Maggie Darling

by James Howard Kunstler

  “I am to be insulted and intimidated now, yes?” Tesla said, his voice still level, with even a note of grim amusement in it. “I see. You ruin the careers of mortal men, like Medusa, turning them to stone?”

  “Gosh, I’m not that bad,” Dawn said, downing a forkful of veal.

  “Well, then, perhaps the two million dollars of your salary has some meaning. I appeal to strictly your mercenary sense.”

  “It’s two point two five, actually.”

  “Whatever. I fire you, you lose it. Pphhhttt.”

  “See, the thing is, Franz, I’ve made nine major feature films in the past seven years. I live rather frugally by the standards of my … ahem … my peers. I’ve got this little twenty-five-hundred-square-foot cottage in Santa Monica. It’s darn comfortable, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not gonna turn up in Architectural Digest, if you know what I mean. I drive one of those Jap Jeep knockoffs. The thing is, I’ve got over ten million stashed in the bank. I don’t ever have to do a lick of work again in my life if I don’t want to. A chimpanzee could invest this nut and get me eight percent a year. As it is, of course, I do a lot better than that, but don’t get me started on investment strategies. Anyway, bottom line: you do what you have to, poopsie. I ain’t starving anymore.”

  Tesla got up and shambled across the circle of chairs until he loomed over Dawn.

  “I suppose you want a bite?” she cracked.

  Tesla seized her plate with both hands and dumped the contents over her head. Dawn merely sat there, letting the veal slide down the side of her face, doing a sort of Jack Benny. One could see that her reputation for comedy was well earned. Less generally known was the set of skills she had begun to acquire while filming the futuristic thriller Kill Zone with Kurt Russell and Chuck Norris back in ’98. There’d been damn little to do on location out there in the Utah desert, but Fox was paying for an instructor in the obscure Korean martial art known as Twan Po, which figured in the plot, and it turned out that Dawn had a gift for it. The little cult gave out headbands rather than belts, as in karate and its offshoots, and Dawn had diligently worked her way up the grades to the black headband in the years since. Nevertheless, it came as a surprise to everyone when Dawn suddenly whirled into a weird dancelike motion and, in under a minute, delivered at least thirty kicks, jabs, and other assorted blows to Tesla’s glandular soft spots, leaving the director gulping and gasping on the ancient paving stones of San Marco like some primordial mudfish. Then she dumped the platter of fruit over his head, letting the syrupy juices dribble off the edge and splatter on his cheek as he moaned and vomited.

  “Hey guys, what’s up?” a voice full of banal California sunshine could be heard to say. The others now gaped as Buddy Torkleson came around the trailer and stopped short. Taking in the scene, he looked rather disturbed in his frat boy casuals. “Jeez, uh, he’s not having a spell or anything, is he? You all right there, Franz? Jeez, whadja … ?”

  Production assistants suddenly materialized from all directions.

  “Think I’ll go grab a bite,” Teddy Dane said.

  “Quite so,” Swann agreed.

  “Might have been a bad piece of calamari,” Steve Eddy told Torkleson as the PAs tried to hoist Tesla to his feet.

  “I’ll have it tested,” the baffled Torkleson said as the rest of the principal actors and a stunned Maggie made for the caterer’s tent on the other side of the square.

  9

  Delicate Persuasion

  Production was suspended while Torkleson huddled with the recuperating Tesla in trailer number 2. When Tesla emerged at two-thirty, he had the pale look of someone who had been drained by a vampire, not only of blood but of his very soul. When filming resumed at five o’clock— a shot of Swann, as Salario, leaping on wires over the Bridge of Sighs— Tesla was a man transformed. He performed his duties with robotic efficiency, but his inner spark seemed extinguished.

  Dawn Vickers received an extremely apologetic and polite visit from Torkleson at her suite in the Hotel Europa. Though packing her bags as the meeting began, she was persuaded to remain in the cast; her current release, Death Frolic, was doing so well ($32 million its first weekend) that she had donned a mantle of box-office invincibility. Tesla, Torkleson assured her bluntly, had been whipped into line. “These foreign guys, they get ideas in their heads,” the producer added genially. “One more complaint and this Hungarian mutt is out on his ass,” the producer said with the full authority of Basilisk Productions behind him. To underscore his sincerity he opened a lizard skin attaché containing bricks of hundred-dollar bills that amounted to half a million dollars. “Some walking-around money, Dawn. Just take it. A little bonus. Don’t even tell your accountant. Keep the goshdarn attaché.”

