Nylla’s eyes were beginning to tear. “Come inside and eat with us,” Nylla asked. “Please,” she added. The baby woke up and screamed. “I’ll ask Doris, too.”
And so John went inside to eat with Ivan and Nylla.
Half a year ago, just as John left the city and became a dharma bum, the couple had had a daughter, MacKenzie. She wailed like a crack baby and had a cluster of medical firestorms that had left Ivan and Nylla frazzled, but especially Nylla. Sleepless nights and worries had made her a soccer mom, and Ivan was converting into a soccer dad. Their kitchen was a shambles and all the more pleasant for it. “Watch where you sit,” said Nylla. “I think Mac might have had a minor exorcism on that seat.”
“Help us choose a name for the next one,” said Ivan.
“No!” said John. “Congratulations.”
Nylla rolled her eyes. “I feel like somebody’s science project.”
Ivan said, “I like the name Chloris—what do you think of Chloris—if it’s a girl?”
Before John could reply, Nylla asked, “Can Borgnine be a first name if you want it to be one?”
“How about Tesh,” suggested John. “It’d work for both.”
“Merveilleux!” Nylla spoke French.
And so the two parents once again lapsed into banter and John pulled himself away ever so slightly. This is what Ivan wanted, thought John. This is a salve for him—his ability to lose himself in a family. And for Nylla, too. The year before, Ivan and Nylla had been like best friends, but now they were absolutely husband and wife. They were content with themselves and with the place their lives had landed. Their train had stopped and this is where they’d hopped off.
John wouldn’t dare mention to them the depression he felt when Ivan had told him he was getting married. It was a few years ago, during the emotionally murky period after having two films flop, and their industry currency had been much devalued. To John, two flops meant a time to change and evolve and go forward—but Ivan had chickened out. He’d invented himself as much as he was ever going to. He was going to take the Full Meal Deal and fade away and make medium-budget teen movies that opened big the first weekend and then died of bad word-of-mouth. It was like a slap to John, who had wanted to go on and on, reinventing himself, and had continued to try doing so.
John suspected that his recent crack-up was precipitated by being, if not abandoned by Ivan, then certainly relegated to second place. He felt selfish even thinking about it, and tried to put it out of mind.
But John did want to reinvent himself, still. Even at thirty-seven, after his castastrophic fuckup.
John loved Ivan and Nylla, and he valued the world they’d built for themselves. Yet he knew that fairly soon, there in the kitchen, after Mac was given to the nanny and hauled upstairs, Nylla would gently grill John about Susan Colgate. She’d be careful not to dwell on the negative—his recent past—and then both she and Ivan would try to steer John closer to the road’s center.
John wasn’t without hesitations in his feelings for Susan. He’d followed his instincts in big ways before, but with his two flop movies and his Kerouac routine, it seemed his instincts now only failed him despite Mega Force’s current stamina. Yet with Susan he felt only pure emotion. There was nothing strategic about the attraction. It was a rush of feelings that could only be satisfied by establishing further closeness. He wouldn’t make money from his feelings. He wouldn’t achieve cosmic bliss—he would only be . . . closer to Susan.
MacKenzie began to bellow like a Marine World exhibit, and Nylla and Ivan carted her up to her nursery. John picked up TV Guide and scanned its pages trying to locate reruns of Meet the Blooms, growing frustrated as he was unable to locate any.
Chapter Eight
John’s mother, Doris Lodge, had fallen in love with John’s father, Piers Wyatt Johnson, a solemn Arizona horse breeder without family or history whom she met at a stable in Virginia, and whom she bumped into again by accident in Manhattan outside the Pierre Hotel, where he’d emerged having just brokered his first five-figure sperm contract. She fell in love with him because she saw this coincidental meeting with him as fateful, but more specifically because of a fairy tale he liked to tell Doris after they’d made love in Doris’s one-room apartment on the fifth and top floor of a Chelsea walk-up, an apartment of the sort that had been attracting young Mary Tyler Moores with tams on their heads since the dawn of the skyscraper era. The room, the rental of which had required much finagling on Doris’s part, was her first place of her own (“Mummy, anything but the Barbizon—this is 1960, we have atom bombs, fergawdsake”). Doris loved the apartment in the way all fresh young metropolitans love the simplicity of orange-crate side tables, and improvised spaghetti dinners eaten by the light of votive candles (“Only a dollar ninety-nine for a box of forty-eight! My Lord, those Catholics have invented bargains”)—this in an era when spaghetti in non-Italian households had the same subversive allure as stashed military blueprints and smuggled parakeets.
