Just Like Family
In the courtyard of our Koreatown apartment complex, roses run riot and bougainvillea blooms hang like hearts. At Christmas, the box hedge is threaded with tiny white lights, and the carriage lamps are garlanded with swags of balsam. Beneath our bedroom window lies a garden featuring orchids, a koi pond and several statues of nude men.
For this wondrous landscape, we have our next-door neighbor Emil to thank. My family and friends back East think L.A. is peopled exclusively by transients, but Emil, a beacon of stability in this changing world, has had the same townhouse apartment--a showcase of mirrored walls, red silk moire, gilt--and the same lover, Bob, for 36 years. In summer, Emil pads around the courtyard in a jungle print lava-lava, dousing the agapanthus with a vat of Miracle-Gro. In winter, he emerges in his sable coat and cries, “Dar-ling! Have you seen my ruby earring?”
Here in L.A., where history is short, Emil, 71, is a window onto a bygone world. He serves salads of iceberg lettuce and “she-crab,” sends away to places advertised in the back of Town & Country for filet mignon and pheasant. He eats at the kind of restaurants you see in black-and-white photos from the ‘40s--Cassell’s, the HMS Bounty, Taylor’s Prime Steak--and shops for upholstery fabric at Michael Levine downtown in the garment district.
Emil loves to cook, and he has one basic recipe--consisting of olive oil, dried basil, lemon, and “freshly ground” pepper--that he puts on everything from London broil to pasta salad. Generous to a fault, he is always running upstairs to deliver a new culinary delight. “Just call me Martha,” he says, holding out an artfully arranged platter of breadsticks, canned olives and hearts of palm, all drenched with his special dressing. He and Bob, a quiet man of 79 whose favorite pastime is reading, have us down for dinner. We perch on the edge of the zebra-striped sofa and try to find a place to set our drinks on a coffee table covered with Waterford bowls and velvet-lined silver boxes. Mozart plays softly; candles glow.
“What do you think about Proposition 209?” Bob asks conversationally.
“Have you seen my armoire?” Emil interrupts. “It’s been appraised at $20,000.”
Bob tries again and queries my husband. “How’s the nursing business, Tim?”
“That Venetian glass candelabra in the hall?” Emil interjects. “It’s worth nine grand.” The table is set with Irish lace and Limoges, Baccarat wine glasses and sterling silver serving tongs. The entree is chicken with olive oil, dried basil, lemon and pepper.
When Emil and Bob moved to the area in 1960, 8th Street was lined with jazz clubs, women still wore white gloves and the neighborhood was entirely Anglo. Back in the ‘60s, they threw an annual costume party that required months of preparation--Monte Carlo, Arabian Nights, Disco Fever--we’ve seen the slides. Even now, they put on a barbecue each Fourth of July, featuring mounds of Beluga caviar and minced egg yolk, lobster-stuffed tomatoes and a cake with boiled frosting meticulously tinted red, white and blue.
Still, Emil says his fondest wish is to leave the neighborhood, a goal he intends to accomplish by winning the lottery. Twice a week he makes a pilgrimage to Vons to purchase $30 worth of tickets.
He leafs through real estate guides in search of Shangri-La. One week it’s an eight-bedroom, three-fireplace condo in Santa Fe, the next, a shingled mansion on an island off the coast of Maine. He has it all worked out: He’s taking us with him. Tim will be the caretaker of the estate, Emil and I are going to shop, and Bob, apparently, will go along for the ride.
Then, every few months, Emil maxes out his credit card, has a moment of clarity and declares sadly, “Let’s face it, Mommy” (he calls me Mommy Dearest), “I’ll probably croak right here in this old dump.”
The fact is that he loves it here and would be lost anywhere else. He knows everyone--every old white or gay person, that is--for blocks around; he’s gone to the same cleaners, post office and veterinarian for 30 years. “Isn’t it gorgeous?” he sighs one sunny afternoon, gazing over his rose-strewn courtyard. “Truthfully, where else could we live like this for what we pay?”
Emil has one minor quirk. Every six months or so, he picks a huge fight. One year it was because he felt a yellow ceramic flowerpot I’d put on the patio clashed with his terra cotta; one year it was because we kept talking to another neighbor with whom he was feuding. This time, Emil and Tim finally have a showdown over the stray cats.
Emil has seven cats of his own-- his “kids,” he calls them--but he also leaves food outside his door for strays. This has always been a minor irritation, but recently it reached critical mass. We have one cat, Blanche, whose life of leisure and minuscule brain have left her ill-equipped to deal with the street-smart bullies who flock to Emil’s meals. Not only do they beat her up, they also urinate on our steps and spray our door. Every morning, I have to go out with a bucket of ammonia and scrub the whole area down.
Tim begs Emil to stop feeding the strays. The landlord orders him to stop feeding the strays. Emil swears up and down he isn’t feeding the strays. The only problem is that every morning, Tim checks Emil’s front steps, and every morning he still finds a huge bowl of Friskies and a saucepan full of milk.
Then one morning (Tim was at work), Emil bangs on our door, brandishes a blue plastic bowl in my face and screams, “I found this in the garbage! He picked this up and threw it in the garbage! You tell him if he ever touches anything of mine again, I’ll call the cops . . . .”
“No, you tell him,” I say, and quietly shut the door.
Privately, even I think Tim has gone too far--”You can’t touch his stuff, honey!” I tell him that night--but he is unrepentant.
“Emil has the run of this whole place and the one thing I ask, he won’t do,” he fumes. Emil is equally intransigent: “After all I’ve done for you two,” he murmurs, shaking his head when I pass him near the clothesline.
Guilty by association, my lot is naturally cast with Tim’s. Months pass without a single word exchanged. Then one day, as I traverse what I think is a vacant courtyard, Emil springs out from behind a hydrangea and lays a solicitous hand on my arm. “How’s Tim?” he asks.
“Fine,” I say, edging backward. “Why?”
“Well, it’s just that he’s been so rude, Bob and I have been worried about him,” he says, his voice dripping concern. “I didn’t want to tell you, Mommie, but he pushed me that day when I asked him about the bowl. He became violent! With me, a feeble old man . . . .”
“Oh, he did not,” I snap. “He wouldn’t hurt a flea and you know it.”
“Of course you would side with him,” Emil says. “A wife has to be loyal no matter how wrong her mate. But just to show I’ve forgiven him completely”--here he dashes inside, runs out and hands over a package decorated with silver sequins, purple feathers and an oversized glitter-speckled bow--”I bought him a little something today. Tell him it’s from old Emee. Tell him I love him just the same . . . .”
When we moved in eight years ago, Emil took it upon himself to arrange our living room and lend me the sheer white curtains that still flutter at the window. Across our plant-filled balcony lies his bedroom, which he redecorated with tobacco walls, leopard print sheets and a rosewood screen he swiped, before the relatives arrived, from the apartment of a friend who died of AIDS.
A few nights later, I play the piano, not very well: “Traumerei” and “Clair de Lune.” Emil and Bob have already finished their cocktails and dinner, and I know he’s over there lying in bed playing with the cats, mulling over whether he should paint his walls cafe au lait next time, looking forward to watching his new video of “Auntie Mame.”
I falter on Chopin’s “Nocturne in E-flat,” and Emil’s voice drifts across the darkness. “You’re so talented, Mommy Dearest! I don’t know what we’d do if you two ever moved, you’re just like family . . . .”
It all passes before me--the shared food, the laughs, the fights.
“You said it, Emee,” I call back, butchering another trill. “We’re just exactly like family.”
Heather King is a commentator on National Public Radio. Her last piece for the magazine was on bird-watching at Salton Sea.
