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“Nope.”

“She says she knows you. Vasha’s a friend of Riccardo? Tisci? I think maybe you might have met in Berlin? At the festival? Anyway, she wants to have dinner with us. Would you be cool with that?”

“Yup.”

“Bunny, are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“You seem so far away.”

“I always get like this when I wrap. You know that.”

Allegra bit the bullet. “Can we talk about the other night?”

“Do we have to?”

Kind of. Are you okay with what happened?” It was her unadvised nature to sometimes barrel forward — another thing that once ensorcelled. “I know that a ‘third party’ isn’t really something we’ve been into…”

“‘Isn’t really,’” said Dusty, tartly.

“I guess I was just… finally feeling in my body again.”

“Well, good for you!”

“Hey, don’t be like that.”

“You don’t have to defend yourself for having an orgasm, Allegra.”

“I’m not defending, I’m just… talking. Look, I thought you were into her.”

“I’m not ‘into’ anybody,” she said, sideswiping.

“When I came in, you were already fooling around! I mean, I thought… you knew I’d be coming in. I thought that was something you wanted. And I’m not blaming you, Dusty—”

“Thank you!”

“—I know I’ve been horrible. I’ve been a total selfish bitch and I don’t blame you for wanting—”

“Can we be done now? I really don’t want to talk about this!”

“Okay,” she said, pouty and stung. “Fine. I just wanted to tell you that I got into it only because I thought you were into it. It’s not something I’m all that interested in pursuing.”

“‘All that.’ Well, okay, good. Good for you! I mean, duly noted. Whatever. It’s fine.”

“—and I’m apologizing for my fucked-up behavior.” Her eyes brimmed with tears. “Because I know I haven’t been so easy to live with. And I just want to make sure we’re okay.”

“We’re fine.” She smiled, mercifully softening, and touched Allegra’s hand. “And I am looking into the Lake District. I’m on it. Okay?”

“Okay.”

When she kissed her cheek, Allegra laid her head on Dusty’s shoulder and began to cry. Dusty caressed the small of her back, softly shushing.

She was being honored again, this time by Hyacinth House. When Livia asked for help, Jeremy reached out to friends for $35,000 buy-ins — the Katy Perry table, the Jada Pinkett Smith, the Annapurna, the Moonves, the bla.

Between calls, from the aerie of his Nichols Canyon office (it sat above a creek), he thought about his life.

I love him.

But what the fuck was he doing with a wonky little twink he met on Scruff?

Tristen was odd, prickly, smart. Jeremy supposed he was fathering the boy (in a fashion) — though he knew better than to call it mentoring, he insisted to himself that it wasn’t sick. And anyway, the warmth of their love and the tenderness of their sex helped salve the heart pain awakened by the death of his baby. That’s right: my baby. His shrink told him not to minimize it, even to say it out loud—my baby died! — to ward off the disconnect that, all his life, had come so easily.

The force of his grief wound up taking him by surprise — the mid-morning sobs and muttered daytime prayers. His subsequent, adamant resolve to try again made him feel virtuous and mature.

The miscarriage felt like some kind of payback on a karmic debt. In his darkest hours, it seemed a just punishment for not having taken full responsibility as a parent; his paternal excitations had been more those of a groupie looking forward to the endless, official perks of a permanent blood alliance with the Wilding dynasty. Fatherhood was only another word for sperming his way into a jackpot; postmortem, he felt stained — stained! — by the pride of provenance and all that went with it. As part of the healing process, he came to view such corrosive self-characterization as simply another indulgence. It is what it is. Everything happened for a reason. No matter how many cretins had said it, it was inalterably true.

Still, he was shaken. Moody. Aggressive. Weepy. The shrink got busy, tweaking his psych meds. Jeremy had a healthy fear of “the black dog” and didn’t want to leave any food out for it. Twice it had chased him — once in college and once when his mom and sis were killed by the drunk. He never wanted to be running from the black dog again. Ever.

The reenergized mission of becoming a dad brought solace. He visualized his offspring (with alternating genders) at different ages — watched it being born — saw himself beside it during the scrapes, sicknesses, and convulsive tears of childhood, the travesties of adolescence, the heartaches and false starts of young adulthood — even imagining himself in hospice, cancer’d or by natural causes, chemo-hairless or wildly white-bearded, ministered to by the one he’d so stalwartly loved, shepherded, and nurtured with father’s milk. The poignant slideshow made him feel part of that great collective: the family of man. He didn’t want to approach Allegra about a do-over, not only because he sensed it was way too soon for her to go there (or that intuition told him she’d miscarry again), but for the larger reason that he needed to move now, in response to a sense of urgency he couldn’t explain. Some sort of fuse had been lit and he was raring to go. What spun him was thinking about how awkward it would be when it came time to tell Allegra he was pregnant — he should probably let Dusty know first. Maybe he wouldn’t tell either of them until the surrogate was six months along. That was probably the best strategy.

He headed to the Plummer Park A.A. meeting. He’d made plans to talk with his old sponsor, who recently had twins. He was walking toward the clubhouse when he saw them — travelers on a bench, basking in the sun.

The woman was in her thirties, lovely and plain, a blond hippie with grey-green eyes. Her companion was a bearded Scottish colossus, burly and red-faced, twice her age. She wore a threadbare cotton sundress, its brilliant colors faded. A bracelet of bells, much larger than they should have been for that sort of thing, was tied to her ankle with a leather cord like a medieval ankle monitor. Her dignified friend raffishly boasted — that would have been the word — an Edwardian morning coat over silken pajamas, an appropriate uniform, so it seemed, for his pastime of smiling toward the ether in divine abstraction.

Something drew Jeremy in.

Uncharacteristically, he approached to ask if he could sit with them. The woman said, “Please do!” The old man looked into Jeremy’s eyes with kindness before directing his gaze, fervid yet impassive, back to sacred horizons. Joining them on the bench, he took in the Scot at a glance: the pasty, wasted epidermis, the greasy pompadour, the flecks of food in his whiskers, trapped like insect exoskeletons in a web.

The hippie lady said, “I knew you would come. Knew it.”

“As a sitting, active board member — and all-around angel — the effect of the work she has done for the House and its children is impossible to quantify.”

The evening’s formidable director and hostess, Livia Lindström, was wrapping up her emotional remarks. Dusty had asked one of the fashion houses to loan her old friend a gown and Livia felt awkwardly glamorous. No one knew of her discomfort; she was a chic, vibrant sixty-three-year-old woman who reminded everyone how beautiful the species could look, au naturel. In L.A., the ones her age who hadn’t gone under the knife were nearly extinct.