I’m Losing You (2 page)

She doped herself and dreamed a parade of Judith Leiber handbags all in a row, marching up and down Rodeo Drive, escorted by fife-and-drum Barneys New York blackamoors. The purses' famed claw clasps detached, nostalgically carrying her from the house on
Carcassonne Way, above the town of Beverly Hills. On a carpet of Demerol she floated over certain personal monuments, joined by a dutiful panoply of royalist flak—a clique of Chanel ensembles that had served her well hovered now like woolly choppers—while she gazed downward, striving to recapitulate what had happened to her life.

Serena had become nocturnal, the four-thirtyish earthquake hour her comforting noon. She flipped through the expensive photo album she had filled with images from
National Geographic
: a legless beggar-boy flogged by his “manager” on the streets of Cairo, a Vietnamese girl feeding mush to catfishes through a trapdoor in the living room of her floating house, the X ray of a pelican that had eaten a gopher—the gopher having burrowed out through the larynx in its death throes. In her mind, she called these images
curiosities
but wasn't at all sure how she'd become their curator.

She told Farfina (a night nurse, Donny insisted, was a “given”) not to disturb her, then slid open the heavy glass door and lit a cigarette. Serena held a slice of angel food cake in her palm and it shivered there while she watched for the floating snakebite eyes of the raccoons. They were late tonight. The old woman stared at the dark hill abutting the backyard like the hump of a beast she'd soon ride off on. Where would it take her? To the lush coast of Raccoon Cove, where hedgehog traffic cops with Gucci scarves stood under sugar-teat streetlamps. She brought the chair closer to the darkness.

At her fiftieth high school reunion, there were three people she wanted to see—two old flames and the girl who stole them away. She called the alumni association and found out the trio was planning to attend. Serena knew how good she looked and wanted to rub their noses in it; haul them down by their scalps to lick the salt off her cunt, if she could. She hadn't seen them since the Big Twenty-fifth, but the dull, chatty alumni newsletter kept everyone au courant. Victor ran a bank and had a successful bypass. Glynis was a widow, remarried (nineteen eighty-eight) to a manufacturer. Ted had fourteen grandkids and started a trust with the eleven-million-dollar lottery he'd won in their names. And what of Serena? Divorced from a Hollywood producer, her son a powerful agent, a Senior Veepee at ICM. AlumNotes ran a pre-cancerous photo Serena had sent, she of the twinkling eyes and the Scaasi chiffon, she of the I-shit-on-you mouth—like some centimillionairess out of
W.

The reunion looked like a collection of fat old talking candles. The banquet ended just after ten. As the pallbearers of the student body returned to their rooms, Serena heard music blaring from a sidebar ballroom. She wanted to investigate. Victor and his wife went up to bed, beat. Serena had to pull Ted by the elbow; Glynn and hubby indulgently followed. Sad to say, but wandering like that with Ted on her arm was the most fun yet. The music grew louder and the air seemed to change, supercharged by the molecules of the young. A prom. Serena wanted to crash, but the others backed off, laughing gray-skinned dumb-asses. Serena made Ted buy her a drink in the bar while they cut up old times. After Ted walked her to the room and kissed her with his dead fish mouth, she went back down and tipsily danced with the kids. They didn't know what to make of it but liked her energy. She grew light-headed and a leg felt numb; Serena thought she was having a stroke, but it was only the carousing and champagne. She sat at a table, pale, dizzy, staring at souvenirs not of her time—then cried all the way to the elevator, like hosing vomit off a sidewalk. By the time the doors sealed her in and the car began its skyward rush, she knew her life had ended.

On Saturday, Donny Ribkin rose early. He exercised, spoke to his mother's night nurse and speed-read three scripts before a solitary hotel breakfast. Saturdays were the best; Sundays were too close to Monday to be anything more than exemplary. In the afternoon, he drove to the beach. He toyed with taking the Impala—the car his father bought him when Donny was sixteen—but settled on the Land Cruiser because of its height. In the Toyota, he could watch the naked, hair-strewn legs of the women and children, worn out from the water.

He was thinking about Leslie Trott, fag dermatologist and celebrity adept. As an agent, Donny was immune to anything more aberrant than a fleeting client crush—excluding directors (at least, good ones), he felt superior to those in his charge. He'd met all kinds of Big Star–fuckers but never anyone so consumed, attuned and addicted as Dr. Trott. Les had a large staff of young borderline-attractive nurses, also enslaved; the one-two punch of awe and resentment delivered by the stellar clientele had pushed his retinue to the reedy marshes of pharmaceutical abuse. How surreal and achingly unfair to
be on such casual, familial terms with world-class icons—sneaking them through the Private Door, trading high-end gossip of love trouble and HIV death, apportioning devoted guffaws and unsolicited Percocets, being kissed, teased, quasi-missed and token-gifted by the most famous men and (mostly) women on Earth. A television comedienne handed out thousand-dollar Bulgari pens like they were Snapples—general thank-yous for being such staunch, discreet Big Star Acolytes in Les Trott's fucked-up swanky codependent parish. Hired more for a talent to soothe and schmooze, Mother's little helpers were duly outfitted in sanitorium whites and signature Mephisto tennies, their minimal skills enhanced by crash-course on-the-job training. They became cyst-popping confidantes, handmaidens to media immortals: after all the in jokes and injections and periorbital peelings—while dope-nodding Big Star snaked and lurched on the table, squeezing Acolytes' hands like a pioneer sister having an arrow-wound cauterized—after all the shushing, sloughing, scraping, flaking, flecking and sucking up, after the poke, prod, swab and salve, the plucky divinity would evanesce (Private Door) to the limo for a stoned shopping spree while hydra-headed Cinderella mopped the pus and dermal dandruff in its wake.

