The Chrysanthemum Palace

by Bruce Wagner

  But I think what galled me most, though I never let on, even to myself, was his prior knowledge of Clea. I’d known about it, even if she had never spoken of the affair in any detail. One word she had used to describe their alliance stuck in my head: “volatile.” Naturally, I took that as a rebuke to my genetically unvolatile ways. There I was again, absurdly, in the same triangle I’d found myself with Leif: unsexy third wheel in an adolescent psychodrama.

  So, as dusk turned to evening, lounging around the vast modernist prairie of the refurbished suite, I did what any self-respecting triangulated schmuck would have done: doted on the bookish Miriam Levine as if she were the reincarnation of Roos Chandler herself, or at the very least, the only one in the room. While Clea flirtily wrangled her restless, doped-up ex, I cozied on the couch with the agent, sassily grilling her on where she lived, which town she’d been raised in, what college she attended (Brown, of course). Oh, and—any sibs? Parents still living? Where did they live and how were they faring? Now when did you enter the book racket, and please to name current stable of authors . . . by the way, how did you and Thad meet? My eyes bore deep into hers and I made sure she saw my nostrils subtly crease in randy inhalation when commenting on her lovely complexion (the latter, I’ll admit, said out of Clea’s hearing range), and so on and so on and so forth, lavishing her with the kind of attention that, falling short of a seasoned lothario’s, more than fit the profile of any decent, serial monogamizing narcissist. During Clea’s own ministrations—far more labored than mine—I caught the occasional sidelong glance betraying grudgey acknowledgment of my heedlessness to both her and the outsized Vorbalidian guest star, a passing irritation at my focus on Miss Miriam. I could have been wrong. My little display may have been laughably transparent.

  Soon enough, Miriam spun from my orbit. We gathered around the fire of Thad, so to speak, as he declaimed sans translation:

  Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa, io non credea

  Tornare ancor per uso a contemplarvi

  Sul paterno giardino scintillanti . . .

  “That’s Leopardi,” interjected Miriam. (She’d obviously heard his act before.) “Ah! To be an ensign fourth-class on the Starship Demeter!” he shouted, shuffling about in seductive, self-mocking dinner-theater mode. He’d taken the stage, disarmed and dangerous. “I cannot tell you how I’ve been looking forward to this”—he addressed himself to me—“I’m Starwatch’s biggest fan, così fan tutte! The stars! Oh, the stars!”

  He cleared his throat, narrowing his eyes like a midget Barrymore.

  Glittering stars of the Great Bear—

  Never thought I’d be back to see you,

  Shining down on my father’s garden . . .

  Still poetizing, he looked each of us square in the eye like the old Wellesian ham he was, transported to the deathless realm of the one-man show. In full, hoary command, he cocked his neck toward the heavens.

  “I could hear the murmur of voices float back and forth in my father’s house, conjuring mysterious worlds and a future full of secret joys, knowing nothing of what might lie in store—nor yet how often times would loom where I’d gladly swap this bereft and wretched life of mine for death.”

  The doors of the massive terrace were shut, yet a breeze from Sunset Boulevard found its way through the cracks like a spirit and advanced to the living room where we sat, shifting the mood from cordial conviviality to melancholy foreboding. Thad suddenly grew pale and wobbly, and Clea signaled she was going to “put him down.” Within moments, Miriam and I were traveling silently in the elevator then saying good-byes at the great wicker chairs that graced the garage’s entrance.

  YOU REACH DEATH VALLEY FROM a town called Baker, which features a motel called the Bun Boy. Thad got a predictable kick out of that, especially as the campy signage had its cartoonish, portly icon pointing at the low-slung resort with a come-hither neon arrow placed literally at Mr. Boy’s pelvis. To make matters worse, or more hilarious, a couple of seedy, shirtless young boys lolled Bruce Weber–style outside one of the rooms, visible from the 76 station where we gassed up.

