Los Angeles

Los Angeles is Jacob’s carefully chosen but never fully settled home: he moves there after years of migration, takes work as a pastry chef near the coast, and stays partly because it places him within reach of his brother without requiring closeness. The city offers distance and a livelihood, yet his recurring sense of being half-packed makes it feel less like an arrival than another stop. Later, its dense urban noise throws into relief the quieter attachment he has formed to St. Nacho’s.

Setting and Sensory Character

Jacob’s account of Los Angeles is shaped by climate as much as by geography. Southern California seems to him too hot and bone-dry, a marked contrast with the humid days he prefers, when moisture moves inland from the south and the air feels thick against his skin. He is close enough to the beach for seagulls to gather in the parking lot of Il Ghiotto, where he works, but proximity to the coast does not erase his feeling that the region is arid and oppressive. The setting registers through his body: heat and dryness are not a travel-guide backdrop but part of the daily atmosphere in which he tries to make a life.

A Home Chosen for Distance

Los Angeles comes after a succession of relocations. At his grandfather Zeyde’s behest, Jacob left the United States for Israel and lived there for six years. After Zeyde died, he returned to New York to be with his mother; she died suddenly of a stroke a year later. He then went to France for cooking school before moving to Los Angeles. The sequence matters because none of these moves settles the question of where he belongs. Wherever he lives, he imagines himself still in transit, one plane ticket or bus fare away from another destination.

His decision to choose Los Angeles was practical and relational at once. It was near his brother, Daniel Livingston, but not so near that Jacob would be drawn into his brother’s household or daily life. Jacob expects Daniel’s wife would not welcome a close relationship, and he therefore values being a few hundred miles away on the West Coast: close enough to feel connected, distant enough to preserve separation. He knows Daniel would be there for him if he asked, but that assurance is precisely what he avoids testing. The city thus becomes a shelter built from distance. Jacob can carry the knowledge of family support without having to accept its obligations or expose his need.

Work and the Limits of Staying

In Los Angeles, Jacob works as a pastry chef at Il Ghiotto. The job gives his life a concrete routine and makes use of the cooking training he acquired in France, but the work also becomes a source of dissatisfaction. He increasingly needs breaks from making cannoli and tiramisu and is nearly out of patience with them. His frustration is not simply with a particular recipe: the repetitive pastry work makes visible the gap between the skilled work he can do and the life he hoped the move might provide.

Illness sharpens that insecurity. Jacob is hospitalized and released, but his workplace is already looking for someone else after he becomes sick. In a phone call, he objects angrily to the idea that he has swine flu and emphasizes that he was in the hospital and had been discharged. The episode shows how precarious his place in the city can be: employment depends on being available, while a health crisis leaves him having to defend his account of what happened. Los Angeles is not only a chosen refuge; it is also a setting in which the basic conditions for staying—a job and the ability to keep doing it—feel vulnerable.

The City in Contrast

Jacob’s eventual return to Los Angeles with Dan makes the city’s soundscape newly conspicuous. After being in St. Nacho’s, traffic on Melrose strikes him as a steady rush, with a grinding, honking wall of noise that disorients him and sirens cutting through it. The contrast is registered as a change in perception: the city was familiar, but after time elsewhere its volume becomes difficult to ignore. St. Nacho’s has altered the measure by which Jacob experiences the place he once chose as home.

That return is not a simple repudiation of Los Angeles. Jacob and Dan plan to go there for a weekend, and Jacob tells Carl at the SeaView Motel that he expects to return to St. Nacho’s by Sunday night. Los Angeles remains part of his practical life and his family geography, while St. Nacho’s has become a place to which he expects to come back. The movement between them reveals a distinction between residence and belonging: Los Angeles is where Jacob has an apartment and a history of work, but it has not ended his sense of being in transit.

Narrative Significance

Los Angeles gathers the conditions that have repeatedly shaped Jacob’s unsettled life: migration, bereavement, guarded family ties, and the need to support himself. His grandfather’s pull toward Israel, his return to his mother in New York, his culinary training in France, and his eventual move west form a personal map in which geographical relocation does not automatically produce emotional homecoming. Even the closeness he seeks with Daniel is carefully calibrated so that support can exist without demanding intimacy.

Against that history, Los Angeles’s contrast with St. Nacho’s is not merely urban versus small-town atmosphere. The heat, dry air, pastry-shop routine, and later roar of Melrose belong to a place that supplies work and distance but leaves Jacob imagining the next departure. St. Nacho’s, by contrast, becomes a destination he intends to return to after going home to Los Angeles. The city’s significance lies in this unresolved double role: it is a real home base, yet also the clearest expression of Jacob’s long-standing feeling that he has not quite arrived.