Still Holding

by Bruce Wagner

  “I loved A Few Good Men.”

  “Thank you. Which is what the Aronofsky script lacked. Because that script you were going to do was essentially a courtroom drama— without a courtroom. And that’s something the audience demands, the kind of classic catharsis a courtroom setting provides. Otherwise, it’s Gladiator without the Colosseum. Of course, there’s a romance too, but we haven’t cast your ‘lady’ yet.”

  Dark Horse

  BECCA GOT THE CALL while she was at Whole Foods.

  The Rob Reiner film was back on track—with Kit Lightfoot in the Ed Norton part. Her agent said that casting the recovering actor was a brilliant stroke (“No pun intended”) and amazing coup. He told Becca the director was anxious for her to read with his new leading man. Rob liked her original audition so much that he had phoned personally.

  She was ecstatic. But the moment she hung up, Becca knew she was doomed. Her agent didn’t even get it. She examined the impasse from every angle—the problem being, it was only a matter of time before someone connected to the movie snapped to the fact that Becca Mondrain used to sleep with the daddy-killer whose buddy had whacked Kit Lightfoot in the head. It was an insane predicament, a tragically ridiculous checkmate, and the more she thought about it the more surprised she was that the Reiner camp had been caught unawares. What should she do? The oblivious agent would probably just say she was paranoid, but she knew that wasn’t the case. Even Annie agreed.

  She was about to call Sharon Belzmerz for advice when it came to her: she would go in and audition for the sheer incredible experience of it—she owed herself that much—and if fate decreed he hire her, she’d bite the bullet, and come clean. Look, Mr. Reiner, there’s something that I think you don’t know but that you probably should because it’s kind of a big deal. And maybe you know already but I don’t think so. See, I used to pretty seriously date Herke Lamar Goodson, the guy who was on trial in Virginia last year? We went out for a few months before he was arrested for a . . . for homicide. He was the one who killed his dad? Everyone—including me!—was totally shocked when that happened. I had no idea he had anything like that in his past or was even capable of such a thing. Anyway, it turned out—as you probably or might already even know—that he also happened to be friends with the crazy person who did that awful thing to Kit. The man who hit him in the head with the bottle? When I found all of this out, it became totally one of the worst periods of my life. Because I’m from Waynesboro, Virginia, and we just don’t live life in the so-called fast lane there. Mr. Reiner, I cried my eyes out on the phone to my mama every night. And I know I probably should have made my agency “tell all” before I came in to audition—I didn’t conceal any of it from him, but to tell the truth I don’t even think he—my agent—was thinking straight—but I was just so amazingly honored to even be asked or considered by you for your film and that you remembered me and were gracious enough to totally ask me back was just almost too much! It’s almost like I didn’t want to let you down or disappoint you. Aside from “Rusty”—that’s what Herke Goodson called himself—he lied to me and everyone else about so many things, even his name—aside from the crazy coincidence of me auditioning with Kit, and my ex-boyfriend knowing the man who struck him on top of the head, I just wanted you to know, wanted to be sure that you understood that I so totally did not know at the time that Rusty, or Herke, had this terrible double life! It was beyond the worst thing that ever happened to me, worse than when my closest friend was hit by a car on prom night! And I am so sorry if I caused you any hassle or wasted your time but you have been so nice to me and I wanted to say all this because I thought that if things went any further it would potentially be embarrassing for all parties down the line, notwithstanding the studio. From a public relations standpoint. And I would never want to embarrass you or Kit. I know that you know that. And I just wanted to thank you for giving me the opportunity—it is something I will never forget. And that I would love to work with you one day in any capacity and just feel that my best chance of doing that is to open up to you in the way that I have today. So thank you, Mr. Reiner, thank you, thank you, thank you for even listening and hearing me out!

  • • •

  THEY SAT face to face.

  A camera taped them as they read.

