“Did I really fall asleep? Sorry, that’s supposed to be a good movie, right?”
This boy, the intern Scott Bristol, probably thought I didn’t care about him. I watched him drive through the Saturday night traffic on San Vicente from Westwood to Santa Monica. Through my blurry eyes, I examined him, framing him for a photograph. The oncoming headlights sprayed flashes across his face. His dark brown hair, streaked with stray blond highlights, dropped in waves to his sport coat collar. A tentative goatee hid his chin, accented by a mustache which mirrored the heavy brows above hazel eyes. Easy on the eyes at least, I thought.
I went on, “I’m sorry . . . I just switched over to days, and didn’t get much sleep last night. My body still thinks I’m working from 11 to 7, I guess. You must think I’m a real bore.”
“No, it’s OK. I liked it.”
“The movie?”
“No . . . yeah, it was better than the first one. I mean, I like that you felt comfortable enough with me to fall asleep when you got tired. Next time we’ll pick a movie we both like.” He actually wanted a next time, after having me snore on his shoulder?
He pulled off Pacific into the alley behind Breeze. Cars jammed the back of every house, barely leaving room for his little Dodge Dart to snake between them.
I pointed, “See the vacant lot? You can park in there. Don’t worry about the fence. Or the sign. It’s Saturday, no one’s going to care.” I remembered waking up in the theater, my head on his shoulder, feeling warmth and strength there.
I led the way up three flights of a fire-escape staircase to my studio apartment. “I’d show you around, but, umm, this is it.” I swung my arm in a horizontal circle. “Not much room, but it’s all mine!” I felt proud of the place, decorated with black-and-white photographs of women on the beach-side bluffs at Isla Vista. The cast-off wooden table held a flowered, lacy tablecloth, topped by a vase of yellow artificial flowers. “Do you want something to drink?” I opened the miniature refrigerator door, scrubbed clean of smudges. “Oh, I forgot – all I have is apple juice. That OK?”
He nodded, taking in the bare wood floor, the leaded windows, wavy with age.
“I’m sorry.” I instantly regretted the apology. When I struck out on my own, I vowed never to let myself be intimidated by a man again. I would be every bit as independent as they acted. I pulled two glasses off an open shelf above the sink, poured the juice, and sat down. “So, what was that movie about, anyway?”
“It’s kinda hard to explain, if you didn’t see the first one. There’s this family, Italian, headed by Marlon Brando. They’re Mafia. People are always getting killed, in cars, in restaurants, even a race horse gets decapitated.” I grimaced. I hate blood and violence in movies. “Yeah, it does get gruesome. Anyway, at the end, he dies, and his youngest son takes over, becomes the Godfather.” He took a sip of juice. “So the second movie goes back and forth between the young Brando character, how he became the Don, and his son, how he gets corrupted.”
“Is it as bloody too? I asked.
“Oh, yeah. Worse. Like, he has to leave Cuba when Castro’s army comes into Havana. A guy in Las Vegas gets shot through his glasses, right in the eye. He even kills his own brother! And at the end, while he’s watching his Godson get baptized, his men are out cleaning house, killing his enemies to take sole control of all the crime in New York. Brutal.”
I shivered. “I’m glad I missed the first and slept through this one.”
“Well, it won the Academy award, and people say this one will, too. They’re both very well done, photographed dimly inside and bright colors outdoors in Sicily. The actors – they’re all so real, so engaging.”
“Why can’t they take that talent, and put it to use in a story where not everyone gets killed? What is it with people, they can only be aroused by violence?”
He shook his head, pursed his lips, and looked around the room again. “Uh, something’s missing…where’s your bed?”
I brightened, glad to leave the movie synopsis. I stood up, saying, “That’s the best part! I’ve got a Murphy bed.”
“A what?”
I walked over to the far wall, covered by a macrame weaving, festooned with small white shells. A frayed rope hung from an opening six feet off the ground. I grabbed and pulled. The hydraulic mechanism groaned and the bed slowly dropped from vertical to horizontal, creaking as it clunked onto the rug covering the hardwood floor. “See? Isn’t it cool?”
