by Bruce Wagner
Calliope reached for the phone, wondering why she’d ever faltered. She left a message for Obie that it was imperative she didn’t miss her next appointment.
The carnival-themed Children with AIDS benefit was on the Twentieth Century–Fox backlot. Everyone wore baseball caps that said HERO—even the agents. Dustin and Goldie and Meryl manned the booths. Tom Hanks got dunked by Bob Zemeckis, Roseanne worked a Hula Hoop and Oliver Stone demonstrated a ring toss. There were lots of children and rich wives, paparazzi and studio heads and an army of people with the lean, mean walking-stick look of waning T cells. As Mitch and Calliope snaked through the crowd, the therapist rehearsed her attitude should she bump into Hassan. They’d only had one session since the Sony incident; he had been understanding, but she couldn’t control who the television star would tell. Somewhere down the line, more scandal awaited.
They found themselves on line for a hot dog behind Oberon and Dr. Trott. A little girl stood on his shoes. He introduced her as Tiffany, and the child extended a hand for Calliope to shake. Calliope asked Obie if she’d gotten her message. Obie said she hadn’t. They were joined by Donny Ribkin and Ursula, Tiffany’s mother. Les made a joke about therapist gridlock, then Donny said seeing Mitch and Calliope in public was like walking in on your parents while they were doing it. Phylliss Wolfe came over and said they almost had enough for a minyan. Ursula asked what a minyan was and Phylliss said it was “Yiddish for encounter group.”
Only on the ride home did Calliope realize the mother and child she met were the players in Obie’s hellish home-movie, with Donny Ribkin as co-star. She shivered, recalling the hairless white arm and the girl’s tender grip, limp as a rag doll’s.
The Dead Pet Detective had a job in Laurel Canyon; Fluffy was in the cellar, party-heartying with the larvae. It was strictly a BYOL scene—bring your own Lysol—and before you could say yech, the little wrigglers were doing the Top Ramen tango. After, he stopped at the Canyon Mart and impulsively bought flowers and sandalwood incense for Serena.
There were police cars in the driveway. The front door was open and Simon stepped inside. Men in suits were questioning the new nurse, who was near hysteria. Seconds later, Donny Ribkin barreled from the kitchen.
“This is insanity! How could this fucking happen?” He locked eyes with Simon. “What are you doing here?”
“I just stopped to give these to Serena.”
“Thank you, but you’re going to have to leave. I’m sorry.”
“Is she okay?”
“Look, you have to leave, okay? Thank you very much.”
He jostled Simon out without even taking the flowers. Had Serena died? She’d been sick enough that her death shouldn’t have aroused such mayhem. What did Donny’s words in the hall mean? The mood of the house seemed more interrogatory then postmortem. Might she have been killed by a burglar? That was too farfetched…maybe the old woman took an overdose and that’s why the nurse was being grilled. Yes—that made most sense. Or maybe she wasn’t dead at all. But if that were true, where was the ambulance? And if she was already at the hospital, what was the son doing here? If she was dead, who were these people? Where was the coroner? It felt like something had just happened: they never rushed a body out of a house like that.
His car was parked curbside. Simon tossed flowers and incense onto the front seat through the open window. A policeman left the front porch of the home across the way. A woman in a bathrobe covered her mouth with a hand, stricken.
“Do you think she’s wandering the streets somewhere?”
“If she is, I would hope someone will take her in and give us a call.”
“Poor darling! She’s been so ill.”
Simon ran to the side of the house.
He could smell her as he shimmied through the access. She was ten yards in, sitting against a post. He whispered “Serena” and hunchbacked toward her. The eyes were open. A horde of disorganized ants in the superheated throes of discovery laid claim to the darkening ground beneath the bloody, blown-out engine room of her bowel. They would say it was delirium, but Simon knew why she had come. He choked back tears, wondering what to do next. She looked so perfect there, timeless and untroubled—Serena. He would keep her from the maggots.
Above came the querulous footsteps of the son and the men, and Simon wished this house could lift off, basement jettisoned, to find its lonesome orbit somewhere near the Fellcrum Outback. The Dead Animal Guy in Space would petition the Vorbalidian Elders for mercy and they would grudgingly comply, resuscitating her with the proviso she could never return to Earth. Together, they’d cross the firmament of the cellars of eternity, performing obsequies over the dead.
