I’m Losing You (36 page)

He sat in the outer office, scanning a ViatiCorps brochure. Horvitz appeared behind the girl at the desk, waving him back.

“I'm sorry you're leaving us, but I understand. It's not for everyone.”

“And I thought show business was depressing.”

“Thinking of giving the talkers another shot?”

“Too many out there right now.”

“Every time I pick up
TV Guide
, there's a new one. Where do they find these people?” He took an envelope from a drawer, handing it to Chet. “Your paycheck and…a partial commission from the ‘dentist' deal.”

“I appreciate that, Stu.”

“Not at all. Keep in touch. If you change your mind, the door is open.”

“I'll call you.”

“By the way, Phil Dagrom just died. The costume designer.”

“I'm not surprised. I thought he was going to die while we were there.”

“No, he got
much
better—after we gave him the money. Happens all the time: the pressure eases, spirits rise. They get
better
. And Ryan—the roommate?”

“What about him?”

Horvitz smiled like a maître d' with no more tables. “He ran off with the money.”

“You're kidding.”

“With a lover. They get on a plane to
Paris
.”

“Oh Jesus.”

“And poor Philip dies forty-eight hours later.”

“Did you tell the dentist that?”

He closed his eyes and gently shook his head. Did Chet think he had no finesse? “I told the dentist Mr. Dagrom died in Crete, in his roommate's arms, while the sun went down on a ruin. Hey! Isn't that what Jackie O called it when she gave Onassis a blow job? Going down on a ruin?”

Aubrey was subdued. He was desperate to touch her, kiss her. The timing was bad, she said. She'd been to UCLA that day for tests. Something was funny with her eyes. They dilated the pupils and made her scan a grid—she was certain it was CMV. If the virus was confirmed, she'd have to take medicine each day through a shunt. She was forthright and even-tempered except when it came to Zephyr. She didn't want the boy to see her around the house with a fucking permanent tube in her arm.

Chet laid her shaking body down. She wet his face with tears and sex, and searched his eyes with the drama of the inchoately blind. He pulled off the condom but Aubrey made him put on another. She came in great, shuddering waves, and when Chet caught up, he hated that his come couldn't find hers, turning stickily onto itself, sheer pornography; he wanted to give her his best, a viscous magic bullet—to fuck her to life as she'd been fucked to early death. Once outside, he tore off latex and quickly wrapped their bodies in sheets, as if to preserve and protect—to cleanse—through an improvised classicism of the bedroom. Aubrey said, “I needed that,” and laughed so hard she shrieked and gasped, pounding his chest with tiny fists.

Zephyr and the sitter were asleep on the couch when they came in. The girl quietly gathered her things, and Aubrey lifted the unconscious child in her arms. She trudged upstairs and tucked him in, then called to Chet from the landing. They went right to bed. It was a long time since Chet had a sleepover. He hoped he wouldn't snore or cry out from a dream.

His last thoughts were of the treasonous roommate, and not the girl he left behind: Ryan the apostate, the cockatrice
à table
at a swanky bistro, say, Le Voltaire, beneath what was once the master's house—supping on
canard aux cerises
, awaiting his lover's return from the urinal.

Wish Jason and his Argonaut well
…

Troy Capra

The legendary personal manager was well known for his collection of large outdoor pieces. He walked them past a Nevelson, a flock of
Lalanne sheep, a Schnabel table with some kind of metal figure in its center, an enormous bronze breast and, finally, the most peculiar of all: a phony garden populated by two male manikins, one young, one old, pants down around the knees, the latter humping a tree while the former fucked a hole in the ground. The figures were motorized; Moe flicked a switch and everyone watched straight-faced. He waved toward a Kienholz—more middle-aged men in suits without pants, standing around a barrel—but the sprinklers had been on and it was too far a trudge.

