by Bruce Wagner
“Yes,” said Dusty, eyes welling with tears. “Thank you.”
—
“Wow,” said Allegra.
“I know,” said Dusty.
“So how long have you been planning this?”
“I wasn’t really ‘planning’—you mean the documentary?”
“I mean, trying to find her.”
She sighed and shook her head. “I think . . . I was just running—I ran, ran, ran, for so many years. It’s . . . complicated, Leggy. And I know I never talked about it that much with you, because I couldn’t. With anyone—but Ginevra.”
“Which is perfect. I knew you needed your space, so it’s not like I’ve been waiting—”
“I know that,” she said warmly. “I really do. And I really, really appreciate it, babe. It was so important, for me not to feel that pressure. I don’t know,” she said, touching Allegra’s cheek. “It’s all so mysterious, right? But everything’s mysterious. Right?”
“Might just be time to visit Marilyn’s bruja, huh,” said Allegra.
Dusty laughed and said, “Oh my God, yes. And have Laura film it!”
“We could show it at our own festival—Burning Woman!” They laughed, and it took the edge off. “So, how are you going to begin? I mean, to look?”
“Livia’s quarterbacking, as they say. And no one knows—not Jeremy, not Elise, no one. So you gotta zip it, ’kay?”
“Of course! Oh Bunny, you are so brave, I love you so much.” They held each other then Allegra said, “Did Livia say how long it would take?”
She shook her head. “I don’t even want to think about it. I mean, we might not even be able to . . .”
Allegra let her wife’s words trail off. “Did you—do you have any . . . like, information?”
Dusty didn’t feel like getting into it, so she lied. (Plus, she didn’t want things to sound bleak.) “Just the hospital and the time frame—I mean, Liv has access to—she’s gonna start exploring what social services were happening back then—agencies or whatever . . . it was the sixties! Did you know she used to be a private eye?”
“Livia? Are you serious?” she said, with a shocked smile.
“Yes! A P.I.—private investigator. Still has her license.”
“Oh my God, she is so Miss Marple!”
“Isn’t that amazing? I friggin’ love it.”
“And it’ll be for HBO or Netflix or what.”
“You know, I’m not sure. I want to say probably HBO? But part of me doesn’t want to get ahead of myself. I mean, it’s kind of something not so much on my mind right now? I don’t want to jinx it! I’m totally feeling superstitious.”
“I can’t even,” said Allegra. She reached over and stroked Dusty’s flat stomach. “Butterflies, huh. You’re a butterfly girl, huh.”
“Beyond. But they’re not really butterflies . . . they’re more like doves or bats or—”
“Cats! Does Bunny have kitties in her tummy?”
“With claws. No: hawks. Bunny has a belly full of baby hawks.”
“Goshawks and eagles—little eaglets. Prob’ly some in your womb too, huh.”
“Yup. That too.”
“Tumblin’ around. Like she’s in there kickin’ again. Mama’s coming to find her and she knows and she’s startin’ to kick.”
“I’ve had diarrhea for days.”
—
Bed: Leggy iPads while Dusty coasts on 25 mg of Trazodone HCl, woozily meditating on her life.
Standing on a Greenwich Village balcony, age nineteen, surveying the windswept nonstop cerulean world. That jazzy sunkissed time of firsts: her first play—The Miss Firecracker Contest, and first big-city love affair—a latina, ten years older (Mark Morris dancer). Her face twitches as she drifts and dreams. How blessed she has been, how blessed she was—again! (My precious baby will be born anew.) Journeying, journeying, journeying . . . she envisions her daughter, their first embrace upon reunion. Though not wanting to think too much about how Aurora will look in present/future time: the color of her hair or how she wears it or how she’ll dress for their meeting or the shape of her eyes or if they have the same freckles, moles, and skin tags or if she likes the same music or where she’s been living all these years or if she’s married or divorced and remarried . . . didn’t want to overthink. And so, with her oblivious wife screen-scrolling beside her, Dusty flew back on Rx wings to primal NYC scenes: all the tumbled, deflowery moments enshrined in a rush of scent and weltered sound—first subway ride, first fireworks, first sighting of a stinky Oh my God, is he dead? sidewalk vagrant . . . first crazy blizzard, first concert (Prince), first Central Park nighttime mouthfuck. She literally saw a bank getting robbed one day, and on another, Yoko leaving FAO Schwarz. And Robin Williams shooting Moscow on the Hudson, hey! . . .
