The Chrysanthemum Palace

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WE FINALLY CARRIED OUT AN affair that began with overheated second-story kisses and ended precipitately (from my side, anyway) with a loss of innocence having more to do with the death of flesh than its celebration. I was squeamish when Clea admitted beforehand to having hep C, even though I had a lot of similarly afflicted friends. I’d done my homework, learning it was difficult to contract the disease through the sex act. To be honest, I’m not so sure how I’d have behaved even on discovering the virus could be transmitted by a single kiss. You see, I believed it was my fate to sleep with this woman — our renewed intimacies could not, would not, be thwarted.

The entanglement, while brief, had that most shocking outcome: we became best of friends. It was like one of those awful sitcoms you love to hate. We behaved like girlfriends (or boyfriends, depending on mood), becoming mutual sounding boards for all manner of crises across the spiritual, emotional, and carnal divides. We AA’d three times a week, and I had the great pleasure of watching her grow physically and mentally stronger. When, after nine months, I gave Clea her one-year sobriety cake, we bawled like babes. The fact that this was the longest-running relationship of either of our lives combined with the Solomonic certitude it would be a terrible mistake to shoehorn ourselves into coupledom seemed to bless our messy union with the platonic promise of longevity a simple marriage could never confer. Clea Fremantle Chandler and Bertram Valentine Krohn truly were till death they do part. The unexpected wisdom of this unexpected development allowed us to walk the earth with a lighter step, divesting ourselves of those gloomy, decades-old self-portraits, the scowling ones reflecting how we’d failed our parents, ourselves, the world. Good-bye to all that. We time-traveled, forward and back, and there was something flat-out amazing about the two of us sitting before my fireplace on a rainy Venice night, honoring one another (and a certain dimple-chinned phantom named Leif Farragon too).

Although Clea spent money freely, living large in the way that actresses do, she consistently claimed to be broke. I never pressed for details. Assuming Roosevelt Chandler’s estate had been in reasonable order (admittedly, a lot to assume), it wouldn’t have surprised if Clea had blown through whatever provisions were made — if they had been made — a long time gone. Aside from voice-over work erratically provided by a friend with a loop group, there was no evidence she was otherwise engaged. She occasionally auditioned for those cliché gritty, comeback indie roles though nothing ever panned out; I think they brought her in mostly out of curiosity. I’m not even sure she had an agent. Once in a while Clea and her beat-up Alfa Romeo disappeared on weekends and I feared the worst. After the third or fourth vanishing, I confronted her and was relieved to learn she was off doing conventions in the heartland, meeting Roos Chandler fans and signing memorabilia for a fee.

She eventually moved to a little Craftsman not far from my cottage on Ocean Park. (When I’d suggested we become roomies, Clea demurred.) She still came over enough to leave a territorial mark: ashtrays overflowing with lipstick-smeared butts, discarded Tampax applicators in the bathroom wastebasket, the errant ripped, discarded panty hose tucked impishly under bed frame. When I brought home dates, I had a speech prepared — always ill received — about how Clea and I were “childhood friends” but nothing more.

As my ambivalence about having joined the Starwatch family mellowed, and my gig grew more secure, I set up an audition. Dad didn’t come to the studio much anymore but cordially arranged to be there on the big day. (He remembered Clea from bygone times, and might even have met Roosevelt at some PTA thing or another.) I’d already made my big spiel so when I reintroduced them, he was on best behavior — as were the casting gals, as was Clea, as was myself — the whole world was gallant, dainty and civil, tender in its hopeful reparations.

She got the job without having to read.

Clea would now report to work in the engine room of the Demeter, where she’d limn the role of Genius Alien Mechanic With Dangerous Sexual Undertow: an expat from the rarely visited star cluster, Albion-12. When the makeup team materialized a diamond-encrusted appliqué that adhered to the upper skull (Clea called it “a rhinestone merkin”), branding Albionesque tribe and ancestry, she took it in playful stride. I was proud of her because with great élan, Clea had made the difficult decision to come in from the cold and humbly ply her trade. If a person was going to do some serious spring cleaning and adopt a new work ethic, this was as good a place as any — if that meant leaving her ego at the fortieth-century door of the Demeter, so be it. We both knew the courage it took to overthrow old dreams and slough off the seductive, gaudily dystopian lifestyle that had brought her so close to immolation.

