I'll Let You Go

by Bruce Wagner

  As they strolled the enclave past various “bench estates” and columbaria—new mausoleums were in varied stages of construction—she learned more about Ms. Campbell and her sister Ethel’s pet peeves than she might have cared to. That was all right; in this instance, a kind-hearted eccentric would serve her well. SIT DOWN AND HAVE A CHAT WITH SADIE AND MORRIS was etched into a marble love seat beside two graves. Dot explained how Sadie and Morris were not yet dead but wanted the legend inscribed anyway. In funeral-world parlance, that was what they called pre-need.

  Something drew her to the farthermost corner of the property, where a maintenance yard was being razed to make way for more tombs. It was lonely there, and felt colder than the rest of the grounds. When she saw a whitish pigeon wheel overhead, it reminded her of the doves at Castaic and she knew her instincts were, well, dead-on. Dot was glad the woman was interested in something family plot–size and said the work-in-progress parcel could be had for a million and a half, including a newly built adjacent shrine.

  But Joyce said she wanted a simple field of grass, and besides, the unfortunately pink cenotaph held just four—not nearly enough. No: her babies needed to be in and of the earth. Well, said Dot, an unbuilt-on field did have its advantages—caskets could be “contumulated” or stacked vertically; if you cremated, you could fit more than a dozen. The benefactress stared at a separate grid that was going for about $500,000—at eleven by fourteen, it still seemed a bit confining … yet what was she expecting in the middle of Westwood? Elysium? Would she even be able to raise that sort of money to bury unknown children? She would have to incorporate her loose-knit group of “angels.” They could call themselves Candlelight—the Candlelight Group. The Candlelighters … they’d have fund-raisers and make the bigwigs give them their money. She was adamant on doing it all without Dodd’s help.

  Joyce felt a surge of confidence and emotion. The gesture of acquiring Westside memorial space was born not of convenience (the drive to Castaic was actually meditative) but as a way of weaving those orphans into the everyday tapestry of her—Westside—world. There was something mildly depressing about their current resting place, that arid, unincorporated outback of hinterland exurbia butt-up against the whiz and rumble of failed ride-share speed lanes, sig-alert big-rigs and CHP gunships. How magnificent it would be to bury those treasures here—here, not there—amid wealth of skyscraper, museum and university, far from potter’s field. The poorest of forgotten children may after all help the richest of men into heaven.

  When they were done, Dot let her be. She communed with Dorothy Stratten, Donna Reed and Dean Paul Martin, then with deliberation, “Mrs. Gilligan” moved closer to the groundskeeper, who now angled toward her as he raked. She struck up a casual conversation, wondering in what schemes her father-in-law had enlisted him. It was Sling Blade’s peculiar fate to be linked to all the Trotters, without one another’s knowledge.

  In time Joyce returned to Pierce Brothers with Father de Kooning, whose blessings she required. The Bel-Air matron needed confirmation that her crusade didn’t smack of dilettantism, that what she was considering was real and mighty and good.

  The pastor mentioned meeting her sister at the Motion Picture and Television Hospital, and Joyce testily corrected him: sister-in-law. It seemed like she could never escape Trinnie—well, she could, but only on Trinnie’s terms … those would be whenever she decided to leave the country or go into rehab (usually doing both at once). And when she returned, the men of this family still dropped everything to pend upon her every move. Now, here Joyce was with Father Tim, her Father Tim, whom she’d first met while doing selfless service at a godforsaken graveyard in Castaic, something Trinnie Trotter would be too stoned or bored or grandiose to ever do, and here he was serving her up just like that! Your sister-in-law, he said, was kind enough to be donating her services in designing a garden for the hospital (“kind” because even in her dereliction she was expensively renowned)—with a coy smile he called ministering at the hospital his “day job,” meaning, thought Joyce, the real place he worked, the place that paid and sustained him, the place with a tangible, needy, dying parish, the place a thousand leagues above whatever after-school volunteer eulogizing he happened to do for dumpster babies on behalf of vainglorious society women with too much time on their hands. Her gorgeous, drug-addicted sister-in-law was donating her time, which was precious—precious, priceless Time and Service, making a beautiful, deathless “wandering garden”—whereas she, Joyce, the drab, laughable, very old in-law, the one who had to work her ass off to even look half decent, the one who cruelly brought a crippled genius into the world, was out there burying the discarded dead.

