Still Holding

Four Affirmations

SIDD KITCHENER McCadden was now eight months old, and a regular at Peet’s Coffee on Montana. There were a lot of regulars at Peet’s, and Lisanne often wondered what those people did for a living aside from drinking tea and lattes. They probably wondered the same thing of her.

In the early morning, she left the baby in the care of a nanny and went jogging along the bluff. The regulars tended to congregate outside, even if it was freezing, and she would see them as she drove to Ocean Avenue. The ones who preferred to stay indoors had special places to sit that they guarded with their lives. When she came at about ten, after collecting her son, the clique was still remarkably intact. They oohed and aahed over “little Sidd” (they assumed he was a Sidney), but she didn’t make small talk. Lisanne held them in benign contempt, wondering which was the actor, model, stylist, which was the kept person or whatnot. Sometimes they appeared in absurd spandex cycling outfits; sometimes they celebrated each other’s birthdays with slices of cake which they tried to foist on whatever innocents had the misfortune to sit close by. They didn’t seem wealthy and no one was famous, although the rich and famous did pass through, like Meg Ryan and her son or Kate Capshaw in jodhpurs or Madeleine Stowe and her sweet husband, who looked like a short, stocky dentist. Everyone from local yoga came to Peet’s, and Lisanne held out hope she would see Marisa or Renée so she could strike up a conversation about the terrible thing that had happened to Kit. She didn’t think that would be inappropriate, but they never showed.

After Viv’s miscarriage and her epiphany that Siddhama was the child of Kit Lightfoot (a revelation she guarded from Philip and everyone else), Lisanne had begun to study vipassana in earnest, meeting regularly with a Westside group. They did their sitting at a Zen center tucked behind a post office in Santa Monica and at members’ houses too. Sometimes there were all-night yazas, but mostly they met on weekday afternoons. She liked vipassana because it was the oldest form of meditation, a technique the Buddha himself was said to have practiced. Philip was supportive even though he no longer evinced much interest in things Buddhist. (She wasn’t sure that he ever really had.) Still, he built Lisanne an airy cabin on the grounds where she could do her ashtanga and even let himself be dragged to a loving-kindness workshop just up the road, in Temescal.

• • •

THE SATURDAY RETREAT was led by teachers from a place up north called Spirit Rock. Lisanne and Philip joined about twenty others in sitting and walking meditations. No one was allowed to speak except to repeat four affirmations:

… May I/you be safe and protected from harm.

… May I/you be happy and live with joy.

… May I/you be healthy and strong, or if that’s not possible, may I/you accept my/your limitations with grace.

… In my/your outer life, may I/you live with the ease of well-being.

The affirmations were recited while visualizing first oneself; then a “benefactor” (someone who had bestowed kindnesses or generosity); then a friend; then a “neutral person”; a “difficult person”; and finally, beings one did not personally know.

The idea was to learn to transmit metta (a Pali word often translated into English as loving-kindness) to all creatures, human and animal, seen and unseen, newly born and newly dying. The teacher said it was a “practice of the heart.” He said that the source of all joy arose from wishing happiness to others and that the source of all sorrow arose from wishing happiness only to oneself.

Lisanne visualized Kit for each permutation. Kit Lightfoot was her Self, her benefactor, her friend, her neutral person, her difficult person, and someone she did not really know. Before the final walking meditation, they were told to send metta to all beings encountered on their way — the hikers, the birds, and even the trees. (“Though in classic Buddhism,” said the teacher, somewhat reluctantly, “trees lack true consciousness.”) The group dispersed, and Lisanne meandered before climbing the hillside trail. As she cleared the ridge, she could see five meditators standing in a small depression, staring down at their feet. She got closer and instinctively slowed, wondering if something lay dead in the dirt. Then she saw it: a snake, sunning itself in the path. Its rattle was translucent and dirty yellow, like a wicked pacifier. The metta-heads bombed it with love and then it started to move. All eyes followed as the reptile slithered through the grass, visible for about seventy-five yards before vanishing. She wished that Philip had been there, but he had gone off in a different direction. For Lisanne, it was the highlight of the workshop, but she never told him about the encounter. That would have been smug, and the teachings were against it.

• • •

THROUGH THE SANGHA of old and new connections, she became acquainted with a group of practitioners who knew Kit before the mishap. And that was how one day she casually, yet with great portent, came to be invited to do service in a modest home at the end of a suburban cul-de-sac.

The Banks of Riverside

THE OLD HOUSE sat comfortably in its skin.

Spiffed and restuccoed, spit-polished, refurbished, a wall around it now, nothing too tall or ostentatious but nicely done. Thick enough to be serious.

Some new additions graced driveway and curbside — Kit’s jet black G-wagen, for one. (A neighborhood boy hand-washed it each week.) His fab old forties pickup, for another. On the lawn, the storied Indian, teardrop Triumph, and Harley with the handlebar fringe luxuriously hibernated beneath a locked-down tarp. A silver Range Rover with little shark gill vents was there too, blocking the drive — for Burke’s use only. The stately, beloved, die-hard DeVille — the junk car gone up on blocks a month or so before Kit came to scan Rita Julienne’s love letters — was gone. Scrapped. Tula, the Fijian bodyguard, spent most of his time sleeping out front in a maroon Crown Victoria, a detective’s car acquired at auction.

A veritable auto show, but the neighbors don’t mind.

The actor, under his father’s imposing, vigilant care, could have been stashed anywhere: Arizona, Jackson Hole, Northern California. Canada, Cabo, the Dominican. Hell, anyplace at all could be transformed into a one-man state-of-the-art rehab. The decision might even have been made, with full cooperation of the trust, to fortify the (already secure) Benedict Canyon compound, bunking nurses, M.D.s, therapists, and cooks in guest rooms and guesthouse, stowing sanghanistas in the zendo. But Mr. Lightfoot knew such a maneuver would have, at least in the public’s eye, made him house nigger; easier for the powers that be to extricate him too, once his boy got better. No, it was all about perception — always was, always would be. He didn’t like the view from the back of the bus much. Never did. He would need a modicum of control from the get-go if he was to have a fighting chance against those legal Goliaths.

He lobbied for Riverside and won. Won big.

• • •

ALL THESE YEARS, the old room has been kept pristine, with its desktop aquarium and blackened-pocket catcher’s mitt straight off the cover of Saturday Evening Post. The shelves in the den were unapologetically lined with clippings from magazines (Cela found the beautiful frames at the Rose Bowl swap): Kit on the receiving end of the People’s Choice, the Golden Globe, the MTV-this, the Show West—that — Kit with Nicole and Bob Dylan, Meryl, Prince Charles, some crippled kids, the Dalai Lama, Rosie, Oprah, Giuliani and the Singing Fireman, Clinton, Sinatra, Mick, Hockney, Mandela and Sting, Kofi and Gwyneth, George W. and Condoleezza.

Shots of Viv had been weeded out.

• • •

(THE BACKYARD DIDN’T have a pool, but Burke installed an aboveground one with a therapeutic wave machine for Wonderboy to kick against. He bought a humongous steel sectional barbecue too. Cost four grand. Kit loved Cela’s burgers more than In-N-Out’s.)

• • •

ALL THE WHITE carpets Rita Julienne Lightfoot ghost-walked for years before the divorce, those bitching, toxic, whiny years before she got the crop of cooz tumors… All the white carpets, once compulsively scrubbed by that fucking harridan, now torn up and replaced with thick pile.

• • •

NO ONE COULD DENY there was a profound folkloric purity, a demoniac simplicity — the stuff of modern pop myth — in Burke’s arranging for the prodigal son’s rehab to be in Riverside. Keep it simple. (He told Cela that it was a case of “the swallowed returning to Capistrano.”) The homely, homespun formula was a major hit with the media too, featured by every conceivable outlet of the entire wired, warring planet. Lightfoot Senior became his own spin doctor, kiboshing rumors that he was trash, a mercenary, deadbeat dad: debonair Burke now vibed caretaker extraordinaire. The lawyers could be counted on to draw out the travails of executorship in order to continue collecting their hourly rape fee. Months went by with nothing resolved. Funds flowed minorly, purse strings tightly cinched; the battle was far from over, and enemies abounded. The estate paid a low-end stipend for a private security detail — Tula, force of one — and an allowance to Kit, which technically, his father could dip into. (The stipend did not pay for Tula’s meals or overtime, and Burke liked to say he was going broke with all the lunch and dinner runs to KFC.) The lawyers were trying to humiliate him, break him down — get him to settle, then book. To Vegas, or wherever. Out of their face. Classic war of attrition. Make him throw in the towel so they could exact their nefarious tolls, play out their godforsaken sociopathic entitlement motives. Rob him of what was his, by blood. Well, fuck them. Y’all can go fuck y’all. As they say in the South.

• • •

RIVERSIDE LOVED IT.

Because the ancestral home sat on NOT A THROUGH STREET beside a moatlike culvert, access was relatively easy to control. With the enthusiastic urging of residents, the city council quickly approved a gated checkpoint. Unless permitted, only locals were allowed entry to the five-square-block area in question. Per special ordinance of the mayor, those trustees of the stalkerazzi — helicopters, small planes, and hot-air balloons — were naturally disallowed in the airspace above. The neighborhood rallied round its fallen hero amidst a tide of global ink, for it really did take a village: Riverside thrilled at its own retooling of image, torqued from homicidal methamphetamine shithole to nurturing municipality. Burke Lightfoot reveled too in his once vaguely hostile hometown’s embrace, rejoicing in their newfound antimedia puritanism. He renewed his bonds of affection with this brave new world, county of movers and shakers, of speedy utilitarians, of fast learners that he’d never after all abandoned, kingdom of civic morality and pragmatism, this adroit, far-seeing, unexpectedly with-it protectorate whose vivacious, obstreperous, out-of-left-field support had been counterintuitive, and left him with nothing but praise and exultation.

Always, a flotilla of media vans and trucks on the neighborhood’s outskirts and the small industry of shiny catering campers that sprung up to feed them (with proper permits, further enriching city coffers). Newshounds made the requisite, random inquiries but were shined by the locals re: purported condition of and/or formal or casual neighborly encounters with the tragic superstar who (allegedly) shuffled, shambled, lurched, and recovered among them. It was unprecedented, but neither grainy image nor insipid anecdote had yet been leaked or sold to tabloids. No bark and no byte. The united front was impossibly, utterly, wholesomely Capraesque, almost as much of a story as its subject. Had a touch of the Branch Davidian too.

Lawns were tidier. This godly little acre took on a lush utopian tinge, a peculiarly Middle-American Shangri-la ruled over by Lord Lightfoot, natty ringmaster and gemütlich Wizard of Kit. If one looked with a very keen eye (the streetlamps did not cast a wide or bright light), one might see them strolling at eventide — wounded wild-child and martyred keeper. By sunny Riverside day (and by night too), troops of saffron-robed monks came and went, polite, amiable, unobtrusive, discreetly stitching themselves into the community quilt. Burke used them for running errands and cleaning house. They engaged Kit in physical therapy, for the father did not trust those sent from the hospital; after their visits, memorabilia seemed to go missing.

Only a few of the old cronies ever called or even asked to stop by. Kiki came just once (it’s true she checked in a lot, but Mr. Lightfoot discouraged actual visits), as did Robin Williams and Edward Norton — but not his so-called soul mate ex-fiancée or Alf, putative running partner and self-proclaimed best friend, now rumored to be dining on Viv’s snatch, or any of the studio parasites, business managers, or legal eagles who had coolly leeched so many hundreds of millions off his handsome hardworking boy. Fine, then. Better he be ministered to by selfless monks.

Larry King and Barbara Walters called, to cajole. Barbara wanted an interview in the worst way. “I’m very, very, patient,” she said slyly. Tough Jew. Ton of moxie. They flirted over time, Burke putting her through his time-tested charmathon workout. Whenever Barbara hung up — after saying she’d call again next week, which she did, like clockwork — he thought: Captivating lady. A real pro, and a hottie in her day, too.

Becca in Venice

BECAUSE OF RUSSELL CROWE’S conflicting film schedules, Look-Alikes was shot over the holidays and into the new year. Becca finished the gig just before Thanksgiving. She never stayed on to do camera-double work because Drew asked that her regular double take over. (Drew was loyal that way.) She was kept abreast of any juicy set scuttlebutt by a second A.D. whom she’d furtively kissed on a day Rusty had been mean to her. Lately, there were a lot of those kinds of days.

The big gossip was that the true Russell (his wife, who was expecting, had only been in L.A. for part of the shoot) had some sort of dalliance-dustup with the true Drew and that the Billy Bob look-alike was hitting bull’s-eyes with all the female look-alikes (and one of the males), even though he had hopelessly lost his heart to the true and very young Scarlett Johansson. Which was funny because, as the second A.D. pointed out, the true Scarlett and the true Billy Bob already had a dalliance (on-screen) in that movie where Billy Bob played a barber. The second A.D. said that the true Scarlett, who may or may not have had a dalliance with the true Benicio, definitely “had it going on” with the true John Cusack. The second A.D. said that he thought the true JC was maybe having something with either the true Meryl (who had a small, very hip cameo) or the Meryl look-alike, or both. Becca doubted the very married Mrs. Streep would be having an affair with anyone, and suddenly all the second A.D.’s whispered intelligences were put into question.

She was pleased that Rusty had spoken of his counterpart with such genuine respect and affection. They’d already shot a few scenes, and Rusty apparently had held his own. He told Becca that “the Gladiator” (though he never called him that to his face) was nothing short of a gent. They’d even had a drink together.

• • •

LIVING IN VENICE was fun. Becca loved going for jazzy little walks on Abbot Kinney and having drinks at Primitivo. She loved popping into retro furniture boutiques and making mental lists of what to buy for her future hillside home. (She was thinking Los Feliz. That’s where Spike and Sofia lived, and the chief of police too.) Rusty’s apartment was cramped and moldy, and even though she enjoyed hearing the sound of the ocean, she was embarrassed to find herself pining for the absurdly decorated nouveau riche Dunsmore aerie.

The desire for a house tugged at her in the way she imagined the desire for a child one day would — craving nest before eggs — and coincided, as usual, with wanting her mom to come from Waynesboro for a visit. She didn’t like the idea of Dixie staying at some Surfside or Ocean View — type motel but couldn’t afford to put her up at Shutters or the Viceroy, either. (Her mom would insist on paying her own way, anyhow.) But it wasn’t like she felt she needed to shoot for the moon either. Aside from being a “Hot Property” junkie, she was always scanning the classifieds in the Times; there were lots of great places for half a million or just a little bit more. Becca had a feeling in her bones that she and Rusty had set a course toward that price range, but her practical, thrifty nature prevailed — she resolved that if it wasn’t soon to happen, she would bide her time. She could see living communally, if she had to. She read in a magazine that, since her divorce, Drew had been staying with a passel of roommates (like in that old sitcom on TV Land that Becca and Annie liked to watch when they got stoned) and her dogs, Templeton (half Lab, half chow), Vivian, and Flossie (the Lab who saved her life on the night of the fire) in a bright orange—orange! — three-bedroom house. Though maybe that was journalistic wishful thinking, as none of it seemed to sync with what Becca had read vis-à-vis the nine-thousand-square-foot gated grounds and servant’s quarters, though it did seem possible that the orange dwelling was on some other part of the property and the publicists were just downplaying how huge and amazing Casa Barrymore really was. (Sometimes they worked like that, in collusion with staff writers, adding or subtracting details in order to make the celeb lifestyle optimally palatable to readership, in terms of the up- or downscaleness of each specific publication.) Becca loved the instant family idea. She’d move Annie and Larry in, forthwith.

Waiting for the gynecologist, she found a really good article in Bazaar. The cover story said that while Drew wholeheartedly embraced her role as godmother to Courtney Love’s daughter, Frances Bean, she wasn’t yet ready to have kids herself. And when she did, she would never adopt — the implication being that the adoption trend was the result of vain actresses dealing with their sick notions of body image. Becca had never even thought of it like that (instead believing that famous young stars adopted because they were infertile), but the statement rang true. Drew had really opened her eyes.

The article ended with Drew saying marriage was not a goal for her at this juncture. She just wanted to have fun and be alive. “I am so in love with love,” she said.

Becca could relate.

• • •

THEY HADN’T SEEN each other since the kissing scene, which happened to be the very day Becca wrapped. Making out was fun and got pretty gnarly, and they bonded but not in a weird way. Becca put so many of those dissolvable Listerine thingies under her tongue that she thought she’d get a burn.

There was so much she wanted to ask that day, but as it turned out, Drew did most of the talking. She, of course, knew that Becca was working for Viv as a chore whore (Becca was convinced that Viv had been shamed into letting her take time off for the Look-Alikes role because, as it happened, Drew did a cameo on Together, not because of a friendship with Viv but because she was the casual ex of one of the costars, and during the taping Drew had raved to Viv in front of Becca about what a terrific gal Becca was and how funny and great it was that Viv had hired her “soul sister,” and Becca knew that if Viv forbade her to work on Spike Jonze’s movie then Viv would have been exposed to the scorn of Drew and her movie friends, a scorn she definitely did not want to inspire) and Drew wanted to know if what she had heard was true: that Viv was sleeping with Alf. Becca said yes — she knew that Drew and Alf were once an item — but that it was a big secret. Drew just laughed and said what a slut Alf was and how hard it must have been for Viv with everything that had happened to Kit but that still there was something cheesy and unheroic about the way Viv kind of dumped him for his best friend. Especially under the circumstances. But far be it from her to judge, said Drew. Then she talked about how sweet Kit was and how they used to hang together when she lived in Carbon Canyon and how he turned her on to meditating and about the time they all — Drew and Kit and Tom and Kathy Freston (Tom was the head of MTV, she said) — went to Westwood to see a vipassana master called Goenka, who was touring the United States in a mobile home and what a horrible thing it was that some asshole did that to him and ruined his life and how she felt kind of guilty for never having tried to go see him when he was at Cedars. For a moment, it looked like she was going to cry, but a crew dog rushed over to lick her, almost knocking her down. She laughed out loud, rubbing its fur and baby-talking through suspended tears. That’s the way Drew was — a big, open heart. A wise old child.

• • •

LATER WHEN THEY fucked, Rusty made her talk about the Drew-kiss like it was some big thing that had turned Becca on. She hated when he wanted to hear stuff during sex. He wanted her to talk about their nipples getting stiff and them secretly getting all wet and excited while the camera rolled, but that was so far from the way it actually was. But as long as Rusty got off, what did she care? The more she talked, the more she got into it, and she hated that he could so easily manipulate her. Seeing him turned on turned her on — sex was powerful. She would say anything he wanted to hear, do anything he asked, except maybe a four-way again, but when he got her going like that she knew she could never say never. When he came, she came too, and that was all that mattered.

On the Street Where He Lives

THE REUNION TOOK place on a cold, gray January afternoon. Most houses in the cordoned Riverside neighborhood had yet to throw out their Xmas trees.

She felt like she’d been to the cul-de-sac before — not just that months-ago time as a reluctant tourist but in another life. Lisanne dug deep and conjured his mother’s beautiful, angular skull, hair gone prematurely white from the vile tawdriness of errant cells covertly ripening under the glass of a fractured marital hothouse. The violence of all of it. According to Web sites and unofficial paperback bios, Burke had finally left Rita Julienne — whose very name signaled delicacy and countryside vulnerability! — alone with her son until the sick woman could no longer stand to remain in that godforsaken city and found sanctuary in a $435-a-month studio apartment in the gang-ridden projects of Panorama City. (Burke loitered in Vegas before reclaiming the family seat on the very evening of the day they fled. He got back so fast, he joked to his running partners, “the toilet seat was still warm.”) Those last months were tough on R.J. Kaiser Permanente was about to trash her womb and feed her to the chemo dogs.

Lisanne closed her eyes and submerged. She called on Tara to help with healing divinations, martyred herself to cries and whispers of unpaid alimony and veiny lymphomas, grapefruit-size divorce tumors sprouting in the domestic loam of cervical pain. Sitting in the car just two houses down, a backward-seeing clairvoyant, she heard all the old sounds and smelled the old smells — witchily raising the zoological mist of Burke Lightfoot’s animal funk, tinctured brew of athlete’s foot, jock rot, and unwashed crack, ne’er-do-well cologne and thirty-dollar parvenu deodorant, Lavoris mouth and pimpy charisma — invoked even the dark, mystic feelings of wet-leafed trees and their vermin, damp streets and window frames, sodden ungathered newspapers, oil-stained driveways and insular neighborhood smells, leavened by the crisp spice and blue smoke of things exaltedly autumnal. The airspace itself spoke in rapturous tongues of suburban decay.

