I’m Losing You (46 page)

They lay side by side, listening to the carp of a cricket, close by. Suddenly, she was looking down, watching his tongue dig at her as she squirmed, arching back, hands trembling on the pommel of his
head. The cricket was an omen that confirmed the fatefulness of this moment: just that day she heard Sri Harold talk on tape about the Music of God manifesting itself as flutes, chimes, buzzing bees—and crickets. Ursula was certain she'd met this boy in a past life. Sara and Phyll had a whole Victorian thing going, but Ursula sensed she and Taj went back much further. It would take some hard work on the Inner to find out just how far, but at least now the path was marked.

She shivered, lifting the boy onto her.

Severin Welch

Severin never strayed far from the Radio Shack scanner and its Voices. He picked his way through mines of static, listening to the agents and execs en route to power lunches; after midnight, pimps and drug dealers ruled. The choicer bits were duly recorded, then transcribed by his daughter, who still lived in the Mount Olympus wedding house on Hermes Drive. Lavinia made a meager living typing screenplays, and Severin was happy to throw some dollars her way.

The transcripts were returned and Severin pored over them, ruminating, sonic editor on high, scaling heights of cellular Babel, ducking into rooms of verbiage, corroded, dank, dead end—then a sudden treasure, odd heirloom, dialogue hung like chandeliers, illuminated. He held the sheaves to his ear and heard the dull, perilous world of Voices—the workday ended, seat-belted warriors homeward bound. All was well. Whereabouts were noted, ETAs demanded and logged, coordinates eroticized; half the world wanted to know just exactly when the other half thought it might be coming home.
On the one-ten—kids there yet?—called you before—love you so much!—trying to reach—taking the Canyon—couldn't get through—losing you
…

Severin thought he recognized Dee Bruchner amid the welter.
You tell that nigger
, said the Voice,
he closes at the agreed four million or I will spray shit in his burrhead baby's mouth
.

Had they always talked that way? He couldn't imagine Mr. Bluhdorn coming on like Mark Fuhrman. Not to worry—he'd use it all to stitch one hell of an American Quilt. These were the Voices of a dying world, no doubt. They needed a script to haunt, and
Dead Souls
was just the place.

“You look awful,” she said, treading the doorway in a flowery perspiration-stained muumuu. Lavinia's skin was oily white, an occasional pimple pitched like a nomad's pink tent. She was turning fifty-three and wore a knee brace; the year had already added thirty pounds.

“Do you have my pages?”

“Do you have my pages! Do you have my pages! Don't you say hello anymore?”

“Hullo, hullo!” He stood and did a jig. “Hul-lo, hul-lo—a-
nuh
-ther opening of a-
nuh
-ther show!”

She scowled, lumbering to the kitchen to fix a sandwich. Thank God Diantha wasn't around for this. His wife had been so fastidious in her person, so immaculate—proprietary of her daughter's fading beauty.

“Have you heard from Molly?” He risked a diatribe but couldn't help himself. It was a year since he'd seen his granddaughter. Her birthday was coming up.

“Molly
died
, Father, remember? Molly died and
Jabba
took her place. That's what she calls herself now—Jabba the Whore!”

He took the transcript from the counter and sat back down with an old man's sigh. “Such a tragedy.”

“Since when is it a tragedy to be a whore?”

“Don't, Lavinia. Don't talk like—!”

“A whore and a doper. A jailbird, Father! She should die in prison, with AIDS!”

“Lavinia, she's a sick girl.”

“
I'm
a sick girl!
I'm
a sick girl!” She pointed to a purplish knee.

“I'm in
pain
, Father,
twenty-four hours a day
. I didn't
choose
that! Jabba the Whore lives in a world of her own choosing.”

“So do we all.”

“So do we all! So do we all!”

“That knee of yours is in bad shape because of the weight.”

“Oh, that is a
lie
and if you want to talk to my chiropractor, Father, he will tell you. So do we all, so do we all! Would you like me to call him?” Severin wearily shook his head. “You can talk to my acupuncturist too. And if you really want to know, which I'm sure you don't, the weight on my knee is a cushion—”

“All right, Lavinia. It's a cushion.”

“And the moral is! If you
don
't know what the hell you're
talking
about,
don
't offer opinions! The great So Do We All has
so many
important opinions! God, do I
hate
that.”

They moved to Los Angeles in ‘forty-three and Severin bused tables at Chasen's, working up to waiter. A quick, funny, ingratiating kid. He made his connections and eventually scored with the regulars, free-lancing bits for Red Buttons and Sammy Kaye. Then he met Hope and sold a few gags to the weekly radio show. They signed him full-time—but he'd always have Chasen's. Took Lavinia there on her tenth birthday, still had the snapshot: slender girl in a party dress wedged between him and Diantha, George the maître d' in his monkey suit on one side, Maude and Dave sidling in on the other, smiling from the blood-red booth like royalty. One of his old customers wheeled in the cake on a copper table—Irwin Shaw. He respected Shaw, a real writer, a book writer, that's what Severin wanted to be in his heart of hearts. He tried and failed a dozen times before deciding to do the next best thing; adapt a classic for the screen. A novelist by proxy.

