I Met Someone

by Bruce Wagner

  Say what?

  The hammer!

  “You may not accept today but it indicates strongly . . . the difficulty you will experience in the next two years is not about relationship. It is about everything. Ketu is more mystical and philosophical than it is material. Ketu is not good for material things. It is good for the spiritual, the psychological, all other aspects of life. As an actress, if you are working and making money, you will continue to. You are okay. It is not affected so far. What’s affected is your state of mind. When your mind is occupied by ‘ABC’—which is temporary!—things appear to be difficult. When it is temporary, it will be difficult for you, because when things are ‘permanent,’ we are accustomed, we are attached. The ‘permanent’ is familiar. But when temporary things show up, which appear to be new, ah! It can be difficult, frustrating, challenging. ‘I don’t know how to make the adjustment!’ That kind of thing.”

  “What happens after this two-year period? Does it get worse?”

  “No—the best period begins, best in twenty years!—until you leave the planet. You are okay thereafter, nothing to worry! You’re in a transition just now. Ketu is a planet of transition, intermediary. Ketu is a node, a magnetic point. It does things in exactly the way that it wants! Jupiter is the enemy of no one—but is not your friend. Jupiter is one more year. Jupiter is death of ‘home,’ death of mother, death of marriage—”

  “Chakrapani, I don’t see my marriage dying!”

  “‘Relationship’ means difficulty. Your marriage is tumultuous.”

  “But it isn’t. I mean, not really . . .”

  “You must remember, a relationship is not the best situation in your chart as a whole. Relationship is not able to give you greatest satisfaction. Not marrying is the best solution for you! Because this solves some of your problems. Jupiter is not swallowing you—it’s making you practical! Jupiter represents the Seventh House, the house of relationship. Pisces is ruled by Jupiter. Relationships do not make you ‘even.’ Either you’re up or down or you’re agitated or not—that sort of thing. But that’s no way to live.”

  “You’re saying it’s not great—not good for me to be married? Or in a relationship?”

  “Oh, but that’s not possible! Your work has not failed you but work is not relationship. Look back at your life—at your ‘love’ relationships so far, how they’ve treated you, and why. That is due to Jupiter! There’s no way to overcome this, no need to. Just take it as it comes. ‘Relationship’ really means ‘trusting companionship,’ trusting partnership. That’s a relationship. You trust for anything and everything. That is a relationship. All other ‘relationships’ are give and take. It is a business.”

  “Okay.”

  Jesus. Shit. Fuck.

  “Things will get easier in two years! That is when Jupiter ends, and Venus comes. Venus is the planet of love, creativity, music, art. You don’t have complete happiness and satisfaction in relationships—you have never had it in your life and may not even know what it means! Normally, I will not talk like that, because people are so much attached to ‘relationship’ that when I throw cold water on it, that is not good. When you go into Saturn, something changes. Still a tough period, not easy, but it may not be as tumultuous as Jupiter.”

  “So in my case, it goes from ‘very difficult’ to just ‘difficult’?”

  “No—some of your best years will be coming.”

  “It sounds like you’re just trying to make me feel better!”

  “Ha ha! No! Not at all! I say this because Jupiter is exalted. When a planet is exalted it gives good things, even if it isn’t ‘friendly.’ What these things are, we don’t yet know. Your losses—mother, wife—maybe not wife! But if you lose the wife, Jupiter is doing this—you can find another! When Jupiter is exalted, it rules more than relationships. You’ll make it. You will. You’re not going to die, I can tell you that. I do not see death.”

  —

  “Well, I didn’t tell her I was sleeping with her wife. I just kind of implied it.”

  “Oh my God, I love you, you are evil, I want to be you!”

  Larissa and Tessa were in the Butterfly Room at Cecconi’s, courtesy of a reservation booked by the ersatz billionaire.

  “You totally fucked her in the bathroom that night at Soho, didn’t you!”

  “Nope.”

  “You did, I know you did! You are so hardcore. Come on, Rissa, you can tell me . . .”

  “We didn’t. We might have mauled each other a little bit, but we didn’t—”

  “Slurp slurp slurp. But now you’re fucking her, right?”

  “Only once. I mean, we’ve only done it once, after the ménage. The other day was the first time solo.”

  “O solo mio! What was it like?”

  “Really . . . intense.”

  “Oh my God, and she’s so fucking hot.”

  “She is, right?”

  “So hot, Rissa.”

