Doubt It

Sunday

The first hot argument of the first hot week of August occurs within minutes of waking and concerns, of all things, the air conditioning. I wake up late with dilated pupils and a vaguely feverish feeling between chakras two and three to Tom sitting on the edge of the bed in a conversationally aggressive mood. He complains at length about his poor quality of sleep, blaming his restlessness on my preference for sleeping with the air conditioning running.

It’s painful, he says.

It’s painful? I ask. Genuinely incredulous.

I don’t know why you are doubting me. Sleeping with the air conditioning on is painful to me.

It’s summer.. we’ve been sleeping with the fucking air conditioning on for weeks… months.. weeks..

So what if it took me a long time to say this.

I’ve just never heard of anyone being brought physical pain by an air conditioning unit…

And I’ve never heard of anyone using the fucking air conditioning as much as you, but…

It’s like, scientifically proven that it’s better to sleep in a cold room…

I don’t give a fuck about the scientists!

He shuts himself into the bathroom and showers while house music plays loudly on his phone, then dries off and goes into the kitchen nook with his laptop to work alone. Good riddance. I get stoned. Part the curtains. Open my laptop and connect my wired headphones and set a Flying Lotus song to play on a loop and pray to God that all of the diary editing I need to do before midnight gets done easily, painlessly, quickly and without much nausea involved. After about ninety minutes of good work, good flowing work that I prayed for, thank you God, Tom starts pacing around the kitchen, loudly packing his things. I remain calm in the eye of his childish storm, keep working until he comes into the bedroom and announces that he is going to leave, work the rest of the day from his apartment. I say okay and he shrugs and then tells me that he hasn’t seen his wallet in days and thinks it might be in my car. So I pull on a pair of jeans over my baby rib thong and follow him outside in ballet flats and a little white tank top with no bra. The walk down Franklin towards our cars is long and hot and silent. I braid my hair in two at a long red light and do not break the quiet. We search my car for his wallet and don’t find it and then stand on the side of the asphalt looking at each other, not saying anything until he asks me what I am going to do with my afternoon and I tell him that I want to find coffee and a good parking spot, then work till all of the work is done. He says okay. Gives me a cold hug goodbye. Gets into his car and pulls away. I wait for him to disappear and then pull away too, drive east down Franklin to Gower and south down Gower to the Gower Gulch, feeling light and happy inside despite all of the words waiting to be sorted through before midnight. Think maybe even because of the words.

The hours between twelve and nine pass neither particularly slow nor fast and are spent doing the following:

• Editing, editing, editing

• Editing some more

• Eating half a white nectarine until the taste mysteriously turns medicinal and begins to nauseate me

• Smoking one thousand bowls

• Ignoring my petulant boyfriend, except for at five p.m. when he calls to tell me that despite having left in an unexplained rage this morning, he is no longer upset with me and is, in fact, very much looking forward to seeing me later

• Eating dry Cheerios for dinner and thinking dog food for girls

• Publishing the diaries to the blog

• Feeling so fucking free

Around ten, an hour or so after I wrap up, Tom calls and shoves all of this morning’s ambiguous troubles under the rug and tells me that he just got off of the phone with Rose, who offered to take the dog for the next few days before Callie goes back to school after summer break. Tom says that he wants to drop the dog off at Rose’s house tonight, deep in the Valley, and that he wants me to come with him. And even though I’d mostly rather die than see Rose tonight after my complete and utter disappearance, after several months of letting her calls and texts go unanswered, after never ever explaining to her why I left the studio or why I lied so many times about Tom, I tell him that I will come and see her. I look in the mirror. Touch up my concealer without washing my face. Retie my braids. Pull my jeans back on over my hot pink underwear, button up a cardigan over my bra and, when Tom calls and tells me that he’s outside, slip my ballet flats on and run out into the moonlight.

