by Bruce Wagner
Arnold’s boy came down the aisle, engrossed in a hand-held digital game. Jeremy gathered him up.
“He’s sweet,” Tovah said. “Taking him to the zoo?”
“Absolutely. You know, San Diego has a taipan, if you’re interested—probably the most aggressive snake in the world. Northern Australia. Last time I was there, a kid put his hand to the window and the taipan struck three times. They didn’t realize until the end of the day that the damn thing had broken its nose!”
Tovah sought her client out below while the new friends bonded over the addictive nature of collectibles. Perry mentioned the eighteenth-century “Pendule Sympathique,” a kind of carriage clock crowned with a half-moon berth to accommodate certain pocket watches; when the latter were placed within, they would automatically be reset and rewound by the “mothership.”
“That’s Breguet—did Napoleon have one of those? That kinda thing comes up for auction every now and then. They’re millions upon millions, it just doesn’t end. You can go to Frank Muller—Muller makes one-of-a-kinds—for two hundred grand, they’ll design whatever kind of watch you want.”
“I’d love to get together,” Perry said as they pulled into the San Diego station. “I’ve heard great things about your show.”
“And I’m a big fan of yours. I’ll bring Berto—know where we’ll go? Ginza Sushiko, heard of it? On the Via Rodeo. Probably the most expensive sushi place in the country. You can get fugu there. Friend of mine in Japan took me for absolutely exquisite tempura—you know, one of these places where you eat out of eight-hundred-year-old bowls. Anyway, he said they had something extremely rare that I had to try. I said, ‘Well now, what would that be?’ And my friend Ryuichi says, ‘Cow penis.’ He began to laugh. ‘I think you mean bull, Ryuichi—though cow penis would be rare!’”
They only had a few hours and decided to skip the zoo.
Tijuana was close but not close enough; Tovah said it wouldn’t be such a good thing if they missed the return jog. They cabbed it to Hotel del Coronado for lunch. On the way, Perry had a grim laugh, imagining himself at the border like Steve McQueen en route to a miracle clinic. What ever happened to laetrile, anyway?
Tovah took a while in the restroom. When she entered the lobby, Perry raised a finger from the front desk, holding her off. She smiled and sat down, not really thinking he was up to anything. When he came over, she said, “I’m starved,” but Perry said he felt like eating in privacy so he’d gotten a room and hoped that was all right.
“When do children learn to tell time?” She was trying to get him to open up about Montgomery.
He could see part of her through the door, naked, sitting on the bowl having her pee. He thought of Jersey, being scrubbed with seaweed. God knew how long it had been since he’d watched a woman in a bathroom, other than his wife.
“That depends,” he said, listening to the tinkle. He wondered if she’d done this sort of thing before with other clients—the afternoon delight. Probably not with a dying one, anyway.
She came out in a white hotel robe. They should be getting back, she whispered, kissing him. “Why, yes’m,” he said. He could smell her sex on his face and dreaded washing it off.
Floating past Capistrano, sitting on a depopulated divan, Perry remembered he had brought Tovah’s gift. There was an impulsive purity behind its purchase, but now, after the act, such a gesture would seem old-fashioned and demeaning: reward for a job well done in the sack, a gold watch for fifty minutes of service. It wasn’t expensive enough to give his wife and he wouldn’t want Jersey finding it tucked away in a drawer, either. He’d bury the thing or bring it back to Henri, for credit.
Arnold’s son passed, and then another reconnoitering boy, who stared at him a moment, causing a pang. He looked just like Montgomery—without the seizures, of course, or the medulloblastoma the size of Children’s Hospital. Only six hundred cases a year and Montgomery one of them; he died at the beginning of March, making him number one-oh-eight, or thereabouts. The last few weeks he got chemo through a tube in his chest. When he curled into the fetal position, a doctor had the gall to say kids responded to trauma by “reverting to infancy.” Perry wanted to scream “He is a fucking infant!” but something stopped him short—he was nothing if not civil. He stabbed at himself for months after, always holding his tongue, his whole life he’d been that way, even when it counted most, keeping a neat little room in the back of his skull to house the cheap inventory of unvoiced comebacks and polished, useless retorts, obsolete and carefully shelved. Jersey was the one who got rowdy, while Perry held the world together. He regretted never having had a big Shirley MacLaine Terms of Endearment moment. Instead, he’d capitulated straight down the line. Why had he let them torture his kid like that?
