“What?”
“Her dress — same as Reeyonna’s. The Alexander Wang!”
“So?”
“So… ReeRee totally rocked it. Leighton looked shitty. I give Ree an 87 % & Leighton a thirteen—a 20 % at most.”
O shit, thinks Rikki, the dude’s into his numbers again.
“87 % of what?”
“Of the vote, nigger, what do you think I’m talking about?” Jerzy hugely smiles. “ReeRee rocked it.”
~ ~ ~
BETTER
BODY
AFTER
BABY
MOTHERHOOD CERTAINLY AGREES WITH HOLLYWOOD’S SEXY STARS! HERE’S HOW THESE HOT MAMAS LOST THEIR BABY WEIGHT — AND THEN SOME!
CLEAN [Bud]
Til Your Hip Don’t Hop Anymore
Bud
read somewhere on the Internet that last year there were 23,000 murders in Mexico. It made him think about his novel; maybe he should take a stab at dystopian sci-fi. He could write about how in the future, 80 % of the world’s population will be murdered annually. How in the future, there’d be no new pop songs, as all melodies/lyrics would be exhausted. In the future, Dolly will be dead too but the interest generated by multiple accounts would live on.
A fear both justifiable and irrational — the fear of falling — seized his mother, preventing her from leaving bed. The occasional diaper Marta taped her into was no longer only for bouts of diarrhea or leaky one-offs, as it had been the last six months or so; it was now her permanent toilet. When the caregivers informed him of this new development, Bud’s first thought was, How can she fall and die if she never leaves the bed? He actually had a lot of guilt over what had become his own obsession — Dolly falling and dying — and spoke about it to a female therapist he was referred to by Michael’s wife. Dr. Pelka said that with adult children, a death wish for one’s elderly parents was fairly normal. (Bud wondered what other cultures would have made of her pronouncement.) She told him it was a common response to “caregiver burnout,” which apparently sons and daughters can have even if they weren’t strictly caregivers.
With Mom pretty much bedridden, Bud had to chuck the fantasies of her falling, instead imagining death from bedsore infection or pulmonary embolism due to inactivity.
. .
Bud was feeling vulnerable and a little sorry for himself when the envelope from CAA arrived by messenger, to cheer him — the Ooh Baby contract. He scanned the pages. Ooh Baby and even CAA took it for granted Bud was an artist: beside each place that required his signature was written Bud Wiggins (“artist”), which gave him a pang of pride as well as one of doubt that he’d ever be worthy of the appellation. What would it take to fulfill that promise?
Lydia Davis, the author Michael and Wendy Tolkin threw a dinner party for, was at Barnes & Noble signing a new trade paperback edition of her acclaimed translation of Madame Bovary. She was in the middle of a 27-city tour and Bud thought he’d stop by; it was either that or the Central Library where David Ulin had undertaken interviewing the undertaker Joan Didion. Whereas authors like James Salter and Barry Hannah had been certified by academia as “writer’s writers” (i.e. doomed to nyrb classic status), Davis was considered to be that rara avis, a writer’s writer’s writer. Apart from translating Flaubert, Blanchot and Proust, she had tried her hand at the art of the novel and short story, efforts, critics duly noted, for which the world was a better, more perfect place.
A lot of her followers were comfortable in asserting that her Madame Bovary translation was best approached as a novel by Lydia Davis, not Flaubert. In her own fiction, her stories were “famously short.” In one essay Bud read, a reviewer excerpted in its entirety what he called “one of her more famous stories, ‘Collaboration With Fly’”:
I put that word on the page, but he added the apostrophe.
The MacArthur Foundation gave her the genius grant.
Her famously short stories… one of her more famous stories… famous to whom? Bud ruminated that all things must be famous in their own way to someone or other, a notion which had the comforting effect of making his dream of achieving fame as a novelist closer to becoming a reality than he thought. Based on Davis’s example, Bud took heart that it might be feasible to release a book of exceedingly short stories of his own culled from the work-in-progress that was currently giving him such a headache. He’d call it Some Extremely Short Stories — A Pop-Up Book, by Bud Wiggins, and sell it out of a pop-up bookshop on Melrose funded by his inheritance. Maybe Barnes & Noble would carry it too, one of those little “humor” items on sale next to the cash register. A Book of Short Torys, by Bud Wiggins (with illustrations by the author). He’d take a little trip to the UK for research on Dolly’s dime.*
During the Q&A, a witty Davis groupie stood up and said, “Do you think it’s possible Flaubert’s book is actually a French translation of a novel by Lydia Davis called Madame Bovary?”
Hilarity ensued.
. .
He took long walks in the evenings now. He began at dusk, looping down Gregory to Rexford, then over to Charleville, back up to Reeves.
The turnaround point was Horace Mann, his old elementary school.
As he passed the various houses where he spent much of his childhood, he thought of all the sons and daughters who had lived in them, the progeny of the famous, crushed beneath their legacies. A good friend from those days was Eric Douglas. A sad case — the obits said handsome Eric was 300 lbs when the police found him, dead of an overdose in his hotel room. He was Kirk’s firstborn… Kirk had a new book out, a memoir. He’d written a bunch of other memoirs, novels as well. Bud thought he should probably have a look. You never know, maybe there’s something to be learned. Michael Douglas told Brando Brainard that the stroke finally gave his father peace. Bud thought, I wouldn’t mind a stroke, though it’d probably be better to publish first. Brando said Kirk had a second bar mitzvah when he was 83, something having to do with the biblical lifespan of 70. Thus far, the strokeless Bud had only been bar mitzvah’d once. He felt like a sluggard.
Someone forgot to lock one of the playground gates. Bud sat in the well-worn leather strop of a swing and propelled himself, letting his thoughts wander. Things were looking up. True, he’d been staying with his mother in the same room where he lived as a boy, but his days there were numbered. He was Bud Wiggins (“artist”), a working writer again. His novel would either come together or not, and Bud had surrendered to both outcomes. He was having a little trouble with the Antigone script though wasn’t too worried; Michael said they could get together again soon to shoot the shit. Also, the pressure was off because Biggie, bless his soul, was preparing to have surgery to remove the tumor that’d been affecting his memory. Brando was completely caught up in that. No one would be breathing down Bud’s neck. It gave him more time to work on the script and his novel.