I’m Losing You (31 page)

Chet Stoddard

That night, he went trolling for HIVs at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting in Van Nuys. Horvitz told him those were good places for leads. Some were restricted to sero-positives, but they were easy to crash—no one asked questions. Chet watched and listened, attuned to money woes. Not everyone had life insurance. Finding out who did was tricky, especially if you weren't infected yourself; one didn't
want to be tagged a policy-chaser. Sussing out candidates was dicey all around. Though he used an alias, eventually some trivial pursuiter was bound to know him as Chet Stoddard, boob-tube relic. Winding up on the “Where Are They Now?” page of a tabloid wasn't a pleasant prospect. “
ONE-TIME TALKER FULL-TIME HAWKER: ADVANCES $$ TO WALKING DEAD
.”

The meeting was lower-scale than Chet would have wished. Lots of bad news bears: sour prison faces, weepy dementia heads, remorseful crack bingers and the usual quota of self-important alcoholics—smug vampires who felt less hopeless hanging with the pozzies. Whenever they stood to speak, you could feel the room's fatal contempt. Around mid-meeting, Chet realized there was a halfway house next door and that explained it; a pissy, policy-poor crowd if he'd ever seen one, hard-core wraiths who took the RTD to get their methadone. Still, you never knew when that stuntman (Aetna) or production designer (Prudential) might stand and share. Expect the unexpected, Horvitz always said.

Luckily, he remembered the party. Someone started a group for heteros with AIDS and tonight they were having a shindig. Chet fished in the glove compartment for a flyer given him by one of his viatical co-workers: Oakhurst Drive, south three hundreds. That was Beverly Hills, over by Olympic—Persian World. No mansions but sure as hell no halfway houses, either. Sounded promising.

The modest two-story home was probably in the eight-hundred-thousand range. The canapé-eaters were nicely dressed, to be sure, and none had the Look except one—a swarthy, charismatic man with thick Yves St. Laurent glasses, a stylish cane supporting sinewy legs and a telltale girth that betrayed (to the trained eye) a set of diapers. Emblazoned across his T-shirt was:
I SURVIVED THE HOLOCAUST MUSEUM
. He was holding court, in the middle of one of those comically anarchic HIV riffs featuring Mothers in Denial, Sado-Healthcare Worker Mayhem, Brides in Dementia on Their Wedding Days and other assorted gruesomely hilarious phantasmagoria. A black-haired boy ran twittering circles around him, mummifying the monologuist with imaginary streamers, like a maypole.

Chet was about to knock at the bathroom door when a woman in a crazy miniskirt emerged.

“This is the hour of lead,” she said, looking straight in his eye. “Remembered, if outlived, as freezing persons recollect the
snow…” He smiled and she went on, very dramatic. “First, chill: then, stupor. Then, the letting go.”

“I like that.”

She held an arm toward the toilet, like Vanna White. “You are free to wash—I'm through vomiting.”

He found her in the backyard a few minutes later. Her name was Aubrey and this was her house. She had black hair and twinkly green eyes.

“How long have you known?” she asked, out of nowhere.

How long have you
…His mind stuttered: she assumed he was HIV-positive. Chet scrambled up the slick rock of her question—the Question of all Questions, it seemed—trying not to fall into the swallowing sea. “Six months.”

“You're a virgin.”

“You?”

“Seven years, eight come May. What do you do?”

“I work at the Holocaust Museum.” It was supposed to be a kind of joke.

“No shit, the Wiesenthal? What do you do there?”

“Acquisitions.”

“Well, that makes you the perfect host—for this party, I mean.” She nodded toward the diapered man, expostulating poolside. “Did you see Ziggy's shirt?”

“Pretty fuckin' funny.”

“You're not going to sue, are you?”

She was swept away by new arrivals and Chet milled around, waiting for her to get free. He'd used his real name and was glad about that. After a while he decided to leave, thinking the time they had in the yard was as good as it would get—tonight. On the way out, she slipped a card into his pocket. He didn't look until he was in the car.

TRYSTS & CONFABULATIONS

Aubrey Anne Turtletaub

(310) 555-1722

Troy Capra

Troy worked feverishly on
Skin Trade
while keeping an eye toward potential venues, Equity-waivers where he might rehearse and film the performance. The idea of shooting on an “X” soundstage came to mind, but Troy dismissed it as too “on the nose.”

The plan was to film ninety minutes of written material honed at private showcases—technically, a no-brainer. The key, as always, was the writing. The autobiographical vignettes had to stand alone yet be of a piece: a child's sudden recognition of the sacred, mystic ordinariness of a winter morning; a twelve-year-old boy, marooned in a body cast after being struck by a car, spins tales of chivalry; the sightless cello teacher who set Whitman to music; tender agonies of first love and the eeriness of first death—his bookish father's, from lupus; mother-son healing on a magical trip to New York, the smell of subways and Broadway and Mother's Arpège. Troy wanted to pierce the heart of things, to learn, if he could, how it was he found himself—three quarters of a life undone—onstage at this precarious benefit, this fund-raiser for his soul.