Miracle: she was now inside that sorrowful house, moving as a docent within its storied walls, an official cog in the beloved sangha. Her humble reunion with the actor went appropriately unnoticed by all parties but herself. Lisanne and a gal from the Santa Monica sit group had been enlisted to accompany a sweet, sallow-faced monk; they were to do service, whatever father and son required. (Anyone who came to Riverside underwent Mr. Lightfoot’s scrutiny and wasn’t invited back without his approval. Most returnees were female.) The women housecleaned while the men, say, an ordained monk or senior meditator, sat with Kit in the yard or living room in quietude, or engaged the actor in gentle conversation. Lisanne tried to be close to him. During lunch, she rearranged foodstuffs in the pantry or washed out the fridge’s veggie bin a second time, if need be.

She especially loved scrubbing his bedroom toilet. A practitioner said that toilet cleaning was an old and venerated Buddhist practice — a particularly honorable way to achieve merit. At first, she didn’t believe it. Then one of the monks told her that cleaning toilets was a surefire way to quiet the ego. There were even special travel groups (they advertised in the dharma magazines) that promoted the tandem merit-generating activities of toilet cleaning and the touring of sacred Buddhist sites. Lisanne understood. She knew that her humble efforts were a poem, a kneeling meditation equivalent to the thousandfold prostrations pilgrims endure while circumambulating holy mountains in Tibet. She never used gloves. She reached in to polish the bowl with a little sea sponge as if it was the rarest of alabaster. Sometimes she gave herself a paper cut before cleaning so that her blood could absorb the microbial effluence that remained. Sometimes she wished he left more of himself.

Now and then a woman named Cela came. Lisanne liked her rosy smile. She and Kit had supposedly been schoolmates. Lisanne was reorganizing a closet when Cela and Kit’s dad blundered into the room and kissed before noticing her. They giggled and rushed out. A sanghanista said that Cela and Kit used to be together, “back in the day.” Lisanne thought: Hearsay is the worst kind of poison, and the self-inflicted karmic wounds unwittingly suffered by gossipmongers are more deleterious than any sort of wound those who were gossiped about might sustain, no matter what their misdeeds. Sometimes Lisanne detected Mr. Lightfoot watching her in a curious, vaguely predatory way, but she always deflected his gaze with a beneficent, neutered smile — her Mona Lisa vipassana. There was a line to tread, because she wanted to please him, to ensure he allowed her back.

In a few visits, she had caught Kit’s eye only once. He grinned, betraying no recognition of Tiff Loewenstein’s honored messenger, the bringer of the Sotheby’s Buddha. Better yet, she thought. Better a tabula rasa. Then she had a wonderful idea — she would restore him the idol. How fitting that it come full circle! She recalled Tiff objecting to her impulse to bring the sacred object to the hospital, but now things were different. Now, it would be her privilege and her duty. She was absolutely convinced, devotionally convinced, that it was paramount Kit have the bejeweled, copper Buddha and its vibrations at hand. The statue was probably at the Benedict house. She resolved to find the right moment to ask Mr. Lightfoot for his help in tracking it down.

A Special Visit

BURKE WAS SITTING on the can reading the tabloids when the doorbell rang. He looked up, distracted. “Oh shit,” he muttered, remembering.

“Just a minute!”

He sucked it in and made a dash to the linen closet.

Kit sat in the pool, wave machine off, smoking one of those herbal cigarettes Tula rolled for him. (Burke let Tula mix in grass when Kit was in spasm.) He held a silver reflector at his neck, a vintage model that Cela had picked up at the Roadium.

Burke rushed into the yard with a stack of towels and a terry-cloth robe, like some freaked-out bellhop.

“Come on! There’s some people I want you to meet.”

“I’m tanning!” barked Kit, good-naturedly.

He spoke with the long-drawl accent of neurological damage, easily recognized yet easily understood. The manner in which he doggedly scooped words from the ether was cozily endearing and made Kit all the more watchable — the trademark grin shone through, crowned by glinting, CinemaScope eyes.

“Too bad,” said Burke. “Come on!” He helped his laughing son step from the pool, buck naked. The homemade haircut was looking worse by the day, and Burke got a whiff of his breath. “Jesus! Try and use a toothbrush once in a while, will you, please?”

Kit cracked The Smile.

“Folks came a long way to see you,” said Burke, toweling him down. “Came all the way from fucking Hiroshima.”

“Fuck ‘em,” said Kit, bantering.

“Yeah right, I know. But we already did. We dropped the A-bomb.”

“Fuck fuck fuck!”

“I know, I know. Your favorite.”

They melodically fuck-fuck-fucked their way to the house, a gleeful trade-off for getting Kit to cooperate. The herky-jerky gait had vastly improved since Valle Verde days.

“And none of that in front of the Takahashis, OK? They didn’t fly 12,000 miles on Air Nip to hear you dirty-talk.”

The industrialist and his family were gathered in the breakfast room. They began their incessant bows and polite susurrations the moment Kit and his dad came in. The teenage daughters tittered, eyes rolling in their heads like crazed little fillies. The paterfamilias squinted in frozen delight, a tiny DV camera poised in readiness.

“Can’t let you use it, Mr. Takahashi,” said Burke, cordial but stern. “Sorry. So solly. Not part of the agreement.”

He acceded without protest, tucking the camera into its case.

“Pretty girls!” shouted Kit. “Made in Japan!”

The dismayed, kowtowing sisters looked as if they might spontaneously combust. Their bold, still furtive glances at the superstar crescendoed to stroboscopic, inhuman speed.

“I have a tan!” Kit shouted amiably. The sisters retreated then all at once advanced, hands over mouths. “You’re too pale! Too pale! ‘Made in Japan’ is too pale!”

“Come on, girls,” said Burke. He literally shoved them closer while singing, “Don’t be shy, meet a guy, pull up a chair!” At first they resisted, but when they actually collided into Kit, the ice seemed finally to have broken. Burke said, in an aside to the patriarch, “My son’s a busy man.”

Kit bussed their cheeks, which instantly reddened as if bruised. One girl was now crying while the other tenuously kept psychosis at bay. The industrialist slapped his knees with delight, caroming toward some kind of hysteria himself.

“Well, whaddaya think, Mr. Takahashi?” asked Burke, rhetorically. He began to doubt strongly if his guests could understand a word. “Was it worth it? Was it worth it?” He turned to his son. “Mr. Takahashi owns steel factories.”

“I fuck!” said Kit and Burke rolled his eyes.

“Oh, here we go. Now don’t you start…”

(The one word they might understand.)

“I fuck! I fuck! I fuck! I fuck! I fuck!”

“Come on now, boy,” he chastised.

But no one seemed to care.

Burke laughed along with the Ornamentals, which was what he called them to their faces once he confirmed to his own satisfaction that they were clueless.

• • •

THE CHIEF ORNAMENTAL left twenty-five thousand in cash wrapped carefully in rice paper. The visit had been surreptitiously arranged through a butler at the Bellagio; the industrialist was a whale. Feeling very Ocean’s Eleven, Burke called to say the deal was done. The butler said he was already taken care of, so enjoy.

They watched an Osbournes rerun while Burke discreetly did hits of coke. (He didn’t necessarily want his son to see that.) Kit laughed at something on the show, and Burke said, “What’s so funny? Ozzy talks just like you. Can’t understand a thing he says.” “You can so,” said Cela defensively. Burke leaned over to kiss the nape of her neck but she pulled away — she didn’t like him doing stuff like that in front of Kit. Burke got up and walked toward the bedroom, turning back to give her a comical come-hither. She smiled and shook her head, then waited a few minutes before kissing Kit’s cheek good night. There were pimples there. The next time Burke wasn’t around she’d squeeze a few and cut Kit’s hair. Cela made a stagy move to the bathroom before joining Burke so as not to be obvious, but Kit was engrossed in the sitcom high jinks and didn’t pay attention to comings and goings.

“Leave the door open,” he said from the bed, with shiny, lecherous eyes. So the kid can have a peek if he wants.

She shut it.

He pulled her to him.

“All that Ornamental money gave me a hard-on.”

Vogue

BECCA WAS EXCITED when the second A.D. called about the Look-Alikes wrap party. Rusty already knew about it. He said Grady and Cassandra were coming along.

There was no reason to mention the party to Viv. When it came to her capricious employer, Annie was always reminding Becca to “curb your enthusiasm” (Annie’s favorite show). Becca knew that Annie was right. Anything having to do with her being a professional look-alike, i.e., a loser, was fine — Viv seemed to revel in it. Anything else, particularly something that pulled her closer into the fraternity of the Business, was dicey. Whenever she auditioned for something — and auditions were few and far between — or even when she got called to be a Six Feet Under corpse, she was forced to lie to escape Viv’s punishing ways. Becca secretly crossed herself that first time when she blurted out that her mother was sick with breast cancer and sometimes needed to be driven to doctor’s appointments. Each time an “appointment” arose, Viv was so kind and sympathetic, going overboard to ask if there was any way she could help. Becca wanted to crawl into a hole and die when she learned that Viv’s mom had passed away from that very thing. She wished she could take it back. She knew that if the truth was ever found out, she would be fired and publicly vilified. Blackballed. Still, Becca didn’t feel as if she had any alternative — she’d come to Hollywood to be an actress, not an actress’s personal assistant. And Viv had made her feelings clear from the beginning. Becca could always quit. But even though the money was bad, working for Viv Wembley was invaluable in terms of experience and connections. Lots of what she did on a daily basis was boring, though other parts of the job, such as interacting with people she was in awe of and had only read about or seen in movies and on television, more than made up for the downside. (It sure beat going out on jobs for Elaine Jordache.) Viv was rough, but Gingher had exaggerated her bad traits. Gingher had an attitude problem herself. No one, not even Larry Levine, had heard from her since she supposedly left for New York. Maybe Viv got her thrown in jail. Becca was still half-worried that she would return from wherever and try to get her job back.

• • •

VIV ASKED BECCA to bring her a cigarette and brew a pot of decaf green tea. She had just begun Day One of the Vogue cover interview.

She hadn’t done any real press since the attack. Her publicist said Vogue would “only be lightly touching on Kit” and mostly focus on other things, “forward-moving things,” such as the usual rumor that Together was in its final season. The writer also told the publicist she was anxious to learn more about Viv’s just-signed costarring role in the new Nicole Holofcencer with the heartthrob Alf Lanier.

“I would like — and I know this is difficult — to briefly talk about the terrible, and very public events surrounding your fiancé.”

Viv felt blindsided, even though she knew it was coming. The journalist had merely wanted to get it out of the way, thinking that would be better all around.

“You know, that’s not something I’m really prepared to talk about,” she said reflexively, with an impenetrable smile.

Becca listened from around the corner. (I wonder if she’s prepared to talk about Alf fucking her in the ass while I watch.)

“I completely respect and appreciate that,” said the interviewer, realizing she’d made a misstep by blundering in. Now there was no turning back.

“And I know you’re trying to do your job,” Viv added, salving the sting. Showing class.

“Are you still engaged?”

She smiled again and took a yoga breath. “All I can say is… we’re both recovering from this — and I don’t want that to sound any way other than it sounds—”

“I totally understand,” said the writer, almost chummily. They’d entered the land of Soft Lob.

“—and that we’ve agreed for now to take things very slow. And that it’s hard to go forward in the way that we were, not only in a world where people can do the kind of… horrible thing they did to Kit — but in a world that’s incredibly…” She trailed off. A tear welled up, elegantly dispersed by a bent, Bulgari-sapphired knuckle. “But he’s very strong. He’s a Buddhist and was, I think, actually, much better prepared for something like this — if anyone could be — than the average person. He’s amazing that way. So he really has this amazing faith, and amazing path, something that I definitely sometimes lack. I have so much faith in him. So much faith that he will come through this.”

• • •

THAT NIGHT, BECCA, Annie, and Larry Levine went to a party with a Kiss cover band whose members were all midgets. It was funny for about a minute.

Afterward, they cruised the Chateau. Annie recognized Paul Schrader sitting on one of the epic couches of the cavernous living room — style lobby. Larry was excited, but Becca didn’t know who Paul Schrader was. They were a little drunk by then and went over to introduce themselves. Larry went on about Raging Bull and Annie said how much she loved Auto Focus. Mr. Schrader was cordial and told Becca that she looked like Drew Barrymore. Annie of course spewed that Becca was a professional look-alike, and Mr. Schrader seemed all interested in that. Mr. Schrader keenly referenced the Spike Jonze movie, in which Becca said she had a small part. Then Larry spewed that Becca’s boyfriend was in it too and that he was a Russell Crowe “body snatcher.” Mr. Schrader, himself a bit tipsy, really got off on that. Becca gave Larry a little frown while telling Mr. Schrader that she didn’t do look-alike work anymore and that she also worked for Viv Wembley as her personal assistant. Mr. Schrader said he knew Viv and that he was supposed to have done a movie with her and Kit Lightfoot that was a kind of sequel to American Gigolo. Larry said that he’d auditioned for the Aronofsky movie that Kit was about to star in before he got brained. Mr. Schrader knew all about the Aronofsky movie too and said that, as far as he was aware, the project had been completely scrapped. (They weren’t going to recast.) Annie said that Larry was written up in the L.A. Times a few months ago because he got a job at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf posing as a retarded person as research for his role in that very film. Mr. Schrader, who really did seem to know about everything that was happening in the world and especially in Hollywood, burst out laughing and said he actually remembered reading something about that on-line. He couldn’t stop chortling about Larry’s I Am Sam bit. Then Mr. Schrader’s friend returned from the rest room, and Becca instantly recognized him from the set of Six Feet Under—the “other Alan,” Alan Poul. (Alan Ball was the creator, and Alan Poul was, according to Mr. Ball, “the engine.”) On inebriated impulse, Becca spoke of her not entirely satisfying, semirecurring role as a cadaver, and Mr. Schrader, deeper in his cups, tried to cajole Alan into giving Becca a short monologue to deliver on the next show. “You’re wasting her talents,” he said. “Have the writers give the stiff a few lines — that’s a no-brainer. Doesn’t Alan Ball go for all that pretentious, surrealistic shit?” “No,” said Mr. Poul, gamely, “that would be you.” “You could have a dream sequence of nude, talking corpses,” suggested Mr. Schrader indomitably. “Only if we can insert Bob Crane,” said Mr. Poul.

Buddhism for Dummies

WHAT HAD HAPPENED to him?

An untold time, staggered by pain and fear. Drowning: cyclonic; then, a battering of seawalls in his head. The nurses said that for a while he kept asking if he’d been struck by a big blue bus.

There was the period he thought he’d been shot. That someone had abducted him, and stuffed him in a car trunk.

Then he thought he had a bad flu that migrated to his head.

• • •

CEDARS TIME: aside from medical staff, the Quiet People came to sit in chairs by the bed. It seemed like they came just to close their eyes. Nothing ever disturbed them. Others visited, familiar imprints — Agent, Friend, Fiancée — now he could summon their genealogies, but in Cedars Time, he could not. Impossible to trace ancestries. The only faces he knew were those of his parents. For a week, R.J. hovered before him, changing sheets and soiled bedclothes. She comforted him in the night when he cried out. So beautiful. R.J. told him she had learned to live with the cancer and that it was a stern but thoughtful companion who would never leave her like his father did. She said not to be angry with Burke for he was doing the best that he could. It was true: he had been so tender. Sometimes when he sauntered in with that Dad-aftershave and a horny word for the nurses (they loved it), Kit was so happy to see him that he burst into tears — Burke daubed his cheeks with a custom handkerchief reeking of piquant fatherhood regained. He left the handkerchief behind, and Kit held it through the night, burying his nose in the softness like a glue sniffer when he woke up terrified. His father grew fiercely protective; hospital security did a fine job, but it wasn’t enough. He hired a gentle giant, a bodyguard from Fiji whose life Burke had saved in South Vegas, to sit at the door and make sure no one trespassed because there were wily, fucked-up people who’d become distraught and obsessive since the incident, who meant well but were determined to lay hands on Kit for a healing. The nurses told Kit he was a famous star, and he took their word at face value even if it couldn’t be processed. A large plasma screen was installed in the Cedars suite, and Tula and Kit and the Quiet People (later to become the Shaved-Heads) watched DVDs. Burke fired an R.N. when he found out she’d brought in a stack of Kit’s movies. He watched one but didn’t recognize himself. Why was his father so mad.

• • •

HE COULDN’T REMEMBER anything that had happened in the months before the assault. (Albeit he never made much effort.) It took everything he had to be present and fight the panic of being entombed, synaptically stuck in a berserk new reality. Not until he was transferred to Valle Verde did Kit try to recall what life had once been like. In rehab, there was much more space and time. Ram Dass came, angel-faced and self-deprecating (Ram was an initialism for run at the mouth, he said). He told Kit to remember his Buddhist teacher, Gil Weiskopf Roshi — and Kit realized he’d been thinking of the guru all along, visualizing his face before him, whenever, as in Ram Dass’s phrase, he “surfed the silence.”

Ram Dass jovially, gently, literally guided him back to vipassana, got him focused on the breath beneath his nose, on body and sensation, dispersement of pain and dread. The pain and dread would arise and fall away, he said, the fear would come and go, though nothing ever came and nothing ever went, there was only the luminous fullness of the now. Vipassana, he said, was the gift that dissolved all makeshift borders. Ram Dass brought him a light and sound machine so Kit could watch the universe switch on, dancing beneath the goggles. He became a particle in the rainbow’s spectrum, a divine, lowly microbe. Now he remembered his first retreat, awakening at four in the morning, sixteen hours of vipassana a day for two weeks, remembered the silence and segregation of sexes, the prostrations, walking meditations, and mealtime prayers, cosmos in a teacup, all barriers transient, dissolved, impermanent. At Valle Verde his practice slowly returned, long preceding the recalled details, the linear landscape, of his life. Wasn’t that as it should be? Wasn’t the practice the only thing that was real?

He couldn’t remember meeting Ram Dass at Yoga House, yet his mind lit on the Getty boy: beneath goggles’ pyrotechnics, Kit saw himself in an elevator, rising… stepping from the gunmetal door that opened with a whoosh to the invalid’s master bedroom, then, as in 2001’s finale, standing at the foot of the bed where the ruined scion lay—himself now prone, Coptic prince dead on a sepulchre, though made not of stone: wizened and unborn, timeless and untimed.

Nakedly clothed in the great Self.

• • •

THE MONTHS PASSED, and he was not so imprisoned.

His body was stodgily effective and hadn’t lost much tone. He had gained weight because the cocktail of drugs made him ravenous. He could finally look in the mirror and court the being who stared back. He knew him a little more each day. He would know him intimately and be filled with compassion and resolve. Such was the power of his will.

• • •

(THE WILL THAT, to his celluloid image, had married and mesmerized billions of eyes.)

• • •

THE QUIET PEOPLE patiently tutored. They reasserted that the name of the Buddha meant “one who is awake,” and again and again offered up the Three Jewels — the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha. They said “Buddhism” did not exist. That Siddhartha Gautama was simply a man who saw things as they were: that to live was to suffer, that suffering was caused by attachment, that there was a cure for suffering and that cure was the Eightfold Path. They said bodily sensations gave rise to aversion and craving and that one could train oneself not to react to what inevitably arose then passed away. Over and over they told him that the difference between buddhas and sentient beings was that a buddha realized all phenomena were totally devoid of arising, dwelling, and ceasing, and had no true existence, whereas sentient beings believed all phenomena to be real and solid; a buddha understood that things and the world were nonexistent, whereas sentient beings believed that things and the world existed. None of this was new to him, but of course everything was new and infectiously, primally urgent. Kit had no choice but to passionately embrace the diamond-pointed construct, to dissolve in it, and in time he became grateful that his own temple had collapsed, it had after all been shoddily built, its upkeep wanting, its materials poor, already in shambles when it came down, he was grateful to near ecstasy that the foundation had remained and proved sound, grateful he’d long ago taken refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, and that for all his warped and lurid rendezvous, his sleazy affairs of self, the vows still held. At Valle Verde he took refuge again, a sacramental honeymooner with no choice but to rewed infinity, and all the mysterious rigors and ceremonies that honed consciousness, he could either do that or give himself to madness because his life had at last become nothing but what it always had been — a dream.

