There used to be lemon groves up and down our street and on many of the surrounding blocks of Riviera. When my brother, Bartie, and I were kids we’d play cowboys and Indians about the trunks of the trees. I’d shoot him and he’d shoot me, and each time we’d jump back up, resurrected like a dog or a cat or a flattened fox in one of our favorite cartoons. Finally we’d pluck the lemons from the lower boughs and bite a hole in the tops. The idea was to turn the fruit in your hand, squeezing the juice into your mouth like a Spaniard with his goatskin—which we did, sphere after sphere, until our teeth ached and we lay back drunk on the stuff. “Ha! Ha! Ha!” Bartie laughed. “Look! At your skin!” The sunlight, filtering through the grove, had been gilded by the ripened fruit. The flesh on my arms, and on my panting chest, was yellow. “You’re a dirty Jap!”
Norman, our father, had tried to include the abutting grove when he bought our house, a pillared colonial like something from Gone With the Wind, in the Forties; but the owner wouldn’t sell. It wasn’t a matter of money, I’ve come to realize, but the age-old question of—well, they didn’t call us Jews, not outright; in those days the term was movie people. For a year or so we stared at the lemons through a row of whitewashed slats. Then our mother, Lotte, with the help of her Japanese gardeners, turned the fence into a hedge, a tangle of rhododendrons, forsythia, and vines hung with improbable figs. The smell of citrus wafted over just the same, and up went, like a canary flock, their chromium sheen. I tried to acquire the same lot when Marcia and I—her cash, my inclination—bought the house back after a lapse of thirty years. This time the issue was money, a great deal of it, as if these last lemons were in fact as golden as their glow.
My wife made out her check to the same family to whom Lotte had sold the house three decades before. I saw at once that the hedge was still there, dotted, in its recesses, with the pouches of the purple figs. The gardeners now are Mexicans or, lately, from Guatemala. I like to set up my easel next to the wall of vegetation, with its smell, its stickiness, its bees. That’s the shadow you see moving on the diagonal, upper left to lower right, on a hundred of my canvases. The blue above it: the sky? Sure. But also the levitated contents of what Marcia calls la piscine. Mikado yellow, in streaks and blobs, an echo of that old sourness, I squeeze directly from the tube. There is a line, a squiggle, that no one can interpret: it is the memory of where crazy Bartie would gambol down the awning and launch himself airborne over the unrippled surface of the pool.
In the Eighties, when I moved back to San Remo Drive, the lemon groves had almost disappeared. But the house was just as we had left it. Somehow the family that bought it from us had managed to raise five girls—and they’d climbed the cork trees and dug divots out of the lawn with a seven iron, just as Bartie and I had, and as my own boys do now—and not move a stick of the furniture.
On the evening of our return I moved by instinct through the living room—could those be the same filmy white curtains? Not possible! They’d have to be as tattered and yellowed as Miss Havisham’s—and turned left, and left again, to the bar. I threw open the cabinet doors. The Capehart was just as we’d left it, its arthropod arms immobilized in midair. And not just the Capehart. Here were our old 78’s, album after album, Schubert and Schumann and Brahms; Toscanini’s version of the Beethoven symphonies; Furtwangler even; Robeson’s Ballad for Americans; Rodgers and Hammerstein, Rodgers and Hart. I piled Pal Joey onto the spindle, and while the machine huffed and puffed its way through the discs I let the cheap music, like some dime novel villain, have its way with me.
“Richard! What are you doing here, sitting in the dark?”
I barely recognized my wife—and not just because she had a scarf like a peasant over the beehive of her hair. She switched on the overhead fixture.
“Marcia. Listen. These are our old 78’s. I could-write a preface on how toe met—Do you remember that? Jesus! Nothing gets erased. So the world will never forget. That’s not all. Here. Johnny Walker. Black Label. These people, they owned a milk company, right? Teetotalers! I’d bet anything on it: this was our bottle of Scotch.”
“You should see what they’ve done to your pool,” she answered. “It’s lit up like a tourist attraction. Like the Blue Grotto of Capri.”
“Do you know, when we bought the house from Mary Astor, there was no pool. Norman and Lotte put it in. They dug it out of the lawn. Norman would only sunbathe. He got a tan with a reflector. The pool was really for Lotte. For Lotte and the Sunday guests, I mean. I told you about them, didn’t I? Elizabeth Taylor? Tony Curtis? The whole Fox and Lox Society, that’s what they called it. Before we came there was nothing but lemon groves. Block after block of them. You could smell them, the budding lemons. You could—”
I stopped. Marcia was staring at me, as if I were a stranger. Truth to tell, I hardly knew her either. The natural order of things had been reversed: we living people were fading like ghosts; only the phenomena of the past—the lyrics, the drapery, the light bulbs hidden in the lozenges of the chandelier—were solid and real. Bewitched, you said it. Bothered! Bewildered!
Marcia said, “Are you drunk, or what? Come on. We’ve got junk to throw out. And we ought to drain that pool.”
“Look at that,” I said. She followed my gaze to the bottle.
“You’ve already brought that miracle to my attention.”
“Can it be?”
“Can it be what?”
I thought it better not to explain that, like a clue in a very bad mystery, the level of the liquor was precisely where we’d left it when we abandoned the house. Instead I struggled out of my chair and seized the whiskey. With my shirttail I cleaned the rims of two grimy glasses. I poured each to the brim.
“To us,” I said. “A new start. In a new house.”
“But it’s an old house, isn’t it?” answered my wife.
The last song came to a halt. The Capehart raised its mechanical arms, as if praying for more. I didn’t budge.
“What are you listening to now?” Marcia asked.
“It’s over.” It wasn’t the music I was hoping to hear. It was the plash of limbs in the water—not myself or my cannonballing brother, but Lotte, undoubtedly in her Forties bikini, the sun gleaming on the helmet of her rubber cap; or else, on occasion, on Thursdays, maid’s day off, butler’s day off, wearing nothing at all. She’d turn like a seal in the water or pose naked on the tiles, the biblical Susanna at her bath; but it was not the elders who were peeping.
We did drain the pool, and kept it empty for seven years. Then, in the fall of 1992, we filled it again so that our boys, adopted Navahos, could learn how to swim.
“Big lake!” shouted Michael, the moment he caught sight of the blue water in the backyard. He ran pell-mell across the fresh-cut grass.
“Me too!” shouted Edward, and if I hadn’t swooped him up he’d have jumped right in.
The boys were three years old. We’d brought them back from the reservation that same afternoon. With their black bangs and flat faces, the twins might have been Chinese. The tribal council had insisted that we take a weekend course of study, which was held in a classroom hung with strips of flypaper dotted with struggling flies. We took notes, Marcia and I, on the Long March and the meaning of sand paintings; on Kit Carson’s cruelty and the birth of all mankind from Esdzanadkhi, the mother of the earth. But here at San Remo Drive were our new sons, in their brown jackets and brown knee pants, their ankles disappearing into pairs of brand new Nikes. All I knew for sure, lessons or no lessons, was that their ancestors had arrived on this continent well before another sort of long march had delivered mine.
“No, no, no!” squealed Edward, as I continued to spin him in the air.
“Me, me!” shouted Michael. “My turn!”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Marcia. She was coming down the back steps from the kitchen. She had changed from her business suit into a blouse, slacks, and a straw hat to keep off the sun. She had a tray with three glasses of lemonade and, for herself, a wine spritzer. “It’s a hundred degrees. Why not let them into the water?”
“Yay-y-y-y!” cried the Navahos. They ran up for the lemonade, which they drank eyes closed, two hands on the glass. Then they began to tear off their clothes.
Marcia pulled a chair under the striped canvas awning that ran from the back of the house halfway to the edge of the pool. We’d met after she’d already spent a small fortune on six of my abstractions. “It’ll be cheaper to collect you,” is what she’d said when I proposed. It had taken a long time, the whole of a first marriage, to convince her that she couldn’t have children; it took a good part of this one to get her to stop toying with the idea of a career in real estate and agree to adopt the twins instead.
“That’s better,” she said, tipping her head toward where the bare, brown bodies of her new sons were jumping up at the hedge. “That’s how they like it.”
It was a surprise to me to see that their penises were uncircumcised. They resembled the purple figs, which, in glee, each boy was hurling at the other.
I took off my shoes and socks and rolled up my pants. I stood on the semicircular steps that dipped into the shallow end of the pool. “Come on, guys!” I shouted. “You can wade here.”
Michael—I think it was Michael, since they now looked as much alike as two brown eggs in a carton or the proverbial peas in a pod—took me up on it. He came bounding across the grass and leaped from the flagstone. At once he ducked to the bottom, only to come shooting upward in a fountain of foam.
“Watch me!” cried Edward. To my dismay he made his leap where the water was six feet deep. Like his brother, however, he bobbed quickly up. The two of them, unsinkable apparently, began whooping and splashing. Their screams were so loud, there was such a hullabaloo, that I hardly heard the ringing of the telephone. A moment later Isolina, our pretty maid, brought out the receiver at the end of a long extension cord.
“Mr. Richard,” she said. “A lady for you.”
Marcia said, “Oh, that must be Lotte. I promised her I’d call as soon as we arrived with the boys.”
I took the telephone and sat down at one of the iron deck tables. Marcia called over: “She’s never been over once in all these years. Tell her to drive out and see Edward and Michael. Tell her we’ve filled the pool. It’s not too late for une nage. How that woman likes to swim!”
But it wasn’t my mother. It was my model. “Are you there, Richard? Can you talk? Or are you surrounded by your new family? Your papoosi? Your pepperoni? Your papyruses. Whatever.”
Against the shouts, the cries from the children, I pressed a finger against my ear. “Yes,” I said, as neutrally as I could. “I can hear you.”
“I see. Oh, I see. Marcia’s there too. Don’t say anything. Just absorb what I’m telling you. You think you can dump me? Now? After all these years? You think you can buy yourself a whole new family? Husband and wife and the adorable paparazzi? What if I decide to make a fuss? A, a—rhubarb! I’m capable of it. Richard? Hello? Are you there, my love?”
“Yes, I hear you,” I answered. “We arrived about an hour ago.”
“You shit. I gave you my heart! Oh, I hear them laughing! Those war whoops! They sound delightful. Why did you have to show me their pictures? I can’t get those little brown faces out of my head. I envy you. I’m burning with jealousy, you lucky son of a bitch. Wish your old friend some luck, okay? It’s a little late, don’t you think, for her to have a wonderful life?”
There was a click. The dial tone came on. I said, probably too loudly, “Yes, well it was kind of you to call. I will. I’ll tell them. Goodbye!”
“Who was it?” asked Marcia, pulling one pale leg from a patch of the sun.
“It was Mrs. Williams. Wasn’t that her name? From Black Mesa? Sheila Williams. She wanted to see if we had a safe trip. She said to give her best wishes to the boys.”
Marcia raised her pointed chin, her pointed nose, as if she meant literally to sniff me out. But all she said was, “That’s very thoughtful.”
I didn’t reply. The wind, the Santa Ana, whipped perspiration from my forehead and the back of my hand. I couldn’t see either of the Navahos in the pool. Then I looked again. Had they learned already? Had they already been taught? Or, like animals thrown into water, did they instinctively know how to swim? I followed the brown blur of their bodies as they moved under the surface, second after long second, until at last in simultaneous gushers they came up for air.
When, some years later, the two of them decided they wanted to play tennis, they didn’t take to it as they had to water. It turned out this was an activity that had to be learned. In the days when Norman was teaching me how to play the game, he’d always say, “It’s a sport you can enjoy all your life. Look at the king of Sweden.” A generation later I was not above holding that example up to the eleven-year-old Navahos, no matter how far they might be removed from the land of the Northern Lights.
“What Swedish king?” Michael demanded. “That country is a democracy.”
I marched the two of them into the clubhouse, where a portrait of Gustavius V—it must have been from just after the war, when he’d arrived in Hollywood for some understandable fence-mending—hung on the wall. The twins stared upward a moment. Their white shorts and white shirts were as dazzling as teeth against the dark, sweat-streaked skin. Then Edward turned aside.
“Oh, he’s dead,” he said.
True, technically. Though the monarch has remained alive in my imagination—not as the father of his people, or the naval officer in his ribbons, or the secret hero of what were then clandestine gays; but as he is on the wall of the Beverly Hills Tennis Club: a bewhiskered old duffer in flannels, squinting through glasses at the approach of the white, not yellow, ball.
The king isn’t the only one still alive and kicking. There’s something about the sun in California, the way it bears down in winter at much the same angle as in July, that has preserved half the population. If you’d been at the club on the afternoon I spent hitting ball after ball, first to Edward and then to Michael, and had glanced over to court six, you couldn’t have missed my childhood friend Mosk doing the same thing with his grandson. “Concentrate, damn it,” shouted the Penguin. “Read the word Wilson. Attaboy!” The uproar on court one? That was the Pumpkin, who in the course of time had been a Davis Cup player and Wimbledon quarter-finalist, thrashing the latest phenom from UCLA. At a quarter of four my cousin Jimbo, the son of Norman’s younger brother, arrived; from his slumped shoulders and the sweat that beaded his near-hairless pate, I could see that he’d already resigned himself to losing the three-set match we’d been playing for fifty years. Mummies, all of us! As perfectly petrified in our attitudes and gestures, not to mention the tendency to drop a forehand volley into the net, as the frozen Swede or dried-out old King Tut.
Jimbo and I changed sides on the odd game; over his panting I could hear the steady splash of someone traversing the pool. Impossible to see over the hedge, but I knew only Lotte would dare take laps in the middle of December. She lived practically around the corner, at Beverly and Oakhurst, but insisted on driving her ‘82 Honda into the alley behind the club, where she’d rattle the rear gate to catch somebody’s attention.
“Thank you, Timo darling,” she’d say to the ancient Filipino—he’d been a ball boy for Gustavius, for Christ’s sake, and rumor had it he spent the next three nights in the Royal Suite at the Ambassador—and pinch his cheek; he never failed to blush, in spite of age and inclination.
I’d once offered her the master bedroom of our old place on San Remo, where she could swim as she always had, hours on end. “Oh, no, sweetie. I don’t dare set eyes on it. I don’t dare think of it. All my old things! Like a fleet in mothballs! My credenza! My Steinway! I don’t want to look backward! I’ve got to look ahead. Next you’ll want to put my old portrait back on the wall. Like Dorian Gray!”
“We have put it back, right over the fireplace. If you’ll come with the Oscar I’ll put it there too, right on the mantle beneath it.”
At that she gave an exaggerated shudder. “See? The very idea makes me quake. It’s like a shrine to the dead. Look, you’ve made me cry. Kiss them away, my prince! Ha! Ha! These tears! Oh, to be seventy again!”
Lotte had no idea that I paid her monthly fees. She thought that because Norman had been a founding member, she was entitled to the privileges of the club, including phone calls and the tab of her bridge group, for free. This was the third Sunday of the month, which meant she’d invited her children and grandchildren for the buffet of baby-back ribs. Bartie, of course, was not going to pass up a free dinner. The twins liked to gnaw on the sticky bones. I shooed them off their court, so that they could shower and change. Then I finished off Jimbo with a backhand down the line. When I followed the boys around the row of bushes, I saw that Lotte was just getting out of the pool. Timo stood by, holding a terrycloth robe.
Lotte approached him, the flesh loose on the bones of her arms, the way the Greeks prefer it on a shank of lamb. The Filipino enveloped her. She gave a bird’s peck of a kiss to his chin.
That’s when Bartie arrived. His forehead, now, was all creases, and his smaller eye, perhaps against the wash of his cigarette, was drawn almost closed. It looked as if the nicotine from all his other cigarettes had left the yellow tinge in hair otherwise gray. “Hey, Bro,” he said, and came out of his stoop to extend his hand. “I’m here to refuel.”
Michael stepped forward. “Hello, Uncle Barton,” he said.
“Hello, Edward,” Bartie answered.
“I’m Michael.”
“That’s all right. What is in a name, eh, Bro? To quote the bard. Have you seen Spielberg? Is he around?”
“I haven’t seen him, Bartie. Maybe he’s playing cards upstairs.”
“I hope so. He better be. Lotte said he was reading my novel. She loved it. It’s called A Girl of the Streets. She gave it to that friend of hers, Pearl. She’s married to Shire, you know, the big agent. Pearl said there was definitely a movie in it. First a book and then a movie. A tie-in deal. She’s very excited by the prospect. She told Lotte this was a Spielberg vehicle. It’s based on a real-life situation. I met this person. I got her life story here, in my head. Your heart could break from the pathos in it. But there’s plenty of hot sex, believe me. That’s what the masses want these days. I’ve got the chicks coupling like monkeys. Balls and cocks and tits and ass. You aren’t listening, Edward. You boys are innocent. You don’t know how to please the public the way I do. Anyway, Bro, Lotte called it a brilliant satire. Don’t be jealous, those were her actual words. Pearl is definitely going to bring this to Spielberg’s attention. Shire will be my agent. I’ve got an idea: you could be the art director. I’ll make sure my big brother is written into the deal. This book is going to get the Jacobi family back in the movies. Wait! I forgot! I am always forgetting! You are going to France.”
“I’m only going for a week, Bartie. I’d be honored to work on your picture.”
“La Belle France! That’s where I’ll go if I hit it big. I’ve lived a Spartan life. According to the precepts of the Buddha. He knows I’m a person who will cross the street so I won’t step on a beetle. Now it’s the Riviera for Bartie! I see him in a villa overlooking the beach. Those filles de la nuit, eh Bro? Those damoiselles!”
The boys had already turned to go indoors. I watched through the glass door as they pulled down thick towels for the shower. When I turned back, Barton had his head in his hands.
“There’s a problem,” he said. “A problem. They don’t let you smoke on those flights. Six hours! I can’t go for six hours! Do you think it’s the same on Air France? Reagan should have crushed those environmentalists. They want to make us prisoners! Before you know it we won’t be able to smoke in our own homes. Six hours: three, four, five, six. Bartie will be unhappy. He’ll start to cry. Are you laughing at me? It’s not so unreasonable, you know. It could be the spirit of Pericles, reincarnated in the form of that beetle. Hee, hee hee! Or Otto von Bismarck.”
A half hour later we were lined up at the buffet. I brought Lotte’s plate to her, a tuna fish salad, since, for all her miles in the pool, she found it difficult to stand. As I leaned over her I saw the patches of scalp beneath her hair’s damp strands. She put her lipstick on, smacking her lips in the mirror of her compact.
“I gather Marcia’s not coming? Not coming again? I don’t know what to do about that girl. I try and try but that’s one heart I can’t win over.”
