by Bruce Wagner
PLUME BOOKS
I’M LOSING YOU
BRUCE WAGNER is the author of Dead Stars, Memorial, The Chrysanthemum Palace (a PEN Faulkner fiction award finalist), Still Holding, I’ll Let You Go, and Force Majeure. He lives in Los Angeles.
Praise for I’m Losing You
“Ruthlessly hip and very funny.”
—Wired
“Edgy, sublime.”
—New York Newsday
“Wagner’s verbal animation rarely flags…. His prose writhes and coruscates.”
—John Updike, The New Yorker
“The author’s images, tones and language give I’m Losing You a hard beauty that glints like a black crystal.”
—Time
“Wagner’s latest novel makes all other Hollywood satires Capraesque in their innocence.”
—Will Self
“One of the year’s most notorious books…a living satire of a dying Hollywood…a must read.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“A black farce played with brute force…. Wagner improves upon the Hollywood-equals-hell novel…with an intricately woven jump-cut montage of deeply twisted parents, children, doctors, filmmakers, agents, writers, and actors who lay waste to each other’s lives and score movie deals from the carnage.”
—Details
“Mr. Wagner…treats us to many glorious phrases and whole passages that have the self-propelled rhythm of great prose.”
—Adam Begley, New York Observer
“Electrifying…a viciously funny, kaleidoscopically plotted Hollywood satire. Will invite comparisons to Robert Altman, Tom Wolfe, or any other modern Swift or Pope you can think of.”
—Boston Book Review
“Funny, mordant, erudite, affecting, perverse, hyperverbal…. Wagner is huge.”
—Washington Times
“A literary novel of Hollywood—a rare event, to be sure. I can’t think of any novel in recent memory that has provoked such a rush of uneasy accolades…. So dense as to be almost tactile.”
—Variety
“Mordantly funny and morbidly real, I’m Losing You is a giant, decadent hot-tub party….A great, gossipy treat.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
“A Hollywood of neurotic self-destructive sex and technology-obsessed locals—and those are the nicer people. Epic.”
—Women’s Wear Daily
“A funnier and even more brutal Hollywood send-up than his previous novel, Force Majeure…brilliant.”
—New York Post
“All of [the characters] are finely, beautifully drawn…. Wagner manages to breathe so much life into them that even their most despicable acts are understandable.”
—The Advocate
“Makes the nonfictional You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again look like a Hollywood valentine.”
—Glamour
“A deliciously guilty pleasure…perfect beach reading for the millennium.”
—Newsday
“The most distinctive Jewish novel since Portnoy’s Complaint.”
—Jewish Journal
“A meditation on moral corruption and loss which is at turns hilarious, tragic, and at times as caustic as a shot of kerosene.”
—Detour
“Compared to this novel, the Hollywood disenchantments of Nathanael West and F. Scott Fitzgerald seem gently nostalgic.”
—Books of the Southwest
“An ambitious and complex literary novel…one of the best serious books published this year.”
—Sun-Sentinel
“A dazzling prose stylist.”
—Hartford Courant
I’M LOSING YOU
B R U C E W A G N E R
A PLUME BOOK
PLUME
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) • Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
This is an authorized reprint of a hardcover edition published by Villard Books, a division of Random House, Inc. For information address Villard Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 201 East 50th Street, New York, New York 10022.
First Plume Printing, August 2012
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Copyright © Bruce Wagner, 1996
All rights reserved
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY: Excerpt from “The Breast” from Love Poems by Anne Sexton. Copyright © 1967, 1968, 1969 by Anne Sexton. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. JOBETE MUSIC CO., INC.: Excerpt from “Didn’t We” by Jimmy Webb. Copyright © 1967 by Jobete Music Co., Inc. Reprinted by permission of Jobete Music Co., Inc.
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
CIP data is available.
ISBN: 978-1-101-59488-9
Printed in the United States of America
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PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I’m Losing You is a work of fiction. The characters, conversations, and events in the novel are the products of my imagination, and no resemblance to the actual conduct of real-life persons, or to actual events, is intended. Although, for the sake of verisimilitude, certain public figures do make incidental appearances or are briefly referred to in the novel, I have included them here without their knowledge or cooperation; their interactions with the characters I have invented are wholly my creation and not intended to be understood as descriptions of real events or to reflect negatively upon any of these public figures; nor to suggest that they ever sought or participated in any psychiatric or psychological treatment.
Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra
trafitto da un raggio di sole:
ed è subito sera
—Salvatore Quasimodo
(Each alon
e on the heart of the earth,
impaled upon a ray of sun:
and suddenly it’s evening.)
