Dead Stars

by Bruce Wagner

  All modest but not staid.

  Feminine.

  . . .

  She approaches the shift leader (who of course knows all about the tragic situation) and requests time alone with her daughter. The shift leader of course says yes & please let me know if there are other ways they might accommodate. Jacquie has no intention of telling them her plans.

  She gathers the family in the lounge. She tells them about the parish of portraits she’s taken, the baby here, the infant in Arizona. She explains what she wants—what she’s going to do. The ragtaggy dramatic personae solemnly accede without hassly questions, for which she is grateful. Everyone’s in shock anyway plus she’s the tribal chieftress, whatever she says is Word.

  She tells Dawn that she needs her help.

  She tells the men they will come back for them.

  . . .

  Both fight back tears as they dress their daughter.

  Unfathomable delicacy.

  Boundless love.

  How heavy the body.

  How heavy the body to make them break sweat.

  Jacquie occasionally stops to examine the skin, as an appraiser admiring/cataloguing the stitches, patterns & imperfections of a vintage quilt—vaccine scar, birthmark, explosion of freckles, earlobe battered by years of repiercings/infections, a single chronically ingrown pubis hair Jeri always fussed with . . . the tattoo that surprises her. Rikki said the singer Rihanna had the same, a tiny on the inside of her left ear. The scanning & commenting to her helpmeet busies her mind. Dawn is grateful she can be of service.

  A sound comes from Jacquie, a moany o from the O of her mouth as they came to the bulky, cellophaned cotton the RNs used to seal now bloodless Caesarean lips; they would need to cut the dress to get around that. Dawn says she’ll go find scissors but Jacquie impatiently tears the fabric of the Wang. They laugh at the grisly absurdity.

  Champagne wishes & cadaver dreams.

  A last pass over seams and buttons before pushbutton raising the bed so that she’s half-sitting, half-laying.

  Jacquie brushes Jerilynn’s hair.

  “Pretty,” she says, on unwitting verge of babytalk.

  Dawn takes a step back & watches.

  “Pretty, pretty girl,” says Jacquie. “Pretty, pretty girl.”

  . . .

  A nurse brings in the baby, hands it to Jacquie and leaves. She believes the two women are giving the dead girl a chance to say goodbye to the daughter she never touched, heard, smelled.

  Jacquie gives the baby to Dawn, then prepares her daughter’s arms. Dawn lowers it down while Jacquie sets up her camera. Dawn supports the baby but realizes she can let go. The baby stays cradled in its mother’s arms.

  . . .

  Rikki, Jerzy & Jim come in. (Photo session over, camera and tripod hidden.) Jim is restrained, the boys gimlet-eyed. Too mindblowing even for heartache. So off-the-charts it’s one of the few predicaments where a so-called normal response might cause them to actually look just as whacked out as they already did. The men wonder what they’re supposed to feel, what they’re supposed to feel.

  Rikki’s the 1st to come close, looking confused. He shakes his head and keeps muttering, So fucked up it’s so fucked up.

  Jerzy joins him bedside, like a boy band, about to sing into the same mic. He stares at his sister & says Whoa. Flashes on the dead naked body beneath the cool-looking dress before lurching back into the present. “Beautiful dress,” he says. “Good choice. Great choice.”

  Not sure what he’s supposed to say or feel but a compliment to Jacquie seems like the right thing. He flashes how if no one else was there he would probably lift up the dress and have a look.

  Almost 15 minutes of people—dramatis personae—coming close then backing away, coming close then backing away. Rikki wonders is this a viewing. Is this official? That’s why she’s in the dress? Is this like a last time? Am I acting OK how do you act at a viewing? When is the funeral is there going to be a funeral?

  Dawn says, “We’re going to go see the baby. Are you OK?”

  Jacquie says that she is.

  The men linger a moment, as if leaving on Dawn’s command would compromise their grieving manhoods. When Rikki finally goes, Jerzy follows after. Jim approaches the body a final time; Rikki and Jerzy turn to see that but decide in their whackitude & laziness to let him have his unmalecompanioned moment. Jim looks at her face, closes his eyes.

  “It isn’t fair. So young, so young—too young.”

  Laconic, clichéd, normal-engineer-type griefy editorials.

  Dawn catches her husband’s eye to let him know it’s time to leave her now. They close the door behind them.

