I'll Let You Go

CHAPTER 49. Pied-à-Terre

Toulouse began his last year at Four Winds feeling very much older, and more philosophical, too. During one of Mr. Hookstratten’s lectures, he stared out a window and mused on the capriciousness of this life. The mature student played a mental parlor game, imagining he was eleven years old again, sitting cross-legged on a hill. Peering into a crystal ball, he saw himself just as he was now, in Mr. Hookstratten’s class during a lecture, musing through a window. The ball then showed him walking the campus alone. “But where,” he asked of a wizened old warlock, “are my cousins?”

“Edward is dead,” said the Merlin. “And Lucille Rose has moved to England.” The images in the crystal swirled and changed: there was Toulouse romping with Pullman at a house in the flats, just south of Wilshire. His mother turned into the drive in a Mercedes G-wagen, while a handsome bear of a man in corduroy slacks, tweed vest and smudged cook’s apron barreled out the front door to greet her. “And who,” asked the mesmerized child, “is that?” “Why, your father, of course!” said the mage. “But,” stammered the boy, “my father is dead—” A final figure materialized in the ether: Amaryllis. But by then class was over. Toulouse gathered up his books, passing Mr. Hookstratten on the way out.

“How is your cousin Lucy?” asked the teacher with a smile.

“Fine.”

“She’s in London? Or was it Monaco.”

“London, sir,” he said, giving his enunciation an Oliver twist. “Living the bloody high life!”

“Well, give her my love — she’s much missed. And tell her Mr. Hookstratten said, ‘Keep writing!’ ” He shuffled his papers, then posed a daring afterthought: “And your father? Is he well?”

“Bloody well, sir. Bloody well.”

As Toulouse emerged from the Hall, a shiver of autumnal breezes brought the scent of chimney smoke and the haunting frisson that only the end of a year can deliver; an unsettled, gnawing feeling that when the music of Time stops (and starts up again, soon enough), one just might be left without a chair. Yet as Lucille Rose “smelled” England, so did Toulouse intuit a whole cosmos awaiting him, grown-up and filled with adventure. Students ran or walked past on the way to their own thrilling destinies; some nodded in recognition, fellow ships nearly launched. The knowledge that his father had returned was by now common and somewhat secondhand. The occasional mockeries had stopped. He wondered if the general restraint had been tied to Edward’s death — maybe not. Everyone was busy enough with sails and rigging, readying their vessels for the full-masted world.

When his brother-in-law left Montecito, Dodd was happy enough to provide him with new lodgings. The redbrick colonial was on South Cañon, between Gregory and Charleville, and within a few weeks had been graced by Trinnie’s sure touch — funky Moorish tapestries hung on wood-paneled walls that overlooked a sly, swank mishmash of furnishings from the sixties of the last two centuries. The backyard garden was deliciously, deliriously remade, with a charming little brook that meandered through creeper and feverfew.

Though Mr. Trotter provided his son-in-law with a generous allowance so that he could begin to manage his own affairs, Marcus retained the frugality he’d exercised on the streets (and still had a not insignificant amount left over from the once Right Honorable Geo. Fitzsimmons’s original bequest); so he was well fixed to treat his boy to marathon movie binges and snackathons. Within the dreaded claustrophobic cineplexes — Marcus beguilingly called them “charnel houses”—our fearless duo leapfrogged from theater to theater, dodging an incessant barrage of special effects and silver-screen profanities. (He was sad his beloved Wilshire Boulevard mecca — the Vagabond, that old Buñuelian bastion of youth — was no more, yet gladdened the lake at MacArthur Park appeared in great good health). They went bargain bookstore — hunting for inexpensive treasures to fill the groaning shelves that lined most rooms of what his father had sardonically christened Cañon Manor. They even journeyed to Tabori & Co. There, after Toulouse made “improper introductions” (Marcus’s witticism), Emerson was startled to be the recipient of profuse apologies in regards to the infamously stolen volume, which the scholar accepted (the apologies) on behalf of his belated brother. The wide-eyed visitor, still Victorian in taste and sensibility, marveled at the establishment’s Gothic arches and spent a full hour lingering over the pages of the Kelmscott Chaucer—Mr. William Morris’s pride and joy.

