I never thought that I would miss my old neighborhood, until I realized that leaving meant I would never see Lucy again, either. My nightly visits with Lucy were something delicate, something magical. In the velvety southern California evenings, while my husband watched “Jeopardy!” with the screen door open to catch a breeze, I would ease out the back door and walk barefoot on the cool, rough sidewalk, listening to the evening breathe and rustle. Skyscrapers pierced the horizon like pagan idols. Two buildings down, in a lush courtyard, our neighbor’s elderly Dalmatian, Lucy, nosed through the shrubbery or sat as calmly as a statue, a stone dog watching passersby. Behind wrought-iron gates, her black and white coat materialized out of the gloom like a fish swimming through shallow water. Flowering vines sugared the air with perfume; a babbling fountain filled the space with the sound of falling water. A particular smell of night-blooming jasmine is what I recall most, as sweet as the candy or junk-food cereal advertised on Sunday-morning TV. In the sultry summer evenings darkness, it hung over everything, a pink shawl over the senses. On Thursday afternoons at 6, I would take the same route to my therapist’s office. Then Id cross the street and enter her pink marble office building, a leftover from old Hollywood. Sometimes I walked there barefoot too. In her office, under the draped wall hangings from Tibet, we would discuss my urgent need to leave the city, which had begun to feel claustrophobic and hostile, awash in malevolent forces. She was a Jungian, and encouraged me to tap deeply into my archetypes of strength and independence, such as Artemis the huntress, who staked out her own turf and knew how to take care of herself. Despite the many aspects of the city that I did love as dearly as a cherished friend, such as the flower-draped nooks and crannies, the velvet evenings, and the black-and-white 1930s silent-film ingenue neighborhoods, a harsher visage had taken over, and it projected itself everywhere I went in town. I felt haunted by bad luck, stalked by something sinister. It was time to exit. I did not know how to pull it off, but I knew that I must. Leaving was as difficult as scraping a tattoo off of my own flesh, maybe the peach-colored butterfly that curved over my shoulder and rode with me like an angel of deliverance.
Posted on: Wed, 08 Oct 2014 23:43:07 +0000
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