I Met Someone

by Bruce Wagner

  “The exhausting part doesn’t happen until the red carpet! And the junkets. But I do feel a little guilty—you should all be at home. It’s so kind of you to accommodate my sometimes ridiculous life.”

  The banter went on in that vein, the mutual praise and phony apologies, with shyer, lesser lights down-table testing the waters by volunteering a clumsily worshipful remark about the star’s body of work and their general gratitude at being born in her time—apart from the incomparable joy of meeting her today in the flesh, breathing the same air, potentially sharing the same sewage plumbing, etcetera. Allegra wondered how high the bullshit would fly.

  A stately woman in head-to-toe Missoni said, “I cannot remember when our team has been this excited about a fragrance.”

  “I’m excited too!” said Dusty.

  “I like to tell Anton,” said a raffish man, clearly a “creative,” “that the Dusty Team is a bit like the Venus flytrap.”

  “Oooh!” said Dusty. “Love me a Venus flytrap!”

  “I promise we won’t close on you all the way,” he added.

  “It will be a velvet glove!” said Dominic.

  The same smile had been slapped on Allegra since she’d arrived, and her face was starting to ache. She felt like a block of ice with teeth stuck in it; a rube and a loser.

  The Missoni said, “You’ve been the Holy Grail around here.”

  “Aw!” said Dusty. “That’s so sweet.”

  “Welcome to the Bartok family,” said Anton.

  They spontaneously applauded and Allegra thought, Oh my God, it will not stop! They were so far up Dusty’s ass you’d need a search party to find them. She wanted to rogue out. I’m gonna spray this fucking room like the self-radicalized homegrown lone wolf I am!

  Dominic gushed about the most recent film she’d won an Oscar for—five years ago, already—and was echoed by a chorus of heartfelt, anachronistic congratulations.

  “Aw, thank you!” said Dusty, as if she’d come straight from the ceremony. “You know, I always think of wanting to do a Woody and not show up. Can’t seem to pull that off!”

  “That was your third, no?” said the Missoni. “Bit of a rare club.”

  “Fourth time’s the charm,” said Dusty blithely. “Am I greedy?”

  “We’ll be there when you accept the fourth,” said the chair.

  “And the fifth,” said the “creative.” “And the sixth!”

  “Let’s talk about the fragrance,” said the chair, down to unctuous brass tacks. “We are expecting to do very well.”

  “You are going to do very well,” said Dominic to the star.

  “Oh no! I can’t deal with the pressure!” said Dusty melodramatically. “But I want to do well. Like, White Diamonds well!”

  “It is our high hope,” said Anton, “that it may be arranged.”

  “Dusty, we are looking at this on a White Diamonds scale,” said Gertrude. “We believe we definitely have the same potential.”

  “She was my hero,” said the actress, with a crestfallen little girl look.

  “We used to go drinking in West Hollywood,” said the “creative.”

  “Oh my God,” she shot back. “Me too! At the Abbey? Why didn’t we ever see you there?”

  “You may have,” he said coyly. “I might even have bought you and Dame Elizabeth drinks.” He winked. “I am nothing if not discreet.”

  “You are so not!” said Gertrude, and everyone laughed.

  Dusty turned to her wife and said, “It’s important to me that Allegra is very much involved.” The crew nodded, almost gravely. “Her taste and her instincts are amazing.”

  “Of course!” said Anton to Allegra. “You are in our family now!”

  “Like mafia, one can never leave,” said the “creative.”

  The Missoni ogled her and said, “Allegra, you have incredible style.”

  The “creative” took in her biker jacket. “Rick Owens?”

  “Yes,” said Allegra, more stiffly than she’d have liked.

  “I love Rick,” said the “creative.” “Rick and Michèle.”

  “Michèle?” said the Missoni.

  “Lamy,” said Gertrude. “His muse.”

  “I just saw them in Paris,” said the “creative.” “There’s a huge statue of Rick in front of Selfridges . . . and the furniture he designs—my God.”

  They included Allegra in their space now, as if to cue her, and she hungrily took the bait, offering, “Aren’t his furnishings amazing?”

