by Bruce Wagner
“Where’s Candelaria?” asked the boy offhandedly.
“I sent the servants home,” answered Ralph, deliberately camp. “Mirdling’s Name Theorem: the small, strange thing that perceptually sets you apart. There’s something so rune-like about Rafe, so rarefied. When you take that rune-like, rarefied thing and make silk from the sow’s ear, ‘Ralph’—”
“You know what? You’re getting to be like the nutty professor. And who’s ‘Mirdling’?”
“My last name.”
“You should change it. Where’s Mom?”
“Getting ready. Your cousins are here, you know.”
“What’s with the tux?”
“Black-tie gala for ten thousand, to honor … Ron Bass.”
“What is your problem with Ron Bass?”
“I don’t have a problem.”
“You’re always going off—”
“Going off?”
“He doesn’t even fit your theorem.”
“Oh yes he does. There’s ‘Bass’—you read it much more than you hear it. An inner voice forever asks: fish or tone? Add the confounding banality of Ron to the oscillating fish-music of Bass and you’ve got a cognitive dissonance—”
“I still don’t know why you’re so freaked.”
The Beau Brummell squealed, kicking up his python boots in a retarded jig. “Did you know Ron Bass’s first nine films took in a billion dollars worldwide? Or that he gets up at three forty-five in the morning to write, seven days a week? That’s why his company is called Predawn Productions. And I’ll tell you something else: Ron Bass skips breakfast because digesting food makes him logy. Ron Bass doesn’t use a computer—huh-uh. He writes on yellow loose-leaf with number-two Sundance pencils made by Blackfeet Indians. Ron Bass, as you probably know, is a legendary mentor, with an inner circle of story-structuring Pradacunts who paste and fax and generally work those three acts like crack whores on a cock. ‘I’m not comparing myself to Mozart,’ said Ron Bass in a recent interview with the L.A. Times, ‘but is the Jupiter Symphony any less magnificent because he worked so much and so fast?’ Do you want to know what Ron Bass does on weekends? I’ll tell you what he does on weekends: he writes! And then he takes his German shepherd to the farmers’ market in Santa Monica on Pico and buys hummus. (Gerry the German shepherd—could have used some help writing that name!) Ron Bass likes to go to movies on the weekend; he’ll see three in a day. He likes to see movies with the public. ‘You really know how good it is,’ sayeth Ron Bass, ‘when you’re in the dark surrounded by strangers.’ On Friday or Saturday nights, Ron Bass likes to have French-onion soup at 5 Dudley or branzino and green lasagna at Vicenti. Ron Bass likes to drive down to Orange County to see opera for a Sunday matinée—”
“Jesus, you’re obsessed! It’s just Ron Bass! He’s not even Robert Towne.”
“Did you say … Robert Chinatowne?” He spun around impishly, in fresh rodomontade. “Did you hear Chinatowne on KCRW, discussing ‘the sound of the shammy’? Polanski understood the importance of ‘the sound of the shammy,’ he said. Oh, how lucky for us all! Oh, 1974, if we could just go back! Do you know—are you aware—of what the Council of Elders—the professors of screenwriting—call that script? ‘The grail.’ Literally. They’re just like Trekkies—with their Grand Wailea Maui Waui seminars and Callie Khouri–Nora Ephron champagne brunches, laughing and clinking glasses while hooking you for thousands. And don’t think Mr. Chinatowne isn’t rewarded monetarily each time some weekend warrior writes a check—oh, the Council makes sure they all get their fat number-two Sundance-pencil’d checks!—don’t think he isn’t cut in by the pantheon—the story-structure gurus—groupies still coming in their pants over Sleepless in Seattle—”
“You’re getting crazy.”
The soberest of smiles quickly normalized him. “Tull, you can’t think I’m serious.”
“Well, you seem awfully serious.”
A thoughtful intake of air, reminiscent of a politician reflecting on a benign opposing view. Then: “Tull, when can we meet—to discuss? There’s trouble around page 50—no, 63, 64—that I can’t put my finger on. Maybe up through 80 or 81—at least toward the end of the second act. You know: the limo driver’s ‘false crisis.’ It’s affecting the whole tone—”
“Maybe Saturday.”
