The Chrysanthemum Palace

by Bruce Wagner

  MIRIAM GOT TICKETS FOR US to see a guru in Culver City.

  She traded in her Taurus for a Mustang convertible. The wind was warm and gusty, and Meerkat1 smelled of sea, sex, and rosewood oil: a stone summer groove. It was good to be on our own, away from “the kids” (that’s what we called them). Though it went unspoken, we were half spooked about any craziness they might get into while out of our immediate supervision. Regardless, we made a concerted effort to chill. We felt like parents playing hooky from their A.D.D.’d brood, except in this case we hadn’t found a sitter.

  Tough titties.

  The hall must have held a thousand people. There were a few celebrities—Garry Shandling, Cheryl Tiegs, Jeff Goldblum—nothing heavy. It was festival-seating, with everyone on folding chairs and lots of SRO overflow in back. A thin, leprechauney guy came out and spoke two hours, nonstop. I liked him right away. He said what I thought were typical guruish things but I really seemed to connect. He talked of that great stillness already in our possession from which truth and happiness emanate (yes, Badwater came to mind), a stillness we seemed intent on ignoring. Pain and suffering came from the inexhaustible need for money, food, sex. The guru said that merely becoming aware of the “forgotten stillness”—the stillness of the moment, the power of Now—was enough. “Why can’t people see how simple it is?” he asked, and everyone laughed. Funny but true. Apparently, he’d investigated all manner of disciplines and “men of knowledge.” One day, upon hearing a Zen master say “No thought!” the budding avatar realized he’d been deliriously happy the last few years for precisely that reason: he hadn’t been thinking. (The audience laughed again.) Thoughts were like clouds, he said, the difference being that no two clouds were alike . . . whereas thoughts were usually the same. “The sky would be quite boring if filled only with thoughts,” he said. The elfin sage jerked back his head, pointing to the heavens like an everyday Joe. “Look! Those two clouds are exactly alike.” Playing the part of another curious pedestrian, he exclaimed, “Hey! There’s that same cloud I saw yesterday—and the day before. Strange, but I saw it the day before that, too.”

  I kept thinking about Thad and his father. Was I becoming obsessed? I dismissed the notion as merely another cloud. Then others blew in on the horizon: the thunderheaded cumuliform of Clea and her mom . . . the cirruslike wisp of Leif Farragon—you didn’t need a weatherman (or a guru) to see the sky was filled with spirits. To my surprise I had truly begun to care about Thad, just as I cared for Clea, and Miriam too for that matter. They were the special creatures who had fallen for whatever karmic reason (to use the contagious jargon of the acolytes) into my orbit and I into theirs. I suppose I was obsessed—by making meaning of it all. Perhaps that was foolish. As the wise and ageless sprite spoke, I meditated on the brevity of life’s duration and the significance of the drama that played out on one’s personal stage. I don’t mean to get corny or metaphysical but I couldn’t help thinking I’d be derelict not to further investigate the path upon which my own heart had led me.

  On the drive home, I told Miriam about my experience. I talked about finishing The Soft Sea Horse, all the miserable things I’d read that Jack had said about his son, and the crazy ambivalence I’d felt in trying to hash everything through—so very democratic, like an honor student mastering both sides of a debate. She smiled, rather gurulike herself, without entering into the fray; her way of acknowledging I was now a rarefield member of Thadwatchers (or Micheleteers), an adherent of the Inner Circle.

  Instead of returning to the hotel, we made love at my house—though it sounds a bit convoluted I think at least part of the reason was to avoid competing with the raw ecstasies of the night before—when Shutters stripped and shuddered, an event whose tomfoolery probably imprinted itself upon the overpriced, designer-seashell-strewn aura of that room for at least ninety days. (A discreetly placed plaque should read: MIRIAM AND BERTIE DIDN’T GET MUCH SLEEP HERE.) A few minutes after we came, in simultaneous, symphonic ciss boom-bah, Miriam fired up a cigarette, sucked in a fog bank of smoke, and set to a little musing herself.

  “I was thinking . . . you know—when you were talking about The Soft Sea Horse. I’m not exactly sure what Thad told you when you were on the train—and I know you’ve read the book, but some things didn’t happen the way he wrote them. Like, he wasn’t in Amagansett—or the Vineyard—when Jeremy died.”

