by Tod Davies.
One of my best friends had become a little famous, with his writing and his filmmaking, and he ended up the house guest of an even more famous film director he much admired. While he was there, the Very Famous Director ran into trouble with his latest project. The script didn’t work. Everyone went into a huddle, and my friend, the Famous Filmmaker offered to help.
The story was a pretty bad one. The heroine fell in love with the hero after he raped her. For some reason, this trope was hugely popular in Hollywood movie circles at this period. You may draw your own conclusions as to why.
At a certain point in the huddle, so my friend told me later much amused, someone said, “I think we need a chick to help with this one.”
My friend said, “I know a chick.”
So I was brought in and asked my opinion. I imagine you know what my opinion was: that the problem they were having with the script stemmed from the fact that it is impossible to make a romantic comedy about a woman who falls in love with her rapist.
They were surprised, but saw my point here, and agreed to let me run with it, in partnership with my friend, the Famous Filmmaker. We had two weeks to write it, as I remember. We worked in the Very Famous Director’s house, or rather, the house next door to the Famous Director’s house, which he also owned, and which was conveniently connected to his house with an aerial walkway. There was much back and forth, much frantic brainstorming, much shouting, and much laughter.
I loved that job. It was one of the two best jobs I’ve ever had.
I have a lot of stories from that time, but what I wanted to talk about now was a dream I kept having while we were working together.
It was set in a kind of Arthurian forest. I was always in a race with the Famous Director and my friend, the Famous Filmmaker, the three of us on horseback.
“What do we get if we win?” I would ask, and some voice would reply, “The winner receives the Grail Cup and the love of the most beautiful of the Grail Maidens.”
Sometimes the dream would end there, and I would wake up, perplexed. Sometimes, though, it would continue, and I would say, “But what would I do with the love of the most beautiful of the Grail Maidens?”
No one would answer. We would have the race. I always won. I would watch the Very Famous Director and the Famous Filmmaker get their second and third best Grail Cups, and kiss their second and third most beautiful Grail Maidens. I would look at the most beautiful Grail Maiden, who would look back at me, disappointed to be my prize. And I would sigh and ride away into the woods, alone, as everyone else celebrated behind me.
Then, the job finished, in real life I moved to the forest. Twenty five acres on a river, running up a mountain covered with lodgepole pine. Me, who had never lived anywhere but a city, born, raised, and fledged. There I was. And I found, to my profound surprise, that I was in love. In love with the space. In love with the quiet. In love with the solitude.
And there was the dog. I fell in love with the dog.
His name was Happy, which was a silly name for a big, black and grey, uncut male Australian shepherd. But I didn’t change it. I wasn’t planning on his being my dog, and by the time he’d made it clear he was planning on being my dog, it was too late.
He followed me everywhere, except, strangely enough, into my work room, instead lying on the linoleum floor of the kitchen outside the door. I, in my naiveté, planned on his being an outdoor dog, but he circumvented that immediately by insisting on sleeping on the upstairs porch against my bedroom door, banging on the door as he turned in his sleep, and against the screen door when the weather turned warm.
The inevitable happened. He was invited in. He never again slept anywhere but at the foot of my bed. Later, when we’d moved to the home of my heart, when I would have to leave on some business or other, he would make his way up the road to a neighbor’s house, go in the open door, and settle down at the foot of her bed, in order to have a woman to greet when she woke.
He was an astonishing dog, though I had so little experience of dogs at that point that I didn’t understand. We went on long, rambling walks together. We swam together in the river. If I traveled by car, I took him with me, and he charmed everyone he met.
“He’s a plant,” someone observed to me once when I was visiting a friend who’d insisted I join her at a New Age sweat lodge. I had an instant vision of a coleus, and thought the person was quite stoned, but they hadn’t meant that kind of plant. They kindly told me that some animals are actually plants from another world, meant to help specific people on their spiritual path, and though I laughed to myself about that, I couldn’t help but look with speculation at Happy, who looked intelligently back. It wasn’t such an odd thought. A plant. Yes.
In a way, it was Happy who was responsible for my finding my true home, the little alpine valley where I’ve lived for thirty years now. For, unsurprisingly, it turned out that the people who had sold us the house after putting an ad in the LA Times, and left their children’s dog behind in it, were exactly the kind of people who would do such a thing. Which meant they had not exactly told the truth about the place.