  Kit seemed shy, but maybe she was just projecting. It was difficult for her to be in the moment. She knew Mr. Reiner was looking for chemistry more than anything else; she was a long shot but didn’t care, because as far as Becca was concerned, she’d already won. If I have to pack my bags and go home tomorrow, she thought, by God’s grace it would be all right. Here she was, all the way from Waynesboro, Virginia, where she’d slaved in a store just like the one Jennifer Aniston did in The Good Girl. She thought of how hard it had been for others before her—especially Drew, who, at thirteen, spent a year in lockdown. Her own mother had put her there yet she still had JAID tattooed on her back, with angels. Every night from the hospital, Drew looked up at the moon and cried her heart out to her dead Grandpa John.

  Here she was, after all the hard, hard times. She’d finagled her way onto a classy cable show and even been some kind of cult figure on the Web, and now she was in a room with Rob Reiner and Kit Lightfoot, cohorts and fellow artist-travelers . . .

  No regrets!

  • • •

  OUTSIDE THE Coffee Bean, two teenage girls breezed by. One of them made a little gasp, then excitedly turned to her friend. A familiar reflex foretold the actress had again been mistaken for Drew.

  But the whispering girl said, “That’s Becca Mondrain.”

  Graduation

  LISANNE SIGNED UP for a Fearless Fliers clinic at LAX. The woman said there would be around twenty-five in the group. Enrollment in classes for “aviophobics” had diminished in the months following 9/11 but over time had rebounded to previous levels. In fact, the woman said sunnily, because of the war in Iraq people were confronting their fears with newfound confidence.

  The three-weekend course began with an informal overview. The counselor, a retired airline pilot, said the most important thing the group would learn was that their phobia emanated not from the fear of death but from the fear of losing control. They couldn’t really grasp the distinction, but he reassured them they had come to the right place. Everyone seemed to exhale at once when he quoted a statistical study from MIT that said if you took a commercial flight every day for the next 29,000 years, the odds were you’d be involved in just one crash.

  The enrollees formed a circle and introduced themselves. They gave their names and occupations before delivering what Lisanne imagined to be AA-style confessionals of how each had found his or her way to Fearless Fliers. One woman, a pediatrician, said that years ago on a stormy night in Minnesota she’d boarded with a syringe of Demerol and given herself a shot in the ass, only to awaken hours later to find they were still on the runway. (Lisanne thought that was someone who probably should be in AA.) Everyone had their own special niche, like the generic panic freaks, for whom fear of flying was a midsize subsidiary of a much larger corporation—or the seasoned claustrophobes, who equated entering a plane with being sealed into a coffin. Lisanne enjoyed the eccentrics the most: the ones who thought that the plane would run out of gas or that God might snatch whichever aircraft happened past Him at whatever arbitrary moment in time. (God was superpremenstrual.) Some in the circle worried about pilots having psychotic breaks or passengers having psychotic breaks or air traffic controllers having psychotic breaks or terrorist passengers simply being themselves. One or two self-proclaimed divas admitted to having been escorted from flights due to pretakeoff “arias”—groans, moans, and high-pitched wails that erupted from seemingly bottomless depths as runways were taxied toward. A man in his sixties was possessed by wind shear and “sudden rollover,” a phrase he invoked and muttered, both prayer and imprecation, with near-comic insistency. (The common denominator of horror being turbulence, hands down.) A sardonic librarian said that whenever she booked a fl
ight, she couldn’t help imagining an AP wire photo of some Middle American farmer’s field strewn with the debris of metal and body parts, being picked over by an FAA crash team. Torsos in tree branches and whatnot. Everyone laughed when the same woman—Lisanne thought she was funny enough to do stand-up—said she’d even attended multiple showings of a theater piece at UCLA that was basically actors re-creating dialogue from black box transcripts of fatal air crashes. Lisanne could relate, though it’d been a while since she’d lulled herself to sleep with the dog-eared paperback. She didn’t share that with the group. Still, when it came her turn, Lisanne found herself saying aloud what she’d never told anyone, let alone strangers—that because of her phobia, she took a train to her father’s deathbed, and missed his passing. Her story opened a floodgate; astonishingly, she wasn’t the only one. The classmates became emboldened. Together, they stared into the face of cowardice and did not like what they saw.

