by Bruce Wagner
Of a sudden, it came: she knew what she would do. The omen was that she hadn’t glimpsed the Sotheby’s Buddha—if it was Lisanne’s to give, the fates would have arranged for it to have been prominently displayed for her eyes to see. No. She would pass on to Burke Lightfoot what was already hers—the Supreme Bliss-Wheel Integration Buddha that Philip gave her. She felt her impulse instantly sanctified by the Source. The giving of the Supreme Bliss-Wheel Integration Buddha would create a space of True Love, and in that space, Kit’s healing could finally begin. Just as the death of Viv’s unborn child had created a space for Siddhama, so would the offering of the Bliss-Wheel Buddha create a space for metta, the loving-kindness that would heal all things. And after the healing, everyone—Kit, Lisanne, Siddhama—would return to Source. She was determined not to make the same error as the student monk. She would not mistake Mu for “no.”
As she walked out the gate, a gardener caught her eye and smiled with beautiful knowingness. She took that as another sign that her instincts were sanctified. Still, she would need to prepare the father; simply bringing the Buddha unannounced on her next day of Riverside service would be presumptuous. Best to be humble. Her pulse and step quickened. She would ring Mr. Lightfoot up and tell him she had a gift that was certain to bring the house—and his son—great peace and prosperity.
Turbulence
TIFF PROMISED DANIELLE Steel he would come to San Francisco for the Star Ball, a benefit for the Nick Traina Foundation, a trust named after her late son. When Philip heard about it, he suggested they fly up on his jet. (Lisanne was shocked to learn Philip even had a jet.) A high-end bunch tagged along: Clive Davis and Quincy Jones, Sharon Stone and a friend, Robin Williams, Steve Bing, and Mattie’s friends Rita Wilson and Tracey Ullman. When Mattie had to cancel over some kind of dental problem, Lisanne became convinced it was a harbinger that the plane was going to crash.
Until takeoff, she hadn’t dwelled on her fear. But just as they began the steep ascent, she said to herself, What have I done? Tucking her head into Roslynn’s shoulder, she gripped the poor woman’s arm in viselike panic. Lisanne thought of those Quecreek coal miners and how much better off they were because even though the water was rising to their chins they could still be rescued, whereas no one in this cave would have the faintest glimmer of a chance. Then she thought of that skydiving woman she read about in People whose parachute had failed. The woman plunked straight down onto a hill of red ants and somehow survived. (At least she was already falling outside the plane, a detail that now seemed positively merciful.) Her descent had probably been slowed by the unopened chute, whereas Lisanne was locked inside the unforgiving crypt of fuselage and wouldn’t be free until an infinitesimal remnant of her charred cells commingled with rocky mountain or gulfstream or wherever it was they’d be blown to. Roslynn kindly stroked her head and said the usual bromide about little jets being safer than big commercial ones, and it sounded like the saddest, most fantastic lie anyone ever told—pure chicanery. The soothing pillow talk of demons when dying children lay their heads down to final rest.
Lisanne set her right hand atop her left, palms up, and closed her eyes. She’d learned a lot from Buddhist classes and workshops, and from her readings too, and thought now might be a good time to put some of it to use. She tried focusing on the breath at her nostrils but only managed to fixate on the rush and precipitation of freezing air outside the paper-thin winged missile—a skittish, sacrificial dance of crazy gusts, currents, and wind shear that teased at flawed engines, themselves nearly spent. The low thunder of turbines reminded her of the diabolically codified sounds described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
She tensed, bringing herself back with near-violence to the meditation that a friend had guided her through while on lunch break at the Santa Monica Zen Center: she struggled to visualize a tiny rainbow in her heart-center. Lisanne made the rainbow expand while envisioning the dissolution of all fear in her body, all disease, all obstacles. As in the Temescal Canyon metta workshop, she tried to imagine herself becoming abstract, losing human form until she was a lamp whose light emanated to all beings, transmuting gross, unmindful, mulish nature into pure awareness, the Pure Land. Why should she cling to this life? The Buddha advised to rid oneself of the defilement of clinging and attachment, but losing Kit and Siddhama would be insurmountable, far worse than losing the Buddha himself. Maybe everything—mind, heart, void—would have to be murdered. True sages were always saying “Kill the Buddha!” but she didn’t think that meant literally. Besides, she didn’t enjoy a phrase like that; it was antithetical to her true nature. Maybe, thought Lisanne, it was antithetical to her true nature to be liberated. If that were so, than nothing mattered anyway.