CONTENTS
BOOK 1: Impala
BOOK 2: Women in Film
BOOK 3: A Guide to the Classics
BOOK 4: The Grande Complication
BOOK 1
IMPALA
It seemed only yesterday that Serena Ribkin was a vibrant, no-regrets member of the Lie—that seventy was “young”—but now she lay bedridden in her frazzled palace with a bad case of colon cancer. Ten months ago, her party, so to speak, had been crashed by a pain-freak hooligan; she duly protested, thinking the intruder could be sassed or paid off, cajoled to leave. Unflappably, she submitted herself to resection and the roughing-up of a good chemo. But when they indecorously cut away thirty-six inches of bowel (not to would be suicide, Donny said), everything changed: the skinhead sodomized her in front of the guests and she had no choice but to give him run of the house. She knew all would be smashed now, every secret-recessed thing. At least, while revelers were slaughtered below, the invader allowed her lucidity and television privileges—that was something, anyway. Now Serena lay stuporous in her cloacal chambers, on the protective-plastic-covered California King. Far from the madding crowd, as they used to say.
She doped herself and dreamed a parade of Judith Leiber handbags all in a row, marching up and down Rodeo Drive, escorted by fife-and-drum Barneys New York blackamoors. The purses’ famed claw clasps detached, nostalgically carrying her from the house on Carcassonne Way, above the town of Beverly Hills. On a carpet of Demerol she floated over certain personal monuments, joined by a dutiful panoply of royalist flak—a clique of Chanel ensembles that had served her well hovered now like woolly choppers—while she gazed downward, striving to recapitulate what had happened to her life.
Serena had become nocturnal, the four-thirtyish earthquake hour her comforting noon. She flipped through the expensive photo album she had filled with images from National Geographic: a legless beggar-boy flogged by his “manager” on the streets of Cairo, a Vietnamese girl feeding mush to catfishes through a trapdoor in the living room of her floating house, the X ray of a pelican that had eaten a gopher—the gopher having burrowed out through the larynx in its death throes. In her mind, she called these images curiosities but wasn’t at all sure how she’d become their curator.
She told Farfina (a night nurse, Donny insisted, was a “given”) not to disturb her, then slid open the heavy glass door and lit a cigarette. Serena held a slice of angel food cake in her palm and it shivered there while she watched for the floating snakebite eyes of the raccoons. They were late tonight. The old woman stared at the dark hill abutting the backyard like the hump of a beast she’d soon ride off on. Where would it take her? To the lush coast of Raccoon Cove, where hedgehog traffic cops with Gucci scarves stood under sugar-teat streetlamps. She brought the chair closer to the darkness.
At her fiftieth high school reunion, there were three people she wanted to see—two old flames and the girl who stole them away. She called the alumni association and found out the trio was planning to attend. Serena knew how good she looked and wanted to rub their noses in it; haul them down by their scalps to lick the salt off her cunt, if she could. She hadn’t seen them since the Big Twenty-fifth, but the dull, chatty alumni newsletter kept everyone au courant. Victor ran a bank and had a successful bypass. Glynis was a widow, remarried (nineteen eighty-eight) to a manufacturer. Ted had fourteen grandkids and started a trust with the eleven-million-dollar lottery he’d won in their names. And what of Serena? Divorced from a Hollywood producer, her son a powerful agent, a Senior Veepee at ICM. AlumNotes ran a pre-cancerous photo Serena had sent, she of the twinkling eyes and the Scaasi chiffon, she of the I-shit-on-you mouth—like some centimillionairess out of W.
The reunion looked like a collection of fat old talking candles. The banquet ended just after ten. As the pallbearers of the student body returned to their rooms, Serena heard music blaring from a sidebar ballroom. She wanted to investigate. Victor and his wife went up to bed, beat. Serena had to pull Ted by the elbow; Glynn and hubby indulgently followed. Sad to say, but wandering like that with Ted on her arm was the most fun yet. The music grew louder and the air seemed to change, supercharged by the molecules of the young. A prom. Serena wanted to crash, but the others backed off, laughing gray-skinned dumb-asses. Serena made Ted buy her a drink in the bar while they cut up old times. After Ted walked her to the room and kissed her with his dead fish mouth, she went back down and tipsily danced with the kids. They didn’t know what to make of it but liked her energy. She grew light-headed and a leg felt numb; Serena thought she was having a stroke, but it was only the carousing and champagne. She sat at a table, pale, dizzy, staring at souvenirs not of her time—then cried all the way to the elevator, like hosing vomit off a sidewalk. By the time the doors sealed her in and the car began its skyward rush, she knew her life had ended.
On Saturday, Donny Ribkin rose early. He exercised, spoke to his mother’s night nurse and speed-read three scripts before a solitary hotel breakfast. Saturdays were the best; Sundays were too close to Monday to be anything more than exemplary. In the afternoon, he drove to the beach. He toyed with taking the Impala—the car his father bought him when Donny was sixteen—but settled on the Land Cruiser because of its height. In the Toyota, he could watch the naked, hair-strewn legs of the women and children, worn out from the water.
