by Bruce Wagner
She nodded, still feeling the affront. “It’s just so disappointing. I mean, people. People are disappointing.”
“A sculpture garden, huh. What a shame,” he said with a droll little smile. And then he left, without taking a final look at the perfect mock-up of what the design team had discreetly labeled
DODD TROTTER MIDDLE SCHOOL
†Mercifully, they would never know of a woman named Jane Scull and the sorrows she endured.
†His son-in-law’s East Los Angeles outing had provided the old man an opportunity to indulge his natural curiosity of local burial grounds while at the same time catching up on Marcus’s doings.
CHAPTER 42
An Epistolary Homecoming
Trinnie decided to stay in Rancho Mirage through New Year’s, getting massaged six ways from Christmas Sunday. She asked Toulouse to come, but he declined. He wanted to be with the cousins.
What with Bluey’s crucifixion and Marcus’s resurrection, the holiday felt more like Easter anyway; family spirits were rather low. They stayed in town (everyone but Trinnie—who wasn’t, in actual Trinnie terms, really out of town), which was highly unusual at year’s end. The trauma of recent events put the dynasty on a kind of tornado watch. They hunkered down, ready to take to the cellars.
On yuletide morning, presents were exchanged at Olde CityWalk, with the most gold stars going to Lucy for her gift to her brother. During their summer hegira, the budding author picked up an exquisite weave of Mor Pakh cotton, rayon and peacock feather in Morocco and had prevailed upon Isaac Mizrahi (an old friend of her aunt’s) to design a light-hearted caftan—which Edward adored on sight.
Among the cadeaux Lucille Rose was happy to receive in turn were a bouquet of pens (among them a spiderwebbed Montblanc Octavian and a saffron-colored Omas, which paid tribute to both Buddha and the Dalai Lama) and a Louis Vuitton writing-desk trunk bestowed by Edward, in the style of the original commissioned by Leopold Stokowski. Such tools may do a young writer no harm.
Toulouse was showered with his favorites—bunches of nineteenth-century ivory bananas carved in half-peel and eerie, delicate watercolor eye portraits set in stickpins (the preceding from Edward). Lucy offered bounty for his mother—part of such largesse being that her cousin was permitted to claim that he had selected them himself—that included a truffle shaver and a bamboo-handled sterling-silver fruit-and-flower cutter. But the most precious gift, at least as far as Lucy was concerned, she saved for last, and dramatically ushered him into the Black Lantern Book Shoppe to impart: standing under hastily rigged mistletoe, she gave him everything she had.
At around two o’clock, just as Pullman was opening his own spectacular goodies (including an old-fashioned milk bucket full of his favorite white truffles), Candelaria Monasterio clopped across the cobblestones to greet the merry gang. She told Toulouse that his grandfather had asked for him; Eulogio was waiting to drive him home.
Lucy wanted to know if he had something for Grandpa Lou. Toulouse shamefacedly admitted he hadn’t. At her wise suggestion, and with her brother’s wholehearted assent, he made the sacrifice and selected a stickpin with the painted eye of Napoleon’s brother. It would do well for a dandified old man. The cunning Edward threw in a bottle of Sassicaia.
When he arrived at Saint-Cloud, the front door was open. Toulouse went in, calling for his grandfather—he knew Trinnie wouldn’t be back for at least a week. He set down the gifts, and Pullman galloped into the yard.
The defining moments of our lives are usually so called in retrospect; they rarely arrive with the unmistakability of an Olympian entering a vast arena, torch held high, to the applause of thousands. The worn epigram of the power of journey over destination still holds—and held still at the first official meeting of father and son.
Marcus and Toulouse found themselves not six feet apart, in the grassy neutral zone between the descending marble steps of Saint-Cloud and a tonnelle of pear trees that led to the formal parterres. They shifted on their feet like shy dancers at a cotillion while Mr. Trotter, a damp towel placed to his neck like a compress, made the introductions.
