Bruce Wagner - The Chrysanthemum Palace

“They’ve been doing that, Clea. Nothing’s turned up.”

“It doesn’t make sense he would just disappear. ”

She got the unshakable idea that he’d returned to Griffith Park to dramatically do himself in. It was close to midnight and I was worn down enough to think the notion plausible. She begged me to drive us. After much stumbling in the dark, I reached the site of our previous trespass — but all we found was emptiness.

ON SUNDAY, WE HAD PLANSfor brunch.

Hugo’s.

She stood me up.

I checked my voice mail. There was a message from the night before. It was Clea, saying he had called and “was fine.” She was going to see him, but didn’t say where.

THE NEXT FEW WEEKS WEREa blur of work, and I was glad.

HBO wanted to move forward with Holmby Hills. They had notes; Dan and I took the requisite conference calls. I did my bible thumping (and tweaking) at night, days occupied by the new Starwatch shoot. No one heard boo from our wayward couple. With an increasing sense of dread, I resorted to Al-Anon meetings, reminding myself I was powerless over Clea — powerless over her drug intake and her romantic life, if there was any difference between the two.

I spoke to Miriam constantly. I missed her but admittedly was confused. It’d been months since I’d slept with anyone else so I longed for her, physically. Besides, the whole Thad/Clea shitstorm had left me stressed out and lonelier than hell. I guess I still wanted her to come to L.A. on my own terms. I was a walking male cliché—obsessed with getting Meerkat into bed but still ambivalent about the relationship thing. I hadn’t discussed my feelings (another male cliché) and psychotic as it might sound it just may be I was operating off the echo and reverb of my last conversation with Thad — the one where he casually implied Miriam wanted to begin some major nest building.

My inner life was crazed. I hung around newsstands, poring over health magazine articles about male hormones, male menopause, male ticking clocks. (Not to mention cutting-edge cancer-screening tests.) When Miriam finally said she was flying out, I felt instantly better. We could have the baby-thing talk— after we fucked. Might even pop the question. When I shared as much at an AA meeting, some smart-ass said, “The question is: ‘Can we have an open marriage?’ ”

A week and a half after Clea split, I got a second message on my machine. (If she really wanted to talk, she’d have called my cell.) She sounded stoned and vaguely distraught. They were all right but “in the middle of moving.” She’d “be in touch.” Around that time, someone on the crew said he saw them over the weekend, at the Palms in Vegas. The gaffer didn’t approach but said they looked “seriously fucked up.” When I called the hotel, no one was registered under either name.

Miriam arrived on Friday and stayed with me in Venice. It was comforting to play house, even under somewhat surreal circumstances. The sex was good. We used it as an anchor — and painkiller. The TV news played nonstop coverage of devastation wrought by a series of tornadoes in the Midwest. Somehow that was a comfort too: happy-to-be-alive faces smeared with dirt and tears, possessions and personal histories flung to the wind. Whenever we saw the foundations of vanished houses and the shattered vertebrae of modest Main Streets, we conjured Thad and Clea as flying Dutchmen unable to dock in whatever harbor they’d been pharmaceutically listing toward. Then came the usual stories of buried house pets found miraculously alive among the rubble. We wished as much for our friends but knew the odds were against them.

The odds were always against everything.

MONDAY CAME. I HADa few days off.

Miriam went to a business lunch and I killed time at the studio visiting Dan. I’d completed the outline revisions and turned them in — HBO would probably take a week or so to give a thumbs-up. Hopefully they’d be cool with whatever work I did and would let me start writing the pilot; I was getting itchy. It was all a little easier if you tried not to have expectations. Anyway, I had other worries: Clea and Thad. Being on the lot brought me nearer to my oldest friend and the mystery of her absence. I felt like a dad waiting around during an Amber Alert — utterly helpless.

I strolled to the editing bay to see Nick Sultan. Normally, he’d have already finished; in TV, it wasn’t typical for directors to stick around to supervise an edit. They were hired hands and they knew it. But in this case, Nick was committed and determined. Because of “complications,” the producers had given him more leeway than usual. The room was dark. The first thing I saw on the Avid was Ensign Rattweil, engaged in final combat on the Fellcrum Outback. The action kept digitally rewinding and repeating itself, images broken into millions of shardy, dust mote — sized squares. The dual was incredibly well done — you’d never know a look-alike had been employed. When I asked the editor how they’d managed, he smiled and said, “Movie magic.”

Just then, Nick appeared in the doorway holding a container of Chinese chicken salad from the commissary.

“Did you hear?” he said.

“What?”

“Oh Christ.” He steered me to the hall and whispered, “They just found the bodies.”

HE WAS BURIED IN THEVineyard with Jack and Jeremy, as his mother had wished.

Sudden death expunged her rancor; at last, Thad was brought into protective arms. It came to mind this was the closest he’d been to his brother in the forty-odd years since that time beside the gently rocking Sea Horse where they parted. Miriam said the configuration of monuments in the family plot put him farthest from Jack, which gave a small measure of comfort. She said there was a wake, with far less turnout than the one I’d attended, and Morgana had behaved much the same as at her husband’s — brave and wittily stoic, boisterously bereft.

We scattered Clea’s ashes at sea. There was to be no headstone or grave marking, by her request. TV tabloids and magazines made much of the lurid deaths, mostly on account of the illustrious parents. In the end, the light (“Even the light”) — the white dwarves that were their children — could not escape the gravity of those legendary black holes.

My own mother took great care of me in the days that followed.

She got some of her old energy back and threw a lovely memorial. It was as if Gita knew that with this death — Clea’s — I had finally graduated, and we now shared consecrated alma maters. (Heartbroken wolves cloaked in sheepskin.) The celebration took place on the beach, where I once fantasized they would exchange vows. Everyone linked hands and cried — friends from AA, the gang from Starwatch. Dad walked me to the wet sand and said that my eulogy was “the finest thing” he’d ever heard. With tears in his eyes, he begged forgiveness for all fatherly transgressions. He was a little drunk but his sentiments were in earnest. I did forgive him, from the bottommost bottom of my heart. I forgave just about everyone for everything, including myself.

Gita was right. School was out — forever.

I DECIDED TO GO TOVegas to retrace their steps. (Later, I wondered if my motivation was born less from a sense of “closure” than the subconscious decision to tell this story.) No matter, I still needed to say good-bye; it felt just too miserable to let the memory of her last, plaintive phone message stand. Like some action hero, I craved pursuit — to chase the dispersed stardust of my first love.