I'll Let You Go

CHAPTER 6. The Great Race

The two cousins visited Bluey awhile, ensconced in her twenty-five-hundred-dollar-a-day high-roller suite — twenty-five hundred above Blue Cross, that is — with the concealed cardiac monitor wiring, silent infrared call system, marble bath and sitting room with parquet floor, Scalamandré brocaded sofa under Jasper Johns collage, orchids—Rhyncostylis gigantea, smelling of cinnamon and nutmeg — and faux Chippendale desk and chairs. It was even nicer than Mount Sinai’s 11 West, where Mr. Trotter once stayed with his pneumonia. She was attended by Winter, Trinnie and Dodd’s erstwhile nanny, but occasionally a “floor concierge” (trained, courtesy of the Laguna Ritz-Carlton) poked his head in, bearing fresh linens and imported magazines, anime for the kids and doctor-approved treats Bluey had bused in from Frenchie’s, her favorite downtown bakery. The hospital bed, its quilt and duvet brought from home, was covered with obituaries from the Times, both coasts’. Winter busied herself by placing the ones not under current scrutiny in a suede photo album, its cover bearing the Trotter family arms within an embossed cartouche.

In fact for most of the children’s visit Bluey was on the phone with her son, the aforementioned eighteenth-richest person in the United States, reading death notices aloud like they were funny pages. Bluey was strong as an ox; the memorials were a tonic. She’d been an aficionado for years and now included Dodd in her enthusiasms, tracking him down to announce a public figure’s controversial or banal demise (actually, the figure needn’t be all that public to qualify). If he’d already heard it on the news, Dodd liked to feign surprise. At first, he thought it macabre, but since he’d never had easy ingress to Bluey’s heart, he let her build this supernal bridge of bones; before long, mother and son stood on the great span and warmly communed, watching a back-page parade of departed souls.

Tull supposed that his cousin got enough “research” watching Bluey — what with her preternaturally keen eyes darting like Pixar bug antennae as she jotted things down in the green leather Smythson of Bond Street ms. notebook with the whimsical gilt heading: BIRD NOTES. He listlessly pushed tarragon around on the rack of lamb (Lucy had kimchi) delivered from the hospital’s gourmet kitchen by a bow-tied blackjacketed server, and was glad Grandma was preoccupied with her call, because his braided friend had delivered a blow from which he had not, nor ever would, recover.

He went to bed early, like an invalid. The sudden notion of his father being alive had conferred a strange new sickness, and his head grew as heavy as Edward’s. Swathed in six-hundred-count Pratesi sheets, a goose-down pillow over his face, Tull sweatily descended — first imagining himself in the labyrinth, shuffling through narcotic mist to mysterious middle, then on to more prosaic fields — a dark school playground, where cottony smoke also swirled. His dreams were unsettling that night. He had shed his innocence; Lucy had fired the pistol and the perverse, arduous race of life had officially begun. Twitching in troubled sleep, Pullman’s was the only familiar face, but even the Dane was creepily confabulated, a dog patch of ill-fitting body parts amid Tull’s tule fog REM. The rest of the supernatural school yard’s denizens were strangers, more phantom than corporeal, and filled him with anguish and apprehension. It seemed as if they were beings of pure emotion, pure feeling, but the emotions and feelings of luminous deep-sea creatures whom he could never know.

Grandpa Lou chuffed awhile with “my Danish friend” before retiring to the library to look over the maquettes of his future grave.

The walls of the vast “Withdrawing Room,” three thousand square feet in area and two stories tall, were fronted by an ornately paneled restoration of fifteenth-century Italian wood intarsia. Trompe l’oeil murals of Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons hung in other spaces: mossy, forbidding underground expanses. Amid thousands of vellum volumes were priceless gouaches and oils — smallish Bonnards, Twomblys and Klimts — old spheres and compasses, a letter and poem written in French in van Gogh’s hand—

Tell me the story simply, as to a little child.

For I am weak and weary, and helpless and defiled.…

Tell me the story always, when you have cause to fear,

That this world’s empty glory, is costing me too dear

— a scale model of Vanbrugh’s Temple of the Four Winds (appropriated for the cover of his grandchildren’s private school’s literary magazine), a similarly scaled version of Le Corbusier’s chapel at Notre-Dame-du-Haut that he’d picked up while in Paris with Trinnie and her fiancé, a shrunken eighteenth-century Louis XVI mahogany armchair, a sixty-year-old potted two-foot-high grove of bonsai juniper trees ($23,000, from Dimson Homma in Manhattan), an original pilaster from the Pantheon and a minuscule copy of the Bacchus Room at Villa Barbaro. Among gaudy torchères were a clutter of miniature “stairways to heaven,” their atheistic steps ending as abruptly as a hangman’s scaffolding. Mr. Trotter commissioned such a spiral for his grave; the cabinetmaker David Linley did a mock-up, delivering it with a Carlton House — style writing desk, gratis. Knowing his client’s taste for follies, he painstakingly built a detailed replica of the famed Russian grotto at Kuskovo to span the tabletop’s length.

Which brings us to the finely detailed tomb fantasias — twenty-five to date, on pedestals — and he walked among them, chuffing and musing. The idea came to him after visiting the Hollywood Forever Cemetery near Gower. The handsome young midwesterner who owned the place told Trotter that a family mausoleum could be had for around two hundred thousand “off the shelf,” though available models were rather wretched. It was then that the old man recalled a contest in Copenhagen, a kind of peacock affair, in which architects submitted plans for a series of shed-size garden pavilions, and luminaries such as Graves, Botto and Isozaki had applied. The concept was a bit precious (like those books that feature celebrity doodles), but when he saw photographs of the eclectic, somber, spirited results, he heard his calling and came closer to solving an endgame puzzle too; he would make a contest to design his grave.

