by Bruce Wagner
He was working on Resident Evil, making good bread. He never stopped taking care of her and the children. He sent regular checks; then sweet notes with the checks; then small thoughtful gifts in the in-between. He apologized for the beat-down and said he understood what led her to betray him. He even said he was in therapy! That he agreed with everything she’d told him about the devastation wrought by capital-S secrets, and was proud of her moxie. (Actually using that word.) He said he was deeply ashamed, and really seemed to mean it. By the end of the year he was living at home again, bedding down in the garage. Tristen was overjoyed; he had missed his father terribly, and been so confused. (Thank God he wasn’t there the night Derek broke her arms.) On his return, Derek really did try his best. The miracle was that things went well, relatively, for a moment anyway, between father and make-believe son—that Derek behaved. His performance wasn’t perfect but it was solid, like a good understudy’s; he fell back on all the years he’d loved that boy as if he was his own. In time, even after becoming Tristen’s tormentor, Derek never told him that he wasn’t his real dad. Didn’t that count for something, for anything? Didn’t that count for some kind of love?
She stood beside the body now.
He wore the clothes he’d be burned in—that gorgeous grey Prada suit she bought for his graduation from Crossroads. Larissa touched the cold forehead. Just beneath the sternum rose the tip of the closed excision atop his heart; through the white shirt’s thin cotton she could see the cowlicky infestation of black threads that sewed it up. Her finger reached out to trace the fabric covering the unruly tendrils’ bristle; then drew back, like the twiggy phalange of a timorous witch.
—
Dusty had been in constant touch with Ginevra since that unfortunate row in the driveway, yet again she vacillated about telling Allegra—Aurora—the full truth and nothing but. Insofar as her daughter had filled in the blanks with an imaginary adultery (the therapist encouraged her to actively say “my daughter” and “Aurora” instead of Allegra), Dusty thought it would be easier to just capitalize on the misunderstanding and make it legitimate; confess to multiple affairs and break it off. The blow had already been struck, albeit for the wrong reason, and she saw no benefit in delivering the alternate coup de grâce. Of course, Ginevra didn’t agree, urging her to be strong, bla.
On Monday, they met as agreed at the restaurant in the hotel. The actress had no plan. The primary thing was to get back on some sort of even keel, whatever that looked like, then see what she could see. So there they were, having a surreal and civil tea; she wouldn’t have been surprised to be interrupted by a hatter and a dormouse—though Bunny, bereft, lacked the oomph just then to give any kind of March hare its marching orders.
The two looked as beautiful as an arrondissement between downpours. For the first time, Dusty sat across from the storybook creature who’d been transfigured by a single kiss (though one that lasted years) from defiled, warty frog-wife to daughter-princess, impossibly, luminously restored. It was breathtaking, and gutted her. They danced around their recent estrangement. When Allegra brought up Jeremy’s loss (in spite of herself), Dusty startled, claiming not to have known. Allegra was certain the actressy denials were for show but held her tongue. Anyway, it was a good distraction to be gossiping about travails other than their own.
Picking up on Allegra’s skepticism about her reaction to the news of Tristen’s death, she recalled her therapist’s edict to take courage and take charge, and dove headlong into the whole Larissa business. (Allegra bridled but Dusty heroically pushed through.) She was not having an affair, she said, not with the camera double or anyone else. She left Allegra’s driveway shout—“I’ve been fucking her too!”—well enough alone.
“Bullshit!” Allegra said, unable to maintain decorum. “You are gaslighting me!”
Mindful of their surroundings, Dusty took a breath and dialed it down.
“Look,” she said, somewhat sternly. “I don’t know what that woman has been telling you but she’s unstable, okay? She’s been sending crazy emails, not just to me, but to Marilyn and Elise, okay? And I haven’t seen Larissa since we wrapped, okay? I don’t do yoga with her and I don’t do anything else.”
Allegra was about to mention the earring in the bed but stared at the table instead, making jailhouse crosshatchings in the linen with a butter knife. Her eyes got watery. “So what do you want to do? Are we getting divorced?”
“I just want . . . to talk about some things, Allegra. But not here.”
“I’ll take that as a ‘yes,’” she said, bitterly. “And why shouldn’t we talk here? Because the patio of the Four Seasons is the wrong place to end our marriage? Like, you need it to be a better place for your memoir?”
“No one’s writing a memoir, Allegra.”
“Well, I might!” she snarled. “Is the Four Seasons too boring? Is Point Dume a ‘sexier’ place for a breakup? The name sure as fuck is more accurate. Doom!”
This is your daughter. Be loving. Be calm. Be courageous . . .
“I have some serious things to . . . discuss—and I just don’t feel comfortable doing that in a public place.”
“You mean you’d rather talk somewhere with lawyers? Is that where you want to meet, Dusty? With your lawyers?—”
She sighed and said, “Can you just come home?”
“That isn’t my home anymore,” said Allegra. “It’s your home.” She made a few more slashes on the table cover and gulped her tea. “We can talk in my room.”
