by Bruce Wagner
“It’d have to be a Nobel!”
Dusty asked Bennett if she should do some business—drink a glass of water beside the bed or fuss with the Marilyn’s hair. He said, “Whatever comes.”
The scene resumed.
“Does he hate that you’re doing a sitcom?”
“Sylvia, oh my God! Hate isn’t even the word. And he’s mean about it. He’s always been a sadist, and that’s on me . . . But you know what? The Golden Girls is the smartest move I ever made. Keeps me alive—and not just in the public eye. I laugh more on that set than I have in my entire life.”
“And the ratings!”
“We’re bigger than Family Ties.”
She lightly kissed the Marilyn, avoiding her mouth—tongues would come “on the day”—then asked Bennett who he thought would be the aggressor.
“It’s probably more interesting if it’s Sylvia,” he said. “I kind of think of Marilyn as the eternal bottom.”
They rehearsed awhile longer (Bonita making her entrance) before calling second team. Larissa came on set. Dusty left an earring in the yoga studio and the stand-in had been carrying it around for a few days but hadn’t found the right moment to give it back.
Dusty kibitzed with the Marilyn on the way out. Stepping into the sun, she was startled to see Marta and her daughter.
She’d completely forgotten.
“Oh my God, Marta! Was this the day?”
Marta nervously wondered if she’d gotten it wrong.
“You say Friday—today. It’s not okay?”
“No, it’s fine! I’m such an idiot, I didn’t even think to look at what we were shooting.” Her face scrunched to a stressed-out wince. “I’m just not sure if today’s appropriate—but whatever.” Her qualms vanished as she turned full wattage on the daughter. “Hi, Julia! Oh my God, look at you, look how pretty you are in your dress! And happy birthday!”
The Marilyn excitedly said, “It’s your birthday?”
“Yeah,” she said shyly, amending to “Yes” so as to be more adultlike.
“Come have lunch in my trailer!” said Dusty. “Though maybe you’ll have more fun eating with everyone outside? That’s probably better than a stuffy old trailer. Go! Go with Mama and I’ll join you.” She stage-whispered to Marta, “It’s kind of an R-rated day . . . but she should be fine, to watch. For a little, anyway!”
“Hey, you’ll both be in your birthday suits,” said the Marilyn, in good humor. “How old are you, Julia?”
“Thirteen.”
“It’s not her quinceañera,” said Dusty.
“Well, duh,” she said, puffing up in contrived offense. “What do I look like, a dumb blonde? Don’t answer that!” She turned back to the girl. “So you wanna be an actress?”
“Don’t encourage her,” said Dusty.
“Maybe,” answered Julia. She’d never given a thought about acting, ever.
“Marilyn,” said Dusty belatedly. “This is Marta, Julia’s mom.”
“Hi!” said the Marilyn, shaking Marta’s hand.
“Her name is Marilyn, and she’s playing Marilyn—Monroe.”
“You look just like her,” said Marta. She really thought she did.
“Aw, you’re sweet,” said Marilyn-Marilyn.
“Who’s Marilyn Monroe?” asked the birthday girl.
“Good question!” said Marilyn. “I guess no one ever really knew.”
“No one,” said Dusty. “Especially Marilyn.”
—
Another Sunday—
—so tired.
Overcome.
Riding on mid-shoot stamina fumes: etiolated blowback of all the emotions expended on her craft.
Dragging through the usual job/ego influenza . . .
Beat up—
—by the spikey, wrenching melodrama of Allegra’s loss too.
Their loss . . .
At sixteen, when she gave up her child, she made a pact with a monstrous paradox: she would covet both fame and oblivion.
She wanted nothingness—if she did not exist, she could not be judged. She wanted fame—balm and anodyne to self-torture.
