Bruce Wagner - I Met Someone

Picking up on Allegra’s skepticism about her reaction to the news of Tristen’s death, she recalled her therapist’s edict to take courage and take charge, and dove headlong into the whole Larissa business. (Allegra bridled but Dusty heroically pushed through.) She was not having an affair, she said, not with the camera double or anyone else. She left Allegra’s driveway shout—“I’ve been fucking her too!”—well enough alone.

“Bullshit!” Allegra said, unable to maintain decorum. “You are gaslighting me!”

Mindful of their surroundings, Dusty took a breath and dialed it down.

“Look,” she said, somewhat sternly. “I don’t know what that woman has been telling you but she’s unstable, okay? She’s been sending crazy emails , not just to me , but to Marilyn and Elise , okay? And I haven’t seen Larissa since we wrapped, okay? I don’t do yoga with her and I don’t do anything else .”

Allegra was about to mention the earring in the bed but stared at the table instead, making jailhouse crosshatchings in the linen with a butter knife. Her eyes got watery. “So what do you want to do? Are we getting divorced?”

“I just want… to talk about some things, Allegra. But not here .”

“I’ll take that as a ‘yes,’” she said, bitterly. “And why shouldn’t we talk here? Because the patio of the Four Seasons is the wrong place to end our marriage ? Like, you need it to be a better place for your memoir ?”

“No one’s writing a memoir, Allegra.”

“Well, I might!” she snarled. “Is the Four Seasons too boring? Is Point Dume a ‘sexier’ place for a breakup? The name sure as fuck is more accurate. Doom!”

This is your daughter. Be loving. Be calm. Be courageous…

“I have some serious things to… discuss — and I just don’t feel comfortable doing that in a public place.”

“You mean you’d rather talk somewhere with lawyers ? Is that where you want to meet, Dusty? With your lawyers ?—”

She sighed and said, “Can you just come home?”

“That isn’t my home anymore,” said Allegra. “It’s your home.” She made a few more slashes on the table cover and gulped her tea. “We can talk in my room.”

In the tense silence on the way up Allegra said to herself We are NOT going to fuck, no matter WHAT. But as the elevator rose she couldn’t help shuddering with the memory of all the cold-hot moonshadow makeup sex they’d shared, that bosomy, timeless, syrupy pull of body and unruly blood that she had always had for Her , Dusty, her love and her life — she who had conquered, liberated, and given form, she who still conferred all meaning and security, sanctity and sanity — the four seasons themselves.

—

A minute after they sat on the couch it was done.

There were moments when Allegra felt doubly gaslit — as if, through a desperate, psychotically bold stratagem, her wife was attempting to erase betrayal by means of a ghastly, unspeakably preposterous invention. The young woman stood up a few times in angsty confusion but was led back to her seat by Dusty’s command that she hear her out.

She told her everything, starting from when Ronny Swerdlow knocked her up — how she ran away when Reina took her to L.A. for the abortion — hitchhiking to Wickenburg then getting homesick for her dad and returning to Tustin with the certainty everything would be okay — how one apocalyptic morning, her baby was gone. How that destroyed her and how she’d punished herself her entire life for having stayed with that monstrous woman, stayed with her after, after she’d stolen her child away, for three tragic years before fleeing to New York. I’ve asked myself why a thousand times . (Though she wasn’t going to get into the hornet’s nest of why she never went looking for her baby, not unless Aurora specifically asked; it didn’t feel like the right time.) She talked about “Snoop” Raskin and the email Ida Pinkert sent after Reina died, how the old woman said she saw Reina give her away, literally hand her off to Claudia Zabert, babysitter extraordinaire. (Just then, in an aside, Dusty, with a tearful smile, said, “Your birth name is Aurora,” the cognitive dissonance of which Allegra of course already knew, so that its formal announcement was rendered as a balmy, poignant baptism)… and how she was in New York a few weeks ago for the Meryl party when out of nowhere Livia and the detective showed up to tell all —which was why she’d been out of touch. Because she needed time to digest, and think about what to do…

When she finished, Allegra sat there without saying a word, which Dusty thought was a good thing. Because anything was better than — what? High-decibel screams? Breaking a glass and using a shard to sever Dusty’s tits? It wouldn’t matter: she could take whatever dishes, words, or tantrums her daughter might throw. She could see now that anything was better than the anything of not telling her. If telling her didn’t feel good, it felt right .

Allegra ceremoniously excused herself to the loo.

She came back around ten minutes later (Dusty had started to worry), returning to the couch like a remorseful prisoner. She asked a few questions, occasionally interrupting her mother’s response with “This isn’t a joke?” (Just as Dusty had said to Livia and Snoop, and with the same lilt.) She wanted to know about her father, as they’d never really discussed the details of Dusty’s Provo pilgrimage. “Does he know?” Dusty said that he didn’t nor was she planning to tell him, at least not for the moment. Who are you going to tell, asked Allegra — with a mixture of outrage, fear, and befuddlement. Only you, said Dusty. Unless you wish otherwise. Allegra snorted at that, not in a mean way, but to indicate how insane it was to be entertaining one’s “wants” in the face of such a thing. Dusty hastened to add, I guess that’s premature . “We’ll find our way. We’ll go slow and find our way.” When Allegra asked about “Willow,” Dusty said the detective apparently had visited her in Albuquerque, and that she wasn’t well , emphasizing the word in such a way to denote grave psychiatric issues.

Dusty wanted to learn a few things herself. Did Claudia ever inform her of the circumstances by which she’d been acquired ? Those were the stilted words she used; the woodenness made her cringe but she couldn’t help expressing herself that way. Allegra said she hadn’t. “She never mentioned you or your mother or ever even having seen one of your films.” Dusty said that Claudia wouldn’t necessarily have been able to put any of it together, as she had changed her name from Janine Whitmore when she started to act. “I always thought she was my biological mom,” said Allegra. “I mean, I didn’t have any reason to think otherwise. She may have even told me she was, directly. I don’t know.”

They sat awhile in silence.

“So, she babysat you?” said Allegra. Her mother nodded. “And this isn’t a joke.”

“Not a joke.”

“Holy, holy fuck .”

There were worlds upon worlds for both of them to suppress — a gargantuan history of body intimacies lay frozen beneath the tundra of the hellish new normal — and they shivered together like survivors awaiting improbable rescue.

“Do you want to come to the house?”

Allegra stared into space (they’d been doing a lot of that). “Okay.”

As if talking to herself, Dusty added, “I know I didn’t want to be alone — when I found out. But I kind of had to be. You don’t.”