  They were encouraged to write essays on worst-case fantasy flying scenarios and were shown how to “stack positive imagery,” slowly replacing bad thoughts and images with good ones. The counselors guided the class through breathing meditations—Lisanne was glad to be reminded of something so familiar. She had done a lot of “sits” at the hospice, but it was well over a year since she’d meditated on her own, as she used to.

  On the last weekend, everyone trooped into a hangar and boarded a 727. They talked to pilots and stewards, mechanics, air traffic controllers, and engineers. They revolved through the cockpit for comprehensive demonstrations and Q & A. They sat in coach seats (seat belts on) while the counselors played a tape reproducing all the sounds one might hear in the course of a normal flight. The tape was constantly stopped and started, each sound discussed and overexplained.

  • • •

  THE GRADUATION FLIGHT to San Francisco was optional, but nearly everyone signed up. The airline gave them a special rate.

  At the suggestion of the counselors, some Fearless Fliers wore rubber bands around their wrists to snap away negative thoughts and feelings. The librarian offered Lisanne herbs and essential oils that she picked up at a health food store. The blue “Fear of Flying” package read, “This box contains enough remedies for one flight.”

  All of them sat together. Lisanne took her place by the window—hardly anyone wanted a window seat, and besides, she didn’t need to be bothered by the bathroom comings and goings of someone in the midst of a preflight freak-out—and quickly got into meditative posture. She focused on her nostrils, following the breath as it filled up her lungs. Sounds of the cabin—the bustle and stowing of bags by unneurotic passengers not in their group, the little suck-rush of air through vents, the buckling and unbuckling, the coughs, sneezes, and throat clearings, the sporadic groaning gallows humor of fellow graduates along with the soothing running commentary of Fearless Fliers counselors—floated in and out of her awareness. (She wondered if anyone had cheated and taken a tranquilizer.) Whenever a bad thought intruded, say, the jackscrewed Alaska Airlines Flight 261 plunging into the Pacific—they would soon be flying over the very place it had gone down—or the documentary she’d watched a few months ago on the Discovery Channel about the famous golfer and his buddies who died on a Lear—the plane broke contact and inexplicably drifted off course, fighter jets were scrambled and got right up close to see the windows frosted over, meaning the cabin had lost pressurization—or the time she had a drink with a temp Reggie hired and the gal said she was supposed to have been on the PSA flight to San Francisco that crashed because a vengeful employee went berserk. The temp said that at that time of her life she was commuting a lot and always took that particular morning flight and this one time she was late: she remembered being at the gate begging them to let her on but they said the flight was already closed. That reminded Lisanne of the English movie she saw when she was a girl, about the supernatural. A woman in a hospital kept dreaming that each night she awakened to ride the elevator down to the morgue, where a man stood and said, “Room for one more.” When the woman was finally discharged, she was about to board an airplane, and the attendant at the gate said the same thing—“Room for one more”—and because she’d had the premonition, the woman didn’t board and of course the plane crashed. Whenever Lisanne was jolted by a morbid train of thought, she used one of the relaxation techniques the counselors had walked them through. She was able to get back in touch with the core of her zazen practice and found that its reawakening served her well.

  There came that iffy time when taxiing was over and things got serious because there was now no turning back and the engines roared and the plane and all its guts began a sprint to the void. Lisanne’s eyes remained closed, but she noticed her section was quiet—that animal-fear quiet, before slaughter. Poor things. They’ll be all right. She was doing OK and suddenly felt maternal. She would meditate on their behalf, to help them through. She actually didn’t mind this part too much because you could really feel the power of the machine, the aircraft flexing its muscles, strutting its stuff, and it was so mightily definitive that it was a comfort—a hint of the kind of majestic strength the machine could summon if called on. (Besides, it was common knowledge that most crashes occurred during descent.) A jet like this one could take a lot of roughing up. That made Lisanne think of another documentary she’d seen about a research plane that flew into the eyes of hurricanes. (It even had propellors.) She remembered being shocked to watch it pierce the “wall” of a thunderstorm system, amazed that could even aerodynamically be done.

