by Bruce Wagner
Allegra sent a quick text—im ok will write later—in response to another flurry from her wife. For the first time she allowed herself to think Maybe I can get through this. Then: Maybe we can get through this. Yet whenever she started fantasizing about reconciliation, the cold reality of the situation gave her whiplash. She tried to feel better by reminding herself that marriage had afforded certain legal and financial protections—then instantly recoiled, not only from the horror of her predicament (unthinkable only a few short weeks ago), but from the idea that she possibly wasn’t protected at all. California being California, the law could be tricky. Plus, with the shit going down the way it had, it suddenly seemed plausible Dusty might not be the generous partner Allegra had always imagined, because she didn’t even really know who the fuck Dusty was anymore. The woman who she’d taken for granted no longer existed, and maybe never had . . .
As if beginning a series of hellish aerobics, she visualized a future without her wife. Dusty Wilding would be in the news forever, on billboards and award shows, joyous and bulletproof, pictures in magazines, jumping off yachts with new loves, new lovers, new friends—time-lined and tweeted in millions of Internet pages, while she, Allegra, would be in the non-news forever, the hapless, humiliated ex, a loser thrown off a hit reality show, dredged up by the press and eternal loser links of the Web, to body-shame a depressive weight gain, or money-shame a ruinous investment, or slut-shame a calamitous post-marital hookup, or soul-shame for merely being born—chronicling DUIs, shoplifting arrests, and other rumored occasions of injury, death, and dishonor . . .
Her wife sent another text asking if they could just please meet. Allegra’s heart quaked and she said yes but that she was going away for the weekend, what about Monday. (She didn’t want it to be on Dusty’s terms.) She wrote back of course and Allegra said you can come to 4 seasons. Her heart clenched again; maybe she shouldn’t have even told her where she was. I keep giving my power away. Dusty texted and Allegra puzzled over whether the hearts were respectfully reserved, hopeful, positive—or contrived, thoughtlessly businesslike, and negative.
But she did feel a little better. Maybe she should book a rub at the spa? She grabbed her iPad instead and scrolled through the videos. She hadn’t looked at the sextape in months. They drolly referred to it as their “performance piece” and it was the only one they’d ever done. Their faces were deliberately obscured; even Dusty’s birthmark had been scrupulously shot around. Allegra watched it dispassionately, like an anthropologist puzzling over an artifact.
Her cell rang, throwing her into electrified chaos for the thousandth time that day—but instead of Dusty, it said
Jeremy
mobile
“Hey!” she said.
Nothing—nobody there.
“Hello? Hello? Jeremy?”
After some clicks, rattles, and throat-clearings, came a honking nose-blow and loud rustles.
“Hello?”
“Jesus, did you butt-call me?”
He started to moan, then wail—totally crazy-sounding.
“Jeremy, what the fuck?”
“Tristen died,” he said, in scary deadpan basso. More phlegmy, aggressive throat-clearings followed.
“What?”
“He crashed his car.”
“He died?” she said dumbly. “When?”
“Four days ago!” he blubbered. “He kind of disappeared and I was starting to worry—so I Facebooked Larissa . . . oh, Allegra! He crashed in his car! He crashed in the car I gave him!”
“Jeremy, I’m so sorry! Where are you?”
“Home.”
“I’m coming over.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I’m coming over.”
“Okay.”
He sounded like a three-year-old.
“Do you need anything?”
Long pause.
“Oh, Leggy . . . he’s dead, my Tristen’s dead, he crashed in the car I gave him . . . the Honda! He crashed in the Honda! He loved that car, he loved that car! It’s my fault, it’s my fault, it’s my fault, he wouldn’t have even had a driver’s license if I hadn’t paid for the lessons—”
He was off to the races and wailing again, ugly and high-pitched, then wandered away from the phone. After a few minutes, she hung up.
When she got to the house, Jeremy was a resplendent mess—on the phone with this one, laughing and weeping with that, rushing around doing his tragic Blanche DuBois hostess thing then collapsing on the couch, a drunken queen in her cockeyed crown, waving a broken fan. It moved Allegra to see how much he really cared for that boy. He went on about the night he died, how only hours before, Tristen had been sobbing in his arms about his dad, and how Larissa later said their son must have had a sixth sense that something was wrong because the tantrum of tears would probably have been right around the time Derek was having trouble breathing—Derek’s girlfriend called her and Larissa was on her way there herself—how Jeremy was obviously rushing over there to help when he lost control of the car. “He was so full of love! He played it so cool and so spiky, but Leggy! He was such a love bug! And he loved me, Lego, he loved me. He really, really did, I know he did . . .”
