by Bruce Wagner
“Yes,” said Clea, affably indifferent.
“I’ve renewed the option ten years running.”
“Then you’ve met him,” she said, opening the anecdotal door. She had more than a touch of geisha in her and knew it was probably a story our host would like to tell.
“Only once. Briefly. I don’t think he was all that well.”
My father clasped his hands, pursed his lips and grew uncharacteristically still, as if to humbly convey that what he was about to impart—the surprising lack of any personal relationship between these two cultural totems—redounded not to him but rather to the quirks, genetic meanness, dipsomania, lunacy, or legendarily demented psychopathology of that towering figure of American letters, Black Jack Michelet. The unspoken implication was that something ugly must have happened to cause Perry to retreat after initial introductions—some horrific scene, for Dad was no piker. In short, he was game. He’d long ago bagged Mailer, Updike, Vonnegut, Styron, Roth and Bellow, with framed letters and carefully mounted correspondence to prove it. In his defense, I’ll admit that as he spoke he took the high road, deferring to Genius, withholding the spiteful remark or characteristic caustic quasi-witticism, choosing to reside in a state of benevolent patronlike neutrality. At the end of the day, I think he was superstitious about speaking ill of the elder Michelet, fearing he might jinx whatever hopes he had of making Chrysanthemum into an Oscar-winning film.
Mother arrived à table via wheelchair to wish Clea well. (After depositing her, Carmen—Gita’s favorite nurse—hung back on the living room couch and flipped through the Star.) Parkinson’s had wreaked havoc with Mom’s body, leaving spirit untouched; the greeting to my childhood love was predictably incandescent. I could tell she’d done her Internet homework, as per custom, thoughtfully counterbalancing the sometimes jarring effect her frail physicality could have upon guests, particularly those who knew the elegant woman in her prime, with details and carefully nuanced trivia from their own lives—a congenial parlor trick as likely to be employed with visitors she’d been briefed on yet never met. Gita was very First Lady that way. She nimbly conjured persons, places, and things from that long-ago time, and Clea, thrown off guard, searched her mind to recall. The very act of mental inventory distracted and leveled the playing field. Mom had been busy on IMDB as well, boning up on movie credits. It was terribly dear, and I knew Clea thought so too. It touched the heart.
We adjourned to the library where my father showed us the aforementioned watercolors—splashy, pornographic studies, all—and the hastily inscribed novel Perry had not yet managed to bring to the screen.
After supper, Clea wanted to stroll the grounds and smoke.
We took the sloping path toward the pool (its flaky, unrefurbished bottom painted years ago by David Salle), talking of tribal gatherings and make-out sessions that once took place on the hormonal, hallowed ground underfoot. “I remember this tree!” she’d shout, or, “This part is so different”—a faraway look in her eyes. Then, moving on, a reinvigorated, convivial affirmation: “This part’s exactly the same!” Like a necromancer, she doused for mood and memory, a naked-hearted empath invoking spirit of place, aching to be reinfected by the magical virus of childhood.
“Leif loved that pool,” said Clea as we got closer. She pointed to the darkness of the adjacent property. “What is that?”
“Dad bought the Freiberg house then knocked it down. I don’t even know if he’s ever going to build. Right now, it’s a garden they let grow wild.”
“Whoa! Amazing.”
“It’s not ‘wild’ wild—it’s made to look that way. It was designed by this famous woman, Katrina Trotter.”
“That is so your father! Perry’s a trip.”
“Hey . . . remember the time upstairs at your mom’s?”
“I remember lots of times.”
“I was feeling you up and Leif came in?” She actually giggled. “He didn’t knock.”
“God forbid!”
“He was drunk. He grabbed you and kissed you—”
“You’re kidding!” said Clea, with a flush of prudery.
“You don’t remember him doing that?”
She shook her head, in Victorian outrage.
“Well, actually . . . he asked me first.”
“He asked permission? How kinky! What did I do? Slapped him, I hope. I should have slapped you.”
That she had no recollection should have been comical but instead I felt sad and hollow, disconnected from the world.
“How did you meet Thad?”
“We were doing The Master Builder, in New York.”
“How long ago?”
