Rêve

“Each of us is in some way or another, and in succession, a criminal and a saint.”
—Georges Bernanos

Last May, after thirty years in greater LA, I moved to Tucson, Arizona. The transition was stark. So quiet! I marveled. So much more space, charm, and beauty for what I was paying in rent. Sure, there were only three art museums (one of which was still closed due to COVID), one-and-a-half cool food markets, and two cool stores for small leather goods, jewelry, and clothes. Sure, the weekly CSA farm box was closed to new enrollees till further notice, the drivers were insanely aggressive and enraged, and the summer temperatures were so high that walks were only possible before seven in the morning or after six at night.

None of that fazed me. I’d visited Tucson several times before moving. To a person, everyone to whom I’d talked during that time had said that “nothing” was available—not to buy, not to rent. Nonetheless, I’d managed to nab a ‘30s adobe with front and back gardens, a ramada, an enclosed garage, and a state-of-the-art washer and dryer. Hardwood floors, new kitchen and bath, built-in bookshelves. A fireplace with a niche on top for a santo.

Even so, when people asked, “Why Tucson?” I never quite knew how to answer. I saw a vermilion flycatcher near the river? I like the way the light glows on the mountains at dusk? I’m curious whether I can survive the summers?All that was true, but closer to the truth was that a pilgrim urge had come over me—had in fact been building for years. I’d lived in LA so long that I could easily have stayed till I died. And something about seeing my way clear to the end didn’t sit right: too safe, too predictable. I needed to change the view from my window. I needed to shake things up. I needed to risk, suffer, and grow in some new way.

So I’d signed up for this. I had zero regret. I felt like Saint Thérèse of Lisieux who, after entering the cloistered, unheated, full-of-neurotics Carmelite convent at the age of 15, observed that life there was exactly what she’d expected.

I spent the first blurred month unpacking boxes, arranging furniture and books, running to Home Depot. I changed over my health insurance, car registration, mailing address, and profile info on about thirty different sites. I scoped out where to shop for groceries, toiletries, garden pots, and vintage furniture. I took long walks around the neighborhood: my usual way of bonding with the place where I live.

But it was only when I started watching movies again that the full measure of what I’d left behind hit me. My tastes range wide, but I’m fixated on the 1940s through 1960s. Black-and-white. Melodramas, weepies, Japanese existential crises, and especially film noir.

One scorching Saturday afternoon in July I cranked up the AC, arranged my snacks, and curled up with a number I’d found free on YouTube: No Man’s Woman (1955). The title, the trailer, the sleazeball femme fatale: what could be better! As a bonus, the action took place in LA.

In the opening scene, platinum blonde “art dealer” Carolyn Grant (Marie Windsor) is breezing along what looks to be the Pasadena Freeway south. She’s at the wheel of a snazzy cream-colored convertible with big fins, the top down, a pricy painting in the back seat, and her lover, an art critic who she’s stringing along in order to advance her career, riding shotgun.

When the wind starts blowing off the wrapping paper that’s protecting the “René” they’ve just bought, she pulls over so the guy can adjust it. “How could I get along without you, Wayne,” she purrs.” “How can I ever repay you?”

Wayne pulls her close for a long kiss, but Carolyn playfully pushes him away. “That’s all, darling; after all Harlow still expects me at six.”

“Can’t we forget about Harlow?” growls Wayne.

“I have to show him some consideration, don’t I, darling?” Carolyn burbles, seductively trailing a white-gloved finger down Wayne’s cheek. “After all, he is my husband.”

I guffawed with déja vu. If you’ve lived in LA for any length of time, you’ve driven that stretch of freeway countless times yourself. You know that light, those shadows, the smog-filtered sun, the heat. You can almost smell the eucalyptus leaves. You also know Carolyn, Wayne, and Harlow, in all their incarnations. They live in Los Feliz and Silverlake and South Pasadena now. They’re just as good-looking. They’re just as ruthless.

Carolyn’s shop is in one of those old-school bungalow-court plazas you still see on, say, Westwood Boulevard or certain stretches of Melrose. Harlow, the estranged husband who desperately wants a divorce, lives in a faux antebellum mansion in what has to be Beverly Hills, and drinks himself stupid one night in a bar that’s probably still serving drinks on, say, Wilshire in Santa Monica. He has a loyal second-wife-to-be waiting in the wings, a more subdued blonde who looks to have been raised in the Palisades or Holmby Hills. The boyfriend of Carolyn’s wholesome assistant runs a fishing boat out of Laguna. Carolyn tries to seduce and then to blackmail him. Two people end up dead.

