6.
What Kind of Honesty Do You Think Is Going to Come out of Me?
Three days later, Rachel and my mother flew in for the party celebrating the third-season premiere of Julie vs. Animals. This was a form of tribute. They wanted to show they didn’t look down on Julie for making television, although my mother hadn’t said this explicitly.
“I’m curious to know what your life is like in Los Angeles, and I hope to come to appreciate it,” she had said on the phone. “Even though it’s probably my idea of hell, over there.”
My mother had asked my sister to join her pilgrimage, and Rachel had said yes. They’d both met Julie several times, but in Wattsbury, down in the snow and the smell of soba noodles, my mother’s turf. Rachel would be nice to Julie without being cowed by Julie in Julie’s own fiefdom. Rachel would be Virgil to my mother’s Dante, in Probably-Hell. In the thirteen years since the divorce, Rachel had filled the spousal role in my mother’s life, the role of protector, of Dad.
I picked them up at LAX while Julie spent the morning with her parents. The two families planned to converge on the Grove for lunch, but my mother’s plane was on time, traffic from the airport nil, and we arrived forty-five minutes early. Rachel and my mother squinted at the Grove, with its fountain, trolley car, its Mediterranean village, its cobblestones. Its “Farmers Market,” a dense village of outdoor taco places, bars, and chocolatiers.
Rachel noticed an Anthropologie across the cobblestoned boulevard from the Apple store and informed my mother she was going to buy her a dress.
“Here, Mom,” she said, “is where we will maximize your chances of finding the one good man in Wattsbury.”
My mother unfolded her damaged golden glasses and put them on to inspect the goods through the window. “This smacks a little bit of internalized oppression, pathetically trying to be youthful,” she said. “But that might be an interesting kind of pathetic to try being.”
It was in Anthropologie that we ran into the Oenervians. Both of our parties had arrived at the Grove early, and each had happened upon Anthropologie unbeknownst to the other. Julie and Vanda were browsing neo-Victorian lampshades, Samson standing apart with his arms crossed, bemused, manly.
When I saw them, my mother was already modeling an outfit for Rachel. “It’s you, Mom. It’s sexy.” My sister’s tone was diagnostic. “You have these amazing gams. You gotta show them a little.”
“Gams?” My mother made one of her neutrally inquisitive therapist faces. “What are gams?”
“Legs. Your legs. Get the dress. Get the hippie top, sure, but also get the dress.”
“They might be very expensive. I can’t even find the price tag, can you believe how stupid I’m becoming?” I was delighted to hang out with Rachel, pleased to hang out with my mother. But part of me, slightly more powerful than the part of me happy to see them, urged me to wait a few more moments before saying hello to the Oenervians, who had not seen me yet. I had an apprehension that the Paquette/Beckermans and the Oenervians would not swoon for each other.
“I can afford it, Mom,” Rachel said.
“Are you in a long-term financial position to go around buying people dresses?”
“I could not drive around L.A. gathering women and buying them dresses in Anthropologie, no. But this particular dress for you, yeah.”
“How stable is your job, really?” My mother took off her glasses and looked at Rachel gimlet-eyed.
“I work for the state of Massachusetts.”
It was time to face the Oenervians like a man. I swallowed and called Julie’s name. My mother’s face took on the same amusement and triumph it’d taken on when Khadijah had called in 1994. When I introduced her to Vanda and Samson, she and Vanda exchanged smiles that were mildly incredulous, as if they were saying “We actually birthed these people.” I could feel myself floating to earth; there were stores of humility and selflessness in our mothers’ faces, a variety of feeling I had forgotten about. Much the same way I had forgotten about snow.
My sister purchased the semisexy dress for my mother, and we made our way as a group of six through the Grove.
Our destination was a restaurant on the far side of La Brea. On Rainwater’s lime-colored walls there were large black-and-white photographs of monsoons in progress. A waiter sat us at a big table in the middle of the room.
“Ms. Beckerman,” said Julie, “that dress looked amazing on you. Your daughter is an excellent personal shopper.”
