“It has nothing to do with thinking, it has to do with knowing. You should know.”
They were lunching at the Barney Greengrass aerie, on the terrace that overlooked the windswept postcard of Beverly Hills—one of those crisp, automatic days that trigger nostalgic dominoes of déjà vu.
“He’s happily married,” Rachel replied.
The agent threw back a creamy neck and snorted. A Jewish star lay on her olive skin like a delicate inlay. “They’re all happily married, that’s part of it. They love going back to Mommy.”
Rachel liked staring at her face; it was out of kilter, like a Modigliani. “He’s not that way, Tovah. They just bought a big house.”
“There’s no way he’s going to go from where he was to where he is now with the kind of money he has made in the time he has made it without some instant gratification, Rachel. Of the genital variety.”
The women laughed. The subject was Perry Needham Howe, a television producer and UTA client who’d recently hit it “large.” Rachel had worked as his assistant almost three years, not once catching the scent of adultery—not even a whiff.
“Are you PMS?”
“Because you always end up grilling me about Perry’s sex life when you’re PMS.”
She was a funny, contradictory girl who’d become Rachel’s best friend on the planet. Her father, Dee Bruchner, was a senior agent at William Morris; ever the rebel, Tovah defected to UTA, where she quickly corraled a group of young writers who cut their teeth on shows like Larry Sanders and were now creating hip, middle-of-the-road TV of their own—the Gary David Goldbergs of tomorrow. But Tovah was shrewd: she wanted a finger in all the pies, including a slice of Perry Needham Howe. She was “attracted to him physically,” but that didn’t explain her ambitions—most men were attractive that way. Her interest could be chalked up to good old-fashioned agenting, pure and simple. Tovah knew that pushing him toward the unexpected, seemingly oddball target—say, sitcoms or one-hours—was the long-haul thing that would keep him at the agency. Smart thing, too. Perry was cautious at first but already loosening up, flattered by her spirited attentions. Tovah told him she was going to push him straight through syndication, into Bochco country.
Rachel was forty-four and Tovah barely twenty-six—worlds apart, with worlds in common. The agent’s family went to Beth-El, the temple where Rachel’s father had been cantor. Tovah was still fairly observant. The mother, long divorced from Dee, became a Chabadist and met an engineer through a shiddach. Rachel, the prodigal Jew, loved hearing the details of an arranged marriage: how they weren’t allowed to touch until they wed and how during courtship the front door was always left ajar, for modesty. “Orthodox Judaism is wonderful,” the mother told her when Rachel went to Tovah’s for Shabbat, “because there are so many rules and you just have to follow them. The rules do not bend.”
“I visited the set of this miniseries,” said Tovah, tucking into a sturgeon omelette. “A writer I represent. They were using black leopards—big, beautiful cats. Oh, Rachel, you would love them. There was this woman trainer there, gorgeous, with a leopard-skin belt! Like out of Cat People. There were all these warnings on the call-sheets: ‘No children or menstruating women allowed on set.’”
“Then I’m safe.” Rachel hadn’t had a period in two years, not a real one, anyway. She was a runner and had always been irregular.
“I told you, just go see an acupuncturist.”
“Maybe it’s menopause.”
“You are not menopausal, Rachel, I’m sorry. I told you who you should see. Watanabe, he’s the best, Crescent Heights and Sunset. And stop jogging. No one even does it anymore.”
“Tell me about the cats.”
“These cats…once they’re out of the cages, the trainers don’t allow any movement, especially in the distance—their eyes go to the horizon, right away. It’s veldt instinct.”
“Oy guh-veldt.”
“And little kids—the woman said the cats see kids as, like, a meal. So, she lets them out of the cages. I’m hiding behind the camera…she takes the leashes off and everyone gets quiet, I mean dead, a very weird moment. This giant gaffer looked like he was going to shit in his pants! Did you hear about that woman who was killed up north, by the cougar?”
“God, Tovah, you’ve really got the bloodlust.”
“Someone at the agency actually knew her. In Cuyamaca—it was in the paper. It’s a recreation area, a park where people camp. There’s been lots of people killed by lions this year. Very Joan Didion.”
“What happened?”
“She was jogging.”
“Without a Tampax, no doubt.”
Tovah shot her a “you’re next” look. “It said in the article that the mistake she made was to flee. Well, excuse me! Evidently, they like to take their prey from behind—that part doesn’t sound so bad. This ranger they interviewed said anyone confronted by a mountain lion should maintain eye contact, make noise and wait for it to leave. Right! I mean, that’s what I do with my lawyer! But a mountain lion?”
They were supposed to meet at the track, but Calliope never showed. When Rachel got home, a message on the machine apologized for standing her up. “I hate it,” said Calliope, “that you don’t have a phone in your car.”
When she was twelve, her father was murdered in a New York subway. The cantor’s killer was never found. Calliope renounced Judaism and moved the family—Rachel and her brother, Simon—to Menlo Park. It was at Stanford that she began the metamorphosis into Calliope Krohn-Markowitz, renowned Hollywood shrink.
The children didn’t fare as well. Rachel lived in colorless communes and volunteer clinics. In Berkeley, she ran day-cares, shelters and co-ops, life an unsweetened wafer, sober and unsalted. Forty and unaffianced, she moved back to the Southland to study law for a time before dropping the thread. Calliope enlisted her in showbiz battalions, where Rachel won the Purple Heart for neurotic conscientiousness, lack of ambition and over-qualification. She felt close to superstar Mom but didn’t see her much; admiring from a distance, like one of her magazine profiles. As for brother Simon, he was a lost soul, a burnt-out tummler—sometimes she wondered what there’d ever been to burn. He was kind of an exterminator and called his business the Dead Pet Society.
Soaking in a tub, candles burning, washcloth over eyes, she jogged along Angeles Crest Highway—a lion suddenly across her path. What would she do? Rachel shivered, imagining the last moments of a deadly attack. A long time ago, there was a story on the news about a woman who’d been killed while tracking Kodiaks in Alaska. Her final radio transmission was “Help! I am being killed by a bear.” The horrific refrain stayed in her head for months.
Oddly, Rachel had forgotten all about a clipping she’d attached to the fridge some months back. She reread it before bed, with her muesli.
A woman on a camping trip in Mendocino stabbed a rabid cougar to death with a kitchen knife; her husband lost a thumb wrestling it off. “None of us panicked, to tell you the truth,” the woman told a reporter. “But we moved swiftly.” People were capable of stupendous things—that meant Rachel, too. It would have to mean her. And why not? She clung to the image of the woman, suburban, untried, hand on hilt of serrated blade plunged deep into the small heart of a dank hard-breathing thing trying to extinguish her life.
Perhaps Rachel would move swiftly when her time came—because something was stalking her, that much she knew. As a girl, running home from the playground at dusk, she pretended something was after her. There was something, her own soft shadow catching up with itself, frozen a moment, then melding, overtaking: no one ever told her shadows had shadows. It was upon her again after all these years, crazy Casper energy, flapping like the sail of a toy boat in a squall—shadow of her father’s shadow—and the cantor’s voice chased alongside, like a bogeyman.
The bogeyman of psalms.
Perry Needham Howe
Seven years ago his son died of a rare cancer and now Perry had something in his lungs exerting its mordant claims. The dead boy’s sister, Rosetta, was flaxen-haired, pink-skinned and almost thirteen; had he lived, Montgomery (they never used the diminutive) would have been a dedicated brother of around sixteen, come June. Graduation days.
The doctors said in the first year of an illness like Perry’s—“stage-four adenocarcinoma”—there was ninety percent mortality; after twelve months, a hundred percent. Chemotherapy might add six or eight weeks. When Perry asked how long the treatment lasted, they said, “You’ll never get off it.” You did the chemo until you died, what candid caretakers described as more a “leeching” than anything else.
Curiously, he didn’t have much fight in him. The professionals translated that as depression, but Perry didn’t feel depressed. He felt like one of those existentialist anti-heroes in the novels he’d read back in college—dreamily disburdened. Maybe all that would change, he thought, and in a few months he’d wake up screaming for Mommy the way pilots sometimes lose it when they go down. That Perry was asymptomatic didn’t help him feel less surreal about his predicament; blood-stool or a little double vision would have gone a long way. At least then, he could become a proper fatal invalid. As it was, the producer was living an ironic “television” reality. He even made a halfhearted stab at getting hold of kinescopes from Run for Your Life, the Ben Gazzara series where the smirking actor learns he’s terminal. It was The Fugitive, with a Camus makeover—the one-armed man was Death.
A routine X ray showed nodules on the lungs. There was the usual hopeful speculation the little balls might indicate an infectious process such as TB or histoplasmosis, transmitted by an airborne fungus kicked up by the quake. Far-fetched but within the realm of possibility. When the cancer was confirmed, his wife became obsessed with the idea the family had been exposed to something environmental. What else would explain two cancers hitting like that? The doctors said there was no connection, but they always said that—there was never a connection between anything. That they hadn’t found Perry’s “primary organ”—the point of origin—made it all the more heinously suspicious. Jersey raked over the past, when her baby was alive, searching for clues, tearing open old wounds with a monstrous fine-tooth comb.
After a decade in the Palisades they relocated to North Alpine, in Beverly Hills. Jersey had mixed emotions about giving up the house where Montgomery lived—and died—but it was time. For Rosetta, it was easy. She was getting hormones and any kind of break with the familiar foretold great adventure (you would have thought they were moving to Paris or England). The Antoine Predock trophy home—walls covered with Bleckners and Clementes—cost around four million. Across the way was Jeffrey Katzenberg’s pied-à-terre; it was that kind of neighborhood. Lately, Perry had been looking to buy a “weekender” in Malibu, and the one Jersey liked best was a few doors down from the Katzenberg beach house. You couldn’t get away from the guy.
A syndicated show about real cops made Perry Needham Howe very rich. He knew he’d gotten right place—right time lucky: in a nation of voyeurs, Streets was a front-row seat to the cartoonish orgy of crime that was the American nightmare. Imitators were legion, but Perry’s half-hour was the mother of them all. Its simplicity couldn’t be further distilled: cops chasing crooks in real time, the jiggling camera and panting, out-of-shape officers lent proceedings the kinky familiarity of coitus, without the mess—they even threw in the handcuffs. Cigarettes were smoked while spent, exhilarated fuzz offered post-bust blow-by-blows. Once in a while, if everything jibed, episodes had Emmy-worthy story arcs: like the one with the body in Hancock Park. An elderly bachelor had been murdered. His car was missing and a detective said it smelled like “sex gone bad.” (A criminologist’s phrase, currently in vogue. Perry heard a stand-up on one of the cable channels use it to define his marriage.) A local minister reports a call from a teenager in Vegas who confesses to the crime and wants to turn himself in. At the end of the show, the killer tidily appears at midnight in front of the Crystal Cathedral, no less—in the victim’s Porsche. The minister asks the cops if he can say goodbye to the wayward hustler. “Just tell the truth,” says Father Flanagan to the kid, like something out of a thirties meller. Streets could give NYPD Blue a run for its money anytime.
Perry was on his way to Club Bayonet.
He was meeting Stone Witkiss, the man who created Daytona Red, the early hotshot vice-squad hit. Stone and investors had pumped a few million into an old Mexican bar on West Washington, transforming it into a private wood-paneled oasis with a literary theme. Perry knew the preternaturally boyish Witkiss from way back—Bayonne, in fact—and enjoyed his company.
The place was packed. Steve Bochco and a few execs from UPN were at the bar and Perry said hello. Bochco complimented his show and that felt good. Cat Basquiat shared a table with Sandra Bullock, and Perry thought he saw Salman Rushdie in a far booth with Zev Turtletaub and Sherry Lansing. Stone gave him a hug and Perry followed him back. Along the way, he met Sofia Coppola and Spike Jonze, a handsome kid who made videos (Perry laughed at the resonance of the name). They liked Streets too.
The old friends settled into Stone’s corner table.
“You look great. How’s Jersey? Why didn’t she come?”
“Rosetta’s not feeling so well.”
“Jesus, what is she, sixteen now?”
“Thirteen, comin’ up.”
“What does she have, the flu?”
“I don’t know. It’s a stomach thing.”
“What does Jersey do, hold her hand?”
“Don’t bust my balls, Stone, all right? Are you coming to the bat mitzvah?”
“Of course I’m coming to the bat mitzvah. What am I, a skeev?”
They talked like that awhile, back and forth, like old times. Then Stone hunched, discreetly nodding at a slender, well-dressed man in his early fifties.
“Guy’s a total freak. Know who he is? Patented a computer thing—something to do with screens. Worth, like, three billion dollars. Just bought a house in Litchfield, next to George Soros, two hundred and fifty acres. Jesus, did you read about Soros in The New Yorker?” Stone ordered wine and stir-fried lobster, then circled back. “Anyway, guy lives in a thirty-room house in Palos Verdes. Contractor does a lot of work for me. There’s smoke detectors in all the bathrooms—you cannot repeat this—with tiny cameras inside, so he can watch the ladies in the can.”
Lesser lights steadily made their way to the table. The host looked a little twitchy. Wearing the hats of TV mogul/restaurateur was doing a small number on him; he hadn’t yet found the groove. Funny, Perry thought, what linked them—from Daytona Red to Streets was a bit of a stretch, but Perry knew his friend liked to think he’d somehow smoothed the way. He respected Stone because he’d been through all the hype, glamour and insanity without cracking up. Perry wondered if he should fess up about stage-four. The moment passed and the waiter brought the wine. Stone sniffed, nodding his assent.
“I was talking to this forensic pathologist about Ted Bundy,” Stone said, puffing on a cigar after the last visitors departed. “Bundy was confessing to everything in those last days—trying to forestall the execution—really blowing lunch. You know, they always talked about the ‘long hair,’ all the girls Bundy killed had long hair. The shrinks wondered who it was he was killing, over and over. Know what Bundy told this guy?” He hunched again, cocking his head, intime. “They never released this because it was too fucking hideous. You’re gonna love it. There was a simple fucking reason behind the long hair. He liked long hair because—are you ready?—because, he said, it was easier to get their heads out of the refrigerator.”
The billionaire smiled as he edged past the table. Stone leaned over and whispered. “See the watch he’s wearing?” Perry hadn’t. “Il Destriero Scafusia: what they call a ‘grande complication.’ Ask him to show it to you, he’d love it. Swiss—seven hundred and fifty components, sapphire crystal, seventy-six rubies inside. We’re talking mechanical, nothing digital about it. I used to collect, mostly Reversos and Pateks; had a thirties Duoplan, Jaeger-Le Coultre. Le Coultre’s hot this year. Loved the thing to death. But this one,” nodding at the billionaire again, now at Frank Stallone’s table, chatting up a long-legged girl with a huge mouth, “is the fucking grail—they call ’em ‘super complicateds.’ I mean, the fucking thing chimes, Perry! It shows the changing of the century on its face, the fucking century! I got a watch, cost me seventeen grand, a Blancpain quantième perpetual. Has a moon phase I used to adjust about every three years. And that’s pretty good. But this motherfucker”—nodding to the freak again—“has a deviation of about a day every hundred years.”
Just before leaving, he found himself at the urinal next to Il Destriero Scafusia. A watch like that probably wound to the movement of the wrist; Perry shook himself and suppressed a laugh, scanning the ceiling for hidden cameras. The billionaire followed him to the sink. Had he been keener on inquiring after baubles, Perry might have asked for a look. He’d done enough of that over the years—everything had always been out of reach. Now, nothing was. Nothing, that is, but time.
Ursula Sedgwick
Ursula and Tiffany weren’t homeless anymore. They lived in a house on one of the old canals.
Their neighbor, Phylliss Wolfe, was a producer who sold her Cheviot Hills home after having some kind of breakdown. She called it “Down(scaling) Syndrome”—movie projects were on hold so she could finish her book and get pregnant. She wasn’t happy about the local gangs, but it had always been a fantasy of hers to live this way: in a writer’s bungalow on an ellipsoid patch of grass still called United States Island. She christened the avenue Dead Meat Street because so many were dying of AIDS, or gone.
On Sundays, they went strolling on the boardwalk. Phylliss brought Rodney the dachshund, fearless sniffer of pit bulls; while Ursula and Tiffany had their fortunes told, she binged on cheap sunglasses. They shared life stories over time, shocked to have Donny Ribkin in common. Every little detail about the agent came out, including sexual proclivities—which Phylliss expanded to include the affair with Eric, her ex-assistant. Ursula blanched. It stunned her to learn Donny’s father recently drowned in Malibu; that was someone he never talked about. But the worst thing was hearing he’d been hospitalized for a crack-up. “Hollywood rite of passage,” Phylliss joked. “Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.” Ursula felt sick inside. He was still her man.
She’d never met anyone like Donny—so smart and chivalrous and full of passion. If that’s what Jews were like, you could sign her up for more. He scared her too, but men did, that was par for the course. He was the first lover to lavish any kind of gifts on her. At a time in her life when she really needed it, Donny Ribkin gave her a whole new way of seeing herself. They used to go “power shopping,” buzzed on crystal. He got her an Oscar de la Renta at Saks, a seven-thousand-dollar strapless sequined gown, and there she was that very same night at a charity ball honoring Forrest Gump’s Robert Zemeckis, the greatest night of her life, speed-grinding her teeth as she eavesdropped on Michael J. Fox and Meryl Streep and God knew who else, Donny’s friends, their smiles like razors. Then he would brutalize her in bed, punching and choking her as he came, reviling her idiot faux pas. How could you say what you said to Goldie? Once he made himself vomit on her. But there was the other Donny, her “Sunday morning boy,” who cried inconsolably for hours on end, begging forgiveness, tears from some faraway place like a sad, hip monster from The X-Files—the Donny who paid Tiffany’s schooling and wept for his dead mother.
He could be cruel, but at least he wasn’t one-sided. Ursula knew nothing but violent men, military father and brothers, men with just one side. The day came when she’d had enough, walked from the trailer park bloodied, holding Tiffany’s bitty hand, living shelter to shelter, freeway to freeway, rape to rape, with only The Book of Urantia to grace and solemnize each day—the Book, with its Morontia Companions (trained for service by the Melchizedeks on a special planet near Salvington) and Thought Adjusters (seraphic volunteers from Divinington). She prayed with Tiffany for the Mystery Monitors to come, “who would like to change your feelings of fear to convictions of love and confidence.”
There was The Book of Urantia and there was her daughter and then one day—off-ramp miracle—there was Donny Ribkin. Now, he shunned her. She still worked at Bailey’s Twenty/20 and began each shift hoping the agent would drop in. The men she stripped for had his face; she made it so. One day it would come to pass. Ursula wasn’t sure how she had turned him off like that—was it her homeless helplessness that turned him on? None of it mattered. This alluring, troubled, soulful man had seen her at her worst and not turned away. For that, she would love him forever.
“You need something to fill this black hole,” Phylliss said. “Donny Ribkin is a panacea. If it wasn’t him, it’d be someone else. Something else. Listen, he’s no catch, okay? He’s fucking loonie tunes. Not to mention a probable health risk at this point. So why don’t you deal with your black hole?”
“Then what do I fill it with?”
“A sausage—a fat, hairy sausage with a ‘Donny’ tattoo.”
“You’re terrible,” she said, laughing. She could still laugh.
“Have you ever heard of Eckankar?” Ursula shook her head. “They call it the religion of ‘the Light and Sound of God.’ The name’s from Sanskrit—it means ‘co-worker with God.’ But it isn’t a Christian thing. It isn’t an anything.”
They said the odd word a few times together. Phylliss told Ursula that she turned to the practice out of desperation: her movie had fallen apart, and she’d suffered the death of a fetus and father—how she’d gone to a hospital to heal but emerged more shattered than whole. ECK reached out and stopped her fall. Since then, it was the most important thing in her life, bar none. “I’ve become a ‘spiritual activist,’” she said. “My New York friends are about ready to do an intervention. I just tell ’em I want to have Yanni’s child. Or John Tesh’s, in a pinch.”
