I'll Let You Go

CHAPTER 3. Saint-Cloud Road

By the time they reached home, Pullman had long overtaken him; the boy ran till he feared his heart would burst, never looking back. The gates of his grandfather’s house, electronically controlled and far more massive than the corroded ones of Carcassone, were, thankfully, open. A dirty vintage BMW meant his mother’s “friend” was there.

Pullman lingered, then peeled off, disappearing past a fountain, while Tull opened the front door, heavy enough that Grandpa Lou had installed sensors and tiny motors to help it along. The interior of the Wallace Neff — designed estate, built for a silent-film director in the twenties, and the design of its sixteen hilltop acres will later be revealed; they held no interest for the hungry boy scudding over terrazzo floors, headlong toward the kitchen.

Ralph sat on a stool, across from a Sub-Zero the size of a giant’s armoire. The handsome, mordantly stubbled face with dimpled chin, hollowed cheeks and tormented eyes reminded Tull of a monk in flight from a monastery — never mind that Trinnie had decked him out in Dries and motocross Menichetti and in six scant weeks addicted him to Keratase emulsions, Hortus Mirabilis elixirs, Lorenzo Villoresi aftershaves and the arcane almond pastes of Santa Maria Novella. Today he wore an absurd Edwardian tux that made Louis Trotter look positively staid. The popinjay’s head hung heavily, mocked by the pots and pans that dangled around him in cheerful, coppery profusion.

“Hey, Ralph.”

He looked up, annoyed. “Why do you call me that?”

“Sorry. I forget.”

With a grunt, Tull broke the vacuum’d death grip of the Sub-Zero and began to forage.

“Do I fuck with your name? Do I call you ‘Teal’?”

Tull phonily mused. “You can call me that.” That was bogus; it would have irritated him no end. Lugging Tupperware filled with Southern-fried leftovers from the shelves, he changed tack. “Did you hear about the tapir? It pulled off a zookeeper’s arm. It was on the news.”

“There’s a rocky island near San Francisco,” said Ralph smugly, “where some naturalists live. They saw a sea lion wash ashore, its ass bit off by a shark, clean. It lived for days, shimmying along on the front fins — whenever the thing tried to rest, a gull would come give it a little peck and it’d move on. This went on for days.”

“That’s rad.”

“A perfect marriage of Beckett and Bosch.” He simpered, then dementedly shrieked, “Teal!” like a sadistic gull himself. The boy recoiled, glowering.

“Oh! Then there’s the whale that got trapped too far inland when the water started icing up — Alaska or something. The polar bears just sat in a ring around the hole swiping at it while a shark had his way from underneath. Oh, the natural world! How pristine and unforgiving! Like Hollywood, no?” He wriggled and sneered and cockadoodled: “Teal! Teal!”

Tull lost his cool. “If you want your name pronounced Rafe, then why don’t you just spell it that way? With an f instead of an l?”

While it wouldn’t be fair to say that Tull baited his mother’s “friend”—the latest, most tolerable of a line of friends stretching as far back as he could remember — he wasn’t exactly indifferent.

“How would you know how I spell it?” asked the poseur.

“Mom said.”

“Oh. In your many discussions. Of me.”

“We were talking about Ralph Fiennes, the actor”—Tull used the l again, as in Ralph’s Foodmarket, and egregiously rhymed Fiennes with Viennas—“and she said you pronounced yours the same way.”

“It’s Rafe!” he furied, nostrils flaring. “Rafe Fines!” The thirtysomething self-anointed screenwriter from Colorado drew a hand through long, gel’d hair. “In this town, unless you’re very lucky, unless you’re Ron Bass”—he spat the name out like pus—“you need something else, something small and subliminal. What the Jews call minor shtick.” Tull greedily set upon half a cold chicken, green peas and whipped potatoes. “Take ‘Rafe Fines.’ You brought him up. ‘Rafe Fines’ ”—he called out the name as if he were announcing the nominees for the Golden Globes—“is a ‘double hit.’ You read ‘Ralph,’ but you hear ‘Rafe.’ You read ‘Fee-ehnnez’ but hear ‘Fines.’ The juxtaposition makes it memorable. It oscillates. And that’s especially true of a ‘double hit.’ ”

“Where’s Candelaria?” asked the boy offhandedly.