“Please, call me Virginia,” said my mother. “But thank you.”
“Beckerman?” Samson addressed his daughter. “I thought it was Paquette.”
“We have different last names,” I explained. “I got my father’s and Rachel got my mother’s.”
“To be equitable,” Virginia said, smiling at the Oenervians, who were all Oenervian. They nodded, serious, open-minded. Rachel reached out and adjusted my mother’s glasses, to convey that she was being weird.
My mother still taught psychology at a small, nonselective college in the Berkshire Hills—a department at a fancier school might not have allowed her to remain openly Jungian and Buddhist. She was wearing a red wool dress with a high waist and short sleeves, and the same John Lennon spectacles she’d worn for fifteen years and repaired with an equally ancient eyeglass-repair kit she kept in the old desk given to us by my father’s friend from the Lampoon. (The desk had remained with my mother in the divorce.) To be Jungian is to feel at the bottom of one’s soul the permanence of problems. (“Psychology teaches us that, in a certain sense, there is nothing in the psyche that is old; nothing that can really finally die away. Even Paul was left with a thorn in the flesh.” “The Stages of Life,” 1930–31.) To be Buddhist is to feel the impermanence of everything else. The glasses perched on my mother’s nose crookedly; there would have been a kind of futility, for my mother, in throwing them away and buying a pair that would sit, for a while, noncrookedly, before they, too, fell into disrepair. Her hazelnut curls, half gray now, exploded from behind her head, as if she were falling through life, the wind blowing her hair around her as she fell. Her face signaled bemusement at this flight, when it wasn’t marred by flashes of dismay at same.
Across the table sat Vanda and Samson, engineers, Vanda of investment portfolios, Samson of medical technology. They solved things, or so I imagined. The Oenervians looked aerodynamic to me, as if they were propelled upward through life, as if air pressure smoothed their hair and clothing as they rose. Vanda’s hair was a dark shell combed backward from her forehead. Samson was owlish in his round tortoiseshell glasses, his thick, side-parted black curls flat against his head, his hands folded. His eyebrows, bushy and soft, were impossibly still. (My own father’s eyebrows were rarely idle; even when his mouth relaxed, his eyebrows continued insinuating.)
“My ex-husband and I agreed to the different last names before we got married,” my mother continued.
“A fair contract, right at the start,” said Vanda. “I applaud you.”
An auspicious beginning to lunch. Julie kept her chin down, her eyes up, a dedicated psychology student at the seminar table, clinging to the professor’s every word. Rachel, for her part, did not fight Julie for alpha. Lanky, like me, she assumed a laborer’s slouch in her chair, legs stretched to one side, an arm slung over the back; in her jeans and plaid shirt, she was, for the moment, relatively butch, Julie’s amicable foil. Her hair, which she’d recently had pixie-cut, made us look even more alike than usual. We looked like half a band. I placed my palm on the top of her head and took it off again.
“Rachel, Julie tells me you have an interesting job,” said Vanda, “working on poverty.”
“Oh, well,” said Rachel, “I try to keep people off the streets. Try being the word.” Everyone looked at Rachel, inviting her to continue. Rolls arrived with green flecks. “What we’re working on now is, no matter what, you don’t let people bum around in a shelter. It’s counterintuitive, there’s a part of us that wants to believe there’s someplace you can always go. But we’ve found, that on Christmas, shelters are empty. People have some other situation they can go to temporarily. And it’s far, far more expensive to put somebody in a shelter for a few nights than it is to pay somebody’s rent. So we’re designing a program where it’s, if you have a problem paying your rent, you notify the state, we pay it.”
Murmurs around the table, of “So interesting.”
“Like, there’s this ritual, with underclass teenage girls in Boston—when you find out you’re pregnant, you go and spend the night in a shelter, so you can get Section Eight housing later on. But we don’t let you get evicted, and we tear down the shelter, which is crawling with bugs and criminals anyway.”