I sat down, bouncing on the springy mattress. Suddenly, I thought, Would he think this was an invitation? So far, I hadn’t gotten any vibe off him, neither stand-offish, nor touchy-feely. I couldn’t read those hazel eyes, hidden behind rimless glasses.
He laughed. “I’ve heard about those. Never seen one. How does it work? Is it hard to lift back up?”
I got up, and said, “Give it a try!” I scooted back to the table while he lifted it up, the spring mechanism taking over once he got it a few inches off the floor.
“Hold on to the ro…” I blurted, a few seconds too late. The bed slammed back into place, shuddering as it disappeared into the wall with a loud “Thunk”. First-date crisis averted, I thought.
He turned towards me, and saw the view out my window for the first time. “Oh, wow, the beach. It’s right there!” He smiled, “You’re so lucky!”
My last two years in Isla Vista, the student enclave next to the University at Santa Barbara, I lived right on the edge of the bluffs over the Pacific. I thought myself a California Girl, with the beach and the ever-present ocean my birthright. I couldn’t leave the soft enveloping fog, the sand swallowing my feet as I walked down to the water. “That’s why I got this place. I’ve got to be close to water.”
“When I first came to LA, I went to all the places in that Beach Boys’ song, “Surfin’ USA”. I’d been a swimmer in high school and college, so I tried the water here. It’s always so cold! What are you supposed to do at the beach? I don’t like lying there, roasting on a towel.”
“We lived for a couple of years in Redondo when I was seven or eight. My girlfriend and I walked by ourselves down to the beach. We’d hang out, listen to sea gulls, take our shoes off and play in the surf.”
He nodded without smiling. “I’m out in Alhambra, and have to work so much, I never get a chance to go out to the beach. You’re so lucky, you’ve got it all right here, every time you come home.”
“It’s cheap in Venice, lots of places for rent. I guess that’s ‘cause it’s kind of a slum?” I barely know the guy, and I’m hinting he should move here? What about being on my own?
“Really? I thought being on the beach was, like, exclusive, expensive?”
I laughed. “Not Venice! For some reason, they don’t let people build all those Santa Monica or Marina del Rey high rises. So the landlords let places gradually fall apart.”
“Well, I want to see what it’s like, during the day, down at the beach.”
“You’ll have to come out during the day sometime,” I hinted.
He laughed. “OK. Another movie? One we both can watch.”
I eyed him carefully. He didn’t give off the same vibes I’d normally get from guys. He didn’t act like a tom cat on the prowl, one who wanted to use me, not treat me like a person. I didn’t know why I’d agreed to go out with him. I only knew he seemed safe. Protective. Caring. Someone who’d never say he’ll be coming by, then not show up.
Without thinking, I said, “I used to work at a theater near here, the Lincoln. It shows older films and foreign ones you don’t see at the big theaters. There’s musical there now, reggae, about Jamaica. Remember I said I wanted to go to an island in the Caribbean, learn from traditional midwives there? When I read about this film, it made me think of that. I want to go see it.”
“That sounds cool. You used to work in a theater? Like, selling popcorn?”
“Yeah, one summer. I got to see all these films no one else did, for free!”
He checked his watch. “I’ve got my last day on OB tomorrow, so I need to get home, get to sleep. I’ll call you Monday, my day off, OK? We can go see it.” He edged away toward the door, gave a little wave. “See ya!”
You’re a real puzzle, Scott Bristol, I thought. He hadn’t made any move to touch me, kiss me, much less jump on the Murphy bed with me. On the other hand, he’d asked to go out again, so he must want to spend time with me. Intrigued by that hard exterior, I looked forward to the next time we got together.
ii
Two days later, he called. “Hi! So, how is it working day shift?”