  Jacquie stares out the window, the very same harmless idle way a visitor stares out the window when the patient is sleeping. You come with gift or flowers but they’re sleeping and you let them because they need to sleep, and also you have things to do, it’s a busy day, you can get more things done if you leave soon and instead just call and tell them later that you stopped by but they were sleeping & you didn’t want to disturb. Tell them that you sat there very peacefully, which would be true, except you might imply you sat there longer than you did. Stretch the truth just a little, what was the harm. The patient is dozing and you turn to look out the window at the world, at life, the dull sun-slanty roar of it. You stare out the window & contemplate the brevity and strangeness, the richness and beauty, the fresh insults and horrors of it.

  And then your friend wakes up.

  . . .

  Jerzy & Rikki walk to the van. Jerzy hates the hospital lot & parked off Robertson, just around the corner from the Ivy. His professional stomping grounds. They walk in silence, still in a bubble of intense weirdness.

  A kid in Vans sprints by, clutching a camera. Then two more, then another . . . not kids, but fellow pros. 2 figures come toward them, surrounded by fly swarmerazzi. For once, Jerzy’s happy not to have his camera.

  “Leighton! Leighton!”

  Jerzy pauses to watch with bemusement—like he’s being given a tour of his life by the Ghost of Honeyshot!s Past.

  “Who is it?” asks Rikki.

  “Leighton Meester. From Gossip Girl.”

  “ReeRee loves that show.”

  Leighton gets closer, then fakes out the fotogs & goes lateral, tearing across the street.

  “Wow,” says Jerzy, staring at the receding & the pursuing hordes. “Did you see that?”

  “What?”

  “Her dress—same as Reeyonna’s. The Alexander Wang!”

  “So?”

  “So . . . ReeRee totally rocked it. Leighton looked shitty. I give Ree an 87% & Leighton a thirteen—a 20% at most.”

  O shit, thinks Rikki, the dude’s into his numbers again.

  “87% of what?”

  “Of the vote, nigger, what do you think I’m talking about?” Jerzy hugely smiles. “ReeRee rocked it.”

  BETTER

  BODY

  AFTER

  BABY

  MOTHERHOOD CERTAINLY AGREES WITH HOLLYWOOD’S SEXY STARS! HERE’S HOW THESE HOT MAMAS LOST THEIR BABY WEIGHT—AND THEN SOME!

  CLEAN

  [Bud]

  Til Your Hip Don’t Hop Anymore

  Bud

  read somewhere on the Internet that last year there were 23,000 murders in Mexico. It made him think about his novel; maybe he should take a stab at dystopian sci-fi. He could write about how in the future, 80% of the world’s population will be murdered annually. How in the future, there’d be no new pop songs, as all melodies/lyrics would be exhausted. In the future, Dolly will be dead too but the interest generated by multiple accounts would live on.

  A fear both justifiable and irrational—the fear of falling—seized his mother, preventing her from leaving bed. The occasional diaper Marta taped her into was no longer only for bouts of diarrhea or leaky one-offs, as it had been the last six months or so; it was now her permanent toilet. When the caregivers informed him of this new development, Bud’s first thoug
ht was, How can she fall and die if she never leaves the bed? He actually had a lot of guilt over what had become his own obsession—Dolly falling and dying—and spoke about it to a female therapist he was referred to by Michael’s wife. Dr. Pelka said that with adult children, a death wish for one’s elderly parents was fairly normal. (Bud wondered what other cultures would have made of her pronouncement.) She told him it was a common response to “caregiver burnout,” which apparently sons and daughters can have even if they weren’t strictly caregivers.

  With Mom pretty much bedridden, Bud had to chuck the fantasies of her falling, instead imagining death from bedsore infection or pulmonary embolism due to inactivity.

  . . .

  Bud was feeling vulnerable and a little sorry for himself when the envelope from CAA arrived by messenger, to cheer him—the Ooh Baby contract. He scanned the pages. Ooh Baby and even CAA took it for granted Bud was an artist: beside each place that required his signature was written Bud Wiggins (“artist”), which gave him a pang of pride as well as one of doubt that he’d ever be worthy of the appellation. What would it take to fulfill that promise?