“You see, it’s like this,” Piers would say, beginning the tale, stretching his milky-white glute muscles on the lumpy mattress of Doris’s brass four-poster, her only concession to her froufrou upbringing, “There was this lonely young heiress who was her father’s prisoner on their estate out in the country. There was a large brick wall covered in ivy that circled the family’s property.”
“What was her name?” Doris would ask at that point. It was part of the ritual.
“Marie-Hélène.”
“That’s so pretty,” Doris would say.
“And she was indeed pretty. She was a catch.”
“It’s hard to be a catch,” Doris would sigh. Sunlight would stream in through the window, which overlooked a generic brick alleyscape of water tanks and a syringe-poke of the Empire State building above, a bevy of trash cans below, all of which seemed to cry out for wide-eyed sad painted kittens, perched and yowling. Piers’s body hairs would catch the sunlight, like light filtered through icicles.
“Absolutely,” Piers would add. “Absolutely.” Piers’s stomach was taut as a snare drum, and he encouraged Doris to tap it with her fingers while he talked. “So anyway, Marie-Hélène spent her days devising schemes to escape, but her family was onto her. They hired extra guards and mortared broken glass onto the top of the brick wall. But then one day she was walking through the many halls of the family’s mansion, despairing, when she passed an old oil painting of a forest scene with a hunter, and something about it caught her eye.”
“What did she see? Tell me again.”
“When Marie-Hélène looked at the young hunter, a strapping lad, she saw him wink at her. And then he spoke to her. He said, ‘Marie-Hélène, come in here—come here inside this painting with me—this is your escape route—through this painting.’ Marie-Hélène was frightened. She asked the hunter, ‘How can I come live in a painting? What will we eat?’ This made the hunter laugh, and he said, ‘We’ll have everything we’ll ever need in here. It’s not like your world. In paintings, you can go visit other paintings. We’ll go visit the feast paintings the Dutch did in the 1700s. We’ll go have coffee inside an Edward Hopper diner. Please—come on in. I’m so lonely.’
“Marie-Hélène said she needed to think about it, but the next day she came back to the painting, dressed in hiking clothes, ready for the forest. The hunter asked her, ‘Marie-Hélène, will you come into the painting and join me?’ and she said, ‘Yes, I will.’ ”
Piers wore Eau de Cédrat, a French citrus concoction that Doris said made him smell like Charles de Gaulle. His already sexy cigarette smoke would mix with his cologne like a spring fog alerting the bulbs beneath the soil to sprout. Piers would say, “The hunter then stuck out his arm and he pulled Marie-Hélène into the painting, into the forest, and slowly the two came together and Marie-Hélène planted a kiss on his lips. She pulled something out of her pockets, and the hunter asked her what it was, but she didn’t reply. It was a book of matches and a bottle of her father’s lighter flu
id. She squirted the fluid out onto the floor of the mansion and lit a match and threw it onto the fluid. The house caught fire and Marie-Hélène said to the hunter, ‘Come on, let’s go now. Don’t look back.’ So off they walked, away from the flames, and away from the world where Marie-Hélène could never return.”
“The catch fights back!” Doris would say.
Doris and Piers married against her family’s wishes in a Manhattan civil ceremony. (“Dor-Dor, he has no family—none. Life just doesn’t work that way. Johnson—what sort of name is that?”) The two traveled the world and then moved to Panama, where Piers had stud farm connections, and Doris became pregnant. One afternoon in her eighth month, Doris was taking an ikebana flower–arranging class in the living room of the wife of a Nestlé executive in Miraflores Locks. Without warning, she fell to the floor in labor pains, screaming like a gorgon, taking with her a zinc bucket full of untrimmed ginger stems. John’s birth was so powerful and fast and hot—the air-conditioning had been broken and the room so sweltering—that for decades afterward Doris was unable to tolerate heat or anything that smacked of the tropics, living her life from one air-conditioned space to the next. John was born on the mahogany floor surrounded by tropical flowers and perplexed executive wives. At the time of the birth, Piers was checking out horses in the Canary Islands. His twin-prop plane was lost in a squall, and he vanished.