From what Ursula understood, Eckankar was less a religion than it was about dreams and soul travel and accepting other planes. That was familiar ground. She was impressed someone as cynical and sophisticated as Phylliss could have allegiance to a thing so radically ethereal; then again, with the terrible abuse Phyll had been through with her dad and all, you would have to let in something new, unless you wanted to go bonkers. When she brought up Urantia, Phylliss yelped “Dueling cultists!” and strummed an imaginary banjo, laughing her coarse cigarette laugh. Ursula said she had considered converting to Judaism as a way of winning Donny back—that sent Phylliss on a coughing jag. “You’re the only person I know,” she said, “who’s more fucked up than I am.” She invited her to Sunday morning worship services at the ECK Center. After a month of wheedling, Ursula gave in.
She wandered the sunny rooms at peace, as if having already dreamed such a place. Phylliss said those kinds of feelings weren’t unusual—it meant the Eckankar Masters had been busy nudging you to the point where you had enough power to seek them out. As more people arrived, Ursula scanned brochures on “the ancient science of soul travel” and the soul’s return to God. God was sometimes called Hu, pronounced hue, or Sugmad. Through a series of exercises that took just twenty to thirty minutes a day, it was possible to reach a supreme state of spiritual being. One was guided in this pursuit by the Living ECK Master, or Mahanta, who was descended from the first Living ECK Master of around six million years ago. (The first was called Gakko.) The current Living ECK Master, also known as the Inner and Outer Master, was a married man from Wisconsin named Sri Harold Klemp. His picture hung in a modest frame on the wall of the meeting room. The Mahanta’s hair was thinning; there was nothing grandiose about him and Ursula liked that.
Around fifteen people gathered in a circle to discuss the morning topic, “The Golden Heart.” Passages were read from a book of the same name, written by Sri Harold. It was a diverse bunch: an impeccably dressed couple, married fifty-two years, ECKists for seventeen; a carefree, homely, shoeless girl with a wide-brimmed straw hat; a heavy-set, dikey-looking nurse; a couple of friendly, formidable-looking black ladies in their sixties; and two or three fresh-faced professional men who might have been marine biologists or aeronautical engineers. One of them looked disarmingly like the Mahanta. They broke into groups of three. Ursula wound up with the old man and one of the churchwomen.
“The Golden Heart,” he stammered. “Well, that’s just another way of saying Conscience, isn’t it?” He sounded just like Jimmy Stewart and it beguiled her.
When the lady’s turn came, she said one day she found herself en route to an ECK convention in Las Vegas to see the Mahanta. “I said to myself, ‘What are you doing?’ Because I’d followed Jesus all my life and now here I was on my way to see Mr. Klemp. When I got to the convention hall, I saw a halo around his head—I knew pretty well then, I was on the right path. For me, that path is the Golden Heart.”
The leader said it was time to chant Hu, and everyone closed their eyes. Ursula blushed as the voices raised around her, blending, fusing, overlapping—a celestial curtain rose behind the lids of her eyes, wafting so tender in the dark, and she knew what was meant by “the religion of Light and Sound.” How could something so beautiful emanate from people so common and undemanding, people just like her? Yet there it was, irrefutable, like the whistle of a thousand trains, heaven-bound.
She cleared her throat and began, her voice a rivulet joining the stream that fed the Golden Heart.
Severin Welch
This man, seventy-six years old, in robust health and reasonable spirits, has not left his home in some fifteen years, initially because he was waiting for Charlie Bluhdorn to return a call.
That was the putative reason, now hidden somewhat by time’s seductive sleight of hand. His name is Severin Welch, a widower who once wrote for Bob Hope; Charlie Bluhdorn, of course, being the legendary founder and ceo of Gulf + Western. Some decades ago, after indentured servitude to set-up and punchline, Severin Welch began a preposterously ambitious big-screen adaptation of the Russian masterpiece Dead Souls, set in the Los Angeles basin. Where else? It took a certain comic gall. Why Dead Souls? He’d read it in school, written papers on it. He once met a fellow at the Hillcrest named Bernie Ribkin. Horror was where the money was—that’s what Ribkin said when Severin took him to Chasen’s for a little interrogation; horror was the future. He told Ribkin about Dead Souls and the producer liked the title. “Just don’t call it Undead Souls,” he smiled, chomping on his cigar, “or I’ll be suing your friggin ass.”
He worked the script ten years, finishing in ‘seventy-five. Over at Morris, his then-agent—the still redoubtable Dee Bruchner—took a month to read, hating it. But Severin wanted Paramount to have first look and (back then) the client was always right. Dee morosely messengered it to a Yablans underling. Over ensuing months, the agent dutifully tracked the hundred-and-ninety-three-page ms. from suite to suite until it was the faintest blip on the radar screen, then no more.
Severin kept his day job, tinkering with Souls on weekends, a hobbyist possessed. Meanwhile, he wrote sketches for Sammy and Company and worked on specials: Mac Davis and Flip Wilson, and Hope’s twenty-fifth anniversary, with a hundred guest stars—Cantinflas, Neil Armstrong, Benny, Crosby, Sinatra, Chevalier—those were the days. Aside from Lavinia’s painful divorce in wake of her husband’s nervous collapse (she somehow blamed her father for The Chet Stoddard Show fiasco), it was a ring-a-ding good time. Severin and the wife had dinner parties twice a week, and bought a place in Palm Springs on a course. He had just one complaint and it lay in wait at the end of each day: the gargantuan discourtesy of Paramount Pictures.
Months passed—why hadn’t someone the decency and professionalism to respond? Because he was a television writer? That seemed bizarre. Chayevsky had been nominated up and down the street for Network. Didn’t that ring anybody’s bells? Didn’t the Morris agency have any clout? Wouldn’t it have been reasonable for Dee to phone someone up at the studio and say: “Listen to me! You have not responded and my client is angry. He is important to this agency and you owe him that courtesy. Call him—now.” If you don’t like something, come out and say it. I want to hear about it, don’t be shy, meet a guy, pull up a chair. Give it to me with both barrels—what doesn’t kill me sure as hell will make my script stronger. That’s the way Severin looked at it. Anything but the silent treatment.
Another year. Severin, with his golf and gags and pool parties under the HOLLYWOOD sign. He’d throw back a few, then go on a Paramount rant: if the script came over the transom, then, he said, then it would be something else. Whole different story. But Dead Souls arrived by the book, so to speak, through a powerful agency—and Severin Welch was an established writer! One of the wiseacres said he should stand in front of the studio gates naked with a sandwich board, and Severin thought that a swell idea, especially when Diantha bridled. It’d probably kill his agent, but hell, Dee was dead already for all the good he did—sitting on El Camino scratching his ass like a dull-wit stonewalling Buddha. The tragedy was, Severin knew it would be a perfect marriage—the studio that so handsomely produced The Godfather would be the ultimate venue for this multi-textured classic. Knew it from day one but was forced to go elsewhere, finally persuading the agency to send the script to other majors. At least they had the courtesy to eventually express their disinterest. Or maybe Dee’s secretary typed the rejection letters to get him off their backs. Maybe the damn script never left the mailroom—Severin didn’t really know anymore. The whole rude, unseemly business had thrown him for a loop.
With dull awareness of his compulsion, he began to place morning calls to his agent, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, year in and year out, urging him to appraise “the progress at Paramount.” To keep his finger on the pulse. The first few weeks, Dee thought it another gag from the gagman, but as the inquiries persisted, the agent grew irritated, then angry and finally intrigued by the underlying pathology. It became something of a joke among Morris acolytes; when they saw Father Bruchner at the Polo Lounge or Ma Maison, they never failed to ask after “the progress at Paramount.” Severin still made money for the agency, so his eccentricities were grudgingly tolerated.
From atop his hill, the television writer watched the bilious Paramount parade: Orca, the Killer Whale; Bad News Bears Go to Japan; Players; The One and Only; Little Darlings; Going Ape!; Some Kind of Hero. No wonder they’d been too busy to respond! It was like the marathon dance in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?—yet the band played on. He was rankled in some deep, unapproachable place. When his wife delicately suggested he might “talk to someone,” Severin reacted so harshly that Diantha half thought he’d try fingering her as a Paramount spy.
Then one day in nineteen eighty-one, a Morris secretary called to say “there was movement.” In measured tones, cryptic and grave, she told him Charles G. Bluhdorn himself was in possession of Souls. “Mr. Bluhdorn wished to give the script his personal attention,” her words went. A senior agent at Morris who dealt exclusively with the chairman would be calling Severin with a follow-up. In the excitement, he didn’t write down the name. He waited by the phone until six, finally calling Dee’s office. No one was in. After a fitful night, he left messages with the switchboard “regarding Charlie Bluhdorn.” He was on his way down to the agency when Dee Bruchner called back. It had been a few months since they spoke; work had been drying up.
“Severin, what the hell is going on?”
“I want to know what’s happening with Bluhdorn.”
“I don’t have time for this crazy shit!”
“Someone called from the agency—”
“Nothing’s fucking happening with Bluhdorn! Okay? Why don’t you go see a fucking shrink, Severin? All right? How many years have we been doing this?”
“A secretary called, from the agency,” said the client, undeterred. “She said Charlie Bluhdorn was reading my script.”
That night, Dee phoned from La Scala. He sounded drunk and vaguely repentant. The whole thing was a practical joke, he said. When Severin asked what he meant, Dee said, “It must have been a joke.” He reiterated his desire for Severin to seek medical help. “You really should,” he said. “For Diantha. It’s not fair to put her through this. You know, people love you, they really do. They really care.” What the hell was he talking about? In the morning, the disbeliever reached Bluhdorn’s office in New York but was rebuffed. He kept calling, and when Dee found out, he sent a telegram saying the agency no longer represented him and that Severin Welch should “cease and desist” contact or run the risk of becoming a “nuisance.”
Came a gentle temblor in his head, a shifting of plates, and so it was decreed: the matter would be resolved by the definitive telephonic intervention of that high-flying commander, that Mike Todd of ceos, Charles G. Bluhdorn, whose imminent call was not open to conjecture. Severin withheld this magical revelation from world and wife; he wanted to live with it a spell, try it on for size, test its sea-legs. Fear of missing the Call soon tethered him to the house. He might have laughed about such an arrangement—how could he have not, particularly after Bluhdorn’s subsequent death?—but there it was, unreal yet present as the HOLLYWOOD sign. The occasional women’s magazine had been perused, Redbook and Reader’s Digest, but these were the pioneer years of phobic disorder: no clubby Internet or national network of like confederates, mystically moored by zip code demarcation and sundry voodoo Maginot lines. Diantha indulged his epic call-waiting best she could. When she died, swept away by the flash flood of cerebral hemorrhage, Severin could not leave the front yard, so missed the procession. Lavinia poignantly misunderstood, thinking her father unhinged, which he was, though not entirely by grief.
That the Call didn’t come never disheartened, for its presentiment rang in his ears, an astral tintinnabulation like the warm, flirty scent of a holiday roast; Severin, wrapped in a comforter of acoustical yearning. Pink Dot delivered groceries and laundry, and daughter Lavinia picked up the slack—thus ensconced, the old fossil roamed the low-tech shagscape of his Beachwood Canyon home, listening to his precious scanner, reading aloud from Thurber and Wodehouse, Gogol and Graham Greene, anchored by his powerful Uniden cordless and the entropy of the years. Did he really expect a call from a dead man? No: after all, he wasn’t crazy.
There was a piece in the Times about John Calley that he’d read with great interest. The United Artists head had returned to the business after years of lying fallow and was now in the methodical process of sifting through studio archives—the idea being to discover old projects, then revise, update and order to production. They had stuff going all the way back to Faulkner and Fitzgerald.
“It’s very much of an archeological expedition,” says Creative Artists Agency’s Jon Levin, who has researched everything from old production logs to the memoirs of Hollywood legends. “There are only so many movies that were made every year, and a number of more scripts that were developed. So chances are there are good [unproduced] works.”
It went on to say that because of rights issues and liability concerns, boxes of unproduced scripts—some of which had been donated to the AMPAS Margaret Herrick Library—now resided at a remote storage facility for “things that are not supposed to be seen…a no-man’s land.” Severin Welch’s Dead Souls had to be out there somewhere, waiting. If you write it, they will come! And when they did (perhaps Bluhdorn progeny, that would be a nice, a fine irony), Severin would have a surprise: the work of the last five years, gratis. For the busy shut-in had been revising all along, retrofitting for these hard, fast times. The money boys would like that—it would save the expense of hiring a pricey rewrite man. Severin wasn’t too worried about ageism. Charles Bennett (the initials alone were auspicious) had sold a pitch right before he died. Bennett wrote for Hitchcock and had to have been in his nineties. No, the tide was turning. Everything old was new again.
He sat by the pool with the scanner, monitoring car phone transmissions. That was illegal now, but Severin had no fear. He used it as a tool, plucking characters from the vapor, finessing dialogue, shoring up unsafe sections of his work. Writers were mercenary—had to use whatever they could. Originally, the old man’s presciently “virtual” adaptation of the Gogol book submitted Chichikov wandering an antiseptic city buying memories of the dead. Now, as if in sly homage to Mr. Bluhdorn, it would be voices the man coveted instead.
Voices on the phone.
Rachel Krohn
On the first night of Passover, Rachel had a dilemma. She was supposed to go with Tovah to an Orthodox seder but now the agent was in bed with a fever, insisting Rachel go alone.
“But three hundred people!”
“It’ll be easier. Less intimate.”
“Tovah, I won’t know anyone—”
“No one knows anyone, that’s the point. It’s skewed toward singles.”
“I haven’t been to a seder since I was a kid.”
“There’ll be lots of Jews who’ve never been to a seder, that’s what this is, an outreach for singles. You want to meet someone, don’t you? Then just go.”
Rachel was in a cold sweat. For some masochistic reason, she arrived early, and because there weren’t a lot of people yet, it was harder to hide her discomfort. She thought about leaving but remembered her pedigree: her father was a goddam cantor. Rachel Krohn didn’t have to prove a thing to these people.
She mingled awkwardly, admiring the rabbis’ long coats, very Comme des Garçons. A woman asked her to light a candle. Were candles lit each Sabbath night or only on Passover? She was clueless. She only knew you lit candles for the dead, though her mother never did.
Nondescript men in poorly cut suits approached, abashedly letting on how they were Fallen Ones, come back to the fold. There were South Africans and San Diegans, Australians and Czechs, Muscovites and New Yorkers, and a dance troupe from Tel Aviv—the girls were gorgeous. Rachel stared like she used to at counselors during summer camp, envying their tawny bodies and musky élan. Again, she felt like bolting.
She was targeted by a schlemiel. He was about to speak—the mouth opened, showing braces—when a rabbi bounded up and introduced himself as “Schwartzee’s son.” Rachel put a hand out but he demurred.
“I’m a rabbi, I don’t shake hands! I don’t mean to embarrass you. It’s just a choice—the only hand I touch is my wife’s. Let’s just say I don’t like to start what I can’t finish!”
A woman lunged forward. “Then I’ll shake it, I’m his sister!” She pumped Rachel’s hand, exclaiming, “I’m not so choosy!”
Schwartzee himself appeared, holding a clipboard in such a way as to discourage the flesh-pressing impulse. He was coatless and wore Mickey Mouse suspenders. “Moishe Moskowitz,” the rabbi crowed, thumbs tucked in each side, “for the children!” He checked off Rachel’s name and was sorry to hear “my old friend Tovah” was sick. The rabbi’s naked, musty breath evoked a weird mosaic of memory and sensation—of synagogue, family and dread. The doors to the banquet hall swung open and Schwartzee shouted after the guests, “It’s fat-free, so enjoy!”
She entered the cavernous room in haphazard search of a table.
“Rachel!”
She spun around. Standing there was her brother, Simon.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, dismayed.
“I got a call from Schwartzee—there’s something dead in the basement. Could be Lazarus! Or should I say Charlton Heston.”
He wore a dark suit and looked thoroughly in his element—the Dead Pet Detective, born-again. Simon had left a slew of messages that she hadn’t returned.
“You never called me back!” he said, oddly enthusiastic.
“I was going to. I’ve been real busy, Simon.”
“I was just wondering if there was any way I could get with your boss.”
“Simon, I’ve already told you, Perry doesn’t know any of the Blue Matrix people—”
“Oh come on, Rachel! All those people know each other.”
“That’s not necessarily how it works.”
“I have three scripts, okay? Can’t you at least get one to your boss?”
“Simon, let’s not talk about this now.”
“Where are you sitting?”
“Not with you. I’m with about twenty people.”
“Well, excuuuussse meeeeee!” She started to go. “Wait! What does a man with a ten-inch penis have for breakfast?”
Rachel was beyond ill will; she didn’t even feel like leaving anymore. She had accepted her lot as among the condemned.
“Uh, well,” Simon stammered, “let’s see now. Uh, I had two eggs, toast…a glass of o.j.—” He cracked himself up as she moved away.
A blithe, bitchy couple sat across. The woman let everyone know they’d met during one of Schwartzee’s relationship seminars at the Bel Air Radisson. On Rachel’s left was an overweight, attractive Canadian called Alberta. Mordecai, the lovestruck schlemiel with braces, hovered breathlessly, too nervous to sit beside her; he took a chair by the great Province. The place beside Rachel remained empty, a sitting target for the requisite Elijah jokes.
After her father’s death, Rachel’s family joined the landlocked diaspora of the faithless. She had been so far and so long away from the water that the dizzying, chimerical ceremonies at hand made her feel like an ethnographer in the field: symbolic foods on plate, the leaning to the left, naming of plagues—boils, hail, cattle disease, slaying of firstborn…like crashing a meeting of freemasons. Yet when she heard the congregants’ intonations and the indomitable old songs of her father, her otherness burned away. Schwartzee’s six-year-old son (the fertile rabbi’s latest) took to the stage and sang a flitting, singsong prayer. Rachel blotted her tears with the hackneyed inventory of images: Sy at the pulpit, mighty and dour, a gray, businesslike Moses, neck vibrating like a turkey’s when he sang; huge white hands and slicked-back hair; fat gold ring.
Schwartzee asked how many commandments were in the Bible. Someone raised a hand and shouted, “Six hundred and thirteen!” Rachel puzzled over that one during the ritual hand washing. She asked Alberta about it.
“You’re not really supposed to say anything after the washing of the hands,” the big woman said. “Until you eat the matzo.”
“Oh! I’m sorry.”
“Sit in the corner,” said Mordecai, leaning over to be seen. “No matzo for you tonight!”
“It’s tradition,” said Alberta, contritely. “I mean you can, but you’re not supposed to.”
“Then I won’t,” said Rachel, unperturbed.
Mordecai shushed her, holding up an admonitory finger. “Please reply in the universal sign language.”
“It’s all right—really!” said Alberta. “I just wanted to tell you what was traditional.” To her annoyance, Mordecai sang a few bars of “Tradition” from Fiddler on the Roof.
“Schwartzee’s seders tend to go till midnight,” said the woman across, to no one in particular. The boyfriend watched the waiters like a hawk, making sure to get double portions. Timing was everything.
A woman in her sixties was ushered to the vacant seat along with edgy Elijah jokes from the hawk-eyed man, who clearly regarded her arrival as a threat to the food bank. Birdie was from New York and, as it turned out, a cantor’s daughter. She ran a mortuary in the Fairfax district, a chevra kaddisha, or “holy society.” Rachel remarked how difficult it must be to work in such a place, but the woman said it was “her greatest mitzvah.” Birdie was a shomer, a member of a volunteer group that attend the dead before burial. She explained that shomer meant “watcher.” Mordecai made a dumb eavesdroppy joke about “birdie-watching” and the woman tensed her lips in a bloodless smile.
