by Bruce Wagner
(The first words she’s ever spoken to her star.)
The actress ripostes, “Preheat to three-fifty—the new foreplay.”
Larissa laughs, touching her shoulder in a sisterhood of traveling innuendo. A charge between them as the double’s eyes lock in and widen before she caroms off.
It’s been a while since Dusty got hit on.
As she stands on her mark, a full-bearded Liam Neeson arrives to take the place of the Ted stand-in.
“Hi, babe,” he says, winking.
“Oh my God!” says Dusty. His skin has a bluish sheen and his nostrils are stuffed with snot crusts. “Someone’s ready for their close-up.”
“My face isn’t, but my ass is.”
“People are definitely interested in your derrière, Liam.”
“It’s huge on Instagram. Literally.”
Dusty chortles.
The First shouts, “Last looks!”
When makeup harpies descend, Liam asks if they’ve brought the Easy-Off. His team re-applies goop under his nose and touches up the spidery nostril webs of broken blood vessels.
The First says, “Okay, let’s try one.”
Dusty stands outside the closed kitchen door as Liam gets on his knees and ducks his head in. Bennett calls action. Dusty takes a breath, shouts “Ted?” then enters. Screams. Runs to him. Clumsily fishes out the body and cradles it in her arms. Liam is dead weight.
“Ted!” she bellows, shocky and distraught. “Ted! Ted! Someone help me! Someone help me—”
Thirty endless seconds of messy, camera-rolling anguish pass.
“And . . . cut!”
“Was I brilliant?” says Liam to Dusty.
“You were incredible.”
“Self-cleaning too.”
“Going again,” says the First.
—
The cast and crew gathered for lunch under a tent, two stages down.
Usually the stars ate in their trailers but sometimes they went socialist, joining workers and day players at the long tables. Last week, when Larissa was scarfing fish tacos with the camera operator, Liam came with his tray and sat down, out of the blue. She had a hunch she might soon be sharing a meal with Dusty but understood the need for caution. The unspoken protocol was Don’t join them, let them join you. The making of a film created an instant family, held together by the glue of a fanatically casual blue-jeans decorum and cordiality; it was easy to get caught up and forget one’s place. The best bet was to be cheery and obsequious when not invisible. Larissa had a plan, though, and was willing to take a calculated risk.
She watched a P.A. sidestep the line to talk to a server.
“Dusty loved the seaweed and kale,” she heard him say. “Do you think there’s any way she could get a little more?”
“Absolutely!”
The caterer went about his task and the stand-in seized the moment.
“Hi, Rory!”
“Oh hi, Larissa!”
(Exclamation-point hellos were the coin of the realm.)
(It was her habit to establish “real” relationships with the crew of each film she worked on, a strategy that often paid unexpected dividends.)
“Can you do me a favor?” she whispered. She was arch and flirty, even though he knew that she knew he was gay. They got off on the goof.
“Totally.”
“Can you get this to Dusty?” She handed him an envelope. “It’s something she asked me to research. I didn’t want to bother her.”
“You got it.”
“You’re awesome.”
“No, you’re awesome.”
“No, you’re awesome.”
They riffed like that a few more times and were cracking themselves up when the caterer returned with Dusty’s healthful treat.
—
“You take such good care of me, Rory,” said Dusty, as he set down her food. “Can I adopt you?”
“You can so adopt me. Oh my God.”
“I love you.”
“Oh my God, I love you for saying that!”
On the way out he turned back, having almost forgotten.
“And this is from Larissa.” She was nonplussed. “Your stand-in.”
Dusty took the note.
“Need anything else?” he asked.
“Nope, I’m great. Might try to nap.”
Before closing the door, he shouted, “Bye, Mom!”
She pulled out the flyer. It was a schedule of yoga classes, with Larissa’s name and a few yellow-highlighted class times. A Post-it read My day job! Come—if you need to de-stress. L
—
At her fourteen-week checkup, the doctor couldn’t find a heartbeat. Apparently, that wasn’t unusual but an ultrasound confirmed their daughter was dead. A few days after the D&C, Allegra was in crippling pain and kept bleeding. They did another ultrasound and couldn’t believe the whole baby was still in there. She had a second D&C.
