The Chrysanthemum Palace

by Bruce Wagner

  Fair enough.

  And that was when I heard a ruckus.

  I hurried to the hallway where Thad and his mom were tussling. He dogged her, disheveled and disgruntled, hissing as she retreated, drink sloshing in his glass like a cartoon of tiny breakers, full fingers five, vodka blown hither and thither by unseen tempests. Even at her age, Morgana had the upper hand physically, and emotionally too—it was no shrinking violet who’d managed to outjoust and outlive Mr. Giant-Killer. She continued to upbraid her son even as he remained on sodden attack though I couldn’t make out their timeworn, warm-spittled maledictions. Then Miriam appeared and scrimmaged between, allowing his mother, and a reconnoitering Brioni, an awkward exeunt.

  The Kabuki-faced Morgana turned for a fierce parting shot.

  “Your father could get away with it but you can’t. Miriam, you have got to help,” she implored. “Otherwise, I will have him removed. And boy, will they do it!” (The Brioni thugs.) “Oh, they’d love to.”

  Once she vanished, Miriam and Thad were suddenly, unhappily aware of my presence. I scuttled to the kitchen where the widow, as if making a tardy stage entrance, breathlessly declaimed to those present (a few noshing, malingering guests plus two caterers): “The air was thin, the sky a scalding blue. The ambidextrous wind wisped clouds around like morphine—or venom—invading the blood.” She dutifully attributed the words to her late husband, addending whichever novel or poem as if it was scripture.

  I doubled back to the hall, like a spectator in one of those outré middlebrow dramas where you follow the actors from room to room. I proceeded to the library, where Miriam and Thad were now seated; my return seemed to embolden him, as fresh bodies in the pantry had his mum.

  “She wanted to know if I would contribute to the funeral expenses!” he spewed, a wet, fulsome, apoplectic cast to lower lip and jaw. “Can you believe it, Miriam? ‘Security is costing more than I expected.’ We’re over budget”—he italicized his mother’s words with spasmodic fury—“and since I was making plenty of ‘Hollywood money,’ I should help defray the cost!”

  “She’s a bit overwhelmed,” said Miriam, diplomatically.

  “Don’t you defend her, Miriam, not you.”

  When he shook his fist in her face, I aggressively stepped from the door frame, to remind that a price would be paid should he dare cross the line. Though he scowled at my Canadian Mountie shtick, it was evident Miriam drew comfort from my efforts, which pleased me to no end.

  “Defray the cost! She’s a pathological miser, why doesn’t anyone confront that? Is everyone so fucking terrified of her? Do you know what she’s worth, Miriam? I tell people this and they think I’m delusional. Her daddy left her ten million—that was 1950. 1950!—and she’s kept every cent of it. Not to mention my father’s fortune, not to even get into that. And she knows the IRS has a lien against my apartment in New York, the woman knows it! She makes Bill Saroyan look like fucking Shirley Temple.” He fixed me with a conspiratorial eye. “If my mother is forced to spend fifty dollars of her own money—that is considered a pornographic catastrophe!”

  Miriam threw me an “I’ll handle this” look, and I sneered before leaving—as if to show Mr. Michelet I had better things to do than attend the hot air ravings of a troglodytic has-been.

  Morgana was in the living room surrounded by admirers. I’d arrived at the tail end of a condolence call from Vaclav Havel. She hung up and turned to Walter Cronkite. “Do you know who was a fan of Jack’s? Ronnie Reagan. Oh, that really pissed Jack off. Jack hated Ray-Gun—that’s what he called him, just like the Yippies. Jack used to joke that U.S. presidents only read ‘The’ books: ‘The Firm,’ ‘The Stand,’ ‘The Whatever.’ Jack said one day he was going to write a book called ‘The The’ and it’d be his biggest seller yet! I said, Don’t forget the sequels! Oh yes—after ‘The The,’ Jack said he’d write ‘The This’ and ‘The That,’ and they’d go straight to the top of the list!”

  Everyone roared.

  I glanced “off camera” and couldn’t believe what was outside the window: Thad, creeping along at petty pace, alternately flanked by Miriam and Clea—attendant and geisha. Like a child, I suddenly panicked, as if the trio were cakewalking to Gatsby’s cosmic roadster with full intent of leaving me behind while lifting off for galaxies unknown. I rushed from the room to join the dysfunctional starbound caravan.

  The melancholy troll, deep in his cups, moved like molasses toward a break in the wind-smacked hedge that marked a path to the sea.