The credits rolled. And as I sank back onto the sofa with a satisfied sigh and helped myself to another handful of spice drops, a realization dawned: my whole thirty years in LA, I had kind of lived in a movie: that movie—or one of the hundreds like it.

I’d never been able to get enough of the tough guys in hats; the dames with cinched-in waists and padded shoulders; the wide, palm-tree-lined boulevards; the sinister, bougainvillea-overhung alleys; the mom-and-pop Mexican joints; the winding car chases up into the hills. The venal urges, the leering close-ups, the laughably convoluted plots.

Not all film noirs are set in LA, of course. But I’d driven past the studios where many of those films had been made. I’d felt myself a character in these larger-than-life dramas. It was as if by relocating to a different state, I’d lost the backdrop to my own story: the stage set I’d unconsciously been building from the moment I’d hit town all those years ago.

The first place my then-husband and I rented, to wit, was in Culver City: a whole town that was a throwback to an earlier time. Our ‘40s stucco ranch had brown-and-white striped metal awnings, a vintage O’Keeffe and Merritt stove, and a fold-up wooden ironing board that fit into its own special cupboard in the kitchen. The old MGM Studio complex was a stone’s throw away: The Thin Man, Rebecca, Spellbound.

After two years, we gave notice, bought the O’Keefe and Merritt off the landlady, and moved to a ‘30s French Normandie complex in the East Side’s Koreatown: two turreted “castles”; a flag-stoned courtyard with carriage lights and miniature pomegranate trees; and a wrought-iron fence, painted black, with pineapple finials.

We had a second-floor one-bedroom with crown moldings, hardwood floors, and old-fashioned casement windows with metal-edged panes that cranked open. Hand-painted tiles in the bathroom and kitchen, a built-in corner vanity. A balcony with a striped canvas awning that, till it rotted out several years later, was actually quite classy; a service entrance. An apartment, in other words, that could have been the setting for a Raymond Chandler novel.

Paramount Pictures at that point was right up on Melrose: Ministry of Fear; Sorry, Wrong Number; The Strange Love of Martha Ivers.Part of me lived in a film noir, and part of me lived in the New England of my childhood. Not New England as it was even then—the early ‘90s—but the New England of the ‘50s and ‘60s: elm-tree-shaded farm stands where people paid by putting their change in an honor-system tin box; where the back roads smelt of purple-loosestrife-covered marshes; where clumps of orange tiger lilies gleamed from the underbrush, and gulls cried overhead.

The New England where the neighborhood mothers dropped in with homemade “covered dishes”: a pot of fish chowder, a shepherd’s pie, a lasagna. Where the Congregational Church across the street still held ham and bean suppers on Saturday nights, and those same mothers brought cylinders of raisin-larded brown bread they’d baked in recycled soup cans. They wore shin-length canvas skirts they’d sewed themselves, freshly pressed blouses, and sensible shoes. They were solid, steadfast, true. They knew your name, they had kindly smiles, they offered sugar.

Growing up, my neighborhood brothers and sisters and I had room to roam, and we also knew that our mothers could be utterly depended on to be home and accounted for: a voice calling you to supper; a meal on the table; clean clothes, dried on the line and freshly folded. The fathers went off to work every morning to jobs as plumbers, carpenters, milkmen.There’d be a turkey at Thanksgiving, a tree at Christmas, chocolate eggs at Easter. You showed up. You were polite or at least polite-ish. You didn’t think about it—you didn’t have to—but those people formed the foundation to a childhood that, though marked by exile and suffering, was built on solid rock.

Alcoholism, child abuse, and incest also ran rampant—on some level, I knew that even back then. But all my life I’d chosen stubbornly to remember my childhood a certain way—to enshrine it, in a sense—as if I’d intuitively known I’d need those curated memories to survive.It was the same impulse that had led me to filter my time in LA through the lens of a movie camera. It was as if I’d subconsciously hoped, all these decades later, to be able to run the celluloid through a projector and discover that—like the film stars whose work I revered, who had entertained and sustained me—I’d never aged.

Georges Bernanos (1888–1948), French Catholic novelist, was a wanderer, perpetually short of money, and fiercely contemptuous of literary salon society. In 1932, he moved with his family to Majorca, where he wrote what would be his masterpiece: Diary of a Country Priest.

