by Bruce Wagner
When Allegra got back, they were dancing. Dusty was still dressed but Larissa was topless; all night long the young wife had prepared for this, inoculating herself against jealousy. Seeing her, Larissa covered her breasts in modesty, taking some comfort in the assumption the duo had enacted this scenario many times before (she would never know how wrong she was). She knew she was in good hands. Allegra welcomed Dusty’s maverick impulse because she’d been feeling so guilty over how she had treated her these last few months. There was something dangerously sexy about it too, because they were in uncharted waters. Sometimes bringing in another person was a point of no return.
Dusty changed into a robe while the others danced. Allegra kissed Larissa’s neck, watching the carotid pulse like a samba-school Carnaval—fiftysomething virgins were the wildest of tigers. She moved to the double’s mouth and got an amateur’s sloppily passionate response. Dusty reemerged and stayed where she was, to observe. Allegra took their guest by the hand and led her to bed. She draped up her skirt, tugged at her panties, and ate her. Larissa literally shouted and staccato-wept. After a while, Dusty knelt by the bed and stroked Larissa’s hair. She kissed her face and said, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” like a hypnotist. “It’s just a festival. Big festival in the palace . . .” Then: “What was the word? What was the word the Goddess gave Marilyn?” Larissa struggled to find it amid the butchery, finally whispering, “Protectorate.” Dusty said, “Yes!” and kissed her some more and said, “A protectorate . . . it’s just a protectorate. Can you hear the drums? Babe?”
—
The film crew alit in a cemetery.
Video village was tucked behind a mausoleum. Bennett sat in front of his monitor, waiting. Dusty and Bonita stood before the grave. Ted Hughes’s casket was poised for a third-take lowering. (Liam wrapped three days ago and was already in Europe, on another picture.) Marilyn sat on a canvas chair near the director. She wasn’t needed until the next scene, an insert of her surreptitiously watching the ritual from her car, but wanted to be there for Dusty’s last shot.
Bennett called action and the mechanism lowered the casket.
Bonita threw a rose into the pit. “Good-bye, Papa.”
The camera pushed in on Dusty as she declaimed a poem beneath her breath:
“Whoop dee-do, the oven’s clean, of you and me and toddler shouts. Cooked too long, it all burned up—the swastikas and brussels sprouts.”
“And cut.”
The director nodded to the First, who cautioned, “Checking the gate!” After a beat, the D.P. nodded all clear and the First shouted, “Ladies and gentlemen, Dusty Wilding is wrapped!”
Yips, applause, and whistles from the crew—Dusty got emotional. She’d been doing this a lifetime but was always surprised at how those traditional, cracker-barrel announcements moved her. “Oh my God,” she said. “I’m so sad! I don’t want it to end.” She hugged everyone, saving Bennett for last.
Larissa hung back, ceding to awkwardness—they hadn’t really seen each other since the palace coup—then made the immodest error of subtly stepping forward to be wrap-acknowledged as Dusty headed back to her trailer.
The star averted an encounter by stagily chatting up one of the pilot fish who was escorting her, and just kept moving.
—
They ate dinner at home. Dusty was brittle and quiet.
“Is there going to be a wrap party?” said Allegra solicitously.
“They’re not done till next week.”
(Leggy had the scary new feeling that Mama’d had enough of her. She talked to Jeremy about it; he said she was nuts.)
Best defense being a strong offense, Allegra said, “You know, I was thinking about the Lake District, for Bloodthrone . . . it might actually be kinda great”—the words emerging from that sly, lopsided grin that once so ensorcelled.
“I just don’t know my dates yet.”
“That’s okay,” said Allegra, laid back and accommodating, trying to be okay with Dusty being a cold, hostile bitch. “And, oh! I didn’t tell you—I got an agent, for my photographs.” (No response; the engine wouldn’t turn over.) “Vasha Bowska. Do you know Vasha?”
“Nope.”
“She says she knows you. Vasha’s a friend of Riccardo? Tisci? I think maybe you might have met in Berlin? At the festival? Anyway, she wants to have dinner with us. Would you be cool with that?”