  Thus, a typical Hollywood personality conflict was typically resolved.

  10

  Apprehensions

  That night, following a quiet hearty supper of osso buco at a little place on a back street of the Giudecca, Swann serenaded Maggie in the drawing room with his lute. This naturally led to the bed chamber and a session of amore. But Maggie’s efforts felt perfunctory in Swann’s service and at the sweaty conclusion he whispered, “’Night, Mum,” in her ear before falling instantaneously asleep. In the ambient light thrown up through a window that opened onto the courtyard, the angels on the ceiling seemed lost amid their clouds the way Maggie felt lost in the fluffy cuckoo-land of showbiz. The illusions that she and Swann had any prospect of a real life together all sloughed off her like the protective layer of her very skin, leaving her in raw agony for hours until darkness swallowed her in a pall of shame and confusion.

  11

  Sweet Betrayal

  Regina understood it too perfectly. Maggie’s second morning on the set of Starvation was interminable agony, made all the more so by the truth Maggie barely concealed from herself: that her run with Swann was over, that she had a personal duty to the now elusive thing she’d once called a life of her own, and that she didn’t have the slightest idea how to end it with Swann.

  It drizzled on and off and they were able to shoot only one minor scene before noon: some business with Salario (Swann) and his mind slave Reuthner (Steve Eddy) on the Rio del Mondo Nuovo. The petty technical mishaps that attended every take allowed Maggie, for the first time, to feel some sympathy for the defanged and emasculated Tesla, who, in the mere expectation of a large paycheck, now slumped in his chair quietly enduring everything. After lunch with the cast (Nigel McClewe working obviously and obscenely to seduce the naive Steve Eddy), she told Swann that she was going to the nearby island of Murano for the afternoon to visit the renowned glass blowers in their studios there.

  Off the set she felt for a while that she could breathe again, but then the drizzle turned to punishingly cold, hard rain. Her head ached, she felt empty, and just shy of Murano she asked the pilot of the motor launch to turn around and take her back to the palazzo. It was really with a sense of astonished relief that she entered the bedroom and found Swann entwined in the still sleek, caramel-colored legs of Regina Hargrave.

  Neither of them seemed to hear Maggie come in. The very abnormality of her recent life enabled her to stand there in thrall watching the incredible spectacle—and not without a certain entitled exhilaration. For not only was it an extraordinary artistic performance, but out of it emanated the clear light of liberation from what she now saw was a mortifying and monstrous episode of self-betrayal.

  “Oh God, oh shit, oh fuck,” Regina exclaimed in seamless segue with the rhythmic conclusion of her orgasmic gaspings, as her eyes popped open to discover Maggie in the doorway. Swann, who was on top, kept ramming away until Regina literally slapped his forehead, at which point he gaped first at Regina with a look of bestial stupidity and then, following her glance, with a look of childlike horror at Maggie.

  Knees wobbling but hopes soaring, she crossed the chamber to a little coral-colored slipcovered armchair and demurely sat down. For perhaps only the second time in ten years sh
e wished she had a cigarette, if only to savor more intensely this gratifying moment.

  “What can I say?” she asked with a sigh, trying not to appear pleased.

  “I am a disgusting cad!” Swann cried, assuming a position of contrition, sitting with his head in his hands at the end of the bed like a Rodin statue.

  “And I am a whore without equal,” Regina said, drawing the bedsheet up only so far as her belly.

  “How will you ever forgive me?” Swann maundered.

  “She’ll never forgive you, you ponce,” Regina said. “I wouldn’t.”

  “This is rather awkward,” Maggie averred. “What if I just bustled around and packed some things?”

  “Oh, God,” Swann sobbed. “What have I done.”

