Skull Session

by Daniel Hecht

  It was all happening very fast. One of the few advantages of being unemployed: a flexible schedule. He had no pressing reason not to take two days to fly to the West Coast. Mark was still at Janet's until Tuesday, the MG needed only a couple more hours of work. With the end of the semester imminent, Lia had so much work to do that she'd have no time for him over the weekend anyway. Actually, the timing couldn't be better.

  Before he left, Lia had reminded him to probe Vivien. "Try to get her to tell you who would go to such lengths to wreck her house. Who might have a grudge they'd try to settle that way."

  "Lia, she's not hiring me to be a detective, she's hiring me to fix up the house. Anyway, Vivien's a regular Medici, if what everybody tells me is true. She's a lot more accustomed to intrigues than I am. I'm not sure I can be that subtle."

  "Why be subtle? Just ask her," Lia said. "Also ask her if I can have that maroon hat." She'd come into his arms then and kissed him sweetly. "Just be yourself with her. Don't let her push you off balance. She can't do anything to you if you relax and stay your easygoing, lovable self. Let her worry about being subtle."

  Paul felt the first lurch of the jet's deceleration. He'd never subscribed to any particular religion, but on seeing the landscape tilt crazily, hearing the whine of air over the lowered wing flaps, his mind flinched into a sort of prayer. Within seconds, just as Lia said, the fear distilled out of him everything superfluous, leaving only the essentials: Let me have more life to live, I will use life more wisely, let Mark and Lia be okay and know how much I love them.

  The landing was uneventful. How fast, he thought, your concern for absolutes gives way to the petty details of disembarking, claiming bags, navigating the airport. What fickle creatures we are, how short-lived our humility.

  He checked the bus schedules, but then remembered that Vivien was footing the bill, and found a row of taxis. Ahead of him, a young woman in a short skirt swung into the backseat of a cab, showing briefly the best legs Paul had ever seen in his life. He took a breath of California air, eucalyptus mixed with diesel exhaust, and was glad he'd come.

  The Royale was an old five-story building just off Union Square, constructed in the era of elaborate cornices and lintels. Paul stood briefly on the sidewalk, savoring the bustle of the street for just a moment before facing Vivien. It was five o'clock, the rush-hour traffic was heavy, people were hurrying past. Still lit by the sun just over the horizon, the sky was a vast dome of deepening turquoise, and the streetlights had come on.

  He'd reserved a room at a cheap hotel on Columbus Avenue, and for a moment he considered going there for a shower and a change of clothes. But that was just an excuse to put off seeing Vivien. He'd agreed to meet her as soon as he got in, she'd insisted on treating him to dinner, and he'd accepted. He shrugged: This was a business trip, not a vacation.

  She stood aside for him to enter. "You are right on schedule, nephew. I do appreciate your punctuality. Welcome to my western redoubt."

  "Hello, Aunt Vivien," Paul said. He held her shoulders briefly and smelled the lavender scent of her.

  Paul followed her into a large living room, where Vivien sat in a burgundy upholstered armchair. "My Lord, here you are. When I last saw you, you were perhaps eight and had rips at the knees of your dungarees and snot running down from both nostrils. And of course, I was not a wrinkled-up old lady."

  Paul started to object, but Vivien waved him to silence. "Now, we can exchange tiresome pleasantries and covertly inspect each other, or we can express our curiosity frankly over a glass of wine, whichever you like. Personally I would prefer the latter."

  "The wine sounds wonderful." Paul smiled. There was a certain charm to her imperiousness.

  She turned to a small table, which held a bottle of red wine and two stemmed glasses. "I took the liberty of opening this to breathe before you arrived. Isn't this a lovely suite? Every day is a luxury for me after those many years at Highwood."

  As Vivien poured the wine, Paul looked around the high-ceilinged room. Victorian-era elegance, only slightly faded: a huge Oriental carpet on the floor, royal purple drapes on each side of the windows, a small fireplace framed by carved white oak and topped with a heavy black marble mantel. Crowded bookshelves rose from floor to ceiling on each side of the fireplace.

