Bruce Wagner - I’m Losing You

The women laughed. The subject was Perry Needham Howe, a television producer and UTA client who’d recently hit it “large.” Rachel had worked as his assistant almost three years, not once catching the scent of adultery — not even a whiff.

“Are you PMS?”

“Why?”

“Because you always end up grilling me about Perry’s sex life when you’re PMS.”

She was a funny, contradictory girl who’d become Rachel’s best friend on the planet. Her father, Dee Bruchner, was a senior agent at William Morris; ever the rebel, Tovah defected to UTA, where she quickly corraled a group of young writers who cut their teeth on shows like Larry Sanders and were now creating hip, middle-of-the-road TV of their own — the Gary David Goldbergs of tomorrow. But Tovah was shrewd: she wanted a finger in all the pies, including a slice of Perry Needham Howe. She was “attracted to him physically,” but that didn’t explain her ambitions — most men were attractive that way. Her interest could be chalked up to good old-fashioned agenting, pure and simple. Tovah knew that pushing him toward the unexpected, seemingly oddball target — say, sitcoms or one-hours — was the long-haul thing that would keep him at the agency. Smart thing, too. Perry was cautious at first but already loosening up, flattered by her spirited attentions. Tovah told him she was going to push him straight through syndication, into Bochco country.

Rachel was forty-four and Tovah barely twenty-six — worlds apart, with worlds in common. The agent’s family went to Beth-El, the temple where Rachel’s father had been cantor. Tovah was still fairly observant. The mother, long divorced from Dee, became a Chabadist and met an engineer through a shiddach . Rachel, the prodigal Jew, loved hearing the details of an arranged marriage: how they weren’t allowed to touch until they wed and how during courtship the front door was always left ajar, for modesty. “Orthodox Judaism is wonderful,” the mother told her when Rachel went to Tovah’s for Shabbat, “because there are so many rules and you just have to follow them. The rules do not bend.”

“I visited the set of this miniseries,” said Tovah, tucking into a sturgeon omelette. “A writer I represent. They were using black leopards — big, beautiful cats. Oh, Rachel, you would love them. There was this woman trainer there, gorgeous , with a leopard-skin belt! Like out of Cat People . There were all these warnings on the call-sheets: ‘No children or menstruating women allowed on set.’”

“Then I’m safe.” Rachel hadn’t had a period in two years, not a real one, anyway. She was a runner and had always been irregular.

“I told you, just go see an acupuncturist.”

“Maybe it’s menopause.”

“You are not menopausal, Rachel, I’m sorry . I told you who you should see. Watanabe, he’s the best , Crescent Heights and Sunset. And stop jogging . No one even does it anymore.”

“Tell me about the cats.”

“These cats …once they’re out of the cages, the trainers don’t allow any movement, especially in the distance — their eyes go to the horizon, right away . It’s veldt instinct.”

“Oy guh-veldt.”

“And little kids — the woman said the cats see kids as, like, a meal . So, she lets them out of the cages. I’m hiding behind the camera…she takes the leashes off and everyone gets quiet, I mean dead , a very weird moment. This giant gaffer looked like he was going to shit in his pants! Did you hear about that woman who was killed up north, by the cougar?”

“God, Tovah, you’ve really got the bloodlust.”

“Someone at the agency actually knew her. In Cuyamaca — it was in the paper. It’s a recreation area, a park where people camp . There’s been lots of people killed by lions this year. Very Joan Didion.”

“What happened?”

“She was jogging.”

“Without a Tampax, no doubt.”

Tovah shot her a “you’re next” look. “It said in the article that the mistake she made was to flee . Well, excuse me! Evidently, they like to take their prey from behind — that part doesn’t sound so bad. This ranger they interviewed said anyone confronted by a mountain lion should maintain eye contact, make noise and wait for it to leave. Right! I mean, that’s what I do with my lawyer! But a mountain lion?”

They were supposed to meet at the track, but Calliope never showed. When Rachel got home, a message on the machine apologized for standing her up. “I hate it,” said Calliope, “that you don’t have a phone in your car.”

When she was twelve, her father was murdered in a New York subway. The cantor’s killer was never found. Calliope renounced Judaism and moved the family — Rachel and her brother, Simon — to Menlo Park. It was at Stanford that she began the metamorphosis into Calliope Krohn-Markowitz, renowned Hollywood shrink.

The children didn’t fare as well. Rachel lived in colorless communes and volunteer clinics. In Berkeley, she ran day-cares, shelters and co-ops, life an unsweetened wafer, sober and unsalted. Forty and unaffianced, she moved back to the Southland to study law for a time before dropping the thread. Calliope enlisted her in showbiz battalions, where Rachel won the Purple Heart for neurotic conscientiousness, lack of ambition and over-qualification. She felt close to superstar Mom but didn’t see her much; admiring from a distance, like one of her magazine profiles. As for brother Simon, he was a lost soul, a burnt-out tummler —sometimes she wondered what there’d ever been to burn. He was kind of an exterminator and called his business the Dead Pet Society.

Soaking in a tub, candles burning, washcloth over eyes, she jogged along Angeles Crest Highway — a lion suddenly across her path. What would she do? Rachel shivered, imagining the last moments of a deadly attack. A long time ago, there was a story on the news about a woman who’d been killed while tracking Kodiaks in Alaska. Her final radio transmission was “Help! I am being killed by a bear.” The horrific refrain stayed in her head for months.

Oddly, Rachel had forgotten all about a clipping she’d attached to the fridge some months back. She reread it before bed, with her muesli.

A woman on a camping trip in Mendocino stabbed a rabid cougar to death with a kitchen knife; her husband lost a thumb wrestling it off. “None of us panicked, to tell you the truth,” the woman told a reporter. “But we moved swiftly.” People were capable of stupendous things — that meant Rachel, too. It would have to mean her. And why not? She clung to the image of the woman, suburban, untried, hand on hilt of serrated blade plunged deep into the small heart of a dank hard-breathing thing trying to extinguish her life.

Perhaps Rachel would move swiftly when her time came — because something was stalking her, that much she knew. As a girl, running home from the playground at dusk, she pretended something was after her. There was something, her own soft shadow catching up with itself, frozen a moment, then melding, overtaking: no one ever told her shadows had shadows. It was upon her again after all these years, crazy Casper energy, flapping like the sail of a toy boat in a squall — shadow of her father’s shadow — and the cantor’s voice chased alongside, like a bogeyman.

The bogeyman of psalms.

Perry Needham Howe

Seven years ago his son died of a rare cancer and now Perry had something in his lungs exerting its mordant claims. The dead boy’s sister, Rosetta, was flaxen-haired, pink-skinned and almost thirteen; had he lived, Montgomery (they never used the diminutive) would have been a dedicated brother of around sixteen, come June. Graduation days.