Bruce Wagner - The Chrysanthemum Palace

It was all trainworthy food for thought. It was possible Clea was working through her own father issues. I’d met Freddy Fremantle plenty of times at the house when Clea and I were kids. He and Roos were amicably divorced. He lived in Mandeville Canyon, a debonair talent agent rarely seen outside an amazingly tailored, subtly pinstriped charcoal gray suit — perhaps courtesy of Nick Sultan père! — a slim, suntanned mensch of ready, overwhitened grin who suffered a massive coronary infarct while visiting a client’s film set in Rome. (At the time, if I recall correctly, Roos Chandler was already ten years in the ground.) Father and daughter were quite close and as I summoned his memory, along with those windy, sultry Bel-Air summer days and nights, I felt a pang of guilt — I was on a roll — over not having spoken to her about Freddy since we’d reentered each other’s lives. I suppose that was another characteristic I shared with my dad, and wished I could exorcise: if a thing required delicacy of inquiry or effort, sometimes I elected to act as if it never was, willing it into emotional nonexistence.

Bucolic scenery overtook my sunlit berth — it grew leafier as we neared the coast — and the musing dominoes fell one to another until eventually Mother was struck. (Though she was no pushover.) I wasn’t thrilled with myself for not having spent more time with her since she became, in the parlance of her fairly recent station, “non-ambulatory,” but my lapse was mitigated by the fact she was a proud woman who no doubt would have interpreted a rush of attention from her loving, characteristically standoffish son as a bit of an insult. For that reason, and because she was so fiercely independent, it was Gita who gave the impression of wishing to see less of me. (Though maybe I was wrong about that too; maybe I was wrong about everything.) I still felt badly because when I did speak to Mother, it was of asinine, mundane things like the general, obscenely ridiculous state of the world or my hygienically censored romantic life — all in tidy sound bites, with nary a nod to anything of sophistication or depth, not even a gentle probing of her own predicament nor the heroic shifts and adjustments it must have required: never a testing of waters to see if she wished to speak of anything that may have disturbed or distressed — mortality, say, or the general mortification of flesh, a subset being Dad’s philandering and long-ago abandonment of his wife as a sexual creature, a wound at least now sealed and cauterized by the diagnosis and progression of her disease. Not that it was my role to play therapist or confidant. But it was my role to treat her as an equal or, rather, a superior being (which she clearly was), not as an old friend with whom I’d lost touch and on bumping into at a party felt shoddily compelled to bring up to speed. In short, instead of taking this invaluable resource for granted, my job was to be a good, righteous, compassionate son. Judging from my performance, I should have been fired and forcibly led from the building.

As I pondered these inadequacies, locomotive lucubrations got the best of me. My mood plunged as we approached Santa Barbara (it had taken three full hours). There was a sudden pounding at the door and I sprang to life, rescued by an ebullient Thad, who suggested the three of us adjourn to the dining car for lunch.

Late that night, I wandered from my cabin to the glass-domed parlor car exclusively designated for those traveling by sleeper. I fixed myself a coffee at the bar and settled into a couch facing the dark waters of the ocean. With a slight start, I noticed an ember flare within a bundle of clothing at the purplish settee’s end. My eyes adjusted; it was Thad. Huddled in wool, as if against an invisible onrush of elements, he held a glass in one hand and a flask in the other.

It was his turn to walk the shifting rails of self-reflection.

“Clea’s asleep,” he said.

“How’s she doing?”

“She’s amazing. She’s really much more amazing than a person has a right to be. Trouble is, I’m not worthy of her.”

The moon was nearly full. Occasionally I glimpsed the sacred ribbon of highway running parallel to the sea. I’ve always had a sense the Beat spirit of Highway 1, the wet, gusty, yellow brick promise of it, can never be adequately conveyed to those not reared by its banks. Possessing a majestic, quintessentially Californian indifference, it rolls and advances by hillock or high water toward the gigantine cliffs of Big Sur and beyond, rugged and celestified, graveled, gravid and golden, beflowered and embedded with the ghostly hitchhiked heft of 10 million hippies’ hajj to the phantom mecca of the Haight.

It disappeared, swallowed up again — clickety-clack.

“My brother and I loved that movie The Time Machine, ” said Thad, pouring himself something stiff from the silvery filigreed flacon. “One day we actually built it — from a chair in Dad’s study. Did you ever see that movie? Remember that red velvet chair? We fastened all kinds of shit to it: stuck a bicycle wheel to its back that we could spin. By the time we were finished, there were all sorts of dials and levers and throttles. Course, Jack was out of town at the time. It was his writing chair and I don’t think he would have appreciated it! He was in Capri. They were making a movie of a book of his, The Death of a Translator. Alain Delon and Sophia Loren. Ever see it? Jeremy was going to visit — Dad, in Capri — and I was supposed to stay at home with Mother because of my asthma. I’d have fits in the middle of the night and couldn’t catch my breath. Plus, I don’t think Morgana and Jack were getting along. A minor detail! (They rarely did.) Oh but Jeremy loved the idea he was going to the ‘Isle of Capri’—that’s how he referred to it — and I’d be left behind. He really was the Chosen One, you know. We were twins but very different. He was Pollux, the immortal; I was Castor… that’s why it didn’t make any sense when he died. The gist of it was — at least the way we overheard it explained to friends —the idea of separating us — you know, the psychologists’ fad at the time was this separation thing with twins. Of course, Jeremy wound up going to school in Switzerland, which actually would have been a torture for me — even as a kid, I didn’t travel well — but back then I was enormously jealous. It sounded so fucking glamorous! Come on . And I think it probably was glamorous… skiing around, doing all those alpine things with coquettish principessas and future despots, wearing cashmere cable knits, drinking cocoa or champagne or schnapps or whatever at the foot of the Matterhorn, God knows what they were doing. I used to tease Jeremy when he came home for the holidays — I was actually pretty good at that — because he had this incredibly affected accent, sort of Continental — we were only eleven or twelve, you know how kids pick stuff up, to fit in — so many students at that school were the scions of dukes or duchesses. Lords and royal lardasses. Jeremy would say ‘row’—‘Mom and Dad are having a row’—and I absolutely savaged him about that. Made him furious! When the fact is, I was jealous. Hurt. Violently .

“So we built this time machine the week before he left for the Isle of Capri (he was on a school break and had flown home from Switzerland a few weeks before to see Morgana). We used it to go back to prehistoric times and way into the future. Must have been charming to watch… if one could have hidden behind some bush with an eight-millimeter camera — what I wouldn’t give to see a home movie of those two little time travelers! Do you want to know the most amazing thing, Bertie? I don’t even know if you’d call it Freudian… but you know what time I wanted to go back to? Morgana, giving birth! I’m serious! I kept spinning the wheel and all the crazy dials, saying, ‘Oh! We’re at the hospital now!’ ‘Oh! Now we’re in the delivery room!’—and I’d make Jeremy pretend Mommy had her feet in the stirrups but this time I was coming out first. “But I was first, I was first!” he shouted, which was the truth, by nine legendary minutes. Or something like that. Jeremy went fucking wild . Because there I was saying we were going to change all that! He said we couldn’t because it already happened and the rules were you couldn’t change what already happened. The rules! Oh yes, there were rules. But can you imagine? The two of us going on like that?