Still Holding

by Bruce Wagner

  The article ended with Drew saying marriage was not a goal for her at this juncture. She just wanted to have fun and be alive. “I am so in love with love,” she said.

  Becca could relate.

  • • •

  THEY HADN’T SEEN each other since the kissing scene, which happened to be the very day Becca wrapped. Making out was fun and got pretty gnarly, and they bonded but not in a weird way. Becca put so many of those dissolvable Listerine thingies under her tongue that she thought she’d get a burn.

  There was so much she wanted to ask that day, but as it turned out, Drew did most of the talking. She, of course, knew that Becca was working for Viv as a chore whore (Becca was convinced that Viv had been shamed into letting her take time off for the Look-Alikes role because, as it happened, Drew did a cameo on Together, not because of a friendship with Viv but because she was the casual ex of one of the costars, and during the taping Drew had raved to Viv in front of Becca about what a terrific gal Becca was and how funny and great it was that Viv had hired her “soul sister,” and Becca knew that if Viv forbade her to work on Spike Jonze’s movie then Viv would have been exposed to the scorn of Drew and her movie friends, a scorn she definitely did not want to inspire) and Drew wanted to know if what she had heard was true: that Viv was sleeping with Alf. Becca said yes—she knew that Drew and Alf were once an item—but that it was a big secret. Drew just laughed and said what a slut Alf was and how hard it must have been for Viv with everything that had happened to Kit but that still there was something cheesy and unheroic about the way Viv kind of dumped him for his best friend. Especially under the circumstances. But far be it from her to judge, said Drew. Then she talked about how sweet Kit was and how they used to hang together when she lived in Carbon Canyon and how he turned her on to meditating and about the time they all—Drew and Kit and Tom and Kathy Freston (Tom was the head of MTV, she said)—went to Westwood to see a vipassana master called Goenka, who was touring the United States in a mobile home and what a horrible thing it was that some asshole did that to him and ruined his life and how she felt kind of guilty for never having tried to go see him when he was at Cedars. For a moment, it looked like she was going to cry, but a crew dog rushed over to lick her, almost knocking her down. She laughed out loud, rubbing its fur and baby-talking through suspended tears. That’s the way Drew was—a big, open heart. A wise old child.

  • • •

  LATER WHEN THEY fucked, Rusty made her talk about the Drew-kiss like it was some big thing that had turned Becca on. She hated when he wanted to hear stuff during sex. He wanted her to talk about their nipples getting stiff and them secretly getting all wet and excited while the camera rolled, but that was so far from the way it actually was. But as long as Rusty got off, what did she care? The more she talked, the more she got into it, and she hated that he could so easily manipulate her. Seeing him turned on turned her on—sex was powerful. She would say anything he wanted to hear, do anything he asked, except maybe a four-way again, but when he got her going like that she knew she could never say never. When he came, she came too, and that was all that mattered.

  On the Street Where He Lives

  THE REUNION TOOK place on a cold, gray January afternoon. Most houses in the cordoned Riverside neighborhood had yet to throw out their Xmas trees.

  She felt like she’d been to the cul-de-sac before—not just that months-ago time as a reluctant tourist but in another life. Lisanne dug deep and conjured his mother’s beautiful, angular skull, hair gone prematurely white from the vile tawdriness of errant cells covertly ripening under the glass of a fractured marital hothouse. The violence of all of it. According to Web sites and unofficial paperback bios, Burke had finally left Rita Julienne—whose very name signaled delicacy and countryside vulnerability!—alone with her son until the sick woman could no longer stand to remain in that godforsaken city and found sanctuary in a $435-a-month studio apartment in the gang-ridden projects of Panorama City. (Burke loitered in Vegas before reclaiming the family seat on the very evening of the day they fled. He got back so fast, he joked to his running partners, “the toilet seat was still warm.”) Those last months were tough on R.J. Kaiser Permanente was about to trash her womb and feed her to the chemo dogs.

