The Chrysanthemum Palace

by Bruce Wagner

  Anyway, Clea was right—I had been judging her. I felt like a jerk. I was genuinely worried about her sobriety yet somehow managed to come across as petty, hostile, and competitive. I had immediately gotten off on the wrong foot by dissing her TV idea. We’d never had an argument like that, and it didn’t sit well.

  Friday, around midnight, Clea called, crying. She said they got into a big fight at the Chateau and she was on her way back to Venice. I invited her over but she needed to pack for a Roosevelt Chandler event over the weekend, in San Rafael. At her request, the promoters had booked a room in a sleeper car on the Coast Starlight—Thad was supposed to have accompanied her but now she begged me to go. I was happy she’d phoned at all, and eager to repair the rift. The convention was on a Sunday; we could fly back that night. A car was coming at 7:00 A.M. to take her to Union Station. Clea said they’d swing by and pick me up.

  As we entered the echoey terminal, redolent of another era, we saw him sitting at the end of a row of chocolate-brown leather Art Deco chairs.

  Thad poked his head from the collar of his tweed coat with exaggerated contrition—no longer Chan, he was Chaplin now—and clutched a bouquet of roses. He wore a broad smile and his Movietone pantomime instantly melted her heart. I was glad of it because anything (especially at that time of morning) was preferable to having a scene.1 Before I had the chance to discreetly bow out and beg off, Thad, with the inherent skill and muted enthusiasms of a concierge, confirmed his suspicions that I was more than a simple escort—I was carrying a small overnight bag myself—and had indeed been enlisted as boon traveling companion and general shoulder to cry on. At that point, I did begin my retreat but he would have nothing of it. Ordering us to “sit tight,” he strode to the reservation desk, returning some twenty minutes later to inform he’d secured a second deluxe bedroom on my behalf, “just two doors down from Mom and Dad.”

  Clea’s eyes told me she was more than happy with the new arrangement. I had a feeling that my role as chaperone would calm the waters—besides, I was actually looking forward to the singular relaxation and magical musing time that only a train trip provides.

  The deluxe cabins were on the small side but their solitariness made them feel more than ample.

  After scoping out my new habitat, I serenely organized my things, like a fastidious man embarking on a long journey. Comfortably ensconced in my chair, feet propped on its opposing twin (a dinner tray sprang up handily between them), I faced northward, the bare bones of the Holmby Hills bible before me like a financial spreadsheet, ruminatively clutching the absurdly expensive fountain pen my mother gave me on my thirty-fifth. Leaving the station I felt surreal, like someone traveling alone without rhyme or reason. I didn’t plan or expect to see friend or her lover until we reached our destination, some fourteen hours later.

  A conductor collected my ticket.

  A Central Casting porter knocked.

  I asked for Diet Coke, a bucket of ice, and a few extra pillows.

  I phoned Miriam, childishly eager to play “Guess where I am?”

  (She relished updates on the Michelet-Fremantle soap.)

  I got voice mail but didn’t bother leaving a message.

  I went to BlackBerry her, realizing with small irritation that I’d left the thing behind.

  Rambling from the vast yard, I set chin on fist in classically informal meditative pose. Say what you will about Amtrak’s chronic insolvency but there’s something insistently, imperishably romantic about a train. The sounds and smells and gentle rocking, the funhouse ambling from car to car (and nostalgic memory of childhood it elicits), the pneumatic mobile mystery of it all more than make up for the occasional derailment, electrical failure, toilet overflow, or death by train vs. auto. A ride on the rails has never failed to awaken an unbearable sense of longing, the whole mournful package—this touching anthology of rhythm and blues—stirring a tenderness within, enlivening me to the great, prosaic poetry that is our lot.

