Bruce Wagner - Still Holding

The “after-party” was across the street in the building where they held the Oscars. It was fun walking the short distance because there were lots of photographers and police, and pedestrians straining their eyes to watch the privileged make their crosswalk pilgrimage. They passed the Chinese Theater, and for little micromoments Becca pretended she was famous. It gave her goose bumps.

While Annie was in the rest room, a woman approached and asked if she was an actress. She was casting for a show and gave Becca her card.

When Annie came back, Becca giddily marched her friend to a corner before uncrumpling it from her sweaty hand to examine:

THE LOOK-ALIKE SHOPPE PRODUCTIONS

ELAINE JORDACHE, FOUNDER/CREATOR

HOLLYWOOD, CA

The Great Plains

LISANNE TREATED HERSELF to a deluxe bedroom on the Amtrak. It was such an intense relief not to be getting on a plane that she found herself almost sensuously relaxed as they left Union Station. She would keep in touch with her father’s caretakers by cell phone and with the office as well, fielding any questions the temp might have. Getting to Chicago took two days. Lisanne would change trains there, arriving in Albany within twenty-four hours.

She kept to her room, hunkering down with a paperback filled with transcribed tapes from the recovered black boxes of crashed airplanes. She laughed a little at her own morbidity — it was so Addams Family-bedtime-story of her — yet each time she dipped into the book, her decision to take the rails was sustained anew. Oh God, thought Lisanne. My fears are completely justified.

One of the transcripts was particularly harrowing. An Alaska Airlines jet on its way from Puerto Vallarta to San Francisco had plunged into the Pacific. It was clear from the dialogue that the captain knew they weren’t going to make it. But what haunted Lisanne was his intercom announcement to the passengers. He said Los Angeles was off to the right and that he didn’t anticipate any problems once he got “a couple of subsystems on the line”—this, after the plane had shakily recovered from a nosedive. Anticipated arrival to LAX, he said, was under half an hour. Lisanne presumed that, by the time of his speech, the doomed passengers, many no doubt injured from the free fall, would have been in a state of shock. For months, she read the account over and over, thinking of Flight 261 as a kind of ghost ship, its wayward souls’ eighty-eight sets of eyes (the book’s favored term, each airborne drama typically ending with “all souls aboard were lost”) forever fixated on Los Angeles, condemned to circle a destination at which they’d never arrive. The moment the captain directed their attention toward L.A. — “off to the right there”—Lisanne imagined the last thoughts and wishes of the passengers focused upon the sprawling city with an incomprehensible, laserlike force, a desperate longing that may ultimately have outlived their physical bodies. (Maybe that was just her father talking. It was the kind of impassioned, fanciful theory he would have advanced over the dinner table, spookily transcendent, darkly romantic; the sort of argument that intimidated her mother and made her feel small.) Our intention, said the pilot to the control tower, is to land at Los Angeles.

On trains, one ate communally, but Lisanne didn’t have the energy for small talk or passing personal histories so she took meals in her cabin. Once in a while, to break the monotony, she had coffee in the observation car. The tracks were dicey, and the cars shimmied and shook. Her body shook too, but Lisanne didn’t feel self-conscious because so many people on the train were fat — L.A. wasn’t the way Americans looked, this was how Americans looked. Cushy and invisible, safe from wind shear, she clicked into cozy “observer” mode…. A family threaded its way through the shifting aisle. The studious-looking little girl said to the others, “Now, if you hold on as you go, you’ll be just fine.” Such a darling, so distinctly American: the budding caretaker. She reminded Lisanne of herself. A young man with a shaved head passed by, wearing a T-shirt that read PAIN IS WEAKNESS LEAVING THE BODY. She saw a hermit-looking fellow staring out the window, with a heavy slab resting in his lap. She thought it was a food tray before getting a closer look — he’d been whittling a finely detailed memorial to the police and firemen of September 11. “How beautiful,” she said. She really did think it an extraordinary example of folk art. The hermit thanked her indifferently, never averting his eyes from the mysterious panorama of the Kansan plains. So American too, this eccentric! Americans all.

One thing Lisanne thought strange: They had traveled hundreds of miles through small and midsize towns, but she rarely saw a human being. The locomotive whooshed, clattered, or lumbered past clapboard houses, some abandoned, others half built, many clearly lived in, yet Lisanne never saw anyone in the yards or driveways — no scavengers or children, idlers or train watchers, no one working in the yard, or even seen through windows, baking, yelling, reading or restive, writing or resigned. She searched her mind, but there was no way to account for it. She thought of Alaska Airlines again — of ghost ships and ghost trains, ghost moms and dads on a ghostly plain. What was that movie she saw on pay-per-view and liked so much? Ghost World. That just about said it all.

The porter, a slow black girl, brought dinner. Lisanne fastidiously arranged the food on the metal tray that dropped down from the cold window of her private compartment. It was pleasurable to eat in solitude with the sun dipping and the scenic world moving by. Had she flown, she would have arrived long since.

Just before sleep, Lisanne thought of the family she’d read about in The New York Times who had perished in France, in a fire aboard a high-speed train. Only those in the deluxe sleeper car had died. The same thing happened in the States some years ago, but she couldn’t get it up to care. Phobias were like that — either you had one or you didn’t. Bed down, tucked beneath the requisition threadbare pink blankets, Lisanne felt safe and secure, certain she’d survive any old little fire or derailment that came her way.

• • •

JUST BEFORE ARRIVING in Chicago, Lisanne showered in the closet-size bathroom. The water was nice and warm, and she smiled at the comic absurdity of hosing herself down in the upright plastic coffin of a train toilet. Looking at the big white folds of skin, she felt like an animal at the county fair. She laughed when imagining herself stuck in the stall, the dull-witted porter having to pry her out.

She had four hours to kill and went to Marshall Field’s for lunch. The grandiose dining room was shopworn and depressing, so she ate lunch in an ill-lit, pretentious chain-boutique hotel with giant, ludicrously stylized chairs and lamps. After the meal, she strolled to the Sears Tower. It was windy, and her mind imbecilically repeated: The Windy City, the Windy City, the Windy City. She tried calling her aunt but couldn’t get through.

It was good to get back on the train. She saw herself traveling like this forever, city to city, station to station, coast to coast, working for Amtrak incognito as a secret inspector in quality control, a plus-size spinster who kept to herself and legendarily took meals in sequestration. She thought seriously about changing her return ticket so that instead of coming through Chicago again she could take the southern route to Jacksonville then over to New Orleans.

By the time she got to Albany, her father was dead.

The Benefit

HE FLIPPED THROUGH the paper. Viv was still getting ready. The driver waited outside to take them to the benefit.