I’m Losing You by Bruce Wagner Read Free Book Online

ghoulish e-mail: prayers and solicitations from a network of God freaks he called the Internuts.
    Donny, the good agent, dutifully brought them back to Phylliss’s project. Obie said she’d recently screened
Salò
, and Phylliss was surprised to hear the filmmaker fascinated her enough that she’d once considered optioning a biography,
Pasolini Requiem
, with the intent to produce. Naturally, the idea of playing a young woman who becomes the sexual obsession of a suburban family appealed to her immensely; Obie’s instincts were always to shock. Though Phylliss knew Big Star was bold (most often for the wrong reasons), she cagily emphasized the commercial elements along with the avant-garde.
    â€œIt’s like a darker version of
Boudu Sauvé des Eaux
—the Renoir film.”
    â€œDown and Out in Beverly Hills.”
    â€œYes!”
    â€œThen it’s a comedy?”
    Phylliss scrunched her mouth up, a translator pondering nuances of an ideogram. “It
is
funny—
unbelievably
so. But I don’t think I’d call it a comedy.”
    Donny laughed. “It’s
definitely
not a comedy.”
    â€œDo you have a director?”
    â€œWe’re close.”
    â€œJane Campion would be so great.”
    â€œI love Jane,” Phylliss said, “but I don’t think she’s available.”
    â€œWell, I love what this is about. And your stuff is always so great—
I love your shit.
And I’m
so
fucking sick of the studios. I need to
do
this.”
    â€œIt’s not a very long shoot,” said Phylliss. “And it’s all in L.A.”
    â€œI wish it was in Miami—or New Orleans.”
    â€œIf that’s really an issue—”
    â€œNaw. I don’t wanna fuck you up.”
    â€œShe just bought an amazing house in Palm Beach,” offered the agent.
    â€œThe two cities are so similar,” said Phylliss.
    â€œFuck it, I’ll do it in L.A. I’ll be cool.”
    They toasted each other. They were having their
Get Shorty
“done-deal” moment—a sort of druggy group hysteria that Phylliss knew usually led nowhere. No matter. Strokes from Oberon Mall were better than a pass from Sandra Bullock. More fun, anyway.
    â€œBy the way, we
are
changing the title.”
    â€œ
Teorema
would be kind of a tough sell.”
    â€œToo artsy.”
    â€œThirty Days in the Hole?”
Donny shouted.
    â€œThe Man Who Came at Dinner.”
Phyllis was choking.
    â€œNo! No!
The Man Who Came
on
Dinner
.”

    Airborne again with her flotilla of Chanels, up, up and away, sucked from Bel Air over park and Palisades, Topanga and Pepperdine and Point Dume, ocean and asphalt and greensward, then the buses of Hearst Castle, faraway confetti of tourists filling Serena with the kind of mournful nostalgia roused by the drone of prop planes or secret garden wishing wells. She felt a fathomless burning. She sat atop a maypole, like the novelty eraser on a child’s pencil, remembering theGreat Intruder. That’s what she was on, then—a metastatic tour of the Americas, a Cook’s cancer carousel of the Western world. Impaled thus, riven by pain and douched by morphine, she kept her stabbing vigil on the highest sail, nightwatch on the old crone’s nest. She’d be first to sight Raccoon Cove, the gelatinous waves of its mossy harbor flecked with sodden offerings: crumbcakes, sheepskin shag and tiny buoys of meperidine ampullae.
    There was Sy, waving from the dock. They first met at Beth-El, the Wilshire Boulevard temple where Donny went to Sunday School. Her marriage was on the rocks. Sitting at those services, Donny’s little hand in hers, she fixated on the tall gray cantor while Bernie fidgeted, dreaming of Vegas or studios or whatever it was Bernie Ribkin dreamed, sitting with sore and stinky cock, unwashed from last night’s whore-fuck. To Serena, the burnished wood of the pews always smelled like coconuts