Chapter One

I spent my entire childhood dreaming of living in Los Angeles. It never occurred to me that, having finally arrived in Southern California, I would ever leave it voluntarily. But now that smog bowl of never-ending amusement had nothing further to offer me. The sprawl of the city faded behind me and I did not look back. Los Angeles was like a lover who had spun me a grand, golden lie that I could inhabit only as long as I did not question it.

I headed up the I-5 freeway, past the Grapevine and toward the center of California. The temperature was at least 95∞ and my yellow VW convertible offered no shade. Angry red stripes of sunburn lashed my shoulders, but I wouldn’t let myself pull over. I shifted the straps of my tank top back and forth, hoping that somehow this would result in a tan. My right foot cramped up from the pressure on the gas pedal. I’d already played most of my favorite tapes, so I repeatedly hit the scan button on my radio. Nothing but a few random country and classic rock stations. Another symbol of how much I was leaving behind; all the little things like my favorite DJs and the latest music. Could I really do this, trade my life as an adult movie actress for a macrobiotic commune in the middle of nowhere?

People never talk about the middle of California. Always either Los Angeles or San Francisco. There is a reason for that. The middle of California is like the middle of Texas. Instant Midwest. Farmland and flat as far as the eye can see. I began to doubt myself, to consider the option that I had made the wrong choice. The road, my life, all of it. Twenty-four years old and I had fucked up so badly that my only choice was flight. Things could only get better, I rationalized; I would be fine. But if I didn’t find a song I liked on the radio soon, I was going to get too scared and change my mind. I could still turn my car around and go back to our beige apartment on La Cienega, put my clothes back in the mirrored closet, take a tranquilizer and have a nice long nap.

My boyfriend, Doug, couldn’t believe I would leave. Not after he’d brought me this far. It occurred to me that women find themselves doing things that are wrong because of men while men do wrong things because they damn well want to. It was rather late in the game to have this sort of revelation, after I had surrendered everything I had and everything I was to his will. When I got the call that I had been accepted for the work-study program at the Aurora Macrobiotic Center, it was good news I could share with no one. I had no real friends anymore; no one who would congratulate me. Only Doug, who would not allow his meal ticket to walk blithely out the door.

“You can't leave,” he said, stalking across the room. “What will you do?” He was always alert, always in charge, but he found himself blindsided by my impending departure.

“I have somewhere to go. I have a job.” I pushed myself off our cream-colored leather sofa, knowing that it was better to keep moving than to remain seated while he lumbered around the room. He hadn’t lost his football body, built from long hours at the gym, protein powders and certain illegal injectables. If not for that wrenching knee injury, who knows where we could have ended up? I tried not to think of our lost future, the days I would never spend in the stadium cheering on my NFL linebacker husband. No wedding ring, no house, no fancy cars and now, at last, no Doug.

“A job? Doing what?” He came to a stop in front of me, inches taller, despite the fact that I was wearing stiletto sandals. The hint of an ironic smile curved his lips. He couldn’t imagine me as a nine-to-fiver, and as much as I hated being what Doug thought, I had to agree. After what we had been doing for the past three years, the idea of me working a normal job was laughable. A girl doesn’t go from porn star to secretary; that arc works only in reverse. Instead, I had chosen total retreat. I was too far gone for half-measures. I didn’t tell him that it was only a six-month position. He would have seen that as a chink in the armor. I didn’t tell him that it was room and board only, that there was no salary. He would have laughed in my face.

“It's none of your business.” I looked down at the floor and then out the window, pretending sudden interest in the never-changing smoggy sky.

“Come on, Julie, you can tell me.” His voice turned silky as he tried to catch my gaze with his cool blue eyes. Did he believe he could make me think that he was concerned about me? The truth was that losing me would force a major lifestyle change for him. Porn was one of the few careers where salary disparity actually tilted in a woman’s favor; porn consumers bought based on the women not the men. My body paid our bills. Lately, I had begun to keep some money in a bank account I’d opened in my name instead of leaving everything in his account. In the beginning, I had been glad that he offered to handle the finances for me and I signed over my checks without questioning it. If we were going to be together forever what did it matter whose name was on the account? My money was his money. Until it started to disappear. Waiters and valets all over town applauded his generosity while I began to wonder what would happen when the well of my ability to earn ran dry.

