The Chrysanthemum Palace

~ ~ ~

“WHAT WAS HE LIKE?” asked my father.

There was something animated and slightly off-color about his query, as if wanting to be reminded of a dirty joke he already knew.

“I didn’t really know him all that well,” said Clea. “I knew Thad—from when I lived in New York. We went to his dad’s place in the Vineyard a few times.”

I’d finally gotten the nerve to ask Clea to dine at the family seat, deep in the canyon wilds of Benedict. The bones of the house were the same that she knew as a girl, though the bracketing properties had long ago been seized from neighbors, razed, and developed in architectural harmony with the ancestral home.

“I would have thought you’d have met while your mother was still alive,” said Perry, the glint evacuating his eye. “Seems they would have crossed paths — or swords.”

The glint came back. Most of the time, when Dad thought he was being suave, he wasn’t.

“Not to my knowledge,” said Clea, good-naturedly. “I’m pretty sure Jack was a fan but I don’t think they ever had an encounter. Though anything’s possible.”

“How is it,” I asked, “that a Starwatch episode was developed exclusively for Michelet Junior? Did you have a hand in that?”

“Absolutely. I was in New York some years ago and saw Rhinoceros,” he said, in the even tones of an egotist on Charlie Rose.

“You’re kidding. You actually saw that?”

“I’m not the Philistine you think I am, Bert.” He used “Bert” when he wanted to bring me down a peg. “I’m in New York three times a year, for the auctions and the theater—primarily, the theater. I thought the play quite remarkable. Thad was wonderful. Saw it again, with Nathan Lane, but Thad was better. I had some awareness of his work in film at the time, but not much. I’m not a big moviegoer. The Playbill said he was the son of Jack Michelet and that got my attention.” He turned to Clea. “I have all Jack’s first editions, signed — he doesn’t sign many, believe me — some watercolors too. Have you seen them? Pretty racy! I’ve wanted to adapt one of his books for the longest time. Chrysanthemum. Do you know it?”

“Yes,” said Clea, affably indifferent.

“I’ve renewed the option ten years running.”

“Then you’ve met him,” she said, opening the anecdotal door. She had more than a touch of geisha in her and knew it was probably a story our host would like to tell.

“Only once. Briefly. I don’t think he was all that well.”

My father clasped his hands, pursed his lips and grew uncharacteristically still, as if to humbly convey that what he was about to impart — the surprising lack of any personal relationship between these two cultural totems — redounded not to him but rather to the quirks, genetic meanness, dipsomania, lunacy, or legendarily demented psychopathology of that towering figure of American letters, Black Jack Michelet. The unspoken implication was that something ugly must have happened to cause Perry to retreat after initial introductions — some horrific scene, for Dad was no piker. In short, he was game. He’d long ago bagged Mailer, Updike, Vonnegut, Styron, Roth and Bellow, with framed letters and carefully mounted correspondence to prove it. In his defense, I’ll admit that as he spoke he took the high road, deferring to Genius, withholding the spiteful remark or characteristic caustic quasi-witticism, choosing to reside in a state of benevolent patronlike neutrality. At the end of the day, I think he was superstitious about speaking ill of the elder Michelet, fearing he might jinx whatever hopes he had of making Chrysanthemum into an Oscar-winning film.

Mother arrived à table via wheelchair to wish Clea well. (After depositing her, Carmen — Gita’s favorite nurse — hung back on the living room couch and flipped through the Star.) Parkinson’s had wreaked havoc with Mom’s body, leaving spirit untouched; the greeting to my childhood love was predictably incandescent. I could tell she’d done her Internet homework, as per custom, thoughtfully counterbalancing the sometimes jarring effect her frail physicality could have upon guests, particularly those who knew the elegant woman in her prime, with details and carefully nuanced trivia from their own lives — a congenial parlor trick as likely to be employed with visitors she’d been briefed on yet never met. Gita was very First Lady that way. She nimbly conjured persons, places, and things from that long-ago time, and Clea, thrown off guard, searched her mind to recall. The very act of mental inventory distracted and leveled the playing field. Mom had been busy on IMDB as well, boning up on movie credits. It was terribly dear, and I knew Clea thought so too. It touched the heart.

