NO!
No no no no no… how can I do that? How can I do that to my baby, how can—
To keep from screaming she told herself that Allegra was a survivor, over and over she thought it, then said it aloud, hoping to convince herself it was so, and that’s why it would all be okay — because Allegra had the family blood, survivor blood, Wilding-Whitmore blood — and that her darling would take a hard fall, of course she would, then be able to get up again and stand tall, head held high, until she found another love, a big love, bigger than life, real and unperverse, the love she was meant to have from the beginning. Your mother was just a starter marriage … that’s what Dusty kept telling herself as she sped through Covina astride her faithful pendulum — now fantasizing about what would happen if she told Allegra the truth, then mother and daughter united to share their reality with the planet. Would that really be the worst of worst things? Would it really be the end? Might in fact transparency be the solution — to everything? Why not tell all? The shockproof social media zeitgeist devoured the daily commedia of anarchy and annihilatory transgressions with all the fuss of a whale inhaling plankton. The yelp of an accidentally incestuous marriage, even a beloved faggot movie star’s, would hardly be discernible among the twittering cries and whispers of the Web, a restless organism that greedily homogenized crowdfunding, dicpix, pandas, and beheadings. Dusty replayed the fantasy tape of a P.R.-spun divorce (whether or not they fessed up the truth, the mature and loving lesbian breakup narrative would still remain the same) but this time Dusty mixed in the yucky, high-opera, mind-blowing admission. There would be initial public scorn and revulsion, but she foresaw the unstoppable backlash of popular acceptance and compassion, the metamorphosizing of fear and loathing into profound respect for yet another worthy Profiles in Courage addition to the American freakshow canon. The mutant couple might even finagle a Time Person of the Year! All families had monsters in the cellar born of deliberate misdeeds — why should a national treasure worry if she and her child, innocents, were temporarily sacrificed, martyred to the cause of dark and hidden things? They’d practically be performing a public and cultural service! And before long, they would be martyrs no more, but mavericks — heroines and outlier pioneers, marching into the history books.
There would always be haters… She and Allegra were used to being vilified for their privilegy, cougary union. So maybe it would be best to face the music: then she might truly earn the name Mother Courage. Some fool once said that irony was dead. How genius would it be to declare that shame itself had died?
Twenty minutes from Trousdale, her brain played more scenes from the phantom, psychotronic, Keeping Up With the Wilders HBO doc — the one where Laura Poitras points the camera on Dusty as she tells Allegra, “I’m your mom.” How would the girl react? What would she say, what would she do? Would she bolt? Or — after a moment, an hour — would she rush toward her? Cleave to her blood? What an embrace that would be! Would she cry, “Mama!”? Was it obscene that Dusty actually yearned for such a sentimental, middle-class result, so saccharine a cliché? (She wondered.) And why would they hug each other, why should Aurora even want that? Wouldn’t the aberrant nature of their involvement forever preclude such a “natural” impulse? Yet, knowing everything that she knew, Dusty ached with the thought of not being able to wrap her arms around her baby… and if she couldn’t, in that raw moment, that moment of courage and sacrifice and honesty, when would they be able to hug, when would she be able to shower her child with a mother’s kisses — when would the moratorium end? How much time must go by before what transpired between them would be neutralized? Could it be? Might it be possible they never touch again? That the terminus of their physical contact turned out to be the violent lovemaking of weeks ago on the night of the Buddhist soirée? What a horror! It was easy for Dusty to imagine things falling apart, once they had their “talk.” Doomed!… and if that was to be the case, what was the point in telling her the truth? If, in the end, the result was that they never touched again — that Ginevra’s theory was unsound, and on Dusty’s revelation, the scales of the serpent’s tail didn’t fall away but multiplied…
Lovers no more, nor mother and daughter could be—
With the lights of downtown L.A. finally visible, all her fantasies collapsed like scaffolding in a fire.
—
Allegra was standing at the open door of her car, poking around in the backseat. When her wife pulled in, she pretended not to notice.
Dusty parked and walked over, heart going wild in its cage. She said a smiley, too boisterous “Hi!” Allegra took her in with a side-glance; face subtly imploding, she returned to hassle some luggage, removing a Goyard tote that was resting on a duffel. She plunked it into the front floorboard.
“What’s goin’ on?” said Dusty.
“What’s goin’ on? What does it look like?”
“Where are you going?”
“Where am I going? Where am I going? Where are you going? Where have you been?”
“You know where I’ve been—”
“Really?” she said derisively. “I know where you’ve been? Fuck you, Dusty!”
“I don’t understand—”
Even though the situation was ugly and volatile, Dusty found relief in realizing that her abominable mission, shaky and amorphous as it was, would most likely abort. She numbed out.
“You disappear for two weeks and now you don’t understand?” She skirted around to the driver’s side and got in. “You’re fucking someone else and you don’t understand?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Oh please stop. Stop! Please!”
“Allegra, I am not sleeping with anyone!” she said, belching the words like some cheeky she-devil — a sinister kink in the script had forced her to declare her faithfulness.