Rod Whalen's body was amazingly beautiful, a transformation casually attributed to years of power yoga. It was easy to see how a true collector might be stirred. Instead of desiring him, Troy merely wondered how muscles could look that way—gills seemed but a small evolutionary jump. They reminisced about that
Guys and Dolls
summer while a gang of pretty boys and fortysomethings arrived, including Zev Turtletaub and the dermatologist Leslie Trott. The producer escorted a handsome kid with tangled eyebrows and a cold sore: “Taj Wiedlin, my Veepee of Bedevilment.” Troy shook hands all around. Maybe Quinn was right and coming here today would somehow pan out. He liked the queers well enough but rarely went to house parties. Wall-to-wall men had a way of throwing him into heterosexual panic.

When the guests disbanded for drinks, Troy cornered Moe for a little spin control. He told the attentive manager how he was in truth a theater director who'd conflated his labors in the adult film world into an epic monologue that he planned to film before an audience the very next month, with himself as star. Trusskopf said the idea was brilliant and demanded an invitation. He seemed sincere.

The director introduced
Up in Adam
as his “seminal work” and that got a polite laugh. The half-hour film took place in a barracks. It featured a raw recruit (Rod Whalen aka G.I. Blow) and a black drill sergeant (Sarge Large). For kicks, Troy had ripped off a favorite movie,
The D.I
.—he had the black get in Rod's face and shout, just like Jack Webb: “
Do you love me?
” G.I. Blow rejoined, “
Yes sir!
” Again: “Do you love me?” “
Yes sir!
” “I can't hear you!” “
I love you, sir!
”—and on and on, until Sarge Large barked, “Prove it, Mister!” At this, the room broke into pandemonium. Troy hung a few minutes, then went to find the head.

As he walked down a hall, Troy imagined big-bellied Kiv waddling
after, realtor in tow, face flushed by desire of possession—house-haunted. He stepped into a vast neo-classical
salle de bain
with white-marble lion-pawed bath and tiny Bonnard. He lowered himself onto the bowl, staring up at a recessed fixture. He imagined a Spy Shop camera hidden within; cued by infrared beam, Troy's naked ape image might at this very moment be supplanting the shopworn
Up in Adam
players. In a bit of funhouse high-tech horseplay, the partygoers were actually watching him shit and he'd never be the wiser.

He decided to explore, treading softly toward the cavernous master suite: twenty-foot ceilings, majestic savonnerie, Louis XIV armchairs in suede and leather—a Johns and a Clemente, and a Haring painted on a vast tarp. There was a life-size sculpture of a man that soon revealed itself to be the true flesh figure of Moe Trusskopf, head turned upward like a poet translating the clouds. Kneeling crotch-level was the bedeviling Mr. Wiedlin himself. Troy slunk off as the latter's coughing began, like croup in a clinic of the damned.

When the director returned, most of the audience had dispersed to kitchen and patio. Only three or four diehard cinéastes remained in quiet attendance of the acrobatic enlisted men—Quinn among them, thigh welded to a married attorney's. The acne-pitted Dr. Trott stood in a corner shoveling down canapés, regaling Zev Turtletaub with radioactive gossip, indifferent eyes only occasionally drifting to television screen. As Moe resurfaced
sans ami
, the houseman answered the door and a great whoop rose up: there was Richard Dreyfuss. Betsey Blankenberg brought up the rear with a party-hopper's fatuous grin. The bantam latecomer embraced Moe and Leslie and Zev, then sat up close to watch final maneuvers with boyish impunity. “You know, I've never seen one of these,” he said, squeamish fascination turning to horrified glee.

Betsey shook her head indulgently.

“Oh my God!” he gasped. “Is that
physically possible
?”

“I thought you knew,” said Moe, deadpan. “This is a CAA training tape.”

Richard laughed like hell and the room started filling up again.

Troy assessed his options from the kitchen. He could make an end run for the Kienholz, but wasn't sure of an easy alley exit; probably worth investigating. He cursed himself for not having parked on the street. He was certain to be boxed in, probably by Dreyfuss.

The door opened and a server came through, followed by his old chum Betsey. There was nothing for Troy to do but take her by surprise—a pain-free moment suspended in time, like after you catch a finger in a door. She stood back, trying to work the equation of why he was there, unable to factor “gay” as an answer. He leapt in and told the truth, more or less, a blue movie done long ago for money, Moe's boyfriend, yadda yadda, and was halfway into the
Skin Trade
rap when Dreyfuss came in, searching for nosh. Betsey reintroduced them, but the actor nodded as if meeting him for the first time.