… Beginner’s Mind. Again and again, over and over they spoke of the irrefutable peace as prescribed by the Great Scientist, guiding Kit through the Four Sublime States and Four Vows, the Three Sufferings and Three Stains, the Three Poisons, Three Dharma Seals, Three Aspects, and Three Lesser Pains:

Not getting what one wants.

Meeting with what one does not want.

Being separated from loved ones and encountering enemies.

Mediation

A GRAY DAY at Department 11 of the Superior Court of Los Angeles, California, the Honorable Lewis P. Leacock presiding.

The flag had been dutifully faced; principles for which it stood, recognized; pledges and oaths, sworn. A phalanx of attorneys lined up before the judge, who busied himself with paperwork, ignoring them. An unhappy Burke Lightfoot sat eight rows back.

“I see there was a motion for sanctions and that motion was denied,” said the judge.

“Your Honor,” said an attorney, “as a matter of housekeeping, the court has bifurcated those original issues.”

“What happened to the one-oh-one?”

“The one-oh-one,” said another attorney, “has been compromised through the public administrator.”

“You’re saying the eleven-seven hundred is frivolous?”

“Your Honor, the petition was never consented to.”

“Then doesn’t it make sense to get all these things before one person?”

“Counsel is asking the court to put the remaining matters over to March,” said a third attorney.

“You’re not answering the question,” the judge said testily. He looked over his eyeglasses. “I repeat: doesn’t it make sense to get all of these things before one person?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” said one of them.

“We are simply asking that 070441 be consolidated into 070584,” said another.

The judge said to a fourth, “Do you have a problem with that?”

“No, Your Honor.”

He returned to his paper sifting. “Then 070441 will be consolidated into 070584. This looks like it’s ready for mediation. Let’s clear the notes. When would you like your hearing date, with the understanding it will not be continued again?”

“We’d like ninety days, Your Honor,” said the first.

“All right. How about the week of April the twenty-eighth?”

“Your Honor, I have a three-day trial on the thirtieth,” said another.

“How about the second week of May — May seventeenth?”

A third said, “Your Honor, I have a five-day trial on that date.”

“June the fifteenth.”

A fourth said, “Your Honor, I have a three-day trial on the sixteenth.”

There was some laughter from the spectators though not from Mr. Lightfoot.

Or the judge. “Whichever trial comes first takes precedence! There’s a lot of money involved in this case — I should think that would act as an incentive. See you on the fifteenth!”

• • •

AFTERWARD, THE CORRIDOR was choked with lawyers, marshals, pregnant women, and tattooed men.

Team Lightfoot stiffened slightly as Burke approached. “I thought you were petitioning to unfreeze the assets.”

“Court won’t do it, Burke. We’ve been through that.”

“They don’t seem to have a problem disbursing legal funds, Lou,” said Burke, sardonically. “For y’all. And what’s this shit about mediation?”

“We’re gonna give it a shot, Burke. Frankly, I think we’re better off settling than taking this to trial.”

“Jerry’s right,” said a cohort. “We’ll have a much better shot.”

“I don’t know how much longer I can hold out, boys!”

“We can’t advance you more monies, Burke.”

“What are we talkin’ about, guys?” said Burke, livid. “We’re sittin on sixty million dollars, kids, ten of that more or less liquid. And you’re tellin me the court won’t toss me a SAG royalties bone? Lou, I got expenses. I got a full-time freakin bodyguard.”

“He’s paid out of the estate, Burke.”

“Not the food he eats, gentlemen! Fill that loophole, will ya? I should have stock in fuckin Koo Koo Roo.”

“Nothing compels you to buy him dinner, Burke.”

“Right. Nothin but doin the right thing. Remember that? What a concept. Listen, Tula is the thin blue line between my boy and a very hostile fuckin world. I should have five Tulas but I cain’t afford it.” He took his foot off the pedal. “I should say fat blue line, cause he sure knows how to eat! Eats more than Dick Cheney.”

“Keep your receipts,” said the counsel. “And submit.”

“Keep a log of every expense.”

“Have you arranged for the tutor?” asked a cocounsel.

“I’m settin it up.”

“Don’t drag your feet on that,” said the other. “If we do wind up going to trial, it has to look good in terms of provision of care.”

“If anyone thinks they can do a better job then I have, they’re welcome to try. I can’t believe this is even up for grabs! I’m his daddy. It’s a slam fucking dunk! Listen, kids: it’s a hardship.” He could see how his personality grated on them, but what could he do? He would rim their greedy assholes if that’d help loosen up some funds. “And I know that you know that. And you guys are doin a helluva job. So don’t think I’m not grateful. I know it’s all going to work out in the end. At least I sure fucking hope so. Cause I am sure as hell not going to stand by and watch my son’s money handed over to the state. Or Mr. William Morris or whomever. But you gotta know that once we’re past the established five-block radius, we are fair fucking media game. The police do a pretty good job and the neighbors have been great — though who knows how long that’s gonna last — but I’m tellin ya, it’s like living in a serious cocksucking fishbowl over there! Hell, I can’t even conduct a romantic life! Fellas! C’mon! What good does Viagra do if you don’t have the opportunity for usage? The paparazzi, by the way — in case you didn’t know — are now flying choppers over my motherloving airspace! And that’s illegal. So put yourself in my Nikes and see how long you’d last. Kit’s barely been out of house—as his guardian, I can’t risk having a telephoto of him not looking his GQ best ending up in some tabloid.” He paused, inhaling martyrdom. “I’m tellin you, kids, I am really in the trenches here. Is the court aware of that?”

“Gotta tough it out, Burke,” said the attorney, beginning a slow retreat down the hall. “There’s light at the end of the tunnel.”

“At the end of my asshole maybe.”

Counsel fled, en masse.

“But not at the end of yours,” said Burke to himself. “Fuck it. We’ll make do until the ship comes in.” He called after them: “My son’s in great shape — he’s fit and he’s feisty and he’s got a daddy who loves him. Tell that to the fucking mediator!”

Transference

THERE WEREN’T ANY guards at the Benedict Canyon estate. The gate was flung open to a cadre of indifferent gardeners, who came and went, wrestling with hoses and foliage. Lisanne strode in, businesslike. No one paid attention.

She shivered again with the same feeling she’d had at the Riverside house — that somehow she belonged — except this time, she felt the chill of his absence. The place seemed frozen in time, like an obscure, well-funded theosophical foundation or museum of atrocities committed in past or even future centuries — or the temple where a mythic hero, wounded in battle, had returned to die. Even now, within sight of the flat obsidian column of infinity pool and dark wood cope of the famous zendo in its grove of eucalyptuses, there was blood, there was blood, bone, and death, it hung in the air like gas, oppressively colorless and odorless, and if one could properly read the signs, one might have translated all the terrible things that had manifested: miscarriages and mayhem, and the messy, fragrant anarchy of impermanence.

She stared through the windows, hoping to see the Sotheby’s Buddha, imagining Kit home again, in a beautiful robe of Thai silk, having bargained her life away for such an impossibility, brokering a deal with Tara (born of tears shed over the sufferings of sentient beings) for his health and sanctity to be returned — the provisions of the contract being that he would never know of Lisanne’s sacrifice, would never even have a thought of her again (which she anyway assumed he hadn’t, not a proper thought anyway, since the day they met in the trailer), because she had argued nobly, selflessly for the monstrous event to be forever expunged from history and memory, and her wish had been granted, the assault had never occurred, this was the agreement that Tara, daughter of Avalokiteshvara, had consented to and so decreed. All that Lisanne had asked was that she be allowed to see him one last time in his habitat, vital and free from worry, restored to grace before Tara — whose face gathers one hundred autumn full moons, who blazes with the sparkling light of a thousand stars, who dwells amid garlands and completely delights her entourage — carried Lisanne off to the Realm of Hungry Ghosts.

Of a sudden, it came: she knew what she would do. The omen was that she hadn’t glimpsed the Sotheby’s Buddha — if it was Lisanne’s to give, the fates would have arranged for it to have been prominently displayed for her eyes to see. No. She would pass on to Burke Lightfoot what was already hers — the Supreme Bliss-Wheel Integration Buddha that Philip gave her. She felt her impulse instantly sanctified by the Source. The giving of the Supreme Bliss-Wheel Integration Buddha would create a space of True Love, and in that space, Kit’s healing could finally begin. Just as the death of Viv’s unborn child had created a space for Siddhama, so would the offering of the Bliss-Wheel Buddha create a space for metta, the loving-kindness that would heal all things. And after the healing, everyone — Kit, Lisanne, Siddhama — would return to Source. She was determined not to make the same error as the student monk. She would not mistake Mu for “no.”

As she walked out the gate, a gardener caught her eye and smiled with beautiful knowingness. She took that as another sign that her instincts were sanctified. Still, she would need to prepare the father; simply bringing the Buddha unannounced on her next day of Riverside service would be presumptuous. Best to be humble. Her pulse and step quickened. She would ring Mr. Lightfoot up and tell him she had a gift that was certain to bring the house — and his son — great peace and prosperity.

Turbulence

TIFF PROMISED DANIELLE Steel he would come to San Francisco for the Star Ball, a benefit for the Nick Traina Foundation, a trust named after her late son. When Philip heard about it, he suggested they fly up on his jet. (Lisanne was shocked to learn Philip even had a jet.) A high-end bunch tagged along: Clive Davis and Quincy Jones, Sharon Stone and a friend, Robin Williams, Steve Bing, and Mattie’s friends Rita Wilson and Tracey Ullman. When Mattie had to cancel over some kind of dental problem, Lisanne became convinced it was a harbinger that the plane was going to crash.

Until takeoff, she hadn’t dwelled on her fear. But just as they began the steep ascent, she said to herself, What have I done? Tucking her head into Roslynn’s shoulder, she gripped the poor woman’s arm in viselike panic. Lisanne thought of those Quecreek coal miners and how much better off they were because even though the water was rising to their chins they could still be rescued, whereas no one in this cave would have the faintest glimmer of a chance. Then she thought of that skydiving woman she read about in People whose parachute had failed. The woman plunked straight down onto a hill of red ants and somehow survived. (At least she was already falling outside the plane, a detail that now seemed positively merciful.) Her descent had probably been slowed by the unopened chute, whereas Lisanne was locked inside the unforgiving crypt of fuselage and wouldn’t be free until an infinitesimal remnant of her charred cells commingled with rocky mountain or gulfstream or wherever it was they’d be blown to. Roslynn kindly stroked her head and said the usual bromide about little jets being safer than big commercial ones, and it sounded like the saddest, most fantastic lie anyone ever told — pure chicanery. The soothing pillow talk of demons when dying children lay their heads down to final rest.

Lisanne set her right hand atop her left, palms up, and closed her eyes. She’d learned a lot from Buddhist classes and workshops, and from her readings too, and thought now might be a good time to put some of it to use. She tried focusing on the breath at her nostrils but only managed to fixate on the rush and precipitation of freezing air outside the paper-thin winged missile — a skittish, sacrificial dance of crazy gusts, currents, and wind shear that teased at flawed engines, themselves nearly spent. The low thunder of turbines reminded her of the diabolically codified sounds described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

She tensed, bringing herself back with near-violence to the meditation that a friend had guided her through while on lunch break at the Santa Monica Zen Center: she struggled to visualize a tiny rainbow in her heart-center. Lisanne made the rainbow expand while envisioning the dissolution of all fear in her body, all disease, all obstacles. As in the Temescal Canyon metta workshop, she tried to imagine herself becoming abstract, losing human form until she was a lamp whose light emanated to all beings, transmuting gross, unmindful, mulish nature into pure awareness, the Pure Land. Why should she cling to this life? The Buddha advised to rid oneself of the defilement of clinging and attachment, but losing Kit and Siddhama would be insurmountable, far worse than losing the Buddha himself. Maybe everything — mind, heart, void — would have to be murdered. True sages were always saying “Kill the Buddha!” but she didn’t think that meant literally. Besides, she didn’t enjoy a phrase like that; it was antithetical to her true nature. Maybe, thought Lisanne, it was antithetical to her true nature to be liberated. If that were so, than nothing mattered anyway.

A bump of turbulence made her drop the thread. She was panting now, and Roslynn pried loose her grip. Lisanne focused on the others. Sharon and her friend were having a quiet moment, like they were at some romantic beach restaurant. He held her hand and stared out the window. A stewardess served drinks to the Clive-Tiff-Bing-Quincy clique. Q and Bing were laughing at something Clive had said. Q and Bing seemed to laugh an awful lot at just about anything.

Philip, Rita, and Tracey shrieked over some bit of business that Robin was up to. The comedian was spritzing about his good friend Lance Armstrong and the love-hate relationship riders had with their bicycle seats. He was in the middle of a limp-wristed riff on pinched gonads and ass cancer when Tracey, apropos of nothing, began singing dirty lyrics from the Jerry Springer opera her husband produced. She stopped in mid-aria to say that she woke up that morning with crop circles carved in her bush. She said the same thing happened to Meg Ryan, then did an eerie impersonation of Meg calling her up on the phone to tell her about the “situation.” Q overheard the last bit and totally lost it. Then Bing lost it again, then Rita and Sharon and Philip, in that hee-haw way Philip had of laughing that drove Lisanne up the wall — in the grip of her terror, she still had the energy to hate him for not having come over to check up on her, for pretending not to notice something was wrong. Philip was of that emotional school that taught, Ignore loved ones in distress.

There was a jolt and the plane dipped. Sharon woofed and Robin Three Stooges woo-woo-wooed and Tracey mimed an Edvard Munch while Rita, Bing, and Philip split a gut. Clive and Q suddenly began to shoptalk, drinking their drinks, cool as can be. Lisanne was convinced that if the plane had somersaulted, no one would have cared in the slightest. Everyone was rich and celebrated and impervious; everyone had logged God knew how many millions of miles on all manner of rickety aircraft without the faintest whiff of anxiety; everyone was blessed and they knew it. Lisanne tried her rainbow vipassana again, but as the jet chop-surfed jagged currents, she felt something collapse like scaffolding within. That Tibetan Book blackness rolled toward her like a carpet of smoldering asphalt, and try as she might she couldn’t remember anything of the teachings except the parts about the Wrathful Bloodthirsty Visions and the homeless souls gathering during intercourse at the genitals of a couple like flies on a piece of meat—

“How’s our girl doin?” asked Philip. Finally.

“She’s going to be fine,” said Roslynn, herself shaken by the force of Lisanne’s naked agonies.

Philip took a closer look. “Wow. We should have given her a Xanax.”

“I have Ambien,” said Roslynn. “But by the time it kicks in, we’ll be on the ground.”

“I think you should give it to her.” Philip stroked Lisanne’s head and said, “She’ll be fine.”

“Oh Jesus,” said Roslynn.

She’d been smelling something, and as she got up for the pills, she saw that Lisanne’s seat was soaked in urine. There were other smells too, and she quickly went into nurse mode, telling Philip to grab some blankets. A steward came with a pile, and after he returned with towels, Rosylnn dismissed him with a curt nod. Philip lifted his girlfriend, and Roslynn shoved a towel then a blanket under her to sop it up. She put a blanket on the floor beneath Lisanne’s stocking feet, covering her up with a third. Sharon, Rita, and Tracey came over and, once they understood what was happening, tried to comfort. Sharon stroked Lisanne’s head, and Rita said, “Poor thing, poor baby,” while Tracey said her daughter Mabel hated flying too, and that the turbulence they’d just been through was really nothing, nothing at all, they all said they’d been in a hundred times worse. Tiff broke away from Bing, Q, and Sharon’s friend, joining Philip and the ladies. He started talking about a bad flight he once had into Aspen, but Roslynn twitched her eyebrows at him to stop. Philip made Lisanne swallow a pill, and then the choppiness got bad enough that the pilot told everyone to strap themselves in.

Swathed in blankets, sitting on a cushion of terry cloth, Lisanne made a game of the speed in which she told the shit to leave her body. She nudged the feces back and forth before expelling it with slow, determined gallantry, envisioning the putrescence first as dark clouds of turbulence, then as disease and fear, finally transforming to rainbow light. In the relative silence that ensued (born not of the rough ride, but of the stymied group’s concern for Lisanne), she recalled the noble practice of cleaning Kit’s toilets and the peace it had bestowed and made the entreaty and promise that she would take formal refuge in the vows if only the Source and Oneness would now spare her, if only the Source and Oneness would let her return to Riverside for her sacred chores again, if only the Source and Oneness would allow her to live long enough to give her man the conciliatory gift of the Supreme Bliss-Wheel Integration Replacement Buddha.

Special Needs

BURKE WORE A chef’s hat and apron. Tula stood at the grill, in uniform: gargantuan three-piece C & R Clothiers relic and equally outsize grin. With fierce concentration, Kit Lightfoot, human pendulum, stood barefoot on the leather swing and propulsed a hair-raising arc. He was the biggest swing daredevil that Ulysses S. Grant or any other school had ever seen. No butterflies; no fear. Cela remembered watching when she was a girl, afraid he would fly off into space and shatter himself on the blacktop. Her heart used to pound, and there was something sexy about the pounding, even though at the time, she wasn’t sure what those kinds of feelings meant.

• • •

BURKE WAS LOADED. He went off on Cela about some shit or other while she did the dishes. Cela said she didn’t even know why she was doing the dishes because they mostly used plastic plates. She was loaded too and shouted back. Tula went to the car and read Robert Ludlum, which seemed to be the only thing he ever did read, same thick paperback, week in, week out. (When he finished, he’d just start over again.) Burke went out to the yard and stripped and sat naked in the pool with a bottle of Jack. Kit curled up on the grungy sofa and watched himself on an E! bio.

• • •

TULA STRETCHED HIS legs and smoked. Squatted down to sponge-soak the bumper sticker that someone had inexplicably gonzoed him with: MY KIDS THINK I’M AN ATM.

Razored it off.

• • •

KIT SAT IN PJ’S at the end of the bed.

Walked to the window and stared at the moon; heard a moan.

Padded through the dark hall toward his father’s room. Stood there at the open door. Burke’s bedside lamp was on. He was fucking Cela. She was on her stomach. He sensed Kit’s presence, swiveling his neck to stare at his son. They looked at each other awhile before Burke went back to his business. Kit fished out his cock and started to rub. He rubbed until he came, then ran to the living room and turned on the TV, ashamed. Cried and rocked and ate an entire bag of chips before getting engrossed in an old CSI.

The Standard Wrap

RUSTY AND BECCA waited in the vaulted living room. There was a shindig going on, and Rusty thought they’d forgotten about the wrap party. Then Grady popped his head in and said a limo was coming and that Rusty and Becca should just smoke a doobie and chill.

There was always some kind of happening on Mulholland. Cassandra usually had one or two QuestraWorld interns wandering around with a DV cam recording the nefarious goings-on for a work-in-progress prototype of “Been There, Dunsmore.” You had to watch your behavior.

“Hope they don’t do anything too weird,” said Becca, once they were more or less alone again. “Especially in front of Spike.”

“Like what?” said Rusty.

“Like embarrassing. Sometimes Grady and Cass can just be… really weird. Haven’t you noticed?”

Rusty laughed, coughing out weedsmoke.

They wandered outside, where Dr. Thom Janowicz held court by the pool. He’d met the Dunsmores through Grady’s lawyer, Ludmilla Vesper-Weintraub. Ludmilla sent a lot of clients Thom’s way, including those who had reaped windfalls from the city by settling wrongful arrest or racial profiling suits. It was Ms. Vesper-Weintraub’s feeling that having a ton of money dumped on you could be a hardship in itself; the golden downtrodden needed all the help they could get. Thom was an old college friend and someone she prized for easily relating to people of all colors and income strata. Aside from his workshops on SWS (sudden wealth syndrome), Dr. J was a novice screenwriter, and Ludmilla thought that he and the Dunsmores would make a nice fit. She was right. With his flair for storytelling and winning disposition, the amiable raconteur in horn-rims and tweed was already a regular in various “Been There, Dunsmore” episodes that Cassandra cobbled together on Final Cut Pro. Dr. J was also engaged to write a movie for QuestraWorld, for which, not being a member of the WGA, he’d been generously paid guild minimum.