The living room of our apartment felt so damned small and the space between the sofa and the chrome coffee table was a little alley trapping me into a corner. I breathed deeply and the room seemed to shimmer a bit.

“You won’t leave.” He lit a cigarette and sucked in a drag with a loud, smacking sound. “I know you. You won’t be able to give this up.”

He didn’t know me. Of course this was only because I did not know myself. Self-ignorance as a survival tool. “I am leaving the twenty-fourth.”

“The day after your birthday. Good. You won’t miss the party.”

“Party?” I had almost forgotten my birthday, but he had remembered. Doug could always be counted on to make me feel special on my birthday. That was the Doug I had fallen in love with, the thoughtful one.

“Some studio people, a few players, maybe make a little publicity and drum up some interest for the new project.” He looked away from me as he spoke.

The party was not a sweet gesture. Celebration serving the cause of business. My heart contracted with fresh pain and I marveled at the fact that his cruelties still had the power to wound me. A party. Translation: a bunch of sweaty wannabes and losers drinking free booze and reveling in their imagined coolness. A few players. Translation: some old greasy men who might invest money but only if they got to slide their hairy hands all over me for a few hours in the name of networking. The new project. Translation: three days in a studio in the Valley faking orgasms for the camera.

“There is no new project for me.”

“Fine, leave if you want, but at least play nice for the party. Come on, honey, you know I don’t want you to go. The whole thing with Lisa was just a big misunderstanding.” His words sounded flat and forced, like we were playing a scene and hurrying through the trite dialogue to get to the meat of things. He was rushing me through my own break-up. This time he had no need to stop me. He had obtained a spare girl and I was now expendable.

How had we gotten so far away from a simple relationship between a man and a woman? The excess of our lives had completely consumed him. For months, I had imagined that I could rescue us both and we would leave together. Our lives still seemed unreal. There were moments when we would be walking through the grocery store or shopping in the mall and I would think we were an ordinary couple. Then I would catch sight of my overly blonde, impossibly tarty profile in a store window and shame would flood me once again.


The sun was at its peak in the sky when I pulled over at a roadside restaurant. I consciously tried to walk so that no one would look at me. I kept my head down, not swinging my brown hair, hunching my shoulders to deflect attention from my breasts. I had bought all new clothes, leaving behind the tight miniskirts, the cutout dresses, the spiky heels in every shade of leather. Instead I wore olive khaki shorts with more pockets than I could ever fill and a heather-gray tank top. I had dyed and cut my shaggy, near-platinum mane into a respectable brunette shoulder-length cut. My new drabness felt like a disguise. Comfortable clothes made me uncomfortable.

I slumped into the diner and found a seat at the counter on a leatherette stool. The waitress handed me a menu.

“Anything to drink?”

“Diet Coke,” I said automatically. “No, wait, water will be fine, thanks.”

She shuffled away and I contemplated the menu. Two days before I would have been with Doug. He would have ordered for both of us. Burgers, rare, and chili fries. I should eat like the person I would have to become. Living at a macrobiotic center meant eating macrobiotically. The rules of macrobiotics were allegedly simple, a balance of yin and yang. To my novice eyes what they mainly appeared to be about was no. No meat, no sugar, no refined flour, no tropical fruit, no dairy. All the things that had been staples of my Southern California life. No more banana-mango smoothies for breakfast. No more Margaritas or Mudslides or any other of the thick and sweet drinks I numbed myself with during long self-hating afternoons. I found something pleasing in the idea of all this deprivation, my new masochism. But by those rules, there would be nothing on the restaurant menu for me. Screw it. There would be plenty of time to eat health food once I arrived. I owed myself a last meal.

“Chicken salad.” I smiled at the waitress. At least I didn’t have to pretend affection for hamburgers anymore. “And I’d like a Diet Coke, too, please.”

