Dead Stars

by Bruce Wagner

  . . .

  She was still searching for a way to reclaim her own firefly soul; that of the artist she’d begun to fear was no more. Her life had capsized, trapping her beneath.

  Then she read something that yanked her back with some hilarity to HelmutWorld & the boomboom years of his mentorship, her artful schooling in the theory & practice of all things photoshock. According to DailyMailOnline, there’d been a great to-do down under. A peer of Jacquie’s who’d shown at the Guggenheim and the Venice Biennale was in hot water. A major show in Sydney had been cancelled due to complaints over pics of a nude 13-year-old girl; a clear case (for Jacquie) of déjà nu. Child protection advocates were incensed; the exhibit was shut down; images seized by police under the Crimes Act. Naturally, the Newtonian Laws of Negative Press prevailed and held true—a censorship hurlyburly ensued on a national level and the revolted Prime Minister leapt dutifully into the fray. But the artist needn’t fear, as celebrity help was on its way (Newton’s 2nd Law) in nothing less than the form of Cate Blanchett captaining her team in pursuit of Australia’s prestigious A Cup. Newton’s Third wrapped things up nicely in the end with a press release: The New South Wales Dept of Public Prosecutions announced that no charges would be filed.

  Jacquie had a wild, mad laugh about it, the kind of huge, careless, orgiastic, toxin-busting guffaws that borderline personalities are known to indulge in the privacy of their homes. She sorely missed the man, his dry wit and wry level-headedness, his kinks & lighthearted gravitas, the charm and wisdom of his cynically uncynical counsel too. Now that she was having another non-career crisis, where the fuck was Helmut when you really needed him? She had the great good fortune of supping with him the night before he died. Jacquie had been oeuvre-hustling in LA, she was a bit rusty and out of her league but Helmut graciously insisted she join them for dinner at Il Sole: he & his wife June, Uma Thurman & Andre Balazs, Benedikt/Angelika Taschen, plus Jacquie & her date Pieter Wogg, a specialist at Christie’s who was a fan of way more than Jacquie’s pictures. (She used to say, “You only love me for my body of work.”) Helmut told everyone at the table how excited he was because “tomorrow, Cadillac is giving me an Escalade!” The next day, pulling out of the Chateau garage presumably to take the car for a trial spin, he dropped dead behind the wheel and crashed into a retaining wall.

  She tried to hear his voice in her head, telling her what to do next, propping her up like he used to with trilingual pep talks, propounding that she still had it, if only she could step out of her own way, promising her that inspiration would come as long as she cultivated that certain je ne sais quoi shtick-to-it-iveness. But it was an old CD. Jacquie had never really been able to escape Phase One of Newton’s Master Plan. She’d never even made it from hairless to bush leagues . . . something happened, she’d lost her faith & self-confidence, & began to spend her days trying to figure out how not to die instead of how she might live. Whatever artistry left in her was stunted, remedial, irrelevant. She failed miserably at the 2.0 thing, failed to transform herself from Mann manqué cartographer of flat tit mysteries/pretween genito-urinary landscapes into a swan that knew exactly what it was—a mature artist, take her or leave her.

  Lately, she’d come close to feeling the breath & hand of her wily mentor, in that she alit on a few things she thought he’d have heartily approved. Jacquie saw something on the CNN site about a 76-year-old Tokyo man, a former travel agent with a wife & children now making his living as an actor in the booming genre they called “elder porn.” She seriously considered flying to Japan to take his portrait—& tracking down other salami men—but it took lots of money to travel around like that. Unless she had a really strong feeling about it, which she didn’t, there wasn’t much point. She couldn’t afford to be lukewarm quixotic.

  Another thing that got her attention was an article in People that came out in the weeks after Gabrielle Giffords got shot called I SURVIVED A BULLET TO THE HEAD. Among the gallery of unfortunates was a 21-year-old cheerleader turned dental assistant whose injury necessitated the removal of a bizarrely visible chunk of skull and brain; her head looked like a clock missing that slice of 9-to-midnight pie—nothing but airspace. She was fully functional, arriving at her own homecoming queen ceremony in wheelchair & helmet. Another fine specimen was a young man who miraculously recovered from a bullet fired into his cerebellum when he was 5 years-old—the shooter was his dad, who killed his brother, strangled his mom then shot himself to death. Far be it from me to suggest psychotherapy. Jacquie thought maybe she could hit the road with the goal of taking 25 portraits of Americans who survived those kind of head wounds. She clipped something the cheerleader had said, “This is my new normal,” which Jacquie thought would make a helluva title for a book: The New Normal.

