“Look, you just better shut up because you’re hogging the line! I need to keep the line clear.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I told you! I’m waiting for a call.”
“From who?” asked Dusty, in numb moratorium.
“Well, it ain’t from Baby Aurora,” said the old woman, glint-winking.
She leaned in and slapped Reina’s face. Her mother immediately began to cry and Dusty leaned in close. She pinched her then quickly stopped, fearful of leaving a bruise. She whispered in her ear, gravely staccato, “I am going to come in the middle of the night and strangle you and shove a knife up your asshole, you sick fucking monster cunt,” and then, as a cover for Reina’s distress, she went and told a nurse that out of nowhere Mom started raving about getting slapped around by the staff. Dusty tried to be a little funny about it until she saw the look of medico-legal anxiety on the R.N.’s face that her lie had evoked.
To defuse her remarks, Dusty lightheartedly improv’d, “She asked me to call Hillary Clinton and Ruth Bader Ginsburg! Has this sort of thing ever happened before?”
—
When she stepped through the door, a barefoot Allegra, gorgeously disfigured by a crying jag, padded over, startling her. Dusty was able to say “What is it?” before her wife’s mouth ended the inquiry. She was overcome by the throaty, familial fragrance of Allegra’s membranes, embargoed since miscarriage.
She towed Dusty upstairs, everything pounding, her hunger corny and romantic, yanking her along by sheer youth, the look on her face like that of a thousand movie action heroes risen from the depths to pierce the glassy sea, choking on oxygen under reclaimed citadel of sky. Blood-lungs aerated, they dove deep into bed, fastening mouths to deltas and coral reefs like parched divers buddy system — leeching on scuba masks — having their fill, surfacing again above breathless waters, now face to face, eye to eye, muzzles still other-dusted, on land now at last, tongues dancing round a bonfire made from waisted frictions:
Celebrants on a criminal’s High Holiday.
—
On Saturday, Dusty threw a dinner party in Trousdale. The dislocation between them was still profound but the renewal of physical vows had kindled a semblance of normalcy — a tenuous cessation of hostilities, anyway, with a tang of the good ol’ days. The get-together was a small coming-out of sorts (they hadn’t really been social for months) attended by Jeremy, Larissa, Marilyn, Tuesday, and Dusty’s forever hair guy Patrice.
Patrice had a passé but fun Heathcliff look, all broody-gaunt and windswept rocker, swathed in beat-up motocross leather. Jeremy said, “You look just like Artaud!” (He knew the reference would be lost but didn’t care.) The laconic hairdresser possessed a vacant, guru-like open-heartedness that pulled guests into its gravitational field whenever a place opened up on the couch beside him. Marilyn’s long, respected career in New York theater preceded her fairly recent successful run as a character actress in film. She was single at the moment, a tough New Age cookie known for her storied marriages to celebrated, difficult men, and reminded Allegra of the cracked, charismatic earth mothers she’d met in the caravan of her cultish travels. Marilyn and Larissa were the same age with the same kind of sunflowery, gregarious energy, though the stand-in, ever mindful of her place in the firmament, erred toward holding back. When Dusty joined the ladies for an impromptu boogie, Jeremy, in an aside to Allegra, said, “Those three broads are a real pussy riot.”
It was the first time Tuesday had been to the house, and the guests were starstruck. Dusty liked throwing a wild card into her party mixes, like Dylan (a Point Dume neighbor) or J. K. Rowling (Dusty called her “Joey”) when she was in town; she adored watching the look on the faces of the unsuspecting when she made out-of-the-blue, ultra-downplayed, homespun introductions to sundry unnerving, nearly mythic folk heroes. Allegra had a long-time Tuesday Weld fetish — Ann-Margret, Joey Heatherton, and Yvette Mimieux were satellites around that moon — and of course knew that Tuesday would be there tonight. (She was Dusty’s old friend and sometimes joined the couple for dinner at Matteo’s.) Allegra also knew how fabulously freaked Jeremy would be to meet her — he was more into Tuesday than she was, if that was even possible — and impishly withheld the surprise.
When he laid eyes on Ms. Weld, he went stone-cold giddy, inanely shouting “T.G.I.T.”!—Thank God It’s Tuesday—over and over.
Halfway through the party, he called Allegra into a bedroom. He’d snuck away to find a clip from Play It As It Lays but uncovered a crazy Roddy McDowall home movie on YouTube instead: Malibu beach, circa 1965. A bikinied Tuesday, around thirty but looking ten years younger, scrutinized a dragonfly on a windowsill with wide-eyed, virginal wonder. The very loaded Allegra couldn’t believe the magical, soundtrackless majesty of what they were watching: a hairless Kirk Douglas lolled on the deck in a scanty swimsuit, a sunlit caliph, as the waves crashed behind him — endless OMG-miracle of the Internet! — as Lauren Bacall made an entrance in prototypical erotic/sardonic splendor — followed by a passel of towheaded surf kids then a bearded Paul Newman then Janice Rule and Jane Fonda — holy shit—a parade of shades and sylphs on a stolen prehistoric Colony afternoon, locked and loaded for futureworld’s iMasturbatory viewing pleasure. And Jane was still getting it up for a party — Allegra sat with her and Taylor Schilling at a gala not too long ago, vaping hash oil, super-present and alive and going on eighty… still sexy. Allegra marveled at the energy, the drive. It was crazy! True movie stars were like vampires that way.
There was a noticeable lull when she and Jeremy returned.
Tuesday was sitting by herself, spacey and contemplative. She was past seventy now and grossly overweight. There was something reserved and melancholy about her, a quality of being mortal, spiritually wounded, spent, as if living on borrowed time since she’d solved the riddle of the dragonfly, and had the follow-up realization that nothing else would be revealed. Allegra was about to make an overture when Tuesday announced to no one in particular that she’d never had plastic surgery.
“I don’t have any lines in my face because I’m fat. You lose wrinkles when you’re fat.”
Jeremy spoke up, his face shiny with disposable intimacy. A zealous serf in the kingdom of Future Anecdote, he decided to ask about Elvis. Their legendary alliance was well known, but when the fuck else would he get the chance to hear about it firsthand?
“I was at a party,” said Tuesday, “and someone kind of grabbed me and walked me over. But Elvis didn’t say anything so I got bored. I did what I used to when I got bored — went to the kitchen, opened the fridge, and let the cool breeze blow.” Jeremy’s eyes bugged from his head like an ecstatic devotee. “He walked in and said, ‘Hungry, little girl?’ I remember what I was wearing: toreador pants, sandals with heels, and a windbreaker tied around my neck. A tight periwinkle sweater. He wore black. I was sixteen.”
It was a killer story, even if the details were too perfect, too rehearsed. Allegra and Jeremy traded glances with the same thought: Did she write a memoir that we missed?
Need to Amazon that…
Dusty and the others joined them. Marilyn caught the tail end and said, “Sixteen? Where were you living?”