I wanted to say I missed him already, but kept that inside. Instead, I groused, “Rogers – you know, that intern with long hair? – he did a C-section with MacGregor, the senior resident. It must have been his first, he didn’t know what instruments to ask for, kept apologizing. I was circulating. Every time he did something slow, or wrong, he looked over at me, winking, raising his eyebrows. Like I was supposed to re-assure him or something. When they were ready to pull the baby out, he forgot the table was tilted, to keep the uterus off the aorta, right? And he popped the bag of waters too soon, before they could get the table straight, so it spilled onto MacGregor, made his shoes all soggy. He had to step out to get new ones, so poor Rogers was in there all alone yanking and tugging on the baby. I mean, it’s a C-Section, the whole point is to make it easy for the baby to come out. I had to mop up the floor at the same time I’m supposed to be tagging the baby. It was a mess. That doesn’t happen when you do one, does it?”
My one time assisting Scott in the OR, his style caught my attention right away. Things went so smooth, so quick, I thought he was one of the residents. That’s why I started talking to him in the lab. I can trust this guy, I thought.
“Yeah, no. Remember, I went to school here, and got to do a bunch of C-Sections when I had my fourth year elective on Ob. It’s a simple operation, hard to mess up, nothing in your way when you’ve got to get the baby out quickly. Then you sew everything up, go out the same way you came in.”
He had it figured out. Another reason to trust him. Care and understanding came through that hard exterior.
When we first talked in the lab, a guy named Johnny still haunted me. The year after I graduated, I lived in an Isla Vista house with four other people, Johnny and Shelly had one room, two other girls another, and me. All alone in more ways than one. With no career plans, just a series of waitress jobs, I wandered around taking pictures, attempting to start a photography business. I printed some calling cards: “Fun Fotos by Ally Jean!” But I couldn’t figure out how to make money out of it. I shot candid photos of my friends with a vague idea to create a book about my tribe, girls who found themselves freed by the feminist wave.
Coming home from work, or from a night out with another random guy, or bumming around town clutching my camera, Johnny would be there, listening to music, his long brown hair swaying in time to the Rolling Stones. Many times, we talked the night away, about nothing and everything, until Shelly came back at midnight from the movie theater where she worked. I sensed a bond with him, but feared what Shelly might say or do if I ever acted on that.
I went off to St. Louis for nursing school, and got the job on OB at LA County. I felt strong enough to find answers to the question which had haunted me ever since: did Johnny like me, really know me, or had it all been a fantasy?
I called some friends in Isla Vista, and found he was still there, getting his Ph.D. in Biochemistry. I reached him at the school. He remembered me and wanted to re-connect. He said he was busy, baby-sitting some experiment, but would call me the next week. I gave him my address and number, said I was looking forward to seeing him, telling him where I’d been, and what I’d learned in the last few years. Once we hung up, I began to day-dream about moving back to Isla Vista, walking along the bluffs with him.
A week went by without hearing from Johnny. With no voice mail, no answering machines, I wondered if what he had to say was too important, too scary to share in the spontaneity of a phone call. Then I encountered Scott Bristol in the lab room, helped him with a difficult delivery, and fell asleep on his shoulder during The Godfather: Part II.
And now he was on the phone, not Johnny. In the middle of explaining…something.
“… started on the Oncology ward. From the beginning of life to the end. Every day’s a grim battle, poisoning patients to kill their cancer cells.” He took a breath while I tried to catch up. He went on, “The head of the service insists all the nurses be at least 50 years old – no chance for the chemo to damage their eggs. I spend my time now trying to draw blood and placing IVs into attenuated vessels. The opposite of OB, where everyone’s veins are bulging from all that fluid they retain.”
He could talk when he got wound up. I burst in with, “Do you get any time off, at least?”
“It’s twelve-hour days, and I don’t get every third day off like Ob. But there’s no call, so we could go see that movie this weekend. It’s about reggae gangs on Jamaica, right? Jimmy Cliff or somebody? Saturday’s the best day for me.”
Reaching out to Johnny opened up a hole in my life, one I’d plastered over for the past three years. Taking those science classes in Santa Monica, then a year in St. Louis, I pretended to forget him. I pictured Johnny driving down to Venice the next weekend, not finding me there, then seeing me come in with Scott. Scared both of looking back at Johnny and starting something new with Scott, I froze.