The novel’s protagonist has a heart on fire for Christ, parishioners who are “bored stiff,” and stomach cancer. Unable to keep down more than bread and a glass of wine, he’s accused by the townsfolk of being drunk. When he tries to help a young girl, she jeeringly tries to seduce him. The Countess, whose soul he desperately tries to save, rages against God for taking her infant son.

Small wonder the priest notes: “How glibly we talk about ‘family-life,’ as we do also of ‘my country.’ We ought to say many prayers for families. Families frighten me. May God be merciful with them.”

Published in 1936, the novel was both popularly and critically acclaimed, winning the coveted Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française.

But Bernanos was increasingly disillusioned by the spiritual bankruptcy of European politics and by the failure of his beloved Church to model the teachings of Christ. In 1938, he published Les Grandes Cimetières Sous la Lune (Great Cemeteries Under the Moon), decrying the terror that was being inflicted by Franco on innocent men, women, and children in the name of Catholic nationalism.That same year, he emigrated to South America with his family and settled in Brazil. Over the course of his career, he wrote essays, plays, and several more novels. Courted by de Gaulle, Bernanos returned to France in 1945, but the homecoming was a disappointment. A loner till the end, he died near Paris at the age of 60. He once wrote: “Never again forget that what still keeps this hideous world from falling apart is the sweet conspiracy—always attacked yet always reborn—of poets and children. Be faithful to the poets, remain faithful to childhood! Never become a grownup!”

I myself had stayed a child, in the wrong way, for far too long, having spent twenty years of my life—the years when most people are establishing a career and raising families—in a series of fetid Boston bars.By the time I moved to LA in 1990, I was sober. I was newly married. I was working as a lawyer, using the degree I’d earned near the end of my drinking in a job for which I had neither the slightest aptitude nor the slightest heart.

In those days, you could still make calls from corner phone booths. Stolen cars, I learned the hard way, were towed to Viertel’s on West Temple, a joint that looked shady even in daytime. The Superior Courthouse, City Hall, Chinatown. County Hospital, The LA Times Building: all straight from old TV shows and ‘40s and ‘50s movies.I’d be driving somewhere, running late, clutching my dog-eared Thomas Guide, and come upon a street sign that blurred the line between make-believe and reality: Sunset. Gower. Hollywood. Vine. Beverly. Franklin Avenue, where Philip Marlowe rented his office.

To explore LA was to live in a state of ongoing cognitive dissonance. Walter Neff from Double Indemnity kept an apartment at the El Royale on North Kingsley. Scenes from Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly were filmed at Malibu’s Point Dume. Southwestern Law School used to be the chic Art-Deco department store Bullock’s Wilshire: Norma Shearer from The Women could have had her nails done Jungle Red there. Back in the mid-ninties, when I freelanced writing legal motions and briefs and did my research at the Southwestern library, you could buy a coffee and eat your sandwich—if memory serves—in the old tearoom.

I walked and walked in LA. I lived in Koreatown for eighteen years, and I walked all through Hancock Park, with its sycamore-shaded streets and old-money mansions. I walked the streets east and west of South Hobart Boulevard—my street—past the grand old decaying apartment buildings: the Ancelle, the Argyle, the Gaylord, the Charmont, El Royale, the Talmadge (after Norma, of course).Gangs patrolled the streets, the paleta guys jingled the bells on their carts, the ice cream trucks blared “The Entertainer,” the Koreans smacked their outdoor-green golf balls in the shadow of their skyscraper banks, and I walked through wrapped in my own little world, in a Gloria Grahame movie.Or a Robert Bresson.

Bresson (1901–1999), French filmmaker, used Catholicism, his early calling as a painter, and his experiences as a prisoner of war to produce such masterpieces as Pickpocket (its protagonist is modeled after Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov), A Man Escaped (a Nazi prisoner tries to break free), and Mouchette (a young girl is tragically corrupted by the adult world into which she is thrust too early).

“[Mouchette] is found everywhere: wars, concentration camps, tortures, assassinations,” Bresson observed.

He favored stars with no previous on-screen experience, preferring to call his actors “models.” He strictly controlled their actions, down to the number of steps and eye movements.

“The things one can express with the hand, with the head, with the shoulders!” he wrote in Notes on Cinematography. “How many useless and encumbering words then disappear.”

His working habits were idiosyncratic and uncompromising. He made only thirteen features over the space of forty years. Loss of innocence, childhood suffering stemming from abusive authority figures, and the seeming absence of God were his themes.Though sometimes described as a “Christian atheist,” Bresson observed: “There is the feeling that God is everywhere, and the more I live, the more I see that in nature, in the country. When I see a tree, I see that God exists. I try to catch and to convey the idea that we have a soul and that the soul is in contact with God. That's the first thing I want to get in my films.”