“Oh shit—I guess I was what, twenty-eight? That was ten years ago.”
“How long did the affair last?”
She smiled at my formality. “Three years? I already told you this, Bertie.”
To my chagrin, I took that as a cue to kiss her full on the mouth. The grope was like one of those clumsy couplings in a Julia Roberts movie where the ex comes back in her life just when she’s engaged to be married. He can’t help himself, lurching at her territorially, the aftermath leaving them awkward and winded—a clear case of Act Two premature infatuation. (They do get together in the end, but only in the movies.) Remember, we’d only “done it” a few times, unspectacularly, more than a year and a half ago, and, as Clea liked to put it, been “nonconsenting adults” ever since. The worst part was that my motivations were nefariously vain and in the end, appallingly halfhearted. I was instantly embarrassed even though Clea was gracious enough to hold the kiss a beat or two—when it was over, we broke into laughter, mercifully at the same moment. She shook her head, and said with a smile, “Can we go back in now?”
We didn’t speak as we cut through the other adjacent lot, the one now sporting an enormous extension to the original house.
“It’s not going to last between Thad and me,” she finally said, as we passed through a gate on our way to the street. I knew what was coming. “Bertie, you know I love you. But—”
“If you want to get a restraining order, I’ll understand.”
“I think maybe Caltrans community service will do. You can put one of those orange vests on and pick up trash on the side of the freeway.”
“I guess I’m just worried,” I said, disingenuously diverting focus, still stung by my ineptly amatory mini-move. “The guy gets so loaded. . . .”
“Oh please!”
“I’m serious, Clea.”
“I can totally handle that, OK?”
“Are you going over to see him now?”
She nodded. “He’s leaving in the morning.”
“For where?”
“Canyon Ranch. To lose some weight before the shoot.”
“Stay away from his migraine medicine, OK?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“Good girl.”
“You know, you kiss pretty good, Daddy.”
“I’ll bet you say that to all the boys.”
“Just the ones who violate their positions of trust. You know—priests, shrinks, childhood sweethearts.”
She kissed my forehead and jumped into the Alfa.
I was restless after Clea left.
I went to say good-bye to Mom but Carmen said she’d already retired. I chose not to disturb. Dad was on the elliptical catching Larry King interviewing some over-the-hill sexpot, an after-dinner ritual.
I drove to Book Soup and loitered in fiction, idly skimming through Henry Miller’s Sexus before backtracking to the pristine spine of Michelet’s oeuvres, recently reissued in stylishly alluring, flat-textured covers. There was nothing of his son’s. Someone at the information desk looked Thad up on the computer—his four novels were out of print. She said I should try Alibris or eBay.
As I was leaving, I saw Nick Nolte peruse the stacks of new releases opposite the front register. He looked restless himself. He wore crazy yellow pants and delicate, amazingly expensive-looking eyeglasses, with two fussy male assi
stants in his wake. Kind of fabulous. Old Nick was on a book-buying spree (I imagined him flying off the next morning to an exotic film locale) and it was funny to watch the eccentric star alight on this or that tome while his amanuenses informally disgorged pithy, thumbnail précis, to which the master responded with a literal thumbs-up/thumbs-down. For a moment, I thought of Nolte as Jack Michelet—not a bad choice to portray him—attended by his fractured progeny: King Zeus and the Castor/Pollux Kidz. After our trip to Death Valley, Clea told me about Thad’s twin, drowned at age ten. She said Thad wrote about the tragedy in The Soft Sea Horse (the short novel I’d been looking for on the shelf), a portrayal which apparently caused a major rift between father and son. Jack, at his blackest, had announced publicly that the thinly disguised roman à clef was no better than a tabloid tell-all, a ghoulishly unforgivable game of one-upmanship; his “spawn” had laid cowardly literary claim to that watery grave, knowing the death in Capri was something Michelet could never bring himself to write of, for it was Jeremy whom Jack loved inconceivably and inconsolably, Jeremy who was the bright, same-spirited, unbroken reflection in his golden eye. The needy survivor’s outrageously meager gifts had been used in the grotesque service of ego—shameful! unholy!—and Clea said the giant-killer had not one but two huge bonfires on the Vineyard: the day the book was blasted in the New York Times, and the day it was remaindered.
