by Maria Semple
(This Buckyism worked its way into Looper Wash. Season two, episode twenty. Josh, the kindly and patient sheriff, refused to arrest a drifter for stealing the girls’ rock tumbler. Vivian stormed off, saying of Josh, “She obviously doesn’t know.”)
“Perhaps,” Lester said, “the post lady would have been more accommodating if you’d given her actual money for Christmas instead of re-gifted potpourri.”
“I suppose next year I could throw in some car-wash coupons,” Bucky said dryly, playing along.
“He’s addictive, this guy!” Eleanor said after they’d hung up.
February drew near. The anticipation became palpable. Not for the premiere of Looper Wash but for Mardi Gras and Bucky’s account of riding on the Khaos float. Could he possibly deliver after all the hype?
“Standing there in my white tights and sparkling shoes, my gold lamé shorts, silk mask, and hair wig—”
What’s a hair wig? someone scribbled on the whiteboard. Nobody knew.
“—tossing beads to the lowly throngs, ten-deep between me and the blue wall of Porta-Potties, entire families with their Deuce McAllister jerseys, acid-dyed shorts, and eighteen-dollar haircuts, springing up from their lawn chairs, knocking over their hibachis, heads back, mouths open like baby sparrows, fingers grabbing at the air, hoping for a lucky throw.” He paused to marinate in the memory. “I know how Lindbergh must have felt.”
Eleanor’s boyfriend, Joe, had dropped by to take her to lunch. He entered during the tail end of Bucky’s monologue and was violently shushed.
When the call ended, the room exploded in victorious whoops.
“Bucky,” Eleanor explained to Joe. “You gotta love him.”
“Do I?”
A week later, the animators were huddled in Eleanor’s office.
“Your big three-oh is coming up, Mr. Lewis,” Bucky said from the speaker. “What are our plans?”
“Eleanor is throwing me a party at her place.”
“Your boss Eleanor?” A sniff could be heard from the speaker.
“Do you have a cold coming on?” Lester asked with a wink to the busting-a-gut animators.
“Remind me of her last name,” Bucky said.
“Flood. She’s related to President John Tyler.”
“A direct descendant?”
“Her mother’s name was Tess Tyler,” Lester said, looking over at Eleanor to make sure that was correct. “Eleanor has a pair of John Tyler’s derringers in her apartment to prove it.”
“A direct descendant of a U.S. president in show business? I must witness such a travesty firsthand. Inform her I’ll be attending her little fête.”
It was the captain of Khaos himself, riding his comet to New York City. Eleanor’s team did what all feral and procrastinating animators did: they came up with a wager.
Everyone put in a twenty and whoever came the closest to drawing an accurate Bucky would win the pot. (The Internet has since fiercely debated why the Looper Four were so sloppily rendered in the “Guitar Zan” episode. The answer: Bucky Fanning.)
Most of the Buckys submitted were stump-sized. Some bow-tied gentlemen-of-yore. One a drooly, fly-swarmed hayseed. Eleanor settled on average height, balding, driving moccasins, no socks, wool pants, floral button-down and lavender cashmere sweater tied loosely around the shoulders. She threw in oversized Versace aviators with gradient lenses.
The day arrived. Bucky strode into Eleanor’s office. Bucky in the flesh.
He was indisputably handsome: tall, perfect skin, sensual lips, luxuriant wavy hair. (Lester had often insisted Bucky was attractive. “So why can’t he get a date?” Eleanor had asked. “He doesn’t want a date,” Lester explained. “He wants someone who won’t leave him.”)
Bucky wore black. Black bomber jacket, black cashmere crewneck with a black silk T-shirt peeking above, black leather ankle boots with the red Prada stripe up the heel. Slightly ridiculous, but only if you knew Bucky was a social cripple with no job. Otherwise, he looked like any other wealthy hipster on the streets of SoHo.
More than anything, Bucky had an imposing presence. He wasn’t fat, exactly. He reminded Eleanor of how papayas swelled during the rainy season or the way Greg Gumbel looked like someone had taken a bicycle pump to Bryant Gumbel.
Bucky’s eyes immediately landed on the twenties spilling out of a wire in-basket.
“What’s the bet?” he asked.
Panicky eyes swung to Eleanor.
“There’s no bet,” she answered too quickly.
