I am gritting my teeth and saying nothing right now. I am so mad that I could spit.
And worse, I can place my anger nowhere. No one deserves it.
I am listening to an air filtering device made by some Korean company that my husband won in a raffle. It was free, not to mention it has a pointlessly flashy LED display panel on the front indicating what kind of level of air cleaning it’s doing at the time, so he decided it was very cool and placed it, with its 1970s faux-wood-panel and square aluminum box shape, looking like a 1970s alarm clock magnified about 20 times, in the middle of my otherwise antique Shanghai furnished living room. When you take out one of the filters to clean it (the magnetic ones — there are six of different types), it plays an electronic musicbox version of There’s No Place Like Home. This is perhaps the most annoying, ugly, sty one could place in my eye, directly in front of what would have been at least some semblance of a fireplace (it’s faux as well, but at least that wasn’t our doing).
My husband has no sense of these things. He has no sense of history or art when it comes to surroundings. He wants everything to be clean and modern, whereas I grew up with simple modern lines to the point of inanity, and crave an elaborate castle out of the middle ages, or a multipatterned Mongolian yurt, or Turkish casbah, or something more comfortably eclectic as that. He has no sense of beauty except a sort of Asian idea of modernity and freshness. It’s in every Japanese, Hong Kong, or Korean magazine I’ve ever picked up. I know it well, with its air fresheners and plastic corner bins and its chrome racks. It’s …. someone else’s idea of a life. It’s a cramped version of the American dream stuffed into the small chambers of the East. And he doesn’t see how I can feel this way. Why would I want that old stuff?
This breaks my heart.
He truly never understands.
After an entire weekend inside the apartment, where I neither felt like creating, cleaning, nor working, the dimness and the L.A.-ness was getting to me. The Spanish yelling outside the windows, the cigarette smoke in the wind, the litter on the parkway, the flat 1970s buildings that once long ago had that sort of Asian idea of modernity and freshness but now are covered with graffiti and closed with metal accordion gating.
I wanted to get out. The ambient television was playing a show on public television while we were both typing at our keyboards, about the San Francisco earthquake. They were showing the beautiful vistas on all the streets I called home for so long. I always obligatorily point and moan like E.T. whenever they come on a TV screen.
“HOOOOOOME.!!” I say. (It’s the same voice I use when I see something dear to me. “Moose!!” or “Pitties!” or “DOG!!” I say.)
My precious, my home. The only years I was truly happy were there.
The claustrophobia hit a high and Let’s go for a drive, I said. Can’t we just go for a drive?
He didn’t really care to, but knew how I felt. He didn’t want to go but was gracious enough to take me out. He knows I’d rather the two of us went together, because for me, that’s the point — I want to share a perfect beautiful time with him. Then came the disasterous question.
So WHERE do you want to go?? he says.
Up to the hills, I said, can we go up to see a view?
But WHERE, he said.
Can’t we just drive that way? Just GO?
Griffith Park Observatory is still closed, he said. We’ve already been up there anyway. He looks puzzled.
(He’s looking at me like I’m crazy. Why would one want to go up there again if you’ve seen it already?)
What about the rest of the hills?, I said. What do they mean when they say Hollywood Hills?, I said hopefully.
That’s the Valley, he said. (This means: No way, we’re not going there, it’s a traffic nightmare.)
What about the hills above where I work? Or above Beverly Hills?
There’s nothing to see up there, he said. It’s all blocked with houses.
But they’re nicer houses! I said, nodding. Yes, that would be fine.
Honey, you can’t see anything up there but bushes, he said.
Well, please can’t we turn around and go UP instead of down toward the freeway and the beach?
He gets disgusted, seeing no point, and turns the car around and heads it over toward the east, not north, as I keep pointing.
He goes to Western avenue, one of the ugliest streets in Koreatown, and then turns north. We have 15 minutes of ugliness ahead.
He’s doing this because it’s quicker, I’m sure. He wants to avoid traffic. His idea is to get me where I want to go quickly, show me the damn grand canyon or whatever, and go home.
We get up toward the hills. I tell him, can’t you go up this way?, still trying to pull him from the main traffic artery off into something with visual interest.
He turns up the street AFTER the one I point to. It’s a yellow triangled sign to the right side, and I say, “It’s a dead end.”
He either doesn’t hear or ignores me. Up we go.
It’s a beautiful neighborhood, white stucco mansions, bird of paradise plants, moroccan windows, statuary. I am enjoying myself till we wind up to the driveway of some rich person. He turns around. We come down. He hadn’t understood it was a dead end.
I enjoy for five minutes and he comes down onto another eastern route, Sunset. Sunset is burger joints and Target and shoechains. Boring boring boring boring.
Can’t we go on some other street? I ask. He tries another one with old glam highrises and it’s under construction. We sit for ten minutes until he turns around out of the stalled line of cars.
Now I feel guilty. I should have just taken the car without him. He’s having un-funness galore. He doesn’t understand anything I’m asking for and everything is now conspiring against us.
Eventually he descends down to another quick artery, Wilshire, that I travel every damn day of my life. That’s all I do is go up and down Wilshire, doesn’t he know that?
He doesn’t seem to care at this point, he just wants to get home. To his websurfing and his ambient television.
There’s no point in asking for him to go anywhere else. He’d just be frustrated with me.
I watch all the familiar shapes go by and wonder why I married. No one else ever wants what I want.
I don’t know why I keep expecting them to share my world.
I don’t live where they live.
I’m in here. Alone.
Tinkle tinkle little airfilter box. Your days are numbered.
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