A traffic-stopping idea

ON THE

afternoon they met, Ronny Cammereri and Loretta Castorini made love. They walked up the stairs of the Italian bakery where daily he toiled and sweated and brooded and raged, and they went straight to his apartment just behind the building. She downed two whiskeys, forced him to eat a rare steak she cooked; he stood, stiff-armed everything off the kitchen table, grabbed her and carried her to his bed while she pretended she had no choice but to give in to the bad luck of her impulses. By nightfall they were in love.

Or something really close to that. It’s a scene from “Moonstruck,” and it’s enough to make you wish that you, too, didn’t have to wait for a traffic light to fall crazy in love in the tempestuous way Nicolas Cage and Cher did. Here in L.A., we usually have to drive the freeway to our destinies, after which we’re too rattled and addled to do much except watch actors live our lives for us

And what about the bakery in “Chocolat,” the novel and film? Transformed from its fusty, closed-up drabness by the mother and daughter who moved into the apartment above into a dazzling confectionary, that in turn transformed the lives of so many of the fusty, closed-up, drab French villagers. It would be impossible to imagine the plot working its sorcery if Vianne Rocher and little Anouk didn’t occupy the two bedrooms upstairs, creating an alluring sense of home downstairs for the customers who eventually, as the book says, “abandon themselves to temptation and happiness” as they stop in to indulge in the sensual pleasure of chocolates galore and tell their life stories.

OK, compelling as they are, these are fictional situations, not likely, you’re thinking, to be duplicated in the auto-intoxicated sprawl of the American Western metropolis. Living with that kind of intimate connection to your workplace is strictly European, or vertical-city stuff -- East Coast, New York in particular, where there’s a city center and no space to spread out.

Where there’s space to spread out, as in Los Angeles, well, that’s exactly what we do. Live here, work there -- 30, 40, 50 minutes away. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Like separation of church and state.

Until you’re plodding and chugging and fuming along a choked byway as I was just this morning, with your pulse racing like a hunted prey in flight because you’re not going to get where you’re going on time. And while you’re not getting there on time and telling yourself to take deep breaths, you’re deeply breathing all that carbon monoxide coming at you through the A/C vents.

And your brain goes flailing about with its interminable rush hour questions, profundities on the order of: What the &%#*@ am I doing? What’s it all about, Alfie? What now, brown cow? You can’t philosophize and shift gears at the same time: Freeways make you dumb. They make you mad. You begin to imagine yourself in a log cabin on a lake, forever.

Apparently I’m not the only one in L.A. with fantasies of a car-less day. Savvy shopkeepers have begun to consolidate their private and professional lives, completing the trek to work in less than a minute and saving themselves the probability of chiropractic appointments, psychiatric counseling, ulcerated bellies, traffic tickets and mean, unseemly thoughts about their fellow man.

Aside from artists in their studios and writers in their bedroom corners, L.A. hasn’t been known for this kind of living/working arrangement. Now we might be seeing the first twinkling signs of our city going European.

The shopkeepers who live above, beside or just behind their workplaces have the extra leisure for counting the time and the money they save by living a few steps (just think of it, footsteps!) away -- from their jobs. And I’d bet the money I’m not saving that they’re counting their blessings too.

Barbara King is the editor of the Home section. She can be reached at barbara.king@latimes.com.