We adjourned to the library where my father showed us the aforementioned watercolors — splashy, pornographic studies, all — and the hastily inscribed novel Perry had not yet managed to bring to the screen.

After supper, Clea wanted to stroll the grounds and smoke.

We took the sloping path toward the pool (its flaky, unrefurbished bottom painted years ago by David Salle), talking of tribal gatherings and make-out sessions that once took place on the hormonal, hallowed ground underfoot. “I remember this tree!” she’d shout, or, “This part is so different”—a faraway look in her eyes. Then, moving on, a reinvigorated, convivial affirmation: “This part’s exactly the same!” Like a necromancer, she doused for mood and memory, a naked-hearted empath invoking spirit of place, aching to be reinfected by the magical virus of childhood.

“Leif loved that pool,” said Clea as we got closer. She pointed to the darkness of the adjacent property. “What is that?”

“Dad bought the Freiberg house then knocked it down. I don’t even know if he’s ever going to build. Right now, it’s a garden they let grow wild.”

“Whoa! Amazing.”

“It’s not ‘wild’ wild — it’s made to look that way. It was designed by this famous woman, Katrina Trotter.”

“That is so your father! Perry’s a trip.”

“Hey… remember the time upstairs at your mom’s?”

“I remember lots of times.”

“I was feeling you up and Leif came in?” She actually giggled. “He didn’t knock.”

“God forbid!”

“He was drunk. He grabbed you and kissed you—”

“You’re kidding!” said Clea, with a flush of prudery.

“You don’t remember him doing that?”

She shook her head, in Victorian outrage.

“Well, actually… he asked me first.”

“He asked permission? How kinky! What did I do? Slapped him, I hope. I should have slapped you.”

That she had no recollection should have been comical but instead I felt sad and hollow, disconnected from the world.

“How did you meet Thad?”

“We were doing The Master Builder, in New York.”

“How long ago?”

“Oh shit — I guess I was what, twenty-eight? That was ten years ago.”

“How long did the affair last?”

She smiled at my formality. “Three years? I already told you this, Bertie.”

To my chagrin, I took that as a cue to kiss her full on the mouth. The grope was like one of those clumsy couplings in a Julia Roberts movie where the ex comes back in her life just when she’s engaged to be married. He can’t help himself, lurching at her territorially, the aftermath leaving them awkward and winded — a clear case of Act Two premature infatuation. (They do get together in the end, but only in the movies.) Remember, we’d only “done it” a few times, unspectacularly, more than a year and a half ago, and, as Clea liked to put it, been “nonconsenting adults” ever since. The worst part was that my motivations were nefariously vain and in the end, appallingly halfhearted. I was instantly embarrassed even though Clea was gracious enough to hold the kiss a beat or two — when it was over, we broke into laughter, mercifully at the same moment. She shook her head, and said with a smile, “Can we go back in now?”

We didn’t speak as we cut through the other adjacent lot, the one now sporting an enormous extension to the original house.

“It’s not going to last between Thad and me,” she finally said, as we passed through a gate on our way to the street. I knew what was coming. “Bertie, you know I love you. But—”

“If you want to get a restraining order, I’ll understand.”

“I think maybe Caltrans community service will do. You can put one of those orange vests on and pick up trash on the side of the freeway.”

“I guess I’m just worried,” I said, disingenuously diverting focus, still stung by my ineptly amatory mini-move. “The guy gets so loaded….”

“Oh please!”

“I’m serious, Clea.”

“I can totally handle that, OK?”

“Are you going over to see him now?”

She nodded. “He’s leaving in the morning.”

“For where?”

“Canyon Ranch. To lose some weight before the shoot.”

“Stay away from his migraine medicine, OK?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

“Good girl.”

“You know, you kiss pretty good, Daddy.”

“I’ll bet you say that to all the boys.”

“Just the ones who violate their positions of trust. You know — priests, shrinks, childhood sweethearts.”

She kissed my forehead and jumped into the Alfa.

I was restless after Clea left.

I went to say good-bye to Mom but Carmen said she’d already retired. I chose not to disturb. Dad was on the elliptical catching Larry King interviewing some over-the-hill sexpot, an after-dinner ritual.

I drove to Book Soup and loitered in fiction, idly skimming through Henry Miller’s Sexus before backtracking to the pristine spine of Michelet’s oeuvres, recently reissued in stylishly alluring, flat-textured covers. There was nothing of his son’s. Someone at the information desk looked Thad up on the computer — his four novels were out of print. She said I should try Alibris or eBay.

