I Met Someone

by Bruce Wagner

  He asked himself if he was in love with her but the question bewildered, which alone made Jeremy feel it was true. She was the wiliest, weirdest, most willful, barbarously charming, dangerously sane and erotic creature he had ever met, and proved herself much looser, warmer, and goofier than she came across in those historic, soliloquizing first encounters. More important was the added, irresistible detail of their fatedness, the sense that a supreme destiny, random and divine, was mysteriously at play in their having found one another—a rare and fragile thing, a privilege he’d never remotely experienced with another human being. (Except maybe for Tristen, but they were never going to have a baby together, they could never have created life.) A further complication was that he had grown to love her body. Throughout his life, Jeremy had had more encounters with women than he let on—turbulent, sexual, deeply emotional attachments. They were atypical but no less intense than male-to-male combat.

  He understood that by advising Dusty it was time to explore, he was being hypocritical . . . because just like she, Jeremy wasn’t feelin’ it. He took the arrival of his son as an evolutionary marker—emblem of the commutation of a life sentence of perversion and promiscuity, a symbol of escape from the prison of bodies and enslavement of flesh. The age-old question watered his musings like a soft rain: What does it all mean? The cock goes here, the mouth there, the proprietary heart and obsessive thoughts follow with the predictability of blind donkeys descending into the recesses of a spectacular, spectacularly meaningless canyon. In his twenties, he was in love with a hermaphrodite (they called them “intersex” now) who had a vagina with a swarthy nub of cock dangling above it like a boutonniere. How perfect that shemale was for him, how he loved that being! What a cruel, lusciously asinine farce was the game of love, desire, and need! With no escape other than the false exit of celibacy . . . and what was celibacy but a smug entr’acte in a dead-end, compulsory burlesque?

  Summoning Devi again, he could smell that meadow of spring flowers that seemed to live on her nape (inexplicably on one side only). Their time of domesticity, measured in months, was surreal. He never said a word about her to friends or colleagues, which only served to heighten the phantasmal aspect. When he came home at the end of a workday there she was, sometimes barefoot, always pregnant, in the kitchen, cooking, like the beatific, soon-to-be-slain wife in a film noir. She’d been curiously dispassionate in telling him she had found her guru dead on the bathroom floor of the beach house, as if all was prefigured. After that last lunch with MacKlatchie, Jeremy Googled Killer, Longtime Fugitive, Dead in Malibu, but there was nothing . . . though he had found a rather obscure article which may or may not have been the spur that goaded Frank to return to Minnesota for his second-attempt helping of “just desserts.” The homicides occurred in the winter of ’83 . . . Yet even after Devi told him Sir had died—“gone ahead” was how she put it—Jeremy never brought it up. He doubted if she knew her teacher had murdered his family but decided it unlikely, as Franklin would have shielded the woman he had loved from the beginning against a thing so unsavory; Jeremy didn’t feel it was his place to disabuse her. Another caveat of MacKlatchie’s might have been that such knowledge on Devi’s part may not only have challenged the “energetically incontestable” beliefs he had so carefully imposed and inspired but made her criminally complicit in harboring him. In the same vein, there had been a few moments, before and after MacKlatchie’s passing, when Jeremy pondered reaching out to the police to report what he knew.

  But he let that go.

  As sleep overtook, he drifted back to the Buddhist dinner party, recalling Michael Imperioli’s story. The actor said that after the retreat in Ukiah, he never saw his friend again, yet got postcards, in which the man wrote that he was on his way to a place called Summerland to meet his dead wife. The strange thing was, Devi had more or less said the same thing—she and her beloved teacher were on their way to that very place, when destiny had interrupted, in the form of “Jerome” himself. The article in the small-town Minnesota paper that Jeremy found online, The Summerland Sentinel, recounted the notorious unsolved murders of Margot and “Little Jim” MacKlatchie more than three decades before, in the hamlet of the same name.

  What did it all mean?

  The soft rain fell . . .

  When Devi summarily announced—again, with odd dispassion—that it was her turn to “go on ahead,” she said it was by dint of finding “my Sir, who waits for me.” By then the lightness had gone out of her, and the light from her eyes too, replaced by something indescribably different. She was no longer his, nor was she Wyatt’s.

