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I was twenty-five and had moved to Los Angeles to become a screenwriter. I did not particularly love screenwriting but I liked to write and I wanted to be very successful. I could not imagine my life without success anymore than I could imagine surviving without breathing. My plan was to write movies without happy endings. My favorite movie at that time was China Town, which I thought had the greatest, least happy ending I had ever seen. That was the reality. The traditional Hollywood ending was a ruse, a glittery fairytale meant to distract us from real life, which offered us stories whose endings, by my count, were usually anything but happy.
For instance, when I was seventeen and living in Providence I saw Jen for the first time in a high school play and thought, “That’s her.” The feeling or recognizing a stranger was so strong I wasn’t surprised when she agreed to a blind date after I tracked down her number. I also wasn’t surprised when on our first date she felt like an old friend with whom I’d just been reacquainted, or how on our second date it was as if we were continuing a conversation that had been going on for a very long time. I was, however, quite surprised when on our third date she told me her family would be moving to Seattle at the end of the school year. This was in 1983, and Seattle might as well have been on the other side of the world. I couldn’t make sense of her leaving. Having met her, I could not imagine what life would be without her living two blocks from my high school.
I soon found out. She went to college in Olympia, WA, while I was on Long Island. Though we wrote letters that summer, and more letters in the fall, and though I visited her over Christmas break and told her maybe I’d transfer schools, she eventually sent me a final letter telling me I should not change schools just for her. It would be too much pressure. So I stayed on the East Coast, she on the West, and that was that.
I told myself it didn’t matter. I was an adult now. That was just kid’s stuff. This was real life: People die, or lose interest in one another, or move away. Get used to it and don’t complain and keep moving. So I did. I had driven from Providence to LA and I just kept driving around that vast, thirsty, sunburnt city. I drove to meetings and jobs and restaurants and more meetings and when I wasn’t driving I was dreaming stories with real endings. I would not stop moving until I was successful until I’d built a fortress of success within which I could retreat from a world a capricious, indifferent world.
Then on one of my drives, while stuck on the 405, I got an odd idea. I thought, “I’m on the same coast as Jen now. Might as well give her a jingle and see how she’s doing.” That was my exact reasoning. She was glad to hear from me, and we talked for a bit like two young adults, about how she was going back to school for art and how I’d dropped out of school to become famous. Well, it’s all different now, I told myself after we’d hung up. I’d met her at the very tail end of childhood when everything still seemed possible.
But I called her back anyway. I called her at night after there was nowhere else to drive to. I used to go to her house after track practice when I was done running and running and running. That was the year I thought I might be State Champion. In those days, we’d sit in her living room and talk and talk until it was time for me to go home for dinner. Now I sat on the floor in the waning Santa Monica light and we talked and talked some more. It was nice talking, but she was in Seattle, and success was in Los Angeles, and so back to reality.
Until I called her again. And again. And then I called her again and we talked until my ear became sore from the receiver. Jen was not a romantic person. She’d never told anyone she loved them. But she was very interested in people and in life, is why we’re happy or unhappy, cruel or kind. There was no ambition in how she talked about life, no goal beyond the understanding of it. Talking to her was like taking a trip you knew had no end, but to which you’d return to every morning just to see where that road went next. When I hung up the phone that night I felt something I had not felt in a very long time. There within me was an alive stillness, a calm that needed nothing more than the next most interesting place to go. “Oh, that’s right,” I thought. “That’s me.”
A month later I flew to see her, and four months later she came down to see me and told me she loved me for the first time. I moved to Seattle, and six months later we were engaged. And I thought to myself, “Well, I left Hollywood for a happy ending.”
Except it wasn’t the end. When I moved to Seattle I decided to switch from writing screenplays to novels. I’d actually stopped reading novels several years before because I found the endings unsatisfying – but no matter. I waited tables and wrote. One unpublished novel turned into two, turned into three, turned into four, and I was still waiting tables. We had two children and bought a house, and the nights I wasn’t working we still talked about people and life, but with every passing year and every unpublished book, I felt something closing in around me. It was like I was traveling toward a distant light that grew dimmer and dimmer the more I walked. I did not want to know what life would be when it was extinguished.
I am tempted to say that my relationship to Jen sustained me through that time, but that is not quite the truth. Usually, it confounded me. When I wasn’t hanging around Jen I often felt like a failure, but when I was hanging around her I just felt like me. I didn’t know what to do about the difference because the world away from Jen seemed to be so much about survival and achievement, success and failure. Sometimes I’d think about that moment of clarity I had in Santa Monica – not as it related to Jen but just to remember what clarity felt like, to absolutely know what I should do next to live the way I wanted to live. There were times I felt like I would never know it anywhere else in my life but with Jen, that ours had become a kind of cruelly happy story against which all the other stories of my life could only disappoint.
It would be twenty years of this before I found myself sitting down to write what would be my first daily blog for a little online magazine for writers I was asked to start. It was just a blog, not a novel, and I wasn’t getting paid anything, so it wasn’t a big deal. I wasn’t sure if anyone was even going to read it. I decided I would write about how everything is always okay. That’s how it felt when I was hanging around with Jen, and so maybe it was the truth. I wrote it in one shot, and when I was done I sat back in my chair and there it was again, that calm alive stillness that wanted nothing more than itself. I had never felt it once in all my novel writing.
That one blog did indeed turn into essays in magazines and newspapers, and books, and workshops and lectures, all about how everything is okay. But that is not the ending either. I do not see much of a difference now between talking to Jen and writing, or talking to Jen and teaching, or talking to Jen and just doing nothing at all. Stories have a beginning and ending, but love does not. Love is what tells the story or finds a friend or makes the child. I watched China Town again recently. I still think it’s a good film, but I am not so moved by the ending. All I can think about is what Jake, the protagonist will do, after his friend says, “Forget it. It’s China Town.” In real life, you always keep living, just as I did when after I turned off the TV and thought, “Okay. What next?”
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