Dusty had been a few weeks shy of announcing the pregnancy; now she needed to do everything possible to hide what had happened. But there were too many variables and all she could really do was hold her breath. The shooting schedule was shuffled to allow her to stay home awhile with her wife. Bennett was the only one told. For everyone else, it became a “family emergency,” related to Dusty’s mother. She got a lot of mileage out of her mother in emergencies—about all Reina was good for.
It was awful. Allegra was crazed, distant, bellicose. Dusty got tired of the lashings and after a few days felt guilty for praying that she pack up her sullen histrionics and take them to the beach house, where she could lick her wounds in solitude. That never happened. She was glad to have withheld the suggestion because the image of her young wife walking into the sea had hauntedly taken hold. Marta, of all people, was the one to persuade Dusty to return to work a few days early.
Not to worry, said the housekeeper. I’ll take good care.
God bless Marta.
—
She spent hours in the pool, soaking in amniotic misery. She wanted a home water birth; now she had a home water death all her own.
Whatever she touched turned to shit, sorrow, and dead ends—everything, that is, but Dusty. Dusty was her salvation, their union her miracle birth. Why, then, was she punishing the only one who ever loved her, loved and protected, bestowing shelter, status, and a fractured raison d’être? (Made an honest woman of her too.) Wasn’t Dusty suffering as well? Of course she was. Well, maybe. Probably . . . —just now, Allegra didn’t give a fuck, and for the most heinously juvenile rationale: Dusty was older, Dusty was rich, Dusty was immortal. Dusty was bulletproof because she’d already had a little girl, already had the whole full-tilt Alien experience of it, already watched the thing slither out and bloodsquall with life. That she basically never saw it again was just a technicality.
Before the Xanax, Ambien, and Percocet mugged her to sleep, she dodged her wretchedness by skimming the recently published diary of a righteous medieval executioner (a little light reading before bed). Allegra fixated on the passage that described his specialty: torturing robbers who used the severed fingers of infants as lucky-charm candles to light the homes they plundered at night. She drifted off the pages into a kaleidoscope of fantasies. She imagined herself buried alive, crouching in a sealed tomb while Dusty organized a rescue party . . . sitting with Anna Wintour at a fashion show while Allegra’s famous, spanking new triplets threw epic, squalling tantrums . . . on the Rue du Faubourg in front of Chanel, having her YouTube head sawed off by Boko Haram schoolgirl recruit hotties. Maybe she’d just stop eating. Feeding the body seemed nothing more than a reward for infanticide—comfort food for an infernal job well done. She was tired of the whole eating/shitting game anyway, the one that turned everything into stink, poison, and sewage. She’d gotten a lemon for a womb, but her asshole was a fertile wo
rkhorse slated to deliver thousands of newborns right to the end. Even in her last moments on earth, her bowels would loosen—God would make certain she’d die in “childbirth,” spraying one final citizen into the fecal world.
She thought of overdosing, which led her to a meditation on media moms, all those trashy suicide fails who snuffed gangs of kids in their bathtubs. At least they had babies to kill. She reflected on sundry sash and doorknob hangings (Robin Williams, L’Wren Scott), wondering if she’d ever manage to grow the cojones to do the same. But how? When she couldn’t even commit to third-draft screenplays, rip-off perfume flacons, and fucktard custom chapeaux? Eight times her beloved Ms. Blow tried in vitro—eight times! Toward the finish line, like some Wile E. Coyote agoniste, she’d variously flung herself off a bridge, rear-ended a truck, tried drowning herself in a lake—and after nothing worked, the bitch drank weed killer. (When the E.R. nurses didn’t know who she was, Issie shouted, “Google me!”) Now that’s commitment! While the bonkers muse had a memorial fit for famous eulogizers and fashionista pallbearers, Allegra knew her own final wrap party was poised to outshine and outgun: the interment would blow Issie’s out of the water, featuring a legendary cortège of Dusty-pimped thumbnail-ready griever-chic A-listers, curated to celebrate her uselessness, infertility, and defeat.