“See, I think that’s genius,” said Julie. “God, Rachel, you’re doing something so real and important. I’m just glad there are people as smart as you figuring out new ways to take care of poor children, instead of making TV. Everything here is spit in the wind by comparison.” She turned to my mother. “You must be so proud of her.”
My mother was. She was blushing. “Your show isn’t spit,” she said. “It’s educational.”
“It’s fascinating, this policy,” said Samson. “But if you’re paying people’s rent, my question is, There must be a mechanism in place for preventing abuse of the system?”
“It’s complicated to get into,” said Rachel, batting away the question with the back of her hand. “But even if people do get some free rent they don’t totally need, it’s cheaper for Massachusetts than maintaining all these shelters, where you have to have security and maintenance.”
For the first, time, Samson’s eyebrows jumped. A twitch of skepticism. Immediately, the eyebrows fell back under his control and went still.
“The ritual of going to the shelter when you get pregnant,” I observed, “is kind of like the upper-middle-class ritual of moving back in with your parents after your first internship and you can’t find a job in New York, or whatever. Or it’s like the ghetto version of being all but dissertation in grad school and letting your parents help with rent. It’s like, Time to fall back on the Man. Just listening to Rachel talk about it, I want to go take a month off at my dad’s loft.”
My mother tipped back her head and released a laugh that started at a high note and swooped. “Or my mom’s house,” I amended. My mother smirked and patted my hand.
“Um hmm,” said Rachel. “I’m not sure the analogy holds, Josh. You clearly want to crash at Dad’s. That might be understood as ‘falling back on the Man.’ But I would hesitate to characterize a pregnant fifteen-year-old girl in Dorchester as wanting a week at a shelter.”
Vanda spoke. “I think what Josh was saying,” she offered, “was that they’re both cultural habits. The struggle is to figure out a way to help a person break a habit, exercise will.”
Rachel opened her mouth to respond to this incriminatingly Ayn Randish comment. Beneath the table, I kicked her solidly in the calf. She closed her mouth, fished the lemon wedge from her water, and bit it.
But my mother, unlike Rachel, could not be prevented from saying whatever she was inclined to say. I didn’t feel comfortable kicking her.
“I respect that, Vanda,” my mother said. “But who do you blame, when a teenage girl from a marginalized minority group in a culturally isolated urban area plays into an economic system designed to exploit her?” My mother’s voice was friendly, and I believe she wanted both to defend Rachel and to clarify Vanda’s position. But Vanda’s expression soured. It was the discrepancy between my mother’s words and her conciliatory tone, I think, that rankled: academic condescension. Vanda studied one of the monsoon photographs.
“Of course it’s very sad,” said Samson. “But ultimately, there are people who make themselves something out of nothing every day in this country.”
“We can’t know,” said Rachel, “whether it’s possible for any given person.” She was slightly wide-eyed. She kept her tone of voice on a very short leash.
Julie cleared her throat. “Maybe what my dad means—correct me if I’m wrong, Dad—is that his parents were Armenians living in exile. They came here when he was a teenager. English wasn’t his first language. He didn’t have the world served up to him. He worked hard.”
Rachel smiled. “I’m looking at your father, and he seems like a smart, hardworking, really nice, cool guy, but he does appear to be a guy.”
“Therefore?” asked Julie, smiling.
“Therefore he benefits, like my father, from being a guy. Just because that’s how things are, not because he did anything wrong or he didn’t work or something.”
“How do you feel about it, Samson?” asked my mother. “Do you feel that has been your experience?”
Samson chuckled. “Oh yes,” he said, “if you are a little boy, a big light comes down and shines on you.” He chuckled again and looked at me, hoping for camaraderie. “What do you say, Josh?”
I returned a meek smile. I had discussed gender with my mother and sister before, and felt that, while it was possible to hold a productive conversation with one of them at a time, to speak with both about gender simultaneously was to subject yourself to a good cop/bad cop. It went like this: My mother asked you in an amused voice to describe your experience of male privilege in an uninhibited fashion; you did so; she withdrew into shadows; Rachel yelled at you in response to the feelings about male privilege you had uninhibitedly expressed.
