On the drive home, I told Miriam about my experience. I talked about finishing The Soft Sea Horse, all the miserable things I’d read that Jack had said about his son, and the crazy ambivalence I’d felt in trying to hash everything through — so very democratic, like an honor student mastering both sides of a debate. She smiled, rather gurulike herself, without entering into the fray; her way of acknowledging I was now a rarefield member of Thadwatchers (or Micheleteers), an adherent of the Inner Circle.
Instead of returning to the hotel, we made love at my house — though it sounds a bit convoluted I think at least part of the reason was to avoid competing with the raw ecstasies of the night before — when Shutters stripped and shuddered, an event whose tomfoolery probably imprinted itself upon the overpriced, designer-seashell-strewn aura of that room for at least ninety days. (A discreetly placed plaque should read: MIRIAM AND BERTIE DIDN’T GET MUCH SLEEP HERE.) A few minutes after we came, in simultaneous, symphonic ciss boom-bah, Miriam fired up a cigarette, sucked in a fog bank of smoke, and set to a little musing herself.
“I was thinking… you know — when you were talking about The Soft Sea Horse. I’m not exactly sure what Thad told you when you were on the train — and I know you’ve read the book, but some things didn’t happen the way he wrote them. Like, he wasn’t in Amagansett — or the Vineyard — when Jeremy died.”
Knowing what I read was “fiction,” I was still bemused. “But it said they came over to the island,” I said, defensively. “After the drowning.”
“That’s what I’m saying. He wasn’t in the States, he was with him in Capri. When it happened. Morgana was busy with a nervous breakdown — they finally put her in Silver Hill. Or somewhere. Lillian Hellman made the arrangements. I think. That’s why Thad wound up going to Europe. What happened was, Morgana thought Jack was having an affair with Sophia Loren which he completely wasn’t, he was screwing two other actresses on that shoot. And the set designer too! The twins were playing in the water…” She closed her eyes, as if projecting a legendarily lost film on the back of her lids. “And his father, that motherfucker, blamed him for it. As usual! I mean, he blamed that little guy if it rained. Jack thought it was deliberate. That was his theory! Some sort of willful act on Thad’s part. The asshole. Bertie, can you imagine? The man was a shitty, shitty father, he never watched those kids, it was criminal, he was — a compulsive pussyhound. Anyway, it was just some creepy literary fantasy of Jack’s, a Henry James thing. And later on, I think he was pissed Thad wrote about it because he was going to, supposedly, but didn’t have the stones. Cajones? And he thought, How dare he! You know, scooping the big genius. Thad would never have been capable of hurting his brother, he worshipped him. But I guess capable and culpable are just a few letters off.
“Anyway, Thad got righteously blamed, and that’s a heavy thing to get laid on you at that age. At any age! Jack just poured out his rage — the rage toward Morgana that he’d always had, I mean way before those kids were even born—they were nothing but… burdens to him — oh right, I know he was supposed to love Jeremy so much—that’s part of the myth, OK? But you know, I don’t even think it was true. Jack had a death wish — for everyone else, not for himself. So when Jeremy died, he probably felt whatever form of guilt he was capable of feeling and then he poured this sick rage on that poor, poor boy. It so breaks my heart, Bertie. It so breaks my heart!”
1 Knowing it may be cloying to some, I include the nickname out of breezy verisimilitude. Having gone this far — I think I’ve probably gotten footnotes out of my system, too — I’m afraid there’s just a bit more to be revealed under the irritating file marked TMI: I had taken to calling her that after watching a show on the Discovery Channel, postcoital.
~ ~ ~
THE NIGHT PROVED A TONIC all around. On Sunday morning, Thad and Clea looked clear-eyed, luminous, and light of heart. I hadn’t fully digested Miriam’s cliffhanger about the twins being together that ill-fated day in Capri; my plan was to visit the Herrick Library and see what I could dig up. I wanted to hold a bit of fragile yellow newsprint in my hand, something the Internet couldn’t allow.
But first, let me backtrack: we officially got busted.
See, everyone was supposed to hook up at Shutters around noon. The Dynamic Duo awakened early, fled the Chateau, and swung by Clea’s to grab a swimsuit. When there was no sign of Miriam at the hotel, they naturally decided to kill time by dropping over to harass me; as they pulled up, Meerkat was just leaving. They clucked their tongues and said “Aha!” in grandly sophomoric pseudo-revelation.
Our pal had hired a driver, and I wasn’t sure that was a good sign. Miriam wanted to run the Mustang over to Shutters to pick up a suit of her own but Thad insisted we take the Town Car on a “pit stop” then continue to the Colony. Clea was gung ho. She’d never been to my parents’ beach house.
We piled into the Lincoln and, after a few minutes of ribbing on their part and half-assed blushing on ours, settled in for the short ride.
My father bought the place twenty years ago and since then had acquired the adjoining properties (his modus operandi, as by now you know). The structure had endured a multitude of upgrades and add-ons in the Richard Meier mausoleum style—“ad mauseum,” as Gita liked to say, otherwise cattily known as the School of Swiss Sanitoria. “Perfect,” she noted wryly, “for your parents’ mutual invalidism.” The sand castle was a suitable showcase for Perry’s outsized art and ego. I had pretty much left the nest by the time they moved in, and while I’m certain to have secretly — all right, maybe not so secretly — coveted the general idea of a $15 million weekend getaway, I was glad to note that for all its meticulous minimalism, in the end, like an aesthetic black (OK, white) hole, the dwelling consumed itself, and everything in near orbit. When I finally visited — already in Berkeley and on the outs with Perry (Mom was inadvertently tarred with that brush) — I realized for the first time just how much money my father had accumulated through the years. My outlandish disdain was tempered by the fact that Gita loved the beach: sun and sea were therapeutic and rejuvenative. If that’s what money could buy, the house had been worth every penny.
Mars (short for Morris), the longtime, fortyish-looking sixty-something majordomo, greeted us at the door. Dad was having a massage and Mom was still asleep. Though just half an hour early, I fitfully asked if my parents had remembered about brunch. Mars smiled like a mandarin. Everything would be ready — he was cooking the food himself — around noon. He suggested we take a stroll on the beach.
It was a spectacular morning. Jerky breezes snappily rearranged our hair and we chased each other around while rich, healthy dogs — locals — leaped and barked. Since our covers had been pulled, Miriam and I dared the occasional intimacy yet when Clea caught my eye, I reflexively dropped my lover’s hand with whatever casualness I could muster. (It was silly but Meerkat seemed mildly amused.) Thad gazed at the horizon with a kind of pilgrim’s poignant hopefulness, like someone with a fatal disease on the eve of sailing away for a last-ditch cure. Clea spent a fair amount of time watching him, not just monitoring moods but fixated on his essence as an anthropologist upon a totem. He completed her in a way — I was going to use “ennobled,” the word I invoked for Morgana on Black Jack’s extirpation — but that wasn’t wholly true, not in either case. He did lend a kind of gravitas: she’d finally met someone whose anchoring to this earth was more tenuous than her own. While Clea always yearned for flight, she had voluntarily grounded herself for this man — a lovely sacrifice. Though I’ll never be certain, I think she must have already known she was pregnant.