Chronicle of a life stillborn . . .
The thought of such inglorious pageantries made her want to vomit.
Jeremy tried to see her but she kept texting that she just wasn’t ready. After two weeks he showed up unannounced. He was sweet and loving, but when she gave him nothing he soured.
“Goddammit! This happened to me too!” he blustered. “And Dusty, it happened to Dusty! It’s fucking selfish, Allegra! And it’s mean! Do you think you can just get over yourself? For, like, ten seconds? Because the line between grieving mom and narcissistic cunt is really thin.”
She winced then let him come hold her while she cried. When he made a douchebaggy showbiz joke, she jaggedly laughed back to life, like the nearly drowned throwing up water.
—
Dusty and her manager shared a gloomy, superficial tea at the house.
The actress was glad that her wife and Jeremy were spending the long weekend out at Dume. The worst was apparently over but things hadn’t returned to normal—not by a long shot.
“How was New York?”
“It was New York,” said Elise. “It’s always New York.”
She was one of those classy, brassy, Big Apple throwbacks, a brazen widow-bachelorette, sprung forth from the Carlyle in a spangled pantsuit of sugar plums, tough love, and flint. She’d worked with Dusty since the late seventies, when she discovered her in an off-Broadway production of Small Craft Warnings.
“See any plays?”
“Want to hear my dirty little secret? I haven’t stepped inside a theater in Manhattan since Into the Woods. That was 1987, can you believe? Lost my appetite. And schlepping my grandniece to Book of Mormon doesn’t count. You know what? Kinky Boots just don’t do it for me. Disney don’t either, nor terrible revivals of not-so-great plays. I’m a snob for the heydays. I’m sure there are absolutely glorious things out there, but you know what? Ain’t interested. Though I may see something when I’m in London.”
“When are you going, babe?”
They loved calling each other babe, kid, sweetheart.
“In four hours. Straight from here.”
“I’m jealous! What’s happening in London, El? Did you sign Prince George?”
“Not yet,” she smiled, then turned grim. It was time to talk about the baby elephant in the room. “Honey, I’m so sorry.”
“I guess it wasn’t meant to be.”
“How’s she doing?”
“Better. There’s still a little bit of . . . subtext. You know—sometimes it feels like she thinks I went in there with a coat hanger and did the job.”
“But why accuse you?” she demanded, playing the outraged naïf.
“Hey, it’s not like it’s rational,” said Dusty, shrugging it off. “My shrink says it’s sublimated whatever. Self-esteem was never Leggy’s strong suit, you know that. And if she felt inadequate before, well . . .”
“Poor, poor darling.”
“But I get it, I really do. I can take the hit.” She paused to absorb. “It’s just so sad, so awful.”
“This too shall pass,” said Elise. “And how are you?”
“How am I? When I run into myself, I’ll ask.”
“Are you going to—do you think you’ll try again?”
“I don’t know,” said Dusty wearily. “It’s our second miscarriage, Ellie. And she had one before, before we were together.”
“Oh Christ,” tsked Elise.
“All girls. They were all girls! Isn’t that bizarre?”
Elise sighed deeply then touched her client’s hand. “What about adopting?”
“Not my thing.”
“Why not?” she asked. When nothing came back, she let it go. “Well, the Universe will sort it out. It always does.”
“Yeah, well I’m not such a big fan of the Universe at the moment. It’s my karma, El. My karma is fucked.”
“Oh bullshit. Your karma is extraordinary!”
“Not in the kiddie department, my love. What’s fucked up is, I thought—we thought, we really did!—this would be the one, you know, the one that would ‘take.’ I think it really would have grounded her.”
“And what about you, Dusty? What would it have done for you?”
“I’ll be all right.”
