Still Holding

by Bruce Wagner

  Becca wanted everything to be copacetic. She asked where the bar was, but Cassandra said she first had to introduce them to Dr. J. Becca reminded their host that she and the doctor had already met.

  “He’s doin scripts for us. We just sold a pilot to USA.”

  “UPN,” chimed her gaunt ladylove (and QuestraWorld coprincipal).

  “Whatever. He likes Dr. J, but I call him Dr. Doctor. Anyhoo, it was Dr. Doctor who had the bright idea we start filming our Tuesday and Friday fiestas. Now why haven’t you shown up for any of those?”

  Thom Janowicz turned toward them as they hove into view. “Well, if it isn’t the all-seeing, all-knowing Dr. Doctor!” said Cassandra.

  “Hey, I know who you are!” said Dr. J—Becca was in his coked-up sights and he grabbed her. Annie followed as he led Becca to the window overlooking the pool. Cassandra & Co. dropped back, waylaid by Alan Cumming and Dana Giacchetto.

  “Now I know you had a boyfriend who got into trouble. I’ve talked with Grady and Cass about it, that’s one helluva story and you’re one helluva lady to have been on that ride. And I’d like you to share your experience at a future date, now is not the time. But I think that is something we could definitely turn into a beautiful, beautiful screenplay and I want to talk with you about that but now is of course not the time. I’m sensitive to time and place. You had a bad egg experience and soon it’ll be time to make an omelet. There are bad eggs, as you well know. Like that beanpole there—see him, over by the Lava lamp?—I’m working on a script about him. I’m five weeks in. He lied to a lady, corresponded with a widow for two years saying he was John Lithgow’s brother. There’s a slight resemblance, but mostly, he’s tall. She was starstruck and he stole her money. End of case. Wound up giving that cad right over there about $96,000. He’s awaiting conviction. Not a bad guy. Smart kid. Knows he did a bad thing. He’s turned to Jesus and that’s his prerogative. Who am I to judge? You get in trouble when you start to judge. Big time. But you know that. And there’s a woman down by the pool. You can see her talking to—who is that, David Spade?”—he gestured through the window—“Hey, who’s that way over there? Andy Dick? Anyhow, see that lady? Well, that lady was a dear friend of the late great Dorothy McGuire. Now you’re too young to know about Dorothy McGuire. Go on IMDb and you’ll learn all her movie credits. Go on Google or the AMC Web site. Well, Dorothy McGuire died a few years back and the Academy Awards failed to mention her passing during their much-touted annual memorial montage. And now this dear woman—the one by the pool—is waging a letter campaign to right a wrong because the Academy failed to acknowledge. Can you blame her? There’s a whole group of people here tonight with similar beefs: there’s Peggy Lee’s people and Troy Donahue’s too. The Academy didn’t acknowledge either one! And it’s a travesty. A few years ago, Peggy Lee got bumped for some little girl named Aaliyah. Now I never even heard of this little girl Aaliyah. She was black and she was in a plane wreck and maybe all that had something to do with why they put her on. You know, the tragedy of it, a life cut short. And she was a hottie—a hottentottie! But what about a life long lived, and lived well? I never heard of Aaliyah but I can tell you I sure heard of Peggy Lee! Gave lots of people lots of pleasure. Hell, even the young kids worship her now. And the Dunsmores freely give of their time and their counsel because they’re for the underdog—the Dunsmores feel a wrong should be righted and they are currently engaged I believe in putting up a Web site—they’re giving the money to put up a Web site for anyone of note who died but was not subsequently honored or acknowledged throughout the many many years of televised Academy Award memorial segment history. Cass and Grady are lobbying to have a special segment air with all those who were never acknowledged. These are not bad people—the Friends of Dorothy McGuire, the Friends of Troy Donahue, the Friends of Peggy Lee (my folks always called her Miss Peggy Lee)—and I don’t believe the folks at the Academy are bad guys either. I’ve spoken to them. Oh yes. I’ve spoken to all parties as a mediator. That is sometimes my role. Role and raison d’être. I spoke to that woman—the McGuire friend or relative or whatever. Spoke to her many times. I’ve had counsel with her the way I would with anyone. And she’s a wounded person but not a bad person—hell, we’re all wounded. Jesus Christ our savior was wounded. We wouldn’t be human beings if we weren’t wounded. Would we? Would we? What are your names?” The girls offered them. “What’s my point, Becca and Annie? My point is that we’re all people and the Dunsmores just go right to the heart of that, they are fearless, they take everyone in, they are for the underdog, they do not pass judgment, they do not have lofty opinions, they do not—”

