As You Like It

I've been a little blueish, perched here in my fake museum house with its odorific new carpet, stark walls and echoing rooms devoid of furniture.

My Beloved is still in New York, The Child still at school, so I'm bumping around here by myself for the time being. Just me and the carpet guy, back by popular demand; Sam the handyman; and the Russian dryer-repair man. (He: "Det vill be two hondred seexty seffen dohllars." Me: "No senk you, I coot be buying nyew one for det much.")

We were in New York for Thanksgiving, the first time since my junior year abroad that I wasn't at my parents' house surrounded by the clamorous Champlin clan. We're usually 30ish at dinner, scattered among several tables, every chair in the house and the piano bench pressed into service, sisters manning the mashed potatoes and the salad and the gluten-free pumpkin pie, brother wielding the ancient carving knife and fork, the under-12 set in the back bedroom draped over the king-size bed watching Nickelodeon before dinner.

In New York we were three in the apartment, once The Child and I found each other through the throng of the Port Authority bus terminal after her six-hour ride down from college. She and I spent Wednesday afternoon in the kitchen, listening to her "Music to Bake By" mix as we made two pies, pumpkin and lemon meringue...






















...and a batch of cookies that emerged from a deliciously disastrous pie crust dough. I called them Mortification Cookies.

At dinner on Thanksgiving we were eight around the table in my Beloved's younger son's apartment, where Peter and his beautiful Portuguese bride, Mariana, cooked the first turkey of their lives—perfectly. Every one of the six chairs in their jewel box of an East Village apartment was pressed into service, along with a trunk topped with cushions.

We devoured everything...

















...except half the turkey.

Then we sat with tiny cups of perfect espresso and talked for a few more hours.






















Late that evening, I called home to L.A., where I got passed around the living room inside the telephone receiver—"Have you talked to Susan yet? Here, talk to Susan." I missed them, and they missed us, but it was okay, too. My family is like a down comforter, and I felt the poofy warmth even across the country. Plus now I have family in New York, too.

The next day, the three of us took the subway to Times Square for a matinee of Finian's Rainbow—my Beloved's favorite musical—on Broadway. I spent the whole first hour and a half waiting for my favorite lyric: "For Sharon I'm carin'/But Susan I'm choosin'."

Afterwards, we walked through the holiday gift booths in Bryant Park and watched the skaters as the lights in the Empire State Building came on.






















It was a very New York holiday, festive and busy. So the re-entry to L.A. was a little rough.

My voice—when I had occasion to use it—seemed literally to echo off the blank walls of the apartment. The blank kitchen window, missing the grotty mini-blinds that we'd thrown away without yet replacing, stared balefully at me in the evenings. I'd reach for the television remote to have a little friendly noise, only to remember we'd already gotten rid of the TV in the living room.

But this is temporary. I've met with the realtors, I've ordered the rental furniture, I'm tidying things up. The place will be on the market probably by the end of next week. Then we'll ring down the curtain on Act I.

For L.A. I'm carin', but it's New York I'm choosin'.

A Bill of Divorcement

10 Things I've Learned Without Meaning To:

1. It won't always be like this. This has become my mantra in times of trial—I recite it robotically to myself even when I can't really believe that anything will ever get better. But no matter what, it's always true. As of today, the carnival of woes I described last time is over. The painting is finished, the plumbing repaired, the kitchen floor installed, the carpet laid. (Okay, so the walk-in closet somehow didn't make it onto the carpet guy's diagram and will consequently be done in a different color. I so don't care.) We lived; we laughed; we moved on. My friend So Lovely had a wonderful blog post recently on the origins of the phrase "This too shall pass." Like most people, I had always assumed this phrase referred to bad times—and of course it does. But guess what? Not only.

2. It won't always be like this (reprise). Those airy highs, the giddy squeals, the heartthrob moments—they too shall pass. Get over yourself.

3. If you post it in the "Free" section of Craigslist, they will come. I used to have lots of furniture. I don't anymore. I sold a few pieces, but most of it I gave away. Some went to Goodwill, some went to other worthy charitable organizations. None of it went to the sneery man from the Salvation Army. ("Pfft," he said, waving an arm over The Child's trundle bed in perfect condition. "This is heavy. And I have to think about me.") But Craigslist's Free section? A fantastic human drama playing out for an audience of one. People actually audition for you when you offer something for free. "This would be perfect for my little boy to put his crayons in!" "I grew up with those books, and I want to read them to my three girls." "We've been looking for one of these for a long time!" And they don't try to bargain you down from $40 to $20 because, you know, it's free. Time elapsed from the time I posted The Child's trundle bed on Craigslist to the time it left my house? 45 minutes.

