Still Holding

by Bruce Wagner

  “The shooting?” asked Annie.

  “Nah, that’s a whole different deal. Their little girl drowned in a municipal pool. A light in the tile shorted out or some such shit—the kid he had with Cassandra. Questra. Electrocuted her. Took five years, but they got eight million. You’ll meet Cass. She’s around somewhere. Trippy lady. Hard-core.”

  They passed the tiki bar, where drinks were being dispensed from an enormous ice sculpture. Blue-tinted gin flowed over the massive crystalline chunk into high-stemmed glasses. Just before the stairway that led beneath the pool came a makeshift shrine. The framed photo of a shiny-smiled toddler was surrounded by leis and votive candles.

  They went down the storm cellar opening to a small booth with a glass wall allowing a view of the swimmers. Their shoes puddled. It was dank and smelled of mold. A girl smoked a joint, nodding her head in stoned, silent assention at what she saw through the aquariumlike window: a disembodied woman, about six months pregnant, sat on the steps of the pool getting head from a fat old Hell’s Angel type. Everything was below the water from the breasts down. The bearded biker wore only Levi’s. Every twenty or thirty seconds, he surfaced for air before going down again.

  “That’s Cass. Grady’s old lady.” Then, with a smile: “I told you she was hard-core.”

  Impermanence

  LISANNE THOUGHT ABOUT letting Robbie know that she was expecting. She would have e-mailed, had he been an e-mail person. Anyhow, she was glad he wasn’t.

  It would have been so easy to have the doctor flush it away. She wasn’t showing and was hefty enough to think she never would, even if she carried to term. For the moment, Lisanne had the perverse luxury of putting the whole thing out of her head. She went to yoga a lot that week over on Montana. There was a kind of remedial class for fatties, newbies, and old folks.

  To her shock, one morning Kit Lightfoot and Renée Zellweger slipped in, just as class was beginning. (She wasn’t sure if they came together.) The ninety-minute session was difficult though not nearly as crowded as the advanced levels—a hip choice, thought Lisanne, for a celeb. She could deal with Renée, but having Kit there made it tough to concentrate. She’d always had a crush on him: now there he was, barely ten feet away, sweating his tight, insanely famous butt off. The teacher kept telling everyone to “stay present,” and Lisanne thought she must have picked up on her delirium.

  After the group Namastes, Lisanne lay in the corpse pose, trying to time her departure from the sweat- and sage-scented room with Kit’s. When he left, she waited a beat, then got up to stash her mat in the anteroom. She retrieved her things from the shelves and laced up her shoes in slow motion. Her mind wandered. The next thing she knew, Kit brushed past. He looked in her eyes and smiled and Lisanne’s heart actually fluttered. With a surrealistic pang, she thought of her pregnancy. Renée emerged from the large room. The two stars said quietly enthusiastic hellos. They left, and Lisanne discreetly followed.

  Her car was conveniently parked a length away from Renée’s. Lisanne opened the hatchback so she could fuss around while eavesdropping.

  “Gonna go see the monks?” Kit asked.

  Renée grinned inquisitively.

  “The Gyuto monks,” said Kit. “They’re making a sand mandala at the Hammer.”

  “Oh! I heard about that,” said the actress excitedly.

  “It’s very cool. You should really try to get over there.”

  “Those are the guys who do that weird throat-chanting thingie?” She imitated the gargling sounds, and Kit laughed.

  “Tantric monks,” he said, nodding. “They had a school in Tibet for like five hundred years. They were forced to go to India in ‘fifty-nine—like everybody else. They’ve been making a mandala all week.”

  “At the Hammer?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “That’s so cool.”

  “It’s really a kind of meditation. You sit, don’t you?”

  “Yes. But not as much as I’d like.”

  “No one ever sits as much as they’d like. So you know a little about what they’re doing, then.”

  “A very little.”

  Lisanne got the feeling Renée was vamping.

  “When they’re finished designing the mandala, they destroy it.”

  “Destroying the mandala,” she said, with a respectful laugh. “That really sounds amazing.”