A bump of turbulence made her drop the thread. She was panting now, and Roslynn pried loose her grip. Lisanne focused on the others. Sharon and her friend were having a quiet moment, like they were at some romantic beach restaurant. He held her hand and stared out the window. A stewardess served drinks to the Clive-Tiff-Bing-Quincy clique. Q and Bing were laughing at something Clive had said. Q and Bing seemed to laugh an awful lot at just about anything.
Philip, Rita, and Tracey shrieked over some bit of business that Robin was up to. The comedian was spritzing about his good friend Lance Armstrong and the love-hate relationship riders had with their bicycle seats. He was in the middle of a limp-wristed riff on pinched gonads and ass cancer when Tracey, apropos of nothing, began singing dirty lyrics from the Jerry Springer opera her husband produced. She stopped in mid-aria to say that she woke up that morning with crop circles carved in her bush. She said the same thing happened to Meg Ryan, then did an eerie impersonation of Meg calling her up on the phone to tell her about the “situation.” Q overheard the last bit and totally lost it. Then Bing lost it again, then Rita and Sharon and Philip, in that hee-haw way Philip had of laughing that drove Lisanne up the wall—in the grip of her terror, she still had the energy to hate him for not having come over to check up on her, for pretending not to notice something was wrong. Philip was of that emotional school that taught, Ignore loved ones in distress.
There was a jolt and the plane dipped. Sharon woofed and Robin Three Stooges woo-woo-wooed and Tracey mimed an Edvard Munch while Rita, Bing, and Philip split a gut. Clive and Q suddenly began to shoptalk, drinking their drinks, cool as can be. Lisanne was convinced that if the plane had somersaulted, no one would have cared in the slightest. Everyone was rich and celebrated and impervious; everyone had logged God knew how many millions of miles on all manner of rickety aircraft without the faintest whiff of anxiety; everyone was blessed and they knew it. Lisanne tried her rainbow vipassana again, but as the jet chop-surfed jagged currents, she felt something collapse like scaffolding within. That Tibetan Book blackness rolled toward her like a carpet of smoldering asphalt, and try as she might she couldn’t remember anything of the teachings except the parts about the Wrathful Bloodthirsty Visions and the homeless souls gathering during intercourse at the genitals of a couple like flies on a piece of meat—
“How’s our girl doin?” asked Philip. Finally.
“She’s going to be fine,” said Roslynn, herself shaken by the force of Lisanne’s naked agonies.
Philip took a closer look. “Wow. We should have given her a Xanax.”
“I have Ambien,” said Roslynn. “But by the time it kicks in, we’ll be on the ground.”
“I think you should give it to her.” Philip stroked Lisanne’s head and said, “She’ll be fine.”
“Oh Jesus,” said Roslynn.
She’d been smelling something, and as she got up for the pills, she saw that Lisanne’s seat was soaked in urine. There were other smells too, and she quickly went into nurse mode, telling Philip to grab some blankets. A steward came with a pile, and after he returned with towels, Rosylnn dismissed him with a curt nod. Philip lifted his girlfriend, and Roslynn shoved a towel then a blanket under her to sop it up. She put a blanket on the floor beneath Lisanne’s stocking f
eet, covering her up with a third. Sharon, Rita, and Tracey came over and, once they understood what was happening, tried to comfort. Sharon stroked Lisanne’s head, and Rita said, “Poor thing, poor baby,” while Tracey said her daughter Mabel hated flying too, and that the turbulence they’d just been through was really nothing, nothing at all, they all said they’d been in a hundred times worse. Tiff broke away from Bing, Q, and Sharon’s friend, joining Philip and the ladies. He started talking about a bad flight he once had into Aspen, but Roslynn twitched her eyebrows at him to stop. Philip made Lisanne swallow a pill, and then the choppiness got bad enough that the pilot told everyone to strap themselves in.
