Bruce Wagner - I'll Let You Go

Suddenly, they were at the redbrick citadel — for Tull, less an agency than a monument to a man long lost to the world.

He sat on the couch in a haze. Boulder was shiny and animated and called out “Hi!” to someone who whisked past. “Oh my God, that was Angelina!” The mom returned from reception and Boulder told her it was Angelina and the mom asked where and Boulder said she’d just gone out the door. A young woman appeared and invited them to “come up.” Tull, now queasy and perspiring, said he’d wait. Mrs. Langon put her hand on his shoulder like a do-gooder nun with a dead man walking. “Are you OK?” she asked solicitously. He said he was fine; maybe coming down with a little something, that’s all. Boulder, aloof and anxious to “go up,” told her mom to just leave him alone. As they went to the elevator, Boulder asked the young woman if that in fact was Angelina and she said it absolutely could have been but that she would find out for certain after they “were up.”

Sitting there about to vomit on the oversize Yamamoto jacket Trinnie bought him at Maxfield’s, Tull felt silly and incongruous. He would wait for them outside — he needed air. He stood to get his bearings.

Idly, he took in the oil portraits by the elevators. He assumed they were agency founders, but there was no inscription. The men looked nothing like his father in the photo Trinnie had shown him.

Lost in thought, he felt his nose wrinkle. He smelled something dense, acrid and vinegary, woodsy, foul. He turned his head and saw him — a bear of a man staring straight ahead at a framed patriarch. His great jaw trembled, making the colossal beard jitter, too, and Tull thought of the nimble upside-down rabbi in Bluey’s bedroom Chagall. He smiled at the boy, who for his part could not have moved a millimeter for any reason on earth. The stranger’s eyes lit up with shaggy candor and kindness; a mellifluous accent pierced the decorum.

“No nameplates … most peculiar! Doesn’t say who they are — now, why, son, d’you think that is?”

In short order, a guard in a blue blazer appeared behind Will’m and asked if he could be of help.

“You certainly may! Who are the gentlemen so depicted?”

“This is not a public space, sir — I have to ask you to leave.”

“You don’t have to, but you’re thus compelled and so be it.”

The unforgettable beast winked at the boy and was gone, with blazer shadowing after like bluish smoke.

Such encounters do indeed happen — they have before and will again. Improbable reunions occasionally find their way to newspapers or television tabloids, offering a freakish respite from “reality”; but what of the plethora of random moments, as in our own example of father and son in El Camino lobby, where interested parties are oblivious of what has transpired? Each of us has experienced the garden-variety oddity and omen — the myriad small coincidences that color our days and are usually dismissed out of hand. Yet we persist in believing such close encounters exist only in fiction — as if life itself were too orderly, too sober and practical for the improbable absurdities of mystery. †

By the time Topsy reached the Promenade, it was dusk. He sat by a steel prehistoric creature that spouted water into a basin. There were many of his kind there, those who lived in a roofless world, stoned and flustered, dazed by hardship and the elements, on falling-down wheelchairs and funky benches holding idiot-cards of crude implorement— HUNGRY SICK PLEASE HELP — and there were buskers too, and drummers and dancers and pantomimists, and fat-cheeked infants, and children riding boards and silver scooters and many more who went arm in arm — whole families bejeweled and exuberant in canvas shorts and clogs, caftans and flip-flops — shameless sisters and wives, mothers half-naked in string-wear and smocks. No class was segregated and the entitled children knew no fear, nor did they disparage: perhaps this was earthly paradise — the alfresco community of man. The great guild’s democracy touched him dearly.

He could smell the sea, but knew the beach would not be safe. Better to find the brush of a hidden highway shoulder. He was glad to be gone from downtown; it had held dominion too long. He was weak and let the crowd carry him like a river, his mind roiled by thoughts of Fitz … and Half Dead … and the lost girl … all paintings in a lobby now, untitled. There were new souls impinging his gallery. He could not make out any of the framed features but was determined to soon know their names.

Since her son’s recent visit to the Withdrawing Room, something had begun to gnaw at her, for she too was undergoing an awakening.

She had always relied on the old man — on his practicality, good sense, fatherliness. But now his mawkish face hung before her like a vintage engraving, mocking. The slight overbite; the foppish collar; the gleam of asperity in conniving, loving eye — each conspired to say that something was quite wrong with this picture. She felt herself move downstage from gauzy darkness toward the footlights, as madwomen do in plays when their monologue has come.

She drove to the eco-industrial park in Azusa, a chain of buildings surrounding a five-hundred-acre quarry — an open pit 275 feet deep. It took more than an hour to get there; all the while his visage loomed outside her windshield like a hologram, baiting with its snarky, sharky kindnesses and muttonchopped sympathies. Mr. Trotter still came and went as she took the off-ramp and surface streets, asserting himself like a carnival barker. Trinnie thought she wouldn’t be able to see the road for him.

The old man was getting his hair cut when she burst in. Having of course been told his daughter was at the gate, he eagerly commanded his minions to escort her to the office forthwith. At first, he was alarmed; he thought something might have happened — to Bluey, or the boy — then apprehension gave way to a hubris of delight at the thought of his dear Katrina wishing after all these years to pay a visit to the workplace.

He saw her twisted features, and was startled and bemused. “What is it?—”

“You found him, didn’t you?”

He looked at her, dumb.

“You found Marcus!”

There was a kind of delirious gaiety to her now, as might befit a minor demon. He chuffed and sighed, glowering at the ground. Mr. Trotter palmed a hundred into the barber’s hand like a card during a magic act, then removed the Art Deco ruby-studded dragonfly clasp that secured the cape around his neck; the cloth slipped off with slinky disconsolation.

“Yes,” he said as everyone crept out.

Again he looked groundward, focusing almost petulantly on the thatched roofs of the huts of his own fallen hair.

“When?”

“Two years after he left you.”

“Where—”

“New York.”

“Where!” demanded the hell-raiser.

“Near Twig House.”

She almost passed out. The old man was looking to brace her fall when a current of energy passed through her and she struck his face. He partially dodged the blow, then groaned, falling against the barber’s chair. The daughter remained pitiless, retreating like a snake from its prey, waiting for the venom to take hold. He rubbed at chin and throat where he’d been hit.

“He was in jail, Katrina,” he said, penitently.

The attack had at least dulled his natural impulse to ease her emotional pain. For a moment, the facts could speak for themselves, uncluttered by his heart.

“He was in jail for hurting a woman.”

Trinnie silently wept. “Samson found him?”

“No — though nearly. He came very close. Was a week or so away from catching up, I’d say.”