Bruce Wagner - I’m Losing You

She was starting to nest (that’s what the house-hunting game was all about) and Troy wasn’t happy. Kiv slept in his bed most every night now. She sipped morning cappuccinos and went on about sofas and ottomans, trying to impress with her thrifty, no-nonsense ways. She called him honey a lot and stroked his head as she stared into space, theorizing about drapes — muslin or parachute? — then off she’d go to a hard-core shoot. It was everything Chet tried to avoid, to shun, to cast off: the pornographic Middle Class. Soon they’d be on Sally Jessy Raphaël with the other porn couples, expounding on the Lifestyle, sugary and witless.

His muffler echoed through the streets like the canned laughter of an old Beverly Hillbillies . He made the mistake of idly recounting his conversation with Quinn, and Kiv was all over it. Quinn was right, he’d be stupid not to “play along for the connections”—she wanted to go to the party too. By the time the realtor hove into view, grinning like a moron beside her billion-dollar BMW, they had almost come to blows.

Champagne wishes and caviar dreams! The woman smelled a fish but kept a stiff upper lip throughout the tour. The house, former residence of John Huston, George Harrison, George Hamilton and Roger Moore, recently rented to Tom Arnold for thirty-five thousand a month. Their guide proffered a lavish binder stuffed with magazine profiles. Not a room had been spared the photographer’s lens — the master bath itself lovingly showcased in Diane von Furstenberg’s big book of celebrity loos. A guest house sprang from the villa’s cunningly designed gardens like a hallucination, stupendous enough to briefly lift Troy’s grim, vindictive spirits. It looked like a gargantuan Roman column snapped off at the center. The thing even had windows. The realtor called it a “folly,” the replica of a house that stood in a forest outside Paris; the owner made the commission after seeing a photo in Architectural Digest . As Troy approached the surreal structure, Kiv’s hickish oohs and ahhs broke the quixotic spell. With great annoyance, he walked to the car and waited.

“Feel better now?” he asked, venomously. They were back in the car, rattling down the hill. “Feel rich ?”

“Fuck you!” Kiv started to weep. A minute later, coasting round a turn, she told him she was pregnant.

“Oh shit,” he said, pulling over to a fiftyish woman selling maps to stars’ homes. The vendor made a move, then held her ground.

“I’m having this baby, Troy!” she sobbed. “I’ve had too many abortions, I can’t do that anymore. Troy, I love you—”

As they reached Sunset, he thought of jumping ship — making a mad dash, but where would he run? Back to the folly, to be swallowed by the rabbit hole. There had to be a rabbit hole—

“We can be so happy , Troy! So happy…”

He laughed and Kiv shot from the car, storming across the Boulevard in a haze of tears, beating him to it. It was just like a movie, except there wasn’t a pile-up in her wake. And — the movies again — Troy gave chase.

Bernie Ribkin

Edie was a big creature who bellowed when they made love.

It was strange, but something about her, something chalky and carnal, took him back to those whitewashed yards of Baltimore. His cousins’ faces floated up as he rode the pale, doughy, mole-flecked country of her flesh, smelled the cooking of ancient neighborhoods in her hair, saw dreary storefronts in the bone beneath her breast. Under her arms were trolleys and hydrants; nipples conjured washtubs and linoleum; her long, flat fingernails, the dirty birds of a public park. Her face, during the act, looked stylized and anguished. She was like a powerful wrestler, scissoring the air with broad, indefeasible strokes. Her eyes were the deepest brown he’d ever seen, and when he looked within, Bernie saw himself as a boy standing tentatively in a sawdust-strewn saloon out of The Iceman Cometh , heard the chink of billiard balls until they shooed him away, running home through wind that tore open his cheeks; had only to smell the gray-white hair at Edie’s temples to summon tracts of sidewalk, his sidewalks, their spidery cracks, graffiti and Crayola’d arabesques evoked by a whiff from the tough, translucent seashell of her ear — had only to nuzzle an eyebrow to step on the burnt-yellow lawn of the downtown house where he once lived. Edie’s teeth were bad (the warped and splintered sun chairs of the falling-down porch where his mother waited) but the breath was always fresh.

How did they banter, Bernie and his new girl, when in bed? Something like this:

“That was lovely. Thank you.”

“You’re a very strong girl.”

“You’re a very strong man.”

“Are you Polish somewhere in there?”

“In where?”

“In there. Somewhere.”

“I am not . No, no, I don’t think so, no.”

“You look a little that way. Jesus H, I schvitz with you. Lemme get a towel. I’m schvitzing like I got stuck.”

“A big patch of hair.”

“I’m the stuck-er and you’re the stuck-ee.”

“Did you know you have a big patch of hair on your back?”

“I’m the Cabbage Patch Kid.”

“Right there, Bern. It’s very funny and sweet.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“Oh? Who told you? I don’t like that, Bern.”

“It’s from the skin graft.”

“Mister Liar. You didn’t have any skin graft. Bullshitter. And who told you you had a sweet funny patch?”

“‘Cause I’m part Apache. Didn’t you know I was part Apache?” “Don’t make me dislike you.”

Out at the beach, Bernie felt the years drop off. He kept his own room (“for propriety,” Edie said) but didn’t think that would be for long. It wasn’t like they weren’t of age, for Jesus H. Soon they would shack up properly — for all he knew, next week they’d be honeymooners. The more things change, the more things change, just like they say. He’d never balled a schizophrenic before. He kept waiting for her to tell him Janet Reno was sending radio signals to her tits, but it never happened. Never even had the decency to crap in her panty hose. The only evidence of malady was a few fat bottles of pills in the medicine cabinet and the occasional puzzling affect. He’d lived with far worse.

Edie wasn’t beautiful but it didn’t embarrass him to be with her, either. He was no Larry King, he laughed to himself, and that said a lot right there. They didn’t socialize too much, anyway, confined for the most part to the paralytic duchy of fallen Big Star daughter. Until he found Edie, the producer hadn’t realized how tired he was. He was through hunting and gathering. What had it ever gotten him? Edie had money and twisted Tinseltown tenure — if this was the end of the line, he’d rise to the challenge. They would marry and attend galas, photographed for glossy Westside society pages, at table with Roddy McDowall, Sybil Brand, the Robert Stacks, and Mr. Blackwell. May we present…Bernard and Edie Gershon-Ribkin.

He stepped from the bright, claustrophobic elevator and stood in the hall, unable to move.

Someone sat by his door. It was sinister because the bulb above had been unscrewed.

“May…may I help you?”

As Bernie edged toward him, the man gripped knees to chest and began to sing. “ Papa, can you see me? ”

“Donny?”

“ Papa, can you hear me? ”—High camp, from the lower depths.

“What’s the matter with you?”

His son looked wild-eyed and spent — as if, lashed to the prow, he’d survived an epic storm only to become transcendently unhinged.