Nina looked frantically at Liz, who had backed up against the nearest bookcase. She caught Nina’s eye and mouthed, Save me, but there wasn’t anything the younger woman could do.
Theodore stopped roaring and raised his hand to his ear, encouraging his readers (willing acolytes in the Temple of Crazy) to bellow louder. They complied. Nina covered her ears and started giggling uncontrollably. People were stopping in the street; a crowd was forming outside the door. It was a pity she hadn’t set out more chairs.
And then, “Humanimals! Let’s prance!” Theodore leaped from his stool and started prowling about, and with a resounding crash of wooden folding chairs, his audience followed suit.
It was pretty much downhill from there.
After the animals had left, the chairs had been folded and returned to the back room, and Liz had taken four Tylenol, Nina was allowed to leave.
“It’s Saturday night,” Liz said to Nina. “You should run along before I have a coronary and you have to waste the entire night in the emergency room.”
“Do you think you actually might?” Nina paused. Liz wasn’t old, but it had been a somewhat challenging Author’s Evening.
“I doubt it. Run along, little doggie.” She waved her hands. “I see someone trampled cheese into the carpet in the young adult section, and it’s going to be relaxing digging it out with my fingernails. Off you go.” Nina made a break for it.
Saturday nights Nina had a ritual: She went home, fed Phil, had a shower, got dressed, and headed out into the night to sink her teeth into the neck of any virgins she could find. Clearly, this isn’t true: There are no virgins out on Saturday night in LA. No, Nina would grab her camera and go out to take pictures.
One of Nina’s few early memories of her mother was when Candice had taught her to recognize a moment worth photographing. They’d sat together in a crowded spot, and Candice had pointed out the images that appeared every so often in the patterns of people around them. It was a pleasant memory, and although Candice tended to take photos of war zones, starving children, or miners covered in toxic chemicals, Nina preferred to take photos of her hometown. Los Angeles was famous for its intoxicating mix of riots and red carpets, but the city she saw was very different.
Bear in mind, Los Angeles is an unnatural oasis. It was built in and on the desert floor of a long mountain valley, which slopes gently east to west into the Pacific Ocean. Native American tribes settled the valley over seven thousand years ago and lived in relative peace until the Spanish showed up and ruined it all. Eventually, the movie industry arrived, driven there by Thomas “Grabby” Edison, who held a monopoly on all things movie related on the East Coast, and wasn’t averse to breaking a few legs to maintain it. The movie business really caught on. Those people who move like jerky ants in old footage built studios and houses and bigger houses and then swimming pools, and before you knew it . . . the Kardashians.
This is a blatant simplification and compression of over a century of development, but the point is that people basically arrived and laid a carpet of tarmac and trash over the top of a beautiful but somewhat surprised natural world. Too polite to point it out, nature simply continued to go about her business and ignored us the way we largely ignore her. But she’s still working, like the experienced old performer she is.
Hike up into Griffith Park in spring, for example, and you’ll suddenly find yourself alone apart from four squillion birds, winding down from their day and chattering over a postprandial brandy or whatever it is birds wind down with. A buttercup filled with dew? A half acorn filled with honey? It’s more likely they’re sipping rainwater from the crumpled edge of a Coors Light can, but whatever it is, it’s rocking their world, because they are singing their feathery little butts off. Sometimes, if she were sitting very still, Nina would see a raccoon, or a coyote, or a jackrabbit, all trying not to be seen and freezing when they noticed her, then dissolving away like Homer Simpson sliding back into the hedge.
As the light dwindled, palm trees and distant buildings would become black silhouettes against an impossibly rosy backdrop. Sunsets are beautiful in California, the cornflower blue of the sky diluting as the light fades into a teenage girl’s pastel palette of nail colors. The whole world is familiar with Big Bold Daytime LA, the blinding sun, the girls in shorts and roller skates, the traffic. They know Nighttime Glamorous LA, too, the paparazzi with their shouts and flashes, the starlets with their cleavage and heels. But only Angelenos get to see LA as she’s waking up and going to bed, and like many beautiful women, she looks best with her makeup off.
That evening, Nina could see the jacarandas were having their usual giddy effect: Every May, jacaranda trees burst into flower in an improbably riotous display of color. Ranging from deep purple to the palest violet, they bloom together on some prearranged schedule, so one night Angelenos go to bed in Kansas and wake up in Oz. They’re all over the city, hundreds of them, but until they bloom, they’re totally unremarkable. Like dozens of transformation scenes in movies from My Fair Lady to Mean Girls, jacarandas are the previously plain girl who suddenly gets a makeover and emerges triumphant to turn everyone’s head. They don’t last long, but while they’re there, people smile more. They flirt more. They feel spring in their step and summer in their underpants.
Nina hid behind her camera and watched people crowd together, or sail alone down the street, looking at one another from the corners of their eyes, noticing and seeing and ignoring like any herd congregating around a water hole. She never felt more contented than she did when she was seeing and taking pictures and being invisible. She thought maybe owls felt the same way, but she couldn’t turn her head 270 degrees, which was a total bummer.
Anyway, once the light had gone, she would take this happy feeling of peace and purpose with her to the movie theater, where she would sprinkle herself with heavily buttered popcorn and then spend the whole movie picking it out of her teeth.
The ArcLight was a Hollywood institution, a movie theater with great seats and amazing sound, plus the usual healthy range of unhealthy movie snacks. Nina loved going to the movies alone, even though Saturday night was always crowded.
It turned out it wasn’t Polly who had the pull with Fate, it was Nina, because the first person she saw as she walked into the movie theater lobby was the guy from You’re a Quizzard, Harry.
No, she said to herself. Ignore him. But then he looked up and saw her and smiled. Unbeknownst to her, he’d seen her, thought she was someone he knew, smiled, then realized she was someone he knew, she was that quiz girl who knew everything and not actually a friend of his, but by then it was too late because she was smiling back at him. Uncertainly, but definitely smiling.
Crap, thought Tom. She’s really so pretty.
Crap, thought Nina. He’s gorgeous.
Crap, thought Lisa, the girl from Quizzard, who had walked into the lobby to meet Tom to see a film and immediately saw Tom and Nina smiling at each other in a strained fashion across a twenty-foot distance. Go! she thought to herself, or rather to Tom, go talk to her. But he wasn’t moving, and the girl wasn’t moving, and so Lisa decided she needed to take matters into her own hands.
“Hey, Tom!” she called out, raising her hand.
Oh thank God, thought Tom, though he was also a little annoyed with himself. Why couldn’t he have gone and said hi, made a new friend? What was this, kindergarten?