“Yup.”
“Bunny, are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“You seem so far away.”
“I always get like this when I wrap. You know that.”
Allegra bit the bullet. “Can we talk about the other night?”
“Do we have to?”
“Kind of. Are you okay with what happened?” It was her unadvised nature to sometimes barrel forward—another thing that once ensorcelled. “I know that a ‘third party’ isn’t really something we’ve been into . . .”
“‘Isn’t really,’” said Dusty, tartly.
“I guess I was just . . . finally feeling in my body again.”
“Well, good for you!”
“Hey, don’t be like that.”
“You don’t have to defend yourself for having an orgasm, Allegra.”
“I’m not defending, I’m just . . . talking. Look, I thought you were into her.”
“I’m not ‘into’ anybody,” she said, sideswiping.
“When I came in, you were already fooling around! I mean, I thought . . . you knew I’d be coming in. I thought that was something you wanted. And I’m not blaming you, Dusty—”
“Thank you!”
“—I know I’ve been horrible. I’ve been a total selfish bitch and I don’t blame you for wanting—”
“Can we be done now? I really don’t want to talk about this!”
“Okay,” she said, pouty and stung. “Fine. I just wanted to tell you that I got into it only because I thought you were into it. It’s not something I’m all that interested in pursuing.”
“‘All that.’ Well, okay, good. Good for you! I mean, duly noted. Whatever. It’s fine.”
“—and I’m apologizing for my fucked-up behavior.” Her eyes brimmed with tears. “Because I know I haven’t been so easy to live with. And I just want to make sure we’re okay.”
“We’re fine.” She smiled, mercifully softening, and touched Allegra’s hand. “And I am looking into the Lake District. I’m on it. Okay?”
“Okay.”
When she kissed her cheek, Allegra laid her head on Dusty’s shoulder and began to cry. Dusty caressed the small of her back, softly shushing.
—
She was being honored again, this time by Hyacinth House. When Livia asked for help, Jeremy reached out to friends for $35,000 buy-ins—the Katy Perry table, the Jada Pinkett Smith, the Annapurna, the Moonves, the bla.
Between calls, from the aerie of his Nichols Canyon office (it sat above a creek), he thought about his life.
I love him.
But what the fuck was he doing with a wonky little twink he met on Scruff?
Tristen was odd, prickly, smart. Jeremy supposed he was fathering the boy (in a fashion)—though he knew better than to call it mentoring, he insisted to himself that it wasn’t sick. And anyway, the warmth of their love and the tenderness of their sex helped salve the heart pain awakened by the death of his baby. That’s right: my baby. His shrink told him not to minimize it, even to say it out loud—my baby died!—to ward off the disconnect that, all his life, had come so easily.
The force of his grief wound up taking him by surprise—the mid-morning sobs and muttered daytime prayers. His subsequent, adamant resolve to try again made him feel virtuous and mature.
The miscarriage felt like some kind of payback on a karmic debt. In his darkest hours, it seemed a just punishment for not having taken full responsibility a
s a parent; his paternal excitations had been more those of a groupie looking forward to the endless, official perks of a permanent blood alliance with the Wilding dynasty. Fatherhood was only another word for sperming his way into a jackpot; postmortem, he felt stained—stained!—by the pride of provenance and all that went with it. As part of the healing process, he came to view such corrosive self-characterization as simply another indulgence. It is what it is. Everything happened for a reason. No matter how many cretins had said it, it was inalterably true.
Still, he was shaken. Moody. Aggressive. Weepy. The shrink got busy, tweaking his psych meds. Jeremy had a healthy fear of “the black dog” and didn’t want to leave any food out for it. Twice it had chased him—once in college and once when his mom and sis were killed by the drunk. He never wanted to be running from the black dog again. Ever.
