Today I decided to read Waiting for Godot. I read four pages. I believe it runs about eighty pages. Perhaps I need someone to read it to me. Or with me. Or I need to watch it performed on stage by a couple of actors who really know how to read lines. Chances are slim that I will read seventy-four more pages. Ever.
Today, also, Wren came to see me. I am not fond of Wren, nor is she fond of me, but we have known each other all our lives so we maintain this ersatz friendship. I like that word, ersatz. I think sometimes I use it incorrectly, but I don’t care. If I am someone who maintains a friendship with a woman I don’t like, then why would I care about word usage? I don’t have an answer to that.
Wren came to my loft. I am in downtown LA in the arts district where I can afford some space, with big windows, cement floor, no heating or air conditioning, a half‐assed laundry-mat down the street, screeching cats that desperately need to be spayed or neutered or kept inside or moved away from our courtyard, and a plethora of artists around me who are either narcissistic or depressed or both. I am not an artist. I just live here because the rent is good.
Wren came to my loft and she looked around. I have furniture I scrounged from the other lofts, when people moved out. Sometimes when people haven’t moved out, but left their front door open and evidently never noticed that a certain chair or side table or lamp was missing. I like my eclectic décor ‐ the most artistic that I get ‐ but Wren wasn’t buying it.
She said, “Gisele, your mother would be horrified to see this. Thank god she is gone.”
She said, “Gisele, why don’t you get a job that actually pays a salary you can live on; what good was all that college work in accounting if you don’t get a job in accounting?”
I wanted to push her down the stairs, except I am on the ground floor. How dare she thank god that my mother is gone. My mother was cool and wonderful and loved me and died two months after I went back east to college. No thanking god for that.
I wanted to push her out the door but instead I said, “Accounting is the most dreadful thing I can think of to do with my life.”
Just then a cat screeched and Wren jumped like a bullet had been fired. She probably thinks bullets are fired a lot around here, but they aren’t. Artists don’t fire guns at each other and gang members from the surrounding neighborhood stay away. I think they think we are weird. Brujas, maybe. It is probably best that they believe that.
Just then the artist upstairs to the right of me dropped something that sounded like a cannonball on sheet metal. And could have been. That prick has a thing for sculptures that are too big and heavy to move out of his studio, so he whines how he can never show his work. When I was sleeping with him (which believe me did NOT last long) that was all he ever talked about and when I suggested he make something a) smaller and b) lighter, he cried. He did, he actually cried. Wren, meanwhile, had her hand on the door and a look of terror on her face. “Is that normal?” she asked.
Today I walked Wren to her car so no one would shoot cannonballs at her. I suggested to her as nicely as I could that I never wanted to see her again. I was curious as to how she would react. She smiled more honestly than I had seen in a long time and nodded her agreement, giggled even. She drove away in her Mercedes or Acura or other expensive car and I felt free and happy.
Today I was so happy I went upstairs to the right to see what had happened and I fell into bed with the lunatic depressed narcissist, and other than two screeching cats outside his window, I had a damn good time.