With an actor’s instinct to rein in the maudlin, he abruptly stepped out of himself to ask, apropos of Allegra’s general marital meshugas, “And how are you?” She squinched a tight little smile, shorthanding, “At the Four Seasons.” When he said he still hadn’t heard from Dusty, Allegra was about to ask if he left word about what happened to Tristen but friends were arriving with flowers and plates of comfort food and Jeremy kept leaping up for hugs.
She hung a while longer then snuck up to kiss him and crept out.
On the way to the hotel she thought of phoning Larissa for a condolence-bla but decided against it. Then, with a shock, she wondered if Dusty was with Larissa this very moment, providing solace, money, palliative sexual favors, whatever . . . the thought sickened, her rage reigniting as she pictured the distraught stand-in cradled in her wife’s arms. Perversely, Allegra fantasized that when they finally talked, Dusty would open with the conversational gambit of “Jeremy’s loss” in order to defuse/minimize her adultery by implying that in context, their own troubles paled in comparison to such an event. At the same time, Dusty’s hands were sort of tied—she couldn’t really get into Tristen’s death without dragging in Larissa, one way or another, which she’d want to avoid, or put off, for as long as she could. So actually, she’d probably know better than to bring it up.
Though maybe not. Maybe Dusty so didn’t give a shit anymore.
When she walked into the suite, Allegra noticed an envelope propped against a vase on the living-room coffee table. Someone from the hotel must have delivered it. She recognized the Smythson stationery she bought for Dusty a few years ago in London.
A calligraphic A. was written on the front. Trembling, she pulled out the thick square note inside:
Everything is going to be OK,
Please please trust
xD
—
They found a pistol belonging to Derek in the trunk of the crumpled hybrid. (The editor used to go shooting with his geriatric director friends.) Larissa theorized their son came across the gun while at Derek’s apartment and took quiet custody, out of worry that after the diagnosis his father had become so depressed he might harm himself.
Larissa was shocked when the E.R. nurse informed that Tristen was an organ donor. It seemed so out of character and made her question everything she thought she knew about her complicated, secretive boy. Later, Jeremy shed some light. He shared the scarifying backstory of the girl who crashed her dad’s Porsche, and Tristen’s mischievous contribution to that unsavory Internet legend; and how, when he took her son to the DMV to get his license, Tristen revealed he’d signed Nikki Catsouras on the donor form.
When she wondere
d why he would do such a thing, Jeremy said he had asked him the same thing. Tristen replied, “For the LULZ.”
Jeremy told her what that meant too.
—
Derek saw an opportunity.
When he learned of Tristen’s improbable donor status, he immediately brought to the doctors’ (and Larissa’s) attention a recent conversation with his son in which Tristen had expressed “his wishes” that Derek be given his heart “should anything ever happen.” Overamped and high on painkillers, he gilded the lily by saying the boy had even written a letter to that effect.
After taking Derek’s dictation by phone, Beth printed out the informal “instrument” and brought it to the CCU. (He made her do it over again because she spelled Tristen with an a, as in “I, Tristan Dunnick . . .”) He told her to initial it but she had qualms so Derek hastily scrawled a TD. He kept telling her no one was going to bust him for forgery. Jumping the donor queue was a victimless crime (kind of), a noble white-lie fraud perpetrated to save a life. Nobody in their right mind would question the “document” except maybe Larissa and even she would see the pointlessness of crying foul. They were going to take everything else—lungs, liver, kidneys, and corneas—what difference would it make where the heart wound up?
He panicked on realizing that in his haste, he hadn’t factored in whether Tristen was a donor match. Then Derek remembered what the doctor said weeks ago: “You’re a universal recipient.”
Anyone’s blood would do.
—
Larissa saw an opportunity as well.
She told Jeremy they couldn’t afford the thirty-five-hundred-dollar cremation fee—a lie, because the Neptune Society was taking care of it, but she knew he wouldn’t probe. He was so tortured by guilt over the car and the driving lessons that he happily gave her ten thousand.
