The Woman On Top Of Beverly Hills: A Tribute

This morning I woke at 6:30, and rolled down on the yoga mat to stretch. My post-surgery scar-tissued hip and funky lower back  hurt when I wake up. Middle age. Then I opened the blinds to the sun rising, a perfect blue sky, the banana palm leaves crowding the view.  I allowed myself a full glass of pomegranate juice with my toast. You know you’re living in Beverly Hills when what you allow yourself is a glass of pomegranate juice, and hope the people walking by aren’t looking in, thinking Reallly? A whole glass of that sugary stuff?

It was a celebratory gesture for me– my year anniversary of living in L.A!  I remembered last January: exhausted after a nine-hour drive from Flagstaff, miraculously finding a parking space on Reeves Drive, and walking up the brick steps to my new apartment. Natasha was in the window of her across-the-hall-place, drinking red wine and tapping on her computer. And then she saw my wanly smiling face. Arriving at a new chapter (still didn’t know it would be anything but a 6-month visit) with a friend I’d known since we were 13. We squealed. There’s a blog about that, of course.

After the stretching, the juice, the toast to myself  for showing signs of finding a new life, I started my walk to the juicery. I passed the Beverly Wilshire where people were sipping coffee and eating croissants on the outdoor patio; several limousines purred in anticipation. As I started to walk up Rodeo, I noticed many more people out on the street than usual. At 7:45, it’s just me, the window-washers, and one guy who looks like Larry King, walking his little dog, and smoking a cigar. But today many, many people–black, white, Mexican-American, formal and casual–were all staring up.

So I looked. On Rodeo, when people are outside staring, it is about celebrity. They heard about a shoot with Nicolle Kidman. They heard that Kim K is getting her nails done on Camden. They heard that Obama is at the Wilshire (All True, Dear Reader.) But this was looking was *up*, not around. So I tilted my face toward the sky and  saw a cartoon shape of a woman on the top of the Camden Medical Center–the tallest building in Beverly Hills, black glass, all symmetry and precision. Her  female figure, like one of the pink Picasso women with big hips and thick middle was fluid, flailing, waving her arms and swinging her legs. The body–full and soft, so NOT Beverly Hills–was rounding that square corner. Her body seemed to defy  the sharpness, the tweezed eyebrows, the skinny butt, the perfect edge of Beverly Hills’ femininity.

Phone cameras were out. Cars were stopped. I don’t know what I was thinking. I was late for work, and ran to the juicery. For hours we all talked about her–the women who worked next door at the make-up salon, the guys from the art gallery. My manager went out to look several times. I wanted to, but I’d already seen her, and I told everyone “I think they’ll get her down.” The cops were everywhere, a ten-block area cordoned off.  But I was wrong.

Before I knew I was wrong, a well-dressed man in his fifties came in, saying that “the whole office is sick.” They worked directly across from the building where she was. He could see her. I asked him how he thought she could have gotten onto the rooftop.  “Those doors are always unlocked,” he said. So!  That Hollywood scene on the roof that seems unlikely if not ridiculous–was actually viable. If you wanted to kill yourself.

I asked, “Can you see her face? What does she seem like? Is she talking? Does she seem like she’s mentally capable, or disturbed?” “I have a telescope,” he explained. “She’s in her sixties and she’s naked except for a big white towel around her middle, which she keeps re-arranging–as if she wants to look pretty.” I did not ask why he had a telescope in his office. “She’s had a lot of work done,” he said, drinking his Green 2 Juice. “I think she’s had plastic surgery in the last few days–black eyes, recent red scar lines on her jaw.” Less than an hour later, I heard that she jumped and died.

I finished my hours at the juicery, and on my way home walked past the spot where she died.

I don’t want to make up a narrative that isn’t about this woman’s real life, real pain, her desperate last act. But I hope she will  forgive me if I make a connection between what is now in my neighborhood being referred to as “The Naked Suicide,” and a cultural environment where youth is fetish-ized, where angular and lean is the only sexy, and where men have telescopes in their offices.

Goodbye to the woman who flailed and wiggled and imposed her flesh on a place of rigid fear. You held us hostage; and you dominated the sky. Goodbye.