In the tense silence on the way up Allegra said to herself We are NOT going to fuck, no matter WHAT. But as the elevator rose she couldn’t help shuddering with the memory of all the cold-hot moonshadow makeup sex they’d shared, that bosomy, timeless, syrupy pull of body and unruly blood that she had always had for Her, Dusty, her love and her life—she who had conquered, liberated, and given form, she who still conferred all meaning and security, sanctity and sanity—the four seasons themselves.
—
A minute after they sat on the couch it was done.
There were moments when Allegra felt doubly gaslit—as if, through a desperate, psychotically bold stratagem, her wife was attempting to erase betrayal by means of a ghastly, unspeakably preposterous invention. The young woman stood up a few times in angsty confusion but was led back to her seat by Dusty’s command that she hear her out.
She told her everything, starting from when Ronny Swerdlow knocked her up—how she ran away when Reina took her to L.A. for the abortion—hitchhiking to Wickenburg then getting homesick for her dad and returning to Tustin with the certainty everything would be okay—how one apocalyptic morning, her baby was gone. How that destroyed her and how she’d punished herself her entire life for having stayed with that monstrous woman, stayed with her after, after she’d stolen her child away, for three tragic years before fleeing to New York. I’ve asked myself why a thousand times. (Though she wasn’t going to get into the hornet’s nest of why she never went looking for her baby, not unless Aurora specifically asked; it didn’t feel like the right time.) She talked about “Snoop” Raskin and the email Ida Pinkert sent after Reina died, how the old woman said she saw Reina give her away, literally hand her off to Claudia Zabert, babysitter extraordinaire. (Just then, in an aside, Dusty, with a tearful smile, said, “Your birth name is Aurora,” the cognitive dissonance of which Allegra of course already knew, so that its formal announcement was rendered as a balmy, poignant baptism) . . . and how she was in New York a few weeks ago for the Meryl party when out of nowhere Livia and the detective showed up to tell all—which was why she’d been out of touch. Because she needed time to digest, and think about what to do . . .
When she finished, Allegra sat there without saying a word, which Dusty thought was a good thing. Because anything was better than—what? High-decibel screams? Breaking a glass and using a shard to sever Dusty’s tits? It wouldn’t matter: she could
take whatever dishes, words, or tantrums her daughter might throw. She could see now that anything was better than the anything of not telling her. If telling her didn’t feel good, it felt right.
Allegra ceremoniously excused herself to the loo.
She came back around ten minutes later (Dusty had started to worry), returning to the couch like a remorseful prisoner. She asked a few questions, occasionally interrupting her mother’s response with “This isn’t a joke?” (Just as Dusty had said to Livia and Snoop, and with the same lilt.) She wanted to know about her father, as they’d never really discussed the details of Dusty’s Provo pilgrimage. “Does he know?” Dusty said that he didn’t nor was she planning to tell him, at least not for the moment. Who are you going to tell, asked Allegra—with a mixture of outrage, fear, and befuddlement. Only you, said Dusty. Unless you wish otherwise. Allegra snorted at that, not in a mean way, but to indicate how insane it was to be entertaining one’s “wants” in the face of such a thing. Dusty hastened to add, I guess that’s premature. “We’ll find our way. We’ll go slow and find our way.” When Allegra asked about “Willow,” Dusty said the detective apparently had visited her in Albuquerque, and that she wasn’t well, emphasizing the word in such a way to denote grave psychiatric issues.
Dusty wanted to learn a few things herself. Did Claudia ever inform her of the circumstances by which she’d been acquired? Those were the stilted words she used; the woodenness made her cringe but she couldn’t help expressing herself that way. Allegra said she hadn’t. “She never mentioned you or your mother or ever even having seen one of your films.” Dusty said that Claudia wouldn’t necessarily have been able to put any of it together, as she had changed her name from Janine Whitmore when she started to act. “I always thought she was my biological mom,” said Allegra. “I mean, I didn’t have any reason to think otherwise. She may have even told me she was, directly. I don’t know.”
They sat awhile in silence.
“So, she babysat you?” said Allegra. Her mother nodded. “And this isn’t a joke.”
“Not a joke.”
“Holy, holy fuck.”
There were worlds upon worlds for both of them to suppress—a gargantuan history of body intimacies lay frozen beneath the tundra of the hellish new normal—and they shivered together like survivors awaiting improbable rescue.
“Do you want to come to the house?”
Allegra stared into space (they’d been doing a lot of that). “Okay.”
As if talking to herself, Dusty added, “I know I didn’t want to be alone—when I found out. But I kind of had to be. You don’t.”
Allegra winced and said, “Well . . . I guess the big decision is—Dr. Phil? Or Dr. Wrigley?”
“Diane Sawyer,” said Dusty with a smile.
(The ice, and everything else, had broken.)
—
Allegra told her to go on ahead, she’d be up in a bit. She thought she might check out of her room, but didn’t have the energy. Why should she, anyway? As if everything was just fine now! The only person who would fully appreciate the batshit bonkers-ness of it was Jeremy, but for now, telling him would have to be off-limits—who could she tell? She wondered if she should even tell herself, because it felt like she hadn’t.