  “My favorite of Dad’s is Chrysanthemum,” I heard him say as I caught up—out of thin air, the comment seemed surreal. “You’ve read that, haven’t you, Miriam? I know Clea has.” (The latter said with vitriol.) “Chrysanthemum always reminded me of Mishima.” He caught my eye as he began the précis, old to them, new to me. “It’s about a murderous gardener who returns to the scene of the crime. He’s never caught. Goes back, day after day, year after year, and eventually comes to the exquisitely mundane realization—that . . . he—just didn’t do it. That’s why I keep coming back—here, to the fucking Vineyard—and why I’ll probably visit again, day after day, year after year. In my head, anyway. I’ll keep coming back—like they say in AA!—until I can see that I just didn’t do it!”

  Words and gaze trailed off, almost too wistfully.

  “There he is!” came a high, reedy voice. “Sammy Jetson!”

  A lean, nasty-looking boy jumped into our space, bursting the bubble. Thad grimaced reflexively, as he probably did ten times a day upon being recognized on the street. A trim, avuncular fellow in his sixties with salt-and-pepper beard materialized as well, and stuck out his hand. “Mordecai Klotcher. Old friend of your dad’s—and Morgana as well.” Thad pumped it, as if by sheer gusto he might cause both man and man-child to dervishly disappear. “We may actually have met when you were quite younger,” he said. “I’ve followed your career and think you’re a marvelous—you bring a wonderful presence to your films.”

  “It’s a dirty job,” said Thad, employing a favorite all-purpose retort. “But someone has to do it.”

  Klotcher laughed. “You’re better than your films,” he added, with the sudden gravitas of a watchdog essayist and all-around culture critic.

  “Are they making a Jetsons sequel?” asked the boy.

  He was a bug that needed to be squashed. Thad ignored him, instead turning to Clea with a wicked smile. “He’s a dirty john, but someone has to do him. Said the whore.” Klotcher appeared unperturbed by the blue remark uttered within earshot of his profoundly annoying great-nephew. In fact, he was delighted. “You get that from Jack! He was marvelous at wordplay.” The producer screwed up his face, as they used to say, and remarked, “You wrote a novel some time back, didn’t you?”

  “He’s written four,” said Miriam.

  “Number five’s in the works,” said Thad, oddly assertive.

  “He’s not a writer,” said the boy, caricature of a sitcom brat. “He’s Sammy Jetson.”

  “Number five!” exclaimed Klotcher, like his horse had come in. “All still in print?”

  “Covers and everything.”

  “Can you send them to me? To my office?”

  “We absolutely can,” said Miriam, extending her hand. “I’m Miriam Levine, Thad’s book agent.”

  Klotcher twitched, as if startled to discover someone else had been standing there all along. A burst of shop talk ensued, with glib references to mutual acquaintances; the ever-obliging Ms. Levine, on showbiz autopilot, seemed merrily distraught. To me, anyway.

  “The books . . . they’re adaptable?” said Klotcher, like a tourist who’d learned just enough of the local language to ask the natives for basics. “To film? I’m always hunting for properties, always on the prowl. In fact, I’d like to see the galleys of the new one. That’s where we make most of our acquisitions—galleys.” He turned his attention back to Thad. “You know, I did one of your father’s books years ago, with Julie Christie. Hearts and Vagabond
s.”

  “Yes,” said Miriam, piping in. “I loved it.” At the moment, she was the only one in our group who seemed capable of speech. “I’ll send you The Soft Sea Horse.”

  “That’s the one I’d heard of,” said Klotcher, a reptilian glimmer of recognition lighting up precataract eyes. He fumbled with the title, as if soliciting her help to make the deposit in his memory bank: “The Salton Sea—”

  “The Soft Sea Horse,” she corrected.

  “Marvelous title! Come to California!” he exhorted. “Will you, Thad? We’ll have a lunch or a dinner.” He swiveled toward Miriam, as if she were the royal food taster—or gastroenterologist. “Can he have a dinner?”

  “He’ll be there all next month,” she said.

  “I’m doing Krapp’s Last Tape in La Jolla,” said Thad, jolting to synthetic life. Klotcher looked at him blankly. Miriam’s adding the word “Beckett” did nothing to clear the producer’s confusion.

  “And a two-parter on Starwatch: The Navigators,” said the agent.

  (As if that were the plummest of plum actor things.)

  “A marvelous show,” said Klotcher, on cue. “Now there’s a phenomenon.”

  “Yup. A real Phnom Penh.” Egregiously bored and egregiously drunk, Thad winced at his own wordplay idiocies. “The Cambodians love it. It killed.”

  “There you go again!” said Klotcher giddily. “Your father was marvelous with the pun. And polylingual, too—like Nabokov! Now there’s someone who rivaled your dad. Ol’ Black Jack didn’t even want to hear his name. He always thought Nabokov was the one who’d snatch the Nobel from his hands. But neither of ’em got it, did they? Big on butterflies, Nabokov. I knew his wife. And his kid. We tried to option one of his books. Ada, I think it was called. Never worked out.”