“Lotte, you know Sunday is her busiest time. She wants—”
“Oh, look! Look!” She leaned back, peering over to where the boys stood in white shirts and flannels, holding their empty plates. “I want to eat them for dinner. They are scrumptious. Just look at those black bodies. Black as Negroes’. Tell me, darling—” And here she said something that, though I’d shared the earth with her for more than six decades, made me gape. “Are the penises big and black too?”
“You know, Lotte. There are times when—”
“All right! I knew it was a mistake even before the words were out of my mouth. You have to forgive a person of my age. We become forgetful. Yes, I forgot you were such a prig.”
Bartie came up with what seemed fifty ribs stacked on his plate. He’d gone to the bar, too, for a highball.
“Tonight Bartie’s not eating his brussel sprouts,” he said as he pulled up a chair.
“Goodness, Barton, you are making a spectacle. You can always go back for seconds.”
“I intend to, ha-ha-ha! Do you see the humor in what I said?”
Lotte let out a peal of laughter. “Oh, Bartie, that’s funny! It’s hilarious. You are such a witty person when you’re feeling happy. We’re all feeling happy. We’re having such a good time. Here come Michael and Edward. Come closer, boys!” She reached for Michael, who was clutching his own plate of ribs. She caught him by both ears and, as if they were the handles on a pitcher of milk, pulled him toward her. Then she dipped her napkin in her ice water to rub the smear of lipstick that was superimposed on his mouth. “But no one is happier than Lotte Jacobi. I am a grandmother. Of two wonderful boys. Now that is an accomplishment!”
Edward got a kiss too. He sat down next to his brother. Bartie rose from his seat, simultaneously feeling in his shirt pocket for his pack of Kools. “Well,” he said, already moving toward the sliding glass doors. “Excuse me while I drive a nail in the coffin.”
Lotte beamed. “Isn’t he wonderful? And clever? When Barton is like this you can have an intellectual conversation.”
Michael was kneeing me under the table. He leaned over and put his fingers, slick with grease from the beef, around my ear. “Grandma loves me too much,” he whispered.
“Mel! Oh, Mel!” Lotte, half-rising, was calling out to the aged, blue-blazered man who had once been our family doctor. Then another gentleman caught her eye. “Yoo-hoo! Judge! You come over here, too!” This happened to be the Penguin’s father, even at his age a member of the State Supreme Court. What stuck in my mind was the afternoon, poolside, when his task had been to join Lotte and the phony Frenchman in marriage, a command performance not repeated in the Mexican divorce. It always amazed me how happy men were to see her. Both came beaming at an octogenarian trot.
Women, too: Estelle, Marjorie, Genie—the whole of the bridge group, with alternates, was coming down the spiral stairs. Even the ones that descended a half-step at a time, clinging to the banister, stopped to wave. The last in line? Pearl Shire, with Bartie bending her ear. In a moment or two they had all gathered around. Various husbands hobbled up at the outskirts. I couldn’t help but think how, after Norman’s death, no one came to Lotte’s election-night parties; it turned out that all the politicians and movie stars had been his friends. But these—why, Jed Masmanian, the famous psychoanalyst, was actually on his knees before her, as if he were about to be knighted by her blown kiss: these were hers.
“Estelle, Genie, you know my grandsons. Aren’t they handsome? That is Michael. That’s Edward. Bartie plays the cutest game of mixing them up. And of course everyone knows Richard. Sweetie, you tell them the exciting news. You haven’t heard? In just one week my oldest son is going to have an exhibition at the Louvre!”
I cut as quickly as I could into the chorus of exclamations. “Not the Louvre, Lotte; you know that.”
“Well, of course I know that. It’s the Jeu de Paume. What’s the difference? It’s the modern wing of the Louvre, that’s all. You didn’t expect they’d hang your paintings in the same dirty old building with the Venus de Milo.”
Marjorie said, “I love the Jeu de Paume. That’s where I saw the water lilies.”
Genie said, “It means they rank you alongside Monet.”
Lotte: “That’s exactly what Betty always said. She said that Richard worked and reworked our pool on San Remo the way Monet did the light on his haystacks or the facade on the Cathedral of Rouen. She was the first to appreciate him. Dear Betty! Of course the element is the same, the pond with its beautiful, beautiful lilies, and the blue pool and the blue sky. You know, in that series, the funny little zigzag in white? Like a kind of question mark? It’s Bartie! Bartie jumping off the awning! Scaring me out of my wits!”
There was a burst of laughter, and even applause, as if one of the paintings had just been unfurled. Then Barton, with a fresh drink in his hand, pushed his way through and sat down. This time the Scotch was in a wineglass, without rocks.
“He’s not there,” he said to his mother.
Lotte, instead of answering, turned to her circle of friends. “Here’s my good-looking little boy. I always said, watch out for him—he’s the one with the talent. Did I tell all of you that Bartie’s finished a wonderful new novel? The Streetwalker, it’s called. It’s just a gem. And so beautifully written.”
“Where the hell is Spielberg? You said he was upstairs. He’s not upstairs. I looked myself. I looked and I looked. There were just a lot of old people playing gin rummy. Ha! Ha! Ha! When the Big One comes, they’ll still be playing. They’ll never die. You people just go on forever. Under the burning buildings, out of the cracks in the ground, we’ll still hear the cry of the Angelenos: ‘Gin!’”
“All right, Bartie. You’re just a little excited.”
“I’m not excited. Pearl said she was going to show my book to Steven Spielberg. Didn’t you, Pearl? Didn’t you say it was a work of genius? A Spielberg vehicle? It’s got everything, right? It’s got verisimilitude. That’s because truth is stranger than fiction. I saw the veins in her arms. The way she has suffered. So you have to show it to him. You made a promise.”
The agent’s wife pushed her sunglasses atop her head. “I hope there hasn’t been a misunderstanding, Bartie, dear. Your mother showed me the manuscript. I told her it had promise. It does! But that’s not the same thing as making a promise. I couldn’t show Steven the manuscript in the shape it’s in—”
“What do you mean? Isn’t it brilliant? ‘Brilliant.’ Isn’t that a direct quotation?”
“I mean, Bartie, things like the presentation. Those crumpled pages. And the mistakes in punctuation. You can’t just run the words together without commas and periods or capital letters and expect the reader to understand the story.”
The red welt, a bulge between Bartie’s eyebrows, began to darken. “This is very disappointing to me. You shouldn’t tell a writer that. It takes away his enthusiasm. Bartie doesn’t use fancy computers. He doesn’t have a secretary to do his typing. You have confused me. I thought it was a work of genius. So why are we talking about commas?”
The crowd had begun to draw back. Most of the men, some pulling at the sleeves of their wives’ dresses, had drifted away.
Lotte said, “Where are you going? Don’t go! I didn’t tell you why my boys, both my darling boys, invited me here today. We were just talking about it when you girls came down the stairs. They said, ‘We know it’s six months away but we wanted to start the plans early’ The plans for my big birthday! They have had the most wonderful idea. You tell them, Richard. You, Bartie.”
I stared at her dumbfounded. Barton, in his bafflement, cocked his head like a dog.
“That’s right. They want to fly me around the world! To far off places like Shanghai! To Bangkok and Bombay!”
The faces of the women lit up.
“How exciting!”
“That’s splendid!”
“Richard! And Bartie! That’s so generous!”
“Of course just as you ladies arrived I was telling them that alas I’m too frail and old. Oh, to be eighty again! But they said, ‘We thought of that. You should take a companion. We are going to buy you a ticket for two.’ Isn’t that wonderful? Well, girls, who would like to go? Oh, look: a forest of hands! It is going to be like the old days. I’d go everywhere with Betty. To Cairo! To Moscow! To Zanzibar! Poor Betty is gone. I think we’ll just have to have a raffle!”
There was a whoop. All the women pressed forward. Laughing, each cried, “Take me! Take me!”
Lotte sat like a queen. “You see, children. My friends understand. Living to ninety is an accomplishment.”
This time the crowd broke into applause. It was as if the cake were before her and she’d blown out all the candles.
In the midst of the celebration one voice piped high. Edward’s. “But Grandma,” he said. “We weren’t talking about that. Uncle Barton wasn’t even here.”
“Goodness,” said Lotte. “Look at the time.” She began to fumble before her, wrapping uneaten rolls, even a rack of the ribs, in napkins and sweeping the food into her bag. Then she stood and began to move from the table. “I’ve got a meeting of the Plato Society tomorrow. Bright and early! That’s practically our motto. And I haven’t finished my research. Do you know what they assigned me? The Ottoman Empire! And I’m just a girl from New Jersey! But it turned out to be fascinating. I had no idea how ignorant I was. I only said ‘Turkey,’ you know, and ‘Turks,’ but the truth was that empire stretched over half of Europe and half of Asia. I think my personal hero is Suleiman the First. The more you learn about his words and his deeds the more you understand why they called him The Magnificent.”
And she was gone. I heard, or imagined I heard, the clang of the back gate and the cough of the Honda’s untuned engine.
The club members went back to their tables or out to their dinner engagements. I sent the boys off to get their racquets and bags from the lockers. For a moment Barton and I sat without speaking. Finally my brother said, “I do this once a month. It’s more than I can stand. She wants to turn me into an infant. I can see that. But I grin and bear it. I know I’ve done my duty. That is the way I gain good karma. What about you, my Bro? What will happen to you after you die?”
Marcia was halfway through her Waldorf salad when we got back to San Remo Drive. She ate in the dining room at the end of the vast cherry table, under the glow of the crystal chandelier. She looked to me like a cross between the proverbial jungle Englishman who has dressed for dinner and, with the napkin tucked under her chin, the black bangs flat on her forehead, and the spectacles slipping down the slope of her nose, a precocious schoolgirl.
“Well, look who’s back. And so early.”
The boys dashed forward. “I won!” cried Michael. “I beat him six-three, six-four.”
Edward: “Liar! He cheated. All his serves were foot faults.”
“You never know the rules. You’re just making excuses.”
Marcia put her fingers to her temples. “Can we keep it to a roar, please? I have been showing houses all day long to very unpleasant people and their very unpleasant children. I was hoping for a half hour of peace. One. Half. Hour.”
“I’m sorry we’re early,” I told her. “I couldn’t wait to get out of the club. Lotte was in fine form. The plan was to stop for ice cream. I drove by Toscanini’s, but for some reason it was closed.”
“Get yourself a glass. Very well, get three glasses. We shall drown our disappointments in wine.”
“That’s not a serious idea. The boys—”
“Oh, the boys! You are going to France, aren’t you? They pour Beaujolais down the throats of their babies and they all grow up to be frog writers and frog philosophers and frog painters, n’est-ce-pas, with their frog pictures in the Louvre. Edward, why haven’t you gotten the glasses, as I asked?”
“The Jeu de Paume,” I corrected, “in case you are referring to anyone present.”
Marcia leaned forward, so that her pretty pointed chin rested on her balled-up hand. She spoke in a stage whisper, “Unless you are afraid that because they are not actual Frenchmen, only poor Indians, they won’t be able to hold their liquor. Their firewater, I mean.”
“Oh, don’t be silly. They’ve got homework to do, that’s all. They farted around all weekend.”
She pushed up her spectacles. “Well, that’s a relief. For a moment I thought that you, of all people, were doing some racial profiling.”
Edward came back with three tumblers.
His mother said, “These are not wine glasses. You see? This is a wine glass. That is a drinking glass. Never mix milk and wine; don’t you learn such things when your father takes you to that temple?”
Marcia saw, as did I, how the boy’s face fell. “Except in working-class France.” She reached for her bottle of burgundy and filled half a tumbler before the wine ran out. “Oh, dear. Well, this one belongs to me.” She transferred the liquor to her own curved glass and tossed it off, perhaps in an imitation of a laborer in Pigalle. “Salud,” she said, as an afterthought.
Michael said, “I know where you keep the bottles. I’ll get one.” Before I could say a word he was off. Marcia said, “Now don’t look at me so disapprovingly, you two. A number of things have occurred this day. My head happens to be splitting. I’ll tell you what happened at the Montana house. You know, Edward, the one that your father always calls the Cotten place. Oh—here we are. What a smart boy! You have chosen an excellent year.” To me she said, “Open it, will you?”
Against my better instincts I set about loosening the cork.
“What was I saying? The Cotten Club. Ha! Ha! Ha! You boys are going to enjoy this story. Attendez! I was showing this family around. In just one moment you will all be asked to guess what sort of family it was. So there they were: a mommy bear, ha-ha-ha, a poppa bear, and a little boy cub and a little girl cub. So the poor broker—we call them that because while once they were rich they no longer have any money; the poor broker, already with a headache, takes them upstairs and takes them downstairs and takes them all around.”
“This is a long story,” said Edward.
“Don’t be impertinent. Just for that I am going to make it longer. It’s quite a lovely house that old Joseph Cotten built. I rather like how the sun comes through the ivy that has been allowed to grow over the windows. To continue: we went next to the kitchen, la cuisine.”
Michael and Edward, who had just started French, dutifully repeated, “La cuisine.”
“Then the dining room, la salle à manger.”
“La salle à manger.”
“Then the den. Le, le—what-the-fuck is the word for it?”
The gagsters in unison piped, “What-the-fuck.”
Marcia said, “Very funny. Extremely funny. So at last we come to the living room, never mind the translation; it is an exceptionally beautiful living room, with hardwood floors and a magnificent Persian rug. What are you waiting for? Richard, pour.”
I gave her another half glass and a thimbleful for each boy.
“Now at last I shall tell you the great event. I happened to glance down while in this living room and there was the little girl, almost as old as you, Michael, and you, Edward. At least eight years of age. Let us agree upon nine. There she was with her pants pulled down peeing on the 19th-century kilim.”
The boys, at this, hopped up and down, screeching with delight.
“Ha! Ha! Ha! She was taking a piss!”
“On the carpet! The kill-him carpet!”
“Quiet! Quiet, please. Oh, my poor head. A needle is going through it from ear to ear. You have missed the point. The point is the parents—”
“The momma bear! The poppa bear!”
“Were they peeing too?”
“No, no, no. Worse! When I expressed to them my shock and my dismay they only, well, they only chuckled; and when I bent down to yank the little bitch off the floor, he, no, it was she, actually said, Allegra isn’t done.’”
Now I thought the boys would pee in their own pants. They were doubled over, holding their bellies.
“Allegra wasn’t done!”
“She hadn’t finished her pee pee!”
“Her sissy!”
“Her number one!”
“Yes, I thought you would enjoy that story,” said Marcia, who was frowning down into the dregs that sloshed in her glass. “But you still haven’t got the point. The point is—well, I told you that you would have to guess. What kind of family were they? I don’t mean were they Jewish or Catholic or black or white, but were they poppa bear and momma bear lawyers? No-o-o-o.”
“No-o-o-o,” echoed the twins together.
“Were they doctors? Certainly not.”
“Not. Certainly not, not, not.”
“Were they business bears? I don’t think—”
I cut her off. “All right, Marcia. I get it even if the boys do not. They were psychoanalysts.”
“Yes! Gold star for Richard! Psychoanalysts! Oh, good lord in heaven: the stain was a big as Russia on the map, right through the priceless kilim, and they didn’t even go tut! tut! tut!”
Michael and Edward staggered around the room, half in hysterics, as if the mere fumes from their tumblers had made them drunk.
“Okay. Okay, guys. Go on upstairs. You’ve got to finish your assignments.”
They stopped their gyrations. “No, Father,” said Michael. “I don’t want to.”
Edward said, “We want to stay here.”
I could have finished their sentences for them. We want to stay with Mom. We never have such a good time.
But Marcia was staring into her salad bowl, at the lettuce, the walnuts, the yellow yolks of the eggs. “It has been a difficult day,” she said, without looking up. “Go upstairs. You are getting on my nerves.”
“Come on. Get going. Let’s hit the books.”
Michael: “That’s mean. It’s not fair. We already did our homework.”
“I know everything I’m supposed to,” Edward chimed in. “Ask me. Ask me about Dr. Maulana Kerenga.”
“Oh, Lord,” moaned Marcia. “Do I have to listen to this?”
“Yes, you do, Mom! We all have to appreciate the culture of Afro-Americans.”
“And of all peoples,” his brother added.
Marcia let her fork drop to the table. “Listen, Richard. Are you listening? We are raising human parrots.”
Michael drew himself up, chest out. “Maulana Karenga was a brilliant professor; he was upset by the riots in Watts—”
“That’s here,” said Edward. “It’s why the festival has special meaning for all of us who live in Los Angeles.”
“—He decided that Afro-Americans needed a festival to honor their culture and their traditions.”
“This is Kwanza, which means first fruits of the harvest: a spiritual celebration of the oneness and togetherness of the people.”
Michael’s turn: “We begin the seven days of Kwanza on December 26th. The first day is Umoja, or unity, as reflected in the African saying, I am because we are. The second day—”
“Me,” said Edward. “The second day is Kujichagulia, or self-determination—”
“Kujichagulia! Marcia brought the base of her glass down hard against the table. It did not shatter, but wine spilled in a wave over the polished surface.”
“I’ll get a towel,” I said, turning to go. Behind my back I heard Michael intoning, in the singsong way with which children perform, “Ujima: that means collective work and responsibility.”
In the kitchen I grabbed the dishtowel from its hook. Then I paused. I think I was hoping for the sound of laughter, Marcia’s whoop, the snort of her merriment, like a drug taken through the nose; and the yip-yap from the Indian boys. Nothing. I leaned against the Arrowhead cooler, which dislodged a hidden capsule of air from its depths. I wondered, at the first pinprick against my temple, whether by some form of airborne contagion Marcia had transferred a migraine from her skull to mine. Outside, the pool light was on and the pool itself, from the vantage of the kitchen window, looked like a turquoise stone in a piece of jewelry. Yes, the kind the Navahos had sold, along with blankets and punchcards, at the side of the road that Marcia and I had driven along to pick up the boys. With the towel over my shoulder I pushed like a waiter through the swinging door.
Marcia had lowered her head to her hands, so that the discs in her neck stood out like those of a Käthe Kollwitz sculpture. Starving Woman. The boys were still chanting, but the smug smiles were gone. They looked as if they were trapped on a carousel that had gone amok. There was a frantic note in Michael’s voice:
“The colors of Kwanza. The colors are Black, Red, and Green. Black for the face of our people—”
“Red for the people’s spilled blood—”
“Green for the hope in our motherland.”
“Our people. Our motherland.” Marcia was mouthing the last words of each line. She raised her head when I came in. “This is how our children have prepared for Christmas in the public schools of California. Umoja! Kujicha-watzis! Why don’t they just dance around like Druids?”
