by Bruce Wagner
“I’m thinking—and it’s very sweet of you to offer a dinner party. But I’m actually thinking—and tell me what you think—I’m actually thinking that maybe I could show the work at Larry’s house. Maybe mix the two. I could hang the pictures, almost like an intimate gallery show. I’m not sure he has the space . . .”
“O he does! He has the space.”
“It might be a better place to show the images than my garage!”
“I think it’s a wonderful idea.”
“I could even bring the last photos—of my daughter.”
“Well, that would be an absolute privilege. For everyone.”
During their conversation she’d wandered into the yard, and then the garage, where one of the enormous prints of Jerilynn hung in a temporary frame. Now she was staring straight at it. Her daughter looked so beautiful in the slate grey Alexander Wang—& Nikki lay on her chest in mid-squall.
“Because in a way,” said Jacquie. “It’s the showpiece.”
CLEAN
[Biggie&Telma]
Search
Biggie’s
operation was a success. The doctors said he would gradually recover “full powers,” though not for a few months.
Telma and Biggie were inseparable. Apart from Brando and the nanny, she was the only one Biggie would interact with. Brando even gave Telma her own bedroom. Gwen was comfortable with it because the children were well-supervised, and Telma did schoolwork with Biggie’s tutor.
Gwen was there a few times a week for lunch and dinner. The story Brando told her about the mother who went away lay heavy on her heart. The father lived in one of the houses on the vast estate but apparently only materialized at night, to pace the grounds. Was he awaiting his wife’s return? Or was it for his own death . . . Gwen never saw him, tho when she was over for dinner, did find herself doing a little rubbernecking into the dusky sprinklermist. It was all rather gothic—she couldn’t help thinking of the father as Rochester’s mad wife, shut up in secret rooms.
. . .
The invitations to cancer galas continued to come in, but Telma evinced no interest. Just before Michael wrapped his movie, he asked Gwen and her to tea but Telma declined. Telma emailed with Aleisha’s mom and phoned the little girl twice a week w/o fail. She accompanied Biggie to the hospital whenever he had an appointment but otherwise stayed away, quietly abdicating her mayoralty. Gwen got all kinds of worried communiqués from the RNs, missing Telma & wanting to know “what was happening.”
Gwen didn’t say it, but something was happening.
Her daughter was growing up.
. . .
She took the call in her bedroom at the Brainards’.
Her mom said that she and Phoebe were thinking of going to Hawaii for a week, and might Biggie and Telma like to come? Telma said no, they were in the middle of a big project, but told her mom she should go enjoy herself, that she’d better or Telma would be mad. While they were talking, a picture of Michael Douglas came on the television, & Telma told Gwen to hold on while she turned up the sound. Shia LaBeouf was being interviewed. “Cancer picked the wrong guy when it picked Michael,” he said.
They spoke a while longer, then Telma said she needed to check up on Biggie. Gwen had already expressed her concerns to Phoebe about her daughter’s codependency; she was afraid Telma swapped one obsession for another. Phoebe said she thought the bond with Biggie was a far healthier manifestation of her altruistic spirit than her relationship to cancer was, which was grandiose & doomed to end badly. Phoebe said, Would you try something? I’d like you to try and stop worrying, for 30 seconds at a time.
Before hanging up, Telma surprised Gwen by saying, “Mom, I’m going to marry Biggie one day. I don’t know who’s going to ask who, but someone’s going to ask somebody.”
Telma said an Aloha! & was gone.
. . .
For the last week, Biggie was having more problems than usual. The doctors said it might go like that; the up and the down of it, until things settled. Telma did flashcards with him every day but sometimes he got tired. He’d say he didn’t know certain things, but Telma was convinced he did. It could be really frustrating but she knew how to get him to push through.
When she stepped into his room, he was Google Earthing. He was listening to music on his Beats so she was able to kind of creep up & look over Biggie’s shoulder, without him knowing. He was in Slovenia, loitering around the parking lot of the Skocjan Caves. (He’d been hanging there with his little “street view man” all weekend.) Biggie told her the caves were created by a sinking river, half on the surface, ½-underground. The wiki said that the subterranean gorge/waterfalls looked like something out of The Lord of the Rings.