As I was leaving, I saw Nick Nolte peruse the stacks of new releases opposite the front register. He looked restless himself. He wore crazy yellow pants and delicate, amazingly expensive-looking eyeglasses, with two fussy male assistants in his wake. Kind of fabulous. Old Nick was on a book-buying spree (I imagined him flying off the next morning to an exotic film locale) and it was funny to watch the eccentric star alight on this or that tome while his amanuenses informally disgorged pithy, thumbnail précis, to which the master responded with a literal thumbs-up/thumbs-down. For a moment, I thought of Nolte as Jack Michelet — not a bad choice to portray him — attended by his fractured progeny: King Zeus and the Castor/Pollux Kidz. After our trip to Death Valley, Clea told me about Thad’s twin, drowned at age ten. She said Thad wrote about the tragedy in The Soft Sea Horse (the short novel I’d been looking for on the shelf), a portrayal which apparently caused a major rift between father and son. Jack, at his blackest, had announced publicly that the thinly disguised roman à clef was no better than a tabloid tell-all, a ghoulishly unforgivable game of one-upmanship; his “spawn” had laid cowardly literary claim to that watery grave, knowing the death in Capri was something Michelet could never bring himself to write of, for it was Jeremy whom Jack loved inconceivably and inconsolably, Jeremy who was the bright, same-spirited, unbroken reflection in his golden eye. The needy survivor’s outrageously meager gifts had been used in the grotesque service of ego — shameful! unholy! — and Clea said the giant-killer had not one but two huge bonfires on the Vineyard: the day the book was blasted in the New York Times, and the day it was remaindered.

I was mulling all these things when Miriam Levine turned the corner with an armful of high-end art books. We nearly collided.

“Bertie! I was just thinking of you.”

“Something inappropriate, I hope.”

“I wanted to get you something of Thad’s but they didn’t have any.”

My mind worked with neurotic acuity, suddenly consumed by the logarithms of romance: it seemed odd that Miriam wanted to buy me one of Thad’s novels, and odder still she wouldn’t be aware they were unavailable, at least in a place like Book Soup, that didn’t sell “used.” So her comment seemed, on the surface, suspect. On the other hand, it may have been the first thing to occur to her after blurting out I’d been on her mind. Maybe I had been, but if that were true I was reasonably certain it couldn’t have had much to do with the elusive, unheralded fiction of her client. It seemed more plausible — not to put too fine a point on it — that she’d merely given voice to the kind of subliminal consideration we sometimes lend to someone we’ve recently met whom we’re attracted to, physically, chemically, or whatnot. (I know it sounds cocky, but allow me to indulge.) Suddenly and unexpectedly seeing said person face-to-face might provoke a genuine feeling one was thinking of them, even if not strictly the case. Still, I had to admit this East Coast girl was fast on her feet. Smugly finding my anthropological legerdemain to be basically sound, I used the sum of the root equation, now adroitly transferred back to the column marked Animal Instinct, as an opportunity to ask Miriam if she wanted to have a drink.

Here’s what then happened:

She suggested the lobby of the Marmont. I said we might run into Thad and Clea, implying I didn’t have the energy for another group encounter. She waited two seconds before saying we could have drinks in her room. (That was a surprise.) I followed her car, smiling and trembling to something unknown for cello on KCRW. We were stripped and ecstatically entangled within minutes of entering her small, back-of-hotel suite. It’d been months since I had taken anyone to bed and maybe years since a seduction was effected with such little effort. The expedience of it worked absolute wonders for my spirit. I felt as if in my early twenties again — we did all the nasty, glorious things new lovers do. (Another surprise.) We were ravenous, leaving no patch of flesh unturned, then starved for food, drink, and sleep… automatically stirring at the hour of the wolf to couple with that edge of violent, sorrowful passion befitting 3:00 A.M. When morning came, we sat in capacious white robes munching muesli and eggs on burnt toast, washing everything down with great gulps of juice like it was our first and last meal on this insanely beautiful blue-green Earth.

I was on the toilet when the phone rang.

I heard her gasp, then came back to the room and listened.

Jack Michelet was dead.