I’m Losing You

by Bruce Wagner

  Donny Ribkin sat at a table with Oberon Mall and the producer Phylliss Wolfe. They were lunching at Sweets, an ICM haunt on Beverly and Sweetzer. Phylliss really owed him for this. She’d been trying to put together an indie remake of Pasolini’s Teorema for years now, with an interesting spin: the Terence Stamp role of the libertine stranger would be played by a woman.

  Phylliss Wolfe was lanky and elegant, with buttery hazel skin. She apotheosized all the New Yorkers Donny’d ever known—brusque and intimate all at once, quick to laugh and trigger-haired when it came to perceived affronts. Although she’d been a fixture on the independent scene for more than a decade, the last few years had been colorless; Phylliss hoped Teorema would change all that. She knew how difficult it must have been for the agent to have gotten Obie’s attention, let alone nailed down a lunch. The fact that Katherine Grosseck, his beloved ex, happened to be the writer on the project further martyred him.

  “Did you go to the screening at Zev’s last night?” asked Donny.

  Obie nodded, attacking the chef’s salad. “I have never laughed so hard in my life. I was hemorrhaging.”

  “What movie?” Phylliss had a mouth full of onion rings.

  “The new Batman. It was horrible.”

  “Let’s cut to the chase,” Donny said. “Did you play Rim the Host?”

  “He had the runs—how could we resist?” Phylliss laughed, and Obie lit up. “Can you smoke in here?”

  “Can I? No. Can you? Probably.”

  Just then, a waitress approached and said she’d have to put out her cigarette. Obie scowled at Donny while she stubbed it in a butter dish.

  “Told you,” he said.

  “Anyway, Moe—Trusskopf—started coming up with titles for porn movies. Mostly gay, of course.”

  “This is so much more wholesome than I imagined.”

  “There were all these categories and sub-genres…”

  “She used the S word!” interjected Phylliss.

  “The S-G word,” Donny added.

  “We did movies: Sleepless in the Saddle…”

  Phylliss submitted Forrest Rump. Obie practically spit onto her plate, gratifying the producer.

  “We went on for hours,” Obie said. “I wish I could remember—why didn’t I write them down? I am such a pig. We did this whole music thing. Mamas and Papas…‘California Reamin’—’”

  “Now we know why all the leaves are brown,” volunteered the agent.

  Obie guffawed and Phylliss took another shot: “‘Long Time Coming’?”

  “That’s good,” said Obie, cordial and imperious, “but it’s the wrong group. You have to stay with the group.” The producer deflated.

  “I have the best,” Donny said, pausing dramatically. “Thirty Days in the Hole.”

  Cachinations all around.

  “I love that. Then we got literary.”

  “A Hard Man Is Good to Find,” offered the producer. She knew she had a winner.

  “Oh my God!” said Big Star. “That is so fantastic.”

  “Wait a minute,” said the agent, clinking a glass with his fork. “I have it. I have the ultimate.”

  “Tell us.”

  “Are you ready?”

  “We’re ready! Tell us!”

  “The Catcher in the Y.”

  No one would top it. Obie exploded with glee.

  “I don’t get it,” said Phylliss.

  “You’re so unhip,” said Donny, disgruntled.

  A handsome young man with five or six tiny hoops in each ear was led to their table—Phylliss’s assistant. He handed his boss a packet.

  “Eric, you know Donny. Oberon, this is Eric, my guy Friday.”

  Obie gave him the lech. “We should put him in Catcher in the Y.”

  “Been there, done that,” said Phylliss. “Right, Eric?”

  “If you say so.” He smiled.

  She turned to Obie. “You’re an icon to him.”

  “It’s a dirty job,” said Big Star, “but someone has to do it.”

  Phylliss raised an eyebrow at the loitering Eric, then sarcastically gave him his walking papers. “Well…we’d love it if you could stay but—”

  Eric adored Phylliss, and was used to her public paddlings. He smiled shyly, bowed his head then left.

  “Thank you, Eric!” Phylliss called out musically.

  “Cute,” said Obie.

  “Here’s the cassette,” said Phylliss, setting Teorema by Obie’s purse. “Latest draft’s in there too—the Grosseck draft.”

