I'll Let You Go (30 page)

AND YOU'RE A NEW AGE PREDATOR!

It wasn't too bad a read after all. A breezy comedy involving a Beverly Hills limo driver and runaway socialite, it aspired to Lubitsch but had more the Mirdling touch.

Ralph was in the kitchen, noshing as usual. His hair shorn militarystyle, he looked stylishly commanding—part of a new regimen. As if taking a cue from Trinnie, he had cleaned up his act. In his shabbily chic navy-blue Costume National he looked like a survivor of Appomattox who with steady rest and diet might soon be attending the officers' ball. Today, Tull found him reassuringly unneurotic.

Pullman snored, insensate, blocking Ralph's access to the Sub-Zero. He was sleeping more than usual; his master had been meaning to take him to the vet.

“You know what they say about Danes, don't you?” asked Ralph rhetorically, gently pressing the spotted rump with the soft point of a demi-boot.

“Go ahead, Ralph. Tell me. Get it off your chest.”

“Two years a young dog, two years a good dog and two years an old dog. The rest is a gift.”

Pullman raised his head and derogatorily chuffed before pressing his muzzle to the humming grille of the restaurant-size freezer.

“Whatever,” said Tull.

“It's plain unfair,” he went on. “If you're a man, you're going to die in your seventies.
Maybe
. And if you're fucking koi, you can push the envelope at two hundred—two fucking
centuries
, Tull, swimming about in a scummy little pond! And they love it!”

“I thought your script was really funny.”

“You're a dear boy, but it's awful.”

“It isn't, Rafe,” he said, giving the name its rightful pronunciation. “I wouldn't shit you. I even have notes.”

“Oh, by the way, it's Ralph—with an l.”

“Ralph?”

“That's what I call myself now. Ralph: simple and American as they come.”

“You're kidding. When did
that
happen?”

“What difference does it make?”

“But what about … Mirdling's Name Theorem?”

“It went the way of all flesh—don't let's dwell on it.”

Tull hoisted himself onto the stainless-steel counter. “I did think the script was funny.”

“It's worthless—I'll seal it in an envelope and pull it out in ten years. Have a good laugh. Actually, though, it did serve its purpose.”

“What do you mean?”

“Guess I had to get something like that out of my system. Took long enough! Hey, you know who I showed it to?”

“Who?”

“Ron Bass.”

“Whoa!”

“Nope. He actually read it—gave it a nice read, too. We've become pretty good friends. He's all right. I'm still not crazy about his work, but … you know, Ron's the one who turned me around. Gave me a whole new ‘P.O.V.' Your mom and I had dinner with him, at 5 Dudley:
great
French onion soup. We met him at that sick-animal thing, you know. Very charming,
tons
of energy. And he
does
care about ‘the work.' That's saying a lot.”

“You showed Ron Bass your script?” he said, still disbelieving.

Ralph nodded eagerly, tucking into a king-size wedge of four-day-old mud cake. “He said I had no business writing that sort of thing, it was more like something
he
would write, but
he
would have written it
better
. I'm telling you, Tull, he's a very funny guy! ‘Mirdling,' he said—that's what he calls me—‘Mirdling, if you're going to do something third-rate, then for Chrissake at least do something true to yourself.' ”

“I'm amazed. Next thing you know, you'll be buddying up to Robert Towne.”

With that, he showed a flash of the old
Rafe
. “Oh Christ! I read yet
another
Mr. Chinatowne piece today. The Master was going on about his movie again—it's an absolute
mania
, the man can't stop! A ‘classy' little essay in
Architectural Digest
 … on and on he went about his ‘nocturnal ramblings' on Western and Vermont, with the
Santa Anas
and the
water company
and all the intense bullshit–Raymond Chandler
channeling
 … ugh! And how he took himself to a little bungalow in Catalina to hammer out that legendary first draft—oh Christ, I just want to vomit down his throat! And what about William Goldman? That vain, pontificating ass! He's worse than ol' Chinatowne! Oh
please
get cancer, Mr G., oh won't you please? With his ‘nobody knows anything' … well,
I
know something: someone should run them both
over
—”

“So you're just going to … throw the script away?”

