Bruce Wagner - I Met Someone

“It’s the habit of human beings to muddle a simple thing. Take a bell: we convert the ineffable into a crude call to faithless prayer, an echo of the ego, unable or unwilling to apprehend that its ‘sound’ represents an entreaty to soundlessness and nothing more. We leach out the mysterium tremendum of its instruction, for it’s our blockheaded nature to make convenient signs and symbols from the Unknowable. The bell’s original purpose loses its way, like a love letter in a littered ghetto — just as they say one cannot see a forest for the trees, we cannot see the face of God for the bells. We insist on reminders to summon us to worship, as if love is a mess hall to which we’re subpoenaed only when hungry… My Sir has also made the comparison of a prizefighter: punch-drunk in the ring, we feint, wobble, and reel, each round marked by a profane cacophony of bells — and for what? What is the boxer’s true prize? A bowdlerized Silence that gives rest from his struggles between rounds, in timed segments so deformed and desecrated they’ve lost all meaning. Money, power, and perverted love is what we hear ringing… The cracked clarion is even on our currency! We troop schoolchildren to see that golden calf: ‘Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.’ How true that is! Yet still we miss how close the broken bell is to the mark, for divinity sees glory in the fissure running through it. Would that cast-iron ruin was our sole legal tender — for a bell that cannot be rung is a cousin to Silence!

“The cliché of all seekers is to stubbornly believe that as long as they hear the airy, rippling magic of a bell, they’re on the path. Its music, melancholy and light, is seductive no doubt, but the sound is mere incense in a temple. One may enjoy it, even be saturated in it, yet it will not lead to Silence. Like Judas, it may even lead one away…

“When I grew older, the poem stayed with me, even influencing the school that I chose. Loyola was Jesuit, and it is said that Poe, living in the Bronx, wrote ‘The Bells’ after hearing them ring in the tower at Fordham, a Jesuit college. When Mother died in that fire — Dad tried to save her but was overcome — the poem became prophecy, a mandala containing all things. My Sir said it was the compassion of the Source that allowed me as a little girl to perceive the bells as messengers of Silence, not harbingers of doom and sorrow; that would have been too ugly and cynical a burden for someone so young. But I wasn’t strong and hadn’t yet found my teacher. After the death of my parents, the ringing of the bells grew violent and too much to endure. The tinnitus would have been fatal but for the birth of my daughter, which quelled all sound — and the intervention of my guru, my teacher, my love.”

Without segue, Devi cheerily asked Jeremy about his life. It was jarring. In an instant, the woman who’d channeled a daft, pantheistic discourse was gone. Caught off-guard, he confessed to the recent stab at fatherhood and his ambition to try again. He felt vulnerable and surreal, as if they’d been thrown together in a Red Cross tent, sharing intimacies amidst an unfolding disaster. Content to follow his nose and his gut (the only two organs that never failed him), he allowed himself to acquiesce, and let the mysterious goings-on guide the way. He really did sense something might be born of such lunacies.

When Devi told him that she and her consort had walked to the restaurant, he offered a ride.

As they drove up PCH, he expected to drop them on some forgotten Topanga utility road leading to a communal encampment. Perhaps they’d wash their faces in a stream before trudging into the helter-skelter woods. When Devi told him to pull into the driveway of a faultlessly manicured beach house off Malibu Road, he thought it was a joke — even when she produced a key that opened the front door.

That was when her cohort uttered his only words of the night.

“Two hundred and twenty-five thousand a month I give ’em! Ain’t that a pretty penny?”

—

Tessa, the Marilyn stand-in, stopped by Larissa’s for a drink. She was on her way to Pump because the man she was dating said that his good friend Lisa Vanderpump told him “Katniss” was having dinner there tonight. (Apparently, Jay-law was all about flaunting her serious reality-show love and insisted on chowing at Pump whenever she was in town.) He was a man of certain means who relished creating a mystique around his wealth — of the L.A. variety who liked to foggily “present” as billionaires. They wore the bullshit, self-aggrandizing rumor like aftershave and were legion. They chose Bentleys over Teslas. Teslas were for schmucks.

“How old is he?” said Larissa.

“Sixty-two.”

“Oh my God! Your cougar membership has so been revoked!”

“Can’t be. Member for life .”

“Ha! How old was the last one?”

“Twelve?” Larissa laughed so hard she belched, which made her laugh harder. “Well, that’s what he told me. Maybe he was fourteen. But I’ll tell you something, Riss — until Mister Billion, it’d been a while since I saw hair on a man’s back.”

“Ask him to shave.”

“That’d be like polishing a turd — an old turd. But actually, I kinda like it. It’s kinda animal . It’s old-school.”

“Oh, fallen cougar! How’s the sex ?”

“No trouble in that department. Rich geezers need to prove it all night . It’s like a campaign! I don’t even think he takes Cialis! He really likes the hard fuck . But we cuddle too, we do . Pushes my ‘daddy’ buttons, I guess.”

“ You are fuckin’ hilarious .”

They were already drunk.

“When I tell him what a man he is, Mister Billion just blooms . All I have to say is, ‘You a rock star ! You a gangsta !’ and he’s hard like a motherfucker. Tell you somethin’ else, Riss: when he’s fucking me and whispering in my ear how I’m the most full-on woman he ever met, it’s a total fuckin’ turn-on. It full-on works . He tells me I have the perfect body! Me! Well, for him I guess it’s perfect… tells me I have an ass like a black woman and I love it. I seriously own that pedestal he puts me on. Aren’t we funny, Riss? How everybody lies to each other and it never gets old?”

Just then Tristen came in, barely acknowledging them as he scurried to his room. (Rafaela was on a sleepover.) Larissa made necessarily hasty introductions before excusing herself to follow the blur of her boy. After a minute she came back in, distracted.

“He’s cute,” said Tessa. “You okay?”

“My son has… a lot of frickin’ issues . Know who I blame?”

“Dad?”

“Tristen always… I mean, he’s his own person, always has been. With incredible gifts. He’s a friggin’ genius . Gets that from his mom, o’ course — not the genius part but definitely the go-your-own-way . Derek always shit all over him — the way he dressed , the way he looked , his sex-shoo-al-itay . Everything! Rafaela was always the angel… our little one. But you know what’s wild? And freakin’ unfair ?” She laughed spitefully. “I poured so much love on that boy! The therapy and the boosting him up . Daily. So much! In some ways, I’m closer to him than Rafi — I know it sounds crazy, even to me, but it’s true. And he knows it, Tristen knows it. But you know what’s unfucking fair? He still seeks that approval from his dad—”