Bruce Wagner - Dead Stars

Pieter did most of the talking. He left Christie’s a while ago & for the last three years worked at Gagosian. He said he had “important, ongoing relationships” with major collectors, but the real perks were impulsive road trips with Damien Hirst, pubcrawl/clubbing with Tracey Emin, and late night suppers with “the Richards,” Serra & Prince.

“I have never been so fulfilled professionally .” He raised a ridiculous eyebrow & ahem’d . “On the personal , um hem, romantic front. . well, it’s been a bit of a bloody trainwreck. Tho the phrase living hell also comes to mind. Yes, I think living hell is a bit closer to the mark. Not closer to, really, but perhaps the mark itself .” She loved it when he lapsed into his Steve Coogan doing Hugh Grant/Hugh Laurie routine. “Wait a moment, wait a moment — somehow living hell doesn’t quite capture the full… catta-strofe. So let’s just call it a natural disaster . Let’s then — no! an unnatural disaster. That’s much better. A calamity, a major calamity , a major colostomy. . a fucking eschatological colostomy of fucking Biblical proportions i.e. I believe that I can safely say that on a personal level the last few years have been what historians of this sort of thing will call the tsunamification of hope, of any hopes or dreams that Pieter Wogg might have had that he would find love, and the marriage & requisite children that often follow. Yes. This is that volume — I am living that volume — Volume 4, of the massive biography — this is that volume entitled Dreams Deferred . I continue to prowl the night, of course. Hope springs nocturnal. As do many other. . things.”

He was more adorable than handsome, which went a long way, with a capacious bag of immensely personable tricks. Pieter always made her laugh; Jacquie & Albie agreed the cliché was true—“funny” got laid first. It felt good being out in the world with an old lover. To feel like a woman again.

She’d almost forgotten.

He reminded her more than once when they got back to his suite at the Chateau. Memory Lane grew, hope sprang, all that.

She brought with her a 5 by 7 of the portrait she took of Ginger, Daniel & their baby. When she showed him Pieter got very quiet, & Jacquie wondered if a stillbirth or child death figured somewhere in his calamity of natural and unnatural disasters. She stepped out on the balcony, to let him be.

Good lord. How beautiful the city was! If she were a god, she’d have reached out and grabbed it to wear around her neck. Her cellphone rang & her heart leapt — it was 1:30AM & no one but Jerilynn would be calling (she’d been keeping the phone in her pocket not her purse for that very reason). She looked in at Pieter, to see if it was him being funny, but he was still completely engrossed.

“Hello?”

“May I speak with Jacquie Vomes?”

“This is she.”

A hesitation, then:

“Did I wake you?”

“No. Who is this?”

“I’m so sorry to be calling this late. Ginger MacMannis gave me your number. Well actually she gave it to my son-in-law. She said you were enormously helpful.”

“What’s this about?”

“The doctors said they don’t expect my grandchild to make it till the morning.” Her voice broke. “We’re all preparing for a loss.”

“Where are you calling from?”

“Scottsdale. We’re at the Mayo Clinic.”

The Children’s Hour

Servers

set up lunch on a gilded, baroque table beside the large stream that flowed thru the grotto/cave (a continuous loop) at the far edge ( which edge Telma knew not) of the property, an unthinkable 112-acres in the heart of the heart of Bel-Air. Biggie’s dad bought the original 30-acre property from Louis Trotter, the waste & excavation king, adding on whenever adjacent parcels became available. The land and three houses sitting on it — all other homes had been razed upon purchase — were owned by Closely Held Holdings, a corporation whose sole shareholders were Biggie, his brother Brando, their father Bertram, and Bonnie the absentee mom.

The enormous structures were approximately a mile apart. Each was inhabited by a single resident (Brando in the Gehry, Biggie in the Neff, Bertram in the Paul Williams), conjoined by seamless Calatrava-commissioned glass corridors, though no one had actually ever used the walkways to go from house to house, at least not to anyone’s memory. Brainard Sr. hadn’t left his classic Hollywood Regency since Bonnie vanished (five years ago come spring), & in fact was rarely seen at all; occasionally, Brando would report to Biggie he espied their father at some ghastly hour of night during a storm, slowly, meditatively making his way a ¼-mile or so into the wind & rain-battered, unbreakable glass cocoon, his Meerschaum Calabash in hand, an insomniac spurned by his succubus, a cuckolded Sherlock lacking the balm of opiates to alleviate the distress of cracking a case for which he would never be hired: The Wife Who Would Not Return.

“Was this here… before ?” said an uncomprehending, nearly bug-eyed Telma, in reference to the cave and underground mini-river. They took an elevator to get there, and Telma noted it hadn’t been a particularly short ride down.

“We finished last year. I think it’s illegal — the city thought we were putting in retaining walls. My dad said it’s some kind of architectural wonder.”

Her salmon & watercress salad just sat there.

“But what’s it for ?”

“Uhm, my mom’s a spelunker. She goes all over the world exploring caves, ones with rivers flowing through. She always sends postcards. She sent me one from the Deer Cave in Borneo. And one from the Caucasus Mountains — it’s the deepest in the world. She sent one from the longest cave. That’s in Kentucky.”

“Is that where she is now? Somewhere in a cave ?”

“She sent one from Vietnam with a picture of where she and Marj were spelunking. The Vietnam cave is the biggest one in the world . But the card took really long to get here so maybe they already left. It’s called Hang Son Doong, & it’s in the Annamite Mountains. National Geographic said the ceilings are 800-feet high. It said you can fit six 40-story skyscrapers inside one cave .”

“Who’s Marj?”

“My mom’s buddy.”

“Doesn’t your mom have email?”

“No. Not really. I don’t think so. She never gave me one. I think she probably just writes postcards and letters.”

“That’s so weird.”

He ignored her comment. Telma regretted having made it.

“Sometimes the only way from one cave to another is by an underground river. They have all kinds of breathing systems, you know, aqualungs, you can go for 5 hours without surfacing. But if you use the river to swim to a new cave, and you have to go underwater for 10 or 15 minutes to get there, and on the way back, after you’re walking around and exploring the new cave, if on the way back something goes wrong with your equipment or you run out of oxygen, the cave becomes your tomb.”

“How horrible!”

“Because there isn’t any way back but through the river. That’s why my mom and Marj use the buddy system. If one of them has an equipment failure, they can still get back because they could take turns with the oxygen on the way back. That’s why they explore together. You just can’t spelunk alone.”

Telma thought OMG so rad so crazy! & for a moment was mindlessly giddy. She stood up, made a few scrunchy elastic gargoyle faces, then sprinted alongside the river, demonically pirouetting as she went.