Rusty wasn’t thrilled to hear that a wanna-be like Dr. J was already on the Dunsmore payroll. He was nearly finished with his own screenplay — they knew as much — and no one had offered him a goddamn thing. Grady countered that was because Rusty’s script predated the incorporation of QuestraWorld; he admitted having worked on it, at least in his head anyway, for years. Grady said that he still thought of Rusty’s “spec” as a QuestraWorld project, regardless. Well that’s good, said Rusty, peevishly. Keep thinkin. Think away. Have big ol’ happy thoughts. Because Rusty said that maybe he’d just take his script elsewhere. Fine, said Grady. Rock on. Prob’ly plenty of folks out there who love unfinished scripts. Shit, said Grady, you don’t even have a title. The fuck I don’t, said Rusty. Then I’d like to hear it, said Grady. Rusty got a far-off, suavely proprietary look in his eye and said, Gonna call it “To Kill a Unicorn.” Grady sat there nodding his head, quiet. I like it, said Grady. I like that. Shit, I really like that. Out from nowhere, in the kitchen somewhere, Cassandra shouted, Somebody already used that title. She said she saw a biography about Dorothy Stratten on the E! channel and that somebody already used that title in a book. About Dorothy and her murder. Grady said, So the fuck what, I like it. Hell, it’s good enough to use again. You can’t do that, said Cassandra. Bullshit, said Grady. You can’t copyright a title. Ask our lawyer. Anybody knows that. Oh yeah? said Cassandra. Then let’s you and me write a script and call it Star Wars, she said. That’s what we’ll call Rusty’s script, she said, laughing. Rusty said sagely, That book about Dorothy Stratten was called The Killing of the Unicorn. Mine’s called “To Kill a Unicorn.” See? said Grady. Know-it-all. See? Man knows his shit. Man done researched. Man knows all the titles out there. Knowledge is fucking power! Cassandra said, Whatever. But I still think it sounds like To Kill a Mockingbird. Yeah, snapped Grady, only it’s “To Kill a Fucking Unicorn,” which is not a fucking mockingbird, unless a mockingbird has a fucking horn in its head, which it doesn’t, last time I looked. You ain’t never even looked at a mockingbird, said Cassandra. Ain’t never even seen one. Yeah, well you’re gonna see one in a minute goin tweet tweet tweet with my fucking fist like a horn in your head if you don’t shut the fuck up. Fuckin hag. He turned to Rusty and said, I like it, man, I do. It rocks. You got the gift, man. You got it. Always knew you did. Then Grady said that Questra-World should have “first option,” and Rusty parried that people usually had to pay for first option. Just like you’re paying Dr. Phil. Oops, I mean Dr. J. Dr. J’s the man, said Grady. Gonna win hisself an Academy Award. They went on like that, having a friendly go at each other, jousting their unicorn horns.

Becca had been telling Rusty for months that she wanted to read the script, but he always said he wasn’t ready. She never really saw him working on it. He kept saying she could see it soon, and she thought maybe he was planning to show it to Spike. Whenever Grady or anyone asked what the script was about all Rusty would say was it was a murder mystery that took place among horse trainers. Rusty used to work a lot around stables, at least he said he did anyway. On the sly, Grady told Becca, “You cain’t trust to believe half the shit come out that boy’s pretty mouth.” But Grady liked the whole racetrack thing. Ever since Cassandra told him about the Spider-Man kid starring in Seabiscuit, Grady thought that horse and jockey stories, or anything having to do with the track, were a sure bet. (Rusty said his movie wasn’t gonna be “no sobby, suckass Seabiscuit turd.”) He became more and more convinced that Look-Alikes was going to make Rusty Goodson a star and incessantly spoke to Cassandra about drawing up a contract to lock their homeboy into a QuestraWorld film at a bargain basement price. Grady read in The Hollywood Reporter about how even Kirsten Dunst’s hotshot agents got stuck honoring some craphouse deal she’d made with a studio way back when, before Spider-Man spun its billion-dollar web worldwide — if Rusty got hot off of Look-Alikes, QuestraWorld should already have him in the bag. Cassandra wouldn’t bite. She was more focused on the new baby than on Rusty’s screenplay anyhow. Focused on the reality show and managing their money. She loved getting loaded and sucking Rusty’s dick in a group thing, but she’d be damned if she was going to shell out cash for something that wasn’t even real. She pissed Grady off, but he kind of loved her for that.

• • •

THE WRAP PARTY was on the roof of the Standard. There were so many stars, it seemed more like a premiere. Being downtown and high up like that was such a different perspective, skyscape-wise. Becca and Cassandra were stoned and kept pretending they were in Toronto or Vancouver, places they’d never even been. When her mom came, Becca for sure wanted to bring her there for cocktails.

The costume ladies and makeup girls and all the funky women that Becca saw hauling equipment during the shoot were dressed to the nines, showing lots of skin. Wrap parties were like that — they were all about sex, and majorly blowing out the pipes. Celebrities were wraparound because Spike and Sofia knew everyone and everyone wanted to know them too.

The look-alikes showed up in full force: her friend the Barbra, the Cameron and a Cher, the Billy Bob, the Pope and a James Gandolfini, a Mike Myers, a Reese, the Benicio and the Cusack, and of course Becca and Rusty. Whenever an official shutterbug flashed a photo of him Rusty knew (even though he was hands-down the best “specialty” actor, and had the biggest role) that attention was being paid because of his look-alike status, and not his own merit. She saw that he was ashamed. He said to her that being a look-alike was like being a porn star. You could never escape your caste: Untouchable.

Becca disagreed, though not to his face. She didn’t mind having her picture taken at all. After a few drinks, she got the courage to say hello to Spike and Sofia. They were always so courtly, especially Sofia — just folks. Mrs. Coppola-Jonze immediately said, in her sweet, disingenuous way, “Oh, Drew’s in Turkey,” as if Becca and Drew were officially linked. Sofia asked how things were going with her boss. Becca said fine, and Sofia asked if Viv was coming to the party. Becca got a shiver because that was something she hadn’t thought of — that Viv had been invited and would probably show. (Suddenly, it seemed superlikely.) Becca didn’t want to run into her, fearing that a whole petty cycle of hassles would be set in motion. Even if Viv acted nice, she knew there’d be hell to pay during the workweek.

Sofia introduced her to Charlie Kaufman. (They had already met, once at the Chateau, and a few times on the set.) The writer was with a woman he said had done the novelization of the Ethan Hawke — Gwyneth Paltrow movie Great Expectations. Charlie kept saying how great it was that his friend had “novelized Dickens,” but Becca felt kind of bad because she didn’t get it. Sofia kept smiling in that mysterious way; you could never figure out what she was thinking, or, for that matter, Spike either, and Becca was always on guard because as far as she was concerned being around either one of them was like an audition for one of their future films.

She ran into the second A.D., and they made out in one of the crazily decorated hotel guest rooms (in addition to the roof, a whole floor had been consigned). The second said that Drew was vacationing in Turkey before returning to work on A Confederacy of Dunces. Becca said Sofia already told her that, then went back to the roof to find Rusty. That was when she saw Cassandra in midconversation, wildly gesticulating before Viv Wembley and Alf Lanier. Becca’s heart went straight to her throat. That was another thing she stupidly hadn’t considered — that the Dunsmores, knowing she worked for Viv, would of course approach the television star and act like the shameless freaks that they were.

I am fucked, she said to herself with a carefree shrug.

Reentry

ROSLYNN BABY-SAT her at the Fairmont while the others went to the Star Ball. There had been urgings among the group that she be hospital-assessed — her behavior after landing continued to be worrisome — but Lisanne always emerged from cloaked silences to resist deftly and cogently, against their better judgment. Mattie and Phil were from San Mateo, so a doctor they knew dropped by the suite to give Lisanne something to settle her. He told Philip and the Loewensteins that he wasn’t sure what was going on but that some sort of “abreaction” should probably be ruled out. Not really his area.

On Monday, they sent her home in a Town Car. She asked the driver to take the coastal route. She loved Carmel and Big Sur. They stopped at coffee shops, and ate club sandwiches and fries.

From her backseat nest, Lisanne caught up on newspapers and magazines. One of the ads featured a gorgeous, buff young black girl.

Shanté puts all kinds of heat on the world’s torturers. And then she hits the gym. Shanté is a member of Amnesty International. Every month, Shanté sends e-mails to world leaders, urging them to stop torturing and killing the prisoners in their jails.

Torturers worldwide wish they never heard of Shanté Smalls.

She read an article in The New York Times about people who have recurrent infections acquired in hospitals, mostly from health-care workers who neglected to wash their hands. The infections were of the type that could no longer be cured by antibiotics. One of the sick persons was an older woman whose sternum had been eaten away by bacteria, and now whenever she went for a drive she had to wear a bulletproof vest because if she got in an accident her chest would be crushed by the air bag. Another article was about a little Jewish girl who was snatched from her crib and killed by a black bear in the Catskills. On the next page was a financial ad with the head of a big black bear staring out. “Are you managing the bear?” read the copy. “Or is the bear managing you?”

• • •

LISANNE VISITED THE Bel-Air home office of Dr. Calliope Krohn-Markowitz, Holocaust survivor and legendary shrink to the stars. Roslynn Loewenstein, a client for years, had arranged it.

“Did you ever lose control like that before?”

“You mean,” said Lisanne, embarrassed, “on the plane?”

“Yes.”

She shook her head.

“Were you a bed wetter, Lisanne?”

Again, a modest shake of the head.

“You know, all kinds of things happen — to our bodies — when we fear for our lives. When that fear is genuine. Right now, there’s a disconnect. Have you heard of a ‘false positive’? When a test comes back positive but it’s actually negative? Well, right now I think you’re dealing with lots of false positives. You’ve got to replace the faulty wiring, so to speak. I can certainly help you with that.”

“How?” She hadn’t understood a word of what the woman had said.

“There are a number of ways,” said Calliope, assuredly.

“Drugs?”

“Medication is one avenue. In that regard, I’d like you to see a friend of mine, a very talented psychopharmacologist.”

“Can’t you give me something?”

“I don’t prescribe.” She paused. “We can also try hypnosis. I’ve had phenomenal results. I like a multidirectional approach. We can do things on a practical plane, no pun intended! There’s a wonderful class — I think they have one right here at LAX, we’ll check the Internet — to overcome flying phobias. I’ve known many, many people who’ve taken that course and now fly like banshees.”

“I know one way to get over my fear.”

“What’s that?”

“Not fly,” said Lisanne, smiling.

“That is a solution,” said Calliope, pleased that her patient had lightened up. “I won’t even say it’s not valid. We all make choices; that is our prerogative. We do what is best for us. To survive. But I think, Lisanne, that with you there are some other issues. What we call a constellation. Your crisis on the plane might be an indicator that it’s time you faced some of those issues, head-on. I want you to visit my friend — and think about what we spoke of today. If you decide you’d like to come back, then we can do some exploring.”

Cadillac Escapade

TULA PULLED THE Escalade out of the drive. To the casual observer, he was alone.

“OK, keep hide now!” he said.

“This is too goddamn weird!” said Kit excitedly from the back.

They were under a Mexican blanket; he smelled Cela’s warm, giggly exhalations. It brought him all the way back to their preteen make-out sessions.

“Kit, it was your idea!” she said.

“Yeah,” he said, cockily. “You’re fuckin right. Time to go to the fuckin mall! Get E! channel more shit for their documental!”

“You are such a wack job,” she said, tweaking his rib cage. “You are such a wacky goofball.”

He squirmed and spasmed at the tickle, then put a thumb in her side, sending her into contortions. Tula gravely shushed as they approached the guard at the barricade. Then Cela shushed Kit, clenching his fingers to neutralize him. It was all so sexy. As the car slowed they grew seriously still and hot-breathed, like children during the critical part of a game.

The rent-a-cop waved Tula through. They rolled past the crowd of fans, photogs, and media trucks.

Once they were in the clear, Kit started singing, “Tommy, can you hear me?” He replaced Tommy with Tula, and Cela had a fresh conniption.

A rogue paparazzo grew suspicious. He ducked under the everpresent WE LOVE YOU GET WELL SOON banner and broke away, discreetly slipping into a Corolla. He accelerated and drew closer. When Kit lifted his head to take a peek at the world, the freelancer saw him and gave spirited chase. Tula muttered Fijian expletives then upshifted into Bad Boys movie maneuvers. The bodyguard, extracautious because his charges were unsecured, reveled in finally being able to do what he was paid for.

Rubber was peeled; corners sharply taken; horns honked; accidents barely averted. Kit and Cela went gleefully bonkers, cheering Tula on. The driver was proficient, hyperconcentrated and adrenalized, his sweaty, scarily resolute, block-headed, thick-necked countenance thrilling them to no end. Then it was over as unexpectedly as it had begun — the paparazzo’s car flipping onto its back like a bug.

“Oh my God,” said Cela, aghast, looking back. “Do you think he’s hurt?”

Tula slowed, and peered in the rearview. The Corolla had toppled again in slo-mo, absurdly righting itself. Its owner stared ahead in a daze.

“No,” he assessed. “Just shook up.”

“Good job!” said Kit. “Good job, Odd Job!”

“Should we go back?” asked Cela.

“No!” said Tula. “No go back! Not our fault!”

“Girl,” said Kit, jokily somber. “You can’t go home again.”

“He just shook up,” said Tula, with a parting glance before motoring on. A pedestrian helped the pursuer from his car; he was already walking under his own power.

Kit put on an Elvis-sneer, singing, “All shook up! Ooh hoo hoo. Ooh hoo. Ay yeah!”

Everyone — even Tula — cracked up.

• • •

THROUGH THE COLD bright Riverside Galleria, wide-eyed.

Holding hands — delirious fugitives.

Kit, unchained. Mall, uncrowded.

The occasional look of stunned recognition from passersby cum well-wishers.

“Wow wow wow!” yelps Kit.

The freedom of it. The old feelings of it.

The spatial newness. Nowness. Wowness.

“Oh my God, that chase,” says Cela. “That was so amazing.”

“Like Steve McQueen!” says Kit. “What that movie? Bullitt.”

“Burke is gonna have a flying shitfit,” she says, slightly paranoid. “He’s gonna kick our ass.”

“I will motherfucking kick his fucking ass!” shouts Kit.

Cela shushes his too public swagger. “Can you please, like, lower the volume?”

“Oh shit, man! I am fucking hungry.”

“OK, Bullitt, what do you want to eat?”

Pause. Then: “Everybody!”

They laugh. A gawking schoolgirl approaches.

“Excuse me, but are you Kit Lightfoot?”

“Steve McQueen!” says Kit.

She turns to Cela while her friends hover nearby.

Awkwardly: “Is he Kit Lightfoot?”

“Yeah,” offers Kit as Cela nods. “The one and only.”

“Oh my God!” says the girl, taking a few steps back. “It is him, it’s him…”

The clique rushes over in pleated parochial school uniforms, waists turned faddishly down to show hipbone. Tula puffs up, bodyguardlike. Needless but endearing — still in hero mode.

“Can we get an autograph?”

“Do you have a pen?” asks Cela.

They dip into North Face — Powerpuff backpacks.

“He can sign my arm,” says the girl, proffering a Sharpie.

“He can sign my leg!” says another.

“Is he retarded?” asks one of Cela.

“Girls,” Cela cautions. “Be nice.”

Kit signs an arm while saying, “Not retarded. Just a little… fucked up.”

“He sounds retarded,” says a girl, not quite sotto.

Her friend examines the signature like it’s a rash and says, “Oh my God, what does it say?”

The other takes a look and says: “It’s like a scrawl—”

“I said, Be fuckin nice,” says Cela. “You’re being rude.”

The girls say reprimanded thank-yous, then dash off. When they’re far enough away, they break into laughter.

“Little cunts,” says Cela.

“It’s OK,” says Kit thoughtfully. Then, with a nasty-assed grin: “They make me horny.”

• • •

INSIDE BLOCKBUSTER NOW.

Rushing down aisles, exhilarated, nature boy in the video forest. (A very strange enchanted boy.) Touching the hard, hollow, garish boxes, wide-eyed, tactile, inhaling collective memory of film. The store is huge and empty, except for clerks, discursively restocking.

“I was a movie star!” he shouts, thumping his chest like Tarzan.

“You still are,” says Cela. “You’re still the biggest star on the planet, OK?”

He ponders then says, matter-of-fact, “OK.” The effect is unintendedly droll. “We should get popcorn.” They walk past the new releases wall. (Like a 99 cent store display.) He asks, “What movies was I in?”

Before she can answer, a Norman Rockwell geek with chin acne enters their frame.

“Excuse me — are you Kit Lightfoot?”

(Cela braces herself. Tula puffs up.)

“Yes, I am!”

“I knew it! I put on World”—there, suddenly, it is, on all hanging monitors, World Without End, the famous scene at Children’s Hospital where Kit and Cameron Diaz erupt in dance, the crippled kids following suit, to Supertramp’s “Logical Song”—“and I just wanted to tell you what a great — how amazing I think you are as an actor and as a person.”

(Cela sighs with audible relief.)

“Thank you.”

“And what an honor it is to have you in our store.”

“Thank you.” A daub of Elvis again: “Thankyouverymuch.”

A little daub’ll do ya—

“I just want you to know that everyone in Riverside, everyone in the world is pulling for you.”

(Cela, nearly in tears. On her period. Quick to cry.)

“Thankyouverymuch.”

“May I show you the Kit Lightfoot section?” he asks, as if coaxing a girl at cotillion to dance. (Includes the others in what he says next.)

“We have a whole Kit Lightfoot section — I organized it myself.”

“I would like some popcorn.”

“You can have all the popcorn you like, sir!”

By now, a few other employees curiously make their way toward the little group.

The clerk turns to Cela.

“Think he’d mind signing a a few posters?”

“Ask him,” says Cela, proudly. Feeling like the missus.

True Confessions

MOTHER AND CHILD dropped in unannounced to the Sunset Boulevard penthouse suite.

Lisanne felt bad because she never thanked her old boss for his kindnesses in those first few months she and Siddhama were home alone. (He had continued to pay her salary.) In fact, she’d never thanked him at all — through the years, he’d been stand-up and generous to a fault. It was true she had made herself indispensable, but it was Reggie, with his sunny, contagious confidence, who, long ago, had so generously opened the door, helping Lisanne to overcome her initial insecurities. He was startled by the hidden pregnancy but, like a true gentleman, withheld judgment. She would have been lost without his emotional support after her baby came into the world.

They hadn’t spoken since she moved to Rustic Canyon, and the fact that the life-saving arrangement with Philip came about under the auspices of Tiff, Reggie’s client, made it even worse. She felt so ungrateful, but nothing could have been further from the truth — now was the time to face him, to reveal all. Reggie Marck, if anyone, should be privy to the certain details of the child’s parentage.

He held the baby in his arms.

She said: “I wanted to tell you that this is the son of Kit Lightfoot.”

“OK,” he said, smiling. Waiting for the punch line.

“And I wanted to give you the supramundane Secret Thatness offerings.” She knelt upon the ground and opened her blouse. He stood there holding the child, looking down at her. “Here is my mustard seed, my scoops of barley and clarified buttered bread, here are my nipples large as the purplebruised toes of homeless children. I, Vajrayogini, generate the celestial mansion with this wide and brazen cunt. Look! at the cervical fire of my stink-necklace, looped through 700 dew-fresh skulls. O, I am asking you to disarm! For these are the weapons of mass instruction. I am the blue dakini, door of membranes and remembrance, the green PHA HA. Let us kneel on the carpet of the cathedral like pilgrims humbled by disaster — O Reggie, join me now! Offer and observe the materials to be burned in bodhi-wood! OM OM OM SARVA PHA PHA PHA SWAHA — Reggie, please — OM NAMO BHAGAWATI VAJRAVARAHI — Reggie! — BAM HU HU—why oh why Reggie is everything so wrong? — PHA OM NAMO ARYA APARAJITE HU HU PHA—”

A Disturbing Call

WHEN BECCA ARRIVED at her Six Feet Under gig, they said there was some kind of fuckup. Her services weren’t needed until later that week.