I had never eaten a meal in a restaurant alone and hardly knew what to do with myself. Desperate to look like I was busy, I grabbed a book out of my pink leather backpack. Principles of Macrobiotics. I had picked up the book in the health food store after I found out I had been accepted to Aurora. The seventies-style yellow cover and badly typeset pages did not inspire confidence. The paragraphs droned on in an excruciatingly dull and pedantic tone but I had to learn enough to fake my way into the safe nest I had chosen. Macrobiotics happened to be the first thing I had hit on. Perhaps it appealed to me because it was the most opposite to my current lifestyle. I had seen the ad in the back of a vegetarian magazine, which I only read as an attempt to rebel against Doug’s Texas meat-eater lifestyle. Northern California macrobiotic center seeks applicants for live-in residence positions. No experience necessary. After six years in the fetid superficiality of Southern California, a retreat northward sounded ideal. I pictured pine trees and hills, clean air and starlight. And I wouldn’t have to look for an apartment or find a group of friends, it would all be there for me in one place. But in order to claim my freedom I had to lie. No problem. The hairsprayed, tanned party girl I had been was a lie. Maybe the honor student who came before her was too. Looking into my past had the quality of staring into a hole so dark that I could not distinguish the bottom from the endless sliding emptiness.

The idea of me being at a macrobiotic center was ironic because I didn’t need to be there. People turned to macrobiotics generally to improve their physical wellbeing. Even though I had picked up numerous bad habits during my tenure in Southern California, I remained disgustingly healthy. I wondered if I should make up a lie, maybe a brain disease or a chronic depression. What I really needed was a good Latinate name for what ailed me, expornomelancholia or something like that.

I turned back to the book, trying to memorize the names of the grains these people ate. Quinoa, millet, amaranth—some of these I remembered from takeout lunches at Amber Waves, the health food restaurant in the Valley. They had seemed edible enough. But lunch wasn’t my choice most days and a full stomach wasn’t conducive to afternoon workouts, either clothed or naked. Mainly, I starved.

The waitress set my meal in front of me and ate slowly while reading of the dire consequences that faced the meat-eater. The author named the condition, SAD, the Standard American Diet. Over and over, he repeated the acronym as if he thought that meat and cheese led directly to unhappiness. Perhaps it did.


By the time I got close to the center it was nearly dark. The directions I had been sent by Carolyn, the center’s office manager, detailed each turn and the exact mileage with welcome precision. I drove down long, straight roads through small, flat towns, turning down smaller and smaller streets until it appeared, half-hidden by trees. The building was low and brown, spanning a wide portion of the street. A wooden sign painted with yellow letters proclaimed this was the Aurora Macrobiotic Center.

The directions advised me to pull my car around back into the parking lot. The lot was lower than the street, and a garden stretched out from where the small dirt parking area ended. I noticed how many wide, uncurtained windows there were. No faces in them, but I couldn’t be certain that I wasn’t being watched. If only I had put the top up on my convertible. Instead I was a sitting duck.

Imagine it as a set, I told myself. Play for a camera. That made it easier. I knew how to do that, to pull myself into a place where I could watch the movements of my body and not feel much of anything at all.

I picked up my pink leather Louis Vuitton backpack from the backseat and slung it over my shoulder in a choreographed carefree gesture. The only doorway I could see looked like a back door, up a set of rickety wooden stairs. Better to enter through the front door.

I opened the black iron gate and stepped up the long brick walkway and into the building. My heart began to pound but I kept thinking of the camera over my shoulder, taking in my every move.

An echoing white hallway spread out before me. The floors shone with an institutional clean. I would have thought this was a hospital except that it didn’t smell sterile; instead, cooking odors hung heavy in the air. No one was in sight but I could hear voices. I followed them down the hall to a set of swinging doors. With one deep breath, I pushed them open. The room was a restaurant-style kitchen. Heavy black stoves dominated one wall. Stainless steel counter top islands and an industrial dishwasher gleamed as if they had just been polished. It was all wrong, too professional—the shining metal everywhere frightened me. Those little lies I had told on my application, greatly expounding on my meager kitchen skills, might yet come back to haunt me.