I dropped the towel over the spill of wine and began to mop up. “Why the histrionics? It’s only a Christmas pageant. They’re making a gesture to diversity.”
“Diversity? That’s what they call it. But it’s the return of paganism.”
“What’s that,” asked Michael. “That paganism?”
Marcia: “It’s the absence of belief in God. Or the belief in many gods—gods in the stones, in the trees, the leaves of trees; oh, for all I know in the hum of the refrigerator—”
“Like Uncle Bartie believes,” said Edward. Both boys began to giggle.
Marcia turned on them. “Are you mocking me? How dare you? Where you come from they believe in witch doctors. Witch doctors with rattles. That’s what we have tried to save you from.”
“Don’t, Marcia,” I said. “It’s not necessary.”
“Listen to me, boys.” Marcia pushed her chair away from the table. “I am not from Los Angeles. Watts, those riots and all that bad feeling, have nothing to do with me. When I was your age, do you know where I was?”
“In St. Louis, Missouri,” said Michael.
“That is correct. In the best part of St. Louis. And in those days, at Christmas time, we put on a play. One year I was a wise man, one year I was a shepherd, and one year I was the Virgin Mary. Do you understand this? Where is he that is born King of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the east and are come to worship him. And the wise men followed the star, and the shepherds followed the star, and they came to Bethlehem; and there in a manger—do you know what this is, my boys?”
“The man who runs the team?” ventured Edward, in a tone too low for his mother to hear.
“It is not the barn,” she went on, “which is what everyone thinks, but the trough from which the animals eat in the barn; and the baby Jesus was laid there in his swaddling clothes because there was no room for this poor family at the inn. Think, darling boys, of how our audience in St. Louis was transformed. A twinkling star, the wise men with their beards and their gifts, and the animals—one year we had real sheep, but mostly we had schoolboys on their hands and knees, and cardboard pigs and cardboard cows. Oh, those sweet cows! Their noble faces! Yes, Bartie may know the truth: the dumb beasts have in them a spark of divinity. That is why they bent on their knobby knees, and so did the wise men and so did the shepherds at the sight of my baby and the sight of me.” She looked up, her glasses flashing. “I was eleven. Eleven.”
There was a pause. I thought of how Christianity, with the power of its symbols, trumped all other religions, from the bloody Aztecs to Zoroaster, where light fights it out with the dark.
“Don’t cry.” That was Michael. His own face was twisted in sympathy with that of his weeping mother.
“Please, don’t. Please,” begged Edward.
“We have to be happy,” Michael cried. “I’m happy. Remember: I beat him in straight sets.”
“Didn’t!” said Edward in a shout. “You cheated! Look, Mom! I’ll show you!”
In an instant he had retrieved his racquet from his sports bag and leaped with it onto one of the dining room chairs. “You can’t step over the line with your foot. Not before you hit the ball. That is what the geek does. Now you are watching the geek.” So saying, Edward threw up his left hand, as if tossing a serve, and swung his racquet—down, then up, and then overhead into the center of the crystal chandelier.
Marcia let out a high, piercing scream.
“No! Oh, no!” cried Michael. In a flash he ran from the room and up the curving stairs.
Edward stood for a moment, gazing down at the shining fragments. Then he jumped from the antique chair’s rosy cushion and fled in the wake of his brother.
Marcia was screaming still, and still on the same note, like a soprano who never seems to take a breath.
“Stop it!” I commanded. “You’ll frighten them. It’s only a chandelier.”
She did stop. The lozenges, the shards of crystal, were spread about her. Pieces of glass glistened in her lap. “That foolish child! That ignorant boy! There are so few beautiful things in the world.”
“You aren’t hurt, are you? Don’t move. I don’t want you to cut yourself.”
“Don’t you understand? This belonged to Lotte.”
“All right. We won’t tell her. She never sets foot in the house. She’ll never know.”
“But I know.”
“Just sit still. I am going for the broom.”
In an abrupt movement she stood at her chair. The prisms and octagons fell from her. Diamond dust winked in her hair. Out of nowhere she announced, “You didn’t open yesterday’s mail.”
I halted. “I guess I forgot. Was there anything in it?”
“Yes. A letter from Air France.”
“Good. My ticket.”
“I opened the envelope.”
“So?”
“How stupid. I told Ernie you weren’t coming. He knows perfectly well you don’t fly.” Again I turned toward the swinging door.
“Wait. Never mind the glass. Isolina will get it in the morning. The ticket wasn’t made out to me. It was made out to Madeline.”
“Oh. I see. Then there was no mistake.”
“Are you standing there and telling me you are going to your opening at the Jeu de Paume and the reception at the embassy and the state dinner with Chirac and all the rest of the froggies with their rosettes or whatever they call them in their lapels—that you are going to these things with your mistress instead of your wife. No mistake! Is that what that means?”
“Just calm down, okay? In the first place Madeline is not my mistress—”
“She used to be! For years! For most of your life! No wonder you never married. You didn’t have to. You had your wife.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Haven’t you ever heard of childhood sweethearts? That’s how we began. And we’ve ended as—I guess you could say as collaborators. What I do is paint her. Period.”
“Don’t lie! Lying disgusts me. You swore when we adopted the boys—”
“And I kept my word. Religiously. Let me finish. For eight years Madeline has been my model and only my model. The people in Paris wanted a roomful of my figurative work and in their opinion, hell, in everyone’s opinion, these last portraits of her are the best. If you’d take the time to look at them you might even agree. And if I don’t finish them in the next week I’m going to have to crate them and carry them on the airplane myself.”
“I’ve taken the time. I’ve seen them. French postcards! With her legs spread wide open and her boobs hanging down and her fat ass shoved in our faces.”
“Look, I asked you to come. Repeatedly. So did the president of the Republic, for Christ’s sake.”
“Yes, you asked me, because you knew for a fact that I’ll never get on a plane again and there’s no way to get there except on a tramp steamer. Ha, ha! Appropriate for her!”
“I swear to you I hoped you’d make an exception. If you were the one with the exhibition and I were the one with the phobias, believe me I’d—”
Marcia lifted the back of her chair and slammed it down. “You didn’t lose your best friend in an airplane crash! Oh, now I’ve got such a headache! You’ve no idea! I’ve told you, Richard. Robbie had a nature like no one I’ve ever met. He was just a boy but he was wise. Childhood sweethearts! I had one too! What was that decent man thinking as he fell through the air? For over a minute! How dare you talk to me about phobias?”
“I’m sorry. I apologize. But it seemed perfectly natural for me to bring Madeline. It wasn’t my idea. They asked for her. They’re paying for her. I couldn’t—”
“Where is she staying? At the Crillon?”
“Yes at the Crillon. In quite different rooms. If that’s a problem—”
“Oh, no. Why should that be a problem? They ought to give you the bridal suite.”
“I told you, I kept my word. I haven’t touched her. Not since we brought home the boys—the papooses, as she calls them.”
“I can’t believe you don’t understand. Are you that big a moron? It’s not the sex that I mind. You two can fuck your fucking brains out for all I care. I wish you would! Maybe you can fuck yourself out of your addiction. This lifelong dependency. God! The whole world is going to look at this scatalogical shit, Tart on Toilet Seat, and see that you are besotted with the woman. You’ll be a laughingstock.”
“Now you really do sound like someone who has lost her mind. How can you be jealous of Madeline? For Christ’s sake, she’s almost sixty.”
“Yes, and you depict it. Every ounce of flab. Oh, Richard, to an outsider like me even the wrinkles look so much like love.”
“Do you know what I feel for her? It’s gratitude. She was the first one to inspire me. And the last one too.”
“I can’t in the middle of a migraine attack bear this high-mindedness. The artist and his muse! As if you haven’t lusted after her all your life.”
“I haven’t. I don’t. You can’t see what’s in front of your face. Okay, I’ll make it simple. I’ll spell it out for you. The woman I love, Marcia, is you.”
She stood clinging to the chair back. The look of pain on her face was so great I thought that I could see the zigs and zags, like an art deco motif, of her headache’s aura. She said, “You are not taking her to Paris.”
“Marcia, let’s think this through. Let’s try to find a solution. Can’t you—forgive me for saying it: can’t you find a way, a hypnotist maybe, like that Russian on Melrose who just snaps his fingers; or else a half bottle of Valium and your whiskey sours? What I’m saying, Jesus I feel like I’m making a wedding proposal—what I really want is for you to join me in the green dress I bought you and for me to introduce Monsieur Chirac to the wife I adore.”
Marcia gave a little wave of her hand. “Even if I believed you—no, let me amend: I do believe you mean what you are saying; you have a gift for being momentarily sincere. But I am not going and neither is Madeline.”
“My God, I can’t believe how much you hate her.”
She turned and opened her eyes, which had been half shut against the thrust of the light. The dust in her hair glittered, as it might have had she been at the American Embassy and wearing a tiara. “I have tried to explain this to you. I have tried for years. You willfully misunderstand me. It is not Madeline I hate; it is the paintings you do of her.”
She sank back onto the cushion of her chair. “Now, my thickheaded husband, do you get it? She won’t be going to Paris.”
I started. “The paintings—?”
She nodded.
I ran from the room and took the stairs by twos. The overhead lights shone through the studio’s open door. Breathless, I walked inside. I felt, upon seeing the carnage before me, the way a man must when discovering the whole of his family slain. Every painting was slashed through left and right, as if by a machete. It was as though a village of Tutsis had been surprised by Hutus. I went from canvas to canvas. I couldn’t find one that could be resewn or restored. This had been two years’ work: Madeline naked on her sofa, on her balcony, frowning as she wiped herself on the toilet, smiling as her breasts floated on the water of her tub. That last, the bathroom grouping, had particularly appealed to the custodians in Paris, who wanted to make a connection to Bonnard. I felt, at the sight of these dismembered limbs, the ripped breasts, the torn threads of the genitals, a sexual pang that I had not experienced while gazing at the sheath of skin wrapped round the living subject. The French ought to put up a placard: Une oeuvre de Monsieur Manson.
“All right.” It was Marcia, standing in the doorway. “I’m here for my punishment.”
I whirled. “You crazy bitch. You ought to be in an asylum. Did you think this was some kind of voodoo? That you could wound Madeline by stabbing her image?”
She stepped forward, into the wreckage. “I wasn’t after Madeline. I was after your love for her. And that’s where it was: in the paintings.”
“You don’t know me, Marcia. And you don’t know art. There is no more love in these paintings for Madeline than there was between Cezanne and a bowl of fruit.”
“That may be. Perhaps I am in error. But at least that fat-assed whore won’t be going to Paris.”
“What are you talking about? What can you mean?”
“There’s the tickets.” She pointed to a small shredded pile at the side of a toppled easel.
“You make me want to laugh in your face. We’re going into the twenty-first century. I can get another ticket by pushing a button.”
She flew at me, fists raised. “You thought you’d get away with it. Like with Lotte’s chandelier. Just don’t say a word! A love tryst! You bastard! At the Crillon! That crappy Crillon!” She was pounding on my chest. I did want to laugh—not at her reasoning or her anger but at the square white patch of napkin that still dangled beneath her chin. “What’s the matter with you?” she cried. “What kind of man are you? What I did was unforgivable. Why don’t you punish me?”
What might have been a film of blood dropped over my eyes. A roar, an animal’s roar, came from my mouth. With all my strength I threw her backward. This room had been Norman’s library. The exterior walls, overlooking the cork tree to the south and east to the front lawn and curve of San Remo Drive, were now little more than frames for the outsized windows that we’d punched through them. But the two interior walls had not been touched; they still held Norman’s books, shelf upon shelf, volume after volume, rising from floor to ceiling. Marcia cowered in the corner where I’d thrust her, at the right angle of those stacks. I leapt forward, onto an oak cabinet. Then I reached up and began to pull the books down on my wife.
She screamed, she bent over; but she did not attempt to escape the cascade that fell on her. I swept off an entire shelf. Chest heaving, with a hoarse rattling in my throat, I hurled down another. The large tomes broke over her. I watched in delight as the pointed corners dug into her flanks and struck the center of her spine. She did not say a word, though I thought I heard her groan. Stretching higher, I hurled down a row of dictionaries and an old Rand McNally. They fell with a rumble and thud. She dropped under the force of the avalanche.
Then a shot, or what sounded like one, rang out.
I ceased. I stood panting. She rolled sideways; she pulled herself from the clutch of the pile. “The children,” she said.
I knew she was right. It wasn’t a gunshot. It was the slam of a bedroom door.
“You go to them.” Marcia forced herself upward. Where she’d been pummeled her face had already started to swell. I started to speak, but she cut me off. “No, no. I’m fine. Go to them. Hurry.”
I dropped to the floor. I strode into the hall and made my way down it. For some years now each of the boys had had his own bedroom; but when I opened Edward’s door, he wasn’t there. I crossed the bathroom that had connected Bartie’s old room and mine: and there, where I used to sleep, huddled together in a single bed, the covers drawn over them, were the petrified shapes of my sons.
From under the blanket there came a cry: “I didn’t mean to do it! It was an accident!”
A second cry: “Leave him alone! Don’t hit him!”
I came up to the bed and squatted beside it. “No one is going to hit you, I promise.”
“Get back! Get away! We hate it here! We want to go home!”
The words chilled me. “But, Michael, you know this is your home.”
“No it’s not! Not really. Our home is where they have witch doctors. She said so.”
“She’s upset. She’s not feeling well. You know what she’s like when she gets her headaches.”
Edward, still invisible, said, “Then why did you hit her?”
Before I could answer, Michael said, “Don’t lie. We heard you.”
“I won’t mislead you. I didn’t hit her. What I did was just as bad. Because I wanted to hurt her. I feel awful. The worst part is, I am setting a terrible example for you. Don’t ever do what I did. No matter how angry you get—and I was very, very angry: never hit anyone smaller or weaker than you. Never hit a a woman, okay? I’m not sure there’s anything more important I can teach you.”
There was a pause. The light from the pool swayed like a beaded curtain on the walls. The shapes on the bed had been like two stones, without even a sign of breathing. Now they began to move. The blanket grew slack. A brown foot, a brown ankle, protruded from the lower edge.
Edward: “Are you going to marry Madeline? Are you going to live in the bridal suite?”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “What big ears you have, said Red Riding Hood to the wolf. You heard the whole thing, eh? No, I’m not going to marry Madeline. I don’t love her. It’s your mother I love.”
“But you are taking her to the exhibition. To live in the crayon.”
“The Crillon. It’s a hotel.”
Michael said, “But what will happen to us?”
“We’ll be here alone.”
“You won’t be alone. You’ll be with your mother.”
“No! She screamed and screamed, even though it was a accident. She hates us.”
“That is complete nonsense.”
“No it’s not. We’re Navahos. We don’t believe in the baby Jesus. You heard what she said.”
“Now look: let me tell you what I heard. I was crazed in there. I pulled down a whole shelf of books on your mother. More than a shelf. She really took a beating. Her pretty face, it was already starting to swell. But when I stopped, do you know what she said? The very first thing she said? Go to the children. She was thinking more of you than of herself.”
A head came out of the woolen blanket. That was Michael, with his chopped head of hair, the two black paisleys of his eyes. “Then you shouldn’t be here. You should be with her.”
I had to look aside, because my own eyes were filling. I saw their clothes, their flannel pants, their shirts, even the white rags of their shorts, heaped in a corner. I rose from my haunches. “You’re right. I’ve got to go to her. You guys all right? No one’s angry. It’s just a lot of glass, that chandelier.”
Edward, the culprit, pulled down his side of the blanket. “I’m really, really sorry about that.”
“Your apology is accepted. I’ll see you both tomorrow when you get home from school. Good luck with that report.”
Michael sat up, his ribs showing through his taudy stretched skin. “Wait, wait a minute. You didn’t tell us about the Jewish Giant.”
“Murphy to Mulrooney,” said Edward. “Murphy to Mulrooney!”
What they wanted, what they needed, was to resume our post-buffet routine. I suppose I needed it too. “Okay. But I’m going to have to make it short. You know I’ve got to get back to Mom.”
“Because she’s got a black eye!”
“A puffed up face!”
“This is very nice. This is swell. Your humanity lasted for two minutes.”
“Tell,” said Michael. “The 1934 season. The pennant race.”
I sat on the edge of the bed. “It was the end of the 1934 season. The Tigers were locked in a pennant race with—who do we love to hate?”
“The Yankees!”
“And rooting for the Yankees is like—?”
“Rooting for U.S. Steel!”
“Except maybe it’s time we changed that to—okay, Microsoft. So then, just when every game counted, here come the Yanks to Detroit.”
Was it even true? I no longer knew if what I saw in my mind’s eye was actual history or the glittering patina of my own embellishments. The Yankees? I think it was the Red Sox. And the Tigers, that September, were four games up. Poetic license, then.
“Obviously, boys, the Jewish Giant had a dilemma. The High Holy Days were coming at the same time as the hated foe. What was he to do?”
“What? What?” said the twins, as if they had never heard the story before. Thus we sit in anguish as Hamlet duels with the poisoned sword, while another part of our brain, held in abeyance, knows that his body will soon be piled atop the other corpses.
“You know the answer. On September 20th—”
“Yom—Yom—”
“Kippur, when all of the city of Detroit was calling on him to play, where was the Jewish Giant?”
“In the sin-a-gog.”
“Can you beat that? The pennant is on the line, and instead of showing up at Tiger Stadium, the Jewish Giant, once a member of our Beverly Hills Tennis Club, has a shawl wrapped around his shoulders and is praying in shul. It’s a disgrace! It’s a betrayal! It’s a plot by international Jewry to destroy the national pastime. But what were the American people saying—in their homes, in their workplaces, and in the barrooms of Detroit?”
“We have to ask Mulrooney!”
“We have to ask Murphy too!”
Then the three of us began to recite the Edgar Guest poem:
Come Yom Kippur, holy fast day wide-world over to the Jew
And Hank Greenberg to his teaching and the old tradition true
Spent the day among his people and he didn’t come to play
Said Murphy to Mulrooney, “We shall lose the game today!—”
Edward broke off, itself a kind of sacrilege. “Father, you are a Jew, aren’t you?”
“We’re not done here.”
“No, really; aren’t you?”
“I guess I am. No, I am.”
“Then why don’t you go to the sin-a-gog?”
The question brought me up short. What I said was, “Well, I wasn’t raised that way.”
“How come not?”
“I think Grandpa Norman and Grandma Lotte, when they were children—they had to go through a lot of that rigamarole, and they wanted to spare me and Uncle Barton from having to do the same.”
“Are we Jews, too?” asked Michael. “At school they say so.”
“I think that’s your choice, whenever you want to make it.”
