Bruce Wagner - Still Holding

“Thanks again, Mr. Reiner!” she said, pouring it on.

As he walked off, he added, “And by the way, you were very funny in Spike’s movie.”

She thought: A “very funny” from Rob Reiner is pretty fucking great. He’d lost about fifty pounds and told Jay Leno that it was because he wanted to be around for his kids. Becca thought that was so sweet. The audience had even applauded.

He ogled her from afar, with a kind of quizzical charm. “You know, you look much more like Drew in the movie than you do in real life. If we can call this real life.”

She laughed. “So much of the Drew thing is how I wear my hair?” she said, with an old-style Valley Girl (Southern belle) upturn. “And it’s partially attitude. I mean, I gotta be in that Drew mood —know what I’m sayin?”

She felt feisty and carefree, talented and desired.

She felt like Ashley Judd.

“Thanks for coming in,” he said. “We’ll be in touch.”

She almost never read with directors — the casting person put her on tape and that was the end of it. Usually, you had to get called back maybe three times before something like that would happen. She told Annie that when she came in the room and saw Rob Reiner sitting there she almost lost it. He was so down-home and had her do the scene a bunch of different ways. It wasn’t a huge role, but there were two scenes with Ed Norton and one with Dustin Hoffman, who played Ed’s dad. Dixie was gonna die when she told her. Dustin Hoffman was her mother’s all-time hall of fame fave, and Becca thought that was funny because Dixie always seemed to go for the Jews. In the movies, anyway.

Labor Day

LISANNE AND PHILIP were in Rustic Canyon, watching the remains of the Jerry Lewis telethon.

Philip was sniffling. He said that around four in the morning he’d called the on-screen number during a five-minute pledge rush to gather funds to send kids to a special MDA camp. It cost $540 a kid, he said. Lisanne thought he’d been moved by the poignancy of it, but then he confessed. Philip said he got connected to a young volunteer and told her he wanted to buy twenty pledges. That was almost ten grand, and the girl got excited. He said he would give her his credit card. He unhurriedly doled out the numbers, while saying he was also doing a certain something to himself and she told him she didn’t know what he meant (she really didn’t) and then he said that he thought she did know what he meant and he warned her not to hang up because if she did that would mean twenty disabled children wouldn’t be going to camp. The girl whimpered but stayed on the line — she was so young that she didn’t know any better. What excited him most was that he could actually see the girl crying in the back phone-bank row as she took down the bogus info. He said that, to the home viewer, nothing appeared out of line because half of the people on the telethon were always crying anyway.

• • •

“THAT’S THE THING about Jerry that always bugged me,” said Robbie.

(Lisanne left the house in Rustic as soon as Philip finished his little story; the telethon was on at the Sarsgaard’s, too.)

“He’s mean, ” said Robbie. “I mean, I love ‘im and everything — and he’s the world’s biggest softie. But Mr. Lewis can be meaner than hell! Right, Max?”

“That is correct,” said the old woman from her La-Z-Boy.

Lisanne recalled the first time she saw her, in Albany, standing in the dusky kitchen. At the motel, Robbie had lied, and said he was sharing his home with his paternal grandmother. She remembered thinking, Something fishy there. Maxine Rebak was in her late sixties, and the alliance was comical to Lisanne at first but then poignant — everybody loves somebody sometime. Looking back, she wondered why he drove them over to see Max in the first place. Maybe it was some kind of ambivalent last gasp defiance toward his wife-to-be. But whatever ambivalence he might have had was now gone. They had the soft, comfy edges of any long-married couple.

Robbie met Maxine on a singles Web site. A Christian Scientist, she had registered her age as ten years younger. He advertised himself as a retired ambulance driver who became further disabled during WTC cleanup efforts, the truth being that on 9/13 he actually did start into Manhattan but was sidelined when a piston blew. That kind of bravado was pure Robbie. He was more a dreamer than a deceiver, and Lisanne loved him because he didn’t have a malevolent bone in his body. (Doesn’t have a bone at all, her dad would have wryly said.) He was a passive, sweet-hearted man. Maxine was a widow with a little bit of money. Shortly after they introduced themselves at a coffee shop rendezvous in Syracuse, she sold her house and moved in. She’d grown ill over the last few months; the road trip to L.A. took it out of her. They were married in Vegas, on the day they visited the Hoover Dam, “a thing of profound beauty” that Maxine had always dreamed of and wished to see before her death. But Siddhama superseded any morbid notions — she loved the idea of her husband being a sudden father, and seeing him with the boy gave her renewed life.

