by Bruce Wagner
Dawn came with usual rosy-fingered treachery. A white Volvo station wagon turned, nosing into its space behind the bakery. With a smile Topsy noticed that his sometime employer, may he be blessed, wore a white mushroomed chef’s hat even as he drove.
“All right, listen,” he whispered urgently. “That man there will help. He’s an ample soul, and his wife is a worker for the public good.”
“But you won’t come?”
A heartbreaking puff of cold came from her tiny mouth.
“It’s no good with me there. He’ll take care of you, girl—him and his wife—but you mustn’t say I brought you here, understand? I know ’im, understand? He’s good and he’ll get me word of what’s happened to you and I’ll come.” Tears again between them, and he dried her eyes with his sleeve. “Go ahead now, there! I’m watching you, child! You’ll do right well with ’im. This man’s my friend. Understand? But you mustn’t tell him it was me. Now, right along, right along!”
She nodded and stared at the ground, her lower lip jerking about. He kissed her cheek, turned her around and sent her off like a toy soldier. She took a few steps, then gazed at him in a way that broke his heart again; but he did not break, and urged her on.
The car’s engine shut off, and Gilles walked to the trunk and rooted around inside. She was fifteen feet from the Volvo, and again turned back—again, he urged her on.
The baker saw her.
“Hullo?”
He stood up straight in his loose bleached clothes and came near. “Hel-lo … here now, what’s wrong? What are we doing all alone?” He looked around but saw no one. “Do you live around here? Where’s Mommy and Daddy? Do you know where Mommy and Daddy are?”
She shook her head, fighting the urge to run to her friend.
“Are you hungry? Do you like cake and pastry? Would you like to come inside, where it’s warm, and have some pastry? Sure you would! Come. Come inside.”
She looked back one last time—the shadow of Topsy was gone.
Amaryllis went to the baker, head bowed like a votary. He knelt and spoke to her with great kindness. The vagrant tucked thoroughly away, strained to hear, but the voice was low and indecipherable. Gilles led her inside.
The morning lifted like a curtain as he retraced his path. The cityscape stirred, stretching itself under a still-cool sun; his step quickened as he entered the tunnel. There would be coffee waiting at Misery House.
CHAPTER 11
Last Looks
Katrina sat on a bench in the middle of the maze in a purple Viktor & Rolf midi, a $27,000 brain coral–clasped torsade wrapped about an ankle. Her foot, shod in Jimmy Choo, tapped nervously—wearily—on the stone base.
Her father proudly called her a landscape architect, but Trinnie always told people she was “just a gardener.” He thought that well enough true—his daughter had made topiary designs of startling scientific whimsy for the duke of Roxburghe and the marquess of Bath, and been engaged by whole cities to memorialize spirit of place in elegant, leafy riddle. She grew puzzles of verdure beside abbeys and ancient almshouses; one of her labyrinths for a private Swedish estate consumed twelve thousand emerald boxwoods and 150 tons of peach-colored Raisby gravel alone (Mr. Trotter pretended to be piqued that she hadn’t used a family quarry). As signature, Trinnie always hid sacred spaces in the branchy creatures of myth sculpted within—her “secret meditation zones.”
But not here: not at Saint-Cloud. This one, shaped like a Fabergé egg, was without artifice, a final, transcendent maze for the ages (you’ll excuse the author when he says it didn’t hedge). Mr. Trotter had been after her to grow one forever, but understood his daughter’s reticence—it was too close to home or, rather, too close to where home might have been: the virid mother of all maze and meadow, La Colonne Détruite. How could she ever top what had pulled the world from under her?
At the unveiling of the Saint-Cloud labyrinth (for the forty-odd months it took to sufficiently mature, Trinnie kept the magical grid sequestered by a Christo-like muslin curtain), the old man couldn’t help but think the end was near—that father and daughter had completed their tomb—and began to regret the commission.