  I finally understood where they shot those car commercials I’d been watching all my life, the ones with swooping helicopter shots of sedans and sport coupes traversing endless ribbons of road. (I’d mistaken the nearly mystical vastness for Arizona or New Mexico.) Being a native Angeleno, I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Palm Springs and Joshua Tree. I’ve driven to Telluride and Santa Fe—and Vegas, of course—but never got around to Death Valley. I guess getting stranded in 120 degree temperatures didn’t have much appeal. This time of year, though, the weather was clement. Besides, we were only going to stay overnight, and I was in pleasant company. Miriam and her bare, backseat legs were really growing on me.

  We didn’t pass many cars along the way. There were rolling dunes, sandy ziggurats, and pristine mountains of tidy majesty. We drove through a town with an incongruous working opera house at the end of a long, one-story adobe hostel that wore ghostly bedsheets for room curtains. Just before the final turnoff came Zabriskie Point. Thad insisted we have a look. Everyone went on about the Antonioni movie of the same name, which, being the dolt I was, I’d never seen. (Not to be confused with another Antonioni film, Red Desert, said Miriam.) We ascended the slope on foot, ahead of a busload of German tourists.

  The point overlooked a place called Badwater. At the top, a plaque said something about Mr. Zabriskie being a mortician before he got to working for the Borax Company, and also mentioned the famous 49ers, stranded and rescued that very year. There was a weird, pervasive, acoustic void, even with the hushed, parenthetical polyglot of voices—people seemed naturally to speak more softly when faced with the fire and brimstone of the valley spread out before them—and timbrey drone of low wind. It made you see how there were all different kinds of quiet, different levels, rungs, and spaces. I can’t exactly describe it but the intensity of silence had a kind of calming, ionizing effect, sucking the human element from the scene the way filters rid the air of dirt particles. Taking in the panorama, I thought of those 49ers and wondered what it would have been like in the peak of summer (one year, it reached 132°) with no roads or wellsprings.

  Like Zabriskie Point, the Furnace Creek Inn sat on a hill above the wide, bleakly beautiful moonscape. It truly seemed a mirage. The anomalous luxury hotel had been there for seventy-five years or so; the dining room even had a dress code. We settled gratefully into three large suites.

  Though Clea had been denying it, the cat was now out of the bag—they’d gotten back together. I decided to decide that was all right. I’d never seen her happier.

  “I thought you were going to ask where they caught Manson,” the front-desk clerk said.

  “All right,” said Clea. “Where did they?”

  “Farther down the road.”

  The man was garrulous and sweet-faced, and Thad was thoroughly entranced, like a writer (or actor) who’d felicitously come across a wonderful character study. Miriam had all her maps out, efficiently poised with a fancy pen, like we were about to go treasure hunting.

  “I’m from New York,” the clerk continued. “Whenever a guest comes from the Big Apple, I say, ‘Which part?’ They tell me the street and I tell them where I lived and that’s how we bond. Well, in Death Valley, it’s different; took me a while to learn that. You don’t ask a certain type where they’re from. If you do, they give you a look.”

  In the discreet, universal language of VIP, the clerk had acknowledged Thad’s celebrity status on check-in, adding he’d go out of his way to provide anything we might need. The dining room was already booked for supper but he would “make arrangements for window table seating” at the hour of our choice.

  As it was already afternoon, explore time was limited. Tourist sites generally took the infernal theme: Dante’s View, the Devil’s Golf Course, Pitchfork Point, Coffin Canyon, and so on. (It was only in the high seventies, with a gentle breeze.) We drove out to one of the dunes where Planet of the
Apes was shot. The Funeral Mountains reflected in the salt pools of the valley floor. As we cruised along, that eerie quietude flirted with hearts and minds, overtaking us whenever we pulled off road and shut down the motor, sauntering into craters and cinder fields.