“Did you choose?”
“Look, what about Mulrooney? And Murphy?”
“Did you?”
“Why?”
“Because I found out when I got older that some very bad people wanted to kill all the Jews—”
“Hitler, you mean—”
“Yes, a long line of people from Haman to Hitler, and I guess without really thinking about it I made up my mind that I wasn’t going to be another victim. Oh, too fancy! I just wanted to keep this tribe, which had been around for a hell of a long time—well, I wanted to help keep them around a little longer.”
“Bad people wanted to kill all the Indians, too.”
“That’s right.”
A small silence fell. I watched the water from the pool, the reflection of the water, dart like herring across the walls and ceiling.
Michael said, “Let’s finish.”
The three of us chanted in unison:
We shall miss him in the infield and shall miss him at the bat,
But he’s true to his religion, and we honor him for that!
There were no lights in the master bedroom when I went in a few minutes later. I flicked on the sconces. “No!” came Marcia’s voice. I flicked them off. But in that instant I had seen that she was not in her bed; she was in mine.
“Your headache?” I asked.
“No. I don’t want you to see me.”
Extraneous light beams came from the streetlamp on the drive. By that illumination I walked to the bed. I reached for Marcia. I ran the palm of my hand over her face. “Poor darling,” I said. “Does it hurt?”
I felt her hand touch my belt, the buckle of my belt, and pull loose the clasp. “Not too much,” she answered. “It would have hurt more if you had done nothing.”
My loosened trousers fell to my ankles. I stepped out of them. She fumbled for the waistband of my shorts. She said, “I was so afraid you wouldn’t do anything. That you’d just stare at me with contempt. That would have stopped my heart.” She stretched the fabric away from my erect penis and drew it down. I put one knee next to her on the mattress. I moved my hand from her face to her breast, holding it beneath the slippery silk of her nightgown. She lifted herself. She put her arms around me. She kissed my face—my forehead and quickly my cheeks, my throat, my mouth, my chin. I collapsed on her. Her legs were open. Her gown was hiked. Her hips were already in movement. My penis rode through the wet hair and in to her.
“Oh, Richard! My Richard!” she called. “Where have we been?”
We made love minute after minute. My pupils grew wide. I could make out, in the half-candlepower, her face: her open mouth and puffed lips, her eyeballs moving in a swoon beneath their swollen lids. A smell rose from her, deep, dark, and distinct, like the tar in a roofer’s vat; I sensed my penis extend itself, until it bumped against some inelastic barrier. Then the strings and bands and threads that held my body together, like the ones the people of Lilliput had wrapped around Gulliver—all these restrictions gave way and I poured myself out.
We all become our parents, through the action of genes of course, but no less through the accumulation of habit and example. Thus I did not rise the next day until noon. When Lotte said she had a meeting of the Plato Society “bright and early” the following morning, what she actually meant was two o’clock in the afternoon. Norman was much the same. Often enough he read the sports pages and sipped his coffee in bed; then he’d trundle down the hallway to the couch in the library and—“I think best in the prone position,” he’d say—lie down on that too. But not when they were shooting on the lot; on those days, if he went to sleep at all, he rose before the first light of dawn. Now and then he’d take me, and later on Barton, with him. I know that my brother likes to say I became an artist by ripping up his drawings and appropriating his box of pastels—and it’s true I drew my first little still life with his materials. Long before that, however, I had taken the tortuous journey on upper Sepulveda, through the black tunnel and down into the valley to Burbank. From the high hills I could make out the large red crosses that Jack Warner had painted on the roofs of the soundstages, to mislead the Japanese zeros into thinking his studio was a hospital. That was the first of the illusions I encountered there, a collection of trompe l’oeil that prepared me to be a painter.
For example: I remember looking up from my pint-sized vantage and seeing the white handkerchief that always flowed from Norman’s breast pocket; I noted how it mirrored the painted clouds on the cyclorama that loomed above him, which in turn replicated the cumuli that moved slowly across the authentic sky. That dizzied me, much like barbershop mirrors, or as the paintings of Magritte—a landscape before which stands an easel that may or may not contain a canvas—still do.
Another example, from one of my very first visits: Norman and I entered a soundstage hand in hand. The building was as large as a hangar, so perhaps I was not surprised to see an aircraft, or at any rate a cross section of an aircraft, inside. To my practiced eye it looked like the cockpit of a Grumman Hellcat or a P38. It sat on a pair of sawhorses, and there was a man inside. He wore a leather helmet, goggles, and a flying scarf. The makeup people were crowded around him, applying last-minute touches of paint; the lighting people took readings; and the camera people stretched a tape to his nose. Then the crowd stepped away, and the pilot reached upward to slam the canopy shut. I squeezed Norman’s hand. From somewhere a voice said, “Okay, everybody, we’re ready to go. And action!”
Flames shot up around us. Thick smoked filled the air. The poor airman, at this catastrophe, was banging on the inside of the Plexiglas. His mouth opened and shut. That meant he was screaming. Again he pounded, his fists turning raw and red. He was trapped! The flames leaped higher, seeming to engulf him. The black smoke curled over the truncated wings. I stood trembling. Norman’s hand gripped my shoulder. If he had not restrained me I might have flung myself forward, lunging at the cockpit in order to pry the pilot free. At the same time I was fully aware that three stagehands lay on their backs beneath the dive bomber, making the smoke and flames. Nor had I failed to notice that the actor’s legs dropped out of the center of the rocking fuselage and rested comfortably on the ground. I was, without knowing it, split in two—part of me wanting to break out in laughter at the comedy of the scene, even as my heart pounded in anguish for the doomed man. I didn’t know then what I know now: that every artist must seek to draw these separate halves of himself, and of those who view his work, together.
I have taken this long digression—Matisse! Jack Warner!—to put off the memory of how, when I woke the next day and strolled downstairs at a quarter past twelve, the children were gone. Not that there was anything unusual about that; they never returned from school until mid-afternoon. “Marcia!” I called. But she did not answer. I glanced toward the garage. Only my little Boxster was there. Shopping, I supposed. Gallery hopping. Lunch with Vanessa or some other friend. Yet for some reason my skin was covered with a film of sweat. Then I heard, from afar, the sound of sobbing. Isolina, the maid. Even that was familiar, since she gave way to tears whenever she thought of her father and her little boy in Guatemala. I tracked her to the window by the bar, dust cloth in hand.
“Isolina,” I began, but she ran by me and out of the room.
I ran myself, back upstairs to the bedroom. The clothes in the closet were strewn helter-skelter, and half the lingerie had been scooped from the chest of drawers. Marcias makeup, her toiletries, even her high-tech toothbrush had disappeared. I checked the hall closet, fully aware that her large Samsonite suitcase would be gone. I raced back to the boys’ rooms. The same shambles. The same chaos. Was there a struggle? A fight? Why hadn’t I heard it? That bottle of wine: had she slipped me a drug? What frightened me most was that the baseball I’d gotten Koufax to sign was missing from Edward’s room: that meant the boys knew they were in for the long haul.
“Isolina!” I roared. “Isolina! Come here!”
No response. Still calling, I went through the whole of the house, even down to the basement that had by then been entirely filled with stacks of Bartie’s manuscripts. No Isolina. Then I simply held still. The sound of her weeping came from outdoors. I found her crouched in the cabana by the side of the pool. I asked her when Marcia had left. I didn’t have to ask her anything else:
“This morning. She drive away in the morning. She take the niños. All with suitcases. I help to carry them. She didn’t say where she going. She didn’t say when in this day she going to come back. She didn’t say nothing, only gave me a hundred dollars and tell me to say nothing too. Here, I don’t want it. The niños, they crying. They say they want to go to the school. She was like to me crazy because she was laughing. I don’t know what Isolina to do. No wake you, not even if the house is on fire. That is what I remember. No wake Mr. Richard. So I dust and I dust always the same top of the table. She going to hurt Mr. Michael? Mr. Edward? I don’t want no hundred dollars. I don’t want no million dollars. You tell me what Isolina to do.”
What I did was send her home in her rusted out Olds. Then I returned to the bedroom, to the studio, to the mantel over the fireplace—wherever I thought she might have left a note. There was none. I sat down in the kitchen, where we kept the address book, and started a series of calls. To Vanessa, who didn’t answer; and to a lot of her friends and my friends, who sometimes did. Everywhere I left the same message: call me if you hear from Marcia. I told the same thing to her hairdresser and her colleagues at the realtor’s office and the desk of the club. Then I called her doctor. Then I called her shrink. It was her yoga instructor who blurted out, “You mean, she’s kidnapped the boys?”
The thought, the word, had not occurred to me. But now that it had, I dialed the number of my business manager and soon enough said, “Listen, Ernie, don’t you think we should call the police?”
He said, “Don’t be silly. You can’t kidnap your own children.”
“Of course you can. I read about these cases all the time. It starts as a family dispute and the next thing you know the father or the mother has taken the kids to Florida or some place like that and changed all their names, and then they marry a rich widow or a rich widower and that’s the last I’ll see of my kids.”
“You’re letting your imagination run away with you. You’re not getting a divorce. This isn’t a custody battle. She’s angry over a specific thing;—”
“That’s right, Glickman: why the fuck didn’t you make sure they mailed Madeline’s ticket directly to her—?”
“Because you never asked me to.”
“I pay you to anticipate problems, not make them.”
I heard plainly enough the fat manager sigh. “Let me finish my thought. She has a specific grievance and I am predicting that in a day or two you’ll get a phone call demanding a specific remedy.”
“All the more reason to call the police. They can tap the phone or trace the phone, you know what I mean, and that way they can find her. Oh, Jesus! And if she doesn’t call? Or call for weeks? They have to be in school. We’re going to France—”
As soon as I said the words I realized what Marcia wanted by way of a specific remedy. But Ernie was already replying: “It won’t take weeks. If you’ll forgive me saying so, Marcia’s not what I would call a doting mother. I don’t mean she’s not fit. I just mean from what I’ve seen Michael and Edward will be a handful for her; I don’t see her stretching this out very long.”
“What if she has help? She’s got family in St. Louis. She’s got her ex-husband in San Francisco. Her bitch of a sister—where is she? I think she lives in Encinada. God, Mexico! What if she’s taken them over the border?”
“That’s your imagination again. Be a mensch, which is what your boys are going to need you to be. I’ll track down the family in St. Louis, okay? Just to put your mind at ease. What’s the sister’s name? Diane, pronounced Dee-Ann? I’ll try to track her down too. Just stay calm and by the telephone. And watch the mailbox. One more day, two more days—she’ll be in touch.”
I hung up. Instantly the telephone rang. It wasn’t Marcia. It was the guidance counselor from Canyon Elementary asking why the boys hadn’t shown up at school. Out of masochism, I suppose, I told her the story. Again, the moment I hung up, the telephone sounded. It was the first of the Schadenfreude Brigade, those I hadn’t yet called, and some that I had, eager to hear the latest turn. After an hour of that I got into my sports car. I drove aimlessly around Riviera, peering left and right, as if my wife and my children might be hiding behind the neighborhood hedges or the one or two remaining lemon groves. Then I swung across the old polo fields and headed out to Toscanini’s, thinking what Marcia might think: buy them off with the ice cream they’d missed the previous night. It was such a dumb notion I didn’t bother to stop.
Instead, I swung back to Sunset and pulled in first at the Bel Air and then the Beverly Hills Hotel. I asked if anyone like Marcia and the boys had checked in. I did the same at the Beverly Wilshire. Next, in the failing light of the December afternoon, I drove to Vanessa’s. I realized she wouldn’t tell me if my family was there, but the parked car on Bedford would. That curb was empty. For a mad moment I contemplated driving all over town, from house front to house front, in search of the silver Lexus. Then, in the stream of six o’clock traffic, I headed home.
As I drove past the front pillars I was suddenly certain that Marcia would be parked at the back circle, just as I always expected that our old pecan tree, long since chopped down, would still be rattling the castanets of its pecans. But when I took the second corner I saw that neither the tree nor the car was there. Inside, I sat with my head in my hands to listen to the messages on the phone. None was from Marcia. One was from the French consul, asking me to drop in. Two were from Lotte:
“Richard? Oh, hello, sweetie. It’s your mother. I just came back from Plato. I had to give a paper on the Turks. Anyway, darling, I’m so sorry to hear the news. Charlotte called me. You must be frantic! I can just imagine what you are feeling. Those poor darling boys! It’s a damned shame she has to act out this way. Of course I know everything will work out just fine. I don’t believe she’ll go back to her husband, do you? I can’t say I am surprised. People will do desperate things when they are depressed. Didn’t you tell me she sits in front of the television until all hours? Watching The Tonight Show? But I never dreamed her psychosis would involve the boys. Do you remember how she’d clutch her head and say, Stop that screaming!? Well, I raised two boys, all on my own after Norman’s death, and I got my degree and rolled up my sleeves, and helped other families with their children. It’s no bowl of cherries for anyone. Where are you, for heaven’s sake? Are you just sitting there listening to your mother in the amused way you have? That is rude, Richard. It’s like eavesdropping. Or are you out? I wish I could help you. The timing is really rotten. There’s your exhibition and my birthday. That’s what she wants: to throw a monkey wrench into our happiness. Oh, I can’t help thinking about what those handsome boys are feeling. They love—”
The machinery cut her off. She’d placed her second call only a few minutes before I’d walked in the door:
“Richard? Are you there? It’s your mother. I don’t know why you haven’t called me. And now I’m about to run out. I’m having a bite with the girls before the Philharmonic. Oh! That’s the doorbell! Marjorie is picking me up. Shall I tell her to go? I could send her away. An evening with Mahler! I could do without that! If you want I could come over in the Honda, though you know I don’t like to drive at night. Not since I went up the wrong ramp of the freeway. Lotte, my girl, as far as driving is concerned the handwriting is on the wall. But I would if you want the company. Who is going to cook your dinner? I know intuitively you haven’t eaten all day. Oh that bell! Coming! Yes, we could sit in the dark together and wait for that girl to come to her senses. Wouldn’t that be nice? To sit side by side the way we used to. Darling Richard, I would hold your hand.”
Click. Off to Das Lied von der Erde.
But she had reminded me I hadn’t eaten all day. I walked to the kitchen. Without thinking I took out a package of cereal and a carton of milk and sliced a banana. I sat down to the breakfast my boys had not. What next? I took two aspirin. I drank some coffee. Then I went upstairs and into the studio. Like my mother I rolled up my sleeves; I did what I could to set things right. I returned the books to their shelves. I restored the toppled easels and gathered the scattered brushes and pencils and tubes. As I had feared, there was little I could do with the paintings. I tried to tape their torn backs, but the sides of the canvas kept drawing apart. I prepared a needle and thread—despite Lotte’s fantasies, Bartie and I had long ago learned to darn our own socks—and like a plastic surgeon set to work on Madeline’s face. Alas, the rows of stitches made her look like Frankenstein’s monster. At two in the morning I threw in the towel.
I staggered down the hall to our bedroom. Impossible to sleep. I thought of Marcia, tugging at my belt, her hips moving before I lowered myself between her legs. A poor way to count sheep. So was climbing into her bed in an attempt to inhale a few molecules of her eau de toilette.
After an hour of this I rose, pulled on a pair of jeans, and returned to the studio. I took a smallish canvas, an easel, and a fistful of brushes and paints. I set up shop in Michael’s bedroom, overlooking the pool that, all ashimmer, spread out below me like a cocktail dress. I painted it—for what? the five hundredth time?—from one edge of the canvas to the other, like a seascape. Then I turned the easel around. I took pains to capture the whitecaps that pulsed over the wall like rays inside an oscilloscope. No one would ever know that these spikes of decomposing light, just flickers, just wisps, were the dragonfly wings and the bumblebee wings, once sodden, but now thanks to my brother taking flight.
I got into bed at five in the morning and might have slept through the whole of the day had not the telephone, shrilly ringing, awakened me at noon. Rain, I noted, was pelting down. I reached for the receiver, but when I picked up no one was there.
“Hello? Hello?” I shouted. “Who is this?” No voice. No dial tone. Then I said, “Hi, Edward, my special friend. Take care of the Koufax, okay?” More silence. Not even the sound of breathing. The receiver almost slipped from my sweaty grasp. Finally a voice, not Edward’s but Michael’s, and not at the mouthpiece but, or so it sounded, a half room away, said, “Let me. Father? I want—” The line went dead. I yelled into the receiver, but it was as if I were shouting at the spot in the ocean where a man had gone under. I hit *69, but of course there was no trace of the number. I sat for an hour, staring at the phone. When it did ring again, I jumped. But it was only Jimbo, trying to be helpful, asking me out to his place for poker. I told him no. This time I left the receiver off the hook.
I wandered a bit, from room to room. I built a fire in the fireplace and poured myself a Scotch. The rain fell even harder. There was a rumble of thunder. The sky grew as dark as the shadow of a solar eclipse. Fooled, the acorn bulbs of the streetlamps came on.
I went down to the cellar, as I used to do whenever I heard thunder as a boy. I looked at the columns of Bartie’s prose, a lifetime’s work, that stretched from floor almost to ceiling. The iron furnace came on with a roar. I went to what looked like an old stack of boxes. The cardboard was rotted by mildew. I pulled at the stained seams. The sheets inside were an odd size, like foolscap, and covered with the loony loops of Bartie’s hand. I managed to yank out a story so ancient the paper clip that held it together had rusted. The paper itself looked as if it had been eaten by worms. “Trouble in the Suburbs,” that was the title, printed out in capital letters, across the top. There was a thud of thunder and the sixty-watt bulb dimmed on its cord. “Depth charges!” Bartie and I had called to each other, pretending that a destroyer on the surface was attacking our submarine.
“A school bus stopped at the corner,” was how the story began. “When the driver opened the door a procession of semi-happy faces crossed the crowed street.” That’s right: crowed. And, not such a bad touch, semi-happy. I squatted on my haunches to read the piece through.
The hero, Dave Conway, gets off the bus with the others. He is looking forward to his date that night with his girlfriend. The trouble is, he’s got a straight F report card in his pocket and knows his parents will ground him (“Go to your room, young man,” he anticipates his father saying). He takes out his frustration by throwing rocks onto the cars that pass on the freeway below. Then he goes home to have a beer. He is interrupted by his mother, “a lean dry woman with cold piercing eyes like a cobra.” Sure enough, Dave and his mother have a terrible fight, in the course of which she slaps him in the face and digs her nails into the flesh of his arm. Dave retreats to his room, from where he hears his mother pick up the phone and “tell his chick that he couldn’t make it tonight for reasons of behavior.” After brooding for a time, he goes downstairs, plucks up an axe, and tiptoes up behind his mother, who is—“chump, chump went her jaws”—eating an apple. He hacks her head off with a single swipe. Another nice touch: “The head rolled beside the apple core, the eyes shutting immediately.” Then, in what may or may not have been a deliberate nod to Oedipus, Dave sits in his father’s leather chair and calls his girl back to tell her he will pick her up later that night. When she asks him if this is all right with his mother, he replies, “Oh, yes, we’ve buried the hatchet.” Finis.