  Somewhere around the Ronald Reagan Library, Clea’s words began reverberating in my head—“You’re not your father and that must really fucking hurt!”—her face dissolving first into Liz Taylor’s then Dorothy Malone’s, a demented montage of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Written on the Wind. I was reminded of an AA meeting some weeks back where the speaker told a large crowd that if an “adult child” didn’t resolve his animosities toward a given parent, he was doomed to become that parent, a pop platitude that still rang true. I’d always been on careful lookout for overt signs or wonders of my inner Perry Krohn, often catching the man’s looking glass leer amid so-called enlightened dealings with the ladies—the way I tended to objectify or condescend toward, rage against, malodorously charm, or smugly indict. (For some reason, I never focused on traits I’d acquired from Gita—the empowering, honorable, nurturing ones, no doubt, of which Miriam pleasurably found herself on the receiving end and wasn’t shy about declaiming, with sweet sarcasm, “Without Gita, you would be a shit.”) I think ultimately I came to believe I had worked through the complex relationship with Father, completed the course with honors, so to speak, and that my behavior in the world was now perfectly au courant, dictated by an independent, if flawed, self that paid no homage, heed, or mortgage to the flawed being from whose seed it had sprung. See, I’d rejected Perry’s ethos and struck out on my own at a relatively young age, pretty much escaping unscathed (that was what I told myself and still believe it’s for the most part true), returning to the fold of my own volition—or should I say Vorbalition. By her harsh comments, it was obvious Ms. Clea thought otherwise. If viewed in a colder light, I suppose there will always be some residual sense of impotence or jealousy regarding Dad’s power and station. At least I consoled myself with the idea that I didn’t suffer as Father did from Failed Artist Syndrome. But maybe I protest too much.

  It was all trainworthy food for thought. It was possible Clea was working through her own father issues. I’d met Freddy Fremantle plenty of times at the house when Clea and I were kids. He and Roos were amicably divorced. He lived in Mandeville Canyon, a debonair talent agent rarely seen outside an amazingly tailored, subtly pinstriped charcoal gray suit—perhaps courtesy of Nick Sultan père!—a slim, suntanned mensch of ready, overwhitened grin who suffered a massive coronary infarct while visiting a client’s film set in Rome. (At the time, if I recall correctly, Roos Chandler was already ten years in the ground.) Father and daughter were quite close and as I summoned his memory, along with those windy, sultry Bel-Air summer days and nights, I felt a pang of guilt—I was on a roll—over not having spoken to her about Freddy since we’d reentered each other’s lives. I suppose that was another characteristic I shared with my dad, and wished I could exorcise: if a thing required delicacy of inquiry or effort, sometimes I elected to act as if it never was, willing it into emotional nonexistence.

  Bucolic scenery overtook my sunlit berth—it grew leafier as we neared the coast—and the musing dominoes fell one to another until eventually Mother was struck. (Though she was no pushover.) I wasn’t thrilled with myself for not having spent more time with her since she became, in the parlance of her fairly recent station, “non-ambulatory,” but my lapse was mitigated by the fact she was a proud woman who no doubt would have interpreted a rush of attention from her loving, characteristically standoffish son as a bit of an insult. For that reason, and because she was so fiercely independent, it was Gita who gave the impression of wishing to see less of me. (Though maybe I was wrong about that too; maybe I was wrong about everything.) I still felt badly because when I did speak to Mother, it was of asinine, mundane things like the general, obscenely ridiculous state of the world or my hygienically censored romantic life—all in tidy sound bites, with nary a nod to anything of sophistication or depth, not even a gentle probing of her own predicament nor the heroic shifts and adjustments it must have required: never a testing of waters to see if she wished to speak of anything that may have disturbed or distressed—mortality, say, or the genera
l mortification of flesh, a subset being Dad’s philandering and long-ago abandonment of his wife as a sexual creature, a wound at least now sealed and cauterized by the diagnosis and progression of her disease. Not that it was my role to play therapist or confidant. But it was my role to treat her as an equal or, rather, a superior being (which she clearly was), not as an old friend with whom I’d lost touch and on bumping into at a party felt shoddily compelled to bring up to speed. In short, instead of taking this invaluable resource for granted, my job was to be a good, righteous, compassionate son. Judging from my performance, I should have been fired and forcibly led from the building.

  As I pondered these inadequacies, locomotive lucubrations got the best of me. My mood plunged as we approached Santa Barbara (it had taken three full hours). There was a sudden pounding at the door and I sprang to life, rescued by an ebullient Thad, who suggested the three of us adjourn to the dining car for lunch.

  Late that night, I wandered from my cabin to the glass-domed parlor car exclusively designated for those traveling by sleeper. I fixed myself a coffee at the bar and settled into a couch facing the dark waters of the ocean. With a slight start, I noticed an ember flare within a bundle of clothing at the purplish settee’s end. My eyes adjusted; it was Thad. Huddled in wool, as if against an invisible onrush of elements, he held a glass in one hand and a flask in the other.