“I might do a number on it—put up some scaffolding and give it a po-mo makeover. Something closer to Charlie Kaufman. Spike and Charlie are the New Wave Wilder and Diamond. Let's hope Spike isn't as nasty as Billie, though—what a fucking monster
he
was. But
smart
. Managed to get his furry old dick pretty far up Cameron Crowe's ass, huh. I
do
think someone should teach him how to dress, though. I mean, Spike. You'd think
Sofia
would—or maybe your mother! By the way, how are you two getting along?”

“Okay.”

Tull was about to do a little cathecting, but Ralph spoke first.

“I think I've entered a
very
fecund moment,” he said. “I'm walking around with a
thousand
ideas. I'm telling you, man, I can't stop the flow! I'm gonna direct something on DV any minute now, I can
feel
it. How do you like this: there's a guy from Iran who's been trapped at the airport in France for ten years because of some bureaucratic snafu. True story. A
fantastic
subject, very Herzog, as in Werner—or maybe it's very Tati. Or maybe Lynch, but the
Straight Story
Lynch. Make a
fantastic
film. Then I was reading in
The Enquirer
about a travel agent
who helps people disappear
. Tells you how to fake your death, open a Swiss account—all totally legal! That could be
very
Japanese.”

“How could it be legal to fake your death?”

“It is if you don't rip anyone off. Then there's this
ensemble
piece I'm thinking of, about a bunch of despots—you know, from imaginary countries—living on a wealthy street in London. They're all neighbors, kind of an outcast's
Notting Hill
. So-called kings who looted their treasuries and tortured people. Idi Amin and Papa Doc types. That could be for HBO. I'd love to create a
Sopranos
, but the dictator thing might be too harsh.” Pullman hobbled out of the room in disgust. “Oh! And I want to do a comedy about a girl who's a ‘G.T.A.'—know what that stands for? Genital Teaching Associate. That's a model who teaches pelvic-exam techniques to med students. I'm serious, Tull, that job actually
exists
! Ya gotta learn
some
where, baby, I am
telling
you—it's like I've been freed: my mind's
completely
opened up. When I look at those ‘Rafe' scripts I wrote, it's like holding third-rate artifacts from another time. And I owe it all to Ron Bass!”

L
et us pick up from where we left Katrina.

She is wearing a sixties Lanvin python jacket and Miguel Adrover chain-mesh halter top; setting off seriously green eyes is a multicolored pearl necklace bought at Piranesi, in Aspen, a few years back, for a quarter-million. She sets aside her Colonne excavations, nostalgically distracted by her father's collection of photographs.

The familiar images erupt, shuffled out of sync, a mess of time: Bluey, in '51, at Count Carlos (Charles) de Beistegui's costume ball at the Palais Labia on the Grand Canal, the Venetian summer before she met Louis. Cecil Beaton took the picture: her friend Daisy Fellowes came as
Marie-Antoinette, and Bluey went as lady-in-waiting, dressed like a milkmaid—they stood with the count, sweetly absurd in his sausage-curl wig. A half-dozen years later: Bluey standing with her dapper, slightly intimidated husband in the downstairs gallery of Peggy Guggenheim's astonishing palazzo among the astonishing Pollocks. Her mother first met Merce Cunningham there—and André Breton, who Trinnie later learned had been obsessed with “the Broken Column” himself, camping with the Surrealists at the Désert de Retz. A snapshot of her father in Guam, 1945; another of Louis pointing to the pig tattoo on a sailor's foot (he told her the popular mariner's notion that, like David Copperfield's caul, the mark could prevent one from drowning); again Louis, on the terrace of a Fifth Avenue penthouse showing off his Bronze Star; at the Paley wedding; then both parents, years later, with the Paleys and Cushing sisters at Round Hill. Summertime clambakes in Nantucket; messing around at Bouldereign (Carefree, Arizona); Jamaica and New Orleans; with Valentino and the Buckleys in Gstaad, and Carol Burnett at Snowmass; grinning madly at the Malaparte cliffhouse in Capri; with Jackie Gleason and Oona O'Neil at Villa Nirvana, Las Brisas … Palm Springs with the Nixons and Annenbergs; a hoedown at the deMenils'; Bluey in someplace like Laguna with a handsome man Trinnie had always suspected to be a lover; Louis and Bluey at their own wedding in Palm Beach. Then—standing on the pontoons of a seaplane on the lake outside their Adirondacks Great Camp, arms raised in a toast; Louis in his duds on digging machines in front of various yawning, mile-wide quarry pits; Louis during somber late-life travels to far-flung graveyards. Then came the kids: blurry black-and-whites of Dodd and Katrina behind nursery glass, haunting, smudgy little faces, swollen post-natal eyes and bundled bodies held aloft by smily-eyed, half-masked attendants for all the world to see.