“Ally? You still there? We’re going to see this movie, right?”
“Yes, of course. Five o’clock, OK? The movies start at 6:30 there, we can get something to eat before.”
“Great! Drink coffee first, so you don’t get sleepy!”
iii
Scott showed up precisely at five. He wore a button down shirt, and looked shorter than I remembered. In my dress shoes, with two inch heels, we were nearly eye-to-eye.
“I thought you were taller.”
“I was!” he laughed. “It’s these Earth Shoes. You ever heard of them? They have dropped heels, supposed to be better for your back. Something about walking like we did when we were barefoot in the sand. They’re great for the OR when I’m standing in one place for hours during those cancer surgeries. And the burgundy color – don’t see any stains from…”
I scrunched my nose and shook my head.
We headed to his car, parked in the vacant lot next door. “So where are we going to eat?”
“Well, at first I thought about Canter’s Deli – I like the hot pastrami. But it’s so far away, back on Fairfax, right?”
My Jewish friends in high school, at Westlake School for Girls, talked about Canter’s with awe, some place they could call their own. “Wait, you’re not Jewish, are you?”
Smiling, he said, “No, but my best friends in high school and college mostly were. And my girlfriend, she was – is – Jewish. When I came out to LA for medical school, she told me to go to Canter’s.”
“When was this?”
“Back in high school and college, I had this girl friend…” He trailed off.
“We don’t have to talk about our past, do we?” I’d had my own high school/college boy, and did not want to bring him up, not now.
He brightened. “No. Yeah, that’s right, we don’t have to, not the best idea, is it?”
“OK, not Canter’s. So where are we going?”
“There’s this place on Wilshire. I went there once with some people when we came out to the beach last year. It’s cool, I like it.”
“Santa Monica beach? I used to go there all the time! After school, when I went to Palisades, we’d drive down Sunset to State Beach. I tried to get tan, but never could. My skin only burns and freckles.”
“You were a beach bunny! Frankie Avalon, Annette, Gidget, all that, huh?”
Is that how I came across to him? Vapid, a little playgirl? Certainly not me now, not how I wanted to be seen. “Not in high school. Oh, I had long blond hair and all that, but I did not go around in skimpy bikinis. My friends were more the brainy ones, we all thought we were going somewhere.”
“Wait a minute, I thought you went to Westlake. What’s this about Palisades?”
This guy picked up on everything. I felt challenged. “My parents sent me to Westlake in 9th and 10th grade. But that was a small school, 30 girls in a class. My old friends in the neighborhood, people I’d gone to middle school with, went to Pali. I wanted to try it out, see what it was like to be there, so I went in the 11th. It was fun, more people to be around, but I liked the challenge at Westlake, so I went back for senior year.”
Scott pulled into a lot on Fifth just north of Wilshire. He came around to open the door for me, but I pushed on it first. It smashed him in the knee and he yelped. “Oh, sorry,” I said. “Didn’t that go out with women’s lib in the 60s, holding doors open and all?”
“Just trying to be polite,” he mumbled.
In front of us, a kitschy diner occupied the northwest corner. A bright orange sign proclaimed “Zucky’s” in garish script, “Open 24 Hours” below. Inside, diners peered out through angled plate-glass windows onto Wilshire.
My heart sank. A diner? I thought.
“You’ve been here before?”
“Right, when we came out to the pier last year. Med school was almost over, and my roommates wanted to go to the beach.”
“Santa Monica?” I reminisced. “When I went down there, south of the pier, I’d see all guys surfing. I wanted to try it, so I took a board out a few times, rode on the waves.”
“Surfer Girl,” Scott murmured.
“No, those guys intimidated me. I thought they might make fun of me flailing around out there, getting in their way. So I quit. Wish I hadn’t.”
As he opened the door, he said, “Look! They’ve got those swivel seats at the counter! And the booths, the squeaky red vinyl…it’s like the places we’d go after a swim meet.”
“Where?”
“Cincinnati. Every summer, we had these meets Thursday nights. The parents always took us somewhere after.”