She would live (in her head) in a mirrorless tenement, in penance and atonement; but would live too in a palace (Point Dume, Trousdale, the Hamptons), for the ease of being found. When the orphan finally sought her, in the immensity of darkness, wouldn’t it be best that the bejeweled glare of a golden seraglio light the way? She customized a mythology that justified fame’s pursuit: to set the stage for the prodigal daughter’s return. Aurora would find her way back by Mama’s crisscross S.O.S. swordplay of movie-premiere searchlights . . .
It was always about her! The child she abandoned would seek her out! Such was the erratic fairy tale of this Mother Grimm—
The chronically torturous state of wretched anonymity and grandiose renown (with its cheap, glorified reunion fantasy) created a bottomless rage and confusion that unhinged.
A pregnant woman was in the news. She drowned her three kids then arranged them in bed with their arms around one another. Before jumping off a building she wrote a good-bye on the wall:
Bury us together We need to stay together I need to look after them and keep them safe A mother never abandons her children.
She died for her kids—
—but Dusty’s kid died for . . . Dusty.
The star had committed an act against nature, a primordial, pornographic sin. The Great Destroyer thought: I am the demon’s demon because I made no effort to find my child. No effort! None: wallowing in the idolatry of fans, attended by a dirty mob of piss-gold statuettes—every prize bore a plaque with the gremlin’s motto “Mother of the Year”—masking her cowardice with luxuries and accolades like a bulimic hiding vomit breath.
On a good day, she told herself she never wanted fame, that fame had come to her, occult and unbidden, a karmic fluke. The humility shtick she hustled on talk shows and magazine profiles was as big a lie as the childlessness she promoted to the world. That her mother could have bullied her into amputating her issue held some truth for a sixteen-year-old; she wouldn’t have been the first to be cowed, manipulated, and ruined by a matriarch. Then how to explain her apathy, her religion of neglect in the decades that followed? What did that say about her as a human being? She’d done well in managing martyrdom. She was lucky; the perks of stardom were narcotic. Yet whenever the drug wore off, she conveniently lapsed into blaming Reina for the walking, talking abortion of her daughter (if, in fact, she were still alive)—the devil made me do it. But it was a dodge that invariably ended in violent self-contempt. The therapy-smart actress usually fell back on deconstructing the abandonment of her only-born as an obvious re-creation and consequence of the original sin of the absence of mother love. Dusty even floated the idea that Reina’s spiteful stratagem possessed an erotic component: the woman got off on her own crimes. She sought affirmation from her therapist, but what good would it have done for Ginevra to give credence to her client’s suspicions? To agree that Reina hated her daughter, which the therapist believed in her gut—everything she knew about the beast conformed to the sociopathic model—to endorse the theory that she took baleful pleasure in Dusty’s torments and that Reina’s wickedness was such that she may plausibly have considered murdering her daughter, in the end substituting a far more sophisticated, destructive act (the trapdoor disposal of her grandchild in order to secure the actress’s admittance to purgatory)—well, Ginevra was of a mind there were professional limitations on candor. How could she concede to such outlandish horrors? Some things were better kept in shadow, else healing never occur.
Sunday—
—reviewing the week on her way up the coast.
Making a film was always a mixed bag. She lived for her time in front of the camera, likening it (naturally) to the attentive mother she never had while at the same time noting the poignan
t metaphor of a lens that could not touch, could not hold, could not love. She took that back—could love, but the manifestation of its embrace was deferred, subject to a director’s intercession and an audience’s diverse, subjective interpretation. Still, the attention given was unrelenting and unconditional, something she’d never had as a child. There was absolute purity to the mother-daughter relationship of actress to camera because in those fleeting, eternal moments of communion she lost troubled selfhood and risked only feelings—only!—not words, for they weren’t her words, but another’s, the screenwriter’s, and as such meant nothing, no matter their eloquence. In that regard, she would always be making silent movies. What were words anyway, between mother and child? Only depth and profusion of feeling were essential. At the end of our lives, only feelings remain.
Still, there were complications.