She’d already given Viv the trusted alibi — caretaking moribund Mom — this time even going slightly overboard in the drama department because of what she felt to be the necessity of washing the taste of a certain recent rooftop encounter out of her employer’s mouth. (Becca said the Dunsmores were crazy and she’d only met them once or maybe twice and didn’t want anything to do with them. Fortunately, Viv dismissed the whole incident with a kind of blithe, disgusted wave of the hand.) Instead of going back to Venice, she went shopping on Third. She phoned Dixie on the cell to say hi, in a cheap attempt to mitigate her guilt over the creepy cancer cover story.

She hooked up with Annie. They ate lunch at the Grove with Larry Levine then went to a movie.

Afterward, Larry split and the girls smoked weed and baked cookies at the apartment on Genesee, gossiping about their exes. At suppertime, they decided to go to Forty Deuce, but Becca was reluctant because she couldn’t reach Rusty to tell him.

“What is he, your fucking keeper?” said Annie.

The TV report caught Becca’s eye. “Oh my God! Turn it up!”

[STUDIO ANCHOR] Lots of excitement in Riverside today when a member of the paparazzi “flipped” for Kit Lightfoot. More now, from Macey Dolenz.

[OUTSIDE THE RIVERSIDE GALLERIA] That’s right, Raquel. The actor, who is still recovering from an assault last year in a West Hollywood liquor store that left him with extensive neurological damage, evidently went on an unscheduled outing this morning [FOOTAGE OF FLIPPED CAR] and was chased by Jimmy Newcombe, a freelance photographer. Newcombe was in hot pursuit of the reclusive superstar when he lost control of his car as Kit Lightfoot’s driver continued on. The photographer was briefly hospitalized before being released. Photos of the recovering actor, at a premium, are said to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars on both domestic and world tabloid markets. [OLD FOOTAGE OF RIVERSIDE HOUSE] Lightfoot, who has not given any interviews since the tragic incident, has been sequestered at his boyhood home since his release last Christmas from Valle Verde Rehab Center in Valencia, where he spent a closely guarded six months. [BACK TO MALL; SCHOOLGIRLS/-BOYS IN B.G., JOCKEYING TO BE SEEN] But, today, it seems like he went on a field trip to the Riverside Galleria, where he cheerfully signed autographs for supportive fans. Macey Dolenz, for KTTL, in Riverside.

[BACK TO STUDIO] A much needed, and hopefully, much enjoyed field trip at that. A tragic, fascinating story — and one we haven’t heard the end of yet.

[OTHER STUDIO ANCHOR] Little bit of an old-fashioned movie car chase there, huh?

— Keystone kops.

Coming up: a wild Wednesday for the Patriots, when they found their offense “up for grabs.”

• • •

BECCA’S CELL PHONE lit up: CALLER UNKNOWN. She didn’t think it was Rusty because when he phoned it usually said PRIVATE.

“Hello? Rusty? Hello?”

The club was too noisy for her to hear anything. She said “Hello? Hello?” through the crowd until she was outside.

“Hello, who is it?”

“Becca? Is it you?”

“Yes, this is Becca. Who is it?”

“It’s Elaine!”

“Elaine?”

“Elaine Jordache. Did you hear about Kit Lightfoot?”

“The chase?”

“They caught the person who did that to him.”

“They what?”

“The one who hit him on the head!” she said, adding testily: “He worked for me.” Then: “Have you talked to Rusty?”

“No—”

“Then you don’t know any of this?”

“Know any of what, Elaine?” said Becca, getting peeved.

“The police are supposedly looking for him because of something that person said…”

“That person—”

“The idiot who cracked Kit Lightfoot’s skull! They were friends, they knew each other.”

“Friends? Who—?”

“There supposedly was a murder, in Virginia—”

“Elaine, I don’t understand this! I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“If you talk to Rusty, do not tell him that we spoke. All right? Will you promise me, Becca? Because we could be in danger, and I am scared shitless. I am in fear for my life!”

A Decent Proposal

BURKE CALLED FROM Vegas to tell Cela that a suspect in his son’s assault had been arrested.

He said the police were sitting on it for the weekend but to expect a burst of media activity on Monday, when the announcement would officially be made. He didn’t want Kit to know anything and was only mentioning it in case something leaked before he got back. Try to keep him away from the television. Just in case.

That night Cela invited Kit to her house for dinner. She lived outside the media-free zone; there was an element of delinquency, but more so because Burke was away and wouldn’t have approved. It was just like the old days, when they snuck around their parents after dark.

Steaks sizzled on the Foreman. Kit leaned over to inspect the water bowls with floating votive candles that dotted the yard.

“So who died?” he said with a smile.

“Very funny,” said Cela.

His limp was no longer pronounced. He wore a white button-down Gap shirt and new Levi’s, and was three days into the haircut she’d given him.

“You look nice,” she said.

She’d chosen a short little black dress, but Kit didn’t comment.

“Dad in Vegas,” he said, declaratively.

“That’s right.”

“When coming back?”

“ ‘When is he coming back?’”

“When is he coming back?”

“You can really speak beautifully when you want to.”

“When is he coming back, when is he coming back,” he said, gently mocking.

“Depends on how fast he loses,” she said. “He loves giving them his money.”

“Loves giving them my money.”

Cela laughed. His sense of humor was intact — everything was pretty much intact. He just moved a bit more slowly, in mind and in body, a bit less elegantly than before. He sporadically discarded words and consonants, his inflection unpredictably emphatic or slurred, but Cela was convinced that was because there was no one riding herd.

“Ever go with him?” he asked.

“To Vegas? Couple of times.”

“Where did you stay?”

“The Bellagio. He knows some people there. Or the Mirage.”

“You fuck him a long time?”

She turned from the grill, narrowing her eyes. “There is nothing between me and your father.”

“I saw you,” he said. She went back to grimly futzing with the blackened steaks. Kit’s smile became bittersweet. “I don’t… judgment. No energy to judge. Have got… energy for eating and shitting and… maybe signing autograph. Autographs,” he corrected.

“Your father,” she said awkwardly, “was good to me. Burke has his flaws — does he ever. OK? And I know that. I’m well aware. The bottom line is he took care of me when I got out of rehab. More than once. And I know he did some really shitty things to you, Kit — to you and your mom. And I respect whatever feelings you have toward him about that. OK? That’s not really my business. All I can deal with is how he — what he did for me. And that he’s a human being. He was right there, Kit. He was there for me. My father wasn’t, and neither were you—and that’s so not your fault! I’m sorry. That’s bullshit, and I shouldn’t have even said it. I’m sorry. It just — it had nothing to do with you. I’m not a perfect person, Kit — never said I was. OK? But I love you and I just don’t even really want to talk about any of this anymore. Or right now, OK?” She choked back tears and said, “I just want us to have a nice dinner and be sweet to each other—”

“I’m sorry, Cela.”

“About what?”

“I’m sorry I had a… big movie star life.”

She hadn’t seen him angry since the injury — anger was probably a good thing. Still, it hurt to be the target.

“That’s not what I meant—”

“But I don’t anymore! So don’t worry!”

His face contorted with rage, then he broke into raucous laughter. Always with the practical jokes. She wanted to hug him, but he turned the tables again. “You’re using,” he said.

Cela poignantly winced. “Once in a while.”

She went back to her business at the grill. (Actor’s prop for a difficult scene.)

“You shouldn’t do it.”

“How about a urine test?” she said, stung. “But can we do it after dessert? Look: I’m well aware that I’m fucking up, OK? Does that make you feel better, Kit? I’m gonna start going to meetings again, I already decided that.” She shoveled the meat onto plates and sighed. “Shit.”

He grew quiet. The table was beautifully set with white cloth, white flowers, white candles.

They didn’t talk as they ate, but she watched him. The world had been upended though some things would never change. She was reminded of when they first went out and how she was nervous and always trying to please him.

After supper, they sat on a porch rocker, staring at the moon.

“Tula’s probably freaking out you’re here, huh.”

“I told him to… get a life. I told him — go guard some chicken tonight. At Koo Koo Roo.”

“Now that he’s a famous stunt driver, you better look out. Some headhunter’s gonna poach him.” She lit a cigarette. “So, what’s up with those Buddhists? They’re kind of a trip. I mean, they’re like full service, huh. They cook, they clean, they meditate…”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, I think they’re great. You’ve been into that a long time, huh.”

“Yeah right. Buddhism has been berry, berry good to me.”

Cela laughed, not really catching the reference. “Kit,” she said, earnestly. “Do you remember anything about what happened? I mean, the night that guy hit you?”

“No.”

“Nothing about the hospital?” He shook his head. “What about when you visited with Burke a few weeks before? You came and looked at some things that belonged to your mom.” He shook his head again. “We went over to Grant, on your hog.”

“I don’t remember anything that happen. Happened. For about maybe a year or maybe three month—s before I hit my head.”

“Do you… do you remember Viv?”

“I do!” he said, stalwartly. “I do remember… Viv Wembley! But I am not assure… that Viv Wembley remembers me!”

Without warning, he groped her. He wetly kissed her mouth and squeezed a tit. She kissed him back, then said, “I don’t think this is such a great idea.”

“Dad won’t mind,” he said.

“That has nothing to do with it,” she said. She quickly decided it was absurd to be offended by his remark — everything was so ridiculous and heartbreaking.

“Could you at least… think about it?” he said.

She shook her head wryly and pulled out a joint. “I think,” she said, “I’m gonna become a Buddhist.”

A Tangled Web

“MOTHERFUCKER SNITCHED off my boy. Leaves Kit Lightfoot droolin in his soup, then goes and ruins a major QuestraWorld property! For sport! For fuckin sport!”

“He was up at the house, wasn’t he?” said Cassandra.

“That’s right — the look-alike wanna-be was swimmin in our motherfuckin pool. Man, how low can you go to be a look-alike wanna-be? No offense, Becca. Cause you and Rusty the real thing.”

“He was here,” said Cassandra as she fiddled with a two-carat diamond created from the ashes of their beloved little girl. “Sniffin round Rusty like a puppy dog. Talkin shit about how he was big in Tokyo doin Kit Lightfoot look-alike gigs. I don’t even think Elaine Jordache would hire him.”

“She wouldn’t get fuckin near his raggedy unlook-alike ass. And you got to be pretty low for Elaine not to try to squeeze some fuckin money out of you. That lady knows her shit.”

“He sure didn’t look like Kit Lightfoot.”

“He looked like Kit Lightfoot as much as I do.”

“Not unless he did his hair up a certain way.”

“He was a fuckin housepainter, Cass! Shit mother fucker.” He stomped around in front of the picture window. “And he snitched off my boy! We was about to lock Rusty up, wasn’t we, Cass?” He turned to Becca, who was struggling to remember whether or not the Kit look-alike was at the Chateau table-read. “We was about to give your old man major dollars and stamp ‘Property of QuestraWorld’ on his hairy butt. Wasn’t we, Cass?”

He made the sizzling sound of a cattle brand while his wife took a hit of pot.

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe we was.”

“That’s right, you better believe it. That was my call. Cause you might be CEO and COO but I’m the president and secretary-in-motherfucking-arms. So motherfuck that ‘maybe’ shit.” He mad-dogged Cassandra though both knew who’d win in a fight. Grady did a line, then handed the rolled bill to Becca. She shook her head but he wouldn’t have it. He watched like a scientist while she snorted up. “Man,” he said. “You gotta write something down about your killer boyfriend.” He got a neon brainstorm. “I know! We’ll get Dr. J to do a script. Cause Rusty’s gonna be hotter than shit — Access Hollywood, Dateline, Sixty Minutes—ev’rybody gonna line up. Old Larry King too. Rusty gonna be hotter than the dude who killed Versace.”

“Andrew Carnegie,” said Cass.

“Whatever.” He looked like he just goosed himself. “Oh shit. Oh shit. What’s Spike Jonze gonna do? Shit, man, this is good! The plot gets fuckin thickerer! I’ll tell you what Spike’s gonna do, he gonna love it, that’s what—”

“There ain’t no such thing as bad publicity.”

“—especially with the motherfucker who whacked Kit Lightfoot on the head bein a Kit Lightfoot look-alike hisself!”

“It’s tawdry, baby,” said Cassandra. “It’s real tawdry!”

Grady began to squeal. “Spike and his peeps gonna be happier than motherfuckers! All hot and bothered, cause now they got Russell and they got Rusty in the can—I don’t mean the penitentiary, neither. That’s somethin to Crowe about! Got the two of ‘em on film, man… it’s a motherfucking wrap!”

He sucked and squealed and clapped his hands together while doing a little dance. Then he fell to his knees before the table like a spent soul singer and sucked up two pencil-thick lines.

Cassandra held the diamond ring up to Becca’s eyes. “Ain’t it pretty? That’s my little girl. Didn’t they do her beautiful?”

“Got your boy on Murder One!” said Grady, gleefully. “Whacked some fucker in the horsey set, in Virginia. Ain’t that your hometown? Didn’t he never say nothin to you about that?”

“Why would he, Grady?” said Cassandra, drowsily. “He and some… fancy lady—” She nodded out, then came to. “Gettin it on at some ritzy equestrian center… now why would he want to—”

“Ritzy whuh?” he said, furrowing his brow. “Some ritzy bar-mitzy whuh?”

“—killed the husband? Or whatever? Now why would he mention that to our sweet little Becca? Why would he want her to even know anything about that? Huh, Grady?”

“Shit,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “How the fuck would I know? Could be nightie-night talk. You and me used to nightie-night talk shit, didn’t we? Never know what goes on behind closed doors.”

Cassandra drunkenly warbled, “When you get behind closed doors, and you let your hair hang low…”

“Who knows what these two look-alikes here shared?” said Grady the horn-dog. “I’ll tell you who — the shadow do!”

“And you make me feel like ah’m a man! No one knows what goes on behind closed doors—“Cassandra shrieked, collapsing in rheumy laughter.

“Man,” said Grady, regarding her with disdain. “You like that fat crazy bitch on The Sopranos. You jus’ like Tony Soprano’s sister.” Jake cried from his crib. Grady cast a lecherous eye on Becca. “Lotta shit goes on behind closed doors… if you know what I mean.”

He touched her thigh and she pulled away. She was sad and stoned and had no energy to leave. Outside the window, a ghostly pool man drew a long pole through the water.

“Tell you one thing,” said Grady, lighting up. “Tell you one thing, for sure—that boy gonna need to get lawyered up. Mr. Russell Crowe Junior’s gonna need hisself some legal funds.”

“And we ain’t gonna give him shit.”

“Oh yes we are.”

“Oh no we ain’t.”

“Oh yes we are. And I’ll tell you why.”

“OK, baby. You tell me why.”

“I’ll tell you why and you’re gonna like it.”

“Right — I’m gonna love it. I’m gonna love it like I love your crusty ol’ butthole.”

“You gonna love that too when I’m through. Gonna love it when I’m prairie doggin. Gonna wanna pitch a tent in there. You gonna wanna up my salary too.”

“I’ll up it. Love to. Up it till it hurts.”

“We gonna buy that screenplay he wrote.”

“We ain’t gonna buy shit.”

“I got five words for you: To Kill a Unicorn.”

“That’s four, dickwad.”

“Now what’d Rusty say when I axe him what that screenplay was about? What’d he say, Cass?” She thought about it as she went on the nod. “What’d he say? Yeah, that’s right — now she finally cain’t say nothin — now she won’t—cause she knows what he said. The man said it was a murder mystery. Right? OK? And where did he say it took place? At the track! Or some kinda horsey farm. ‘Member, Cass?”

“That’s right,” said the wife, eyes sealed. The cigarette was about to burn the tip of her finger. “That’s right.” He knew that she knew where he was going. “I’ll give you that.”

“Yeah well, you gonna give me more than that, Mamasita. While my guitar gently fuckin weeps. I wouldn’t be surprised if Russell Crowe Junior laid the whole motherfuckin crime out in that scriptuh his. OK?”

“OK,” said Cassandra. When you’re right, you’re right. “OK, Columbo?”

“I ain’t shittin, Sherlock. And I mean everything that fucking happened, all right? OK? All right? QuestraWorld gonna own that shit — the whole fuckin deal. All right?”

“I see what you’re saying,” she said.

“I knew that you would. Took me to think of it, though, didn’t it?”

“You just might get that raise, babylove.”

“Better believe I’m gonna get that raise, Mommy!” he said, then whooped. “You gonna suckle my grody anus too. Taste like tutti-frutti. Gon’ give in to all my hostage demands! Fifty thousand in change, for a night at Hustler’s! In beautiful downtown Gardena!”

“We ain’t closed no deal with Rusty yet.”

“When we close. That’s fair. That’s fair — I’m a fair man. Though I do think you should give me ten up front, for a finder’s fee. For puttin the fuckin pieces together. But I’m fair and I got a mind like a motherfucking iron trap and don’t you or anybody forget it! That’s why I got all my millions. Trick is, to get the screenplay off him before it becomes evidentiary.”

“Fore somebody else buys it.”

“That’s right. That’s right. Now you got it. I don’t think he gonna be in a hurry to tell the police about it. But when HBO find out, HBO gonna want it.”

“Naw,” said Cassandra, shaking her head. Her lids were heavy, like a groggy seer’s. “We wan’ somebody else. HBO is for the TV show. Don’t want to dip in that well too many times. We want this for a DreamWorks.”

“That’s why you’re QuestraWorld CEO,” said Grady respectfully.

“Could be for a Soderbergh,” said Cassandra.

“Maybe. Hell, George Clooney love to get his hands on this!”

“Too old to play Rusty.”

“Then he could just direct or exec produce. They gonna be linin up for this motherfucker! So get your checkbook ready, girl! Get your yayas out!” He clapped his hands, rubbing them together as if to make a fire. “Whoo-eee! We got ourselves a major project acquisition.” He did a war dance, then turned to Becca. “You gonna help, ain’t you? Help persuade him? Make you an E.P. for that. Wanna exec? We can swing that, cain’t we, Mama Cass? Cain’t we swing exec prod for our girl here?”

“Associate,” said Cassandra.

“She gonna be an invaluable part of the package — she was the girlfriend and she’s hot and she’s a look-alike! Look-alikes ‘bout to be hot as motherfuckers! And shit—bitch works for Viv Wembley! I didn’t even think of that shit! It all ties in!” He coughed a dewy fogbank of smoke. “Our little girl works for the wicked witch former fiancée! The bi-atch who dumped Lightfoot — in sickness and in health my left nut. Bi-atch left his twappy rear end standing at the altar!”

“Waitin around for that slut with a buncha bald old Buddhists with hard-ons,” said Cassandra, stirring from a nod.

“It’s a Shakespearean fucking tragedy, man! I love it! I love it!”

“Associate producer,” said Cassandra, from the viraginous depths.

“That’s what I said.”

“You said exec.”

“Well associate’s what I meant.”

Negotiations

LISANNE CALLED TO SAY that she was from the sangha and had a gift for the house. Burke said that, since the arrest, things had been kind of crazy and he wasn’t having anyone over until next week. She didn’t want to intrude and suggested they meet somewhere nearby. Burke was half-intrigued and wanted to check her out. Maybe she was fuckable.

The voice on the phone had been familiar but he couldn’t quite place it. When he saw her, he laughed: the chubby one with the angel’s face who loved cleaning toities. That was all right. He liked ’em with a little extra padding.