  “So genius,” said the “creative.”

  “We have some in the Zurich office,” said Dominic.

  “I didn’t know Rick was fabricating furniture,” said the Missoni.

  The “creative” swiveled toward her to enlighten. “Some of the pieces are . . . promethean. They’re incredible! Museum pieces—literally. They always remind me of Rodin.”

  “We have a few,” said Allegra, très engagé, her cherry taken at last. “At Point Dume.”

  “A bed in one of the guest rooms,” said Dusty. “It’s petrified wood, isn’t it, Allegra? Like, thousands of years old. You don’t actually go there to nap—you go there to die.”

  Everyone thought the remark was beyond funny.

  “And crazy expensive,” said the “creative.” “I mean, crazy-crazy.”

  Some talk ensued about the scent itself . . . kudos to boutiques such as Le Labo and Byredo . . . the Osmothèque in Versailles. Legendary “noses” that might assist in creating DNA (none of whom Allegra recognized) were bandied about with cryptic, gossipy bluster, and even a little aside about Chanel No. 19 between Dusty, the Missoni, and Gertrude went over her head. The celebrity wife was at sea.

  “Allegra’s been working on some amazing designs for the bottle,” said Dusty.

  “They’re very rough,” said Allegra, adding, “They’re in the conceptual stage.” She thought that sounded dumb, but—too late.

  “We’d love to see them!” said a bookish man who hadn’t yet spoken. He wore a green tunic and a gold Aztec-y medallion around his neck.

  “We eagerly welcome,” said the chair, directing his comments to Allegra, “we solicit your help in this creative process.”

  “What do you think about ‘Ecco’?” said Allegra boldly, to no one in particular. “With two c’s?”

  “Ecco, Ecco!” said Dusty, in ludic enunciation, a bad actor “doing” an Italian. “I love it!”

  “It is lovely,” enthused the Missoni. “We wanted to use it last year, didn’t we, Paco?”

  “We did,” said a cherubic, self-effacing down-tabler. “We had some hassles with the ‘Ecco Bella’ lawyers, so didn’t pursue.”

  “Maybe open it up with them again?” suggested Dominic, knowing the effort would be futile. “Do some reaching out?”

  “They were fairly adamant,” he said. “But of course.”

  “Then what about ‘Echo’ spelled E-C-H-O?” said Allegra, in brainstorm mode. Fun! “Can you get around it that way?”

  “I like your mind,” said the Missoni, showing her canines.

  “That belongs to a competitor,” said the chair. “But—it’s a process. Sometimes more of a process than we’d like.”

  “How about a movie theme?” The ideas were flowing. “Something related to the cinema?”

  (Dusty, proud mama, thought it so cute that, surrounded by Europeans, Allegra invoked “the cinema.”)

  “Well, we love that,” said the Missoni.

  “Something like ‘First Team’? Or ‘Final Touches’ . . .”

  (Dusty saw that the names had been in Allegra’s pocket all along—little secret weapons. Proud!)

  “‘First Team’ might be a little sporty,” said Dominic. “But its energy is rather charming.”

  “I love ‘First Team,’” said the Misso
ni. “And ‘Final Touches.’ Really great. But I’m wondering if they convey the glamour.”

  “‘Final Touches’ is intriguing,” said the chair, though in truth, more conciliatory than intrigued.

  Allegra was heartened and said, “What about ‘Last Looks’?”

  “There’s a lovely poetry in that,” he said. “Though I think with both of these—‘Last Looks,’ ‘Final Touches’—we wish to avoid anything too funereal.”

  Of course he was right and his clarity broke the bubble.

  (He wasn’t the chair for nothing.)

  “‘Scent of a Dead Woman,’” said Dusty, not making fun of but rather seeking to riff away her wife’s defeat. “From Al’s movie! That way, we keep the theme of le cinéma.”

  “Our first choice,” said the chair, “—and of course we want to involve you in this decision, both of you, of course nothing shall be approved without your complete assent—our first choice is one that’s been in the marketplace for years under many different auspices. Which actually gives us wherewithal in terms of trademark.” He paused to make a steeple with the fingers of his hands. “We’ve given this a tremendous amount of thought and the feeling was unanimous: ‘Dusty.’”