She was about to let her presence be known when he opened Google & typed
mother
There were 1,341,000,000 hits.
END
David Rosenthal
Nothing to Undo
Sarah Hochman
Acknowledgments
Lily Burk
& Greg Burk & Deborah Drooz
John & Lydia Jane & Lisa Stafford Gladwell, Todd & Emily Horowitz & Elroy & Pebbles Solondz, James Truman & Leanne Shapton & Bunny, David & Carolyn Cronenberg, Ed & Danna Ruscha, Andre Balazs, Wallace Shawn & Deborah Eisenberg, Kate Adair Pohlman, Dr. Gary Bravo & Susan Seitz, Andrew Wylie, Leonard Cohen, Wendy Wall and Claudia Liberman, PG, The Midnight Mission, Salman Rushdie, Bunny & Adolfo, Carlos Castaneda, Father Fabricio Magaldi, James Ellroy, Julius Renard & Darien Donner, Rita & John, Eric Peterson, Bill & Carolyn & Bertie, Marylou Shockley, Hal de Becker Sr. & Hal de Becker Jr., Bob & Lauren Dubac, Peter Feibleman, Seth Flaum & Tamara Blaich, Michael & Wendy Tolkin, Danna & Ben & Rebecca Schaeffer, Jim & Kathleen & Julianna Seligman (and Matty & Herb & the boys), Sherman Alexie, Dr. Bob & Marge & Ted (and the boys), Frenchy Ruscha & Francesca Gabbiani, Dr. Edward Kantor, Jesse Dylan & Susan Traylor, Steve & Kathy Kloves, John Waters, Nadine Johnson, Pico Iyer, Chandra and Billy, Chris and Dori Carter, Susan Kamil, George Meyer & Maria Semple, Nick Marck & Linda Lichter, Mary McMannes, Dr David Bockoff, Mary Ann King, Marta Morales, Francisca, Maria, & Flor, Darren Star, Michael & Lisa & Sean Goedecke, Debbie Reynolds & Todd Fisher & Gloria Crayton & Mary Douglas French, Richard Buckley & Tom Ford, Cyndi Sayre, Chris Silbermann, Mark Gordon, Jim Bartholemew, Brad Spielman, Ron Hugo & Janice Hampton & Jeff Prettyman, Joan Halifax, Bret Easton Ellis, William Gibson, Jenn and Geoff and Ian, Andrea & Joshua, Oliver Stone, Allen & Tracey McKeown & Mabel & Johnny McKeown, Grant Vospher, Bryan & Billie Lourd, Dr. Shawn Nasseri, Dr. Bill Stafford, The Atlantic Group, George Garrett, Gayle & Murgatroyd Boarnard, Dr. Michael Chaikin, Paul Bartel, Cotty Chubb, Cita and Myles Cohen, Harry Shearer & Judith Owen, Dr. Jeremy Fine, Tom Scott, Lynne Scott, Laraine Newman, Glen Goldman, Tony Krantz, Alan Poul, Nelson Lyon, Terry Southern, Terry Gilliam, Ed Begley Jr. & Rachelle Carson, Frank Jones, John Graf, Luma & Lilly & Naqaqa staff, Kevin Nealon & Suzanne Yeagley, Ed Moses, UCLA Special Collections, Dave Mirkin & Savannah Brentnall, Paul Fortune & Chris Brock, Garry Shandling, Ken Finkleman and Miriam Cohen, Angela Janklow, Eric & Tanya Idle, Olivia Harrison, Jonathan Carroll, Dana Delany, Christine & Marlene & Guthrie McCarty Vachon, Bob Kaplan & Signe Johnson, Pam Koffler and Russell Fine, John Sloss, John & Kimberly Keefe, “Schultzie,” Brian & Cindy Rogers, Anne Thompson, Frank & Berta Gehry, Gerry Harrington, Gil & Janet Friesen, Leonard Michaels, Haley van Oosten, Wilkie McClaren, Leonard Brooks, Collin & Elizabeth Callender, Hughie Dixon, Charley Powell, Gus Van Sant, James Shaheen, Renee Tab, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, Hudson Marquez & Susan Clary, Iosefo Dramea de Becker, David Rozansky, Father Fernando Mata, Miriam Altshuler, Bill Guthy & Victoria Jackson-Guthy & Ali & Jackson & Evan Minogue, Frank Roddam, Rose & Manfred & Hanna, Jerry Hartman, John Liechty, Ricky Jay & Chrisann Verges, Harvey Purgason, Father Thomas Sells, Darrell & Terri W, Jerry Stahl, Joan Hyler, Gail & Moon Zappa, The Delancey Street Foundation, Tom & Kathy Freston, Wes Craven, Marianne Maddalena, Mary Farley, Hector Babenco, Paul Schrad