“Well, in any case,” said Julie, “I think it’s awesome to keep teenage girls out of shelters.”
“Thank you,” said Rachel. She pushed back her chair. “I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Did I say something wrong?” asked Samson, once she was out of earshot.
“Nothing,” I said.
“It’s probably not the conversation, Samson,” my mother said. “Rachel gets terrible cramps, and then she takes aspirin for the pain, and the aspirin gives her these unimaginable stomach pains. I worry about her stomach lining.” Her voice was flat. We took up our menus. My mother’s was open in front of her face, with only her eyes visible. She removed her crooked glasses, to better read. Now that her eyes were finally unadorned, I could see that they were dull with indignation.
This wouldn’t have happened if Julie had Wattsbury parents, like Khadijah, I reflected. Even with Nancy, it would have been fraught, but there could have been debate in a common language. The thought was so evil that I dropped it and ignored it, let it scurry like a cockroach in the dark.
? ? ?
After lunch, the Oenervians went to Bed Bath & Beyond, and the Paquette/Beckermans repaired to Julie’s house in Miracle Mile. My mother locked herself in the guest bedroom and did her prostrations. I could tell from the soft thumps of her palms on the floor.
“It’s weird you never taught us how to do those,” I said, when she was done.
“You can easily find out,” she said, her face flushed, her hair held back with a tortoiseshell clamp. “You’ll come to Buddhism if you need it.”
? ? ?
The third-season premiere party took place at a Japanese restaurant in Century City. As Julie received congratulations from acquaintances, I watched a man with cheek implants wander the room, looking lonely, cranially impaled.
“So unnatural, right?” said a tall, red-haired man my age, wearing a cardigan and a green tie with yellow skulls on it. “It makes the rest of us look puffy.”
“If women grade our cheekbones on a curve, he f*cks the curve,” I agreed. We were now better able to understand, we agreed, what it meant to be female in our contemporary, media-saturated culture. His name was Simon. A producer on Julie’s show who was really a writer, but for complicated guild-related reasons couldn’t be described as such, he’d grown up in Maryland, outside D.C., worshiping Scream and Fugazi. He pinched the freckled bridge of his nose and drummed on it with his index finger as he spoke of Le Tigre, and Le Tigre’s ruinous loss of Sadie Benning. He seemed non-evil. I reconsidered my across-the-board hatred of Julie’s co-workers.
He asked me what I did.
“You were in Shapeshifter?” His mouth fell open just slightly. “I saw you guys at the Echo. You were tight. Some fat, drunk guy got onstage, and your guitarist was playing some kind of seventies synth, and he just ducked over and tackled the guy, just f*cking ran him off, like it was all in a day’s work, and then went right back to the synth and picked up the riff. It was f*cking pro.”
I thanked him. “Let me guess,” I said. “You wrote that line where she says lobster is the gangsta rap of seafood, once considered low-class and disgusting, now considered festive?”
He blushed. “I originated that, yeah.”
Soon, Simon and I committed to a hike in Runyon Canyon, and held our feet side by side, to confirm that we were really wearing the same Tiger sneakers with the same brown and orange color scheme. Julie disentangled herself from a news crew across the room and threw her arms around both our shoulders. “Protect me, entourage,” she said. “Put your matching sneakers up that anchorwoman’s ass.” She tilted her head backward toward her tormentor, a brunette, angular as a microphone stand, who appeared now to be summarizing the night’s footage with one hand on her hip, the other on her Channel 7 KATV microphone.
I was feeling good about the party and, by extension, the future. Julie’s world was cosmopolitan and well-informed about my band, and I was a necessary part of a retinue. But we left, so that Julie wouldn’t be prodded into further mandatory extemporizing for news cameras. I grabbed a half-empty bottle of gin standing on a table—when Julie was walking next to me, I’d learned long ago, this was sometimes acceptable at catered events. The four of us—Julie, Rachel, my mother, and me—piled into the Volvo, and I drove us to the Holiday Inn in Silver Lake, where Rachel and my mother were staying. There, I hoped, Julie and Rachel would have the opportunity to drink together and female-bond.