I was mulling all these things when Miriam Levine turned the corner with an armful of high-end art books. We nearly collided.
“Bertie! I was just thinking of you.”
“Something inappropriate, I hope.”
“I wanted to get you something of Thad’s but they didn’t have any.”
My mind worked with neurotic acuity, suddenly consumed by the logarithms of romance: it seemed odd that Miriam wanted to buy me one of Thad’s novels, and odder still she wouldn’t be aware they were unavailable, at least in a place like Book Soup, that didn’t sell “used.” So her comment seemed, on the surface, suspect. On the other hand, it may have been the first thing to occur to her after blurting out I’d been on her mind. Maybe I had been, but if that were true I was reasonably certain it couldn’t have had much to do with the elusive, unheralded fiction of her client. It seemed more plausible—not to put too fine a point on it—that she’d merely given voice to the kind of subliminal consideration we sometimes lend to someone we’ve recently met whom we’re attracted to, physically, chemically, or whatnot. (I know it sounds cocky, but allow me to indulge.) Suddenly and unexpectedly seeing said person face-to-face might provoke a genuine feeling one was thinking of them, even if not strictly the case. Still, I had to admit this East Coast girl was fast on her feet. Smugly finding my anthropological legerdemain to be basically sound, I used the sum of the root equation, now adroitly transferred back to the column marked Animal Instinct, as an opportunity to ask Miriam if she wanted to have a drink.
Here’s what then happened:
She suggested the lobby of the Marmont. I said we might run into Thad and Clea, implying I didn’t have the energy for another group encounter. She waited two seconds before saying we could have drinks in her room. (That was a surprise.) I followed her car, smiling and trembling to something unknown for cello on KCRW. We were stripped and ecstatically entangled within minutes of entering her small, back-of-hotel suite. It’d been months since I had taken anyone to bed and maybe years since a seduction was effected with such little effort. The expedience of it worked absolute wonders for my spirit. I felt as if in my early twenties again—we did all the nasty, glorious things new lovers do. (Another surprise.) We were ravenous, leaving no patch of flesh unturned, then starved for food, drink, and sleep . . . automatically stirring at the hour of the wolf to couple with that edge of violent, sorrowful passion befitting 3:00 A.M. When morning came, we sat in capacious white robes munching muesli and eggs on burnt toast, washing everything down with great gulps of juice like it was our first and last meal on this insanely beautiful blue-green Earth.
I was on the toilet when the phone rang.
I heard her gasp, then came back to the room and listened.
Jack Michelet was dead.
THE FUNERAL WAS AT MARTHA’S Vineyard. Thad begged Clea to come and she, in turn, begged me. She needn’t have: I knew Miriam would be going and I was very sexed up. To be perfectly frank. Besides, life had become a dull shuttle between AA meetings, the gym, Starwatch tapings, and reluctant dinner dates—I looked forward to a geographical break in routine, especially one promising to be historically memorable. (OK, half that is bullshit. What I wanted was more Miriam, and the sooner the better.) When Dad found out I was going, he was actually jealous.
The burial took place on Saturday,1 amid bright sun and nipping cold while the salty seawater, ever near, rhythmically murmured the Lord giveth . . . the Lord taketh away. Thad was supposed to have arranged a car but it never showed so we cabbed it to a charming B&B where, remarkably, our rooms were still being held. (The island was completely booked.) Michelet’s death was an international event and the presence of journalists and paparazzi permeated the Vineyard, lending a cockeyed, festive, Dia de los Muertos vibe. Thad’s mother hired a cadre of Secret Service types to fend off media vultures already circling the cemetery’s entrance. They wore earpieces and sharp Brioni suits.
