Bruce Wagner - I’m Losing You

Two years from now , Taj thought, my name will be on seventeen hundred screens and you will be trudging to the Royalton whenever Joe Marginal Icon blows into town . He maliciously finished the “Calendar” piece in his head:

The producer wanted to know why the fax in the Bentley was on the fritz. “Doesn’t anything in this fucking car work?” His driver smiled, accustomed to the employer’s colorful imprecations. On the tarmac, the Gulfstream waited to loft him to azure skies, to the London premiere of All Mimsy . He would dine at the palace with the Queen Mother. As he mounted the steps, Mr. Turtletaub turned, his face breaking into the trademark, toothy grin. “Who would have ever thought that the Mother of all Queens was not to be found on Fire Island?” Minutes later, he was where he belonged, where as a boy he dreamed he might be, far from the dirt and disorder of the world — where he could lay claim to his rightful title in a palace of his own that hung in the sky: Emperor of the Air .

They talked about the Turtletaub Company slate and the writer asked about the Salinger adaptation. Taj was coy. He knew Zev wanted to give the appearance to the press that the reclusive author was involved.

“I read you’re going be associate producer on Dead Souls .”

“Uh huh.”

“ That’s an interesting project. Will it be period?”

“Contemporary.”

“It’s been a while since I read the book, but I can’t imagine — the man buys peasants , doesn’t he?”

“The core of the book — the conceit — will be the same.” Taj instantly regretted using that word; the writer would use it against him. “Everything else is quite different.”

“The same but different.” The journalist smiled, savoring the Wonderland doublespeak. “Is there a screenwriter attached?”

“We’re talking to one or two people.”

“And the ‘conceit’ is—?”

“It’s actually Zev’s — Love in the Time of AIDS. It takes place in the viatical settlement industry. Those are the people who—”

“I did a piece on that,” he said eagerly.

“The protagonist is a salesman — they call them ‘sellers’ advocates.’ He’s kind of a down-and-out. He becomes this — merchant of death. And suffers the consequences. It’s also a love story.”

“Wow. That is very compelling. Very cool!”

Mimsy arrived with her trainer. The journalist amused himself with an impromptu interview: how much was a bitch like this worth? did she have a shrink? how could he be sure this was the “real” Mimsy? — surefire fodder for the Nathanael West sideshow angle. When the photographer came, the “Calendar” boy made him take a Polaroid while he mugged, shaking Mimsy’s paw. “I will treasure this,” he said, watching it develop. What a wag.

Zev was on his way to the pool when the phone rang. It was Hobson, the AIDS specialist. The doctor had dreamed of building a luxury hospice and healing center in Ojai; when they met at a benefit, Zev expressed interest in seed-funding. Hobson was calling to say — in confidentiality — that Aubrey Anne had been admitted to a hospital in the Valley for what her doctor believed was an allergic reaction to CMV meds complicated by a flu. Zev asked if his sister was dying and Hobson said he didn’t think so. The producer thanked him and they spoke a moment about the hospice. Then Zev went to meet his hagiographer.

The producer hadn’t been told “Calendar” wanted him photographed with Mimsy. “Oh Jesus. Another shot of me and the dog? Let’s do something more original, okay? Is the piece about me? Or the dog? Or is it about me and the dog?” he asked, not expecting an answer.

“It’s your call!” said the writer, delighted at the auspicious first encounter — the producer as godhead orchestrator of his world. “Your call, absolutely!”

“We’ve taken thousands of pictures already.” He bent to kiss Mimsy’s crown. “Haven’t we, girl? You won’t be upset with me, will you? No, I didn’t think so.”

Chet Stoddard

Aubrey wouldn’t let him come to the hospital. When he called, she gasped like someone who’d just run a marathon. “ How! are you! can’t! talk! call! back! how! are! you! do! ing! can’t! — ” Her diapered friend Ziggy occasionally picked up the phone and that’s how Chet got his information.