I reckon with my anxious conscience in the car, feel anguished in the check out line while Tom purchases dog food at the Ralph’s in Van Nuys and nearly faint in the dark on Rose’s doorstep, waiting for her and Callie to appear. Tom says relax ten thousand times and offers to hide me in the bushes while he takes care of things. I’m kidding, but I’m also not, he says. Can you handle it? I do my best to quit cringing and put on a normal face. The half hour or so we spend inside of Rose’s house begins with a shot of tequila. I swallow and then feel grateful when Callie immediately leads me into her bedroom, leaving Tom and Rose in the kitchen alone. Callie shows me her stuffed animals, the tie dye tee shirts she made at camp, and her new class yearbook photo. I point to a blonde girl with pigtails and say she looks like a bitch and Callie says she is! and then points out all of the other bitches, then all of her crushes, then all of her friends. I think I hear my name in the conversation happening between Rose and Tom in the kitchen and start to get paranoid. I pull Callie out of her bedroom and into the kitchen and, when no one but Tom is looking, motion to the door with desperation in my eyes like let’s fucking go. So he ties things up quickly and cleanly, squeezes my hand hard all of the way down the driveway, pushes me into the passenger seat, lights a joint, routes us twenty miles south to the In-N-Out by Hollywood High and says when you look at me like that… there’s nothing I can do, there’s nobody who can stop me, nothing matters, I have to take you, we have to go.

We find princess parking on my block right before midnight. The moonlit sky looks so unreal, so like a movie set or a painting or the ceiling at Caesar’s Palace that it’s almost unsettling. We undress and get stoned and eat cheeseburgers and fries and sip Diet Cokes in bed while No Reservations plays on the TV. Try and forget about what happened in the Valley.

Monday

Awake and in a terrible mood at five a.m., having an impossibly hot time trying to sleep through this August night without any air conditioning to appease my sensitive boyfriend. I lie and writhe and turn from side to side and boil inside with resentful rage until I can’t stand it anymore, get up, crawl over Tom without caring if I wake him up and lock myself into the bathroom. I spread my cheetah print robe across the cool tile like a rug and lie there looking at my phone and hitting my vape until the sunlight starts to get bright. I finger myself to orgasm twice and don’t get up or return to bed until my phone dies.

And when I do, Tom is on his back, blinking awake from a dream. He tells me that it was a nightmare and that I was running away from him, as usual, and that his family was there and everyone around him was warning him that I didn’t love him. I take his hand in mine and lie my head against his chest but he’s rigid. There are a few moments of quiet and then he breaks in with a series of rapid-fire accusations posed as questions. He asks me why I slept so far away from him last night, why I spent the whole time time at Rose’s house locked up away from him in Callie’s bedroom and why I didn’t call him as soon as I finished editing last night. He tells me that I mistreat him, that I’m unkind and that I love him much less than he loves me. I sigh. Say nothing for a long time, then give up and start screaming. In the heat of the moment, I pick up a lighter and toss it across the room, nearly missing his head, which rightfully elicits him to pack up his things and abandon the premises immediately. I sit quietly with myself in the wake of his absence, contemplating my regressive behavior, picturing the way he ducked my projectile and alternating between finding the fact that I threw something at him funny and humiliating. And before I can settle on a feeling, not five minutes after he left, there’s a knock on the door and when I open it there he is, standing on my doorstep, smiling like a crazy person. We have sex on the living room floor and when it’s over he says get dressed and pulls me out of the bungalow and into the car and sets the GPS to Joshua Tree. I imagine that endless stretch of hot lonely desert and can’t help but ask, wait, you’re not taking me there to like, kill me and dispose of my body, right? He laughs.

The drive up interstate 10 is flat and hot and dry. I light a joint and look out at the cloudless baby blue sky through Tom’s Prada glasses and sigh. I am wearing white socks and blue Adidas and the black Cou Cou midi slip dress I shredded into a mini a few months ago, and when Tom asks me if I’d like to find a hotel somewhere in Palm Springs, spend the night, I say alright even though all I have with me is my wallet and my vape and my keys and my phone. I text James asking if he’ll use the spare key to feed the cats, and when he says yes I sink deeper into the passenger seat. There is so much smog blanketing the Inland Empire that we can hardly make out the mountains, and as we fly past Arcadia and Azusa and San Dimas towards Claremont, I ask him if he’d like to pull off by Scripps for coffee, take a short tour of the place I lived and suffered for four years. And he does, so we pull off on Towne Ave. and park in the village and order two cappuccinos from a busy place on Foothill and then take a slow lap around Scripps, through the green lawns and the old white buildings and the orange trees. I show him the koi pond and the oratory chapel and my name inscribed on the wall of the rose garden. When you were here, were you happy? he asks. No, I don’t think so… I mean sometimes, I guess, but like… not really.

Before we pull back onto the freeway, we purchase ten one gram sativa joints from a dispensary, two four-packs of virginia tobacco Juul pods from a smoke shop and two four-shot espressos over ice from Starbucks.