Tovah brought him a drink.
“Did you ever sleep with Jeremy Stein?”
“Oh please.”
“Why not?”
“First of all, the guy is, like, totally into whores. From what I hear. And he had a stroke—it probably doesn’t even work anymore.”
“So those are the top two reasons you wouldn’t.”
“That’s not what I meant! He’s not my type. He’s got a kid. Who he, like, abandoned.”
“But you want to sign him.”
“He’s got a hit show. The one thing in his favor.”
He eyed her quizzically. “Why is it,” he asked, “that agents always say, ‘You got it’?”
“I know. I hate that.”
“And now all the assistants say it. Every time you ask for something, they say, ‘You got it.’ No: ‘You gahhhhht it.’ You don’t say that, do you?”
“I don’t know who started that.”
“Probably your dad.”
“That’s a horrible thought.”
They watched bodysuited surfers catch a wave. The agent was pensive. Perry tried finding her smell on his upper lip, but the booze had killed it.
“You know,” she said, “I’m not so sure that was such a good thing. What we did.”
“Sure felt like one.” He regretted asking if she’d slept with Jeremy Stein. Vulgar and flip.
“That’s not what I meant.” She smiled, blinking sultrily. “Are you okay with it?”
Perry was at a loss. He fell back on sheer age, which conferred a certain ready cool. He began to sing. “‘Strangers on a train, exchanging glances’—”
“Are we?” she asked, preparing to be hurt—now, or later. “Are we strangers?”
All women are mysterious, he thought. Without the twin antidotal axiom, there would be no game: All women are insecure. “Here’s an idea for a film: Two strangers meet on a train and agree to kill each other’s agents.”
“How about lawyers?” Tovah asked, relieved to be steered from her mushy course. “I’d feel more comfortable with that.”
“You gahhhhht it.”
Ursula Sedgwick
Donny couldn’t believe that Taj Wiedlin, his “shadow” at ICM for over two years, was the child’s killer. He felt like Walter Pidgeon in Forbidden Planet—the scientist whose unleashed id runs murderously amok. After the funeral, the agent dropped from sight. Ursula reasoned her old lover finally understood what she’d tried to tell him that day at Cicada: life is a wheel that turns round and round, like a carousel.
She was going downhill living in the house where her daughter was bludgeoned. She slept a few nights at Phyll’s, but the bungalow was small; the producer was pregnant and sick and it was hard on them both. Sara asked her to stay in a guest room of the Brentwood hacienda. The garden and clean, cool walls were welcome. Ursula liked that the streets had no sidewalks. During the day, she puttered around the old Venice house, straightening up, watching TV, sometimes napping on Tiffany’s bed. Taj called from jail a few times and left messages on the machine—she refused to change the number because it still felt like a link to her daughter. Sara and Phyll couldn’t argue with that.
She was wonderful with Samson. Sara’s actress friends wer
e always visiting, spinning bawdy, cynical Hollywood tales—so funny and compassionate and full of life—Marcia Strassman and Arleen Sorkin (she’d just had a little boy), Mary Crosby and Marilu Henner. And, of course, Holly and Beth Henley (Beth just had a baby too). Holly was so giving. She kept offering money and work. “Hey!” she shouted. “Be mah damn purrsonal ‘sistant!” Ursula wasn’t ready, but it was neat to get the offer. She knew Holly was sincere.
She found the infamous Dictionary of Saints at a used-book store on the Promenade and brought it to the children’s section of the library to read. Ursula felt safe surrounded by all the big, colorful books and lilliputian tables and chairs. The women who worked there assumed she was a nanny—or young mother, which she was and would always be. She re-examined the barbarous painting, as if remembering a childhood fever. Saint Agatha was often pictorialized carrying loaves of bread on a tray. The text said those loaves were actually breasts, sliced off by tormentors—that’s why she was simultaneously known as “the patron saint of breast disease and of bakers.” It was silly enough that she laughed. In other illustrations, the breasts were shown to be bells; so too was Agatha “the patron saint of bell ringers and firemen.” Something for everyone.