  The brochure said Badwater had the lowest elevation in the republic. Miriam bent to pick up a mineral chunk. Clea said “borax” but Miriam touched it with her tongue and said “salt.” Clea was hung up on borax, calling our attention to the “borax-covered mountains” ringing the plateau. (It was actually snow. Hard to believe; the brochure said the mountains topped off at 11,000 feet.) Miriam didn’t argue the point, which had the effect of eroticizing her further, in contrast to Clea, who traipsed around like a fool, looking for “pupfish.” I wondered if she was stoned—my old friend looked a bit “faded,” as one of my 12-Step cohort’s nephews might say—I just didn’t want to go there. A moody Thad wandered the farthest away, like a surveyor of unknowable, unnameable things. I followed his contemplative lead, striking off in the opposite direction.

  There came the silence again: warm, lapping, sensual yet somehow indifferent. It was nice having it all to myself—we are greedy even when it comes to the whisper of the infinite. Once familiar with its alien though not unfriendly persona, the exotic, wadded qualities and texture of it, you became a believer, an initiate of the numinous, whose ears couldn’t but help (at least for the rest of your stay) seek out its presence within “ordinary” quiet—that common currency of soundlessness that fell between voices, between reverbatory hush of wind and insect whir—in the end, mastering the ability to detect the silence embedded in quietude itself. It was a layered wedding cake, a dessert of stillness that imposed meditation, forcing each to cocoon within. Conversation ended as we walked and paused, testing and savoring its syrupy strangeness, startled and nurtured by mutual discovery. There was something slightly narcotic, and psychedelic too, about the blown-out hermetics of emptiness. I realized how much human beings crave it, as much perhaps as we crave wide open space, yet how rarely we’re able to commune.

  “I was reading an article by Primo Levi,” said Thad. “Poor man! He was writing about translators—how they struggle with the Babel of voices.” My bullshit detector sensed the beginning of a casually pretentious pontification; wickedly, I wondered if he was doing a cheap imitation of his dad. “Levi was obsessed with the Word—when this is what needs to be translated, no? This . . . nothingness. ‘Luminous emptiness.’ That’s what the mystics are up to. Mystics are the real translators, trying to get us to understand—this. As if anyone has anything to say that needs to be heard! Or read, for that matter. That’s why Levi killed himself. Went to the bathroom and had a big vowel movement”—he cackled at the pun—“then threw himself off a balcony. Translate that!”

  Thad had circled a final destination on the brochure.

  It was an hour away, and I was glad we’d taken my SUV. After consulting a passing ranger, we hiked to Racetrack Playa. It looked like a vast skating rink, its dry mud surface cracked by an interlocking honeycomb of trapezium shapes—like a lake of cobblestones flattened by the Devil’s Fist. On the bed were large rocks with skid marks in tow, crude plinths and markers pushed by awesomely mischievous hands. The movement of the boulders was attributed to the silty rink’s slick surface when it got rained on, and the powerful gusts of wind that “sailed” the stones across at speeds slower than the naked eye could detect. The explanation made sense but that didn’t mean it wasn’t spooky.

  “The Lord is my Vorbalid,” said Thad, “I shall not want.” He picked up a branch, wielding it like Moses. “My agent maketh me lie down in Starwatch pastures. She leadeth me beside the FX waters. Yea, though I walk through Death Valley of the shadow of Death Valley, thy rod and thy brilliant writing staff will comfort me. Thou anointeth my head with prosthetics; my chai tea runneth over. Surely goodness, borax, and residuals shall follow me all the days of my life.”

  Dinner at the inn was delicious. (Clea and I had rattlesnake.) Well-off retirees discussed terrorism and luxury hybrid cars.

  Our waitress recognized both actors—from the movies—and that was nice for Clea because the clerk hadn’t acknowledged her fame. Thad was drinking, but Clea held back on my account, even though I was pretty sure she’d broken her sobriety. I flirted with Miriam as usual, and Clea said, “Don’t worry, he’s just a clit tease.” It was much more crass than something she’d normally say—another indicator that she had, in AA parlance, “slipped.”

  When the food came, Thad asked the waitress where she lived.

