boardwalk with its in-line skaters and weight lifters and runners without joining them once in a while. I ran from our house down Washington, even in the rain, and then let myself get lost around the little side streets and the canals of Venice. On the way home, I usually ran along the sand. I watched the surfers, all of them in black bodysuits, bobbing on the water like a pack of beetles.
Jogging allowed me to explore Venice, an area I came to love, but I wasn’t very comfortable with the other places in L.A. There were too many people in the same biz, struggling for the same jobs. There was too much flesh, too much perfect skin, too many full heads of hair. But I liked Venice. It reminded me of New York—a ragtag amalgamation of people. Poor and rich; writers, artists and lawyers.
Still, I had too much time on my hands. Emmie told me I should sketch, that I should work on my designs, but new ideas, images, hemlines and sleeves stayed hidden from me.
I knew Emmie was right, though. Even if inspiration eluded me, I needed to find a new pattern maker, a new cutter, a new manufacturer for my designs. It’s not particularly difficult to locate these people. They are there for hire. Whether you ever sell your designs after they make them is irrelevant. But it’s important that you trust them, and that they don’t rob you blind.
I made a few calls to Manhattan and soon I had appointments in L.A.’s fashion district with a host of people. I drove the surface streets in my new car, too anxious to get on the highway. The fashion district was bordered by an industrial section of downtown that could’ve been Anywhere, U.S.A., but the district itself had sidewalks crowded with hot-dog stands and displays of luggage, nylon dresses and athletic shoes. Most of the people I met there weren’t right for me, or I for them. They were either astronomically expensive, or they specialized in sportswear, things with Lycra in it, while I designed with chiffon and silk and linen.
Finally, on a Tuesday afternoon, I found a pattern maker named Rosita, a sweet, kind Puerto Rican woman who had years of experience yet charged rates I could afford. Rosita then made a call and hooked me up with a cutter named Victor, and Victor, in turn, recommended a small factory that agreed, at a reasonable rate, to make my designs. That is, whenever I got my ass in gear and decided what my next line would be.
Poet’s blouses had been my thing for a long while—silky slips of fabric with my circle of fake diamonds pinned at the cuff of one puffed sleeve. I’d sold a few lines to Neiman Marcus, and a couple others to a boutique, but for the last few years, no one seemed interested. Ditto for the line of trumpet skirts I’d designed last spring. But my real passion was in the even girlier stuff—the halter dresses, the flounced party skirts, the elegant gowns. I wanted to design clothes I would wear myself. But in L.A., would I ever wear those things again? When we walked the beach, I wore a casual skirt and T-shirt. When we went to dinner, most places were much more casual than New York.
Yet as I pulled into the apartment parking lot after meeting Rosita and Victor, I remembered that I did have something to dress up for very soon. The premiere for Declan’s movie, the one he’d filmed with Lauren, was only a few weeks away.
I began to rework a dress I’d designed years ago in preparation for the premiere. Unfortunately, the work didn’t exhaust me as I’d hoped, and sleep continued its elusive hide-and-seek. Insomnia, I learned, is one of the most ghastly of all medical conditions.
People who can sleep through tornadoes, the way I used to, have no capacity to understand this. “You’re a little tired, huh?” they might say. “Well, just get some rest tonight.”
You consider strangling them, but then you would go to prison, and it would be even harder to sleep, so you just give them a patient, bleary-eyed smile.
I was committed to L.A., for Dec’s sake, and yet it was difficult for me to get accustomed to the way the city looked. It was something to do with the constant mix of the ugly and the beautiful: the beige-painted concrete buildings next to the natural loveliness of the palm trees; the homeless man with soiled plastic bags for his pillow, passed out next to a boutique on Third Street Promenade, where girls emerged with their own plastic shopping bags, their eyes lined with kohl, their lips pearly pink.
But surely, I told myself, this was purely American—the way the ugly and the beautiful converge. New York had its own mix, its own ugliness, ugly people. In Manhattan, for instance, there were the bond traders, brash packs of men talking too loudly and smoking cigars (“Cubans!” they told anyone who would listen). In L.A., the traders were replaced by thin-hipped boys in their twenties, smoking French cigarettes, claiming to be movie producers. Produce, production, producers—these words, I’ve decided, are the most vague in the entire English language.
The newness of the city bothered me, too. There were no turn-of-the-century monuments, so few prewar buildings. The city lacked, for me, a certain antiquity of character. It seemed a city without a soul. Or maybe I was losing mine.
Jack Nicholson took me to the bathroom one night.
Dec had come home early from his Scottish-hen job and, sensing that I was restless, he took me to Shutters to have a drink. It was a New England–style hotel with gray shingles and little white balconies overlooking the ocean. Inside, the lobby bar had overstuffed leather couches and chairs surrounding a crackling fireplace.
We sat near the fire and ordered a bottle of wine with a big cheese board. We cuddled and talked, and he made me remember why I was there with him, in that city.
After an hour, I went looking for the ladies’ room and got turned around. I stopped to ask directions from a guy in a sport coat.
“Let me walk you there,” he said in a mischievous and strangely familiar voice.
I glanced at him as he led me down a marble hallway. He looked familiar, too. A second later, I realized who he was. I felt like gushing. He was one of Emmie’s favorite actors, and I debated telling him that. I actually considered the dreaded line he’d heard a million times—I really enjoy your work—but I’d been in L.A. just long enough to know better.
So I did what any good Los Angeleno would do. I pretended not to recognize him.
chapter 10
I didn’t know what to expect of Declan’s first movie premiere, but I knew I liked the sound of…the red carpet.
My gown was a black halter style with the circle pin at the base of a very deep V-neck, which came almost to my waist. Dec looked dashing in the Hugo Boss jacket we’d found for him on sale at Daffy’s. I was a little more dressed up than Dec, but isn’t that usually the case with women? Yet, when we arrived at the theater, I realized I was more dressed up than nearly everyone. Many of the women wore jeans and stilettos. The men were in everything from khakis to tracksuits.
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