In 1951, he released a film based on Diary of a Country Priest. The Guardian called the performance of Claude Laydu, in his debut role, one of the greatest in the history of film. The priest’s dying words were “Grace is everywhere.” But perhaps his very last word was this: “Hell is not to love anymore.”

That last caught my attention, as my marriage was foundering. After a few miserable years as a lawyer, I’d quit my job and started writing: my vocation, my passion.And in 1996, I’d converted to Catholicism—which didn’t help matters either.

I worked, I wrote, I went to Mass. I was surrounded by people; I interacted with plenty of other people. But I lived in a kind of urban cloister, ordered by ritual, routine, and prayer.

My “criminal” tendencies hadn’t disappeared, but behavior that during my drinking years had consisted in overt, if not flamboyant, lying, cheating, stealing, and promiscuity had been distilled down to what usually manifested as some form of obsession or compulsion. I wasn’t robbing banks, but my thoughts, actions, and emotions, especially around interpersonal relationships, were frequently disordered: extreme, irrational. I pondered often what I’d come to call the thin line between passion and pathology.

But mostly I wrote. In Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke observed:

“‘Il faut toujours travailler’ [one must always be working], said Rodin whenever I attempted to complain to him about the schism in daily life; he knew no other solution, and this of course had been his. . . . To stick to my work and have every confidence in it. . .  so long as it is in any way possible, not do two things, not separate livelihood and work, rather try to find both in the one concentrated effort: only thus can my life become something good and necessary and heal together out of the tattered state for which heredity and immaturity have been responsible, into one bearing trunk.”

I wanted to make a living; I needed to make a living. And yet from the beginning I firmly resisted writing toward any “market.” Also, my “genre” was creative nonfiction—never known for being a huge money-maker. On top of that, I was Catholic, which automatically excluded me from any kind of mainstream literary culture, circle, or community (as well, as it later transpired, from many that were Catholic).

I was over forty when I began. For the first six or seven years of my apprenticeship, I supported myself through part-time legal writing, putting in just enough hours to pay the bills. I gauged how much mental and physical energy I would need to write, and I ordered my life to it. When my work seemed sufficiently worthy to submit, I made sending out submissions part of the larger vocation of writing.

Without putting a name to it, I consciously shaped my life as a work of art, too. Koreatown was basically a ghetto, but, smack in the middle of it, I made my apartment beautiful. Everything in it was lovely or charming or interesting and had a story. I filled my balcony, visible from the courtyard, with succulents and agaves. I took off my shoes so my footsteps wouldn’t bother the people who lived below. I made a documentary film about one of my next-door neighbors, Emil, who’d been in his two-story townhouse for over fifty years. I picked Meyer lemons from the tree in the yard and made a champagne meringue tart to present to Tim on Valentine’s Day. I hung my clothes on the line so as to conserve energy.

I walked every day. I had favorite flowers in the neighborhood; I don’t just mean hibiscus or gardenia or copa de oro; I mean literal individual favorite bushes, stands, beds, and stalks, which I greeted and thanked on my rounds. Same with trees, certain storefronts, the homeless people I passed each day. I wrote about the neighborhood: reflections, character sketches, essays.

I read widely, eclectically, steadily. I played Mozart and Haydn sonatas on the piano Tim had bought me, damping the keys (again, so as not to bother the neighbors). I often walked to noon Mass at St. Basil’s up on Wilshire, an ugly modernist church on an unprepossessing block that came to be a kind of second home.

I wrote a book about my conversion that sold about ten copies. I wanted to take people by the shoulders, shake them, and say, “Christ died so Margot Fonteyn could dance, Billie Holiday could sing, Gaudi could design La Sacrada Familia, Beethoven could compose his late quartets! He died for love. He died for art.”

He died to honor our willingness to suffer for what we love, for what is beautiful, good, true. He died for what wrenches our hearts and makes us weep.

Being Catholic in any way outside the culturally acceptable, married-with-kids, don’t-rock-the-boat, prosperity Gospel on the one hand, or the “social justice,” anti-Church activist crowd on the other, meant that I didn’t fit in much of anywhere.