As a novice drawn to the “set piece,” I was sorely tempted to begin this diary with the great man’s interment (remember The Bad and the Beautiful?), though am happy now to have throttled the impulse, being fairly sure I’d have botched it—a pastiche of eulogies would have been a regrettable launch for these modest pages. Comments from the makeshift podium seemed par for the posthumous course: from the heart, the head, the ego, the groin. Hardly anyone was sober and the ones who were, for all the cringeworthiness of their remarks, may as well have been stoned to the gills. It does seem fairly harmless, though, to list a small roster of mourners: ancient mariners Styron, Mailer, Vonnegut and Vidal, with Hitchens, Auster, Wallace and Lethem representing the new. A half-dozen unlikely showbiz types paid homage as well: Sumner Redstone, Ron and Ellen Perelman, Steve Martin (Joyce Carol Oates on his arm!), Jim Belushi, Daryl Hannah and Carly Simon (I assumed the last three were neighbors). And last, but not least, Nicole Kidman, willowy, alabastrine, and regal red. Supposedly she had optioned Michelet’s penultimate book.
I became separated from my group and stood sheepishly on the fringe, bending an ear to discern the minister’s words as the wind kicked up, with that nagging outsider feeling—wondering why I’d come.
The Michelet compound bore a sandy, legendary rusticity, still soaked, so to speak, in the cologne of its erstwhile emperor.
I actually recognized it from an Architectural Digest feature some years ago. The amicable gathering of houses, barns, and famously rock-bound, stand-alone study—the latter studiously avoided by downcast minions while they circulated, as if Jack Michelet might still be inside, hard at work—achieved an astonishingly poignant feng shui in its placement on the promontory. The smoky remnant of day, with memorial winds blowing warm enough from sea to bluff that brought to mind my own cherished Santa Anas, gave me gooseflesh. A splendiferous, production-designed dusk made everything reassuringly golden and as evening fell the overall mood lightened; meaning, the crowd openly brandished whatever preferred weapons of choice had gotten them through a collective thirty-five centuries of lusty, wigged-out, existential nights and jaundiced, penitential, hungover days. Miriam and I found a torchère-lit corner to have our first kiss since the Chateau idyll. That neither Clea nor Thad knew about it made postmortem intimacies all the sweeter.
Alone again, I looked suspiciously out of place. Whenever I got the nascent evil eye (on tap for potential media gate crashers), I very publicly touched base with Clea or Miriam to make myself official. Once the security boys pegged me as kosher, I was free to roam the house, dipping into this room or that, or zipping to the patio bar—I was chaining Diet Cokes—stooping beneath a tree to light up, hand
s cupped à la James Dean while little gusts flared to put out my flame. The cliché is true: there’s nothing like a funeral to make one feel alive.
In wood-paneled rooms were portraits of the old dead king in sundry luxe-framed inaugurations. For the last four decades, he had that luxuriously photogenic shock of white hair befitting a Russian or Bolivian billionaire—I thought first of Derrida, then Gianni Agnelli, then finally, most perfectly, of Burt Lancaster. (Perhaps because I’d read somewhere that in his prime, Lancaster was the nastiest, toughest, most feared son of a bitch in Hollywood.) There were pictures of Jack and Morgana on yachts with society types, of black-tied Jack receiving this or that award of national or foreign commendation, of white-tied giant-killer with Jack ’n’ Jackie O—he’d written the first of his Pulitzer Prize–winning novels at just thirty years of age—a congery, a menagerie, an agglomerated panoply of silvery and kodachrome portraits: Jack with Hall of Fame rockers, world- and working-class saints and sinners, caretakers, -givers and corporate raiders, icons, poets and acolytes—Jack be nimble, Jack be quick—fools and royals and unwashed unknowns. While there were no recent images of the patriarch with his surviving son, I did manage to scope a shot of BJM posed, a tad uncomfortably it seemed, with the very young Thad (future third-rate novelist, classily idiosyncratic staple of big-screen blockbusters, and now our very own soon-to-be Starship ensign) aboard a rather grand little boat with The Soft Sea Horse written in elegant cursive on its prow, and I knew it predated the drowning. I wondered how the photo had lived; perhaps Morgana snatched it from one of the legendary bonfires.
I moved on, gamely attempting to unravel the riddle of a bronze plaque propped up against a soapstone Buddha. Why it had been memorialized, I would never know:
“Americans define Time as the space within which one succeeds or fails.”
—JACK MICHELET, JONAS AND THE WHALE