For years, she had barely managed to stay on deck; her body clock stormily ticked maritime. She knew the marriage to drugs and hospitals (she cheated on one with the other) was bottom-line tawdry: just another circle-of-hell party girl. What was she really in the grip of? a man? a phantom? a middle-class fantasia?—was that what murdered her? But how? Yes, she adored her husband. She was certain—convinced—that her love—their love—matched, gale force, the greatest loves in the history of the love-long world. Then came that silly, horrifying, Dickensian thing—that deformed moment—absurd old literary saw come to life replete with falling-down Havishamian villa—except in Trinnie’s case, there was a marriage … so which was worse? Perhaps all of it, all the heartbreak and weirdness, was merely her excuse for a fabulous thirteen-year debauch. Before him—even before Marcus—hadn’t her body longed to be fucked and held, honey’d, moneyed and opiated? Wasn’t she always this way? From nowhere came this dream of domestic life—such as it was—the old Carcassone dream … a cockeyed, hillside family life. He was crazier than her, and smarter too, and that was new and it calmed her. Trinnie could see herself settling down—and then, when he vanished …—yet how could she have done that to her precious son? She with her Year of the Pig heart, vast as the sea? It was one thing to torment her dad; Louis was a digger, a scarab, a burrower who could book his own passage. And Bluey—well, Bluey never suffered, at least not conventionally. Trinnie envied her for that. But Tull!—small, living thing, with scrunchy bones and soft smelly feet, who loved her, a wizardly child she made, then abandoned. That kind of cruelty was a dissolution sidebar; she felt like a pervert. When he needed her, when he cried and hated and wet his bed for her, she lay in the arms of jackals with pleasure palaces, jet-flown to inconceivable houses in every place on earth—Moroccan hunting lodges and Vietnamese retreats, lava-island belvederes and ranches in Tulum, festive cottages in Mustique, Compass Point flats and Christchurch aeries, sprawling pavilions in Biarritz and Jaipur, Chamonix and Amazonia, Negril, Margaret River, Lake Como, Faux-Cap, Madagascar—until, stoned and panicky, she moved on—to spa and hotel, monasteries and rainy sacred ground—and on—posh sanatoria (at one three-week stint, she found herself at the castellated Priory arranging flowers beside General Pinochet)—and when her son was dying for her, or when he was laughing with friends and not even thinking of her, she sat in the wide dayrooms of Hazelden or The Meadows listening to tales of woe from athletes and drunks, cabbageheads and kings. And for what? A sailor now fallen from grace, she walked slowly to dock and stood over, looking down on gelatinous waters. The perorations of those rooms would soon be—must be—drowned by the waiting sea.
She heard heavy breathing and the staccato crush of pebble under paw and looked up. Pullman charged, then, as if bowing for a minuet, adroitly backed off. He licked her hand and lay down like a griffin. Now, more crush of stone, with approach of a slower gait. Her son appeared, face flushed, a ragamuffin who looked like his ears had been boxed by the yew.
“Tull?” She stood. “What is it, darling?”
He inhaled, gathering ragged lungfuls, then stormed her, clutching and kneading her fashionable waist. That tiny, desperate, expensive waist … his small-mouthed frame shook, keened and bellowed, and for a moment she was afraid—for both of them—and even Pullman was roused, coming over to sniff the boy.
Abashed, she stroked her son’s head while he wept; the dog looked Trinnie square in the eye as if to shame her.
That night, in the exotic fortress of the Withdrawing Room, she told him everything.
Tull refused to sit. He stood throughout, as if enduring a reprimand in the study of the Four Winds headmaster. He didn’t feel at all well. Only hours ago, he had been at the school library searching on-line for the St. George Motel in blissful denial, mooning over Amaryllis; he fantasized tr
olling downtown streets in Mauck or Escalade until the girl was found. Yet his daydream had been overtaken by a combustible sense of urgency, and at the final bell, he fled campus, feeling Lucy’s ambivalent eyes on his back. He walked to the beach, then took a cab home from Shutters before finding his mother in the maze.
He stood before them—Trinnie and Grandpa Lou—chin quivering, jutting ticcishly forward so that it looked like Edward’s. (The impersonation comforted him.) He was oddly remorseful for having pursued any of this now—as if caught in one of those dreams where one feels like a patient trapped in some sort of nefarious clinic.