Hey? Say what—now she’s quit the Greenwich balcony, and hears a clamor of soft voices. Music? Ahhh: dance party in Brooklyn. No . . . New Orleans? Liam and Livia and Marta are there, and . . . Martin Luther King? WTF! Now someone’s shaking her. Uh oh. Stop—
The clattering chorus becomes a single voice: Allegra’s.
She blinks open her eyes. Her wife’s hand is on her shoulder.
“Dusty, Dusty! It just said online that your mom died.”
—
Soon after, a nurse from Sea Bluff called the house to inform.
It was “sudden,” she said, and was Dusty coming up? Sometime tomorrow, the actress told her.
By morning, a bare-bones obit appeared on the Time and Us websites, and just a few others. Not exactly news of the century. Dusty got the expected emails and phone messages. The only one she answered was Elise’s. She doubted if Ginevra had yet heard.
Allegra drove. Dusty spoke to her lawyer, who said that one of the kitchen staff texted her sister about the death minutes after it occurred, the sister put it on Facebook, and bla. Dusty waved away the notion of legal action. Jesus, Jonathan, like I fucking care. She called her shrink a half hour before they arrived; the conversation was brief. Dusty told Ginevra she didn’t feel anything, but didn’t feel numb either. As usual, when it came to Reina, she didn’t know how she felt.
She went into the viewing room alone.
Her mother lay beneath a white quilt, on a table draped in white sheets, bookended by what looked like delicate miniatures of streetlamps from another time. They seemed borrowed from a prop house; the presentation was theatrical and unexpectedly lovely.
Reina’s visage was unlined, bare of makeup. The hair had been brushed so that it hurried behind her, giving an effect of breezy repose. A fine white tendril of scar grew scalpward from each ear, soft-spoken evidence of face-lifts gone by. After those surgeries, no hair could grow on the high temples and the baldness there made for strange, denuded fields, like the tonsure of an anchoress. Her ears were enormous, as if drawn by a caricaturist. (Reina called them “rabbit ears”—that’s why the actress bristled when Allegra first called her Bunny.) The lids of the sunken eyes were Rembrandt-dark and beautiful.
Death had fallen for her.
She reached out to touch the cheek she had slapped before stepping back to circle the body. Then sat, stood, and circled again, an antsy ritual of shock, relief, and acclimatization. She wanted her money’s worth. She’d had the persistent fantasy that when this time did come, revelation would appear in a softening guise, forgiving and merciful. But there was none of that. Accustomed to editorializing when it came to this woman, she was already “writing” her impressions, crafting the raw, pithy commentary of what she would soon convey to Ginevra in session. Her mother could still wound her, no doubt, though no longer by the spoken word. Seeing the body was like the taking of an important beachhead or the demolition of strategic tunnels or the murder of a prolific sniper; many strongholds still needed to be captured before it could be proven the enemy had truly been neutralized. But it
was a good start, and with that realization, Dusty came the closest she could to grace—an apprehension of peace that echoed the cadaver’s stillness and signaled the potential end to a lifetime of predation.
Perhaps in such hopeful quietude love resided.
It wasn’t lost on her either that the moment she resolved to find her daughter, Reina had died. That seemed like grace, real and cosmic. It was a time of inauguration and more: might it be that Dusty slew the dragon by her bold (albeit belated) resolve? It did feel like mythology—something she was anxious to talk to her therapist about. A bulletin from the Universe: Your mother’s power will die when your own mother-power manifests in the search for your child. And when she pulled the sword from that stone, Reina drew her last breath . . .