The thunder had finished its drumrolls. I looked round at the pillars of paper that rose on every side. Was the Buddha smiling at this? And at the way Dave, after hurling rocks onto the freeway, kicks the hindquarters of the neighbor’s dog? I thought of how Bartie would spend hours in the pool, splashing the waterlogged insects onto the flagstones, so that they might dry their wings in the sun. Did St. Francis of Assisi also want to set fire to the family cat? What about Prabhavananda, Bartie’s guru? And those Jains who are loath to take a step, or a breath, lest they destroy an unseen caterpillar or microbes by the million? Did they, too, wish to chop off their mothers’ heads while they, like Eve, chump-chump-chumped on an apple? With a pang I suddenly remembered how Lotte—yes, a cobra on occasion, a serpent, a seductress: how she used to read all of Bartie’s stories. Had she read this one? And mussed his hair, saying, It’s so beautifully written! It’s just a gem!
When I came upstairs, it was no longer raining. I started for the kitchen but stopped at the sound of the front-door chimes. They’re back! I thought, running through the foyer. The chimes sounded again. “Marcia!” I shouted, even as I fumbled with the doorknob, the lock. “I’m coming! I’m here!”
But it wasn’t Marcia, and it wasn’t the boys. Ernie, rumpled as ever, stood in the doorway. He was wringing his hands. “I’m sorry to disturb you. I didn’t know you’d be working. But something has come up.”
I saw that he was glancing at the speckled jeans I’d climbed into bed with, and at the tank top, also bedabbed. “No, no. I tried to start a canvas last night. Come in, you’re getting wet.”
But in truth the late afternoon sun was shining, though raindrops still fell from the tree limbs and off the portico’s edge. Ernie, however, was soaked by his own sweat.
“I won’t come in. It’s just that I thought I’d better tell you the news in person.”
“What news? Has something happened? Is it the boys?”
“First of all, I want to apologize. I made light of the situation. I said it would all blow over. And that’s what I thought. I didn’t think she had the heart for it.”
“Okay, Ernie. I never doubted you are a well-meaning man. What happened?”
“I got a call from a friend. Well, there’s a chain of acquaintance here, which ended up in Judge Mosk’s office. He feels for you. He’s an old friend of the family.”
“Will you get on with it? I want to know if the boys are all right.”
“Yes, yes, as far as I know. The thing is, she’s brought charges. Wait, I’m not sure she has. I think it was Vanessa who called the district attorney. She’s the one who brought Marcia in. Both her eyes were shut, Richard. Her throat was purple. The problem is, this is going to come before Judge Schoenberg’s court.”
“Ronny? I used to play tennis with him, for Christ’s sake.”
“I wouldn’t count on past relationships. We’re in a post-O.J. world here. The whole city is spooked.”
“But if Marcia didn’t bring charges—”
“I don’t think that matters. Right now the issue is, will you be charged with a felony or not.”
“A felony!”
“I think that’s what Judge Mosk is doing. He’s trying to have it reduced to a misdemeanor. The world is upside down, you know. It doesn’t help that you are a famous artist. The press will howl about favoritism. In this case your talent actually hurts.”
“What is the case? What is it I’m supposed to have done?”
“The charge is assault with a deadly weapon.”
“Are you crazy, Glickman? We’re talking about books! The weapon was a book!”
“An atlas, I heard. A heavy one. Look, a shoe can be a deadly weapon. A toaster, I think. People get smothered with pillows.”
I stepped out onto the brickwork of the portico. The great white pillars loomed above, like the phony Greek columns on a courthouse. A bird, I saw, was hopping over the lawn, looking for unlucky worms.
“All right. I get the picture. What is it you want me to do?”
“I think you ought to go in and shave and get into a suit and come downtown with me.”
“What the hell for, Ernie? I’m not going anywhere.”
“The thing is, even if the charge is misdemeanor assault you’re going to have to come to court to be arraigned. If it’s a felony, there’s going to be a bench warrant for your arrest. I made all the calls. I’ve arranged for your surrender.”
“I love that, surrender. What if I don’t? What then?”
“The police will come here and make the arrest.”
The two of us were pacing—too fast for Ernie, who was already wheezing—the length of the covered porch. I stopped, directly beneath the spot where the glass-enclosed lantern hung suspended on its chain. “Ernie, I can’t go. I’ve got to wait this out. The boys are going to need me. Michael tried to call last night. I’ve got to be here for them. Call Jimbo, will you? I’ll call Ronny. We’ve got to get this quashed.”
“Well, I’ve got more news. Not good news. About the boys.”
I whirled on him. “You said they were fine. I asked you and you said they were fine.”
The fat man held up his hands, as if he thought I would hit him. Rivulets of sweat—and this was a cool day in December—ran down his cheeks. “They are fine. Just listen: I got a call. From a Ms. Williams. She was in Arizona—”
“Wait a minute. Sheila Williams? Was that her name? Was the call from Black Mesa?”
“Yes. From Black Mesa.”
“I remember her. She made us jump through hoops when we adopted the boys. She and a Mister Toombs.”
“He got on the phone, too. The two of them. I don’t know how, but they knew all about the assault. They knew Marcia had taken the boys.”
My knees weakened. I caught hold of one of the green shutters to stay upright. It had suddenly dawned on me that Marcia had flown the boys to Flagstaff, or had driven all night to the reservation, and had dumped them there, the way a shopper trades in defective goods. “Ernie, you can tell me. Is that where they are?”
“No. I don’t think so. But it’s clear they are interested in getting them out of your custody.”
“What do you mean, custody? They’re not in my custody. These are my sons. Jesus! Toombs, he and Williams came out here a year after the adoption. We all had a good cry. Do they really want the boys back with their mother? Can she still be alive? She had cirrhosis even then. She was as yellow as a Chinaman. No one knew who the father was. She gave us nine names. Is that what’s going on? Has the father shown up? Someone claiming to be the father? Are we going to have to pay him off the way we did the mother? And we furnished the goddamned dormitory. Twenty-five thousand dollars. What now? What now, Glickman? Do they want us to computerize the whole reservation? This is bullshit! We did everything by the book. The mother had six weeks to change her mind. She didn’t. She gave up her rights. The tribe gave up its rights. There is no further review. Michael and Edward belong to Marcia and me.”
Ernie struggled out of his jacket. His breasts showed through the damp front of his shirt. He crooked an elbow in one hand as he stood there; he used his other hand to prop up his heavy head. “Shoot the messenger if you want to. Nail me to the cross. They read me the documents. The boys are minors. As long as they are, the council has the right to petition any local authority to determine if they are being abused.”
“Better and better! Abuse, now! I’m a pervert! I beat my children with a belt!”
“They don’t claim that. Not physical abuse. They raise the question of whether you are a fit father. Listen, Richard: a lot of it was nonsense—that you are denying Michael and Edward their heritage and telling them stories about witch doctors and, well, leading what they call a bohemian life.”
“What’s that about? Because I’m a painter? The most respectable people I know, the most straight-laced and utterly bourgeois, are painters. Including, alas, myself. My god! They claim, these Indians, that we stereotype them!”
“Look, it’s all a lot of crap. You don’t have to convince me. But a felony charge, battering, an attack—that is a problem for us. Even a misdemeanor won’t help. And—I hesitate to mention this. You are so straight-laced! Well, I shouldn’t joke. They also heard about Madeline.”
“Heard what about Madeline? Heard what?”
“They talk about an adulterous affair. A habitual pattern, over many years. They also mentioned some new pornographic paintings.”
“These are outright lies. They were beautiful paintings. And I haven’t been with Madeline since the day we brought the boys home. I want to scream. I want to tear my hair out. Nothing is true here. Everything is distorted. No. Not what happened with Marcia. I don’t deny that. I feel disgraced by it. Of course it’s a terrible example to the boys. But it never happened before. It will never happen again. Ernie, I’m not going to lose them, am I? Is this really happening? What am I going to do?”
“You’re not coming with me?”
“No, no, I can’t. What if they call again? What if I’m not here? They might lock me up for the night.”
The big man sighed. “Okay. I gave you my best advice. I feel responsible. I mean, about not acting sooner. I’ll do what I can. I still think I can track the boys down.”
“I’m a faithful husband. I love my wife. I’m a good father, Ernie.”
“I know that. You hang on. Stay here. I’m going to try to head off the police. It’s contrary to type, my saying this, cynic that I am, but things have a way of working out.”
He gave a little wave, a flap of an arm, and stepped off the bricks, onto the asphalt of the driveway. I watched him duck, gasping, into the blue sedan he’d left at the curb.
What now? What next? I knew I ought to eat, but the first bite of the sandwich I put together filled me with nausea. I fixed another Scotch and held it in one hand while I put the telephone back in its cradle and lifted it again to check for messages with the other. Nothing. The goddamned French Consul. Lotte, too eager. A handful of friends. I took Ernie’s advice and shaved, missing more spots than I hit. I felt hotter than the water that poured from the tap. The sweat poured from me as it had from the body of my manager. I tried lying down on Norman’s old couch. I must have slept for a time, because when I opened my eyes it was pitch-dark. My skin, my body, were burning. Was I coming down with a fever?
I peeled myself off the leather and changed into a pair of trunks. I thought I would try to cool myself off with a swim. When I got to the back yard a mist was rising into the chill air from the surface of the heated pool. I got in. I did the dead man’s float. William Holden on his back instead of his belly. I stared up: there were the moon and the stars, smeared together like an erased equation on a blackboard. A bird, which should have been sleeping, trilled from the branches of the eucalyptus. Not a bird. The phone.
Edward! Michael!
I splashed to the edge of the pool and hauled myself onto the flagstone. No Isolina. No receiver at the end of a cord. Impossible to run in a pair of rubber thongs; I was trotting headlong, you could say, when on the sixth or seventh ring a deck chair materialized against my shin. I understood then, slapping about wetly like a duck, that the rest of this night was likely to be a comedy.
And why a comedy? Because I knew who was on the line even before I picked up the phone. “Hello, Madeline,” I said.
“How did you know it was me?”
“I’ve heard from everyone else. I figured it was time I heard from you.”
“I’m sorry. Sorry I didn’t call, Richard-boy. I didn’t know what to say. Everything I thought of sounded self-serving. I knew you’d think I was an opportunist. Not that I don’t want you back. There’s no point pretending I don’t. But I know all too well you won’t come.”
“You’re right about that.”
“More’s the pity. I’ll settle for hearing that you’re all right. I’d bet a new car you haven’t eaten a real meal in days. Is it true? Is she gone? Don’t answer! Aren’t we old friends? Why don’t we just have a nice chat, like friends are supposed to. Did you hear I’ve got a new part? A real part? Not television. Not the voice overs. Not that damned UPN. It’s Madame Ranevsky. You know, in Chekhov? The Cherry Orchard? I am amazed at how much this has meant to me. Franklin is mounting it at the Playhouse. We’re going to start rehearsals—oh, listen to me! I haven’t gotten anything. If I get the part, and it’s a big if, then we start rehearsals right after we get back from Paris.”
“Madeline, about Paris. There’s something I have to tell you.”
“Uh-oh. The voice of doom. I’ve been expecting it. Go ahead, tell me. I’ve got a cyanide capsule in my cheek, like Eva Braun.”
“Which makes me Hitler, huh? I wish you’d—”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake! I’m a big girl. I’m sitting quite firmly down. Why don’t you just tell me what happened? Starting at the beginning.”
“What happend was the fools at the airline sent your ticket to the house. Marcia opened the envelope.”
“Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Poor Richard.”
“She thinks it’s a love tryst. That’s her language. She was wild. She was crazy. So was I. I pulled a bookcase down on her. The next morning she was gone.”
“Gone, eh? Really gone? Once upon a time that would have constituted a happy ending.”
“There’s no happy ending. She took the boys with her.”
There was a pause. Then Madeline said, “And she’ll bring back the porpoises if I don’t go to France?”
“Ernie thinks so.”
“And what do you think?”
“I don’t know. Marcia tore up the tickets. Now the tribe is making trouble. About the paintings. About you and me.”
“My nursery, dear delightful room! I used to sleep here when I was little. Those are my lines. Madame Ranevsky’s. And here I am, like a little child. Do you know why I called? The audition is tomorrow morning. Early. Eight. I thought maybe you’d give me a ride.”
“Madeline, you have to admit this isn’t the greatest time.”
“No. Wait. It wasn’t really for the ride. Richard, Richard-boy, I have a problem. All of a sudden I can’t remember my lines. They are in my head and they just fly out. I pick up the text and for a moment I can’t remember which role is mine. Varya, the young one. Ranevskaya, the hag. A half hour ago I had the paperback of the play in my hand and I didn’t know what it was doing in my house. Richard, am I going mad? Is it a breakdown? Did I imagine you said I am not going to Paris? Is that what you said?”
“Okay, listen. I better come over. Jesus, I’m dripping wet from the pool.”
“No, no. Don’t come over. I’m fine. Don’t think I had a stroke. I think it was petit mal, or whatever they call it. A transient episode. Let’s say good night. Let’s be civilized people. You should sit there and sit there and sit there and wait for your wayward wife.”
“Ten minutes, okay? Hold on, sweet. Ten minutes, I’m there.”
I was pulling on my pants before I hung up the phone. I threw on a shirt and stuck my feet, sockless, into a pair of loafers. I ran down to the garage and pulled out the Boxster, the voiture de sport à l’Allemand, as Marcia, always Frenchifying, called it.
I gunned the car onto San Remo and didn’t slow up at the stop sign for Sunset. On the straightaway, with the Riviera Club on the left, I hit eighty-five, then, after the turn onto Amalfi, eighty-five again. I skidded around the downhill turns, tighter than San Francisco’s, that dropped toward the shore. Madeline owned a tiny top-floor flat on Sumac, at the ridge of the canyon. From the windows you could see a chunk of the ocean. I pulled up behind her beat-up Volvo and took all four flights of the outdoor staircase by twos.
Madeline was waiting on her balcony, among the potted trees. “Goodness, what a racket,” she declared.
“You’re the one disturbing the peace,” I answered, between gasps, “dressed like that.”
For all of her age, Madeline had only a few silvery strands in her otherwise jet-black hair. It was loose at the moment, as if for bed, and fell over a salmon-colored sweater. What had startled me was the flimsy piece of purplish lingerie that barely covered the fold at the base of her buttocks. Was she, in fact, about to go to bed? Didn’t think, for all my protestations, that I was coming? Or had she thrown it on for my benefit? The thing was no longer than the skirt on a bathing suit, or the fairy-fluff on a tutu. Brazen was the old-fashioned word that came to mind.
She ignored my remark, pushing her sweater to the elbow and pointing over the ocean to the soft soapstone of the moon. “Look. Aren’t we lucky. It’s full. With a reflection, like in Munch.”
“It’s been hung very nicely. Is that what you asked me here for? Stargazing?”
“I’m surprised you came at all, considering you’ve lost your parabolas. Your parachutists. I know where I stand in that line.”
I seized her wrist, above the silver bracelet I’d bought her two decades before. “I wish you’d drop that gag. After eight years it’s getting stale.”
“Ouch! Let me the hell go!”
“All right. Don’t shout. They can hear you all the way to the Jonathan Club.”
“Do you know what I think, darling? I think we should start over. Hello, Richard. You look thin. You look famished. I’ve opened a bottle of wine. I was right: you haven’t eaten in ages. I’ll make you some chicken. I’ll make you a salad.”
She’d taken up the untucked hem of my shirt. She fumbled with it, tugging a little. Behind her, the door to the flat was open. Now I heard the music, Vivaldi’s oboes, on the loop of her carousel. I smelled the perfume evaporating from the hollow of her clavicle and from behind her elfin ears. She gathered her hair in her free hand and swept it from the curve of her throat. “You set a record,” she said. “You and your Boxster.”
I followed her inside the one large room that made up her flat. The windows on the far side were open over the crest of the ridge; floodlit moths were hurling themselves against the twanging screens or hanging motionless, green wings extended, on the glass. I came to a dead stop in front of her sofa bed. Next to it, two candles burned on the coffee table, flanking two bottles of wine, one not opened, one half empty. The chicken she mentioned, her crummy chicken Marsala, and the salad on salad plates, had been laid out already. What else? In the fireplace, a fire. Of course the music. Of course the Chanel. I had to smother a laugh. It was like amateur theater. The set for a seduction.
“What the hell is this?” I demanded. “Soft lights and music. Perfume and wine. Don’t tell me you threw all this together in ten minutes.”
She sank onto the sofa, feet doubled beneath her, like the old-fashioned White Rock girl. “Well, I was hoping you’d come. Based on my knowledge, I thought you would.”
“There isn’t any audition, is there? You didn’t have a panic attack over your lines. You heard about Marcia. You probably heard about the boys. Start boiling the rice. Jesus Christ, Madeline! Didn’t you think this would be—well, a little transparent?”
“Richard. Darling. Give a girl a break. It’s been eight years.”
“And you trick yourself out like a whore!”
“Who are you to give lectures? Ten minutes? That’s how long it took you to drive here from Riviera. We both know what you came for. You came for a lay. No one drives eighty miles an hour for anything else.”
I considered this. “Maybe I did—”
“Maybe! I heard your tires squealing on Amalfi!”
“Because you scared me. With false pretenses.”
“Are you just going to stand there like a wooden Indian? Come on,” she said, patting the cushion beside her. “Come get a feel of my papillons, my papillas.”
Here Madeline stretched backward so that I could see she wasn’t wearing a bra. The tightened sweater might have been the cape before the bull.
“Can’t you turn off that music?” I strode to the stereo and punched futilely at the buttons. The volume only got louder. I pulled a plug from its socket. The lamp went out. From behind my back I heard her laughter. More comedy. I yanked a wire from the back of the machine. The oboes stopped.
“Next we put out that phony fire.” But when I turned I came face to face with the only painting she kept on her walls, an early study, mostly of her back, in charcoal. Her face was half turned so that you could see the blur of a nose, of an eyebrow, of a myopic eye. Her sharp, jutting pelvis was lost in the drapery of the bedclothes, which rose in a series of little wavelets, like the points of a stiff meringue.
All she said was, “A masterpiece. By a thirteen-year-old child.”