His grandfather paced languorously before the Piranesi backdrop, hands clasped behind him, suppressing a chuff, pretending to study the detail of his maquettes (he paused an inordinately long time before the Sir Norman Foster) while actually listening with great intensity to his beloved Katrina. Earlier in the afternoon, he’d been at the cemetery when Epitacio walked over to hand him the phone; an opportune time, to be sure, for at that very moment Dot was upon him, eager to impart a bit of recently gleaned pop paranoia. He waved her off with a cadaverous smile, which Sling Blade, raking leaves behind them, thought amusing. Without ceremony, Mr. Trotter climbed into the car and sped off.
As they made their way to Bel-Air, he listened to his daughter’s voice through the receiver, a voice he hardly recognized—deliberate and sorrowful, a slow elegy for brass. He had always known one day that his grandson Toulouse would come into “a piece of intelligence” and that it would be Trinnie’s duty to make full disclosure, the one responsibility from which he would not abide her run. Trinnie knew as much and long dreaded it. She would do what she had to, and if accounts were not settled, then at least the books would be opened—here, now.
Her mother, tipped off by Mr. Trotter, was initially averse to such overheated summitry—then indifferent. She elected to sit in bed with Winter, organizing the album of obits.
Trinnie looked dazed but sat erect. Her gown was abraded and still bore dust from when she chased her son as he fled the maze. Her long, pale arms were scratched; even her face had been smacked by tough little leaves. At first, still worrying her waist with small, slender hands, Tull stopped crying long enough to ask if his father was alive. When Trinnie said no, he pushed her over and sprinted. Pullman ran interference as she chased after—well, this was too much! She took off her shoes and swatted the Dane, shoving the animal aside with an oath more than once. Ralph loomed from the terrace in a rage over actors-turned-directors, and it wasn’t long before he saw something was amiss. Trinnie pushed him away, too, and he stood to one side with the chastened Pullman, partnered. She pinned her son to the ground, shouting at him to be still. By now, the entire staff—a disapproving Winter included—gathered to watch from afar. The boy wriggled but was quiet enough to hear her say that she would tell him what he wanted to know after supper. First they must eat, she said. And Grandpa would have to be there; she would need to call him. She took Tull to the house and gave him water. She felt ruffled and terrified and strangely empty, because she was about to be unburdened. (She did not feel like swallowing a drink or a pill.) She told him to take a warm bath. She would see him again in Grandpa’s study, she said, at eight o’clock. It was now a quarter past that hour.
“Your father didn’t die in a snowmobile accident.”
“Then why did you say it?”
“Your father was … the most amazing man I ever met.”
“Then why did you say he was dead?”
“Because—I was so hurt. And I’m sorry. I should have told you the truth.”
“But why? Why were you so hurt?”
“He was … older.” The declaration was meaningless, but Trinnie knew not where to begin. “I thought I’d found—I had found the person I wanted to be with. To spend my life with. And after a little while—a week or two—I moved in. He had a place in West Hollywood, on Alfred. We were so happy. Papa met him—Bluey too … I never introduced my boyfriends to them.”
He turned to his grandfather. “Did you like him?”
“Marcus was a good man,” he said without taking his eyes from Mr. Gehry’s metal gefilte fish. “But I wasn’t glad about what he did to your mother.”
“What did he do?”
The more conversational things became, the more Tull’s anxiety mounted.
“He asked me to marry him. I thought it was a mistake—we’d been having such a good time! See, I wasn’t the marrying kind. I was already twenty-eight and had plenty of offers. I guess I was … superstitious. He wanted to elope, but I said, No, if we’re going to get married, we’re going to get married. Let’s have a big wedding, I said—like a fool. We did. It took ten months to plan. Papa built us a house.” She looked wistfully at her father. “A beautiful house. A strange and beautiful house.”
“The boy should see it.”
“It was a copy of a real place—an eighteenth-century garden outside Paris, where your father and I had once been. Though ‘copy’ doesn’t sound quite right, does it, Papa?” The old man smiled humbly. “Your dad and I came upon it during our meanderings and fell absolutely in love with the place—and Grandpa built a … re-creation, right in the middle of Bel-Air. The most beautiful wedding present anyone could ever—” Again, she looked toward her father, eyes swollen with tears. Her pain was lancing, and the old man steadied himself against the vitrine that held a knockoff of Le Corbusier’s chapel at Notre-Dame-du-Haut. “But Grandpa kept it a secret. He had artisans from all over the world working around the clock. I used to complain, didn’t I, Papa? ‘What is going on down there on Carcassone?’ That’s what I used to say. The whole neighborhood was in an uproar, but Grandpa kept smoothing things over. God knows who and how much he had to pay to keep everyone happy!”