4. Maximizing your pain is also minimizing your pain. Not everyone chooses to refurbish their house, sell their house, move across the country and edit a 650-page cookbook at the same time. Not everyone is a masochist. But there are definite advantages to boxing things up once and getting them out of your house once. I can't say the same for the cookbook.

5. Certain things stink. I have a cough I didn't used to have. I chalk it up to the new paint and the new carpet and the newly reglazed, cartoonishly white kitchen sink and resurfaced shower pan. They look beautiful, but they smell. Get out of the house.

6. Certain things should never be said out loud. "Maybe no one will take this middle seat between the aisle and the window." "Wow, traffic is moving really nicely." "I think we've had as many plumbing problems as one household can be expected to have."

7. It's all relative. We had no kitchen sink and no dishwasher (poor us!) for a week. Our friend Pam had no discernible hot water in her apartment through the entire summer and into the fall, and didn't complain to her landlord because her landlord's husband was unwell. When the truth finally came out, the landlord was not grateful for Pam's thoughtfulness; instead, she trudged up the rickety stairs to Pam's apartment and complained about having to put in a new hot water heater. "I'm the tenant," Pam explained. "You're the landlord. It's your responsibility." Did I mention she had no bathroom for several days after her floor fell on her downstairs neighbor's head? I no longer have any complaints.

8. Happy Hours are the answer to everything. Most things. Okay, some things. Nothing in the fridge? A new sink you can't touch? Fumes you can't breathe? Bring on the $3 beers and free hot dogs!

9. Your home leaves you before you leave home. Our place looks kind of astonishingly great. It's clean, it's light, it's spacious. It's no showplace, but it's kind of a nicely Zen blank canvas. I think even Miss Hepburn would approve of its New England austerity. I thought I'd be kicking myself around the block for having waited so long to do these things. Instead, I realized something: It's not my house anymore. I'm just caretaking it for the next owner. And that's okay. This domestic Master Cleanse has helped me divorce myself from my home.

10. This too shall come. We're in New York now, preparing for a brand-new kind of Thanksgiving. The Child will arrive from college tomorrow. We're putting together the new bookshelves. The new futon chair was delivered today. It's a little bit of chaos, but that's okay. If it's chaos, it must be home.

The Madwoman of Chaillot

So far I've only cried twice. Okay, I also choked up a little when my washing machine hose sprang a leak, but I hadn't had any coffee yet and it all just seemed like a little too much.

Once upon a time—say, a week plus one day ago—I had things down to a science: painting would be finished by Monday, kitchen floor installed Tuesday, new carpet a week later, furniture arranged in pleasing configurations, meet with the realtors and get out of Dodge for Thanksgiving.

No.

The carnival began last week, when my sainted brother-in-law and nephew arrived from Marin County to paint the place. Bob is a singing Irishman—he sings when he wakes up, he sings when he drives off at 7 in the morning to a painting job, he sings through the day, he sings before dinner, he sings as he goes to bed.

But the song died in his throat and his smile froze in place as he took in the water-stained vaulted cottage-cheese ceilings, the still-overcrowded bookshelves, and the godawful decorative remnants left from the previous owners: fringe glued on to every single shelf edge; metallic gold wrapping paper encircling every closet rod; warped plastic shelf liners. Incredibly, these things had seemed sort of amusingly kitsch to me when I moved in, so I left them alone and forgot about them. Ten years later, it was like waking up in the middle of a nightmare.

As Bob and Terry started prepping the rooms, I ran around documenting the traces that were about to disappear under a new layer of Swiss Coffee-colored paint. The measurements on the doorframe...






















...the wall in The Child's room.

















I created arrangements of The Child's things and e-mailed the pictures to her at college, asking, "Keep or toss?"






















(Keep.)

My beloved and I worked maniacally to box things up, schlepping stuff from room to room to try and stay ahead of the painting wave. The cat was not pleased by this turn of events.






















Meanwhile, I fielded dozens of Craigslist e-mails from people coveting my solid pine desk hutch, my sweet antique-ish dresser, my papa-san chair. A trail of young people who'd just moved to L.A. from Virginia and Texas and Long Island trooped in and out of the clutter, bearing off my possessions.

