THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER23, 2020 19
then there’s a whole other set of fears
and insecurities that he would never be
able to understand. Like when you
throw in something like growing up
with social media while being a girl.”
She took a swig of water from her can-
teen. “My dad might go to a party and
think, ‘Everybody here is smarter and
more successful than me,’ but, when I
go on Instagram, it’s like socializing
every second with everyone who’s de-
signed to make me feel the worst about
myself: my exes’ new girlfriends, peo-
ple who have the career I want, Kylie
Jenner.” She began to walk down the
cemetery path again. “I take breaks from
Instagram, and, of course, it helps so
much,” she said. “But I have this fear
that, if I don’t check my phone con-
stantly, I would be publicly humiliated
somehow and I wouldn’t know it.”
Stepping over a trail of ants rushing
along a pavement (“Do you know that
some ants can live for up to thirty years?
That always makes me feel guilty about
killing them”), David headed toward a
pond. She came across the grave of
Johnny Ramone (né Cummings), whose
headstone is topped by a bronze statue
of the musician, shredding on his gui-
tar, with his motorcycle jacket and sig-
nature bowl-cut hairdo. “This is so sick!”
she said, enthusiastically. She stepped
back. “Do you think he would have
liked this grave? It’s a little cartoony,
maybe. I wonder if I would like a grave
like this.”
—Naomi Fry
Cazzie David
1
THEOTHERCOAST
DREADBYTHEPOOL
I
t was a scorching day in Los Angeles,
the heat rising from the pavement in
a near-audible sizzle, but the writer Caz-
zie David was not about to put on sun-
glasses. “I’m the sort of person who, if I
put on sunglasses, I’m afraid everyone
will be, like, ‘Oh, she thinks she looks
cool,’” she said, grimacing. David, who is
twenty-six, slight, and dark-haired, with
the kind of sardonic manner associated
more with the East Coast than the West,
tugged at the hem of her sweatshirt. “Why
did I wear long sleeves? That’s so stupid,”
she muttered. She took it off, and then,
squinting over her surgical mask, she was
ready to enter a graveyard.
David was at Hollywood Forever,
an L.A. cemetery in which laypeople
rest side by side with celebrities, lend-
ing the serene grounds—palm trees,
swan-filled ponds, the occasional pea-
cock—a kitschy glamour. “I’ve never
really spent time in a graveyard,” David
said. Her father, Larry, the co-creator
of “Seinfeld” and the creator and star
of HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,”
will probably be other opportunities.”
After her neighbor urged her to take ac-
tion, she said, “I put it in a pillowcase,
wrapped it in a lot of bubble wrap, went
to my granddaughter’s apartment, hung
it on the wall, and said, ‘Call me if you
need me.’” (Covid concerns made her
eager to avoid a curator’s visit.)
The other day, the painting’s owner
and her husband were invited to visit
the exhibition, privately, before the Met
opened. (The painting has since left the
museum, and will travel to Birming-
ham, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.)
As an homage to Lawrence’s distinc-
tive palette, she wore a royal-blue jacket
and a new blue checked scarf. “I usu-
ally like earth tones,” she said. “So it
was, as they say, bashert.” The painting
was still in the gold-leaf frame that Fa-
gelson had chosen. “It doesn’t just be-
long to me,” she said. “It belongs to the
artist. I’m just part of the story.”
—Alexandra Schwartz
may be our era’s preëminent icon of un-
ease. “My grandparents all died when
I was young, and my parents didn’t want
me and my sister to come to the funer-
als,” she said. “They thought it would
be too disturbing. Instead, they would
do these things with us, like release
flowers into the ocean.” She paused. “It
would have probably been healthier
to just go to the funerals!” Pointing to
a black marble headstone, she said,
“How cute is this couple, though?” The
slab was laser-engraved with the photo-
graphic image of a man and a woman,
cheek to cheek, she in a beret, he with
his hair slicked back, nineteen-thirties
style. “I wonder if this is from the time
they died or from when they were
young?” She made her way over an ex-
panse of lawn, searching for a shady
spot to sit down, then stopped abruptly.
“Oh, my God, did I just step on a grave?”
she asked.
David has recently published a book
of humorous essays about being young,
self-doubting, and anxious. “I find it
kind of impossible to ignore the more
looming aspects of being alive,” she said.
“I’ve always had anxiety, but when I was
a freshman in college”—at Emerson, in
Boston—“I had a sort of mental break-
down. I was looking at my own eyeballs
in the mirror and was, like, ‘How do I
even exist? How do our cells make us
people? What does it all mean?’” S h e
attended an outpatient program, which
helped her get over the episode, but
existential dread—which, as she de-
scribes in her book, can make one “pan-
icked to the point where your bones
are rattling in your body so fast you
can’t feel them vibrate”—still dogs her.
“It definitely ruins every part of life
you’re supposed to be enjoying,” she
said. She laughed: “Obviously, at the
same time, I know how completely un-
important and unoriginal I am when I
have these thoughts.”
With the advent of COVID, David
moved into her father’s house, in Pacific
Palisades, to “make sure everybody was
protected, because I was afraid my fam-
ily was too stupid to take care of itself.
I’m just slightly less stupid. I was in
charge of sanitizing produce, which
meant I could have easily killed my dad
with bleach.” She went on, “My dad
and I are very similar in terms of our
worries about sickness and death, but