  A few visits later, Joyce let it be known to Ms. Campbell that she was in fact a Trotter. She handed her a check for $50,000 as a deposit on a deposit—which Dot happily though confusedly accepted, noting that her father-in-law, “Mr. Louis,” already had a plot and rather famously at that. Joyce said she was well aware, but the space she’d become interested in was for a “different” family, one she was quite close to and for which she wished to make this gift. That melted Dot’s heart, triggering a lengthy, somewhat inappropriate monologue of how her sister Ethel told her of a “great scandale—a horrible woman bought up all the remaining cemetery space in the Hamptons—for her own family of course, not for others. A hundred and ten plots! The selfishness!” Joyce listened and clucked along before making it exceptionally clear that she did not wish her visits or intentions passed on to the Trotter patriarch; she would tell him in time. She assumed Ms. Campbell gossiped with employees, so took it upon herself to reiterate as much to the character we know as Sling Blade, who was surprised and impressed that she and the old man were related. For his part, he couldn’t help wondering if Joyce would soon put him to work. The possibility caused him some anxiety, what with Dot being not at all shy about expressing her dissatisfaction with his growing absenteeism. The clan had him moving around so much—as occasional night watchman at various properties, for which he was on the Quincunx payroll, and sometime Mauck chauffeur, whereupon the old man tipped him lavishly—that under his breath he called them not Trotters but Gallops. He was not without his own brand of humor.

  But have we gone off-trail? Then let us speed the pace.

  The billionaire has been steadily adding to his ghost portfolio of empty tenements, and it bothered his wife not a little. Outlaid moneys were not the issue; such a burden Dodd Trotter could easily bear. It wasn’t the cost of the forays that disturbed her but the compulsive behavior surrounding them.

  As private wealth increases, cities and states struggle for revenue. Structures once deemed historic are sold off; that is how Dodd came to own the oldest government building in Newark, the Essex County Jail (put up in 1837, it was made by the designer of the Tombs). Mr. Trotter also traveled to Poughkeepsie, Dutchess County, New York, to purchase the four-hundred-acre High Victorian Italianate Hudson River State Hospital for the Insane. He is now landlord of the crenellated asylum on the hill in Binghamton, with its trefoil-embossed stair treads and floors embedded with glass blocks; he has bought a somber, elegant bluestone palace with fifty-foot Doric columns, once the Utica State Hospital for the Mentally Ill. He acquired the Traverse City asylum (1885), too, in Michigan, another turreted affair high on the preservationist list.

  Dodd Trotter leaves Detroit. From the 40,000-foot-high cocoon of his bed, he daydreams of Beverly Vista School’s vast tarry playground and early-morning fog, where boys floated toward him from the mist like foretellers of doom and misfortune—wrong answers in a novelty eight ball. It strikes him as ironic that he’s helping Marcie Millard and her committee refurbish the edifice, the only vacant building he has ever actually restored.

  He notices a blinking light on the console. A steward peeks in and, seeing he’s resting, discreetly begins to exit. The fitful sleeper inquiringly raises his head. It’s your mother, says the steward, and Dodd picks up.

  She is calling with today’s deat
hs.

  We’ve almost come full circle.

  Bluey too is in bed, happy to have reached her son, imperfect as the satellite connection may be. There’s a little Cessna crash in the local Times—a CEO and his three children—because Dodd is airborne, the item is bypassed in favor of the New York paper’s listing of a one-hundred-year-old “socialite-turned-big-game-hunter and prisoner of war”; then, a famous singer Bluey never heard of, dead at forty from “total organ failure.” She thinks it suspect; sounds like AIDS.

  Winter sullenly pastes notices into the suede memory album. Since Pullman’s birthday gala, the Icelander has been somewhat “off,” so grumpy that Bluey calls her “the Winter of my discontent”—which only exacerbates her mood.