  “Let me explain some basics, Swanny,” Regina began. “We film stars—and by extension, you musical stars, or whatever you are now, some hybrid, I suppose—we performers in the public eye are special and we have tacit permission from society to behave in special ways, as the ancient demigods once did. We act out the fantasies of the multitudes. They expect it of us. Ordinary self-restraints don’t apply to us. These days we literally get away with murder. Do you see what I’m driving at, Swanny? We’re just doing our bit. Oh, Maggie, dear darling Maggie Darling, whom I admire so very much, you mustn’t take this at all personally. We’re just doing what we’re supposed to.”

  Swann flew off the bed and flung himself at Maggie’s feet.

  “Oh, my dearest Mum. Please don’t leave me.”

  “Does he call you Mum, too?” Regina asked, lighting a cigarette.

  “Yes,” Maggie said, released from all feelings of embarrassment and regret. “Say, may I have one of those?”

  “Certainly. Forgive my manners. These days smoking is so outré. Nobody else smokes.”

  Maggie maneuvered around the groveling Swann to take a cigarette from the proffered pack. Regina flicked the lighter for her.

  “He lost his mother in some dreadful act of terrorism,” Maggie said, exhaling a plume of smoke.

  Swann’s sobs turned to a racked heaving.

  “Oh, what rubbish.” Regina climbed out of bed and strode majestically across the room to where Swann lay curled. Maggie was dying to know what she did to preserve her superlative figure. Plastic surgery? Implants? Hormones? All that and step aerobics, too, no doubt. “Did you tell her that sob story, you absurd quiff?” Regina said, kicking Swann on the buttock, just hard enough to elicit a little howl between his heaving sobs. “For your information, his progenitors are alive and well in West Wycombe. Papa is a veterinary surgeon and she that carried and bore him”—Regina paused for dramatic effect—“raises hybrid primroses for the Royal Garden Society. Did he give you the whole script—the racing beetles, the Malay bombing, the paralyzed father, the gruesome apartment in Spitalfields?”

  “Why, yes.”

  “All lies. You shabby boy.”

  “I’m sorry,” Swann moaned. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Oh, be still.”

  “You’ve been lovers before, haven’t you?” Maggie said, the ineluctable truth finally dawning on her.

  Regina laughed, though not cruelly. “Dear, dear Maggie. How do you think he got this part? Would you like me to call the airport for you?”

  “That would be very kind of you, Regina,” Maggie said, stepping over Swann to collect her lotions and unguents on the nearby vanity. “I’ll get my things together in the meantime.”

  Part Six

  Domestic Complications

  1

  Party Pooper

  It was a pity that she had to find out about it in the newspaper. It was seven in the evening at Kennedy Airport when Maggie settled into the back of the hired limo with the New York Times. She’d been out of the country five days altogether and had seen and read no news of America during her Venetian interlude, so she devoured the paper greedily as the car sped north toward Connecticut through the spring darkness. The Chinese and Russians were still at it along the Amur. Pacific Northwest separatists (“Treeheads”) had blown up a National Forest Service administrative building in Washington State near the Grand Coulee Dam. Ted Turner was attempting a hostile takeover of the eponymous broadcasting company he had sold to Time Warner several years earlier. (An attractive fellow, that Ted, Maggie noted, and lately available, too.) National unemployment statistics topped 12 percent. The Morgan Chase–Fleet-Citibank megaconglomerate was about to be gobbled up by the ultraconglomerate Deutschehauseurobank, which had acquired Argentina in a default action a few months earlier. The Businessmen’s Lunch Posse had brazenly robbed Le Cote Basque and Zoe in a single afternoon. A headline in the Metro section reported “No Suspects in Parkway Snipings.”

  Maggie held the newspaper closer and adjusted the gooseneck reading lamp. The lone fatality in a second Merritt Parkway sniping that injured five people was Robert DiPietro, fifty-seven, of Botsford; DiPietro had finally been disconnected from life support after two days in Stamford’s St. Cecilia’s Hospital. Maggie lurched forward in her seat groping for something to hold on to. The world spun and lights in the opposite lane seemed to skewer through her. She knew she was hyperventilating and tried to calm herself by counting each breath, but she could not escape the knowledge that her chief gardener and dear friend Bob DiPietro was dead. Murdered! Another statistic in America’s slow-motion holocaust. Rage and terror rifled through her like alternating currents of electricity. The car was one of those stupid stretch vehicles— it was all she could get on a moment’s notice—and a window separated the driver from the passenger’s compartment. She wanted desperately to talk to someone but at the same time was terrified of appearing so obviously distraught. There were telephones positioned at either side of the rear seat and she lunged for one, punching the keypad while she gasped.