At the same time, this is where being a drunk for so many years came in handy. A single, childless, aging woman—not a lot of social cachet, and yet in a weird way I was well equipped to occupy precisely that station. I had lived so far beyond the bounds of propriety, integrity, and basic decency for so long it turned out that simply to be sober, with my free will restored, able to seek purpose and meaning undisturbed, was all I’d ever wanted.

And to not fit in anywhere, in another light I eventually learned, is to fit in everywhere.

As for my fellow Catholics, they mostly wouldn’t have known Georges Bernanos from Oprah, or Robert Bresson from Taylor Swift. I had editors at Catholic magazines and newspapers who had never watched a movie made before 2010. Not only did many lack basic reading literacy—Henry James, Jane Austen, Dostoevsky, Kafka—they also didn’t even know the Catholic writers I revered. Francois Mauriac—who? Caryll Houselander? Madeleine Delbrȇl? Flannery O’Connor? Never heard of her.

No matter. No matter the ugly churches, the often bad music, the lukewarm homilies, the hypocrisy, inconsistencies, and scandals.

As Christ said: “Store up your treasure in heaven, for where your treasure is, there will your heart also be.”

After the divorce and annulment, when I’d finally moved away from Koreatown, I walked all over Silverlake, Echo Park, and Atwater Village, forever on the lookout for the stray Arts and Crafts stained-glass window, the Spanish Mediterranean tiled fountain, the old-school plants: bamboo orchid, hydrangea, poinsettia.

My father died in 1999, and then my mother several years later: plain-spoken, salt-of-the-earth people who were as good as their word, who distrusted flash. In LA, I could never quite get over the trust-fund parents who named their kids Xerxes and Laszlo; the “friends” who asked you for lunch, then casually bailed at the last minute; the “neighbors” who turned on you: Charlotte, who after we’d lived for twelve years in adjacent apartments, wouldn’t give me back the office chair she’d agreed to hold for a few months after I moved—“I’m not a storage space,” she snapped, and hung up. The roommate-landlady-real estate magnate who trailed around the house braying mortgage rates into her phone, and after five years, looked me in the eye said, “What is it you do? Oh. . . a writer. . . Have you ever published anything?”

Just as well. I’m no angel myself, obviously. But this, too, is where the Yankee roots came in. Back in New England, you honored commitments, social and otherwise, whether you were tired, whether something “better” had come along, whether it was going to cost you or not. You didn’t blow your own horn, you didn’t waste, you used a little elbow grease. Where I come from, hard work and manual labor were signs of character. You put in a little extra effort and—my own gloss after having come into the Church—made a tiny penance out of it, a prayer.

In LA what was admired was hiring someone else to clean your house, weed your garden, deliver your groceries. What was admired wasn’t character, integrity, or kindness, but rather an expensive car, a good haircut, business savvy, cloying self-promotion. In LA, people said things without meaning them. They made promises they had no intention of keeping. They consumed, squandered, and wasted in staggering amounts.

To that end, it was the place I rented in Pasadena that after thirty years broke me. The setup would have been great had I lived there myself, but mine was one of eight apartments in a three-story, 100-year-old Craftsman that was under constant, and I mean constant, repair.

For years in Koreatown, my ex-husband and I had paid $675 for a huge one-bedroom with a formal dining room, a balcony, and a garage. Thanks to rent control, even eighteen years later, I’d still been forking over less than a thousand each month. But people like me were being edged out. You could no longer live cheaply, really, anywhere in LA. I was now paying $1450 for what would have been a studio if the owner hadn’t chopped the space up into a living room, miniscule bathroom, and bedroom, the latter of which also served as my office. I couldn’t sit down in the kitchen. I shared parts of every wall. I had people above, beside and (two sets) beneath me, one of whom was a three-year-old. The landlord would say things like, “The problem with Pasadena is people want to live here who can’t afford it.”

The good news was that I had a west-facing second-floor balcony that gave onto the nightly sunset. Moreover, the property included an abandoned lot in back where I ended up spending the better part of two years cleaning, clearing, digging, designing, and planting a splendid, I must say, California native plant garden.

That garden was a huge part of my life. I sweated, bled, and ached for that garden. I wrote a book about that garden. But if ever there were an enterprise designed not to honor my “ethos,” for lack of a better word, that garden was it.

I saved the water from my shower each morning and hauled the bucket out back, a gesture intended to keep usage to a minimum: my neighbors—too fancy to sweep even at the height of a years-long drought—leisurely hosed off their driveways, left the water running till rivulets ran all the way into the street, and let their kids use the hose as a toy: fountaining wasted water high into the air.