In short order, the “Trotter Funerary” became one of architecture’s hot cynosures — handling the big themes on a small, elegiac scale was a natural for the vanity portfolio, even if the designs remained unbuilt. Mr. Trotter personally contacted the world-class talents whose aesthetic captured his fancy. He would have them create miniatures of projected works — temple, sculpture, earthwork — the only requisite being that each was no larger than 300 square feet. Anything could be submitted: a pile of “sacred” rocks would do. He remembered the megalithic slabs of Avebury, in the bare, chalky downs of southern England’s Wiltshire … let the tourists troop down Westwood’s Wilshire to see the Trotter Stones, a ring of nineteen just like those at Penzance, waist-high in broom sedge and gorse, hard by the graves of Marilyn and Burt, Dean and Natalie and John (Cassavetes). Oh, he liked it. Let there be tors and barrows, hollows and cairns! It had all gone swimmingly, even though he couldn’t for the death of him make up his mind: so far, the only entry taken out of the running was Richard Meier’s; Trinnie gibed that selected future wags would call his crypt “a Getty gift shop adjunct.” There it sat, withdrawn in the Withdrawing, a small, slick white-tiled elephant.

Here they were, then: Gehry’s neoclassical bowl-shaped marble carp, an homage to Louis XIV’s obsession as much to the gefilte fish of his youth; George Hargreaves’s loamy waves of rattlesnake- and blue-grass; a tiny replica of the incestuous tomb of Halicarnassus (built for Mausolus and Artemisia, a married brother and sister); a pistachio-colored room built by Renzo Piano, its floating roof’s aluminum petals powdered and powered by the sun; a Frank Stella “Dresden” folly with entrance through a berm; a copper barrel-vaulted “dwelling” by Bartholomew Voorsanger from a drawing by Mies, with climate control, olive wood interiors and walls of gneiss hewn from one of Mr. Trotter’s own quarries; Charles Jencks’s Alice in Wonderland miniature golf course plot of sliced ponds, carved crescent tumuli and grassy ziggurats; a “mouth of Hell” martyrium; Len Brackett’s mortise-and-tenon teahouse, inspired by the Pine-Lute Pavilion (wood planed so smoothly it required no sealant); a cunning replica of the James Smith — designed mausoleum at Greyfriars churchyard in Edinburgh; Rafael Moneo’s stone ruin of a seventeenth century — style cloister, with echoes of his own Our Lady of the Angels still taking shape in downtown L.A.; Rem Koolhaas’s stainless-steel cage and huge rusty oculi with ghostly elevator that silently motored to the roof; another stairway to nowhere from Predock, made of water and riverstone; Herzog and de Meuron’s nod to their famed Yountville winery, with more gneiss, ground up and held together by signature mesh — the old man loved the way the light filtered through the arrowhead shards into the sanctum; two curved walls that formed parentheses, after a children’s area conceived by Noguchi for a park on the island of Hokkaido; Robert A. M. Stern’s playful Palladian villa (the only one Trotter had had built to scale, for chez Pullman); a Hellenistic pyramid, typical of those found in Constantine and Tripolitania, stretching skyward into obelisk sleekness; a sixth-century Palmyrene tower-tomb, four stories tall, with burial compartments on each level; various bronze maidens weeping over TROTTER-emblazoned sarcophagi; an angel leading a downcast naked man of formidable physique into a stained-glass tomb; Tadao Ando’s Gordian sluice of bamboo-shaped aqueducts; Lauretta Vinciarelli’s classic enfilade of slick aluminum sheds; Zaha Hadid’s symbolic, mournful tekton bridge; Daniel Libeskind’s zinc-clad bunker, stabbed eerily by unframed window openings (you peered in and saw empty vitrines, as if in an abandoned museum. Dodd liked this one best); Shodo Suzuki’s Zen garden of pine, bamboo, irises and azaleas; and Trinnie’s favorite, after a tomb at cobblestoned Lachaise — a painted couple staring out from the crypt’s window frame with a kind of haunted, remonstrating indifference.

That was the image he turned over while drifting to sleep in the master bedroom of the main house. The California king felt good; he hadn’t slept on it in years. What brought him back there tonight? His wife would be home from Cedars tomorrow. Tomorrow, like a mad scientist, he would return to the “bespoke” Murphy bed that sprang from the vast study’s muraled wall.

We have described how Louis Trotter and the boy closed the night. But what of Trinnie?

Ron Bass had, in fact, been at the gala. Inadvertently introduced to Ralph Mirdling, he was most gracious and kind, even correctly pronouncing his name. Thus charmed, the fledgling screenwriter unraveled.

Home from the Animal CAT-scan Ball, she sent the boyfriend back to his Koreatown single and promptly went to bed. Couldn’t sleep. Threw on clothes and raced down the hill, tucking the old chocolate-brown Cabriolet beneath a suppurating magnolia. Through a bosk of cottonwoods was a hillock with a culvert, but the drain wasn’t real. There was a wad of chain link deep inside the baffle, and a lock for which only she had the key.

Under mysterious moonlight (much like Lucy’s taper girl, but wearing a Y’s bis LIMI box-coat) she made her way to the broken tower. The wind blew wild and the yews’ brushy applause made her hair stand on end, a commotion that covered the startled exhalation of a man in pressed bib overalls; he saw she wasn’t a trespasser and hung back, charting her progress from the blind of a myrtle ball. She entered the column, snubbed by the lonely groups of dusty white tents within, then clambered up a corkscrew stairwell to the fourth-floor bed. Everywhere was mildew, and bad smells; weeks ago, a possum died up there, seeping fluids into the faded, hand-printed Indian-patterned toile de Jouy.

She got into bed, drew the cold cover to her collarbone and fell quickly to sleep.