Bruce Wagner - Still Holding

Supreme Bliss-Wheel Integration

LISANNE WAS ENTERING the second trimester. All the mommy magazines said that any day now she was supposed to start feeling better. Less fatigued, sexy even. She felt worse than ever.

A cashier at Erewhon vibed her pregnancy and told her about yoga with Gurmukh at Golden Bridge. Lisanne got the time wrong and arrived at the end of a class. She stood outside the musty, lily-scented room while rich, distended women danced to drum and sitar. When they began to chant, Lisanne fled.

• • •

MATTIE MUSKINGHAM, Phil’s older sister, was petite and unneurotic. Lisanne liked her right away because she was one of those no-nonsense gals who called a spade a spade. Lisanne still couldn’t believe her luck — she had the feeling this sort of luncheon was arranged whenever Phil met someone who was potential relationship material. But she felt so fat. Her self-esteem was at its lowest ebb, and on top of it all, she was living a serious lie.

Rita Wilson was at a patio table with a girlfriend, and Mattie went to say hello. The Hankses were on the board of the Muskingham Family Foundation.

When the bill came, Mattie asked Phil if he’d forgotten about “the meeting,” and he rolled his eyes. He pretended to cop an attitude and said he would go only if they brought Lisanne. Mattie (who it seemed to Lisanne was also playacting) told her brother that he knew it was “strictly against the rules to bring in outsiders.” Her delivery was a bit arch. “We’ll just say she’s family,” retorted Phil. When Lisanne asked if they were talking about AA, the two laughed out loud. “I wish,” said Phil, cryptically.

As they left the Ivy at the Shore, the sibs were as giddy as children initiating a new friend into a favorite game. They told her not to ask anything more about where they were going; it would be their little surprise. Phil made Lisanne promise that, if pressed, which was unlikely, she would inform “the group” she was their half sister. No, said Mattie, not half sister — first cousin.

They swept through the lobby of Shutters, taking the stairwell to a lower floor. Lisanne was steered toward a series of conference rooms at ocean level. A few nondescript types congregated outside one of the smaller suites. The Muskinghams called some of them by first name, casually introducing their “poor relation” before going in.

A caterer put the final touches on a buffet. The arrival of Dr. Janowicz, an affable, fiftyish man in horn-rims, made for cohesion. In rumpled tweeds, he was a parody of the congenial, humanist professor, with a touch of New Yorker cartoon psychotherapist thrown in. In short order, everyone gathered fruit, bagels, and coffee, finding seats at a round table in the room’s center.

Desultory chatter was broken by the unexpected, somewhat jarring words of the ringleader. “I want to die in my sleep, in peace, like my father,” Dr. Janowicz said somberly, initiating a hush from the group. With the timing of a pro, he added, “Not like the other people who were in the car!”

When the punch line sunk in, they all busted a gut. Decorum restored, Dr. J, as they called him, said he wanted “to just throw a theme out there” and see how people reacted. He interlaced his fingers and hung his head a moment, as if summoning a word from the depths. He looked up, grinning, and said, “Envy.”

Group groan.

“Oh God,” said a thin-faced woman in ivory bangles. “Do we have to go there?”

The roundelay began, unruly and hilarious, anecdotes in which the covetousness of friends and strangers was given subtle shade or boldly drawn. Avarice segued neatly to rage; rage to impotence; and finally, to envious feelings of their own — envy toward those with simpler lives and the imagined serenity that went along. Eating disorders, insomnia, and depression were blithely noted (and their Rx handmaidens too), along with yo-yoing self-worth, psychosomatic illness, free-floating anxiety, and general feelings of impoverishment amidst plenty. Toward the end, Dr. J asked each person what nice thing they were planning to do for themselves in the coming week. When he got to Lisanne, she surprised herself by saying she was going to buy a mandala that she’d seen in the glass case of a bookstore but had thought too expensive. The group thought it a glorious idea. The puzzling session ended with everyone standing and holding hands in silent prayer.

• • •

“LONELYHEARTS,” said Phil as they drove her home.

“I thought some of them were really nice,” said Lisanne.

“Kibbitzers,” said Phil. “Whiners. How many meetings do we have left to go to, Matt?”

“I think maybe four?” his sister said. “It is by far the single most perverse thing Dad ever engineered.”

“And that’s saying a lot.”

“I don’t understand,” said Lisanne.

“We have to go to the meetings,” said Phil.

“Or we’re disinherited,” chimed in Mattie.

“Attendance being mandated by a closely monitored stipulation of our eccentric father’s last will and testament.”

“But what is it — exactly? I mean, who are —”

“A support group for rich people,” said Phil. “No one in that room has less than fifty million.”

“The meetings were hatched during the dot-com boom and kept on. For what they call sudden wealth syndrome. Funny thing is, I don’t think anyone in the industry has that kind of money anymore.”

“Oh bullshit,” said Phil. “Tell it to Larry Ellison’s grandkids. Them that got, still got.”

“Not for much longer,” said Mattie, ominously. “Don’t you read The Guardian ? America isn’t long to be. The great experiment is nearly done! As the Romans’, our population shall be leveled and its cities rendered unto farmland. Hopefully, Bechtel will do the rebuild — we still have shares.”

“That joke he told about his father dying,” said Phil, “may have been the funniest joke I have ever heard in my life.”

• • •

LISANNE LEFT FOR the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf on Larchmont. She had just scooped up her blue-wrapped Sunday New York Times and was walking to the car when a man came toward her with a package.

“Are you Lisanne McCadden?” he said.

“Yes.”

“I have a delivery.”

She signed and went back in the house, thinking What kind of messenger delivers things on a Sunday? She opened the rich wooden box, gingerly removing the gold-flecked tissue that surrounded the dark, dense core. She gasped. The object in repose was an exquisite lotus bud, its metallic petals sensuously opened to expose what a typed enclosure identified as the tantric deity at its center: Paramasukha-Chakrasamvara — otherwise known as Supreme Bliss-Wheel Integration Buddha.

“… to save you the trip to the Bodhi Tree,” read the handwritten note. “Anyhow, my mandala can beat up your mandala. Ha ha ha. Ever yours, Phil.”

Top of the World

HE SAID THEY were there for the Spike Jonze table-read, but the valet in the Chateau garage told Rusty that he had to park in a lot down the street.

Becca, in full Drew mode, turned heads when they entered the penthouse. She wasn’t an official invite and was paranoid that someone was going to eighty-six her, but the crowd (and crowd of look-alikes) was large and the mood, casual and festive. She blended in.

Rusty went straight over to Spike and introduced Becca as “my girlfriend Drew.” The diffident director grinned and said he was glad they could make it. He was quite the gentleman. The whole “Sharon controversy” about her canceling or not canceling never even came up, and suddenly she was grateful to Rusty for his thoughtful insistence that she join him. She liked the “my girlfriend” part too, though she was a little disappointed when Spike said the true Drew wasn’t able to make it. Becca started tripping, wondering if that meant maybe she’d be reading Drew’s lines, but then she snapped to the fact that she was clueless — Rusty hadn’t told her a thing about Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay, so she had no way of knowing what kind of lines the true Drew had or if she had any at all. (Maybe the Drew look-alike had some, or maybe the part was silent.) She decided the best thing was to just keep her mouth shut and have no expectations. Don’t worry, be happy — happy to be there at all and super happy to have been chatting with Spike Jonze, the amazing auteur.