  Um, well, I have a new normal too: career death & poverty, and severely damaged children who hate & rob me.

  Ain’t that a kick in the head?

  . . .

  She couldn’t believe it: Pieter was friend requesting. They’d been out of touch for a few years. He was living in London now, coming to L.A. next week. Hey let’s just pick up where we left off, he wrote, in a light & funny way, so he wouldn’t feel so rejected if Jacquie was in a relationship or whatever.

  He took her to a wonderful Moroccan restaurant called Tagine that he’d been “obsessing about.” (A typically gay Pieter phrase.) He told her that James Franco recommended it to him—the actor recently collaborated with Gus Van Sant & Michael Stipe on a mixed media installation at the gallery Pieter worked for in the UK—as a place where the odds were good for running into cast members of Glee, the show he said he was unfortunately “still fucking obsessed with & it’s so over.” O boy, he’d gotten so much gayer than she remembered. “James said the glee club gather at three distinct watering holes: Tagine, Sur or The Little Door. So before I blow this town, I’m going to take you to each one.”

  They jogged/ambled down a rather short & narrow Memory Lane—they’d only had a six-month thing. Oddly, the cork in the affair had been the dinner party at Il Sole; they spent the night together, & that was that. They’d only seen each other a handful of times since Helmut died, in ’04.

  Pieter did most of the talking. He left Christie’s a while ago & for the last three years worked at Gagosian. He said he had “important, ongoing relationships” with major collectors, but the real perks were impulsive road trips with Damien Hirst, pubcrawl/clubbing with Tracey Emin, and late night suppers with “the Richards,” Serra & Prince.

  “I have never been so fulfilled professionally.” He raised a ridiculous eyebrow & ahem’d. “On the personal, umhem, romantic front . . . well, it’s been a bit of a bloody trainwreck. Tho the phrase living hell also comes to mind. Yes, I think living hell is a bit closer to the mark. Not closer to, really, but perhaps the mark itself.” She loved it when he lapsed into his Steve Coogan doing Hugh Grant/Hugh Laurie routine. “Wait a moment, wait a moment—somehow living hell doesn’t quite capture the full . . . catta-strofe. So let’s just call it a natural disaster. Let’s then—no! an unnatural disaster. That’s much better. A calamity, a major calamity, a major colostomy . . . a fucking eschatological colostomy of fucking Biblical proportions i.e. I believe that I can safely say that on a personal level the last few years have been what historians of this sort of thing will call the tsunamification of hope, of any hopes or dreams that Pieter Wogg might have had that he would find love, and the marriage & requisite children that often follow. Yes. This is that volume—I am living that volume—Volume 4, of the massive biography—this is that volume entitled Dreams Deferred. I continue to prowl the night, of course. Hope springs nocturnal. As do many other . . . things.”

  He was more adorable than handsome, which went a long way, with a capacious bag of immensely personable tricks. Pieter always made her laugh; Jacquie & Albie agreed the cliché was true—“funny” got laid first. It felt good being out in the world with an old lover. To feel like a woman again.

  She’d al
most forgotten.

  He reminded her more than once when they got back to his suite at the Chateau. Memory Lane grew, hope sprang, all that.

  She brought with her a 5 by 7 of the portrait she took of Ginger, Daniel & their baby. When she showed him Pieter got very quiet, & Jacquie wondered if a stillbirth or child death figured somewhere in his calamity of natural and unnatural disasters. She stepped out on the balcony, to let him be.

  Good lord. How beautiful the city was! If she were a god, she’d have reached out and grabbed it to wear around her neck. Her cellphone rang & her heart leapt—it was 1:30AM & no one but Jerilynn would be calling (she’d been keeping the phone in her pocket not her purse for that very reason). She looked in at Pieter, to see if it was him being funny, but he was still completely engrossed.