We pull through the toll booth gates guarding Joshua Tree at precisely five p.m. The car thermometer reads one hundred and eleven and everything outside is dry and hot and aesthetically identical to Las Vegas. Feels like home, I think, and feel pleased. We drive deep into the park and pull off on a remote trail to climb boulders and explore the landscape. High up, we find a cave carved by wind and water into the side of a giant slab of sandstone big enough for us to crawl inside. We lie down, light a joint, discuss rough sex as a potential therapeutic solution to our relationship troubles and then French kiss until sunset.

The dark drive out of Joshua Tree and into Palm Springs is hot and haunted and lined with a dense army of enormous windmills, eerily spinning in the dark. Which do you find creepier, I ask Tom, the ones that spin or the ones that just sit there, stopped? He looks out the window at the sea of white spinning arms, contemplates. The ones that just sit there, stopped. Tom steers the wheel with one hand and books a one-bedroom suite at a sprawling resort in Palm Desert with the other.

Ten p.m., one hundred and two degrees. We check in at the empty front desk, wander around the giant hotel room (you’re insane, I scream at Tom upon clicking open the door with the card key), drop our few things on the enormous bed, then get back into the car and drive thirty minutes back into Palm Springs for dinner. We are starving, ready for anything, but the city is vacant. We route to a Mexican restaurant that is supposed to be open and find it dark. We park on the main road and walk down the warm empty sidewalks all alone, hoping to come into contact with a hot plate or even just a sign of life, but we walk and walk and find nothing. Just a couple of empty bars playing loud music for nobody, the cicadas, the big low moon and the relentless blowing of hot wind. Green traffic lights as far as the eye can see. We give up on hot food and route to Ralph’s instead, old reliable, to collect a basketful of potato chips and beer and fresh fruit.

Later, near midnight, tucked into the crisp sheets of our plushy white King, Tom and I fantasize before falling asleep. Let’s get married and buy a house in Palm Springs… yes… it’ll be so cheap… we will have a big pool and a big backyard and so many bedrooms… so much space… fill it with babies…

Tuesday

I wake up at nine with a new tan and sore calves in my underwear in an unfamiliar room to Tom pulling open the hotel curtains and filling the deep bath with cool water and kissing my face all over and lighting a joint inside of the suite and bringing it to my lips in bed. We take pictures of each other in the heat, smoking naked on the balcony underneath the palm trees. We soak in the bath with the jets running and then have wet sex on the giant bed with the first-floor balcony doors swung wide open. The heat is wild and the cicadas are roaring and when we look out through the big doors, we find a man-made lake we didn’t know was there, couldn’t see in the dark last night when we arrived. We run the shower cold and get in together and press white tea scented shampoo and conditioner and soap into each other’s bodies. I use his razor to shave my legs and he uses my little tin of Kiehl’s to moisturize. We dry off quickly in the natural hair-dryer that is the city of Palm Springs and check out of our room at exactly eleven minute past eleven. Tom routes us back into the center for breakfast at Farm, a little French restaurant tucked into a plaza on Indian Canyon with a lush garden. We sit at a little shaded table outside underneath a mist machine, drinking fresh orange juice and cold brew with cream and splitting a breakfast sandwich with fried potatoes and showing each other all of the explicit pictures we took over the past twenty-four hours and sighing and saying things we don’t mean like we should stay here forever, I think. By one, we are back on the 10-West, flying one hundred miles west past the windmills towards Los Angeles. I play “Sweet Lady” by 03 Greedo, a song Tom has never heard before which understandably blows his mind. Fuck it, set it to play one hundred times, he yells over the sub-bass. We sail through the Inland Empire and when Tom’s check-engine light flips on, he changes the destination on the GPS from Hollywood to the car service center on Wilshire, revs the engine, hits the gas and says whatever. We make it to the service center exactly one minute before closing (to the chagrin of the bored and tired mechanics) and are back in the middle of Hollywood by seven. We feed the cats and undress. Have sex. Kiss and wax poetic and bask in the post-vacation feeling and eat potato chips and nectarines for dinner until midnight in my fluffy white bed.

Wednesday

In my dream, I accidentally show up to my own wedding, groom unknown, with no clothing on. And when I wake up, it’s almost nine o’clock and I feel disoriented and there’s a crow croaking loudly somewhere close by. I part the bedroom curtains with my toes to peek and there he is, looking right back at me, sitting on the power line.