  On the morning that she left, she told one last story in the “old” style.

  “After my Bella died, my guru said we must go. That he had heard the bells and they beckoned us to take to the road—to the ‘Highway of Holiness,’ he said, that would deliver us to freedom. To Silence. I gathered what few possession I had (I threw everything away when Bella went ahead) and spent my last hours in Chicago with pounding heart, blushing like a bride. My Sir bought me a beautiful suit at Marshall Field and told me to have my hair and nails done because ‘one must begin such a great adventure with understated elegance and easy formality.’ So I did. And as I was rushing to meet him at the train station, I bumped into a boy I knew from middle school. We’d gone to college together too, and while we didn’t see each other much because of our schedule of classes, I knew he had always been in love with me. He was shy and held back, but I knew. When he saw me he was shocked at how I looked because I was usually so plain! I never cared about makeup or how I did my hair or what I wore. When he saw it was me, it made him crazy. I’ll never forget the look on his face. ‘Cathy!’ he said—I wasn’t Devi yet, I was still Cathy to the world, and to that world I suppose shall always be—‘Cathy, my God, I didn’t recognize you!’ We chatted, though he could see I was anxious, and in a hurry. And finally—finally!—he asked me out. I was polite, but said that I was on my way to the station and was going away on a long journey. His face got sad and he said, ‘Did you meet someone?’ I just looked down at my shoes. How could I tell him the truth of who—of what—I had met? How does one say one ‘met’ Silence? I could scarcely say it to myself. And how paltry the question was, how human, yet how poignant, how beautiful! So I stammered yes, kissed his cheek, and ran off.”

  Jeremy remembered her final kiss to him, and the one she bestowed on their son.

  Then, those last words:

  “I’ll see Bella soon—and my precious Sir . . . his wife and son—and my . . . why, I’ll see Mother and Father—and Tristen too! Then you, Jerome, and then Wyatt—

  “And all whom I ever loved.”

  —

  The flirty, dark-clouded skies snubbed the storm, and the birthday party was a marvel. Nature was in an uproar—as if thrilled to have been invited, she changed costumes like a teenager who couldn’t make up its mind. (Her room was a glorious mess.) Thankfully, she had decided not to bother the event with any petulant, hormonal displays, at least none that a light umbrella couldn’t handle.

  Cell phones were confiscated on entry, the unpopular chore carried out with panache by an affable stable mucker, size Extra Large, who’d dopily squeezed himself (and been well squozen by others) into the chrysalis of a grungy old Quiksilver wetsuit, festively adorned in leaves, twigs, Post-its, and glitter. The donkey ears that his smaller, even more puckish counterpart would soon attach to a snoring Bottom were taped to his battered cycling helmet like a HELLO sticker at a jackass convention. In regard to the banning of electronic devices, the invitees already knew it to be a policy of the manor. When she first took up residency, Dusty threw a housewarming whereby she welcomed the new neighbors with a heartfelt speech expressing her hopes that one day she might be deemed a worthy addition to their community. She also spoke of her partner’s “accident” and its effect on their lives, before congenially segueing to enlighten her guests as to the obscene bounty placed
upon post-trauma images/videos of Aurora (there had been none as yet) “should they become available.” Such an eventuality, she said, was doubtless an intrusion she wished to postpone for as long as she could. The actress took great care not to tar the villagers with that brush, making sure they understood that even friendly group shots, taken by the innocents now gathered, and photobombed, as they say, by the sometimes scampish Aurora (the guests tittered but warmly understood where Dusty was going with this), had the potential to be hacked by professionals with all the stealth, speed, and brutality of wolves slaughtering sheep. Their embarrassed but resolute hostess couldn’t apologize enough, as she felt the whole business to be unneighborly, but really had no need, because the good and honorable Brutonnières, won over by her sensitivity, humility, and earnestness, not to mention the touching heroism of her predicament, heartfully assured those wishes would be respected. And besides, their sons’ and daughters’ smartphone umbilicuses were ones they looked forward to cutting, be it only for a few hours. The prospect made them right jolly.

