Mona Simpson - My Hollywood

for Elma Dayrit

Contents

50/50

Once, we sat with a small candle between us on the tablecloth, drinks for our hands. After the salad, he asked if I wanted children.

I dont know. I fingered the glass votive. Id like to, but I dont know if I can.

That got his attention. His whole head stilled.

My hands fluttered to reassure. No, its not that. I mean, I dont know if I can afford them. I want to write music. And Ive already started that.

He had a nice manner. He said he didnt know musicians that well, women or men, but he counted on his fingers female writers whod had children. He actually couldnt think of any.

Nope, died of lupus, I countered. Young. Thirties, I think. Then, Married but no kids.

Happily married?

Probably would have preferred Henry James.

Well, who wouldnt?

I laughed. For years and years, he could make me laugh.

Does Yo-Yo Ma have kids?

Two, I said. But he also has a wife.

Madame Ma, cest moi. He had an odd brightness Id heard all my life. You can be both! my mother had said. But my mother was mentally ill.

He was not. I believed him, a trumpet promise. Some Bach came into my fingers. Cello Suite No. 2 in D minor. The haunting Prelude. I had to sit on my hand.

That evening, our first date, we had a conversation about who would do what.

With a woman who worked, itd have to be fifty-fifty, he said. Of course.

We didnt talk about that again until after William was born.

In Pauls gaze, it seemed I couldnt fail, as if the terrors Id known, so looming theyd strapped me in bed a few days a month, had been products of an overly active imagination. So this is how it works, I thought. It turned out to be easier than Id expected. When I talked about my childhood, his face took on an expression of pity, which also looked like reverence. Then hed twirl in a dance step, with a confident air. I marveled at these shuffles and turns, as one would at the performance of a child not yours: watching happiness.

I became accustomed to myself in this new atmosphere. My opinions grew emphatic, my gestures expansive, my stumbling attempts at jokes more frequent. Who was to say this wasnt love?

I burrowed into his chest at night. He lost his hands in my hair and I could sleep.

Children were a star-wish.

Love had been a problem, already. Perhaps I wanted to curtail my range. In the custody of Paul, within the larger corporation of his family, things Id feared all my life became impossible. No Berend lived in poverty, or even without a weekly cleaning woman. I loved their formality and cleanness. We would always be in rooms like this. Insanity occurred, but that, too, with the proper funds, rounded to eccentricity. He carried within him a solid floor. Like most women, Id spent a great deal of time thinking about whom I would marry. Paul never felt like the end of all that yearning. Could anyone have been?

I hadnt really known, up close, a good love.

I promised myself to be grateful.

Id always perplexed my mother. She attributed my temperament to my face and never ceased trying to fix me up. My wedding made the happiest day of her life. Balloons loose in a blue sky, forty-two of Pauls relatives stood in suits as we said our vows. On my side, only my mother. My friends felt exuberant with relief. Paul was beautifulthat word. A perfect profile, dark smooth skin, Grecian hair, the small wire glasses of a yeshiva boy you wanted to lift off. He had a mother-father Jewish family, who belonged to the Harmonie Club.

The student photographer followed a guest we hardly knew. A dozen pictures of this oboist appeared on the proof sheets and a half page of my mother, in her long white skirt and cranberry jacket, looking, as one of the ushers said, like something out of the Kennedy era, but not one shot of the mother of the groom. In the only picture that included both of us, we were greeting friends, looking in different directions, his hair blown wild, my arms still young. His face looks open and surprised.

God bless them. Wish them luck .

Its the picture my son keeps on the face of his cell phone.

Claire
THE SEARCH

Thats how they get you . Id heard that phrase all my childhood, though who they were was never clear. Ten in the morning, Will seventeen weeks old, I knocked over the bottle of milk Id been pumping. It hurt to pump, but Id already adjusted to the sucking bites and the odd porousness of my nipples after. I hiccuped sobs, moving around the black kitchen. We needed those ounces. I had a concert in New York in nine weeks.

Then he started crying too. I rocked him, his blanket loosening. No matter how many times I studied the folding diagram, my swaddlings opened. His small arms shook, his face blotchy. Everyone told me babies liked the bouncy chair. I slid Little Him in, and he screamed. Paul was gone. Will and I were both exhausted. I couldnt sleep because I believed our baby might die. I didnt know why he wouldnt sleep. This was a monumental responsibility, like nothing Id ever known.

The black kitchen depressed me. I would never work again, I thought, as if these two problems were equal.

Just then Pauls mother paid me a visit, while her son was at work. Shed come to town for the weekend. I raised my eyebrows, See! Look at my ruined life . But she chatted on about the advisability of live-in help so Paul and I could dash out for a romantic evening. A romantic evening! I looked at her. Will cried. He seemed more furious than other babies, more bereft.

I had no talent for this. Paul could make funny sounds like the track of a cartoon, momentarily interrupting Wills misery. But Paul wasnt here. Will and I both felt astonished that he was stuck with me.

Do you ever just put him in the crib and go up to your office? Pauls mother asked. Wed chosen this particular rental house because it had an upstairs room with windows on all four walls. Easterners, wed wanted light. Unfortunately, the windows didnt open and by ten oclock, the room hit seventy, by noon ninety. I led her up, to show.

Wed needed four men to move the piano here. They had to take the legs off to get it upstairs.

Can you order shades? A reasonable question, but Id wanted her to see . I want to be a perfect mother-in-law, shed once said. That weekend alone, shed bought us a set of stainless cutlery and six antique dessert plates. I loved those dessert plates. Shed seen opposing sides in her daughter-in-law and picked the one she preferred.

Youll have shades installed and then just give him to a babysitter and get to work.

But he cries.

Then let him cry.

He wasnt the only one who cried. Paul understood that I stumbled around the rental house broken and that this, too, might be something wed have to endure. Still, I cried too much. That at least had to be fixed.

He knew a way. And we would use it.

On a Saturday in August, in Los Angeles, we interviewed thirteen women, all immigrants, on the quarter hour. Three toothless, more than half heavily made up, a few truly ragged, they resembled the hags of Grimm more than Juliets nurse or any Disney nanny. From far away in this flat city, women had boarded buses to audition for our fifteen-dollar-an-hour job. Paul set up a waiting room in the black kitchen of our rental house. He knew how to do this. He put out a newspaper and a plate of store-bought cookies. That was like him, the nice formality. But the 10:45 woman scarfed the cookies.

Pauls mother had advised us to ask the women for their theories of discipline, but when he asked the first one, she just stared. Like, say, if they dont behave, he said.

She shook her head.

After that Where are you from? became our opening question.

We were new too, Paul explained. Wed moved five weeks ago from New York for him to have his chance. At thirty, he felt like a recent graduate, with a ten-week offer on a show he admired. I held his tremendous hope like an egg found in a fallen nest, but I wanted something toowhat Id always had. When wed left, I held the baby and Paul carried my precious instrument onto the plane. Wed had to buy the cello its own seat, but Will flew free. Now it hurt to look at the scuffed black case. Since childhood, Id played every day. Even holidays, even sick. I remembered, with a loosening of sobs, which fell onto my babys face.