  “Efficient little fuck,” said Obie, looking Donny’s way.

  “I wouldn’t know,” he said. “But she is full-service.”

  They gossiped about people who were dying. Phylliss mentioned a friend, a screenwriter with AIDS who recently took a turn for the worse. Suddenly, he was getting ghoulish e-mail: prayers and solicitations from a network of God freaks he called the Internuts.

  Donny, the good agent, dutifully brought them back to Phylliss’s project. Obie said she’d recently screened Salò, and Phylliss was surprised to hear the filmmaker fascinated her enough that she’d once considered optioning a biography, Pasolini Requiem, with the intent to produce. Naturally, the idea of playing a young woman who becomes the sexual obsession of a suburban family appealed to her immensely; Obie’s instincts were always to shock. Though Phylliss knew Big Star was bold (most often for the wrong reasons), she cagily emphasized the commercial elements along with the avant-garde.

  “It’s like a darker version of Boudu Sauvé des Eaux—the Renoir film.”

  “Down and Out in Beverly Hills.”

  “Yes!”

  “Then it’s a comedy?”

  Phylliss scrunched her mouth up, a translator pondering nuances of an ideogram. “It is funny—unbelievably so. But I don’t think I’d call it a comedy.”

  Donny laughed. “It’s definitely not a comedy.”

  “Do you have a director?”

  “We’re close.”

  “Jane Campion would be so great.”

  “I love Jane,” Phylliss said, “but I don’t think she’s available.”

  “Well, I love what this is about. And your stuff is always so great—I love your shit. And I’m so fucking sick of the studios. I need to do this.”

  “It’s not a very long shoot,” said Phylliss. “And it’s all in L.A.”

  “I wish it was in Miami—or New Orleans.”

  “If that’s really an issue—”

  “Naw. I don’t wanna fuck you up.”

  “She just bought an amazing house in Palm Beach,” offered the agent.

  “The two cities are so similar,” said Phylliss.

  “Fuck it, I’ll do it in L.A. I’ll be cool.”

  They toasted each other. They were having their Get Shorty “done-deal” moment—a sort of druggy group hysteria that Phylliss knew usually led nowhere. No matter. Strokes from Oberon Mall were better than a pass from Sandra Bullock. More fun, anyway.

  “By the way, we are changing the title.”

  “Teorema would be kind of a tough sell.”

  “Too artsy.”

  “Thirty Days in the Hole?” Donny shouted.

  “The Man Who Came at Dinner.” Phyllis was choking.

  “No! No! The Man Who Came on Dinner.”

  Airborne again with her flotilla of Chanels, up, up and away, sucked from Bel Air over park and Palisades, Topanga and Pepperdine and Point Dume, ocean and asphalt and greensward, then the buses of Hearst Castle, faraway confetti of tourists filling Serena with the kind of mournful nostalgia roused by the drone of prop planes or secret garden wishing wells. She felt a fathomless burning. She sat atop a maypole, like the novelty eraser on a child’s pencil, remembering the Great Intruder. That’s what she was on, then—a metastatic tour of the Americas, a Cook’s cancer carousel of the Western world. Impaled thus, riven by pain and douched by morphine, she kept her stabbing vigil on the highest sail, nightwatch on the old crone’s nest. She’d be first to sight
Raccoon Cove, the gelatinous waves of its mossy harbor flecked with sodden offerings: crumbcakes, sheepskin shag and tiny buoys of meperidine ampullae.

