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?”