  Trans World

  SHE SAT AT Lavendar House with perspicacious George, who lay dying. It was George who actually wanted to watch the Barbara Walters interview with Kit Lightfoot after the Academy Awards. Lisanne thought how funny the world was because she hadn’t even been aware of it. She’d tuned all that Hollywood stuff out.

  She turned on the set—there he was before her, so handsome! Still the rumpled élan, rapscallion glint in the eye. But the Kit Lightfoot who had ruled her life and her energies was dead to the hospice-worker of the present moment. This Kit was a movie star and just that, a fallen idol risen again in the popular imagination. He was a human being who’d been through a great ordeal, just as she had, but the commonality ended there. He was not her lover nor was he the father of her child. He was not the Buddha; light and nectar did not pour from his crown. He was a man, plain and simple.

  The segment began with Barbara showing clips from his films followed by a medley of breaking-news edits, both local and international, related to the assault. They strolled through Kit’s new house and garden (how lovely the zendo was, thought Lisanne) and spoke about what he had been able to mentally reconstruct—with gentle, yet somehow obscene inelegance, Barbara probed the arduous process of rehabilitation and what returning to Riverside was like, especially to stay in the room he’d occupied as a boy (“So you can go home again,” she said, eliciting oddly genteel laughter from the interviewee). She wanted to know just how it felt to live with a man he’d been estranged from since the death of his beloved mother, a man of questionable character and motive who was abusive to him even when he was a child. She did not refer to the father’s incarceration nor to his crime; Lisanne couldn’t decipher if that would come later or if it was simply off-limits.

  “Kit,” said Barbara, all hard-nosed metta. “Can you talk about Viv—Viv Wembley? Can you share with us why you’re not together?”

  He smiled, and Lisanne saw him take deep, yoga breaths—she knew he was doing ujjayi, yet the knowing was of itself free from obsession. She felt sane and at ease. A magisterial compassion for his being washed over her.

  “Barbara . . . I wouldn’t wish that on anyone—not just what happened to me but . . . I wouldn’t wish it on the partner, of whoever becomes ill or debilitated. It’s a terrible, terrible burden.”

  “And a great test, isn’t it?” she said, sowing seeds of doubt and betrayal with that copyrighted wince of scurrilous sympathy. (Viv Wembley had failed out.) Kit smiled ambiguously. “And yet,” she went on, “couples do survive a catastrophic occurrence. Christopher and Dana Reeve are one example that comes to mind.”

  “I think every situation is different,” he said generously. “People move on—or through—what happens to them, in different ways. Everyone has a path, Barbara.”

  “You certainly do. And that path is called Buddhism. And I’d very much like to talk about that in a moment. But have you spoken? Have you spoken to Viv?”

  “Oh yes—”

  “You have?”

  “We’re good friends.”

  “Really?” she asked. Copyright honeyed skepticism.

  “Yes, really!” He laughed. “I was at her beach house. You know, Barbara, we’ve been through a lot together and we respect that. We honor that. Have to! But Viv’s moved on with her life—as I have with mine. We both know that we’re there for ea
ch other when we need to be.”

  It was time to go for the jugular. Barbara segued with kill-shot celerity to Cela. Lisanne wasn’t sure if she wanted to see this part. She looked over at George, who was asleep. She shut it off. Kit would be all right. She didn’t need to protect him anymore. She never had, never could. All she wanted was to wish him well.

  • • •

  HE WAS A SWEET old man without much time left. Anyone could tell by looking at him how handsome he must once have been. He lost his wife in 1970. Their only son died five years ago in a car crash. George had never remarried.

