(He wasn’t the chair for nothing.)
“‘Scent of a Dead Woman,’” said Dusty, not making fun of but rather seeking to riff away her wife’s defeat. “From Al’s movie! That way, we keep the theme of le cinéma.”
“Our first choice,” said the chair, “—and of course we want to involve you in this decision, both of you, of course nothing shall be approved without your complete assent — our first choice is one that’s been in the marketplace for years under many different auspices. Which actually gives us wherewithal in terms of trademark.” He paused to make a steeple with the fingers of his hands. “We’ve given this a tremendous amount of thought and the feeling was unanimous: ‘Dusty.’”
Gertrude said to Allegra, “It is not yet un fait accompli.”
“Not at all!” said the chair, realizing his announcement may have been premature, and slightly impolitic.
Dominic stepped into the breach. “It was one of those eureka moments. We said to ourselves, how could we call it anything else?”
The star tilted her head and gazed out the window, turning over the eponymous nom de fragrance in her head. With a half smile she slowly raised her eyes from the hem to the collar of an invisible sky.
“One of those forest-for-the-trees things,” said the bookish man.
“If we can clear it, no one will remember its other incarnations,” said Dominic.
“Oh, we can clear it,” said the man in the green tunic, assassin-like.
“Clear the forest — for the trees,” said Dusty.
“Have we cleared it?” asked the chair, suddenly businesslike.
“Yes,” said an unidentified man, far enough away to be practically out the door.
“‘Dusty’ for women, ‘Dustin’ for men,” said the actress, not entirely serious. Her thoughts roamed elsewhere.
“‘Dusty Rose’?” said Allegra, startled by her own eruption.
The Walmart-y suggestion instantly made her cringe. She thought she saw the “creative” and the Missoni lock eyes. She was about to deflate her own idiocy with a joke about Dusty’s white-trash fan base but fortunately had become paralyzed.
“That’s owned by a competitor,” said the unfazeable faraway man.
“And it’s lovely,” said Gertrude, ever charitable. “But they got there first.”
“It is kinda downscale,” said Allegra, rousing herself. “Plus, her middle name isn’t even Rose.”
“I could change it to Rose,” said Dusty supportively.
Allegra died a little.
“So much of what we do is about getting there first,” said the chair diplomatically. “And so much of what we do is… intangible.”
The actress smiled and put a hand on her better half’s.
—
She had been staying in the guest cottage but couldn’t sleep. She walked past the pool to the kitchen in the main house, made herself a soup bowl — sized cup of champurrado, then stole away to the den with a bag of marshmallows and medley of books.
She tucked her knees into a cashmere throw and dug in. As was her habit during trying times, she picked through their library’s shelves with messy, surefire alchemy to gather a healing wildflower bouquet. One of the selections was a strange meditation on loss-of-pregnancy grieving rituals, acquired just after her first miscarriage. The Japanese memorial practice was called mizuko kuyō. Wikipedia dryly informed that “mizuko” meant dead fetus but she preferred the book’s claim of literal translation: water-child. It said the root—mizu—meant “lost” or “unseen.” Allegra thought that beyond beautiful.
She plucked yet another flower and softly read aloud:
There are no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue,
no body, mind; no color, sound, or smell;
no taste, no touch, no thing; no realm of sight,
no realm of thoughts; no ignorance, no end
to ignorance; no old age and no death;
no end to age and death; no suffering,
nor any cause of suffering, nor end
to suffering, no path, no wisdom and no fulfillment.
The Heart Sutra was supposed to be everything you ever wanted to know about Buddhism but were afraid to ask, though it only made her think of her baby. Her babies—lullaby of things unseen and unsaid, things almost-but-never-were… maybe that was Buddhism — the presence of absence and the absence of presence. The aroma of nothingness might have comforted if only she weren’t suffering so.
She pulled an anthology of Greek myths from the nosegay, remembering a picture book she adored as a little girl. Her mom got it at the Salvation Army just before they left the Family, right around when Willow began an affair with the itinerant, charismatic American guru named Gridley Wright. She joined his group, the Shiva Lila, and early one morning they all ran off to India, leaving the last of Allegra’s American “stepfathers” behind. (Shiva Lila was a child-worshipping cult, though you wouldn’t have known it, because a lot of the kids were never vaccinated and wound up dying of diphtheria.) Even as a six-year-old, she knew she was living inside an allegory — the word was almost her very name — and sought confirmation in the colorful storybook’s exuberant grandeur: sheer escapism from the tawdry Olympus of dirty magic, delusional soothsayers, and beleaguered, narcissistic women who littered her adoptive communal worlds.
The hyper-sexualized child had obsessed over the story of Tiresias…
When he separated two snakes having intercourse in the middle of the road, the female became so enraged — Allegra the adult couldn’t blame her! — that she punished his meddling by turning him into a woman. After seven long years, the transgendered Tiresias saw the same snakes fucking and somehow reasoned that if he interfered again, his maleness would be restored. He was right; his original form was bestowed. When Zeus and Hera squabbled over who enjoyed lovemaking more — man or woman — they asked Tiresias to judge, as he alone had experienced both sides. Strangely, it was Hera who insisted that men received the greatest pleasure. But Tiresias ruled in favor of the gentler sex, calling their ecstasies tenfold. Hera was so peeved at being contradicted that she blinded him. Being Tiresias was a bummer.
She thought it would make an amazing screenplay, abetted by the culture’s ravenous appetite for all things intersex. The version in her hand (while sipping Mexican hot chocolate in the other) implied that Tiresias became a whore during his phallic exile, making Allegra even more passionate about the transgressive prospect of adaptation. But when the thought of her unfinished Children of God script swiftly intruded, inspiring winds poured through tattered sails.
She ruminated some more on that mad time. She hadn’t been altogether honest with Jeremy about her early experience; there was much she was ashamed of and much she’d repressed. It was true that while Allegra remained mostly amnesiac about the Family’s ritualized sex-play, she knew bad stuff happened in India for sure. A few years ago, to her dismay, a persistent childhood masturbation fantasy resurfaced, featuring a totem cock that sprung from her nine-year-old cunny like a genie when summoned. She could fuck women with it, and boys too. (Another memory: frottage was the prepubescent sleep aid of choice.) She vividly recalled what the thing looked like — the real, veiny deal. Yuck. It wasn’t so much the Boschian precocity of the image of her bedangled cherub self that alarmed and mesmerized, but the ensuing speculation over the nature of dark materials, lost and unseen, that drove poor, gypsyfied Alice-Allegra through the looking-glans. A mishmash of nefarious, arousing, troublesomely indistinct home movies played double matinees in her head throughout her late teens. If she’d blacked out their content for nearly twenty years, what else might soon be resurrected?