  “Hello?”

  “May I speak with Jacquie Vomes?”

  “This is she.”

  A hesitation, then:

  “Did I wake you?”

  “No. Who is this?”

  “I’m so sorry to be calling this late. Ginger MacMannis gave me your number. Well actually she gave it to my son-in-law. She said you were enormously helpful.”

  “What’s this about?”

  “The doctors said they don’t expect my grandchild to make it till the morning.” Her voice broke. “We’re all preparing for a loss.”

  “Where are you calling from?”

  “Scottsdale. We’re at the Mayo Clinic.”

  CLEAN

  [Telma&Biggie]

  The Children’s Hour

  Servers

  set up lunch on a gilded, baroque table beside the large stream that flowed thru the grotto/cave (a continuous loop) at the far edge (which edge Telma knew not) of the property, an unthinkable 112-acres in the heart of the heart of Bel-Air. Biggie’s dad bought the original 30-acre property from Louis Trotter, the waste & excavation king, adding on whenever adjacent parcels became available. The land and three houses sitting on it—all other homes had been razed upon purchase—were owned by Closely Held Holdings, a corporation whose sole shareholders were Biggie, his brother Brando, their father Bertram, and Bonnie the absentee mom.

  The enormous structures were approximately a mile apart. Each was inhabited by a single resident (Brando in the Gehry, Biggie in the Neff, Bertram in the Paul Williams), conjoined by seamless Calatrava-commissioned glass corridors, though no one had actually ever used the walkways to go from house to house, at least not to anyone’s memory. Brainard Sr. hadn’t left his classic Hollywood Regency since Bonnie vanished (five years ago come spring), & in fact was rarely seen at all; occasionally, Brando would report to Biggie he espied their father at some ghastly hour of night during a storm, slowly, meditatively making his way a ¼-mile or so into the wind & rain-battered, unbreakable glass cocoon, his Meerschaum Calabash in hand, an insomniac spurned by his succubus, a cuckolded Sherlock lacking the balm of opiates to alleviate the distress of cracking a case for which he would never be hired: The Wife Who Would Not Return.

  “Was this here . . . before?” said an uncomprehending, nearly bug-eyed Telma, in reference to the cave and underground mini-river. They took an elevator to get there, and Telma noted it hadn’t been a particularly short ride down.

  “We finished last year. I think it’s illegal—the city thought we were putting in retaining walls. My dad said it’s some kind of architectural wonder.”

  Her salmon & watercress salad just sat there.

  “But what’s it for?”

  “Uhm, my mom’s a spelunker. She goes all over the world exploring caves, ones with rivers flowing through. She always sends postcards. She sent me one from the Deer Cave in Borneo. And one from the Caucasus Mountains—it’s the deepest in the world. She sent one from the longest cave. That’s in Kentucky.”

  “Is that where she is now? Somewhere in a cave?”

  “She sent one from Vietnam with a picture of where she and Marj were spelunking. The Vietnam cave is the biggest one in the world. But the card took really long to get here so maybe they already left. It’s called Hang Son Doong, & it’s in the Annamite Mountains. National Geographic said the ceilings are 800-feet high. It said you can fit six 40-story skyscrapers inside one cave.”

  “Who’s Marj?”

  “My mom’s buddy.”

  “Doesn’t your mom have email?”

  “No. Not really. I don’t think so. She never gave me one. I think she probably just writes postcards and letters.”

  “That’s so weird.”

  He ignored her comment. Telma regretted having made it.

  “Sometimes the only way from one cave to another is by an underground river. They have all kinds of breathing systems, you know, aqualungs, you can go for 5 hours without surfacing. But if you use the river to swim to a new cave, and you have to go underwater for 10 or 15 minutes to get there, and on the way back, after you’re walking around and exploring the new cave, if on the way back something goes wrong with your equipment or you run out of oxygen, the cave becomes your tomb.”

  “How horrible!”

  “Because there isn’t any way back but through the river. That’s why my mom and Marj use the buddy system. If one of them has an equipment failure, they can still get back because they could take turns with the oxygen on the way back. That’s why they explore together. You just can’t spelunk alone.”