A group of people clustered around the central counter island. They gazed up at me with uniform expressions of surprise and displeasure. I plunged ahead.

“I’m Julie Cooper,” I said. “I’m supposed to be here.”

A lanky plain-faced woman detached herself from the group, who were now sizing me up even more boldly. “I’m Arla,” she said. “I’m your roommate.”

Roommate. This had not been part of my plan. I had always had roommates, but I had imagined that this time I would be alone. I wasn’t sure whether I should be nervous or relieved. I took inventory; she was tall, thirty-five maybe, short dark hair and a face like wheat bread. Feminist, bohemian, politically correct, too I’d bet. Not my ideal choice of companion. Compared to her, my version of understated looked like Vegas showgirl wear. An alarm sounded in my body but I forced a friendly smile onto my face.

The other people around the table stared at me with frank curiosity. I imagined they could smell the impurity of my lunch or see that I was dying for a cigarette. I had worn the baggiest shirt I could fine but my high, rounded, obviously fake breasts strained against the cloth. My version of the natural life looked like the pure Los Angeles version, a bizarre adaptation at best.

“Let me introduce you around,” said Arla, clearly enjoying everyone’s reaction to me. “Ethan, Gina, John and Carolyn.” She waved her hand toward the group, giving me no clue as to who was whom. I smiled weakly in their direction, trying to guess identities. The younger guy with the red hair and freckles had to be John, making the older dark-haired man Ethan. Gina was the younger woman with the long, dark braid, which meant that Carolyn was the older woman with the unabashedly weedy gray hair and the firm frown lines.

“I’m Ethan Oggles,” said the red-haired man, blowing my theory straight out of the water.

“Ogles? Like the verb?” I would not allow myself to giggle.

Ethan sighed but Arla stepped in. “Exactly. He doesn’t like to admit it. I’ll show you your room so you can get settled.”

Arla went back through the double doors and I waved goodbye to the others, who did not wave back. I trailed after Arla, through another door and into a semi-dark hallway.

“We conserve electricity in the staff quarters,” Arla said. “You’ll get used to it.”

We passed three doors and then she stopped in front of one and opened the door. After she switched on the light, she turned to face me. “Here it is.”

The room was slightly larger than my walk-in closet back in Los Angeles. Two wooden twin beds stood on opposite sides of the room. Large metal closets flanked the beds and another doorway at the end of the room led to the outside. On the left, there was a miniscule bathroom, barely a cabinet, with a toilet and a small sink.

I had no problem figuring out which side of the room was mine. It was bare, a stark contrast to Arla’s side, which looked like a New Age store closeout sale. A garish purple batik covered the wall, crystals hung from the ceiling and misshapen glazed pots filled with paintbrushes, pens and incense sticks were lined up on the windowsill.

I tossed my backpack onto my new bed. It sank into the cotton mattress with no hint of a bounce. “I’m going to get the rest of my things from the car.”

“You don’t have too much stuff, do you?” Arla asked, alert to opportunities of encroachment.
“Hardly anything,” I said. It was the truth but I hated to say it. Already I was being pushed around. Same as always.

I walked back out to the car. I hadn’t been expecting much of a greeting but still I had hoped for a little glimmer of warmth. I felt like turning around and going home, except that I had no home. I had no choice but to stay so I hoisted my duffel bag on my shoulder and went back to the room.

Arla was gone. I could hear everyone talking down the hall. I wondered if I should join them and be social. The eight-hour drive from L.A. had exhausted me. I decided it was better to wait and win them over the next day when I was fresh. I opened up my bag and rooted around for something to sleep in. Boxers and a T-shirt seemed like the most practical choice and a luxury for me. Doug had liked me to sleep in sexy outfits, little bits of lace and silk that provided no coverage and little comfort. I brushed my teeth in the tiny sink and then tucked myself between the soft cotton sheets.

I was sleeping alone for the first time in years. How strange not to have another body to curl myself against. Despite his cruelty to me, my heart ached for the woodsy scent of Doug’s cologne and the heat of his muscled body. I fell asleep certain that I had made a grave mistake.