Apartment Story

Matthew Specktor moves in

I’ve spent much of the last week sick and housebound, with the rest of my family sick as well. Stuck in bed, television quickly seems monotonous and it’s in these moments that I remember what a delightful gift it is to read writing that can transport you. For my part, I dove into The Covenant of Water and cannot recommend it highly enough. Abraham Verghese’s novel is sprawling and extraordinary—700 pages that fly by.

But for days when a weighty tome doesn’t feel right, there’s nothing better than an evocative essay that takes us out of our own routine even just for a few minutes. Matthew Specktor’s short, funny piece below, about seeking to rent an apartment in Hollywood, is a perfect example. Accompany the writer as he goes to his new digs and encounters Aurelia, the manager with a lengthy list of famous friends. To worry whether her stories are true, completely fabricated or somewhere in between is to deprive yourself of the joy of traveling into some else’s magical universe.

Finally, while this essay may take place in California, I want to note I’m entirely neutral on the teams playing in a game tonight, but sending luck to both the KC and 49ers fans among you.

—Abby Rapoport

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Carol Schuldt. San Francisco. 2013. Photograph by Jessica Eve Rattner

“Welcome to Hollywood” Matthew Specktor, Stranger’s Guide: California.

Hollywood. If you’ve ever been to Los Angeles, you’ll know it’s a neighborhood—not a very big one— you can find near the center of LA’s interlocking grid of suburbs and incorporated municipalities. If you’ve ever been, or even if you never have, you’re probably aware that “Hollywood” is almost everywhere—except in Hollywood itself, which is largely quotidian and residential, and mostly not affluent enough to attract those pillars of the motion picture industrial complex we tend to think of when we say the word “Hollywood.” (Hell, even the sign—the fabled structure that announces the presence of Hollywood—isn’t technically in Hollywood, but rather in the Santa Monica Mountains.) I’m not trying to be a pedant here, but rather to gesture toward the thing that frustrates everybody who comes to Los Angeles trying to find the pulse of the city. If it isn’t exactly where it says it’s going to be, then…where exactly is it?

I moved back to LA in the early aughts. I’d been gone a long time—nearly two decades—and while I wasn’t exactly searching for the movie business, I wasn’t looking to avoid it, either. That was why I had left: to get away, but funnily enough, I had blundered into the industry all the same, working for a time as a development executive in New York, then keeping myself afloat, ambivalently, as a screenwriter. My career was crumbling, along with the rest of my life, but when I returned, I crash-landed along the eastern margins of the Sunset Strip, which is to say smack dab in the middle of Hollywood, the neighborhood, but also staring into the maw of Hollywood, the metonym. A block and a half away from my apartment was the Chateau Marmont, and if I leaned far enough out the window, I could see it: the twisted Via Dolorosa of Sunset Boulevard—the Sunset Boulevard—exactly where its history of celebrity, mayhem and collapse seemed to begin geographically, with John Belushi’s 1982 overdose in one of the rooms at the Chateau. As I trained my gaze west, this history seemed to unfurl almost like an estuary, with tributaries (like Benedict Canyon, where Sharon Tate was murdered) and streams (the Viper Room, site of River Phoenix’s death) running all the way to the Pacific, where, presumably, the dream of the movies also ended. “Hollywood” might remain elusive, yet all the same: if it existed, this was it. The apartment was in a courtyard building a few blocks from the one where Nicholas Ray shot In a Lonely Place, and directly opposite the one where Sheilah Graham, the English gossip columnist, had lived in the 1940s, where F. Scott Fitzgerald had suffered his fatal heart attack. You couldn’t embed yourself any more deeply in Hollywood than this.

“I’ll take it.”

The act of renting the apartment, in fact, had offered a kind of parable, the demonstration of a theorem in which proving the presence of Hollywood was like proving the existence of God. The landlady had led me upstairs and shown me an L-shaped room with a fireplace, French windows, a tiny kitchen and bath. A fountain splashed pacifically below, at the center of a courtyard jungled with banana palms and birds-of-paradise; slab-pink paths forked off to different units.

“I think you’re gonna love it,” she said. Her name was Auralia, which struck me then as being like—and which indeed was, I found out later—the name of a Catholic saint. I still see her in my dreams: plump, tan and blond, the color of a person who might have spent at least a dozen hours a day in the sun, like if George Hamilton had been a woman and also a little aggressive with a peroxide bottle. I didn’t blame her. This wasn’t a place where you were supposed to maintain an indoor pallor, nor one where you were permitted to grow old. I guessed that she was probably just on the near side of 70. Also, that her hair had been the same color since she was 12.

“You know who used to live in this apartment?” she said.

“Who?” Our voices drew little echoes, contrails against the room’s blank, white walls.

“Al Pacino. You know who else?”

“Nope.”

“Cary Grant. Oh, and also,” she added, as we stepped out the door and went downstairs to draw up a lease, “also Billy Crystal.”

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this. It seemed possible, not even unusual, to imagine that any one of those people might have lived here during the early stages of his career, well before he became famous. It was a faint stretch to imagine two of them had. But three (Billy Crystal?) felt like embellishment to me. Flannery O’Connor said once that it takes three strokes of detail to make an object in fiction real, but here, it seemed the opposite: the third stroke rendered all of them suspect.