Birdie’s father died just last year, at ninety-five; it surprised her Rachel’s loss had come so long ago. Spontaneously, the younger woman offered that he had been killed.
“What is your last name?” Birdie asked.
“Krohn.”
She stared at her plate, then turned and looked at Rachel with a dead blue eye. “I knew your father,” she said.
“You—knew—”
“Yes. My husband did his taharah.”
“His what?”
“Your father’s taharah. The ritual cleansing—the prayers. He sat with your father before he was buried.”
He took Jersey to all the black-tie benefits and still, hardly anyone knew. That’s how he wanted it. He felt strangely invisible—imperishable, even—a dapper traveler incognito in the land of the living. He hadn’t succumbed to the savage placebos that made one a bald vomit-machine: that would be sheer cowardice. Perry wanted to die on his own terms, not like some whore pretending to be a hero.
They went to the Bistro Gardens for the Hospice of the Canyon, an outpatient program in Calabasas for the terminally ill. Perry liked the irony. He cracked death jokes under his breath, but Jersey wasn’t up to playing Mrs. Muir. A few friends knew, with his permission—like Iris Cantor, their great guide. Iris had networked them through Memorial Sloan-Kettering and was there tonight, along with the usual crowd. There were bevvies of doctors and nurses (Jersey felt like buttonholing Leslie Trott and pouring her heart out) and a monsignor, for show.
On Saturday, it was Suzan Hughes’s birthday at Greyhall mansion. The former Miss Petite USA had married the perennially handsome founder of Herbalife. Jersey was active in the Herbalife Family Foundation for at-risk children, as she was in Haven House, Path, Thalians, Childhelp, D.A.R.E., Share, the Children’s Action Network, the H.E.L.P. Group, the League for Children, Operation Children and the Carousel of Hope. All the “ladies who lunch” loved Jersey Stabile Howe’s energy—and thought Perry was gorgeous, like a young Mike Silverman. Something of the Cary Grant about him. The tragedy of their son’s death was well known and bestowed another, popular facet: they had the dignified weight of a handsome couple who had journeyed to “another country” and come back with slides for future tourists. The ladies spoke of Montgomery as one would an infantine lama, snatched from their midst to fulfill a greater prophecy—cosmic honors to which aggrieved parents must perforce acquiesce.
Jersey wondered what would happen when they found out about Perry; he’d be wasting away by then. The ladies might even revile her misfortune, secretly dubbing it over-kill. (That was a sick thought.) There was nothing to do but master the art of crying in public restrooms. She’d tough it out, had to for Rosetta’s sake, her beautiful little girl. Jersey knew how to cope: she drank Kombucha mushroom tea by the gallon, washing down Zoloft and Ativan. To outlive one’s husband and son! She perversely looked forward to the ladies’ memorial attentions. For now, all she could do was natter about environmental carcinogens—leukemia in the suburbs, toxic seepage, government lies. And across the world, the doomsday cover-up of the corroding containment husk around Chernobyl’s reactor number four.
Stage four…Reactor number—
The Bistro gardenias weren’t completely sold, worried their young friend might be truffle-hunting too far afield. They were more at ease with orphanages and battered women, AIDS and oddball diseases. What chance did plain-wrap adenocarcinoma stand against pediatric exotica? Standing there between Vanna White and a bloated Charlene Tilton, Jersey watched her beautiful blue—blazered husband and blinked back the image of him stone cold dead. Guiltily, she watched the Tadao Ando—designed monolith rise before her: THE PERRY (AND JERSEY?) NEEDHAM HOWE CENTER FOR EARLY DETECTION. The betrayal was more than she could bear—how could she? There was Jay Leno and Steve Allen, LeVar Burton and Charo, Pia Zadora and someone from Laugh-In whose name she couldn’t remember. Perry hooked his arm in hers and charmed the lot of them, all the while turning over the one thing that had possessed him since Club Bayonet: II Destriero Scafusia.
Rachel contacted its makers, and the International Watch Company FedExed a cassette along with a small hardback catalogue. Within the latter was an inventory of prices—a “moon phase skeleton model” pocket watch available in yellow gold, at sixty thousand; a Da Vinci wristwatch, for over a hundred. There were Portofinos, Novecentos and Ingenieurs—and, of course, the rather modest looking eighteen-carat rose-gold Destriero, a grande complication that stood, trěs grande, at a cool quarter of a million.
The watch itself was crafted in the village of Schaffhausen on the banks of the Rhine. Destriero was the name given to a jouster’s steed; one easily imagined such knightly trials unfolding hard by the medieval castle—built from plans designed by Albrecht Dürer—that overlooked the town. Just what was a “super complicated” watch? The voice on the tape explained a mechanism could only be classified as such if three elements came together in its movement: chronograph, perpetual calendar and minute repeater. Among collectors, “minute repeaters” were the most coveted. They were the watches that chimed the hour, quarter-hour and minute, an action originally devised for the blind.
Perry lingered over a bit of text: “Firmly secured inside the movement is a replacement century display slide, which can be installed at the end of the twenty-second century and will continue showing the correct year until the end of twenty-four ninety-nine A.D.” Heady stuff, though he wasn’t exactly sure what it meant. There were other details hard to fathom, such as the Destriero’s unique ball-bearing-mounted “flying” tourbillon (eight vibrations per second) that was described as a kind of cage made of anti-magnetic, ultra-light titanium. The tourbillon was invented right after the French Revolution, its function being to improve accuracy by counteracting the earth’s gravitational pull on the balance.
The catalogue ended with a flourish. “Fin de Siěcle: The Grand Finale—This Is What Will Happen at Midnight on 31 December 1999. At precisely this moment, the most complicated wristwatch the world has ever seen will come into its own, as a multitude of functions start taking place simultaneously.” The final paragraphs walked one through the horological ballet, ending with the changing of the millennium guard. “A figure ‘twenty’ replaces the ‘nineteen’ in the date display of the II Destriero…and the twenty-first century since the birth of Christ has begun.”
Tovah called, wanting drinks at the Bel Air. He opted for breakfast at the Four Seasons instead—that felt safer. He wasn’t going to cry himself a river and he wasn’t going to fuck his brains out behind the cancer blues. Not his style.
What she proposed was a “special project,” a television movie about the remarkable life and death of his son, Montgomery. Perry felt trivialized, ready to be offended. Tovah stiffened. Then he laughed and the agent smiled.
“I hope it’s all right, my—”
“It’s fine. It’s fine,” Perry said, suddenly emotional.
“Rachel told me the story. I just thought it was so amazing.”
“And I wondered why no one ever—did anyone ask if you and Jersey—”
“I think Aaron and I talked about it. And Jim Brooks—we played a lot of basketball together. But I don’t think Jersey and I were up for it. It really took the wind out of us. The idea of revisiting…”
“I’m sorry—”
“No no no. Maybe it’s time,” he said, tapping his glass with a fingernail. “Maybe it’s been long enough.”
Ursula Sedgwick
“She’s not coming,” said Sara.
“Shit,” said Ursula, disappointed. “Why not?”
“Because,” said Phylliss, “I’m a crabby cunt.” She padded to the kitchen and retrieved a carton of Merits from the old Amana.
Sara Radisson was a casting agent who had worked on a movie of Phylliss’s that never happened. There was money from a divorce. After the split, Sara took the baby and lived awhile with her mom in Minnesota. It was a hard time; Phylliss was going through changes of her own. When the producer discovered Eckankar, she ordered Sara to visit the Temple of ECK, in Chanhassen—right near her mom’s place. Phylliss said that was no coincidence. There had to be a reason she wound up so close to the source.
Sara was a seeker. She found plenty of chelas, students of the Mahanta. She chanted Hu and was initiated on the Inner. One night, the ECK Master Rebazar Tarzs came to her in a dream and said it was time to stop running. The ECK Master (a pure blue light) said she should return to Los Angeles and complete unfinished business with two women she knew from a past life. When Sara awoke, Phylliss Wolfe and Holly Hunter hung before her like illuminated cameos. She got on the phone to Venice and the tears poured out in a stinging, soulful rush. Within a week, Sight Unseen had been sold to Lifetime, with Holly and Phylliss committing to star and produce.
“We know you’re a crabby cunt. But you still have to go.”
“I didn’t even hear about this thing.”
“I told you last week.”
“My womb is tired and bleeding.”
“So that’s it.”
“phyll thought she was pregnant.”
“By who?”
“Some Abbot Kinney bimbo.”
“Is it serious?”
“Of course, it’s serious. He’s a selected donor.”
“She means, selected at Hal’s—from the bar.”
“Is that safe, Phyll? I mean, has he been tested?”
“Yes, Mother. And I’m telling you,” she said, hands to crotch, “this model has got to go. If Larry Hagman gets a new liver, Phylliss Wolfe sure as shit wants a new womb.”
“Annie, Get Your Womb.”
“You need a transplant.”
“The girl from Baywatch.”
“No! From Friends—”
“Amateur hour, baby. I need me a professional womb, a Meryl Streep —Mare Winningham model, industrial-strength. I want me a litter.”
“How many does Meryl have?”
“Four, at last count. Mare has, like, twelve.”
“Meryl has four? I thought it was three.”
“Don’t quibble.”
“Come on, Phyll, please come.” Ursula rubbed her neck. “It’ll be fun. It’ll get you out of your mood. Pretty please?”
“You guys go. I just want to sit in bed and watch Bewitched. I have an inclination to see Dick York, pre—dementia.”
“Oh all right,” said Sara. “I guess someone has to baby-sit that big bratty uterus of yours.”
“Damn straight. And that’s ‘cervix’ to you.”
Ursula gathered up her things. “Tiff, do you want to come with us or do you want to stay with crabby Phylliss?”
“Go with you!”
“See?” said Phylliss. “Kids instinctively know to shun a barren woman.”
Sara asked if it was okay to leave her baby, and Phylliss insisted. “It’s high time,” she said, “that Samson bonded with Dick York. You know, a little imprinting couldn’t hurt.”
On the way to the ECK Center potluck, Sara talked about Sight Unseen. She was becoming another person, she said, and the book was part of that transformation. She talked about the divorce and what it was like to live with her mom again—the bond between mothers and daughters. Ursula reached back and grabbed Tiffany’s bare foot, almost the size of her own.
“Are you writing the movie too?”
“No way! We’re trying for Beth Henley—she wrote Crimes of the Heart. There is no way I could write a script. I could barely do the book!”
“Phyll’s writing one too, huh.”
Sara nodded. “We have the same editor. But Phylliss is going to have a best-seller—she’s a real writer. Mine’s just a compilation of letters.”
“It must be so exciting! Is Eckankar going to be in it?”
“I’d like it to be but…Phyll and I are kind of at loggerheads about that. I just want it to be universal. I don’t want critics saying there was anything—cultish, or whatever. I’m already thinking about critics!” She laughed, remembering how Phylliss said she wanted their “movie of the weak” to be special.
The Center was filled with kids and tons of Tupperware food. Sara pointed out seven H.I.s—Higher Initiates—those who’d been around ECK some twenty years and more. They were plain folk, down-home and grounded. Ursula talked to a writer who got turned on to ECK by his shrink, and a horse trainer from Rancho Cucamonga who married a non-ECKist. (He was into reincarnation, she said, so they got along just fine.) There was a shy young man with a bright smile—a boy, really—who looked a little ragged. Two of the H.I.s asked how he’d heard of the Center. Once they realized he was possibly homeless, they made sure his plate was full. Ursula was touched.
After a while, everyone sat in chairs and the cabaret began. The horsewoman read a poem about the Mahanta, then a trio sang songs about Light and Sound and Soul. The boy took a seat beside Ursula. A sticker on his shirt said HELLO, MY NAME IS TAJ. His knee touched hers and she moved it away, then moved it back. He smiled a bright, disenfranchised smile.
An H.I. who cheekily called herself “the Living ECK Master of Ceremonies” introduced a sketch called “Motorcycle Man.” A girl around Tiffany’s age slipped into a makeshift bed onstage. As narration began, a bearded, friendly-looking biker roused her. The girl brushed sleep from her eyes and climbed on his back while he revved the high handle of an imaginary Harley. “Now this girl was visited every night by the Motorcycle Man,” said the H.I., “and they cruised the city streets, then up to the sky. He told her many, many things. But every morning her parents wanted to convince her it was just a dream.” The upshot being that when the child grew up, she realized the Motorcycle Man was none other than a Living ECK Master. After the applause and laughter ebbed—the girl was a natural-born ham—the H.I. thanked “the father-daughter comedy duo of Calvin and Hobbes.” Everyone knew that “Calvin and Hobbes” was the Mahanta’s favorite cartoon. The sketch was taken directly from Sri Harold’s parables, she added.
The afternoon ended with everyone chanting Hu. “Gather your attention in the third eye,” whispered Ursula to the ragged boy. “Hold on to your contemplation seed.”
That night, Tiffany stayed with Phylliss. Ursula turned around and picked Taj up at the place she said she would, over by the Center. He was waiting there like a kid, after school.
They went to Bob Burns and listened to jazz. Taj ate some more. He’d pretty much been homeless the last few months, he said, begging for change outside Starbucks and the twenty-four-hour Ralph’s. She brought him back to United States Island and plunked him in a bubble bath. Then she lit the candle of her earthquake preparedness kit, slipped into a robe and put on Gladys Knight. Taj came to bed sopping wet, and she ran to get a towel to dry him off. He seemed perplexed, a dreamy colt, sweet and wobbly. He let her roll on a condom. She got on top, and when they were done, Ursula started to cry; she was thinking of Donny and everything, wanting out of her own skin. Taj got flustered. He said she was crying because of the transmitters in his mouth that made people sad when they kissed him. That scared her, but he laughed his bright laugh and she punched him. They wrestled awhile, then chanted Hu.
They lay side by side, listening to the carp of a cricket, close by. Suddenly, she was looking down, watching his tongue dig at her as she squirmed, arching back, hands trembling on the pommel of his head. The cricket was an omen that confirmed the fatefulness of this moment: just that day she heard Sri Harold talk on tape about the Music of God manifesting itself as flutes, chimes, buzzing bees—and crickets. Ursula was certain she’d met this boy in a past life. Sara and Phyll had a whole Victorian thing going, but Ursula sensed she and Taj went back much further. It would take some hard work on the Inner to find out just how far, but at least now the path was marked.
She shivered, lifting the boy onto her.
Severin Welch
Severin never strayed far from the Radio Shack scanner and its Voices. He picked his way through mines of static, listening to the agents and execs en route to power lunches; after midnight, pimps and drug dealers ruled. The choicer bits were duly recorded, then transcribed by his daughter, who still lived in the Mount Olympus wedding house on Hermes Drive. Lavinia made a meager living typing screenplays, and Severin was happy to throw some dollars her way.
The transcripts were returned and Severin pored over them, ruminating, sonic editor on high, scaling heights of cellular Babel, ducking into rooms of verbiage, corroded, dank, dead end—then a sudden treasure, odd heirloom, dialogue hung like chandeliers, illuminated. He held the sheaves to his ear and heard the dull, perilous world of Voices—the workday ended, seat-belted warriors homeward bound. All was well. Whereabouts were noted, ETAs demanded and logged, coordinates eroticized; half the world wanted to know just exactly when the other half thought it might be coming home. On the one-ten—kids there yet?—called you before—love you so much!—trying to reach—taking the Canyon—couldn’t get through—losing you…
Severin thought he recognized Dee Bruchner amid the welter. You tell that nigger, said the Voice, he closes at the agreed four million or I will spray shit in his burrhead baby’s mouth.
Had they always talked that way? He couldn’t imagine Mr. Bluhdorn coming on like Mark Fuhrman. Not to worry—he’d use it all to stitch one hell of an American Quilt. These were the Voices of a dying world, no doubt. They needed a script to haunt, and Dead Souls was just the place.
“You look awful,” she said, treading the doorway in a flowery perspiration-stained muumuu. Lavinia’s skin was oily white, an occasional pimple pitched like a nomad’s pink tent. She was turning fifty-three and wore a knee brace; the year had already added thirty pounds.
“Do you have my pages?”
“Do you have my pages! Do you have my pages! Don’t you say hello anymore?”
“Hullo, hullo!” He stood and did a jig. “Hul-lo, hul-lo—a-nuh-ther opening of a-nuh-ther show!”
She scowled, lumbering to the kitchen to fix a sandwich. Thank God Diantha wasn’t around for this. His wife had been so fastidious in her person, so immaculate—proprietary of her daughter’s fading beauty.
“Have you heard from Molly?” He risked a diatribe but couldn’t help himself. It was a year since he’d seen his granddaughter. Her birthday was coming up.
“Molly died, Father, remember? Molly died and Jabba took her place. That’s what she calls herself now—Jabba the Whore!”
He took the transcript from the counter and sat back down with an old man’s sigh. “Such a tragedy.”
“Since when is it a tragedy to be a whore?”
“Don’t, Lavinia. Don’t talk like—!”
“A whore and a doper. A jailbird, Father! She should die in prison, with AIDS!”
“Lavinia, she’s a sick girl.”
“I’m a sick girl! I’m a sick girl!” She pointed to a purplish knee.
“I’m in pain, Father, twenty-four hours a day. I didn’t choose that! Jabba the Whore lives in a world of her own choosing.”
“So do we all.”
“So do we all! So do we all!”
“That knee of yours is in bad shape because of the weight.”
“Oh, that is a lie and if you want to talk to my chiropractor, Father, he will tell you. So do we all, so do we all! Would you like me to call him?” Severin wearily shook his head. “You can talk to my acupuncturist too. And if you really want to know, which I’m sure you don’t, the weight on my knee is a cushion—”
“All right, Lavinia. It’s a cushion.”
“And the moral is! If you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, don’t offer opinions! The great So Do We All has so many important opinions! God, do I hate that.”
They moved to Los Angeles in ‘forty-three and Severin bused tables at Chasen’s, working up to waiter. A quick, funny, ingratiating kid. He made his connections and eventually scored with the regulars, free-lancing bits for Red Buttons and Sammy Kaye. Then he met Hope and sold a few gags to the weekly radio show. They signed him full-time—but he’d always have Chasen’s. Took Lavinia there on her tenth birthday, still had the snapshot: slender girl in a party dress wedged between him and Diantha, George the maître d’ in his monkey suit on one side, Maude and Dave sidling in on the other, smiling from the blood-red booth like royalty. One of his old customers wheeled in the cake on a copper table—Irwin Shaw. He respected Shaw, a real writer, a book writer, that’s what Severin wanted to be in his heart of hearts. He tried and failed a dozen times before deciding to do the next best thing; adapt a classic for the screen. A novelist by proxy.
“And don’t you forget: Jabba the Whore was made from his seed.”
“Who?” he asked, riffling pages, not really listening. Severin tensed; too late—fell for it again. He was a player in a grim sitcom, a straight man in Lavinia’s little shop of horrors.
“Who! Chet Stoddard, that’s who!”
“Oh Christ—”
“Don’t you oh Christ, don’t you dare! For what that man put me through? Did you know that my jaw will never mend? Never mend: do you even know what that means?”
“It’s a long time ago.”
“Tell it to my jaw! Tell my jaw how long it’s been! I go to Vegas to rescue him and that piece of shit punches me out! At Sahara’s, right in the casino, hundreds of people!”
“All right, Lavinia—”
“Don’t all right me and don’t Oh Christ! The bone could have gone to my brain. Do you know what kind of headaches it has caused me? The migraines, Father? Do you understand how demeaning?” She began to weep. “With the pain and the police…the humiliation in that desert town. And not even jail, they dried him out in a luxury hospital, flew him back first class! If it wasn’t for me, his show would have gone off months before it did! I schmoozed for that man! With Saul Frake pawing me, his tongue in my mouth, I could vomit. Father? Would you please give me the courtesy of an answer?”