  The amphitheater was graced with revolving sets of forest and castle hall, but the former, with its breeze-twitched bramble, carpet of leaves, and overhang of painted stars, was what captivated Aurora most. The excitable girl, more of a girl at forty than ever, sat in the audience beside her mother, thrilled to teeth and bone by the tin-rattled tempest—courtesy of the forearms of Sir Extra Large—that accompanied the drama. (The scudding drafts of the real storm kicked up their heels in delight at the tin-eared impersonation.) Her manic gaiety was such that Aurora temporarily forgot she had a part to play in the night’s ensemble; Dusty feared she’d spent a greater part of the week preoccupied more by habiliments than the learning of lines. But the resultant outfit, a sensational catchpenny mash-up of punk-royale fairydom, had well been worth it: a tiara of safety pins, waggles of black and bloodred tulle and chiffon, a vintage Belstaff biker jacket, tatty ermine stole, and enormous rhinestone-spangled butterfly wings. She spent hours scuffing her new Capezios, meticulously spattering them with paint, and carried a skull-knobbed scepter with a rocker’s hauteur—half Siouxsie Sioux, half Queen Cersei. Dusty had already emailed pictures to Vivienne Westwood, due in July as a houseguest.

  So as not to try the patience of its audience nor the elements, Shakespeare’s romp had been condensed enough to be rendered more conceit than dream. As in the play, actors took on multiple roles, though more multiple in this show than likely meant by the author. The cast comprised manor employees, among them a shepherd (who made all the daughters swoon, as shepherds tend), a gardener’s apprentice (a close swoony second), and the son of a caretaker (not even in the running). A flock of Aurora’s carebirds—minders, P.T.s, and the like—rounded out the company, with hawk-like Edwina divebombing the coveted role of Titania. She proved herself far freer in expression and lighter on her feet than one would have guessed from her strict day-shift demeanor and fighting weight.

  A crowd of around forty gathered to watch. When he wasn’t making sly asides to Dusty about how he should liked to have been cast—being a “natural Bottom” and all—Jeremy fought to keep hold of the lap-dancing Wyatt, while the au pair remained ever vigilant of a hand-off. About halfway through, a minder pulled Aurora backstage. When it came time, the shepherd (as Quince, whose beauty prompted Jeremy to remark on all kinds of jellies), addressed the Duke of Athens—though he made his speech directly to the movie star—begging permission to put on the storied playlet of the star-crossed lovers. The wall and the lion soon made their entrance to much applause, then the birthday girl made hers, to an acclamation so raucous it gave pause, even to the trees, who respectfully stopped their thrashing. Aurora blushed and curtsied, and the child’s play, with subtle accompaniment of strings, began. She acquitted herself of cherry-lipped lines whispered to Pyramus through the chink in the wall traditionally represented by scissored fingers—in this case, those of the apprentice gardener who got lost enough in his role to be paralyzed (pruned?) by an unexpected fit of stage fright, made infinitely worse by the traitorous sniggering of those fickle girls who not long before had hung on his every word (and eyelash), so much so that one of Aurora’s posse was forced to stand behind the lad and go unto the breach, dear friends, more than once more, by speaking his lines directly from the text held in the prompter’s hands. In summary, Pyramus saw Aurora-Thisbe’s voice, heard her face, and so forth; the catatonic hole in the wall was kissed by both parties, to an eruption of squeals from the iPhoneless lassies; the lion appeared (assuring the spectators he wasn’t a real lion—not to be alarmed); and at last, a pony Moon clomped dutifully forward, an LED lantern strung from its neck by a lanyard. The king of the forest, no longer defensive about his so-called lionhood and mindful of furthering the narrative, lurched at Aurora, who, in fleeing haste, dropped her scepter, which was promptly retrieved and handed back by the timorous wall itself. Jeremy perspicaciously shouted to Aurora not to forget to let the big cat have her scarf (one of the carebirds was about to address that very issue). The leonine poseur set to bloodying it with a mouthful of tomatoes—causing a hemorrhage of ewwwws! from the younger set—then both lion and girl ran off. The man on the moon, or in its saddle anyway, was left to pronounce his only words: “The lantern is the moon; I, the man in the moon; and this pony, my pony.” (There was, oddly, a shortage of wags, not of ponies.) Much hilarity was thrown at the players, which the banjo, violin, and zither caught, fluffed, and threw jauntily back. An ebullient Pyramus arrived on the scene but upon seeing the bloody scarf buffoonishly took his own life—though not without a gasp from a confused child toward the rear, which set off the car alarms of other baffled toddlers, which triggered a few five-alarm sirens in the form of bawling infants, etcetera, etcetera. When Aurora returned from the wings with a wing of her own inexplicably intact—she was no monarch after all—she saw her hapless love and said, “Asleep my love? What, dead my dove?” and proceeded to unpack the death speech in an effing, ineffably moving way, with a tragicomic flair that no one saw coming. She covered the dead man’s eyes, lips, nose, and cheeks in regret, and then, with that bloodied shroud; by the time she farewell’d her friends and bid the fabled three adieus, Dusty and Jeremy felt stabbed along with her.