The day she returned from her final skullcap fitting, she cried in my arms, in hope and defeat, and I felt she was truly my sister.

Now, I’m a little unsure if this is kosher from a “literary” standpoint but I need to introduce someone essential to our story whom as yet hasn’t even been hinted at. (Remember, I’m new to this; maybe that’s a plus.) Why not? In the actual chronological scheme of things — and I know that sounds odd — I’m about to meet him for the first time myself. But I wanted to make a preliminary sketch, so you’re familiar.

(Call it part of my ten-finger exercise.)

All right, here we go:

The plucky, diminutive Thad Michelet was fifty-four years old, and while endowed with the rakish quality of an overgrown cherub, he was very much our elder. He was widely known as a gifted comic actor, with powerful dramatic skills as well; ten more years and he’d have made a fine, if physically uncharacteristic Willy Loman. He was supposed to have been marvelous in an Off-Broadway revival of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros some years back — had I not been in the midst of a dry-drunk bender with a girl whose name I’ve now forgotten, I’d have certainly gone to see him. He was also (I was dimly aware, even before Clea reiterated) a published novelist, and like so many of us, the thing he found himself most passionate about was made manifest by talents the world deemed second-rate. What the world wanted was the incarnation of Thad Michelet it had known for the last dozen years — a lovable buffoon who graced interchangeable studio “tent poles” that never grossed less than $200 million, sometimes approaching a billion worldwide. He’d been George Jetson’s hapless brother in Barry Sonnenfeld’s delightful live-action feature and played Sancho Panza to Peter O’Toole’s Quixote for the ebulliently uncontainable Terry Gilliam. He had guest-starred in just about every CSI permutation to date, and done three-episode arcs on most of TV’s hottest half-hours. The remarkable thing being, Thad Michelet was as likely to do a turn for Polanski, Frears, or the Coen brothers as he was for Spielberg, Ratner, or the Farrellys. A Renaissance man, he divided art and life between the avant-garde stage, studio films, indies, television cameos, and book writing. Among these avocations, Thad’s literary efforts are by far the most pertinent (at least, in regards to my tale), in that his very idea of himself as a man of letters constituted the Significant Other that bound him so closely to Clea and myself — and at this point, it’s probably best to come clean with the “reveal” that his father happened to be none other than that titan of our time, the singularly profane, lavishly gifted, beguilingly protean, salaciously elegant, carnivorously charming novelist who I presume was and is still known to most readers of these pages as both giant and giant-killer Jack Michelet — Michelet of the three Pulitzers and perennial Nobel short list, Michelet of the Lannan Prize, Michelet of the Neustadt and two National Book Awards, Michelet of the eight novels, countless screenplay adaptations, and three Academy Award noms, Michelet of the six books of essays and criticism, two children’s fairy-tale compendia, five volumes of poetry, and countless short stories, Michelet of the outrageously trenchant, scabrous, scholarly, dashed-off feeling yet meticulously crafted op-ed pieces, Michelet of the Harold Bloom canon, Michelet the occasional translator from Czech and Celtic and old Italian, Michelet the now-and-then classically outrageous, outrageously classical rethinker, rewriter, and rearranger of Chekhov, Ibsen, and Molière, Michelet of the editorial stewardship of myriad international quality-lit anthologies, Michelet of the required college reading, Michelet the mythic lion in winter of whom biographers and journalists high and low had gleefully written did not go gentle into that good night (or whatever miserable cliché they saw fit to employ) — Black Jack Michelet who most definitely didn’t end with a bang or a whimper but instead lingered in bodystink and agonized ill health so as to take pleasure in maiming and brutalizing whomsoever loved him, or at least had put in their time as blood or bloodied relations upon countless scarlet battlefields, the last being the Vineyard, where the sadistic, near-senile general’s body finally fell.

In other words, Michelet the Genius.

But here’s what I meant by Significant Other.