She didn’t dream anymore about the Roman brothel but knew that wasn’t a repudiation of her vision. She wasn’t sure how she had been so wrong about Taj’s role, but ascribed it to her lack of sophistication on the Inner. Ursula chose not to think about it for now. In her heart, she was certain Tiffany had been taken for a reason; in her heart, she knew the Mahanta was with her daughter at the exact moment she translated (the beautiful ECKist word for “passed on”). She had no doubts Tiffany was on the Soul Plane now. On one of his tapes, Sri Harold spoke about people translating because they had so much love for life that they needed more room to express it—that’s why they went to a “higher channel.” Ursula wondered if murder changed any of that; there was nothing in the Eckankar literature that pertained. Maybe Tiffany was ready to go but didn’t want to leave her mother so she drew this person Taj to aid in her translation. Something like that may have been true for Saint Agatha as well.
She poured herself into ECK volunteer and study groups. Ursula would do good works for those who had shown her kindness. She would heal herself through dreams and seek the Inner Master’s help in unwinding her karma.
Rachel Krohn
Aside from Tovah’s encouragements, Rachel didn’t know why she agreed. She couldn’t even remember giving out her number. When Mordecai called, he said they met at the seder, and a casually crass remark brought it all back: the one with the braces who owned the messenger service. (He probably got her number from Alberta, the portly yenta. Rachel called her Alberta, Canada, but never to her face.) So there they were, Mordie and Rachel at the movies, an Indian art-house flick she had wanted to see for a while. Surprisingly, he was attentive and cordial—aside from the trademark verbal gaffes, Mordecai Pressman passed for gallant.
The film was about a man whose wife dies in childbirth. Unhinged by her death, he becomes a vagrant. After five years of wandering, he guiltily returns to meet his son. Raised by in-laws, the little boy is a terror-on-wheels; they want deadbeat Dad to reclaim him. The boy, grown used to stories of a debonair father who lives in Calcutta, rejects the visitor’s paternal claims. In the end, the disconsolate widower refuses their pleas to take him by force, as would be his right. He departs alone. The child catches up on the outskirts of the village and asks if the man is going to Calcutta. “Yes,” says the widower, “if you like. Come with me.” The boy considers. “Will you take me to my father?” At this, Rachel cried—the true father before him and still the boy asks! The idea of a phantom father forever in Calcutta was so gorgeous and so sad to her, all at once. Mordecai handed her a handkerchief. “Don’t mind the spots,” he said, with a laugh. “It’s only chutney.”
They were supposed to go to dinner, but Rachel lied and said she had cramps. Mordecai dropped her off with a clumsy kiss.
She showered and slipped into bed. Will you take me to my father? The image of the cantor rose before her, crumbs of pottery on eyes and mouth, dirt on the heart. Then Tiffany Amber Sedgwick—for a week, she dreamed of washing her in a tub. As she soaped the tiny cello of her back, the little girl moaned like kids do when you try to rouse them for school, druggy and irascible. They just don’t want to wake up.
Rosetta Beth Howe’s bat mitzvah was celebrated at a temple in Bel Air, across the freeway from the Getty. Tovah tagged along.
Around two hundred sat in pews—lots of parents Rachel’s age, friends of the Howes’ who’d come with their kids, Rosetta’s classmates. Rachel was surprised all the hip-looking moms knew songs and Hebrew prayers by heart. Perry and Jersey flanked their daughter onstage. Eventually, Rosetta and the rabbi retrieved the Torah from its ornate tabernacle. The heavy scroll was placed in her arms and the girl, half hidden by its sacred blue-clothed bulk, held tight as she marched among the congregation. Rachel forgot exactly why they made you do that, but it was an impressive bit of pageantry nonetheless. The girl’s eyes deftly scanned the crowd as she dispensed sweetly modulated insider smiles to relatives and friends.