  “My husband and I work half the year up at Crater Lake,” she said. “Do you know where that is? They close for winter, so we come down here. We get subsidized housing—a hundred dollars a month and no utilities. If you have a fifth-wheeler, you pay a couple bucks a day and get a little more mobility. Plug it in and you’re good to go. All you got to do is pay utilities—with a fifth-wheeler, you have to pay. We figure if we work a year, we can earn enough for a house. It’s kind of inconvenient living in a remote place. You have to do all your shopping on your day off. We go to Pahrump. If we really want to buy, we go to Vegas.”

  “Subsidized housing,” Thad riffed, after she left. “They should have that at the Chateau! That’s where the IRS wants to see me—in a fifth-wheeler. Whatever that is. But ahma gonna fool ’em, see? Got it all planned out. Know where I’m gonna live when they take my apartment away?”

  “No one’s going to take your apartment away,” said Miriam, definitively.

  “I’m serious. Know where I’m going to live when they take it all away?”

  “No one’s going to take your house, honey!” said Clea, laughing. “And if they do, you can stay with me.”

  “No, no—I have it all planned. I’ll tell you where I’m going to live.” A pause, then: “In my head.” He swigged down the glass of wine. “That’s where I’m gonna live when the IRS swoops down and takes ev’rythang away. In my fucking head.”

  We went down the hill for a nightcap at the 49er. (Clea and I had date shakes.) Thad was drunk enough he wanted to set out for the Racetrack again, but that would have been a disaster. Miriam adroitly steered us back to the inn, with its anomalous Olympic-sized swimming pool and spectacular outdoor fireplace. By then, the guests had all gone to bed. Only a staff person stoking the flames remained. (I felt like one of the Hearsts.) The gentleman asked if we knew about the lunar eclipse; it was almost over. Before disappearing into darkness, he pointed to the small bite taken out of a coppery moon.

  Thad, the Gemini, showed us Castor and Pollux. When Castor was killed in battle, the twin’s grief was so great he wanted to die, but instead, Zeus made him immortal. With great tenderness, Thad said it was their fate to be separated for eternity, adding with a private smile—I didn’t understand it at the time—how they were beacons of good luck for sailors. Then the same abstracted shadow that befell him at Badwater settled over us like a tent made of gossamer. The stone-girdled fire sparked and popped.

  We grew quiet, cousined to the stillness that lay beyond.

  “WHAT WAS HE LIKE?” asked my father.

  There was something animated and slightly off-color about his query, as if wanting to be reminded of a dirty joke he already knew.

  “I didn’t really know him all that well,” said Clea. “I knew Thad—from when I lived in New York. We went to his dad’s place in the Vineyard a few times.”

  I’d finally gotten the nerve to ask Clea to dine at the family seat, deep in the canyon wilds of Benedict. The bones of the house were the same that she knew as a girl, though the bracketing properties had long ago been seized from neighbors, razed, and developed in architectural harmony with the ancestral home.

  “I would have thought you’d have met while your mother was still alive,” said Perry, the glint evacuating his eye. “Seems they would have crossed paths—or swords.”

  The glint came back. Most of the time, when Dad thought he was being suave, he wasn�
�t.

  “Not to my knowledge,” said Clea, good-naturedly. “I’m pretty sure Jack was a fan but I don’t think they ever had an encounter. Though anything’s possible.”

  “How is it,” I asked, “that a Starwatch episode was developed exclusively for Michelet Junior? Did you have a hand in that?”

  “Absolutely. I was in New York some years ago and saw Rhinoceros,” he said, in the even tones of an egotist on Charlie Rose.

  “You’re kidding. You actually saw that?”

  “I’m not the Philistine you think I am, Bert.” He used “Bert” when he wanted to bring me down a peg. “I’m in New York three times a year, for the auctions and the theater—primarily, the theater. I thought the play quite remarkable. Thad was wonderful. Saw it again, with Nathan Lane, but Thad was better. I had some awareness of his work in film at the time, but not much. I’m not a big moviegoer. The Playbill said he was the son of Jack Michelet and that got my attention.” He turned to Clea. “I have all Jack’s first editions, signed—he doesn’t sign many, believe me—some watercolors too. Have you seen them? Pretty racy! I’ve wanted to adapt one of his books for the longest time. Chrysanthemum. Do you know it?”