Severin poured himself a drink at the wet bar. He felt like an actor doing a bit of business.
“I’m a good person! Why has this happened to me? What has happened to my life? Why me, Father? Why! Why! Why!” She went to the bathroom and blew her nose while Severin sat down again to surf the bands. Lavinia re-emerged, waddling toward him with a fat rusty tube in her hand. “I took this from the drawer,” she said meekly. “Okay?” Some forgotten Coppertone cream. She seized the typed pages from his hand, brandishing them. He turned up the volume of the scanner. “What are you going to do with this? Your eyes are so bad you can’t even read. What are you going to do?”
“What do you care? You get paid.”
“People pay me to type for a reason, they have scripts, they have jobs, they’re writing books. I don’t understand your reasons—you’re just eavesdropping on people’s lives! People have a right to their privacy—”
“What are you, ACLU? You get paid to type. Period.”
“I’d love to hear what Chet Stoddard, the Larry King of his time, has to say—maybe you could listen to him. But he probably can’t afford a car phone. I hope he can’t afford a car or if he can, he’s living in it.” Her face lit up like a battered jack-o’-lantern as she threw down the pages and backed toward the door, Baggied sandwich in hand. “If anyone ever finds out you’re doing this—illegally eavesdropping—I want you to say you typed it yourself. Not that anyone would believe it. Just tell them you found someone else, not me, okay? All right, Father? Because I do not want to be drawn in.”
Free to listen to Voices again—shouting from canyons and on-ramps and driveways without letup, bungling into digital potholes on Olympic, dead spots on Sunset—shpritzing from palmy transformer-lined Barrington…Sepulveda…Overland…crying from electrical voids on nefarious far-flung PCH, dodging wormholes and power poles, festinating to beat devil’s odds of tunnel and subterranean garage as one tries to beat a train across a track—prayers and incense to ROAM (where all roads lead)—trying to beat the ether. A blizzard of Voices fell from range, chagrined, avalancheburied spouses in flip phone crevasse, electromagnetic wasteland of tonal debris. Neither Alpine nor Audio Vox nor Mitsubishi-Motorola could defend against unnerving fast food airwave static: recrudescent, viral, sudden and traumatic—words dropped, then whole thoughts, pledges, pacts, pleas and whispers, jeremiads—maddening overlap, commingling barked-staccato promises to reconnect swiftly decapitated: Westside loved ones morfed to scary downtown Mex, collision of phantom couples in hissing carnival bumper cars, technology cursed, torturous redial buttons pressed like doorbells during witching hour—hullo? hullo? can you hear me?—symphony of hungry ghosts begging to be let in.
I’m losing you.
Rachel Krohn
She sat in the lobby of the storefront mortuary, nervously thumbing a Fairfax throwaway. An ad within offered membership:
ONLY $18.00 A YEAR
· Free Teharoh (washing of body)
· Free Electric Yartzeit Candle
· Recitation of Kaddish on day of Yartzeit
Rabbinical-types in white short-sleeved shirts came and went without acknowledging her; she wondered if they were apprentices. A smiling Birdie brought her back to the cluttered office.
“Your father was not murdered.”
The old woman said it without preamble, like a teacher delivering a Fail.
“What are you saying?”
“Forgive me—but something in my heart told me it wasn’t right to hide what I know. I thought it was God putting me next to you at the seder.”
Rachel was dumbfounded. For a moment, she wondered if Birdie was someone in the grip of a religious psychosis. “What do you know? What happened to my father?”
“Your father took his own life.”
Rachel let out a great sob. The old woman touched her, then withdrew. She handed her Kleenex and a cup of water, then calmly spoke of Sy Krohn’s affair with a congregant—how the “lady friend” gave him a disease (“nothing by today’s standards!”); how the cantor, realizing he’d passed the infection to Rachel’s mother, chose to die.
“You said…your husband was there?” She spoke as if reading a script from a radio show. Your father was not murdered—Orthodox film noir. “You said at the seder—”
“Here—the body was flown back. But you know that.”
“But your husband…”
“He performed the taharah.”
“May I talk to him?”
“He will not speak to you. He was opposed to me telling what I knew.”
“Was it here that he—” The old woman nodded, and Rachel thought she would faint; this is where the body had lain. She stood, as if to go. “You said those who do the…purification—are volunteers. Is that something I could do?”
“It’s not for everyone.”
Rachel shook, flinching back tears. “But it’s for me!” The words came savagely, humbling the shomer. Rachel composed herself and said again, softly: “It’s for me.”
Birdie walked her to the sidewalk.
“You’ll call?”
The old woman nodded. “I will.”
“There’s just one other thing I wanted to know. My father’s buried at Hillside. How is it—I thought if a Jew killed himself, he couldn’t—”
“There are ways around that. It was simply said your father was not in his right mind. Which he was not.”
As she reached her car, Rachel imagined a string of women in the lobby, pending on Birdie—each with a revelation waiting, custom-made.
Sy Krohn was buried in the Mount of Olives on the outskirts of the park, across from a large apartment complex. On her way to the plot, Rachel tried remembering details—but that was thirty years ago. A worker on a tractor respectfully cut his engine as she stood over the stone. She was certain it was park policy; he even seemed to hang his head. BELOVED HUSBAND AND FATHER was all it said.
Rachel wasn’t ready to confront her mother, so she drove to the mansion overlooking the necropolis. That’s where the rich were interred—far away from the syphed-out cantor-suicides. Al Jolson’s sarcophagus adorned the entrance. “The Sweet Singer of Israel” knelt Mammy-style while a mosaic Moses held tablets in the canopy above. Mark Goodson, game show producer, was across the way, the outline of a television screen around his name.
No one was inside but the dead. Scaffolding stood here and there in the hallways, as if the artists painting the ceilings were on lunch break. Small rooms off the main drags were filled with stacks of thin green vases. A few employees loitered outside, tastefully—they seemed aware of her browsing, and again, she wondered if by policy they’d left their workaday posts, awaiting completion of her tour. She entered an elevator as if it were a tomb and rode to the second floor. More couches and vases and yarmulkes and emptiness. She took the stairs down, past the David Janssen crypt. There were flowers and a big birthday card signed Liverpool, England. “We cry ourselves to sleep at night,” it said. “We will never forget you.” She passed vaults of “non-pros” with strangely comic epitaphs: HIS LIFE WAS A SUCCESS; SHE LIVED FOR OTHERS. Then came Jack and Mary Benny, and Michael Landon. “Little Joe” had a room to himself, with a small marble bench. The entrance had a glass door, but it wasn’t locked. Anyone could go in.
“Who told you this?”
They stood in the hot, bright kitchen. The psychiatrist was between clients.
“What difference does it make? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I planned to,” said Calliope. “At the time, there were so many other things…I was going to wait until you were a little older, but then—”
“Well, now I am!” A mocking kabuki mask, glazed with tears.
“Do you really think you would have wanted all the details, Rachel? Could you have handled them? Can you handle them now?”
“Don’t insult me, Mother.”
“Is it any better now that you know?”
“I’m glad I know the truth.” A door opened outside. Mitch and a patient said goodbyes. “It’s so…classically hypocritical! The old cliché, isn’t it? The psychiatrist who tells her patients that secrets kill—and here we are, all these years, living a lie! Can’t you see how insane that is?”
Calliope whitened, trembling. “Your father was the hypocrite, not I! What I did, I did for you, Rachel, to protect you, you and Simon. If we had stayed here, believe me you would have been hurt. So don’t talk to me about hypocrisy.”
They heard footsteps. Mitch returned to his office. The women caught their breath, and Rachel resumed in subdued tones.
“Do you—do you know who the woman was? Is she still…”
“Serena Ribkin. She died last year. She happened to be the mother of a client, strangely enough.” She sat in the banquette, limp. “There: now you even have a name.”
“Was…was my father in love with her?”
“I imagine. Such as love is—though I doubt it would have lasted. But what the hell do I know? Maybe they were Tracy and Hep.” She stood, energized again; her mother was always a quick recovery. “Rachel, I have to get back. Why don’t we have a nice dinner over the weekend—we need that. We can go to that fabulous sushi place on Sawtelle.”
“All right, Mama.”
She fell into Calliope’s arms and wept. Mitch was suddenly at the back door, but the psychiatrist sent him away with a shake of the head.
“That was a terrible, terrible time—you’ll never know, darling, you don’t want to. You and Simon were away, remember? I was glad of that. I used to literally thank God for Camp Hillel.”
She stroked her daughter’s head and kissed it. And then she cried and Rachel couldn’t remember seeing that, ever. Her hair was thick and gray; at sixty-seven, she was still a beautiful woman. They strolled to the front door, arm in arm.
“Who was it that told you about your father?”
“A woman I met at a seder.”
“You went to a seder?” She smiled, genuinely surprised.
“At my boss’s.” Rachel wasn’t sure why she lied. “I had to, for business.”
“And who was this woman?” Calliope asked, a paranoid glint in her eye. “Is she talking to people about Sy?”
“Not at all—Mother, it’s nothing like that. It was an isolated event, a weird thing. She didn’t even know who I was.”
“She didn’t know who you were yet ends up telling you your father killed himself. Very mysterious.” Calliope smiled indulgently. There would be no more interrogations, at least not today. “Well,” she said, kissing her daughter again, “you go home and soak—take a bubble bath. I’ll call and we’ll make a time.”
Severin Welch
ESCUELA Rochester is singing “Oh My Papa”—sounds like a buzz saw dying—Benny walks in from rehearsal. Benny keeps saying, “It’s going to be a great show tonight! I think it’s gonna be a great show!” In comes Don Wilson, asks if Hope’s still mad that he makes a late entrance. Benny says Hope’s a little hot under the collar but he’ll get over it. Wilson leaves and Rochester gives Benny a shave. He’s shaving and then he jumps back. “Uh oh, I think I cut you!” Benny says, “What do you mean, you think, can’t you tell?” Rochester says, “It would help if you’d bleed a little!” Benny hears the orchestra play his theme, but he can’t find his pants. Hope walks onstage—he’s holding Benny’s pants! Looks at the pants and says he’s about to introduce a great entertainer: Gypsy Rose Benny. Says how strange it is working over at CBS—“that stands for Crosby & Benny’s Strong-box”—feels out of place as Zsa Zsa at a PTA meeting. But CBS is right next to the Farmer’s Market, so “you can lay ’em here and sell ’em there.” Holds up the pants again. “Look at that material, ain’t it wonderful? They call it ‘unfinished payments.’” Unfinished payments—that was Severin’s. The whole premise about swiping the pants so Jack couldn’t go on was Severin’s. And the “Road to Nairobi” sketch, with Benny and Hope in a cauldron surrounded by Zulus. There’s a tiger hanging upside-down on a spit. When Hope swivels it around, there’s leopard spots on the other side. Benny says, “The cat must have seen a vet—in Denmark.” Hope says, “I wondered why it had its hand on its hip when I shot it.” All Severin. Hope laughing so hard Severin didn’t think he’d be able to finish. Martin and Lewis lit the cauldron bonfire at the end of the show. Must have been on ten seconds, tops. i’m gonna fuck you up! take you to the
cloisters, CUNT MOTHERFUCKER!
jerome, you didn’t let me explain
explain! you cn explain.
xplain it to th mother fkng emergency room
how there’s a bullet through your mothrfucked
Rachel found a dealer for the grande complication at the Regency Beverly Wilshire. The fine watch emporium was managed by a suave, self-effacing Frenchman. As things had it, Henri Clotard was a huge fan of Streets. He was very sorry to say there were no Destrieros in the country at this time; he would have to make a few inquiries. Monsieur called the next morning to say he had arranged for a minute repeater to be sent by courier from the East Coast. Since Mr. Howe had never seen one, he thought it would be of interest. Perry went over as soon as the timepiece arrived.
He waited to be buzzed in.
Henri extended a hand, smiling graciously. “What a pleasure it is to meet you! Your kind assistant said you were a prompt man, and on this day I am most grateful, for I have been called away on a minor medical emergency.”
“I’ll come back another time.”
“Nonsense, sir—I would not think of it. You are here and it would be bizarre to send you packing.” He possessed the heightened, anachronistic politesse of a diplomat in a drawing-room farce. “I was fortunate enough to locate a complication here in the United States. Would you care to see it?”
The watch was similar to the Destriero, except its movement was concealed by a solid platinum case (the Destriero’s was see-through). Perry strapped it on, feeling the full weight of its six hundred-some parts—perhaps one got used to the heaviness. The face was elegant, without bejeweled ostentation. To the untrained eye, there was nothing to indicate its worth; that was part of the allure.
“There are complications far plainer than this, sir. Two days ago, I had here an Audemars: one hundred forty thousand dollars. You would really not look twice. And yet, if you buy yourself a ticket to New York next week for the auction at Sotheby’s (you don’t have to fly first class!), you can put your bid on a very simple-looking Patek Philippe, a minute repeater from the year nineteen and thirty. But make sure,” he added, with a showman’s grin, “to have half a millions in your wallet.”
They walked through a catalogue. There were peculiar-looking “jumping hour” models; Reverso Tourbillons; Chronograph Rattrappantes; a Breguet (the premier genius of watchmakers and Marie Antoinette’s favorite) that measured the length of each day as would be shown by a sundial; and the wristwatches of Ulysse Nardin, portable astrolabes reflecting the time and position of the stars all at once, in addition to the month, lengths of day, night and twilight, moon phases, astronomical coordinates and signs of the zodiac. The dials were made of meteorite.
“The ‘Astrolabium Galileo Galilei’ is so correct,” said the Monseiur, “that there would merely be a deviation of one day from the position of the stars after a period of approximately one hundred and forty-four thousand years.”
“Where does one buy something like this?”
“Oh, you can get them. Mostly, at auction—Genève. I was, last month—une grande farce. Dealers should just stay away. You see, the auctions are now open to the public, they are in the hands of consumers who know nothing. I saw a watch that retails for thirty-five thousand go at thirty-eight. It retails at thirty-five, new, sir! There was an Italian on one side of me, a German on the other and they just did not stop. They were competing with one another—in a frenzy for the absolutely insignificant. For things of no consequence. I said to the auctioneer, ‘Why are you doing this?’ He said, ‘Je ne fais rien.’ But the auction houses…alors. Have you seen this?” He pushed at him a photo of what looked to be an oversized pocket watch. “Patek Philippe: the ‘Calibre 89.’ I have a video I can show you. They sold one at auction to a group of Japanese investors for some three millions. Patek was livid—they thought it should have gone for seven. You see, the house set the reserve too low. They started at six hundred thousand when it should have been one and three-quarters millions. Only three ‘Calibres’ exist, sir!”
Perry undid the band, balancing the watch in his palm. “And how much is this one?”
Henri consulted another book. “One hundred and seventy-five thousand.” He turned it over to reveal the engraving: “You see? One of fifty produced in nineteen ninety-five. It is also available—I would have to make a phone call, maybe two—with a platinum band. For that, seventy-five thousand is added. But if it is not in the country…” He winced a small, punishing smile; the dollar was weak. “You see, these kind of watches are made for a very elite group. And we are pushing ourselves into a corner, dealers and manufacturers alike. One day, I predict it will be very bad. They are making these in China now—in fact, I am going to Peking next month. They will make them at a fraction of the cost and sell low! They will say, ‘This is authentic! Look, we are the oldest culture! We invented gunpowder! We! We! We!’”
The moment Perry had been waiting for was at hand: time to depress the repetition slide, the lever that triggered the chime. Henri set the hour at 11:57 and, without fanfare, keyed the mechanism with his thumb. The eleven meditative strokes of the hour were plangent and softly surprising, like a bell tower ringing in a distant town square. Perry thought of the shrunken city Superman kept under a glass in the Fortress of Solitude; he imagined the atom-sized inhabitants of a village—Schaffhausen?—going placidly about their business as the sealed world sang with the chronometric music of time. After the hours marked, there immediately followed the ringing of the quarters: three mellisonant double-chimes like delicate flares of wheat. To the sightless (and privileged), the clock had thus far “read” the hour as 11:45. Then, higher tones still, came an aborted minuet of minutes that remained. When this was done, Henri discreetly stepped away, allowing Perry the honors of initiating such a feast of minutiae and movable parts himself.
“I know a collector who has eleven minute repeaters,” said the Monsieur as he returned. “Each a different maker. His joy is to set them off in unison. He lines them up in front of a microphone and broadcasts the cacophony over speakers—and these are not the normal speakers, I assure you, they are quite monolithic. I don’t know what the neighbors think; it sounds like nothing you’ve ever heard before. It isn’t necessarily pleasing to the ear—not to mine, but to his, yes. He is eccentric. You’ll note I don’t say crazy, I say eccentric. We all have a fever. My friend has his and you have yours, I can tell. I’m not sure what it is, but you have it.”
Perry snapped to: “I’ve kept you far too long.” The television producer longed to engage in the florid, mannerly volleys of noblesse oblige.
“It is perfectly okay,” said Henri. “It has been my utmost pleasure, and of that, I am sincere.”
“You’ve been exceedingly gracious” was the most the novice could muster. Then: “I hope whatever calls you away isn’t serious.”
“It is very kind of you to offer a comment and I thank you for that. My mother is ill, for some many years. She recently had the misfortune of taking a tumble and it seems she has taken another. Not to worry: fortunately—if one can say such a thing—this last unpleasantness occurred one hour ago while at hospital for the purpose of assessing hip transplant surgery. She is in good hands and I am assured all is status quo. I am headed there now.”
Perry didn’t buy the complication but felt he probably should have, if only for selfishly detaining his adviser. He bought a Tiffany watch instead, and told Henri it was for his wife. He would give it to Tovah as an emblem of their new project—knowing full well that was artifice. He would give it to her because it felt good and because he wanted to see her face when he put the box in her hand. It was as uncomplicated as that.
Ursula Sedgwick
Ursula kept calling ICM, leaving Donny messages that she needed to see him. When she told one of his assistants it was “urgent,” the agent finally agreed, out of sheer paranoia. He was half an hour late for their lunch at Cicada.
“Phylliss Wolfe tells me you’re big buddies.”
“Phyll’s great—and she’s great with Tiffany. She really wants to have a kid.”
“Yeah, well, she’d better hurry. Her hormones are almost in turnaround.”
“She’s very spiritual, too.”
“So Phylliss is the one who got you involved with this shit! She tried to drag me to one of those fucking meetings.”
“She didn’t drag me anywhere, Donny.”
“With the guy—Mahatma Hoot-muh—what do they call him?”
“His name is Sri Harold Klemp. He’s called the Mahanta—”
“Right! Klemp! The guy from Wisconsin. Wisconsin, the dairy and guru state.”
“You can sit and make fun all you want, but it’s real. And so is reincarnation of Soul.”
“You have to admit it’s kind of hilarious, Ursula. I know I said ‘Get a life,’ but I didn’t mean a past one.” People stopped by to say hello. Donny didn’t bother to introduce her. “Why don’t we have the food to go and get a room somewhere? Someplace sleazy.”
“I don’t want to do that, Donny.”
“Because of the boyfriend? I want to hear all about the boyfriend.”
“He isn’t a boyfriend.”
“Then let’s go.”
“I don’t need to do that anymore.”
“Oh, I get it.” He scowled. “Past Life Therapy…is that what this is?”
When she started to talk, he waved at a table. The luncheoners beckoned him over. Ursula used the wineglass to make imprints on the cloth, drawing faces in the circles with a fork. Donny sat back down and the same thing happened again, different players. He was gone ten minutes, returning as the salads were served.
“It was early in the fourth century—”
“Joan of Arc?” he asked cursorily, digging into the romaine.
