Book Lover. Karen Mack

movie lines, in bank teller lines, or when the shuttle from L.A. to San Francisco is four hours late. Layovers in unfamiliar airports are a treat, as are jury notices that arrive at my home and give me license to sit around and read all day, knowing that I’m doing my civic duty. On my last jury duty, I was rejected from two trials, one because I told the judge in voir dire that I thought the defendant, a skinhead with tattoos, looked guilty, and the other because the attorneys got a load of the hostile jury pool and settled the case. That day, I actually got to finish Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections.

      What to read now? Maybe Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women. A quote on the back talks about the dark side of womanhood. Maybe something lighter. How about Kate Braverman’s Lithium for Medea? Oh god, forget it. This is even more depressing. A woman who has a terrible relationship with her mother as well as every man in her life.

      I burrow through the trunk of my fifteen-year-old cobalt-blue Mercedes 280, a graduation gift from my father. It is still a lovely old coach with faulty wiring and a broken windshield wiper that I’ve been meaning to fix for the last five years. Every time it rains, which isn’t very often, I vow to take the thing in and then immediately lose interest when the sun comes out.

      It’s a sad commentary that I’ve been with my car longer than any man in my life. I’m not one of those people who affectionately bestows a name upon their car, but I can understand the inclination to do so.

      The gates to the long sloping driveway slowly begin to open and I dive behind my car as a grim-looking plumber carrying his toolbox emerges. We were always having trouble with the water system, which belched greenish-looking water no matter how many experts we called in. I used to joke that our house was West L.A.’s version of the Love Canal. I do have some sense of pleasure that this problem has not been resolved and that my replacement will have to deal with the endless stream of aeroscopic engineers, construction supervisors, and plumbers.

      Palmer is now living with an elegant, beautifully put-together woman named Kimberly, who he thinks will be the next domestic diva. She first came to Palmer for legal advice regarding a line of cookware she wanted to sell on the Home Shopping Network. Already the host of a cheery little show on the Food Network, she had just signed a multimedia deal that included her own magazine. She uses phrases on the air such as “Ladies, we can make our families happy without working our tushies off,” and includes tricks like turning old bed linens into junky tablecloths.

      Last year, the top job at Sony Pictures opened up, and in a surprise move, the Sony brass named Palmer to replace the retiring studio head. His latest string of movies has been financially successful, and now he has a house on the Vineyard, another in Cabo, and I see his name on the letterhead of a dozen charities.

      I’ve spent the last year trying to figure out how I feel about all this. I thought back to the times when I’d toss and turn all night worrying about something, and in the morning, when I’d wake up bleary-eyed and conflicted, he’d get that look on his face and effortlessly work it all out. There was this calm brilliance about him that had nothing to do with money. I think I loved him. I certainly admired him. But not for his success. That just seemed to get in the way.

      One day, shortly before the breakup, I found him arranging his neckties according to color and pattern. He used to collect Hermes ties with their endless whimsical micro patterns—sailboats, penguins, golf clubs, whales, baseball bats, hot air balloons, beach umbrellas, trotters, fox hunters, Labradors, and so on, ad nauseam. I scanned the array of expensive patterned silks that covered the entire king-size bed—a sea of ties. “You must have five hundred of these, and look at them,” I said with disdain, “they all look alike. Wait! You’re missing the one with the dollar bills all over it.”

      He picked up a tie and threw it at me. “How come you’re always such a downer, Dora?” That’s me, Dora the Downer.

      For a while, Palmer and I tried the marriage counselor route. I remember the therapist took a look at us and said, “Couples shouldn’t divorce unless one of you clearly doesn’t like the other.” It was good advice and I went with it for a while, but eventually he found solace in his work and his new girlfriend. A friend of mine says that I have deficient wiring because I’ve never been dumped. What she doesn’t realize is this: I always manage to extricate myself first, before things get too dramatic. It’s easier that way. But now I’m thinking maybe I should have tried harder. Oh god, it’s all so confusing. I do wish him well, although it wouldn’t make me unhappy if his next movie is skewered by the critics and flops at the box office. No. I don’t mean that.

       Emily Post and Grand Larceny

      “I never travel without my diary. One should always

      have something sensational to read in the train.”

      ∼ Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), The Importance of Being Earnest ∼

      My first husband, Jack, was a different story. He was the classic catch in a high-school sort of way—handsome, popular, athletic, and he liked to party. That’s where I met him, by the way, at a party. For the first time in my life, he made me feel “in.” He was also the first man to tell me that I was sexy, beautiful, and desirable—how could I not love him forever?

      I wish I had a better reason for finding him so appealing. But I don’t. I married him because he was a hunk. That’s it. No one understood it. But the thing is, men do this all the time and no one says boo about it. Why do women have to come up with all sorts of explanations for doing the same thing? I didn’t try to impress him with my book stuff because I knew he didn’t care. To tell you the truth, it was actually liberating … and very romantic.

      But as Shakespeare wisely pointed out in The Tempest, romantic love is so much more complicated than that. Even though Jack set me on fire in bed, alas, it couldn’t compensate for the fact that he had no intellectual curiosity whatsoever … he read car magazines, played video games, watched NASCAR on TV, and smoked pot. When you take out the sex factor, we had nothing in common. One day it just hit me. In all my years of making stupid decisions, this was the capper.

      I had just graduated from Columbia and he was studying for his real estate license, the only classes he’d attended since high school. When we decided to get married, I was twenty-one years old and even as I was marching down the aisle, resplendent in Madeira lace, trying to ignore my disappointed relatives, mainly my mother, I knew I was making a mistake.

      I landed my job at the Los Angeles Times two weeks after my wedding. That’s when I met Darlene. I was the hot new reporter (there’s always a hot new reporter) and my world was filled with infinite possibilities. Darlene, however, was buried in Classifieds, selling twenty words to anyone with a charge card and something to offer.

      She was ten years older than me and married to a cop. The hierarchy at the Times was a caste system with Editorial on top and Classifieds somewhere near subzero. People treated Darlene with the same affection they reserved for their maid. They were nice but they weren’t sharing their drinks or their secrets with her. It didn’t help that she looked like a female serial killer—long straight blonde hair that she bleached herself, black roots, epic tits, too much sun, and too much booze. Of course, I found her tremendously amusing and we threw back more than a few on several occasions after work. I particularly enjoyed these evenings because it prolonged the inevitable trip home and put off the nearly nightly confrontations with Jack. He was feeling insecure about the marriage, not surprisingly. I also thought he was back seeing his old girlfriend, a wretched creature he’d lived with for a few years before dumping her for me.

      One night Darlene and I were at Cassidy’s, a once-lively spot wedged between two strip malls, which had spiraled downward until now the only time the place was full was on St. Patrick’s Day, when they gave away frothy mugs of green beer on tap. I had once seen the bartender, an aging thug with a long blond ponytail and a receding hairline, topping off the barrels using the hose in the back alley. His wife, a hefty Armenian girl with short hair and a mustache, waited tables and served