Bruce Wagner - Still Holding

Trans World

SHE SAT AT Lavendar House with perspicacious George, who lay dying. It was George who actually wanted to watch the Barbara Walters interview with Kit Lightfoot after the Academy Awards. Lisanne thought how funny the world was because she hadn’t even been aware of it. She’d tuned all that Hollywood stuff out.

She turned on the set — there he was before her, so handsome! Still the rumpled élan, rapscallion glint in the eye. But the Kit Lightfoot who had ruled her life and her energies was dead to the hospice-worker of the present moment. This Kit was a movie star and just that, a fallen idol risen again in the popular imagination. He was a human being who’d been through a great ordeal, just as she had, but the commonality ended there. He was not her lover nor was he the father of her child. He was not the Buddha; light and nectar did not pour from his crown. He was a man, plain and simple.

The segment began with Barbara showing clips from his films followed by a medley of breaking-news edits, both local and international, related to the assault. They strolled through Kit’s new house and garden (how lovely the zendo was, thought Lisanne) and spoke about what he had been able to mentally reconstruct — with gentle, yet somehow obscene inelegance, Barbara probed the arduous process of rehabilitation and what returning to Riverside was like, especially to stay in the room he’d occupied as a boy (“So you can go home again,” she said, eliciting oddly genteel laughter from the interviewee). She wanted to know just how it felt to live with a man he’d been estranged from since the death of his beloved mother, a man of questionable character and motive who was abusive to him even when he was a child. She did not refer to the father’s incarceration nor to his crime; Lisanne couldn’t decipher if that would come later or if it was simply off-limits.

“Kit,” said Barbara, all hard-nosed metta. “Can you talk about Viv — Viv Wembley? Can you share with us why you’re not together?”

He smiled, and Lisanne saw him take deep, yoga breaths — she knew he was doing ujjayi, yet the knowing was of itself free from obsession. She felt sane and at ease. A magisterial compassion for his being washed over her.

“Barbara… I wouldn’t wish that on anyone — not just what happened to me but… I wouldn’t wish it on the partner, of whoever becomes ill or debilitated. It’s a terrible, terrible burden.”

“And a great test, isn’t it?” she said, sowing seeds of doubt and betrayal with that copyrighted wince of scurrilous sympathy. (Viv Wembley had failed out.) Kit smiled ambiguously. “And yet,” she went on, “couples do survive a catastrophic occurrence. Christopher and Dana Reeve are one example that comes to mind.”

“I think every situation is different,” he said generously. “People move on — or through — what happens to them, in different ways. Everyone has a path, Barbara.”

“ You certainly do. And that path is called Buddhism. And I’d very much like to talk about that in a moment. But have you spoken? Have you spoken to Viv?”

“Oh yes—”

“You have?”

“We’re good friends.”

“Really?” she asked. Copyright honeyed skepticism.

“Yes, really!” He laughed. “I was at her beach house. You know, Barbara, we’ve been through a lot together and we respect that. We honor that. Have to! But Viv’s moved on with her life — as I have with mine. We both know that we’re there for each other when we need to be.”

It was time to go for the jugular. Barbara segued with kill-shot celerity to Cela. Lisanne wasn’t sure if she wanted to see this part. She looked over at George, who was asleep. She shut it off. Kit would be all right. She didn’t need to protect him anymore. She never had, never could. All she wanted was to wish him well.

• • •

HE WAS A SWEET old man without much time left. Anyone could tell by looking at him how handsome he must once have been. He lost his wife in 1970. Their only son died five years ago in a car crash. George had never remarried.

She’d spent the last month or so sitting with him. He was often chatty, but lately his strength had waned. Lisanne sat through the blank spots, night sweats, and myriad terrors. Some afternoons, she gave him sponge baths which he stoically endured, too polite to tell her the pain of being touched was excruciating. As the end approached, she closed her eyes and drifted with him to this moment, to unconsciousness and beyond. Sometimes she rubbed baby oil over the corroded tattoos of his jaundiced skin or blotted water onto colorless lips. He stank, but it wasn’t hard to transform death smells into balm. She thought of her dad a lot and how narcissistic fear had banished her from the very moment of his death. Now she understood that sitting with George was a gift from God, any god, pick a god. She had come serenely, she had not rushed to this room at Lavendar House as she had rushed to her father’s deathbed from the platform of that train, like a fool. She was already here — one of his hands pressed between hers. Already here, to comfort to the end. She was present, and accounted for.

As she sat with him, she meditated on her father’s library. She remembered waking up in the middle of the night and restlessly communing with the forest of volumes, some with their backs turned as if to snub her late arrival. Lisanne’s finger had strummed against the spine of Milarepa’s The Hundred Thousand Songs. What was it doing there? She’d since had time to puzzle over that. Dad was a learned man, but how had the book been acquired? Was he simpatico to Buddhism, or was he indifferent? Was he a cognoscente? And what, after all, did he actually know about the great saint Milarepa? Maybe not a damn thing. Maybe the book had been absorbed rather than acquired, had belonged to a hippie lover, one of his students, say, from back in the day — someone he took a fancy to while her mother was shut in the guest room with migraines. There was so much she’d never know about Dad — or Milarepa or her mother or Philip, and George too. She was OK with that.

As she emptied the bedpan, she thought about cleaning the Riverside toilets and how crazy she’d gotten. It was hard to believe — she would have laughed if it wasn’t so gut-wrenching. Lisanne thought about the claustrophobic Amtrak water closet too, then shuddered at her shaming and violation by that horrible man, now behind bars, reaping the karmic whirlwind. Burke Lightfoot had orchestrated and overseen the rape, not just of her, but of his own son, and Lisanne wondered if Kit would ever try to contact her to make amends. She hoped he wouldn’t, but if he did, she’d tell him that there was no one really to blame, that she had allowed it to happen, that she had been in a bad place but now was well. The pills that Dr. Calliope’s colleague prescribed had stabilized her, but mysterious forces were at work, forces that conspired to provide a healing, an occult glissade of grace and nonresistance, and love unperverted. Now her life was filled with the light of Siddhama and nonsectarian prayer, a humble dyad between Lisanne and her faith. Each day, she and God created a simple space, wherein hope and regret, splendor and sorrow — and love — could be born.

When Lisanne came from the bathroom, she lit a scented candle. She was drawn to a photo of George and his wife and son that hung upon a wall. He wore a gleaming smile and captain’s hat: suspended in time, like one of those fallen astronauts. He’d been a pilot for TWA in the fifties and sixties. She took the photo in hand.

It was time for her to shed the last of her fears, and fly.

With Rob Reiner in the Patio of the Ivy on Robertson