She had that blissed-out look, scarier in a nascent fattie — bit of a red flag but so what? He’d seen crazier. Anyhow, what could she do, suffocate him with her tits? She was a Buddhist, and they didn’t act out. He got right to it and asked about the gift. She said she was good friends with the studio executive Tiff Loewenstein (Burke, of course, knew who he was, even though the connection to his son didn’t at first compute; maybe Loewenstein was a sanghanista) and how Tiff had entrusted her to bring an ancient Buddha statue to Kit’s trailer during his last shoot. As a present. Out of curiosity, she asked Burke if he’d had a chance to see that Buddha and he said no, everything in the Benedict house of any value had been inventoried, packed, and stored by the insurance folks. That’s when Lisanne told him she had an “energetic replacement.” She called it by its unwieldy name and Burke couldn’t help but laugh out loud. He was starting to think she was a certified wack job, but what the fuck, she cleaned a mean toilet. He was in an expansive mood. Lisanne remained unperturbed. She said she’d been given the Supreme Bliss-Wheel Integration Buddha as a gift herself — not from Tiff — and that it was now her desire to pass it on as a sacred offering to the Lightfoot household. When she told him it was extraordinarily expensive, that got his attention. The piece, she said, celebrated Paramasukha-Chakrasamvara, a tantric deity that Kit seemed destined to possess. Lisanne recounted how she saw his son at UCLA on the night the monks ululated over that very god in the midst of their solemn public ritual. “Tantric” got his attention too, and he asked Lisanne if she knew anything about tantric sex. Burke said he read somewhere that Sting was into it and that it was all about holding back orgasm. Lisanne said she didn’t know much about that but was sure that all things tantric could only be taught by an authentic guru. Burke said he had a special guru when it came to sexual matters and she asked who and he said Master Bates. He said his friends called him Stormin’ Norman and he ran the Master Bates Motel. She smiled but didn’t get it — any of it. His blood was up and he got horny for her. Burke asked if she knew anything about kundalini. Lisanne said that it was “serpent energy” and began talking about chakras from the little she’d learned in books. Burke started calling it cuntalini — what the hell, she’d either leave the table or not, she was a wack fattie and he wanted to ball her, he didn’t give a shit what her reaction was — and said Master Bates told him that after cuntalini it was always important to smoke a cigarette and eat Rice-A-Roni. He couldn’t get a rise out of her and that made him hornier. He asked when she wanted to bring over the Super Tampon Piss-Wheel Segregation Buddha and without batting an eye Lisanne said the best time would be when no one from the sangha was there because she didn’t want others to think she was currying favor. He thought: Well well well. Maybe this fat cuntalini’s a dirty bastard. Maybe ol’ loosey-goosey’s in what we call a righteous orangutan heat. Lisanne said the Buddhist community was a bit incestuous and even enlightened people gossiped and misinterpreted. Incestuous — you got that right, fatso. Daddy’s going to do some major rectal probe enlightening. Show you nirvana six ways from Sunday. She said the Supreme Bliss-Wheel Integration Buddha would do wonders for the house and was even partially responsible for the arrest of the person who did his son — and all beings — such a terrible wrong. Get on that Piss-Wheel of Fortune. Integrate that Buddha-bootie. Super-ream that lard-ass bumper butt. She said the Buddha would help Kit to heal his crown chakra. Burke said his crown needed healing too. Said he had a purple crown with a big ol’ hole that needed healing, big-time. Master Bates called the geyser-hole Old Unfaithful.

Lisanne smiled vacantly, unhearing. She looked through him but saw only Kit, who was her breath and her benefactor, her friend and neutral person, her enemy, and the being she didn’t even know. She looked through him and saw all things human and animal, seen and unseen, waiting to be born and waiting to die.

They made a plan when she should bring it.

After the Fall

THE DETAILS OF the arrest of Kit Lightfoot’s assailant, himself a Lightfoot manqué, predictably became a nightly news staple, as did a legion of seamy Hollywood Babylon-redux celebrity crime scandal minidocs in general — and the shadowy fringe world of look-alikes in particular. (Becca and Annie noticed how they always used clips of Kim Basinger from L.A. Confidential.) The creep turned out to be one of Elaine Jordache’s third-string loser-hires; when he wasn’t working low-end convention sideshows or Mar Vista bachelorette parties at the Look-Alike Shoppe’s behest, he made his living as a housepainter and petty grifter. When they pinched him, the Kit got nervous, and hastened to cop a plea. Herke Goodson immediately came to mind.

The down-and-out look-alikes hooked up around a year ago on the rent-a-star circuit. They became friendly but hadn’t spoken in a while — the Kit still being miffed at a beating Goodson gave him outside a club in Playa del Rey. For months before, “Rusty” had been showing off pages of a script he’d written, a murder mystery entitled “The Trainer.” Because of certain coy remarks and a plethora of plot minutiae that struck him as a little too authentic, the Kit always had a hunch the story was based on something real. After he shared his potential Get Out of Jail Free card with the LAPD, Virginia detectives were quick to ID Herke Lamar Goodson as the subject of numerous outstanding warrants for home-invasion burglary and aggravated assault, and as the suspect in a high-profile local homicide.

• • •

BECCA MOVED IN with the Dunsmores on the same day she was interviewed by the police. Investigators went through every square inch of the Venice love nest. The idea of pervy old detectives handling her underthings made her skin crawl. Rusty’s arrest hadn’t yet been announced, and Becca was glad — she wasn’t in the proper frame of mind to be stalked by the tabloids. Annie said she’d probably be in the national papers too. Becca dreaded that. When the time was right, she would have to call her mom to preempt any freakouts.

The cops were like cordial pit bulls. They brought her in every day, for a week. They talked to the Dunsmores, and Grady started getting paranoid. He was afraid that even though he never had a clue about Rusty’s bad boy status, they’d bust him for “consorting.” Cassandra reminded him that one of the outcomes of the Rampart suit was that his record had been expunged — he was no longer classified as a parolee. Grady said it didn’t matter: they were gonna nail anybody who won a settlement. “Payback’s a motherfucker.” He threw out their dope. They cleaned up their act for a while.

Living at the Dunsmores’ was handy. Becca signed a contract making her coassociate producer with profit participation on any project or projects that QuestraWorld produced re: the compelling saga of Herke Lamar Goodson, a.k.a. “Rusty” Crowe. (Annie and Larry told Becca that she could be “like Rosanna Arquette in The Executioner’s Song.”) The contract also stipulated that Becca’s rights as a real-life personage in said project(s) would be waived, that a writer or writers could deem to make her life or her person “more interesting” (Cassandra’s words) without fear of legal reprisal and that Becca would make herself available for attendant press and publicity chores, lending name and/or image to the promotion of said QuestraWorld product(s), electronic press kits, print ads, et cetera. The contract came with a five-thousand-dollar check and Cassandra’s word that there would be more — which really helped because Viv had fired her and she was completely broke.

• • •

ON THE WAY TO Elaine’s, Becca pondered Rusty’s innocence — the one thing no one seemed to have considered. Her attempts to visit him in jail had been rebuffed. A sign of guilt? Not necessarily. Becca knew her man; he was prideful. He probably just didn’t want her to see him that way, encaged like an animal.

The door to the Look-Alike Shoppe was ajar. Everything was in boxes. Only some banged-up furniture remained.

“This has been the day from hell,” said Elaine, as if she and Becca were in midconversation. “The LA Weekly’s doing an ‘investigatory’ piece — I don’t even want to be in the fucking country when that comes out. I heard they might put me on the cover. Can you believe it? Why! Why! I called them up and said no—but they don’t need my fucking permission. I am not Heidi Fleiss. Read all about it! Elaine Jordache, the Low-Life Look-Alike Queen!”

“But isn’t that good? I mean, for business?”

“You must be kidding.”

She went back to her packing.

“What about that guy?” asked Becca. “The Kit look-alike?”

“What about him?”

“Well, you hired him for stuff. Do you know what happened?”

“What’s there to know? Kit Lightfoot dissed him in front of his girlfriend so he went off. When they split up, she turned him in for the award — end of story.” She spoke with the noir affect of a court stenographer, indifferently reading back notes. “Haven’t you talked to the police?”

“All week long,” said Becca.

“Didn’t they tell you what Rusty’s accused of?”

“That he killed some rich lady’s husband?”

“In Albemarle County,” she said, again with hard-boiled nonchalance. “Didn’t they tell you who he killed? Daddy. That’s right: his fucking father. And guess who the rich lady was — they didn’t say, huh. Well, I’ll give you a clue. Little Rusty slid out of her pussy. Need more than three guesses?”

Contact

THE ARREST AND pending extradition of Herke Lamar Goodson a.k.a. “Rusty” Crowe took media center stage, ratcheting up the hullabaloo over all things look-alike. The frenzy escalated, if that were possible, upon the revelation that the defendant had a “starring role” in the celebrated director Spike Jonze’s latest offering. The auteur’s reps smartly underplayed their hand. A press release stated that Mr. Goodson had indeed participated in the film, “along with a dozen other look-alike actors,” but his screen time had been substantially reduced, for reasons which — so they claimed — had nothing to do with current controversies.

• • •

WHEREAS KIT RESPONDED to the capture of his double with a cryptic half smile, Burke Lightfoot, who at least publicly, had limned the part of selfless caregiver to such perfection, vehemently demanded assurance from the lawyers that all measures would be taken to guarantee that his son be spared a circus-like courtroom confrontation with the man who had so grievously injured him. He even said as much on Fox News — after cannily alerting Barbara Walters beforehand so as not to subvert the chance of father and son making a future appearance on one of her specials.

The Buddhists were allowed back in. Burke hadn’t heard from what’s-her-name and found himself ruminating on her fat ass. Ought to hang a sign on it: WIDE LOAD. He smiled to himself — he sure did like ‘em crazy. Maybe he’d put her off with the cuntalini shtick. Who knew? Still, all that talk about how no one should be there when she brought over the Super Tampon Tit-Wheel… hmmm. Made ya wonder. Might just make a late-night bootie call yet. Buddha call. Whatever. Ask me if I care.

• • •

RAM DASS WANTED Burke’s permission to bring someone special to the house, a holy man that Kit had met shortly before his injury. He said that H.H. Penor Rinpoche was a reincarnated lama; it was from him that Kit’s root guru, Gil Weiskopf Roshi, had received “the transmissions and secret sealed protector empowerments.” Burke didn’t know what the hell Ram Dass was talking about. He thought Mr. Dass was just fine so long as the conversation didn’t get too out there — aside from the Moses beard and the electric Kool-Aid bug eyes, he was kind of a regular guy. But the idea of a quasi-royal visit from a Tibetan big enchilada tickled Burke’s fancy.

A few days later, Ram Dass, a fellow called Robert Thurman, and the yellow-robed guest of honor arrived with an entourage of orange-swathed monks and khenpos, the sight of which impressed even the neighbors, who by now were more or less inured to the unusual if not the outlandish. Thurman was a bearish, convivial man around Burke’s age, the first Westerner to be ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist monk by none other than the Dalai Lama himself. He was a professor at Columbia and a prolific author who had translated scores of sacred texts. More important for Burke, he was Uma Thurman’s dad (father-in-law of Ethan Hawke), making them comrades-in-arms of the rarefied Movie Star Parents Club.

While his son communed in the backyard with the holy man, Bob — the others called him Tenzin — put Burke at ease. He said that he could relate to what had happened to Kit because he had sustained a life-altering injury when still in college. Bob had lost his left eye in an accident; forced to confront his mortality “head-on,” he dropped out of school and embarked on a journey whose road inexorably led to Tibet.

“That was more than forty years ago.”

“That’s a good thing,” said Burke, humbly nodding. “A heroic thing. Wish something like that had happened to me—minus the pain, of course,” he said, winking. He was genuinely impressed and thought the doctors had done a helluva job with that glass eye. “Though it’ll probably’ll take dick cancer to get Burke Lightfoot to straighten up and fly spiritually right.”

Bob laughed. He was unpretentious that way — a heavyweight who wasn’t about to proselytize. A mensch, and Burke appreciated that.

“Who exactly is His Holiness?” he asked.

“Extraordinary man. Left Tibet in ‘fifty-six, a huge group. Only thirty or so made it. Built a monastery, practically with his own hands — Namdroling, in Mysore. I’m pretty sure your son was there, maybe ten, twelve years ago.”

“Did you know Kit?”

“We did meet but unfortunately never got the chance to spend much time together. I think we were introduced at a benefit in New York, at Tibet House. He was very sober, very centered. Not at all interested in the ‘movie star thing.’”

“Guess he and Uma must have hung out.”

“You know, I spoke with her and said I was coming out to see you. They never worked on a film but she said they spent some social time.”

“Did she get teased a lot? About her name?”

“Oh, I think when she was younger! But not too much anymore.”

“It’s a beautiful name.”

“She was heartbroken when she heard what happened.”

“Well, the next time everyone’s in town, we’ll have us a dinner. Ethan too.”

“That’d be terrific. She would love that.”

“We’ll go right over to the Mission Inn — that’s just a few miles from here. Diane Keaton is rumored to drop by now and then to partake of the prime rib. But you’re probably some kind of vegan. Isn’t that what they call that?”

“I have been known to be carnivorous.”

His mind returned to the rinpoche. “So, our friend — is he a ‘lama’ like the Dalai Lama?”

“Well, yes, but not of that lineage. He’s also called a tulku, or reincarnated being. His Holiness is actually recognized as the incarnation of the Second Padma Norbu, a great Buddhist saint and meditation master.”

“He’s a saint?” said Burke, eyebrow arched in playful skepticism.

Bob smiled and said, “In Buddhism, saint means ‘realized being.’ ”

“You know, I’ve been doing a little meditation myself.”

“Ya have? Great!”

“M & M — meditation and medication.”

Bob laughed.

“We have a lot of Buddhists moving through here — it’s like Grand Central, can’t help but rub off on you. They seem to calm Kit down pretty well, that’s for sure. He still gets frustrated. You know, with everything that’s happened.”

“I can’t stress enough the importance of Kit getting back to his practice. Feeling it again. And that you’re meditating is great — this can’t have been easy for you, either, Burke. It’s a wonderful gift you’ve given your son, bringing the sangha into your home. That’s great, great merit. And I hear Kit’s doing phenomenally well — I don’t have to hear it, I can see it. He’s just flowering.”

“He’s a tough kid, Tenzin. Tough like his old man.”

Red Essence Rising

LISANNE BROUGHT over the Supreme Bliss-Wheel Integration Buddha at the agreed upon time. She noticed a general stillness; even the neighborhood seemed more deserted that usual. She could feel the Source all around her.

Mr. Lightfoot said that Kit was in the shower. He asked if she wanted anything to drink, and when she said no, he sat on the couch, eyes focused on the box. The copper-leafed mandala was in its original velvet-lined mahogany container. He enthusiastically bade her remove it. Lisanne smiled and looked toward the bathroom. She could hear the water running and tried to indicate that she wanted Kit to be present for the unveiling, but he said they should go on ahead. That way, it would be “in full regalia” when Kit came in.

She carefully took it out, and the father inhaled appreciatively. That’s really something. When he asked somewhat boyishly if he could touch it, she said the Buddha was his, that it belonged to the house now and he could do with it as he wished. He held the antiquity high in the air, as if already appraising its fair market value.

He asked her to come sit beside him. He put his hand at the nape of her clammy white neck, resting it there while he complimented the sculpture. He said that such a thing was “probably priceless” and wanted her to be certain she wished to make a gift of it. And would she mind signing a paper to that effect. He began rubbing her neck to see if she would balk at his attentions. When she didn’t, he let the hand drift to her collarbone, then out to the shoulder, telling her what a generous gesture it was she had made, all the while making tight semicircles with his fingertip. The pudgy skin was soft and unblemished and turned him on. Kit emerged from the steamy bath in one of Burke’s silk robes. He smiled, and she smiled back. When Burke’s hand deliberately brushed a big tit, Lisanne stood and asked if she could use “the ladies’ room.” She wasn’t sure if Kit was finished in there, but the impulse was too strong. She excused herself and entered the space Kit had been only moments before. She closed the door. She got the can of Comet and a brush from below the sink and began to scrub the basin of the stall. The mirror was fogged. It was humid and there was no fan. She was on her knees, sweating as she leaned into the crud. When she didn’t come out, Burke boldly opened the door without knocking. He laughed in a friendly way. You really like to clean, don’t you? he said. When she started in on the toilet with that spacey smile, he knew what he always knew — she was the Grand Imperial Super Tampon Wack Job. He fished out his cock, just to see if she’d notice. “You know,” he said, “we had a holy man here the other day. And evidently he said — this is what Ram the Ass told me but maybe I got it wrong because Ram the Ass sometimes talks out of the side of his fucking head, goo goo guh-joo, but Ram the Ass supposedly said that this holy man said that my Kit was showing signs of being a reincarnation of some kinda holy man himself. H.H. Kit Lightfoot. Now what d’ya think of that?” He pulled on his pud and moved closer, brushing the cock against her face as she scrubbed. He kept talking, trancelike. “You like to clean shitters, huh. You’re pretty good, huh. Gotta pretty big throne on you yourself. I’d like to sit on that fucking throne. Hey, what do you get when you cross a king with a toilet? A royal flush. Come on. This king’s crown has some dust on it. Do a little cleaning.” He bent his knees and put the tip of his softish penis in Lisanne’s mouth. He moved it in and out with his hand. She was a slack-jawed corpse, and he joked, “You’re a real party animal, aren’t you?” He took her by the elbow and helped her up. Come on, Big Bertha. Time to get a load off. He led her to the bedroom and sat her on the coverlet. Are you a holy woman? Are you a holy girl? Cause I think you’re a hole woman. That’s right. You a whole lotta hole. He laid her down. He stripped his clothes off while asking if she wanted to be with his son. “Oh c’mon now, that’s some kind of great honor. And you know what? Time he get himself some! Cause he’s had less pussy than a Muslim cleric, and I don’t want him on Cela either. He may have been on her already — I don’t put nothin past that girl — but I don’t play that shit, not in my house. He had his time. This is my time. I own that cunt. Hell, own the both of ‘em. And I think you should be with the holy man. In Xanadu, I so decree: you are hereby the Chosen One. Or maybe you’re fat enough I should call you the Chosen Few.” He laughed at his joke, shouting, “Son! Get in here!” Kit entered smiling, not knowing at first what was going on — so bizarre and unthinkable. Burke was in the middle of pulling Lisanne’s shirt up over her head. Wow, those are big. Jesus H. — real Louisville Sluggers. Stinky too. Y’oughta wash ‘em now and then. That’s a Howard Hughes special. Haven’t seen a brassiere like that since the freakin forties. Fuckin zeppelin catchers. Her head got trapped in the blouse then emerged and Kit recognized her, not just from minutes ago but from all the weeks she’d come and tidied, so polite and helpful. When he saw his father’s stiff dick, he backed up. He asked what he was doing and Burke said, “Lookin after you, tulku-breath. Your Analness. Your Holy Dipshit.” Then, as Bogart: Here’s lookin’ after you, kid. Kit said, It’s wrong. Burke said, Wrong never felt so right — or so tight, neither. You gonna see. You gonna see. He pulled off her jeans and panties and said, Now that’s a fuckin bush! Jesus! Know who had a bush like that? Your mother. R.J. had a bush like that. Kit said, Shut up, and Burke said, When I saw that bush on your mother, I said: Gonna marry that girl. Got to. That’s right. ‘He gotta have it.’ Oops, what have we here? It was a Tampax string. Houston, we have a problem. Gonna need a towel. Ground control to major towel. He started for the linen closet before saying, Oh fuck it. He looped the end of the string around a forefinger and slowly pulled. Woo, that stinks. That’s muggy. That’s a New York subway, summertime. When it came out he said, Plop plop fizz fizz oh what a relief it is. Woo woo woo. Sunday bloody Sunday. Burke got tired of his son’s lame, chivalrous reticences and ordered him to take off his pants. Kit got hard right away, in spite of himself. Thar she blows! That’s right. Made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Lisanne opened her eyes long enough to see the tattoos: the FOREVER VIV and the Sanskrit she didn’t understand the first time she saw it on him in the trailer but had since learned to recognize as Om. She was on her back, beached. Burke led him down, grabbed Kit’s pecker, and put it in. There now. Fits like a glove. Fire in the hole! Kit said, Shut up, then Lisanne put her hands on his ass and worked it. Burke got a kick out of that. She ain’t dead yet, he said. He ain’t heavy, he’s my lama. Burke jacked, watching the bloody cock. In and out. That’s what a hamburger’s all about. Now that’s a beautiful thing. That’s a very beautiful thing. But I’m gonna have to burn these sheets when you lovebirds are done. And those are Ralph Lauren, they ain’t cheap. Gonna have to do a serious burn. Cause Fatty Arbuckle is hemorrhaging. Gonna need to find ourselves a tourniquet for that clit. Lookie that thing. Gonna have to tie it off. He got down and peered under his son’s flat, pistoning stomach. Yee-haw. Looks like someone stuck a buncha Bazooka gum on a goddamn Brillo pad. Lookit that belly. That’s a Goodyear blimp belly. When I was seventeen, he sang, it was a very Goodyear… As Kit fucked her, Lisanne thought, I am in the in-between. In the bardo of their lovemaking she saw his white essence sink in the sky like the moon and her red essence rise from the earth of her navel like a sun through karmic winds. Father and Mother merged — she couldn’t feel her own body but saw them copulating as if staring down from the ceiling. She waited for the wrathful deities, but they didn’t come. Lisanne stroked his skull, caressing the double surgical scars where the rainbow light would one day emanate. He was oblivious to her touch. He pounded her, dry-mouthed and ecstatic. His eyes were closed, but they opened as he came, shuddering, that was when she saw the energy leave the scar, she was rehearsing him for phowa, she’d read all about it and listened to the audiotapes but had never spoken of the esoteric maneuver with her teachers or anyone in the sangha but now here she was, performing like a natural. Coaching, guiding, evoking. She’d sent away for the tapes from Boulder and vigilantly done the meditation, and in the second week, she even got a nosebleed — the tapes said that wasn’t uncommon, external signs were indicators of the power of the practice. (You were supposed to repeat the phowa meditations twenty-one times a day but no more, because if overdone, they could have a deleterious effect.) The tapes said to imagine the white male drop falling from the crown chakra and the red female drop rising from the lower loins, both drops merging to form a pearl in the heart chakra. (The Dalai Lama said that when a body died, the heart was the last organ to lose its warmth.) After the merging, you said a prayer, asking for purification and forgiveness for all negative thoughts and actions experienced in this life, then you expelled the pearl through the fontanel or soft spot at the top of the head with an audible Hic! or a Pung! — straight into the heart of a Buddha or deity that you visualized to be floating somewhere above, though it didn’t necessarily have to be a Buddha, it could be your grandma or your best friend or anything really that was beloved. For Lisanne, of course, it was Kit — friend and benefactor, lover and enemy, human and animal, seen and unseen, newly born — newly dying — Kit, who was in her breath and the breath of her son, now inhabiting the lungspace of her very womb — the pearl was delivered, the merging, complete. She was certain that invisible wanderers sensed his godliness and already swarmed like flies onto meat: Imagine the multitudes of lost souls circling this bardo! — all this she thought while ejecting their mutual awareness into the heart of the ethereal Buddha-Kit floating above their heads through the corridors of dharmakaya. The tapes said one had to be certain that the person having his consciousness ejected by proxy was dead but Lisanne’s intentions were to elicit a gentle run-through, unlike classic phowa, which is always done after final respirations… a temporary, anomalous, honored healing instead, a kind of ventriloquistic bloodletting (wasn’t Kit letting her blood? She felt it streaming down her legs like a martyr in some religious painting but shook herself, careful to climb out of any unhelpful or confusing theistic mind-set and return to the Source, Oneness, the manifestation of True Love) or medieval trepanning. She had mingled their minds, energy, and ejaculate, catapulting them to Infinitude; they clambered into the lap of the Great Mother like unruly children, holy beggars, snow lions. Train right now in the path luminosity, the guidebook said, so that at the moment of dying you can dissolve confusion in the ground luminosity—

Suddenly their bodies were overturned.