“I think,” I said, “I can remember the day I painted it.”
Sheepishly, then, I went to the sofa and sat beside her. She continued, “I live with it and if I don’t want to break into tears every five minutes I have to avert my eyes.” She picked up my hand. She started to kiss the web of skin between my fingers. She licked at my wrist. She took the whole of my middle finger into her mouth. It gave not pleasure but a pang, the way the lines at her puckered lips revealed her age. She pulled back, wiping a stand of spittle.
“Do you like that?” she asked.
“By analogy, I guess.”
“I adore it. I adore the hand that held the chalk, the pencil, the stick of charcoal; the hand with the brush.”
Here Madeline flung her head over the back of the sofa, so that her hair fell almost to the floor and that same throat, plump, white, and bulging, lay exposed. It was like the gesture, I thought, of one wolf in submission to another. I stared down at her bare foot and ankle, then seized it, where it disappeared under her buttock.
“What are you doing?” But she raised herself, so that her leg came free.
“Not a charcoal,” I answered. I slid my hand to the meat of her calf, then under the bend of her knee. The sole of her foot was against me. I worked my fingers along her inner thigh, up to the hollow at the top. I could see the darkness at her groin. She continued to stare at the ceiling, but took a deep breath and held it. I felt, against my knuckles, the heat that came from her.
“Madeline, sweet. Do you really want this? Shall I go ahead?”
Her other leg spread outward, which made the pale folds of her lingerie fall open. I glimpsed the beginning of the rise of her mound.
Without lowering her head she said, “I have wanted this every day for the last eight years. And more! Since Marcia bought you and you bought your paprikas. Sorry! Sorry, sorry, sorry! Edward. Michael. What happened to Dog-with-Tongue-Out? To Cloud-in-Sky? Oh, God in Heaven! Those round heads! Those black eyes. I am going to hell because of the sin of envy. Oh, and covetousness. And hatred. How I wished they would die!”
“You don’t mean that. You’re more exhausted than I am. Maybe I should put you to bed. You’ve got an audition tomorrow morning. At eight, isn’t that right? You’re going to need your sleep.”
She reached for my trousers; she fumbled at my zippered fly. “Oh, my sins! I’ve always thrown my money away like a lunatic. I married a man who—who—Do you see? I can’t remember! Who made nothing but debts. My husband died of champagne.”
Madeline had worked my pants down. Her hand rested on my crotch. I pushed my own hand through her stubble and cupped it over her. She went on, as if we were discussing the theater in a taxi.
“How can I read those lines? I once saw a woman from the Moscow Arts Theater. A woman directed by Stanislavsky.”
“You’ll perform them as well as she did. Everyone sounds great in Russian.”
“No, no. I know who I am. The range of my talents. Oh, that painting! If I weren’t enjoying sitting here with you, and your hand on me, I’d get up and turn it to the wall. Richard-boy, can’t you see I am in despair? Didn’t I have really beautiful breasts? Can’t we agree on that proposition? Look at this! Oh, dear God, hairs are growing out of them! Like out of an old man’s ear. Fool! I’m a fool! Why did I fall in love with you? Why did you make me? Can’t you just love me back?”
“You know I love you. Even the fucking French can see that. Madeline, you can’t believe our whole lives have been some kind of fling.”
“Do you remember, Richard-boy, the first time I kissed you?”
“Yes. At Halloween. After Bartie attacked the little jockey.”
“And those boys, the Coveneys, all those boys were in the lemon grove. Spying. I felt you. You were hard against me. Just the way you are now.”
Her words, or the memory they evoked, stiffened me. I leaned forward, wanting to kiss the spot on her throat where a vein was throbbing. She started to laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“You!”
She was gazing down at my loins—rather, at the red and white stripes stretched tightly over them.
“I was in the pool. I forgot. I pulled my pants on over my trunks.”
“Ha! Ha! Ha!” She couldn’t take her eyes off the bulge of a halfhearted erection. “It’s like a candy cane! Ha! Ha! A barbershop pole!”
“All right, Madeline.”
“A peppermint stick!”
I crammed my shirt into my waistband and zipped myself up. “I had a feeling this night was going to be a lot of laughs.”
“Oh, forgive me,” she said, with her legs now primly shut. “Don’t be angry, darling.”
“Don’t be angry? You know what this reminds me of? When I came back from Yale delirious with desire and you led me on and said only five more days, four more days, three more days, and then, what the hell happened? You locked yourself in the bathroom.”
“I’ve reproached myself. I’ve cursed myself for that night.”
“Yeah, well now I know what I hated about what you’re wearing. They’re the same damned panties. Lavender!”
“But wasn’t it for the best? What if we’d gone to your bed that night? Everything might have ended.”
“Listen. I’ve got some news for you. It’s what I came to tell you. Marcia didn’t just tear up the tickets. She tore up the paintings. Ripped them through. The whole series. Everything we’ve done over these last few years.”
Madeline’s face went completely white. As though I’d done her portrait in barium sulphate. She rose from the cushion and took one step backward. Leaning sideways, she took another. I didn’t move. A primitive part of my brain had connected the way she looked now—bloodless, lifeless, listing—with what Marcia had done to her image. The voodoo had worked after all.
“Madeline—”
“Don’t talk. All right? Just don’t talk. I feel disconnected. As if you’d pulled the wires out of my life, the way you did to the music. My life! You never understood what a conventional view I had of myself: three papooses, six papooses, a picket fence, apple-fucking-pie. And I tried. Two marriages! Poor Franklin! And dear old Ned. Do you remember him that night? Hiding in the lemons? And believe me there were plenty of your fly-by-night flings. And do you know what I thought? As my consolation? I thought, well, Richard gets everything: a wife that—don’t kid me—you adore. In middle age the miracle of children.”
As she spoke she continued backward, a deliberate step at a time. “But I had something. I was not—not bereft. Oh, Madeline is not going to pass on anything to posterity. No platitudes. No pontoons. And it’s not as if I’m going to be remembered for the soap operas and tearjerkers I’ve been doing for the last forty years. Very well. So be it. This was my solace: I have known a great man. I have been his—Dora? Wait a minute: is that Freud or Picasso? Olga! Jacqueline! Saskia! That was Rembrandt’s wife. Naked in a pool of water. Older, even, fatter even, than me. You never in your whole life painted yourself, darling. I would be your self portrait. My God! What an honor! I felt honored to be in your work. Even if Picasso was a shit, rather like you.”
She took a last step back. She was at the doorway. Her eyes were now nothing but pupil, as if all brain function had stopped. Then she turned, walked onto the balcony, and leaned over the rail. “My life!” she cried.
Was it a cry of longing? Or a line from her play? For a terrible moment I thought she might hurl herself onto the stones of the patio below. I moved onto the balcony. There was, through the windows, more than enough light to see the line of her crack and the maidenhair curling from her linen. I kicked off my shoes. I dropped my pants. I stepped directly behind her and tore off my trunks.
“Oh,” she murmured, as though surprised. “Is it you?”
I bent at the waist, thrusting both hands under her sweater and up the length of her backbone. Then I reached around her ribcage, searching for her swaying breasts. I gathered them. I felt the nipples spring taut, like, in miniature, the tophats of a magician.
“We’ll do them again,” she said. “Every one of them. I’ll lie in the bath for you. I’ll piss in the toilet for you. I’ll hold my legs in the air. Will you make my breasts beautiful? As beautiful as a Russian actress’s?”
I stepped back, hooked a finger into the lavender drawers and drew them down. Her buttocks floated before me. There was the periwinkle of her anus. The rim of it opened and closed, like the folds of cloth that surrounded the shutter of a camera. I thumbed either side and moved the under part of my penis against it.
“No, not there,” she said, hoisting herself, so that the pod of her sex organs, slick already, was exposed. I placed myself inside her.
She said, “At last.”
I moved inches into the canal. With a groan, she thrust back at me. Then we began to slap loudly, repeatedly, against each other. I was leaning forward, braced on her back. Her hair fell down like black laundry. I raised my gaze to the ocean and kept it there. All this while the earth must have been turning. Because the moon, with its silver reflection, had long since gone down.
“Ah, Richard-boy! My only love!”
Which was when I spent myself fruitlessly inside her.
She stood upright. She stepped from the blue blot of her underwear. Then she turned, putting her hands in front of her body, like the knock-kneed September Morn: no, like a Renaissance painting, Masaccio maybe, of Eve after she has discovered evil and good.
I pulled on my pants. I stepped into my shoes. Then I went inside and set to work. I cleared the table. I scraped the uneaten food into the disposal and rinsed the silver. I corked the opened bottle of wine. I turned off the overhead lights.
“Such a busy hausfrau.”
Madeline had lain down on the sofa. She had covered herself with the lime-green coverlet she kept at one end. It was up to her chin.
I moved toward her and squatted next to where, in the light of the candles, she squinted up at me.
“Going home now?” she inquired.
I nodded.
“You aren’t coming back, are you? In the morning?”
“No, dear. I’m not.”
“And France—?”
I didn’t answer.
“I understand. The disgrace of this night is all mine.”
“There’s enough of that,” I answered, “to go around.”
“Do me a favor?”
“If I can.”
“Under the couch. The book. My lines.”
I saw the paperback. I fished it out and let the pages fall open to near the end.
“Oh, my orchard!” I prompted.
She didn’t look at the text when she said, “My sweet, beautiful orchard! My life, my-my—Wait. Don’t tell me. I am going to remember. Yes, I do remember. No wonder I repressed it. How pat. Ha! Ha! Ha! How apropos. My life, my youth, my happiness, goodbye! Goodbye!”
She closed the book.
“Shall I put out the candles?” I asked her.
“Put them out,” she said.
I did.
I wasn’t going back to the Palisades, in spite of what I’d told Madeline. How much time was there to kill? Of course I’d run off without my watch. The clock in the Boxster, which I hadn’t switched from daylight savings, read 6:02. A little past five, then, in the morning. I eased down Channel Road and turned left on the Pacific Coast Highway. I drove south, past the Beach Club and the Jonathan Club, movie people grudgingly allowed. In the dark, amidst the lit-up dials, I remembered a letter Norman had written to the Times. “It is unfair to accuse our fine country clubs of anti-Semitism,” he began. “Why, recently both the Jonathan Club and the California Club have asked me to become a member. The Jonathan Club invited me to join the California Club, and the California Club invited me to join the Jonathan Club.” They didn’t print it.
I drove back and forth along the coast until it was light, and then I drove some more. At midmorning I headed north to Santa Monica Boulevard and took it all the way into Westwood. I parked behind the offices of the French Consulate. The consul, a tall, bald man named Trouvé-Roveto, greeted me at the door and led me down a corridor to a large, oval-shaped room. Curtains covered the windows. A number of screens—computer screens? video?—were built into the wall, which created the impression of a visit to the aquarium. At one spot a number of photographs were hung in a cluster. I recognized one of them.
“That’s Romain Gary, the writer, isn’t it?”
Trouvé-Roveto looked up from where he’d settled himself, one leg over the corner of his desk. “Yes, he was the consul here in the past. You know his work?”
“A friend of my father’s,” I answered. “He used to come to the house for dinner. I do remember him, though I was only a child.”
He looked, in my memory, much as he did in the photo. He would pull letters from his pockets and read them to us, first in French, then English. Norman explained they were from his mother, a Jew trapped in North Africa. Even I could see how he seemed to live for these messages, which came week after week, all through the war. “I’ve never forgotten how he used to read aloud to us from his mother’s letters.”
“Ah, yes,” said the diplomat, across whose hairless head the reflection of the overhead lights glided like streetlamps over the hood of a car. “It is a fantastic story. All the time she was dead, you know. She wrote them before the occupation. A friend mailed them with faithfulness to her son.”
“No. I didn’t know.”
“But it is a fact. He wrote a book about it.” So saying, the consul touched a switch on his desk and the room grew dim. He touched another switch and all six of the screens came on. “Now you will see, my dear Mr. Jacobi, why I have asked you to this room. I do not think I will leave you with disappointment.” He fiddled some more at his desk top; suddenly each of the screens turned blue. I saw that they were filled with my paintings: the water of the pool; the cloudless sky; a dark shadow that was an abstraction of the fig-heavy hedge; the white scribble, like a toothpaste squirt, midway between the trampoline of our awning and the unrippled depths.
“Voila!” said M. Trouvé-Roveto. “This is the installation, just as you will see it in five days. Is it to your liking? One turns, and then turns again, and everywhere the manifestation, en blue, of your talent. Do you not feel at this moment transported to L’Orangerie? Yes! Definitely! One sees the well-known affinity with Monet.”
The man stopped speaking. His jaw, a rare thing in a diplomat, gaped. He could not disguise that he saw that his guest was weeping. I did not try to disguise it myself. My shoulders shook. The tears came out in a flood. I moaned.
Trouvé-Roveto recovered and came to where, in sheer helplessness, I’d dropped to my knees. He bent over me, flourishing a handkerchief. “It is because of the beauty? Tell me: is not that the reason you have been moved?”
The reason? I didn’t know the reason. Was it a deferred reaction to everything that had come before? The suggestion, by unknown lawyers, that I had intended to murder my wife? That other lawyers were busily at work to rob me of my sons? Or was it Madeline, those three gray hairs, the imperfect breasts, the flesh accumulating at her throat? Or maybe it was the paintings, these paintings, their cleanliness and their calm. Or was I weeping for poor Gary, when he found out about his mother? Or because of the foresightedness of the woman herself? It might have been all of these reasons, which, like Atlas, I bore simultaneously on my shoulders. No. To my own amazement, I heard myself tell the Frenchman the actual cause:
“I wish it were that, Monsieur. But it isn’t the beauty of the paintings; it’s that I shall not be able to see them—not in your exhibition. I shall always be grateful to you. And to the government of France. To President Chirac. Forgive me: I cannot attend the premiere.”
The consul drew back. “What? This is impossible. It is too late. Everything has been prepared.”
“I wish I could change things. I can’t.”
“But this is to us an insult. Really, a scandal. Are you ill? Is it grave?”
I handed him back his handkerchief which, as in a folk dance, had dropped to the floor between us. Then I rose and walked through the roomful of paintings. “Yes, that’s right,” I told him. “My illness is grave.”
Nine hours later I was reunited with my sons. What happened was that, after returning from the consulate and sleeping through much of the afternoon, I was awakened by the ringing of the phone. It was Barton. He didn’t give me a chance to say hello.
“Richard. It’s me. You’ve got to come down here now. The situation is serious. It’s giving me a nervous breakdown. You know I have a virus in my stomach. I need peace and quiet. That’s why I have a garden. I like to live with plants. So get out here pronto. They are screaming like banshees! Banshees, brother. They don’t understand I am set in my ways. You know how I am if you use one of my towels. Now the sun is going down! It’s going down! That’s when I start to write. How can I? You tell me that. I’m not like you. You can paint in any circumstances. You don’t have to think. I use words. Words are a superior medium. I’m not like those Frenchmen who write inside cafés. That’s all a big act. You can’t compare their work to mine. Oh! Did you hear that? They’re running up the stairs. My fingers are trembling too much to light a cigarette.”
“Bartie, calm down. Take a breath. Tell me what happened.”
“It’s Marcia. That woman you married. She shouted my name at three in the afternoon. That is like three in the morning for you. She pounded on the door. It woke me up. She pounded and pounded. I thought it was an emergency. I thought it was an earthquake. When I came downstairs she was there with the wild Indians. That’s who they are, brother. You’ll never get that out of them. It’s in the blood.”
“Bartie, wait. Do you mean Marcia was there with the boys?”
“Yes! She couldn’t handle them. She said she was tearing her hair out. I knew she was petit bourgeois. A real Angeleno. That’s why she left them with me. I think she wants to go shopping. To her yoga class. To have somebody do her nails. She doesn’t understand I have an artistic temperament. What about the paper lanterns in my garden? What about the goldfish in my pool? My little plants! It’s an oasis of tranquility.”
“All right. You hold on, okay? They’re not hurt or anything, are they?”
“Who? The boys? They’re fine. But I can see the pink clouds! Pink clouds! I should be starting my next chapter. I can’t—”
I hung up on him. I hadn’t had time to remove my hand from the receiver before it rang again.
“Bartie, I told you I’m on my way.”
“It isn’t Barton. It is your mother. Isn’t it fantastic! Isn’t it exciting! I have been saying prayers every night. I got onto my knees, darling, like a nun! Now my prayers have been answered. Those dear boys are back. You ought to go right away. What if she changes her mind?”
“Mom, I was out the door when you called.”
“Well, don’t let me hold you up. I just wanted to tell you to be nice to your brother. He’s having a little difficulty with the situation. He is such a confirmed bachelor. Do be kind. He’s had a big disappointment with his book. Steven is being such a shit. A simple thing like reading a manuscript and he can’t be bothered.”
“All right! Christ, I’ll be nice.”
“Why are you shouting? I’m not accusing you of anything. A little thoughtfulness never hurt anyone.”
“I didn’t say it did.”
“Good. Now when can I expect you? I’m running out for bagels and cream cheese. I called Timo to bring over some nice rare roast beef from the club. He’ll do it as a special favor. What else do the boys like? Oh, my flan! I’d better get going. Goodness, I don’t know if she left them with so much as a toothbrush.”
“Lotte, what are you thinking? I’m not bringing the twins over there.”
“Of course you are! Where else could you take them?”
“Home. To their rooms. To their friends. To their school.”
“Sometimes, Richard, I think you are stupid. School is over. The Christmas holiday has started. That’s how much you know about raising children. It makes me laugh to think you could take care of them yourself. Do you think Isolina is going to do it? That silly little Mexican—”
“Guatemalan. She loves the boys, it so happens. And she has a child of her own.”
“In a mud shack some place! Do you think I am going to allow my grandchildren to be brought up by a servant?”
“Why not? You let us be. Right? Before Norman died.”
“I never heard of such an accusation.”
“Knock it off. You’re not in your dotage. Who took us to the Carlsbad Caverns? Arthur! Arthur and Mary. And in the Fifties. They were the only black people in the state of New Mexico. And who took us that time to the dude ranch? Arthur! While you were off with Betty in Timbuktu. I shudder now at the humiliation. His humiliation. And who cooked for us and fed us and put us to bed? Mary!”
“Oh, well, nineteen-fifty. That is ancient history. Everybody did things differently then.”
“Oh, my god. You even let that poor man take us to Jack’s-at-the-Beach. And in his uniform!”
“Ingrate! Your father treated you to the Hotel del Coronado. Have you forgotten that? The finest hotel in Southern California. And the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. You were so demanding! You made us stop at that awful Anderson’s soup place. Every Thursday we took you and Barton to the Swiss Chalet. We were a loving family. People smiled in appreciation. You are like a Communist! Rewriting history this way.”
