I’m Losing You (41 page)

 

Rachel Krohn

“It has nothing to do with
thinking
, it has to do with
knowing
. You should
know
.”

They were lunching at the Barney Greengrass aerie, on the terrace that overlooked the windswept postcard of Beverly Hills—one of those crisp, automatic days that trigger nostalgic dominoes of déjà vu.

“He's happily married,” Rachel replied.

The agent threw back a creamy neck and snorted. A Jewish star lay on her olive skin like a delicate inlay. “They're
all
happily married, that's
part
of it. They love going back to
Mommy
.”

Rachel liked staring at her face; it was out of kilter, like a Modigliani. “He's not that way, Tovah. They just bought a big house.”

“There's no way he's going to go from where he
was
to where he is
now
with the
kind
of money he has made in the
time
he has made it without
some
instant gratification, Rachel. Of the genital variety.”

The women laughed. The subject was Perry Needham Howe, a television producer and UTA client who'd recently hit it “large.” Rachel had worked as his assistant almost three years, not once catching the scent of adultery—not even a whiff.

“Are you PMS?”

“Why?”

“Because you always end up grilling me about Perry's sex life when you're PMS.”

She was a funny, contradictory girl who'd become Rachel's best friend on the planet. Her father, Dee Bruchner, was a senior agent at William Morris; ever the rebel, Tovah defected to UTA, where she quickly corraled a group of young writers who cut their teeth on shows like
Larry Sanders
and were now creating hip, middle-of-the-road TV of their own—the Gary David Goldbergs of tomorrow. But Tovah was shrewd: she wanted a finger in
all
the pies, including a slice of Perry Needham Howe. She was “attracted to him physically,” but that didn't explain her ambitions—most men were attractive that way. Her interest could be chalked up to good old-fashioned agenting, pure and simple. Tovah knew that pushing him toward the unexpected, seemingly oddball target—say, sitcoms or one-hours—was the long-haul thing that would keep him at the agency. Smart thing, too. Perry was cautious at first but already loosening up, flattered by her spirited attentions. Tovah told him she was going to push him straight through syndication, into Bochco country.

Rachel was forty-four and Tovah barely twenty-six—worlds apart, with worlds in common. The agent's family went to Beth-El, the temple where Rachel's father had been cantor. Tovah was still fairly observant. The mother, long divorced from Dee, became a Chabadist and met an engineer through a
shiddach
. Rachel, the prodigal Jew, loved hearing the details of an arranged marriage: how they weren't allowed to touch until they wed and how during courtship the front door was always left ajar, for modesty. “Orthodox Judaism is wonderful,” the mother told her when Rachel went to Tovah's for Shabbat, “because there are so many rules and you just have to follow them. The rules do not bend.”

“I visited the set of this miniseries,” said Tovah, tucking into a sturgeon omelette. “A writer I represent. They were using black leopards—big, beautiful cats. Oh, Rachel, you would
love
them. There was this woman trainer there,
gorgeous
, with a leopard-skin belt! Like out of
Cat People
. There were all these warnings on the call-sheets: ‘No children or menstruating women allowed on set.'”

“Then I'm safe.” Rachel hadn't had a period in two years, not a real one, anyway. She was a runner and had always been irregular.

“I told you, just go see an acupuncturist.”

“Maybe it's menopause.”

“You are
not
menopausal, Rachel, I'm
sorry
. I
told
you who you should see. Watanabe, he's the
best
, Crescent Heights and Sunset. And
stop jogging
. No one even
does
it anymore.”

“Tell me about the cats.”

“These
cats
…once they're out of the cages, the trainers don't allow
any
movement, especially in the distance—their eyes go to the horizon,
right away
. It's veldt instinct.”

“Oy guh-veldt.”

“And little kids—the woman said the cats see kids as, like, a
meal
. So, she lets them out of the cages. I'm hiding behind the camera…she takes the
leashes
off and everyone gets quiet, I mean
dead
, a
very
weird moment. This giant gaffer looked like he was going to shit in his pants! Did you hear about that woman who was killed up north, by the cougar?”

“God, Tovah, you've really got the bloodlust.”

“Someone at the agency actually
knew
her. In Cuyamaca—it was in the paper. It's a recreation area, a
park
where people
camp
. There's been
lots
of people killed by lions this year. Very Joan Didion.”

“What happened?”

“She was jogging.”

“Without a Tampax, no doubt.”

Tovah shot her a “you're next” look. “It said in the article that the mistake she made was to
flee
. Well,
excuse me!
Evidently, they like to take their prey from behind—that part doesn't sound so bad. This ranger they interviewed said anyone confronted by a mountain lion should maintain eye contact, make noise and wait for it to leave.
Right!
I mean, that's what I do with my
lawyer!
But a mountain lion?”

They were supposed to meet at the track, but Calliope never showed. When Rachel got home, a message on the machine apologized for standing her up. “I hate it,” said Calliope, “that you don't have a phone in your car.”

When she was twelve, her father was murdered in a New York subway. The cantor's killer was never found. Calliope renounced Judaism and moved the family—Rachel and her brother, Simon—to
Menlo Park. It was at Stanford that she began the metamorphosis into Calliope Krohn-Markowitz, renowned Hollywood shrink.

The children didn't fare as well. Rachel lived in colorless communes and volunteer clinics. In Berkeley, she ran day-cares, shelters and co-ops, life an unsweetened wafer, sober and unsalted. Forty and unaffianced, she moved back to the Southland to study law for a time before dropping the thread. Calliope enlisted her in showbiz battalions, where Rachel won the Purple Heart for neurotic conscientiousness, lack of ambition and over-qualification. She felt close to superstar Mom but didn't see her much; admiring from a distance, like one of her magazine profiles. As for brother Simon, he was a lost soul, a burnt-out
tummler
—sometimes she wondered what there'd ever been to burn. He was kind of an exterminator and called his business the Dead Pet Society.

