I'll Let You Go (84 page)

She looked at him blankly, thinking he spoke in metaphor.

“The potter's field in Boyle Heights.”

“No.”

“A dear friend of mine was buried there. Do you know how they do it, at potter's field?”

“Yes. Edward told me …”

“No names—not even an apothegm! Only dates. They keep markers, markers with the year etched upon it.”

“I don't think I could do that to him.”

He had only been trying to make things better, but had made them worse instead. “Oh, I wasn't suggesting it, Joyce. Oh, not at all!”

“I know you weren't, Marcus. It's just that … I feel it's so important—
apart
from honoring him—you know, that he was
here
—that he was
with
us … It's a way of saying: ‘The world will not forget you.' ”

“Oh, I doubt Edward would ever feel he could be forgotten, ma'am.” He saw that he'd wounded her again. “But surely you're right, surely you're right. Names
are
very important—I should know. I've had more than one!”

She smiled, and felt his warmth. She had sold this man short—had called him crazy and unwashed and a bad father in the bargain, the major kink in her sordid sister-in-law's dissolute life. But he was the sanest of the lot. She so appreciated him visiting her son each day. He was unmorbidly comfortable with death, and that made Joyce more comfortable too. He never judged her.

Only days before, something strange had happened. After receiving a frantic call, she had invited Rachel, one of the lesbian moms, to Stradella House for lunch. The frazzled woman showed up with the baby, saying Cammy left her for a man and that she had no idea as to her “wife” 's current whereabouts. She asked point-blank if Joyce—being the infant's godmother—would “look after him” for a few weeks while she went east. Her mother was dying, and Rachel said she didn't feel up to the task of caring for the boy in the midst of deathbed duties. While she spoke, she glanced nervously about the house, like a slave girl soon to be banished.
Take him!
her flitting eyes seemed to cry.
You could take
ten thousand—
this place could fit them all
.

S
he called him Ketchum; the name the Palisades ladies had given him simply wouldn't do.

Winter moved to Stradella to help out. She and Joyce almost had heart attacks—it was scary and messy and hysterical fantastic fun; it was
life
, tiny and needy, pissy and shitty and squalling—and she found herself actually looking forward to coming home from Pilates or Aida
Thibiant or Candlelighters, and that was a big change, because since Dodd had moved to the Hotel Bel-Air after telling her he was in love with his assistant, Frances-Leigh, she had found the house and haunted Olde CityWalk grounds to be a far less amenable place than where her son lay anonymously (for now) buried. The absurd thing was, she was living the life of some kind of sitcom: the rich lady of a certain age whose husband leaves her for the secretary and who inherits a toss-away baby—throw in a nanny, she joked to Winter, and you've got an old-fashioned prime-time hit! She felt like Bea-fucking-Arthur. It made her laugh, and anything that could do that had to be good.

Ketchum's presence healed them both, for Winter had been at wit's end; Bluey's condition had deteriorated exponentially and was a horror to behold (she thanked God Mr. Trotter could no longer bear witness). When Trinnie finally decamped, Saint-Cloud became a very creepy place to lay one's head; though Winter kept the television on all night long and slept on the living room couch, she still felt as if Jack Nicholson were going to come axing his way through the front door. At least there was life on Stradella, and new life at that. Joyce let her stay in any room she liked, and it almost felt like a holiday. Still, when she made herself dinner, she fell to musing about the condo Bluey had promised, wondering if it would vanish, as Mr. Trotter had, into thin air.

O
f course, now that Toulouse's hormones were racing, Amaryllis was no longer interested—well, she was, but not in the kind of explorations that had taken place some months ago in the penthouse of La Colonne. Then, Toulouse had been a gentleman, wise and respectful beyond his years;
now
, thinking back on that precocious moment, he merely wished to shoot himself. He'd become obsessed with her, and the evil thing was that she knew it. She fussed over him just enough (her attentions falling sadly short of the cockpit grapplings with his English cousin, which now seemed stupendously pornographic) to keep him from going bananas.

