I'll Let You Go

by Bruce Wagner

  “I wanted to ask you—I wanted to know if you would think about the idea—or the possibility … and it doesn’t have to be, well, it couldn’t be something that would happen now or even very soon but—something that would happen maybe in the future … well, I wanted to know if you would think about thinking about the idea of us—of us eventually getting married. I mean, years from now. When we are older or after college or whenever you—whenever you thought that might be something you wanted to think about or maybe say yes to in the future but not necessarily now.”

  She took his hands and looked him in the eye.

  “I do love you, Toulouse,” she said. “I always have. And I always will.”

  She kissed him and ran to the ladder to rejoin the group, now in general tumult over a tightrope walker’s derring-do.

  That night he lay in bed more tortured than ever. No amount of careful analysis could yield a definitive result: had she said yes or no? Was it an undying—or a sisterly—proclamation? Luckily, sleep laid siege to the conundrum and put it to rest until the fresh misery of morning.

  It was true that Dodd Trotter had fallen in love with his secretary, but one could not hold it against him. He had been loyal to Joyce for as long as humanly possible, and remained so in his fashion; unlike his wife, he had no dumpster babies with which to sublimate his grief. Frances-Leigh was a good woman. She was devoted to his happiness.

  Trinnie asked her brother for help. She had decided to sell La Colonne Détruite, or rather sell the property where the broken tower resided, for no buyer could be expected to preserve such a monument. Nor would she wish it preserved—to that end, she had even considered tearing it down before putting the park up for auction. Strangely, Trinnie found she could no longer set foot in the place. Bluey was right; they should have sold and subdivided years ago. All the furniture and items so mathematically arranged were carted off to storage, to be sold on another day. Next on the list was Saint-Cloud—everything must go. She wanted no more shrines or mazes in her life.

  Dodd had an agenda of his own. He decided to move the corporate headquarters out of Beverly Hills. His son and father were dead and his daughter was living in England; his mother did not know anymore who he was; and the last of his worries—his rolling-stone sister—was safely anchored by Marcus and Toulouse. It was all right now for him to begin afresh, away from the nexus of his old life. To her credit, Frances-Leigh argued against the move. Conservative by nature, she felt it more symbolic than practical.

  The dream of revamping Beverly Vista was dead too. There would be no rooftop gallery, no Puckish cafeteria, no starstruck planetarium or fiber-optic learning center powered by truck-size servers buried underground—no Sage Hill, no Ross Institute, no Cary Academy—no footprint or imprint, only misprint. There would be no thinking outside the box, only thinking inside the box. Probably what his dad was doing right about now, he darkly joked (Frances-Leigh didn’t think it so funny). That’s all the imperial Beverly Hills school district knew how to do anyway, he said: think inside the box.

  The Quincunx Holding Company undauntedly continued to acquire rectangles of real estate in the Beverly Vista matrix and was now in possession of nearly one hundred houses and apartment units. Like an embittered dramaturge (but more like a broker calling in margins), the billionaire ordered the division to take possession of the deeded homes that surrounded the school. It would be a three-month process, for that was the amount of time the tenants—former owners who had continued to “squat” on the properties—agreed they would need in order to move, upon notice to vacate. (Many of the homes whose original owners had already taken the money and run were currently inhabited by Quincunx employees.) Within six weeks, Dodd Trotter’s hydra-headed enterprise had transplanted itself to Northern California, and the eighty or so employee-participants of the Middle School Adjunct Residency Program had followed, leaving empty residences behind.

  A series of increasingly frantic calls to the Quincunx CEO from honorary PTA president Marcie Millard went unreturned. As one by one the dwellings around the school went dark—and the student body dwindled accordingly—Dodd Trotter’s disappearing act became fuel for the media. Stories of the unfolding suburban debacle invariably contained two sides: that the celebrated nerd had avenged himself Carrie-like on an ungrateful school district for failing to allow him to remake the alma mater in his own image (and name), and the counterspin being that any reports to this effect were patently absurd, the vacancies an unfortunate by-product of a recessionary downsizing. For a few months the Trotters, Dodd in particular, endured more scrutiny than may have been desired. They would endure.