  Knowing what I read was “fiction,” I was still bemused. “But it said they came over to the island,” I said, defensively. “After the drowning.”

  “That’s what I’m saying. He wasn’t in the States, he was with him in Capri. When it happened. Morgana was busy with a nervous breakdown—they finally put her in Silver Hill. Or somewhere. Lillian Hellman made the arrangements. I think. That’s why Thad wound up going to Europe. What happened was, Morgana thought Jack was having an affair with Sophia Loren which he completely wasn’t, he was screwing two other actresses on that shoot. And the set designer too! The twins were playing in the water . . .” She closed her eyes, as if projecting a legendarily lost film on the back of her lids. “And his father, that motherfucker, blamed him for it. As usual! I mean, he blamed that little guy if it rained. Jack thought it was deliberate. That was his theory! Some sort of willful act on Thad’s part. The asshole. Bertie, can you imagine? The man was a shitty, shitty father, he never watched those kids, it was criminal, he was—a compulsive pussyhound. Anyway, it was just some creepy literary fantasy of Jack’s, a Henry James thing. And later on, I think he was pissed Thad wrote about it because he was going to, supposedly, but didn’t have the stones. Cajones? And he thought, How dare he! You know, scooping the big genius. Thad would never have been capable of hurting his brother, he worshipped him. But I guess capable and culpable are just a few letters off.

  “Anyway, Thad got righteously blamed, and that’s a heavy thing to get laid on you at that age. At any age! Jack just poured out his rage—the rage toward Morgana that he’d always had, I mean way before those kids were even born—they were nothing but . . . burdens to him—oh right, I know he was supposed to love Jeremy so much—that’s part of the myth, OK? But you know, I don’t even think it was true. Jack had a death wish—for everyone else, not for himself. So when Jeremy died, he probably felt whatever form of guilt he was capable of feeling and then he poured this sick rage on that poor, poor boy. It so breaks my heart, Bertie. It so breaks my heart!”

  * * *

  1 Knowing it may be cloying to some, I include the nickname out of breezy verisimilitude. Having gone this far—I think I’ve probably gotten footnotes out of my system, too—I’m afraid there’s just a bit more to be revealed under the irritating file marked TMI: I had taken to calling her that after watching a show on the Discovery Channel, postcoital.

  THE NIGHT PROVED A TONIC all around. On Sunday morning, Thad and Clea looked clear-eyed, luminous, and light of heart. I hadn’t fully digested Miriam’s cliffhanger about the twins being together that ill-fated day in Capri; my plan was to visit the Herrick Library and see what I could dig up. I wanted to hold a bit of fragile yellow newsprint in my hand, something the Internet couldn’t allow.

  But first, let me backtrack: we officially got busted.

  See, everyone was supposed to hook up at Shutters around noon. The Dynamic Duo awakened early, fled the Chateau, and swung by Clea’s to grab a swimsuit. When there was no sign of Miriam at the hotel, they naturally decided to kill time by dropping over to harass me; as they pulled up, Meerkat was just leaving. They clucked their tongues and said “Aha!” in grandly sophomoric pseudo-revelation.

  Our pal had hired a driver, and I wasn’t sure that was a good sign. Miriam wanted to run the Mustang over to Shutters to pick up a suit of her own but Thad insisted we take the Town Car on a “pit stop” then continue to the Colony. Clea was gung ho. She’d never been to my parents’ beach house.

  We piled into the Lincoln and, after a few minutes of ribbing on their part and half-assed blushing on ours, settled in for th
e short ride.

  My father bought the place twenty years ago and since then had acquired the adjoining properties (his modus operandi, as by now you know). The structure had endured a multitude of upgrades and add-ons in the Richard Meier mausoleum style—“ad mauseum,” as Gita liked to say, otherwise cattily known as the School of Swiss Sanitoria. “Perfect,” she noted wryly, “for your parents’ mutual invalidism.” The sand castle was a suitable showcase for Perry’s outsized art and ego. I had pretty much left the nest by the time they moved in, and while I’m certain to have secretly—all right, maybe not so secretly—coveted the general idea of a $15 million weekend getaway, I was glad to note that for all its meticulous minimalism, in the end, like an aesthetic black (OK, white) hole, the dwelling consumed itself, and everything in near orbit. When I finally visited—already in Berkeley and on the outs with Perry (Mom was inadvertently tarred with that brush)—I realized for the first time just how much money my father had accumulated through the years. My outlandish disdain was tempered by the fact that Gita loved the beach: sun and sea were therapeutic and rejuvenative. If that’s what money could buy, the house had been worth every penny.

