by Bruce Wagner
“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 croo
ks 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?”