I faithfully brought out my vegetable and fruit peelings each morning: the minute the compost was harvestable, “someone” would take it all for their raised beds. People “borrowed” my tools and didn’t bring them back.

Everyone was crazy about the garden. People invited their families over, had dinner parties, enjoyed their evening wine, nursed their babies, let their kids run wild in the garden. I paid for the garden, shopped for the garden, took care of the garden. No one ever took me up on my gentle invites to help. No one ever offered to pitch in twenty, thirty bucks towards plants, or fertilizer, or hoses, or pea gravel, or stakes. No one ever thought to help me pick up the free mulch the City of Pasadena offered one Friday a month, so I did it alone, three or four trips in my Fiat, pitchforking the stuff into bins and empty potting soil bags, ferrying it home, dragging the heavy containers out back, raking it around.

And no one had to. No one had asked me to plant or maintain the garden. No one owed me anything, and, in fact, I enjoyed beyond measure every minute of the work. It was just that when I occasionally wandered out back of an evening hoping to enjoy ten minutes in the garden myself to find people sitting at the table I’d hauled home from the Rose Bowl Flea Market, in the vintage scallop-backed chairs, ditto, under the umbrella I’d bought and set up, no one, once, invited me to join them, or offered to make room, or even much acknowledged me.

I thought of how my father had left his tomatoes to ripen on a card table in the breezeway and handed out paper-bagfuls to whoever stopped by. I thought of how his buddies had come over with zucchini and peppers and string beans from their own gardens. I thought of the raspberry bushes in back of my grandmother’s house on the New Hampshire coast, and of how when I went to visit, she’d hand me a pair of the white cotton gloves my grandfather wore laying brick, point me to a stack of used balsa-wood pint boxes, and let me pick all I wanted.

The year of COVID, I watched tons of film noir. The Big Heat, The Big Combo, Naked City, Naked in the Streets, The Naked Kiss. T-Men, Gun Crazy, Underworld USA, The Killers, The Killing, DOA, Scarlet Street, Out of the Past, In A Lonely Place, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Chase.

I’d seen most of them already, but that didn’t matter. Where Danger Lives. Time Without Pity. Detour. Pickup on South Street. Gilda. Touch of Evil. Richard Widmark, leering with those shiny choppers. Robert Mitchum, eyelids seductively drooping. Robert Ryan, jaw clenched. Fat guys by the pool. Obsequious valets. Mistresses swanning about in mink-edged dressing gowns, blowing smoke rings.

Bad men hunted down, cornered and killed by worse men—many of them cops. Double-crossing, snake-hearted women. All refreshingly pre-political correctness: men who hit women; women who asked for it. Women who stole other people’s babies. Women who murdered their identical twin (Bette Davis: Dead Ringer). Women who slept their way to the top, stepping over their best friends, mothers, and daughters. Women who impersonated dead fiancées (Barbara Stanwyck: No Man Of Her Own). Rich women who married hustlers who tried to kill them (The Big Bluff; Sudden Fear).

Men who sold their souls to The Industry (The Big Knife, The Sweet Smell of Success).

Faces twisted by lust, rage, fear. Darkened hallways, stairwells, alleys. Venetian blinds casting barred shadows across the cheap living room carpet of a two-bit gun-for-hire headed for the gas chamber.

I didn’t watch to see the evil grifters get what was coming to them. I watched because those people were me: all of them. The desperate women. The ruthless, hunted men. The hearts yearning for true love, a moment of peace, a place—however fleeting—in the sun.

I couldn’t pick a favorite film noir, but John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle would hands-down make the top ten. The plot: an ensemble cast led by Sterling Haydn (Dix) carries out one last meticulously planned heist. The place: an unnamed Midwestern city. The mastermind: Erwin “Doc” Reidenschneider (Sam Jaffe), an elderly German-American with an Old World accent, impeccable manners, and a cigar fetish.

“We all work for our vices,” Doc observes, his being young females. Recently released from prison, his plan is to move with the loot to Mexico and “chase pretty girls in the sunshine.” Dix’s is to return to his childhood home: a Kentucky horse farm.

Doc assembles a safecracker, a lawyer, a hooligan (Dix), an explosives expert, and a driver. Naturally, the plan goes horribly awry. Someone is accidentally shot during the heist and dies shortly afterwards. After a brutal police beating, someone else squeals. A third member of the gang, threatened with exposure, commits suicide. The two surviving criminals meet, divide the spoils, separate, and flee. Dix heads to Kentucky. Doc and his driver head to Cleveland.

