Bruce Wagner - I’m Losing You

Perry got the elbow as Jeremy nodded toward the dealer. “Would you buy a used Breguet from this man? Oh!” His face lit up. “Know what I heard? I heard there was a black American Express card.”

“Yeah, Farrakhan has one,” said Berto.

“I’m serious . Perry, have you heard of that? It’s supposed to be for people like Bronfman and Gates. You can, like, buy buildings with the damn thing.”

“Or minute repeaters,” said Perry.

When they left, Jeremy gave the chef his card and made him promise to call at first fugu.

That night at the Century Plaza, Perry clutched his side and collapsed during the silent auction at a Luminaires fund-raiser for the Doheny Eye Institute. Jersey wanted to call an ambulance, but he stubbornly said the limo would do. The doctors were concerned the bowel had been perforated; they needed to go in and take a look.

“They might have at least let you keep on your tux,” Jersey said as they wheeled her husband to surgery.

“Listen,” Perry said groggily from the gurney. “I want my liver donated to the right restaurant — five-star.”

“What?” She smiled, wiping tears away with the back of a hand. “What is it, darling?”

“I want—”

“Tell me what you want…”

“—none of this Mickey Mouse Mickey Mantle rejection shit. And make sure it’s in season —says so on my driver’s license. Promise?”

“You’re a crazy man, but I promise. And I love you.”

She kissed him twice and he rolled away.

Severin Welch

Out of the ICU, thank God. Two days in that sonsabitchin place. They fished a catheter through his groin and cleared a blockage in a valve, that’s how they did it now. Instead of a triple bypass they snaked in like plumbers through a pipe. Lavinia was there in all her weepy, slobby, hard-bitten splendor, like some kind of Kathy Bates. Frankenbates. She kept asking what was he doing in the middle of the street. Where was he going, what had possessed him? The old man thought it best not to answer. She’d have to move to Beachwood, she said — told anyone who’d listen — because her father couldn’t be left alone. But she would need help , who could help? She’d call her ex, that fuck, he wouldn’t lift a finger for anyone. Who, then? All his neighbors were so fucking old. Total care! Get real —that’s what they were talking about — and who paid? Medicare? Medicaid? I’ll tell you who: nobody! Nobody paid for total care, total care was for the rich! For English and Canadians, and the Swiss! But maybe the Motion Picture Hospital — Daddy, what were you doing , you could have been hit by a hundred cars! She railed against her rotten ex and Jabba the whore and the whole fucked up shitty planet.

“I’d like to have my radio, Lavinia.” She knew what he meant. “I’d like you to get it from the house.”

“They won’t let you have that here,” she said.

“Everyone has a radio.”

“Not that kind. You’ll be home soon anyway.”

“I see. You’re preparing my schedule? You’re a doctor now?”

“That’s right — so you better listen.” She reached into a gold Godiva tin for a marron glacé . “This is such a beautiful hospital. The paintings! On every floor . It’s like a museum.”

“Why don’t you move in, if you love it so much? You could give tours.”

Three in the morning. The nurse gave him Dalmane, but he couldn’t sleep. Lavinia refused to bring the scanner but he made her retrieve the script — its dirty pages gathered by paramedics from oil-stained macadam and, along with bruised Uniden, sealed in a Hefty bag — the very original draft of Dead Souls , put through anemic paces by Dee Bruchner so long ago. Pressed like a linty yellow flower within was the clipping from The New York Times :

Charles G. Bluhdorn, who built a small Michigan auto-parts company into Gulf and Western Industries, the multibillion-dollar conglomerate, died yesterday while flying home to New York from a business trip in the Dominican Republic. He was fifty-six years old and lived in Manhattan.

Jerry Sherman, an assistant vice-president and director of public relations for G.&W., said Mr. Bluhdorn, the company’s founder, chairman and chief executive, was aboard a corporate plane when he died. Mr. Sherman said the cause of death was a heart attack.

Severin sat by the window, touching the cool security glass with a bunged-up finger. The nail still had a fissure, all the way from Brooklyn, ‘thirty-one — looked like a miniature ice floe — when his best friend, Joey Dobrowicz, smashed it with a rock (by mistake, Joey said). Did he holler. He stared out the thick pane, trying to conjure faces, but the slate was gray, the drizzle dull. It was raining the night his Diantha died, in this very wing.

He went to the chair and sat down, winded by memory. There was something terrifying about chairs in hospital rooms, especially at night. An immense longing came upon him, and Severin revisited the time they first met…the Automat— For Me and My Gal —nineteen forty-two, the year Mr. Bluhdorn immigrated to America from Vienna. Severin was a Western Union messenger by day (extreme myopia would exempt him from the service), tyro novelist by night. Sometimes they threw him a few dollars to create a radio ad, but what he really wanted was to be an Author — do an All Quiet on the Western Front , or something in the Steinbeck vein — then hire out for the movies. When Diantha got pregnant, they took a bus to Hollywood.

He worked at Chasen’s for a while—

began his career in a New York cotton brokerage house, earning fifteen dollars a week. In nineteen forty-nine, he formed an import-export concern that he operated until, at the age of thirty and already a millionaire, he bought into the Michigan parts company.

Among its hundreds of subsidiaries, the most widely known are Paramount Pictures, the Madison Square Garden Corporation and Simon & Schus

What could it have been like to live with him? Diantha saw less and less of those she cared for. Corraled by his sickness, she became a mirror, herself house-bound and bizarre. It had never been easy for her to make friends. She lived for Lavinia, grown unsavory and irascible before her eyes; turned to her granddaughter, but Molly was in trouble early on, evaporating around the time of Severin’s own manic retreat — all that jail business broke Diantha’s heart. His wife would have no rewards; when she passed, Molly had been gone almost five years. Severin kept hoping their grandchild would appear at Diantha’s bedside and she did, yes she did, a day late, sores and scabs everywhere, tattoo covering her back, spidery rendering of a woman entered from behind by a skeleton with a scythe. For the last few years of her husband’s madness — five, really — well, ten — what Diantha really had then was Lavinia. Overbearing, unkempt, gloomy, abusive Lavinia.

He saw his wife hanging in the air outside the window, a blown out, blighted angel dragged to hell by the gagman’s caravan of black humors. Severin came to the Beachwood bedroom once and there she was, rocking, eyes slammed watery shut, hands over ears to evict the scannerbabble.

Mr. Bluhdorn’s favorite expression, said an associate, was, “What is the bottom line?”

Didn’t even bury her — too busy waiting, and waiting still! Why had he been so indulged? They should have done something, rancorous and violent, lacking decorum, caved in his head and smashed his machines, chased him down with wild children and devoured him on the beach.