  After lunch, they walk to the maze and Bluey sits on the granite bench at its entrance. (Trinnie likes that spot, too.) There, she decides to tell the helpmeet she’s going to leave her something in the will. Winter scowls, but the old woman with will-o’-the-wisp hair and translucent bluish temples persists, calm and imperious enough so the younger must listen. She is going to leave her a condo, she says. It is already paid for. Winter gasps as the words sink in—and cries, because no one ever gave her anything, ever, not even the Trotters, not in the thirty-five years she has served them.

  Bluey turns to stare down a wall of boxwood leading to the maze’s center. She remembers reading how slaughterhouses were designed with curves so the animals couldn’t see where they were heading. Panicking, she lifts her head to the sky and searches for the plane. “Dodd? Dodd? Doddie!”

  Chastened, Winter walks her to the house.

  Her daughter, at an AA meeting in an old wooden church on Ohio Avenue.

  A homely woman stands to say she turned everything over to God and that meant “antidepressants and nicotine patches, too”—a tacit indictment of the weak hypocrites in the room who cannot do without. She says she isn’t going to celebrate her AA birthday this year (Trinnie thinks: as if anyone cares) because her home group “forces women to put on dresses” to accept their sobriety cakes. She says she won’t put on a dress for anyone.

  You dyke, thought Trinnie. You’re not going to make it. You’re going to die.

  She dreamed of Marcus Weiner and spent her days in the vast archives of the Withdrawing Room. Her father thought she was researching the wandering garden, but it wasn’t so; she was busy unearthing blueprints and photos of the Bel-Air Colonne Détruite. Soon after her husband disappeared, Trinnie ordered that an inventory be taken of the marital house—all objects and their placement in each room painstakingly measured and documented. Everything—furnishings, clothes, books, utensils—was subsequently placed in storage.

  Now, like a necromancer, she pores over the fastidious records, looking for signs of life.

  †Of his sudden, compelling memory of that ruined column (both, incomplete), Will’m could make no sense or give good context. We offer that sidebar as sheer human interest—for it is a rare, poignant, shivery thing to glimpse the metaphor of one’s coming disarray, in a storybook garden to boot. That house cracked his head, then made him take up fractured residence.

  †Simply because Mr. Mott’s agonies are of lesser general interest than our principal players’ does not rob them of meaning, for pain is pain. Consolation comes more to the earnest reader who may have been briefly hoodwinked, in a simple truism: when invariably one is misled—in book or in life—better it be for a price not too high or investment too dear. We are early enough in our history for the latter to hold true.

  CHAPTER 21

  The Secret Agent

  “Thanks for looking at the script,” said Ralph. “But I’m on to something else now.”

  Tull was actually disappointed. He had found the copy of How to Marry a Billionaire, A Screenplay by Ralph Mirdling, Third Draft, Second Polish, A Method to His Sadness Productions, Registered at Writers Guild West—all 154 pages of it—gathering dust in the nook of his room, where the boy had abandoned it some months before.

  ANGELA

  (SELF-RIGHTEOUS)

  YOU’RE AN UNTREATED SEXAHOLIC!

  SEBASTIAN

  (HEATED, WILD-EYED)

  AND YOU’RE A NEW AGE PREDATOR!

  It wasn’t too bad a read after all. A breezy comedy involving a Beverly Hills limo driver and runaway socialite, it aspired to Lubitsch but had more the Mirdling touch.

  Ralph was in the kitchen, noshing as usual. His hair shorn militarystyle, he looked stylishly commanding—part of a new regimen. As if taking a cue from Trinnie, he had cleaned up his act. In his shabbily chic navy-blue Costume National he looked like a survivor of Appomattox who with steady rest and diet might soon be attending the officers’ ball. Today, Tull found him reassuringly unneurotic.

  Pullman snored, insensate, blocking Ralph’s access to the Sub-Zero. He was sleeping more than usual; his master had been meaning to take him to the vet.

  “You know what they say about Danes, don’t you?” asked Ralph rhetorically, gently pressing the spotted rump with the soft point of a demi-boot.

  “Go ahead, Ralph. Tell me. Get it off your chest.”

  “Two years a young dog, two years a good dog and two years an old dog. The rest is a gift.”

  Pullman raised his head and derogatorily chuffed before pressing his muzzle to the humming grille of the restaurant-size freezer.