Mr. Weiner had been told about the existence of the boy at a special afternoon briefing in Montecito; a full complement of therapists had been employed to shore up their client if need be, while a battery of men in suits waited in the wings. Even Harry and Ruth were there to lend support. The old man himself refreshed Marcus’s memory of the wedding (over past weeks, his son-in-law had recalled much on his own that he hadn’t yet shared); his rash leave-taking; how his wife had gone on to make the best life for herself and her son that she could. Mr. Trotter said Katrina was aware of his return but was not yet prepared to see him. When Marcus asked if she had ever filed for divorce, the same therapists who had presented a united front were at odds as to whether this was a healthy question, but the old man thought it absolutely on point.
What impressed the experts most (aside from his equanimity in the face of these formidable bulletins) was that the client’s main concern appeared to be for his son’s well-being. He wanted to know how much Toulouse had been told and was keenly interested in the boy’s current emotional state and general response to his arrival on the scene. His patron said “it hadn’t been easy for him”; at that Marcus gravely nodded his head, emitting the closest thing to a Trotterian chuff that those gathered had ever heard. During this session—a session in which even professionals dropped their defenses and became teary-eyed as the client, flanked by his parents, spoke elegantly of time lost and time never to be regained—Marcus pronounced the words my Katy for the first time in more than a decade (for that is what he had always called Katrina). Remarkably, he even commented on “that dreadful tower.” But then he looked to the old man and said apologetically, “It was the most beautiful thing a father could ever have done for a daughter—I wish I’d been as beautiful for her.”
Marcus asked after her health and was satisfied by what he was told. He wished to be given the boy’s name, and smiled delicately upon hearing it. “Might I see him?” His patron said that was the purpose of this meeting; the time was nigh, and they were seeking his thoughts about a rendezvous. “Yes,” he said, with a great sigh. “I’d very much like to see the boy.” The old man wished to tell him he had already in effect met Toulouse during the trip to Boyle Heights, but the shrinks had thought better of it, cautiously theorizing that the client might misinterpret the child’s adventure as backhanded or spurious. If, they said, when he met his son he recognized him from that trip (which seemed doubtful), well, that would be something else.
And so it was he’d come to Saint-Cloud seventy pounds lighter than in SeaShelter days. As said, the epigram still held, at least for Toulouse, who felt oddly let down and now understood his mother’s reluctance toward reunion. After all, he was in her camp—he too had been abandoned.
A quick handshake—followed by an awkward span, which felt at least as long as the years his father had been away.
After an elision of chuffs, Mr. Trotter spoke up. “Well! I felt it best to just bring the two of you together.”
The boy rocked uncomfortably on his feet.
“Do you go to school, son?” asked the stranger. He had rehearsed the opener for an hour or so.
“Yes.”
“And where would that be?”
“Four Winds.”
“Sorry?”
“It’s called Four Winds,” he said impatiently. “In Santa Monica.”
“I see. That’s where I stayed awhile—over by the freeway. And what do you study there?”
“All kinds of things.”
Marcus solemnly nodded.
“Pull! Pullman!” Toulouse upbraided the dog, who was absurdly frolicking through the bushes; it irked his master no end that the Dane should be exhibiting such freakish sprightliness. A fresh torment.
“Large dog, he,” said Marcus.
“Pullman!”
The disobedient leviathan finally cantered to his side and, with a si
ngle fart, laid himself down.
“Ho!” said Marcus, smiling at the dog as if awaiting another outburst.
“I really should go—I’m supposed to be with the cousins.”
“Toulouse!” said Grandpa Lou sternly. “Talk with your father a little—”
“What should I say?” shot back the boy.
“It’s all right,” said Marcus. “Another time.”
“You didn’t even see me!” said Toulouse contemptuously. “I was in the Mauck, and you didn’t even see me!”
“The Mauck?”
“The truck that took you to that grave,” said Mr. Trotter.
Without missing a beat, Marcus said, “Of course I saw you.”
“Bullshit!”
The old man restrained himself. He expected the waters to be a little choppy.
“I didn’t mention it,” Marcus went on coolly, “because I feared it was something you weren’t glad about. Did you hide away? I did that once at your age—at the Huntington, in San Marino. Holed up in the library, clear through to the next morning. Scared all hell out of my parents.”