  Neither the New York Times Magazine cover (“An Unsentimental Education”) nor the intercession of various moguls, senators and billionaire busybodies—most of them friends and colleagues or at least high-level acquaintances of Dodd’s and his father’s—did anything to sway him. His lawyers said the courts would eventually force Quincunx to sell off the marooned properties, but such a decision might take two years, at least. By then the paint would have faded and the lawns died, and Dodd Trotter’s interest along with them. He never held on to the empty buildings in his portfolio for longer than that anyhow.

  When approached by outraged do-gooders, Trinnie chose not to get involved. Was she supposed to have an opinion? Did they think she was going to get big feelings over her kooky brother’s little stunt? She actually liked it when Dodd took some kind of action; the more bizarre, the merrier. Anyhow, who gave a shit. Beverly Hills could go fuck itself. He had always been there for her, and had suffered his own terrible losses; she would stand by him. She didn’t think it was any of her business to meddle—hers or anyone else’s.

  One weekend, after paying a purely social visit to Marcus at Cañon Manor, Dodd took a dusk-time walk to old BV. For a half-mile around ground zero, there was the eerie absence of customary sights, sounds and smells—the lived-in-ness of a neighborhood. A few cars idled here and there while tourists snapped pictures of loved ones posing in the driveways of vacant houses as if they were their own. City-leased klieg lights lined the sidewalks to ward off vandalism. He saw a few media vans rumble past, and private patrol cars. Some of the news teams were from other countries.

  When he was sure no one saw him, Dodd entered the apartment building on the corner of Rexford and Charleville. He passed the dry lobby fountain and rode an elevator to the fourth floor. Using a master key to gain entry to one of the empty units, he walked out to the patio that overlooked the darkening playground where the ugly bungalows still held dominion.

  He watched the night fall.

  Coda

  Now sleep, the land of houses,

  And dead night holds the street,

  And there thou liest, my baby,

  And sleepest soft and sweet;

  My man is away for a while …

  —William Morris

  With some reluctance, the author concedes that he has reached the end of his story. The garden will be frozen in time and yet, paradoxically, grow wild outside these pages. Some last trimmings are in order.

  At the age of eighteen, Lucille Rose Trotter gave her hand to the son of Lord Tryeferne, thereby becoming the fairest component of that entity known in English society sheets as the Hon Travis and Lucille Rose Tryeferne. Through an unfortunate act of terrorism, she somewhat prematurely became Lady Tryeferne and Lady Tryeferne she would remain, through miscarriage and divorce and romantic entanglements thick and thin. Our dear cousin, who wore braids when we first met, would not settle down until her mid-twenties, when, after the usual diversions—stints at fashion and auction houses, jewelry designing, handbag making, hospice working and even finally a passing stab at children’s-book authoring—she regained her senses and went to work for her dad. Taking to Quincunx like koi to water, she quickly proved herself to be more than a nepotistic adornment, and those who doubted her talents certainly suffered, though not for long; Mrs. Tryeferne (she detached the aristocratic handle in the workplace)
had a way of wielding a blade so that its business was done before there was time to notice a spot of blood. She had always gotten on well with Frances-Leigh, who was endeared by the girl’s bossiness, especially after a star turn as the former secretary’s maid-of-honor at the most spectacular Scottish castle anyone in the world had ever seen. (Her father had bought it especially for the wedding ceremony and the three-day gala that followed.) Lady Tryeferne—or Our Lady of the Tryeferne, as Trinnie liked to call her—was also keen on South Sea pearls, and looked more and more like her auntie each day: lanky, freckle-flecked, willowy and red, red, red, with a keen look in her eye that made one fear she knew, or at least had known, too much. Now, whether the lady would one day have children—she had no hankering to marry again, nor did she pine for the patter of little feet upon marble—is not for us to guess; though she did take the loss of the child she had conceived with Travis as an omen, and was sorely reminded of the bittersweet genes that had ushered her brother into the world. (It mattered little that she’d been told she was no likelier to have a child with Apert than anyone else.) While Lucille Rose could not imagine another Edward in spirit, she could conjure one in body; that would have been a terrible thing to inflict upon anyone. So she put off thoughts of childbearing for a while and told herself she was doing the responsible thing. But time is on her side. Her life, we can say with certainty, shall be a long one, with never a use for a wandering garden.

