I’m Losing You (42 page)

Perry was on his way to Club Bayonet.

He was meeting Stone Witkiss, the man who created
Daytona Red
, the early hotshot vice-squad hit. Stone and investors had pumped a few million into an old Mexican bar on West Washington, transforming it into a private wood-paneled oasis with a literary theme. Perry knew the preternaturally boyish Witkiss from way back—Bayonne, in fact—and enjoyed his company.

The place was packed. Steve Bochco and a few execs from UPN were at the bar and Perry said hello. Bochco complimented his show and that felt good. Cat Basquiat shared a table with Sandra Bullock, and Perry thought he saw Salman Rushdie in a far booth with Zev Turtletaub and Sherry Lansing. Stone gave him a hug and Perry followed him back. Along the way, he met Sofia Coppola and Spike Jonze, a handsome kid who made videos (Perry laughed at the resonance of the name). They liked
Streets
too.

The old friends settled into Stone's corner table.

“You look great. How's Jersey? Why didn't she come?”

“Rosetta's not feeling so well.”

“Jesus, what is she, sixteen now?”

“Thirteen, comin' up.”

“What does she have, the flu?”

“I don't know. It's a stomach thing.”

“What does Jersey do, hold her
hand
?”

“Don't bust my balls, Stone, all right? Are you coming to the bat mitzvah?”

“Of course I'm coming to the bat mitzvah. What am I, a skeev?”

They talked like that awhile, back and forth, like old times. Then Stone hunched, discreetly nodding at a slender, well-dressed man in his early fifties.

“Guy's a
total freak
. Know who he is? Patented a computer thing—something to do with screens. Worth, like,
three billion dollars
. Just bought a house in Litchfield, next to George Soros, two hundred and fifty acres. Jesus, did you read about Soros in
The New Yorker
?” Stone ordered wine and stir-fried lobster, then circled back. “Anyway, guy lives in a thirty-room house in Palos Verdes. Contractor
does a lot of work for me. There's smoke detectors in all the bathrooms—you
cannot
repeat this—with tiny cameras inside, so he can watch the ladies in the can.”

Lesser lights steadily made their way to the table. The host looked a little twitchy. Wearing the hats of TV mogul/restaurateur was doing a small number on him; he hadn't yet found the groove. Funny, Perry thought, what linked them—from
Daytona Red
to
Streets
was a bit of a stretch, but Perry knew his friend liked to think he'd somehow smoothed the way. He respected Stone because he'd been through all the hype, glamour and insanity without cracking up. Perry wondered if he should fess up about stage-four. The moment passed and the waiter brought the wine. Stone sniffed, nodding his assent.

“I was talking to this forensic pathologist about Ted Bundy,” Stone said, puffing on a cigar after the last visitors departed. “Bundy was confessing to
everything
in those last days—trying to forestall the execution—really blowing lunch. You know, they always talked about the ‘long hair,' all the girls Bundy killed had long hair. The shrinks wondered who it was he was killing, over and over. Know what Bundy told this guy?” He hunched again, cocking his head,
intime
. “They never released this because it was too fucking hideous. You're gonna love it. There was a
simple fucking reason
behind the long hair. He liked long hair because—are you ready?—because, he said, it was
easier to get their heads out of the refrigerator
.”

The billionaire smiled as he edged past the table. Stone leaned over and whispered. “See the watch he's wearing?” Perry hadn't. “Il Destriero Scafusia: what they call a ‘grande complication.' Ask him to show it to you, he'd
love
it. Swiss—seven hundred and fifty components, sapphire crystal, seventy-six rubies inside. We're talking
mechanical
, nothing digital about it. I used to collect, mostly Reversos and Pateks; had a thirties Duoplan, Jaeger-Le Coultre. Le Coultre's
hot
this year. Loved the thing to death. But
this
one,” nodding at the billionaire again, now at Frank Stallone's table, chatting up a long-legged girl with a huge mouth, “is the fucking
grail
—they call 'em ‘super complicateds.' I mean, the fucking thing
chimes
, Perry! It shows the changing of the century on its face, the fucking
century
! I got a watch, cost me seventeen grand, a Blancpain
quantième perpetual
. Has a moon phase I used to adjust about every three years. And
that's pretty good. But
this
motherfucker”—nodding to the freak again—“has a deviation of about a
day
every hundred years.”

Just before leaving, he found himself at the urinal next to Il Destriero Scafusia. A watch like that probably wound to the movement of the wrist; Perry shook himself and suppressed a laugh, scanning the ceiling for hidden cameras. The billionaire followed him to the sink. Had he been keener on inquiring after baubles, Perry might have asked for a look. He'd done enough of that over the years—everything had always been out of reach. Now, nothing was. Nothing, that is, but time.

Ursula Sedgwick

Ursula and Tiffany weren't homeless anymore. They lived in a house on one of the old canals.

Their neighbor, Phylliss Wolfe, was a producer who sold her Cheviot Hills home after having some kind of breakdown. She called it “Down(scaling) Syndrome”—movie projects were on hold so she could finish her book and get pregnant. She wasn't happy about the local gangs, but it had always been a fantasy of hers to live this way: in a writer's bungalow on an ellipsoid patch of grass still called United States Island. She christened the avenue Dead Meat Street because so many were dying of AIDS, or gone.

