Bruce Wagner - I'll Let You Go

“Good evening, Mr. Trotter!” the Voice greeted, setting Tull to giggle. “How may I be of assistance?”

Lucy crossed her hairy arms and fumed.

“Trotter Junior here. Can you tell us our location?”

“Right now we have you on San Vicente and La Cienega,” said the Voice, absurdly mispronouncing the latter boulevard.

“And where are you ?”

“Detroit, Michigan, sir!”

They pulled into the Rexall; Tull could barely contain himself. “We’re, uh, looking for someplace to eat.”

“All right, Mr. Trotter … let me just check my guide.… I have a Locanda Veneta, on Third? Let’s see — just bear with me, Mr. Trotter, while I pull this up — if you’re in the mood for meat, there’s Arnie Morton’s, on La Cienega …”

Tull, in the firm grip of a virulent strain of silliness, merely gaped at his cousin. Lucy violently froze him out.

“We’re actually in the mood”—now Tull looked at Epitacio as he said it—“for a Cedars salad. Where do you think we could get a nice Cedars salad?”

After a few moments’ interchange, he jumped out.

When Tull returned with his bag of Sno-Caps, the voice from the satellite had apparently long since departed. They doubled back to the hospital. Lucy waited until they were upstairs in the enclosed pedestrian bridge before speaking.

“Tull,” she said in low tones. “There’s something I wanted to talk to you about — about your father.”

“What about him?” he asked hesitantly.

“I’m thinking of using it for my story.”

“What story?”

“The Mystery of the Blue Maze.”

“Using what?”

“Do you mind if I ask you about him? For research.”

“Go ahead.”

They entered a kind of hushed sitting area, bordered by a wall of lithographs. He felt suddenly uneasy, and it wasn’t solely from the subtle shift in the balance of power.

“Well, would you mind — and you don’t have to answer — would you mind if I asked how he died?”

“You know how he died.”

“I have to ask — for journalistic reasons.”

“But you’re writing fiction.”

“It’s just the way you have to ask when you’re researching. So, do you want to talk about it or not?”

“In a snowmobile accident.”

“Where?”

“Where what?”

“Where did he pass away?”

“You know where he passed away. In New Mexico.”

“When?” She paused, then said, “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

“Why wouldn’t I want to, Lucy?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t want you to be uncomfortable. I’m not that kind of writer — I don’t believe in forcibly interrogating a subject. You never get the truth that way.”

“This is bullshit.”

“Fine. You don’t have to answer.”

“March, the year I was born. ’Eighty-eight.”

“Then he passed away right after you were conceived.”

“That’s obvious, isn’t it?”

“Mr. Hookstratten said nothing is obvious. And what did your father do? I mean, for a living? You don’t have to answer.”

He wondered what she was up to. If it was payback for his earlier high jinks, she’d gone overboard.

“He studied the classics. He went to the Sorbonne in Paris.”

“A scholar. Really …”

“Why do you want to know?”

“My parents were having an argument. They were talking about Aunt Trinnie — you know, Mom’s always been jealous, she always thought Dad paid her too much attention or something. Anyway, Mom and Dad were having this fight. I think what happened was, Mom called to ask Trinnie if she wanted to name one of the dead babies — they give them names before burying them — and you can imagine what Trinnie said. Probably something really mean and funny. So Mom ran back to Dad and said she was trying to be friends with Trinnie but Trinnie was being a major bitch and that Trinnie should just get over it and get a life. Mom said Trinnie was putting on a big act and all that Dad and Grandpa Lou ever did was indulge her and she’d never get off drugs that way. Then Mom started talking about the tragedy of Edward and how much courage it took for them to raise him and how Trinnie could never face anything like that herself and was always running away — that it was sad what happened with Marcus — your dad — but that she had to take some responsibility, because she picked him in the first place and people don’t wind up together for no reason and Trinnie was probably better off it happened right away instead of later.”

“That what happened?”

“That he left the way he did.”

“By dying—”

“But he didn’t die. He never died. That’s what I’m saying. That’s the whole point of the story.”

The two cousins visited Bluey awhile, ensconced in her twenty-five-hundred-dollar-a-day high-roller suite — twenty-five hundred above Blue Cross, that is — with the concealed cardiac monitor wiring, silent infrared call system, marble bath and sitting room with parquet floor, Scalamandré brocaded sofa under Jasper Johns collage, orchids— Rhyncostylis gigantea , smelling of cinnamon and nutmeg — and faux Chippendale desk and chairs. It was even nicer than Mount Sinai’s 11 West, where Mr. Trotter once stayed with his pneumonia. She was attended by Winter, Trinnie and Dodd’s erstwhile nanny, but occasionally a “floor concierge” (trained, courtesy of the Laguna Ritz-Carlton) poked his head in, bearing fresh linens and imported magazines, anime for the kids and doctor-approved treats Bluey had bused in from Frenchie’s, her favorite downtown bakery. The hospital bed, its quilt and duvet brought from home, was covered with obituaries from the Times , both coasts’. Winter busied herself by placing the ones not under current scrutiny in a suede photo album, its cover bearing the Trotter family arms within an embossed cartouche.

In fact for most of the children’s visit Bluey was on the phone with her son, the aforementioned eighteenth-richest person in the United States, reading death notices aloud like they were funny pages. Bluey was strong as an ox; the memorials were a tonic. She’d been an aficionado for years and now included Dodd in her enthusiasms, tracking him down to announce a public figure’s controversial or banal demise (actually, the figure needn’t be all that public to qualify). If he’d already heard it on the news, Dodd liked to feign surprise. At first, he thought it macabre, but since he’d never had easy ingress to Bluey’s heart, he let her build this supernal bridge of bones; before long, mother and son stood on the great span and warmly communed, watching a back-page parade of departed souls.

Tull supposed that his cousin got enough “research” watching Bluey — what with her preternaturally keen eyes darting like Pixar bug antennae as she jotted things down in the green leather Smythson of Bond Street ms. notebook with the whimsical gilt heading: BIRD NOTES. He listlessly pushed tarragon around on the rack of lamb (Lucy had kimchi) delivered from the hospital’s gourmet kitchen by a bow-tied blackjacketed server, and was glad Grandma was preoccupied with her call, because his braided friend had delivered a blow from which he had not, nor ever would, recover.

He went to bed early, like an invalid. The sudden notion of his father being alive had conferred a strange new sickness, and his head grew as heavy as Edward’s. Swathed in six-hundred-count Pratesi sheets, a goose-down pillow over his face, Tull sweatily descended — first imagining himself in the labyrinth, shuffling through narcotic mist to mysterious middle, then on to more prosaic fields — a dark school playground, where cottony smoke also swirled. His dreams were unsettling that night. He had shed his innocence; Lucy had fired the pistol and the perverse, arduous race of life had officially begun. Twitching in troubled sleep, Pullman’s was the only familiar face, but even the Dane was creepily confabulated, a dog patch of ill-fitting body parts amid Tull’s tule fog REM. The rest of the supernatural school yard’s denizens were strangers, more phantom than corporeal, and filled him with anguish and apprehension. It seemed as if they were beings of pure emotion, pure feeling, but the emotions and feelings of luminous deep-sea creatures whom he could never know.