If we’re lucky in life, one day we discover our passion; and while it’s true we become in a sense married to that passion, what I seek to convey is something ultimately above and beyond trade or creative calling. Put it like this — I, Bertie Valentine Krohn, am bound to Perry Needham Krohn in the same peculiar way that Clea Fremantle was to her mother Roos, and dearest Thad to giant-killer Jack. It is impossible to ignore that the three of us diabolically chose to scale the Olympian summits of peaks already conquered, staked, claimed, and mythologized by the sacred monsters who bore us. Now, why on earth would we embark on a cause so futile and without distinction? Was it cowardice, sloth, delusion? Genes, arrogance, simple perversity? All of the above? The most pernicious of my theories was that we’d been subtly seduced and savagely suppressed by the gravity of whichever dominant, offending parental star, in the same way adult children are ensnarled, emasculated, and snuffed out in Strindberg chamber plays. (All right, I confess; I probably didn’t have it all that bad.) While it isn’t particularly convenient, and might even strike some readers as paranoid, let me put everything on the table with a cold, Oedipal eye — if, say, by the power of the Starship Demeter’s tractor beam my own father insidiously reeled me into the orbit of Planet Hollywood and its promise of moguldom and if, like a druggy automaton, Clea had played out her unlikely role as failed ingénue, soaked in a provocative parfum of sex and death daubed behind the ears by a platinum-haired succubus who only grew more controlling and persuasive in the afterlife… well, if these things were true, then it only made sense that Thad, eldest of these musketeers, was likewise mesmerized into believing he might actually compete at the authorial heights of his father — when in reality he was merely saloon dancing like the town drunk, feet shot out from under by an artfully messianic, infanticidal gunslinger.

Jack Michelet, cold-blooded killer of the Modern Library.

However you sliced it, the burgeoning threesome provided more than enough material to bring psychoanalysis back into vogue.

Thad’s case was a bit more complicated than ours, perhaps because he was older and had traveled further distances upon more perilous roads, perhaps because he was more complicated himself. It’s no shame for me to admit that of the trinity, I was the dullest of the lot. (Ultimately, my saving grace.) I always thought of Clea as fragile, yet at her toughest—“tough” being one of the more helpful chromosomes she’d acquired from Roos — she was tougher than me by a long shot. While I can’t really claim to have been an intimate of Thad’s, I never thought of him that way — fragile, I mean — though he definitely possessed what one critic noted as the “tragic element.” Even on first sight, there was something of the comic desperado, a charismatic pathos, hopeful and hopeless all at once, a kind of wounded-animal magnetism that made a person rush to hug the man or prop him up, fix him a sandwich or syringe: whatever it took to calm his nerves and make the agonized world (all other worlds were sure to follow) right again.

The reader has been patient with my exposition, and kind enough to recall this as a virginal effort. Some of you, I sense, may be tiring of my voice, so I’ll take the bull by the horns and lunge into that very first meeting, which took place in the cavernous, Benedictine sanctuary of the Chateau Marmont lobby.

“My God,” said Thad, with dumbfounded, courtly amplitude as I approached.

Clea knew that my meeting her old lover was a momentous occasion. (Proud, fresh-scrubbed, and beaming, she looked like an excited bureaucrat on a day the inaugural ribbon is cut.) There were so many glasses, dishes, books, scripts, and scarves on the table before him that it seemed as if he’d been living on the commodious, tasseled sofa rather than in a suite of rooms somewhere skyward.

“He’s just…”—he took me in a while longer, then looked to Clea for theatrical approbation—“well, I’m shocked. I mean, well — he’s exactly as I imagined him!”

“Thad knows everything about you,” she said, slyly.

“I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing,” I said.

“It’s a good thing,” said Thad. “Thus spake the Vorbalid.”