  Lisanne closed her eyes and submerged. She called on Tara to help with healing divinations, martyred herself to cries and whispers of unpaid alimony and veiny lymphomas, grapefruit-size divorce tumors sprouting in the domestic loam of cervical pain. Sitting in the car just two houses down, a backward-seeing clairvoyant, she heard all the old sounds and smelled the old smells—witchily raising the zoological mist of Burke Lightfoot’s animal funk, tinctured brew of athlete’s foot, jock rot, and unwashed crack, ne’er-do-well cologne and thirty-dollar parvenu deodorant, Lavoris mouth and pimpy charisma—invoked even the dark, mystic feelings of wet-leafed trees and their vermin, damp streets and window frames, sodden ungathered newspapers, oil-stained driveways and insular neighborhood smells, leavened by the crisp spice and blue smoke of things exaltedly autumnal. The airspace itself spoke in rapturous tongues of suburban decay.

  Miracle: she was now inside that sorrowful house, moving as a docent within its storied walls, an official cog in the beloved sangha. Her humble reunion with the actor went appropriately unnoticed by all parties but herself. Lisanne and a gal from the Santa Monica sit group had been enlisted to accompany a sweet, sallow-faced monk; they were to do service, whatever father and son required. (Anyone who came to Riverside underwent Mr. Lightfoot’s scrutiny and wasn’t invited back without his approval. Most returnees were female.) The women housecleaned while the men, say, an ordained monk or senior meditator, sat with Kit in the yard or living room in quietude, or engaged the actor in gentle conversation. Lisanne tried to be close to him. During lunch, she rearranged foodstuffs in the pantry or washed out the fridge’s veggie bin a second time, if need be.

  She especially loved scrubbing his bedroom toilet. A practitioner said that toilet cleaning was an old and venerated Buddhist practice—a particularly honorable way to achieve merit. At first, she didn’t believe it. Then one of the monks told her that cleaning toilets was a surefire way to quiet the ego. There were even special travel groups (they advertised in the dharma magazines) that promoted the tandem merit-generating activities of toilet cleaning and the touring of sacred Buddhist sites. Lisanne understood. She knew that her humble efforts were a poem, a kneeling meditation equivalent to the thousandfold prostrations pilgrims endure while circumambulating holy mountains in Tibet. She never used gloves. She reached in to polish the bowl with a little sea sponge as if it was the rarest of alabaster. Sometimes she gave herself a paper cut before cleaning so that her blood could absorb the microbial effluence that remained. Sometimes she wished he left more of himself.

  Now and then a woman named Cela came. Lisanne liked her rosy smile. She and Kit had supposedly been schoolmates. Lisanne was reorganizing a closet when Cela and Kit’s dad blundered into the room and kissed before noticing her. They giggled and rushed out. A sanghanista said that Cela and Kit used to be together, “back in the day.” Lisanne thought: Hearsay is the worst kind of poison, and the self-inflicted karmic wounds unwittingly suffered by gossipmongers are more deleterious than any sort of wound those who were gossiped about might sustain, no matter what their misdeeds. Sometimes Lisanne detected Mr. Lightfoot watching her in a curious, vaguely predatory way, but she always deflected his gaze with a beneficent, neutered smile—her Mona Lisa vipassana. There was a line to tread, because she wanted to please him, to ensure he allowed her back.

  In a few visits, she had caught Kit’s eye only once. He grinned, betraying no recognition of Tiff Loewenstein’s honored messenger, the bringer of the Sotheby’s Buddha. Better yet, she thought. Better a tabula rasa. Then she had a wonderful idea—she would restore him the idol. How fitting that it come full circle! She recalled Tiff objecting to her impulse to bring the sacred object to the hospital, but now things were different. Now, it wou
ld be her privilege and her duty. She was absolutely convinced, devotionally convinced, that it was paramount Kit have the bejeweled, copper Buddha and its vibrations at hand. The statue was probably at the Benedict house. She resolved to find the right moment to ask Mr. Lightfoot for his help in tracking it down.

  A Special Visit

  BURKE WAS SITTING on the can reading the tabloids when the doorbell rang. He looked up, distracted. “Oh shit,” he muttered, remembering.

  “Just a minute!”

  He sucked it in and made a dash to the linen closet.

  Kit sat in the pool, wave machine off, smoking one of those herbal cigarettes Tula rolled for him. (Burke let Tula mix in grass when Kit was in spasm.) He held a silver reflector at his neck, a vintage model that Cela had picked up at the Roadium.

  Burke rushed into the yard with a stack of towels and a terry-cloth robe, like some freaked-out bellhop.

