Oracle Bones was one of the books I’d been led to by The Dream of the Red Chamber, and it was proving to be one of the best. I managed to stretch dinner into a couple of hours, barely noticing what I was eating as I followed the sweep of Chinese history over 5,000 remarkably rocky years. The whole time I was in the restaurant, I never once thought about Thistle Downing.
Well, almost never.
Since Kathy and I broke up, this has pretty much been my life: sleep in motels and eat in restaurants, with books for company. It wasn’t as bad as it probably sounds. I felt a kind of lightness about having gotten my possessions down to a suitcase’s worth, just some clothes and my three touchstone books. I had a fine-quality first edition of The Recognitions, complete with dust jacket, autographed by Gaddis himself, that had cost me fifteen hundred and was now worth about $10K, and a beautiful 1930 edition of Moby-Dick with illustrations by Rockwell Kent. My copy of The Dream of the Red Chamber was more prosaic, a five-volume set of Penguin Classic paperbacks in the extraordinary translation by David Hawkes, which he titled The Story of the Stone. I didn’t feel starved for human companionship, not when I had the enormous, tumultuous Chinese family in the Stone, especially the pampered and extravagantly romantic boy, Bao-Yu, who was born with a magical piece of jade in his mouth, and the two girls who love him.
But now I was caught up in something involving real people, and it didn’t look like it was going to end well. None of my Big Three books has a happy ending, but when I read them I took some consolation from the fact that I had no opportunity to affect the way things worked out. Here, on the other hand, was a fluid situation with a bunch of living, breathing folks in it, all of whom were going to end up either in better or worse shape than they’d been in when the story began. Assuming that it was possible for Thistle Downing, or anyone, to be in worse shape than the lost soul Doc had described.
Back on the sidewalk, I persuaded myself that it was all going to be okay. I’d make all Trey’s problems go away, and Wattles would swap the surveillance tape, and I’d move on as though none of this had happened. Maybe I’d just bury Bunny’s necklace.
And maybe Thistle would be okay, too. Maybe she’d get through the shoot intact, or at least as intact as she was when she went into it. Maybe Doc would keep his promise and do something about the drugs, and she’d live happily ever after.
Maybe. But if it were a book, I wouldn’t bet on it.
16
As Rina had said, it was called “Once a Witch,” and it seemed to be on all the time.
I hadn’t known anything about Thistle’s show when I watched those bits of it at the Snor-Mor, that one long scene and the end credits. By midnight, I was an expert.
Thistle played a character called Wanda, which I thought was a little on the cute side, since Wanda was a witch and had an actual wand. In a cosmic mix-up among dimensions, she’d been swapped with a normal baby, leaving her to wreak innocent havoc in the middle-class (read: all-white and all non-witch) suburb into which she’d been mistakenly dropped. A parallel plot line, following the normal little girl who’d been accidentally given to a family of witches, had been filmed but was dropped at the end of the first season, by which time it was apparent that the only reason anyone was watching was Thistle.
The other little girl-who was adorable but, compared to Thistle, lumpen-was apparently allowed to return to normal toddlerhood obscurity, where the odds were good she’d grow up nursing a lifelong grudge against Thistle Downing. Or might have, if things hadn’t gone so spectacularly wrong in Thistle’s life.
By twelve o’clock I’d seen four shows and three actors playing Wanda’s father, all of whom might as well have been furniture. It wasn’t fair, because when Thistle’s spells went awry, they often required some expert physical comedy on old Dad’s part, and at least two of the Dads were equal to it. But, unfortunately for them, Thistle was usually onscreen when their best bits came up, and it just wasn’t possible to take your eyes off her. When these scenes were written, they had been about the father’s dilemma, but when they were filmed they became about Thistle’s reaction to the father’s dilemma. It really wasn’t fair. Here’s Dad, trying to play ping-pong while hanging upside down with his shoes stuck to the ceiling, and Thistle’s just standing there, and you still looked at her. And the Dads weren’t helped by the fact that, by season three, there was almost never a shot in which Thistle didn’t figure.
The actress playing Mom learned early to give the screen away with a kind of ego-free good humor that put her on the audience’s side. Her attitude seemed to be saying to the viewer, I’m with you. Let me get out of the way here, so you can sit back and see what she comes up with. Dads had come and gone, but Mom had lasted through the show’s entire eight-year run.
By the beginning of the fourth show I watched, I had distanced myself far enough to begin to wonder how Thistle could be destitute, no matter how much dope she was gobbling. The residuals from the show had to be substantial. Five or six episodes daily were fed into the maw of the cable channels. Her take had to be hundreds of thousands a year.
I wondered who would know why she wasn’t getting any of it.
The shows I saw were apparently chosen at random by some programming computer. There was no attempt to stick with any single season or even cluster of seasons. As a result, I saw Thistle at eight and ten, then at eight again, and then at fifteen. It was amazing that she could hold me for two straight hours of uninspired sitcom machinations, ninety percent of which was filmed in that eternal, unchanging living room with the same damned bouquet of flowers on the table in front of the couch. She just outshone the material so strongly that everything else faded away. It was like seeing a diamond in a pile of manure.
But Rina had been right. As Thistle aged, she changed. At eight, she was all energy and uncanny instincts; she barely seemed to know the cameras were there. When she was ten, she still had the energy although the instincts weren’t as clearly visible, and she had learned some technique that allowed her to build the jokes gradually and then ride them until the audience was helpless. There was, as far as I could tell, no electronic enhancement of the laughs she drew. They all sounded messy, spontaneous, and ragged, just like the laughs a real audience would create.
At fifteen, she didn’t have so much energy. She was working hard, trying for the first time. Her technical skill had grown, but there didn’t seem to be much of herself behind it. And she looked tired. Caught at certain angles, she had circles under her eyes. In one or two especially unfortunate shots, possibly preserved by an editor whom she’d treated badly, she looked exhausted. At fifteen, there were moments when Thistle Downing looked thirty.
And sad.
I turned off the television and booted my laptop, logged onto Google, and read what I could. Family life was unremarkable, at least from the outside, but then the Borgias probably looked normal from the outside. Father died when Thistle was little, mother had the kind of big-toothed smile that said she could probably bite a Chevy in half, and there was a brother, Robert, just an amorphous, pudgy, resolutely ordinary kid a couple of years older than Thistle. The kind of kid you could meet twenty times with no memory of him. In fact, I had to look back after I’d navigated away from the page to check his name again. Robert. His name was Robert.