“I’m gonna go,” said Toulouse, flustered.
“All right, son.”
He ran to the house, Pullman leaping ahead.
He heard his father shout after him, not without emotion, “I’m sorry, boy! I’m so sorry about everything!”
When Toulouse ran off, a somber mood washed over this stranger in a strange land—a wave of what philosophers have called ontological sadness. (A phrase that of itself can make one wistful.) He floated on that tide like a creepy jellyfish whose tentacles wished to caress but had only managed to sting the flesh of a small bodysurfing boy: Toulouse …
Toulouse!
That would be from the tattoo he got in Paris (he was hypo-manic at the time) after they first saw La Colonne Détruite—
Né Toulouse
It was still stretched across his shoulder, bleached by sun and hard times, a silly thing Katrina ill-advisedly took to heart after he fled the other tower, the Frankish one’s better half, on Carcassone Way …
Toulouse: he would not have wished that for his son—a name born from a loser’s pun—but so be it. Pay the piper. His mind caromed between wife and boy, and the old man let him be.
When his son-in-law vanished into the maze, Mr. Trotter had a nagging fear he would end his life somewhere within. Holding the towel-wrapped ice pack to his neck, he slowly climbed the steps that led to the house. Suddenly, Marcus burst from the boxwood asking for pen and paper, and watercolors, too, if they were to be had. Mr. Trotter enthusiastically conducted him to the Withdrawing Room, where the visitor spent scant moments marveling at treasures before settling down to business.
During the next few hours, each time he was looked in upon, the man was hard at work. Candelaria brought food, which he barely touched. Around eight in the evening, he blotted what he’d made and requested a large envelope. He said he was tired and wished to be driven home.
“I want you to know how much I appreciate all you’ve done,” Marcus said, standing at the Town Car. “Plucking me from prison and arranging it so I could visit my dear Janey. You’ve looked after me, and I shan’t forget it.”
The old man couldn’t help but wonder if he was saying good-bye.
“And bringing me together with the boy! That was sure a noble, risky thing and cannot have been easy. Bold! Can’t say I would have done it myself.”
Louis chuffed, stroking his chin. “He’ll come around,” he said. “The boy’ll come around.”
“I’d like that—I’d like it fine! But I’m not so sure. The unbreakable does break; I know it too well.”
“I don’t want you to be discouraged. I wouldn’t want—”
“I left him once,” said Marcus, as if reading his mind. “I shall not leave him again.”
“Time,” abbreviated the old man. “Time.”
“You’ll give the boy my package, then?” he said, proffering the envelope.
“Of course.”
“Does—does she know I came today?”
“No.”
“And will you tell her?”
He nodded. “I am going to tell her that I brought you here to meet your son.”
Marcus sighed. “When you talk to her—to Katy—ask if I might write to her.”
“I’m sure that would be fine.”
“I would not like to presume. I imposed my absence on her; and don’t wish to impose my comeback. But would you please, sir, mind just telling her that I wanted to put down some thoughts? And that I’d like to share them with her, if she’s willing? And that it is not incumbent on her to respond?”
“Yes. I’ll tell her.”
“It is not incumbent on her …”
Words failed him and so they embraced—and any trepidations the old man had of having done the wrong thing by bringing him to Saint-Cloud dissolved as smoke into air.
Tull opened his eyes just before midnight. The air was stagnant and fetid; the wind of the dozing Dane was rank.
Life was strange. For most of the year, since learning that his father was alive, he’d been like someone convalescing after a blow to the head. And now that they had finally met, he felt no different from before he knew the man existed. He rummaged his brain for the few times he’d seen him: from a distance at the Hotel Bel-Air … crouching over a grave … wailing in the back of the Mauck … then pressing his flesh in the backyard of Saint-Cloud (the backyard!), and all of it seemed like a dream or—dare he say it—a hallucination. The very word struck fear in the heart of him. How many times in as many months had he awakened from troubled sleep to rev search engines for chat rooms and bulletin boards on the p-(key)word: “psychosis.”