The reenergized mission of becoming a dad brought solace. He visualized his offspring (with alternating genders) at different ages—watched it being born—saw himself beside it during the scrapes, sicknesses, and convulsive tears of childhood, the travesties of adolescence, the heartaches and false starts of young adulthood—even imagining himself in hospice, cancer’d or by natural causes, chemo-hairless or wildly white-bearded, ministered to by the one he’d so stalwartly loved, shepherded, and nurtured with father’s milk. The poignant slideshow made him feel part of that great collective: the family of man. He didn’t want to approach Allegra about a do-over, not only because he sensed it was way too soon for her to go there (or that intuition told him she’d miscarry again), but for the larger reason that he needed to move now, in response to a sense of urgency he couldn’t explain. Some sort of fuse had been lit and he was raring to go. What spun him was thinking about how awkward it would be when it came time to tell Allegra he was pregnant—he should probably let Dusty know first. Maybe he wouldn’t tell either of them until the surrogate was six months along. That was probably the best strategy.
He headed to the Plummer Park A.A. meeting. He’d made plans to talk with his old sponsor, who recently had twins. He was walking toward the clubhouse when he saw them—travelers on a bench, basking in the sun.
The woman was in her thirties, lovely and plain, a blond hippie with grey-green eyes. Her companion was a bearded Scottish colossus, burly and red-faced, twice her age. She wore a threadbare cotton sundress, its brilliant colors faded. A bracelet of bells, much larger than they should have been for that sort of thing, was tied to her ankle with a leather cord like a medieval ankle monitor. Her dignified friend raffishly boasted—that would have been the word—an Edwardian morning coat over silken pajamas, an appropriate uniform, so it seemed, for his pastime of smiling toward the ether in divine abstraction.
Something drew Jeremy in.
Uncharacteristically, he approached to ask if he could sit with them. The woman said, “Please do!” The old man looked into Jeremy’s eyes with kindness before directing his gaze, fervid yet impassive, back to sacred horizons. Joining them on the bench, he took in the Scot at a glance: the pasty, wasted epidermis, the greasy pompadour, the flecks of food in his whiskers, trapped like insect exoskeletons in a web.
The hippie lady said, “I knew you would come. Knew it.”
—
“As a sitting, active board member—and all-around angel—the effect of the work she has done for the House and its children is impossible to quantify.”
The evening’s formidable director and hostess, Livia Lindström, was wrapping up her emotional remarks. Dusty had asked one of the fashion houses to loan her old friend a gown and Livia felt awkwardly glamorous. No one knew of her discomfort; she was a chic, vibrant sixty-three-year-old woman who reminded everyone how beautiful the species could look, au naturel. In L.A., the ones her age who hadn’t gone under the knife were nearly extinct.
“Not just through her heroic fund-raising efforts—which in the foundation’s early years literally sustained us—but through her unique and pioneering role in public education, raising the bar and public awareness for L.A.’s then burgeoning, now flourishing LGBT community. Please dim the lights!”
The audience focused its attention at the large screens to watch a montage of the actress interacting with the Hyacinth staff and challenged children, in private and public venues, down through the years. Celebrities and studio executives sat closest to the dais. At the “family” table were Dusty (backstage just now) and Allegra, Jeremy, two longtime volunteers, and a girl whose mother was in prison for molesting her while under the influence of meth. After parental rights had been severed, the foundation orchestrated the teen’s adoption by a wealthy couple, who were at the table as well. The lights came up.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Livia, “please welcome the most beautiful of Hyacinth’s ‘founding flowers’—our very own Dusty Wilding!”
All rose as the star made a luminously diffident entrance from the wings. Livia took a dainty, deferential step backward; Dusty warmly chastised by bringing her in for a hug before turning to face the cavernous room. She let them love her awhile, then pantomimed “sit.”