He had surreptitiously skimmed Ralph’s latest draft of How to Marry a Billionaire, the po-mo screwball Notting Hill clone, and erred by making a few casual, goading observations—concise and lucid enough to convince the absurd, desperate writer that the boy was a savant.
When Ralph further pressed, Tull took the stairs, shouting, “On the weekend!”
The hallway was dark; the cracks around her bedroom door blazed. It was actually a child’s room of epic proportions—she’d grown up there—the only place his mother ever stayed while alighting from the colorful, ragtag rest-stops she sardonically called the Fourth World. Her son knew by name the drabber exotica of those faraway countries—Connecticut and Minnesota included—a landscape of famous rehabs and less famous halfway houses.
“Mother?”
Tull knew she couldn’t hear; he edged the door open and crept into a shambles of incense, perfume, cigarette smoke and discarded clothes. He made a beeline to her blasting Bose, still in its stylishly beat-up gray-cloth portable battery pack, and lowered the volume.
“Baby?” she called from the toilet.
“It’s me.”
Tull scrunched his face, ticcing it this way and that with the excitement and distress of being near her.
“Oh, baby. Would you turn the music back up?” He didn’t budge, struck dumb by the sheer smell of her. “Did you know you’re going to see Grandma after dinner? At Cedars.”
Trinnie swept into the room in trademark strands of Tahitian black pearls—otherwise nude as a peach—and gave a goony flasher’s grin. He looked away, frowning with the effort not to ogle. From the corner of his eye, he watched this creamy, high-voltage half-moon as it fished through mounds of couture—hand-painted satin-lined toile, copper-wire camisoles and furry capes, beaks of Blahniks peeking out from under like a dominatrix’s smothered chicks.
“What’s she in the hospital for?”
“Angioplasty. Catheter in the heart. Used to be a big deal, now it’s outpatient. But Bluey—dear Grandma Bluey has to have the celebrity suite at Cedars. She is obsessed.”
Usually she wore vintage suits, dark flues that ended in a glorious ignition of orange hair, even while working on her knees in clients’ gardens—but tonight she would sport a pale gray silk-faille jacket, Galliano for Dior, topped with a Steven Jones feathered hat that might have been the fanciful lid of a great and cordial eagle’s teapot. She was nearly forty, with her son’s cool Celtic skin and emerald-green eyes, the see-through lids subtly dilating just before she laughed, which was often. Trinnie tantalized. She was a stormy, beautiful, damaged thing and she was irresistibly his mother. Details of the ancient hurt—the death of his father—went assiduously unspoken, for all practicality expunged from the Histories. Tull was certain Grandpa Lou was part of the puzzle—he could tell by the way the old man watched her, the keen vigilance of his face reflecting back his daughter’s emotions. There was something inextricable about them. It was clear she was the only human being his grandfather had ever loved; nothing incesty about it, Tull knew that in his bones—only that rarest of rare things, an unconditional affection for her mind, her body, her blithe broken spirit.
“Lucy and Edward are here,” she said, while excavating a stiletto.
“Where are you going with Ralph?”
He acidly mispronounced the name, but she couldn’t have cared less. He loved her a little more for it.
“They’re raising money for CAT scans—for animals, can you believe? You know: when Kitty gets that titty lump or Fido has lymphoma. They care more about fucking animals than they do about people. I’ll give them animal,” she said, twirling around. “How’s this?”
He fin
ally turned—there the hell-raiser stood, tall and fabulous, arms righteously crossed beneath princessy sneer—Russian sable open just enough for a redundant, fiery wink of bush.
As he ran to his cousins, the child (for he was still a child) was ecstatically certain he could devise a way to keep her home forever. Yet each time he warmed himself to the thought, like a moth drawn to spectral mother’s flame, he was singed awake by the knowledge that there were no strategies to deploy—all was doomed. Like his grandfather, he was helpless and unmoored before her.
Lucy called out as she leapt from the shadowy pergola and dashed to the maze, Pullman barking furiously from within. Tull strode to the topiary sundial, where, on a granite bench at ten o’clock, sitting Buddha-like in his titanium body brace, was the most mysterious, most admirable, bravest, brilliantest creature he knew he would ever meet: his ten-year-old cousin Edward.