  There was Sy, waving from the dock. They first met at Beth-El, the Wilshire Boulevard temple where Donny went to Sunday School. Her marriage was on the rocks. Sitting at those services, Donny’s little hand in hers, she fixated on the tall gray cantor while Bernie fidgeted, dreaming of Vegas or studios or whatever it was Bernie Ribkin dreamed, sitting with sore and stinky cock, unwashed from last night’s whore-fuck. To Serena, the burnished wood of the pews always smelled like coconuts and musk—as she imagined the skin of the cantor—and for her, this odorously illicit concatenation made her pulse pound. Rejoice: she watched the deadpan cantor silently clear his throat, neck shifting mysteriously, Sy Krohn, the inscrutable religious pro, and the Ribkin family stood along with all the others when his songs began, prayerbooks open for talmudic anthem, this soignée, beaten-down housewife who could actually smell the cantor’s balmy breath, redolent of Listerine and borscht, matzo brei and brisket, beer and kugel; she built an aromatic bridge to him, tendons of ambrosia, sandalwood and heliotrope, jasmine and rose—high altar of attar. He lifted the span with the tension of his voice and held her aloft while Bernie vanished to the men’s room or sidewalk with a sixty-dollar cigar. They journeyed together, cantor and mistress, a powdery pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, Gaza and Alexandria, Palmyra and Damascus. Skirting the Empty Quarter—Rub al Khali. To Athens they went—along the way, eloping from the caravansary and camping in a grove of tamarisks, near a spring-fed pool. Sy roasted a young goat over thuriferous firewood and served tea thick as molasses. He tore into her Arabic tail, slicing it open, licking her spit. Come morning, she awakened in his arms beneath a cloudy anvil of monsoon.

  The congregation sat again, jarring her reverie. As the rabbi spoke, Sy faded to the wings to begin his trademark mucosal rumblings. Once she was his, Serena resolved to do a makeover. A few adjustments, that’s all. Get him to stop putting grease in his hair, that’s why he had the dandruff. Then, in the middle of these absurdities, Donny looked into her eyes, freed by the absence of his father, a strange beseeching look, the abstract, abject entreaties of a small boy’s nameless misery. The seven-year-old could not give his heartbreak a voice—the cantor would have to speak for them all. The congregation would rise again as Serena fell back on her fantasia: East of Aden, there they were amid merchants and drovers, wending through souks with the imperturbable charm of post-coital complicity: stalls of cinnamon, cardamom, turmeric and thyme, ivory, indigo, coffee and galls. He gave her myrrh for menstrual cramps, and ground red coral for the abrasions from their lovemaking, resin from the dragon’s blood tree. The cantor wore blue loincloth, scabbard and jambiyya. Gone were the grease and the talis, the flaky skin. Under hallucinatory skies of eagles and crested hoopoes, through fields of wheat and fire-red aloes, rock-laden baboon-screeched wastelands and stands of lemon trees they went, Sy and Serena, until reaching the vulcanean cliffs of Hisn al Ghurab.

  Bernie rejoined them, sliding onto the bench (that reeked of the mucus of her love), soft and honey-smooth as a bowling lane. It had been hell for almost four years; he hadn’t touched her in three—why didn’t he leave? Because of the child, he said. But we’re killing the child! Their rancor was sloppy and public. Why hadn’t she forced him out? Because of the child…

  Soon she would go to the cantor, to save her soul. She didn’t care what it took. She would corner him, talk to him, make him touch her. He had a wife but that meant nothing. She would ask him to sing—to her alone. She would tell him that spices rode on his voice and that he should stop putting grease in his hair. She would say she was lost in the Rub al Khali and would he please take her arm lest she be swallowed by the dunes.

  Simon decided to wait a few weeks before calling Calliope to apologize. They’d been through this type of blow-up before. The bad part was, this time he needed rent money.

  He came up with a great idea for a Blue Matrix episode. Simon would call it “Heart of Arknes,” Arknes being the name of the Vorbalidian navigator’s long-lost mother, a fierce warrioress who died in a tribal feud when Fista—Hassan DeVore—was a boy. His idea was to bring her back as a hologram, the computer-simulated virtual images of dead loved ones made available to lonesome crew members on request. Fista “checks her out” at the library but begins having doubts; the ectype seems too real. What if it’s more than just a hologram? Fista starts seeing Mom everywhere—on the bridge, the engine room, infirmary—this time wearing nurse’s whites; that time, ensign’s blues. Fista fears for his sanity. After a violent outburst, the Captain throws him in the brig to cool off. Only one person believes him: Statler, the Malclovian hermaphrodite and ship’s cook.

