by Bruce Wagner
But Allegra was not free; she hadn’t the courage yet to die, so she might live.
What must she do, to take flight? It was a pretty metaphor but she was no Persian peacock, no mystic songbird—she was a Looney Tunes buzzard, feeding on its own flesh. If she died this moment she’d have no interest in reincarnation; why would she want to be reborn into the miscarried, adulterous world? When she thought of killing herself, the comfort—the hopefulness—came in the notion of remaining dead.
Jealousy, bewilderment, and fury had made her psychotic.
During yoga meditation, she heard a voice: You must embrace the sovereign indifference of Love. Why not just let Dusty be? Perhaps that was the answer! She and her wife were holy, sovereign creations with discrete sovereign paths. Those paths would naturally diverge but their love, if it were true (and she sort of knew it was), would endure.
Yet each time she inched toward the bejeweled cage’s door, she froze.
She went on long drives and took solace in churches.
A pastor in Sylmar recited Ruth’s words to Naomi—
Entreat me not to leave thee or turn away from thee, for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Where you die, I shall die, and there I will be buried.
She wondered if it were possible for a person to truly surrender, in utter humility—maybe it wasn’t, maybe it was just an eternal ideal—then mused over whether an imperfect but sustained acquiescence would be sufficient to set one free. And when does the very idea of “forgiveness” no longer matter? When does the act become an ethereal concept, finding its proper place in the sacred, no longer earthbound, dream . . . because shouldn’t a person be able to go beyond such a thing? I mean, if one was able to truly forgive something awful, it would seem that one might have advanced far enough, and had evolved to such a . . . but how, how to forgive Dusty for what she’d done? Only weeks ago, she couldn’t even have imagined her wife having an anomalous emotional affair, let alone actively being with someone else . . . what was “forgiveness,” anyway? Allegra scoured the Internet for those courtroom videos of families acidly dressing down prisoners after verdicts were read—the “victim impact statements” at the end of a trial. The cathartic public shaming when mothers and daughters and fathers and sons formally vilified those who took away that which was most precious. The clichéd, hectoring redundancy of the futile rebukes was heartbreaking; there were only so many ways to say You will have Christmas but my husband will not and I hope you rot in hell. Now and then, a family member faced the unrepentant monster and said, “I forgive you.” I forgive you—for raping and strangling my bride. I forgive you for sodomizing and burying my child alive . . . and here am I, whining because Bunny came with Larissa! (And God only knows how many others. And I don’t give a shit if that makes me look like a fool, because what she’s done is the same as murder, it’s the same, the same, the same!) Some of the convicted showered their forgivers with threats and obscenities. Others cried and said they were sorry. (There were only so many ways to say, If I could give up my life so that he could live, I would.) Sometimes the forgivers actually went to the jails for special meetings and tearful embraces. Allegra imagined herself in court. I forgive you for sleeping with her and lying to my face like I was a piece of shit. I forgive you for filling your heart and your holes with her fingers and cunt juice and for obliterating my name and my memory with your wanton whorefuck treasons—
She wondered how to make ready for such a choice—to “forgive”—if it even was a choice. How does one prepare? And how hard, how desolate, how barren was the land on which the road to forgiveness, that royal road to the sovereign indifference of love, how long and how wide, how impossible to cross, was the avenue that led to the songbird’s destination?
That snaked its way toward that travesty of a word: freedom . . .
“Imagine wearing the outfit of ‘Whole Foods customer,’” the pastor was saying, “and they don’t have the item you want in the cookie section. So you take off that outfit and go elsewhere. You run into a friend on your way to Trader Joe’s and that friend hands you a gift—the very cookies you were shopping for. So you take off the ‘Trader Joe’s customer’ outfit and put on the ‘friend’ outfit—and receive the treats. And if you grow vegetables in your garden, the ‘customer’ and ‘friend’ outfits come off and you put on the outfit of ‘self’—and harvest the food. You take it from the Universe. If we allow God to move through us, using more than just the roles and outfits we’re comfortable with—good son/bad son, miserly man/generous man, lover/hater, Christian/Muslim/Jew—the congestion clears. Thousands of outfits are available, we design them! As a young man I did missionary work in India and tried on many. Savior, tourist, seeker, student, teacher, American, consumer . . . I was always wearing something. And all that we’re trying to do with these outfits is express love. But we get stuck. By getting stuck with twenty, with ten, with three, even one, we limit ourselves. In trying to make those outfits work as expressions of who we are, we end up hurting people.”