Toulouse accompanied him to Redlands, where the boy had the surreal experience of rediscovering the childhood bedroom of his father (the same one he had napped in on a prior visit) through the very eyes of the man responsible by half for bringing him into the world. Marcus made his folks a succulent osso bucco with risotto alla Milanese before embarking on a bicycle tour of old haunts. (Redlands, oddly enough, was famed for its Victorian homes.) They camped in Joshua Tree. He showed his son the Dog Star, Sirius, and spoke intimately of Magellanic clouds buffeted by stellar wind, nostalgically perusing the sky as he once did from the lonesome beaches of Santa Monica, as if it was there whence he’d hailed — not Redlands or England or Misery House — now so far away from home. On the way back to L.A. they went to Huntington Gardens — there was a Morris exhibit that his father assiduously avoided but whose presence seemed to galvanize him nonetheless, for suddenly he got the urge to visit the 4th Street Bridge. Off they trooped, and made a walkabout to that encampment and other spots of local lore and legend: the motel where Amaryllis had lived with her mother, and the Higgins, too (now property of Quincunx Holdings), where he and the girl once rendezvous’d — on to the magnificent cathedral (in those days barely a shadow of its current self) that had replaced dear old St. Vib. He told him how he piggybacked their friend alongside its fence in the wee small hours of night, saving the whole of the story for another time.

At dusk, the Town Car stealthily skirted the Twin Towers, then rolled by thousands of homeless in cardboard shacks. Watching the street bonfires scared Toulouse, and he leaned into his dad. Before long, Marcus had guided them to the alley behind Frenchie’s, where the boy took over. Recovering his courage, he directed the driver to double-back to the SRO where the children and Amaryllis had first met — but in the darkness, the former movie set could not be found.

“Are you certain?” she asked, with not a little superstition. They were stepping from Katrina’s G-wagen; Pullman had already leapt out. “You’re sure this is a good idea?”

“Well — actually, no! But we’ve got the boy here. The boy will keep us from harm, won’t you?” He winked, but Toulouse didn’t wink back; seeing his father was having sport, he merely smiled. “And if the boy won’t, then Pullie will!”

Mr. Greenjeans had left for the day and the heavy, corroded gates of La Colonne Détruite were flung open in readiness.

Toulouse lugged a picnic basket filled with delicacies. Pomegranates were in season again, and Marcus had poached Shinseiki pears with caramel sauce made from the ruby-studded fruit. They’d packed bread from Poilâne, a small round of Époisses (his father said it was Napoleon’s favorite) and a Solengo, one of Tuscany’s finest.^†

“Pullman and I have been coming here for years,” said Toulouse, by way of small talk to calm his mother’s nerves. “I mean, before I even knew anything.”

“Beautiful,” said Marcus, breathlessly taking it in. “Untouched! Exactly as I remembered.”

As they walked in deeper, past skedges and box globes, hornbeams and hedges of hawthorn, viburnum, rhamnus and sweet briar, silence overtook them; the little family got soaked in the lush, peculiar meadow kingdom as a cotton pad in chloroform. Beyond the allée, the great cracked tower hove into view above the swales. The smile plastered on his father’s face struck Toulouse as garishly bogus, and his mother had the same stilted, artificial look — like goo-gooing pedestrians who lean over a pram only to find themselves nose-to-nose with Rosemary’s baby.

“That was quite a wedding we had here!” he awkwardly exclaimed (and somewhat ridiculously, too, thought Toulouse), not so much halfhearted as half winded by the sight of the castle before him. He had slain the dragons of psychotic delusion — and still there was this: like something out of Piranesi run riot, it should have had the sense to confine itself to Mr. Trotter’s Withdrawing Room wall.

“Yes,” said Katrina, privately undergoing her own swampish dishabille. “Amazing!” she averred. (Her reading was hollow and stagey.)

His father turned to him. “Horses and carriages — the works!”

“We have pictures!” said Katrina, taking up the slack. “I’ve never shown you pictures, Toulouse?”

“I saw some at Grandma Weiner’s.”

“Well!” said Marcus, rubbing his hands together. “Shall we have a walk around it?”

“Yes! Let’s.”

It was like watching a car wreck. Toulouse set the basket down, and his father handed him the colorful blanket he’d been carrying. The boy thought it better to let them wander alone. He took out food and drink, linen and silverware, arranging things as best he could; he even tore a sprig of flowers from a bush and laid it fetchingly upon the spread. He watched his parents glance at the tower like fitful tourists as they strolled. They held hands intermittently. When they reached the entrance, they stood in suspended wonderment — then laughed, declining the open invitation of its mouth. Their laughter broke the mood, and Toulouse rushed over. At least, he thought, they had the good sense to know it wasn’t yet time to explore; in his worst imaginings, he saw them swallowed up, never to return.

