Any Resemblance to Actual Persons (4 page)

(On an impulse I just looked up
Transformers: The Movie
[1986, dir. Nelson Shin] in
Fleeber's Encyclopedia of Film
, which sits on a shelf near my desk, and it turns out that the voice that sounds like Orson Welles actually
is
Orson Welles. I'm a bit baffled and troubled by this. Before I took up this project, compiling the research to properly refute my sister's claims, I had been engrossed in a new three-volume biography of Welles, but I had to set it aside before I got to the end of his life. I'd read all about the tough times Welles went through, how he was forced to do projects simply for the money, but what makes this voice appearance in
Transformers
worse is that it was his final performance in a film; it came out within months of his passing. Grieving audiences were left not with the grandeur of
Kane
or his ophidian performance as Harry Lime in
The Third Man
fresh in their minds, but rather some piece of Sunday morning confection, a toy advertisement masquerading as a film. Indeed, “Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell.”)

“Aunt Paige was crazy,” Edie concluded. “Admit it. You have to admit it.”

I admitted that Aunt Paige was a little eccentric, perhaps, but that that was probably inevitable at her age. But if she was really this devoted to our dear old dad, didn't we all deserve our own Aunt Paige, keeper of the flame, Boswell to our Johnson, Bruccoli to our Fitzgerald, Kinbote to our Shade? If the fear of death is not a fear of an end to our consciousness but rather others' consciousness of us, i.e., really just a
fear that we'll be forgotten, and if here we were in a shrine to our father thirty years after his passing, then hadn't Aunt Paige effectively offered an antidote to death itself?

Edie didn't seem very satisfied with my answer, which was enormously frustrating, but it was not a point I had time to elucidate. I still had a fuck-ton of grading to do. I told Edie this (the part about the grading), and left.

As you can see, Edie probably did not come back to L.A. with ill intentions. She has always been a bit excitable and drama-prone, but she was not yet, at this point, an insane person. So where exactly did this all come from? A man named Rory Beach. You surely know the name, if not the man, as he appears in Edie's book both on the “acknowledgments” page and in the character—because this so-called nonfiction book is, as I will prove, a piece of fiction—of “Dr. Beach,” the man who helps Edie “recover” “repressed” “memories.” I have seen no evidence that this man actually has an advanced degree, so I will refer to him as Rory, not “Dr. Beach.”

Anyway. After I dropped Edie off at our old house that day, I didn't see her again for some time. My teaching kept me busy. Plus, during that fall semester, Chris got suspended from school for fighting, and I had to home-school him for a month to ensure that he would not get left behind. (I found his math lessons not only impenetrable but frighteningly Masonic in their cryptic iconography, so I spent most of that month helping him stay up on his English, but since I've always found Steinbeck's depiction of the American West to be a bit pedantic I substituted in McCarthy's
Blood Meridian
, and the ancillary readings on the antebellum scalp-trade filled in for Chris's history lessons.)
Also, I started dating someone, a new teacher at COLA named Julia. We are still together and I think it is going quite well. (She is, no point in hiding it, the colleague I mentioned on page 7; her legal expertise has helped me enormously in preparing to write this, and will continue to aid me should this issue go to court, and the fact that we have a sexual relationship—on average, three times a week, which, I've read, is one above the national average for monogamous middle-aged couples—should in no way be seen as affecting the objectivity of her counsel.) The point is, I was busy, and I assumed Edie was getting on fine, sleeping in her old childhood bed, getting her life back together. That assumption was incorrect. It would be foolish now to spend too much time regretting not seeing more of her during that time, thinking that I could have stepped in earlier.
What-if
s and
if-only
s always annoy me, the way people invest so much in what could have been, like a warped belief in alternate universes in which different decisions were made. I can't change what I didn't do. I can only try to correct what has been done.