I scanned the interior. Squeals competed with a grating hum from an overhead fan. Several children scurried past, heading for the first booth by the door. A man, presumably their dad, grabbed the closest and hauled him back to the bench seat. “Sit down!” he bellowed. “The food’s coming, and you’d better not make a mess!”
Chastened, the boy slumped next to his mother for a moment, then brightened when he saw the sugar packets stuffed in a container by the window. He snatched one, ripped it open, and dumped it into a glass of ice water. Three more quickly went over the cubes. He stirred the mess with his finger and started to drink.
His mother struggled with a little girl tearing into the butter pats stuffed in a bread basket. She slowly sucked the yellow square on one, then licked the sticky wrapper clean.
Scott asked, “So where do you want to sit? At the counter, or a booth?”
With a glance back at the family by the door, I headed to the far end of the L-shaped counter, a bit isolated from the chaos by the windows.
After we sat down, Scott swiveled towards me. “See? All these families! Kids!” He beamed. “Summers in college, I was a lifeguard and assistant coach on a swim team at a private club. I’ve always wanted to have kids around me.”
I remembered my last date with one of the doctors at the hospital. In Manhattan Beach, the kind of place a frat boy would go. Couples, low lights, table cloths, and drinks before dinner. No talk of children, no families to disrupt the mood. I thought, Well, this guy’s different.
“You like kids?” I ventured.
He hesitated, brow furrowed as he considered this.
“I guess so…I mean, that must be part of why I chose Ob. It feels right, having them around. Feels … normal, you know.”
“I’m a little scared of kids. Of having a family.”
“But you said, you wanted to go deliver babies on a beach somewhere.”
My home life turned dark after my brother arrived, six year younger than me. He had something off about him, something wrong with his brain and how he acted. He could do amazing things with numbers, and he always remembered people’s names. But he’d repeat the same things over and over. Sometimes, he’d talk way too fast to be understood. Schools couldn’t handle him, then the drugs made him groggy and agitated at the same time. My parents would argue about what to do for him, late at night. My mother spent most of her maternal energy on him from the time I was seven. And my father withdrew, becoming more silent around us as the years went by.
That frightened me. I grew scared of what my own kids might be like. He can’t know this about me, not yet, I thought. I wanted to be honest, to match his openness with my own, so I said, “Sometimes I see myself, old and wrinkled, helping other women.”
He laughed. “You? No way!”
“I’m not afraid of getting old, are you? It’s where we’re all going to end up. It’s a natural part of life.”
“Like having kids! That’s a natural part of life, isn’t it?”
Persistent, this guy.
In the movie, young black men with swinging dreadlocks alternately sang slow reggae tunes or ran through Kingston towards or away from another street fight. A rhythm of the waves suffused the screen, covering for a non-existent plot. I got lost in my fantasy of living there.
That day, a cleansing storm had rolled through, sweeping out the smog, revealing the San Gabriel Mountains ringing the city. I took Scott’s hand as we walked to the car. He squeezed tight, then put his arm around my shoulder. A few stars sparkled up above, miles away, mirroring the observatory lights high on Mt. Wilson. Scott breathed deeply, and asked, “I love it when it’s like this, the air so fresh, when you can see the mountains. Do you ever go up there…”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s trails you can take, go on a hike. Wanna do that? Tomorrow? You have the weekend off, don’t you?”
Enthusiasm exploded from him like early bursts of a fireworks display. “Uh, I don’t know. I don’t have any hiking boots…”
“Aw, come on! How often is it like this? I bet there’s even snow up there!”
iv
So that’s how I found myself, fifteen minutes into our “hike”, with water-logged tennis shoes, goose-bumped legs under my midi khaki skirt, and a smoldering resentment towards Scott Bristol.
“Do you really think this is the right idea?” I asked.
“Come on, it’s only another mile to the viewpoint. We’ll be able to see all the way out to Venice, and the Pacific.”
I stood rooted to a dry spot in the trail. I said, “You go. Give me your keys, I’ll wait in the car.”