CHAPTER 4
The Labyrinth
He wore a sort of embroidered pillowcase on his head, as if hiding a cockeyed bolster, its open edge ending beneath the nose so that only his lips, with their funky mob of yellowish teeth, were revealed. The jaw jutted like a thirties movie tough’s—too much bone. A slick bar of light metal rose from his collar, and the chin, with a scintilla of scar where a nurse had once dropped him, sat stalwart in its rubber rest (the neck alone would not have supported the outsize skull). Cutout holes for the eyes, lined in silk or leather, varied in shape and size. Edward designed each hood himself and was much praised for his efforts.
It excited Tull to see him. As usual, he was eager to gauge his cousin’s mood.
“What’s happening?”
Edward shrugged, pursing his mouth à la Early Cher.
“He’s upset with Trinnie,” said Lucy with the smugness of an off-duty medium.
The self-described bespectacled “girl detective” had the lambent cheeks of Aunt Trinnie, who, incidentally, had long ago taught her how to weave her hair into mandala-like plaits. Almost thirteen now, she had never trimmed a lock; today, braids dangled down to non-hips.
“I’m upset with your mother,” Edward said.
“You are? I mean, really?”
The gangster-cousin mouth roiled and twisted.
“She didn’t do it for spite, Edward,” said his sister. “Anyhow, the world doesn’t revolve around you—it revolves around me! Didn’t you get the memo?” Lucy tittered as her brother coughed up a snigger. Tull smiled; if Edward was sniggering, things couldn’t be so bad.
“Well, what did she do?” asked Tull.
“It’s the maze,” said Lucy.
“What about it?”
“He’s just amazed with it!”
Edward folded his arms outside the thin bar of the brace and glared. “It isn’t a maze, it’s a labyrinth. There’s a difference.”
“Ah! So solly.”
“A maze has tricks and dead ends. A true labyrinth’s only dead end is the center.”
Pullman shot from the hedge and lay down at the sundial, where he stretched and shivered. Lucy took a seat in Edward’s custom golf cart; with fringed canopy and fat white tires, it looked a little like a time machine—half-buggy, half-lunar mod. She put her hands on the wheel.
“You’re mad at my mom for designing it?” offered Tull, by way of opening a dialogue.
“That’s right.”
“But it was Grandpa’s idea.”
Lucy drove the quiet car in an arc around the earthen clock’s edge, the dial itself being a tall bush sculpted in the form of an enormous harp.
“Come on, Tull, don’t be naïve. She knows how much time I spend at Saint-Cloud. And we know what the labyrinth held, don’t we?”
“The minotaur,” said Lucy, cool as a cucumber.
Tull let this sink in. “I don’t see the connection.”
“Then let me clarify: I am the minotaur. The monster, OK?”
Lucy flinched. “Oh, Edward, give it up!”
“You know what they call me at school. Dilbert—and Cat-in-the-Hat. And don’t forget their favorite: Headward the First. Which at least has wit.”
“My mother would never make fun of you, and you know it.”
“I even played the minotaur at school, remember? Trinnie even filmed it.”
“You wanted to play it,” said Tull.
“I didn’t do it for them. They’re retarded. Afterward, they came up—the worst Headward offenders—and said, ‘That was so cool!’ All of them talk like kids in bad teen movies. But why begrudge them their little heartfelt charitable moment?”
Lucy laughed, loving his rancor; his impersonations were always dead-on toxic.
“Anyhow, your mother—her little verdant puzzle has me feeling … sorely mocked.” He set his arms in a favorite Jack Benny pose, and at last, Tull knew he was being had.
Without fanfare then, let it be said: it was the presumption of medical experts that Edward Aurelius Trotter would not exceed the age of five (he and Pullman bore that in common, Danes being notorious for their short life-span)—and that the boy had already lived twice that long had dumbfounded the very same, who had expected him to at least have the courtesy and forbearance to remain under house or hospital arrest. But the victim of Apert Syndrome refused to play the invalid game.
