What’s your deal? You okay? Why so serious? All these questions are asked. Again and again. I’m good. Sometimes I even feel a glimmer of great. But mostly, just okay. Truthfully, I am just sitting on the well-worn fence of fine and who gives a fuck anymore. I am tired of that face. Now leathery, rarely caressed by sunscreen, most times set in a downcast resting bitch face. I hate that I have to look at it every day – and at other things too. These feelings turn my insides sour. They surge and retreat of course, but it wears away at me. I never say it out loud, but it really makes me sick sometimes. I am not referring to my face, like you thought. It’s her face. The woman who lives with me in our increasingly shrinking prewar quadplex, Christine, my wife of 24 years. Back then, we filled this east-facing apartment with dual hopes, lofty dreams and secondhand, overstuffed striped sofas. That was back when we we were newly in love, filled with impromptu lust and easily moved to laughter, then tears when something ridiculous, unexpected, or even tragic happened and we were together to witness it. We had a lot of fun, spent many evenings with some of our newly-coupled neighbors – people like us, feeding each other partially true compliments and encouragement in a rotation of our small, twin kitchens while attempting new recipes torn from the latest Sunset magazine just the night before. Hasty dinner parties were created on the fly because the weather here is usually hospitable, Mexico-grown produce abundant and we were drinking very cold and cheap white Zinfindel, often, like college kids. Sometimes straight from the upturned bottle, it’s little round glass handle, like a child’s ear, briefly throwing a golden flare grabbed quickly from the sun before it fell down behind our kitchen sink between the two bloated French windows that no longer meet in the middle, so always cracked open, our indoor words leaking out generously to the two neighbors below and the ones next door. Mostly drunken cooing and goofing, some belting of disco ballads along with sweeping gestures and clumsy footwork, but with time, our words have morphed into acidic hissings. Lots of “How come you nevers?” and “How could yous?” floating like the scent of simmering bolognese, an olfactory taste of our fights du jour, free for anyone nearby to sample. We share our arguments freely with the same neighbors we will feed later in our small dining room on chipped and mismatched Fiestaware, once a month, for as long as our unknown futures choose.

It is not just us. We are all guilty of airing our business to the other apartments in the building. It’s just that me and Christine have the loudest voices and most unresolved traumas. We attribute some of our clashing energies to astrology and birthplace. She’s an Aquarian, Los Angeles native and I’m a Scorpio, east coaster, but I don’t really believe in that crap any more than you do. I just like to find more flimsy excuses for our rickshaw ride of a marriage.

We gather for our monthly dinners on the last Saturday of every month. At the front door, we all pretend to know nothing new about each other. Every month we ask the same questions wearing soft faces between cheek kisses standing in identical circular foyers roughly the size of a hula hoop “How have you guys been? What’s been going on?”. We all pretend to know nothing new about each other. But the small elephant in the room dances around our heels. We all know that my wife is a torrent of bad behavior and suffers from random fits of demolishing glass objects indoors. Only two of the six of us know for sure what’s going on between my wife and Bruce. Some things cannot be proven with tangible evidence. Their bond is something etherial. It floats through the air when they are in the same room. They are far apart on paper, but very close in unexplainable chemistry.

We glance appreciatively at the wine labels on bottles extended to us at our front door. “Oh, we love this one…thank you so much.” We all like wine, but we also all know that Christine really loves wine, especially the sneaky dry whites. When she is good and white-washed, I never know how she’s going to overreact to an ordinary story or situation that arises among our neighbor friends. Christine always starts off looking polished and sharp. Her dark auburn hair squeaky clean and swingy, her deep navy blue eyes clear and sharp. She tends to wear a variation of very tight white, or tan capri pants, topped by a random bouquet of large patterned blouses. She prefers bare feet when we are hosting, thin and strappy sandals when we are not. A routine pedicure in Ballet Pink, tidies her look just a bit when she has becomes increasingly louder, overly-grinning while trying to keep focus on whomever is speaking.

Christine quietly kills a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc during the brie and baguette course and before I return from quickly basting the roasting Moroccan chicken. We all pretend to be her faithful pace car, but we are trailing her, neck and neck in fifth place. After two hours, her pink toenails just draws attention to her dirty feet. By the start of her second bottle, her gait has become increasingly jerky, her eyes swirl around us like bare umbrella spines. She believes her inebriation is well-disguised inside her dance moves to various ’80s songs, but I know better and she makes me angry. As she dances, the filthy soles of her feet flash at us like burnt toast slices. I turn down the music to slow her roll, her dance moves are nearing those of Elaine on Seinfeld, but unironically. They all laugh and clap, instigating her exuberant carefree ways. Christine is so uninhibited – the barefoot hostess with the mostest! I seethe inside and then take my anger to the kitchen before the others can detect my rage. Christine’s lack of control and need for attention obliterated only when I turn my back to look out of the kitchen window. I close my eyes and take a few deep breaths at the same time knowing I can count on Bruce to join my wife in her solo wine-fueled Soul Train very soon – and I hate that part the most.