Larissa sat alone in the viewing room. He died on Tuesday and now it was Sunday. Tomorrow, the body would be burned at a facility in Van Nuys. Tessa, her only real friend, was in Cabo. Rafaela was full-on camping at the hospital with her dad. When she learned of her brother’s death, the force of the girl’s grief took Larissa by surprise.
In the cool stillness, her son on the other side of the room, she regretted not having asked Jeremy to come. It would have been nice to have had another human being there who loved him. Tristen had been so unloved in this life, or loved improperly, yes, that was it, been so poorly, wrongly, egregiously loved, unworthy of his roving, prickly, lionhearted, rebellious, brutally loyal and generous nature. I should have left Derek when I was pregnant with him. Why didn’t I leave? Or at least why couldn’t I have just shut my effing mouth? She’d confessed her affair in a moment of psychobabble fervor and Human Potentialist delirium, after having convinced herself that people—family—could forgive, that anything could be healed by the truth, and love only grew stronger when secrets couldn’t thrive.
Here was the truth: telling Derek that Tristen wasn’t his had killed her son as surely as that telephone pole. The police said he’d probably been reaching for a dropped cell phone when he crashed, and Larissa had done a little investigating of her own. Beth (who fled to Portland right after Derek’s surgery, this time for good) had already shared with her that Derek was obsessing over health insurance that night, trying to reach his son. Derek later told Larissa that when the two finally spoke, “the kid was insanely pissed,” he wasn’t even sure about what, because Tristen “wasn’t making sense. He just started screaming at the top of his lungs. He got so crazy he hung up on me—loaded, no doubt. Toxicology will establish.” But the evidence showed that he hadn’t hung up on Derek at all, merely fumbled his cell during the rage-out; when he tried to retrieve it, he lost control of the car. Larissa wondered what he could have been so mad about and kept pressing her ex. What did you SAY? What did you TELL HIM, Derek, that he got so ANGRY about and Derek just said Nothing! I said Nothing! but she kept pressing until finally he said uh, well, maybe it was something about where he came from, you know, maybe I think it was something about where he might have come from and when she said what are you talking about Derek said uhm maybe it was something about who his father was and Larissa said what the fuck do you mean what did you SAY what did you TELL him and Derek finally blurted out that the kid maybe somehow learned the “reality”—ferociously snarling the word—learned what the reality was and she asked her ex point-blank did you tell him and Derek said NO, I never told him, he was super-emphatic about it, maybe too emphatic, he said why the fuck would I tell him then reiterated that he never told him EVER, and not while they were on the phone either, and besides, he wouldn’t have been able to even if he wanted anyway because he couldn’t get a fucking word in edgewise, not that he didn’t feel like telling him, the thought always crossed his mind (though not on that fateful night), but even if he wanted to he would never have had a fucking chance because the kid was foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog. None of what he was saying made sense to Larissa, all this shit about wanting to tell him but not telling him, none of it added up, it was beyond passive-aggressive, it was just more bullshit and she didn’t believe him, not for one second. So she just kept saying Oh my God while Derek did his usual number of if you never wanted me to know then you should never have done what you did and he would never have fucking been born! and of course both of them thought of the hacking thing right away, that Tristen might have hacked his way into finding out the reality of his bastardhood, Derek remembering the email he sent to Beth a while back, one would think he wouldn’t have because of the state he was in during its composition . . . he’d never tried to retrieve or restore the damning note or whatever, hadn’t looked at it since, not once, but knew the content was incriminating. No way would he have hacked into my shit. The kid told me he’d never do that, my shit was sacrosanct, and I believe him. Believed him . . . That stoned email moment with Beth was literally the first time he ever “talked” about it, the reality of Tristen, or even shared it with anyone—anyone (except Father Wayne)—but of course he wouldn’t divulge that to Larissa. For a nanosecond he even thought maybe Beth told Tristen as some kind of payback but no, too improbable, Beth could be a bitch but she wasn’t malicious. Had a good heart. Larissa wracked her brain some more about Tristen hacking his way into the truth but knew there wouldn’t have been anything to hack into, not on her end anyway, knew she had never breathed a word on the topic, not a drunk-text, not a bare-her-heart email, not a single poignant, bitter journal entry that she hadn’t burned long ago . . . and confident as well that it was one of those totally taboo things that Derek would never write or speak to anyone about, it was all too painful for him, too shameful for his fucking elephantine ego, not just that he’d been cuckolded but that he’d kept the boy in the fold and family after knowing what he knew: that Tristen was of another man’s blood. Instead of giving him props for being nobly compassionate, his sick junkie editor friends would have called him out as the ultimate Ashley Madison’d Blue Angel pussy. Then suddenly she thought she knew . . . of course!