On the eve of burying Serena, the agent had a massage. He got a name from Laura Dern’s chore whore. The masseuse spent a lot of time moving her hands over his body without touching—“dispelling dark energy,” she said. Someone must have blabbed about his mom dying. It was lovely being rubbed out there on the patio. He got sleepy. The fountain tinkled and the hill rustled with scavengers. The girl said she saw a big raccoon.
All day long, he’d been airing the place out. Donny loved this house; maybe he’d move in for a while. Strange, but he’d never bought, always rented—he thought he must have got that from his father. Bernie was always bouncing from duplex to hotel. Serena had kept things up pretty well, though the lot was probably worth more than the house itself. Whole thing might bring two-point-seven—with the market the way it was, who knew. Maybe two-three, two-one. He’d find some Persian schmuck-Jew or Big Star wannabe, sell it for cash, then buy a place in Mandeville or Rustic Canyon. Three acres felt about right. He could actually afford to spend five mill, if he had to. Five mill on a house. You could get something really decent for that. Lying there, getting his bad energy laundered, Donny performed a sprightly minuet of acquisition: he could retire in Fiji or the Côte d’Azur if he chose, or spend a million on a Pissarro. Lasso koi from the Sargasso or bid on a boulle Louis XIV bureau plat at Sotheby’s, three million for a piece of fucking furniture, thank you very much. Something to set the teeth of his colleagues on edge—they were always jockeying for rarefied outside investment interests that made them more than “just agents.” How about the Donny and Serena Ribkin Foundation? Generous and unconditional stipends to radical artists. Whatever he came up with, the grieving son promised himself Jessye Norman would sing at his next birthday.
The service at Hillside would be small. He hadn’t yet called his father. The old man was probably gambling at some West Hollywood card club or standing at the Peninsula bar, informing a hooker his son was king of ICM. He could see it: Bernie at the cemetery, sussing out the gallery, slithering up to a mark, one of the agency crew, pitching his loser sequel there at the open pit as the casket ratcheted down. Well, fuck him. He’d have to read about the death of Donny Ribkin’s mother in the trades. Then he could make his phony graveside communion—oh, the way we were!—hike up the hill for the big false moment, standing on the grassy doormat of her remains with supermarket flowers and crocodile tears. What a ham. His drinking buddies from the Golden Years were buried there, Dick Shawn and Vic Morrow. On the way back to his bunged-up Range Rover, the old bag of semen might even take a walking tour, stop and say hello. All that gloom sure made a fellow want to play an exacta or two—from the memorial park’s gentle slopes, you could practically see the track…. Donny was hard for half the massage, cock straining against the sheet like a dumb, friendly ghost. He didn’t feel remotely erotic, but that was of no consquence; day after night after day, the absurd beggar made its demands. Energy Girl worked around it, never making a move. Wouldn’t toss it a nickel.
The agent got restless and went to see Ursula. On the way, the radio said Oberon Mall had overdosed. He doubled back to Cedars. When he got to the hospital, the media circus had already staked its tents. Donny parked across and sat in the darkness, immobilized. He didn’t have it in him tonight, not just because of his mother’s death, though that was handy. No
one would exactly expect him to show up at the ER with the lawyers and publicists. He was thinking more along the lines that it was time to change his life, disappear somewhere in a three-hundred-thousand-dollar motor home; cliché agent burnout thoughts, life as Lynchian road show. Nic Cage could play him in the movie of his life. Donny began to laugh, then saw his mother drifting before him in a Valentino; she hovered outside the windshield, an ancient dulcinea on the hood, trying so hard to charm the Acolytes at Les’s, so valiant, smiling through a veil of eviscerating pain. The agent wept convulsively until the windows fogged, shielding him from the prying searchlight eyes of Entertainment Tonight.
A tube snaked down the hole in Obie’s throat. Les was the only one she “talked” to—grunts, clicks and tortured exhalations amid farts and yowling tears. He sat with her every day after work and on weekends. One blink for yes and two for no assured she was compos mentis. He wished, mercifully, that she weren’t.