He smiled devilishly, as did Clea, his scampish lady-in-waiting and all-around acolyte-in-cahoots. His ambience — and fizzy, frizzy physicality — was at once raw and cultured, cultivated and kitschy, a curious commingling of scholar and clown. Thad’s eyes hungrily surveyed the topography of human detail unfolding before him like a jet devouring a runway at takeoff (recall that I am a beginner; forgive the turbulence of simile), his bristly brows, courtesy of Holbein or Cranach the Elder, hovered gnomishly above balding pate. His clothing, out of style and synch in our town and time, was cut from seventies-era flannel: Pendleton and corduroy that collected thread, clusters of tiny twigs, dust-ball tumbleweeds, bread crumbs, and other couch miscellanea miniatures. Like a creature in a storybook, the most delicate boughs and tendrils of hair tended to grow within and without the cartilaginous folds of his ears, and from small hands — the backs of which sported alarming tufts of fur — sprang unlikely, attenuated finger-bouquets with effetely polished nails: snapshot of a friar in cozy recess of library or den accompanied by Scarlatti (harpsichord) in those charged yet leisurely hours before transformation to werewolf. His manner of speech was a charmed slurry of murmured hesitancy and ballsiness. I would eventually chafe at this dichotomy (blend of wolf and leprechaun, of capricious qualities both simpatico and cruel), but at this moment the feeling that prevailed was of complete and familiar, blood-close ease. In fact, I found myself exhilarated upon meeting the final element of what was to be a pivotal, self-historic ménage à trois; I don’t think it too melodramatic to say that something inside me knew my life was about to change and would never again be the same.

“How long have you been in town?” I asked, stiffly. It was always like that when I met someone formidable.

“Town?” He looked curiously at our mutual friend and said, “Clea, what does he mean by ‘town’? Haven’t we already warped into Vorbalidian Space?”

I wrote the unscintillating reference off to jet lag and general drunkenness.

“Forgive him,” said Clea. “We just got back from Cedars. He had a migraine shot.”

“Wow,” I said lamely, though I actually felt for him. “My mother used to get them.”

“Cluster headaches,” said Thad, with lurid emphasis. “They should call it cluster fuck. That should be the official medical terminology! They say in the lit’rature that when a cluster fuck gets beyond a certain point, all the Percocet in the world won’t touch it. Won’t do shit. It knows you’re trying to find it, they’ve proven this with CAT scans, it’s like fucking Al Qaeda. (Or being fucked by Al Qaeda.) Thing stays one step ahead of whatever you throw at it — moves to different parts of the brain. Nomadic. That’s actually the word they use. Like a storm system. I’ve seen ’em map it, with dye — cluster fucks look like gypsy thunderstorms. Rollin’ thunder!”

He rambled on, interspersing arcane physiological factoids with Starwatch jargon (I soon understood why). As he spoke, a stream of hipsters and admirers who were staying at the hotel — Ed Lachman, Rachel Griffiths, Philip Seymour Hoffman — either waved or dropped by to pay brief homage.

Twenty minutes in, a gregarious, attractively mousy woman named Miriam joined us. Thad baroquely introduced her as his book agent. Then another Philip, this one the actual manager of the Chateau, discreetly interrupted to officially welcome the actor-author to the premises. An agent from ICM offered praise while a preteen German girl (from The Jetsons demographic, probably the daughter of some international film financier) stood gawking not too far off. Amid this friendly tumult Mr. Michelet gathered his things and broke camp, inviting everyone in earshot to “take the party upstairs.”

Though he’d arrived only hours ago, the airy, legendary penthouse was redolent with the scent of his moppish, matted being, a potpourri of pot, herbal teas, longneck bottled Fig & Olive bath oils (courtesy of Clea), and seemingly, his very (busy) brain itself. At first, both women tried to curtail Thad’s alcoholic intake, as it was contraindicated to whatever opiates the ER had seen fit to dispense. He put up his dukes, but folk wisdom, folk medicine, and feminine wiles prevailed. As Miriam and Clea changed him into a favorite soft sweatshirt, they marveled at a physical constitution that, after the travails of the afternoon, would still leave their old friend “upright.” At least he was in a jovial frame of mind.

