by Tod Davies.
I lived in Los Angeles for eight years. I didn’t learn to drive until about six years in, when my then husband gifted me with a little Fiat convertible missing its top. It cost $250, it was bright red, and when it choked on Sunset Boulevard as I drove it to school where I avoided getting an MFA in screenwriting, it was so light I could pick it up and push it to the curb all by myself.
In the days before that car, I loved not knowing how to drive. It never seemed to keep me from having experience after experience, but it did slow down the progression so that I had a lot of time to myself to write. Or to fight with myself about writing. I had a mean case of writer’s block. I remember that vividly, and my heart still clutches when I do. I wrestled with that writer’s block. And I won, too. Everything I have now, I think often, came from that one victory.
It was as if when I looked inside myself there was a long, deep well, and at the bottom of the well lurked a hulking black monster. I was terrified of that creature, but it was becoming more and more clear to me that it—whatever it was—was keeping me enslaved. I wasn’t having that. I hadn’t escaped from my mother’s thrall only to be captured by a creature like that.
Fate had been both kind to me and apparently unkind—though as often happens, the latter often leads to the greatest freedoms, a fact I have referred myself back to often enough. My first husband was a charming and fatally wounded man who kept his own anxieties at bay with the common treatments of lavish amounts of alcohol, marijuana, Camel cigarettes, television, and fruitless dreams. He was going to be a famous writer and a famous director, and that was going to make everything all right. What was everything? A horrific childhood, which he idealized past what even I recognized then as probable truth. He talked of his parents’ glamorous New York life, his mother a fashion icon, his father a hard-bitten newspaper man, theirs the great love story until she died, suddenly and mysteriously, one night when he was ten years old. His father woke him up, carried him from the house to a neighbor’s. He never saw his mother again. His father sold the house, moved them both to an apartment, and never spoke of her.
So my first husband was wounded, very wounded. His monster at the bottom of his well was far more terrifying than mine, and he never descended, so far as I know, to offer it battle.
I couldn’t stand my own lack of freedom one more day. Where Fate had been kind, she had organized mysteriously for my then husband and me a fairy tale place to live. I just happened to look in the want ads one day and saw a strange ad: a couple living on the edge of a canyon running down to the sea looked for another couple to live in the house they owned next door to theirs. In exchange for gardening and housekeeping duties. A small salary. The house had an ocean view from the living room and the bedroom, a small study for me, a working fireplace, and a little kitchen that still lives in my memory as the best organized kitchen ever built, with a big square window at the end looking out at a tangled garden running up to the street.
The garden was a riot of rosemary, jasmine, gardenia, lemon blossom, rose, and the biggest camellia tree I had ever seen.
Amazing.
We got the job and moved in. I commenced wrestling with myself three to five hours every day in the little study that also had a corner of windows looking out on the garden. The gardenia bush was right outside, and the room always smelled of flowers. Flowers and mold. It was really damp there by the ocean.
I wrestled and wrestled, and I dreamed that a big, blowsy, sandy-haired woman with a blank face kept trying to break into the house, where I hid beside a box of stuffed children’s toys.
A voice would say, “You’re writing to get away from her.” And piecing my way, patient and terrified, through the kaleidoscope of feeling that threatened to overwhelm me, I, bit by bit, came to see the difference between writing as defense and writing as revelation.
Writing as defense never worked for me. I had another dream that explained why, back when I lived and worked in that little fairy tale house on the cliff in the Palisades. I dreamed that I came upon a beautiful, graceful woman who danced effortlessly in leaps and twirls. Her name, I somehow knew, was The Foundation Dancer. “I can dance better than that,” I boasted, and I began a stiff, constricted hop while she, compassionate, danced fluidly, simply, gracefully above. I woke and knew the difference, then, between the writing that comes from my poor defended ego, and the writing for which I could never take any credit. I saw where my courage failed to follow where she led. For that I could only take the blame.
So I went down the mineshaft, the well, right down to the bottom. There I said to the monster, “It’s either you or me. I am not going to live with you mastering me, so try to kill me. But if I kill you, go away and never come back again.”