If he kept it honest, he couldn't go wrong—that's why he decided to begin with a skit of himself directing porn, in pantomime: stooping to invisible actors as he held camera on shoulder, zooming in, panning flesh, cajoling, extolling, a clockwork artist under the fiendish, ticking cock of a come-shot. A naked and bravura opening for the performance of his life.

He made Kiv call the actor a week after they'd met. A week felt about right—a week wasn't pushy. Troy wanted to play out the connection, keep it alive until he could sit with the star and fill him in on
Skin Trade
.

When Richard asked if she and Troy were an item, Kiv said, “Off and on.” Very high school—very Beverly. That's what Troy told her to say and they fought about it but Kiv finally agreed, in the name of Troy's career. (She couldn't resist adding, “Mostly on.”) They were supposed to get together for coffee, but Richard was going to England for a few weeks and wouldn't be able to see her till he got back. She was somehow relieved. Before they hung up, the actor asked if she'd ever been to London. When Kiv said no, he said she
should come along. She just laughed and so did Richard, in that famous way. She wondered if he was serious.

A few days before Richard was due home, Troy called the office. He was close enough to finishing
Skin Trade
to lay the groundwork for drinks. If they could just meet somewhere—Orso's or the Grill or the Ivy—he'd bring the actor up to speed, dropping the completed script in his lap. He knew that without Kiv, there was little chance Richard would even return his call; maybe that wasn't even the case. What was he expecting from the star, really? Financial backing? Hosannas and camaraderie? How could he benefit from pimping Kiv? By becoming Richard's friend? (The pseudo-friendship of a dealer.) Maybe his needs were that simple. Where was the rule that said he couldn't be Richard Dreyfuss's friend?

“Hi, my name is Troy Capra. I met Richard at a play…”

“Troy?” asked the astonished voice on the phone. “It's Betsey—Blankenberg!”

“Jesus! Betsey? How
are
you?”

“I'm
great
! How are
you
?”

“Fantastic!”

“This is
so funny
.”

“I didn't know you—you work for Richard?”

“No, I'm
stalking
him. I break in every few weeks and answer the phones.”

“For how long?”

“Oh God. I've worked for Richard four
years
now.”

“It is
such
a small world.”

“He
told
me he ran into you—he said he saw someone from Beverly.”

“He couldn't have remembered—”

“He barely remembered
me
and we went
out
together!”

“I didn't know that! But
how
? He was gone by the time we—”

“
Way
after I graduated. Long, boring story.”

“So you just
work
for him now.”

“What can I say, I like the bastard.”

“Well, that's fantastic. Are you married?”

“Divorced with children. You?”

“No way.”

“Tell me what you've been
doing
, Troy Donahue—with your
life
.”

“I'm still directing theater—”

“I
knew
that—I mean, you've been doing that for
years
. But I don't see plays anymore, unless I'm in New York. Even then, I'm not really a big—
I'm so ashamed!
”

“I do stuff all the time, you should really come.”

“I'd love to
see
you.”

“Tell me when. But the reason I was calling was…Richard and I met at this Ibsen play and we talked about getting together—”

“Let's see…he was supposed to be back on Saturday but now he has to go to Dublin, for a
wake
if you can believe it. He
should
be home the fourteenth, but I know he'll be crazed that first week.”

“Can we pencil something in for the twenty-first?”

“Uh huh. Will he know what this is about?”

“Uhm, yeah. When we talked, he asked—”

“That sounded horrible, didn't it? What I meant was, if there's an agenda, sometimes it's good that I know so I can remind him—who knows
what
manner of jet-lag we'll be dealing with.”

“
Adventures in the Skin Trade
—the performance piece I'm working on.”

“
Great title
.”

“I'm just about done and—”

“Super! You know, you guys should really
do
something together, Richard
loves
the theater. He's doing
Medea
, in La Jolla—”

“He mentioned that.”

“With Des McAnuff. It's going to be
so wild—Medea
meets
Sunset Boulevard
.”

“Set in Hollywood?”

“It's called
Medea Madness
. Medea marries this great director. When his movie goes in the toilet, he leaves her for this Sherry Lansing–type—and you know what happens
next
!”

“Sounds intense.”

“Practically the whole second act is a murder trial—it's, like, this great
commentary
.”

“Have they found someone for Medea?”

“That's what's so great: Des reversed all the roles.
Richard
is Medea!”

“You're kidding.”

“Isn't that fantastic?”

Bernie Ribkin

Sitting on the deck chair in his Polo shorts, mezuzah sweating in the snow of chest hairs like a tiny gold traffic light, the producer scanned the printout:

He glanced from the mechanical litany to the ocean—a gorgeous day in the Colony. No one wrote about the fabled enclave anymore, at least not like they used to. The place really used to get the hype. To this sandy Eden, Oberon Mall had come home.