It is not for us to present a study of what M. Apert in 1906 identified as acrocephalosyndactyly here; neither shall we delve into the flattened occiput, bregmatic bump, mandibular prognathism, high arched palate or anti-Mongoloid palpebral fissures incurred by those unfortunate genetic heirs. Suffice that Edward’s feet and gloved hands, though eminently usable, were webbed, and his skull had what the technical books called a turret or tower-shaped effect, cracked as surely as Carcassone’s La Colonne. To add—or detract—from his misfortunes, he handily shared an artistic streak with Aunt Trinnie that showed itself in the swankly poetic hand-sewn hoods (naturally, she had tutored him in the art) that on occasion sported papier-mâché prosthetics: a beak, an ear or some such excrescence. To his credit, Tull reveled in his mother’s attentions toward his cousin, for he knew Edward took her absences nearly as hard as he.
And how was the precocious cousin treated at school? As noted, he was first tormented by “Gimme head, Headward!” and its varied variations—then Special Ed, Dilbert, Cat-in-the-Hat and, finally, Casper (the boy, when stung, could be less than friendly and more than trenchant). Only once, around a month or so after he’d begun to wear the self-stitched hoods, had a bored and motley crew unveiled him; ever stalwart, Edward replaced the hood and claimed not to be bothered. His stoicism, and the fact that he never reported the crime, duly impressed—from then on he was watched over and given tender respects and, because of his vast intellect and sagacity, consulted and revered.
“Edward,” said Tull with a frisson of relief. “There’s something I don’t get. If a labyrinth doesn’t have dead ends, how can someone get lost?”
“You can’t. It’s impossible. The myth’s a metaphor—we don’t want to get out. We’re hardwired for failure. It’s in our genes. Even flies want to fail.”
“What do you mean?”
“Put a hundred flies in a jar and leave the lid on awhile. Take it off and only a few escape.”
“What does that prove?”
“Psychologists say the flies suffer from ‘premature cognitive commitment’: meaning, the commitment that they’re still trapped.”
“That is so brilliant,” said Lucy as she maneuvered the buggy into a harbor of manicured bush. “See? Fits perfect. Though I’m not sure it’ll turn.”
“Back up, Lucy!” said Tull with proprietary zeal. “You’ll ruin the hedge.”
Like the Tin Man, Edward swiveled on the bench to watch while she threw the buggy in reverse. “What’s a $400,000 hedge?” He shrugged, nonchalant.
She cleared it, then turned back to her brother. “Tell him about Joyce.” Then to Tull: “Our mother has a pet project.”
“Animal CAT scans?” asked Tull, pleased to elicit a smile from
the invalid.
“Mother Joyce has been searching for a calling,” said Edward. “The middle-aged need their passions, you know.”
“We were hoping,” said Lucy, eyes atwinkle, “that it would be in the form of a personal trainer.”
“Or pool man.”
“That would have been the best.”
“At first, we thought she’d adopt a disease, but that’s tricky. My particular anomaly’s too shamelessly grotesque to build a telethon around. Too obscure. Unphotogenic.” Lucy chortled, then nudged a tire against Pullman’s back; he twitched an ear. “Then Mother read an item in the Times about a baby in a dumpster. A drive-by: someone tossed it in and the thing died. People don’t leave kids on doorsteps anymore—they’d have to park the car, God forbid. Park and toss and you’re ahead of the game. And what does Mother do when she reads about said odious crime? Remember, this is no ordinary woman! This is a filthy rich woman with too much time on her hands! She goes to the morgue to claim it, that’s what. But they won’t just give it to her, they make her wait thirty days. I, for one, find it comforting to know the finders-keepers rule has such broad and universal application. Voilà! a month later, there she sits, morgue-ready, far away from the Hills of Holmby. Comes the Man—from her emotionally charged description, we read between the lines and deduce the deputy to be a burly cretin with, no offense to you, Tull, sweaty, orangish body hair. From the distant end of the hall, Frankensheriff walks toward her. Clump clump clump. And what does Frankensheriff do? Hands Joyce a Hefty bag dripping with the baby’s remains!”
“Edward, that is gross.”
“You’re serious,” said Tull, happily playing straight man.
“And Mother vows—this being the first in a series—Mother vows the next time she comes, she’ll do things a little differently. Two weeks later, she makes good. Hands the sheriff one of those humongous Hermès scarves from a few seasons back with an African theme, because the next little dead baby’s black. Oh, Mother Joyce thinks of everything! Frankensheriff appears in said distant hall—clump clump clump—weeping as he approaches, sobbing as he hands it off! He’s caught the spirit! Touched by an angel! Frankensheriff stands converted!”
