Bruce Wagner - I’m Losing You

All this against the ceaseless crashing of waves. Bernie thought that was probably calming to the Big Star, in the amniotic sense. It was to him, anyway — he never slept this well in town. The air, the mood, the everything was better. He even cut back on Halcion. Edie invited him to stay in a guest room for long weekends. Edie was in love: so be it.

CK FOR EXHAUST NOISES. REPLACE STUDS FOR BOTH EXHAUST SECURING CLAMPS W/DAMAGED THREDS, REPLACE MUFFLER CENTER MOUNT

CUSTOMER REQUESTS THE “ROYAL CROWN” SERVIC. PERFORM SERVICE AS REQUESTED

THANK YOU FOR ALLOWING US TO SERVICE YOUR VEHICLE

The producer anchored the Rover printout with a gin glass, squinted over the water and stood. He set out with his huaraches and Dunhill, a crusty pioneer.

Gulls hung in the wind like mobiles. The old man walked barefoot to the water, sand warm as memory. A sweet, unclassifiable scent cudgeled his being. The scent became a feeling, the feeling an image: a Baltimore yard, nineteen thirty-two. White-hot and wickedly bright. He was seven years old, younger than his rich first cousins, whose house looked like a bank — the property took up a full city block. Aunt Janine built them a two-story playhouse that rivaled the apartment Bernie and his mother lived in downtown. June hated her sister for that. The boy had only visited a handful of times; this would be his last, during a short period when the feuding sisters attempted rapprochement. (Their animosities sprang from money, of course. Janine wouldn’t give them any.) The aunt, in black taffeta and pink parasol, served cookies and cider and he remembered with a shudder June’s embarrassment when she called from the sidewalk for him to come, Bernie clinging catastrophically to Janine’s traumatic skirts, miserable and blind, cousins laughing at first, then queerly gawking as a servant pinched the boy’s neck to get him off, like a crazed, distraught pet. Poverty didn’t become him, even then.

What would he do with Edith-Esther Gershon? he pondered, luxuriously rhetorical, even jaunty, amused and heartened by the strange and generally positive turn of events, for it wasn’t a bad thing that she loved him, no love could ever be, even if — He sidestepped a frothy, impetuous little wave that rushed at him with the pep of a Pekingese. As Bernie bent to scoop a sodden card, a cantering Labrador spattered the cuffs of his shorts.

Just then, three shirtless, wiseass men were upon him.

“Hey! Aren’t you Donny Ribkin’s father?”

Bernie blinked. “I certainly am.”

“Pierre Rubidoux. We met at the bar in the Peninsula.” The tall blond extended a hand. “Showtime.”

“My watering hole,” said the old man. “I hope I was civil.”

Pierre introduced the others, whose names the producer didn’t catch. The bald one had a massive shoulder tattoo; the other was around six-five, with a half-dozen studs in each ear. He was smoking a joint. Bernie tucked the bottleless Artists Rights message into a pocket.

“Your son’s a helluv’n agent,” said Pierre. The bald one belched, then laughed indiscriminately.

“Taught him everything I don’t know. Say, you and Donny didn’t go to school together, did you?”

“No, we didn’t.”

“He grew up with a Rubidoux — Jesus, I think it might have been a Pierre!”

“I know two other Pierre Rubidouxes. We get each other’s mail.”

“The mother was Clara,” he said, irresolute. “You’re not related?”

“Not that I know of. Were they from Toronto?”

Bernie shrugged and turned to the others. “Are you fellas also with Showtime?”

“We were, but now we’re homeless,” said the bald one.

“Now,” said the giant one, “we’re PWAs.”

“Forgive my slightly fucked up friends,” said Pierre.

The bald one began to sing. “ We had fun, fun, fun till my daddy took our T cells away! ”

The giant exploded with laughter, then lit out after a Frisbee. The bald one overtook him but the Lab got there first.

“Do you live out here, Bernie?”

“No, I’m visiting with a friend,” he said, resisting the urge to name-drop. “But I’d like to — certainly on a day like today.” The others rejoined them, tailed by the foaming Frisbee-mouthed dog.

“Bernie produced all those Undead flix,” Pierre called out. “ The Waking Dead, The Walking Dead —”

“The Mister Ed…” said the giant.

“I loved those movies,” said the bald one, circling back as the giant waded into the tiny swells.