  Mars (short for Morris), the longtime, fortyish-looking sixty-something majordomo, greeted us at the door. Dad was having a massage and Mom was still asleep. Though just half an hour early, I fitfully asked if my parents had remembered about brunch. Mars smiled like a mandarin. Everything would be ready—he was cooking the food himself—around noon. He suggested we take a stroll on the beach.

  It was a spectacular morning. Jerky breezes snappily rearranged our hair and we chased each other around while rich, healthy dogs—locals—leaped and barked. Since our covers had been pulled, Miriam and I dared the occasional intimacy yet when Clea caught my eye, I reflexively dropped my lover’s hand with whatever casualness I could muster. (It was silly but Meerkat seemed mildly amused.) Thad gazed at the horizon with a kind of pilgrim’s poignant hopefulness, like someone with a fatal disease on the eve of sailing away for a last-ditch cure. Clea spent a fair amount of time watching him, not just monitoring moods but fixated on his essence as an anthropologist upon a totem. He completed her in a way—I was going to use “ennobled,” the word I invoked for Morgana on Black Jack’s extirpation—but that wasn’t wholly true, not in either case. He did lend a kind of gravitas: she’d finally met someone whose anchoring to this earth was more tenuous than her own. While Clea always yearned for flight, she had voluntarily grounded herself for this man—a lovely sacrifice. Though I’ll never be certain, I think she must have already known she was pregnant.

  Another thing that touched me was how sweetly anxious Clea was to see my parents again, this time in the company of her man. I’m sure she thought it legitimizing, making her more respectable to the world. If I’d had my wedding fantasies, I can only imagine what her feverish brain drummed up. She probably saw herself back at the Vineyard, fumigating ghosts of that haunted cliffhouse with a sage-burnt ceremony of sacred union. If that termagant Morgana were to deny permission, she knew the Colony would be readily offered (one helluva backup plan) and they’d be hitched without a hitch, vows exchanged in Chanel gown and bare feet over unnumbered grains of sand—which actually made today a kind of holy reconnoitering.

  As we returned, the masseuse was leaving, an enormous folded leather table tucked under her arm with the ease of a yoga mat. Gita waved to us from the kitchen. Perry appeared, groggily post-shiatsu, with the newly arrived Captain Laughton and his (much) younger partner in tow. Dad gave all a generous greeting, with particular attention paid to Mr. Michelet, the informal guest of honor. As we entered the living room, Nick Sultan and his wife materialized at the front gate. Perry announced to Mars that “the door may now be bolted.” Apart from the help, there were ten of us.

  While I hadn’t expected it, the addition of a few friendly couples was a relief. They leeched some pressure off. Of course it didn’t hurt that the captain’s fey, charming friend was slightly in awe of Thad, and not just for his film and stage work—he praised his novels and had the good sense not to bring up Jack. Whether or not he was sincere, he’d definitely done his homework, for which I was grateful.

  Mom and Thad became instant partners in crime. She was always terrific with wounded souls and I think her being crippled allowed him to tap into the innate graciousness that played just beneath the surface of his cynical mask of social dysfunction. They were fellow Masons, funny and literate and conspiratorial—of the secret order of Those Who Knew. As the day grew longer they huddled and whispered, becoming even more fabulous and risqué. We gave them plenty of space. (I had a neurotic moment before reassuring myself Thad’s scabrous repartee would stop short of any mockery of Father. He would never have been so crass.) For his part, Perry was pleased at the alliance; he never brought home much except riches, so he was satisfied not to take center stage, happy that she was happy.

