No Ordinary Life

I’d known MoVan for at least a year before she casually revealed that, a few years ago, she’d been in Playboy magazine. As part of a photo feature (is there any other type in Playboy?) titled something like “Women We Love Over 40.” “It was no big deal,” she said, shrugging, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a woman who was almost 50 to appear naked in a magazine. I never saw the pictorial. Not that MoVan was against me seeing it. She promised me--every time we agreed to have lunch--that she’d bring the magazine along. But then she’d show up without it and say she forgot. Again.

I don’t think she forgot because she was embarrassed by it. I think she forgot because, as she said, she didn’t want to make a big deal out of being a grandmother and a naked icon for college-aged (and older) boys. I also think that she didn’t want me to think of her as MoVan the Playboy Playmate. That certainly wasn’t how she thought of herself.

And since I’d known her for a year or so before the matter came up, it wasn’t how I thought of her either. I thought of her as my friend and as MoVan the artist. After all, she had a successful art gallery, which is where I met her, on Coast Highway across the street from the Laguna Art Museum. Her work had been shown in a number of Southern California art shows. So this posing nude for Playboy thing was just a lark. Something to have fun with. Something to prove to her grown daughters that she meant it when she said getting older was nothing to be ashamed of.

I hadn’t seen MoVan for a year. And then, out of the blue, she called me last Saturday and suggested we get together. “I’ve got breast cancer,” she told me when I asked her how she was. She said it almost as casually as she’d once told me she’d posed nude in Playboy.

So we had brunch together the next day at Madison Square & Garden, which is this funky upscale Laguna gift shop and garden cafe that sprang up in an old house next door to an older but similar eatery, the Cottage. While the Cottage is a bit hectic and crowded most of the time, Madison Square is more like a restaurant haiku.

Lavender sea statice waves like Rose Festival princesses from the river rock garden planters in front. On the big wooden porch are Chinese nesting boxes and elephant wood carvings. And just inside the front door is a painted bathtub full of rosemary lotions, cherry tomato soaps and Celtic sea salts. It’s all very orderly. And calming. Which, I think, is why MoVan chose to go here.

Here’s the thing about MoVan: Everybody loves her. I have never been anywhere with her and not had people come over and greet her, give her a hug, ask how she is. Men and women. And this was way before cancer made an appearance in her life.

Things are no different this Sunday morning. As I stand in line waiting to order our eggs and German apple pancakes from the counter, it seems half the restaurant mills about to say hello. The young clerk who had carefully been arranging French soaps on a counter. An older woman in a flowing chiffon dress with paint stains on her hands--another artist?--who kisses her on both cheeks. Even the cafe owner, Jon Madison, comes out of the kitchen to give MoVan a hug when he sees her. Hugs, I think, are a big part of her karma.

“I’m so glad you’ve come in this morning,” he says, and seeing the look in his eye, the way he touches her arm, you have to believe he means it.

“Is there anybody in Laguna you don’t know?” I ask MoVan as we walk out into the sunny garden carrying our coffee and looking for a table.

She smiles. “Probably.”

We sit beneath an old Chinese elm in a garden filled with potted citrus trees and scented vines, talking about life. I don’t want to get too weird here, but I’m almost certain MoVan is an avatar, which, if you don’t already know, is like a goddess who gets bored up in the heavens and decides to come down to Earth in some sort of human or animal incarnation.

I am convinced of this because MoVan always tells me startling things about my life that she shouldn’t know. Things that sometimes even I don’t know about. As if she were privy to information that I will learn in another six or nine months, if I’m lucky. Once I told her that I was no longer going to see a certain individual, someone she’d heard me talk about but had never met, she took me by the arm and told me that I was wasting my time. “Of course you’ll see her. It’s destined. Why don’t you just get on with it?” And she was right. But it took me almost a year to figure that out.

This morning, as we sit in Madison’s garden, where the air smells of orange blossoms and the sea, she tells me of another reincarnation--her own. “I feel like I am giving birth to myself,” she says, fingering the long scarf that covers her head. “I am bald, like a baby. And I’m nauseous in the morning, like I was when I was pregnant with my daughters. And the whole process--from when I learned about the tumor to when I will have completed treatment--is nine months.”

She leans across the table and takes my hand. “Something in me is dying,” she says, “but it doesn’t scare me because something else--a new me--is being reborn.”

Then MoVan, who never likes to spend too much time talking about herself, asks what is happening with me. I tell her that it is a very long story. One that could take all day. I give her the nickel version. She listens intently. When I am done, she is silent for a few minutes, though her eyes dance as she stares into my face, as if she were reading my palm.

“It’s the same,” she says. “Your dilemma and my cancer. They come from the same source. They have just manifested themselves in different ways. You, too, are changing. You, too, are being reborn. Don’t be afraid of this, David.”

We leave the restaurant arm and arm, crossing to the other side of the street, to her gallery. I kiss her goodbye on the cheek and tell her I think she looks quite beautiful, and I mean it. She smiles and pats my arm. As I turn and walk away from her I feel, for the first time in months, as light as air. I feel as if I am a balloon being carried by the wind high into the sky. Away from all the troubles of the earth.

Cafe open 7 a.m.-4 p.m. Store open 7 a.m.-5p.m. Wednesday through Monday.

*

David Lansing’s column is published on Fridays in Orange County Calendar. His e-mail address is occalendar@latimes.com. Settings: Madison Square & Garden Cafe, 320 N. Coast Highway, Laguna Beach, (949) 494-0137.