“Let’s not argue, Lotte. I’ve got to go.”
“Listen to me, sweetie. I am sure you and Isolina will do the best you can. But who is going to watch them when you are in Paris? Give me the pleasure. It’s a grandmother’s prerogative.”
“No, no. They’re wild Indians. Real little savages. You’ve got all those figurines from Germany and Czechoslovakia. All the little cups from China. Don’t worry, Marcia will be coming back in a day or two.”
“Never! You can trust my intuition. She ought to be arrested for what she’s done. And if I’m not concerned about my apartment you don’t have to be either. Besides, we’ll be out all day at the club. Be reasonable, Richard. Who else is going to do it? Your poker friends? Your tennis friends? And Madeline will be with you in Paris—”
“Madeline’s not going to Paris.”
“No? Not Madeline? Then who’s going with you? You can’t be thinking of me? Is that it? Have you been planning a surprise? Oh, and I thought I was joking about a trip round the world. Paris would be wonderful! I haven’t been there forever! There is nothing on earth like those flowers in the flower boxes. This makes it almost worth turning ninety. Oh, Richard, I just adore you!”
“Mom, maybe you are in your dotage. Don’t you understand? No one is going to Paris. Not Madeline. Not you. And not me.”
There was a brief pause on the line. I heard her swallow and gulp. “What did you say? It is a terrible connection. It sounded as if you said you weren’t going to your premiere.”
“I’m not. I’ve already told the French Consul. I can’t leave Michael and Edward. They are going to need me. And so does Marcia now. I’ve got to be there for all of them.”
“Richard, don’t do this to me. You might as well stab me with a knife. They need you? She needs you? What about me? At the end of my life? This exhibition is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me. It is more important than Norman’s Oscar! I didn’t even care that Adlai Stevenson was going to invite me to the White House. Ha! Ha! Ha! I was a fool! I had fantasies of being a First Lady. Dolly Madison Jacobi! No, Richard. You are my heart. You are my brain. You are my soul. Go alone if you have to! I’ll still be with you. Don’t rob me of this. I’ve told all my friends!”
“You sound like that Frenchman. Don’t make a scandal. I don’t give a shit. I’m going to pick up my sons.”
“A knife! You are twisting my entrails on a knife! This will kill me.”
“I don’t have time for histrionics, Lotte. Can’t you see it’s the right thing to do?”
“No! It’s self-indulgence! It’s sentimentality! I hate those things. You listen to me. I am going to Bartie’s. I am getting into the car. I’ll take the boys. I’ll show you I can do it. We’ll have a lark together! My house will ring with laughter! Then you will feel free to go.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t drive at night. That Honda is older than you are.”
“Ha! Ha! That’s true, if there were dog years for a car! Oh! I’ve just gotten the perfect idea! You go, sweetheart. You pick up the children. I’ll meet you at San Remo Drive. Isn’t it absurd that I haven’t been back in all these years? You told me you put up that oil portrait over the fireplace. I was so touched to hear that. Yes, it’s just silly not wanting to see all my old things again. If I leave right away maybe I can get there before it gets really dark. I can pack a suitcase. That’s my idea! I will watch them there! So they can be with their friends and climb on the cork tree just like you and Bartie. Two brothers having fun again! Do you know what? I’ll bring my suit! It will be just like the old days, performing my laps up and down my very own pool.”
“You can’t come!” I shouted. I almost added, They smashed your chandelier. “It’s dangerous. It’s already dark. You stay home, all right? We’ll talk it over tomorrow, okay? Bartie’s going crazy right now.”
“No, not if you don’t promise. Promise me! I’ll never ask for anything else. You’ll be in every magazine. You’ll be dining at the Palais Royal. I knew one day you would hang with Leonardo! I’ve known it for years. With Leonardo at the Louvre.”
“Not the Louvre.”
“Be quiet! It’s the same thing!”
“We’ll talk later. I’ll call you when I get home. Okay, Lotte? Let me go.”
To that there was no answer. She had hung up the phone.
Back to the Pacific Coast Highway. Through Santa Monica and Ocean Park. Before Venice Pier I cut over to Speedway and right on 29th Avenue, where I parked the car. Bartie lived in one of the old houses whose windows had untended geraniums drooping from the ledges and shutters either unslatted or askew. The doorbell, I knew, was broken. I edged down the alley to the rear. Ordinarily, he’d be sitting there, puffing his Kools and piling up the pages of his manuscript. This was, as he often explained, the Age of Shudra. All the men and women of our time were living under the veil of Maya. He wasn’t falling for that. In other words, his working day was only beginning, just as all the Angelenos were settling in for an evening of opium in front of their glowing screens.
“Hey, Bartie,” I called, over the pointed staves of the backyard fence. “You there?”
No answer. I moved to the wooden gate, which was askew. I stepped through it into what might have been a botanical garden. The walls were covered with mosses, with grape fern and lady fern, like some vision of the Old South. There was a pepper tree in the center, just like the one we’d had on San Remo, bursting with hard red berries. Bartie had set up three pools, with little bridges and little boats. I glanced down at the gulping carp. Gladiolus, iris, larkspur—I couldn’t remember the names of all the flowers. Snapdragon, I thought. Jack-in-the-pulpit or jack-in-the-box. Naturally, there was an iron Buddha, smiling and serene, his upturned hands on his knees. What the hell? I touched his nose for luck.
My brother was sitting at his round metal table, with a lamp shining over his shoulder. The smoke from his cigarette hung over him like a species of moss.
“There you are! What’s the matter with you? Didn’t you hear me call you?”
He didn’t look up from the pages of his manuscript. His lips moved as he sounded out his words.
“Barton!”
He raised his head at last. “Hey, Bro. I can’t talk to you now. It’s my time to work. I’m like a slave in a galley ship. A prisoner on bread and water. It’s what you have to do for art.”
“I won’t interrupt your writing. I’m just going to collect the boys and we’ll be off.”
“It isn’t writing. It’s rewriting. I have to fix my punctuation. The masses demand that you cross your t’s and dot your i’s. That’s why Spielberg won’t read it. Because of semicolons, Bro! Because of commas! He’s just like all the others. He gives them what they want. Car chases and shoot-’em-ups and hot babes. What else can you expect from a capitalist culture? Jonathan Swift called these people Yahoos. They don’t know anything about refinement. All they do is watch television. They whistle Bing Crosby. It’s the Shudra Age. No one’s going to look at your paintings either. Norman was the artist. He was a sophisticated man. The Lubitsch touch. He must be spinning in his grave.”
“Bartie, I don’t have time for this. Just tell me where the boys are. Are they sleeping upstairs? I don’t hear them.”
“The boys? You mean Michael and Edward? How do I know where they are? They were a distraction. I told them I always begin work at sundown.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know where they are? They were here, weren’t they? You called to say Marcia had left them. Where are they now?”
“I am not a babysitter, my brother. That’s not my style. I don’t have to put up with those irritations. They got in my hair. Up the steps! Down the steps! I told them I must have tranquility. But they threw stones at my Chinese carp.”
I didn’t wait to hear more. I pushed through the back door. “Edward!” I called. “Michael! It’s me! It’s Dad!” There was no one downstairs. I raced up the staircase. Could they be so sound asleep? I burst into Barton’s bedroom. A candle was burning, filling the room with incense. There was no one on the bed. I checked the other rooms, calling as I went. The house was empty. I went back outside.
“Bartie, will you stop writing a minute, please, and pay attention?”
“Don’t tell me to stop writing! Why don’t you give me five hundred dollars? It’s a pittance to you. Then I could hire a student from UCLA. From Pepperdine. They could do this shitwork for me.”
“God damn it, Bartie!” I leaned over the table and swept his stack of manuscript pages off the metal surface, into the air. “Aren’t you ever going to be normal?”
“Why did you do that?” he cried. “You know I have a stomach virus. That’s why I’m not like you.”
“My children are missing! Can’t you grasp that?”
“The children?” Suddenly the red welt on his forehead, the seat of his emotion, ceased throbbing. It went as white as a blister. “I don’t know, Bro. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Bartie doesn’t know. They were here. A little while ago they were here.”
Then I remembered the garden gate. It had always been latched. This time it was open. “Bartie, stay calm. Try to think. Did they go out of the garden? By the garden gate? Did they? Did you see them? Which way did they go?”
He sat in his chair, rocking back and forth. “It’s Bartie’s fault. Crazy Bartie. He lost them. He made them drown-ded. In the ocean. They’re drown-ded, drown-ded.” He rocked to the sound of that word, which he pronounced as he had when a little boy.
“You stay here. Okay? I’m going to look for them. Don’t you move.”
“Bartie’s afraid. He’s afraid of Lotte. What will she say to him? What will she do? Bartie’s bad. He can’t do his commas. Why was this Bartie ever born?”
I started off toward the beach at a trot. By the time I crossed Speedway I was running. A rusted ramp led to the sand; I clanged down it. The beach was deserted. The sun, like a blacksmith’s ingot, was plunging into the bucket of the Pacific. A gull flew seaward, seeming to pull behind it the black curtain of night. Ow-ow-ow, it called. I could see, far out, like a line of chalk, the row of breaking waves. Kelp lay in piles about me, as did heaps of broken shells. There wasn’t, in the damp sand, a single footstep, aside from my own. I ran northward, a hundred yards, a hundred yards more. Impossible, in the sudden gloom, to peer more than a few feet in any direction. And what was I expecting to see? The two of them playing catch? Playing tag? Or wrestling, as they had always wrestled, on the sand instead of the carpets at home?
“Michael!” I called. “Edward!”
My heart was pounding. My skin was covered with sweat, either from my own exertions or the windblown spume of the sea. Was it possible? Could they have wandered into the ocean? There were riptides. There was the chilling cold. What was Bartie’s word? Drown-ded? The pun in it struck me with sudden horror. Was I going to find them lying cold in each other’s arms?
“Michael! Edward! Answer me!”
I turned, heading back the way I had come. I stumbled. I staggered. I fell and got up again. Please, God. Please, God, I kept saying. Suddenly, off to the south, a thousand lights went on: Venice Pier, lit up for Christmas. Is that where they’d gone? Out to the pilings? But these days there was nothing to attract them. They’d long since torn down all the amusements, the Giant Dipper, the Some Kick Coaster, and the Noah’s Ark Funhouse, which had giraffes in the windows and rocked like a boat. There were only fishermen now.
Then, in silhouette, against the twinkling backdrop of light, I saw a dark shape. It was as tall as one of the ark’s giraffes, and just as spindly. I could see the pier, with its illumination, through what might have been the latticework of its bones. But this giraffe was alive; it was moving. Rather, something was moving on it. I heard a smothered cry, a laugh, a shout. I staggered forward. I blinked my eyes clear. What I had seen was a lifeguard stand, abandoned for the winter months. Someone had climbed up its crisscrossed boards and stood teetering at the top.
“Chicken! Chicken!” It was Michael’s voice. “Jump! You’ve got to jump!”
I stood, too choked with tears to form words of my own. I watched as the dark figure, it might have been one of Noah’s little monkeys, launched itself into the air and tumbled to the ground.
A second monkey scampered up the scaffold and took its place on the precipice.
There was a triumphant laugh. Edward cried, “Ha! Ha! Who’s a chicken now?”
“Geronimo!” Michael leaped into the black of the night, landing on all fours.
I watched, as if bound by a spell, as another shape, gorilla-sized, rose up against the lights. The little chimps danced around it. “Your turn! Your turn! You said! You promised!”
“Oh, I’m scared. I’m old. I’ll break my bones.” Thus protesting, the big black figure hauled himself hand over hand to the tower’s top. You could hear his cigarette-wheeze as he stood there panting.
The others taunted him. “Now! Do it! Now! Jump! Jump! Jump!”
Windmilling his arms, legs thrashing, my brother Bartie flung himself outward and, instead of landing safely in water, came crashing onto the ground.
I felt the concussion through the soles of my shoes. “Bartie!” I cried, running forward. “Are you all right?”
“Fa-ther!” cried Edward.
“Fa-ther! Fa-ther!” cried Michael.
The two of them came racing forward. They threw themselves on me.
Barton slowly rose. “Hi, Bro! You see? Bartie lost them. Then Bartie found them. I did it all by myself.”
I dropped to my knees, embracing my children. I could feel them in the dark; they were kissing my hands and kissing them again, as if I were a potentate.
The three of us barely fit into the little Boxster. The boys, instantly asleep, lay tangled in the second seat. I drove slowly along the ocean, past the fat cannon and the cannonballs, under the transplanted palms. I took the twists and turns of Amalfi at a crawl. The arms of the boys were linked, their legs entwined, as they might have been in their poor mother’s womb. After what may have taken half an hour, I turned off Sunset and made my way up the curve of San Remo Drive. As I approached the house I saw, reflected on the opposite stand of cypress, a blinking band of light. I took my foot off the accelerator; we coasted until the police car came into view. It was parked directly in front of 1341. An officer, cap off, was in the passenger seat; another, cap on, stood between the columns of the portico. I downshifted, roaring by the patrol car and fishtailing up the slope of the street. The boys awoke.
“What is it?” asked Michael.
His brother said, “Aren’t we going home?”
I was too busy to answer. I took the corner of Lucca on two wheels and then turned again on Monaco. I didn’t obey the stop signs. Back at Sunset I ignored the prohibition on a left turn and swung back onto the boulevard, heading east.
Edward’s voice was breaking: “Father! You’re scaring me. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong,” I told him, and braked for the Allenford light. But of course something was. The police could only be there to arrest me on a felony, or, worse, to seize the twins. Was everything upside down? Marcia kidnapped the boys and I was the one fleeing into the night. The light turned green. I started up again, this time at a steady forty. The last thing I wanted was to be stopped for speeding, or failing to signal, or changing lanes.
“I wasn’t sleeping,” Michael said. “You went right by the house.”
“Where are you taking us? To Grandma’s?”
Where else could you take them? Those were Lotte’s words. But that was the last place I could go now. If the police weren’t already waiting at the corner of Oakhurst, my mother would soon let them know of her proud possessions. Ernie’s place was only a few blocks away, in Brentwood. Should I drive over there? Or check into a hotel? I could just keep on in a straight line, over the mountains, through the Mohave, and into the reservation lands of Arizona, which is precisely what I had feared Marcia had done. High up on the left, like a sailing ship stranded on a reef, or the earlier Noah’s ark on Ararat, loomed the floodlit walls of the Getty Museum. I cut into the right-hand lane and looped around to the northbound conduit of 405.
“No,” I said, by way of a belated response to my son’s question. “We’re going to Jimbo’s. I left some papers there. Maybe we’ll spend the night. You can play with Hannibal and Caesar. Okay? Do you remember how they used to pull you over the leaves?”
“I remember,” Edward said.
Michael added, “We used to hold on to their tails.”
I stayed on the freeway until Mulholland, then skirted the ridge of the hills until Calneva, where we went into something like free fall until ending up in front of the expanded ranch house on Garvin Drive. The Great Danes started barking before we got out of the car. Jimbo came out in that day’s whiskers and a bathrobe. He plucked up a boy under each arm and ferried them through the gate.
“This is what the animals need for their late night snack.”
The boys let out a squeal as the two dogs reared up, big as horses. They pawed the air like horses too. Then the four of them started a romp in the yard. I went indoors to the den. The walls were covered with my own paintings, and an occasional photograph of James’s parents, my uncle Julie and Frances, the Irish actress he’d married back in the Thirties. The poker table was still set up from the night before, along with the remains of the beer and pretzels and vegetable dip that my cousin had put out for a spread.
“Ingracia’s away?”
“For the week,” Jimbo answered. “She’s with her family in San Salvador.”
“It’s just as well. I’d like to stay a few days, if it’s all right with you.”
He scratched the few tufts of hair left on his head. “Sure. Love to have you. But what’s going on? Isn’t Marcia back? Didn’t she bring the boys? And aren’t you about to leave for Paris? I’m coming myself at the end of January.”
Suddenly the dogs set up a howl. The doorbell rang. Jimbo glanced through the slats on the window. “It’s the police,” he said. “They’re after you, right? You and the boys?”
I nodded.
“Don’t move. They can’t come in. I’ll tell them I haven’t seen you for days.”
“No, no. It won’t work. My car’s out in front. How stupid! And look: the boy’s are peeping over the gate. I’m sorry, Jimbo. I shouldn’t have gotten you involved.”
He strode toward the foyer. “Just stay quiet. Don’t say anything. I doubt they’ve got a warrant.”
The twins came in through the side entrance and tumbled into the room with the Danes. I put my finger to my lips. The boys fell silent. The drooling dogs stood panting. I could hear voices coming from the front of the house: Jimbo, a patrolman, Jimbo again. Then my cousin walked to the door of the den. His face was white.
“It’s Lotte,” he said. “There’s been an accident. They had to cut her out of her car.”
The boys rode with the police. What a thrill for them, I thought, following in the Boxster: the siren, the speed, the whirling lights. We got off the freeway at Wilshire and raced through Westwood. We went even faster through the stretch between the golf course fairways, and only slowed when we approached the intersection of Santa Monica. The sky there was lit, not only by the usual mauves and greens and yellows of the gushing fountain, but by the blinking blues of police cars and the steady beam of a searchlight that a fire truck was directing over the scene. Traffic backed up on both boulevards. A crowd stood on the grass and the cement. A car lay upside down in the basin. The water from the fountain splashed down on its undercarriage. I leaned from my window: the car was a hatchback, the color of the meat of a plum. Lotte’s Honda! She’d lost control heading west on Santa Monica. She’d become airborne after striking the curb. Foolish woman! Silly old chatterer! What if she’d been heading east? What if, according to plan, she’d already picked up the boys? I struck my fist against the seat beside me. I got a last glimpse of the Indian brave, kneeling on his pedestal and still calling upon the Great Father, just as he had done since before Barton and I had been born.
Born, as it happens, at St. Vincent’s. But it was Cedars-Sinai I drove up to now. I collected the boys and took the elevator to intensive care. Marcia was sitting in a chair outside my mother’s door. She rose. We embraced. The twins held back, wide-eyed in the hall.
“How is she?” I asked my wife.
“Go in. You’ll see.”
“Where’s Bartie?”
“He’s here. He was the first to arrive. Try the visitors’ lounge.”