He glanced through the pines down the trail, then back at me. He said, “You don’t get to see LA like this very often. You sure?”
I held my hand out. “Keys?”
Instead of reaching for them in his pocket, he handed me his jacket, a blue puffy affair with duct tape keeping the down from drifting. “What about you?” I asked.
In response, he pulled his watch cap over his ears and lifted up the collar of his red flannel shirt. “OK, let’s go back down, stop by my house to get warm.”
Five thousand feet lower, we turned off Arroyo Seco Parkway where it becomes the Pasadena Freeway. A few blocks later, we arrived at a side street of single-story tract homes. The bright winter sun reflected off stucco’d walls, alternately painted pastel blues, pinks, greens and yellows. Not at all like the ramshackle student quarters of Isla Vista, the stolid brick dorms of St. Louis nursing school, or my decaying three-story apartment house in Venice. And especially not like my parents’ home in the Brentwood hills, replete with swimming pool and backyard canyon plunging down to Sunset Boulevard.
Indifferent décor awaited inside. A living/dining area featured an enormous crudely constructed table, made from thick pieces of unsanded wood resting on four mismatched legs, equally over-sized. On the table sat a week’s worth of unopened mail and the remains of a half-eaten eggs-and-bacon breakfast.
“Rick doesn’t clean up very much. He’s an Internal Medicine resident, and they get even less time off than we do,” Scott explained. He slid open a glass door and walked out onto a leaf-strewn patio. A tiny white-and-black mutt scooted out from brambles clawing their way up a fence at the edge of the yard. He leapt at Scott, who scooped him up and cooed, “Ocho, buddy, what’s going on?”
“You have a dog?” I wondered. “Ocho? Eight? That’s his name?”
“Yeah, the kids next door where we lived, their dog had puppies and they pawned one off on me. I’m a sucker for dogs, always had one until I came out here. I asked them how old he was, and they said “Ocho semanas.” So that’s what I called him.” He turned back inside, filled up a bowl in the kitchen, and brought it along with the raggedy pooch into a room featuring a rectangular box on the floor. What appeared to be a rounded mattress nestled within. Ocho jumped on the covers and the surface jiggled like a giant pool of Jello.
“You have a water bed?” I marveled.
“Yeah, they’re cheap, and easy to deal with. Ten dollars, and it’s going strong after four years now.”
This guy kept surprising me. He lived in a house from TV sit-com land with a tiny dog who has somehow survived while he works 80 hours a week at the hospital. Boy Scout, wilderness junkie, sentimental dog owner, and hippie with a water bed. What next, I wondered.
He shut the door on Ocho and the bed, and pointed around the corner. “I want to show you the attic!” He started to pull down the hidden stairs when I noticed the entire alcove was covered with maps of California, of the US, of Los Angeles. I’d been with guys who had pictures of scantily-clad women everywhere, or swirly psychedelic concert posters, even one in Holland with shiny motorcycle photos on the wall. But maps?
“Maps?” I asked.
“I’ve always had maps around. We’d take car trips out west when I was a kid. My father made me the navigator. I learned how to read maps and figure out where to go. It stuck with me.”
“But as decoration? Why not pictures, photographs of places you’ve been.”
He spread his arms wide to encompass them all. “I always like to know where I am,” he answered.
On the drive back to Venice, stop-and-go Sunday evening traffic on the Santa Monica Freeway occupied Scott’s attention, while I dozed off. A dreamy collage filled my nap with images from our weekend. Jimmy Cliff shared the beach with swaying pregnant island girls. Ocho the dog frolicked in snow banks next to the dome on Mt. Wilson’s observatory. Hordes of children bounced on the squeaky red vinyl seats at Zucky’s while their parents pored over maps, hoping to find a way out of their daily grind. Johnny and my friends at Westlake shared a swimming pool with Scott’s swim team, battling over who got the choice lounge chairs in the shade. Easing to a stop in the vacant lot next to my apartment on Breeze, the curtain lifted from my dream as I heard Scott say, “…show me how that Murphy bed works again?”