—Pastor Wayne! It would had to have been him—the man Derek confided in during his/their darkest hours—and so she asked Derek if Tristen ever talked to Pastor Wayne or if he thought they’d have maybe been in touch but Derek got testy and said how the fuck would I know and she said Oh my God then rather bombastically announced that maybe she’d reach out to the man herself then immediately couldn’t bear the thought of it, even the fantasy she couldn’t bear, no, just now she couldn’t bear the thought of anything—
When her son turned ten, she was already in a period of intense self-reflection. The Twin Towers had fallen the year before and Larissa took that as a sign. She was thirty-eight, deeply depressed, and pregnant with Rafaela—a mindblower because she had been so sure she’d never have another child. It occurred to Larissa that she would never be famous, which apparently had been obvious to everyone on the planet but her; the second child was the final nail in the career coffin. She’d been acting since her
twenties, running the hideous L.A. 10K of doomed equity waiver runs, pay-to-play daytime improv “workshops” in rented comedy clubs, power-drunk pilot-season casting directors, and failed cartoon voiceover auditions (though she did get occasional loop-group work). In her golden years, the late eighties, she booked nonspeaking roles on Murphy Brown, Alf, and Married with Children, and got Taft-Hartleyed into SAG when a showrunner gave her a line (subsequently cut, but no matter) on Knots Landing. She thought she was on her way, but nothing happened. Nothing! Why was it so impossible? And why was it so possible for others? She was getting lapped by everyone she knew, they blew by her on the track, all her friends and acquaintances were getting rich and famous. She frequented the bars where actors hung out. She met Tony Danza and Bob Saget and Kelsey Grammer that way. As a conversation starter, Larissa invented a story about how she was the illegitimate daughter of Richard Harris, that he had a one-night stand with her mom in Cannes when he won an award there for This Sporting Life, and how her mother was a chambermaid (she actually used that word) at the Hotel du Cap. She tried to seduce Danza et alia but wound up sucking off the bartenders instead. Then she married a film editor . . . how losery of her! And nothing happened in her fakakta career until years later when she had another golden era, in the movies. She was a day player in Kalifornia (Female Officer), Indecent Proposal (Dress Shop Saleslady), and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (Reporter #5). She dipped her toe back into the television waters (it was all about being versatile), getting a gig as a Law & Order stand-in—fun! She was good at it and networked her way into camera doubling for Gillian Anderson and Fran Drescher. Then she hit it big and became a full-time stand-in for Katey Sagal (they really did look alike) on 8 Simple Rules but when John Ritter died, her niche career got buried along with him. The Stand-In Years dissolved into the Switching Price Tags at Department Stores Years. She wasn’t even sure why she did what she did because Derek was making more than okay money. The first time she was arrested it wasn’t too huge a deal but the second time they had to pay a lawyer $23,000 to keep her out of the hoosegow. That was when she started going to Landmark Forum, looking at her deep dark secrets and the ones her family kept, trying to get to the root of all her shit. She really thrived there, she was a Forum rock star. Larissa even thought of becoming a Landmark personal coach or maybe a therapist, like an MFCC—all her struggling actress friends were aging out and hanging marriage- and family-counselor shingles . . . She started feeling so much better about herself, the whole empowerment cliché but for real, and after she gave birth to that second child something inside her said it was time to tell Derek about the affair and about Tristen. What happened was, she caught Derek in his affair three years into the marriage (he was an editor on Lethal Weapon, and she was his intern; so totally his M.O.) and he begged Larissa not to leave him. A few months after she took him back they had some argument and she slept with a stranger as a fuck-you. (Landmark allowed her to see that it was really just a fuck-you to her dad.) So because of her own personal evolution it was time to come clean and she confessed all and of course he was shaken but seemed to be okay. (As okay as he could be.) He asked for paternity tests on both kids, and when the results confirmed that Rafaela was his and the boy wasn’t he broke both of Larissa’s arms. She cabbed it to the hospital and said she got mugged. At the E.R. a lady cop pushed her to file charges on her husband but she stuck with the mugging alibi. Her mom flew out to help with the new baby while Larissa mended. Derek got his own place. She could never explain why she hoped he’d come back.