“And where is that?” asked Jeremy.
He almost didn’t want to know. It had all become too heartbreaking.
“To a region known as Summerland. My Sir says we are close now.”
—
She moved to a hotel.
Allegra had a few hundred thousand dollars in an account her wife set up for her years ago. Some of it was money she’d earned herself.
In residence now, at the Four Seasons: footloose, jangly, blackhearted.
Couldn’t reach Jeremy — who else was there?
She felt like an asshole for calling Ginevra a second time—again the cunt didn’t return the call. She wouldn’t, right? Because Dusty owned her, right? If I drop dead tomorrow, she’d help Bunny move on — at $475 an hour, seven-fifty for a house call. Allegra was jolted by a surge of revulsion as she realized how involved the therapist must already be in their business; privy to every nook and cranny of her wife’s revolutionary new love… quarterbacking the breakup of their marriage. Their life—
She puked right there on the California King.
She kept getting texts from Dusty to please come home. Home! Why would she even use that shitty word? (Only “love” was shittier.) Maybe Ginevra told her to.
She deleted the messages.
And just lay there, letting all sorts of memories take her.
Allegra ached for her mother… but how? Why? It’d been years since she’d had two thoughts about Willow (née Claudia Zabert) — and now she was aching. She hadn’t seen the woman since she was a teenager, living together in that scummy flat. (Hated London but anything was better than the phantasmagoric cesspool of India.) She remembered the pouring rain. She was on her way home and ducked into a gallery for free wine and cheese. The rich painter hit on her — she was forty, Allegra pretended to be nineteen — and that was that. The artist brought her to New York. They lived in a Chelsea loft for a few years and it was cool, it was superfun, it was all good. But the lady was crazy possessive, and Allegra couldn’t keep her panties on.
After they broke up, she did deep-tissue massage — way deep — at fancy hotels (did astrology and crystal readings too). Took solace in her deep, cultish roots… Got into some heavy coke, sex, and yoga scenes — dead-eyed pixie, an adventuress, an excitable girl who’d seen too much. Hung with violent and hilarious hermaphrodites; hung with Raëlian sex workers; stayed in Vermont a few months with twins who happened to be lovers, becoming their lover too. (Ironically, they were the daughters of a Twelve Tribes couple who ripened into FREECOG kahunas bent on destroying her alma mater, the Children of God… sheesh!) She finally got tired of all the fascist third eye crystal qijong esoteric chakra bullshit and remade herself as a serial au pair. More Upper Yeast Side sexual hijinks ensued. At twenty-three, she fled to California, back to the mountainous commune at Black Bear Ranch where she and Willow lived before that fucked-up kingpin spirited them away. (Some folks she knew as a kid were actually still there.) God, how she loved that land. Human beings always failed you but the land never did. For a few healing years she lived comfortably in her yurt and her skin, like a child again, not a slave-child of some insane erotomaniacal god, but a free child — of river and forest, of mountain, moon, and stars.
An innocent…
So many terrible things had been done to her body, especially in the Family when she was so, so young, and when it all got too heavy even for Willow, they escaped from that hell house in the Tenderloin and hid out in Black Bear, fugitives from the lie and the law. Oh, halcyon days… why couldn’t they have just stayed? In the Siskiyous, with the good new people, she was safe. As if to expiate all the sins she had sponsored, Willow introduced her daughter to the river. It washed her clean. They skinny-dipped in a glorious Huck Finn swimming hole and she befriended the fishes, tadpoles, and tiny frogs — how they welcomed her! The men of the commune were kind and respectful and left them alone. (She couldn’t even believe men like that existed.) Allegra recalled the path that snaked to the water and how she would run, her mom chasing after — in they’d go, and again she was cleansed. Willow washed her daughter’s hair on the edge of the brook, lathering it to a beehive meringue. Then one day Gridley Wright arrived, the Rasputin of Shiva Lila — Mr. Right! — and wanted Allegra to lay on the bed while he fucked her mother, and Willow just let it happen, like she let everything. He made the girl join them, not that Allegra fought that, because by then she was up for any kind of parental guidance. And it seemed like when she blinked, they’d been stolen away to Bombay… Goa… Mysore, Kochi, and Kerala — where everything smelled like a gang rape of incense, shit, and death. The grown-ups were freaking and all her little friends were getting sick and disappearing and brand-new monkeymen kept saving and destroying them, saving and destroying, saving and destroying.
So: after she left her half-mad mother in Brixton, after she left her apoplectic painter in New York, after checkered careers as au pair and energyworker, and nostalgic Black Bear sabbatical with restorative old friends — mountains, river, yurt, night stars — she settled in L.A. with a droll, quirky psych nurse from Panorama City whom she met at a Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous meeting. They rented a bungalow off Sawtelle. Allegra worked at Trader Joe’s and at a bonsai nursery on weekends. Five years of that—five years—such happiness, unalloyed! Why then the sudden, oh-so-bold, so creative transition to waitressing? She couldn’t remember. Prolly just bored.
Then she saw Dusty Wilding at the Hotel Bel-Air and every cell in her body woke up, every hair stood on end. She went to the house in Point Dume and they laughed and cried for real, hours of it, stoned on hash, singing out SUFFERING was the only thing made me feel I was alive thought that’s just how much it cost to survive in this world — till you showed me how how to fill my heart with love how to open up and drink in all that white light POURING DOWN FROM THE HEAVEN! as they roared up PCH to the movie star’s secondary love shack (in Carpinteria) in the canary yellow Alfa that Dusty wound up giving as a birthday gift.
—
And now she was at the Four Seasons.
How fucked was that?
So fucked.
In three weeks, she’d be thirty-seven…
Allegra sent a quick text — im ok will write later — in response to another flurry from her wife. For the first time she allowed herself to think Maybe I can get through this. Then: Maybe we can get through this. Yet whenever she started fantasizing about reconciliation, the cold reality of the situation gave her whiplash. She tried to feel better by reminding herself that marriage had afforded certain legal and financial protections — then instantly recoiled, not only from the horror of her predicament (unthinkable only a few short weeks ago), but from the idea that she possibly wasn’t protected at all. California being California, the law could be tricky. Plus, with the shit going down the way it had, it suddenly seemed plausible Dusty might not be the generous partner Allegra had always imagined, because she didn’t even really know who the fuck Dusty was anymore. The woman who she’d taken for granted no longer existed, and maybe never had…