Bruce Wagner - I’m Losing You

It was pouring. A thousand gargoyles spat rain at the windows (Diantha gone now) with fatal, mischievous mouths. Severin slept.

Rachel Krohn

Oberon Mall was dead.

Mitch had a flu, and Calliope asked her to come to the service at Hillside Memorial Park. Rachel showered when they got off the phone. She was showering at least five times a day, skin chafed from overwashing. Mortuary parking lot lustrations hadn’t been enough “to remove death,” not by a long shot — in fact, the effort was risible. According to the Hebrew Bible, even a mikvah couldn’t banish the intensity of the tumah of a corpse. This is where the red heifer came in.

The cow would be slaughtered, then burned with cedarwood (the mightiest of trees — HOPE), hyssop (because it grew in crevices — FAITH) and “crimson stuff” (from the scarlet worm — CHARITY) added to the fire. The ashes were to be mixed with living water, not stagnant, then sprinkled over the unclean — all in addition to immersion. That’s what it took to emerge tahor . This particular law of Torah was one of four that remained unfathomable to even the most faithful of interpretants, the others being: marrying one’s brother’s widow; not mingling wool and linen in a garment; performing the rites of the scapegoat.

She put on the brown Armani her mother had bought for her birthday. To calm herself, Rachel recited the laws. When a wife entered the niddah state, she and her husband could not touch. They could not comb each other’s hair, nor could they brush lint from each other’s clothes. They couldn’t even hand objects to one another, a small child being the rare exception. They were forbidden to sit together on a sofa unless another person — or, say, cushion — was set between them. They may not pour each other drinks, nor should a husband eat or drink from his wife’s leftovers, though she could eat from his. If the husband didn’t know the leftovers were hers, it was all right for him to eat. If someone ate from his wife’s leftovers first or the leftovers were transferred to another plate, the husband could eat them too, as long as the wife had left the room. While she was unclean, he was not to sit on his wife’s bed, smell her perfume or listen to the sound of her singing….

They drove through a phalanx of paparazzi at the cemetery gate.

This, the green freeway-bound park where her father was laid.

It was Calliope’s genius to stage a reunion via this ballyhooed alternative event. The psychiatrist was a public figure of sorts, a bit-player perennial in the media drama — she would upstage the cantor (with a little help from Oberon), as he had upstaged her in that shattered time. She wanted him to feel her feathers as she swept past his table with the VIPs. Yes: it seemed to take forever but now all the bodies were in their proper place. Mother and daughter could have their mikvah.

Donny Ribkin and Zev Turtletaub said hello. They were joined by Katherine Grosseck. Calliope said she was glad to finally meet the real McCoy, and Katherine quickly filled Zev in on the impersonator scandale . Then the screenwriter said: How can I be sure you’re the real Calliope? “By her hourly fee,” said Donny, and everyone laughed. More jokes were made, belaboring the theme of the double. Before they broke off, Donny said he and Katherine were a couple again. Calliope offered congratulations. Zev said they were together only because Katherine’s directing career needed jump-starting.

“Donny Ribkin was a patient of yours,” said Rachel, reiterating what she’d already been told. She felt a bond with the agent, an illicit kinship.

“Not any longer. Not for months.”

“Did he — does he know about Sy…and his mother?”

She nodded. “Just recently. He called to say he found her diaries.”

“Well, didn’t he think it a little strange ? I mean, that you were the wife of the man that his mother was—”

“Of course , he thought it was strange. It is strange.”

“I just can’t see how — how you ever could have agreed to see him as a patient, Mother. Knowing that—”

“I made a choice, Rachel. Doctors make choices.”

Rachel felt like making a choice of her own: to kick off her heels and sprint up the hill to the Mount of Olives, where the cantor awaited. She had cedarwood in her purse, and minty hyssop too — a small fire would be kindled at grave. She would perform the rites of the scapegoat while Aztec laborers shut off tractors, respectfully turning away.

Leslie Trott shook hands like it was a collagen convention. Calliope was always pushing her daughter to see him. A few years ago, Rachel gave in, but the emperor was overbooked. She wound up in a distant room, far from Big Star country — the Mount of Olives suite — where a dull colleague cheerily burned off a minuscule nostril wart.

“How long did you see Obie, as a shrink?”

“A year. A very troubled girl.”

“Isn’t it… inappropriate for you to be here?”

“I don’t know where you get your ethical bulletins from, Rachel, but no. I’m a human being. I dance at weddings and I cry at funerals.”

“You haven’t cried yet . Did you visit her in the hospital?”

“Yes. She couldn’t speak. At least, I couldn’t understand her. She mostly blinked her eyes. The doctors said she knew what had happened to her — the mind apparently wasn’t affected.”

Rachel was startled to learn the Big Star was a Jew. She couldn’t help wondering who prepared her for burial. In her mind, she saw the sexpot legs guided through Donna Karan pjs, silken string twisted nine times at the waist, then looped into the letter shin , which stood for God — though, at time of death, she was probably already clean as a whistle. When you’re rich and paralyzed like that, private nurses were always sponging you down.

“You look too thin, Rachel.”

“I feel fine.”

“But are you? I worry—”

Rachel silenced her with a hug. Only a month ago, such a gesture would have been unthinkable for either one.

Calliope pointed out the mother of the deceased, a mountain of a woman who looked slightly deranged. Her enormous bosom heaved in laughter and tears at Leslie Trott’s words. Eventually, he eulogized only to her and the grievers blushed to be privy to such intimacies.

They drove to the beach, north on PCH to points unknown. The sky looked like the bottom of an old porcelain bowl. When the rain began, it felt like the end of the world.

Calliope smiled dreamily. “We used to make this drive all the time, remember? San Simeon, Big Sur, Point Lobos…Do you remember what Sy used to sing?”

“We’re off to see the Wizard!—”

“And Simon — what was that crazy song…”

“‘Hit the road, Jack…’”

Together: “ ‘And don’t you come back no more, no more, no more, no more!’ ”

They laughed and sang some more.

“Well, how far should we go?”

“Till we run out of gas.”

“Thelma and Louise.”

“You know, she’s a client — or was, for a while.”

“Thelma or Louise?”

“Geena — whichever one she was.”

The rain stopped. They got burgers and fries at a roadside place and crossed to the beach. Calliope had a blanket in the trunk. They spread it on a picnic table and faced the frothy gray-green tubes.

“This is nice,” her mother said.

“Mama,” said Rachel, plaintively. “I can’t stop washing — since I found out — about Father…and then there was this — this horrible thing —a little girl — this tumah —we washed her — and this whole — and, and the red heifer!” She laughed, then sobbed with great embarrassing snorts. “I don’t know, Mama! I think I’m going crazy!”