er, Brandon Scott & Rylyn Demaris, Ted Field, Tina Brown, Tina Albert, Anne Thompson, Yoko & Yuko Kanayama, John Kinney, Tamara Masloff, Carol and Tony Monaco, Veronica Godoy, Jirka & Rasmus & Olivia, Alan Bernstein, Mike & Vanessa, Kristy & Damon, Liz & Ted
Bruce Wagner is the author of Memorial, The Chrysanthemum Palace (a PEN/Faulkner fiction award finalist), Still Holding, I’ll Let You Go, I’m Losing You, and Force Majeure. He lives in Los Angeles.
ALSO BY BRUCE WAGNER
Memorial
The Chrysanthemum Palace
Still Holding
I’ll Let You Go
I’m Losing You
Force Majeure
The hyperlinks in this book are not enabled.
* Ass to Mouth
* The Internet informed that Bill Condon, who adapted the musical to film, happened once to have lived with Ryan Murphy—one of the detours of MD’s bewitched, bewitching reverie.
* Even Harry was caught off-guard by the rampant success of THE HONEYSHOT!s webpage Honeyshot! Olden Goldies (Ms. Hawn’s two faces conjoined at the top of the page like those of comedy&tragedy, her Laugh-In-era face with her Medicare one), said page being wholly devoted to peeholes of a certain age as they stepped from their cars—Helen Mirren, Julie Christie, Diane Keaton, Susan Sarandon, Debra Winger. Zsa Zsa got hers as she was lifted from wheelchair to gurney, but that was more of a goof—Harry, who always wrote the webtext, called it a funnyshot!
* The kitty-clawed Capote’s comments were prescient, prefiguring the fad of live-streaming Allah Akbar! decapitation, the extreme sport of extremist enthusiasts. The go-go years of online decaps straddled the millennium, peaking with the martyrdom of Daniel Pearl. Bud had planned to write a novella-length fantasia—in the genre critics call “Swiftian meditation”—about a headless man, but nothing ever came of it.
* He thought it ludicrously ironic that the deceased was a frustrated writer whose unfinished novel JCO found and read after his death. (He began writing it before they met, a half century back.) Even though the deceased was an editor by profession, he supposedly never read any of her books. Any. Bud thought that was passive-aggressive o’plenty; there must have been a lot of rage there. Apparently, JCO was remorseful that she hadn’t better encouraged his creative side. Reading between the lines—and there were a lot of lines!—Bud thought it sounded like the poor fellow had literally been crushed by his wife’s productivity—outgunned, deballed & anonymized. (His surname being Smith, he left the world as blandly as he had entered it.)
* JCO became engaged to her 2nd husband just 11 months after Mr. Smith passed—while the body of her meditation on grief was still warm.
* Of course, the Times routinely turned to Toni Bentley when it came to books on ballet, and in the realm of the overtly or mildly incestuous, had Kathryn Harrison on permanent tap; the estimable Julian Barnes recently carved himself a nice little niche when it came to mourning & death. He in fact reviewed Joyce Carol Oates’s memoir of widowhood for The New York Review of Books. Barnes rather gently took JCO to task for omitting mention of her remarriage, which predated publication of her memoir, a criticism JCO initially rebuffed before eventually reconsidering. She set the record straight in reprintings of the mem. Still, the pairing of Liz Phair and Keith Richards did strike Bud as borderline.
* Department of Children & Family Services.