  “Come on! There’s some people I want you to meet.”

  “I’m tanning!” barked Kit, good-naturedly.

  He spoke with the long-drawl accent of neurological damage, easily recognized yet easily understood. The manner in which he doggedly scooped words from the ether was cozily endearing and made Kit all the more watchable—the trademark grin shone through, crowned by glinting, CinemaScope eyes.

  “Too bad,” said Burke. “Come on!” He helped his laughing son step from the pool, buck naked. The homemade haircut was looking worse by the day, and Burke got a whiff of his breath. “Jesus! Try and use a toothbrush once in a while, will you, please?”

  Kit cracked The Smile.

  “Folks came a long way to see you,” said Burke, toweling him down. “Came all the way from fucking Hiroshima.”

  “Fuck ‘em,” said Kit, bantering.

  “Yeah right, I know. But we already did. We dropped the A-bomb.”

  “Fuck fuck fuck!”

  “I know, I know. Your favorite.”

  They melodically fuck-fuck-fucked their way to the house, a gleeful trade-off for getting Kit to cooperate. The herky-jerky gait had vastly improved since Valle Verde days.

  “And none of that in front of the Takahashis, OK? They didn’t fly 12,000 miles on Air Nip to hear you dirty-talk.”

  The industrialist and his family were gathered in the breakfast room. They began their incessant bows and polite susurrations the moment Kit and his dad came in. The teenage daughters tittered, eyes rolling in their heads like crazed little fillies. The paterfamilias squinted in frozen delight, a tiny DV camera poised in readiness.

  “Can’t let you use it, Mr. Takahashi,” said Burke, cordial but stern. “Sorry. So solly. Not part of the agreement.”

  He acceded without protest, tucking the camera into its case.

  “Pretty girls!” shouted Kit. “Made in Japan!”

  The dismayed, kowtowing sisters looked as if they might spontaneously combust. Their bold, still furtive glances at the superstar crescendoed to stroboscopic, inhuman speed.

  “I have a tan!” Kit shouted amiably. The sisters retreated then all at once advanced, hands over mouths. “You’re too pale! Too pale! ‘Made in Japan’ is too pale!”

  “Come on, girls,” said Burke. He literally shoved them closer while singing, “Don’t be shy, meet a guy, pull up a chair!” At first they resisted, but when they actually collided into Kit, the ice seemed finally to have broken. Burke said, in an aside to the patriarch, “My son’s a busy man.”

  Kit bussed their cheeks, which instantly reddened as if bruised. One girl was now crying while the other tenuously kept psychosis at bay. The industrialist slapped his knees with delight, caroming toward some kind of hysteria himself.

  “Well, whaddaya think, Mr. Takahashi?” asked Burke, rhetorically. He began to doubt strongly if his guests could understand a word. “Was it worth it? Was it worth it?” He turned to his son. “Mr. Takahashi owns steel factories.”

  “I fuck!” said Kit and Burke rolled his eyes.

  “Oh, here we go. Now don’t you start . . .”

  (The one word they might understand.)

  “I fuck! I fuck! I fuck! I fuck! I fuck!”

  “Come on now, boy,” he chastised.

  But no one seemed to care.

  Burke laughed along with the Ornamentals, which was what he called them to their faces once he confirmed to his own satisfaction that they were clueless.

  • • •

  THE CHIEF ORNAMENTAL left twenty-five thousand in cash wrapped carefully in rice paper. The visit had been surreptitiously arranged through a butler at the Bellagio; the industrialist was a whale. Feeling very Ocean’s Eleven, Burke called to say the deal was done. The butler said he was already taken care of, so enjoy.

  They watched an Osbournes rerun while Burke discreetly did hits of coke. (He didn’t necessarily want his son to see that.) Kit laughed at something on the show, and Burke said, “What’s so funny? Ozzy talks just like you. Can’t understand a thing he says.” “You can so,” said Cela defensively. Burke leaned over to kiss the nape of her neck but she pulled away—she didn’t like him doing stuff like that in front of Kit. Burke got up and walked toward the bedroom, turning back to give her a comical come-hither. She smiled and shook her head, then waited a few minutes before kissing Kit’s cheek good night. There were pimples there. The next time Burke wasn’t around she’d squeeze a few and cut Kit’s hair. Cela made a stagy move to the bathroom before joining Burke so as not to be obvious, but Kit was engrossed in the sitcom high jinks and didn’t pay attention to comings and goings.