  It was his turn to walk the shifting rails of self-reflection.

  “Clea’s asleep,” he said.

  “How’s she doing?”

  “She’s amazing. She’s really much more amazing than a person has a right to be. Trouble is, I’m not worthy of her.”

  The moon was nearly full. Occasionally I glimpsed the sacred ribbon of highway running parallel to the sea. I’ve always had a sense the Beat spirit of Highway 1, the wet, gusty, yellow brick promise of it, can never be adequately conveyed to those not reared by its banks. Possessing a majestic, quintessentially Californian indifference, it rolls and advances by hillock or high water toward the gigantine cliffs of Big Sur and beyond, rugged and celestified, graveled, gravid and golden, beflowered and embedded with the ghostly hitchhiked heft of 10 million hippies’ hajj to the phantom mecca of the Haight.

  It disappeared, swallowed up again—clickety-clack.

  “My brother and I loved that movie The Time Machine,” said Thad, pouring himself something stiff from the silvery filigreed flacon. “One day we actually built it—from a chair in Dad’s study. Did you ever see that movie? Remember that red velvet chair? We fastened all kinds of shit to it: stuck a bicycle wheel to its back that we could spin. By the time we were finished, there were all sorts of dials and levers and throttles. Course, Jack was out of town at the time. It was his writing chair and I don’t think he would have appreciated it! He was in Capri. They were making a movie of a book of his, The Death of a Translator. Alain Delon and Sophia Loren. Ever see it? Jeremy was going to visit—Dad, in Capri—and I was supposed to stay at home with Mother because of my asthma. I’d have fits in the middle of the night and couldn’t catch my breath. Plus, I don’t think Morgana and Jack were getting along. A minor detail! (They rarely did.) Oh but Jeremy loved the idea he was going to the ‘Isle of Capri’—that’s how he referred to it—and I’d be left behind. He really was the Chosen One, you know. We were twins but very different. He was Pollux, the immortal; I was Castor . . . that’s why it didn’t make any sense when he died. The gist of it was—at least the way we overheard it explained to friends—the idea of separating us—you know, the psychologists’ fad at the time was this separation thing with twins. Of course, Jeremy wound up going to school in Switzerland, which actually would have been a torture for me—even as a kid, I didn’t travel well—but back then I was enormously jealous. It sounded so fucking glamorous! Come on. And I think it probably was glamorous . . . skiing around, doing all those alpine things with coquettish principessas and future despots, wearing cashmere cable knits, drinking cocoa or champagne or schnapps or whatever at the foot of the Matterhorn, God knows what they were doing. I used to tease Jeremy when he came home for the holidays—I was actually pretty good at that—because he had this incredibly affected accent, sort of Continental—we were only eleven or twelve, you know how kids pick stuff up, to fit in—so many students at that school were the scions of dukes or duchesses. Lords and royal lardasses. Jeremy would say ‘row’—‘Mom and Dad are having a row’—and I absolutely savaged him about that. Made him furious! When the fact is, I was jealous. Hurt. Violently.

  “So we built this time machine the week before he left for the Isle of Capri (he was on a school break and had flown home from Switzerland a few weeks before to see Morgana). We used it to go back to prehistoric times and way into the future. Must have been charming to watch . . . if one could have hidden behind some bush with an eight-millimeter camera—what I wouldn’t give to see a home movie of those two little time travelers! Do you want to know the most amazing thing, Bertie? I don’t even know if you’d call it Freudian . . . but you know what time I wanted to go back to? Morgana, giving birth! I’m serious! I kept spinning the wheel and all the crazy dials, saying, ‘Oh! We’re at the hospital now!’ ‘Oh! Now we’re in the delivery room!’—and I’d make Jeremy pretend Mommy had her feet in the stirrups but this time I was coming out first. “But I was first, I was first!” he shouted, which was the truth, by nine legendary minutes. Or something like that. Jeremy went fucking wild. Because there I was saying we were going to change all that! He said we couldn’t because it already happened and the rules were you couldn’t change what already happened. The rules! Oh yes, there were rules. But can you imagine? The two of us going on like that?