A woman shrieked.

Mr. Lightfoot yelped, guffawing.

The lady called Cela was in the room.

Kit grabbed his robe and ran. Cela swatted Lisanne, shouting, “What are you doing! What the fuck are you doing!” Lisanne jiggled and trembled, modestly covering her sex with a smeary hand while Burke, still laughing, put himself between them, urging Goodyear to get dressed.

Cela struck him. “You motherfucker! She bled all over the bed! The bed where we fuck. How could you do that? And how could you do that to him? He’s your son, he’s your fucking son! You’re sick! You’re sick sick sick sick sick! You sick fuck, how could you bring a fat fucking whore in here like that! Oh God, look at the blood! She’s like a pig! You put your dick in that — she could have fucking AIDS! How could you do that? How could you do that to me! And your son, your son, your son!”

• • •

HE SAW HER STANDING in the driveway, disheveled. He brought her to the house — his wing, where she’d spent so little time. She was docile. He asked if she was hungry, but she shook her head. He gave her water from the kitchen tap, the Bulthaup/Poggenpohl kitchen that she called the mothership because it was capacious and made of steel, and the housekeeper made sure there were always steel bowls of fruit and redolent flowers there. Then he brought her to the bedroom and laid her down as she’d been brought to the Riverside bedroom and laid down hours before. He saw that she wasn’t wearing panties. Her thighs were smeared brown with blood. She’s been fucking, he thought. But who? Someone on the street. Maybe someone on the bluff, there was that section from the pier on up to Wilshire where he told her never to walk, where the woebegone held court, lying in wait under newspapers and ratty quilts, pretending to be sleepy and harmless so the liberals would continue to condone and indulge their predatory verminlike presence. She was vulnerable. She was prey. Her heart was kind and large and damaged — it grew larger each day and pumped less blood to its own system, an aneurysmal craving to burst and reabsorb into the generalized heart of needy humanity — and if it weren’t for his patronage he knew she would become one of them, dissolved into that scabrous communal wound. He hoped that wasn’t so and she’d just been out wandering because he worried about her catching a disease. Not that she would give him anything; their relationship wasn’t that way. His concern was unselfish. Also, he saw the end, and his seeing of that perhaps was the one selfish thing. He did not delight in the end, even though he had seen it coming for so long and had recognized Lisanne as its instrument. He soaked a rag in hot water and sponged her down with soap. (Maybe, he hoped, she’d been roughly, crazily masturbating and hadn’t been raped.) She was numb and bereft and he understood those things with tough and poignant insularity as might the translator of an astonishingly moving text who cannot then pass on what he knows. Yet who better to know those unknowable things and silently commune with her than he, the benefactor? Philip did this very thing with his mother when he was twelve, after she went out wandering. But my mother, he thought, was not a whore. My mother went out wandering to forget herself, to forget her wealth, to forget her husband — who himself had fled because he knew a wandering was coming and could not bear it — to forget how she had been crushed, her dreams eliminated. (Neither she nor the father nor the son nor his sister knew or would ever know what those dreams had been. It is a tragedy to forget what it was that was vanquished and merely be left with emotional detritus, the dried up tears of phantom loss.) Mattie would be with his father in La Jolla and Philip with his mother when she came back with her scrapes and contusions born of brambles, various small stones and the brushings-by of domesticated bark and branches — nothing more, nothing less — such damage could be done without leaving the property, which was vast. As he damp-toweled his mother, he would linger at her fine white wrist scars, thicker by a hair than a hair’s width, wispy keloids whose origin it had been ingrained within him never to ask, the way some Jewish families never discuss the murky prehistory of modified noses. No, this was not his mother before him but rather it was as if he had swallowed her and regurgitated Lisanne’s soft white form and that he was now responsible for that form’s maintenance and comfort and for all of the forms it would beget. This was a tender lozenge before him, living and corpuscular, a sentient being whom he must protect, its cocoon rent, blown away like a bruised gown in the gusty albeit warm, sacral winds of the Santa Anas and it was up to him to father her — though he saw his own energy at an ebb, and that frightened him, he could see the recession of his earthly powers at hand. All that kept him here, and all that ultimately would send him away, lay in the animal eroticism of mother and son communion. All that kept him attached to the world was the sheer abandon inspired in the gaudy firelight of that act, by its holy, meretricious witness.

Bygones

TWO WEEKS LATER, his father in Vegas, Kit made an appointment to see Alf.

(While Burke is away, the mice will play.)

He tucked into the backseat of Cela’s Volvo while Tula spirited him away. They knew the drill — same old same old. Not too much action on the barricade, anyhow.

They drove past old haunts.

(He’d gathered up the addresses and given them to Tula, who spent the night before hunched with the Thomas Bros.)

The Chateau and the Strip…

(Though not a glance to or thought of the liquor store.)

His old house, in Benedict…

(Had the impulse to go in but forgot to ask the lawyers for a key. Was of a mind to sell the whole caboodle, but legally, nothing could be done until issues of conservatorship had been settled. At least that’s what Burke said. He sat and stared, trying to imagine living there again or having lived there.)

Viv’s house.

(Imagining himself and Viv inside; then being replaced by Alf.)

Last stop before Alf’s aerie — the grave. Old haunts…

Rita Julienne Lightfoot

1950–1996

“Mother Courage”

• • •

THEY DROVE THROUGH the gates, high above Sunset Plaza — minimalist, hipster digs, as if Lenny Bruce still lived and had commissioned a Richard Meier redo. There stood barefooted Alf, grinning from the porch. Both men nervously self-conscious. Kit wore the gray Prada suit that Cela had selected on a rare after-hours expedition. (Maxfields had stayed open late, so he could shop without hassle.)

Big hugs. Awkward stuff. Alf offered Tula entrée, but the bodyguard declined. More hugs inside. Water and foodstuffs dispensed by a nondescript helper who then vanished for good. Kit was laconic, weighing and measuring words far more than he would in Riverside. They settled into couches. Alf took a brief phone call. Apologized. Said it was business.

“Think you’re going to sell the house?” said Alf. (To have something to say.)

“Maybe,” said Kit. “Not sure.”

“Now, don’t do that,” said Alf, with a pleading, country-western star smile. “Shit, that place should be on the historic registry. We had some crazy times there, huh.”

“Very crazy!”

Alf laughed with tension release, and Kit laughed too, spittle boisterous; still finding his way. It got a bit easier — the court and spark exchange of trademark grins. “If those walls could talk! Speaking of which, what ever happened to our old friend Mr. Raffles? What’s he doing now, workin escort?”

Kit had to be reminded of the canine casanova, more on account of nerves than anything else.

“He died,” said Kit.

“Oh shit,” said Alf, genuinely sorrowful. Any sort of loss now had a larger context. “That’s fucked up.” Then, joshing again: “Thought he might have met a nice Beverly Hills socialite and settled down.”

“Great Danes don’t live too long.”

“Sure you don’t want a martini?”

“Can’t. Take all the medicines. For seizure.”

“Oh, right. Right.” Awkward. “You know, you look really great. And you talk well too — I mean, you’re well-spoken. Much better than the last time I saw you.”

Wished he hadn’t said it. Sounded patronizing. And it had been too long since they’ve seen each other — his fault.

Everything his fault…

“Yeah,” said Kit.

“I been workin,” said Alf, by way of explanation and apology.

“Me too,” said Kit.

“Oh yeah?” he said, intrigued.

“Physical therapy!” said Kit, grinning at the joke.

“Right!” The attempt at humor shot past. “They’re workin my ass, Dog. But you ain’t missin much — ain’t shit out there. Scripts are all shit. Showbiz is a shambles, dude. I mean, there’s always one or two people out there keepin it real. But hey! You’ve really managed to stay fuckin hidden, man, I’m impressed. Guess your dad’s done a pretty good job. After Osama, you’re the world’s most wanted man!”

Awkward again — coming in waves.

“But it’s good over there? I mean, with Burke?”

“Pretty good. Pretty good.” He shifted on the couch. Reached for the water, drank, set the glass back down. Cleared his throat. “Hey, Alf, I want to ask you something.” Cleared his throat again. Reached again but pulled back his hand before it got to the glass. Shifted. “OK. I want to see Viv. I know she feel bad — feels bad. Maybe afraid. Maybe she’s afraid. Not of me! I want to tell her it is — that it’s OK. I want to tell her that, Alf. That I am OK. That it — it’s cool.”

“She knows that!” Alf said, too congenially. “She knows that, Kit. She’s smart, she’s really smart. You know how smart she is. But, you know, she’s away.” Lit a cig (skittish actor’s prop). “Yeah, she, uh, was doin a film, you know, the David Gordon Green, while they were on hiatus? That’s why she couldn’t come see you. Pretty much. Cause you know she wanted to… but she got really run-down and shit. Then her grannie died. Her mom got real sick too, no lie. Got all jaundiced, but I think she’s cool now. The mom’s cool. Out of the woods and all. But it was fucked up. Been kind of a fucked-up year for her. Not to take away from your fucked-up year.” Levity, then amended gravity.

“I feel bad for her!” said Kit, earnestly. Winced and shifted some more — stabby nerve-ending pain out of nowhere, per usual. Pressure in the temples. He could deal but hoped his eye didn’t start to twitch; hated that. He could feel Viv’s sorrow and only wanted to comfort her. “I really want to see her!”

“Here’s the thing, man.” Actors Studio — size drags off cig. “And look — I didn’t think this was a good time to tell you but I guess it’s that old cliché. Ain’t no good time to give bad news.”

Kit panicked, envisioning the worst. His lips went bloodless and he began to tremble. To Alf, it looked kind of pathetic.

“She OK? What is happening to her?”

He shifted into Samuel French/Dramalogue mode — Alf Pacino. “She’s fine,” he said, to allay him. “She’s got a pretty good support system. I guess that — Well, I guess I’m the support system. Now. I’m kind of the one she turns to for comfort. Know what I’m saying? I know it sounds like a bad movie or some… fucked-up Mexican soap opera or whatever, but it’s — it’s life, man, it’s what happened. And it wasn’t right away, it didn’t happen right away, you gotta know that. No lie. It was a gradual thing, something that happened out of a grief thing. I mean, that girl was seriously hurting, Dog! Like, crazy out of her mind. Takin pills to sleep. Doin whatever — I don’t mean it that way. But we both were. We spent a lot of time together. Most of that time was all about you. And it just fucking happened. And we knew it was fucked up but we couldn’t do anything to change it. I’m sorry, Kit. I’m sorry about fucking everything, man! I’m sorry we went to that club—I’m sorry you went to that liquor store—and you know what? I’m gonna hire someone to full-on fucking kill that punkass motherfucker in prison — that’ll be my gift to you, bro. And I’m sorry about Viv… and I’m — I’m all sorried out. And you know what? I’m glad I can finally be telling you all this — that you’re at my house, and you’re happy and healthy and look fuckin hunky-dory — cause it’s been eatin me up. Been killin Viv, too.”

“OK.” Laughed. Pains in body. Shifted. Quick water drink — smiled and winced like it was ninety proof. “Bad movie… bad Mexican movie!”

“Are you OK?”

“Yeah! It’s like, cool. I’m all cool. I’m all, like, yeah. Yeah!”

“Looks like we’re gonna be doin this Nicole Holofcener thing together. The ‘Lovely and Amazing’ chick?”

“Lovely and—”

“We’re doing a movie. It shoots in Maine…”

Softly, Kit said, “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.”

“Sorry, man.” Alf sheepish and mewling now, redundant with self-contempt. “Too much information. I’m an asshole. Shit.”

“Shit.”

“It’s crazy,” said Alf, lamely.

Spastic laughter from Kit: “Crazy fucked up!”

Alf managed an agonized grin. His grins were getting old.

“Hey, know what… dawg?” said Kit, slapping his thighs as he stood. “I’m gonna go home. I–I real tired.”

Alf nodded like a jack-in-the-box while staring at the ground.

“Thank you for having me as your guest.”

“You’re family, man.”

A clumsy O.G. soulshake, segueing to standoffish, gentlemanly hug.

“Tell Viv I am happy because she is happy. And I am happy for you. Because I love you both and I am… happy for everybody!”

Sincere relief. Worst part over. He can smell Viv again. Wants her terribly now — will rush to her as soon as Kit’s gone, rock-hard the whole way. She paces at Beachwood as they speak, a woman awaiting her man’s return from battle, salty and bloodied. This morning, after it was agreed that he would tell Kit everything, she said that she’d shave her pussy. For when Alf came home. He flashed on it, banishing the image.

“You don’t know what that means — to me. And to Viv. I know she wants to see you, Kit. She just needs a little more time.”

“Bye, Alf.”

Walked out. The air was good. The house oppressed like a cage. Tula jumped, opening the passenger door.

As Kit got in, Alf said, “Hey, Cameron sends her love, Dog!” They pulled away. Alf shouted, “I talked to her last night. She’s in Africa, doing a thing with Bertolucci.”

Apologies

A COUPLE OF GAYS shouted from their car while rolling out of Fred Segal.

“Oh my God! An Undergirl!”

When the same thing happened a few hours later as she was leaving Elixir (a less flamboyant shout-out from a passing dyke), Becca thought she was being mistaken for someone in a band. Then it happened again, near Agnès B. — but this time, the person scarily invoked her name. She grumpily assumed it had something to do with recent notoriety. The article in the Weekly had come out (an LAPD mugshot of Rusty on the cover, not Elaine) with a photo of Becca inside captioned DOUBLE TROUBLE. One of the tabloids — RUSTY NAILED! — ran a grainy picture of the two walking hand in hand, just like Penélope and Tom. That was actually kind of cool.

When Becca got home, she went on a crying jag. She was about to call her mom (who had actually been really great about everything) when Annie and Larry phoned. Larry, being the Internet troller that he was, had discovered that Becca was part of an unofficial Six Feet Under Web site paying tribute to the show’s legion of mortuary extras (Undergirls and Underboys) via a rogues’ gallery (the Not Ready for Lifetime Players) of “toe-tag bio” pop-ups called “The Not So Vitals.” The dead, subclassified as “Dying to Be Taft-Hartleyed,” were sorted by personality type, according to popular vote. There were Undertakers and there were Undergivers; a competing Web site for CSI cadavers had since sprung up.

Larry was giddily on-line as they spoke and assured Becca that she was the most beloved Undergirl by far. Her “gurney-cam” shots (“Dead! From Los Angeles! It’s Becca Mondrain!”) had already registered many thousands of hits — Mr. Levine’s theory being that it was distinctly possible her popularity was based upon the fact that in one or two downloaded stills (each snapped directly from the TV screen as the show aired), part of a tit was visible as she lay on the slab. Becca remembered being forewarned by the casting people that the director of that particular episode wanted her breasts exposed because it tied in with the comic dialogue of the scene. She had agreed, because you really couldn’t see her face. She probably would have agreed anyway.

In another inset blowup, the Web site lovingly called attention to a production glitch: a strap of Becca’s thong was showing. The whole spectacle made her feel kind of violated, but Larry said she should get over herself. He said it was a hoot — with all the negative attention she’d gotten lately she should feel good about it and just do what everyone else did in this town, which was to find a way to exploit whatever press came their way. It had been Larry’s opinion all along that, instead of running from it, she should be actively milking the look-alike cause célèbre. She totally felt like Monica Lewinsky.

• • •

BECCA WAS A little uncomfortable lodging at the Dunsmores — she didn’t like being beholden. (Annie said she could stay with her awhile, but Annie was the kind of girlfriend who would get too dependent, and resent Becca when she finally found her own place.) She could have used the money Cass gave her to pay first and last on an apartment, but then what? In a few months, she’d have been scrambling again. At least this way, she could feel what it was like to have a nest egg. Besides, if she split, the Dunsmores might get grudgey, and that was one more problem she didn’t need. They might try to fuck with her. Since Rusty’s arrest and Grady’s attack of nerves, they’d actually been behaving pretty well. Their attempts to enlist her in ménage à whatevers were half-assed, and she’d made her feelings about that exceptionally clear.

She thought about going home. She couldn’t even believe Rusty was from Virginia and had lied all that time. He’d lied about a lot of things. (Though she felt ambivalent about him these days, Becca still nursed the hope he hadn’t lied about his feelings for her.) But she kind of needed to stay put awhile because with Rusty about to be extradited, if she flew to Waynesboro it would almost be like they were going back as a couple. Becca didn’t want to be psychically, or tabloidally, linked. She was still kind of in shock about it all.

One thing she did know was she wanted her mommy. Needed her — called and said she better come to Hollywood, right now. Sang into the phone while Dixie laughed: “Right here, right now, there is no other place I want you to be. Right here, right now, watching the world wake up from history.” They’d share the bed and spoon like when she was little and everything would be all right. Grady had better not perv on her, but Dixie could handle herself — hell, if she handled Daddy, she could sure handle Grady. Besides, the Dunsmores had more bark than bite. Dixie would have fun and be so impressed because the whole Mulholland Drive experience was kind of a magical mystery tour. And poor Dix never got a chance to go anywhere. She actually did visit New York three years ago as a job performance bonus and loved it so much she’d been planning another trip. Who needs loser New York? Everything’s so expensive the only thing a person can afford to do is go stare at that open grave. The dirty Bath Tub, or whatever the fuck they call it. Oh, Becca, you are terrible. C’mon, Mama, don’t you want to come see your baby? Don’t you love your baby? Now course I do, you know I do. Course I’m gonna come. Then c’mon, and she started singing “Right Here Right Now” again. She said the Dunsmores would rent limos and take them to all the fancy clubs and restaurants, the ones Dixie read about in Us Weekly and InStyle.