Lisanne had been in the hospital only a few days when Reggie tracked Robbie down. Reggie and the Muskinghams met Robbie and Maxine for dinner, and that was when Philip offered to lease them a duplex in the Fairfax area. The nannies’ living quarters were on the second story (that way, Max wouldn’t have to negotiate stairs), and they worked in revolving shifts so that the Sarsgaards were never without help. Between hospitalizations, Lisanne visited Siddhama whenever she wished, and while no one broached the topic of the baby returning to Rustic Canyon to live, she knew she wasn’t ready. But she was no longer afraid of her child. The aberrant ideation of his Panchen-like abduction receded, as flotsam upon floodwaters, and she reveled in their communion, staring deeply into his eyes with unneurotic affection. It was in this fashion that she willed Siddhama into being, assembled him with her love, and that he grew more real with each passing moment. She could not fathom this luscious, magical creature not being in her life.

Meanwhile, Lisanne did everything she could to reclaim her health and spirits. She went to an obesity clinic at UCLA and drank protein powder packets each day. She chugged down potassium pills with sugarless Metamucil, morning and night. She lost thirty pounds in the first month. She did yoga, Pilates, and Gyrotonics, returning to her five-mile walks along the bluff. She lifted weights and submitted herself to the energetic meridian needlings of Dr. Yue-jin Feng. (The only thing she didn’t do was meditate.) She saw Calliope Krohn-Markowitz for talk therapy five hours a week in conjunction with cutting-edge palliative care provided by Chaunce Hespers, M.D., the renowned Camden Drive psychopharmacologist. All was relatively well with the world.

She emphatically knew who this baby was — a beauteous boy child, born of the union of Lisanne Emily McCadden and Robert Linden Sarsgaard.

“Did you hear what Jerry said just before Julius La Rosa came out?” said Robbie, poised before the campfire of the TV. “Lisanne, you didn’t hear? Maxine! Max, come on, you guys have to watch ! Ed McMahon was announcing Julius La Rosa — Maxine, you know Julius La Rosa”—she nodded from her chair and said, “He’s of the where-are-they-now ilk”—“what they call a singer’s singer. Tony Bennett worships him. And if Bennett’s considered a ‘singer’s singer,’ I guess that means La Rosa’s a singer’s singer’s singer . Whew! That’s a tongue twister. Sinatra loved him too — Lisanne, you’re too young. But I happen to know my saloon singers, and La Rosa coulda been big as Frank. Right, Max? Hands down. But he was cantankerous. This guy pissed everybody off… Arthur Godfrey, Ed Sullivan, the mob guys. Everybody. So McMahon introduces him — this was just twenty minutes ago! — and Jerry says, ‘Is he still alive?’ And you know that had to hurt. Jerry, with that pumpkin face full of cortisone, like he should talk! The guy comes on and sings— beautifully — What’d he sing, Max? ‘Cat’s in the Cradle’? Beautiful. And I was never wild about that song — that’s Harry Chapin, a Brooklyn boy — but it was like we were hearing it for the first time, huh, Max. La Rosa was in a tux, that’s their thing, all those saloon guys, but handsome, like he was born in it”—Maxine said, “Very” —“and probably older than Jerry, if that’s possible! So, after he sings, Jerry looks in the camera with those crocodile tears and says, ‘It don’t get any better than that, folks’—and how if there’s a pantheon, the top guys would have to be Frank and Tony and Julius (he throws in Jack Jones only cause Jack’s coming on later), and you kind of get the feeling he means it but it’s too late! OK? He’s already made the Is he still alive? remark, and that’s the thing that makes me uncomfortable about Jerry”—“So why do you watch?” interjects Maxine, without expecting an answer, then says to Lisanne, “You can’t tear him away”—“A mean motherfucker, pardon my German. And that’s why if I was famous, I would never do that show”—“Fortunately, you will never have that problem,” said Maxine—“I don’t care how many sick kids you supposedly cure. And I don’t think they’ve cured one yet. But they will, and I’m not taking that away from him. But if you do go on that show, and I don’t give a hoot if you’re the Pope, Uncle Jerry is gonna take a crap on you sooner or later. He’ll take a giant shit on your head — pardon my French — that’s from Full Metal Jacket —great movie — Uncle Jerry will crap on your head and you’ll never know until it hits you.”