* Not having read the novel, Bud checked it on Wikipedia when he got home. Wallace wrote about a movie, not a virus, which was actually closer to Bud’s initial observations of the bums’ “watching” something on an invisible screen. The plot synopsis said that viewing the film rendered its audience not happy, but lifeless, but it was enough in the ballpark to discourage Bud (for the moment) from further “pitch” fantasies. He remembered a Python bit as well, something about a joke that was so funny that it killed whoever heard it.
* He went on a “Rapture” site recently, out of curiosity. It said that the ascension to the Heavens would come at dusk, or the late afternoon.
* Permission to reprint rest of lyrics denied by rights holder. —author.
* Permission to reprint rest of lyrics denied by rights holder. —author.
* Imagine the unendurable agony of the members of the above, the depressed, depressive Whores With No Name Class as they watch, like invalids, the hypnotic, rainy day, addictive, back-to-pack X Factor (UK & US) auditions on YouTube, going back so many years. Confronted by the spectacle of other (Non Chore-Whoring) No-Names bursting forth to become instant supernovas, their tears turn them into pillars of Loser Salt. Consider their anguish, watching—knowing—the fecundity of a universe that is constantly spitting out new stars . . . while they remain eternally condemned to the purgatory of the Stillborn.
They cannot even be dead stars, for they were never stars at all.
* Before at long last being remanded to the loving care of Engineer Jim and his “Dawnie.”
* As quoted in London Review of Books, May 27, 2010.
* The New York Review of Books, February 24, 2011.
* When it’s time for a cable auteur’s fawning, metacritical dicksuck (usually coinciding with the release of the complete DVDs of his show), brain surgeon Ms. Moore makes a savory mouthpiece; there are few things sweeter than egghead head. The novelist has shown herself to be down with the squad/groupie—ready to traitorously jump the ship of her own craft: in a wet pantiesgyric to The Wire in the pages of NYRB (if only David Milch was still around for her to service!), she calls David Simon’s Baltimore a “quiet rebuke to its own great [in the dialect of the Brownnose Indians, Moore employs “great” as a means of softening the already soft snarkiness of her takedown] living novelists, Anne Tyler and John Barth [is Barth great? is he living?]” and goes on to pamdesbarres the anus by asserting that her beloved show is “arguably biblical, Dantesque . . . the series’s creators know what novelists know [ooh, I’ll bet] . . . whether time comes [like a jackhammer] in the form of pages or hours. On DVD, it can be watched all at once, over 60 hours: this particular manner of viewing makes the literary accolades and comparisons to a novel more justified and true . . . The Wire has much in common with the plays of George Bernard Shaw. [It] embraces the Wildean sense of art’s cleverness as well as its uselessness.” In a companion cockstroke/rimjob of Friday Night Lights offered in the same pub, the brainy, brain-giving plaster caster begins by sharing with the reader her slutty surprise and delight in finding herself at a Manhattan book party “locked in enthusiastic conversation in a corner with two other writers [Barth & Tyler? Toni & Fran?], all three of us, we discovered, solitary, isolated viewers of the NBC series Friday Night Lights.” After referencing Janet Malcolm, Wozzeck & Daniel Mendelsohn, the pundit pantycreams about FNL being filled with actors who are “disconcertingly attractive young people with pink, wavy mouths.” A final quote from Moore: “In fact, two characters on The Wire are murdered [Barth? Toni? Tyler? Fran?] in David Simon’s Baltimore just in time for the excellent actors who play them to join Friday Night Lights.” From Friday Night Lights to The Wire then back again—this gangbanger knows how to righteously 69!
* Ooh Baby Baby It’s A Wild World Films was named after Brando’s mother’s favorite song. Tolkin was of the opinion that naming a production company thus was “heinously charming—or charmingly heinous. Either way, something about it works.”
* Bud’s detailed fantasy drew on the results of research he once did for a still unfinished script.
* . . . . never be eulogized for having a big brain that finally crashed down around him like a chandelier, its footnotes scattering like gewgaw frippery.
* Permission to reprint lyrics denied by rights holder. —Author.
* Permission to reprint lyrics denied by rights holder. —Author.
* Or write one of those short books about salt or the word bullshit. “A Brief History of Brief Histories” by Bud Wiggins was another possibility.
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