  She’d spent the last month or so sitting with him. He was often chatty, but lately his strength had waned. Lisanne sat through the blank spots, night sweats, and myriad terrors. Some afternoons, she gave him sponge baths which he stoically endured, too polite to tell her the pain of being touched was excruciating. As the end approached, she closed her eyes and drifted with him to this moment, to unconsciousness and beyond. Sometimes she rubbed baby oil over the corroded tattoos of his jaundiced skin or blotted water onto colorless lips. He stank, but it wasn’t hard to transform death smells into balm. She thought of her dad a lot and how narcissistic fear had banished her from the very moment of his death. Now she understood that sitting with George was a gift from God, any god, pick a god. She had come serenely, she had not rushed to this room at Lavendar House as she had rushed to her father’s deathbed from the platform of that train, like a fool. She was already here—one of his hands pressed between hers. Already here, to comfort to the end. She was present, and accounted for.

  As she sat with him, she meditated on her father’s library. She remembered waking up in the middle of the night and restlessly communing with the forest of volumes, some with their backs turned as if to snub her late arrival. Lisanne’s finger had strummed against the spine of Milarepa’s The Hundred Thousand Songs. What was it doing there? She’d since had time to puzzle over that. Dad was a learned man, but how had the book been acquired? Was he simpatico to Buddhism, or was he indifferent? Was he a cognoscente? And what, after all, did he actually know about the great saint Milarepa? Maybe not a damn thing. Maybe the book had been absorbed rather than acquired, had belonged to a hippie lover, one of his students, say, from back in the day—someone he took a fancy to while her mother was shut in the guest room with migraines. There was so much she’d never know about Dad—or Milarepa or her mother or Philip, and George too. She was OK with that.

  As she emptied the bedpan, she thought about cleaning the Riverside toilets and how crazy she’d gotten. It was hard to believe—she would have laughed if it wasn’t so gut-wrenching. Lisanne thought about the claustrophobic Amtrak water closet too, then shuddered at her shaming and violation by that horrible man, now behind bars, reaping the karmic whirlwind. Burke Lightfoot had orchestrated and overseen the rape, not just of her, but of his own son, and Lisanne wondered if Kit would ever try to contact her to make amends. She hoped he wouldn’t, but if he did, she’d tell him that there was no one really to blame, that she had allowed it to happen, that she had been in a bad place but now was well. The pills that Dr. Calliope’s colleague prescribed had stabilized her, but mysterious forces were at work, forces that conspired to provide a healing, an occult glissade of grace and nonresistance, and love unperverted. Now her life was filled with the light of Siddhama and nonsectarian prayer, a humble dyad between Lisanne and her faith. Each day, she and God created a simple space, wherein hope and regret, splendor and sorrow—and love—could be born.

  When Lisanne came from the bathroom, she lit a scented candle. She was drawn to a photo of George and his wife and son that hung upon a wall. He wore a gleaming smile and captain’s hat: suspended in time, like one of those fallen astronauts. He’d been a pilot for TWA in the fifties and sixties. She took the photo in hand.

  It was time for her to shed the last of her fears, and fly.

  With Rob Reiner in the Patio of the Ivy on Robertson

  “HOW DO YOU memorize?”

  “Jorgia taught me some tricks.”

  “Jorgia Wilding.”

  “Yeah. And I do some—neurolinguistic stuff. With therapists. I’m just a dog who jumps through hoops.”

  “Well I think you’re being a little modest. I really did want to tell you that your performance in True West was . . . pretty damn seamless.”

  “Thank you. I try to go with—the feelings. Behind the words.”

  “There were so many levels there. Will you do more theater?”

  “I want to do Beckett.”

  “That’s funny.”

  “Hopefully,” he said, smiling.

  The director laughed. “Beckett can be very funny, it’s true. But it’s also funny because I’ve been talking to the Geffen about putting up Krapp’s Last Tape.”

  “Whoa! That’s a trip. I love that play.”

  A youngish man in a suit approached the table. “Gentlemen,” he said respectfully, “forgive me for interrupting.” He turned to Kit. “Sir, I just wanted to say that I am honored to even be sitting in the same restaurant.”

  “Thank you,” said Kit.

  “No—thank you,” he said, and left.