It wasn’t an overdose at all. Oberon Mall went in for a root canal and bacteria got in the blood, attacking a congenitally weakened valve in her heart. It festered there before unleashing a shower of emboli to effervesce the brainstem, blocking supply of blood to the pons—the area commanding movement. When the tide rolled out, death of tissue left her marooned—“locked-in,” went the jargon—a Big Star cognitively undamaged, sensoria intact, dungeoned in a useless body, a catheterized sandcastle princess on a wide dead sea.
He left her to the caretakers when it became too much, Obie with her ungodly wail, blind but sensing his departure, the distraught dermatologist rushing for the elevator while nurses unstuck watery carbuncle of bedpan, rotating her so she wouldn’t grow decubiti. A few days in, two attendants were caught photographing her nude, their hands on her.
Les wondered how much she could see. Once in a while, when he held her, an eye rolled up and looked into his like something from Sea World. Her doctors, most of them friends from medical school, said Obie would never recover movement or speech. Les couldn’t imagine that. Perhaps he’d assume care once she was discharged. When she got over her depression (if that were possible), she would require a van, with driver and attendant, like the Getty boy. He would have to get with her accountants. She was completely vulnerable now. The court would need to appoint an executor. The only relative he knew of was the mother, and Edith wasn’t able. It would be easy for him to step in. They shared the same attorneys, and he knew Obie would agree to such an arrangement. But could he afford it, emotionally? Professionally? There was still the matter of the Medical Board investigation. If Obie fell to his care, he would hire a publicist for a few months, a friend at PMK. He’d been thinking of doing that anyway. He was already being slandered—there were whispers of the root canal story being a cover, that Les had furnished the drugs that destroyed her. People would say he was just doing penance with his attentions, Big Star–martyred, reading aloud to her for hours, Tolstoy and George Eliot, arranging on-line chats with Chris Reeve, visits from Deepak Chopra, injecting collagen here and there for old times’ sake. Hosting morbid dinner parties…Who cared what they said? He loved her and would do the right thing. Yet he knew what happened to “love”—he’d been through that with his mother during her slow decline. How many times he had wished her dead, wanting to piss into that hairy, sleeping scowl of a mouth.
He would accommodate. Les’s spirits rose as he saw himself arriving at a benefit with Oberon and her pharaonic attendants—a famous pair the Doctor and Big Star would make, odd and legendary, real New Yorker material, Avedon’d and Yohji’d in summer whites, Obie tied by Hermès scarves to a high-tech wheelchair, atrophic and glorious in her Anna Sui, gums overgrown from anti-seizure meds.
Once Obie’s mom was coaxed into coming, she didn’t want to leave. The ICU nurses bent the rules and let her sleep in a cot in the room. Les took her to Mortons while the medics fiddled with the Big Star gastrostomy tube.
Edith had gained about a hundred pounds since he’d seen her last. She was remembered as a tall, lanky woman, a big-boned American classic—pasty and menstrual-smelling now, cheeks like slabs of halvah, wet with tears. A borderline schizophrenic, she lived alone in a building Obie had bought and christened the Edith-Esther. Her mother was holy to her. Big Star had managed to keep her existence from the world and that was good, because Edith Esther Gershon was not built for scrutiny; she was gentle and alien and rarely left her rooms. Les remembered stopping over one night after a premiere. Edith giddily showed them the bawdy printouts of her dialogue with AOL lotharios. One of them, a Turk, owned a strip club in Akron. He wanted to know how “tall” Edith’s breasts were and Obie laughed until she cried.
Calliope told Les he didn’t look well. She said he needed time off and gave him “permission” to recharge in Rancho Mirage.
Les left Thursday and drove back Sunday night, top down all the way. He hadn’t done that since college. The freeways were clear, the night a velour, spangled dome. He thought about Obie, turning the pages of the memory album while “Streets of Philadelphia” repeated itself on CD. They had some hilarious times. As the air knifed around him, the physician felt grateful and alive. I’m not paralyzed, he thought, then said it aloud. And said it again, louder this time, as if courting danger, shouting his Schadenfreude to the stars. The words soured in his mouth and he felt naked and foolish, unclean, ashamed. He recoiled as he heard the voice: You should really try to stop being such a fag….