The supercosmic joke of it—and it was a cosmic joke, because how the fuck else could you describe it—slammed Allegra as she drove through the flats on the way to Trousdale. The overall miscarriage of her life dogged and assailed: the esteemed, numerous non-accomplishments of a parasitical, childfucked existence had led her like a flower girl to this, her greatest achievement, the jewel in her crown of thorns. The snakes in the road that Tiresias would be separating for eternity were none other than she and her mother. No wonder the myth had riveted so! At last, she understood her destiny: to be one of the women she’d read about, plucked from her library’s bouquet—the daughters of Aphrodite that Herodotus wrote of, sacred whores who practiced in temples, consorts of divine marriage and tantric rape. Like defrocked priestesses, they were always out of their robes; just now, Allegra couldn’t remember where she’d left hers.
The gate was open. It felt like she’d been away for months. Dusty waved nervously from an upstairs window then retreated. Probably worried I wasn’t going to show. She imagined Willow up there too, waiting in the wings.
She entered the old house (she didn’t recognize it) as in a dream, wanting to awaken—but where? In Big Sur, for the wedding? In Cuba, when Dusty (and “co-hostesses” Anderson Cooper and Nathan Lane) threw a surprise party for her thirtieth? On that amazing day when she learned she was pregnant for the first time? In what moment of the slipstream did she want to wake up, before the propellers broke off? Well, there was no moment, because she’d never taken flight. All these years, she was really just a cripple sporting 3D goggles.
Dusty called from the landing, “Down in a minute!”
Allegra went up anyway. It was still her house, wasn’t it? More than ever now. Maybe she’s gonna surprise me with a nursery, she thought mordantly. With stuffed bunnies and a mobile dangling over a crib that I can be fucked in after a nice bedtime story. Overcome, she plunked herself down on the carpeted steps. She heard the flush of a toilet. She didn’t want Dusty to be her mother, she wanted Dusty to be her wife—for it to be like before and stay like that, when they were both so happy . . .
Dusty reappeared. “I know,” she said of Aurora’s little stair collapse, as if reading her thoughts. Like a mother would.
She roused herself and stood. When she reached the landing, Dusty touched her arm and the young woman smiled as she walked slowly by. Entering their bedroom, she thought of that glorious, sun-dappled path to the swimming hole at Black Bear that her mom—AKA Willow, Claudia, babysitter and kidnapper, sex and death cultist, madwoman—loved to chase her down, Allegra squealing in ecstasy before seizing the rope that would carry her far over the water before she let go.
She ran to the terrace, hurdling the balustrade.
THEN
I see the sleeping babe, nestling the breast of its
mother;
The sleeping mother and babe—hush’d, I study them
long and long.
Leaves of Grass
heart sutra
“Today, we have an amazing guest—amazing guests—with an extraordinary story. Four months ago, Derek and Larissa Dunnick lost their twenty-three-year-old son Tristen in an automobile accident. Just three weeks before his son’s tragic death, Derek was put on a waiting list . . . to receive a heart transplant for a condition doctors said might end his life at any moment, without warning. Now, it wasn’t until an emergency-room nurse checked their son’s driver’s license that Derek and his wife Larissa learned their son had chosen to be an organ donor—even going so far as to leave behind a note instructing that should anything happen to him, if it were in any way possible, he wanted his dad to receive his heart. Within hours of Tristen’s death, that wish came true. And because of his sacrifice, his father is able to be with us here today. Please welcome . . . Derek and Larissa Dunnick.”
The audience, who’d salted the host’s pithy introduction with sighs and murmurs, broke into applause. Dad smiled as Mom’s hand fell upon his. Rail-thin, Derek still looked healthier than he had in years. Larissa’s blown-out hair was a vibrant, recolored red, with maroon-gold highlights. She was overdressed for the occasion in the Givenchy gown she bought at a high-end vintage store on Melrose with some of the additional $25,000 that Jeremy had given the couple in support of Derek’s recovery.
Dr. Wrigley walked them through a gripping play-by-play of the events leading to his surgery, and Derek didn’t disappoint.
“I understand,” said the host, “that it was something . . . completely unexpected. I’m not talking about the accident, which of course was a terrible, terrible shock. But that your son had decided to be a donor—that took you both comple
tely by surprise. Can you talk about that?”
“We’d had a conversation about it,” said Derek. “When I first got diagnosed, and it became clear that I would need to go on the list, the transplant list. But the conversation was brief. To be honest, it was something I’d totally forgotten. I think at the time I thought it was a beautiful thing for him to express, for a son to express. Then that was the end of it. Because you know . . . I don’t think there’s a mom or dad out there who even wants to consider the idea of their child . . . passing away . . . while that parent or parents are still living. And especially in my case, if that even makes any sense, because I was so close to dying. I really—I really did have a death sentence—and I don’t think—well, there just wasn’t a possibility something like that would happen with one of my kids before it happened to me. It wasn’t something I was even remotely capable of imagining.”
