She eventually moved to a little Craftsman not far from my cottage on Ocean Park. (When I’d suggested we become roomies, Clea demurred.) She still came over enough to leave a territorial mark: ashtrays overflowing with lipstick-smeared butts, discarded Tampax applicators in the bathroom wastebasket, the errant ripped, discarded panty hose tucked impishly under bed frame. When I brought home dates, I had a speech prepared — always ill received — about how Clea and I were “childhood friends” but nothing more.
As my ambivalence about having joined the Starwatch family mellowed, and my gig grew more secure, I set up an audition. Dad didn’t come to the studio much anymore but cordially arranged to be there on the big day. (He remembered Clea from bygone times, and might even have met Roosevelt at some PTA thing or another.) I’d already made my big spiel so when I reintroduced them, he was on best behavior — as were the casting gals, as was Clea, as was myself — the whole world was gallant, dainty and civil, tender in its hopeful reparations.
She got the job without having to read.
Clea would now report to work in the engine room of the Demeter, where she’d limn the role of Genius Alien Mechanic With Dangerous Sexual Undertow: an expat from the rarely visited star cluster, Albion-12. When the makeup team materialized a diamond-encrusted appliqué that adhered to the upper skull (Clea called it “a rhinestone merkin”), branding Albionesque tribe and ancestry, she took it in playful stride. I was proud of her because with great élan, Clea had made the difficult decision to come in from the cold and humbly ply her trade. If a person was going to do some serious spring cleaning and adopt a new work ethic, this was as good a place as any — if that meant leaving her ego at the fortieth-century door of the Demeter, so be it. We both knew the courage it took to overthrow old dreams and slough off the seductive, gaudily dystopian lifestyle that had brought her so close to immolation.
The day she returned from her final skullcap fitting, she cried in my arms, in hope and defeat, and I felt she was truly my sister.
Now, I’m a little unsure if this is kosher from a “literary” standpoint but I need to introduce someone essential to our story whom as yet hasn’t even been hinted at. (Remember, I’m new to this; maybe that’s a plus.) Why not? In the actual chronological scheme of things — and I know that sounds odd — I’m about to meet him for the first time myself. But I wanted to make a preliminary sketch, so you’re familiar.
(Call it part of my ten-finger exercise.)
All right, here we go:
The plucky, diminutive Thad Michelet was fifty-four years old, and while endowed with the rakish quality of an overgrown cherub, he was very much our elder. He was widely known as a gifted comic actor, with powerful dramatic skills as well; ten more years and he’d have made a fine, if physically uncharacteristic Willy Loman. He was supposed to have been marvelous in an Off-Broadway revival of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros some years back — had I not been in the midst of a dry-drunk bender with a girl whose name I’ve now forgotten, I’d have certainly gone to see him. He was also (I was dimly aware, even before Clea reiterated) a published novelist, and like so many of us, the thing he found himself most passionate about was made manifest by talents the world deemed second-rate. What the world wanted was the incarnation of Thad Michelet it had known for the last dozen years — a lovable buffoon who graced interchangeable studio “tent poles” that never grossed less than $200 million, sometimes approaching a billion worldwide. He’d been George Jetson’s hapless brother in Barry Sonnenfeld’s delightful live-action feature and played Sancho Panza to Peter O’Toole’s Quixote for the ebulliently uncontainable Terry Gilliam. He had guest-starred in just about every CSI permutation to date, and done three-episode arcs on most of TV’s hottest half-hours. The remarkable thing being, Thad Michelet was as likely to do a turn for Polanski, Frears, or the Coen brothers as he was for Spielberg, Ratner, or the Farrellys. A Renaissance man, he divided art and life between the avant-garde stage, studio films, indies, television cameos, and book writing. Among these avocations, Thad’s literary efforts are by far the most pertinent (at least, in regards to my tale), in that his very idea of himself as a man of letters constituted the Significant Other that bound him so closely to Clea and myself — and at this point, it’s probably best to come clean with the “reveal” that his father happened to be none other than that titan of our time, the singularly profane, lavishly gifted, beguilingly protean, salaciously elegant, carnivorously charming novelist who I presume was and is still known to most readers of these pages as both giant and giant-killer Jack Michelet — Michelet of the three Pulitzers and perennial Nobel short list, Michelet of the Lannan Prize, Michelet of the Neustadt and two National Book Awards, Michelet of the eight novels, countless screenplay adaptations, and three Academy Award noms, Michelet of the six books of essays and criticism, two children’s fairy-tale compendia, five volumes of poetry, and countless short stories, Michelet of the outrageously trenchant, scabrous, scholarly, dashed-off feeling yet meticulously crafted op-ed pieces, Michelet of the Harold Bloom canon, Michelet the occasional translator from Czech and Celtic and old Italian, Michelet the now-and-then classically outrageous, outrageously classical rethinker, rewriter, and rearranger of Chekhov, Ibsen, and Molière, Michelet of the editorial stewardship of myriad international quality-lit anthologies, Michelet of the required college reading, Michelet the mythic lion in winter of whom biographers and journalists high and low had gleefully written did not go gentle into that good night (or whatever miserable cliché they saw fit to employ) — Black Jack Michelet who most definitely didn’t end with a bang or a whimper but instead lingered in bodystink and agonized ill health so as to take pleasure in maiming and brutalizing whomsoever loved him, or at least had put in their time as blood or bloodied relations upon countless scarlet battlefields, the last being the Vineyard, where the sadistic, near-senile general’s body finally fell.
In other words, Michelet the Genius.
But here’s what I meant by Significant Other.
If we’re lucky in life, one day we discover our passion; and while it’s true we become in a sense married to that passion, what I seek to convey is something ultimately above and beyond trade or creative calling. Put it like this — I, Bertie Valentine Krohn, am bound to Perry Needham Krohn in the same peculiar way that Clea Fremantle was to her mother Roos, and dearest Thad to giant-killer Jack. It is impossible to ignore that the three of us diabolically chose to scale the Olympian summits of peaks already conquered, staked, claimed, and mythologized by the sacred monsters who bore us. Now, why on earth would we embark on a cause so futile and without distinction? Was it cowardice, sloth, delusion? Genes, arrogance, simple perversity? All of the above? The most pernicious of my theories was that we’d been subtly seduced and savagely suppressed by the gravity of whichever dominant, offending parental star, in the same way adult children are ensnarled, emasculated, and snuffed out in Strindberg chamber plays. (All right, I confess; I probably didn’t have it all that bad.) While it isn’t particularly convenient, and might even strike some readers as paranoid, let me put everything on the table with a cold, Oedipal eye — if, say, by the power of the Starship Demeter’s tractor beam my own father insidiously reeled me into the orbit of Planet Hollywood and its promise of moguldom and if, like a druggy automaton, Clea had played out her unlikely role as failed ingénue, soaked in a provocative parfum of sex and death daubed behind the ears by a platinum-haired succubus who only grew more controlling and persuasive in the afterlife… well, if these things were true, then it only made sense that Thad, eldest of these musketeers, was likewise mesmerized into believing he might actually compete at the authorial heights of his father — when in reality he was merely saloon dancing like the town drunk, feet shot out from under by an artfully messianic, infanticidal gunslinger.