  He fantasized about success. After all, his story idea was sound and there was personal entrée—not only was a Matrix producer a former client, but the series’ star was emotionally dependent on his mother. Simon surmised that psychologically, on all kinds of weird Freudian levels, Hassan DeVore would be dying to please Calliope by doing her son this favor, even if the whole business might appall her. He would have to keep his mother from finding out until after the fact, until the thing was on the air, if that was possible. He’d make sure to inform Hassan that secrecy must be maintained, this was an adventure, a “gift” to her from the two of them. Simon ached to be another Harlan Ellison—or Dean Koontz. He read in People that Koontz had a full-time staff whose sole function was to keep track of worldwide royalties. Things would be different once Calliope saw the In Style photo spread of Simon at his Santa Ynez ranch, romping with Arknes 1 and Arknes 2, his purebred Rhodesian ridgebacks. He’d make sure the guards turned her away at the gate if she didn’t call first. Mitch the fame-slave would kiss Simon’s ass so deep they’d need the Jaws of Life to pry him out. No estoy problemo! Simon would still go on dead animal treasure hunts, for the sake of photo op and keeping his hand in. It’d be good press to show the Emmy-winning oddball under a house, doin’ what came naturally. Harlan typed short stories in bookstore windows; Andy Kaufman bused tables; Larry Hagman wore chicken suits to his own black-tie galas. Why shouldn’t Simon Krohn man the maggot brigade? The Pet Sematary pinup would even keep the scurvy Datsun pickup—that’s right, leave it right there in the garage between the Corniche and the Cobra. He might eventually buy an exterminating business, that would be the coup d’éclat. A profitable one, at that.

  The phone rang. Serena wanted him to come to the house again. He reflexively began the sixty-five-dollars-just-to-say-hello spiel but stopped himself. She had pots of money; that made it easier. She was lonely, that’s all. He’d make a token inspection, then sit awhile, like a volunteer at a hospice.

  When he got there, it was late afternoon. Simon hung back in the entryway. The regressed old woman sat on the living room couch while a doctor gathered up his medical bag. “If the spasms return, I want you to call.” Serena nodded meekly. The nurse stood by the piano watching, vaguely aroused, vaguely punitive. “You’ll promise to call then, Serena?”

  She bowed her head contritely. “Thank you, Dr. Stanken.”

  “You know, this business of being brave is for the birds. And I know Donny has encouraged you to use the phone. Serena?” He squatted before her, staring into her drifting, blepharotic eyes. “You need never suffer from pain again—not so long as I am here to help. Do you understand?”

  “Thank you,” she mumbled, mouth pursing involuntarily in the wake of the gentle scolding. Stuart Stanken took his bag and said goodbye. They were suddenly face to face in the front hall.

  “I—I’m the Dead Animal Guy,” he whispered. Nothing else came to mind.

  “I’m the pain guy. Nice to meet you.” The doctor smiled, sailing out.

  The nurse swooped on Simon officiously. “You’ll have to go—Mrs. Ribkin isn’t feeling well.”

  “Sorry to hear it.”

  “I don’t think she really needed you.”

  “I’l
l just take a quick look under the house and be on my way.”

  “This nonsense—if I had known she called—”

  “Juana? Is that the young man?” Simon muttered “Baby Jane” under his breath as the nurse turned back to the living room, steeling herself. He followed her in. “Why didn’t you tell me he was here?”

  “You should be going to bed now. You’ll be passing out from what Doctor gave you.”

  “I want to sit on the terrace.”

  “You should be lying down.”

  “I want to sit on the terrace, goddammit!”

  Outside, they propped her on a chaise, and Simon tucked a Ralph Lauren throw around. His knees acted as a hedge to keep her from falling.

  “Can you smell it?”

  “I smell skunk, but it’s far away.”

  “Poor raccoons—it’s their mama, I know it. How awful!”

  “How long have you been sick?”

  “Awhile. But I’m just about done.”

  Something stirred on the hill.

  “I could take another look. I mean, under the house.”

  Serena coughed, and he asked if she needed water. She waved him away. “I heard a marvelous joke. Farfina told me, she’s the night nurse. Stupendous gal.” She pointed toward the house with a hitch-hiker’s thumb and coughed some more. “This one—Juana—is a Nazi.”

  “I’m not excessively fond of the ladies in white myself. They’re all Nurse Ratcheds.”