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Phoenix and I didn’t hear from him again. I didn’t really expect to, since we were just colleagues who had run into each other by chance. But L.A. now beckoned like never before. I had welcomed my temporary assignment in Los Angeles as a chance to report on new subjects in an area of the country I didn’t really know. San Francisco and Los Angeles were so different in geography and zeitgeist that their two populations were notoriously oblivious to each other. In my many years in the Bay Area, I had been to L.A. twice at the most. If you lived in San Francisco, there was no reason to go to Los Angeles, and vice versa. Now I had two good reasons to brave the spread of what I used to know as la-la land. Jim awaited, or so I thought.
    On my first day in the
Times
’s L.A. bureau, my dreamboat greeted me warmly. He offered me a tour of the office and introduced me to the eight other colleagues who worked there.
    â€œOver here, the fax machine,” Jim said as I followed like a giddy puppy. With the flair of a magician, he opened an upper cabinet in the kitchen. Ta-da! The shelves were stuffed with snacks. “Here’s where we keep our stash of Oreos.” He grinned. “In the morning, the office manager buys doughnuts from Bob’s in the farmers’ market. Do you like glazed or jelly?”
    Talk about sweet!
    All correspondents had the luxury of their own private offices, but Todd had not moved out yet, so I staked out a corner of the common area near the office manager’s desk by the front door. I soon got started on a couple stories, befriended the manager, Catherine, and forgot about my surroundings. I cared more about the apartment I had found just blocks from the ocean and the shopping promenade in Santa Monica. The sight of water felt like home. I woke up every day to impossibly perfect weather. Every single day. Driving against traffic (to my surprise, the bulk of commuters headed away from downtown Los Angeles toward the Pacific Coast Highway), I had a short commute to the
Times
bureau in the mid–Wilshire Boulevard area. No one came in before nine a.m. except for Andy, the biotech reporter, who typically was the first one in and the last one out no matter how bright the sun shone outside. I knew this because I was in the perfect spot to see the comings and goings of my colleagues. Jim and I saw each other every day, trading hellos, smiles, and stolen glances. I bode my time, waiting for my handsome office guide to ask me out to lunch. Then I waited some more. Then—nothing. The invitations never came. Camping? I wished.
    Jim spent the days out on the street reporting or holed up in his office, and soon there was not even casual conversation. Even when we sat next to each other at Todd’s send-off over lunch at Morton’s, roasting our colleague and joking about a celebrity two tables over we couldn’t place (Judith Light)—nothing.
    Much later Jim would explain that he was involved with someone at the time and didn’t want to complicate things. But, he asked, hadn’t I noticed that he had carved a path on the carpet from the many trips he took to the office pantry just so that he could walk by my desk and catch a glimpse of me? Frankly, I had not, distracted as I was by disappointment and desire.
    I was crestfallen. My L.A. fantasy failed to materialize. I moved on. I spent some quality time with my friends Rose, a news editor with the
Press-Telegram
in Long Beach, and Gabriel, a Hollywood publicist who let me tag along for some fun red-carpet events. And I was busy at work. One story took me to the famous border fence between Mexico and the United States that ends in the ocean off the California shore. Driving there, I passed billboards showing the silhouettes of a man, a woman, and a little girl with pigtails clinging to her mother’s hand as they ran. It was a disconcerting warning: watch out for illegal immigrants attempting to cross the