In the midst of the chaos, my three angelic sisters brought over a generous picnic lunch that we ate all together on the sundeck, along with Lucy the pug, who enjoyed her munches in the shade of a Monet umbrella:






















When everyone left that day, it was time for my first meltdown. Amid the paint cans, the ladders, the draped furniture and the constantly migrating cat-food bowl, my beloved—who four months ago had neck surgery and has been trying to go easy on his back—expressed his anger.

He'd been trying to tell me for months that we weren't doing enough to prepare for this moment, and found himself beyond frustrated by the chaotic condition of things in the house. Plus his arm was aching from all the lifting and from a sudden wrench while removing a heavy wooden CD rack from the wall. And the worst thing: He felt his opinion didn't matter to me at all.

I reacted with typical Hepburnesque flair: I sobbed snottily, lurching from room to room in search of the Kleenex box that I'd packed in the back closet.

He was right, and I felt horrible. I'd been trying to continue living a normal life, taking a box to the Goodwill here and there as a token gesture of packing up, while dismissing his warnings as overly dour and pessimistic. I wanted to show him I was true to my word—that we'd be out of L.A. by the end of the year—but I wasn't working with him as a partner in the moving process. It was a ridiculous, self-defeating exercise, and it crashed on me that night.

Somehow we talked it out, I relinquished some control, we got rid of more stuff, the painting was nearly finished, and we began to see the outlines of a pared-down, organized new home. The fog started to lift.

Then my downstairs neighbor showed up at our front door on Saturday morning and announced that water was dripping on his head from his kitchen ceiling.

The next few days were like a Keystone Kops movie—by way of Fellini.

Monday: 8 plumbers, 3 painters, 10 hours in a single kitchen. Dishwasher removed. Holes gouged in walls. Leak determined to be coming from the drain line.

Tuesday: 2 different plumbers, 5 hours. Drain line replaced. Dripping continues. Leak determined to be coming from the risers. Risers to be replaced tomorrow. Dishwasher sits in middle of dining room. Wash dishes in bathroom sink. Watch pool of water spread across bathroom floor, from newly sprung leak in drain pipe under bathroom sink. Susan has quiet weep over realization that there's no such thing as home anymore.

Wednesday a.m.: Put load of laundry in washing machine. Turn on washing machine. Water spews from water valve.

Wednesday p.m.: Lone plumber arrives with single screwdriver. Announces he's there to remove wood siding then go away. Susan turns into screaming banshee (Susan is never a screaming banshee). No risers replaced. No use of kitchen sink.

Wednesday p.m. postscript: Plumber with screwdriver fixes leaks in bathroom sink and in washing machine faucet. Susan regrets neurotic screaming banshee behavior.

Thursday: 2 plumbers, 13 1/2 hours. Shiny new copper risers in place. Delivering clear, rust-free water to kitchen faucet for first time in 10 years.

Friday: Dishwasher sits in middle of dining room. The carnival continues.

The Iron Petticoat

Me: Miss Hepburn, I had the strangest dream. I—

KH: Oh good lord, not a dream story. Don't you know that dreams are never as interesting to the listener as they are to the dreamer?

Me: Actually, yes, I know that, but—

KH: Well, if you're determined to tell it.

Me: I dreamed that I was chaperoning Bill Clinton to his surprise birthday party. Madeline Albright was there, of course, and Tippi Hedren. And I was trying to keep track of who was ordering the steak and who was ordering the lamb by poking holes in a dinner roll with the tines of a fork. Needless to say, this wasn't very—

KH: What on God's green earth are you talking about?

Me: Yes, exactly, it was very confusing. And sort of upsetting.

KH: You must be easily upset.

Me: People were waiting...I couldn't keep track of anything...Bill was getting annoyed...

KH: And what do you think this means?

Me: Well, it may have to do with the couch.

KH: Of course it does.

Me: The 900-pound couch is finally gone. There are huge divets in the carpet where it used to be. After getting rejected by the Salvation Army—

KH: You do have a gift.

Me: —I put it on Craigslist under "Free" and a nice guy and his big, strong teenage son came and took it away.

KH: Excellent. The couch needed to go. So what does this have to do with Bill Clinton?

Me: Well, nothing, obviously. But we're in a state of chaos here.

KH: Oh, you don't know the meaning of chaos. Have you seen me play a Chinese peasant in Dragon Seed?

Me: Okay, "chaos" is a little strong. "Disarray."