A few hours out of town, the pair stop at a roadhouse. At a table by the jukebox an attractive teenaged girl holds court for two hunky guys, jitterbugging with one of them. When the dance is over, she calls for another song, and her partner confesses he’s broke. “A nickel he’s complaining about,” she teases him. “What a spender!” From the counter Doc eyes her hungrily, a half-smile on his face. You can almost hear him thinking: Oh, you have no idea. I’ve got fifty grand in jewels in my pocket. I’d give you the moon. I’d drape you in diamonds and furs. He asks the soda jerk for two bucks’ worth of nickels, brings them over to the young people’s table, gives a courtly nod, and gaily slaps down the change, saying “I like music, too! Play what you like.”

When the girl gets up to feed the jukebox, Doc takes her chair, lost in reverie. The two guys exchange shrugs: The old geezer wants to sit here, let ‘im, I guess.

“Come on,” the girl beckons to her guy, bum stuck playfully out, fingers wiggling. Let’s dance. And they dance: the girl part animal youthful exuberance, part frenzied lust—just coming into her sexual power, she herself isn’t quite sure which. Doc watches, mesmerized. He can’t take his eyes off her: a burlesque queen in a sweater set, with a ribbon in her hair. He seems not so much lustful as bewildered: Could people really be so free to flirt, tease, dance; so careless? Could happiness be that easy, that close? He himself has to suppress his desire, mask his feelings, stay alert every second. But for once, he lets his guard down. His driver approaches. “Mister, it’s getting late,” he urges nervously. “Mister, we should be moving along.”

“Plenty of time, my friend,” Doc replies as if in a trance, never taking his eyes off the girl. “Plenty of time.”

At the end of the song, he gives a gallant bow and leaves with the driver. Outside, two burly cops emerge from the gloom, guns drawn, and nab him. He half-heartedly claims they must be mistaking him for someone else, but they frisk him and soon find the jewels. A single muscle clenches in Doc’s cheek as they radio headquarters; other than that, he gives away nothing.

“Okay, keep those hands up.”

“Of course,” he says in his cultured accent, voice calm but eyes darting sideways. You can almost see his brain whirring. “Excuse me, officer. But would you tell me something?”

“Maybe. Just keep your face front.”

“How long have you been out here?”

“That’s a darned funny question.”

“It’s not important.”

“We’ve been watching you through that window two, three, minutes.”

“Ah, yes,” replies Doc, sotto voce. “Say as long as it takes to play a phonograph record,”

“How’s that again? What’re you talking about?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Doc answers pleasantly, gazing into the middle distance. “Do you mind if I smoke a cigar?”

Not important to them: but staying for that song has cost Doc his freedom, possibly his life. You get the impression he may well consider the trade to have been even. For three minutes, he was free, he belonged, he could do as he wished. Buy a dance from a pretty girl. Tell his driver to wait.

When you’re young, you think problems get resolved over time. You think life is a steady upward trajectory. You imagine a soulmate: someone who has your back, cherishes the good in you, is in it for the long haul. You don’t imagine falling in love with “the wrong guy”: not just at eighteen, and twenty-five, and thirty-one, but at fifty. You imagine your family growing ever closer, tighter, warmer. You don’t imagine, decades down the line, an ugly will contest and a schism that might never be healed. You imagine naturally attracting a wide circle of friends, a safety net of affection and respect. You don’t realize that the things that are most precious about you can also tend to keep people away.

You don’t think about what Teilhard de Chardin, author of The Divine Milieu, called “passive diminishments”: the things we can’t change about ourselves no matter how hard we try. A terror of abandonment that generates a certain off-putting prickliness. A sensitivity to chaos and noise that makes normal people going about their business seem intrusive and oblivious. A life of the mind—of books, ideas, music, art, prayer—that renders you almost completely uninterested in passing political winds, social movements, and the ideology du jour. You don’t imagine pushing seventy and moving to a new city to start over one more time, alone.

But you also would never have imagined finding a mysterious happiness—a freedom, a detachment—in so much seeming deprivation. You followed your star; you answered your call: in that one thing, you’ve never wavered.

In the process, you’ve let go of so many expectations—of success, of a certain kind of acceptance. You’ve stopped longing to have things any other way than they actually are. You like having money in the bank, but you’ve lived much of your life without any, and if necessary, you can do so again. You treasure your friends, but if you had to, you could do without them. You hope with all your heart that your family comes back together, but if not—let the dead bury their dead.