What was her role in the marriage? What were the outfits she wore now? “Wife betrayed,” “the abandoned innocent,” “she who lost her religion”—because Allegra had always been certain it was God that brought them together, it was God who’d arranged their union, she knew it was so! Yet what could the consequences be, what was the meaning of such divinity, if not that of redemption bestowed by the sovereign indifference of love supreme? Surely God could be interested in nothing else! What was it she’d been seeking all these years? Security? Status? Ownership (of another)? And with what costume had she insisted her wife be adorned? Had she really expected Dusty—either one of them—to be faithful, forever and always? How to even begin to define “faithful,” “faithless”? No—it was time to lead by example. She must be steady, impersonal, godly . . . If Dusty could see her wife stripped of the will toward judgment, shorn of everything but all-encompassing love, indifferent and sovereign, she’d have no choice but to become naked as well. And if she chose to reply to such selfless virtue by trying on something else—“divorcee,” “elder free spirit,” “she who fell out of love and is now with another”—what difference should it make?
When days passed without Allegra hearing from her, the migraines she had as a girl returned.
She raced down PCH to a laid-back new urgent care in Malibu. The doctor said, “Do you need a big shot or a little shot? I can give you a shot then top you off with a second. If your experience is that doctors take a look and say, ‘She’s so shrimpy,’ and don’t give you enough, we can give you a big shot. Have you ever had Dilaudid? I’m not the narcotics police. If you come every few months, we’d love to see you. If you come every week, that’s a problem. We have lots of lovelies who come in and we make them feel like princesses. Do you know what the lovelies all say? That compared to Saint John’s, we’re Heaven! Because we don’t make you wait and wait and wait. We give you a shot, then off you go to have your princess time at home.”
—
She finally had lunch with Jeremy.
They hadn’t seen each other since she’d spewed her sordid chicaneries at the beach-blanket Buddhist bingo party. He did leave a voicemail blaming his MIA-ness on work, which was “super-jammy,” plus his boyfriend’s dad being back in the hospital and maybe dying, yadda yadda, but Allegra thought it was all jive. She knew she was a little crazy right now and that Jeremy had a life, everyone (but Allegra) had a life (a wife?), though it sure the fuck felt like the whole world was conscientiously saying its good-byes. And yes, she was working on being okay with that, getting comfortable with her new outfitless outfit, but she just couldn’t get the thing to fit. It didn’t go with any of her shoes either.
Oh well . . .
She’d been out of touch with Dusty for almost two weeks now, which had never happened, ever. After that bullshit email about quiet time and the �
��house” in Big Sur, Allegra ate a lot of Adderall and embraced her inner Nancy Drew. First she called Esalen and the Post Ranch Inn, asking for Dusty by her road aliases—Beatrix Potter, Eve Harrington, Jonah Feldstein—before covering NYC: the Mercer, the Lowell, the Mandarin Oriental. (Even the Gansevoort.) She phoned Buvette, their fave romantic spot in the Village, lying to the maître d’ about Dusty maybe having made a reservation in the hope he’d say she was there the night before or had just left or was there right now. “Allegra, hi! Yes yes yes, we have her down for lunch tomorrow—you’re going to surprise her? Of course I won’t tell her you called. And how are you!” She didn’t dare get in touch with any of their mutual friends but obsessively checked the Internet for sightings, comments, images. There was nothing. Tried the aliases again with Ten Thousand Waves in Santa Fe (disguising her voice because all the employees knew her and she didn’t want anyone thinking something was amiss) and was about to start on Europe before saying fuck it. Smoked some dope and ate a giant blueberry cobbler from Sweet Lady Jane instead. Topped it off with a chunk of Reddi-Wip the size of a preemie. Disconsolate, loaded, ruined . . . crying and moaning, staccato-burst yelping like some favela street mongrel after a hit-and-run. Faced the corner of the room à la Blair Witch and meditated to calm her breath. Thought of maybe emailing Elise, then got a brighter idea and left a vmail for Ginevra. Micro consult session aside, she would definitely rate a courtesy callback. But a few days went by—nada. How rude. I mean, she was still Mrs. Wilding.