Her family tsk-tsked and I-told-you-so’d. Her father assigned her to a small family-owned apartment on the Upper East Side, doled out a child-support allowance for young John, plus limited expense accounts at a few grocers and clothiers. Her days of waxy Chianti bottles, Japanese paper lanterns and peacoats were over before they’d even fully begun. She was to become a New York matron. She was to play the part of rich—she was bred to be rich—but she wasn’t rich, and this powerless position defined her life. Yet she cherished her lovely memory of Piers in this red roast beef of a baby who wailed like the thrashed clutch of a Chevrolet.
Thirty-seven years later, when John met former child star Susan Colgate, he skipped many pages of the family’s story. John was a member of Delaware’s Lodge clan—pesticides originally, and then all forms of agrochemicals, plastics and pharmaceuticals, eventually forming a monster that spat out everything from mousetraps to orange juice to nuclear weapons components. The firm was largely privately owned, and headed by Doris’s uncle Raitt, who reigned from the family Tara in rural Delaware.
The family had decided, though not in these exact words, that Doris was a flaky financial drain who had willfully strayed outside the clan’s unspoken bounds. She was grudgingly tolerated at annual family events, and she often arrived alone, because young John was a sick child. John was home more than he was at school, frequently in the hospital with infected ears or sinuses or other microbial lapses, which Doris handled with a genial calmness.
“Come along, John, I need to ferry you off to your quack for a checkup.”
“Let me finish my breakfast first.”
“What is that orangey glop you’re drinking there?” She picked up the bottle of drink powder John had begged her to buy the previous week and read the label. “ ‘Tang’—brilliant. I’ll try some with Bombay gin tonight.”
“It’s for astronauts.”
“Really? Then I must have a sip immediately because this afternoon I’ll be off to see Raitt at the St. Moritz, and it’ll take an extraterrestrial amount of energy to go and pry him away from the charms of Sixth Avenue long enough to discuss raising my allowance just slightly.” She sipped it. “Bravo! Now off we go.”
John was an imaginative child, but his curiosity was often limited by illness to the confines of the apartment. When Doris was out, John would sneak into her room and go through her treasure box. It contained the shell of a baby turtle she’d eaten for breakfast with Piers in Kyoto in 1961 (“I felt it wriggling down by my voice box, the little dickens”); before-and-after cosmetic surgery photos of saddlebag removal (“Saddlebags are the Lodge family curse, Johnsy. Oh, to be a boy!”); the handwritten menu from her wedding dinner catered by an Andalusian chef recommended to her by Gala Dalí—unborn lamb in a mint coulis (“Lambryos, darling, and don’t go knocking it until you’ve tried it, and don’t go giving me that Mutual-of-Omaha’s-Wild-Kingdom face”). There was one of John’s baby shoes (gilded, not bronzed), some seashells and a stack of girlhood horse-jumping ribbons. There was also a photo of Doris water-skiing with Christina Ford, one of Piers on his prized Chesapeake mare, Honeymoon, as well as a faded black-and-white shot, reverently framed and somehow out of synch with the other photos. It was seemingly taken near a stable—Piers was talking with somebody in the background—and showed Doris standing with Marie-Hélène de Rothschild, with Marie-Hélène lighting Doris’s cigarette, a wicked grin on Doris’s face.
John didn’t think it abnormal that his mother spent her days neither learning skills to make her employable nor making thrusts at wisdom. Rather, Doris preferred spending her time pursuing rich men, which she had been raised to do, with the uncritical instinct of terns who migrate from continent to continent each year. John found this fascinating.
“Mom, why do you always go everywhere in a plane?”
“What do you mean, darling?”
“Like today. You went up the Hudson Valley and you could easily have taken a car, but you flew.”