  Lydia Davis, the author Michael and Wendy Tolkin threw a dinner party for, was at Barnes & Noble signing a new trade paperback edition of her acclaimed translation of Madame Bovary. She was in the middle of a 27-city tour and Bud thought he’d stop by; it was either that or the Central Library where David Ulin had undertaken interviewing the undertaker Joan Didion. Whereas authors like James Salter and Barry Hannah had been certified by academia as “writer’s writers” (i.e. doomed to nyrb classic status), Davis was considered to be that rara avis, a writer’s writer’s writer. Apart from translating Flaubert, Blanchot and Proust, she had tried her hand at the art of the novel and short story, efforts, critics duly noted, for which the world was a better, more perfect place.

  A lot of her followers were comfortable in asserting that her Madame Bovary translation was best approached as a novel by Lydia Davis, not Flaubert. In her own fiction, her stories were “famously short.” In one essay Bud read, a reviewer excerpted in its entirety what he called “one of her more famous stories, ‘Collaboration With Fly’”:

  I put that word on the page, but he added the apostrophe.

  The MacArthur Foundation gave her the genius grant.

  Her famously short stories . . . one of her more famous stories . . . famous to whom? Bud ruminated that all things must be famous in their own way to someone or other, a notion which had the comforting effect of making his dream of achieving fame as a novelist closer to becoming a reality than he thought. Based on Davis’s example, Bud took heart that it might be feasible to release a book of exceedingly short stories of his own culled from the work-in-progress that was currently giving him such a headache. He’d call it Some Extremely Short Stories—A Pop-Up Book, by Bud Wiggins, and sell it out of a pop-up bookshop on Melrose funded by his inheritance. Maybe Barnes & Noble would carry it too, one of those little “humor” items on sale next to the cash register. A Book of Short Torys, by Bud Wiggins (with illustrations by the author). He’d take a little trip to the UK for research on Dolly’s dime.*

  During the Q&A, a witty Davis groupie stood up and said, “Do you think it’s possible Flaubert’s book is actually a French translation of a novel by Lydia Davis called Madame Bovary?”

  Hilarity ensued.

  . . .

  He took long walks in the evenings now. He began at dusk, looping down Gregory to Rexford, then over to Charleville, back up to Reeves.

  The turnaround point was Horace Mann, his old elementary school.

  As he passed the various houses where he spent much of his childhood, he thought of all the sons and daughters who had lived in them, the progeny of the famous, crushed beneath their legacies. A good friend from those days was Eric Douglas. A sad case—the obits said handsome Eric was 300 lbs when the police found him, dead of an overdose in his hotel room. He was Kirk’s firstborn . . . Kirk had a new book out, a memoir. He’d written a bunch of other memoirs, novels as well. Bud thought he should probably have a look. You never know, maybe there’s something to be learned. Michael Douglas told Brando Brainard that the stroke finally gave his father peace. Bud thought, I wouldn’t mind a stroke, though it’d probably be better to publish first. Brando said Kirk had a second bar mitzvah when he was 83, something having to do with the biblical lifespan of 70. Thus far, the strokeless Bud had only been bar mitzvah’d once. He felt like a sluggard.

  Someone forgot to lock one of the playground gates. Bud sat in the well-worn leather strop of a swing and propelled himself, letting his thoughts wander. Things were looking up. True, he’d been staying with his mother in the same room where he lived as a boy, but his days there were numbered. He was Bud Wiggins (“artist”), a working writer again. His novel would either come together or not, and Bud had surrendered to both outcomes. He was having a little trouble with the Antigone script though wasn’t too worried; Michael said they could get together again soon to shoot the shit. Also, the pressure was off because Biggie, bless his soul, was preparing to have surgery to remove the tumor that’d been affecting his memory. Brando was completely caught up in that. No one would be breathing down Bud’s neck. It gave him more time to work on the script and his novel.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been on a swing. 50 years? He was never a daredevil like the other kids. In fact, swings scared him. No doubt those fears could be traced back to the days when his father installed a set in the backyard of their first house. Morris, a sadistic drunk, gave his son powerful push-offs and refused to stop, even when Bud screamed and cried and the swings shook, partially breaking free of their foundation – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –of an instant, he was on the asphalt. What? Confused. What happened . . . how silly!—the swing had broken. Well of course it did, it was old, and made for 100 lb kids. Bud fell hard on his ass and it hurt like hell. What a fool. Dad was probably laughing his ass off, or at least the rotting coccyx it was once attached to.