She had a horrible rash, he said, a side effect of the drug taken intravenously for her eyes. And she was out of breath like that because she probably had bronchitis — the docs had ruled out PCP, a viral pneumonia. The minute he got her home, Ziggy was gonna do his alternative thing: ayurvedic eyedrops and hydrogen peroxide baths, ganoderma, schisandra and white atractylodes, ligustrum and licorice. Toad’s breath and baby-tooth if he had to.

Chet felt her weight on him at night. He carried her during the day, too — like the fat lady he read about in Star who strapped on her invalid husband before morning chores. Why this mawkish preoccupation, this neediness, this profound yearning, this nostalgia for what they nearly were? Why now, why this woman — merely because she was dying? Obscene. Yet, as Chet told himself he loved her, the question cuffed his ear: how was it he hadn’t gone to visit? He hated hospitals, spent too much time there recovering from too many battles lost. Days of infamy. He remembered the blur of visiting hours with a shudder, friends and flunkies come to view the perpetrator in his habitat. Aubrey was different that way. She wasn’t cowardly, spiteful or ashamed; she wasn’t a neurotic with a death wish. Yes, there was the thoughtful moment Chet reasoned she’d want her privacy, but in a few days his delicacy showed its color of fraud. After a week, he still hadn’t gone. He went to bars and flirted instead, nursing drinks like a jilted man, telling himself lies: he and Aubrey were on the brink, they’d yet to arrive; tragic miscarriage of love, one of those curves life throws, all they’d needed was one more week for that animal bond. This time we almost made our poem rhyme … didn’t we, girl? A few times, just before last call, he drove toward the hospital — if he went to her now, Chet feared he’d be as unrecognizable to her as she to him. They’d crossed over. Turning around and heading for home, he still reserved the right to call it love. This time we almost made that long hard climb. Didn’t we almost make it…this time?

He kept calling her room — he knew she wouldn’t answer — and Ziggy didn’t seem to mind. Ziggy didn’t judge. They would be doing a spinal tap soon because Aubrey lost some muscle coordination. The doctors wanted to check for cryptococcal meningitis, a fungal infection that swelled the brain. It was shoptalk for Ziggy, inventory and nothing more. Voices subdued, they lollygagged on the phone like teenagers with crushes on Death — guides to the Holocaust Museum.

Zev Turtletaub

Aubrey was sedated so she wouldn’t panic during the MRI. They were checking for brain cysts and put you in this tunnel — she didn’t like enclosed spaces. The Valium or whatever it was let her drift; a lozenge in a cylinder, she woozily returned to the scene of old crimes.

She could remember visiting a brewery, when a girl — was it Schlitz? It rose up in the Valley like an Erector-set Oz. You toured the place from a tiny tram and Aubrey’d had that fantasy ever since: life as slow monorail past the blown-out landscape of memory, forgotten landmarks of the dead. From her people-mover perch, the child saw middle-class phantoms in seats ahead and behind, safety bars pulled down around laps; polite, curious, hygienic, each watching its own diorama unfold against the autumnal Muzak of remorse, chilled and tender, fragrant with burning leaves and failing light. In adolescence, fantasy honed to futuro-utopian: naked Aubrey lay within a clear, impermeable tube — emerald cities rising in the distance, floating sci-fi brewery palaces — snaking its Grand Tour past lantern-fish-filled ocean floor, then forest primeval, wind-scarred dune and glaciers that cracked apart like thunder, transecting volcano heart and hurricane eye, through pasture pure, plains and prairie; and there, Aubrey — fantasy further evolved — now icon of Woman, chosen representative of this blue planet, itinerary no longer encompassing the rooms and rude basements of suburbia (the basement where Zev did the things he’d done) — no, that was centuries ago — but the galaxies themselves. She floated like a cork inside her crystalline conveyance, trajectory set to Infinity. If only the cannon of Magnetic Resonator would shoot her through the Big Top, to the spray of stars beyond.