Movie acting was like gambling in a burning casino. Dusty bridled at the small, sadistic window of time allotted each scene for emotional stuntwork. You prepared for months, weeks, hours, you tortured yourself, and when the day of reckoning came, suddenly you were in a shoot-out that lasted only moments, some kind of high noon showdown with eternity, though you were always outdrawn and outgunned. At best, your performance ended in a dignified, technically proficient, sometimes stirring death—but always a death. When things weren’t going well she felt dumb, bamboozled, whorishly deranged, though probably more like a miner than a trampy clown; having experienced a thousand cave-ins, the old pro had learned how to breathe through the panic and find her way out. Now and then, her most critically rewarded work had been by rote—sometimes it went like that. Mother Lens would hold you when you were at your worst and see you through. Though not always—even now, at this time in her career, she got lashed to directors who sacrificed her on the altar of “making the day.” The casino was burning daylight. Sometimes it went that way.
She yearned to be Frances McDormand, unglamorously formidable workaday actor’s actor, but was marooned in the body of fabled Dusty Wilding instead, no more able to deny her showy iconic heft than the condemned could their crimes. Like the story she once dramatized on NPR about a torture machine that etched the transgressions of convicts into their flesh, she could never escape her glorious star chamber, its hidden walls graffitied with the classy New Yorker profile cant of her lies and unworthiness. It’s been said that an actor is less than a man and an actress more than a woman. As one of the most famous gay women on the planet, Dusty sometimes still felt less than a man; by throwing away her child, her chance at feeling—being—more than a woman was shot . . .
—Sunday!
Past the midpoint on Sylvia & Marilyn, she got a second wind.
It was overcast . . .
Driving up PCH to see Reina.
All her work with Ginevra had led to this.
Leggy’s miscarriage had led to this—
Maybe there was still a chance to be more than a woman.
But was the idea of finally becoming a warrior—of showing up on her mother’s set—just another fantasy of a bravura role? It hardly mattered. The motivation behind entering combat, however chimerical or self-glorifying, would be quickly expunged by the act of warfare itself.
All would be bloodily forgotten, especially in victory.
—
The “memory care” home, formerly a private residence, lay at the end of a cul-de-sac on a high Santa Barbaran bluff. Straining, one heard the low, querulous static of the ocean.
She never called beforehand to announce her visits, few as they were.
Ninety-year-old twin sisters nodded on a couch while a man in formalwear tinkled a saucy, castrated version of a Nirvana song on the lobby’s baby grand. As the staff caught sight of her, tiny seismic shocks of surprise jostled them one by one. Like a royal incognito, Dusty kept her head down but managed to dispense a few fleeting, undercover smiles as she floated toward her destination.
She stood at the door, looking in.
Asleep in her chair, Reina wore the robe Dusty brought a few years ago from Beijing. Deep blue, with an embroidered astonishment of yellow-gold swallows. The braided bun atop her head was a work of art; a hairdresser came each week and did the ladies for a small fortune. She instantly thought of retreating. Why not just have a cup of tea and catch up with the R.N.s? Then Reina’s eyes opened and seemed to look at her—into her. Devil. So Dusty entered, dutiful and dignified, like a eulogizer taking the stage.
“Hi, Reina.” That’s what she called her, for years. “How ya doin’?”
“Well, I’m doin’,” said Reina. “I am definitely doin’.”
A not-too-far-off neighbor’s voice cried, “Mama! Mama! Mama! Mama!”—battle cry of dementia and defeat.
Dusty kept the ball in the air for the usual amiable volley of nonsense: how long Reina had been sitting versus lying down, how beautiful her hair was, the beautiful weather, had she been to the beautiful beach, did the piano man play her favorite Bacharachs. A nurse brought Dusty’s special tea (kept on reserve) then two more appeared and they all had a jovial visit in the queen’s wing of the broken-memory palace.
When they left, Dusty sunnily asked, “Do you know who I am?” Reina looked askance, brow knit in disgust. “Tell me my name.”
“Why should I?”