  . . .

  Bud was invited to a Sunday brunch at Michael and Wendy’s.

  The house in Hancock Park was beautifully done. He was a bit rusty on the social side so when Michael’s wife playfully chided him for being a wallflower, Bud forced himself to mix. He wound up talking to the writer Scott Berg and his partner Kevin. Bud hadn’t read any of Berg’s work but knew he’d gotten the Pulitzer for a bio having something to do with Scott Fitzgerald. He also knew that his brother Jeff was the bookish head of ICM.

  Michael came over and asked Berg if he enjoyed teaching at Princeton. The conversation led to the great Dante scholar Robert Hollander, a professor emeritus there. Though in pain from his fall and higher on oxycodone than usual, Bud wanted to join in. He had more than a passing knowledge of the Italian poet. In the last few years, he’d pushed himself through a pastiche of different Infernos—Pinsky, Mandelbaum, Longfellow—and read most of the SparkNotes to Purgatorio and Paradiso.

  The conversation was heady and he held his own.

  “I’ve read the Hollander translation,” Bud lied. Though it probably was true he at least owned the volume. Whenever a new translation of La Commedia appeared, he OCD-one-clicked. “It’s always been a dream of mine to give a Dante lecture.”

  Bud made it clear he was being wry, but not entirely. Why not? Why couldn’t he one day lecture on Dante? And why shouldn’t they take such an aspiration seriously? Michael was an esteemed novelist, Berg, an honored author of nonfiction. While not as celebrated, Bud was a working writer—a journeyman peer.

  Berg twitched. It was only the discreet, gently admonitory touch of his partner that softened his scowl.

  “You want to lecture on Dante?” said Berg. Already Bud felt like he’d been stung. “Really? Somehow, I don’t think so. Durante, maybe! You can lecture on Jimmy Durante. Maybe.”

  . . .

  The soreness from the fall didn’t go away.
<
br />   Bud didn’t have a doctor, so he went to Dolly’s internist, Dr. Fine. He’d have to ask her for money because his Writers Guild insurance wouldn’t kick in till next quarter.

  He was back in the examination room putting on his shirt when the doc came in holding x-rays.

  “Congratulations! You’ve got a break.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s classic.”

  “What do we do?”

  “You’re going to need surgery.”

  “Jesus, you’re kidding.”

  “See the break?” He held up the film. Bud was too perturbed to focus. “We don’t see it too much in people your age. It’s literally called an ‘Old Man’ fracture. You’re a little young—I’d expect to see it in your mom. The good news is, it’s eminently repairable. I’m sending you over to Moe Ravitz. He’s in the Cedars Towers. Great bone guy.”

  “Moe Ravitz?”

  “Best geriatric orthopedist on the Westside.”

  CLEAN

  [Gwen]

  High Resolution

  Gwen’s

  lawyer had already been given an inkling of “the number,” but wanted the other side to go ahead and present its case. There was of course no question of the hospital’s wrongdoing. A heretofore unbreakable chain of checks and balances had been torn asunder by human error, each link’s failure more improbable than the next. The day of reckoning had come.

  The timing couldn’t have been worse for the plaintiff. St. Ambrose was compellingly forthright, telling Gwen and counsel that a philanthropist and longtime donor was about to make the largest gift to a private teaching hospital on record—a billion dollars. Bertram Brainard, whose name already graced one of their buildings, was deeply grateful that its doctors had discovered a rare, sesame seed-sized brain tumor in his son that had failed to be detected by the world-famous Houston clinic Biggie was initially brought to after exhibiting signs of memory loss. (There was no reason the hospital attorneys would have known that Biggie and her daughter had become fast friends, and no reason to enlighten them either.) Gwen got the sense they’d told her more than was needed—they could have just mentioned the billion-dollar gift and stopped there—because they wanted to state, almost for the record, that catastrophic mistakes can and do happen, and are not in the domain of any single institution; nor was it a conspiracy of negligence that brought them to this room, on this day, but rather the banality of events—lab reports read in haste and fatigue, faulty calibrations and equipment, malignant interpretations of benign processes—that accreted to provide an evil end.