KH: You're selling your home and moving across the country. Did you expect to remain arrayed?

Me: I donated my wedding china to the UCLA Thrift Store, and the framed James and the Giant Peach poster from The Child's room. We're shredding years' worth of ancient bank statements. We have carpet samples on the floor and boxes everywhere. Some even have things in them.

KH: And?

Me: Well, that's it, I guess. I just feel so...scattered. So out of order.

KH: It's the disorder before the order, that's all. Think of the disorder I put poor Cary Grant through in Bringing Up Baby. And that ended happily, didn't it?

Me: It did.

KH: And you do realize you're not the first person ever to do this?

Me: Yes, of course I do. It's just odd, watching your life history evaporate in front of your eyes.

KH: Oh, let's avoid the melodrama, shall we? Joan Crawford you are not.

Me: Sorry.

KH: Now just roll up your sleeves and dive right in. Do the work.

Me: I am.

KH: No, you're not. You're sitting here talking to me. Go to it! Work clockwise! Don't touch anything twice! Take pictures of things to remember them by if you must, then throw them out! Take charge!

Me: Yes, ma'am!

KH: Just don't ask me to help.

"I would I were at home."

I've been trying for several days to write a piece about feeling discombobulated, but I haven't been able to get myself combobulated enough to write it.

I feel like a sparrow hopping between twigs, with no perch to land on.

Last Thursday, I drove from New York to The Child's college for Family & Friends weekend. It rained on me most of the way up—when it wasn't snowing. Little did the college know that I had almost no intention of attending the myriad events scheduled (the better to extract donations for a shrinking endowment, my dear), and that I was using the weekend as an excuse to soak up time with my daughter.

Because I waited too long to make reservations, the only hotel room I could get was a half-hour drive from the school. Then I found out about a wonderful program called "Beds for Books," in which local residents rent out rooms in their homes during special college weekends and donate all the money to the local library. I signed up, and was matched with a couple who lived across the street from the college. Genius! And in a wild stroke of coincidence, the husband turned out to be one of The Child's professors. Awkward!

Actually they were lovely, although for obvious reasons, neither I nor The Child was comfortable with the idea of lolling about their house for relaxed visits. And because she refused to let me see the inside of her dorm cell, that meant we spent three days looking for things to do in 35-degree weather, rather than just hanging out and being. We did a lot of driving and meal-eating. In an odd way, being together like this made me miss her more.

Of course, it was still October in New England, and I went snap-happy as I...

...drove onto the campus:

















...crunched through the woods:

















...admired the leaves in a tiny creek:

















...scoured the empty shelves at the local market for their insanely popular cider doughnuts, only to be offered one that had just come out of the oven:























...waited in the car in the rain for my oversleeping child to join me for our final brunch:

















...handed her the camera as we drove past the house selling pumpkins from their front yard:

















...and watched her return to her dorm before I turned the car around and headed back to New York:






















It felt like a long drive back—though a quick visit to my favorite McDonald's ladies' room in Southington, Connecticut, with its inexplicable choices in wall art, cheered me up for a minute:






















As soon as I got back to New York, it was time to move out of the loft: The guys were coming first thing Monday morning to refinish the floors. We spent Monday trooping through the streets of the Village, catching a movie, and then spending a restless night in a friend's apartment, where the radiator clanged so loudly I'd swear someone was hitting it with a baseball bat.

Tuesday I flew home. Where is that, exactly? Oh right, Los Angeles. The condo where we've just begun the process of getting rid of everything we've stored up for 10 years. Where my daughter's room is stripped bare. Where the carpet is...beyond description. The place where I now feel more like a visitor than I do in New York.

Today I met with the realtors who will help me sell the condo. I'll get it painted, get new kitchen flooring, replace the carpet. Get rid of my lousy furniture and rent a decent-looking dining room table and chairs. And we'll live in a pretend house for a while until we finally pack up our jammies and my favorite stemless wineglasses and The Child's funky antique dresser and head east.

We'll leave "home" to go home.

* * * * *

Title courtesy Rosalind in William Shakespeare's As You Like It, in which Miss Hepburn starred in 1950.

Woman of the Year

The other night we had a mini dinner party with a dear friend and my beloved's Number 2 son and daughter-in-law. I cooked a casual supper, we drank beer and wine, we ate cupcakes for dessert, and had a generally delightful and sociable time. And I realized I was channeling my mother while we were doing it.