They saw each other at least twice a week. Toulouse lived for Friday afternoons, when he found himself being driven over the Shakespeare Bridge to the home of his true love, now legally known as Amaryllis Kornfeld-Mott (the hyphen had been her idea). He stood at her door, warmly greeted by Lani or Gilles, feeling spiffy in his sporty Costume National
Homme. The object of his devotion invariably summoned him to her room to present a clipping or two—this week, her particular favorites being the piece in the
Journal
about a woman whose actual job was to sniff the leather of new Mercedeses, and an item in the
Times
detailing the amount his uncle had lost in a recent week of trading ($237,198,940, to be precise—Toulouse gulped, but did his best to remain cool). They would then stampede to the Silver Seraph and be delivered to Cañon Manor, where their sagacious host had spent all day preparing the most heavenly food known to man. When Trinnie was there, it was fun, but a different kind of fun, because Marcus was always sweetly mindful of her and charmingly distracted; in other words, she came first. Toulouse thought that was how it should be, and it gave him pleasure to see them laughing and joking and holding hands. Though in fine general spirits, his mother still walked beneath a cloud, as if not yet fully recovered from the years. The boy was certain—the
children
were certain—she'd come around.

On other nights, Trinnie's absence was sorely felt but soon blotted out by food and revelry and the spellbinding tales of a shadowy world—a street world, one that Amaryllis of all people had shared. Toulouse was envious; when his father spoke of carrying her on his back through the night, he may as well have been describing a magic carpet ride. Sometimes the details were so vivid Toulouse felt he might somehow insert himself so that Marcus would remember a time when the
three
of them had had some such adventure. Just when the boy's desperation nearly drove him to recount some pathetic anecdote from his own life (shoplifting from 7-Eleven came to mind), Marcus sagely saw fit to weave another web, only this time one whose weave Amaryllis had not been part of. She would listen enrapt, her eyes wide as her suitor's, even reaching for Toulouse's hand during the telling—then all would be right with the world again.

The ride back to Franklin Hills would be quiet, with a kiss stolen here and there in the rare moments Epitacio avoided peering into the rearview.

Weekends were devoted to the babies. There was usually a large group—Gilles and Lani, Candelaria and her niños, Cody and Saffron and their foster parents, along with their other three wards—and off they'd go in a minivan to Downtown Disneyland or the San Diego Zoo. Sometimes they made a day of it at Stradella, and Trinnie hired a circus with
acrobats and elephants and sword-swallowers too. After barbecue they would trip to the Majestyk for a noisy matinée. Of course Winter brought Ketchum, and everyone was glad to see Joyce looking so well again.

It was good for Toulouse to wander Olde CityWalk. Since Lucy left, there hadn't been much reason to visit; he'd even built up something of an aversion to the place, as in the time Amaryllis vanished from her hideaway. But now it was like walking inside one of the dreams he still had about Edward—dreams that left him feeling warm and reassured when he awakened, and without melancholy. He would grab Amaryllis and break away from the crowd, stealing into the Boar's Head to survey the workshop, where masks still hung as if awaiting selection by their master for the new school day … then they would creep upstairs to the “apartments” where so many schemes had been hatched and secrets revealed.

Toulouse poked open the trapdoor, and they climbed to her old safe house.

She looked around with a shiver of nostalgia. He kissed her and she let him.

“Amaryllis,” he said.

There was a catch in his throat, and she noticed how he'd gone a little pale.

“I wanted to ask you—I wanted to know if you would think about the idea—or the
possibility …
and it doesn't have to be, well, it
couldn't
be something that would happen now or even very soon but—something that would happen maybe in the
future …
well, I wanted to know if you would think about thinking about the idea of us—of us eventually getting married. I mean, years from now. When we are older or after college or whenever you—whenever you thought that might be something you wanted to think about or maybe say yes to in the future but not necessarily now.”

She took his hands and looked him in the eye.

“I
do
love you, Toulouse,” she said. “I always have. And I always will.”