“You don’t say.”

She wore a soft pink suit, the color of a vintage Cadillac, and Gucci sunglasses. As I followed her across the courtyard to her unit, I watched the sun spark off her expensively pixie-cut hair, enjoying the evident serenity of her movements. She looked like she belonged here, like this place was a kind of museum—the Museum of Imaginary Celebrity Residents—and she was its docent.

“How long have you been here?”

She shrugged. I was guessing she didn’t own this building, just managed it, but her own apartment had a cobwebby, almost Miss Havisham-like quality: Deco furnishings, faded greens and salmons. Lit like a bar or a 1940s nightclub, in which the patina of elegance bleeds into shabbiness and vice versa.

“Not long enough to have known Cary Grant?”

I was joking. However old she was, she couldn’t have been managing this place since the Second World War, or before that most likely. But she brightened.

“Al was a good tenant.”

“He—what?”

“He was.” There are people in Los Angeles who collect these stories, who repeat them and reform them (maybe it wasn’t Pacino, maybe it was—Carrot Top, or somebody) until they shine like polished stones. “He was very good.”

“What…made him a good tenant?” I had that feeling like I was falling into someone else’s dream. You know that sense? I was sitting in the property manager’s apartment, one which seemed as if she might have been living in it forever—like her, the furniture and everything were of an indeterminate vintage—while I myself was acutely aware of the time, not just for the day (I had errands to run, my daughter needed to be picked up from school), but in my life: recently divorced, old enough to sweep up the pieces from a series of failures, I could feel mortality rubbing up against eternity in that moment. “Punctual with the rent? Kept the stereo down? That sort of thing?”

She nodded. “He was—cute.”

“Cute.”

This was Hollywood is what I’m getting at here. This very awkward collision between the dream of permanence (Pacino!) and the problems of time, the bright delusions of this landlady, who was nice, and the clumsy, sweaty, middle-aged person (me) who sat on the couch opposite her. I’d thought I didn’t harbor those delusions, whatever they were exactly, of someone who comes to Hollywood seeking fortune. I’d never imagined I was going to be Al Pacino, or Cary Grant, or even Billy Crystal, wherever he is these days. But it turned out I wasn’t exempt from these imaginings either.

“I’m going to marry him, you know.”

“Ah, really?” I switched into that mode—you know the one—that gets deployed against small children and senile relatives. Of course you can have a pony, and Auntie so-and-so is still alive. “Congratulations!”

“No, don’t make fun of me. I am.”

“Really.”

She sounded so collected in this belief—I knew she was deranged, she had to be—I could almost believe it myself. I could at least believe that she believed it, which was something.

“We talk on the phone sometimes. He calls.”

“Does he now?”

“Yes!” She sighed like an ecstatic fan. “He does!”

This I did believe, because she sounded so full of not just conviction, but of joy. I wanted to press her further (“What do you talk about?”) but I didn’t, because there’s only so far into someone’s dream you’re ever willing to travel. You go to the movies to watch them, not to get stuck in them. I think.

“That’s great,” I said. By then, I was done filling out my forms—phone numbers, bank info, former housing information: stuff you never see in the movies unless it’s relevant to the plot—and just wanted to get out of there quickly. It was dark in her apartment, and weirdly narcotic—the too-sweet smell of her perfume, like gardenias and bubblegum; the velvety sheen of the couch I was perched on—and I just wanted to get out. “It’s nice to have people like that in your life.”

“It is,” she said cheerfully. (While I wondered, like what? People like what? Real or imaginary celebrities?) “He’s one of my best friends!”

I signed the paperwork. I gave her a check. I realized I had nothing else to give her, but I felt, somehow, like I was missing a piece of the ritual, like I should offer her some confidence (“My best friend is Elliott Gould! We should all get together!”) that would have made this exchange feel normal. I told her I would be by tomorrow to pick up the key, and I’d be ready to move in after the weekend.

“Wait!” she said. We had stepped outside her apartment and were out in the courtyard now, standing close to the building gates by the fountain. She reached into her bag and pulled out her phone, which she held out to me with a programmed number pulled out and visible. “That’s him!”

“Who? Al Pacino?”

“Yeah.” The sun beat down now on our heads. It was bright out here, and I could hear just up the block the steady traffic of Sunset Boulevard: the regular hiss and hum of city drivers, birdsong, occasional pedestrian voices: the ordinary churnings of Los Angeles (“Hollywood”) in motion. “You wanna give him a call?”

I still live here, albeit no longer in that apartment. I still like this city, even after I have extracted myself from the quicksand of that conversation, but I cannot tell you whether I like it despite or because of that quicksand. Both, maybe. She held the phone out to me and I stared at the numbers glowing (917, Al, really? Shouldn’t you be a 212?), but I didn’t take it from her, at least not right away. I closed my eyes and listened to the traffic flowing, that liquid, artificial murmur that begins to seem almost natural once you’ve heard it long enough, begins to sound more like running water, like a churning river or like the sea.