When I was little, I'd eavesdrop from down the hall as my mom and dad hosted dinner parties in our living and dining rooms. I'd hear the sounds of matches being struck as cigarettes were lit, and of ice cubes clinking in glasses, and loud peals of laughter as my dad told funny Hollywood stories in his skillful raconteur style.

All the time, my mom would be working away in the kitchen putting final touches on the dinner (I remember the Chicken Veronique, with green grapes tucked among the chicken breasts), chatting with female guests who'd slip in to see how she was doing or to offer help (I'd guess Mom rarely took it), and generally making the whole event look smooth and effortless.

She ran the whole house that way.

In no way was it effortless raising six children—four of them born so close together that she had four children under the age of 5 in the 1950s and four teenagers in the 1960s. Or moving the family from city to city when my dad's job as a Time-Life correspondent took him across the country and to England and back. Or getting her master's in her late 40s and her Ph.D. at 60. But we never saw her sweat. (That's a trick I haven't learned.)

The night of our dinner party was my mom's 84th birthday. While I seriously doubt I made the whole thing look effortless, and though my mother was in Los Angeles while I was scrambling around our New York kitchen, I felt her spirit with me as I chopped and simmered and tried to make conversation at the same time.

I'm a lot like my dad in some obvious ways. I went into journalism straight out of college, just like he did—for Time-Life, even. We express ourselves best in writing. We have similar senses of humor, looking at the world from an oblique angle and inserting a sharp verbal blade.

But my mom is the unassuming role model who has demonstrated—not preached, but shown by gentle, loving example—the art of living a generous life. I have a long way to go, but I hope to get there someday.

Happy Birthday, Mom. Thank you.

The West Side Waltz

When we arrived in New York a week ago today I discovered this picture, which had been slipped under our front door.





















A thoughtful neighbor and fellow Hepburn devotee had taken it from the Talbot's catalog to share it with me. (Talbot's...Hepburn...no. But I digress.)

It was the perfect welcome, a smashing-of-the-champagne-bottle-over-the-prow kind of gesture.

Even though I don't officially live live here yet—there's the whole pesky matter of selling my condo in Los Angeles and, you know, moving—this feels like a practice live-here. I'm working, shopping for groceries, cooking (a little), going to the post office, meeting friends for dinner, doing laundry, buying toilet paper. And I'm a little giddy while I do it.

I keep taking out my camera phone to record moments. Everything seems photogenic here:

The architecture:

















The pilings of a ghost pier in the Hudson River, marking a trail to Hoboken, New Jersey:






















The High Line, the former elevated railway that's been transformed into landscaped walkway in the air, sailing over the trendy Meatpacking District and the grit of 10th Avenue:

















And the view from our living room window, which I can't take my eyes off of, morning...

















...afternoon...

















...and night.

















Plus, we do things here. It's really easy to do things here.

Yesterday, we went up to the New York Public Library's Performing Arts branch at Lincoln Center, where there was a special exhibit called "Katharine Hepburn: In Her Own Files." It featured photographs, letters, posters and scripts from Hepburn's theater career, beginning with her days as a student at Bryn Mawr through her late-life performances in Coco and A Matter of Gravity. There were some wonderful pieces in the exhibit, including a fan letter from Judy Garland (who added, "I'm getting fat, pregnant, and mean") and Hepburn's statement on the Kent State shootings, which she delivered to the audience after a performance of Coco ("Now you may call them rebels or rabble-rousers or anything you please. Nevertheless, they were our kids and our responsibility").

I was particularly struck by her typescripts from the plays she was in, marked in extraordinary detail in her own handwriting—notes on blocking or inflection or character. It seemed that almost every line of dialogue was accompanied by a notation she'd written on where to cross the stage or how to emphasize a word. Miss Hepburn was a star, a personality, a legend. But she also did the damn work.

After we left the exhibit, we walked 30 blocks down Columbus and 9th Avenues, then caught the subway home. At 8:15 last night, we headed out again. Let me pause here. I said, we went out in the afternoon, and then we went out again in the evening. At 8:15 at night. To have dinner and see a 9:40 p.m. movie. And then we walked home at midnight.

These are things we don't do much of in L.A. The going out twice in a day thing. The 30 blocks and the subway thing. The walking home at midnight.

It's been exhilarating. I'm grinning a lot, and whacking Stan on the shoulder, and saying "Isn't this great?"

But I also look forward to taking on a new role. I want to open the typescript, do my research, write my notations, deliver the performance. I'm ready to do the damn work.