Doris preferred flying—even to nearby locales like the Hudson Valley or the Hamptons. “Darling, if there’s one thing a man will never admit to a woman, it’s that he is unwilling to pay for a plane ticket or charter a craft for the day. A man would sooner eat ketchup soup for a month than to not hire a helicopter to hop to Connecticut with a lady. Easiest just to order the plane and then tell him to pay once you’re at the other end.” This was not a cynical statement from Doris. She had been taught this on her mother’s knee.
Relatives were somewhat kinder to John than they were to Doris, as families often prefer to skip generations when it comes to conferring affections, and John was a handsome, affable, if quiet, young boy. Spending so much time in bed, he soaked in abnormally large amounts of daytime TV programming—far more than the occasional episode of Love of Life or The Young and the Restless watched by the typical American teenager. John absorbed everything. TV loaned him a vocabulary and a tinge of sophistication lacking in others his own age. Relatives brought him presents and slipped him envelopes of money. John appeared grateful for these gifts in their presence, and, once they left, promptly gave the cash to Doris. She stashed it away in her mad-money Vuitton valise, up above her collection of Op and Pop outfits that began to infiltrate her sensibility across the decades.
Doris liked arty men. She liked men who lived inside paintings. And these men tended to like Doris at first, when they thought she could buy their way out of paintings, but it usually took about one season before they discerned she wasn’t in the Maria Agnelli league and elegantly dumped her. Doris was aware of this cycle, but it failed to harden her in the same way that the serial tribulations of soap opera characters left them similarly undented.
With John, Doris was quite talkative about her family, its source of wealth and its role in the overall scheme of the world. John would squint and try to envision the Lodge Corporation, and he would briefly gather the impression of a massive diseased creature—a sperm whale in which all cells were infected and doomed.
“Darling, all aspects of the Lodge corporation are malignant. Lodge food products are unnutritious and rot quickly. Children raised on Lodge baby formula quickly sicken and die. Lodge electronics fizzle, pop and quickly expire like thrushes hitting the front picture window. Untold thousands of Lodge factory workers routinely become emphysemic by breathing the solvents used in the making of Lodge footwear which, I might add, invariably render their wearers unstylish, lame and beset by fungus infections. Lodge service divisions give sloppy parodies of service at hyperinflated prices needed to pay for Lodge’s vast overhead of union bribes, drugs, lynx fur coats and Bahamian holiday
s for executive wives. Lodge is a goiter on society, draining and taking, pustulant and mute.”
John would egg her on: “What kinds of things does Lodge make, Ma?”
“What doesn’t Lodge make is the better question, darling. Lodge will make anything. Nothing is sacred: children’s cigarettes, Holocaust boxcars, dairy products that are born time-expired, Vatican City parking spots—just call Lodge. Each time somebody in America cries or dies, Lodge nabs its shaved penny from somewhere in the proceedings. Well, darling, that’s Lodge.”
When he was fourteen, John developed breathing problems, and spent, with minor exceptions, a year in bed while his lungs and bronchial tubes healed. He watched TV, read, chatted with Doris—he had no friends and his numerous cousins were conspicuously kept away from him. Tutors came in and kept him primed with the basics. He wasn’t dumb and he wasn’t a genius. He liked his world, and he didn’t mind its limitations.
John did wonder, though, how he could make up for the lost time in his life. Assuming he recovered, how might he catch up with all the other children who had been out in the everyday world—chasing balls? throwing sticks? shoplifting? John’s notions of normal childhood behavior were sketchy. And he worried about Doris, who came close, but didn’t “snag herself a may-un.” Would she ever be happy? What could he do to bring love into her life? TV had taught him that love was pretty much a cure for all ills.
Doris put a good face on it all. John was the constant in her life, the one thing family could neither take away nor reduce. From her perspective, the more time John spent watching TV in the apartment away from hooligans, third rails and strange men in raincoats, the better.
The year he spent in bed was certainly the longest of his life. When he was older and met other people who had accomplished great things during their stints on earth, he found that invariably, somewhere in their early youth, they had felt the experience of death or incapacity burned into them so deeply that ever afterward they gambled with all their chips, said fuck it, went for broke in the sound knowledge that wasting life is probably the biggest sin of all. John’s illness made him value extremeness.
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