  A not too distant crack of thunder pretty much said it all.

  Any prudish notion of shelter was abandoned as the audience jumped to its feet, roaring and stomping in approval. Onstage, everyone began to dance; the spectators ran up to join them. Through a path between the litter of tumbled folding chairs, Dusty, in pell-mell procession, was ushered to Aurora, and as her daughter led them in a rocky, rocked-out Dionysian jig, the mother’s heart nearly burst at the berserk and joyful travesty of this life. The au pair danced with the Wall, and Edwina with the carebirds; the oldest of the old, with the youngest of the young, and the XXXL, with the Extra Small; the pony moon tangoed amidst a tangle of squealing piglets; and Wyatt bounced on his daddy’s neck with pure, fierce pleasure as the skies emptied themselves, and Nature set about blasting all of Sussex in exaltation, determined to make more than some corner of a foreign field forever England.

  —

  Nine o’clock—

  Aurora’s fast asleep, spent from the day. Her mother can’t remember the house ever being so peaceful at that hour . . .

  Jeremy is off to London in the morning and Dusty needs to be up early to see him off. She loved that he came; it meant so much to Aurora as well. And having him here wasn’t like old times—they were making new times. New old times. Nostalgia could go fuck itself.

  She felt hopeful, expansive, resilient.

  Every few weeks, her assistant sent a pouch from the States with fan notes and whatnot. She had slacked off on writing people back—burned out. Jeremy said she should just post a video on her website (“Like Ringo did”) saying she was busy living her life and would no longer be responding to letters. “Fans need tough love too. But be sure you add ‘with peace and love’!” In
the pouch this time was a folder with a faded Whitmore written on it, in Dusty’s hand. Her assistant found it tucked in a box in the Trousdale garage right before the house was sold. Inside were the letters her father had written from his final place of residence, a flophouse on South San Pedro in downtown L.A. She pulled them out but didn’t really have the energy for a comprehensive look. She plucked one at random.

  I hope ONE DAY you will FORGIVE, if not FORGET. I could not STAND UP to your mother because I was a DISHONEST MAN about SO MANY THINGS—things YOU have been so HONEST about in YOUR life for which I am SO PROUD, Janine! If only I had your COURAGE and STRENGTHS I would have LEFT YOUR MOTHER LONG AGO but more importantly I would have STOOD UP FOR YOU AND THE LITTLE ONE and NEVER LET HER GO. Never let go EITHER of you. Please please please FORGIVE,

  your loving Dad

  Poor, poor man . . .

  She meditated on Arnold Whitmore as she fell asleep.

  That’s what she was born of: cowardly blood and tender bones. She thought she might dream of him tonight, but her sleep was haunted by Aurora instead—Allegra really, because the ambience was from that time. There they were on a lazy Sunday, downwind from Santa Barbara (not far from where Reina died), chillin’ at the Love Shack. Nothing bizarre ever happened in this recurring fantasia, it was always prosaic. They just hung out together, without secrets, without history. Without drama.

  Then she woke up.

  Only 12:40—ugh. It was going to be one of those nights.