Chapter 4
Grant: I Once Had A Girl
Here’s the thing about Greener Valley. You’re either part of it or you’re not. You either get it or you don’t. To try to bring in an outsider is a strange and difficult experience. I’m not the only one who tried it. A lot of the kids here meet other kids at the mall in Weston or at football games or whatever and they bring their boyfriends and girlfriends into Greener Valley. It’s a weird thing with the people here. We try to assimilate everyone into the town experience. We don’t just invite them to dinner to meet the parents or bring them to the Fourth of July Parade. We try to get them to get the town. We try to make them understand. And they can’t. They just can’t. They don’t get the whole Stu McLundy thing. They don’t get the isolation or the way we seem to exist in some shadow of the past.
I met Cherilynn in Los Angeles. She was at one of my exhibits. Not because she liked my art or because she liked any art at all; she was there because her yoga studio was next door and she had nothing to do after the studio closed that night. So she sauntered around my exhibit in yoga pants and a t-shirt that said, predictably, “Yoga instructors do it with more flexibility” and she stuck out like a Trekkie at a Star Wars convention. Everyone else was dressed up; women in impossible shoes that made their feet arch at strange angles, men in stiff suits drinking stiff drinks. Rich, delicate people staring quizzically at my art, but buying it even if they didn’t understand it because buying it made it looked like they understood it.
Cherilynn walked the floor in her New Balance sneakers, grabbing finger sandwiches off trays held up by young men eyeing other young men. She was oblivious to it all; to the stuffy air, to the reek of new money, to the eyebrows raised in her direction. Something about this turned me on. Granted, it doesn’t take much to turn me on. But this was a different kind of turn-on. She offered me no cleavage to stare down, no ass to measure up, no sculpted facial features I was so used to getting from the women I wooed. She was as comfortable in her yoga outfit and air of displeasure as I was in a room full of cocaine. And I liked that. It was when she came up to me, offered her hand – after wiping sandwich crumbs off on her pants - and said “Nice to meet you. You know, your art is kind of bullshit. It’s nice to look at and all, but it doesn’t mean anything” that she really made me want to fuck her.
And I did. Three times that night and countless times in the months that followed. We moved in together in a small apartment in a dreary L.A. suburb beset with smog, sushi restaurants and a prevailing sense of despair that made me miss the sublime sameness of Greener Valley. The thing I sought to escape when I moved to California was the thing I wanted back. Cherilynn could sense my unhappiness but she stuck with me anyway, hanging on through my drinking, my drugging, my cheating on her and my declining ability to sell my art.
I begged her to move Greener Valley with me. I told her it would be good for me, it would clean me up, get me back to a place where I could be creative, make some money and get my good name back. For reasons I can’t fathom, she placed her trust in me and moved to Greener Valley.
It lasted three weeks. It wasn’t just about her not getting the nuances of the town or not fitting it in. It’s cliche to say, but true: you can take the girl out of California but you can’t take the California out of the girl. And all she wanted from the moment she step foot in Greener Valley was to be back in California. She missed the city. She missed walking out of our apartment and being in the middle of everything. She missed the noise, she missed her Yoga studio, she missed everything. And yea, it was the town. Listening to Scratch and Skip drove her mad. The hokey way we go about our business of daily living as if we were picked from some tv show and placed in a façade town to live out our lives. And there was the other stuff.
“I can feel something brewing in this town, Grant.”
All that yoga stuff went to her head sometimes.
“No, I can feel, it Grant. Like a rumbling. An existential earthquake rumbling just under the surface. This place is full of shadows and who knows what else lurking in the corners. It’s creepy and weird and I want to go home.”
Home. So that was it. L.A. was still home. Greener Valley wasn’t. Did I ever think she would think of this place as home? Probably not. She only handed over the keys to her studio to an employee and I think that anyone who was intent on really moving away would have done something more like sell the studio or something, not just act as if she’d be back in a couple of weeks. I let that go when it was happening because there was a part of my brain that really believed she would fall in love with Greener Valley once she got here.
She didn’t. Obviously. She left last week and we promised we’d try to keep up a long distance relationship and I’d come out to L.A. to see her and she’d fly into New York every once in a while if I promised to meet her in the city and not make her stay in Greener Valley. Sure, I told her. Sure. But I had my fingers crossed behind my back. Because really, I never wanted to go back to L.A. And I was pretty sure she didn’t want to come to New York. I was sort of heartbroken but the breaking of my heart was so dulled by the gin I was drinking that I never really let the sadness of it sink in. And I’m pretty sure you don’t want to hear about it.
Greener Valley is completely insulated. We don’t let people in. And when they do come in, they freak out about it. Rightfully so, it turns out. I should probably send Cherilynn an email when this clusterfuck clears up. Something like “Hey, 8.5 existential earthquake here. You were right. Miss you. Smiley face.”