The next time I saw Edie was in August 1995. The new school year had just started and I was, once again, quite busy, but I managed to make some time for her when she called and asked to meet for lunch. She suggested Jerry's Famous Deli on Ventura Blvd., a place I've always had a mild fascination with simply because of the brilliant tautology of its name. Were it simply Jerry's Deli, after all, it would not be famous. But it is Famous, and so it is famous. This was, however, my first time inside, and I was delighted to find it a bustling place with geriatric waiters and vaguely sapphic waitresses rushing by, holding trays of sandwiches the size of my head. It reminded me a little of
Katz's Deli, which I'm sure you New Yorkers are more familiar with; I used to make Oliver take me there whenever I visited your side of the country, and I'd ask him if it was a hot spot of publishing types—was that George Plimpton noshing a pile of pastrami between two slices of rye? the ghost of Max Perkins waiting in line with his ticket for corned beef? an improvised Algonquin Round Table being cleared of mustardy plates?—No, Oliver would say. But, still, you must be familiar with the place. Although, Jerry's Famous is, in true West Coast fashion, a bit glossier than Katz's: shinier, the arrangement of celeb-signed headshots on the walls more calculated than casual.

I met Edie by the front counter, which displayed an impressive array of dessert items, everything looking lacquered with sugar, voluptuous pastries with nippley cherries.

“Thanks for meeting me,” Edie said. “You're a hard one to get a hold of these days. This'll be on me, okay? A business expense.”

“No problem, Edie.” I noticed a framed poster of
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
over by the corner booths near the restrooms. I could make out a looping signature but couldn't tell if it was Bette Davis or Joan Crawford. “Do you think we can get one of those corner booths?” I asked.

She began looking very urgently to the corner booths.

“I know,” I said, “I can't make out the signature either.”

“Listen,” she said, “I want you to meet someone, okay? I've been trying to get you two together for a while now. You'll really like him, I promise. Here he comes. Like each other, okay? Please?”

She waved to a tall man with slicked-back hair who'd just left the restroom and was walking over to us. When he approached I noticed
what looked like a pet ferret resting on his shoulder, and I realized that the hair I'd taken to be slicked back was, in fact, pulled back, ponytailed, and I adjusted my prejudices accordingly. Edie introduced us. Rory, this is Paul. Paul, this is Rory. We shook hands. Or rather, Rory shook my hand. That's the way it felt, at least. Not a mutual action to meet in the middle, but one man taking the hand of the other, moving it around as if checking the integrity of its manufacture, then giving it back. It was hard not to feel like my hand had somehow failed whatever inspection this hawkish man had just made of it.

“Paul, yes,” Rory said. “I've heard so much about you. A novelist. Wow. I must say, I have so much admiration for writers.” For a moment, it looked like he had eyes of two different colors, like one of those ridiculous husky dogs, or David Bowie, but then I realized it was just a trick of the light. Both eyes were, in fact, quite green, narrowly set atop a nose that was really, now that I saw it, more Romanesque than aquiline. “Tell me,” he continued, “what is your latest project? I'm very interested.”

I explained that I was, at the moment, between projects, but that my latest novel,
Rarer Monsters
, was still being shopped around to publishers by my agent and longtime friend Oliver Kelly. It was a coming-of-age story about a boy who blames his father when his mother abandons the family, and finds himself drawn to the more overtly masculine father of his best friend. I hesitated, worried that my summary sounded trite, and admitted that I am not very good at giving concise pitches of my work, that authors never are since we understand our creations to be incredibly complicated and nuanced things, and that a summary is, by its very nature, reductive, though necessary in this marketplace.

“I understand completely,” Rory said. “It sounds marvelously interesting. The title—from
Macbeth
, yes?”

It was! As the hostess showed us to our table—a corner booth!—I explained the subtle network of Macbethian themes that interlace the novel, how the perspective of the boy is, in a way, an imagining of Fleance's perspective, who of course witnessed the murder of his father, Banquo, but eventually became, as was prophesied, the ancestor of a line of great kings. In order to fully explain this, I had to go into some detail about the events in the novel that lead up to the scene when the boy witnesses what he perceives as his father's metaphorical castration but which turns out to be a contemporary play on what literary critics refer to as “the bed trick.” By the time I got to the part about our young protagonist masturbating into a catcher's mitt, our waitress was already at our table demanding orders.