Beverly Hills. The kids with new Schwinns. The kids at Point Dume. The kids in water-hose sword fights with Liz Taylor's sons in the driveway of the house on Roxbury, overlooked by a scowling, very much younger Winter. The kids in the back of the Corniche at Dolores's Drivein, hamburgers already transferred to mahogany seat trays. Dodd, age thirteen, at the Beverly Vista graduation, standing in front of the orange-brick wall of the inner court like a prisoner about to be executed. A photo of the ten-year-old Tull riding Pullman had snuck in …

She stole another look at Bluey in Venice and thought, Her life has been full. Still, it distressed her to already be eulogizing.

Her eyes grew tired. She felt a hard frame beneath the remaining fan of images and pulled it out—a quote from the embattled founder of the William Morris Agency, clipped from a 1909
Variety
. Marcus used to keep it on his desk at work.

Stuck to its underside for no rhyme or reason was the Kodak she had taken (her heart skipped a beat) of the benighted Désert de Retz on the day of their long-ago trespass. A chill came over her—she hadn't seen a photo of her Marcus in so long. He stood in the foreground of the meadowy depression, the cracked alabaster skin of the castle rising from his shoulders to crown him.

Finally, Trinnie saw the thing for what it was: the megalithic woman he'd left her for. She'd never had a chance.

She heard something and looked up—it was her son. He walked toward her through the vestibule of the great room, small steps over a floor made of 57,000 hand-carved pieces of mahogany, ebony and tulip-wood, past draperies tied with leg-of-mutton passementerie, circumnavigating his grandfather's cemetery of beloved architectural models, slowing regally as he reached a grove of Chinese porcelain birds on giltwood brackets, and Fragonards resting upon a Pluvinet canapé covered in horsehair. His mother had by then tucked away the portfolio and greeted him with a smile.

He thought her ostentatiously dressed, and that concerned him; it usually presaged a leave-taking or breakdown. “What are you doing?”

“Some research.”

“For the hospital garden?”

“Yes.”

“How's it going?”

“Well.”

“How's Bluey?”

“Not so well.”

“How are you?”

“Couldn't be better.”

“Can I talk?”

“Yes, you can talk!”

“It's about my father. I found out a few things.”

“Such as?”

“That he was an agent. And that he worked at William Morris.”

“You talked to your grandfather …”

“No. I just—I found out myself.”

“I could have told you that. It wasn't a big secret.”

“
Everything's
a secret,” he reprimanded. “Anyhow, I wouldn't have asked.”

“Why not?”

He lowered his eyes, wanting respect conferred upon his discretions. “But I
do
want to ask some things now.”

“Ask away.”

“Who was he an agent for? Actors?”

“Actors, directors, writers. He had them all.”

“How did you meet him?”

“A party. At the home of a man named Ed Limato.” She smiled; it had been years since she'd said that name. “Everyone went to those parties—they were great fun. I wanted to be an actress, or thought I did. For about a week.”

“He was
your
agent?”

“No.”

“If I mention something, will you not ask me how I found out?” She nodded. “Because I gave certain people my word.” She nodded. “Do you—do you know anything about him—about Marcus—stealing a book?”

“Yes.” Then: “They never brought charges.”

“Because the store was reimbursed by the detective.”

“You're good. You are
very
good.”

She lit an American Spirit, inhaling the smoke like a native.