“And don't you forget: Jabba the Whore was made from
his
seed.”

“Who?” he asked, riffling pages, not really listening. Severin tensed; too late—fell for it again. He was a player in a grim sitcom, a straight man in Lavinia's little shop of horrors.

“Who! Chet Stoddard, that's who!”

“Oh Christ—”

“Don't you
oh Christ
, don't you dare! For what that man put me through? Did you
know
that my
jaw
will never mend? Never mend: do you even know what that
means
?”

“It's a long time ago.”

“Tell it to my
jaw
! Tell my jaw how long it's been! I go to Vegas to
rescue
him and that piece of shit
punches me out
! At Sahara's, right in the casino, hundreds of people!”

“All right, Lavinia—”

“Don't
all right
me and don't
Oh Christ
! The bone could have gone to my
brain
. Do you know what kind of
headaches
it has caused me? The
migraines
, Father? Do you understand how
demeaning
?” She began to weep. “With the
pain
and the
police
…the
humiliation
in that desert town. And not even
jail
, they dried him out in a
luxury
hospital, flew him back first class! If it wasn't for me, his show would
have gone
off months
before it did! I
schmoozed
for that man! With Saul Frake
pawing
me, his
tongue
in my mouth, I could
vomit
. Father? Would you please give me the courtesy of an answer?”

Severin poured himself a drink at the wet bar. He felt like an actor doing a bit of business.

“I'm a good person! Why has this
happened
to me? What has happened to my
life
? Why
me
, Father? Why! Why! Why!” She went to the bathroom and blew her nose while Severin sat down again to surf the bands. Lavinia re-emerged, waddling toward him with a fat rusty tube in her hand. “I took this from the drawer,” she said meekly. “Okay?” Some forgotten Coppertone cream. She seized the typed pages from his hand, brandishing them. He turned up the volume of the scanner. “What are you going to
do
with this? Your eyes are so bad you can't even
read
. What are you going to
do
?”

“What do you care? You get paid.”

“People pay me to type for a
reason
, they have
scripts
, they have
jobs
, they're writing
books
. I don't understand your
reasons
—you're just eavesdropping on people's lives! People have a right to their privacy—”

“What are you, ACLU? You get paid to type. Period.”

“I'd love to hear what
Chet Stoddard
, the Larry King of his
time
, has to say—maybe you could listen to
him
. But he probably can't
afford
a car phone. I hope he can't afford a
car
or if he can, he's living in it.” Her face lit up like a battered jack-o'-lantern as she threw down the pages and backed toward the door, Baggied sandwich in hand. “If anyone ever finds out you're doing this—
illegally eavesdropping
—I want you to say you typed it your
self
. Not that anyone would believe it. Just tell them you found someone
else
, not
me
, okay? All right, Father? Because I do not want to be drawn in.”

Free to listen to Voices again—shouting from canyons and on-ramps and driveways without letup, bungling into digital potholes on Olympic, dead spots on Sunset—shpritzing from palmy transformer-lined Barrington…Sepulveda…Overland…crying from electrical voids on nefarious far-flung PCH, dodging wormholes and power poles, festinating to beat devil's odds of tunnel and subterranean garage as one tries to beat a train across a track—prayers and incense to ROAM (where all roads lead)—trying to beat the
ether. A blizzard of Voices fell from range, chagrined, avalancheburied spouses in flip phone crevasse, electromagnetic wasteland of tonal debris. Neither Alpine nor Audio Vox nor Mitsubishi-Motorola could defend against unnerving fast food airwave static: recrudescent, viral, sudden and traumatic—words dropped, then whole thoughts, pledges, pacts, pleas and whispers, jeremiads—maddening overlap, commingling barked-staccato promises to reconnect swiftly decapitated: Westside loved ones morfed to scary downtown Mex, collision of phantom couples in hissing carnival bumper cars, technology cursed, torturous redial buttons pressed like doorbells during witching hour—
hullo? hullo? can you hear me?
—symphony of hungry ghosts begging to be let in.

I'm losing you
.

Rachel Krohn

She sat in the lobby of the storefront mortuary, nervously thumbing a Fairfax throwaway. An ad within offered membership:

Rabbinical-types in white short-sleeved shirts came and went without acknowledging her; she wondered if they were apprentices. A smiling Birdie brought her back to the cluttered office.

“Your father was not murdered.”

The old woman said it without preamble, like a teacher delivering a Fail.

“What are you saying?”

“Forgive me—but something in my heart told me it wasn't right to hide what I know. I thought it was God putting me next to you at the seder.”

Rachel was dumbfounded. For a moment, she wondered if Birdie was someone in the grip of a religious psychosis. “What do you know? What happened to my father?”

“Your father took his own life.”

Rachel let out a great sob. The old woman touched her, then withdrew. She handed her Kleenex and a cup of water, then calmly spoke of Sy Krohn's affair with a congregant—how the “lady friend” gave him a disease (“nothing by today's standards!”); how the cantor, realizing he'd passed the infection to Rachel's mother, chose to die.