“Great flick,” said Dreyfuss, incognizant of the director's presence. The server merrily prepared a Fiestaware bowl of Spanish olives. “Needs a new title, though: how ‘bout
Full Metal Jack-off
?” He cackled as someone shouted his name, and then he was gone.

The air was stale from the innocent snubbing, and Betsey's awkward failure to make an assertion. It would have been so easy to reference the alma mater—her loser-detector must have gone off. Troy asked what brought them to the party. Betsey said they were filming the La Jolla
Medea
, with Zev's company producing. People noisily poured in and Troy excused himself, telling her she should have a look at the art in the backyard. It would blow her mind.

He went out front to the circular driveway—blocked in, as he suspected. Just then, Moe appeared and offered a cigar. Troy declined.

“Don't know why I still smoke—some kinda throwback. I don't even enjoy it. Freud got cancer of the palate, didn't he? That's all I need. ‘Moe, the lower jaw has to go.' Jesus! Cigars are ‘hot' again. I know four guys want me to join their ‘smoking clubs,' I'm supposed to pay twenty-five hundred a year for the privilege. Know what I read in some fashion magazine last week? I think it was
Vogue
. It said: ‘Black—the new white!' Black is the new white, isn't that
brilliant
? You know what? Pretty soon, it
will
be. Black-white, in-out, hot-cold, who dictates?
W
? The
gangs
? Bill Gates? And I'm the one who's supposed to
know
! I'll tell you something: I don't have a fucking clue…”

“It certainly is mysterious.” He felt dull and vocational, like one of the caterers.

“Troy, I have a question for you. Would you make a movie for me? I know you're busy with other projects—”

“A movie?”

“I'd like you to direct a little film, for Zev's thirty-fifth. Do you think you could do that for under thirty? With, of course, something for yourself.”

“Thirty thousand?”

“No, thirty
million
. Of
course
thirty thousand! I'm not
that
rich,” he said, laughing. “Who you been talking to?”

“What kind of film?”

“It should be
totally hilarious
.” Troy asked if that meant X, and the personal manager nodded. “This could be a
classic
. What I want to do is find actors that
look
like the people in his life—and someone who looks like
Zev
! That'll be the hard one—but maybe not. Maybe we can use masks or something. You
know
a lot of these people, don't you? Are they any good, these actors? I mean, when you give 'em lines? And we need a
dog
, a dog that looks like Mimsy! I don't want anything illegal—but I want it
crazy
. Think you can do it, Troy?”

Zev Turtletaub

Taj sat by the pool with the writer profiling Zev for the “Calendar” cover. The frothy ethnography—part
Day of the Locust
, part
That's Entertainment!
—was a sexy Sunday staple, its recipe tried-and-true: a breezy, somewhat cynical day-in-the-life of a mogul of the moment (one who played by his own rules, of course) that included brutal and/or sybaritic anecdotes, unhappy childhood bits with foreshadowings of the “inveterate dreamer” (quotes from grade school teachers preferred, along with fuzzy photo of the bucktoothed, incipient Barnum surrounded by classmates/future losers); a little false-starts/years of failure/turning-point shtick, with obsequious and/or borderline libelous quotes from even more famous friends and traumatized unnamed sources re: the Subject's lavish generosity/pathological niggardliness and longtime generally-rumored-to-be-lithium-treated bipolar moodiness; not to forget his onetime political aspirations and current Major Contributor status; slight pause for some
What Makes Sammy Run
? pop psychologizing, with REVENGE/FUN/ART/SPIRITUALISM/FOR THE HELL OF IT alternately speculated upon as the Grand Motivation; rounding off with the seems-to-have-slayed-his-demons number, a tip of
the hat to Hedonism (“One cannot deny that in this singularly serious world, he is having, well, yes, dare we say it? Fun”) and a quick dip into the Subject's perennial bachelorhood and sexual ambiguity…topping the whole concoction with a creaky allusion to “Rosebud.” In between, the columns garnished by newfangled City Walk/City of Angels/City of Quartz observations; quotes from Adorno; nonsensical Internet forays.