Bruce Wagner - I’m Losing You

I’m Losing You is a work of fiction. The characters, conversations, and events in the novel are the products of my imagination, and no resemblance to the actual conduct of real-life persons, or to actual events, is intended. Although, for the sake of verisimilitude, certain public figures do make incidental appearances or are briefly referred to in the novel, I have included them here without their knowledge or cooperation; their interactions with the characters I have invented are wholly my creation and not intended to be understood as descriptions of real events or to reflect negatively upon any of these public figures; nor to suggest that they ever sought or participated in any psychiatric or psychological treatment.

It seemed only yesterday that Serena Ribkin was a vibrant, no-regrets member of the Lie — that seventy was “young”—but now she lay bedridden in her frazzled palace with a bad case of colon cancer. Ten months ago, her party, so to speak, had been crashed by a pain-freak hooligan; she duly protested, thinking the intruder could be sassed or paid off, cajoled to leave. Unflappably, she submitted herself to resection and the roughing-up of a good chemo. But when they indecorously cut away thirty-six inches of bowel (not to would be suicide, Donny said), everything changed: the skinhead sodomized her in front of the guests and she had no choice but to give him run of the house. She knew all would be smashed now, every secret-recessed thing. At least, while revelers were slaughtered below, the invader allowed her lucidity and television privileges — that was something, anyway. Now Serena lay stuporous in her cloacal chambers, on the protective-plastic-covered California King. Far from the madding crowd, as they used to say.

She doped herself and dreamed a parade of Judith Leiber handbags all in a row, marching up and down Rodeo Drive, escorted by fife-and-drum Barneys New York blackamoors. The purses’ famed claw clasps detached, nostalgically carrying her from the house on Carcassonne Way, above the town of Beverly Hills. On a carpet of Demerol she floated over certain personal monuments, joined by a dutiful panoply of royalist flak — a clique of Chanel ensembles that had served her well hovered now like woolly choppers — while she gazed downward, striving to recapitulate what had happened to her life.

Serena had become nocturnal, the four-thirtyish earthquake hour her comforting noon. She flipped through the expensive photo album she had filled with images from National Geographic : a legless beggar-boy flogged by his “manager” on the streets of Cairo, a Vietnamese girl feeding mush to catfishes through a trapdoor in the living room of her floating house, the X ray of a pelican that had eaten a gopher — the gopher having burrowed out through the larynx in its death throes. In her mind, she called these images curiosities but wasn’t at all sure how she’d become their curator.

She told Farfina (a night nurse, Donny insisted, was a “given”) not to disturb her, then slid open the heavy glass door and lit a cigarette. Serena held a slice of angel food cake in her palm and it shivered there while she watched for the floating snakebite eyes of the raccoons. They were late tonight. The old woman stared at the dark hill abutting the backyard like the hump of a beast she’d soon ride off on. Where would it take her? To the lush coast of Raccoon Cove, where hedgehog traffic cops with Gucci scarves stood under sugar-teat streetlamps. She brought the chair closer to the darkness.

At her fiftieth high school reunion, there were three people she wanted to see — two old flames and the girl who stole them away. She called the alumni association and found out the trio was planning to attend. Serena knew how good she looked and wanted to rub their noses in it; haul them down by their scalps to lick the salt off her cunt, if she could. She hadn’t seen them since the Big Twenty-fifth, but the dull, chatty alumni newsletter kept everyone au courant. Victor ran a bank and had a successful bypass. Glynis was a widow, remarried (nineteen eighty-eight) to a manufacturer. Ted had fourteen grandkids and started a trust with the eleven-million-dollar lottery he’d won in their names. And what of Serena? Divorced from a Hollywood producer, her son a powerful agent, a Senior Veepee at ICM. AlumNotes ran a pre-cancerous photo Serena had sent, she of the twinkling eyes and the Scaasi chiffon, she of the I-shit-on-you mouth — like some centimillionairess out of W.

The reunion looked like a collection of fat old talking candles. The banquet ended just after ten. As the pallbearers of the student body returned to their rooms, Serena heard music blaring from a sidebar ballroom. She wanted to investigate. Victor and his wife went up to bed, beat. Serena had to pull Ted by the elbow; Glynn and hubby indulgently followed. Sad to say, but wandering like that with Ted on her arm was the most fun yet. The music grew louder and the air seemed to change, supercharged by the molecules of the young. A prom. Serena wanted to crash, but the others backed off, laughing gray-skinned dumb-asses. Serena made Ted buy her a drink in the bar while they cut up old times. After Ted walked her to the room and kissed her with his dead fish mouth, she went back down and tipsily danced with the kids. They didn’t know what to make of it but liked her energy. She grew light-headed and a leg felt numb; Serena thought she was having a stroke, but it was only the carousing and champagne. She sat at a table, pale, dizzy, staring at souvenirs not of her time — then cried all the way to the elevator, like hosing vomit off a sidewalk. By the time the doors sealed her in and the car began its skyward rush, she knew her life had ended.

On Saturday, Donny Ribkin rose early. He exercised, spoke to his mother’s night nurse and speed-read three scripts before a solitary hotel breakfast. Saturdays were the best; Sundays were too close to Monday to be anything more than exemplary. In the afternoon, he drove to the beach. He toyed with taking the Impala — the car his father bought him when Donny was sixteen — but settled on the Land Cruiser because of its height. In the Toyota, he could watch the naked, hair-strewn legs of the women and children, worn out from the water.

He was thinking about Leslie Trott, fag dermatologist and celebrity adept. As an agent, Donny was immune to anything more aberrant than a fleeting client crush — excluding directors (at least, good ones), he felt superior to those in his charge. He’d met all kinds of Big Star — fuckers but never anyone so consumed, attuned and addicted as Dr. Trott. Les had a large staff of young borderline-attractive nurses, also enslaved; the one-two punch of awe and resentment delivered by the stellar clientele had pushed his retinue to the reedy marshes of pharmaceutical abuse. How surreal and achingly unfair to be on such casual, familial terms with world-class icons — sneaking them through the Private Door, trading high-end gossip of love trouble and HIV death, apportioning devoted guffaws and unsolicited Percocets, being kissed, teased, quasi-missed and token-gifted by the most famous men and (mostly) women on Earth. A television comedienne handed out thousand-dollar Bulgari pens like they were Snapples — general thank-yous for being such staunch, discreet Big Star Acolytes in Les Trott’s fucked-up swanky codependent parish. Hired more for a talent to soothe and schmooze, Mother’s little helpers were duly outfitted in sanitorium whites and signature Mephisto tennies, their minimal skills enhanced by crash-course on-the-job training. They became cyst-popping confidantes, handmaidens to media immortals: after all the in jokes and injections and periorbital peelings — while dope-nodding Big Star snaked and lurched on the table, squeezing Acolytes’ hands like a pioneer sister having an arrow-wound cauterized — after all the shushing, sloughing, scraping, flaking, flecking and sucking up, after the poke, prod, swab and salve, the plucky divinity would evanesce (Private Door) to the limo for a stoned shopping spree while hydra-headed Cinderella mopped the pus and dermal dandruff in its wake.