“Oh come on, Mom.” The Mom just came out—she’d process that later, with Ginevra. Interesting. “What’s my name? You can tell me.”
“I’m supposed to do everything you say?”
“You’ve never done anything I’ve asked you to!” She had to laugh. “I’m Dusty, your daughter.”
“Want to give me your autograph? Asshole?”
Scalded, she backed off and took a few yoga breaths before starting over.
“How are you, Reina?”
“Oh, just fine,” said her mother, with blank kindliness. She was somewhere else now but Dusty wondered how much of it was an act. “I do a lot of dancing.”
“Really?” she asked, humoring. “When? When do you dance? When do they have dances?”
“Every night, Josephine!”
“Wow. Really. Okay.”
“You know that,” said Reina, scowling.
“Cha-cha? Fox-trot? Do you fox-trot?”
“Well, I don’t trot. I’m not a horse. Last time I looked.”
The old woman smiled, bits of green food in her teeth. Dusty wanted to shove stalks of frozen broccoli down her throat until she choked—to flood her lungs with saltwater and organic juices till they ruptured.
“What about tango? Do you tango? Do you samba?”
“They don’t allow that.”
“Illegal, huh.”
She was running out of things to say. She had come with a mission but everything was getting sweaty and fuzzy now.
“Have you eaten yet? Did you have lunch?”
“They don’t serve lunch till six-thirty.”
“They don’t serve lunch till dinnertime?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, I’m not sure if that’s the case, but okay. Maybe they do it differently here.”
“I’m glad you approve.”
They sat in silence. Her mother said, “So how’s Big Movie Star?”
“Big Movie Star’s great!” said Dusty, with bullshit bravado. “Makin’ shitloads of money.” Announcing her worth was her most toxic venom.
“And how’s the little tramp?”
She didn’t see that coming and contorted under the knife.
“She’s not a little tramp and her name is Allegra. She’s my wife and she’s effin’ fantastic.”
“She’s stealing from you.”
“I don’t think so, Reina.”
“Why else would she be with you?”
“Good question!”
“She wants your money.”
“She c
an have it, she can have all of it! In fact, I’ve already given her millions!”
For all her bluster, she may as well have been a crippled woman being chased down a dark field by a rapist with superpowers. Reina guffawed and wet-farted. “She’s cheating and stealing from you because you’re old, old, old. Look at your skin. The young do not love the old!”
Dusty walked from the room and out of the building. She moved listlessly toward the car and stopped. No: she would go back in—had to. She’d do what she promised herself then never return.
The twins on the couch were gone and so was the pianist.
An orderly in a hairnet had just brought a lunch tray and Reina was snarling that she wasn’t hungry. Dusty was surprised when her mother asked her for help. A happy-faced R.N. came in and Dusty told her that Mom would eat later, they were going to visit awhile longer, it was all good. The nurse said of course, then, with comic flourish, reassured that “Your mother eats . . . whenever she wants to!”
“I’m sure she does,” said Dusty.
The nurse said, “No one’s on a timetable here.”
Everyone left.
Dusty steeled herself.
“Mother,” she said studiously. “I wanted to ask about Aurora.”
There it was: the euphemism shot by a fainthearted cannoneer. Ginevra told her to expect nothing, which was understood. Therapist and client agreed to call it an exercise—just asking the question was an important step in healing. Dusty had even psyched herself up the night before by performing a visual meditation, linking this final errand to the closing of the lid of Reina’s coffin.
“Can you tell me what happened to her? Years ago you told me she was adopted by a ‘nice family’—Daddy told me that too. But you never . . . we never really talked about it. Ever! Why? Why didn’t we?” The old woman remained quiet and expressionless. “But we can now. Can you tell me anything? About the details? Mother, is there anything you can remember?”
The trickster genius of wet brain lay in its oracular unpredictability; Dusty’s arrows might elicit cyclopean rage, the flinch of nonresponse, or essential truths. Hope rose hard, like a hundred shuttlecocks in her chest.