  “Leave the door open,” he said from the bed, with shiny, lecherous eyes. So the kid can have a peek if he wants.

  She shut it.

  He pulled her to him.

  “All that Ornamental money gave me a hard-on.”

  Vogue

  BECCA WAS EXCITED when the second A.D. called about the Look-Alikes wrap party. Rusty already knew about it. He said Grady and Cassandra were coming along.

  There was no reason to mention the party to Viv. When it came to her capricious employer, Annie was always reminding Becca to “curb your enthusiasm” (Annie’s favorite show). Becca knew that Annie was right. Anything having to do with her being a professional look-alike, i.e., a loser, was fine—Viv seemed to revel in it. Anything else, particularly something that pulled her closer into the fraternity of the Business, was dicey. Whenever she auditioned for something—and auditions were few and far between—or even when she got called to be a Six Feet Under corpse, she was forced to lie to escape Viv’s punishing ways. Becca secretly crossed herself that first time when she blurted out that her mother was sick with breast cancer and sometimes needed to be driven to doctor’s appointments. Each time an “appointment” arose, Viv was so kind and sympathetic, going overboard to ask if there was any way she could help. Becca wanted to crawl into a hole and die when she learned that Viv’s mom had passed away from that very thing. She wished she could take it back. She knew that if the truth was ever found out, she would be fired and publicly vilified. Blackballed. Still, Becca didn’t feel as if she had any alternative—she’d come to Hollywood to be an actress, not an actress’s personal assistant. And Viv had made her feelings clear from the beginning. Becca could always quit. But even though the money was bad, working for Viv Wembley was invaluable in terms of experience and connections. Lots of what she did on a daily basis was boring, though other parts of the job, such as interacting with people she was in awe of and had only read about or seen in movies and on television, more than made up for the downside. (It sure beat going out on jobs for Elaine Jordache.) Viv was rough, but Gingher had exaggerated her bad traits. Gingher had an attitude problem herself. No one, not even Larry Levine, had heard from her since she supposedly left for New York. Maybe Viv got her thrown in jail. Becca was still half-worried that she would return from wherever and try to get her job back.

  • • •

  VIV ASKED BECCA to bring her a cigarette and brew a pot of decaf green tea. She had just begun
Day One of the Vogue cover interview.

  She hadn’t done any real press since the attack. Her publicist said Vogue would “only be lightly touching on Kit” and mostly focus on other things, “forward-moving things,” such as the usual rumor that Together was in its final season. The writer also told the publicist she was anxious to learn more about Viv’s just-signed costarring role in the new Nicole Holofcencer with the heartthrob Alf Lanier.

  “I would like—and I know this is difficult—to briefly talk about the terrible, and very public events surrounding your fiancé.”

  Viv felt blindsided, even though she knew it was coming. The journalist had merely wanted to get it out of the way, thinking that would be better all around.

  “You know, that’s not something I’m really prepared to talk about,” she said reflexively, with an impenetrable smile.

  Becca listened from around the corner. (I wonder if she’s prepared to talk about Alf fucking her in the ass while I watch.)

  “I completely respect and appreciate that,” said the interviewer, realizing she’d made a misstep by blundering in. Now there was no turning back.

  “And I know you’re trying to do your job,” Viv added, salving the sting. Showing class.

  “Are you still engaged?”

  She smiled again and took a yoga breath. “All I can say is . . . we’re both recovering from this—and I don’t want that to sound any way other than it sounds—”

  “I totally understand,” said the writer, almost chummily. They’d entered the land of Soft Lob.

  “—and that we’ve agreed for now to take things very slow. And that it’s hard to go forward in the way that we were, not only in a world where people can do the kind of . . . horrible thing they did to Kit—but in a world that’s incredibly . . .” She trailed off. A tear welled up, elegantly dispersed by a bent, Bulgari-sapphired knuckle. “But he’s very strong. He’s a Buddhist and was, I think, actually, much better prepared for something like this—if anyone could be—than the average person. He’s amazing that way. So he really has this amazing faith, and amazing path, something that I definitely sometimes lack. I have so much faith in him. So much faith that he will come through this.”