Within a week, the couple returned sans Toulouse. In earlier days, Lucille Rose would surely have found them perfect subjects for a book cover, though she would no doubt have bestowed them flashlights, the more dramatically to ascend the spiral staircase at midnight hour. As it was, husband and wife performed their excavations in the reassuring light of day.

They ventured forth in much the same way that Toulouse first had — with titillated innocence, fearless and inspired. They giggled a lot and delinquently skidded around corners. Only upon entering the master suite, did they allow their mood to become something more layered. The sheets on the mattress Katrina had put down months ago were mussed, as if a body had lain there only hours before, calling to mind all manner of curious comings and goings; when she confessed, as she had in her letter, that she had drawn comfort from staying here—here, on this very bed — Marcus rushed to the loo to compose himself. Trinnie was at the window reclaiming the empty, verdant vista (unchanged from so many years past) when she suddenly realized how quiet it was and panicked that her husband would evaporate, or already had. She shivered and moaned aloud, and then he came toward her. He held her awhile before they descended.

Emboldened, she asked him to Mexico. They stayed in separate rooms, sharing a canary-yellow villa choked with elephant’s ear and guayabi trees whose lanky branches sprang from saffron-colored brush. They took long walks on the beach and siesta’d in a stranglervined palapa overlooking Careyes Bay. Under its thatched roof, she told him how La Colonne was shuttered after he’d gone, and how everything inside had been finically accounted for and fastidiously stored away.

“Do you mean, it all still exists? As it was?”

She nodded. “I think that I — well, I hoped you’d be back. I thought you might have suffered a memory loss … I don’t know what I was thinking. I was crazy. When you came—if you came back — I was going to return everything to how it was. To jog your … it’s silly, I know … so that it would be as if you never — I still have the maps the curators made of each room, showing where everything was — because I didn’t want photos taken. Like little art pieces, really. They’re in Father’s study.”

“There’s something ineffable in that,” he said softly. “It pierces my heart.”

She held him, kissing the tears. Then his body awakened, and he trembled with desire. He lifted her blouse and kissed her there.

“But”—she felt so lurid to be bringing it up! — “have you … have you been tested?”

He didn’t know what she meant. “What I mean is, well — you’ve been — you were on the streets for so many years … have you been tested? At one of the clinics?”

“Do you mean, for a disease?”

“Well — yes. For AIDS, mostly … for anything. I don’t have any condoms.” She cringed, but soldiered on. “Have — have you — did the doctors — did the doctors give you a test? I mean, at the jail. Or Father must have had them—”

“I have not been with any woman since you, Katy.”

She had not expected that response in a million years.

“But how?”

“That part of me closed down.”

“But that woman … the one you visited at the cemetery—”

“Jane Scull? I wasn’t with her that way. I loved her dearly, but was not with her like that at all.”

“Oh!”

“What is it?” he asked tenderly.

“But I have, Marcus.”

“Have?”

“Other men! I have—”

She sobbed in his arms, feeling very Mary Magdalene — then grew ravenous.

“Marcus, there’s something I want to talk to you about.”

“Anything, sir!”

The former colleagues had been rehashing the good old days at Morris. It wasn’t John Burnham’s first time chez Weiner; just last week, Marcus and his wife had invited the agent for dinner with Diane Keaton and Gus Van Sant (another Burnham client). The group had salivated over their host’s seared Kobe rib eye, DHL’d the day before from Japan.

“This might sound a little unusual, but — what you’ve been through — your life—is really kind of … amazing. Have you thought of doing anything with it?”

“Doing anything?”

“Writing it down.”

“The baker said I should try that very thing!”

“The baker?”

“Gilles Mott. Said I’d win an Oscar — some such claptrap. One of my therapists encouraged me to keep a journal. Used to do just that. Afraid I haven’t been very religious about it lately.”

“You wrote?”

“Oh yes, kept a book for years.”

“While you were out there?”

“Yes.”

“A journal …”

“Called News from Nowhere.”

“I love that. Would I be able to see it? ‘For my eyes only.’ Or, if it’s too personal—”

“Not at all. I have it somewhere, hidden in the house. Give me a day to find it! Become somewhat of a rabbit warren here, I’m afraid.”