Those were the choices I thought I had. To my surprise, though, there was a third choice. The monster shrank and became furry and friendly like a pet dog. He followed me back up, and he told me this: that my writer’s block came from having promised my mother, when I was five years old, that I would never write about her. “Because if you promise your mother you will never write about her,” he told me, “especially when you are very young, you are promising to never write about life itself. Because what else is your mother but your life?”
She made me promise because she was afraid I would write about her true self. She was afraid that what she was had to be hidden in America, or be threatened by the mortal danger she had cowered under during the war.
I wrote about her then. It was predictably painful. But it opened first a keyhole, then a door, then an archway, then a road. The Foundation Dancer danced on that. But, like I said, not as freely as she and I would have liked. My courage often failed. It often fails now.
I realize as I write this that my monster was a kind of phantom dog, and that the dogs that came after him were a living embodiment of the energy that formed him. I didn’t have a living dog then. The most I had were two dogs that belonged to a friend of mine.
Willie and Nemo. Two overbred, tiny black dogs like wind up toys. Their owner, my friend, lived in a house her father’s money had bought her, and worked very hard as a chef in her own restaurant. She was very funny, and a good friend to me at the time, though I know now that our friendship was mainly based not on our shared sense of humor, but on a quirk in my own concept of what it meant to be friends. I discovered this much later. I encouraged my friends to feel they were superior to me in every way. It was a way of hiding myself. But also, to give myself a little credit, of giving presents to those I loved . . . or thought I loved. I discovered this unconscious trait painfully, as one does, in the common experience of finding that one’s friends and loved ones feel anger when one changes. It’s a kind of mourning, I think. And when I made my first film, and it was not a success, not then, though later it found its feet, my friend took the opportunity to feel superior to me and to its lack of success. She showed this too openly, and I resented it, found it hard to forgive. That was the end of our friendship, for one of my faults is that when I cut a tie it happens quickly, and rarely is the tie repaired. I wonder about that, about myself. I look into myself, and I hardly feel—or, at least, I can’t see the feeling if it is there—any regret or anger about the relationships I have dropped by the wayside. It feels more as if they were done, as if I had sucked them dry and left behind just a dusty husk with nothing more to be gained.
I may just outgrow them. That can happen. When I’ve gone back to one or two, it’s as if I’m standing outside of a tight circle I don’t want to venture back into.
I’ll leave it to others to judge me on that, since I’m at a loss to understand it. It’s true I was angry with my then friend when she made it so obvious that she wasn’t going to mention my failure out of pity for me, but it seems funny now. And yet, I don’t miss her at all. You can’t go back, I suppose.
If I went back, I would see some pleasant meals, and I would see myself being patronized and used as a backdrop for her own successes. Her little dogs were really quite weird, but I loved them, and I think they, in their brainless way, were fond of me. I would watch them for her, once in awhile, little mechanical furry toys scurrying around my living room. I would listen to anecdotes about them.
I remember going to walk them for my friend the day that I told my soon to be first husband what I had found about his story.
We planned to be married. I thought I should know what his mother had died of, just in case it was hereditary, and we had children. So I set some friends sleuthing, and they found he had an aunt, a stepsister of his mother’s, who had been a missionary nun in Africa and was now retired to a convent. I called her and she told me his mother had killed herself during the night, while her ten year old son slept in the house. “Her husband drank,” she said in a matter of fact voice. “I don’t think she meant to do it, but he probably came home too late to save her.”
I told my husband. Would I do that now? Probably not. But then, I thought, no secrets. He never forgave me. The pain of it was just too much. We began to have more and more difficulties with each other, which he insisted was because of Los Angeles and the way we lived there. So when I unexpectedly got a writing job that paid a big chunk of money, I said go ahead and pick a place, any place, that we can afford to buy outright, as long as it’s near an airport and there is a separate room where I can write. I didn’t care. He looked again in the newspaper—we’d had such luck the last time!—and found a house on twenty-five acres, forty five miles east of a town in Oregon that was already in the middle of nowhere. So this was forty five miles east of nowhere.
Fine, I said. Fine. Whatever you want. We were married by this time, and all I wanted to do was write, so we flew up and looked at the place, and I wrote a very big check, and we moved in.
The people who sold us the ranch left their dog behind. And in some ways—in a lot of ways—that was the start of my real life. Late, it’s true. But better late than never.