Back at the room, it quickly became clear this had been a fine idea. When my mother went into the bathroom to take out her contacts and wash her face, Julie and Rachel, without prompting, poured the gin into glasses and lay on the bed side by side to watch Rihanna videos on Rachel’s laptop.
“She’s grinding the hedge,” observed Rachel. “I feel like not even M.I.A. would be grinding up on a hedge.”
“But if you’re in a video, your job is to commit frottage with any object that’s placed in front of you, or behind you,” said Julie. “Be it Will Smith or like an Easter Island head.”
“If you’re a girl, can you technically commit frottage?” Rachel wondered. “Is there a dictionary here?”
“Just Google; see ‘Frottage: A method of making a design by placing a piece of paper on top of an object and then rubbing over it, as with a pencil or charcoal.’ What? This dictionary is bullshit.”
“But that means if you were to put a charcoal crayon in Rihanna’s vagina, you could get a rendering of hedge with superincredible verisimilitude.”
“Yeah, if you were like, Excuse me, I’m just going to put this piece of paper here.” Julie drank her gin.
“And this charcoal up in here.” Rachel sipped, keeping up.
Julie thought about it. “That would be money in the bank, charcoal-drawing plants with your vagina, if you were an artist, and you wanted a grant or something? ‘I will use my female orifice not merely as inspiration for my work but as the implement itself.’”
Rachel nodded. “Cunt charcoal.” On screen, Rihanna writhed obliviously. I looked at these women lying peacefully together, drinking, and felt sleepy with happiness, an overwhelming contentment with the women life had given me. The desire I’d had to add Khadijah seemed obscene, a barbaric invasion of this sweet idyll.
“Rachel, you have to do it, you’re such Whitney Biennial material. Especially if you do the frottage on people live in the museum.”
“I’ll try it out at Art Basel. It seems more sanitary if there’s just rich people around.”
“I’ll do Basel Miami,” said Julie. “My exhibition will be called ‘Eighteen Studies of Viggo Mortensen’s Face,’ by Julie Oenervian.”
My mother emerged from the bathroom. “What are you two talking about?” she asked. She was in her askew golden spectacles again. Her hair was down, and she wore a turquoise bathrobe. “Josh, do you understand what the hell they’re saying?”
“Dirty jokes, Mom.”
“I don’t mind dirty jokes if they’re not degrading anybody. Sometimes I still like them if they’re degrading the right person.”
“It would take too long to explain,” said Rachel. “How are you doing? Do you want us to stop being noisy, so you can go to bed?”
“No, that’s fine, thanks, you two are very cute.” My mother smiled. “What I would love to do is turn on the television for just a second, and check the weather. If we’re going to do Joshua Tree tomorrow, Rachel, I want to make sure this rain that’s supposed to start tomorrow night doesn’t really get going until after we get home.” She picked up the remote and studied it.
“We can look it up online,” said Julie. “Believe me, we’re not doing anything important.”
“That’ll take too long,” said my mother, with an authority born of deep, generational ignorance of the Internet, and turned on the TV. As local news buzzed to life, I joined Julie and Rachel on the bed to see if we could YouTube people drawing with their genitals. We were finding them surprisingly elusive when my mother took a sharp breath.
“Look, look,” she said. “It’s Julie, where we just were.”
“Oh my god,” Julie said. “We really don’t have to watch this, you guys.” It was the skinny newscaster from the party, shoving her mic in Julie’s face.
“What do you think you would do,” the woman asked Julie, “if this turned out to be the last season, as some have speculated?” Be funny or colorful screamed the woman’s eyes.
“You look so pretty,” said Rachel. “I could never be so poised on camera.”
“Oh God, please change it,” said Julie. “Please.” She sounded genuinely distressed.
“Well, hmmm,” her television image said, stalling.