Bruce is one of Christine’s oldest friends. They went to college together and have a million inside jokes and stories that grips me endlessly with unwelcome deja vu and jealousy. Bruce and Glynne, his longtime girlfriend, live across from us, on the other side of our shared landing. They are both “creatives” and work in “the industry”. Glynne is a leggy blonde, naturally beautiful with large green eyes that strip you bare. If I am honest, I picture her stripped bare all the time, so I can’t really fault Bruce for his long and mysterious relationship with my wife. Don’t get me wrong, Bruce is no troll. I really wish he was. He is tall, 6’3″ in flip flops, has a full head of sandy brown hair and a perennial tan from his daily, mostly shirtless jogs around the reservoir that sits half a mile below our building. I truly believe that men who can jog shirtless and only look better the farther they go, are the most dangerous men on earth. Prove me wrong. Ah, there’s one of those men now and he is dancing with my dirty-soled wife in my living room.

Originally, all us gathered for monthly dinners, but Hank and Brenda who live in the unit below us, have been bowing out more often than not since Brenda has been suffering with varying degrees of dementia. A few months ago we were heading down the hill to pick up some fish tacos. As we turned right onto the main road, we noticed a woman wearing a baby blue robe and black slippers, both her arms clutching the chain link fence that separates the winding road from the edge of the reservoir. Her face tilted up to the darkening sky, her mouth moving silently. I pulled the car to the other side of the road and we ran across the street wordlessly so as not to startle her. I softly asked her what she was doing. Brenda turned to us and asked “Hank, is that the little dipper?” I left Christine with Brenda and quickly drove to our building to get Hank. I raced Hank back to the edge of the reservoir where his wife still clung to the sharp fence and her fleeting sanity. He untangled her fingers from the cold metal and pulled her tightly into his chest. He whispered something in her ear and a creepy, muffled giggle erupted from Brenda. Hank turned to us “I’ve got this. Thank you for your help. Have a good night.” and casually waved us away. The head lights of north-bound cars sprayed our ankles as we ran across the road and back into our idling car. Hank never mentioned the incident of Brenda clinging to the twilight covered reservoir ever again.

Hank and Brenda purchased our building thirty years ago and are responsible for the whole damn monthly dinner thing. We first met them at our open front door on our fourth or fifth run of bringing moving boxes from the back of a U-haul and up the Saltillo tiled stairs. “Welcome neighbors!” yelled Brenda, her long blonde-grey curls quivering. Hank was attached to her side, his light brown dome gleaming with the sheen of some sort of fancy oil product. They were such a visual mismatch that it made them perfect. Brenda held out a basket of cookies spread over a paper Christmas napkin, a charming glass bottle of eggnog clutched in her other hand dangled precariously by five long red fingernails. “These are for you! I made the cookies and this here is Hank’s famous homemade eggnog.” She gave us both a hard wink and whispered, “It’s verrry boozy.” We knew right then we had met our kind of people.

Our building is regal and lovingly maintained. It is a charming 1920 Spanish made up of four identical units each containing one bedroom, one bath, high ceilings, wood burning fireplace, wrought iron sconces, gleaming hardwood floors and full bathroom, half-tiled all around in tangerine and black. The kind of dwelling that is quite common in Los Angeles, especially in the Silverlake area. To say we were pinching ourselves for scoring this exquisite apartment, would be an understatement. I don’t think I slept the first three nights. I kept waking up before dawn, expecting to be sitting on our old mattress floating on a swath of filthy brown industrial carpeting inside a 65 unit building deep within Canoga Park. Parking for two cars was included, but so was sharing the flickering elevators with twitching meth customers at all hours of the day. Christine and I were very excited to fill our new home with lots of bohemian coziness, a decor sundae of our eccentric personalities coming together. That mid-December afternoon the apartment was a pristine nest of white washed potential, the soft smell of newly painted ivory walls mingled with the smell of freshly baked gingerbread cookies. We were golden.

The biggest payoff is the unobstructed view of the reservoir from the huge living room window. Pines, palms and jutting purple hillsides all around as far as you can see. A “pinch me” landscape that took our breath away when we first saw the ad in the Recycler. We never expected the unit to still be available by the time we could drive the 25 miles from the valley to the northeast of LA the following afternoon. But somehow, it was and we were fantastically hopeful and giddy with the possibilities of living “over the hill” – again. After a brief life detour to do some hard time in the hot depths of the San Fernando Valley, I would finally be returning to my neck of the woods. We all make our choices as we walk through life and I knew then that I had picked the right woman, job and now, the perfect new home.

At first I was very hesitant to move into this place with Christine, precisely because Bruce called Christine one night after 11pm, interrupting a movie we were watching. In my book, way too late to call someone with a non-emergency. I could hear him shouting through her phone, something about grabbing the newest Recycler magazine as soon as she could. “Bruce, what’s the deal?” “Just go get the latest issue at 7-11, then look on page 28.” “Why, are you selling the TV and coffee table I gave you two years ago?” “Nope. We gave those to Glynne’s sister a few months ago. There’s a unit coming available in our building. I know you and Shawn have been wanting to get out of that drug pen and back to LA proper for a long time – you love this area, you love our building.” Bruce lowers his voice, Christine leaves the room with Bruce in her ear. “Would be really nice for you to be geographically desirable again, Christine. I am always desirable, Bruce. You sure are, kid…. Have a look and get back to me. Would be a blast if we were neighbors, again..” Wait! Bruce, which unit is available? The one across from us! No, way. Yes, way. What about the one downstairs, next to Brenda and Hank? No one lives there, right?” That might be better…. Cree, that place is off limits. It’s always been vacant. I asked Hank about it a few times and he always blows me off. Told me he uses it for storage. Just get your ass over here to meet with them sometime tomorrow. This place will be perfect for you guys.”

(To be continued, maybe.)