“I sent the servants home,” answered Ralph, deliberately camp. “Mirdling’s Name Theorem: the small, strange thing that perceptually sets you apart. There’s something so rune-like about Rafe, so rarefied. When you take that rune-like, rarefied thing and make silk from the sow’s ear, ‘Ralph’—”

“You know what? You’re getting to be like the nutty professor. And who’s ‘Mirdling’?”

“My last name.”

“You should change it. Where’s Mom?”

“Getting ready. Your cousins are here, you know.”

“What’s with the tux?”

“Black-tie gala for ten thousand, to honor … Ron Bass.”

“What is your problem with Ron Bass?”

“I don’t have a problem.”

“You’re always going off—”

“Going off?”

“He doesn’t even fit your theorem.”

“Oh yes he does. There’s ‘Bass’—you read it much more than you hear it. An inner voice forever asks: fish or tone? Add the confounding banality of Ron to the oscillating fish-music of Bass and you’ve got a cognitive dissonance—”

“I still don’t know why you’re so freaked.”

The Beau Brummell squealed, kicking up his python boots in a retarded jig. “Did you know Ron Bass’s first nine films took in a billion dollars worldwide? Or that he gets up at three forty-five in the morning to write, seven days a week? That’s why his company is called Predawn Productions. And I’ll tell you something else: Ron Bass skips breakfast because digesting food makes him logy. Ron Bass doesn’t use a computer — huh-uh. He writes on yellow loose-leaf with number-two Sundance pencils made by Blackfeet Indians. Ron Bass, as you probably know, is a legendary mentor, with an inner circle of story-structuring Pradacunts who paste and fax and generally work those three acts like crack whores on a cock. ‘I’m not comparing myself to Mozart,’ said Ron Bass in a recent interview with the L.A. Times, ‘but is the Jupiter Symphony any less magnificent because he worked so much and so fast?’ Do you want to know what Ron Bass does on weekends? I’ll tell you what he does on weekends: he writes! And then he takes his German shepherd to the farmers’ market in Santa Monica on Pico and buys hummus. (Gerry the German shepherd — could have used some help writing that name!) Ron Bass likes to go to movies on the weekend; he’ll see three in a day. He likes to see movies with the public. ‘You really know how good it is,’ sayeth Ron Bass, ‘when you’re in the dark surrounded by strangers.’ On Friday or Saturday nights, Ron Bass likes to have French-onion soup at 5 Dudley or branzino and green lasagna at Vicenti. Ron Bass likes to drive down to Orange County to see opera for a Sunday matinée—”

“Jesus, you’re obsessed! It’s just Ron Bass! He’s not even Robert Towne.”

“Did you say … Robert Chinatowne?” He spun around impishly, in fresh rodomontade. “Did you hear Chinatowne on KCRW, discussing ‘the sound of the shammy’? Polanski understood the importance of ‘the sound of the shammy,’ he said. Oh, how lucky for us all! Oh, 1974, if we could just go back! Do you know — are you aware—of what the Council of Elders—the professors of screenwriting—call that script? ‘The grail.’ Literally. They’re just like Trekkies — with their Grand Wailea Maui Waui seminars and Callie Khouri — Nora Ephron champagne brunches, laughing and clinking glasses while hooking you for thousands. And don’t think Mr. Chinatowne isn’t rewarded monetarily each time some weekend warrior writes a check — oh, the Council makes sure they all get their fat number-two Sundance-pencil’d checks! — don’t think he isn’t cut in by the pantheon—the story-structure gurus—groupies still coming in their pants over Sleepless in Seattle—”

“You’re getting crazy.”

The soberest of smiles quickly normalized him. “Tull, you can’t think I’m serious.”

“Well, you seem awfully serious.”

A thoughtful intake of air, reminiscent of a politician reflecting on a benign opposing view. Then: “Tull, when can we meet — to discuss? There’s trouble around page 50—no, 63, 64—that I can’t put my finger on. Maybe up through 80 or 81—at least toward the end of the second act. You know: the limo driver’s ‘false crisis.’ It’s affecting the whole tone—”

“Maybe Saturday.”

