“Forget it, Jackie. It’s too late. Just come to my place.”
Jackie opened her mouth, then closed it again, biting down on her reply. She didn’t want this to go any further—not now, not today. Their fights had been like quicksand lately—if they stepped down in the wrong place, they’d be swallowed up fast, neither of them able to pull herself out, or to reach back and pull out the other. “OK,” she said finally. “I’ll be there in forty-five minutes.”
Jackie took a long shower, fingering the caulk between the square crimson tiles, wondering how she was supposed to deal with Laura. Images of the last ten days kept popping up in her mind. The thin paper of the will. The heavy urn in its flowing furoshiki. The black strangers in the church. And she knew she would share none of this with Laura. She felt as guilty and overwhelmed—and as committed to silence—as if she were washing off the evidence of a clandestine liaison that she not only wouldn’t admit to, but planned to repeat. She wasn’t sure where this secrecy came from—she used to tell Laura everything. And now, as much as she tried to convince herself that she hid things from Laura to keep their relationship pure, to have Laura as an untouched sanctuary from all the things that ailed her, she knew she was kidding herself.
The house where Laura lived was only half a mile away. As Jackie left her apartment and stepped onto the sidewalk, she saw that the streets were plugged with cars, full of people who were heading toward the restaurants and boutiques up on Melrose and down on Beverly. Jackie took a detour to a convenience store to buy some Ben & Jerry’s—her usual peace offering—and as she walked the ice cream softened, the carton sweating through its paper bag. Jackie loved the Fairfax district and was always amused by it. Their neighborhood was home to many young, hip people trying to break into acting or music, and to elderly Jews who’d been living there for decades. Within walking distance were two large synagogues, several Jewish retirement homes, half a dozen Jewish private schools, and the most famous Jewish deli in L.A. Laura, who’d gone to Hebrew school until she was fourteen, often joked that if she had to be involved with a woman, at least she’d picked the right neighborhood to do it. To Jackie, it was the right neighborhood, period. The seventy-year-old apartment buildings were beautiful and grand, dressed with turrets, gables, red-tiled stairs and roofs, ivy winding up the fronts and the sides. Restaurants, markets, delis, banks, were all within a couple of blocks. Other than driving back and forth from school, she almost never used her car.
Jackie walked at a leisurely pace, enjoying the fresh air, thinking about her girlfriend. It occurred to her that they hadn’t been happy for quite some time—maybe not since the summer they met. Although they were both from L.A., they’d started dating in San Francisco, two months before Jackie started law school. Laura had an internship, working for the San Francisco Community Development Department between her junior and senior years at Stanford, and Jackie, who’d just graduated the year before from Berkeley, was finishing her paralegal stint in one of the Embarcadero buildings. They were set up by a mutual acquaintance who’d gone to school with Laura at Stanford and was working as a paralegal at Jackie’s firm. Their first date had started over ten-dollar sandwiches at a downtown lunch spot, and hadn’t ended until two days later.
They had a perfect, all-too-brief summer of bike rides, big dinners, wine-tasting in Napa Valley, long nights of conversation and sex. Every weekend they’d bike across the Golden Gate Bridge and walk down to Black Sand Beach, where they’d hold hands and stare back at the sparkling city. Then, in early September, Jackie left for L.A., and they’d spent the academic year on the phone. During breaks, Jackie would go up to Stanford or Laura would come down to L.A. Laura would split her home time between Jackie and her mother, who loved that Laura was seeing someone in L.A. because it meant she came down more often. And Laura’s mother—and Jackie—were even happier when Laura got the job with the city; she moved back to L.A. right after her graduation.
It wasn’t clear to Jackie when things had started to go wrong. But their relationship, on this different turf, had changed somehow, the way a crop that might flourish in one kind of soil struggles simply to survive in another. When Laura first came to L.A., Jackie had visions of their one day moving in together (they both agreed they should live apart initially), having a dog, two cats, and eventually some children. But it quickly became clear that Laura was miserable. Despite the prestige of her job, she hated the stress of it. Despite how wonderful her family seemed to Jackie (Laura’s older sister was a second-year student at Stanford Business School, her mother the principal of an elementary school in Beverly Hills), Laura didn’t like being so close to them, and Jackie wondered if she resented her for also living in L.A. and being part of what had lured her back. But whatever the reason, or combination of reasons, Laura had grown increasingly depressed, and Jackie, who’d been so happy for their first year and a half together, watched with interest, then concern, and then growing despair as Laura slipped further and further out of reach.
Jackie arrived at Laura’s door and knocked softly; Laura opened it a few seconds later. She hadn’t changed much in the two years and eight months since they’d met. She was thin, 5’4", with dirty blond hair—but her eyes were often watery now, and a little puffy around the edges. She looked very tired these days.
“Hi,” she said, moving aside.
Jackie held her bag out. “New York Super Fudge Chunk?”
Laura smiled sadly and took the bag. “Thank you, sweetie.”
Jackie stepped inside and Laura hugged her, holding on as if they hadn’t seen each other in months. This embrace, Jackie knew, was about her grandfather’s death; was meant to show love and support. But it was hard for her to stand through it. Lately all their hugs had seemed out of proportion to the situations in which they occurred—and she didn’t feel like she deserved this one anyway.
“Are you sure you don’t want to go to the dinner?” Jackie asked as they separated.
Laura nodded. “Yeah. I’m tired anyway.”
Jackie looked around. “Where’s Rodent and Amy?”
Laura smiled, finally looking just a bit happy. “They’re both of out of town.”
Rodent—Rodney Adams—and Amy Carillo were Laura’s two roommates, acquaintances from Stanford. Amy was a second-year student in the screenwriting program at USC. She was almost always home, working on her screenplay or groaning over other people’s, which she read part-time for an agency. Jackie preferred her, though, to Rodney, who wrote music for TV and movies. He had a huge fancy set-up in his bedroom—synthesizer, drum machine, three-foot speakers, and a set of control panels that looked like they could be used to fly a plane. Rodney often had women in his room, watching him worshipfully, as he created the theme song for a new pilot at Fox, or wrote the music for a death scene in a horror movie. He worked off and on from dawn until midnight, and Jackie always felt, when she was there, with Rodney’s music in the background, as if she and Laura were trapped in a bad sitcom.
“Both out of town,” she said. “How tragic.”
“I knew you’d be disappointed. Here, come into the kitchen with me. I was just heating up some milk for hot chocolate.”
They walked hand-in-hand, Laura pulling Jackie along.
“Wow,” Jackie said as she sat down at the kitchen table. “It’s so quiet. Wish I hadn’t been busy all day.” She recounted, then, the more innocuous parts of the day—cancelling the AOL account, going to see the house, which was, it turned out, in horrible shape. “So obviously,” Jackie concluded, “it would have been a lot more fun to hang out here with you.”
Laura smiled. “I wouldn’t have been very exciting. After Marie left,