“I know that, kid. But I never hear enough about you—”
“You know how tough I am.”
“I do, and sometimes I wish you wouldn’t be. So tough all the time. You don’t have to be.”
“I’m a survivor, Ellie.”
“You can’t hold the world up all the time. Pass the globe to your old friend, sweetheart. I’ll put it on my shoulders while you have a good cry.”
“I will, Ellie, and I have. You know I have—you’ve held it up for me plenty, more than anyone.” She was really the closest thing to “Mother” Dusty had ever known. “But Leggy needs . . . something, to get her out of herself. A baby would have—I don’t know. She’s just . . . she’s still not a woman in a lot of ways.”
“Let me tell you something, a baby doesn’t poof! save the day. Ask the gals with postpartum. Ask the special-needs moms. And a baby doesn’t make you a woman, either, you know that and I know that. Want to hear Elise’s deep thoughts?”
“Do I have a choice?” she said, with a smile.
“I think you need to start giving Allegra the freedom to find out who she is.”
“That’s all I give her, Ellie! All she has is freedom!”
“I’m not talking about the freedom that comes from being indulged like a child. Give her the space to find out who the grown-up is. I know there’s one in there somewhere, just dying to get out.”
“I thought having the baby would take care of that.”
“Maybe,” Elise said indulgently. “Maybe. ‘More will be revealed.’ But I think for Allegra, a baby might have been—God bless her, you know how much I love that girl—it may just have been another project. I don’t mean that to sound harsh. Look: I’m not saying a baby was a bad thing. Of course not. It may still be the best idea in the world!”
“Yeah, well,” Dusty said impatiently. “You know what? Raising a kid at my age wasn’t exactly on my bucket list, either. I’d be collecting fucking Medicare when she got her first period. But—” She briefly closed her eyes to access something. “I was really starting to look . . . forward to it. I don’t know. I guess I was starting to go to all these places in my head. ‘Oh, the places you’ll go!’” With a quick, cartoonish smile, she muttered, “Well, you know what they say. If you want to make God laugh . . .”
“To hell with what ‘they’ say! I’ve had my dukes up against ‘they’ all my life.” Her grassroots psychotherapeutic tack having failed, she sloppily defaulted to Feisty Old Broad. “If you want it, Dusty, go for it, and don’t let anything stop you. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again! It’s a terrible cliché but it’s true. That’s what my mama always said and I say the same. Words to live by.”
Set to music, it would have been one of those act-break showstoppers Elise abhorred.
“We’ll see,” said Dusty, suddenly more depressed than ever. “We’ll see.”
“Okay, all right,” said the manager, breezily putting a button on it. “Now: I know the moment isn’t opportune, but we need to talk about the Bloodthrone sequel before I’m stuck on a plane for a hundred and forty-seven hours. It’s a spectacular offer. They’re up to five million for six weeks.”
“Shut the front door. Are you frickin’ serious?”
“Completely. Joss has been wonderful.”
“Love Joss.”
“He certainly didn’t have to bend anyone’s arm but he did tell Bob to make sure you were very happy.”
“Aw! Isn’t he a doll? And so talented. He’s an artist. Love him.”
“And Bob knew Elise had to be happy.”
“Aw! Eliza Doolittle, sweet dragon lady!”
“They want you to do Comic-Con but everyone does Comic-Con.”
“Love me a rock-star Comic-Con.”
“So I can close?”
“Fuck yeah. And let’s get something for Joss, don’t you think? Maybe a BeoVision? Or a Tesla! Oh my God, Ellie, let’s get him the new little Tesla. Let’s get him three—he can give ’em to his kids.”
“We’ll talk about it when the check clears,” said Elise, slyly. “How’s the shoot going?”
“It’s heaven.”
“It’ll get you nominated.”
“Ya think?”
“Yup. One for love, one for money. That’s the way we do it.”
“Did Mama tell you that too?”
“You better believe it.”
“But I want to do three for love and ten for money!”
“Greedy girl.”
“I’m totally serious!”