As it turned out, Thad was in L.A. to meet with the Starwatch: The Navigators team, who had written an episode expressly for him. It was news to me. The two-parter commenced filming in a month or so; Mr. Michelet’s face needed to be fitted for prosthetic appendages, that sort of thing. I shot Clea a glance and she shrugged, indicating it had been a surprise to her as well. I was irked, without exactly knowing why. The fact was, just because I’m the son of the show’s creator, I had no more an inside track of the goings-on, stunt-casting strategies, or “event episodes” being cooked up than did anyone else. As a rule, I had no interest — to care enough to be curious would have been an added humiliation — yet there I was, suddenly feeling left out. The explanation for my annoyance was actually quite simple: I was jealous, not only of Thad Michelet’s bigger, messier, brillianter, more glamorous life (and that he had the profound luxury of a temporary docking aboard the loveboat Demeter instead of taking up slaveship residence, as I had), but of his father’s loftier progenitorship as well, rendering my own, in comparison, more to that of blue collar than blue blood.

But I think what galled me most, though I never let on, even to myself, was his prior knowledge of Clea. I’d known about it, even if she had never spoken of the affair in any detail. One word she had used to describe their alliance stuck in my head: “volatile.” Naturally, I took that as a rebuke to my genetically unvolatile ways. There I was again, absurdly, in the same triangle I’d found myself with Leif: unsexy third wheel in an adolescent psychodrama.

So, as dusk turned to evening, lounging around the vast modernist prairie of the refurbished suite, I did what any self-respecting triangulated schmuck would have done: doted on the bookish Miriam Levine as if she were the reincarnation of Roos Chandler herself, or at the very least, the only one in the room. While Clea flirtily wrangled her restless, doped-up ex, I cozied on the couch with the agent, sassily grilling her on where she lived, which town she’d been raised in, what college she attended (Brown, of course). Oh, and — any sibs? Parents still living? Where did they live and how were they faring? Now when did you enter the book racket, and please to name current stable of authors… by the way, how did you and Thad meet? My eyes bore deep into hers and I made sure she saw my nostrils subtly crease in randy inhalation when commenting on her lovely complexion (the latter, I’ll admit, said out of Clea’s hearing range), and so on and so on and so forth, lavishing her with the kind of attention that, falling short of a seasoned lothario’s, more than fit the profile of any decent, serial monogamizing narcissist. During Clea’s own ministrations — far more labored than mine — I caught the occasional sidelong glance betraying grudgey acknowledgment of my heedlessness to both her and the outsized Vorbalidian guest star, a passing irritation at my focus on Miss Miriam. I could have been wrong. My little display may have been laughably transparent.

Soon enough, Miriam spun from my orbit. We gathered around the fire of Thad, so to speak, as he declaimed sans translation:

Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa, io non credea

Tornare ancor per uso a contemplarvi

Sul paterno giardino scintillanti…

“That’s Leopardi,” interjected Miriam. (She’d obviously heard his act before.) “Ah! To be an ensign fourth-class on the Starship Demeter!” he shouted, shuffling about in seductive, self-mocking dinner-theater mode. He’d taken the stage, disarmed and dangerous. “I cannot tell you how I’ve been looking forward to this”—he addressed himself to me—“I’m Starwatch’s biggest fan, così fan tutte! The stars! Oh, the stars!”

He cleared his throat, narrowing his eyes like a midget Barrymore.

Glittering stars of the Great Bear—

Never thought I’d be back to see you,

Shining down on my father’s garden…

Still poetizing, he looked each of us square in the eye like the old Wellesian ham he was, transported to the deathless realm of the one-man show. In full, hoary command, he cocked his neck toward the heavens.

“I could hear the murmur of voices float back and forth in my father’s house, conjuring mysterious worlds and a future full of secret joys, knowing nothing of what might lie in store — nor yet how often times would loom where I’d gladly swap this bereft and wretched life of mine for death.”

The doors of the massive terrace were shut, yet a breeze from Sunset Boulevard found its way through the cracks like a spirit and advanced to the living room where we sat, shifting the mood from cordial conviviality to melancholy foreboding. Thad suddenly grew pale and wobbly, and Clea signaled she was going to “put him down.” Within moments, Miriam and I were traveling silently in the elevator then saying good-byes at the great wicker chairs that graced the garage’s entrance.