“I was a wealthy girl—”
“Why is it that in past lives, poor people are always rich?”
She stared down at the scarified linen, collecting herself. “It was in Rome. I was born in Palermo, of a noble family. A powerful senator wanted to sleep with me, but I refused.”
“Maybe that was Newt—Newt had to have a past life. Or Ross Perot! Al Gore?”
“As punishment for my stubbornness, I was forced into a house of prostitution…”
“Now we’re getting somewhere. You know, I believe in past lives, I really do. I knew a guy who sold used cars. Always called them ‘chariots.’ Sweet guy, name of Benjamin—Benjamin Hur. But all his friends called him—”
“Donny, just listen!” The agent grew sullen and fidgety. “The only person who would help me was a boy who ran errands for the madam—”
“Right! The new boyfriend—your hero. I’m happy for you, Ursula. Maybe you can rule the trailer park together. But let me ask you something: does Mahatma Junior share the same little recovered memory? I mean, does he at least get the chance to rebut? You know: ‘Hey, I don’t remember that! That’s not one of my past lives! I was King of the Zulus!’”
“Sometimes it takes a while to bring those memories from the Inner to the Outer. And Taj is very new—as am I.”
“Taj?”
“He needs to come by it himself, and he will. If he lets the Mahanta guide him.”
“What’s his last name?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it Wiedlin? What’s he look like?”
“I don’t see why that’s important.”
“You’re right,” he said, nodding at the waiter for the check. “Nothing’s important. Including the fact you are out of your fucking mind.”
Why did she even bother? She was grateful for all he’d done, especially for Tiffany. She wanted to release him, because Ursula knew her love had been overbearing. But to release him meant sharing the found vision of her passion play: smell of wet stones and burning wood, sting of incense, bordello voices (they seemed like Latin or maybe Italian, though she spoke neither).
She hadn’t yet mentioned to Sara or Phylliss what girlhood memories and a trip to the downtown library had confirmed. When she was Tiffany’s age, an aunt bought her a Dictionary of Saints. There was a painting of an ecstatic girl, implements of torture scattered at her feet. A man in a shirt with puffed sleeves held a sword to her neck. The story said she’d been forced into prostitution for refusing a rich politician; this hapless blonde, found on the Inner—who was Ursula, sad whorehouse girl exhumed from a dream—was none but St. Agatha herself. Now that her life made sense, she wanted to tell Donny everything, but how could he listen? Agatha had rejected the senator as Ursula had her father and his rough friends. Agatha consecrated her virginity to Jesus Christ; Ursula would make her vows to the Mahanta Sri Harold Klemp, the Living ECK Master. She must have known all this even as a tiny girl (it made her think of the Motorcycle Man at the potluck). Ursula was mildly embarrassed at the “bride of Mahanta” aspect, because she knew that wasn’t at all something ECKists encouraged. Maybe it was inappropriate. She’d talk to Phyll about it. Phyll would set her straight.
Tiffany was coloring her book with a child’s fierce attention. Occasionally, she glanced up at Fraggle Rock.
A woman came looking for Ursula. Taj saw her through the curtain; he knew Phylliss from ICM days and didn’t feel like an encounter. He slunk to the bedroom.
For a few weeks, he’d been crashing there, unbothered, leaving in the early morning hours—but it seemed that the truth about Taj Wiedlin would soon out. Maybe it was time to call his sister for airfare home. He hadn’t spoken to the family since Zev let him go. His mom was probably worried near to death.
When the coast was clear, he returned to the living room with a milkless bowl of Cheerios.
“Why did you hide?” asked Tiffany.
“I didn’t hide.”
“You’re weird,” she said, going back to her routine.
Taj couldn’t believe he was offended by the little girl’s dismissal. She shook her head, curling her lip in disgust as she drew. Taj began an “I’m weird” dance to break the tension, but her rejection congealed.
“When’s Mama coming home?”
“I don’t know, Crabby,” Taj said, doing his goofy jig. “Come on and smile.”
“I am not crabby and stop it.”
“Crabby Tabby.”
“You’re bothering me,” whined Tiffany. “You don’t even live here.”
“Ground control to Major Crab! Have a Cheerio and do the ‘weird’ dance. You’ll feel better.”
“I hate you.” She didn’t really, but now she’d said so.
“A little over the top, don’t you think? And rude.”
“You’re rude.” Less emphatic now.
“Why do you hate me?”
“Because you’re weird.”
“You mean I’m weird because I fuck your mother between the legs?”
Tiffany stood, agitated. “Be quiet!”
He started a “Be quiet!” dance, and she pushed him. Taj grabbed her head and held it fast so they were nose to nose, like player and ref. He made creepy, guttural sounds and Tiffany shook, squealing in terror. He screamed all over the surface of her head as if it were the earth, his cries satellite signals covering land, sea and polar cap. He dug nails into her chest and yelled at the top of his lungs in her ears, making funny kung fu faces as he butted Tiffany’s head and yanked out a slim broomful of hair.
He dialed Zev’s office, pounding her stomach while they had him on hold. “Hello? Are you casting yet for Dead Souls?”
He left her there, receiver propped to bloody mouth and ear.
Rachel Krohn
It was almost midnight when the old woman called.
Someone had died. Could Rachel make it to the chevra the next morning, say, eight-fifteen? The taharah would take an hour, maybe more. Birdie said it was a child and asked if that might be too upsetting. Rachel wasn’t sure. She asked if it was an accident, and Birdie said the girl had been murdered. Was there blood? Birdie didn’t know.
Rachel skimmed a handbook for grievers she’d picked up at the Jewish bookstore. It said mourners should cover mirrors and overturn beds. She turned out the lights and thought of the furnitureless mansion of her father’s memorial park. She drifted to an ocean of bobbing canopy beds, each with wide-eyed child marooned. The beds bellied-up in the water until all that was left were their periscope-legs. She woke up drowning just after three and never got back to sleep.
Ursula Sedgwick
Donny argued with Phylliss and Sara, who were pushing for an ECK memorial, with readings from “The Golden Heart” and “Stranger by the River.”
When his mother died, the rabbi explained how the human being was often compared to a Torah scroll, the parchment equivalent to the body; the divine names written thereon, the soul. The agent thought that beautiful. Serena’s pilgrimage beneath the house had left her filthy, and Donny loved the idea of pious, level-headed strangers ceremonially scrubbing her down—wiping the pages clean—for the Journey. When he suggested the taharah would be a good thing, Ursula didn’t speak. She smiled, grateful he was there at all—that anyone was who could help her Tiffany.
Donny called the rabbi and said Ursula was a Jew, and that is how her daughter was buried.
Rachel Krohn
Rachel was early. The girl’s mother had been there all night with friends while the shomer sat with the body. The police arrested the boyfriend, Birdie said.
She sat on the couch and waited, wondering about the gore. What if the girl had been stabbed or mutilated? Rachel didn’t think she could take that. She pulled a taharah primer from her sack. Some of the rules and regulations ranged from comical to macabre. All severed limbs were supposed to be tossed in the coffin. As blood was considered to be part of the body, it was kosher to be buried in the stained clothes of one’s demise. And if a Jew wanted to be cremated, that was too bad—his wishes could be overruled by something called the Halachah, or Law. Birdie emerged from the back. It was time to begin.
The room was cold. There was a tiled floor with drain and slop sink. Buckets were filled with water and wooden two-by-fours lay stacked on a chair. The girl was on a metal gurney, wrapped in a bag. Another woman was there, around Birdie’s age. She was the “watcher” who sat with the girl through the night, the one who recited prayers and reminded the body of its name “so it would not be confused before God.” They washed their hands and put on gowns. Birdie offered surgical gloves, but Rachel declined; no one else wore them. The bag was removed. Rachel gasped—she was blond and looked like an angel. There was a bluish bump on her forehead and the chest was spotted with bruised whorls. She will never have her period went through her mind, like a mantra to keep her from sinking. A tube had been left in her mouth, and when Birdie tugged, it wouldn’t budge. She took scissors and clipped so it didn’t protrude, closing the lips and cutting the hospital bracelet. They covered the face and pubis with separate cloths, then the whole body with a sheet. Birdie tore pieces from the sheet to be used for the washing.
They tucked the sheet down and washed face and hair, drying afterward but not covering. The body was washed from right arm to shoulder, down torso to legs and then back. The process was repeated from the left side, Birdie washing while Rachel dried. Normally, rainwater or melted snow was required, but in this case they used water from the tap.
When the first washing was finished, they cleaned under finger and toenails with toothpicks. That was the most heartbreaking for Rachel, because the girl had painted her nails in different colors. They used polish remover that Birdie got from a metal drawer. Then the two-by-fours were placed under head, shoulders, buttocks and legs. The second washing—“the taharah proper”—began. Three buckets were used this time, and the girl was completely naked, even though Rachel thought the guidebook said that wasn’t supposed to happen. They put a sheet over the body to dry it and the wood was removed. The other woman was ready with the shroud. (“After the taharah is completed,” the book said, “the deceased is dressed in shrouds sewn by the hands of a woman past the age of menopause.”) The sheet was lowered around the girl’s head, and Birdie put a bonnet on her, as well as a piece that went around the face. Rachel helped with a collared, V-neck shirt—“you fuss with it. You have to learn,” Birdie muttered—reaching in to take the little arm and pull. Both arms were brought to the head and manipulated through. The shirt had no buttons and was tied at the top. They slid the legs into the pajama bottoms, pulling them up to the waist. There, the string was twisted nine times, then made into three loops so it looked like the letter shin, which stands for God. Birdie tied strips of shroud just below the knee, and made a bow. The last piece they dressed her in was an overshirt, made the same way the shirt was, only longer. It was easier than before to get the arms through. They brought the wooden box next to her. Inside was a long strip from the shroud; when they lowered the girl in, it ended up around her waist. Birdie repeated the twisting procedure—it seemed like twelve or thirteen twists this time—then made the shin again.
The face covering was pulled down, and Birdie put broken pieces of pottery on the eyes and mouth. When the shroud was replaced, the other woman sprinkled dirt from Jerusalem over pubis, heart and face. The casket was lined with a very large piece of shroud that was then folded over the body, right side first, then left, then bottom and top. They put the lid on the casket and took off their gowns.
“To remove death,” Birdie explained as they washed their hands from a hose in the parking lot. “When you come home from the funeral there’s normally water outside the front door, for washing.” Rachel stood there, numb and exhausted. “What a shame!” Birdie said. “Thank God it was not also a sexual assault.”
That night, Rachel dreamt she stood pallbearer in a stream, guiding a raft into darkness. The chilly waters were deep and she carried a long pole. The little girl lay in her open casket, floating down this river that ran under Westwood. The bier became a barge filled with debris and Rachel climbed aboard, snaking her way past insolent men and passive women, searching for the vanished body. No one would help. Finally, she came to Tovah and a flying wedge of UTA militia.
“The cantor is ready for the second washing,” said her smiling friend.
Severin Welch
Deh-souls! deh-souls! deh-souls!
ev
Turle taub’s
DEH SOULS
“Well? What’s he saying?” Severin bent over the recorder like a crone at a crystal ball.
The Dead Animal Guy hit PLAY, squinting hard. He’d been up to the house before—even to the daughter’s. The Welches were clients from way back, when he worked for Three Strikes. Simon had kept in touch, and was simply delivering a carton of ciggies when he was suddenly drafted into a bit of the old Our Man Flint.
“Tell me! What is he saying? Is it ‘Dead Souls’?”
Simon took in the scanner apparatus, gleaming at the gonzoid anarchy of it all. “Hey, this is off cellular!”
“Oh to hell with it,” said Severin, exasperated. He shooed at Simon and retreated.
“Rad! You should let my friends post ‘listen-ins’ on the Net. Get the lotus-eaters where they live!”
As Simon rewound, the ancient auditor fast-forwarded to the William Morris façade. He saw the red brick edifice before him; they’d know in an instant if the Gogol property was being developed—by and for whom and how much. But who could Severin ask? Certainly not Dee Bruchner. He thought about Charlie Bennett, the expired Hitchcock collaborator. He’d call the Guild in the morning, see if he could drum up the erstwhile rep. Maybe it’d be someone amenable to—
“Hey, I think I know who that is!” cried Simon.
The old man stumbled over, fairly salivating.
“That’s Zev Turtletaub, on Verde Oak! Around the corner—Ramon Novarro’s old place. I was up there last week.” They listened again. “‘Zev Turtletaub’s Dead Souls’—hear it? Big producer. Did those canine flicks. And might I add, at the time of my housecall, the gentleman had a harem of, shall we say, ‘lovers of the dog.’ He is himself an extremely hairless Homo erectus.”
Severin liked the dog pictures; he’d seen them on cable. His pulse quickened. “Are you sure?”
“It’s him, I’m telling you, Zev Turtletaub. His Siamese got stuck in the wall: a very large and may I hasten to add messy problemo. A two-hundred-dollar job. Mimsy! That’s the name of the mutt. Lotta people went to see those. I told him when I left that the next movie he makes should be more like Casper, only about the ghost of someone’s pet who gets stuck in a wall—starring Jim Carrey as the Dead Pet Detective. But instead of Casper, you call it Fluffy! I do not think he was thrilled.”
Severin called the L.A. Times research line and requested they send anything on Zev Turtletaub that mentioned Dead Souls. The Xeroxes came in the mail a few days later; Lavinia enlarged them for his bad eyes. The old man feasted on photos of this bald quarry. Friend or foe?
The “Calendar” profile numbered Dead Souls (“based on the Russian classic”) among the Turtletaub Company’s active slate. A number of projects were tied to Paramount and Severin found that of note. A few days after he received the clippings, Lavinia read an item over the phone from the Times “Hot Properties” section. It detailed Turtletaub’s recent purchase of the former Novarro estate from actress Diane Keaton. The house was a Lloyd Wright jewel he’d bought “as a lark” while awaiting renovations on a home in Bel Air. Just last year, she read, the producer paid seven-point-two million for a Montecito villa adjacent to the Robert Zemeckises’.
The Dead Pet Detective slipped him the Verde Oak address and phone. Severin gave him a twenty for his trouble.
“Mr. Turtletaub?”
“Who is this?”
“My name is Severin Welch.” He was nervous as hell and barely got the words out. “I’m a writer—”
“How did you get this number?”
“An old client of Dee Bruchner…”
“Dee Bruchner gave you this number?”
“Yes. Because I understand you’re at the Morris agency now—”
“I’m surprised. I don’t generally enjoy receiving calls at my home from people I don’t know.”
“It’s about Dead Souls.”
“And you say Dee Bruchner gave you this number.”
“I have been working on that script twenty years, sir!”
“What did you say your name was?”
“Severin Welch, Esquire. May I inquire of you, sir, are you using the script from the Paramount vaults?”
“What?—”
“All I am asking from you and Mrs. Lansing-Friedkin—”
Turtletaub laughed gutturally.
“All I am asking is that my labors be acknowledged as seed work. As the inception. I do not have a lawyer, sir, nor do I intend to engage one; I’m not overly fond of the breed. You don’t have a worry on that account. I merely ask that you consider the revisions I have painstakingly entered, with much attention to colloquial verisimilitude, over the last sixty-five-odd months. I am not seeking sole credit, sir, meaning that if another writer has already been contracted, there is no reason for him to be perturbed—writers are, easily so: I know, as I am one myself. If another has been engaged, more power to him! If we could just meet, sir, you might bring me up to date—”
“Who the fuck is this? Burnham? Burnham, is that—?”
“This is Severin Welch, sir, as I have said.”
A long pause. Then, without levity: “I said who the fuck is this!”
“It’s Homo erectus, you chrome-domed doggie-dick cock-sucker!” shouted the tense old man in a fit of rheumy inspiration. “I already told you my name, sir, three times! I am the original writer of the adaptation of Dead So—”
Zev Turtletaub hung up.
Stepping jauntily from the house, Severin carried Souls script and trusty Uniden cordless, for comfort—its range a mere fifteen hundred yards, yet how could he leave it behind? He might have jumped in a cab, but his own locomotion felt revolutionary. Bracing: Verde Oak, Verde Oak, baker’s man, bake me a cake as fast you can—pounding the pavement, hitting his stride, humming hap hap happy talk inanities. By the lights of Frères Thomas, chez Turtletaub was under two miles…luck, if you ‘ve ever been a lady to begin with left! left! left right left! Must concentrate on objective. Must take Turtletaub Hill—HUMP! two-three-four HUMP! two-three-four trudge. trudge. trudge. trudge. Company—ho! trudge trudge trudge trudge. Criminy…ho! What the hell, the houseman could drive him back. Have pity on an old man. Here we go, then: brisk, breezy downhill gait. Then he got lost. Asked directions from gardeners and sundry housewife types, proffering slip of paper with Via Verde venue—at which they stared grinning fixedly, illiterates. Cretins. Homo Cretinus Erectus. A toot! A toot! He blows eight to the bar (in boogie rhythm)—knew he was near because the Thomas Bros. told him so. Murphy’s Law for you. Yowza yowza yowza. The gig is up. The Gig Young is up. Not such a bad walk, a walk like this. Astonished to have been the fool on the hill for so long—fifteen years, excluding one emergency outing for gallstones, Diantha hauling him in the T-bird, drugged like a cat on its way to the vet. Jesus God he’d ruined that woman with his mad quarantine, mucked up her golden years but good—
huh? Severin heard digital chirp of phone, the a-pealing ting in his ear. He smiled with a start then looked around past curtains of exhaust-flecked ivy, storm drains and driveways, astigmat’s eyes jump window to window to focus the locus—ring now clear as day. From whence it came? Ah! From him! Severin Welch! And he knew…shimmying off backpack, shoulder blades like crows’ wings, disgorging Uniden and punching TALK—out of range! How cruel! Sobbing bitterly, like a child, a senile drama queen, how cruel to call me now, when you know I’m out of range!
ev’ry body’s been KNOW ing
to a wedding they’re GO ing
and for weeks they’ve been SEW ing
turned and marched up the hill in long, uneasy lope
ev’ry SUSIE and SAL!
stridulations louder until as if by yelping flames surrounded, he fell down on his march
the bells are ring! in! for me and my
bloodying his bony self, Souls script splayed on asphalt, hand clutching prop-like Uniden to chest
they’re con gre gay! TING!
FOR ME AND MY GAL!
THE! PAR! SON’S! WAY! TING! FOR ME AND
pinned in the road like a bug by the knitting needle of a sky-high heart attack collections man.
Missing the Call.
Perry Needham Howe
It was a drizzly Saturday and he sent his wife to Aida Thibiant for some all-day exfoliatory pampering. As for Perry, he was on his way to San Diego with Tovah Bruchner.
The resolute agent had a new client. Arnold Eberhardt owned an animation house that churned out sarcastic, offbeat cable cartoons along with regular-fare programming for kids. He was a railroad enthusiast who enjoyed renting a few private cars from Amtrak—a coastal no-brainer that got friends and families to Balboa Park around noon. A little low-key first-class fun. The all-aboard crowd was techie and un-Hollywood; Perry didn’t know anyone, and that was always easier on the nerves. The couples played poker on the way down, using Sweet’n Low packets for chips.
Perry and Tovah sat in the dome car lookout with their screwdrivers. He was talking about one of the watches he’d boned up on—it could tell you exactly where the sun would rise or set on the horizon—when a man from another table spoke up.
“The Ulysse Nardin. Friend of mine has one.”
Perry was pleasantly taken aback. “You’re kidding. I never thought I’d hear anyone but a dealer pronounce that name.”
“I’m a bit of a fanatic—or was. Be careful!” he admonished, with a laugh. “That stuff’s crack for the wrist. Though I have to tell you most people consider those Nardins a bit tacky.”