  The graduates broke into huzzahs as they leveled off from the ascent. Soon, the drone would become that all-encompassing vibratory OM, filling ears and senses, the collected, collective hum of airspace within and airspace without. They were now over the Pacific. She pushed Alaska Airlines from her mind and tried to think of the water as a good thing, but again, it was common knowledge that crashing in water is actually worse than crashing on land, experts said the impact was somehow more devastating—even putting aside the likelihood of drowning if by some insane miracle one had managed to survive the collision. (It was one thing for Tom Hanks to endure his ocean crash in Cast Away, she thought, but would be quite another for Lisanne McCadden.) Still, this wasn’t a long flight, they weren’t even going all that high, nowhere near the altitude of a plane on its way to New York. Or maybe they were. If something went wrong, they could probably just glide down and land on the 5 or the 101. Regardless, she didn’t want to break meditation or pseudomeditation to ask one of the counselors about altitude because somehow she thought that might trigger something bad, some kind of small mechanical failure—when she caught herself having that nonsensical, superstitious notion, she laughed—and breathed—and suddenly felt normal again—then remembered something she hadn’t thought of in a long time. When she was nineteen, a friend asked her to fly with another couple in a Beechcraft to Catalina. Even though the trip was relatively smooth, she had been so unexpectedly terrified that she hadn’t flown again until the shit-filled jaunt with Philip et alia. Years later the friend who’d invited her to Catalina had crashed in the very same plane, and though he didn’t die, he had his jaw clamped shut for six months and everywhere he went carried wire cutters in case he choked on something or got sick and vomited. It was eerie that she had actually ridden in the same machine that had subsequently gone down and been damaged beyond repair. Room for one more . . . The soothing 29,000-year MIT statistic floated back to her and then the OM drone came and the FASTEN SEAT BELTS light went off and there was more jubilation from the grads. She thought of Philip, poor Philip and his unseemly death, death by hanging, what would that be like, and what a strange personage he was in her life, what a marvel it was that he’d come along to protect her, taken her in, her and the boy, and his perversions didn’t matter because he never touched Sidd or made him bear witness, and Lisanne thought how glad she was that she’d never judged him, Philip had enough pain, and her judgments would have hastened his death. Imagine your mother being c
ut from her own mother like that. She knew that children of Holocaust survivors were damaged by their parents’ mind-sets just the way people’s lungs were damaged by secondhand smoke. It is so common for the child of a suicide to commit the same act, she imagined the suicide of a parent like a magnet or dare, an enticement to join the dark fun. He’d written Lisanne a final note that had disturbed her. He said she had given him a book on rebirth that spoke of the Buddhist realm of the gods. In that they died, the gods were actually mortal yet because their lives were of such incomprehensible length and because they had lived them in unfathomable luxury it was particularly agonizing when they realized the end was upon them. He rambled in his letter and said that he had lived like a god and America had lived the same way and now the end had come, for both him and America, and what a fantastic shock it was for him and the Republic but that it was her duty, hers and Siddama’s, to carry on—he said he would make sure to think of them at the end because the Buddha said how important was one’s final thought, that if one had lived one’s life raging then one would rage at the end or if one had lived one’s life lusting one would lust at the end and Philip said he wished he could be like Gandhi was at death’s door and call out for Krishna or whatever the equivalent but was afraid he would shout something fearful or profane not devotional though he would do his best to think of her and the boy and even if he wasn’t sure that he could or would he joked he would die trying. She never showed those last words to anyone, not even Mattie—he was not in his right mind and no one would benefit. Philip bequeathed her the Rustic Canyon house and what he poignantly called a “dowry” so she would never have to work again in her life. To put it mildly. She asked Robbie and Maxine to move in and they did, but they kept the Fairfax duplex, and sometimes she and Robbie even slept in the same bed, without sexing. It was a comfort to have a body to curl up into. And he was a decent man. She didn’t understand his relationship with Maxine, but why should she? What business was it of hers, or anyone’s? She was a firm believer in “whatever gets you through the night.” No one understood anything anyway. All she knew was that Robbie was kind to Max and loving to Siddhama. What more could one ask for than loving-kindness?