across the water

At the hotel in Santa Monica they hand me a glass of sparkling wine at check-in and I scrub off the plane in the fancy marble shower, peer out the window at the pool. I text my sister, my husband: here I am.

California is Francesca Lia Block beautiful, but emphatically not for me. The sprawl of it makes me uneasy. I have an irrational fear of palm trees at night. Everyone in Los Angeles looks like a parody of a person from Los Angeles. I’ve forgotten my sunglasses, which is a shame.

I go to the cocktail party; I go out for drinks. Back in the fall I decided I was going to be pickier about what I agreed to do and then actually do those things, to have the full author experience, and I’m surprised that it’s an experience I actually kind of like a lot: I meet writers I admire and humans I want to be friends with, who I hope I’ll run into again. People introduce themselves to me and I introduce myself to people and it occurs to me that I do in fact belong here, that there is in fact nothing in my teeth.

Still: when Jennie comes and picks me up I dive into her car like something out of an action movie. Go, I instruct. On Saturday night we bring tacos back to the hotel room and watch a Katherine Heigl movie as the smell of somebody else’s weed drifts down the hall. “It’s like college,” Jennie says, laughing. We spill salsa on the crisp white sheets.

Talking about my books in public is the scariest part of writing them; the night before my panels I dream of a literal car wreck, jolting awake in the dark. But one of them goes fine and one of them goes better than fine and as some of the tension drains out of my neck I realize I’m getting better at this, that it’s turning into something I know how to do.

I tweet. I order room service. I look for famous people, but find none. I like how green it is here. I imagine I can feel the Vitamin D.

On Sunday Jennie takes my headshots, me leaning against a concrete wall and making weird faces, my hands fluttering in front of me like plastic grocery bags. “I feel like an asshole,” I tell her, shifting my weight, glancing at a perfect woman biking by with a literal armful of farmer’s market tulips, but Jennie is unruffled.

“Relax,” she tells me, shaking her head and checking the camera screen, west coast sun glinting off the gold in her hair. “You’re doing great.”