Jeremy Stein was the creator of Palos Verdes, a nighttime soap that was starting to smell like a hit. When he introduced himself, Tovah smiled the infernal, knowing way agents do, as if to say “Don’t fight it—you’re done for. Soon you’ll be mine.” The corner of his mouth subtly drooped, and Perry remembered some controversy surrounding the name. He’d have to wait for Tovah to enlighten.
“I just signed Arnold,” said Tovah, suggestively. Again, the cocky devil-woman grin.
“Yes, I know. He’s the best. We went to college together.” He turned to Perry. “If you’re interested, I can put you in touch with a guy who gets unbeatable prices—forty percent off at minimum, and I’ve seen him go high as sixty. Crichton’s a customer; buys himself one whenever he finishes a project, as a little reward.”
“I’ve been looking at grande complications,” Perry said. “Did you ever have one?”
He shook his head matter-of-factly. “Never. I know Geena just got one for Renny. I should tell you, if you wear the things, they’re gonna wind up in the shop. They’re like Ferraris that way. Renny’s had his in four times—he’s a very active guy! It’s important to know a watchmaker, that’s why Berto’s so great. He’s the guy I was telling you about. I made the mistake of sending one of my Pateks to Geneva for a repair. Here it comes, eleven months later! Berto usually has a three-week turnaround.”
Arnold’s boy came down the aisle, engrossed in a hand-held digital game. Jeremy gathered him up.
“He’s sweet,” Tovah said. “Taking him to the zoo?”
“Absolutely. You know, San Diego has a taipan, if you’re interested—probably the most aggressive snake in the world. Northern Australia. Last time I was there, a kid put his hand to the window and the taipan struck three times. They didn’t realize until the end of the day that the damn thing had broken its nose!”
Tovah sought her client out below while the new friends bonded over the addictive nature of collectibles. Perry mentioned the eighteenth-century “Pendule Sympathique,” a kind of carriage clock crowned with a half-moon berth to accommodate certain pocket watches; when the latter were placed within, they would automatically be reset and rewound by the “mothership.”
“That’s Breguet—did Napoleon have one of those? That kinda thing comes up for auction every now and then. They’re millions upon millions, it just doesn’t end. You can go to Frank Muller—Muller makes one-of-a-kinds—for two hundred grand, they’ll design whatever kind of watch you want.”
“I’d love to get together,” Perry said as they pulled into the San Diego station. “I’ve heard great things about your show.”
“And I’m a big fan of yours. I’ll bring Berto—know where we’ll go? Ginza Sushiko, heard of it? On the Via Rodeo. Probably the most expensive sushi place in the country. You can get fugu there. Friend of mine in Japan took me for absolutely exquisite tempura—you know, one of these places where you eat out of eight-hundred-year-old bowls. Anyway, he said they had something extremely rare that I had to try. I said, ‘Well now, what would that be?’ And my friend Ryuichi says, ‘Cow penis.’ He began to laugh. ‘I think you mean bull, Ryuichi—though cow penis would be rare!’”
They only had a few hours and decided to skip the zoo.
Tijuana was close but not close enough; Tovah said it wouldn’t be such a good thing if they missed the return jog. They cabbed it to Hotel del Coronado for lunch. On the way, Perry had a grim laugh, imagining himself at the border like Steve McQueen en route to a miracle clinic. What ever happened to laetrile, anyway?
Tovah took a while in the restroom. When she entered the lobby, Perry raised a finger from the front desk, holding her off. She smiled and sat down, not really thinking he was up to anything. When he came over, she said, “I’m starved,” but Perry said he felt like eating in privacy so he’d gotten a room and hoped that was all right.
“When do children learn to tell time?” She was trying to get him to open up about Montgomery.
He could see part of her through the door, naked, sitting on the bowl having her pee. He thought of Jersey, being scrubbed with seaweed. God knew how long it had been since he’d watched a woman in a bathroom, other than his wife.
“That depends,” he said, listening to the tinkle. He wondered if she’d done this sort of thing before with other clients—the afternoon delight. Probably not with a dying one, anyway.
She came out in a white hotel robe. They should be getting back, she whispered, kissing him. “Why, yes’m,” he said. He could smell her sex on his face and dreaded washing it off.
Floating past Capistrano, sitting on a depopulated divan, Perry remembered he had brought Tovah’s gift. There was an impulsive purity behind its purchase, but now, after the act, such a gesture would seem old-fashioned and demeaning: reward for a job well done in the sack, a gold watch for fifty minutes of service. It wasn’t expensive enough to give his wife and he wouldn’t want Jersey finding it tucked away in a drawer, either. He’d bury the thing or bring it back to Henri, for credit.
Arnold’s son passed, and then another reconnoitering boy, who stared at him a moment, causing a pang. He looked just like Montgomery—without the seizures, of course, or the medulloblastoma the size of Children’s Hospital. Only six hundred cases a year and Montgomery one of them; he died at the beginning of March, making him number one-oh-eight, or thereabouts. The last few weeks he got chemo through a tube in his chest. When he curled into the fetal position, a doctor had the gall to say kids responded to trauma by “reverting to infancy.” Perry wanted to scream “He is a fucking infant!” but something stopped him short—he was nothing if not civil. He stabbed at himself for months after, always holding his tongue, his whole life he’d been that way, even when it counted most, keeping a neat little room in the back of his skull to house the cheap inventory of unvoiced comebacks and polished, useless retorts, obsolete and carefully shelved. Jersey was the one who got rowdy, while Perry held the world together. He regretted never having had a big Shirley MacLaine Terms of Endearment moment. Instead, he’d capitulated straight down the line. Why had he let them torture his kid like that?
Tovah brought him a drink.
“Did you ever sleep with Jeremy Stein?”
“Oh please.”
“Why not?”
“First of all, the guy is, like, totally into whores. From what I hear. And he had a stroke—it probably doesn’t even work anymore.”
“So those are the top two reasons you wouldn’t.”
“That’s not what I meant! He’s not my type. He’s got a kid. Who he, like, abandoned.”
“But you want to sign him.”
“He’s got a hit show. The one thing in his favor.”
He eyed her quizzically. “Why is it,” he asked, “that agents always say, ‘You got it’?”
“I know. I hate that.”
“And now all the assistants say it. Every time you ask for something, they say, ‘You got it.’ No: ‘You gahhhhht it.’ You don’t say that, do you?”
“I don’t know who started that.”
“Probably your dad.”
“That’s a horrible thought.”
They watched bodysuited surfers catch a wave. The agent was pensive. Perry tried finding her smell on his upper lip, but the booze had killed it.
“You know,” she said, “I’m not so sure that was such a good thing. What we did.”
“Sure felt like one.” He regretted asking if she’d slept with Jeremy Stein. Vulgar and flip.
“That’s not what I meant.” She smiled, blinking sultrily. “Are you okay with it?”
Perry was at a loss. He fell back on sheer age, which conferred a certain ready cool. He began to sing. “‘Strangers on a train, exchanging glances’—”
“Are we?” she asked, preparing to be hurt—now, or later. “Are we strangers?”
All women are mysterious, he thought. Without the twin antidotal axiom, there would be no game: All women are insecure. “Here’s an idea for a film: Two strangers meet on a train and agree to kill each other’s agents.”
“How about lawyers?” Tovah asked, relieved to be steered from her mushy course. “I’d feel more comfortable with that.”
“You gahhhhht it.”
Ursula Sedgwick
Donny couldn’t believe that Taj Wiedlin, his “shadow” at ICM for over two years, was the child’s killer. He felt like Walter Pidgeon in Forbidden Planet—the scientist whose unleashed id runs murderously amok. After the funeral, the agent dropped from sight. Ursula reasoned her old lover finally understood what she’d tried to tell him that day at Cicada: life is a wheel that turns round and round, like a carousel.
She was going downhill living in the house where her daughter was bludgeoned. She slept a few nights at Phyll’s, but the bungalow was small; the producer was pregnant and sick and it was hard on them both. Sara asked her to stay in a guest room of the Brentwood hacienda. The garden and clean, cool walls were welcome. Ursula liked that the streets had no sidewalks. During the day, she puttered around the old Venice house, straightening up, watching TV, sometimes napping on Tiffany’s bed. Taj called from jail a few times and left messages on the machine—she refused to change the number because it still felt like a link to her daughter. Sara and Phyll couldn’t argue with that.
She was wonderful with Samson. Sara’s actress friends were always visiting, spinning bawdy, cynical Hollywood tales—so funny and compassionate and full of life—Marcia Strassman and Arleen Sorkin (she’d just had a little boy), Mary Crosby and Marilu Henner. And, of course, Holly and Beth Henley (Beth just had a baby too). Holly was so giving. She kept offering money and work. “Hey!” she shouted. “Be mah damn purrsonal ‘sistant!” Ursula wasn’t ready, but it was neat to get the offer. She knew Holly was sincere.
She found the infamous Dictionary of Saints at a used-book store on the Promenade and brought it to the children’s section of the library to read. Ursula felt safe surrounded by all the big, colorful books and lilliputian tables and chairs. The women who worked there assumed she was a nanny—or young mother, which she was and would always be. She re-examined the barbarous painting, as if remembering a childhood fever. Saint Agatha was often pictorialized carrying loaves of bread on a tray. The text said those loaves were actually breasts, sliced off by tormentors—that’s why she was simultaneously known as “the patron saint of breast disease and of bakers.” It was silly enough that she laughed. In other illustrations, the breasts were shown to be bells; so too was Agatha “the patron saint of bell ringers and firemen.” Something for everyone.
She didn’t dream anymore about the Roman brothel but knew that wasn’t a repudiation of her vision. She wasn’t sure how she had been so wrong about Taj’s role, but ascribed it to her lack of sophistication on the Inner. Ursula chose not to think about it for now. In her heart, she was certain Tiffany had been taken for a reason; in her heart, she knew the Mahanta was with her daughter at the exact moment she translated (the beautiful ECKist word for “passed on”). She had no doubts Tiffany was on the Soul Plane now. On one of his tapes, Sri Harold spoke about people translating because they had so much love for life that they needed more room to express it—that’s why they went to a “higher channel.” Ursula wondered if murder changed any of that; there was nothing in the Eckankar literature that pertained. Maybe Tiffany was ready to go but didn’t want to leave her mother so she drew this person Taj to aid in her translation. Something like that may have been true for Saint Agatha as well.
She poured herself into ECK volunteer and study groups. Ursula would do good works for those who had shown her kindness. She would heal herself through dreams and seek the Inner Master’s help in unwinding her karma.
Rachel Krohn
Aside from Tovah’s encouragements, Rachel didn’t know why she agreed. She couldn’t even remember giving out her number. When Mordecai called, he said they met at the seder, and a casually crass remark brought it all back: the one with the braces who owned the messenger service. (He probably got her number from Alberta, the portly yenta. Rachel called her Alberta, Canada, but never to her face.) So there they were, Mordie and Rachel at the movies, an Indian art-house flick she had wanted to see for a while. Surprisingly, he was attentive and cordial—aside from the trademark verbal gaffes, Mordecai Pressman passed for gallant.
The film was about a man whose wife dies in childbirth. Unhinged by her death, he becomes a vagrant. After five years of wandering, he guiltily returns to meet his son. Raised by in-laws, the little boy is a terror-on-wheels; they want deadbeat Dad to reclaim him. The boy, grown used to stories of a debonair father who lives in Calcutta, rejects the visitor’s paternal claims. In the end, the disconsolate widower refuses their pleas to take him by force, as would be his right. He departs alone. The child catches up on the outskirts of the village and asks if the man is going to Calcutta. “Yes,” says the widower, “if you like. Come with me.” The boy considers. “Will you take me to my father?” At this, Rachel cried—the true father before him and still the boy asks! The idea of a phantom father forever in Calcutta was so gorgeous and so sad to her, all at once. Mordecai handed her a handkerchief. “Don’t mind the spots,” he said, with a laugh. “It’s only chutney.”
They were supposed to go to dinner, but Rachel lied and said she had cramps. Mordecai dropped her off with a clumsy kiss.
She showered and slipped into bed. Will you take me to my father? The image of the cantor rose before her, crumbs of pottery on eyes and mouth, dirt on the heart. Then Tiffany Amber Sedgwick—for a week, she dreamed of washing her in a tub. As she soaped the tiny cello of her back, the little girl moaned like kids do when you try to rouse them for school, druggy and irascible. They just don’t want to wake up.
Rosetta Beth Howe’s bat mitzvah was celebrated at a temple in Bel Air, across the freeway from the Getty. Tovah tagged along.
Around two hundred sat in pews—lots of parents Rachel’s age, friends of the Howes’ who’d come with their kids, Rosetta’s classmates. Rachel was surprised all the hip-looking moms knew songs and Hebrew prayers by heart. Perry and Jersey flanked their daughter onstage. Eventually, Rosetta and the rabbi retrieved the Torah from its ornate tabernacle. The heavy scroll was placed in her arms and the girl, half hidden by its sacred blue-clothed bulk, held tight as she marched among the congregation. Rachel forgot exactly why they made you do that, but it was an impressive bit of pageantry nonetheless. The girl’s eyes deftly scanned the crowd as she dispensed sweetly modulated insider smiles to relatives and friends.
She was six months away from her own bat mitzvah when her father died. With the swift move to Menlo Park, the uprooting was complete—Rachel never saw her friends from Beth-El again. No more carpools and sabbaths, Succot and shofars, no more kissing of mezuzim on doorsills. Calliope donated her husband’s “religious accessories,” as she called them—his tallit and siddur—to the synagogue the way old clothes would be left at the Salvation Army. Each year, tradition faded while the Christmas tree grew gaudily redolent, its blinking, snow-sprayed branches heavy with goyische trinkets.
She made new friends in Menlo Park, and nursed a secret terror. Rachel had expected her period to come with the bat mitzvah; when that was broken off, she panicked. One by one her girlfriends fell to the red cabal, but for her the stainless months came and went like white clouds latticed across the sky. At night, flashlight under covers, she reread her underlined Leviticus, desperate to be “unclean.” They had studied the strange book in Hebrew School, with its ancient laws of sacrifice and defilement, delineations of forbidden sex and catamenial superstition: Rachel wanted the curse. She wanted to turn wine to vinegar with her touch or rust iron at the waning of the moon. She wanted to make mares miscarry. It was said a woman on her period might cause the death of a man if she passed between him and another, and Rachel wanted to try that in the worst way—she wanted to feed her blood to the neighbor’s cat and see if it would die. She yearned to be unclean, like the animals with “true hoofs but no clefts through the hoofs,” like the creatures that lived in the water but had no fins or scales, like abominations of winged, swarming things: eagles and vultures, falcons and ravens, ostriches, kites, hawks and gulls, owls and cormorants and pelicans, bustards, storks, herons and hoopoes and bats. She wanted the rhythmic drama of murderous potency, unclean. And when the bleeding stopped, she wanted to bring turtledoves and pigeons to the priest “so that he might offer the one as a sin offering and the other as a burnt offering; and the priest shall make expiation on her behalf, for her unclean discharge, before the LORD.” So said the Torah, and this is what she read aloud. But the vaunted discharge would not come.
Until she was seventeen. The temple was awash in blood: she kept black beach towels in the dresser, rushing to menstrual intercourse. She wanted to be unclean and make others so. Through her twenties and thirties, Rachel studied laws of Taharah HaMishpachah regarding a niddah, or menstruant woman. This became her Jewishness and perversely circumscribed expertise—her Orthodox window of stained glass. Marathon running made her irregular; so the doctors said. With a sense of belonging, Rachel noted she was a zavah, “one who continues to bleed beyond the normal period of her menses or who has bleeding at a different time of the month.” During that impure time, anything one slept, sat or rode upon (California King, LifeCycle, Land Cruiser) became unclean. The Torah distinguished between two types of vaginal discharges: a mareh was accompanied by specific physical sensation, while a ketem came with no warning—the stain simply discovered. The woman must always consult a rabbi to determine her status. Was she clean or unclean, tehorah or niddah? It depended on where the stain was found, its color and size. A ketem could only render a woman a niddah if it was the size of a circle around nineteen millimeters in diameter.
The woman must confirm by examination that the cyclical bleeding had ended. This was done with a three-inch-square cloth wrapped around the index finger, inserted deep into the vagina and rotated to detect any blood that might be hidden in the folds (a tampon wouldn’t do). The inspection could be done a number of times during the day, between douching. If questionable stains were still found on the cloth before sunset, it was to be put in an envelope and taken to a rabbi in the morning. At the end of seven spotless days, the woman would immerse herself in a bath called a mikvah; this was the only way to make the transition from tumah to taharah, tameh to tahor. It was necessary to submerge the entire body in the water, and the immersion must take place at night, “after at least three stars are visible.”
As the service ended, Rachel’s eye flitted to a passage in the book of Torah that she held in hand. It was a preface to Numbers and referred to the highest form of ritual defilement: contact with a human corpse. The rabbis called the human corpse “the father of fathers of impurity.”
The Red Cow; Laws of Purification
The rules regarding the red heifer are often called the most mysterious laws of the Torah. They prescribe a process of purification for anyone who has been in contact with a dead body….
The congregants adjourned to the anteroom for blessings over bread and wine. Rachel drank the little cup down, then quickly had two more. The mood was festive as the guests filed in and tore chunks from the challah. Rachel stood listening to the klezmer band, entranced. The girl from the mortuary stared through the glass—the sun white as the shroud shyly held to her breast. The room whirled and the floor broke Rachel’s black fall.
Ursula Sedgwick
She was in Century City running errands while Holly and Sara were at yoga. Army Archerd said in Variety that Holly had been set for Sight Unseen, a made-for-cable-movie “limning the political and spiritual journey of an abused wife who gives birth to a blind child” (timed to coincide with the publication of the book). Ursula thought that was brave—Holly could do any kind of international role she wanted, but here she was on Lifetime. That was the sign of a great actress: someone interested in the work and the part, not the glamour and the money.
Ursula got a hamburger at Johnny Rocket’s and sat in the sun, jostling Samson’s carriage with her foot. People passed and smiled and she remembered those times, rocking Tiffany in a public place. Nursing her. Packs of oblivious girls rushed by on their way to the cineplex—little foxes. They had long blond legs, and she thought of Tiffany.
Ursula chewed her burger and unfolded the map. She never knew odd-numbered routes went north-south and even ones (Route 66), east-west. Well, that was a handy thing. Minnesota was the “gopher state,” fourteenth largest in the Union—had only been a state a hundred and fourteen years. Chanhassen, site of the Temple of ECK, was just southwest of Minneapolis; she marked it in red ink. Sara said the Temple was pyramid-shaped and suffused with the Maha Nada, the great music of the ECK life current. Ursula couldn’t wait. She wasn’t going to tell anyone about the road trip, though folks would probably be relieved if they knew. If you fell in the lake, you were supposed to grab on tight to the rope that was thrown while they hauled you ashore—dry yourself off, shake a few hands and move on. But Ursula was still thrashing and no one liked to see that. People wanted results. That was only human.
She decided to send the ladies postcards, keep an album of the whole trip. That would be fun. She’d been pasting together a very special photo montage: Ursula and Tiff and Sara and Phyll and Rodney the dachshund on boardwalk, pier and Promenade; Planet Hollywood and Dive!; lolling around United States Island’s dry canals in their dungarees; carousing on the train to Sea World for an Eckankar family outing. She was going to have Kinko’s laminate it to a beautiful piece of wood—Ursula did that with a “Calvin and Hobbes” cartoon, the one where Calvin stares out the window and says, “You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don’t help.” She was going to give that to the Mahanta when they met in Minnesota.
Her first concern was fixing the Bonneville because, in its current shape, Ursula didn’t think it would make it to Chanhassen. The alignment was bad. She should hurry, though—an ECKist friend had been to a gathering in upstate New York and the Mahanta appeared ill; as a vessel for so much energy, his physical body was often under siege. The friend didn’t know where the Mahanta lived but was sure it couldn’t be far from the Temple.