She left the room to bring in her wife.
Allegra had always wanted to meet her, at least lay an eye on her, out of curiosity if nothing else, but Dusty would only laugh, saying, “That will never happen.” She was sheepish until the actress took her by the arm and walked her close. She could see her wife in the dead woman’s face and suddenly felt like a child, so inferior to these warrior gods, one fallen, the other at the forceful peak of her artistic and retaliatory powers. She felt weak and insignificant, but lucky too. Worthy somehow.
Dusty addressed the corpse with defiance. “You’re finally meeting her, Mom.” She turned to Allegra and said, “I should pry her eyes open and let her have a good look at you.”
“Dusty!”
“Well, there she is, Leggy. And for once, she has nothing to say. Not an unkind word for anyone.”
Allegra sat respectfully in a chair not far from the body.
Dusty pulled up a stool and spoke to her mother with fierce intimacy. “You’ll never meet your granddaughter, Reina.” It was like the beginning of an actor’s soliloquy, which of course technically, it was. Allegra knew that she meant her grown child, Aurora, but it comforted her to imagine that Dusty was speaking of their own daughter as well—not the one they’d lost, but the one they might still have. “I was never going to let that happen when I found her.” Adding, for good luck, “When I find her. If I find her.” Then: “I wouldn’t bring her to your grave. Though maybe I will—for a little dance. We can have a little dance and a pee—”
“Baby . . .” said Allegra, trying uselessly to settle her.
“Reina—meet Allegra. Allegra—meet Reina. Meet the young woman—my wife in marriage—who’s given me so much pleasure, so much joy! A beautiful person who knows how to love. She gave me the joy you took. But that’s done. It’s over. I’m free.”
On the way out, Dusty told an employee that the directive for cremation was obviously a mistake because her mother was terrified of fire. (A lie.) Obediently cowed by celebrity, the gentleman apologized and changed it on the spot. She said she’d call soon to make arrangements for Reina’s ground burial, reconfirming there were to be no services or witnesses, at the deceased’s request. (A lie.)
Then she upgraded the coffin to the most expensive, the one made of steel, because she wanted the lifelong claustrophobe sealed in tight for as much of eternity as could be guaranteed. Maybe you could still scream in the afterlife. Who knew? God was full of surprises.
—
Tristen used to walk, hitch, bus, and Lyft himself around town. He biked and skateboarded for a while too but that got old. Then, for his birthday, Jeremy bought him driving lessons and a new car. (Tristen didn’t want to be anyone’s sugar baby but accepted the gift as a goof.) He thought it’d be funny to show up at Mom’s or Dad’s in some doofussy electronic ride.
They drove to the DMV in a brand-new fire-engine-red Honda CR-Z. He passed all the tests. The whole deal made him think of Nikki Catsouras; he had fantasies of himself on a toll road, beheaded. The lulzy image cracked him up.
On the way home, they listened to Sirius. (The car came with it.) A man was talking about how he treated his sex addiction by perfecting the technique of “masturbating without thought.” That way, he avoided the trap of “cheating” on his girlfriend. “I let thoughts of other women come,” he said, “but don’t stay with them, don’t ‘own’ them. They’re just clouds.”
Tristen laughed behind the wheel until he choked.
—
He didn’t have a clue how or why he’d bonded with the runic couple from Plummer Park. Bonded with the hippie girl, anyway. She was actually thirty-five.
They’d really only just begun a conversation when the friend that Jeremy was meeting about the surrogate came along and he had to run. Devi asked for his email and he thought that would be the end of it, so it was a surprise when he heard from her. He invited them to an old haunt on Chautauqua, a quiet place for an early supper, and was delighted when she agreed. He found himself thinking it would be nice if she came without her cohort, and wondered what that was about.
She had an aggressively peculiar, somewhat archaic manner of speaking that both confounded and charmed. What was it about her—about both of them, really—that spellbound? It dawned on him that he was attracted to Devi physically. That occasionally happened with women; once or twice he’d even followed through, to mixed results. He wrote about the encounters in his journal, under the chapter heading “Miss Adventures & Other Ms.-haps.”
