Bruce Wagner - I'll Let You Go

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 …”