Beyond the house,
across the United States, truckloads of cold bodies lined Central Park as the gray March air turned from late afternoon to night, while overhead, apartment-dwellers cheered from out their windows for the nurses and the doctors, the cashiers and the garbage men, and other normal people who were working with the dead and the infected. At least, that’s how the New York Times portrayed it. Or that’s what I imagined from the mattress on the floor of our apartment, swiping my thumb across photos of Manhattan and Shanghai, London and Italy – their hospitals and vacant city streets – while outside, here, the car horns blasted from the parking lot of Gelson’s on Franklin.
We came here when our toilet broke. It really was the oven that broke first, and then the toilet. Our needs and the family’s fortuitously aligned: David’s grandmother was home alone in quarantine; we were without a toilet or oven in 600 feet of space. Her needs were fairly minimal, her children had assured us. And Newsom said the lockdown should be done at the end of May. In surgical masks, we entered the house through a side door that was carefully propped open. We dropped our bags on the washing machine, a month’s supply of Trader Joe’s snacks, charger cords and clothing. We’d taken the 101 to the 405 to the Skirball exit. We’d be together in the house for the rest of that year.
The first thing that I noticed was that everything inside the house was white. The tall foyer walls were papered with a white-on-cream damask; white carpets covered the floors, their blank tufts saturated with a threat of coffee not yet spilled upon them. A porcelain chandelier hung prominently in the dining room, whose walls and curtains also were white damask, and opened onto a living room furnished with ornate crystal objects – candlesticks, vases, statuettes of animals – and another porcelain plate on a low glass coffee table angled in the center of the room.
The home’s owner, its sole inhabitant, resembled its interior. Betty Jane – BJ – was a matriarch to four whom she had raised there, and during which time was also abruptly widowed; in her homemaking years, she’d played tennis between the secretary pool and weeknight dinners made from scratch. Now 93, she’d shrunken to a hunched 5 feet, her weight dropping likewise and her gait slowing down to a cane-assisted shuffle.
Yet also like the house, despite or perhaps because of apparent age, she was strikingly elegant and severe; out of time with one world and still the clear arbiter of another one’s rules. Her hair was a sleek blown-out bob shaped like a gumdrop, white like the carpets and smooth like the ceramic chandelier. It framed a bony face with a long, sharp nose and huge, heavy-lidded eyes beneath neatly arching penciled gray-black eyebrows. Her fingers were thin and tapered, their nails manicured a light shell pink; their elongated shape evoked the slanted cursive she wrote in grocery lists and date books with gold-edged pages. She was beautiful: though older than a ghost, her presence was vivid, a slow-moving dart of consistency tipped with vanity, and weighted with the blunt practicality distinctive of the Greatest Generation.
Against the backdrop of a virus often lethal to the elderly, our quarantine was strictly confined within the walls of BJ’s house. As long as we stayed six feet away from the world outside of Grandma, then we could breathe and eat as we liked within the quiet museum of rooms where we cohabitated. We were a Pod, as some were coming to call the small groups of people who socialized indoors together, attempting to lessen the risk of isolation-induced insanity. Some days our quarantine seemed to successfully prevent that psychological risk; others seemed to charge directly toward it.
The longer I spent in the house, the more its objects seemed ensouled with something: BJ’s previous selves, the secrets shared by women; a kind of aspiration, the 20th Century. Photographs, china, books and mementos formed a portrait of the era that her life had mostly spanned, a spatial depiction of one Jewish family’s American tale from Depression to empire to whatever the hell this was. The rooms held them all in hazy balance between truth and ambition, each glamorous object a reach beyond the Pittsburgh orphanage, the Nazi-occupied suburb; the immigrant community, the working class from which she and her late husband had respectively come.
Outside, the world was jolting daily, at times an earthquake of uprising, at others a more fluid reality. Friendships shifted as subtly or abruptly as the news itself. In some ways, experiencing these seismic upheavals within the uncanny stillness of BJ’s house was disorienting, creating a feeling that the world beyond its walls was distant folklore. At others, it was poignant, reframing the history unfolding outside as new points within the constellation of earlier eras that were preserved like butterfly specimens inside. At night, David and I drove on Sepulveda, from West LA to the deep East Valley, listening to jazz along streets both lit up and vacant. We had been tested by cohabitating, caretaking and isolation, yet were also newly strengthened by our challenges and routines. When Coltrane improvised, I felt peaceful hearing the notes through David’s musician ears: the band operated without structure, receptive to possibility, seizing it when noticed. Sepulveda twinkled by while the car moved through it.
Two points in the house always struck me. The first was a wide-format photograph, hung upstairs in a hallway on a wall of family frames. It showed 25 people in a banquet room, their faces somber and dignified, half smiling with corsages at a table lined with water carafes and lilies. Beneath them is inscribed by hand: DAVID MOSCHKOWITZ BAR MITZVAH RECEPTION, LOS ANGELES OCTOBER 30 1938. The Bar Mitzvah boy stands with his parents in the back, one year and one day after their boat docked in America. He would never to go home or speak German again, and would die 37 years later on a treadmill off the hall where that photo was hung. The Jews in the picture were other immigrants. Their stares were proud with sacrifice, together in traditions they had given up all else they knew to continue. I saw the bar mitzvahs of my own youth in early 2000s LA private school, their glow-sticks and airbrushed souvenir t-shirts, and felt dizzy with the vertigo of time. My life was not my life but just a pin within a process, the last stop on one century’s assimilation train and the first stop for the people in the 80 years to come.
The other point was a vista opening out from the house’s backyard, a panoramic view of rolling mountains in Mulholland Canyon. On clear days, Mt. Baldy appeared with its snow cap; at dinner times, the ocean mist would drown the empty chasms in fog. Against the manicured homes and jewel-green swimming pools dotting the landscape, its essence still was wild: trees grew thick past the reach of power tools and architects, mustard plants bloomed and exploded and died as birds and squirrels darted in and through them. The inside world – the lives lived behind doors, in rooms; the time held in closets and cabinets and boxes – seemed an infinite set of reflexive meanings, a tunnel of mirrors that faced one another and led to the core of the Earth. When I slid the glass pane open in the kitchen, pulling the old screen behind it and stepping in the air outside, I felt my feet on the sun-warmed concrete and the light against my face. The hummingbirds and squirrels didn’t know about our problems. The canyon’s trees would burn to ash, and then regrow in cycles of fire and rain. Mt. Baldy watched 10,000 feet above us from the east. The view appeared contained, but it continued.