  “Whatever,” said Tull.

  “It’s plain unfair,” he went on. “If you’re a man, you’re going to die in your seventies. Maybe. And if you’re fucking koi, you can push the envelope at two hundred—two fucking centuries, Tull, swimming about in a scummy little pond! And they love it!”

  “I thought your script was really funny.”

  “You’re a dear boy, but it’s awful.”

  “It isn’t, Rafe,” he said, giving the name its rightful pronunciation. “I wouldn’t shit you. I even have notes.”

  “Oh, by the way, it’s Ralph—with an l.”

  “Ralph?”

  “That’s what I call myself now. Ralph: simple and American as they come.”

  “You’re kidding. When did that happen?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “But what about … Mirdling’s Name Theorem?”

  “It went the way of all flesh—don’t let’s dwell on it.”

  Tull hoisted himself onto the stainless-steel counter. “I did think the script was funny.”

  “It’s worthless—I’ll seal it in an envelope and pull it out in ten years. Have a good laugh. Actually, though, it did serve its purpose.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Guess I had to get something like that out of my system. Took long enough! Hey, you know who I showed it to?”

  “Who?”

  “Ron Bass.”

  “Whoa!”

  “Nope. He actually read it—gave it a nice read, too. We’ve become pretty good friends. He’s all right. I’m still not crazy about his work, but … you know, Ron’s the one who turned me around. Gave me a whole new ‘P.O.V.’ Your mom and I had dinner with him, at 5 Dudley: great French onion soup. We met him at that sick-animal thing, you know. Very charming, tons of energy. And he does care about ‘the work.’ That’s saying a lot.”

  “You showed Ron Bass your script?” he said, still disbelieving.

  Ralph nodded eagerly, tucking into a king-size wedge of four-day-old mud cake. “He said I had no business writing that sort of thing, it was more like something he would write, but he would have written it better. I’m telling you, Tull, he’s a very funny guy! ‘Mirdling,’ he said—that’s what he calls me—‘Mirdling, if you’re going to do something third-rate, then for Chrissake at least do something true to yourself.’ ”

  “I’m amazed. Next thing you know, you’ll be buddying up to Robert Towne.”

  With that, he showed a flash of the old Rafe. “Oh Christ! I read yet another Mr. Chinatowne piece today. The Master was going on about his movie again—it’s an absolute mania, the man can�
��t stop! A ‘classy’ little essay in Architectural Digest … on and on he went about his ‘nocturnal ramblings’ on Western and Vermont, with the Santa Anas and the water company and all the intense bullshit–Raymond Chandler channeling … ugh! And how he took himself to a little bungalow in Catalina to hammer out that legendary first draft—oh Christ, I just want to vomit down his throat! And what about William Goldman? That vain, pontificating ass! He’s worse than ol’ Chinatowne! Oh please get cancer, Mr G., oh won’t you please? With his ‘nobody knows anything’ … well, I know something: someone should run them both over—”

  “So you’re just going to … throw the script away?”

  “I might do a number on it—put up some scaffolding and give it a po-mo makeover. Something closer to Charlie Kaufman. Spike and Charlie are the New Wave Wilder and Diamond. Let’s hope Spike isn’t as nasty as Billie, though—what a fucking monster he was. But smart. Managed to get his furry old dick pretty far up Cameron Crowe’s ass, huh. I do think someone should teach him how to dress, though. I mean, Spike. You’d think Sofia would—or maybe your mother! By the way, how are you two getting along?”

  “Okay.”

  Tull was about to do a little cathecting, but Ralph spoke first.

  “I think I’ve entered a very fecund moment,” he said. “I’m walking around with a thousand ideas. I’m telling you, man, I can’t stop the flow! I’m gonna direct something on DV any minute now, I can feel it. How do you like this: there’s a guy from Iran who’s been trapped at the airport in France for ten years because of some bureaucratic snafu. True story. A fantastic subject, very Herzog, as in Werner—or maybe it’s very Tati. Or maybe Lynch, but the Straight Story Lynch. Make a fantastic film. Then I was reading in The Enquirer about a travel agent who helps people disappear. Tells you how to fake your death, open a Swiss account—all totally legal! That could be very Japanese.”