On Sundays, they went strolling on the boardwalk. Phylliss brought Rodney the dachshund, fearless sniffer of pit bulls; while Ursula and Tiffany had their fortunes told, she binged on cheap sunglasses. They shared life stories over time, shocked to have Donny Ribkin in common. Every little detail about the agent came out, including sexual proclivities—which Phylliss expanded to include the affair with Eric, her ex-assistant. Ursula blanched. It stunned her to learn Donny's father recently drowned in Malibu; that was someone he never talked about. But the worst thing was hearing he'd been hospitalized for a crack-up. “Hollywood rite of passage,” Phylliss joked. “Don't knock it till you've tried it.” Ursula felt sick inside. He was still her man.

She'd never met anyone like Donny—so smart and chivalrous and full of passion. If that's what Jews were like, you could sign her up for more. He scared her too, but men did, that was par for
the course. He was the first lover to lavish any kind of gifts on her. At a time in her life when she really needed it, Donny Ribkin gave her a whole new way of seeing herself. They used to go “power shopping,” buzzed on crystal. He got her an Oscar de la Renta at Saks, a seven-thousand-dollar strapless sequined gown, and there she was that very same night at a charity ball honoring
Forrest Gump
's Robert Zemeckis, the greatest night of her life, speed-grinding her teeth as she eavesdropped on Michael J. Fox and Meryl Streep and God knew who else, Donny's friends, their smiles like razors. Then he would brutalize her in bed, punching and choking her as he came, reviling her idiot faux pas.
How could you say what you said to Goldie?
Once he made himself vomit on her. But there was the other Donny, her “Sunday morning boy,” who cried inconsolably for hours on end, begging forgiveness, tears from some faraway place like a sad, hip monster from
The X-Files
—the Donny who paid Tiffany's schooling and wept for his dead mother.

He could be cruel, but at least he wasn't one-sided. Ursula knew nothing but violent men, military father and brothers, men with just one side. The day came when she'd had enough, walked from the trailer park bloodied, holding Tiffany's bitty hand, living shelter to shelter, freeway to freeway, rape to rape, with only
The Book of Urantia
to grace and solemnize each day—the Book, with its Morontia Companions (trained for service by the Melchizedeks on a special planet near Salvington) and Thought Adjusters (seraphic volunteers from Divinington). She prayed with Tiffany for the Mystery Monitors to come, “who would like to change your feelings of fear to convictions of love and confidence.”

There was
The Book of Urantia
and there was her daughter and then one day—off-ramp miracle—there was Donny Ribkin. Now, he shunned her. She still worked at Bailey's Twenty/20 and began each shift hoping the agent would drop in. The men she stripped for had his face; she made it so. One day it would come to pass. Ursula wasn't sure how she had turned him off like that—was it her homeless helplessness that turned him on? None of it mattered. This alluring, troubled, soulful man had seen her at her worst and not turned away. For that, she would love him forever.

“You need something to fill this black hole,” Phylliss said. “Donny Ribkin is a
panacea
. If it wasn't him, it'd be someone else.
Something
else. Listen, he's no catch, okay? He's fucking
loonie tunes
. Not to mention a probable health risk at this point. So why don't you deal with your black hole?”

“Then what do I fill it with?”

“A sausage—a fat, hairy sausage with a ‘Donny' tattoo.”

“You're terrible,” she said, laughing. She could still laugh.

“Have you ever heard of Eckankar?” Ursula shook her head. “They call it the religion of ‘the Light and Sound of God.' The name's from Sanskrit—it means ‘co-worker with God.' But it isn't a Christian thing. It isn't an
anything
.”

They said the odd word a few times together. Phylliss told Ursula that she turned to the practice out of desperation: her movie had fallen apart, and she'd suffered the death of a fetus and father—how she'd gone to a hospital to heal but emerged more shattered than whole. ECK reached out and stopped her fall. Since then, it was the most important thing in her life, bar none. “I've become a ‘spiritual activist,'” she said. “My New York friends are about ready to do an intervention. I just tell 'em I want to have Yanni's child. Or John Tesh's, in a pinch.”

From what Ursula understood, Eckankar was less a religion than it was about dreams and soul travel and accepting other planes. That was familiar ground. She was impressed someone as cynical and sophisticated as Phylliss could have allegiance to a thing so radically ethereal; then again, with the terrible abuse Phyll had been through with her dad and all, you would
have
to let in something new, unless you wanted to go bonkers. When she brought up Urantia, Phylliss yelped “Dueling cultists!” and strummed an imaginary banjo, laughing her coarse cigarette laugh. Ursula said she had considered converting to Judaism as a way of winning Donny back—that sent Phylliss on a coughing jag. “You're the only person I know,” she said, “who's more fucked up than I am.” She invited her to Sunday morning worship services at the ECK Center. After a month of wheedling, Ursula gave in.

She wandered the sunny rooms at peace, as if having already dreamed such a place. Phylliss said those kinds of feelings weren't unusual—it meant the Eckankar Masters had been busy nudging you to the point where you had enough power to seek them out. As
more people arrived, Ursula scanned brochures on “the ancient science of soul travel” and the soul's return to God. God was sometimes called Hu, pronounced
hue
, or Sugmad. Through a series of exercises that took just twenty to thirty minutes a day, it was possible to reach a supreme state of spiritual being. One was guided in this pursuit by the Living ECK Master, or Mahanta, who was descended from the first Living ECK Master of around six million years ago. (The first was called Gakko.) The current Living ECK Master, also known as the Inner and Outer Master, was a married man from Wisconsin named Sri Harold Klemp. His picture hung in a modest frame on the wall of the meeting room. The Mahanta's hair was thinning; there was nothing grandiose about him and Ursula liked that.