You wouldn’t change anything about yourself: no matter how much suffering your “defects” may have caused, they’ve also allowed you to sustain, to persevere. You can afford to risk, and between the risk of a criminal and the risk of a saint—who’s to say?

That’s really why I love film noir: the protagonists are willing to go for broke and pay the consequences. They live outside the law—not just outside the legal code, but outside the law of respectability, safety, security. Outside the law that says the very worst thing is to be an outsider, a misfit, a loner, in the eyes of the world a loser.  Outside the law that asks, “But do you know anybody? Who will you hang out with? What if something happens?”  Outside the law that says it’s foolish to take one possibly last wild gamble.

As soon as I gave notice on my Pasadena apartment, suddenly I was Mother Teresa. The downstairs neighbor who’d trained even her tiny child to give me mean-girl stares suddenly professed her undying gratitude and love. Thrilled at the prospect of at last having the garden to themselves, the neighbors fell all over themselves saying how much they were going to miss me.

C’est la vie: all other things being equal, why not have people be kind? It wasn’t my neighbors’ fault they weren’t the ladies who made the ham and bean suppers back at the Congregational Church in North Hampton, New Hampshire. Like Saint Paul, I’d stayed the course; I’d run the race. It was time to let the garden, and Pasadena, and in fact the whole state of California, go.

I’ve lived in fantasy for much of my life. But by the time I moved to Tucson, I knew no cowboy was going to be waiting by the gate to sing me “Across the Borderline,” Ry Cooder-style. No Harry Dean Stanton was going to turn up, ever, having held a torch for years, like in Paris, Texas.

I wasn’t finally going to be discovered. My books weren’t suddenly going to become bestsellers. The cicadas still shrill soothingly from the mesquite, but it’s 2021, not 1992, when my ex-husband and I first took a road trip here from LA, and you could buy a house for sixty grand, and one afternoon I tucked away a moment—a moment, that’s all. A sleepy street lined with old agaves, a stand of Mexican bird-of-paradise, an ocotillo-rib fence. A shaded porch. Mourning doves, murmuring of siestas, monsoon rains, creosote.

A lot of that remains, if you squint. Like LA, Tucson also has trash, poverty, rudeness: jerks who gun their motorcycles up and down the main drags; water wasters who maintain honking green lawns in the middle of the desert.

As for the New England of my childhood—people who called “How’s yah mothah?” from their front porches, dropped in with a batch of cookies, looked out for you—that was gone by 1960, if it ever existed at all. Today my bricklayer father couldn’t afford to build a house and raise eight kids in our hometown; a once-pleasant mixture of blue-collar and middle-class families that’s now an upscale bedroom community of Boston. Still, that small-town template, stamped on my malleable young psyche, and enhanced by hours of watching Andy of Mayberry and Leave It to Beaver (both filmed in LA), has never quite left me. And if that childhood, the New England of my archetypal memories, never existed, where did I get all that is best in me? My love for flowers, trees and birds; a preference for the road less travelled by; a ridiculous trust, in spite of near constant anxiety and fear, not so much that things will “work out”—but that there’s something beyond—or within.

Sometimes in my new place, especially while lost in writing, I’ll forget where I am. One recent day I came to, looked out the window at my own stand of Mexican bird-of-paradise, and had a memory of a childhood day that was so vivid my mouth watered. I was at my grandmother’s house on Rye Beach where I often spent the weekends. I had the run of the place: the rock gardens luscious with iris, peonies, cosmos, hollyhocks. The weeping willows Nana had planted (“When I see a tree, I see that God exists. . .”). The second-floor bedroom with its high bed and Belleek dresser set, overlooking the Atlantic. The tide pools across Ocean Boulevard. The bright, clear, fresh, salt air; the lulling waves; the long view. The light whose edges, even then, swam with tears. That’s what paradise will be, I thought: a late summer afternoon at my grandmother’s house in Rye.

If you love something enough, in some way you bring it into being. Not in a way that allows you to possess it, but in a way that invites you to lay down your life for it.

In the Bernanos novel Un Mauvais Rȇve (A Bad Dream), the jaded writer Ganse and his tortured assistant Olivier are both obsessed with Simone, a merciless, manipulative secretary. Mercilessness notwithstanding, at one point Simone declares that she does not believe that anyone “has ever quite succeeded in uprooting totally the little child he once was. . . . In any case, if such a thing still exists within you, don’t let go of it.”

“It isn’t very likely that there’s enough of it to help you live,” she continues—“but it will surely be of use to you to help you die.”