Rachel put her hand on Julie’s arm. “It’s cool,” she said, “we can just turn it off, if you don’t—”
Then something horrible happened.
“I think it could be nice to be homeless. There’s this law they’re going to pass in Massachusetts . . .” said the Julie on the television. The Julie in the hotel room with us covered her face with her hands as we watched the TV version of Julie describe Rachel’s program.
“And it says that if you’re about to be homeless you can just call the state of Massachusetts, and they’ll pay your rent. Which I think is an awesome policy.”
“Massachusetts, of course!” said the newscaster.
“Right? So, if we get canceled I’m going to buy six hundred Dean and Deluca to-go meals and a Netflix account, check into the Boston Ritz-Carlton, and be homeless in Massachusetts.”
“Thank you for that,” the newscaster said. “Julie Oenervian, informed and hilarious.”
My mother clicked the remote, and the picture flickered away, just as the serene, corpse-like face of a meteorologist appeared. There followed about two seconds of silence.
“There’s nothing wrong with what you said,” my mother said. “It was slightly weird because you sounded so enthusiastic over dinner, so, I thought, Why watch? Who cares, is what I mean.”
“I’m so ridiculous,” said Julie. “Sorry, oh my god, I was just looking down at a microphone trying to think of something funny to say. Silliness came out of me. I’m so embarrassed.”
“It’s okay,” said Rachel. “I get it. I mean I don’t totally understand why you were so into it before and then . . . Or actually, I do understand, you were being nice. Which is cool.”
“I meant what I said when I was being nice, it was just I had to say something spur of the moment, when the microphone was, you know, in my face.”
I felt an urgent need to defend somebody. But I didn’t know who I was supposed to defend.
“I am so so sorry, I suck,” said Julie.
“Let’s just not talk about it anymore,” said Rachel. “It doesn’t bear discussing, it doesn’t bother me.” She rose from the bed, walked to the sink with her glass, and tipped her gin into the basin.
Once Julie and I were in the car on the way home, she was the first to speak.
“I was extemporizing.”
“Exactly.” This wouldn’t have happened with Khadijah, I thought, and dropped the thought.
“What?” She threw up her hands. “You want me to be tactful about your sister’s welfare thing when I’m trying to make up a joke about what I’d do if we got canceled? I’m sorry, stuff comes out. It’s part of my job.”
“The truth comes out when you need to be funny.”
“As I just explained fifteen minutes ago, I didn’t mean it as a criticism of your sister. It was bullshit for a reporter.” She clutched her seat belt with both hands, as if to brace for a crash.
“Yeah, I mean, everyone gets that, so, hey. It was just, whoops, awkward, change of tune.”
“WHEN YOU MEET YOUR BOYFRIEND’S FAMILY, YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE SUPERNICE TO THEM. I WAS BEING NICE. And later, it was, What kind of honesty do you think is going to come out of me, after what she said about my dad? She was looking at him like she was going to bite him in the neck.”
“He denied the existence of male privilege. You don’t do that around Rachel.”
“He downplayed its significance in his particular, very difficult life. That’s different.”
“It’s just what every bourgeois libertarian does, discount their own particular privileges as irrelevant to their success.”
“‘Bourgeois libertarian.’ Would that be me, for example?”
“You’re a dark-skinned woman, so I never think of you that way, I just think of you as really good. You’re excused.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m sorry, it’s just been a rough visit. I didn’t eat enough at the premiere. I’m really hungry.”
Some strangeness worse than fighting bubbled up beneath us. We rode the rest of the way home in silence.
We were back before the battle stations when we started to speak again. “You clearly don’t—you don’t see us, my family, very well,” she said. “I don’t get your mother and your sister either.”
“I’ll try to get your parents better,” I said. “I’m just trying to be loyal. My dad picked women he loved over his family. I can’t be like that.”
“Do you like my parents?” she asked.
“Yeah. Yeah.”
“I don’t want to be your Khadijah’s mom,” said Julie. She slammed the door.
I flossed, alone at my battle station.