Ali in Wonderland: And Other Tall Tales by Ali Wentworth

Author:Ali Wentworth
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Humor, Azizex666, General
ISBN: 9780061998584
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2012-02-07T05:00:00+00:00

From that point on the Four Seasons became my mecca for a quiet mind, my ashram of calm. If Eloise had narrowly escaped a gang rape or was coming off heroin, I’m sure she would take to the Plaza the same way. Sam never questioned why he was sleeping at the Four Seasons. I guess trauma had rendered him mute. If I was eating at a luxury hotel on somebody else’s tab, I probably wouldn’t question it either.

Shortly after the trauma, Felix and I broke up, and, as happens when people experience such a thing together, Sam and I briefly dated. Trauma brings couples together, but we were short-lived. It turns out a harrowing ordeal isn’t enough to keep two people together. Oh . . . and he was gay.

It’s curious to me that my parents never actually flew out to L.A. to see me after this. Perhaps without an actual rape or severed jugular, it wasn’t worth spending the miles. I did get a bouquet of lilies from a friend of my mother’s. I think she misunderstood and thought I’d died.

Years later another tragedy struck, this one a little less personal: 9/11. I was newly engaged and in New York to apartment-hunt. I was moving from L.A. to New York, and my fiancé had to give up his bachelor pad (and all that implied). I was excited to leave the California wheatgrass shots and avocado face masks behind me and dive into the dirt and grit of urban living.

The planes had struck the Twin Towers while I was still sleeping. I woke up and turned the kettle and TV on. In my stupor I assumed the Twin Towers burning on the screen were a scene from some crappy Bruckheimer film, and as I flipped the channels, I couldn’t understand why at a peak news hour all networks were choosing to show the same movie. But after five minutes without a glimpse of Nicolas Cage’s glistening muscles, I knew it was real.

I went out to West Eighty-second Street to witness faint smoke wafting from downtown and people rushing in different directions the way ants do when you pour water on them. Cell phones and landlines weren’t working. I was desperate to reach my fiancé, George, and find out where he was. (He was climbing out of a smoke-filled subway. But that’s his book.) I suddenly felt the vibration of my cell phone in my pocket. The one person who had managed to crash through the technology pileup? My mother. “Are you okay?”

We spoke quickly, knowing that the connection could be lost at any moment. “Where’s George?”

“Not sure, I assume at work.”

“You need to get him, and the two of you go right to the Four Seasons!”

Let me explain the geography of this proposal. If the island of Manhattan were a naked lady, we were already safely ensconced in her collarbone; 9/11 hit her calf, and my mother suggested we go down and stay in the belly button. Nonsensical? Yes. Did we do it? Yes! I was so emphatic that George didn’t question me.

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