The producer repositioned his extinct corona. “We had lots of fun.”

“You know,” said the bald one to Pierre, “you guys should remake those.”

“Love to do it for ya,” Bernie said.

Pierre scrunched his face. “They did that already — with those rock ‘n’ roll zombie pictures.”

“That was, like, fifteen years ago,” said the bald one. Bernie was starting to like this guy.

“What do you care , Mr. Showtime?” said the giant. “Those were bullshit .”

“Maybe,” said Pierre.

“It’d be fucking fantastic ,” spat the bald one, all marijuana breath and missionary zeal. The giant tore Frisbee from muzzle and threw it to sea. “Man, we fucking loved that shit. We used to go to midnight shows in Westwood—”

“At the Plaza,” said Pierre, warming to the concept.

“The days of Lew Alcindor.”

“Lew! Lew! Lew!”

“Who owns them now?” asked Pierre, donning his business affairs hat.

Bernie got a pang of heartburn. “Me, myself and I,” he said, rotating the cigar on the marbly mucous membrane of his mouth.

“No shit,” said the giant, indifferently.

“Didja make a bundle, Bernie?”

“I did fair-thee well, fair-thee well.”

“I’ll bet. Donny Ribkin wasn’t the son of no slouch.”

“How do you know Donny again?” asked the proud father.

“I was at ICM five years.”

“Well,” said Bernie, “it was nice meeting you boys.” Better not to pal around too long.

“Call me, at Showtime.” They shook hands while the others peeled off without saying goodbye. “I can rent those, right? The Undead —”

“Sure can. Blockbuster has ’em. You can get ’em anyplace.”

“Vaya con Dios,” said Pierre, flashing a peace sign.

“Don’t you mean Viacom ?” he bantered. The executive laughed, then ran ahead.

Bernie dreamed this and the dream had been delivered, lapping at his feet like so much mother-of-pearl. That was the omen. To hell with the Studio Shuffle, he would sell The Undead cycle to Showtime without lifting a finger: the world was still magical, vivid, ultramarine. The world still held treasures for the likes of Bernard Samuel Ribkin — now hopping wood steps, scrubbing sand from ungainly feet, the fragile, knobby creepers of a courtly old player who’d seen a few things. He was hungry and wondered about dinner. Then a shiver of the abstract washed over him, and for an instant the mysterious seaboard of his destiny was illumined; but Edie’s second-story shout reeled him back to mundane shores and he lost what had been seen as quickly as the thread of a reverie.

“Old Man and the Sea!” she cried, leaning from the window of her room, smiling like there was no tomorrow. “Old Man and the Sea, do you love me?”

Zev Turtletaub

Taj sat in the bath and visualized the article from that day’s Reporter , a front-page piece about the Turtletaub Company’s “hefty slate”: a musical remake of a Spencer Tracy movie called Dante’s Inferno , planned for Broadway; two films already in the can and soon to be released — a Robert Redford and a Martha Coolidge; All Mimsy , a sequel to Mimsy , a spin-off of the hugely successful Jabberwocky chronicles; an unnamed Holocaust project with Richard Dreyfuss, plus the potential filming of a yet-to-be-announced Dreyfuss stage vehicle; an upcoming feature to be written and directed by David Mamet, with songs by Mamet and Sondheim; Middlemarch , to be adapted by A. S. Byatt and directed by Stephen Frears; three bestsellers — a romance, a policier (for Dustin Hoffman) and a dysfunctional-family drama — in active development; an animated film of a tale from the Brothers Grimm by the director of A Nightmare Before Christmas ; a remake of The Four Hundred Blows , directed by David Koepp, the Jurassic Park scribe; Charlotte’s Web , by the Jabberwocky writers; an unnamed story by Poe to be helmed by actor Anthony Hopkins; a remake of Pasolini’s Teorema (with producer Phylliss Wolfe attached, Turtletaub serving as exec producer); and a teaser about Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut that vaguely implied J. D. Salinger might possibly have agreed to expand and adapt his original story. This, of course, was untrue. To his utter dismay and delight, the name Taj Wiedlin had been invoked as “associate producer” in the very last paragraph of page seven in connection with a “fast track” adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls , for which no writer or star had been set. Mr. Turtletaub called it “a priority project, a labor of love.”