“I never spent a dime on that sort of thing,” he said, letting loose a gentle chuff or two.
“I’ll bet you didn’t,” said Trinnie sardonically, the smile returning to her face, along with some color. “Six hundred people came to the wedding … I bought my wedding gown last minute, do you remember, Papa? At Christie’s—”
“Oh yes.”
“—Cristóbal Balenciaga himself had cut the material. Everyone arrived in horse-drawn landaus. La Colonne Détruite—that’s ‘the broken column’—it was so beautiful, there was no reason to leave for a honeymoon.”
“They threw rice,” said the old man, prompting.
“We stood on the steps and threw rice on the guests as they left.” She gathered herself, nervously smoothing the lap of her gown. “That night, you were conceived. I fell asleep in your father’s arms.” Now her face darkened as the life went out of it. “When I woke up, he was gone.”
“Where—where was he?” asked Tull, trembling.
“It was so quiet! I’ll never forget that. It was the first time—the only time!—we slept there overnight. So you have that funny sleepover feeling—vulnerable. You don’t really … you know that disoriented feeling where your body—where you don’t really know where you are? And nothing’s familiar? The grounds were so huge, so you really did feel like a trespasser in a park … We didn’t have staff, because no one had even been hired. I listened for sounds of him—nothing. I don’t know what I thought at first. I was still floating from the night before! I thought he was in the bathroom or the kitchen. I waited awhile, then went out to find him. I was certain he’d be walking around, but he wasn’t … maybe he’d gone to Nate ’n’ Al’s for deli, to surprise us—breakfast in bed—he used to love that—but the cars were all there. I went back to our room to wait. His wallet and pants were in the upstairs bath, and a book too, thrown facedown on the floor like he’d been snatched off the toilet! I laughed—oh, I thought he was just being evil, evil. Hours and hours and hours went by. I started to feel trapped, like I was losing my mind … I was afraid to call anyone. Then I got angry and then I got scared and then I got mad—at myself—for being mad—and then I got angry and scared all over again and finally called
your grandfather.”
The old man wandered closer now. “I had a feeling.”
“You loved him!”
“Yes, Katrina, I loved him. But I had a feeling when you called.”
“What kind of feeling?” asked the boy.
His grandfather’s chest expanded as he took in a long breath. “I knew we would never see this man again.”
Tull nearly swooned with the drama of it.
“Grandpa called an old friend of the family, a detective. I was—I was worried, of course I was worried, that something terrible had happened to him—but in the back of my head—this thing, this jilting thing—I was ashamed to even think it possible this man who I loved and just married had actually disappeared—”
“What did the detective do?”
“Looked for your father,” she said.
Before Tull could ask, his grandfather said: “The gentleman was unable to find him.”
The old man sighed, settling into the Louis XVI.
“But where did he go?” Tull could do nothing about the pleading whine in his voice; he was at their mercy.
“That, my dear grandson, we were not able to ascertain.”
He turned to his mother. “Did—did my father give me my name?”
She smiled. “When we came back from France, he began calling himself Toulouse—demanded everyone at work do the same. He was quite serious about it. Said he was going to get a tattoo: NÉ TOULOUSE. Do you know what né means? ‘Born.’ That was your father’s little joke: Born Toulouse. But you were named after Grandpa too—‘Louis’ is in ‘Toulouse’—”
He wished he were someplace else; remembering his ghostly peregrinations on Carcassone Way, he felt the chill of the profane; he wished Cousin Lucy dead. Yet he no longer felt a fist in his chest, though the weight of the world seemed upon him. His jaw ached from being stuck out, and he dug his fingers into the points beneath each ear for relief.
“Do you know why we were in France?” his mother asked rhetorically. “We were there to visit a film set. One of your father’s clients was a famous actor. We were in a beautiful train station there.”