  “It’s not about making art. That is a component—because the mandala and the meditation itself are both art. It’s really more a way of showing dedication and compassion to all living things.”

  “Sentient beings.”

  “Right. It’s about impermanence.”

  “And they’re doing that today? They’re still doing that today?”

  He nodded and lit a cigarette. “The deconsecration ritual isn’t open to the public, but I could definitely arrange for you to go in. If you want to see it. I’m kind of a patron of the San Jose Center.”

  “Kit, that would be so great! I would love that.”

  • • •

  LISANNE PLANNED to take off early from work and finagle her way into the mandala ceremony, but everything conspired against her. A string of tiny crises kept her longer at the office; when she finally got in her car, traffic was gridlocked. Her repertoire of residential street detours failed abysmally.

  When she got to the museum, the guard signaled that the exhibition was closed. She stood there downcast.

  Moments later a monk in orange robes appeared, on his way in. He was short and radiated a cliché, childlike bliss. Unexpectedly, he took Lisanne’s arm, gently ushering her into the large hall. She felt like Richard Dreyfuss at the end of Close Encounters.

  While her eyes adjusted, she looked around for Renée, but the actress wasn’t there. Neither was Kit. One of the masters had already begun sweeping away the colored sand. The Yamantaka deity, an emanation of the Bodhisattva Manjusri, was disappearing. The eight heads and thirty-four arms, two horns—“the two truths”—and sixteen legs (sixteen kinds of emptiness), the nakedness that symbolized abandonment of the mind, the self, and its worldly concerns were all being swept into a container. The monks would offer the commingled grains to an undisclosed local body of water. Water, which reflects both the world and infinity at once.

  Now Lisanne had no doubts.

  She would keep her baby.

  Reunions

  KIT GUNNED the Indian down the 60, toward Riverside—the familiar, unfamiliar route. The faux-stucco skin of the old house was thick with cement spray-on coatings, ordered throughout the years by Burke in varying fits of mania. Seasonal cosmetic makeovers were his thing.

  The sun-bleached DeVille was in the drive, and a junk car too. It was less than a beater—no wheels and up on blocks. Urchins ogled the chopper.

  Kit sat in a ratty chaise, feet propped on a tire swing, sipping beer while scanning love letters and ghostly Polaroids of Rita Julienne. Burke came from the house bearing gifts: coleslaw, corn, and KFC. “If I knew you were coming, I’d have provided something a little more sumptuous,” he said, delighted his son had shown up.

  “That’s cool,” said Kit benevolently, softened by the words and images of his beloved mother.

  “See? You’re like your old man after all. You arrive unannounced.”

  He let the remark slide. “I see the neighborhood hasn’t changed. Still shitty and depressing.”

  “That’s Riverside!” said Burke.

  He talked about a methamphetamine lab that had been busted up a few blocks from there. A chemical odor hung in the air for weeks— no one could figure out where it was coming from until someone’s lawn caught fire.

  “I’m telling you, it was straight out of David Lynch.” He looked over Kit’s shoulder at a snapshot. “Catalina. You were conceived on that trip. Did we ever take you to Catalina?”

  “No.”

  “We had a wonderful time there. Years later we went back and had a not so wonderful time.” He sighed. “Such is life.”

  “L
ook,” said Kit, neatening the documents. “I think I’m gonna head back.”

  “But you didn’t eat,” said Burke, waxing paternal. “Have a bite before you go.”

  “Some other time,” said Kit, lighting a cigarette. He lifted his feet off the tire.

  “Don’t you want to see your old room? It’s exactly as you left it.”

  “Got to keep it authentic for the tour groups, huh, Burke.”

  “I thought we could go by the school and have a look at the future Kitchener Lightfoot Auditorium.”

  “They’re not going to do that, are they? Name it after me?”

  “I know they want to. I’m told ten thousand will make it happen. It’d be nice press,” said Burke, smiling like Cardinal Mahony. “I’m always looking out for you.”

  Kit got the notion to fuck with him.

  “Do you need ten thousand, Dad?”

  The man chuckled like a bad actor.