“Nothing,” she began, after dramatically gathering herself, “is or remains more important to me than Hyacinth House. I have been privileged to have grown up among so many selfless people who, with their sacrifice, their compassion, their consistency and single-mindedness of purpose, who with their hearts have been instrumental in transforming—saving—thousands of at-risk young people. Not just by providing them shelter from the storm—sanctuary from harm—but by literally rescuing them, many of them, rescuing this precious, vulnerable resource from dangerous, often life-threatening circumstances beyond their control. And I want to say very clearly . . . that I have been a soldier, not a general. Hyacinth has nourished me and fed my soul. I’ve tried to be a good soldier . . . and a mother as well. And I have been mothered too—sometimes rescued!—by the amazing Livia and her extraordinary staff, by the amazing volunteers and amazing fund-raisers, by the amazing judges and attorneys—yes, attorneys can be amazing! (laughter) And most of them are women! (more laughter, applause, whoops) I want to thank all of the ‘friends of Hyacinth’ too—I like to call them the garden where our flowers grow—who’ve worked so very hard and continue to perform miracles within our often very unmiraculous court and legal system.” She steeled herself, in anticipation of the next few words. “And when I say I have been mothered, it was by the children themselves. They have enriched my life in ways they can never know. They have been my lighthouse and taught me how to love in ways I never could have dreamed, never could have expected. And are walking with me now, on my own journey . . . (the cryptic inference was meant for no one but herself) So I’d really like everyone to stand—there are lots of ‘flowers’ out there, and I want them all to be seen. It’s a beautiful garden! A sea of hyacinths!—can we please rise? Would everyone who belongs to the House in any capacity please stand? Come on—everybody stand. Everybody! Lights up!”
—
She suggested Livia drop by the house to return the gown, an impromptu feint that somehow lightened the burden of what she was about to reveal.
Marta brought them tea by the pool.
“Was the night a smash?” asked Dusty.
“Three and a half million dollars!”
“Isn’t that wonderful?”
“That’s a high-water mark. Because of you.”
The actress waved that away. “Are we getting a new building?”
“That’s a conversation I’d really like to have,” said Livia. “You know, the old building isn’t so bad! We can do a little cosmetic work and still have so much left over for things that just seem more real.”
“Okay!”
“I keep thinking, Why? We’re not a hospital, you know; we’re not Children’s Hospital, where there’s a need . . . we’re not MOCA or LACMA either. We can always use more space, there are people who want to give us space. But I’ve s
een too many foundations take a tumble over real estate.”
Suddenly something shifted in Dusty and her guest took note.
“What’s wrong?”
“Livia . . . we’ve spoken about this over the years—not a lot, but we have. And you know there’s some shame—a lot of shame—over how I’ve chosen . . . how I chose—to handle it. I’ve been so—I’ve tried to be courageous in my life, but this, this as you know, is an area where I’ve failed.”
She knew straightaway what Dusty meant.
“But you didn’t—you didn’t fail. You haven’t. You made a choice.”
“—and it’s okay. I’m okay with what I did, I really am. But I’m not that person anymore, the person I was when I made that ‘choice.’ Or whatever you want to call it. I’m not that sixteen-year-old girl anymore. Though sometimes I feel like her! Anyway, I’m making another choice now—a real one—because I think it’s time. I’ve been with the House for twenty years—I’ve grown up with you. She brought me to you. Everything I do, Livia, everything that motivates me, in my life—has been because of her.” She breathed deeply. “And . . . I think I want to find her now, Livia. I want to try to find her.”
“Oh, Dusty.”
Livia’s smile belied her emotions. She resisted leaning in to hug her friend; she didn’t want to whitewash the moment with sentimentality. She’d always looked up to her—Dusty was a great woman, a fearless woman—and felt so moved to be included in such intimacy.
“I know it sounds totally crazy but I actually do try to keep my life private. Some of it, anyway. You’ve seen that. And it’s a lot of work! But I’ve pretty much decided that . . . I want to make this ‘journey’—hate that word!—that I’d like to do it in front of the world. In front of a camera. Total transparency. And it’s not an ego thing. I just think it might really help people. Not just the ones who’re searching for their kids or for the kids who’re searching for their parents—but for anyone who wants to speak their truth but can’t find their voice. For whatever reason. That’s why I want to document it. I have some ideas about that and I want to hear yours.”