Swathed in blankets, sitting on a cushion of terry cloth, Lisanne made a game of the speed in which she told the shit to leave her body. She nudged the feces back and forth before expelling it with slow, determined gallantry, envisioning the putrescence first as dark clouds of turbulence, then as disease and fear, finally transforming to rainbow light. In the relative silence that ensued (born not of the rough ride, but of the stymied group’s concern for Lisanne), she recalled the noble practice of cleaning Kit’s toilets and the peace it had bestowed and made the entreaty and promise that she would take formal refuge in the vows if only the Source and Oneness would now spare her, if only the Source and Oneness would let her return to Riverside for her sacred chores again, if only the Source and Oneness would allow her to live long enough to give her man the conciliatory gift of the Supreme Bliss-Wheel Integration Replacement Buddha.
Special Needs
BURKE WORE A chef’s hat and apron. Tula stood at the grill, in uniform: gargantuan three-piece C & R Clothiers relic and equally outsize grin. With fierce concentration, Kit Lightfoot, human pendulum, stood barefoot on the leather swing and propulsed a hair-raising arc. He was the biggest swing daredevil that Ulysses S. Grant or any other school had ever seen. No butterflies; no fear. Cela remembered watching when she was a girl, afraid he would fly off into space and shatter himself on the blacktop. Her heart used to pound, and there was something sexy about the pounding, even though at the time, she wasn’t sure what those kinds of feelings meant.
• • •
BURKE WAS LOADED. He went off on Cela about some shit or other while she did the dishes. Cela said she didn’t even know why she was doing the dishes because they mostly used plastic plates. She was loaded too and shouted back. Tula went to the car and read Robert Ludlum, which seemed to be the only thing he ever did read, same thick paperback, week in, week out. (When he finished, he’d just start over again.) Burke went out to the yard and stripped and sat naked in the pool with a bottle of Jack. Kit curled up on the grungy sofa and watched himself on an E! bio.
• • •
TULA STRETCHED HIS legs and smoked. Squatted down to sponge-soak the bumper sticker that someone had inexplicably gonzoed him with: MY KIDS THINK I’M AN ATM.
Razored it off.
• • •
KIT SAT IN PJ’S at the end of the bed.
Walked to the window and stared at the moon; heard a moan.
Padded through the dark hall toward his father’s room. Stood there at the open door. Burke’s bedside lamp was on. He was fucking Cela. She was on her stomach. He sensed Kit’s presence, swiveling his neck to stare at his son. They looked at each other awhile before Burke went back to his business. Kit fished out his cock and started to rub. He rubbed until he came, then ran to the living room and turned on the TV, ashamed. Cried and rocked and ate an entire bag of chips before getting engrossed in an old CSI.
The Standard Wrap
RUSTY AND BECCA waited in the vaulted living room. There was a shindig going on, and Rusty thought they’d forgotten about the wrap party. Then Grady popped his head in and said a limo was coming and that Rusty and Becca should just smoke a doobie and chill.
There was always some kind of happening on Mulholland. Cassandra usually had one or two QuestraWorld interns wandering around with a DV cam recording the nefarious goings-on for a work-in-progress prototype of “Been There, Dunsmore.” You had to watch your behavior.
“Hope they don’t do anything too weird,” said Becca, once they were more or less alone again. “Especially in front of Spike.”
“Like what?” said Rusty.
“Like embarrassing. Sometimes Grady and Cass can just be . . . really weird. Haven’t you noticed?”
Rusty laughed, coughing out weedsmoke.
They wandered outside, where Dr. Thom Janowicz held court by the pool. He’d met the Dunsmores through Grady’s lawyer, Ludmilla Vesper-Weintraub. Ludmilla sent a lot of clients Thom’s way, including those who had reaped windfalls from the city by settling wrongful arrest or racial profiling suits. It was Ms. Vesper-Weintraub’s feeling that having a ton of money dumped on you could be a hardship in itself; the golden downtrodden needed all the help they could get. Thom was an old college friend and someone she prized for easily relating to people of all colors and income strata. Aside from his workshops on SWS (sudden wealth syndrome), Dr. J was a novice screenwriter, and Ludmilla thought that he and the Dunsmores would make a nice fit. She was right. With his flair for storytelling and winning disposition, the amiable raconteur in horn-rims and tweed was already a regular in various “Been There, Dunsmore” episodes that Cassandra cobbled together on Final Cut Pro. Dr. J was also engaged to write a movie for QuestraWorld, for which, not being a member of the WGA, he’d been generously paid guild minimum.
