Bruce Wagner - I Met Someone

There would always be haters… She and Allegra were used to being vilified for their privilegy, cougary union. So maybe it would be best to face the music: then she might truly earn the name Mother Courage. Some fool once said that irony was dead. How genius would it be to declare that shame itself had died?

Twenty minutes from Trousdale, her brain played more scenes from the phantom, psychotronic, Keeping Up With the Wilders HBO doc — the one where Laura Poitras points the camera on Dusty as she tells Allegra, “I’m your mom.” How would the girl react? What would she say, what would she do? Would she bolt? Or — after a moment, an hour — would she rush toward her? Cleave to her blood? What an embrace that would be! Would she cry, “Mama!”? Was it obscene that Dusty actually yearned for such a sentimental, middle-class result, so saccharine a cliché? (She wondered.) And why would they hug each other, why should Aurora even want that? Wouldn’t the aberrant nature of their involvement forever preclude such a “natural” impulse? Yet, knowing everything that she knew, Dusty ached with the thought of not being able to wrap her arms around her baby… and if she couldn’t , in that raw moment , that moment of courage and sacrifice and honesty, when would they be able to hug, when would she be able to shower her child with a mother’s kisses — when would the moratorium end? How much time must go by before what transpired between them would be neutralized? Could it be? Might it be possible they never touch again? That the terminus of their physical contact turned out to be the violent lovemaking of weeks ago on the night of the Buddhist soirée? What a horror! It was easy for Dusty to imagine things falling apart, once they had their “talk.” Doomed!… and if that was to be the case, what was the point in telling her the truth? If, in the end, the result was that they never touched again — that Ginevra’s theory was unsound, and on Dusty’s revelation, the scales of the serpent’s tail didn’t fall away but multiplied…

Lovers no more, nor mother and daughter could be—

With the lights of downtown L.A. finally visible, all her fantasies collapsed like scaffolding in a fire.

—

Allegra was standing at the open door of her car, poking around in the backseat. When her wife pulled in, she pretended not to notice.

Dusty parked and walked over, heart going wild in its cage. She said a smiley, too boisterous “Hi!” Allegra took her in with a side-glance; face subtly imploding, she returned to hassle some luggage, removing a Goyard tote that was resting on a duffel. She plunked it into the front floorboard.

“What’s goin’ on?” said Dusty.

“What’s goin’ on? What does it look like?”

“Where are you going?”

“Where am I going? Where am I going? Where are you going? Where have you been ?”

“You know where I’ve been—”

“Really?” she said derisively. “I know where you’ve been? Fuck you , Dusty!”

“I don’t understand—”

Even though the situation was ugly and volatile, Dusty found relief in realizing that her abominable mission, shaky and amorphous as it was, would most likely abort. She numbed out.

“You disappear for two weeks and now you don’t understand ?” She skirted around to the driver’s side and got in. “You’re fucking someone else and you don’t understand ?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh please stop . Stop! Please!”

“Allegra, I am not sleeping with anyone!” she said, belching the words like some cheeky she-devil — a sinister kink in the script had forced her to declare her faithfulness.

“Fuck you !” shouted Allegra, crying now. She slammed the door and screeched a reverse arc while Dusty jumped from harm’s way.

“I need to talk to you!” yelled Dusty. Allegra jerked the car forward, waiting impatiently as the automated gate crawled open in slo-mo. Dusty ran up and hollered through the closed window. The driver stared ahead, ramrod and tear-streaked.

“Allegra, please! We need to talk!”

We need to talk —she was in hell again, a cheap disaster-movie, condemned to repeat a trite line ad infinitum. And she hated what she had to say next but there was no way around it, if there was any hope in assuaging:

“I am not seeing anyone else!”

The insanity, the Byzantine contortions, the absurdity of it!

Allegra rolled down the window. “I know that you’re fucking Larissa —”

“What?”

“—because I’ve been fucking her too!” It was the only weapon Allegra had and she hurled it with full force. “ Who else are you fucking, and for how long?”

“I am not fucking Larissa or anyone else , goddammit!”

She peeled into the street and was gone.

—

Sometimes a boy was just a boy.

That’s what it felt like as he held the sobbing Tristen. He wasn’t a thing for sex play; he wasn’t a wickedly brilliant shit-disturber; he wasn’t a stoner orphan needing to be saved.

Nothing but a boy…

Though “sobbing” was euphemistic, for he was in the grip of a primal woundedness that was awesome to behold, a blowup of near epileptic proportions. Eyes glued shut, he clutched and windmilled, fighting and flighting for his life — Patty Duke to Jeremy’s Anne Bancroft — pounding on the door of his lover’s chest like a panicked repentant child locked out by punishing parents on a haunted forest night. The superheated bellows of his stomach pumped and furiously spasmed during the embrace yet Jeremy remained deserted by Eros. It was as if he’d become a leading man overnight, an understudy no more — a father now, fully present, seasoned and magnificent, in no need of rehearsals, dressed or undressed. The role felt so new and so old at once that its effortlessness astonished and pleased. The inconsolable boy behaved like a fugitive fresh from a first murder (one that might well have been his own), but interestingly, the details behind his misery failed to intrigue the padrone . Anyway, Tristen would have been mute if queried, he was beyond language, and of course Jeremy knew it had to do with the dad who lay in hospital, cardiac cosmonaut on the launching pad of ruined atria. Holding him now as he did, in a stuttering, slow jam boxer’s ballet, Jeremy was disgusted with himself for daring to question Tristen’s character in the last few weeks, that he’d tarred him with Larissa’s brush, when in fact the boy had done nothing but bestow inestimable gifts — he was certain Tristen had endowed him with the courage needed to have chosen the surrogate path — and was honored young Twist felt safe enough, cared-for enough, loved enough (with father-torn spirit and his own failing heart) to collapse in Jeremy’s arms just as natural as could be. He had learned so much from this boy! He’d never been so open and inspired with any of his young men.

What would never be revealed, at least not directly , to Jeremy or anyone else (though suspicions would be raised), was that Tristen had stumbled upon an email that effectively destroyed him. When his father’s girlfriend unexpectedly returned from Portland (Derek had been on a quiet campaign to get her back), she usurped his quality time with the old man, and Tristen got pissed. So he hacked Beth’s phone, archiving her banking/medical records plus the usual mix of quotidian/scandalous texts, cock&tits selfies, and lo-res videos (a four-minute one of Beth blowing his dad) — before coming across a note written some months ago, from Derek to Beth while he was stoned and unguarded. He said the boy wasn’t his, that Larissa had a one-night stand early in the marriage but for ten years had passed “bitchboy” off as theirs, and that when Rafaela was born, his wife finally confessed. it was like a fuickin grim fairey tale, he wrote. one day you go to your kids room to wake him for bgreakfast and there’s a WHOREPIG there instaead. A filhy nasty fucking WHORPIG and you justthink aboutKILLIN it and EATING it and feedint it to your family and expecially too that bitch you want to see her choke her on that bacon LOL i got a peternity test on raffi, she’s MINE & you cn tell, she got my EYES ( not my tits ) and she HOT like her old man USED to be but you still like riding that cock, right girl??!?!?