Bruce Wagner - I'll Let You Go

We are that malleable, usually punishing ourselves for no good reason, and are happy-go-lucky and indifferent while leaving sorrow and havoc in our wake.

Trinnie divided her time between the presidential suite of the Peninsula Hotel and Cañon Manor (where Toulouse was installed), for the solitariness of Saint-Cloud was too much to bear. Over the next few months, the seeds the doctors had planted finally took root so that, looking back, she could recall the time she thought herself a patricide as one recalled the paranoid Technicolor of a fever dream. Slowly, her father’s memory was able to take its rightful, benevolent, quietly riotous place in her garden.

The social cachet of the Weiners, steadfastly building after fits and starts, achieved a kind of flash point with the publication of “The Man Who Would Be William Morris” in Vanity Fair . John Burnham felt terrible for having initially provided access, but there was nothing he or anyone in his circle could do to quash the piece. The profile, one of those lush, quasi-literary tabloidal numbers that tipped their hat to Oliver Sacks, contained a treasury of La Colonne wedding photos and even Weiner juvenilia (to wit, a grainy shot of the boy staring directly to camera, Portrait of the Itinerant Schizophrenic as a Very Young Man). What disturbed Marcus most was that the writer had duped poor Harry into handing one of the old albums over. He thought that unforgivable, but graciously shook it off, for he was glad just to be whole again, and reunited with his family. Besides, a certain amount of notoriety accompanying their “coming-out” (as Burnham put it) was inevitable; the agent in him was savvy enough to know the publicity apparatus would soon enough move on to fresher prey. The article was optioned as a feature film, but certain forces — which did not exclude the artful designs of Dodd Trotter or, for that matter, those of Mr. Burnham himself — had conspired to guarantee that nothing would ever come of it.

Marcus, who still took his constitutionals to and from the cemetery, one day found Joyce crouching over her son’s grave, agitated beyond the norm.

“Are you all right, girl? What is it?”

“I’m just heartsick — some heavy equipment came through here, and look what happened.”

The plaque had cracked in two, with only the bottom-most half remaining. It now read:

EDWARD AURELIUS TROTTER 1990–2001

“Soon you will have forgotten the world,

and soon the world will have forgotten you.”

“It’s going to take three weeks to repair.”

“What a shame! What a shame …” They knelt there staring at it awhile before he spoke up. “Joyce — have you been to potter’s field?”

She looked at him blankly, thinking he spoke in metaphor.

“The potter’s field in Boyle Heights.”

“No.”

“A dear friend of mine was buried there. Do you know how they do it, at potter’s field?”

“Yes. Edward told me …”

“No names — not even an apothegm! Only dates. They keep markers, markers with the year etched upon it.”

“I don’t think I could do that to him.”

He had only been trying to make things better, but had made them worse instead. “Oh, I wasn’t suggesting it, Joyce. Oh, not at all!”

“I know you weren’t, Marcus. It’s just that … I feel it’s so important— apart from honoring him — you know, that he was here —that he was with us … It’s a way of saying: ‘The world will not forget you.’ ”

“Oh, I doubt Edward would ever feel he could be forgotten, ma’am.” He saw that he’d wounded her again. “But surely you’re right, surely you’re right. Names are very important — I should know. I’ve had more than one!”

She smiled, and felt his warmth. She had sold this man short — had called him crazy and unwashed and a bad father in the bargain, the major kink in her sordid sister-in-law’s dissolute life. But he was the sanest of the lot. She so appreciated him visiting her son each day. He was unmorbidly comfortable with death, and that made Joyce more comfortable too. He never judged her.

Only days before, something strange had happened. After receiving a frantic call, she had invited Rachel, one of the lesbian moms, to Stradella House for lunch. The frazzled woman showed up with the baby, saying Cammy left her for a man and that she had no idea as to her “wife” ’s current whereabouts. She asked point-blank if Joyce — being the infant’s godmother — would “look after him” for a few weeks while she went east. Her mother was dying, and Rachel said she didn’t feel up to the task of caring for the boy in the midst of deathbed duties. While she spoke, she glanced nervously about the house, like a slave girl soon to be banished. Take him! her flitting eyes seemed to cry. You could take ten thousand— this place could fit them all .

She called him Ketchum; the name the Palisades ladies had given him simply wouldn’t do.

Winter moved to Stradella to help out. She and Joyce almost had heart attacks — it was scary and messy and hysterical fantastic fun; it was life , tiny and needy, pissy and shitty and squalling — and she found herself actually looking forward to coming home from Pilates or Aida Thibiant or Candlelighters, and that was a big change, because since Dodd had moved to the Hotel Bel-Air after telling her he was in love with his assistant, Frances-Leigh, she had found the house and haunted Olde CityWalk grounds to be a far less amenable place than where her son lay anonymously (for now) buried. The absurd thing was, she was living the life of some kind of sitcom: the rich lady of a certain age whose husband leaves her for the secretary and who inherits a toss-away baby — throw in a nanny, she joked to Winter, and you’ve got an old-fashioned prime-time hit! She felt like Bea-fucking-Arthur. It made her laugh, and anything that could do that had to be good.

Ketchum’s presence healed them both, for Winter had been at wit’s end; Bluey’s condition had deteriorated exponentially and was a horror to behold (she thanked God Mr. Trotter could no longer bear witness). When Trinnie finally decamped, Saint-Cloud became a very creepy place to lay one’s head; though Winter kept the television on all night long and slept on the living room couch, she still felt as if Jack Nicholson were going to come axing his way through the front door. At least there was life on Stradella, and new life at that. Joyce let her stay in any room she liked, and it almost felt like a holiday. Still, when she made herself dinner, she fell to musing about the condo Bluey had promised, wondering if it would vanish, as Mr. Trotter had, into thin air.

Of course, now that Toulouse’s hormones were racing, Amaryllis was no longer interested — well, she was, but not in the kind of explorations that had taken place some months ago in the penthouse of La Colonne. Then, Toulouse had been a gentleman, wise and respectful beyond his years; now , thinking back on that precocious moment, he merely wished to shoot himself. He’d become obsessed with her, and the evil thing was that she knew it. She fussed over him just enough (her attentions falling sadly short of the cockpit grapplings with his English cousin, which now seemed stupendously pornographic) to keep him from going bananas.

They saw each other at least twice a week. Toulouse lived for Friday afternoons, when he found himself being driven over the Shakespeare Bridge to the home of his true love, now legally known as Amaryllis Kornfeld-Mott (the hyphen had been her idea). He stood at her door, warmly greeted by Lani or Gilles, feeling spiffy in his sporty Costume National Homme. The object of his devotion invariably summoned him to her room to present a clipping or two — this week, her particular favorites being the piece in the Journal about a woman whose actual job was to sniff the leather of new Mercedeses, and an item in the Times detailing the amount his uncle had lost in a recent week of trading ($237,198,940, to be precise — Toulouse gulped, but did his best to remain cool). They would then stampede to the Silver Seraph and be delivered to Cañon Manor, where their sagacious host had spent all day preparing the most heavenly food known to man. When Trinnie was there, it was fun, but a different kind of fun, because Marcus was always sweetly mindful of her and charmingly distracted; in other words, she came first. Toulouse thought that was how it should be, and it gave him pleasure to see them laughing and joking and holding hands. Though in fine general spirits, his mother still walked beneath a cloud, as if not yet fully recovered from the years. The boy was certain — the children were certain — she’d come around.