Wasn’t she?
“Hey now.”
He was already sitting in the booth.
“Hey, stranger,” she said, with a bite.
“Aw, don’t be like that, Lego.”
“Like what. I’ve been chasing you for weeks.”
“I told you, Tristen’s dad is dying. He’s been a total train wreck.”
“Whatever.”
“Whatever?” he said, zero to sixty riled. “Okay, ‘whatever.’ Don’t you already know everything anyway?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Don’t you already know the details? I mean, doesn’t Larissa, like, fill you in on shit?”
“I don’t talk to Larissa. And what the fuck do you mean, Jeremy?”
“Oh! Are we going to pretend you don’t know that Larissa is my boyfriend’s mom?”
“What? Of course I knew—know. And we totally talked about that.”
“Excuse me?”
“We totally did.”
“As in you and me talked about it? Jeremy and Allegra?”
“That’s right.”
“Bullshit we did!”
“Did we not totally discuss how weird that is?”
“Uhm, no-o-o-o. What’s weird is that we didn’t. Because you never even mentioned it.”
“I’m sorry. There’s just been so much . . . shit—”
“I’ve been, like, ‘Of course Larissa would have told her. Why hasn’t Allegra said anything?’”
“It wasn’t deliberate, Jeremy. Why would I withhold that?”
“I don’t know,” he said, with a sly twist of the mouth. “Why would you?”
“Well, fuck me, I’m sorry. It wasn’t like it was this big topic of conversation. It just kind of came up, she said her kid’s boyfriend bought him a car and we just kind of figured it out from there. What is the problem, Jeremy?”
“No problem at all. I just assumed that since you and Larissa share so much, she’d probably already have mentioned her ex being at death’s door. You know—pillow talk with the mistress.”
“Fuck you!”
“Thank you, sir, I’ll have another.”
“Why are you being such a queen?” She teared up but he wasn’t having it. “I mean, why are you being so weird and mean about this? Anyway, I did what you said and broke it off, so I don’t even talk to her anymore. And I’m sorry I didn’t have a big discussion with you about the bizarre genealogy of our twink family tree. Because I can see how fucked up you are over it, for whatever reason.”
“Whatever.”
“You know, I’ve got a lot on my plate right now! It’s not like I wake up every morning thinking, ‘Oh! Larissa is Jeremy’s boyfriend’s fucking mother! Oh my God, that is so, so interesting! That is, like, the most interesting and amazing thing that’s ever happened in the world! I need to go write a fucking book about it!’”
“Let’s drop it, Allegra.”
“It’s Hollywood, Jeremy! It’s a tiny little town, shit like that happens. It just happens, what is your fucking problem?”
“You’re the one who’s acting like the one with a problem, darling.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, with a measure of sincerity. She dabbed at her eye. “Okay?”
“Sure.”
“Can we please start over?”
“Love to.” They took a moment and manned up; they’d lost the energy to brawl. “So what’s going on with you and Dusty?”
“I haven’t talked to her—at all. She doesn’t return my emails. You?”
“Same,” he said. “Incommunicado.”
Jeremy was used to movie stars and their impetuous vanishing acts—the royal prerogative. When confronted by close friends and dependents about the havoc created by their absence (cf. romantic intrigue, drugging, wanderlust, or a combination thereof), they tended to offer the flimsiest of excuses or the most solemnly earnest; in the end, none of it mattered because the injured parties always forgave. But the situation was far more serious than he’d suspected.
