I’m Losing You

by Bruce Wagner

  “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 HEAR

  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 excite
d 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?