Grady got pulled away. He waved at Rusty and the girls as he was sucked into the house.
“What does Grady do?” asked Becca as they headed toward the pool.
“Personal trainer. He was Kevin Costner’s stunt double — before he fucked up his leg. They still work out together whenever Kevin does a movie. He’s K.C.’s camera double too.”
Annie said, “I don’t understand how he has this place.”
“A settlement from the city.”
“The shooting?” asked Annie.
“Nah, that’s a whole different deal. Their little girl drowned in a municipal pool. A light in the tile shorted out or some such shit — the kid he had with Cassandra. Questra. Electrocuted her. Took five years, but they got eight million. You’ll meet Cass. She’s around somewhere. Trippy lady. Hard-core.”
They passed the tiki bar, where drinks were being dispensed from an enormous ice sculpture. Blue-tinted gin flowed over the massive crystalline chunk into high-stemmed glasses. Just before the stairway that led beneath the pool came a makeshift shrine. The framed photo of a shiny-smiled toddler was surrounded by leis and votive candles.
They went down the storm cellar opening to a small booth with a glass wall allowing a view of the swimmers. Their shoes puddled. It was dank and smelled of mold. A girl smoked a joint, nodding her head in stoned, silent assention at what she saw through the aquariumlike window: a disembodied woman, about six months pregnant, sat on the steps of the pool getting head from a fat old Hell’s Angel type. Everything was below the water from the breasts down. The bearded biker wore only Levi’s. Every twenty or thirty seconds, he surfaced for air before going down again.
“That’s Cass. Grady’s old lady.” Then, with a smile: “I told you she was hard-core.”
Impermanence
LISANNE THOUGHT ABOUT letting Robbie know that she was expecting. She would have e-mailed, had he been an e-mail person. Anyhow, she was glad he wasn’t.
It would have been so easy to have the doctor flush it away. She wasn’t showing and was hefty enough to think she never would, even if she carried to term. For the moment, Lisanne had the perverse luxury of putting the whole thing out of her head. She went to yoga a lot that week over on Montana. There was a kind of remedial class for fatties, newbies, and old folks.
To her shock, one morning Kit Lightfoot and Renée Zellweger slipped in, just as class was beginning. (She wasn’t sure if they came together.) The ninety-minute session was difficult though not nearly as crowded as the advanced levels — a hip choice, thought Lisanne, for a celeb. She could deal with Renée, but having Kit there made it tough to concentrate. She’d always had a crush on him: now there he was, barely ten feet away, sweating his tight, insanely famous butt off. The teacher kept telling everyone to “stay present,” and Lisanne thought she must have picked up on her delirium.
After the group Namastes, Lisanne lay in the corpse pose, trying to time her departure from the sweat- and sage-scented room with Kit’s. When he left, she waited a beat, then got up to stash her mat in the anteroom. She retrieved her things from the shelves and laced up her shoes in slow motion. Her mind wandered. The next thing she knew, Kit brushed past. He looked in her eyes and smiled and Lisanne’s heart actually fluttered. With a surrealistic pang, she thought of her pregnancy. Renée emerged from the large room. The two stars said quietly enthusiastic hellos. They left, and Lisanne discreetly followed.
Her car was conveniently parked a length away from Renée’s. Lisanne opened the hatchback so she could fuss around while eavesdropping.
“Gonna go see the monks?” Kit asked.
Renée grinned inquisitively.
“The Gyuto monks,” said Kit. “They’re making a sand mandala at the Hammer.”
“Oh! I heard about that,” said the actress excitedly.
“It’s very cool. You should really try to get over there.”
“Those are the guys who do that weird throat-chanting thingie?” She imitated the gargling sounds, and Kit laughed.
“Tantric monks,” he said, nodding. “They had a school in Tibet for like five hundred years. They were forced to go to India in ‘fifty-nine — like everybody else. They’ve been making a mandala all week.”
“At the Hammer?”
“Uh huh.”
“That’s so cool.”
“It’s really a kind of meditation. You sit, don’t you?”
“Yes. But not as much as I’d like.”
“No one ever sits as much as they’d like. So you know a little about what they’re doing, then.”
“A very little.”
Lisanne got the feeling Renée was vamping.
“When they’re finished designing the mandala, they destroy it.”
“Destroying the mandala,” she said, with a respectful laugh. “That really sounds amazing.”
“It’s not about making art. That is a component — because the mandala and the meditation itself are both art. It’s really more a way of showing dedication and compassion to all living things.”
“Sentient beings.”
“Right. It’s about impermanence.”
“And they’re doing that today? They’re still doing that today?”
He nodded and lit a cigarette. “The deconsecration ritual isn’t open to the public, but I could definitely arrange for you to go in. If you want to see it. I’m kind of a patron of the San Jose Center.”
“Kit, that would be so great! I would love that.”
• • •
LISANNE PLANNED to take off early from work and finagle her way into the mandala ceremony, but everything conspired against her. A string of tiny crises kept her longer at the office; when she finally got in her car, traffic was gridlocked. Her repertoire of residential street detours failed abysmally.
When she got to the museum, the guard signaled that the exhibition was closed. She stood there downcast.
Moments later a monk in orange robes appeared, on his way in. He was short and radiated a cliché, childlike bliss. Unexpectedly, he took Lisanne’s arm, gently ushering her into the large hall. She felt like Richard Dreyfuss at the end of Close Encounters.
While her eyes adjusted, she looked around for Renée, but the actress wasn’t there. Neither was Kit. One of the masters had already begun sweeping away the colored sand. The Yamantaka deity, an emanation of the Bodhisattva Manjusri, was disappearing. The eight heads and thirty-four arms, two horns—“the two truths”—and sixteen legs (sixteen kinds of emptiness), the nakedness that symbolized abandonment of the mind, the self, and its worldly concerns were all being swept into a container. The monks would offer the commingled grains to an undisclosed local body of water. Water, which reflects both the world and infinity at once.
Now Lisanne had no doubts.
She would keep her baby.
Reunions
KIT GUNNED the Indian down the 60, toward Riverside — the familiar, unfamiliar route. The faux-stucco skin of the old house was thick with cement spray-on coatings, ordered throughout the years by Burke in varying fits of mania. Seasonal cosmetic makeovers were his thing.