“There’s a bet,” Bucky said calmly.
Beside Eleanor on the couch sat a coffee filter filled with honey-mustard pretzel nuggets. Her hand reached for one. Bucky took in Eleanor for a beat and nodded, as if that told him all he needed to know. He turned to Lester.
“I made us a lunch reservation at Balthazar, Mr. Lewis. I presume that is up to your middling standards.”
It should have come as no surprise to Eleanor that at Lester’s party, her baby sister, Ivy, Ivy the willowy, translucent one with a fluttery aura (she was the air and Eleanor was the earth), Ivy six foot one in ninth grade, who, a month before high-school graduation went to model in Paris and then Japan but had no luck in New York, where it mattered, who followed an acting coach to the Berkshires which ended up being a cult and had to be rescued by Eleanor and her then-boyfriend Joe, Ivy who miraculously booked a Dior campaign so her face was all over the subways one summer but lost all that money and her modeling connections in an ironically named Ponzi scheme, “Friends Helping Friends,” Ivy who hitchhiked to Telluride for an ayahuasca ceremony and stayed three years shacking up with the shaman, Mestre Mike, next finding religion in Fat Is a Feminist Issue, Toxic Parents, and Healing the Shame That Binds You, this Ivy, who became a certified masseuse but quit because the constant transfer of bad energy was making her weak, she was allergic to wheat and cut out sugar before anyone was allergic to wheat and cut out sugar, she also refused to eat meat because it was biting into animal screams and she avoided nuts because viruses clung to nuts, the Ivy whose skin had become flaky and eye sockets saggy, who couldn’t shake her angry dry cough, who Eleanor’s by-then-husband Joe, a surgeon who knew a dying bulimic when he saw one, checked into an eating-disorder unit on Second Avenue where Ivy was forced on arrival to eat a sloppy joe on a white bun, despite sobbing and gagging and collapsing on the linoleum floor, Ivy who was now answering phones for David Parry, rock-and-roll manager and husband of Violet, the head writer of Looper Wash, as a personal favor to Eleanor, Ivy who was now thirty-three and healthy if getting a little old for her act, it was this Ivy who came to Lester’s party, it was this Ivy who met Bucky, captivated Bucky, went back to the St. Regis with Bucky, and to New Orleans the next day.
A year later they were married.
The engagement party was held in New Orleans.
One of Joe’s rules: The first thing you do in a new city is take the public transportation. He and Eleanor chugged along St. Charles in the overstuffed streetcar. From afar, the live oaks seemed to drip with Spanish moss, but up close, they were just Mardi Gras beads, months old, stuck there.
Eleanor and Joe hopped off at Third Street and crossed. The Fanning estate was on the good side of the avenue, the river side.
2658 Coliseum stretched the entire block, its iron fence skillfully wrought into stalks of sugarcane. A plaque told the history, but it was too dark out to read.
The mansion glowed from within. Eleanor balked at the gate.
The disbelief had been hitting her in waves since she’d gotten the news that Bucky had proposed to Ivy on the plane to New Orleans. (“All I require is that you love oysters,” he’d told her. “But I don’t love oysters.” “You will.”) Eleanor had shown up at work that Monday, her in-basket still rich with twenties. Nobody had the heart to claim them. The joke wasn’t funny anymore.
Lester had marched manfully into Eleanor’s office. “There’s a good chance it won’t work out—”
“I’m happy for the
m,” Eleanor said and returned to her work. “Could you close the door?”
The mansion door swung open courtesy of a courtly black man in tails with white hair and white gloves. He was Mister, the husband of Taffy. Both uniformed servants to two generations of Fannings, and hopefully a third, now that Bucky had returned from New York with, of all things, a bride.
Eleanor and Joe entered. The living room was a-swish with ball gowns and tails. Just as an “Oh!” was about to escape Eleanor’s mouth—she’d worn flats and a knee-length dress she’d had no time to iron—a mint julep was thrust into her palm. The shock of the frosty silver tumbler slapped Eleanor’s face into a smile.
“Eleanor! Joe!” It was Ivy, wearing a pleated chiffon gown, lime with orange flowers and sleeves that hung like calla lilies. She gave it a twirl. “1972 Lilly Pulitzer! It belonged to Bucky’s mother. Did you know that if you admire something, the person has to give it to you? That’s the Southern way.”