  She found her mother’s adoption of the McDonald’s baby galling. In her mind, he hadn’t so much been adopted as co-opted—a fledgling, deputized into Edward’s memory posse. It was just so blatant and, as she put it to friends, “unattractive”; happily, such judgments coincided with the arrival of that age when a young girl cultivates her innate desire to cannibalize or at least crucify the woman who bore and raised her (the very woman who, in therapists’ undying jargon, “had done the best she could”). Well, Lucille Rose did her best to loathe her put-upon mom. Yet each time she saw Ketchum, he was a little bit bigger and a little bit older, and a bit more affectionate, too, until Lucy (that’s what she let him call her) began to see him as a person in his own right rather than a substitute for the loveliest, most poetic soul she’d ever known. Watching Joyce with the boy, watching her chide and correct, hold and fuss, watching her love in a way the woman had never been able to with Edward (not to mention Lucy herself), she grew to respect and forgive, and to imagine her mother anew. It brought her close to godliness, for she finally untied what up till then had been the banal knot of Christian charity: that to save a life—such as Ketchum’s had been saved—to love for love’s sake alone created a chain reaction that truly changed the world. During yoga, or in moments of repose, Lady Tryeferne felt herself on the receiving end of her mother’s selfless act and was invigorated to start her own “chain”—when and where and whatever that might be. Her heart overflowed with hope and abundance.

  It was true that Joyce had never been happier. When Dodd came to town, they caught up over drinks at swank Brentwood hideaways, a routine Frances-Leigh lobbied for and was immensely satisfied to see take hold. The amazing thing was, they even flirted. Yet on the romantic front, Joyce had no time or desire. Her life was filled by Ketchum and the others—her Westwood children. Men fluttered around like butterflies, but she was no collector; she took her leave from fancy fund-raisers on the arm of Father de Kooning, her walker and biggest fan, and that was just fine.

  Shortly after his move to Cañon Manor, Marcus Weiner spent many a Saturday at Frenchie’s, refining and embellishing his prodigious gifts. The first thing he did was re-create the Persephone, the original pastry that had drawn Bluey in years ago, making sure it was delivered to her cottage at the Motion Picture and Television Hospital in Woodland Hills. According to Winter, whenever the old woman partook of that favored treat, she broke lustily into song and a certain woodenheaded Mr. Jones was invariably invoked.

  One person who particularly benefited from Marcus’s drop-ins was none other than the proprietor’s daughter. Amaryllis Kornfeld-Mott proved herself a studious yet inventive helper, with the knack of being one step ahead of her tutor, even when at his most unpredictably daring. Sometimes he challenged her—threw down the gauntlet and stood back, hands clasped behind him like a Russian maestro commanding a scherzo to be played at speeds beyond human capability—in this case, the prodigy pulled it off and then some. They simply took over, relegating Gilles to the front register, and the only thing left for him was to get coffee and cupcakes for the old folks who shuffled in. During lulls, the poor baker tried to small-talk, but so involved was the pair that they wouldn’t even notice; if they did, he was shooed away forthwith. Back at his post, he heard Marcus roar at his pupil or clap with delight upon tasting her morsels, and the coffee-sipping pensioners wondered what the hell was going on. The pâtissier got carried away enough that he often forgot to remove his old-style tweed coat, which became dusted with confectionary powders as a field by snow. Even when Amaryllis was enrolled in Pitzer College, she came home on weekends to see Cody and Saffron, and to attend master classes with the man she loved as a father—the man who had once fed her and the babies and who carried her on his back, where she would forever in both their eyes remain.