“It’s kind of become obvious what’s happening,” she said. “I feel like such a clown, Jeremy. I tried turning the other butt cheek or whatever, like you said. And I’m not blaming you, I actually thought it was really good advice, still do. But I mean, like, fuck her to treat me like this! Right? Right? It’s so disrespectful. Man, if you’re seeing someone or you’ve fallen out of love or in love or what-ever, just, like, have the fucking decency and courage to tell me to my face. It’s so fucked up, Jeremy! Right?”
“And you definitely think it’s Larissa,” he said flatly, like an IT tech assessing a software issue. The familiar rhythm of gossip comforted, because he wasn’t looking forward to what he was going to tell her.
“Probably—I don’t know. Larissa never really came out and said it. But she sure didn’t deny it. And there’s no fucking other way to explain that earring in her bed. I don’t know . . . maybe Dusty’s been into that all along—seeing other people. Maybe she’s some kind of secret psycho sex addict. I mean, her demented mother was a sick fucking cheater and how far can you fall from the whatever? Maybe she’s—maybe she’s been fucking Michelle Rodriguez, for all I know. Strapping it on for Maria Bello and Tatum fucking O’Neal. She could be out there sleeping with men, with whatever. Dogs and horses! And you know what?”
Her rage slammed into a wall of tears and the words wouldn’t form. He put his hand on hers, drawing sweet little circles over her knuckles. Then Selma Blair appeared, gushing hellos. Allegra quickly recovered; if the actress noticed anything amiss, she didn’t let on. When she asked after Dusty, Allegra said, “She’s great! We’re great!” Selma girl-pleaded, “I want to come see you guys, we need to see each other, when can we hang?” and was gone.
“It’s so surreal,” said Allegra, sadly pensive. “I never thought this would happen. Not like this. I thought we’d be together forever.”
“Maybe you will . . . it isn’t over, Leggy. Maybe—”
“It is, Jeremy! It’s over for me. It can’t just be over when it’s over for her—she can’t just say, ‘It’s over! It’s not over! It’s over! It’s not over!’ She can’t expect me to sit here waiting for whatever she wants. It’s not fair, Jeremy, I’m too fucking vulnerable!” She cut herself off and went dead—disgusted and resolute. “I guess I really don’t want to talk about it anymore. But
thank you. Thank you for listening to my endless bullshit.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“I’ve made some plans.”
“Can you stay at the beach for a while?”
“I’m making plans,” she said noncommittally.
“Listen,” he said, with a small adjustment in posture. “I know this isn’t a great time but there’s something I wanted to tell you.”
“Are we getting a divorce too, Jeremy? You can’t divorce me!”
At least she was laughing. “Nope. Not gonna happen. Never gonna happen.”
“Well, good. Because that would definitely send me over the edge. I’d refuse to sign the papers.”
“No worries. But here’s what’s going on.” He took a breath. “Since the thing . . . with the baby— . . . I’ve been really thinking. A lot—you know, that I’d like to try again, try to be a dad. So I’ve been talking to a surrogate.”
“A surrogate. Really.”
“It’s not that I didn’t want to do it with you—‘do it’ sounds funny—but I—I didn’t know where you were at, in your head.”
“It’s fine, Jeremy.”
“Maybe I should have talked to you about it but I was pretty sure it was something you wouldn’t be into, at least not this soon.”
“You’re probably right.”
He read it all on her face: the relief and the hurt. Yet by her tone, he knew the worst was over. She’d become luminous, filled with grace.
“I can’t explain it, Lego, but I just felt this urgency.”
“So did you find someone?” she said warmly.
“I did. She had twins for my old A.A. sponsor.”
“Okay,” she said, in forlorn approval.
“And I just—it came together much faster than I thought. I mean, everything just . . . fell into place.”
“Thank you for telling me.”
“Can we talk a minute about ‘Children of God’?”
“Sure.”