An Excerpt from Sugartime:

was still on the day shift in Echo Park. I’d arrive there before Zach left for the restaurant in the morning, and stay until he came home unless Jessie had company and didn’t need me. But I’d moved my toothbrush, dog and laptop back to Laurel Canyon. When you’ve lived alone as long as I have, it’s hard to adjust to the rhythms of other people’s lives, and I’ve never really been able to write anywhere except in my own surroundings. But when even that didn’t get my creative juices flowing, I hung out with Hallie.

    We’ve known each other since our kids were in kindergarten together; she’s the friend I miss most when I’m not here and can’t wait to see again when I come back. We’re still on each other’s wavelength and speed dial, even though for the last few years we haven’t been in the same time zone very often.

Hallie is a queen among the queen bees of L.A. real estate, a far cry from

the Montana girl who came out here on the back of Peter Fonda’s Harley, or

maybe it was one of the Bridges boys, back in the day when all those brilliant young actors hung around Livingston or Missoula shooting and screwing and drinking and drugging between movies until the ones who’d been nerds in high school, like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, replaced them with mechanical

sharks and ray guns and ushered in the era of the blockbuster. Between then and now, Hallie’s stayed happily married to a short sweet shmata manufacturer whose idea of a hot time is two scotches before dinner with his sexy, statuesque,

redheaded wife, who he calls his shiksa cowgirl.

   “So how are things with you?” I asked after we’d put Max down for a nap in the shade and stretched out on the lounge chairs with gin and tonics and cheese and crackers.

   “About the same, minus the details.” With really good friends, the ones whose hearts you can see into, the shorthand is enough. Better, the same, worse—you know what it means without asking, so you don’t. Instead you reach across the space between you and squeeze her hand, and she knows you know, and she’s glad she doesn’t have to explain it any better than that.

   Somehow, on the way to the perfect life we feel entitled to for our children—the life we secretly believe they owe us—Hallie’s daughter had picked up a heroin habit, which was why Hallie was playing with her grandson on a sunny weekday afternoon when she might otherwise have been showing a newly anointed studio head or expatriate Iranian currency trader a ten million dollar fixer-upper in the flats of Beverly or a ten thousand square foot Tudor in Holmbly Hills. Heroin is one of those words like “terminal” you can’t imagine hearing in connection with your kid—it’s not even on the list of things you worry about, especially when, like Amanda, they sail through high school and college and marry a sweet guy who gives them a nice home and a beautiful little boy.

The sweet guy had divorced Amanda and won custody of Max—“I don’t blame him, if he were my son, I’d have told him to do the same thing,” Hallie said sadly. There wasn’t much she could do for Amanda except pay for another stint in rehab, but Max needed her, and his father was grateful for her help.

     About a week after I got out here Hallie had a dinner party for me…old friends, people we’d both known for years, through marriages, births, divorces, deaths, remarriages, cross-country moves—all the rituals of our lives. The conversation turned to our kids, the way it always does, and when it got around to Hallie she went on and on about Amanda’s sister, Sarah, who’d just finished a Ph.D. in environmental studies at Berkeley and won an NSF grant to study mushroom spores in Peru.

   “That’s what you do,” she said later, after everyone left and she gave me the real low-down—the producer whose kid who turned their cabin in Big Bear into a meth lab, the broker whose son was doing time for kiting checks, the plastic surgeon whose daughter’s boyfriend had put her in the hospital twice but still refused to leave him. “You talk about the one who’s doing fine, or you brag or you lie—sometimes both at the same time. Because telling the truth—that you’re scared or frightened or furious or frustrated about your kids, that you’re disappointed in how they turned out, is just too embarrassing. And you know the worst part, the dirtiest little secret? It’s how much you envy the ones whose kids are great, not even stars, not fabulously rich or accomplished, but just okay.”

Her torrent of words slowed down. “Not you,” she said. “I’m glad yours are fine, I didn’t mean you, I meant people like Georgia, whose kid just made his fifth million, and Laurie, whose daughter wrote that best-seller.”

   “Tell you what, when one of mine wins a MacArthur or finds a cure for cancer, you can envy me to your heart’s content,” I said.

   “Deal,” she agreed, and we had another gin and tonic before I went back to my studio and tried to work.