  Gertrude said to Allegra, “It is not yet un fait accompli.”

  “Not at all!” said the chair, realizing his announcement may have been premature, and slightly impolitic.

  Dominic stepped into the breach. “It was one of those eureka moments. We said to ourselves, how could we call it anything else?”

  The star tilted her head and gazed out the window, turning over the eponymous nom de fragrance in her head. With a half smile she slowly raised her eyes from the hem to the collar of an invisible sky.

  “One of those forest-for-the-trees things,” said the bookish man.

  “If we can clear it, no one will remember its other incarnations,” said Dominic.

  “Oh, we can clear it,” said the man in the green tunic, assassin-like.

  “Clear the forest—for the trees,” said Dusty.

  “Have we cleared it?” asked the chair, suddenly businesslike.

  “Yes,” said an unidentified man, far enough away to be practically out the door.

  “‘Dusty’ for women, ‘Dustin’ for men,” said the actress, not entirely serious. Her thoughts roamed elsewhere.

  “‘Dusty Rose’?” said Allegra, startled by her own eruption.

  The Walmart-y suggestion instantly made her cringe. She thought she saw the “creative” and the Missoni lock eyes. She was about to deflate her own idiocy with a joke about Dusty’s white-trash fan base but fortunately had become paralyzed.

  “That’s owned by a competitor,” said the unfazeable faraway man.

  “And it’s lovely,” said Gertrude, ever charitable. “But they got there first.”

  “It is kinda downscale,” said Allegra, rousing herself. “Plus, her middle name isn’t even Rose.”

  “I could change it to Rose,” said Dusty supportively.

  Allegra died a little.

  “So much of what we do is about getting there first,” said the chair diplomatically. “And so much of what we do is . . . intangible.”

  The actress smiled and put a hand on her better half’s.

  —

  She had been staying in the guest cottage but couldn’t sleep. She walked past the pool to the kitchen in the main house, made herself a soup bowl–sized cup of champurrado, then stole away to the den with a bag of marshmallows and medley of books.

  She tucked her knees into a cashmere throw and dug in. As was her habit during trying times, she picked through their library’s shelves with messy, surefire alchemy to gather a healing wildflower bouquet. One of the selections was a strange meditation on loss-of-pregnancy grieving rituals, acquired just after her first miscarriage. The Japanese memorial practice was called mizuko kuyō. Wikipedia dryly informed that “mizuko” meant dead fetus but she preferred the book’s claim of literal translation: water-child. It said the root—mizu—meant “lost” or “unseen.” Allegra thought that beyond beautiful.

  She plucked yet another flower and softly read aloud:

  There are no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue,

  no body, mind; no color, sound, or smell;

  no taste, no touch, no thing; no realm of sight,

  no realm of thoughts; no ignorance, no end

  to ignorance; no old age and no death;

  no end to age and death; no suffering,

  nor any cause of suffering, nor end

  to suffering, no path, no wisdom and no fulfillment.

  The Heart Sutra was supposed to be everything you ever wanted to know about Buddhism but were afraid to ask, though it only made her think of her baby. Her babies—lullaby of things unseen and unsaid, things almost-but-never-were . . . maybe that was Buddhism—the presence of absence and the absence of presence. The aroma of nothingness might have comforted if only she weren’t suffering so.

  She pulled an anthology of Greek myths from the nosegay, remembering a picture book she adored as a little girl. Her mom got it at the Salvation Army just before they left the Family, right around when Willow began an affair with the itinerant, charismatic American guru named Gridley Wright. She joined his group, the Shiva Lila, and early one morning they all ran off to India, leaving the last of Allegra’s American “stepfathers” behind. (Shiva Lila was a child-worshipping cult, though you wouldn’t have known it, because a lot of the kids were never vaccinated and wound up dying of diphtheria.) Even as a six-year-old, she knew she was living inside an allegory—the word was almost her very name—and sought confirmation in the colorful storybook’s exuberant grandeur: sheer escapism from the tawdry Olympus of dirty magic, delusional soothsayers, and beleaguered, narcissistic women who littered her adoptive communal worlds.

