Around the Gaps (interlude)

This is fiction.

Little by little (until it was all at once, as it goes), she found herself nursing a soft obsession with Los Angeles. With Didion and with Del Rey, yes, but just as much with the videos of the women about her age now—the ones talking to their cameras propped up on kitchen counters and dashboards and narrating from behind it, looking outward at chest level.

She liked the expanse she saw out of their lenses. It reminded her of home, sort of. That was the only thing that she could think of, the only reason that she could come up with that might make this place so beautiful to her. Because she knew about the gray covering the streets and the skies out there. She saw it, sometimes, even in the videos when she was paying close enough attention to the blur of some street while the women spoke absently to the camera sitting on the dashboard, or in the wide shots from some ravine where they hiked, and the low-hanging sun illuminated the scrim of smog, turning it ruddy and opaque and glowing. Still—and more—she saw the high-ceilinged skies, wide and undefined. She found a sort of soft focus on the women’s shadows slanting out long and charcoal on the dust of the canyons or the gentler slopes of the hiking trails. She kept watching the videos and kept allowing herself to be brought along from the other side of the camera, bobbing and bouncing along with their steps like a baby strapped to their chests.

She liked the balconies and the sun-dappled patios, with the visible warmth of the tile baking in the sun. She liked driving, and she missed being alone. It wasn’t really about the weather, though it could be. Maybe it should be, but she could take or leave the East Coast’s ebbing and flowing, be alright losing it. The glamour and the appeal was as much in gliding through freeway exits and in dining tables that could seat eight as it was in the silk scarves in the convertibles and the bands in the storied dive bars.

The problem, she knew—along with the logistical and the financial and all the others—was in being new to LA. All of the women talking to the cameras already had lived-in lives. Many of them were five or ten (a couple of them inching closer to fifteen) years in, or they were on their second go; enough of their friends had stuck around in the interceding years. This made the dreaming slightly more complicated. How many dining room chairs could she need?

She had spent the time following each of the exoduses from New York—after the first year’s lease was up, then the third, and the fifth—reacquainting and resettling, getting her bearings around what actually were the contours of the city itself and what had only been the curves of the time she had spent with the wave of friends who had just cleared out. She’d been warned about the leaving, once, by an old coworker who had made it ten years before leaving herself. And each time, she decided that she just needed to readjust, to straighten out around the gaps of the people who had just left. But she was right in thinking this, every time. She stayed; she remained; she, steadfast.

She insisted, along with everyone else, that she loved New York the whole time. She meant it along with everyone else, most of the time.

She found it funny, watching these women, how they seemed to hate LA a little bit. Everyone there seemed deeply ambivalent about it. New Yorkers—as well as and especially New York transplants—love New York. The weather’s nice in LA.

She did mean it, though. Every swaying toast too deep into the night to say much of anything of substance, was to the city. She grew up in the city, really. Her best friends were here; Andrew was here, and he made his coffee here; her work and her spots and her favorite bakery were here. She loved her routine, her deli around the corner, the weird bar where she played some of the first songs she had written about New York, and later, the songs she had written in New York so they could be about something else. She loved writing late into the night with Andrew, brought together by the size of their bedroom and claustrophobic press of air inside their apartment. And Andrew loved New York.

She watched the vlogs anyway. She read about Joni anyway, but she didn’t listen to very much of her. Joni was wintery crisp edges, like the quiet that settled into a house by way of a whistling, angry wind gliding against the windows outside. She’d been listening to music that dripped more than anything; lately, she wanted songs that felt like syrup falling off her fingertips, like tar getting pulled up from between the ground and a shoe. She liked space, hot and sweet, in her music these days—cavernous drums, viscous guitars, languid synth wails. Reverb, reverb, reverb.

Andrew came home late but not too late that night. When he did, she was sitting with her headphones on. She greeted him dimly before clicking her headphones back into their case. She followed him to the bathroom doorway to let him unfurl the evening over the hiss of the running water as he showered. As he spoke, he wasn’t so much rinsing the city or the memory off, but letting the steam curl around him and wrap him up in it, like bandages meant to let a salve soak in. She laughed and interjected and asked about their friends where he left spaces to, rinsing his face or collecting his thoughts. And when he emerged from the bathroom, she kissed him, deep and long. She let the remaining water on his lips, which were flushed and a little puffy from the shower, cover her own. She pictured the droplets leaching from him into the back of her throat and all the way down. She wanted to let them settle deep within her like a shot, a tincture. And with Andrew’s hands, damp and shining, reaching around to the small of her back, she meant it. She loved it. She meant it.