Ivy took Eleanor’s hand and introduced her around. Ivy’s frailty was still there, but without the undercurrent of unpredictability. No, being adored by Bucky—and she was adored, no question, the way his soft gaze infused her with ease, the delight they took in each other’s words, the way his forearm fit the curve of her waist—had softened Ivy’s edges. One might say she’d grown into her frailty. The South was a good place for that.
Politicians and oil barons, lawyers and historians, shipping titans and ne’er-do-wells: to a person, they loved Ivy, had fully embraced her and, by association, Eleanor and Joe. Eleanor had never before felt so fascinating. In turn, those she spoke with became fascinating, and so the bonhomie spiraled up, up, up. The air felt cozy with kindness and laughter, not like New York, where people you talked to perpetually scanned the room for someone better. A week earlier, at a Fox network party, a Simpsons writer had literally pushed Eleanor aside midsentence when James L. Brooks walked in behind her. Manners, Eleanor grasped through the haze of mint juleps, weren’t a function of hollow snobbery and misguided airs; they were acts of profound generosity.
Granny Charbonneau sat sternly in the corner, both hands firmly gripping the long handle of her cane. At one point she flapped her hand at Eleanor.
“Are you the sister?” Granny Charbonneau barked. “Maybe you can convince Bucky to stop dressing like a hangman.”
At the food table, Eleanor couldn’t get enough of the hot spinach dip. Taffy leaned in and shared the secret ingredient: “Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom.”
Bucky’s mother led Joe over. “This one I just want to slip in my pocket.” Earlier in the day, she’d cut her forearm sharpening the blade of the push mower. “Mister hurt his back, and what’s the alternative, to hire a team of gardeners? I can cut my own lawn.”
Later, Eleanor found herself alone. She dropped into a fussy love seat. The pillows hit her low back in just the right spot. Mary Marge leaped onto her lap and curled up.
“Hello, you,” Eleanor said to the pooch, startled by how thick-tongued it came out. She was unaccustomed to the relentless salvos of alcohol.
Chunky leather scrapbooks lined the coffee table, their sumptuous padded covers begging to be opened. Eleanor obliged. On the first page was a truly weird photo.
The Royal Court of Khaos.
Grown men and women in outlandish costumes, their faces morbidly serious, more waxen than human. Bucky, in a beaded gold satin shirt, gold shorts, white tights, rouged cheeks, a platinum-blond Prince Valiant (hair?) wig and a fountain of ostrich feathers springing from his gold headpiece, stood among the similarly lurid king, queen, pages, and maidens.
“Those parties start in a month.” It was Ivy, with Bucky. “I couldn’t be more nervous. Bucky’s making me take curtsying lessons so I don’t embarrass him before the court.”
“Ivy, my love,” Bucky said with mock exhaustion. “They’re not parties. They’re balls.”
“Finally! Someone to do all my thinking for me!” Ivy mimed plucking her head off her shoulders and handing it to Bucky.
“Bucky,” Eleanor said, straining to enunciate, “I want to thank you for making my sister so happy.”
“My life will have been a failure if spent making your sister happy,” Bucky boomed. “I won’t rest until the sun and the moon redden with shame knowing Ivy outshines them both.”
“We’re flying to Italy to have me fitted for white gloves,” Ivy said. “If you’re sitting in the front row, the gloves have to be over the elbow. Don’t you love it?”
“It’s on the front row, darling,” Bucky said. “One sits on the front row.”
Joe had a nickname for Ivy: “the Monstrance.” On certain Catholic holy days, the Eucharist was displayed in a golden-sunburst monstrance where worshipful eyes gazed at it around the clock. Joe, an altar boy, had often been tasked with the graveyard shift. In Bucky, this living monstrance, Ivy, had found her perpetual adoration.
Eleanor’s shoulders melted. Something deep in her jaw loosened. Ivy was going to be okay.
Their mother had died at St. Vincent’s. Those final visits, once so vivid in Eleanor’s mind, had faded with time. The old woman in the next bed being wheeled out for hip surgery, then wheeled back in thirty minutes later when they didn’t have the right instruments. The bag of dark urine hanging from the bed rail. Their mother, the Broadway star, dry-mouthed and distant. On one of her last visits, Eleanor had brought a picture she’d drawn: Tess with a grown-up Ivy and Eleanor, all three improbably wearing wedding dresses. “This is lovely, Eleanor,” her mother whispered. “But it won’t work.”
