Bruce Wagner - I’m Losing You

Les treated most of Donny’s clients, appearing at screenings and charity balls, art openings, award shows, tapings, shootings, bar mitzvahs, weddings and funerals. The reason the sultan made time for the agent’s occasional eruptions (when Donny got a pimple on his nose, he liked it injected ASAP) rather than shuffling him off to, say, a partner with offices in the megasuite’s Siberia, was owing to Donny’s official role as wrangler to three of the doctor’s seven key Big Star fetishes. In fact, Les Trott had only three observable modes of discourse: (one) that while with an unempowered, non-celebrity stranger (this sometimes occurred inadvertently. He remained coolly cordial and glassy-eyed while plotting his trajectory from sandtrap to nearest Big Starlit oasis. It was during such encounters Les convinced himself he was a normal person, capable of self-effacing civilian banter); (two) that while with a powerful yet non-celebrity acquaintance (in such an instance, he might affably field medical queries, overwhelming one with minutiae. He assiduously kept current on the journals and enjoyed regurgitating their contents to laymen, a kind of parlor trick with the dual function of helping him retain what he’d read.); lastly, (three) that while interacting with a Big Star . Donny Ribkin, whose whimsical scrutiny of Trott was an extension of his student anthropology days at UCLA, breezily noted gradations therein: a breath of alacrity, almost subjective, an iridescence discerned in the jump from Victoria Principal to, say, Jane Seymour. Then one watched a Seymour fall to an Ali MacGraw, who then fell to a Helen Hunt; a Hunt to a Bergen, a Bergen to a Bening (more so, of course, if Bening spouse was present), a Bening to a Midler, a Midler to a Whoopi, and so on, until all fell to Streisand or Taylor or Streep. It was banally, bizarrely riveting.

A few weeks ago, Donny brought his mom to the Cedars-Sinai office so Les could look at her moles and tags. Donny knew they were harmless, but Serena was vain. Since the surgery, she’d spent countless hours poring over the map of her skin — though the cancer inhabited her desert’s dark hole, not the negligible cacti growing on chaparral of tummy, pelvis and neck.

Serena always liked Les, having visited through the years for age spots, spider veins and cortisone. He seemed genuinely to enjoy her company. Dr. Trott knew she was dying and, after all, such imminence conferred a kind of celebrity too, linking her to the power-sodden, ticking-clock clan of his H.I.V.I.P. friends. Thus, Les was able to enter a makeshift fourth mode of tender ministrations: the incongruous one of healer. The wry, happy-face Acolytes, never more than an hour or so away from the next Big Star fix, garlanded the agent’s mother with queen-for-a-day benedictions and real sugarless-candy giveaways — actual lollipops of affection — just as they had Bette Davis in her pre-mortem dermo once-over. Outside the windows, birds chirped a Technicolor musicale and even the nurses seemed less stoned; angelic, whitewashed sisters of charity, loving the agent for bringing his mum, lifting her spirits like that at death’s elaborate, unfunny door.

Serena loved them back (but brought no Bulgari nibs). Here was a doctor who wouldn’t snip away at her guts! Here was the clinic as vanity fair, a fluorescent cotillion with a smooth maestro of emollients — here was a doctor with his gorgeous gals to coo over her Sandrine Leonard handbag and antiquarian brooch; to overlook her shrunken, balding frame; to studiously ignore the fecal odor following after like the devil’s courtship cologne.

Donny went down to the street to smoke and that’s when he saw Katherine Grosseck, love of his life. He wanted to run but managed a sickly smile as they collided. She was sleeveless and her chic workout arms carried bags from agnès b. “My mother’s seeing Les.”

“I heard she wasn’t well. I’m sorry.” Serena and Katherine had always gotten along. “I have to go now,” she said, then winced as if she were passing a stone. Donny got that hit-and-run feeling.

It was two years since the breakup, but their life together — for him — continued on a parallel, spectral track. He watched it unfold from a shadowy place he called the Imaginarium (after the toy store in Century City), watched as shadow-Donny and shadow-Katherine went about their daily couple-life: saw them vacation and marry, go to movies, buy a house. Saw belly swollen — saw child come. Watched them banter through the day the way they always did, like no two people in the world in the history of time. For the last two years, whenever idiot things happened (in the office, on the street, something glimpsed or overheard), he saw Katherine look at him the way she used to, the way no one ever had, no person in the world or in time, sly and throaty, sexy, knowing — watched them laugh away the nights and days the way they did — his shadow self staring into the sturdy well of her chocolate eyes with the kind of hyper-realism he imagined preceded psychosis.

Their love continued to grow the way nails were said to grow on a corpse.

“I’m the Dead Animal Guy.”

The family in the house at the end of the Downey cul-de-sac had been waiting a day and a half. When the handsome man with tight gray curls opened the screen door, Simon Krohn was already kneeling at the foundation to sniff a mesh-covered vent. Inside, the disdainful Latina was sorting her husband’s freshly laundered Water and Power shirts. She hated Simon on sight; his quirky metabolism put her right off. He was so white his skin glowed. “Make sure you show him the den,” she said. The smell was here, there, everywhere. She couldn’t be sure anymore — it was stuck to her nosehairs. After holding forth on the importance of durable screen installation, Simon was led to the bathroom. She didn’t want to get too close to this coveralled emissary of Creep. Like having a gravedigger in the house.

The door to the bathroom was shut, as if to trap a poltergeist. Simon the Discursive squatted at the bath.

“As I explained over the phone, if our friend has found himself a little home between the walls, that’s a problemo. There’s not much I can do short of busting in there, which doesn’t thrill me and I’m sure won’t thrill you . To summarize, if that’s the case, there’s not much to do but wait for our fine furry friend to burn itself out — you’re looking at anywhere from three to seven days. Sometimes,” he said, tap tap tapping, “they die just on the other side of the tub. And — as I said over the phone — that can also be a very large problemo.”

The eavesdropping wife flinched from her post by the Naugahyde E-Z chair. This asshole was saying the only thing that separated them from the infested, debris-strewn Valley of Mexico was a thickened toenail of bathtub porcelain. She wished they had called a professional, a proper man in proper uniform; she’d pinched pennies, and here they were at the mercy of an inept, cut-rate reaper. The husband, a city worker with a broader band of experience, was more tolerant.

Simon stood. “I made a kind of covenant with God when I started this business — not that I’m a fervent believer, but I’m probably the most religious in my family. That’s an understatement. My mother’s an atheist and my sister’s a total agnostic. My little family joke is that we’re really pagan Jews. Anyway, I have two cardinal rules: never endanger public health, and never gouge the customer. Even though I charge one hell of a lot less than an exterminating company, before I actually come out I want people to know I can’t always save the day. In a situation where little Fluffy is trapped in a wall space, for example, I always try to make it very clear that coming to a site will cost you. I mean, it’s sixty-five dollars just to say hello. Depending on the amount of time I spend under the house, the supplies used, that can go high as a hundred and thirty-five. In your case, if everything’s cut-and-dried, I imagine the charge could be one-oh-five or one-oh-seven. That’s why I wanted to make it very clear as I said in our phone call this morning that if I go under the house and can’t find our friend Fluffy, I can only assume that, unhappily, Fluffy is between walls. And that is una problemo grande because equipment would be required to actually go through that wall and said equipment won’t make either of us very happy. Besides, I don’t do that. I work strictly under the house, as I said on the—”