Soaking in a tub, candles burning, washcloth over eyes, she jogged along Angeles Crest Highway—a lion suddenly across her path. What would she do? Rachel shivered, imagining the last moments of a deadly attack. A long time ago, there was a story on the news about a woman who'd been killed while tracking Kodiaks in Alaska. Her final radio transmission was “Help! I am being killed by a bear.” The horrific refrain stayed in her head for months.

Oddly, Rachel had forgotten all about a clipping she'd attached to the fridge some months back. She reread it before bed, with her muesli.

A woman on a camping trip in Mendocino stabbed a rabid cougar to death with a kitchen knife; her husband lost a thumb wrestling it off. “None of us panicked, to tell you the truth,” the woman told a reporter. “But we moved swiftly.” People were capable of stupendous things—that meant Rachel, too. It would
have
to mean her. And why not? She clung to the image of the woman, suburban, untried, hand on hilt of serrated blade plunged deep into the small heart of a dank hard-breathing thing trying to extinguish her life.

Perhaps Rachel would move swiftly when her time came—because something was stalking her, that much she knew. As a girl, running home from the playground at dusk, she pretended something was after her. There
was
something, her own soft shadow catching up with itself, frozen a moment, then melding, overtaking: no one ever told her shadows had shadows. It was upon her again after all these years, crazy Casper energy, flapping like the sail of a
toy boat in a squall—shadow of her father's shadow—and the cantor's voice chased alongside, like a bogeyman.

The bogeyman of psalms.

Perry Needham Howe

Seven years ago his son died of a rare cancer and now Perry had something in his lungs exerting its mordant claims. The dead boy's sister, Rosetta, was flaxen-haired, pink-skinned and almost thirteen; had he lived, Montgomery (they never used the diminutive) would have been a dedicated brother of around sixteen, come June. Graduation days.

The doctors said in the first year of an illness like Perry's—“stage-four adenocarcinoma”—there was ninety percent mortality; after twelve months, a hundred percent. Chemotherapy might add six or eight weeks. When Perry asked how long the treatment lasted, they said, “You'll never get off it.” You did the chemo until you died, what candid caretakers described as more a “leeching” than anything else.

Curiously, he didn't have much fight in him. The professionals translated that as depression, but Perry didn't
feel
depressed. He felt like one of those existentialist anti-heroes in the novels he'd read back in college—dreamily disburdened. Maybe all that would change, he thought, and in a few months he'd wake up screaming for Mommy the way pilots sometimes lose it when they go down. That Perry was asymptomatic didn't help him feel less surreal about his predicament; blood-stool or a little double vision would have gone a long way. At least then, he could become a proper fatal invalid. As it was, the producer was living an ironic “television” reality. He even made a halfhearted stab at getting hold of kinescopes from
Run for Your Life
, the Ben Gazzara series where the smirking actor learns he's terminal. It was
The Fugitive
, with a Camus makeover—the one-armed man was Death.

A routine X ray showed nodules on the lungs. There was the usual hopeful speculation the little balls might indicate an infectious process such as TB or histoplasmosis, transmitted by an airborne fungus kicked up by the quake. Far-fetched but within the realm of possibility. When the cancer was confirmed, his wife became obsessed with the idea the family had been exposed to something environmental.
What else would explain two cancers hitting like that? The doctors said there was no connection, but they always said that—there was never a connection between anything. That they hadn't found Perry's “primary organ”—the point of origin—made it all the more heinously suspicious. Jersey raked over the past, when her baby was alive, searching for clues, tearing open old wounds with a monstrous fine-tooth comb.

After a decade in the Palisades they relocated to North Alpine, in Beverly Hills. Jersey had mixed emotions about giving up the house where Montgomery lived—and died—but it was time. For Rosetta, it was easy. She was getting hormones and any kind of break with the familiar foretold great adventure (you would have thought they were moving to Paris or England). The Antoine Predock trophy home—walls covered with Bleckners and Clementes—cost around four million. Across the way was Jeffrey Katzenberg's pied-à-terre; it was that kind of neighborhood. Lately, Perry had been looking to buy a “weekender” in Malibu, and the one Jersey liked best was a few doors down from the Katzenberg beach house. You couldn't get away from the guy.

A syndicated show about real cops made Perry Needham Howe very rich. He knew he'd gotten right place—right time lucky: in a nation of voyeurs,
Streets
was a front-row seat to the cartoonish orgy of crime that was the American nightmare. Imitators were legion, but Perry's half-hour was the mother of them all. Its simplicity couldn't be further distilled: cops chasing crooks in real time, the jiggling camera and panting, out-of-shape officers lent proceedings the kinky familiarity of coitus, without the mess—they even threw in the handcuffs. Cigarettes were smoked while spent, exhilarated fuzz offered post-bust blow-by-blows. Once in a while, if everything jibed, episodes had Emmy-worthy story arcs: like the one with the body in Hancock Park. An elderly bachelor had been murdered. His car was missing and a detective said it smelled like “sex gone bad.” (A criminologist's phrase, currently in vogue. Perry heard a stand-up on one of the cable channels use it to define his marriage.) A local minister reports a call from a teenager in Vegas who confesses to the crime and wants to turn himself in. At the end of the show, the killer tidily appears at midnight in front of the Crystal Cathedral, no less—in the victim's Porsche. The minister asks the cops if he can say goodbye to the wayward hustler. “Just tell the truth,” says Father
Flanagan to the kid, like something out of a thirties meller.
Streets
could give
NYPD Blue
a run for its money anytime.