Bruce Wagner - Still Holding

Suddenly their bodies were overturned.

A woman shrieked.

Mr. Lightfoot yelped, guffawing.

The lady called Cela was in the room.

Kit grabbed his robe and ran. Cela swatted Lisanne, shouting, “What are you doing! What the fuck are you doing !” Lisanne jiggled and trembled, modestly covering her sex with a smeary hand while Burke, still laughing, put himself between them, urging Goodyear to get dressed.

Cela struck him. “You motherfucker! She bled all over the bed! The bed where we fuck. How could you do that? And how could you do that to him ? He’s your son, he’s your fucking son ! You’re sick ! You’re sick sick sick sick sick ! You sick fuck, how could you bring a fat fucking whore in here like that! Oh God, look at the blood! She’s like a pig! You put your dick in that — she could have fucking AIDS ! How could you do that? How could you do that to me! And your son, your son, your son!”

• • •

HE SAW HER STANDING in the driveway, disheveled. He brought her to the house — his wing, where she’d spent so little time. She was docile. He asked if she was hungry, but she shook her head. He gave her water from the kitchen tap, the Bulthaup/Poggenpohl kitchen that she called the mothership because it was capacious and made of steel, and the housekeeper made sure there were always steel bowls of fruit and redolent flowers there. Then he brought her to the bedroom and laid her down as she’d been brought to the Riverside bedroom and laid down hours before. He saw that she wasn’t wearing panties. Her thighs were smeared brown with blood. She’s been fucking, he thought. But who? Someone on the street. Maybe someone on the bluff, there was that section from the pier on up to Wilshire where he told her never to walk, where the woebegone held court, lying in wait under newspapers and ratty quilts, pretending to be sleepy and harmless so the liberals would continue to condone and indulge their predatory verminlike presence. She was vulnerable. She was prey. Her heart was kind and large and damaged — it grew larger each day and pumped less blood to its own system, an aneurysmal craving to burst and reabsorb into the generalized heart of needy humanity — and if it weren’t for his patronage he knew she would become one of them, dissolved into that scabrous communal wound. He hoped that wasn’t so and she’d just been out wandering because he worried about her catching a disease. Not that she would give him anything; their relationship wasn’t that way. His concern was unselfish. Also, he saw the end, and his seeing of that perhaps was the one selfish thing. He did not delight in the end, even though he had seen it coming for so long and had recognized Lisanne as its instrument. He soaked a rag in hot water and sponged her down with soap. (Maybe, he hoped, she’d been roughly, crazily masturbating and hadn’t been raped.) She was numb and bereft and he understood those things with tough and poignant insularity as might the translator of an astonishingly moving text who cannot then pass on what he knows. Yet who better to know those unknowable things and silently commune with her than he, the benefactor? Philip did this very thing with his mother when he was twelve, after she went out wandering. But my mother, he thought, was not a whore. My mother went out wandering to forget herself, to forget her wealth, to forget her husband — who himself had fled because he knew a wandering was coming and could not bear it — to forget how she had been crushed, her dreams eliminated. (Neither she nor the father nor the son nor his sister knew or would ever know what those dreams had been. It is a tragedy to forget what it was that was vanquished and merely be left with emotional detritus, the dried up tears of phantom loss.) Mattie would be with his father in La Jolla and Philip with his mother when she came back with her scrapes and contusions born of brambles, various small stones and the brushings-by of domesticated bark and branches — nothing more, nothing less — such damage could be done without leaving the property, which was vast. As he damp-toweled his mother, he would linger at her fine white wrist scars, thicker by a hair than a hair’s width, wispy keloids whose origin it had been ingrained within him never to ask, the way some Jewish families never discuss the murky prehistory of modified noses. No, this was not his mother before him but rather it was as if he had swallowed her and regurgitated Lisanne’s soft white form and that he was now responsible for that form’s maintenance and comfort and for all of the forms it would beget. This was a tender lozenge before him, living and corpuscular, a sentient being whom he must protect, its cocoon rent, blown away like a bruised gown in the gusty albeit warm, sacral winds of the Santa Anas and it was up to him to father her — though he saw his own energy at an ebb, and that frightened him, he could see the recession of his earthly powers at hand. All that kept him here, and all that ultimately would send him away, lay in the animal eroticism of mother and son communion. All that kept him attached to the world was the sheer abandon inspired in the gaudy firelight of that act, by its holy, meretricious witness.

Bygones

TWO WEEKS LATER, his father in Vegas, Kit made an appointment to see Alf.

(While Burke is away, the mice will play.)

He tucked into the backseat of Cela’s Volvo while Tula spirited him away. They knew the drill — same old same old. Not too much action on the barricade, anyhow.

They drove past old haunts.

(He’d gathered up the addresses and given them to Tula, who spent the night before hunched with the Thomas Bros.)

The Chateau and the Strip…

(Though not a glance to or thought of the liquor store.)

His old house, in Benedict…

(Had the impulse to go in but forgot to ask the lawyers for a key. Was of a mind to sell the whole caboodle, but legally, nothing could be done until issues of conservatorship had been settled. At least that’s what Burke said. He sat and stared, trying to imagine living there again or having lived there.)

Viv’s house.

(Imagining himself and Viv inside; then being replaced by Alf.)

Last stop before Alf’s aerie — the grave. Old haunts…

Rita Julienne Lightfoot

1950–1996

“Mother Courage”

• • •

THEY DROVE THROUGH the gates, high above Sunset Plaza — minimalist, hipster digs, as if Lenny Bruce still lived and had commissioned a Richard Meier redo. There stood barefooted Alf, grinning from the porch. Both men nervously self-conscious. Kit wore the gray Prada suit that Cela had selected on a rare after-hours expedition. (Maxfields had stayed open late, so he could shop without hassle.)

Big hugs. Awkward stuff. Alf offered Tula entrée, but the bodyguard declined. More hugs inside. Water and foodstuffs dispensed by a nondescript helper who then vanished for good. Kit was laconic, weighing and measuring words far more than he would in Riverside. They settled into couches. Alf took a brief phone call. Apologized. Said it was business.

“Think you’re going to sell the house?” said Alf. (To have something to say.)

“Maybe,” said Kit. “Not sure.”

“Now, don’t do that,” said Alf, with a pleading, country-western star smile. “Shit, that place should be on the historic registry. We had some crazy times there, huh.”

“Very crazy!”

Alf laughed with tension release, and Kit laughed too, spittle boisterous; still finding his way. It got a bit easier — the court and spark exchange of trademark grins. “If those walls could talk! S peaking of which, what ever happened to our old friend Mr. Raffles? What’s he doing now, workin escort?”