  Vivien was much as he remembered her, a tall, broad-hipped woman who projected an aura of authority. With her vital manner, the fashionable cut of her brown hair, she registered as younger than her actual age. Her facial features clearly resembled Aster's, but while his mother's face had sagged into wrinkles of disappointment and self-pity, Vivien's was the face of a woman accustomed to having her way, lined with pride, anger, impatience. Her eyes were a piercing blue, hungry and alert, set in nests of fine wrinkles. They were the eyes, Paul decided, of a bird of prey. No, a dragon. Vivien the Dragon Lady.

  "Your wine," she said.

  He took the glass and brought it to his nose, inhaling the strong tannic scent. Vivien watched him closely, eyes darkly amused. "You have no idea how much I have looked forward to seeing you," she said. "It has been so long since I've seen a family member, someone of the same blood. It has to do with my narcissism, of course—a blood relative can provide a convenient mirror of oneself. An opportunity to find out what sort of stuff one is made of."

  "I suppose," Paul said. "For better or worse."

  "Absolutely! In fact, I suspect we learn most from that which is least flattering."

  "Perhaps."

  "Oh yes. Every time. The blood tells. Let's have a toast, shall we? To family. To the blood." She raised her glass and struck it hard against his, then sipped it thirstily. Paul lifted the rich red liquid to his lips, vaguely ill-at-ease with her toast.

  "I must ask you to indulge me," Vivien said. "For years, I've gotten only bits and snatches of family news, from Kay. I am eager to hear all about you Skoglunds."

  Be yourself, Lia had said. Keep it businesslike, Aster had warned. "Tell you what," Paul said, hedging. "I'll be happy to tell you about the Skoglunds if you tell me about the Hoffmanns. If it's reciprocal."

  "You mean I'm not to get out the klieg lights arid truncheons? That seems fair enough."

  Paul told her about his sister and about Aster, avoiding anything too personal. Vivien sipped her wine and watched him closely as he spoke.

  Outside, the muted noise of city traffic ebbed as rush hour passed.

  "You've omitted one of the Skoglunds—yourself," she pointed out.

  "I've already told you the basic saga. There's not a lot else."

  "You have told me only the material data and have studiously avoided anything substantive."

  "Such as?"

  "Such as what you believe, what you aspire to. What it is you want."

  "What do I want? I'd like to be a good father to my son. I want to build a good relationship with Lia. I'd like my family to be happy. I want to do work that I believe in and that makes me enough money to live on."

  She looked at him incredulously. "You don't want wealth, fame, power, lots of women—?"

  He smiled. "Occasionally. Not so much anymore."

  "You don't want to, for example, experience bliss, know God, probe life's mysteries, give wings to your own creative genius—"

  "I don't think I'd recognize any of that if it came my way. In the existential department, I'll settle for being a decent person and keeping my worst impulses in check. A good marriage, a happy family, a vacation to someplace warm once a year. I figure that if I get that far, those other things will find their way into the equation."

  She looked at him as if he were some exotic animal. "Astonishing!" she said. She took another sip of wine and then sighed. "Well. It all sounds lovely. You Skoglunds are such normal and decent people. It sounds as if you have all done quite well, considering."

  "Considering?"

  "Tut-tut! I'm speaking with admiration. The death of a father, especially by suicide, can have such difficult and lasting repercussions. There are whole boo
ks written on the subject."

  "I'm not sure we exactly escaped unscathed, Vivien," Paul said carefully.

  She must have noticed his hesitation. "Perhaps Ben's death isn't a topic you're comfortable with."

  "It's been thirty years—it's territory I've gone over fairly thoroughly. You might say I feel the way you do when I tell you how long the driveway at Highwood is."

  Her eyes narrowed and she smiled faintly, approving. "Point taken."

  They both sipped their wine, and Vivien's expression softened. "Dear Ben. You may not know it, but your father and I were quite close." She gazed for a moment into space, remembering. "There was a wonderful period when the four of us spent a great deal of time together, Ben and Aster and Erik and I. And even after Erik . . . took his leave, there were Ben and Aster and I. And of course Dempsey. We were young enough to be optimistic still. We sincerely believed our thoughts and ideas and our . . . our style were so splendid that everything would turn out as we planned. That our meals and conversations, our games, our walks in the woods, the books we read and discussed, somehow mattered, were significant. With such elan we would accomplish all sorts of meaningful things. Such arrogance! But for us it was—how can I express it?—a golden era."