  “About five years ago, I was in a store in Manhattan. One of these side-street movie-memorabilia shops. They had it in a glass case—a beautiful copy of the time machine, an authentic one, an actual model from the movie. Beautiful upholstery, tuck-’n’-roll, soft, tufted, brushed velvet, tiny gold widgets . . . and that fantastic, whirring engine wheel! Whoever made this thing was a genius in miniatures. Incredible draftsman. I asked the nerd behind the counter if I could buy it and he said it wasn’t for sale but he would give me the number of the guy who built it. Great! Fantastic! So I called and found myself talking to the creator. Went out to Coney Island, that’s where he had his workshop. Bertram, I am telling you it was unbelievable. Here’s this man-child, this sweet, lonely wizard surrounded by spare parts of all the fantasy machines he’d constructed for films—like that toymaker from Blade Runner. There was a half-built time machine on one of the drafting tables (there was a ton of debris, very ‘Santa’s workshop’) and I was suddenly just so touched that my brother and I weren’t the only aficionados. Apparently, there was this whole secret society . . . a worldwide fraternal order! And I really had to bend his arm—he said he was busy with so many things—the guy was very convincing!—but he finally agreed to build me one. I said, Take all the time you need. And I meant it. See, I knew he was kind of squirrelly and I wanted to make it easy on him because I understood his temperament. He wasn’t of this world! He was an artist. I mean, if that’s how you spend the bulk of your time, you’re not fully on the planet, right? And what he was creating for me was this ephemeral—this magical mystery memory thing—how do the CIA say it? ‘Eyes only.’ My eyes only. A Caligari cabinet. Fabergé egg. I’m telling you, I was the ideal client—or ‘patient’! That’s probably the better word. And man, it was really expensive—I can’t remember exactly how much, maybe seven or eight grand. But totally worth it. At the end of the day, I was going to have this amazing sculpture, this talismanic fetish. I thought it was a fucking bargain.

  “So the months go by and finally I heard from him. ‘Progress is being made,’ he said. Funny-looking little guy—I wish you could see his face. But he needs more money. OK. No problem. I’d already given him an advance, right? A few thousand. So I send fifteen hundred. Then I wait and I wait—I must have waited another year because that was the deal, I said
from the get-go I wasn’t gonna hassle him, and I meant it. One day I call to see how he’s doing and he says more or less the same thing: He’s waiting for a part, he got sidelined by a big studio project . . . now I start to feel like I’m being had. I give him an ultimatum—still friendly, mind you—but I tell him I really need to have the little chair in two months’ time. That’s the deadline. Nonnegotiable. He says OK—but never delivers! I’m getting pissed off. He doesn’t answer my calls. I’m starting to think lawsuit. So—and I can’t remember the time sequence—I actually wind up going to Small Claims! To file. Can you imagine me, at Small Claims? You can’t, right? It’s insanity. I have no idea what drove me to that—I mean, I was frustrated, but still—anyway, after however many weeks I get a letter from the court telling me the person I sued was requesting a delay due to the fact that he was traveling on business. Right. A light goes off: something clicks and I realize that my fragile little model maker, my exquisitely tender artiste, is extremely well-versed in Small Claims! Knows the System, through and through! Been through this sort of action before—broken lots of hearts. Whatever. I don’t give a shit. I become obsessed with justice being served. I want my time machine! The motherfucker’s welshing on my time machine. And I’m, like, totally enraged! I’m serious, Bertie! Part of me is genuinely galled. Because there I was, trying to reclaim some part of my fractured boyhood—and there he was, defrauding my innocence!

  “It went back and forth: another date would be requested, and the tinkerer-con would delay—then I’d be unavailable and would have to go in and see the clerk to set another time on the calendar. And so on and so forth. And you couldn’t do this shit by mail, you had to go in, right? This was pre-‘online.’ It became this bureaucratic ritual. Finally, the day comes we’re both due in court but the asshole doesn’t show. My moment of triumph! I thought that’d be the end of it—I’d win by default—but the tinkerer-stinkerer knew better. The judge rules in my favor but says his ruling could, most probably would, be appealed. He was actually tipping me to the guy’s M.O., right? The judge was saying in so many words that I was involved with a pro. OK. So now we’re talking maybe thirty-five hundred dollars that I’ve laid out in terms of advances, plus time spent filing, driving, parking—I actually kept a little leather satchel with receipts! You couldn’t put a dollar amount on the raging and bullshitting that was going on in my head. Right? OK? Are you loving it, Bertie? I haven’t even thought about this in fifteen years or whatever.