“Mama, look! Its eyes!” A boy stood over Samson, who was now awake. “What’s wrong with its eyes?”
The mother grabbed him roughly by the wrist. She smiled at Ursula. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right.”
“He’s darling,” said the mother, peering into the carriage.
“But why are his eyes like that?”
“That is rude!” the mother exclaimed, mildly appalled. Ursula reassured the woman, then told the boy the baby was blind.
“But how did he get blind?”
“Well,” said Ursula patiently, “it’s just the way he was born.”
“Samson.”
“He is a doll. He’ll have no trouble finding his Delilah.”
“He already has,” Ursula said with a twinkle. “Me.”
The little boy asked his mother who Delilah was over and over until they were out of sight.
She was pushing Samson toward the Imaginarium when the two women collided. Ursula gasped, though wasn’t sure why. “Do I know you?”
Rachel’s eyes bugged, jaw trembling. “We—we met at—at the mortuary…”
Ursula fought for air. She sneezed three times, then burst into tears.
“Please, please don’t!” groaned Rachel, weeping herself.
“My Tiffany! My baby!”—dumbly backing the carriage away.
“Please! I’ve been dreaming about her…”
“You!—” Then Ursula remembered this was the woman who had washed her girl; the last to see her translate from this earth. “Was she—was she beautiful?”
“Please!—”
“Tell me! Was she beautiful?”
“Oh yes! So beautiful! The most beautiful thing I have ever seen—”
“And you…took care of her?”
“Yes! We took perfect care of her.” Ursula slowly deflated. “Are you…are you well? Can I—”
“Thank you!” shouted Ursula, abruptly heading for the long ramp beside Gelson’s.
The part-time washer of the dead gave chase and shoved something into her hand. “Take it! It’s yours!” Now it was Rachel’s turn to flee.
She stormed off, stymied and haunted—like a witch whose potions had all failed.
Jeremy Stein made good on his promise to take Perry to lunch at Ginza Sushiko. He brought with him the free-lance dealer he’d mentioned on the train. Berto was a sound editor at one of the big post-production houses in the Valley. His family had been in the watch trade and from early on, he was attracted to the aesthetics of the old pieces they repaired.
They were the only ones there. Apparently, the restaurant was so expensive it didn’t bother opening unless someone made a reservation; a hundred-dollar penalty was charged in event of cancellation. Perry said he wanted to try the fugu (you only live once, he thought) and was disappointed to hear its season came in November. It seemed fugu wasn’t poisonous in itself but enjoyed eating something that was. At any rate, the chef said he served it “young,” before too many toxins accumulated in the liver. The liver, of course, was the real delicacy—like most toxic things.
“You’d love it,” Jeremy said. “It’s rather like foie gras.”
The chef scowled, his English not up to a riposte. “Better than foie gras.”
“There’s usually a residual toxin in fugu: first time I had it, my tongue started tingling from the inside. I almost shat myself! Finally got it together to inform the chef and he put me right.”
Perry couldn’t help but wonder if stage-four adenocarcinoma was a tasty treat out there in the star-speckled vomitus of the Big Bang. Somewhere, a galactic cook was serving it up “young” (before chemo).
The men were delivered soups that made the counter smell of forest. Then came bowls of hot water filled with leaves; they dipped shredded sashimi within and each grabful swelled like a white rose in time-lapse bloom. Perry felt as if he’d ingested a mild psychotropic.
Berto knew the creator of Streets was interested in a minute repeater. He admitted he’d never sold one but said they could be gotten, at a price. A Vacheron Constantin retailing around a hundred and sixty thousand might be had for about half.
“You know, there’s a guy in Pennsylvania who will get the Swiss parts and make you a repeater, do anything you want. We’re talking a substantial reduction. See, a lot of these super-complicated watches aren’t manufactured by the companies that sell them. Look.” He jimmied the back of his wristwatch, revealing the works. “(I know just where to press.) See: Patek bought the ébauche—the raw movement—from Le Coultre. The big names aren’t necessarily the manufacturers. They do stuff to the watch, it’s not like they do nothing. Take VCRs: there’s ten thousand different kinds but only a handful of places that make the components. Okay?”
Jeremy picked his teeth with one of the hand-carved rare-wood toothpicks that sat in tiny reliquaries before each man. Perry popped an urchin in his mouth that elicited a primitive sense-memory of ocean. He’d suffered a lot of epicurean bores in his day, with their gustatory boasts and simpleminded metaphors; now he was one of them.
“There’s a European auction house called Habsburg you should know about, if you really want to go crazy.”
“Oh, he’s that already!” said Jeremy, eyes closed in ecstasy of octopus aftermath. “He’s totally gone.”
Berto pulled a Sotheby’s catalogue from his valise and flipped to a dog-eared page at the back. Lana Turner stood next to a thuggish-looking man on her wedding day, nineteen forty-eight. “That’s this guy Topping. There were two brothers, right? They inherited about a hundred and forty million.” On the center of the next page was a plain-looking wristwatch with a black band. “One of the earliest perpetuals—Topping was the first real owner, bought it from Schulz—and it’s a minute repeater and a one-button chronograph—that’s in the crown—and it’s got a moon phase. We’re talking nineteen thirty!”
Perry took a closer look. “It says ‘tonneau’—”
“Shape of the case. Like a barrel, see? It was made by this guy Schulz, who worked for Cartier.”
“Schulz made the ébauche?” Perry asked.
Jeremy winked. “I told you he was gone.”
“You’re learning! No,” he said, pointing to the text. “See? It says the movement wasn’t signed. Probably Piguet; they did a lot of the early complicated Pateks. This one sold for five hundred fifty thousand—and remember, we’re talking nineteen eighty-nine. But that’s an unusual piece.”
Dessert was a drift of shaved green ice adorned by a Fuji-esque snowcap of crushed kiwi. The bill came to twelve hundred and thirty-seven dollars and fifty-six cents, without tip. The two men offered credit cards, but Jeremy refused.
“That’s okay,” said the benefactor. “My treat. Next time, buy me a watch. Hey, Berto,” he joked. “Can you get a used Breguet for what we paid for lunch?”
“You could pay the tax on a Breguet—maybe.”
Perry got the elbow as Jeremy nodded toward the dealer. “Would you buy a used Breguet from this man? Oh!” His face lit up. “Know what I heard? I heard there was a black American Express card.”
“Yeah, Farrakhan has one,” said Berto.
“I’m serious. Perry, have you heard of that? It’s supposed to be for people like Bronfman and Gates. You can, like, buy buildings with the damn thing.”
“Or minute repeaters,” said Perry.
When they left, Jeremy gave the chef his card and made him promise to call at first fugu.
That night at the Century Plaza, Perry clutched his side and collapsed during the silent auction at a Luminaires fund-raiser for the Doheny Eye Institute. Jersey wanted to call an ambulance, but he stubbornly said the limo would do. The doctors were concerned the bowel had been perforated; they needed to go in and take a look.
“They might have at least let you keep on your tux,” Jersey said as they wheeled her husband to surgery.
“Listen,” Perry said groggily from the gurney. “I want my liver donated to the right restaurant—five-star.”
“What?” She smiled, wiping tears away with the back of a hand. “What is it, darling?”
“I want—”
“Tell me what you want…”
“—none of this Mickey Mouse Mickey Mantle rejection shit. And make sure it’s in season—says so on my driver’s license. Promise?”
“You’re a crazy man, but I promise. And I love you.”
She kissed him twice and he rolled away.
Out of the ICU, thank God. Two days in that sonsabitchin place. They fished a catheter through his groin and cleared a blockage in a valve, that’s how they did it now. Instead of a triple bypass they snaked in like plumbers through a pipe. Lavinia was there in all her weepy, slobby, hard-bitten splendor, like some kind of Kathy Bates. Frankenbates. She kept asking what was he doing in the middle of the street. Where was he going, what had possessed him? The old man thought it best not to answer. She’d have to move to Beachwood, she said—told anyone who’d listen—because her father couldn’t be left alone. But she would need help, who could help? She’d call her ex, that fuck, he wouldn’t lift a finger for anyone. Who, then? All his neighbors were so fucking old. Total care! Get real—that’s what they were talking about—and who paid? Medicare? Medicaid? I’ll tell you who: nobody! Nobody paid for total care, total care was for the rich! For English and Canadians, and the Swiss! But maybe the Motion Picture Hospital—Daddy, what were you doing, you could have been hit by a hundred cars! She railed against her rotten ex and Jabba the whore and the whole fucked up shitty planet.
“I’d like to have my radio, Lavinia.” She knew what he meant. “I’d like you to get it from the house.”
“They won’t let you have that here,” she said.
“Everyone has a radio.”
“Not that kind. You’ll be home soon anyway.”
“I see. You’re preparing my schedule? You’re a doctor now?”
“That’s right—so you better listen.” She reached into a gold Godiva tin for a marron glacé. “This is such a beautiful hospital. The paintings! On every floor. It’s like a museum.”
“Why don’t you move in, if you love it so much? You could give tours.”
Three in the morning. The nurse gave him Dalmane, but he couldn’t sleep. Lavinia refused to bring the scanner but he made her retrieve the script—its dirty pages gathered by paramedics from oil-stained macadam and, along with bruised Uniden, sealed in a Hefty bag—the very original draft of Dead Souls, put through anemic paces by Dee Bruchner so long ago. Pressed like a linty yellow flower within was the clipping from The New York Times:
Charles G. Bluhdorn, who built a small Michigan auto-parts company into Gulf and Western Industries, the multibillion-dollar conglomerate, died yesterday while flying home to New York from a business trip in the Dominican Republic. He was fifty-six years old and lived in Manhattan.
Jerry Sherman, an assistant vice-president and director of public relations for G.&W., said Mr. Bluhdorn, the company’s founder, chairman and chief executive, was aboard a corporate plane when he died. Mr. Sherman said the cause of death was a heart attack.
Severin sat by the window, touching the cool security glass with a bunged-up finger. The nail still had a fissure, all the way from Brooklyn, ‘thirty-one—looked like a miniature ice floe—when his best friend, Joey Dobrowicz, smashed it with a rock (by mistake, Joey said). Did he holler. He stared out the thick pane, trying to conjure faces, but the slate was gray, the drizzle dull. It was raining the night his Diantha died, in this very wing.
He went to the chair and sat down, winded by memory. There was something terrifying about chairs in hospital rooms, especially at night. An immense longing came upon him, and Severin revisited the time they first met…the Automat—For Me and My Gal—nineteen forty-two, the year Mr. Bluhdorn immigrated to America from Vienna. Severin was a Western Union messenger by day (extreme myopia would exempt him from the service), tyro novelist by night. Sometimes they threw him a few dollars to create a radio ad, but what he really wanted was to be an Author—do an All Quiet on the Western Front, or something in the Steinbeck vein—then hire out for the movies. When Diantha got pregnant, they took a bus to Hollywood.
He worked at Chasen’s for a while—
began his career in a New York cotton brokerage house, earning fifteen dollars a week. In nineteen forty-nine, he formed an import-export concern that he operated until, at the age of thirty and already a millionaire, he bought into the Michigan parts company.
Among its hundreds of subsidiaries, the most widely known are Paramount Pictures, the Madison Square Garden Corporation and Simon & Schus
What could it have been like to live with him? Diantha saw less and less of those she cared for. Corraled by his sickness, she became a mirror, herself house-bound and bizarre. It had never been easy for her to make friends. She lived for Lavinia, grown unsavory and irascible before her eyes; turned to her granddaughter, but Molly was in trouble early on, evaporating around the time of Severin’s own manic retreat—all that jail business broke Diantha’s heart. His wife would have no rewards; when she passed, Molly had been gone almost five years. Severin kept hoping their grandchild would appear at Diantha’s bedside and she did, yes she did, a day late, sores and scabs everywhere, tattoo covering her back, spidery rendering of a woman entered from behind by a skeleton with a scythe. For the last few years of her husband’s madness—five, really—well, ten—what Diantha really had then was Lavinia. Overbearing, unkempt, gloomy, abusive Lavinia.
He saw his wife hanging in the air outside the window, a blown out, blighted angel dragged to hell by the gagman’s caravan of black humors. Severin came to the Beachwood bedroom once and there she was, rocking, eyes slammed watery shut, hands over ears to evict the scannerbabble.
Mr. Bluhdorn’s favorite expression, said an associate, was, “What is the bottom line?”
Didn’t even bury her—too busy waiting, and waiting still! Why had he been so indulged? They should have done something, rancorous and violent, lacking decorum, caved in his head and smashed his machines, chased him down with wild children and devoured him on the beach.
It was pouring. A thousand gargoyles spat rain at the windows (Diantha gone now) with fatal, mischievous mouths. Severin slept.
Oberon Mall was dead.
Mitch had a flu, and Calliope asked her to come to the service at Hillside Memorial Park. Rachel showered when they got off the phone. She was showering at least five times a day, skin chafed from overwashing. Mortuary parking lot lustrations hadn’t been enough “to remove death,” not by a long shot—in fact, the effort was risible. According to the Hebrew Bible, even a mikvah couldn’t banish the intensity of the tumah of a corpse. This is where the red heifer came in.
The cow would be slaughtered, then burned with cedarwood (the mightiest of trees—HOPE), hyssop (because it grew in crevices—FAITH) and “crimson stuff” (from the scarlet worm—CHARITY) added to the fire. The ashes were to be mixed with living water, not stagnant, then sprinkled over the unclean—all in addition to immersion. That’s what it took to emerge tahor. This particular law of Torah was one of four that remained unfathomable to even the most faithful of interpretants, the others being: marrying one’s brother’s widow; not mingling wool and linen in a garment; performing the rites of the scapegoat.
She put on the brown Armani her mother had bought for her birthday. To calm herself, Rachel recited the laws. When a wife entered the niddah state, she and her husband could not touch. They could not comb each other’s hair, nor could they brush lint from each other’s clothes. They couldn’t even hand objects to one another, a small child being the rare exception. They were forbidden to sit together on a sofa unless another person—or, say, cushion—was set between them. They may not pour each other drinks, nor should a husband eat or drink from his wife’s leftovers, though she could eat from his. If the husband didn’t know the leftovers were hers, it was all right for him to eat. If someone ate from his wife’s leftovers first or the leftovers were transferred to another plate, the husband could eat them too, as long as the wife had left the room. While she was unclean, he was not to sit on his wife’s bed, smell her perfume or listen to the sound of her singing….
They drove through a phalanx of paparazzi at the cemetery gate.
This, the green freeway-bound park where her father was laid.
It was Calliope’s genius to stage a reunion via this ballyhooed alternative event. The psychiatrist was a public figure of sorts, a bit-player perennial in the media drama—she would upstage the cantor (with a little help from Oberon), as he had upstaged her in that shattered time. She wanted him to feel her feathers as she swept past his table with the VIPs. Yes: it seemed to take forever but now all the bodies were in their proper place. Mother and daughter could have their mikvah.
Donny Ribkin and Zev Turtletaub said hello. They were joined by Katherine Grosseck. Calliope said she was glad to finally meet the real McCoy, and Katherine quickly filled Zev in on the impersonator scandale. Then the screenwriter said: How can I be sure you’re the real Calliope? “By her hourly fee,” said Donny, and everyone laughed. More jokes were made, belaboring the theme of the double. Before they broke off, Donny said he and Katherine were a couple again. Calliope offered congratulations. Zev said they were together only because Katherine’s directing career needed jump-starting.
“Donny Ribkin was a patient of yours,” said Rachel, reiterating what she’d already been told. She felt a bond with the agent, an illicit kinship.
“Not any longer. Not for months.”
“Did he—does he know about Sy…and his mother?”
She nodded. “Just recently. He called to say he found her diaries.”
“Well, didn’t he think it a little strange? I mean, that you were the wife of the man that his mother was—”
“Of course, he thought it was strange. It is strange.”
“I just can’t see how—how you ever could have agreed to see him as a patient, Mother. Knowing that—”
“I made a choice, Rachel. Doctors make choices.”
Rachel felt like making a choice of her own: to kick off her heels and sprint up the hill to the Mount of Olives, where the cantor awaited. She had cedarwood in her purse, and minty hyssop too—a small fire would be kindled at grave. She would perform the rites of the scapegoat while Aztec laborers shut off tractors, respectfully turning away.
Leslie Trott shook hands like it was a collagen convention. Calliope was always pushing her daughter to see him. A few years ago, Rachel gave in, but the emperor was overbooked. She wound up in a distant room, far from Big Star country—the Mount of Olives suite—where a dull colleague cheerily burned off a minuscule nostril wart.
“How long did you see Obie, as a shrink?”
“A year. A very troubled girl.”
“Isn’t it…inappropriate for you to be here?”
“I don’t know where you get your ethical bulletins from, Rachel, but no. I’m a human being. I dance at weddings and I cry at funerals.”
“You haven’t cried yet. Did you visit her in the hospital?”
“Yes. She couldn’t speak. At least, I couldn’t understand her. She mostly blinked her eyes. The doctors said she knew what had happened to her—the mind apparently wasn’t affected.”
Rachel was startled to learn the Big Star was a Jew. She couldn’t help wondering who prepared her for burial. In her mind, she saw the sexpot legs guided through Donna Karan pjs, silken string twisted nine times at the waist, then looped into the letter shin, which stood for God—though, at time of death, she was probably already clean as a whistle. When you’re rich and paralyzed like that, private nurses were always sponging you down.
“You look too thin, Rachel.”
“I feel fine.”
“But are you? I worry—”
Rachel silenced her with a hug. Only a month ago, such a gesture would have been unthinkable for either one.
Calliope pointed out the mother of the deceased, a mountain of a woman who looked slightly deranged. Her enormous bosom heaved in laughter and tears at Leslie Trott’s words. Eventually, he eulogized only to her and the grievers blushed to be privy to such intimacies.
They drove to the beach, north on PCH to points unknown. The sky looked like the bottom of an old porcelain bowl. When the rain began, it felt like the end of the world.
Calliope smiled dreamily. “We used to make this drive all the time, remember? San Simeon, Big Sur, Point Lobos…Do you remember what Sy used to sing?”
“We’re off to see the Wizard!—”
“And Simon—what was that crazy song…”
“‘Hit the road, Jack…’”
Together: “‘And don’t you come back no more, no more, no more, no more!’”
They laughed and sang some more.
“Well, how far should we go?”
“Till we run out of gas.”
“Thelma and Louise.”
“You know, she’s a client—or was, for a while.”
“Thelma or Louise?”
“Geena—whichever one she was.”
The rain stopped. They got burgers and fries at a roadside place and crossed to the beach. Calliope had a blanket in the trunk. They spread it on a picnic table and faced the frothy gray-green tubes.
“This is nice,” her mother said.
“Mama,” said Rachel, plaintively. “I can’t stop washing—since I found out—about Father…and then there was this—this horrible thing—a little girl—this tumah—we washed her—and this whole—and, and the red heifer!” She laughed, then sobbed with great embarrassing snorts. “I don’t know, Mama! I think I’m going crazy!”
Calliope clasped her daughter’s hands and looked deep in her eyes, like a hypnotist. “Rachel, you are not. It’s just terribly sad and terribly confusing…”
“Well, I’ve been acting pretty strangely lately! Maybe I should—be—on an antidepressant or something.”
“We can certainly investigate that. You wouldn’t be the first.”
“I don’t know if anything will help.”
“Just talking about it helps—a lot. Believe me.”
“Oh yeah?” she said, sweetly chiding. “How would you know?”
“I have a little bit of experience in that area.”
Rachel shook her head tearfully. “Everything is a tumah—”
“What is this tumah, darling?”
“Mama, I can’t get clean! Haven’t you ever felt like that?”