  To my surprise, Thad segued to a toast (he still had drink in hand)—to me, Bertram Krohn, “putative son” of the Starwatch creator. Klotcher pivoted, duly impressed.

  “Starwatch is cool,” said the great-nephew, taking me in. “I want to do a walk-on!”

  “Walk on this,” said Thad.

  “They’ve asked him to do a game show too,” said Miriam, nervously unstoppable. “One of these postmodern George Schlatter things, with a floating guest spot. Sort of a permanent cameo—like Whoopi did in Hollywood Squares. Merv Griffin and Ryan Seacrest are producing. They’ve offered a ton of money; they’ll be lucky to have him. But Thad’s got so many other projects . . .”

  She looked winsomely toward her old friend but he blew her off.

  “The Michelet name’s hot right now,” said Klotcher, hoisting an imaginary glass of his own. The crusty old pro frowned and recanted. “Sorry—didn’t mean that to sound disrespectful.” He delicately lifted the glass again, bowing to everyone present. “To continuing the legacy! Salud!”

  As soon as they left, Thad’s mood darkened. (I was amazed by his relative civility during the encounter.) He scolded his agent, cruelly mocking her postmodern floating-guest-spot riff. He called her “the unstinkable Molly Brown-Noser” and, when Clea rushed to her defense, grew venomous. There was always a mysterious—I should say sadomasochistic—undertow between those two, a tacit agreement that Clea literally bow her head in penance as the blows rained down. After a blunt screed that cut her to the quick, he strode through the sandy gap in the brush and headed for the pounding waves. Clea took her shoes off and followed, sprinting as he sped up. I leaped in pursuit until I felt Miriam’s hand upon my arm, holding me back. We already possessed the physical shorthand of lovers; both touch and look assured that Clea was in no imminent danger. Time and again she’d seen the couple play out this scene and knew best not to interfere.

  We went back to the main house to decompress. Miriam drank wine and I guzzled Diet Coke as we numbly mingled among guests before saying our good-byes to Morgana. For the first time, she stood back and sized me up. There was real kindness in his mother’s eyes as she thanked me for having come all the way from Los Angeles “to be with the family, such as it is.” Morgana knew that my father was a honcho—she was good at retaining details, however hastily imparted, particularly when they applied to money or status—and tenderly asked if I’d “look after” her boy when he did his Starwatch “thing.” She was full of shit but I liked her nonetheless.

  She turned to Miriam and stage-whispered, “There’s a plot for him beside Jeremy’s. When he saw that today, it made him furious. I know it sounds gothic, but it’s . . . it’s, well it’s just right that he should be buried there. I understand Thaddeus having resentments. His father did not do well by him—not by anyone—it wasn’t the best family but it’s the only one we’ve got. The only one he’s got—that’s what I told him. My God, Thaddeus, no one fed you dog shit or Seconal! Nanny didn’t masturbate you—far as I know. Maybe that would have been a good thing. By contemporary standards, we were the von Trapps. But Miriam, won’t you please talk to him? About Jeremy? I mean, where else is there for him to go? His brother’s been there over forty years. Forty years! And now Jack—” Tears welled up; she loved an audience. “And I shall be there, long before Thad. Though sometimes,” she amended, “I’m not so sure. The way he treats himself . . .”

  She took a fashionably loose cigarette from the pocket of her shirt; Klotcher appeared en passant to deftly light it before discreetly disappearing. Morgana inhaled, blowing smoke like a dragon.

  “Did you know I made every effort? To breast-feed. But he wouldn’t take it.” She waved a hand in the air, as if shooing a fly. “The doctors said something in the milk made him allergic. Now, how can that be? His brother gnawed that tittie till he was five—ruined it. Did you know Jeremy used to tear into a hamburger, then wash it down with a suck?” She smiled before returning to the matter at hand. “He cannot, it makes no sense for Thaddeus to continue . . . this—vendetta against his twin. So will you talk to him, Miriam? Because I know he listens to you. I know he does.”

  She walked us to the door.

  “I don’t know what’s going on between those two,” said Morgana, rather hush-hush. “But it cannot be wonderful. You know that, Miriam. She’s not good for him. She’s not welcome—I won’t have her here again in this house! Why on earth did I allow it? I suppose it’s because I’m getting so damn old. The old guard let her ol’ guard down.”

  The face softened to a smile again. As we walked out, she said cryptically, “I militated for that boy’s happiness. Absolutely militated.”