  Telma thought OMG so rad so crazy! & for a moment was mindlessly giddy. She stood up, made a few scrunchy elastic gargoyle faces, then sprinted alongside the river, demonically pirouetting as she went.

  She stopped, about half a 747 away from her host.

  “Hull there!” she shouted.

  There was a faint echo.

  “Biggie! How deep is it? How deep is the river!”

  “Maybe 4½, 5 feet?” He spoke normally but the subterranean acoustics made him easy to hear. “You can program how fast you want to make the current—or make it so there’s no current at all.”

  “Can we swim in it?” she asked, slowly venturing back while doing a jig.

  “I don’t, but you can. I like to rowboat.”

  “Let’s rowboat!” She was positively Dionysian. “But where does it go? Where does the river go?”

  “It just loops around.”

  “This is so much radder than Disneyland!”

  “The whole thing goes for like maybe four miles?”

  “O my God.”

  She could barely contain herself. After a few more cartwheels, she resumed her place at the table. Biggie was halfway through a 4-tiered club sandwich, the most beautiful club sandwich Telma had ever seen. She wanted to marry him.

  “Will you come with me to the Courage Ball?”

  “Sure. What is it?”

  “It’s St. Ambrose’s annual fundraiser for pediatric oncology. I’m actually going to perform.”

  This, announced with less than usual verve, owing to the development with the Canadian girl.

  “Will you tell Camino so she can put it in the calendar? I’m really bad at remembering that kind of stuff.”

  “Beyoncé’s performing too!”

  The elevator opened and a server stepped out, along with Camino, who stood by while he cleared the table before setting down goblets of hot fudge sundaes.

  “Camino, Telma wants me to come with her to . . .” He turned to his guest. “To what is it again?”

  “The Courage Ball, on the 19th.”

  Telma wasn’t sure if his forgetting was normal or maybe a part of what was wrong with him. Camino swiftly handed her a card with all her contact information and Telma said she would forward the invitation. Then Camino told Biggie that his other guest had arrived—“a Mr. Bud Wiggins.”

  “What does he want?”

  “Your brother said it’s about one of your projects. He said you made the appointment yourself.”

  “O! I know what it’s about. My Antigone.”

  The server stepped back into the lift after setting down a fresh pitcher of pi
nk lemonade. Camino followed him, and briefly held the door to keep it from closing.

  “Shall I say that you’re on the way up?”

  “As soon as we finish our dessert.”

  Camino smiled, the door closed, & they ascended.

  “What’s Antigone?” asked Telma.

  “It’s a Greek play.”

  “What’s it about?”

  Biggie just shrugged. Telma thought he might be getting tired, but she’d be going soon & had to ask one more question.

  “She didn’t come home even when she was in Kentucky?”

  Biggie didn’t respond. It was as if he hadn’t heard her. The silence was awkward but she decided to ride it out.

  “Kentucky has the longest cave in the world. It’s called the Mammoth Cave and it’s over 350 miles long. I always Google Earth whatever cave my mom and Marj are exploring.”

  Telma wasn’t sure if the oddness of his response was due to Asperger’s (her mom put that in her head) or something as-yet undiagnosed & more serious.

  “My mom sends me postcards, she doesn’t do email. They’re spelunkers,” he said, wrinkling his forehead. “My mom and Marj. That’s why we put the cave in. Because it’s undiscovered, and she loves finding new caves. If you’re going to be a spelunker, you have to live by the buddy system.”

  . . .

  Biggie looked away as Bud shook his hand. They sat in the living room, Bud making awkward desultory talk while Biggie majorly fidgeted. Then Biggie stood, motioning for Bud to come along; the rest of the meeting was held in the boy’s bedroom.

  “Your brother tells me you’re the idea man.”

  Bud felt like he was auditioning for a reality show.

  Biggie was already engaged in front of the monitor; without taking his eyes from it, he told Bud to come closer. The writer wheeled up a chair and looked over Biggie’s shoulder.

  “Is that Google Earth?”

  Bud never used it before. Biggie said he was in Vietnam, at a great cave. He used his “man on the street” cursor to fly over hillocks & mountains. The sea level indicator rose and fell.