“‘Out, out, damn spot,’” she intoned, like a schoolteacher. “But there is no blood on your hands, Rachel! There just isn’t. You know, sometimes there’s a difference between the truth and what a child perceives to be that truth.”
“Mama…did you know there’s a moth that feeds off the tears of elephants? Human tears, too—I read about it in National Geographic. It pokes the poor thing’s eye just so it can drink the tears. What kind of world would have such a thing?”
“Darling, please—”
“And there’s a bug—they call it a burying beetle. It digs the ground out from under dead things and buries them. I saw a picture of one, digging the grave for a mourning dove…” Rachel stood, unable to go on. She wanted to throw herself in the water, but her mother chased her down and held fast.
“No, baby! No!” she shouted as Rachel seized with tears, straining toward the maliciously indifferent surf. Calliope steered her back to the car, cloaking the frail, shivering shoulders in the blanket as if she were a princess—a mourning dove—who had launched her dead on a floating litter, toward unforgiving seas.
Ursula Sedgwick
When Taj Wiedlin hanged himself, Ursula took it as a sign for her to go. She went to Travel Shoppe and booked a deluxe sleeper—that’s what Sara did when she visited her mom. Ursula wouldn’t have felt safe on the road. She never got around to fixing the Bonneville, and besides, it was too big a target. They changed trains in Portland and began the journey east.
The cars were uncrowded. Ursula befriended a porter, a kind, fiftyish Captain Kangaroo—looking man. He was married, from Red Wing.
“Chanhassen,” he echoed, a little unsure, then scratched his head. “That’s a suburb—boy, I should know that place. Relatives there?”
“Sort of. What’s the weather like now?”
“Well, it’s going to be a pretty hot Fourth of July, I’ll tell you. June, July and August are generally humid.”
“My friend told me Bob Dylan was from Minnesota.”
“Hibbing. Oh, we have many famous people. Loni Anderson, Roger Maris, the rock singer Prince—though my daughter tells me he doesn’t call himself that anymore.” Samson shifted in his sleep. “Lots of writers, too,” said the porter. “Sinclair Lewis—he wrote Main Street—and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby.”
“They made a movie out of that.”
“Sure did. That was Mia Farrow. There’s a woman who’s had nine lives.”
“And nine children, at least.”
The porter thought that was funny. With a glance at the baby, he asked about her husband. Ursula said she was separated. “That’s a shame,” he said, tickling Samson’s neck with a finger. “You’re a pretty one, aren’t you?”
“He’s actually a boy.”
“Oh, I’m sorry—never could tell them apart, even my own. You know, you really ought to go to one of the fairs while you’re there. Best in the world. And come the Fourth…”
“County fairs?”
“Granddaddies of ’em all! Oh my, I’d guess St. Paul has the biggest fairgrounds in the whole country. There’s Forest Lake, Pine City, the Cokato Corn Carnival. ‘Princess Kay of the Milky Way’—that’s a beauty pageant. Win, and they carve your face in butter.”
“I’m not so sure I’d like that.”
“When I was a boy, they had midways: sideshows and tattooed ladies, weird stuff in formaldehyde jars. Things are a bit different now—well, they’re a lot different. Biggest entertainers in the world come by to sing. Garth Brooks, Tony Bennett. Anyone you can think of.”
“Maybe I’ll take my friend’s mother. She lives in St. Cloud.”
“Oh, she’ll take you—we don’t like to miss our fairs. She’ll have you baking cakes and riding a greased pig.”
“Well,” Ursula said, standing with the sleepy boy in her arms, “I guess we’ll be taking a nap.”
“He’s got a head start on you.”
“It’s contagious.”
The bottle fell from the seat to the ground and the porter retrieved it. “That’s a real pretty watch,” he said, noticing it on the thin wrist as he handed the bottle back.
“It was a gift—an unexpected one.”
“Best kind. Anyhow, you go ahead now. I hope I haven’t talked your ear off.”
“No, I liked it. Hope you’ll talk some more.”
“You just let me know if you need anything,” he said, “with the baby and all. I’ll bring you dinner in your berth, if you like.”
Ursula weaved the clacking way back to their compartment. She locked the door behind her, closed the shades and lay down with Samson. They were still in Montana, with Malta, Glasgow and Wolf Point to go—then Williston, Stanley, Minot, Rugby, Devil’s Lake, Grand Forks…St. Cloud. Sara’s mom’s was the third stop into Minnesota. Ursula thought maybe she would just drop the baby off. She’d been so full of hope at the start of the trip, sure that the Mahanta would meet her at the Temple because of her tragedy—then certain he’d lay healing hands on Samson’s eyes and help him see. Now, the bottom had dropped out. What arrogance! Hadn’t her friend said the Mahanta wasn’t well? Who did she think she was with her false charity and selfish expectations, her profane misjudgment of the Light and Sound of God? Sri Harold Klemp was not put on this planet to lay hands on anyone, let alone at their convenience. She’d been so controlling; it was time to let go. There was nothing to do but fall asleep and hope the Living ECK Master would guide her.
She dreamed of her daughter. Tiffany waited at the Temple of Golden Wisdom and told her mother to follow. “Once you’re here,” she said, “we’ll cry a river of tears. And when our tears dry up, we’ll come back to Earth to live again.” When Ursula awakened, it was night. She went and found the porter.
“Well, that must have been a good nap.”
“Is it too late for supper?”
“I kept yours warm,” he said, with a wink. “I’ll bring it to your room.”
She stood between sleeper cars, and the cold bit the tops of her cheeks. A man passed through and nodded. Ursula thought she saw a vast body of water out there in the dark. She wondered about it—too early for Devil’s Lake. She looked at the watch the woman from the mortuary gave her that day in Century City. It was a Tiffany: that’s how Ursula knew her daughter was reaching out. They belonged together, and now was the time. If they did return to Earth like she said in the dream (Ursula secretly hoped they would journey to a different plane), her only wish was to be far away from all the people and places that had hurt them. She stuck out her wind-clipped head and inhaled. How nice it would be to start fresh, to come back as anonymous passengers on a train—or summer cotton-candy eaters at a county fair.
Ursula smiled, raising her leg with its flowery tennis shoe atop the steel half-door. Princess Kay of the Milky Way, ha! hoisting herself up, Mama, come!—
Faces carved in butter.
Perry Needham Howe
It turned out to be old-fashioned appendicitis. When the doctor said there was something else, Perry got the gooseflesh: he didn’t want to know. No, listen, said the doc, the nodules shrank, saw it on the pre-op X ray, plain as day. Little buggers were practically gone from the left lung altogether. But what did that mean? Naturally, the doc didn’t know. Was it a good thing? he asked, animatedly cautious. Yes, said the doc, it was definitely a good thing. Then Perry pulled back emotionally because he didn’t want to get sucker-punched—that’s what cancer liked to do, ambush for a living. He asked what they were supposed to do now, and the doc said nothing, nothing to do but “follow it,” eyes peeled, ears to ground. The producer giddily theorized he was making so much money even the cancer was intimidated and the two men shared a nicely cathartic moment of comic relief. Perry asked if he was still going to die, a bullshitty question but he wanted to know. It’s a good question, said the doc. Then he gave him the trusty Zen of Common Sense standby, the old listen-whatever-you’ve-been-doing-don’t-stop-because-you’re-doing-something-right speech. When the doc left, Perry got on the phone to his wife.
Rachel brought mail and a videocassette to the hospital. She looked terrible. When Perry asked what was wrong, she broke down and confessed—she never returned the watch. She gave it away to a homeless person instead. Perry was further confounded when she handed him a personal check for fifteen hundred dollars, less than half the cost of the misappropriated item. She wanted to know if he would be kind enough to deduct the balance from her bi-monthly paychecks—unless, of course, he wished to prosecute. Rachel said she was prepared for that. When he pressed her to explain, she fled in tears.
Perry popped the “Calibre 89” into the VCR, perusing the cover.
Calibre 89
THE MOST COMPLICATED WATCH IN THE WORLD
Total development time: 9 years
(Research and development 5 years—manufacture 4 years).
Total diameter. 88.2 mm. Total thickness: 41 mm.
Total weight: 1100 grams Case: 18 ct. gold
Number of components: 1728, including 184 wheels—61 bridges—
332 screws—415 pins—68 springs
429 mechanical parts—126 jewels—2 main dials
24 hands—8 display dials.
The two-sided Patek denoted the time the sun rose and set; the date of Easter; the season, solstice, zodiac and equinox. There was an alarm too—when the carillon of its “grande sonnerie” sounded, the melody was nothing short of an especially composed theme of some sixteen notes. A pinion drove an astral map with a night sky that, thanks to a “modern method of gold evaporation under vacuum,” was able to show twenty-five hundred stars grouped in eighty-eight constellations. This supreme mechanism (forty-eight thousand man hours in the making) was even a thermometer. The tape showed its works in micro-, fetishized detail; one of the satellite wheels depicted within took four hundred years to make a single revolution.
“Where’s Harold Lloyd?”
The sprightly old man from down the hall peeked through the door at the monitor. “Well, hey there. How you doin’ today, Severin?” He freeze-framed while his visitor took a closer view of the enlarged cog.
“Where’s Harold Lloyd?” he demanded. “Didn’t you ever see Safety Last?”
“Now, which one is that?”
“Harold Lloyd! Hanging on for dear life from the hands of a big clock.”
“I know the image well, but am embarrassed to say I’ve never seen the film.”
“A beautiful movie. So when are you checking out? If you’ll excuse my use of the term.”
“Tomorrow morning. You know, I’m actually getting a lot of work done. I’m gonna miss the place.”
“‘Please don’t talk about me when I’m gone,’” sang the old man. “Heard the one about the guy who married an older woman?” Perry smiled, cocking an ear. “She comes out of the bathroom on their wedding night and Junior jumps her. ‘Hey!’ she says. ‘Slow down! I’ve got acute angina.’ And Junior says, ‘I sure hope so because you’ve got ugly tits.’”
Perry began to snigger—guardedly, because he was already sore from the earlier jag. Then he couldn’t help himself and laughed until he almost bust a gut.
Severin Welch
To be his age and so rich, with a cancer: sweet Jesus, but that was the hand you were dealt. The Kid said it was in remission, but that was always a crock—no self-respecting cancer knew from “remission.” The Kid should be free and clear. Turtletaub should have it, right in the prostate or deep in the anus better yet, sitting poolside with his purloined scripts and Lady Schick’d legs. The old man prayed the cells were already splitting like sonsabitches, tarring up his stool but good.
Severin liked the Kid. The Kid was hung up on high-dollar watches. People were crazy any kind of way and so what. He could sure as hell afford it. The Kid was a swell connection to make; you never knew how you’d meet people (it helped if you left the house). He’d really opened up to the old man, gotten intimate about his disease and all…He could help him find an attorney, a Kid like that was bound to have them on retainer. Because I will have to deal with Mr. Turtletaub eventually, no way around it. He’d ask about it before he checked out in the morning—much as Severin loved the phone, some things were best done mano a mano. And pronto. No time like the present. Why wait. Kid seemed in pretty good shape. Good mood. Why not? Stroll over and watch some more of that crazy cassette, chat him up. Severin had already given him a little background. Not much, just a taste. The Kid was cordial—a real gentleman.
He turned and walked toward Perry’s room, not caring anymore, not really. No expectations. Only wanting justice or a measure thereof—to be acknowledged and credited, partially recompensed. He’d solicit his new friend’s help, his new friend who had to have as much money—more!—than any Turtletaub could ever dream. Plus he’d kicked cancer’s ass, and how was that for clout?
Severin spied him at the end of the hall in a natty robe, sharing his super-complicated mania with the Vietnamese nurse. As the smiling old man got closer, he shrieked and toppled, eyes rolling back in his head. They were dragging him from a great pyramid; a stone had fallen and was lying on his chest. He surfaced on a bed. Perry held his hand and they had the old man’s teeth out. He was crying. Doctors were everywhere and Zev shoved a needle in while Lavinia hooked him to a machine—the scanner!—wired into Voices of America like a switchboard Medusa. Why don’t Molly ever come? What went so wrong with that girl? You wait and you wait and—Can you hear me? asked a smooth-faced Doogie. Someone kept lifting the stone and dropping it down, lifting and dropping, like him and Joey used to pin beetles with a rock on the thorax—Can you hear me, Mr. Welch? Tried to speak. It’s okay, said Nurse Lavinia, the Kid nowhere in sight. It’s all right, you’re going to be fine…saw the Kid again, old man’s vision suddenly lake-stream clear, bad Samaritan Perry just outside the door, helpless—he looked so pained and so lost, Severin wanted to talk to him, prop the Kid up and make nice, he felt bad, too much death in that extremely wealthy young man’s life already, didn’t want any part of that ghoulish diorama, he wished the Kid would just look away: hooked up now to his Radio Shack gills, American Voices filling him up: house of the rising souls—Can you hear me, Mr. Welch?
There it was again, the idiot query. Dr. Bluhdorn leaning over, persistent, the mantric question again and again Can you hear me?
can you—me?
hh
HEAR—
losing you
Mr. Welch!
The stab again, and stone settling down like a cold house. They worked like athletes, breaking ribs to rouse the heart: ringing, ringing, ringing—Mr. Welch would not pick up.
Rachel Krohn
After twenty-five years, Rachel stopped training for the unnamed, unannounced event. She left the track and stinging night air, cold turkey. Her mother once said she ran away from her life; Rachel thought that a lame analytical cliché. If anything, she’d been running toward it, trying to catch up.
“May I help you?”
“I work for Mr. Howe.”
While the saleswoman retrieved the linen, she browsed the pillow puffs encased in delicate brocade. She found sheets she liked, Egyptian cotton at twenty-two hundred a set. Rachel smiled: there was no end to luxury. She thought of the torn shroud—so pure—and realized that for the rest of her life some part of each day she’d spend washing and dressing and tucking the little girl away. Such was the prayer now carried within, and Rachel finally understood. She would write to Birdie, thanking her for that mitzvah.
The saleswoman appeared with an elaborately gift-wrapped bag. Rachel hovered over the Egyptian bedsheets. “Aren’t they extraordinary? Those are three-hundred-and-eighty-thread.”
“Yes,” she said, guiltily withdrawing her finger from the fabric folds. “A bit beyond my budget—I’d be too nervous to sleep.”
“Oh, I think you’d sleep fine.”
Rachel sat in the bath, scented candles burning. She’d told her boss the story behind giving away the watch—about the seder and the chevra and how she had bumped into the dead girl’s mother in the mall. It moved him to share his own loss, something he had never done. He wished he’d known of the taharah “then,” he said. He would have washed Montgomery himself. They talked a long while, but Rachel came away feeling something between them had been torn that couldn’t be mended. She’d stay on a few months before giving notice. She was tired of living in the city, anyway. It was time to leave—time to surprise herself. “We moved swiftly.” Wasn’t that what the woman who killed the cougar said?
She felt flushed and, stepping out, turned on the light—the water was pink from her discharge. How wondrous, she thought, to be clean and unclean at once. That was her; that was Rachel Lynn Krohn, forever and ever. What were the laws regarding a woman who bled into purifying waters? Whatever they were, she would not abide.
She sank into bed, exhausted. She reached for the folded paper tucked under her alarm—the prayers said over the dead. She read aloud in slow, measured tones.
His head is like the most fine gold, his heaps of curls are black as a raven…His eyes are like doves beside the water brooks, bathing in milk and fitly set…His cheeks are like a bed of spices, towers of sweet herbs…His lips are roses dripping flowing myrrh…His arms are golden cylinders set with beryl…His mouth is most sweet and he is altogether precious…This is my beloved and this is my friend—
It was her father she was reading to, and she hoped he wasn’t suffering. Everyone had suffered enough, hadn’t they? So, good night, Father! she said. I wish you hadn’t left so soon, I’ve missed you! Good night now…
All is forgiven.
Perry Needham Howe
Perry navigated through the river of static. He knew Tovah was thanking him for the sheets, but she was hard to hear. Can’t wait, she said—something about—oh: can’t wait to give them a trial run.
Perry, are you—
whn…cming
Perry?
Perry can you hr
She was breaking up and there wasn’t a sunspot, canyon or high-tension pole in sight.
Tovah had a place near Beverly High, on Moreno. It was the first time he’d been over and that excited him. The two-bedroom was smallish, immaculate and bright. The decor was flowery, with a touch of Judaica; he would have thought a middle-aged woman lived there. She showed him the Pratesi duvet and he kissed her, parting the robe to touch her bush. Tovah smiled, then modestly covered herself, retreating to the bathroom while Perry undressed.
“I have some meetings set,” she said.
“I haven’t even mentioned it to Jersey.”
“Oh. Do you think she’ll have a problem?”
“I don’t know. She shouldn’t. But I’ve been thinking…why don’t we aim our sights a little higher?”
“Meaning—”
“Why don’t we do it as a feature, with an A-list director—a Barry Levinson or a Jonathan Demme.”
Tovah came back in and sat on the bed, hair spilling down around shoulders. “We can absolutely do that. You know who would really spark to this? Penny.”
He nodded approvingly. “Or—I don’t know. Maybe someone like Jane Campion. Do you think she’d be interested?”
“I love Jane—we represent her. She’s shooting, but we can get it to her in a second.” She put her hand around his neck. “Perry, that’s a wonderful idea.”
“I just want to get the best people. Or at least see if the best people might want to be involved.”
They pitched the story of Montgomery’s life and death over the next few months. Nothing in Hollywood was a slam dunk, especially the story of a nine-year-old boy who, upon prognosis of death, became a most peculiar savant.
He noticed his son’s abilities one day when Jersey called out from the hall to ask the time. Montgomery responded to the second, from a feverish sleep. He had become a living chronograph, a perpetual calendar, a minute repeater—the boy with a caged tourbillon heart and titanium soul. The passage of hours suddenly had color and music and texture so that time was jazz and symphony, algorithm and blues, a drum and a psalm, a hootenanny that began in his forehead, washing over enamel of skin, his very joints the jeweled movement, head a cabochon crown, eyes the sapphire glass that read the jumping hours, organs the ébauche: the very expression of his being the grandest of complications. This child, who knew nothing of calendar arithmetic, gave the name of the week to dates ten thousand years in the past or thirty thousand in the future for each and every day of every year man had breathed or would give breath still: knew the sundial length and breadth of those days, and all the sidereal noons and midnights—and more, had perceived the very moment of his death. Seven months and a handful of days before it arrived, Montgomery wrote it down in cool, untrammeled hand and laid it in a drawer.
Perry sat in the library. Jersey slept. Perhaps it was time to end his affair; he hated having used the cancer as an excuse to betray her. So graceless. He knew now that he was getting well.
A special two-hour block of Streets was on. He watched it in MUTE, sipping his gin. Tonight, the cops were in Venice chasing a creep who’d killed his girlfriend’s kid. Christ, he looked like a kid himself. They brought him back to the house so she could ID him. The girlfriend peered through squad car glass, but the perp stared down till they forcibly raised his head. “That’s Taj,” said the woman, dead-eyed. Just then, the paramedics wheeled out the victim and loaded her into the ambulance, with the mom climbing in. Good show—you couldn’t beat closure like that. Emmy time.
He slit the envelope and removed the card. There it was, in his son’s sinistral scrawl: March 7, 1989, 4:07:20 A.M. He weighed the paper in his hand like a collector’s curio—a watch that would remain unwound. It was heavier than anything Henri might have strapped to his wrist. The Monsieur said chronograph was Greek for “I write the time.”
Perry stuck his finger in the gin and dripped a bead down. It bubbled over the ink. He rubbed until the numbers ran, smearing to illegibility. He smiled shakily, lower lip jigged by unseen leprechauns, holy creatures of time and space.
March 7, 1989, 4:07:20 A.M.—Montie’s death, on the nose.
How’s that for closure?