Les drove to the hospital.
The cot was empty and a curtain was drawn around Obie’s bed. A small light shone within.
He hesitated to enter, thinking her in the midst of some intimate minor procedure. He tried to discern silhouettes, then went in. The two laid atop the sheets, Oberon in her mother’s puissant arms, mouth fastened to nipple. Edith’s tear-streaked face looked up and smiled, lips trembling like an ecstatic clown. Les’s mouth was open too and he covered it with one hand while the other felt for a chair. Eyes riveted, he backed up, noiselessly lowering himself as if onto a pew.
“Hey, there.”
Eric was at the Sweets bar when Donny walked in.
“There he is,” said the agent.
“Here for dinner?”
“No—I was at Muse.”
“Can I buy you a drink?”
“Absolutely. Absolut.”
It was a Monday crowd—the place had become so hot that Monday was the only hip night left.
“Have you been to see her?”
“Yeah,” Donny lied. He hadn’t visited once.
“Pretty horrible, huh.”
“Pretty horrible.”
“Do you believe—is it true about the root canal stuff?”
“Yeah, it’s true.”
“Jesus. Phylliss was really freaked out.”
“A lot of people were.”
“She went over to see her.”
“To the hospital? You’re kidding.”
“It really freaked her out.”
“What did she say? That she was rewriting the part for a quadriplegic?”
“Yeah, right!”
They laughed darkly and sipped their drinks.
“I heard your mother died,” Eric said. “I guess this hasn’t been a great couple of weeks for a lot of people.”
Donny impulsively asked if he wanted to go somewhere else. The assistant was flattered and surprised. He ducked into the men’s room while the agent waited for the valet. A few boisterous associates came and went, and Donny was grateful to have been standing there alone. Eric said he was parked on the street. They left his car and wound up at a club in Silverlake.
“I thought you were straight,” said Eric as they got out of the car.
“As an arrow.”
They drank and watched men dance. They were joined by a friend of Eric’s named Quinn. Quinn had some coke, and ten minutes later, Donny actually found himself on the dance floor, two-stepping with the boys. They had more drinks and more coke and he invited them back to Carcassonne Way. Quin
n followed on his blue-and-white Harley.
Donny showed them around the house. When they got to the patio, Eric stripped off his things and jumped into the pool with a whoop. Donny asked Quinn if he was into cars, and they went to the garage.
The day Serena died, he brought the old Impala over and left it there, as if for a period of mourning—wild car of his youth back in the coop to pay its respects. Quinn ran a finger over the hood. Donny opened the door and climbed in. Quinn slid behind the wheel, shirtless. He asked if they could hear music and Donny handed him the key. Quinn turned the radio on then leaned over and kissed the agent on the mouth. His hand snaked into Donny’s pants.
“You don’t remember me, do you?”
“You’re Quinn,” Donny said, blankly.
“You’re married, right?”
“Uh, was.”
“Your wife has an angel tattooed on her butt, right?”
“Last time I looked.” The agent was curious now.
“I went home with you. You live in Laurel Canyon, right?”
“Jesus.”
“With the scarf, remember? That was pretty hot.”
“All in the family,” the agent said, unbuckling his pants. The old acquaintance got out a tiny tube of K-Y. Donny took it and greased Quinn’s cock. Donny asked if he’d tested and Quinn said, Every three months. Donny just wanted it inside him. They did some coke and the agent leaned back against the door, legs up in the air. The windows fogged and the Senior Veepee winced. Is this what his mother felt? This kind of cancer…A shape appeared through the misty glass. Bracing with his body, wet from the pool, Eric carefully opened the door, so the agent wouldn’t fall out. Donny arched, groaning as he rode up on Quinn. Eric braced Donny’s back and neck while Quinn scooted back like an insect, taking the stuck agent with him. Eric put his knees against the seat and his balls in Donny’s mouth. Donny twisted his head so that in his agony he could get at Eric’s prick. The agent was stoned enough that the twisting nearly made him black out.