Dixie said Sadge had called, looking for her. He’d been trying to reach her ever since Rusty’s arrest. (Annie said he’d been calling her too.) Becca was avoiding him because she knew that whatever sympathy he put on, all Sadge really wanted was to gloat. He was still in love with her and that was his way.

• • •

VIV WEMBLEY WAS mortified that the waif whom she took into her home and her trust had been exposed as the lover of a suspected murderer and his associate — the latter being the very man who, for all intents and purposes, had killed her fiancé (and, uh, had creepily made his living impersonating). It was like one of those old Vincent Price movies that Kit used to love. When she thought of this Trojan horse, this Manson girl, roving through her Beachwood Canyon home unsupervised, her blood ran cold. (She wondered if Becca had been in cahoots with Gingher, that other thief and criminal, from the very beginning.) When at their last meeting, as part of an ill-timed, messy catharsis, a hysterical Becca had tearfully begged Viv to believe that she knew nothing about her boyfriend’s or his psycho friend’s “alleged” crimes while at the same time misguidedly confessing to myriad deceits regarding her noncancerous mom, Viv had literally pushed her from the house, run to the front bathroom, and thrown up.

• • •

RUSTY FINALLY consented to a visit.

(She could never bring herself to call him Herke.)

Grady had already been to see him and supposedly closed the deal on “To Kill a Unicorn,” privileged information that the Dunsmores shared with Becca only after becoming amazingly shitfaced on a hellacious combo plate of she knew not what. Even though the LAPD were aware of its role in ensnaring their suspect, they still didn’t have, as Grady liked to say, a “habeas scriptus.” To date, the prisoner’s creation was hearsay (though its whereabouts were a recurring theme of Becca’s station house interrogations). But Grady had a feeling the detectives were beginning to write “Unicorn” off; from everything he had heard, the Virginia D.A. was building a case just fine without it. After all, they had their corpus. Rusty talked about that missing screenplay like it was the Holy Grail, and Grady could understand why. Shit, he’d done the same type of thing when he was incarcerated — a man in prison had to hold on to something — but for the QuestraWorld president and secretary-in-motherfucking-arms, “To Kill a Unicorn” wasn’t so much the grail as it was his ace in the hole, a heat-generating ticket to ride in the Hollywood Derby. Rusty said it was buried in the desert somewhere, to be revealed at a future date. Mama Cass said her husband was a fool for believing him, but Grady fronted seventy-five hundred into his jailhouse account on good faith before declaring the whole topic verboten—it being the pardoned parolee’s superstitious opinion that even mentioning “the property” would not only endanger his own actual freedom but quite possibly jeopardize the Dunsmores’ most valuable holding, ergo threatening the very existence of QuestraWorld itself. He was certain the Mulholland digs were bugged.

Becca told Annie she couldn’t understand how anyone survived even a minute behind bars. It was funny — now he looked more like Russell Crowe than ever, all tousle-haired and gorgeous, sulky and dreamily wronged. Even his sweat smelled sweet. He told her he was sorry he’d “withheld” certain things and that he never meant to hurt her. When she asked if he loved her, he lowered his head like the genius in A Beautiful Mind, mumbling, “Pretty much, yeah. I pretty much did. And do.” She was glad he tacked on “and do.”

She asked about his crimes, but he simply shook his head. “Has your mother been to see you?” The tender question came unexpectedly from her depths. Again he shook his head, with forlorn indifference. He hadn’t really known the woman — his mother — all that long, he said. Their first meeting had occurred just three years ago. Becca presumed that Cassandra’s hypothesis was correct and that Rusty had been raised as an orphan. (Perhaps the tragedy had been set in motion when he decided to seek his ancestry.) Now was not the time to probe; it was a story she might never know. He wondered if she knew anything about the release date of the Spike Jonze film. Becca said she’d heard it was sometime in the fall. “Ah,” he said, with a scampish wink. “Did a little A.D. tell you?” He said that Grady told him there was something in the paper about his role being chopped down to nothing. Becca had heard the same thing on Access Hollywood but said she didn’t really know anything about it.

When she finally asked about Herke, he said it was short for Hercules. That had never occurred to her, and she thought it touching because at that moment he really did seem to bear the weight of the world on his shoulders. He told her he was happy that she was living with the Dunsmores. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” he said. Becca said, “You don’t have to worry.” She was going to ask if he’d been sleeping with Elaine Jordache all the time they’d been seeing each other and if it was true he really did kill a man and if it was true what she heard that he was related to that man by blood and why was it only three years ago that he’d first seen his mom and she wanted to tell him that she still loved him and that maybe they would make a QuestraWorld movie of his whole life and saga and write to each other every day until he got out as long as it was true that he still loved her — but in the end, none of it seemed to matter. She recounted the very last part to her mom, trying to sound hardened and nonchalant and mature, but when Dixie replied, “Honey, everything matters,” Becca burst into tears.

And that was the last time she saw him, in the flesh anyway.

Blackout

MATTIE WAS CONCERNED about Lisanne, as were Reggie Marck and the Loewensteins. Since the episode on the jet, she’d been going downhill.

When she stopped by his office to deliver that deranged soliloquy, Reggie got seriously spooked. She left before he could take any action — not that he knew what that action would have been, though he kicked himself for not having “detained” her. He was worried that Lisanne might potentially harm herself or the baby. He phoned Roslynn, and they tried to sort things out. Reggie asked about the boyfriend, but Roslynn said he was out of his league when it came to her troubles; Philip had grown too dependent on Lisanne to be objective. The sister, she said, was the one with the head on her shoulders.

Reggie and Roslynn initiated a conference call with Calliope Krohn-Markowitz to discuss some sort of intervention. (Lisanne saw the psychiatrist for a few sessions, but had since gone AWOL.) The Muskinghams were also on the line. Calliope asked if there were any new developments. Mattie said that Lisanne had been spending a lot of time in the “yoga cabin” and appeared withdrawn. Also, there was a “growing diminution in personal hygiene.” Roslynn spoke of what she felt to be a “continued inappropriate response” to the plight of the actor Kit Lightfoot. Impatient with the pussyfooting, Reggie circled back to the astonishing office visit. “That was a crazy person,” he said. “That was a deeply disturbed woman who either needs to be taking medication or should be locked up. Probably both. Period.” There was a pause. “Frankly, I’m very concerned for the welfare of that baby. I don’t think we can in all good conscience sit by while there’s a tragedy in the making.” Calliope asked Philip about his thoughts — he was, after all, the one closest to Lisanne in a number of ways — but he said she seemed fine. Reggie said, sotto, “He’s got to be kidding.” In her role as mediator, Calliope reiterated Reggie’s concern about the well-being of Siddhama, and Philip said the nannies hadn’t noticed anything strange. Not that they’d talk about it if they had, said Mattie sardonically. And why is that? asked the doctor. Because, said Mattie, one of Lisanne’s eccentricities was, she was always giving them cash on the side. Roslynn wanted to know how much cash. Philip said there was a daily limit on the ATM. Reggie said, “What is it? Three hundred? Four hundred? That’s a lot of money to be giving a nanny.” “Is that ‘hush money’?” wondered Roslynn. “I mean, what’s she doing? Money for what?” “It’s just misplaced largesse,” said Mattie. “She has a big heart,” said Philip. “That’s all very well and good,” said Reggie, in hard-nosed attorney mode. “But I think we really need to be in reality regarding this woman. This is a damaged lady. Look, I’ve known her a lot of years now, and I am telling you this is someone who needs to be hospitalized. And I think we should take that step. Because we don’t want a tragedy on our hands. Hey, maybe it’s something that only needs a few days — or a week — or whatever. Great. Maybe it’s strictly a medication thing. I don’t know, Doctor, could having a child have brought this on? I mean, the whole concealing of the pregnancy… is this a postpartum psychosis thing?” “It may be,” said Calliope, with caution. “Of course that needs to be ruled out. But I can’t rule out anything if I’m not able to meet with the patient.” “Maybe Phil can help with that,” said Roslynn, knowing that his sister would chime in. “Yes,” agreed Mattie. “Phil and I can definitely talk to her about coming in for another session. Don’t you think, Philip?” “Uh huh,” said her brother. “And if not,” said Mattie, “we can talk about something more definitive. We’re actually all going out tonight for an event.” “Great,” said Roslynn. “Maybe that would be a good time for discussion,” said Calliope. “But I think it’s important you use your own judgment. If that’s a conversation you think would be better suited to have at home, then wait until you get home.” It was agreed all around that Lisanne wouldn’t be left alone with Siddhama. Reggie said, “Won’t that be difficult?” Philip said Lisanne was rarely alone with the baby anyway. Mattie said she would have a talk with the nannies, and Roslynn said that Philip should take her ATM card away. He assented. Calliope told Mattie and Philip to check in with her as soon as they spoke to Lisanne, even if it were late tonight.

After everyone had hung up, Reggie called Roslynn back and said that he couldn’t understand why the call hadn’t ended with more of a concrete plan. Roslynn contradicted him. She definitely got the feeling things were “coming to a head” and that hospitalization was imminent. “I missed that,” said Reggie skeptically. “I guess I zoned.”

• • •

IT RAINED HARD that night.

Months ago, Philip had got tickets to see the Dalai Lama at UCLA. He engaged a driver, but when his sister arrived at Rustic Canyon, Mattie said, “I refuse to take a chauffeur-driven Mercedes to see the Dalai Lama.”

Their seats were up close. As they arrived, tantric monks gargled timeless liturgies from the foot of the stage. Ushers handed out pamphlets that told the story of a little boy who had been recognized by His Holiness as the eleventh Panchen Lama of Tibet. He had been kidnapped by the Chinese government, who then replaced him with a Panchen pretender.

It made Lisanne think of her own Siddhama. Since she’d given away the Supreme Bliss-Wheel Integration Buddha, whenever she looked in her baby’s eyes it seemed as if he wasn’t there. As a mother, she could no longer recognize his energy; the bond had been swiftly, elegantly severed. She cursed herself for being on her period when Kit came inside her. She’d been too hasty — she should have waited until she was ovulating. Now her fate was sealed. Craving estrus, the flies of all those souls awaiting human rebirth had been repelled by her blood’s brackish, viscous, tarry rejection of the “liquid gold” of H.H. the venerable Kit Clearlightfoot’s semen. In that very instant, she had slammed the door on the Buddha, his teachings, and the holy community, forever.

Philip discreetly pointed, alerting Lisanne and his sister that Viv Wembley was just a few rows away. How perfect! The succubus was with Alf Lanier. Both had dressed down in a ridiculous attempt at self-effacement, so shabbily casual as to almost backfire, evincing disrespect, shallow, wicked, radiant poseurs come to gawk at His Holiness as high society once did the Elephant Man. Anyone with two eyes could see that Alf had replaced Kit in her life the same way the Panchen pretender had supplanted the true lama, wherein Lisanne saw an even more sinister motive for their attendance at the arena. Because Viv was an actress, Lisanne knew that she needed to be loved above all else, begging exoneration for her abandonment of Kit (and subsequent flagrant transgressions). The miscarriage and all-around fickle public sympathies were not enough to salve an ego of her proportion. Lisanne was certain the Together star was of a mind that merely being seen in the Dalai Lama’s presence with copper petals humbly spread, ready to receive the nectar of atonement, would by necessity gather great merit, as sure as the wealthy sinner once obtained indulgences by the pressing of exculpatory lucre into the hand of the Pope. Still, she admired Viv’s cunning, her élan, her pirate’s nature, and with a twinge in the womb, admonished herself: Viv Wembley would never have gone over there while menstruating. Viv Wembley would have waited until she was in heat. She was so angry because she had bested that rich and famous woman — Viv Wembley’s cervical loss had been Lisanne McCadden’s magical gain — but the executive assistant had choked at the moment of truth. And now her baby, her Siddhama, was abducted and unknown to her, as unknown as the child Viv had coldly flushed away.

A ripple of applause became a torrential ovation as the exiled head of state was led to the stage, surrounded by monks and bodyguards. His English was difficult to understand. Lisanne spaced out on Viv and Alf until half an hour later, when the Q & A began. Someone asked, “What is the best way to become spiritually pure?” His Holiness said he didn’t like the word best because it usually meant fastest, quickest, easiest. “That is wrong,” he said, sternly. “Wrong, wrong, wrong!” The cultivated mob laughed obsequiously. He went on to say that the answer to the man’s question was “everything I have been talking about tonight.” There was a testy, imperious edge to his words, and Lisanne thought: Good for him. It must be tough to talk to shits and dunces. Then some jerk-off wanted to know if he ever “just relaxed and enjoyed” himself. His Holiness smiled and said, “I am going to enjoy this cool glass of water.” With that, he dramatically hoisted the glass and took a long, steep drink while the mental midgets laughed, wept, and clapped. “And now,” he said, “I will enjoy going to sleep!”

He left the stage without fanfare. Barely an hour had passed.

As they filed out, Philip said, “What a pro.”

Mattie said, “Amazing.”

Philip said, “Short but sweet. He’s the Man.”

Mattie said, “We have to go to that Kalachakra thing.”

Philip said, “Where do they do that, in India?”

Mattie said, “Wherever. Sign me up, I’m goin.”

• • •

KIT AND CELA danced, drank, and smoked weed. Kissed and groped. He told her about Viv and Alf being a couple. She commiserated. (She’d already read about it in Entertainment Weekly.) He literally cried on her shoulder. She knew they were going to fuck tonight — that whole scene with the Super Size Hare Krishna girl had clinched it.

The motherfucker was in Vegas again. She didn’t even want to think about what he was doing. Why kid herself anymore? She’d done enough of that through the years. The dad had been a perverse aberration — Kit was her man. And now like some romance novel he’d come back to her. She would take him, any way she could. He wasn’t even that fucked up. Hell, everyone was damaged goods. And he was getting better every day. All Burke thought about was the money anyhow. Cela never thought about the money. If she could guarantee that Burke and the whole shitty world would just leave them alone by signing a piece of paper giving away Kit’s money, then she would. She sure-ass would.

He asked her to put on the “blockbuster,” World Without End. He wanted to fast-forward to the dance scene with Cameron Diaz. As they watched, Kit sensually mirrored his on-screen movements while Cela mimicked Cameron’s.

— Acceptable, Respectable, Presentable, A Vegetable!

At night…

when all the world’s asleep…

the questions run so deep…

for such a simple man…

He turns the volume up as loud as it will go, gyrating toward the sliding glass. Rain sheets crashing. Shirtless now, coiled and muscular, swaying to the beat, hands gliding over each other tracing wet forms, shadows of mutual tattoos, snaking into the downpour through mud-grass puddles, shoes off, wrestle-wriggling jeans over ankles, oblivious to torrents, no longer lip-synching but shouting lyrics full-bellow, eyes closed—

Won’t you please

please tell me what we’ve learned

I know it sounds absurd

please tell me who I am…

Something happens.

Stops singing.

Eyes open wide now, as if finally in complete awareness — the enormity of what befell him.

Lifts his head to the star-dead Riverside skies and yowls.

Cela, who is not finished with him, who cannot, will not leave him, never has and never will, Cela, who is not yet done with her epic love, love of her life, not yet done in this life or childhood life or life any other, sobs and sinks to her knees, holding, ballasting, rooting this tree that tears loose from its mulch, pointing with rent goblin’s thicket of caterwauling branches toward freezing (star-dead) Riverside skies: Cela bears him down, afraid he’ll loosen and ascend, forever lost, gasping with the horror she may not have what it takes to hold him, that her love will not be enough to make it so.

• • •

SHE SLAUGHTERED the pug — Philip’s pug, the one Mattie gave him for his birthday, the one he loathed at first but in three short weeks had learned to love — by hurtling it against the wall, then doing some eviscerating with a pair of antiquey, gilt-edged scissors that she got at Restoration.

The dog was an obstacle between student and teacher, novice and guru, between the Vulnerable Lisanne McCadden and H.H. the Venerable Kit Clearlightfoot. The dog came uninvited to the in-between, where only empty spaces may reside. That was a karmic violation — there was only so much room for official bardos. (The guidebook said there were supposed to be only six, but the dog made for a seventh.) That sort of thing had been studied and decreed for millennia and was certainly not beholden to the whims or policy makings of an errant pug. Lisanne was unconcerned about the implications of the killing. Hadn’t Milarepa, poet-warrior and student of the supreme phowa master Marpa, committed dozens of murders before his fated enlightenment? Anyway, it was a mu or moot point whether dogs possessed the Buddha nature. If this one did, she thought, it sure doesn’t now.

She used masking tape to cover her apertures, as the guidebook suggested. “During the practice of phowa,” she read aloud, “one must first block all the openings in a special way so that only the aperture at the crown of the head remains open. When the mind leaves the body through the crown of the head, one will be reborn in a pure land beyond samsaric existence where the conditions for practice are perfect.” She wanted to bypass the disintegration of the five winds and the dissolution of gross and subtle thoughts. When, through the Brahma-hole, her life-winds ceased at last breath and came the merging of red and white, of earth and sky, she wished to remain conscious and not panic. Otherwise she worried that she would have to endure the three and a half days of darkness and the gang of wrathful demons — the 100,000 suns and 100,000 thunderclaps. No: only the fourth rigpa would do. According to the guidebook, “The first sign of a result in phowa practice is that a strong itch is felt at the top of the head. Later a tiny hole appears into which a straw of grass can actually be inserted.” She needed one-pointed concentration in order to eject consciousness, “as a competent archer shoots the arrow from his bow.” She taped a sanitary napkin over her bottom holes before sealing navel, ears, and mouth. As she plugged her nostrils, Lisanne imagined blood and lymph leaking there, a classic sign to whatever monks were present (she wished some were here now) that recitations from The Tibetan Book of the Dead should begin. Finally, she covered up her eyes.

Some texts said it was best to die standing up. Some said it was best to die sitting, in full lotus. If one couldn’t manage either, the guidebook suggested one simply recline, in the posture of a sleeping lion. That was how the Buddha had died. Then it is good enough for me. As she lay on her right side, she punched at her skull with the gold-handled scissors in the complementary area of Kit’s surgical incisions. She stabbed to the cadence of measured oracular tones, and shouted out loud: “Listen, Lisanne! Now has come the time for you to seek a Path! As breathing stops, the clear light of the first phase of dying, as shown to you by H.H. the Venerable Kitchener Clearlightfoot, will dawn! This is primordial mind, empty and radiant, without horizon or center! See that for what it is! H.H. the Venerable Kitchener Clearlightfoot will describe it and help you!”

• • •

GUESTS SCREAMED, in revelry.

Becca locked herself in her room. Every now and then some drunk stumbled into her door or tried letting himself in.

She was checking out Us Weekly’s Celebrity Look-Alikes page, with its paired photos of famous people who supposedly resembled each other — like Kate Spade and Kate Beckinsale, or Tina Turner and Beyoncé Knowles. It was sort of a goof. There was also a famous/nonfamous section, and there she was: a picture of Becca beside one of Drew. Without her knowing, Larry and Annie had sent in one of Becca’s eight-by-tens — along with a link to the Six Feet Undergirls Web site.

If you’re like Drew double Becca Mondrain, a twenty-two-year-old actress, Internet goddess, and “Six Feet Undergirl” in Los Angeles, and people are always saying to you, “You know, you look just like…,” send your photo along with your name and daytime phone number to Letters, Us, 1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY, 10104-0298, or e-mail it to letters@usmagazine.com. If we run your picture, you’ll win a prize!

A body slammed dumbly against one of her walls, and she startled. She flung herself to the bed and cried.

“I will not leave this town a loser look-alike!” she exclaimed, then thought: I sound like a bad actress. (Out of some fifties film.) She giggled, then picked up the phone to call Annie. They talked excitedly about the Us Weekly piece, and Becca said she wondered what the prize would be. She told Annie she should get her horny ass up to Mulholland right here, right now, then hung up and went to the bathroom and did a line of coke as she peed. She washed the tears from her face, put on a thong, and looked at herself in the mirror. Flat stomach, belly ring, high ass. Tried on a short black Barneys skirt. Thought of Rusty, then pushed the thought away.

Ready to party.