  Besides, he would soon shine during the Grand Tour. I knew it might be dicey but Dad was particularly eager to display various artifacts belonging to Jack Michelet that he’d collected over the years like so many big-game heads. He also knew there was business to be discussed, however obliquely: Miriam’s odd proposal that her client novelize “Prodigal Son” for the Starwatch book series—I’d already primed the pump—and the more engaging idea of Nick Sultan’s that the surviving son adapt Chrysanthemum to the big screen. In fact, Perry had invited the television director and his spouse for brunch out of the former’s tenacious entreaties to package the shtick-fueled, intergenerational project. When I took Dad aside to briefly discuss, he said he’d have much preferred a “name” like Neil Jordan or Phil Noyce but had had the option for so damn long without incurring A-list interest (“A” for “Anyone”) that Nick’s passions were actually welcome. Besides, he said, if instinct had taught him anything, there was a lot to be said about going with what was in front of you.

  I could tell Thad wasn’t fond of the director and it wasn’t hard to see why. Nick Sultan was one of those grating showbiz animals who couldn’t take a breath without advancing some pet project or other. His American wife reflected the same naked ambition—an aging Gold’s Gym rat, she must have thrown $40,000 at her teeth alone; exquisitely symmetrical, they gleamed like airbrushed headstones. Though hardly saying a word, Mrs. Sultan possessed the boundless energy of a trained spaniel, one who could circle her tail (or her master’s) ad infinitum, eating whatever amount of poo it took to get the job done.

  When brunch was over Mars took latte orders, and that’s when Dad made his move—like sweethearts, he and Thad adjourned on cue. I watched the others quietly wrestle with whether they should follow but strategically held them at bay, informing that my father’s show-and-tells were heart-stoppingly tedious. I promised a scintillating private tour after espresso and desserts. They got the message.

  As soon as they were safely engaged in frivolities (the captain’s boyfriend thought he saw Sting strolling past and everyone ran to have a look) I sprinted in hot pursuit of host and honored guest, catching up in the library.

  “Your father’s firsts,” said Perry, waving to a shelf of leather-bound folios. “Did Miriam tell you I hold the option on Chrysanthemum?”

  “Yes,” said Thad. “Mr. Sultan won’t let me forget.”

  “He’s interested in directing.” I could tell by Dad’s tone that he wanted us to know he was slumming by even considering the Brit. But another implication was at hand: Perry Needham Krohn’s instincts never failed him. “I’m sure he’d do a fair job—he’s certainly thought about it long enough. He’s passionate, and I think that’s key. If you have a passion, you’re halfway there.”

  “Talent helps,” said Thad drolly.

  (A small, unvarnished dig that my father dug.)

  “Talent would be nice. But Nick comes from British theater.”

  “They all come from British theater.”

  “Right—the RSC. Well if he can hack Marat/Sade, I’m hoping he’s up for Chry
santhemum. Besides, you’ve got people like Rob Marshall hitting home runs, right out of the box. Nick’s got great energy.”

  Suddenly he was cheerleading, which I doubt had been his intention. As if to stop himself in his tracks, he turned to ask what I thought.

  “It’s kind of hard to judge from his work on the set. I mean, it’s a well-oiled machine at this point, right? A feature takes a whole different—”

  “True,” said Perry. He faced our friend. “What do you think of Chrysanthemum? As one of your father’s books.” A good, simple question which I’m sure gave Dad the fleeting sense he’d regained control. When Thad didn’t reply, he added, somewhat awkwardly, “What’s your opinion?”

  “I’ve always had a special relationship to that novel,” said Thad, without elaborating.

  This seemed to please my father.

  “Nick said it might be something you’d like to adapt.”

  “I didn’t quite say that.”

  He was standoffish though still friendly—not so much hard-to-get, but insinuating the complexities of blood he knew Perry would appreciate.

  “I thought it’d be a hell of an interesting experiment. Son adapting father.” Dad was in murky waters but I didn’t intervene. “I like the idea of it.”

  Thad walked closer to a framed watercolor.

  “Recognize it?” my father asked. “One of Jack’s.”

  “Yes,” said Thad. “I do.”

  It was a woman with her legs spread, hands cupping a resplendent purple vulva.

  “A recurring theme,” he said, not without humor. “You know, Perry . . . what really interests me—at the moment—and I’m not saying I wouldn’t want to take a stab at Chrysanthemum because that intrigues as well, it really does.”

  “OK.” He exhaled, giving Thad his full attention—like a merchant ready to barter.