She kissed him and ran to the ladder to rejoin the group, now in general tumult over a tightrope walker's derring-do.

That night he lay in bed more tortured than ever. No amount of careful analysis could yield a definitive result: had she said yes or no?
Was it an undying—or a sisterly—proclamation? Luckily, sleep laid siege to the conundrum and put it to rest until the fresh misery of morning.

I
t was true that Dodd Trotter had fallen in love with his secretary, but one could not hold it against him. He had been loyal to Joyce for as long as humanly possible, and remained so in his fashion; unlike his wife, he had no dumpster babies with which to sublimate his grief. Frances-Leigh was a good woman. She was devoted to his happiness.

Trinnie asked her brother for help. She had decided to sell La Colonne Détruite, or rather sell the property where the broken tower resided, for no buyer could be expected to preserve such a monument. Nor would she wish it preserved—to that end, she had even considered tearing it down before putting the park up for auction. Strangely, Trinnie found she could no longer set foot in the place. Bluey was right; they should have sold and subdivided years ago. All the furniture and items so mathematically arranged were carted off to storage, to be sold on another day. Next on the list was Saint-Cloud—everything must go. She wanted no more shrines or mazes in her life.

Dodd had an agenda of his own. He decided to move the corporate headquarters out of Beverly Hills. His son and father were dead and his daughter was living in England; his mother did not know anymore who he was; and the last of his worries—his rolling-stone sister—was safely anchored by Marcus and Toulouse. It was all right now for him to begin afresh, away from the nexus of his old life. To her credit, Frances-Leigh argued against the move. Conservative by nature, she felt it more symbolic than practical.

The dream of revamping Beverly Vista was dead too. There would be no rooftop gallery, no Puckish cafeteria, no starstruck planetarium or fiber-optic learning center powered by truck-size servers buried underground—no Sage Hill, no Ross Institute, no Cary Academy—no footprint or imprint, only misprint. There would be no thinking outside the box, only thinking
inside
the box. Probably what his dad was doing right about now, he darkly joked (Frances-Leigh didn't think it so funny). That's all the imperial Beverly Hills school district knew how to do anyway, he said: think inside the box.

The Quincunx Holding Company undauntedly continued to acquire
rectangles of real estate in the Beverly Vista matrix and was now in possession of nearly one hundred houses and apartment units. Like an embittered dramaturge (but more like a broker calling in margins), the billionaire ordered the division to take possession of the deeded homes that surrounded the school. It would be a three-month process, for that was the amount of time the tenants—former owners who had continued to “squat” on the properties—agreed they would need in order to move, upon notice to vacate. (Many of the homes whose original owners had already taken the money and run were currently inhabited by Quincunx employees.) Within six weeks, Dodd Trotter's hydra-headed enterprise had transplanted itself to Northern California, and the eighty or so employee-participants of the Middle School Adjunct Residency Program had followed, leaving empty residences behind.

A series of increasingly frantic calls to the Quincunx CEO from honorary PTA president Marcie Millard went unreturned. As one by one the dwellings around the school went dark—and the student body dwindled accordingly—Dodd Trotter's disappearing act became fuel for the media. Stories of the unfolding suburban debacle invariably contained two sides: that the celebrated nerd had avenged himself
Carrie
-like on an ungrateful school district for failing to allow him to remake the alma mater in his own image (and name), and the counterspin being that any reports to this effect were patently absurd, the vacancies an unfortunate by-product of a recessionary downsizing. For a few months the Trotters, Dodd in particular, endured more scrutiny than may have been desired. They would endure.

Neither the
New York Times Magazine
cover (“An Unsentimental Education”) nor the intercession of various moguls, senators and billionaire busybodies—most of them friends and colleagues or at least high-level acquaintances of Dodd's and his father's—did anything to sway him. His lawyers said the courts would eventually force Quincunx to sell off the marooned properties, but such a decision might take two years, at least. By then the paint would have faded and the lawns died, and Dodd Trotter's interest along with them. He never held on to the empty buildings in his portfolio for longer than that anyhow.