  A golden era, yes, Paul thought. But with odd shadows on the periphery.

  "Do you know, Ben and I even corresponded? It seems silly, with us living so close by, but Ben was a great believer in the gentle, scholarly art of letter writing. I still have his letters. I save all my correspondence." Her face twitched suddenly, mouth pulling downward sharply, a bitter frown. "That is, if they're not destroyed. Along with everything else at Highwood."

  "I have a confession to make—I stole something of yours. Borrowed, anyway, from the floor of the library. This." He unfolded Ben's letter from his jacket pocket and handed it to her.

  More than anything he'd said, the letter seemed to affect her. Her hands shook slightly as she held it to the light. When she was done reading, her face looked suddenly weary, eyes distant. Without saying anything, she folded the letter and handed it back to him. You wonder about your life, whether it meant anything, she'd said. You struggle to maintain a delicate balance.

  "Yes. Well. We had many fine dinners together," she said.

  Paul gave her a moment. "Maybe we should talk about the house."

  Vivien stirred in her chair, as if she'd just remembered he was there, then checked her watch. "I suppose I can endure it whenever you're ready. However, it's now half past six, and I made dinner reservations for seven. We can talk about it after dinner. I hope you like Chinese food—I reserved a room at the Xi'an, which I have found to be the finest in the city." She rose, crossed the room to pause in a doorway. "I will need a few minutes to get ready," she said over her shoulder.

  "Please have some more wine."

  He poured another glassful, then stood to look out the window. Below him in the street, traffic cruised past and several cabs waited at the curb. A siren whooped close and faded, the night sky glowed with the lights of the city.

  Vivien was a powerful personality and would no doubt be an unpleasant person to have as an enemy. But she was also interesting.

  She enjoyed being provocative, she didn't talk around a subject. If she . often managed to hit a nerve, it was due to her obvious aversion to small talk, her preference for matters of substance. And however the letter had affected her, she had rallied quickly: She had come back, speaking with precision and formality, mustering the stubborn arrogance that sustained her. You had to admire that.

  Still, he didn't trust her either, any farther than he could throw her.

  Paul strolled around the room, sipping wine, and stopped in front of the bookcase. Judging by the books she'd purchased in her six months in San Francisco, Vivien had maintained her eclectic reading tastes. Agatha Christie, the Castaneda books, a row of le Carre novels. History: books about the history of San Francisco, the Crusades, the Vikings. Several histories of the Philippine Islands.

  There were maybe two dozen slick contemporary paperbacks on topics such as alien abduction, channeling, and life after death, and he wondered if these were interests Vivien had acquired since coming to the trendy credulity of Northern California. Farther down were a dozen or so textbooks on biochemistry and anatomy. Surprised, he found a whole shelf devoted to psychology and neurology, and pulled a book at random, finding it to be a fairly detailed layman's text on the brain.

  "One can learn a great deal about a person by observing his bookshelves," Vivien said, startling him. She had appeared at his side without his hearing her approach. "As one can by observing what a visitor takes from the shelf. Apparently you share my interest in neurology." She had put on a brown coat trimmed with mink and had applied lipstick to her mouth, a bright, unflattering crimson.

  "It comes with the turf," he said, tapping his head. "With having Tourette's. What prompts your interest?"

  "Right now I'm looking into how your brain works when you get old. Quite fascinating. I've started taking 'smart pills' every day, guaranteed to improve your cognition and completely legal. Here in San Francisco, there are even smart-drug cafes where you can order a malted milk with L-pyroglutamic acid and phosphatidyl choline and 2dimethylaminoethanol, and so on. Lovely brain-nurturing chemicals."

  "If you can remember the names, they must be working pretty well."