There was also the fact, again perhaps unsurprisingly, that the marriage that had begun to unravel in Los Angeles was completing the job in the woods. But we still could stave off any understanding of that circumstance if only we could concentrate on some other difficulty or some other trauma.
So we sued. We got our money back. Now what?
We had been used to driving over the enormous mountain range to the west to go to a little community ski resort there, above a little, charming, culturally adept town. We always brought Happy with us, leaving him peacefully in the car while we skied. One day we took this trip, and it suddenly occurred to us both that we loved where we were. Why not live here? We could go anywhere. As long as we could afford it, that is.
It started to snow. It didn’t stop. It blizzarded and chased us off the mountain. So we decided to look in at a realtor’s office and see what was available in the neighborhood.
A realtor asked what we wanted. I had given this a lot of thought already and briskly ran through my dream requirements. Not too big to clean. Big enough for two bedrooms and two baths. Not too close to town, but close enough to run in for a shop or two. Not too much property to be responsible for, but backing property owned by the public for space. Something like that.
“I had exactly that house,” he said mournfully, “But it sold yesterday, with two back up offers.” He showed me a picture of the house and I said, “That’s exactly what I want. If you get something like that, let us know.” We stood up to leave, looking doubtfully out the window at the sheet of white coming down.
It was going to be impossible to get back across the mountains that night. So we asked the realtor on advice about a hotel room that would take a large, shaggy dog, and, thanking him, made our way slowly up the quickly deserted streets.
We walked into the hotel room just as the phone was ringing. It was the realtor. The deal on that house had just fallen through, did we want to see it? Also, could we take our jeep? The road to the house was graveled, and unplowed, and it was going to be difficult to get there.
We could. We did. We drove through a white forest to a fairy tale house set at the end of a meadow fringed with trees of multiple persuasion, and when Happy leapt out of the car, he ran about, jumping up in the air and twirling like Nijinsky.
All the other offers on the house fell through. The realtor said he’d never seen anything like it. The owners were so fed up, they accepted our offer, which was what we could afford—but less than they had asked.
I knew it was my home the moment I saw it, though the knowledge frightened me so badly I almost backed out of the deal. I had shivering visions of the envy of others coming up the long, winding driveway to kill me. I could hardly believe such a thing was possible, to find my dream home in this life, without some kind of death to repay it.
There was a death, of course. The final death of my marriage. We just couldn’t make it work, no matter how we twisted and turned, and even though it was two years after the divorce before I woke up every single morning thanking the goddess that was over and done with, it was an experience I would not willingly go through again. One divorce is enough for any lifetime, is my feeling.
Where are you going to go? I asked. Los Angeles, he said. Of course, Los Angeles. After all of that.
Where are you going to go? He asked, assuming a city somewhere, but the question, even, appalled me. “This is my home. I’m never going to live anywhere else.” Both of us looked surprised. I hadn’t known I felt that way before I said it. But there have been many times since that I’ve felt it, and more.
He left me the house, finally, after much traumatic wrangling of the type drearily usual to these kinds of situations. And of course he left me most of his stuff in the attic, angry, later, when I gave it all away.
When Happy was dying, my now ex-husband came back to say goodbye, and to dig a grave in the front meadow so that I wouldn’t have to when he was gone. I appreciated that. Happy died with his head on my lap, and I buried him there.
But that was much later. Before that was a good time, Happy and me alone in the fairy tale house, making our own way. That was when I discovered how impossible it is to be lonely when you have a dog and a forest to walk in with him. We never got lost. If I couldn’t find my way, I just followed him. He always brought us home.
The walks we took then are now, thirty years later, paths well-marked in the woods, walks that my husband and I and our dogs, and the neighbors and their dogs, take every day. But once they were just faint deer tracks that Happy and I explored. No one in the neighborhood but we two, in those days, walked in the woods.
The days were busy and happy, but it might have been the nights that were the best. The two of us would sit on the deck under the trees as the sun set behind them, and then we’d go in to sleep beside a window open to the sounds of the stream running behind.
And I had this dream: there I was again in the Arthurian forest of that dream so long ago. There I was again getting ready for the race with the two men, and wondering, forlorn, what it was I would win. This time, though, the voice spoke again, saying something different now. “What do I win?” I said in the dream, and it said back, “What you win is yourself.” That was enough, and I kicked up my horse and rode past the finish line into the woods, and into my own true life.