Women who were never saved

I'm staying in an old house.

An old villa that looks out over the canyon as if it has seen everything and decided not to speak about any of it. The gardens open onto an enormous pool — blue, perfectly still — ringed by palms that move just enough to remind you that time exists. The phone, up here, doesn't. No signal, no notifications, no small mechanical pull at your attention every few minutes. You forget, very quickly, how loud that was.

I came to Topanga for five days because, in this work, you eventually learn that you have to give yourself back to yourself. Not because the work is unkind — it isn't, not the way I do it — but because a body and a mind that are constantly available to other people need, at some point, to be entirely unavailable. To eat slowly. To sleep without an alarm. To walk through a garden in the early morning with nothing to do and nowhere to be.

The house has had a life. Built in 1930 as the Sylvia Park Country Club, it became, in turn, a youth retreat, a Jewish boys' school, an American Legion hall, a gay nightclub, a concert hall — and, in the 1940s, a gambling house and brothel run by the Los Angeles mobster Mickey Cohen. It is officially a California Point of Historical Interest. Today it's called The Mountain Mermaid, and Lana Del Rey, among others, has filmed here. The walls hold scenes that never quite belonged to ordinary life and somehow feel more real than ordinary life does.

I walk through the gardens and think about how many love affairs began here. How many promises. How many lies. I think about the women who worked these rooms in Cohen's years — heels on stone floors, cigarette smoke in the corridors, silk brushing past velvet armchairs. I wonder if any of them were ever saved.

And then I wonder why we always tell that story — that women in this work need saving.

What if some of them didn't want to be saved? What if some of them were already saving themselves?

The world loves a redemption arc. The rich man who falls for the courtesan. The fairy tale of the upgrade. The gilded cage rebranded as rescue. But what if the real redemption is autonomy — the slow, unglamorous work of building a life that belongs to you, on terms you wrote yourself?

And yet — I still believe a man will arrive one day. That's the contradiction I've made peace with. Women in this work are, I think, eternal romantics. From the outside it looks cynical; from the inside it is the opposite. We are constantly looking for the right person. And yes, we picture him accomplished, cultured, alive to beauty — because we love beautiful things. We love villas like this one. We love art, space, elegance. We don't only want love. We want a love that lives well.

I never imagined I'd be staying somewhere like this. Not because it was impossible — but because my ambition has always carried me further than my imagination. These days I'm moving more slowly. I'm not working constantly. I'll work tonight, yes — but my work has changed. High level. Selective. Not available to everyone, and not trying to be. I'm no longer for the crowd. I'm for the few.

Walking past the pool in the last of the afternoon light, I understand something simple. Beauty isn't only what surrounds you. It's the distance between who you were and who you've allowed yourself to become.

Maybe the women who worked here all those years ago weren't waiting to be saved.

Maybe they were already writing their own way out.