“We were interrupted in the park,” she was saying. “You didn’t think you’d hear from me again, did you.”
“That’s true. I didn’t.”
“If you had the energy—if you cultivated what you already have—you probably would have known we were fated to meet.”
“O-kay,” he drawled, sweetnaturedly.
“You might even have known that this restaurant happens to be very close to where my teacher and I are staying.”
“Interesting! And who is your teacher?”
“My guru!” she said, as if he were being silly. “My ‘Sir.’”
“And what does he teach?” he asked, playing a little game of pretend that the Scotsman wasn’t present.
“How to cultivate energy.”
“Oh, I see. Well, I’d very much like to meet him.”
“I think that can be arranged. He’s right here at this table.”
“I had a vague suspicion,” said Jeremy, smiling at the “Sir.” It was just the kind of bizarre back-and-forth he craved. He’d had his share of exotic encounters, back in his salad days.
“My name is Devi.”
“I know that!”
“My teacher says it is of utmost importance to state one’s name before one speaks . . . of certain things.”
The oversized gentleman was eating, which seemed to be his favorite (perhaps only) diversion. Using a tiny fork that looked positively dollhouse-scale in his hands—mitts so large, swollen, and slow-moving they reminded Jeremy of Mickey Mouse’s gloves in the Macy’s parade—he was daintily in the midst of removing clams from their shells. There was numinous glee in the extraction; the outré smile of a mystic never left him. He began to wonder if the fellow was retarded and the girl possibly dangerous. He decided he didn’t give a shit. It was all too deliciously outlandish and intriguing.
“I’ve been traveling with Sir for seven years now. My daughter would be entering puberty, if she had lived; more of that later. Myself, I was born and raised in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. Father was a physician, Mother a housewife. I had a normal childhood, as they say. My single hobby was guitar. Laura Nyro was my favorite—I was a precocious student of the sixties! I was absolutely possessed by her ‘Wedding Bell Blues.’ I was all about the bells! (More of that later too.) I was extremely self-disciplined and drew consistently high marks. My plan was to enter medical school and join my father’s practice. I was completely devoted to him—devoted to them both.
“As I was saying, my childhood was uneventful. Nothing exceptional happened and nothing exceptional in middle school either. I never rocked the boat. I was pru
dent in my daily life, blessed with a cautious but cheerful disposition. On graduating twelfth grade, I was accepted to Loyola and moved to Chicago. Leaving home was hard but my parents insisted. They wanted me to have a fine education. As you may know, Loyola was a Jesuit school—I wasn’t at all religious and of course no demands were made in that regard. I was at the top of the honors list. I worked weekends in an E.R., helping the nurses as much as I was allowed. It was the happiest time of my life, until my second year of premed, when Mother died.”
Jeremy hadn’t expected that in the laundry list.
“She must have been so young!” he exclaimed, a little too eagerly. The strangeness of it all had gotten the better of him. “What happened?”
“A house fire. She was forty-five. If I’d known that her death was only the beginning of my misfortunes, I would have put a bullet through my head. But of course I didn’t know then what I know now.”
“And what do you know now?”
“That it’s the worst greed to yearn for a different destiny than what we’re given. It’s a sin, and the tragic flaw of man.”
Then just like that, her monologue ended, as if turned off at the spigot. The Scotsman stuffed his face, oblivious. Jeremy had to admit that “Sir”’s glacial uninterestedness, his not-thereness, was immensely appealing. On second thought, there seemed to be a great presence behind it.
At this time in his life, feelings of doubt concerning his own judgment pursued Jeremy with fair regularity, and it didn’t take much—say, impulsively inviting two freaks he’d met at the park to a fancy watering hole—to lead him to that most inane of philosophical questions, “Who am I?” (With its popular corollary, And what the fuck am I doing here?) Perhaps he intuited that Devi had the answer, or at least might be inclined to point him in the general direction.