Eleanor cherished the memories of her mother: being picked up at school by Tess in her dance clothes and blue fedora, fringe purse swinging at her hip; listening to Tess, Gigi, and Alan gossip outrageously about the other dancers in the company, Eleanor not quite following but oh, the thrill of joining in the laughter; the parties that ended with everyone standing around the piano singing show tunes; the Cornish game hens for dinner; the exotic scent of Erno Laszlo facial products; the dazzling contents of her jewelry drawer; the lazy afternoons at the Bowlmor.
But these recollected moments also carried extreme guilt. Eleanor was old enough to remember how much Tess enjoyed her company, how unhurried their moments were together. Ivy remembered only the abandonment.
“Please don’t hold it against me,” Bucky told Eleanor, “but the future Mrs. Fanning and I must beg our exit. The Times-Picayune has arrived.”
With Bucky gone, ruddy-cheeked Joe joined Eleanor.
“Wow,” he said, the pillow hitting his back in the sweet spot.
“I know.”
“Make room, make room.” Lorraine, Bucky’s second cousin, nestled between them. “Get that rat off you.” She pushed a snoozing Mary Marge onto the floor and waved over some champagne.
“Can you believe how seriously everyone takes this?” Lorraine said of the scrapbooks. She opened up to her year. There she was, the Queen of Khaos. “Look how thin I was! I know what y’all are thinking, it’s moneyed tomfoolery, and you’re not wrong, but I tell you, it’s a gas!”
Across the room, Bucky arranged Ivy’s train for a photographer. Behind them hung a portrait of Bucky’s ancestor P.G.T. Beauregard, the Confederate general who ordered the first shot fired in the War Between the States.
“Oh, Barnaby!” Lorraine said with a mixture of fondness and spite. “Anytime he vexes you, and he will vex you, just remember, he’s a Troubled Troubadour. It’s a nickname we gave him. We were in the car when Kurt Cobain shot himself. The announcer came on the radio and said, ‘Troubled troubadour Kurt Cobain has been found dead’… The name just stuck, Troubled Troubadour. He’s not so bad once you realize it gives him great comfort to know where he stands.”
It was Irish coffee now, and who wasn’t comforted by knowing where they stood? The birds with the cascading tail feathers on the wallpaper, the butter-colored ceiling, the gold mirrors and jute rugs: the effect wasn’t pretentious, it was comforting, just like the blue-and-white stripe
d love seat. Who would have thought blue-and-white stripes went with butter and birds and gold and jute, but it worked. So did being looked in the eye when people spoke to you, and teens in tuxes conversing with adults. Why not waiters in tails and white gloves? Why not Bucky’s mother and her friends in decades-old dresses, sun-damaged skin, frosted lipstick, and low chunky heels? Why not flowers from the garden and dinged julep tumblers and food that was good but not great? When Dixieland music started playing, the splash of the trumpet and belch of the tuba confused Eleanor at first because it was clearly live but not coming from inside. Then, faintly through the garden windows, Eleanor made them out: joyous black kids in short sleeves and neckties playing for the party, outside so it wouldn’t be too noisy. They could see in but Eleanor couldn’t see out. Why not that too?
The next morning, the jagged double ring of the hotel phone startled Eleanor awake. It was Ivy, tentative, asking how Eleanor had slept but not wanting to know how Eleanor had slept. Bucky was upset about the cachepot.
“What’s a cachepot?”
“You don’t know what a cachepot is?” Ivy said. “It’s a porcelain pot for hiding things. Last night the ice cream was meant to go in one. Instead, it got plunked down on the sideboard in its carton. In the Times-Picayune this morning you can see it, bold as life, right there among the Charbonneau china. Dreyer’s.”
Eleanor vaguely recalled. When the bananas Foster was served, someone had asked for ice cream. At the time, Taffy had been on hands and knees working on a wine spill, so Eleanor went into the kitchen and set the ice cream out herself…
“I know,” Ivy said. “We finally got to the bottom of it.”
Was this a joke?
“You made Bucky look like a philistine on a night that should have been a celebration of our engagement.”
“It was a celebration of your engagement.” Eleanor sat up in bed. Nausea welled.