  “She’s young.”

  “Not that young.”

  “Young enough. Does that mean I get a Cougar Town zip code now?”

  “There goes the neighborhood. So tell me, tell me, tell me: how did it start? Did you call her?”

  “She called me. Apparently, she needed someone to talk to.”

  “Slurp slurp slurp.”

  “Stop that!” said Larissa, swatting her.

  “And now you have her thinking that you’re sleeping with Dusty?”

  “I don’t even know why I started that, Tess, it’s crazy. And last night I was up at, like, four a.m.? Watching Dangerous Liaisons? On Netflix? Which is kind of what I suddenly realized I was doing. Have you seen that?”

  “Dangerous what?”

  “Liaisons. Glenn Close is so genius.”

  “Is it, like, about a ménage à foie gras?”

  “God, you’re fuckin’ funny.”

  “’Cause that would totally make an amazing friggin’ movie, right? The Star . . . the Wife . . . and the Camera Double—oh my God, Rissa! You need to start writing right now.”

  “. . . I guess I’d feel worse about everything if—it’s not like I held a gun to her head. ’Cause she’s the one who called, right? And I know Allegra’s playing the payback game, so I guess I’m kinda being used. Again!—”

  Tessa drunkenly sang, “Girl, you just keep on using me . . . till ya use me up—” while Larissa continued her experimental hyperloop train of thought.

  “—Allegra’s really sweet and vulnerable and I know that Queen Wilding treats her like shit.”

  “Well, duh. It’s all about who got duh power, honey.”

  “And I don’t even know anymore why I got so pissed—”

  “Because Star Whore took a steaming dump on you and that never feels good. Though maybe it does! Hairy Man would prob’ly know.”

  “I mean, it was just a fling with a movie star, and it was fun—”

  “Until it wasn’t.”

  “Because hey, you know what? I’m a big girl. I can do a one-nighter. Like, no problem! I can be the whatever who saves your marriage and I can be the whatever who blows it up. I can be whatever you want me to be, whatever you need. I can do it all, but just, like, treat me with respect. Treat me like a human being, okay? Right? You know, like, don’t make me feel frickin’ used. And I probably should’ve known better. I guess I got sucked in. You know, the lifestyle sucks you in every time.”

  “Dusty Wilding is a cold fucking cunt.”

  “She is, right? It was, like, abusive. And I think I am going to write something about it—”

  “Yass!” said Tessa, with a fist pump. “I told you, Riss, anyone would publish that. You could get serious magazine money from a—even maybe, like, Vanity Fair. Oh my God, Vanity Fair! Like, it doesn’t have to be The Star or a shitty tabloid. Payback is a motherfucker. You got laid, now get paid.�
��

  “No, I don’t want to do that. And nothing online. I’m thinking of something so much cooler—like a novel, like a Fifty Shades of Grey. Or even classier, like a Dangerous Liaisons, which I Googled by the way and which happens to actually have been a ‘pistol’ novel written in 1782. You can totally steal from novels written centuries ago. All the copyrights have totally expired.”

  “Oh my God, Fifty Shades of Grey made a billion dollars.”

  “I could sell it to publishers as a roman à clef.”

  “A what?”

  “It’s French, for a novel based on real people.”

  “I love it! A reality-show novel!”

  “But without—I wouldn’t necessarily have to come out and say who the real people are. You hire publicists to kind of spread the word.”

  “But your name’s on it, right? Like, written by you?”

  “I don’t know . . . I think maybe ‘Written by Anonymous.’”

  “Larissa, you can’t, you have to put your name on it. You can leave theirs out—even though I think that’d be a huge mistake—but it has to have your name on it. ‘Le Ménage à Twat, by Larissa Dunnick’ has to be in huge letters on the cover!”

  “Mais non, cheri . . .”

  “But why? Otherwise people won’t know you wrote it—”

  “I don’t even know where this is going, contessa.”

  “Did you just call me a cunt?”

  “It totally may not be going anywhere. I’m just making it up as I go along.”

  “But that’s what a novel is. That’s what novelists do, they make shit up.”

  “All I know is, I’m just gonna do whatever I have to, to maybe come out of everything with a book. And right now, it’s weird but it’s fun.”

  Tessa begged to hear more but Larissa wanted to talk about Mister Billion instead.

  “What’s going on with you two, anyway?”

