Bruce Wagner - Still Holding

Waiting for the gynecologist, she found a really good article in Bazaar. The cover story said that while Drew wholeheartedly embraced her role as godmother to Courtney Love’s daughter, Frances Bean, she wasn’t yet ready to have kids herself. And when she did, she would never adopt — the implication being that the adoption trend was the result of vain actresses dealing with their sick notions of body image. Becca had never even thought of it like that (instead believing that famous young stars adopted because they were infertile), but the statement rang true. Drew had really opened her eyes.

The article ended with Drew saying marriage was not a goal for her at this juncture. She just wanted to have fun and be alive. “I am so in love with love,” she said.

Becca could relate.

• • •

THEY HADN’T SEEN each other since the kissing scene, which happened to be the very day Becca wrapped. Making out was fun and got pretty gnarly, and they bonded but not in a weird way. Becca put so many of those dissolvable Listerine thingies under her tongue that she thought she’d get a burn.

There was so much she wanted to ask that day, but as it turned out, Drew did most of the talking. She, of course, knew that Becca was working for Viv as a chore whore (Becca was convinced that Viv had been shamed into letting her take time off for the Look-Alikes role because, as it happened, Drew did a cameo on Together, not because of a friendship with Viv but because she was the casual ex of one of the costars, and during the taping Drew had raved to Viv in front of Becca about what a terrific gal Becca was and how funny and great it was that Viv had hired her “soul sister,” and Becca knew that if Viv forbade her to work on Spike Jonze’s movie then Viv would have been exposed to the scorn of Drew and her movie friends, a scorn she definitely did not want to inspire) and Drew wanted to know if what she had heard was true: that Viv was sleeping with Alf. Becca said yes — she knew that Drew and Alf were once an item — but that it was a big secret. Drew just laughed and said what a slut Alf was and how hard it must have been for Viv with everything that had happened to Kit but that still there was something cheesy and unheroic about the way Viv kind of dumped him for his best friend. Especially under the circumstances. But far be it from her to judge, said Drew. Then she talked about how sweet Kit was and how they used to hang together when she lived in Carbon Canyon and how he turned her on to meditating and about the time they all — Drew and Kit and Tom and Kathy Freston (Tom was the head of MTV, she said) — went to Westwood to see a vipassana master called Goenka, who was touring the United States in a mobile home and what a horrible thing it was that some asshole did that to him and ruined his life and how she felt kind of guilty for never having tried to go see him when he was at Cedars. For a moment, it looked like she was going to cry, but a crew dog rushed over to lick her, almost knocking her down. She laughed out loud, rubbing its fur and baby-talking through suspended tears. That’s the way Drew was — a big, open heart. A wise old child.

• • •

LATER WHEN THEY fucked, Rusty made her talk about the Drew-kiss like it was some big thing that had turned Becca on. She hated when he wanted to hear stuff during sex. He wanted her to talk about their nipples getting stiff and them secretly getting all wet and excited while the camera rolled, but that was so far from the way it actually was. But as long as Rusty got off, what did she care? The more she talked, the more she got into it, and she hated that he could so easily manipulate her. Seeing him turned on turned her on — sex was powerful. She would say anything he wanted to hear, do anything he asked, except maybe a four-way again, but when he got her going like that she knew she could never say never. When he came, she came too, and that was all that mattered.

On the Street Where He Lives

THE REUNION TOOK place on a cold, gray January afternoon. Most houses in the cordoned Riverside neighborhood had yet to throw out their Xmas trees.

She felt like she’d been to the cul-de-sac before — not just that months-ago time as a reluctant tourist but in another life. Lisanne dug deep and conjured his mother’s beautiful, angular skull, hair gone prematurely white from the vile tawdriness of errant cells covertly ripening under the glass of a fractured marital hothouse. The violence of all of it. According to Web sites and unofficial paperback bios, Burke had finally left Rita Julienne — whose very name signaled delicacy and countryside vulnerability! — alone with her son until the sick woman could no longer stand to remain in that godforsaken city and found sanctuary in a $435-a-month studio apartment in the gang-ridden projects of Panorama City. (Burke loitered in Vegas before reclaiming the family seat on the very evening of the day they fled. He got back so fast, he joked to his running partners, “the toilet seat was still warm.”) Those last months were tough on R.J. Kaiser Permanente was about to trash her womb and feed her to the chemo dogs.

Lisanne closed her eyes and submerged. She called on Tara to help with healing divinations, martyred herself to cries and whispers of unpaid alimony and veiny lymphomas, grapefruit-size divorce tumors sprouting in the domestic loam of cervical pain. Sitting in the car just two houses down, a backward-seeing clairvoyant, she heard all the old sounds and smelled the old smells — witchily raising the zoological mist of Burke Lightfoot’s animal funk, tinctured brew of athlete’s foot, jock rot, and unwashed crack, ne’er-do-well cologne and thirty-dollar parvenu deodorant, Lavoris mouth and pimpy charisma — invoked even the dark, mystic feelings of wet-leafed trees and their vermin, damp streets and window frames, sodden ungathered newspapers, oil-stained driveways and insular neighborhood smells, leavened by the crisp spice and blue smoke of things exaltedly autumnal. The airspace itself spoke in rapturous tongues of suburban decay.

Miracle: she was now inside that sorrowful house, moving as a docent within its storied walls, an official cog in the beloved sangha. Her humble reunion with the actor went appropriately unnoticed by all parties but herself. Lisanne and a gal from the Santa Monica sit group had been enlisted to accompany a sweet, sallow-faced monk; they were to do service, whatever father and son required. (Anyone who came to Riverside underwent Mr. Lightfoot’s scrutiny and wasn’t invited back without his approval. Most returnees were female.) The women housecleaned while the men, say, an ordained monk or senior meditator, sat with Kit in the yard or living room in quietude, or engaged the actor in gentle conversation. Lisanne tried to be close to him. During lunch, she rearranged foodstuffs in the pantry or washed out the fridge’s veggie bin a second time, if need be.

She especially loved scrubbing his bedroom toilet. A practitioner said that toilet cleaning was an old and venerated Buddhist practice — a particularly honorable way to achieve merit. At first, she didn’t believe it. Then one of the monks told her that cleaning toilets was a surefire way to quiet the ego. There were even special travel groups (they advertised in the dharma magazines) that promoted the tandem merit-generating activities of toilet cleaning and the touring of sacred Buddhist sites. Lisanne understood. She knew that her humble efforts were a poem, a kneeling meditation equivalent to the thousandfold prostrations pilgrims endure while circumambulating holy mountains in Tibet. She never used gloves. She reached in to polish the bowl with a little sea sponge as if it was the rarest of alabaster. Sometimes she gave herself a paper cut before cleaning so that her blood could absorb the microbial effluence that remained. Sometimes she wished he left more of himself.