Rusty wasn’t thrilled to hear that a wanna-be like Dr. J was already on the Dunsmore payroll. He was nearly finished with his own screenplay—they knew as much—and no one had offered him a goddamn thing. Grady countered that was because Rusty’s script predated the incorporation of QuestraWorld; he admitted having worked on it, at least in his head anyway, for years. Grady said that he still thought of Rusty’s “spec” as a QuestraWorld project, regardless. Well that’s good, said Rusty, peevishly. Keep thinkin. Think away. Have big ol’ happy thoughts. Because Rusty said that maybe he’d just take his script elsewhere. Fine, said Grady. Rock on. Prob’ly plenty of folks out there who love unfinished scripts. Shit, said Grady, you don’t even have a title. The fuck I don’t, said Rusty. Then I’d like to hear it, said Grady. Rusty got a far-off, suavely proprietary look in his eye and said, Gonna call it “To Kill a Unicorn.” Grady sat there nodding his head, quiet. I like it, said Grady. I like that. Shit, I really like that. Out from nowhere, in the kitchen somewhere, Cassandra shouted, Somebody already used that title. She said she saw a biography about Dorothy Stratten on the E! channel and that somebody already used that title in a book. About Dorothy and her murder. Grady said, So the fuck what, I like it. Hell, it’s good enough to use again. You can’t do that, said Cassandra. Bullshit, said Grady. You can’t copyright a title. Ask our lawyer. Anybody knows that. Oh yeah? said Cassandra. Then let’s you and me write a script and call it Star Wars, she said. That’s what we’ll call Rusty’s script, she said, laughing. Rusty said sagely, That book about Dorothy Stratten was called The Killing of the Unicorn. Mine’s called “To Kill a Unicorn.” See? said Grady. Know-it-all. See? Man knows his shit. Man done researched. Man knows all the titles out there. Knowledge is fucking power! Cassandra said, Whatever. But I still think it sounds like To Kill a Mockingbird. Yeah, snapped Grady, only it’s “To Kill a Fucking Unicorn,” which is not a fucking mockingbird, unless a mockingbird has a fucking horn in its head, which it doesn’t, last time I looked. You ain’t never even looked at a mockingbird, said Cassandra. Ain’t never even seen one. Yeah, well you’re gonna see one in a minute goin tweet tweet tweet with my fucking fist like a horn in your head if you don’t shut the fuck up. Fuckin hag. He turned to Rusty and said, I like it, man, I do. It rocks. You got the gift, man. You got it. Always knew you did. Then Grady said that Questra-World should have “first option,” and Rusty parried that people usually had to pay for first option. Just like you’re paying Dr. Phil. Oops, I mean Dr. J. Dr. J’s the man, said Grady. Gonna win hisself an Academy
Award. They went on like that, having a friendly go at each other, jousting their unicorn horns.
Becca had been telling Rusty for months that she wanted to read the script, but he always said he wasn’t ready. She never really saw him working on it. He kept saying she could see it soon, and she thought maybe he was planning to show it to Spike. Whenever Grady or anyone asked what the script was about all Rusty would say was it was a murder mystery that took place among horse trainers. Rusty used to work a lot around stables, at least he said he did anyway. On the sly, Grady told Becca, “You cain’t trust to believe half the shit come out that boy’s pretty mouth.” But Grady liked the whole racetrack thing. Ever since Cassandra told him about the Spider-Man kid starring in Seabiscuit, Grady thought that horse and jockey stories, or anything having to do with the track, were a sure bet. (Rusty said his movie wasn’t gonna be “no sobby, suckass Seabiscuit turd.”) He became more and more convinced that Look-Alikes was going to make Rusty Goodson a star and incessantly spoke to Cassandra about drawing up a contract to lock their homeboy into a QuestraWorld film at a bargain basement price. Grady read in The Hollywood Reporter about how even Kirsten Dunst’s hotshot agents got stuck honoring some craphouse deal she’d made with a studio way back when, before Spider-Man spun its billion-dollar web worldwide—if Rusty got hot off of Look-Alikes, QuestraWorld should already have him in the bag. Cassandra wouldn’t bite. She was more focused on the new baby than on Rusty’s screenplay anyhow. Focused on the reality show and managing their money. She loved getting loaded and sucking Rusty’s dick in a group thing, but she’d be damned if she was going to shell out cash for something that wasn’t even real. She pissed Grady off, but he kind of loved her for that.