“Goddammit! This happened to me too!” he blustered. “And Dusty, it happened to Dusty! It’s fucking selfish, Allegra! And it’s mean! Do you think you can just get over yourself? For, like, ten seconds? Because the line between grieving mom and narcissistic cunt is really thin.”
She winced then let him come hold her while she cried. When he made a douchebaggy showbiz joke, she jaggedly laughed back to life, like the nearly drowned throwing up water.
—
Dusty and her manager shared a gloomy, superficial tea at the house.
The actress was glad that her wife and Jeremy were spending the long weekend out at Dume. The worst was apparently over but things hadn’t returned to normal — not by a long shot.
“How was New York?”
“It was New York,” said Elise. “It’s always New York.”
She was one of those classy, brassy, Big Apple throwbacks, a brazen widow-bachelorette, sprung forth from the Carlyle in a spangled pantsuit of sugar plums, tough love, and flint. She’d worked with Dusty since the late seventies, when she discovered her in an off-Broadway production of Small Craft Warnings.
“See any plays?”
“Want to hear my dirty little secret? I haven’t stepped inside a theater in Manhattan since Into the Woods. That was 1987, can you believe? Lost my appetite. And schlepping my grandniece to Book of Mormon doesn’t count. You know what? Kinky Boots just don’t do it for me. Disney don’t either, nor terrible revivals of not-so-great plays. I’m a snob for the heydays. I’m sure there are absolutely glorious things out there, but you know what? Ain’t interested. Though I may see something when I’m in London.”
“When are you going, babe?”
They loved calling each other babe, kid, sweetheart.
“In four hours. Straight from here.”
“I’m jealous! What’s happening in London, El? Did you sign Prince George?”
“Not yet,” she smiled, then turned grim. It was time to talk about the baby elephant in the room. “Honey, I’m so sorry.”
“I guess it wasn’t meant to be.”
“How’s she doing?”
“Better. There’s still a little bit of… subtext. You know — sometimes it feels like she thinks I went in there with a coat hanger and did the job.”
“But why accuse you?” she demanded, playing the outraged naïf.
“Hey, it’s not like it’s rational,” said Dusty, shrugging it off. “My shrink says it’s sublimated whatever. Self-esteem was never Leggy’s strong suit, you know that. And if she felt inadequate before, well…”
“Poor, poor darling.”
“But I get it, I really do. I can take the hit.” She paused to absorb. “It’s just so sad, so awful.”
“This too shall pass,” said Elise. “And how are you?”
“How am I? When I run into myself, I’ll ask.”
“Are you going to — do you think you’ll try again?”
“I don’t know,” said Dusty wearily. “It’s our second miscarriage, Ellie. And she had one before, before we were together.”
“Oh Christ,” tsked Elise.
“All girls. They were all girls! Isn’t that bizarre?”
Elise sighed deeply then touched her client’s hand. “What about adopting?”
“Not my thing.”
“Why not?” she asked. When nothing came back, she let it go. “Well, the Universe will sort it out. It always does.”
“Yeah, well I’m not such a big fan of the Universe at the moment. It’s my karma, El. My karma is fucked.”
“Oh bullshit. Your karma is extraordinary!”
“Not in the kiddie department, my love. What’s fucked up is, I thought—we thought, we really did! — this would be the one, you know, the one that would ‘take.’ I think it really would have grounded her.”
“And what about you, Dusty? What would it have done for you?”
“I’ll be all right.”
“I know that, kid. But I never hear enough about you—”
“You know how tough I am.”
“I do, and sometimes I wish you wouldn’t be. So tough all the time. You don’t have to be.”
“I’m a survivor, Ellie.”
“You can’t hold the world up all the time. Pass the globe to your old friend, sweetheart. I’ll put it on my shoulders while you have a good cry.”
“I will, Ellie, and I have. You know I have — you’ve held it up for me plenty, more than anyone.” She was really the closest thing to “Mother” Dusty had ever known. “But Leggy needs… something, to get her out of herself. A baby would have—I don’t know. She’s just… she’s still not a woman in a lot of ways.”
“Let me tell you something, a baby doesn’t poof! save the day. Ask the gals with postpartum. Ask the special-needs moms. And a baby doesn’t make you a woman, either, you know that and I know that. Want to hear Elise’s deep thoughts?”
“Do I have a choice?” she said, with a smile.
“I think you need to start giving Allegra the freedom to find out who she is.”
“That’s all I give her, Ellie! All she has is freedom!”
“I’m not talking about the freedom that comes from being indulged like a child. Give her the space to find out who the grown-up is. I know there’s one in there somewhere, just dying to get out.”
“I thought having the baby would take care of that.”
“Maybe,” Elise said indulgently. “Maybe. ‘More will be revealed.’ But I think for Allegra, a baby might have been — God bless her, you know how much I love that girl — it may just have been another project. I don’t mean that to sound harsh. Look: I’m not saying a baby was a bad thing. Of course not. It may still be the best idea in the world!”
“Yeah, well,” Dusty said impatiently. “You know what? Raising a kid at my age wasn’t exactly on my bucket list, either. I’d be collecting fucking Medicare when she got her first period. But—” She briefly closed her eyes to access something. “I was really starting to look… forward to it. I don’t know. I guess I was starting to go to all these places in my head. ‘Oh, the places you’ll go!’” With a quick, cartoonish smile, she muttered, “Well, you know what they say. If you want to make God laugh…”
“To hell with what ‘they’ say! I’ve had my dukes up against ‘they’ all my life.” Her grassroots psychotherapeutic tack having failed, she sloppily defaulted to Feisty Old Broad. “If you want it, Dusty, go for it, and don’t let anything stop you. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again! It’s a terrible cliché but it’s true. That’s what my mama always said and I say the same. Words to live by.”