I hadn't had time to consult the menu yet, so I asked to go last. The menu at Jerry's Famous advertises an impressive seven hundred items, and I was fairly overwhelmed. This very American overabundance of choice often results, paradoxically, in a subversion of choice. While I was trying to think of a pithier package of that observation to deliver to Rory, the waitress looked at me, and I panicked and simply got what Rory had ordered, a Rueben and an iced tea.

When the waitress left, I leaned over to Edie and said, “Robert Aldrich.”

“What?”

“The autograph on the
Baby Jane
poster. It's not Bette Davis
or
Joan Crawford. It's Robert Aldrich.”

“Paul,” she said in that doubting way of hers.

“You don't believe me? Look.”

“We need to discuss something.” This was the exact thing our mother said to us before she (Mom) went to Africa. I felt a little offended by her (Edie) co-opting this phrase, along with our mother's flat cadence, but realized that it could have been unintentional. I also realized—as I had not when I was a kid—that the inclusiveness of the first person plural subject, not to mention that verb, was a lie.
We
would not be
discussing
anything.
She
would be
talking
. But I played along. I listened. Besides, I knew from experience that if you don't take Edie's crises as seriously as she wants you to, she'll only exaggerate them to absurd heights. So I listened.

“I should say that when I came back last year,” she said, “I was a little out of sorts. I'd gotten into some trouble and needed a home base, needed to regroup. I won't get into what sort of trouble, just say that it is irrelevant to everything that followed and that it's all being sorted out. I want to say this up front to apologize for the way I simply arrived back in your life as I did. It was unannounced, unexpected, and I had no right to intrude like that. I say this because it's important that you know I completely understand why you couldn't make it to Paige's funeral and why you've neglected my calls since then. Relationships cannot be repaired as easily as a phone can be dialed.”

What is it about aphorisms that seem to require the passive voice? People seem to think the passive voice bestows on that which is said a kind of yogic—if not Yodic—wisdom. She could just as easily have said, I cannot repair a relationship as easily as I can dial a phone. Boom—passive voice eliminated.

“But I did as you said,” she continued. “I went through George's—Dad's—things, began to get everything organized. There was, as I'm sure you can imagine, a lot of it. I found—I'm not sure how I should say this. I found a number of documents.”

Or perhaps it is the intrusion of the “I”—which returns agency to a previously passive construction—that makes an aphorism too person-specific to be aphoristic?

“A manuscript, for one,” Edie said. “I'm sure you know, he'd been working on a novel for—some time. He kept it in a locked trunk, along with a number of other documents that I will get to. But first, I read this manuscript. Read it with great interest. I remember him locked up in his office, writing, always writing. Even when the TV show was on hiatus, he was in there writing. I wanted to know what he'd been writing all that time.” She looked at Rory, who did the sort of hand-over-hers/comforting-nod thing that I—and surely he—had seen on countless daytime talk shows in which some traumatized woman must recount the details of her trauma to a salivating host. “It was not what I expected. It was—disturbing.”

The waitress brought our food. This was, I see now, remarkable turnaround time. Perhaps I am omitting something in the conversation between the waitress's order-taking and food-delivering, or perhaps my sense of time had gotten compressed (I remember us already having our beverages, so perhaps this is the case), but either way, I distinctly remember my—our—food being brought at this moment, my and Rory's twin Reuben sandwiches—their melted Swiss cheese congealing with the sauerkraut above densely striated layers of pastrami, a pile of meat so high it could not actually support itself as a sandwich anymore, was
pushing the very limits of its structure, the top slice of marbled rye having slid off—along with Edie's food, a salad maybe, or soup.