“You know, Gus really loved meeting you. He mentioned something to me that might be kind of an amazing opportunity. I think he’s interested in doing a film about you.”

“A film?”

“Did you have a chance to see Good Will Hunting?”

“Not since you spoke of it. Been a bit derelict. Toulouse and I were going to rent it.”

“You really should look at it.”

“Katy said it’s quite marvelous.”

“It’s a wonderful film—aside from the fact that it’s Gus. Good Will took a lot of people by surprise, because it was mainstream without really being mainstream. And this from the man who made Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho. Not exactly Middle America! Gus can do it all.”

He screwed up his eyes and said, “Now, what do you mean, John, when you say he wants to make a film about me?”

“Gus was incredibly moved by your story — your journey. He’s looking for something to do next. He wants to do something ‘smaller,’ and I think this could be it — though this might be a little ‘bigger’ than what he’s looking for … but I think it could totally work. There’s a book called A Beautiful Mind, have you heard of it? At one point, Gus was interested in developing it — it’s a pretty amazing story. Ron Howard did it. Russell Crowe. It’s about a professor at Princeton — a true story — who kind of dropped out for twenty years because of his schizophrenia. They let him roam the campus, that sort of thing. He wasn’t violent or anything — is it weird for me to be talking about this?”

“Not at all, John! Talk away!”

“Then he had this incredible recovery and they wound up giving him the Nobel Prize in economics.”

“I don’t think there’s a likely chance of such a thing happening in my case,” said Marcus sardonically. “Though if they gave a prize for walking, I might get one.”

“I mention it because I think that while Gus is drawn to that kind of screenplay or book — stories with certain ‘elements’—the fact that this one, your story, is so personable … and I don’t think he wants to do the whole campus thing again, which he’s done and which A Beautiful Mind kind of heavily gets into. He wants to go more the Charlie Kaufman route. But what I needed to know, what I wanted to ask was, would you be interested in him pursuing that? Because Gus was very specific about not wanting to offend or intrude. And I, certainly, as your friend — and possible agent! — wouldn’t want you to become involved in anything that’s going to make you uncomfortable. I wouldn’t even bring something like this to the table if it was anyone but Gus. He expressed the interest; I didn’t pitch him. Gus is a genius. He gets it. He’s an artist. And Good Will made about $250 million! I asked if you’d written anything for two reasons. One, because that’s something I would be interested in reading personally and possibly passing to someone in New York if we felt there was a book there, or if you felt a book could be something that might help you or be valuable in your recovery or journey or process. Or even if you just wanted to do a book to see what it felt like to be an author who suddenly has a book on the shelves. Because — bam! — you’re a bestselling author. The agency could do that. And, two, because Gus would be totally open to you writing the screenplay.”

“Me? John, you’re kidding!”

“There’s a tremendous ‘independent’ focus, and we are very strong in that area. Gus bridges both worlds. Do I think that with his help you could write a great script? Absolutely. The old rules don’t apply. And, Marcus: if you write the same way you talk, the potential is amazing.”

“Well, I’m flattered, John — I think.” He chuckled. “And if you’d like me to meet with Gus, I’d be more than happy to. A very interesting man, very humble. I like that.”

Marcus walked Burnham to his scintillating Facel-Vega. They chatted about their kids, and the agent asked after his father-in-law.

“Marcus,” said Burnham. “Would you please come by?”

“Come by?”

“The agency — whenever it feels right. I think it’d be great, or interesting anyway, for you to see the changes that have happened since you were away.”

“You’re not going to offer me a job, are you, John?”

“It crossed my mind.” They had a laugh. “Seriously, though, lots of people you knew are still doin’ their thing. Doing very well, too. Let me throw you a little coming-out.”

“Ah. The medicated debutante.”

Burnham smiled as he switched on the engine. “Gus called me four times the day after our dinner. He was really moved — that story you told about the dream you had … about the ‘disembodied’—”

“The Chairman of the Disembodied.”

“The Chairman of the Disembodied! Great title, don’t you think? You could call the book or the movie that—The Chairman of the Disembodied. I love that. Anyway, it really blew Gus’s mind.”

“Well, it surely blew mine,” he said. Burnham waved good-bye, then mischievously peeled some rubber.

Marcus repeated the words sotto voce: “it surely blew mine.”

^†Of late, Katrina allowed herself the occasional social drink; and while it may seem politically incorrect to note, her decision was — and remained — a most sober one.