  “I don’t need it. I could use it but I don’t need it. Not personally. The alma mater needs it: Ulysses S. Grant.”

  “I’ll send a check over, OK?”

  “That would be a beautiful thing.”

  “Now who should I make that out to? You, Dad? Or the school? If I made it out to the school, that’d probably be better. For me. I mean, tax-wise.”

  “Either way,” said Burke, staring off with stagy indifference. “Either way’ll do. To the school would be fine.” A pause, then, “It’s just . . . I’m not one hundred percent sure if Grant School is the right entity. I’m not sure they have their funding entity together yet. They could be calling that project something else. So if you write the check to me, that’s fine too, I’ll hold it in escrow then funnel it to the correct entity. No problems. Make it out to me, son—or leave the pay to line blank—not the amount—and I’ll turn it over. Save your business manager the hassle of a reissue.”

  Cela appeared at the front fence and made a dash to Kit’s arms. Pleased at the fortuitous arrival, Burke said, “Kit Lightfoot, this is your life!” He went inside so the high school sweethearts could be alone. Kit was certain his father had alerted her, because she was dolled up more than a Saturday afternoon would call for.

  “What a surprise.”

  “How you doin, Cela?” She was still gorgeous to him, but drugs had taken their toll. She was old around the edges.

  “Slummin today?”

  “Just a little,” he said.

  Some preteen girls pressed up against the driveway gate and giggled.

  “You look great,” said Kit. “You been all right?”

  “Not too bad. Burke and I have a pretty good thing going—we do the Sunday Rose Bowl swap, in Pasadena? Find all kinds of stuff then sell it on eBay. I know you’re doin OK.”

  “Can’t complain.”

  “Oh and hey, thank you for the eight-by-tens. That was a bonanza. People at the swaps go nuts for anything of yours that’s signed. Especially when Burke says he’s your dad—which, to his credit, he doesn’t a lot of the time.”

  The Afterworld

  IT WAS COLD but fun laying on the slab.

  Thanks to Elaine Jordache and her connected friend, Becca had been hired to play a cadaver on Six Feet Under. She was a little embarrassed to tell Annie, even though the casting people said it was the most coveted “extra” gig in town. Evidently, the producers were superfinicky about who they hired. Becca’s mom was thrilled. She immediately ordered HBO.

  All the actors were really nice. They felt bad for the extras because they had to spend so much time on their backs, sometimes wearing uncomfortable prosthetics.

  “You look so much like Drew Barrymore,” said a regular.

  “I think she might be a little bit heavier than I am right now,” said Becca. She didn’t mean to sound catty.

  “She’s a big fan of the show. Her agent supposedly even talked to Alan about coming on, but I don’t know if that’s going to happen.”

  There were actually two Alans. Everyone was always mentioning one or the other without using last names. (If you were “family,” you knew who they meant.) Becca had met the executive producer-sometime director Alan, but not the executive producer-director-writer-creator Alan.

  “The show doesn’t really work that way,” the regular went on. “They don’t usually cycle in movie stars. It’s not like The Sopranos. Thank God.”

  The actor went away, and a few minutes later another actor who Becca thought was gay sort of hit on her. He asked if she’d read about the mortician who had been caught posing bodies so a friend could take arty photographs.

  “It was so Witkin,” he said. She didn’t know what that meant. “We actually did a story line kind of like that—life imitates art. Did you see L.A. Confidential?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Remember the whole thing with Kim Basinger? The call girls who looked like celebrities?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Wasn’t she supposed to be, like, Veronica Lake? You could seriously do that—I mean, as Drew Barrymore!”

  Becca smiled politely from her cold metal tray. Even though she knew he was just being friendly, she didn’t like the suggestion that she could capitalize on her looks by being some kind of whore. But she was a captive audience and not in any position to take offense. All the cadavers spent their time praying that Alan—any Alan—would bestow upon them lines for, say, an impromptu dream sequence or that in some future episode they’d at least be allowed to cross over to the living for a speaking role. A speaking role was the Valhalla.

  The first A.D. called camera rehearsal.

