“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 assistants 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.