  Toulouse was still in love. It was unnecessary to remind her of the pledge he had made—she knew full well his feelings. She did love him, but could not jump, as Lucy had with Travis Tryeferne; perhaps, thought Amaryllis gloomily, that was her flaw. The truth was, too much had happened in her young life for her to ever have a passionate, clear-cut feeling. Eroticism and emotions had been commingled, and mangled too, and ghosts conspired to put a governor on her ability to sort it all out. Things had been done to her of which she never told a soul. Eventually, she would, thus opening a door to the world; it can be assumed that Toulouse Trotter would be standing there, first in line, in forthright, timorous fashion, holding a slender stalk of honeysuckle and passionflowers. She would let him in. But that time was not now, nor would it be for some years. There would be other loves and other heartaches for both, the lesser ones which they’d share as best friends do. By that time (the time they found each other), Amaryllis would have consecrated a Westside Frenchie’s, hard by Le Marmiton, and its wafery creations would make her name—and bake it too.

  What was Toulouse Trotter doing while the door to her heart remained closed (or at least secured against entry of all but an occasional breeze of sweet nothings)? Well, he was doing the things that young people do while casting about for “meaning.” Taking a leaf from Lucy’s earliest Smythson, he attempted to write what he thought to be a touching absurdist play about his cousin, called Prince Headward (after careful consideration, the somewhat sacrilegious title was revised to Edward the First). Sadly, the title was its high point. He traveled the world, notching this and that power spot on his belt, taking care to avoid places visited during the famous Four Winds holiday—not an altogether easy task. He became enamored of Cambodia and New Guinea, Java and Madagascar, Abu Dhabi and the Maldives, Zanzibar and Nepal, and kept the river on his right during the requisite near-death, near-homosexual experiences of an inveterate adventurer; he had dalliances with nymphomaniacal girls who spoke pidgin English; he sometimes stayed with families who thought him a poor vagabond—in short, got up to all the normal mischief that could be expected of any self-respecting scion.

  He never stayed away too long (whenever home, he bunked at Cañon Manor), and sent his parents a raft of letters, which Trinnie thought so wonderful she threatened to have published under the title Off the Road. Particularly savored was the antic account of Toulouse’s re-enactment of his father’s legendary walk from Oxford to the great earthwork of Silbury Hill, a path William Morris himself had once trod as an undergrad. He called his dispatches “News from Anywhere,” a nod to the log Marcus kept all those years and had long ago given him for safekeeping—a gesture so intimate that his son had immediately handed it over to Harry and Ruth.

  The young man at
last fell upon the career of medical doctor, with a specialty in maxillofacial reconstruction; he had no stomach for blood, so it didn’t pan out. His studies did get him writing again, penning thoughts on morbidity and mortality (which had become a clichéd literary genre in itself)—but the trenchant, tender quality of Dr. Trotter’s observations proved anomalous, and anomalously marketable at that. Now wisely engaged in dermatological pursuits, he wrote as elegantly of lupus as he did of childhood acne, though readers generally conceded his finest essay to date concerned a dog—his own.

  Toulouse had meant to meditate on his cousin’s infirmity but wound up memorializing Pullman instead. In “A Harlequin Romance,” he wrote how as a boy his mother had tried to put him off Great Danes, owing to the breed’s short life-span, and recounted that tragicomic year of vicarious hypochondria wherein Pullman was needled, massaged and therapized. But the dog turned eight, then ten, then twelve, then fourteen … an age thought impossible for the breed.

  Then he disappeared.

  At first, Toulouse thought that in a misguided act of charity, his mother and the Monasterios had taken it upon themselves to incinerate the finally dead creature and concoct a story of his mysterious departure. But they withered under his interrogations—he had after all inherited the digger’s formidable “nose”—and the young man concluded that if they had been responsible, they’d have surely come clean under his assault.

  He had gory theories galore: someone had struck the dog with a car then buried him in a literal cover-up—or that Pullman had collapsed and fallen into a street-maintenance dugout, where the body was inadvertently mutilated by pipe cutters or whatnot, then simply buried by workers out of sheer expediency. Awakening in the middle of the night from a dream, he was certain the dog was in the maze, but would then remember it had been uprooted and that the house on Saint-Cloud was no more.