  Vivien smiled slightly. "I'm probably not the best judge. Perhaps you can tell me. Now, we had better go." Paul instinctively offered his elbow, and she gripped his arm firmly above the biceps as they left the suite. "But Paulie—you won't start shouting obscenities at the restaurant, or anything of that sort, will you?" It was a gentle teasing, a flirtation.

  "I'll try to restrain myself," he said.

  13

  HE WAS SURPRISED when she suggested they walk back to the Royale from Chinatown.

  "You must understand," she explained, "this is the San Francisco I love most. Mysterious, timeless. We could be in old Shanghai. I don't often have a willing companion for evening walks, and I intend to take full advantage of your presence." She gripped his arm, steered him to the right, into the labyrinthine streets on the edge of Chinatown.

  A fog had rolled in, occluding the city. The smell of the ocean mingled with the exotic stink of restaurants and groceries: butchered meat, dried fish, strange herbs, incense. Through the windows of darkened storefronts, Paul saw plucked corpses of geese hung in rows by their long necks, doomed carp hovering in their packed aquariums, bins of contorted roots and bulbs and dried squid. A few other pedestrians, faceless in the fog, walked hurriedly past them.

  They had lingered over an excellent dinner of central China's regional cuisine, drinking plum wine and conversing on a wide range of topics—everything but what had brought him to San Francisco. The walls of their small private room were decorated with panels of intricately carved wood, lacquered a deep red, depicting scenes at the court of some Chinese emperor. Sitting opposite Vivien, Paul felt that the setting perfectly framed her: There was an imperial quality to her, with her dramatic red lips, the cynical arch of her eyebrows.

  "Now, where were we?" Vivien said. She walked easily, still gripping his arm. "Oh yes. It was your turn to explain your interest in neurology. Per our agreement to be entirely reciprocal."

  "As I said, it comes with the territory. When I was a kid, Ben taught me about the brain so I could understand my own neurological problems. Now I try to stay current on Tourette's syndrome research—there's been a lot of progress. Also, I thought I should understand how brain functions develop during childhood, if I wanted to understand the learning process. For teaching."

  "And it has nothing whatever to do with your son, Mark, and his behavioral problems."

  He didn't try to hide his irritation. "I guess Kay has kept you pretty well informed."

  "You are so wary of me, Paulie! Have you heard such terrible tales about me? I'd think you'd be glad to compare notes with another amateur scholar of the br
ain."

  "Mark has been variously diagnosed as autistic, epileptic, and about half a dozen other things. Since the medical community couldn't agree on what his problem was or how to help him, I thought I'd give it a try.

  I've done a lot of reading, but I don't consider myself a scholar so much as, basically, a parent."

  They turned again, onto a darker residential street where the streetlights cut cones of light in the fog. In a dark doorway, what he'd thought to be a shadow stirred as they passed, revealing itself as a homeless man, swaddled in blankets. Paul felt tension begin to twitch in the muscles of his shoulders.

  "Is there any similarity between Mark's condition and what you once had? Before the Tourette's?"

  At first he was hesitant to go into details with Vivien, but then decided the hell with it. It was a relief to unburden himself. Vivien nodded encouragingly as he talked.

  Yes, he explained, there were similarities between Mark's symptoms and the symptoms he himself had shown as a child. Dealing with Mark's condition, Paul had learned only a little from the failed programs the child psychologists and neurologists had prescribed, and mainly by negative example. He'd gotten more from his own reading, and still more from remembering his own childhood experience. Though his first symptoms had been later eclipsed by Tourette's and had never returned, he remembered distinctly the same micropsia Mark com plained about, and the strange, remote, frightened mood that seemed to accompany it.

  "Remind me what micropsia is," Vivien interjected.

  It almost always had come on near bedtime, when Paul would be reading or playing with toys, getting drowsy. He remembered being fascinated by the slippery play of light on the shiny paint on one of his toy soldiers. Suddenly it was as if he were looking through the wrong end of a telescope: His own feet looked tiny, tapering with the distance, the soldier nearly imperceptible in his faraway hand. A fascinating change of perspective, making him feel like a giant of geological proportions. But also frightening. He'd shake his head violently in an effort to clear his sight, which never worked.