  She lay there quietly amid the tumult, pondering her life. The relationship with Sadge was coming to an end; a strange and powerful new man had entered the scene. The strange and powerful new man frightened her, but Annie said that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. It wasn’t a great thing, but it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. It could even be a good thing.

  Becca played a game with herself between takes, seeing how long it took to get wet while thinking of him.

  School Days

  “SCHOOLS NEVER LOSE that smell, do they?” asked Kit.

  “That smells-like-teen-spirit smell?”

  He cocked an eye.

  “Did we ever fuck anywhere on campus?”

  “Hey, mister,” she said. “I held out a long time. Don’t go mixin me up with somebody else.”

  They sat on a plastic picnic table outside the auditorium. Padlocked vending machines, scratched with graffiti, hibernated against the stained cinder block wall.

  “I wish I could have seen your mama before she died,” she said. “I miss her, I truly do.” She shook her head. “That was a rough time for me—’Cela Byrd: The Rehab Years.’ It’s all about me, isn’t it?” she said, sardonically.

  “You doing OK now?”

  “Still peeing in a bottle. Hey, my birthday’s coming up! AA—six months. Wanna give me a cake?”

  “Love to.”

  “So . . . you gonna marry Viv Wembley?” She smiled as Kit simulated a blush. “Well you should. She’s pretty! And I love that show, it’s hilarious. She’s from L.A., right?”

  “Orange County.”

  “Michelle Pfeiffer’s from OC too. I read that somewhere.”

  A faraway girl approached on a bike. The sight of her summoned a memory.

  “Remember when we got loaded at that Christmas party?”

  “Yeah,” said Kit.

  He fished a roach from his wallet.

  “And we went into that room where everybody left their coats and purses and shit? And you, like, stole all the money—”

  “I wasn’t the only one! You had some magic fingers.”

  “I did, didn’t I?” she said, sex creeping into her voice.

  “You surely did.”

  “Please don’t call me Shirley. Remember that from Airplane! I loved that movie.” She put her hand on his leg. “We had something special, huh. First loves . . .” She unbuckled his belt. He lit the roach. “You don’t k
now how fucked up it’s been, Kit. Sitting in rehab, watching you in a movie. Reading about you in People. Or wherever. At the premieres. Always with someone else. There I am thinking: That girl should have been me. I used to tell people we went out, but I stopped. I was in jail once, all like, ‘He was my boyfriend! You don’t understand! He took me to the prom!’ That was a low point. As worsts go, that was a personal best.”

  She kissed him lightly once or twice to see how amenable he was, then drifted down and put him in her mouth.

  The faraway girl was closer now and stood on her bike, watching.

  A Gathering at the Rose

  BECCA DROVE SADGE to LAX. He would be away about three months. It was understood that when he returned, he’d find his own place. He would for sure have the money by then, anyway.

  On instinct, Becca drove to the Rose and parked in the lot. She decided to go for a stroll and check out Rusty’s building. Why not? He had described it to her. It was right on the boardwalk, a few doors up from the Figtree.

  Suddenly, Elaine Jordache emerged from the café. She dawdled, then Rusty came out holding a coffee and talking animatedly to a blondish young man of slight build. He wore an incongruous dress shirt and tie along with a warm and wolfish, slightly bemused grin. Becca slid down in the car seat to watch.

  A boy barely out of his teens was the last to join them. He held a binder and hung behind the blondish man with subtle, efficient obsequiousness. The trio strolled toward a vintage convertible with the boy lagging behind. The blondish man enthusiastically shook hands, first with Rusty then with Elaine. The boy-assistant got into the convertible and started the car. Becca couldn’t quite hear the words but thought Rusty was complimenting the blondish man on his car as the latter climbed into the passenger seat. There were a few more good-byes as boy-assistant and blondish boss pulled away.

  Becca slunk lower as Rusty walked Elaine to her car. They stood talking awhile in earnest. The mood got lighter, and Becca’s heart sickly speeded as she wondered if he was going to kiss Elaine on the mouth. He bussed her cheek. Becca, vindicated, swore eternal allegiance. Elaine drove off. Rusty strolled from the lot toward the beach.