  “I don’t know,” said Tessa. “I think I’m kinda over it. He says he wants to take me to Turks and Caicos. I call it Kikes and Jerk-offs . . . he has this boat. Or says he has a boat. So far, all I’ve seen are fucking pictures. On Instagram. He takes more pictures of that boat than he does of his dick. Whatever.”

  “Turks and Caicos on a private yacht sounds kinda awesome.”

  “Fuckin’ hate me a boat, Riss. But if you’re very good, I might tell you something I did that was naughty.”

  “Oh my God, you better—after what I told you? You owe me like a motherfucka!”

  Tessa slowly finished her wine (she’d been drinking on top of the Xanax) then scofflawed an American Spirit. Larissa snatched it from her lip and hissed it out in a glass of Perrier.

  “Now fess the fuck up.”

  “He paid me for anal. Paid. Twice. No—three times.”

  “No shit.”

  “Pun intended. ’Cause I made sure I was clean as a whistle.”

  “Did you ever do that before?”

  “Ever do anal? Or ever get paid for it?”

  “Both.”

  “I have. Done it. But only a handful. Assful? Never got paid for it though. Not exactly.”

  “How much did he give you?”

  “Five thousand.”

  “Whoa! Each time?”

  “Yup.”

  “Nice!”

  “It started as a goof. Like, he kept talking and talking about it? Kind of pressuring me? And girl, you know Tessa don’t like bein’ pressured. And I think he thought I’d like just keep saying no . . . like, I’d be all Betty Ford—Just Say No!—the Betty Ford of anal. Or was that Nancy Ray-gun. But maybe he was gettin’ off on me saying no. So when I finally said, ‘For ten grand, you can wear it like a turtleneck,’ it was sorta like he was up shit’s creek and I finally handed him a paddle.”

  “I thought you said five though. That he gave you five. Was it ten each or five each?”

  “Girl, don’t you watch Shark Tank? Apparently, Mr. Wonderful felt my valuation was too high, but was in love with the product. I gave him back-end points. Hey: a good businesswoman never wants to hear Mr. Wonderful say, ‘I’m out.’”

  —

  They went to Crossroads to see their daughter in Legally Blonde. Rafaela played one of the Delta Nu sisters—a small part but she really shined. Derek sucked O2 through a nasal cannula during the show.

  For the past few weeks, Tristen had been crashing on his dad’s couch in the cluttered Hollywood apartment. With Beth gone, Derek needed help. He was too weak and too bummed to resist the boy’s overtures, and signed a provisional truce with the ex as well. Thanks to the medics, there was no shortage of Percocets and grass; getting loaded did wonders for his level of interpersonal tolerance. He’d lost most of his bark, and all of his bite—he was scared. He was on the organ wait list but had been designated “Status 2,” the least needy of recipients. They said it could take months, even years. Derek saw that as a death sentence.

  Their shit was upside down. They still owned the house together but in twenty years the mortgage hadn’t budged. They were half a million and change in the red, plus a hundred and thirty-three thousand in credit-card debt, plus a hundred and sixty borrowed against the property. (And another ninety grand in back taxes to the IRS that he hadn’t even told her about.) She cursed their spendthrift ways. They’d lived like delusional pimps—the Barneys shopping sprees, the celebrity doctors who eschewed insurance, the horseshit weekend getaways at the Beverly Hills Hotel. All for the look-good, what Derek called “keeping up with the Jewses.” And now she was old, a grifting wannabe dyke with just $16,000 left in her secret savings. She looked into the future, the near future, and saw a dried-up widow, a stinky hoarder living in borrowed rooms, on borrowed time.

  During intermission, she brought him a tea because seeing him mingle with the parents—if he’d even had the energy to walk to the lobby—would have embarrassed her. He was sallow and gaunt, struggling.

  “Did you know Bobby Altman had a heart transplant?” asked Larissa.

  “Bobby Altman? Who the fuck is ‘Bobby’ Altman? What were you, a family friend? It’s Robert Altman. And he had money. If you got money, you live. If you ain’t got, you die.”

  “I was searching transplants online. Tracy Morgan had one.”

  “A heart transplant? From the car accident?”

  “Kidney—way before. His girlfriend gave him one. She thought if she gave him a kidney they’d get back together, but they didn’t.”

  “That’s what they call ‘donor’s remorse.’ Ol’ Tracy don’t need any handouts, either—nigger’s rich. Walmart probably gave him a hundred mill.”

  “You knew Cheney had a heart transplant, right?”