Les treated most of Donny's clients, appearing at screenings and charity balls, art openings, award shows, tapings, shootings, bar mitzvahs, weddings and funerals. The reason the sultan made time for the agent's occasional eruptions (when Donny got a pimple on his nose, he liked it injected ASAP) rather than shuffling him off to, say, a partner with offices in the megasuite's Siberia, was owing to Donny's official role as wrangler to three of the doctor's seven key Big Star fetishes. In fact, Les Trott had only three observable modes of discourse: (one)
that while with an unempowered, non-celebrity stranger
(this sometimes occurred inadvertently. He remained coolly cordial and glassy-eyed while plotting his trajectory from sandtrap to nearest Big Starlit oasis. It was during such encounters Les convinced himself he was a normal person, capable of self-effacing civilian banter); (two)
that while with a powerful yet non-celebrity acquaintance
(in such an instance, he might affably field medical queries, overwhelming one with minutiae. He assiduously kept current on the journals and enjoyed regurgitating their contents to laymen, a kind of parlor trick with the dual function of helping him retain what he'd read.); lastly, (three)
that while interacting with a Big Star
. Donny Ribkin, whose
whimsical scrutiny of Trott was an extension of his student anthropology days at UCLA, breezily noted gradations therein: a breath of alacrity, almost subjective, an
iridescence
discerned in the jump from Victoria Principal to, say, Jane Seymour. Then one watched a Seymour fall to an Ali MacGraw, who then fell to a Helen Hunt; a Hunt to a Bergen, a Bergen to a Bening (more so, of course, if Bening spouse was present), a Bening to a Midler, a Midler to a Whoopi, and so on, until all fell to Streisand or Taylor or Streep. It was banally, bizarrely riveting.

A few weeks ago, Donny brought his mom to the Cedars-Sinai office so Les could look at her moles and tags. Donny knew they were harmless, but Serena was vain. Since the surgery, she'd spent countless hours poring over the map of her skin—though the cancer inhabited her desert's dark hole, not the negligible cacti growing on chaparral of tummy, pelvis and neck.

Serena always liked Les, having visited through the years for age spots, spider veins and cortisone. He seemed genuinely to enjoy her company. Dr. Trott knew she was dying and, after all, such imminence conferred a kind of celebrity too, linking her to the power-sodden, ticking-clock clan of his H.I.V.I.P. friends. Thus, Les was able to enter a makeshift fourth mode of tender ministrations: the incongruous one of healer. The wry, happy-face Acolytes, never more than an hour or so away from the next Big Star fix, garlanded the agent's mother with queen-for-a-day benedictions and real sugarless-candy giveaways—actual lollipops of affection—just as they had Bette Davis in
her
pre-mortem dermo once-over. Outside the windows, birds chirped a Technicolor musicale and even the nurses seemed less stoned; angelic, whitewashed sisters of charity, loving the agent for bringing his mum, lifting her spirits like that at death's elaborate, unfunny door.

Serena loved them back (but brought no Bulgari nibs). Here was a doctor who wouldn't snip away at her guts! Here was the clinic as vanity fair, a fluorescent cotillion with a smooth maestro of emollients—here was a doctor with his gorgeous gals to coo over her Sandrine Leonard handbag and antiquarian brooch; to overlook her shrunken, balding frame; to studiously ignore the fecal odor following after like the devil's courtship cologne.

Donny went down to the street to smoke and that's when he saw Katherine Grosseck, love of his life. He wanted to run but managed
a sickly smile as they collided. She was sleeveless and her chic workout arms carried bags from agnès b. “My mother's seeing Les.”

“I heard she wasn't well. I'm sorry.” Serena and Katherine had always gotten along. “I have to go now,” she said, then winced as if she were passing a stone. Donny got that hit-and-run feeling.

It was two years since the breakup, but their life together—for him—continued on a parallel, spectral track. He watched it unfold from a shadowy place he called the Imaginarium (after the toy store in Century City), watched as shadow-Donny and shadow-Katherine went about their daily couple-life: saw them vacation and marry, go to movies, buy a house. Saw belly swollen—saw child come. Watched them banter through the day the way they always did, like no two people in the world in the history of time. For the last two years, whenever idiot things happened (in the office, on the street, something glimpsed or overheard), he saw Katherine look at him the way she used to, the way no one ever had, no person in the world or in time, sly and throaty, sexy, knowing—watched them laugh away the nights and days the way they did—his shadow self staring into the sturdy well of her chocolate eyes with the kind of hyper-realism he imagined preceded psychosis.

Their love continued to grow the way nails were said to grow on a corpse.

“I'm the Dead Animal Guy.”

The family in the house at the end of the Downey cul-de-sac had been waiting a day and a half. When the handsome man with tight gray curls opened the screen door, Simon Krohn was already kneeling at the foundation to sniff a mesh-covered vent. Inside, the disdainful Latina was sorting her husband's freshly laundered Water and Power shirts. She hated Simon on sight; his quirky metabolism put her right off. He was so white his skin glowed. “Make sure you show him the den,” she said. The smell was here, there, everywhere. She couldn't be sure anymore—it was stuck to her nosehairs. After holding forth on the importance of durable screen installation, Simon was led to the bathroom. She didn't want to get too close to this coveralled emissary of Creep. Like having a gravedigger in the house.

The door to the bathroom was shut, as if to trap a poltergeist. Simon the Discursive squatted at the bath.