He had surreptitiously skimmed Ralph’s latest draft of How to Marry a Billionaire, the po-mo screwball Notting Hill clone, and erred by making a few casual, goading observations — concise and lucid enough to convince the absurd, desperate writer that the boy was a savant.

When Ralph further pressed, Tull took the stairs, shouting, “On the weekend!”

The hallway was dark; the cracks around her bedroom door blazed. It was actually a child’s room of epic proportions — she’d grown up there — the only place his mother ever stayed while alighting from the colorful, ragtag rest-stops she sardonically called the Fourth World. Her son knew by name the drabber exotica of those faraway countries — Connecticut and Minnesota included — a landscape of famous rehabs and less famous halfway houses.

“Mother?”

Tull knew she couldn’t hear; he edged the door open and crept into a shambles of incense, perfume, cigarette smoke and discarded clothes. He made a beeline to her blasting Bose, still in its stylishly beat-up gray-cloth portable battery pack, and lowered the volume.

“Baby?” she called from the toilet.

“It’s me.”

Tull scrunched his face, ticcing it this way and that with the excitement and distress of being near her.

“Oh, baby. Would you turn the music back up?” He didn’t budge, struck dumb by the sheer smell of her. “Did you know you’re going to see Grandma after dinner? At Cedars.”

Trinnie swept into the room in trademark strands of Tahitian black pearls — otherwise nude as a peach — and gave a goony flasher’s grin. He looked away, frowning with the effort not to ogle. From the corner of his eye, he watched this creamy, high-voltage half-moon as it fished through mounds of couture — hand-painted satin-lined toile, copper-wire camisoles and furry capes, beaks of Blahniks peeking out from under like a dominatrix’s smothered chicks.

“What’s she in the hospital for?”

“Angioplasty. Catheter in the heart. Used to be a big deal, now it’s outpatient. But Bluey—dear Grandma Bluey has to have the celebrity suite at Cedars. She is obsessed.”

Usually she wore vintage suits, dark flues that ended in a glorious ignition of orange hair, even while working on her knees in clients’ gardens — but tonight she would sport a pale gray silk-faille jacket, Galliano for Dior, topped with a Steven Jones feathered hat that might have been the fanciful lid of a great and cordial eagle’s teapot. She was nearly forty, with her son’s cool Celtic skin and emerald-green eyes, the see-through lids subtly dilating just before she laughed, which was often. Trinnie tantalized. She was a stormy, beautiful, damaged thing and she was irresistibly his mother. Details of the ancient hurt — the death of his father — went assiduously unspoken, for all practicality expunged from the Histories. Tull was certain Grandpa Lou was part of the puzzle — he could tell by the way the old man watched her, the keen vigilance of his face reflecting back his daughter’s emotions. There was something inextricable about them. It was clear she was the only human being his grandfather had ever loved; nothing incesty about it, Tull knew that in his bones — only that rarest of rare things, an unconditional affection for her mind, her body, her blithe broken spirit.

“Lucy and Edward are here,” she said, while excavating a stiletto.

“Where are you going with Ralph?”

He acidly mispronounced the name, but she couldn’t have cared less. He loved her a little more for it.

“They’re raising money for CAT scans — for animals, can you believe? You know: when Kitty gets that titty lump or Fido has lymphoma. They care more about fucking animals than they do about people. I’ll give them animal,” she said, twirling around. “How’s this?”

He finally turned — there the hell-raiser stood, tall and fabulous, arms righteously crossed beneath princessy sneer — Russian sable open just enough for a redundant, fiery wink of bush.

As he ran to his cousins, the child (for he was still a child) was ecstatically certain he could devise a way to keep her home forever. Yet each time he warmed himself to the thought, like a moth drawn to spectral mother’s flame, he was singed awake by the knowledge that there were no strategies to deploy — all was doomed. Like his grandfather, he was helpless and unmoored before her.

Lucy called out as she leapt from the shadowy pergola and dashed to the maze, Pullman barking furiously from within. Tull strode to the topiary sundial, where, on a granite bench at ten o’clock, sitting Buddha-like in his titanium body brace, was the most mysterious, most admirable, bravest, brilliantest creature he knew he would ever meet: his ten-year-old cousin Edward.