  “Lou Petroff. Do you know him?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Sweet man,” said the director. “And a good agent.”

  “Mr. Reiner—my managers said you had a script.”

  The director leaned in, his hand cupping a bread roll like it was a healing stone. A peculiar but effectively intimate gesture.

  “It’s all very weird. You know, originally—and I’m sure they told you this—Ed was going to be doing it. Ed Norton.”

  “Ed’s great.”

  “But there was a conflict.”

  “Ah!” said Kit. “I love ‘conflict’! Creative differences.”

  “Exactly. We had lots of those. And what happened was—your agents probably already told you this—what happened was, I literally woke up in the middle of the night—because I’d seen your play a few weeks before so you were already bouncing around my subconscious—and I’ll never forget. I sat bolt upright in bed and thought, BAM! Kit Lightfoot.”

  “Eureka. I found it.”

  “My Eureka moment. And I called Ellen—Ellen Chenoweth . . .”

  “I know Ellen. You called her in the middle of the night?”

  “I had the sense to wait until morning. And I said: Ellie, does he wanna do movies? Is everybody asking him? Or is nobody asking him?”

  “That’s closer!”

  “And I said that out of total respect. Because right now you’re like the pretty girl who everyone’s afraid to ask out—that’s what I was hoping, anyway. The bottom line is, this project is something I’ve been wanting to do for about five years.” He pivoted the bread roll, wheeling it this way and that. “It’s about a man who suffered an injury not dissimilar to yours. He was a law student when the accident happened—”

  “True story?”

  “Yes. A true story. In fact, I had lunch with him two weeks ago, in Boston.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Stan Jiminy.”

  “Jiminy Cricket!”

  “Jiminy Cricket was his nickname,” intoned the director, as if all—especially Kit’s involvement—had been predestined. “A brilliant guy. The injuries he sustained left him damaged but with ‘a beautiful mind,’ if you will. And after years, many years of incredible discipline and hard work—something you’re certainly not unfamiliar with—Stan became an attorney. Now of course I’m making a very long story short, which is the challenge we’ll have with the film.”

  “He became an attorney—”

  “Right. And along the way, this amazing woman was his mentor and kind of guardian angel, who hired him to assist with pro bono work. She was a criminal lawyer. Rhoda—that was her name, Rhoda Horowitz—had a sister who the family kind of shunted off to a state home. The sister was retarded, and Rhoda always felt that was kind of the skeleton in the family closet. W
hich it was.”

  “Like Michelle in I Am Sam.”

  “I wouldn’t say Rhoda Horowitz was quite in the Michelle Pfeiffer mold,” he said, wryly.

  “Who plays the mentor?”

  “Susan Sarandon’s going to do that for us. And Dusty’s the dad—Stan’s father.”

  “Ah—”

  “Do you know Susan and Tim?”

  “Yeah! I like them!”

  “And of course, you’ve worked with Dusty.”

  “She’s a real angel?”

  (He had spaced on that part of the pitch. Nerves.)

  “No, no. Not a real one—a guardian. Not that I’m above using the device of an angel, if I need to!” The wry smile again. “Anyway, one day in the middle of a very important trial, she dies.”

  “Susan?”

  The director nodded.

  “How?”

  “Embolism.”

  “True?”

  “All true.”

  “Did you know Susan?”

  “You mean, Rhoda?”

  “Rhoda! Yes.”

  “I didn’t have the pleasure.”

  Kit sipped at his water. “Mr. Reiner, does it seem— I don’t want to knock your project! But—”

  “No, please . . .”

  “With me in the role, does it seem, maybe, a gimmick? You know—stunt casting?”

  “No. No, I don’t think so, Kit, not if we do it right. I completely understand the question—and it’s a good question—but I don’t think so. By the way, I read the Aronofsky script. Very intriguing—as Darren always is. And I think Darren is absolutely brilliant, a visionary. But it was a bit ‘postmodern’ for me. I guess it’s all about sensibilities but I found it hard to get under the characters’ skin, emotionally. And there was another thing. I really strongly feel that for these kinds of movies—if one can say we’re doing a ‘kind’ of movie without instantly losing integrity!—that you really need to be in the courtroom.”