I moved to Lotte’s door and went in. She was asleep, propped up on the bed. The usual tubes and wires ran in and out of her. She wore a clear oxygen mask, beneath which her makeup was smeared. There were no cuts. There were no abrasions. None of her limbs was in a cast. Even her reading glasses sat unbroken on the bedside table. I leaned over her and touched the brittle curls of her hair. Then I walked out and went in search of my brother. He wasn’t in the lounge. He wasn’t in the corridors. But I sniffed him out, standing in a corner of the bathroom, puffing on one of his Kools. He whirled around when I entered.
“They won’t let me smoke!” he exclaimed.
“It’s all right, Bartie. I won’t stop you.”
“This is a terrible situation, Bro. Just terrible. I begged the nurses. I told them about the shock to my nerves. But they are like the Gestapo. It’s cruel and unusual punishment.”
“You go ahead. Smoke all you want to. I’ll stand guard by the door.”
He took a final inhalation and ground the stub out on the side of the sink. “Never mind. I was upset. They exaggerated so much on the phone. I thought it might be fatal. What would Bartie do then? But you saw her, didn’t you, Richard? There’s not a scratch on her. Did you talk to her?”
“No. She was sleeping when I went in.”
“Well, I did. She said she was feeling fine. She asked me to buy her a New Yorker so she’d have something to read. She’s a tough bird. It’s all that swimming. She’s in tip-top condition. Absolutely tip-top.”
“Jesus, she’s lucky. There are no airbags in that car. I’m not even sure the seat belt worked.”
“Don’t blame the Honda. The Honda is a reliable machine. It wasn’t her fault either. She hit a wet spot. We have to get a lawyer. It was the spray from the fountain. I’ve skidded through that lane myself. You’ll sue them, Bro. An accident waiting to happen happened. That’s what I told her. She thought it was witty. But she could have been killed. Thank God she’s going to walk out tomorrow. They’re only keeping her overnight for observation.”
A man, strawhatted, as if for summer, came into the men’s room. We went out and returned to the ward. Lotte was awake. The children were there, one on each side of the bed, holding her hands. “Oh, here you are,” said Lotte. “I’ve had a little detour.”
“Lean back, Miss Lotte,” said the orderly, a plump young man in a green gown. “I got to put in your drops.”
“This is Enrique,” said Lotte, thrusting her head back, so that the drops would fall into her eyes. “He takes good care of me. Isn’t that right, Ricky darling?” She blinked her wet lashes at him, dropping Edward’s hand in order to grip the bare brown skin of the orderly’s arm.
“That’s right, Miss Lotte. Enrique going to treat you good. You already my favorite pinup girl.”
“There!” said my mother. “It is amazing how everybody loves me.”
“We love you too,” said Michael.
“Oh, I know you do. We’re going to have such a good time together. Richard will tell you. I was on my way to take care of you. Isn’t it silly what Grandma did? I was driving along thinking of how I was going to sleep in my old bedroom and how I was going to play the Schubert sonata on my old piano, I could practically hear the chords, and the next thing I knew I woke up with these tubes in my arm.”
“You hit a wet spot,” said Barton. “We’re going to sue the city of Beverly Hills through the nose.”
“Is that what happened?” she said, a little dreamily. “Aren’t you smart for figuring that out.”
“It’s an opportunity for us. We’ll live in the lap of luxury.”
“Yes, just like the old days, with our lovely servants and the Japanese gardeners and the pansy beds. Tomorrow you and Richard can drive me over to San Remo. Did they bring my suitcase? My suit’s in there somewhere. So I can do laps. Guess what, boys? Do you know what I’m going to make you for dessert? That’s right! Flan!”
She broke into a brilliant smile, which gave me a start. What I had taken to be a smudge of lipstick looked more like a smear of blood. “What’s that?” I asked her. “On your teeth?”
“Oh, it’s such a bother. Look, I have a tissue to blot it.” She raised a reddened kleenex and dabbed at her mouth. Internal injuries, I thought with alarm. She must have read my expression, because she gave a little laugh. “Oh, Richard, you are such a worrywart. I had a tube down my throat. You know, a ventilator. It scratched me, that’s all. Did you really think I was going to provide you with another excuse not to go to France?”
The door behind me opened. A nurse asked, “Which one is Mr. Jacobi? The son?”
“I am,” I said, then caught myself. I motioned toward my brother. “We both are.”
“The doctor would like to see you a moment.”
Bartie said, “I know what this is. They want to get paid. That’s the capitalist system. If you can’t pay then you’re refuse. They throw you on the garbage heap. You go, Richard. You’re the one with the credit cards.”
The nurse held the door. “I think Doctor Weiner would like to see you both.”
Barton and I followed her out into the crowded reception area. A middle-aged man, younger than either of us, was waiting with an elbow on the counter. He had thick spectacles and damp, close-cut hair that looked as if it had just come out of the shower. He introduced himself: Doctor Weiner, indeed. Then he said, “We’ve just gotten your mother’s echocardiogram.”
I glanced quickly around the bustling room. The large sign of the coronary unit had been staring me in the face all along. “Echocardiogram? Was that necessary? Why is she in the coronary unit? She’s been in an automobile accident.”
The doctor looked from me to Barton, one of whose eyes was growing wide with surprise, while the other was drawing shut. “Gentlemen, has no one explained this to you? Your mother has had a heart attack. Whether it occurred before the crash or after it I can’t say.”
Just like Norman, I thought. The same accident. The same uncertainty.
Bartie was stammering. “No, no, no. That’s wrong. She hit a wet spot.”
I said, “I don’t understand this either. She’s never had the slightest problem with her heart. She stopped smoking thirty years ago. She swims a mile three times a week. She’s done that for as long as I can remember. She eats a can of tuna fish for lunch every damn day.”
Bartie: “Oh, well, lots of people have heart attacks. She’s fine now, isn’t she? What I call her is a tough old bird. She rolled over completely and you can see she didn’t get a scratch.”
“The fact is, it was a massive attack.”
“You don’t know her the way I do. She’s an Angeleno. A sun worshiper. These people, they go on forever. A hundred is nothing to them. They’re the status quo.”
“Bartie, be quiet. Let the doctor finish.”
“If you like, I’ll call up the pictures. But look, I can show you on a piece of paper.”
Weiner pulled out a ballpoint pen and clicked it. He leaned over the counter and in one quick motion I couldn’t help but admire drew with an unbroken line the four chambers of the heart. “The difficulty,” he said, “is here.” He made a crosshatching motion over the line that separated the left and right ventricles. “I’m afraid she’s torn a hole in the wall here. The blood ought to be received here and sent out here, through the aorta, and some of it is. But too much of it is just sloshing back and forth through the whole in the septum. Unhappily, it’s pooling.”
“Can you repair the hole?” I asked. “Can she go into surgery?”
“Certainly we can try heroic measures. But it would create a good deal of pain and distress and give her only another day or two of life.”
At those words I felt my own blood drain, as if through an excavation, from my heart. I could feel it throbbing in my legs and my feet. I managed to say, “You are telling us she is dying.”
“I am very sorry,” he answered.
“How long has she?”
“She’ll go before morning. A few more hours at best.”
I thought I heard the doctor’s voice catch in his throat. Good for him, was my crazy thought. He reached out and squeezed my arm. When he reached for my brother, Bartie jumped back and uttered a loud, echoing laugh.
“Ha! Ha! Ha!”
Then he said, so that everyone in the room could hear, “Well, if there’s no life there’s no death!”
I was able to catch a brief glimpse of the tears spurting from his one open eye before he whirled about and dashed into the corridor.
I returned to the room where Lotte was once again sleeping. The boys and Marcia looked up. I shook my head. Michael, at that, began to whimper. The door opened; Jimbo, in slacks and a shirt now, walked in. He was followed, strangely enough, by Gloria, my mother’s hairdresser. She dropped to her knees by the bed. “Oh, the nice funny woman make me laugh!”
It may have been these words that awakened Lotte. She turned her eyes on my cousin. “Oh, Jimbo. Poor Jimbo. Can’t you ever win a match from Richard? Richard, there you are. Can’t you be a gentleman and let Jimbo win?”
“I try, Mom. It isn’t so easy.”
“Try harder.”
“Okay, I’ll play left-handed.”
But she had lost interest in the topic. “Is it Tuesday already? I didn’t know that. Gloria, are you here to do my hair? It’s your last chance, you know.”
“I know, Miss Lotte.”
“That’s right. I’m moving back to San Remo Drive. It’s much too long a trip for you.”
There was a brief pause. The machines beeped and gurgled. On the screens little balls, like tennis balls, leaped the series of nets in their path.
“Goodness! Why are you all standing around with such faces? I’m not going to die or anything!”
Marcia said, “Of course you’re not. You just need some sleep. We’ll go out. Is there anything you need? What can I get you?”
“I asked Barton ages ago to buy me a New Yorker. I was just starting the ‘Talk of the Town.’ You know my mistake? I didn’t give him any money. He is a sweet child, my Bartie, but he certainly knows how to squeeze a penny!”
“I’ll bring back the latest issue.” Marcia herded the boys to the door. Jimbo held it for her and went out after the others.
Lotte didn’t seem to realize they had gone. “On second thought, never mind. I have so much work to do. That Plato Society! They’re like slave drivers! I worked so hard on Suleiman the First. I think I fell in love in a manner of speaking with that man. All his good works. Now what do you think they’ve assigned me? At my age? The Great Wall of China!”
“Are you tired, Mom? Would you like to sleep for a bit?”
“Of course I’m tired. That doesn’t mean anything. It’s the middle of the night.”
Gloria reached upward to rearrange the dyed strands of my mother’s hair. “You going to see. I take the bus if I have to. Going to see you every Tuesday.”
“Thank you, Gloria. You are a good friend. That will do for now.”
The hairdresser rose from her knees and left me alone in the room. Lotte’s eyes had closed. There were spaces between every breath. Suddenly she looked directly at me.
“Oh, Richard! What a thing this is!”
“It’s all right, Mom. It’s just a bump in the road.”
“Nothing is in order. Ernie will have a fit. You never stopped telling me to lock up Norman’s Oscar. Or bring it to your house. Someone was always going to steal it. The caterers. Gloria!All those girls who cleaned my flat. Why didn’t you want to give me that pleasure? I’d have had no pleasure if I locked it up in a vault. You think you’re so smart. But you’re not so smart. No one would touch it. It’s only worth four-hundred and sixty dollars. It’s just a lump of metal. But I got to enjoy the sight of it every day.”
“I’m glad, Mom. I was wrong. I’m glad you had the pleasure.” I went to the side of the bed and dropped down where Gloria had been kneeling. I took a hand, and almost gasped at how cold it had become. She put another icy hand on top of mine.
“You have to take care of Bartie, you know.”
“I know.”
“I just hate that Steven Spielberg! Couldn’t he have looked at a page or two? You’d think he’d do it for Norman’s memory. And then just send an encouraging note.”
“Don’t worry. Don’t worry. I’m going to be a better brother. I’m going to be a better person too.”
“As if that were possible! Don’t you understand anything? I love the person you are.”
“Well, I let you down about France.”
“Don’t be silly! We have an arrangement. I’m going to watch the boys. You know I must be losing my mind. I could swear I saw Marcia here. She’s the one who’s not such a good person, darling. I’ll tell you a secret.”
But she didn’t tell it. Her voice trailed away. I looked at the green screens, like grass courts, where the game was still going on. I tried to make sense of the numbers that measured the oxygen in her blood. Pooling, that was the doctor’s word.
Lotte spoke again: “My shameful secret is that I wish she would go back to that awful man in San Francisco. Oh, darling, then I’d have you all to myself.”
She gave a small cough. With her right hand she pulled at the edge of her hospital gown, so that the white flesh of a breast was exposed. I turned my head away. I heard her say, “There’s no one else.”
I turned back and leaned over her. I saw that her face, in relaxing, was transformed. It was growing younger before my eyes, as in a film that was running backwards. Oh, to be eighty again! But she was sixty; she was forty; she was the girl who had stepped off the Super Chief at Union Station. I said, “What, Mom? No one else for what?”
A pause. “No one else to watch them. Those dear boys. While you are having your triumph in France.”
“That’s right, Mom. You’ll have to watch them.”
A longer pause. A gasp. Then she said, “What fun.”
I put my ear to her lips. She did not say anything more. The door opened. My family came in. Gloria followed. Then Doctor Weiner. We stood on the three sides of the bed, while she snatched at the air a moment longer, and then to her own surprise I think was gone. The doctor confirmed this. And when he had done so I kissed my mother on the mouth.
Lotte was right: nothing was in order and Ernie did have a fit. “Jesus Christ, she always said she had a plot at Hillside, a plot next to Normans. But there’s nothing. I checked and double-checked. You can buy a plot now out in Siberia or have her cremated and put in with her husband. His grave is much too old to bury her whole. They’re afraid it will collapse on the diggers.”
That is why, at the ceremony, she ended up in a little bronze box that could not have held her shoes. The elderly ladies and gentlemen from the Plato Society were there, and her men-friends from the club—Judge Mosk; Mel, the doctor; Masmanian, the psychoanalyst—and all the girls from bridge. Her sister’s daughter had flown in with her husband, and there were a few cousins I’d not met before. My own friends—the Pumpkin, the Penguin, the Cow, and the rest—sat in chairs before the pile of fresh dark earth that had been turned out of Norman’s grave. My family was in the front row—the boys in matching blue suits, Marcia in a veil, and her sister in a little jacket and skirt like a stewardess. Ah, there was M. Trouvé-Roveto, dressed entirely in black. There was Madeline. And Ernie Glickman, trying to button the jacket of his suit. Barton stood, putting an unlit cigarette in his mouth, throwing it down, and then replacing it with another. When he finally had to bend down to start again on the discards, I was startled to see that his hair was combed all around a bald spot, like the tonsure of a monk.
When the rabbi cut our black ribbons I asked if I might speak and got up to face the crowd. At the fringes, sitting on a little fold-up chair, was an elderly black gentleman. The cap on his knees gave him away: Arthur! Our butler, our chauffeur, our fisherman friend. I saw Gloria. I saw the woman who did her nails. Timo, the little Filipino, stood at the back, his hands behind him, repeatedly rising on his toes. I hadn’t the least idea of what I wanted to say. The day was a warm one for the weary end of the year. But the clouds overhead were tumbling and fresh, like clothes in a washer.
“I am trying to think of my first memory. Please give me a minute.” My mind went back to the day that René had taken me out in a rowboat. How sure I had been that he wanted to kill me! For an instant I had believed in telepathy. But over time I came to realize that I had projected my own murderous impulses onto the so-called Frenchman. You think you’re so smart.
“My first memory is of a rowboat,” I told the mourners. And so it was. I was, I think, little more than one year old. My mother and I were in a lake. I think it was at MacArthur Park. I think it was a Sunday. My evidence for that was the colored funny papers that the man in the boat held before his lips, like a guide using a megaphone. Was that Norman? Fooling around to divert us? Or was it some stranger? Were there even multicolored comics in 1939? In all likelihood Lotte was pregnant; thus it is not beyond all possibility that I could feel my brother moving as she pressed me against her. Nothing was certain, save for the green grass, the blue sky, the white clouds, and the undeniable fact that my mother was holding me in her arms; and what I told her friends was that for the whole course of my life she had held me, and was doing so still.
I finished. We lined up to throw dirt into the grave. Marcia, I saw, had smuggled in a lozenge from the chandelier and used it instead of a stone. My boys came next, Edward and Michael, and then Jimbo and his sister, Liz, who was followed by the relatives on Lotte’s side of the family. I looked for Bartie, but he was leaning against a tree, this time with a lit cigarette. Then I noticed a small group standing off to one side. At first I did not recognize them. I looked again. These were Normans friends from the old days, the actors and actresses, the writers and directors, who had so dazzled me with their wit and beauty and bright spirits when I had been a boy in knee pants. Elizabeth Taylor, Tony Curtis, Lauren Bacall. And there our neighbor, Gregory Peck. They trembled now, they swayed, and clutched each other, as if to hold themselves up. They seemed to know they were standing on the edge of a cliff, at the palisade that marked the continent’s end, and that the wind that was blowing about them would seize each and all and like pumice-stone dolls hurl them down. It was only then that with a shock I understood I too had grown old.
We took up our lives on San Remo Drive, Marcia and I and the boys. The school year resumed. I try, at night, in the stray beams of the street-lamp, to rediscover the pleasures of married life. I went to France not at the start but at the end of the exhibition. I did not see the ambassador. I did not see M. Chirac, though I received a note of condolence upon the death of my esteemed mother. The room that had been meant for Madeline’s portraits was left empty. I saw the crowds hurry through. But I was pleased to see how they lingered in the room that had been covered with my paintings in blue. Yes, they were like the waterlilies at L’Orangerie. I watched as the visitors stood before the zigzag puzzle in each of those works, a worm in white that meant something to me but was as mysterious to them as an ideograph in Japanese.
In the spring Barton got his letter from Spielberg—or at any rate a letter on genuine DreamWorks stationery. The check for the option on A Girl of the Streets was genuine too. Bartie worried that they were going to sign Julia Roberts or Gwyneth Paltrow for the lead part. “That’s the star system, Bro. This company thinks they’re artistic, but they’re no different than the others. All they want to do is rake in the bucks. These actresses are superannuated. They need a fresh face. A young girl. Someone with charm.”
He said this in high summer, while sunning himself on our deck furniture. The sweat poured off the flesh of his belly, his breasts. He was grinning over the top of his gin and tonic. “You’ve always lived off the fat of the land, Bro. Now it’s time for me to start living the life of Riley too.” I’d never seen him so happy, at least not since I’d tied the green-backed mackerel to the end of his line. I hope that, in this second act of subterfuge, I have kept my promise to be a better brother.
“It won’t be long now, Bro, before I leave for the real Riviera. Not that I have to. Hell, those starlets are going to be lining up to get into bed with Bartie. Bartie, the artistic consultant. You read Spielberg’s letter. It said I was a brilliant writer. That’s what impresses these blondes, like Arthur Miller with Marilyn Monroe. But I can’t stand this city! These Angelenos! I can’t sleep—not in the day, not in the night. I wake up and I know she’s in the room. I swear I’m going to have a heart attack myself. It’s her restless spirit. She’s not at peace. She’s jealous, that’s the reason; she knows that my ship has come in. She always wanted to take care of me. She doesn’t want to share me. Watch out, Bro. You have to settle your accounts. If you don’t have good karma you are going to wander like a ghost too. Poor Lotte. It must be hard for her. Those chicks will be all over me now.”
There was a shout. Then a scream. The canvas awning, with its red and green stripes, writhed like a thing alive. But it was only Michael, only Edward. I could see the canvas bulge downward with each of their steps and then spring back into shape, launching them first into the air like playful sparrows and then into the waiting water of the pool.