Edward, that paragon of cynical morbidity, had giddily helped fuel the theory that somewhere an errant gene-spore was already shooting tendrils into the plant box of Toulouse’s brain. It was a concern he never mentioned, not to his shrink (whom he’d stopped seeing anyway), not to his mother (she was already crazy), not even to Pullman, to whom he dared tell everything. He had read somewhere that, like Apert, schizophrenia usually skipped generations … or maybe he just imagined having read that. Maybe he’d hallucinated it. A kind of pre-psychotic disposition—“prodromal,” one of the websites called it—would even explain his blasé, somewhat irritated reaction to the man he shook hands with at the maze.
Toulouse wondered if he should begin taking medication. The therapist had had him on antidepressants, but he’d balked, because the pills made him dry-mouthed and nauseous. A kind of virtual shame engulfed him as he slipped through the Internet’s cracks—the same mortification he knew he would feel on becoming homeless. That seemed a fait accompli … anyway, was there any real difference between what had happened to Bluey and what had happened to his father? Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia were busy coursing through his veins! At least his dad could be treated—or managed … maybe. He imagined himself in ten years living downtown in rags like those men he saw in boxes when they visited Boulder. Lice in his hair, toothless, falling-down pants smeared with shit, ready for a little recreational fecal-play. Sores on his head from AIDS … scarred and scabbed from cop beatings, and a hundred broken-bottle scuffles. There would come Edward and Lucy in the Mauck, all grown-up, searching. He’d be rescued just as Grandpa Lou had rescued Marcus, and they would let him stay in Edward’s long-vacant rooms above the Boar’s Head Inn—he would live out his days watching movies at the Majestyk, tended by male nurses who’d suck his dick after doping him up. But maybe the cousins wouldn’t be so kind. Maybe they’d by then have become Scientologists or militant throwbacks to the pre-millennial concept of “tough love” and Toulouse would be farmed out to an asylum. One of Uncle Dodd’s empty asylums! Or maybe the Trotters would build another wing where Bluey was and he could just hang with his demented grandmother, both of them heavily sedated, walking arm in arm on the infinity road that wended through the garden his by-then-probably-even-more-famous mother had
once designed—
The overheated boy decided to take a purgative dip in the pool when he noticed the envelope that had been slid under the door some hours before. He picked it up and read the elaborate scrawl: For My Son.
He was seriously spooked.
Was his father still there, on the grounds, in the house? Worse: was he actually staying over? No!… the same panic he had felt while hiding in the Mauck overtook him—as in a horror film, Marcus Weiner would burst in and shake him to death like a newborn in the hands of a wigged-out au pair. Shamed again, he ascribed his thoughts to the hysterical, nay, prodromal, throes of incipient psychosis, until he was fully beside himself once more—
He opened the door.
And stood in the hall, letting the quietude of the upper floors restore his pulse to a reasonable rate. While there was a certain flamboyance in bringing the man to Saint-Cloud, Toulouse was convinced it would have been uncharacteristically reckless of his grandfather to have organized a sleepover—especially after his churlish response to the visitor’s clumsy overtures. The gambit had been an unmitigated failure.
He closed the door and bolted it. He raced to bed, still nervously clutching the heavy leaf of stationery with the Trotter family crest. Upon it was an elegant, forthright cursive, beautifully engraved and colored in. He drew it to his nose and sniffed the damp paint, instantly becalmed.
Dearest son,
I robbed myself of having known you—and this, along with having done harm to your mother’s heart, has broken mine. But you must be assured that even should you choose not to know ME or speak with me again, and while I would be utterly respectful of your feelings, I shall never leave you and shall always honour you as my progeny; for you are a brave and wondrous boy—this I know without having been told. You have nothing to fear from me, for I have only the deepest and most abiding awe for a boy called Toulouse. Awe, and a father’s kindest love!
Marcus
PS: I have had it with the JINNAS; they will not take me away again. (Ask your grandfather about the latter; it is not a raving but rather a metaphor.) SALUD!