  The hyper-sexualized child had obsessed over the story of Tiresias . . .

  When he separated two snakes having intercourse in the middle of the road, the female became so enraged—Allegra the adult couldn’t blame her!—that she punished his meddling by turning him into a woman. After seven long years, the transgendered Tiresias saw the same snakes fucking and somehow reasoned that if he interfered again, his maleness would be restored. He was right; his original form was bestowed. When Zeus and Hera squabbled over who enjoyed lovemaking more—man or woman—they asked Tiresias to judge, as he alone had experienced both sides. Strangely, it was Hera who insisted that men received the greatest pleasure. But Tiresias ruled in favor of the gentler sex, calling their ecstasies tenfold. Hera was so peeved at being contradicted that she blinded him. Being Tiresias was a bummer.

  She thought it would make an amazing screenplay, abetted by the culture’s ravenous appetite for all things intersex. The version in her hand (while sipping Mexican hot chocolate in the other) implied that Tiresias became a whore during his phallic exile, making Allegra even more passionate about the transgressive prospect of adaptation. But when the thought of her unfinished Children of God script swiftly intruded, inspiring winds poured through tattered sails.

  She ruminated some more on that mad time. She hadn’t been altogether honest with Jeremy about her early experience; there was much she was ashamed of and much she’d repressed. It was true that while Allegra remained mostly amnesiac about the Family’s ritualized sex-play, she knew bad stuff happened in India for sure. A few years ago, to her dismay, a persistent childhood masturbation fantasy resurfaced, featuring a totem cock that sprung from her nine-year-old cunny like a genie when summoned. She could fuck women with it, and boys too. (Another memory: frottage was the prepubescent sleep aid of choice.) She vividly recalled what the thing looked like—the real, veiny deal. Yuck. It wasn’t so much the Boschian precocity of the image of her bedangled cherub self that alarmed and mesmerized, but the ensuing speculation over the nature of dark materials, lost and u
nseen, that drove poor, gypsyfied Alice-Allegra through the looking-glans. A mishmash of nefarious, arousing, troublesomely indistinct home movies played double matinees in her head throughout her late teens. If she’d blacked out their content for nearly twenty years, what else might soon be resurrected?

  The myth of Tiresias was so compelling because it held the seeds of both punishment and a child’s polymorphous perversity in hand. Yet no one would arrive to separate the snakes, no one but Allegra the Orgasmic Dragonslayer—for in her wild, ambivalent couplings, she dreamed herself to be the seer come to her own rescue, who would then be betrayed for telling the truth about the poisonous, anarchic power of sex. (Rendered blind, might she at least be rewarded with the power to un-see all that she’d seen?) Along with retribution for whistleblowing came the deep consolation of prophecy—a double bind the child would have eagerly embraced, because she’d have sacrificed the pantheon of gods and Mothers themselves to foresee how her story would end.

  —

  The set was cleared while Dusty and her co-star rehearsed for Bennett. Only the D.P. watched from the periphery, and Bonita, who would make a late entrance in the scene.

  The lovers lay in bed. The Marilyn was blowsy, radiant, and real—like one of those JPEGs of what movie stars might look like if they hadn’t died young. When the First shouted, “Very quiet! We are rehearsing!” the people milling around the soundstage suddenly deactivated, staring into their phones like recharging droids.

  The director hovered over the actors as they ran their lines, occasionally watching through a handheld lens like a referee poised above wrestlers.

  “Arthur’s in a major fucking funk,” said the Marilyn.

  “Talk to me,” said Dusty.

  “At a certain point, male artists just keep going back to the well.”

  “You mean the womb. And not just artists! All men. Ted’s been so depressed.” Dusty paused. “He can’t fuck.”

  “Tell me about it! Arty never could. Maybe if I wore a mask . . . of his face! The man would not eat pussy under threat of death.”

  “You could dangle a Pulitzer down there . . .”