  I wanted to make love in the worst way but Miriam needed food in her stomach; the day had taken its toll and she was wobbly. As we waited outside for one of the drivers provided to ferry guests into town, we scanned the grounds—immensely, guiltily relieved that Clea and Thad were nowhere in sight.

  Back in the village, we had burgers (sans milk) and Miriam drank more wine—I came dangerously close to sharing a glass—while romantically snuggling in a booth. My mood cycled again, shedding the skin of gloom, doom, and ill tidings it acquired at Michelet Manor. I felt reborn: suddenly, I couldn’t have been happier being on the other side of the country, frisky, depleted, flirting with insobriety, my own migraines of the soul on storm watch. As Miriam’s appetite abated, along with nausea and nausée, she grew hungry for something else,2 running her hand under the table. Picturing us in various XXX-rated poses, I frantically signaled the waiter for our bill. As we loped past the registration office to Miriam’s cabin, I leaned into her in erotic play, low-growling and hot-breathing while she giggled, a wolf and his well-read Riding Hood. Then suddenly, a break in continuity: eyes and ears perked: officiously, she nodded toward a taxi pulling up to the cottage adjacent mine. Out stumbled Clea. I sighed. Miriam shrugged, quickly kissing my neck before departure.

  I rushed to help my poor, dear sister, who stood fumbling in her purse for a room key. When she saw me, her eyes welled with tears.

  “Please . . .”

  She nearly collapsed in my arms. I half-carried her to my door and, as we staggered, turned to find Miriam—al
ready gone.

  Clea was in a state. She smelled rankly of booze, pathetically informing that her boyfriend had thrown a drink on her blouse (still wanting me to believe). She fell directly into bed, letting me strip off her clothes. The moment I lay down beside her, she seized me with agonized, asexual fury; each time the grip became too painful, I relocated those tiny starfish hands. Clea cried and cried, in contorted, schoolgirl plaint—“But why? Why! I’m his friend.” “I told him I was sorry! I didn’t mean it to happen, but nothing really did, Bertie, nothing really did.” “He doesn’t care, it doesn’t matter, there’s nothing I can do.”—while I used my free fingertips to carefully blot away the tears.

  I unfurled a reluctant fist with its clutchful of pills. She confessed to having swiped them from Morgana’s medicine cabinet. I was touched because even though she was in terrible pain, Clea knew I’d be proud of her for not having swallowed them. She broke my heart.

  I left the bed long enough to flush them down.

  When I climbed back in she was fast asleep. Why was that snorish sonata of breath so poignant? I lay on my back, spooning her into me. I put her hands on my chest but they kept slipping off like penguins from an ice shelf.

  Then I too slept, and was grateful for it.

  * * *

  1 I’d only been to one funeral in my life, which at my age was below quota. It was Brandon Tartikoff’s, a friend of my father’s. The Forest Lawn chapel was SRO—I remember seeing a yarmalke’d Rob Reiner in the distance, arguing with someone over not being let in—with hundreds of folding chairs set out so the crowd could watch the services on some kind of JumboTron screen. I’ll never forget the moment I looked down to see the wooden legs of my seat, and those around it, resting upon humble granite graves.

  2 Forgive the lapse into pulp. A writer needs to try a bit of everything.

  CLEA STAYED ON AT THE Vineyard, or thereabouts.

  The days passed in a flurry of artistic endeavor. As already mentioned, I was intent on developing a spec series for HBO. I thought the time was ripe for a literate drama about the movie industry (though others before me had tried and failed), and was busy circling an idea I’d christened with the Aaron Spelling–like title Holmby Hills. I didn’t have much more than that—OK, I’ll admit I had casually referred to it among friends as a cross between The Sopranos and Entourage—and while it sounds strange, I did own up to a special feeling about my unwritten saga. Dad always said “the gut” should never be discounted. I met with Dan Fauci, an old-school friend of my father’s who used to run Paramount Television. Dan suggested I get to work on what he called a bible, the guidebook for any projected series. (A perfect word for it: I really had got religion.) Still, it was harder than I thought to let go of the writer/director fantasy. It was one thing to strive toward an Emmy but quite another to envision oneself on the red carpet at Cannes jostling elbows with Lars von Trier. Among activities outside my duties on the Demeter, I’d continued to stockpile ideas in the hope of eventually shoehorning them into script form. The punctilious archives, composed mostly of newspaper and magazine articles, went back years, even including a series of pieces about a traveler who somehow lost his citizenship while in transit and had been forced to live at an airport, improbably marooned without passport or country. I remember the day I read in Variety that Spielberg was going to direct Tom Hanks in that very saga; a movie that’s already come and gone. It was moments like that when, salving my wounds, I shouted from the bridge the reliable, “Warp nine!”—a kinky confirmation that, if nothing else, I had a producer’s instinct for good material.