  “Yo, wussup?” a deep male voice answered.

  “Sorry, I must have the wrong number.”

  She punched in the number again.

  “Yo, wussup?”

  “Is this 645-5527?”

  “I don’ know what dis numbah is.”

  “Well, who are you?”

  “Def Trip.”

  “What?”

  “D. T. Big D. Mistah D. Yo, who dis is?”

  “Wait a minute,” Maggie said. “Is this the Darling residence?”

  “It’s aw’ite,” the voice said. “Ain’t my dream crib, ’zackly.”

  “Oh for God’s sake … !”

  She slammed the phone down and wept from Throggs Neck to Greenwich. Computer technology had succeeded in taking the phone company to Soviet levels of service in recent years. She tried to call Nina at home and got an answering machine. Ditto Harold Hamish. Ditto Hattie Moile and Eva Mosley. She considered calling her mother and decided not to. Finally, with a feeling of disgust overtaking her rage and sorrow, she merely slumped and quietly gnawed her nails, gazing out the window as rain made the passing lights streaky and surreal, trying to imagine her summer world without Bob. Impossible …

  Eventually, the limousine threaded its way through the maze of familiar little country roads that led to Kettle Hill Farm, and Maggie thrilled, as always, to the long approach through the stone gates to the beautiful house. She arrived to find the driveway clogged with vehicles, though—a huge white Mercedes, a preposterous gold-flaked Chevy Suburban elevated on ultrahigh shocks, and Hooper’s Saab—and her spirits collapsed all over again as she stepped out of the limo. Sinister drumbeats emanated so loudly from the east wing that her rib cage vibrated. She asked the driver, a tall Sikh in a turban, to follow her inside with the baggage and stick around for a few minutes. The house reeked of marijuana. She followed the smell into the game room, where a quartet of young black men was drinking cognac, eating pizza, and enjoying a video on the giant TV screen. They paid no attention to Maggie, even when she cleared her throat, so she strode between them and the screen.

  “Yo, wussup?” the largest of the four asked with an edge of indignation.

&nbs
p; “How do you turn this thing off?” Maggie asked.

  “Yo, we ’bout to come on.”

  “Yeeeeeah.”

  “Turn it off!”

  “Dis our flavor of de month, yo.”

  “Who dis bitch is?” a lank, shirtless youth asked the huge one.

  “Flavah, flavah, be doin’ me a favah,” chanted another in a sideways baseball cap.

  “New York Mets done put on the waiver,” chimed in a fourth, who wore candy-red eyeglasses that gave him a demonically intellectual veneer.

  “Where’s my son?” Maggie said.

  They glanced at one another, clueless.

  The video that had commenced seemed to depict a jail riot. Prisoners and guards ricocheted around the screen spewing blood, while nubile women slithered in cages above the action to electronic squeals and percussive gunshots.

  Maggie struggled to reach the cord behind the gigantic television and, finding it, ripped it out of the wall by main force. The horrible video stopped. Silence engulfed the room like a shock wave before an explosion. Maggie decisively turned up a wall dimmer switch and the halogen spots shot up full. The interlopers shielded their eyes. The one in the sideways baseball cap dropped a slice of pizza gooey-side-down on the carpet.

  “Who the hell are you, and what are you doing in my house,” Maggie demanded in a low, authoritative tone of voice that successfully galvanized their attention.

  “We Chill Az Def,” Huge said, as if anyone should have been able to understand this fact. “Who you is?”

  “Oh, hi Mom,” Hooper said, tripping in from the kitchen carrying a six-pack of Dutch beer and a giant bag of Famous Amos cookies. His hair hung down in weird, stiff ringlets, as though it had been styled with mud.

  “Yo, H-Man. Dis yo’ moms?”