She was six months away from her own bat mitzvah when her father died. With the swift move to Menlo Park, the uprooting was complete—Rachel never saw her friends from Beth-El again. No more carpools and sabbaths, Succot and shofars, no more kissing of mezuzim on doorsills. Calliope donated her husband’s “religious accessories,” as she called them—his tallit and siddur—to the synagogue the way old clothes would be left at the Salvation Army. Each year, tradition faded while the Christmas tree grew gaudily redolent, its blinking, snow-sprayed branches heavy with goyische trinkets.
She made new friends in Menlo Park, and nursed a secret terror. Rachel had expected her period to come with the bat mitzvah; when that was broken off, she panicked. One by one her girlfriends fell to the red cabal, but for her the stainless months came and went like white clouds latticed across the sky. At night, flashlight under covers, she reread her underlined Leviticus, desperate to be “unclean.” They had studied the strange book in Hebrew School, with its ancient laws of sacrifice and defilement, delineations of forbidden sex and catamenial superstition: Rachel wanted the curse. She wanted to turn wine to vinegar with her touch or rust iron at the waning of the moon. She wanted to make mares miscarry. It was said a woman on her period might cause the death of a man if she passed between him and another, and Rachel wanted to try that in the worst way—she wanted to feed her blood to the neighbor’s cat and see if it would die. She yearned to be unclean, like the animals with “true hoofs but no clefts through the hoofs,” like the creatures that lived in the water but had no fins or scales, like abominations of winged, swarming things: eagles and vultures, falcons and ravens, ostriches, kites, hawks and gulls, owls and cormorants and pelicans, bustards, storks, herons and hoopoes and bats. She wanted the rhythmic drama of murderous potency, unclean. And when the bleeding stopped, she wanted to bring turtledoves and pigeons to the priest “so that he might offer the one as a sin offering and the other as a burnt offering; and the priest shall make expiation on her behalf, for her unclean discharge, before the LORD.” So said the Torah, and this is what she read aloud. But the vaunted discharge would not come.
Until she was seventeen. The temple was awash in blood: she kept black beach towels in the dresser, rushing to menstrual intercourse. She wanted to be unclean and make others so. Through her twenties and thirties, Rachel studied laws of Taharah HaMishpachah regarding a niddah, or menstruant woman. This became her Jewishness and perversely circumscribed expertise—her Orthodox window of stained glass. Marathon running made her irregular; so the doctors said. With a sense of belonging, Rachel noted she was a zavah, “one who continues to bleed beyond the normal period of her menses or who has bleeding at a different time of the month.” During that impure time, anything one slept, sat or rode upon (California King, LifeCycle, Land Cruiser) became unclea
n. The Torah distinguished between two types of vaginal discharges: a mareh was accompanied by specific physical sensation, while a ketem came with no warning—the stain simply discovered. The woman must always consult a rabbi to determine her status. Was she clean or unclean, tehorah or niddah? It depended on where the stain was found, its color and size. A ketem could only render a woman a niddah if it was the size of a circle around nineteen millimeters in diameter.
The woman must confirm by examination that the cyclical bleeding had ended. This was done with a three-inch-square cloth wrapped around the index finger, inserted deep into the vagina and rotated to detect any blood that might be hidden in the folds (a tampon wouldn’t do). The inspection could be done a number of times during the day, between douching. If questionable stains were still found on the cloth before sunset, it was to be put in an envelope and taken to a rabbi in the morning. At the end of seven spotless days, the woman would immerse herself in a bath called a mikvah; this was the only way to make the transition from tumah to taharah, tameh to tahor. It was necessary to submerge the entire body in the water, and the immersion must take place at night, “after at least three stars are visible.”
As the service ended, Rachel’s eye flitted to a passage in the book of Torah that she held in hand. It was a preface to Numbers and referred to the highest form of ritual defilement: contact with a human corpse. The rabbis called the human corpse “the father of fathers of impurity.”
The Red Cow; Laws of Purification
The rules regarding the red heifer are often called the most mysterious laws of the Torah. They prescribe a process of purification for anyone who has been in contact with a dead body….