  “Heart Vader! Ol’ spotted Dick. Had his pick of donors at Gitmo too. And all those ‘black’ sites . . . now there’s an unkillable motherfucker.”

  “—and this golfer who had, like, two heart transplants.”

  “Yeah, one of the nurses was talking about him. He was probably Status 2, like me. But they took a look in his wallet and said, ‘Oh! Rich Sports Guy! Need a heart? There’s a fourteen-year-old girl in line before you, she’s been on the list for three years, but fuck her, she won’t mind, ’cause you’re Mr. Rich Sports Guy! Oops—body rejected it? So sorry, sir, here, have another, our treat! ’Cause you’re Mr. Rich-As-Fuck Sports Guy!’”

  Derek could be funny when he was mad—which was pretty much 24/7. She loved that about him for the first few years, before everything got old.

  “Have you seen Tristen’s car?”

  “Yeah,” he snorted. “He was gonna get a Tesla but apparently they go for five thousand blowjobs. The Honda was only five hundred.”

  She just shook her head and asked how “the sleepovers” were going.

  “They’re going.”

  “Well, they’ve done wonders for him. He’s s
ure been a happier camper lately.”

  “Been making hisself useful, anyway.”

  “So sorry that Beth—your other slave—escaped the plantation.”

  “Easy come, easy go.”

  “What do you have him doing over there, crushing up your pain pills? Putting a polish on those nonexistent editing awards? Fielding offers from J. J. Abrams?”

  “Nope. Got him hacking into the IATSE system. He’s goin’ North Korea on it. Goin’ rogue. Goin’ Putin.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Creating a dummy employment file so we can keep our insurance.”

  “Oh shit, Derek,” she said, with a mixture of caution and pride in Tristen’s wayward expertise.

  “No other option, babe. Look at the bright side—once he’s locked us in, you can get your eyes and neck done. Have that titty reduction you always wanted. Hell, have an augmentation and a reduction. Spoil yourself! The tummy tuck’s on me, the ass lift’s on IATSE. Get your teeth and bunghole whitened. Shit, you can build yourself a hymen—get back that new car smell.”

  “Fuck you,” she chuckled. “But can’t we get in trouble for that?”

  “Not ‘we,’ babe. It’s on him.”

  “Oh, great. Why do you fucking hate him so much?” She ignored his dagger eyes. “He loves you, Derek. God knows you’ve never given him a reason to, but he does. He loves you and you hate him.”

  “I don’t hate him,” he said jauntily. “I hate you.”

  “Well, get over it. He’s your son. Goddammit, it’s heartbreaking.”

  “My son?” He coughed up a scrap metal resemblance of a laugh. “No shit it’s heartbreaking. Tell me about it. My heart’s so broke I need a new one.”

  —

  In her twenty-eighth year, not long after winning her inaugural Oscar, Dusty Wilding came out to the world. The effect of that avowal, so thinkable now but unthinkable then, lends itself to clumsy metaphor—say, pick tsunami: waves of public acclaim receded at the announcement, exposing a naked, drawnback shore of flotsam, garbage, and gasping, outrun grunion; a perplexion of outraged starfishes and nationally stunned disbelief. After shocky abeyance, a hundred-foot-high wall of murderous judgewater raked in from the heartland, destroying everything in its path on the way to both coasts (and the continents and land masses beyond). Nothing could have prepared the actress for the initial, sustained violence of cultural response, the mad ugliness of it, the innumerable FBI investigations of mayhem and threats of mutilation and death, the mockery, vandalism and hate riffs of the country’s best comedians. Against her will, she submitted to invasive shifts of bodyguards until one day Dusty’d had enough. “The tide cannot be held, let it come.” She watched from higher ground as the villages of her spirit, her soul, her very being were drowned and reordered. Most of those whom she considered friends went missing; the cats all died; only her dogs remained, limping and three-legged. Yes she had her tribe, vociferous and militant, tried and true blue, but they were outliers too. They were fragile, and died hard—many were swept to sea in those first chaotic days, weeks, and months . . . so many tree trunks, startled by their own amputation, a confusion of desecrated bodies and debris, with no Internet (for better and for worse) to damn the flood. Yet in all such catastrophes, one may note the photo of the single church that survives, alone and untouched, magisterially indifferent amid the ruins, a day-after symbol of Christian love and renewal—Dusty and her heart were like that. She held fast until houses and new life sprung up around her.