He was thinking about Leslie Trott, fag dermatologist and celebrity adept. As an agent, Donny was immune to anything more aberrant than a fleeting client crush—excluding directors (at least, good ones), he felt superior to those in his charge. He’d met all kinds of Big Star–fuckers but never anyone so consumed, attuned and addicted as Dr. Trott. Les had a large staff of young borderline-attractive nurses, also enslaved; the one-two punch of awe and resentment delivered by the stellar clientele had pushed his retinue to the reedy marshes of pharmaceutical abuse. How surreal and achingly unfair to be on such casual, familial terms with world-class icons—sneaking them through the Private Door, trading high-end gossip of love trouble and HIV death, apportioning devoted guffaws and unsolicited Percocets, being kissed, teased, quasi-missed and token-gifted by the most famous men and (mostly) women on Earth. A television comedienne handed out thousand-dollar Bulgari pens like they were Snapples—general thank-yous for being such staunch, discreet Big Star Acolytes in Les Trott’s fucked-up swanky codependent parish. Hired more for a talent to soothe and schmooze, Mother’s little helpers were duly outfitted in sanitorium whites and signature Mephisto tennies, their minimal skills enhanced by crash-course on-the-job training. They became cyst-popping confidantes, handmaidens to media immortals: after all the in jokes and injections and periorbital peelings—while dope-nodding Big Star snaked and lurched on the table, squeezing Acolytes’ hands like a pioneer sister having an arrow-wound cauterized—after all the shushing, sloughing, scraping, flaking, flecking and sucking up, after the poke, prod, swab and salve, the plucky divinity would evanesce (Private Door) to the limo for a stoned shopping spree while hydra-headed Cinderella mopped the pus and dermal dandruff in its wake.
Les treated most of Donny’s clients, appearing at screenings and charity balls, art openings, award shows, tapings, shootings, bar mitzvahs, weddings and funerals. The reason the sultan made time for the agent’s occasional eruptions (when Donny got a pimple on his nose, he liked it injected ASAP) rather than shuffling him off to, say, a partner with offices in the megasuite’s Siberia, was owing to Donny’s official role as wrangler to three of the doctor’s seven key Big Star fetishes. In fact, Les Trott had only three observable modes of discourse: (one) that while with an unempowered, non-celebrity stranger (this sometimes occurred inadvertently. He remained coolly cordial and glassy-eyed while plotting his trajectory from sandtrap to nearest Big Starlit oasis. It was during such encounters Les convinced himself he was a normal person, capable of self-effacing civilian banter); (two) that
while with a powerful yet non-celebrity acquaintance (in such an instance, he might affably field medical queries, overwhelming one with minutiae. He assiduously kept current on the journals and enjoyed regurgitating their contents to laymen, a kind of parlor trick with the dual function of helping him retain what he’d read.); lastly, (three) that while interacting with a Big Star. Donny Ribkin, whose whimsical scrutiny of Trott was an extension of his student anthropology days at UCLA, breezily noted gradations therein: a breath of alacrity, almost subjective, an iridescence discerned in the jump from Victoria Principal to, say, Jane Seymour. Then one watched a Seymour fall to an Ali MacGraw, who then fell to a Helen Hunt; a Hunt to a Bergen, a Bergen to a Bening (more so, of course, if Bening spouse was present), a Bening to a Midler, a Midler to a Whoopi, and so on, until all fell to Streisand or Taylor or Streep. It was banally, bizarrely riveting.
A few weeks ago, Donny brought his mom to the Cedars-Sinai office so Les could look at her moles and tags. Donny knew they were harmless, but Serena was vain. Since the surgery, she’d spent countless hours poring over the map of her skin—though the cancer inhabited her desert’s dark hole, not the negligible cacti growing on chaparral of tummy, pelvis and neck.
Serena always liked Les, having visited through the years for age spots, spider veins and cortisone. He seemed genuinely to enjoy her company. Dr. Trott knew she was dying and, after all, such imminence conferred a kind of celebrity too, linking her to the power-sodden, ticking-clock clan of his H.I.V.I.P. friends. Thus, Les was able to enter a makeshift fourth mode of tender ministrations: the incongruous one of healer. The wry, happy-face Acolytes, never more than an hour or so away from the next Big Star fix, garlanded the agent’s mother with queen-for-a-day benedictions and real sugarless-candy giveaways—actual lollipops of affection—just as they had Bette Davis in her pre-mortem dermo once-over. Outside the windows, birds chirped a Technicolor musicale and even the nurses seemed less stoned; angelic, whitewashed sisters of charity, loving the agent for bringing his mum, lifting her spirits like that at death’s elaborate, unfunny door.