I lock myself in the bathroom to look in the mirror and take issue with what I see. A wild halo of baby hairs. Grey follicles sprouting from the crown. Dark eyes. Splotchy skin. Puffy nose. Bloated abdomen. I wash my face and moisturize all over and comb my hair and roll perfume oil on my neck and feel no better. So I get back into bed with my ugly mood, and when Tom comes in to say good morning I pick a fight that quickly escalates into a one sided screaming match in which I am the only one screaming. In the middle of my rage, he calmly asks me to quit swearing so loudly, to which I reply with a blood-curdling, top of my lungs, Final Girl scream. Which deeply scares him I think. He blinks at me. Asks, are you fucking crazy? And I nod. Yes, definitely.

He leaves with his things and I lock the doors behind him and collapse back into bed, exhausted by my own theatrics. Desperate to kill any feeling of emptiness produced by Tom’s absence before it can even arrive, I light a joint and call Cal. He picks up and I spend half an hour listening while he talks about himself with the desperation and fervor of a person who has not been presented with the opportunity to talk about themselves in a long while and cannot, at any cost, let the current opportunity slip by. His voice sounds deep and lonely over the phone. He describes an argument he had with his mother last week, complains about work, tells me that a guy we went to high school with’s younger brother might have brain cancer, tells me that the cat has gotten fat, tells me about his new workout routine, about all of the protein he’s been eating and the new rifle he just bought. And when he runs out of things to say, he sighs and does not ask me any questions about myself. He does not ask me any questions at all, except for can I come over later? To which I reply something like yes… maybe… I just need to clean up* a little… call me later, I’ll let you know…

*eliminate any and all physical evidence that may clue him into the months long torrid love affair I have been busy carrying on with another man

I lie around for an hour or two waiting for the will to clean up for Cal to arrive but it never does. So I call Tom and he picks up right away and I say sorry, what was that, oh my God RE: this morning’s psychotic behavior and to my surprise, instead of taking the rightful opportunity to chastise and torture me, he simply says don’t worry about it baby, just come over. I blink. Say okay. Then hang up the phone and make no moves, lie around some more. I fall asleep around three and don’t wake up again until six. And when I do, there are two missed calls on my phone. One from each boyfriend.

I pull on a white long sleeve top and tiny white shorts and hiking boots with white socks and leave the bungalow in big sunglasses at a truly beautiful hour with nothing but my Corto Moltedo bag and duplicitous agenda. Puffy white clouds patchwork the baby blue sky. The mail lady blasts oldies from her truck, parked beneath the pepper trees. I get into my car and drive up Franklin towards Beachwood without thinking really. Numb feeling. KJazz playing. I park on the corner of Beachwood by Cal’s apartment, walk up to the gate and call him. Say, are you home? I’m outside and then wait at the bottom of his steps for him to appear. And when he does, he looks so tall and so beautiful and so happy to see me. I touch his long hair. His arms. I kiss him and it feels strange. Feels… not Tom. And when I sit on his couch and he tries to touch me, take my clothes off, I let him until he starts spreading my thighs and I have to push him off. Not really for the sake of my self respect or loyalty to Tom, but simply for the sake of not liking the way it feels when he touches me.

After a little less than an hour of lying around Beachwood with Cal’s blue balls, bullshitting, drinking sparkling water in his living room, talking about nothing, I tell him I have to go and let him walk me to my car and kiss me and then speed away from him fast. I stop at the ARCO on Franklin to fill my tank and purchase a glass bottle of mint terra yerba mate, then merge onto the clogged 101-South and route myself to Tom. I wash Cal’s tongue out of my mouth with tea and look out at the beautiful pink sky and all of the golden light reflecting off of Downtown and feel guilty. I park on Venice Boulevard and trudge up the stairs to Tom’s apartment feeling paranoid until he swings open the door and rushes out in his briefs with a big grin on his face to scoop me up into his arms and carry me over the threshold. He sets me down on the black leather couch and kisses me and tells me that as punishment for my bad behavior this morning, he cancelled the trip he booked to Vegas for my birthday in secret, but then rebooked it an hour or two later and upgraded the suite. The Bellagio baby, he says. Fuck it, fountain view. Then he stuffs one thousand dollars cash into my purse without explanation, eats me out until I orgasm and says for dinner tonight, let’s have steak. He pulls me downstairs into his car and speeds us to a steakhouse in Marina Del Rey. We eat filet mignon and caesar salads and fries and drink tequila sodas until we are drunk. He slides into my side of the booth midway through and squishes my face in his hands and says you are so fucking crazy, I love you so much, the way you screamed at me this morning holy shit… my crazy girlfriend… I love you so much… craziest girl I’ve ever met.

Thursday