Your Duck Is My Duck Page 3

  Now Ray looked at Christa. “Did you give her one of my Vexnixes? You gave her one of my Vexnixes, didn’t you!”

  “So what?” she said. “I told you to throw that shit out.”

  I was just standing there agape. “You gave me some pills that make you e-mail in your sleep?”

  “‘Some’!” Ray yelled. “You gave her some?”

  “I’m sorry,” Christa said to me, “but you said you were desperate. And they don’t do anything to most people.”

  “They do something to me,” Ray yelled. “They’re the only things that get me to sleep!”

  “They fucking decerebrate you!” Christa turned to me. “Ray drives in his sleep.”

  “I do not drive in my sleep!”

  “Oh, you’re awake when you jump in your car at two A.M. and go tearing up the coast to see that loony, anorexic bitch?”

  “She is not anorexic—that’s just the way she looks! How many of those things do I have left now?”

  “In one second you’re not going to have any,” Christa yelled, tearing out of the room after him, “because I’m going to flush them down . . .”

  And then, happily, both of them were out of sight and earshot. So I helped myself to lunch, and it was all delicious. That night there was the first in a long series of freakish storms, and the sky erupted over and over into webs of lightning that crackled across the water and mountains and valley. Ray didn’t show up for dinner, and he didn’t show up the next day, either. In fact, he didn’t return for nearly a month, during which time Christa alternated between shutting herself up in the bedroom, pounding on my door to talk incoherently for hours, and scaring up whatever expats and aimless travelers she could, for wild parties that lasted days. I was pretty worried about her, especially when I realized she was taking not only Crestilin but Levelal and Hedonalex, too.

  When I could, I would hide myself away from the noise and confusion of the parties and ask Marya for meals to bring to the little house for myself. And sometimes Amos and I would stand together at the kitchen window to watch the storms, and the fires springing up on distant slopes. And I would also sneak peeks at Amos, whose face reflected the flames as an entrancing opalescence, as if the light were coming from his lunar skin.

  Ray was still gone, and one day Christa came to my room wearing baggy pajamas and carrying a huge armload of beautiful, beautiful dresses. “Here,” she said. “These are for you. I don’t want them anymore.” In her eyes, tears were welling and subsiding and welling. I took the clothes from her, and we stood and looked at each other, and then she turned away and was gone. Naturally, during that time, I thought about Graham quite a bit, and I longed not for him but for the apparition he fell so far short of, which I called up over and over, and gradually wore away until there was nothing left of it, though the loss wasn’t exactly a nullity—I could feel an uncomfortable splotch marking its spot, like a darned patch on a sock.

  I watched the ravenous flames devouring Ray’s eucalyptus, where there had once been small farms and living crops, and I was sorry that I hadn’t sent myself my paints and brushes. So Fred drove me to the nearest large town, where I spent most of the frisky money that had made me feel so powerful to acquire some passable materials.

  We passed some donkeys on the road, sweet little gray things with eyes as black as Amos’s. “Donkeys!” Fred said affectionately.

  Fred spoke only a bit of English, so I’m not sure exactly what he was telling me—I think it was that he had a wife and lots of children, and that his wife was a baker, who made the delicious pastries that Marya served every day, but that the price of flour was now so high that the remaining local people could barely afford to buy her bread.

  Fred himself was an electrician, I think he said, but these days there wasn’t much paying work, so he had started to do any sort of thing he could for Christa and Ray, to make ends meet. I’m not sure, but I think he said that he was helping build a generator, too, for the little hospital in the area, and that there were sometimes electrical emergencies, so he had to drop whatever he was doing for Ray or Christa and go attend to the problem.

  Anyhow, he was good at doing a lot of things, and he was kind enough to help me stretch some canvases. Accident had selected me to observe, in whatever way I could, the demonic, vengeful, helpless, ardent fires as they consumed the trees that had replaced the crops—to observe the moment when, at the heart of the conflagration, the trees that sustained it became phantoms, the fire’s memory.

  In those days I was neither awake nor asleep. The fires, the sea, the parties, Christa, Marya, Amos, and Fred wove through the troubled light, the dusk, the smoky, phosphorescent nights. The water had become rough and gray, and down by the shore a little group of shacks had sprung up, where people waited for a boat to appear on the horizon. Sometimes I thought of my former employer, Howard, just standing there, as I left, not looking at me.

  I was getting fed; at home, so was my cat. I arranged to stay another month. Ray returned, and the wild parties came to an abrupt end, though now and again a fancy car would still roar up, and some flashy, drunken teenagers would tumble out at the doors and have to be shooed away. I learned, online, that Zaffran had taken up with a young actor. The first few days Ray was back, he was irritable and silent, but soon he became cheery and expansive, as though he had achieved something of note, and Christa began to make plans to redecorate. “Would you like the dresses back?” I asked. “I don’t really have anyplace to wear them.” “The dresses?” she said. She smiled vaguely, and patted me, as though I had barked.

  Three weeks of drenching rains kept us all indoors, and by the next week, when the rain began to let up, I had completed almost what I could, and Amos was ready to run his show, which he was provisionally calling State of Emergency.

  The dank fires were still smoldering, and several donkeys had slid into a ravine where they died, heaps of blood and shattered bone, though no tourists had been hurt. With the help of Fred and some kids from the village, Amos had constructed a little theater inside the main house, and we all settled in to watch—Christa and Ray and me, of course, and Marya, and a few Europeans and Saudis, who still had vacation places in the area, and a visitor from Jaipur, who designed software for a big U.S. corporation, and his elegant wife. I wore one of Christa’s lovely dresses for the occasion, the only one that didn’t make me look seriously delusional.

  The curtain rose, over a vibrant and ominous bass line. You could hear the plashing of the alligators in the moat and the lethal tapping of the computer keys in the towers. A low, queasy buzzing of the synthetic string section slowly amplified as the murky dawn disclosed drone aircraft circling the skies around the castle. Fred had done an amazing job with the lights, and the set, with its beautiful painted backdrops, was so vivid and alluring that sitting there in front of it you felt as though you had been miniaturized and were living in the splendid castle, pacing its red stone floors among the silk hangings. In the caves, where the serfs and donkeys toiled, at a throb of the woodwinds, pinpoints of brilliant yellow eyes flicked open, revealing hundreds of upside-down bats.

  Amos had supplied a makeshift recording in his own strange, quavering, slightly nasal voice, of all the vocal tracks laid over an electronic reduction of the score—the forceful recitatives and the complex, intertwining vocal lines. As the conflict built toward a climax, the powerful despots—the king and queen, the generals, and the alligators in the moat—sang of the need for gold and of growing fears. The twilight deepened, and the hills beyond the castle grew pink. Small black blobs massing on them became columns of donkeys and serfs, advancing. The sound of piccolos flared, and Marya grabbed my wrist as a great funnel of dots swirled from the turrets and bats filled the sky, and Amos’s quavering voice, in a gorgeous and complicated sextet, both mourned the downfall of the brutal regime and celebrated the astonishing triumph of the innocents.

  The curtain dropped, and there was a brief silence until Marya and I began to clap. The others joined
in tepidly. “Nicely done, nicely done,” the man from Jaipur said.

  “We love to have artists working here,” Christa said to his elegant wife. “It’s an atmosphere that promotes experimentation. Sometimes things succeed and sometimes they fail. That’s just how it works.”

  “That was only the first act,” Amos said. “This is intermission.”

  “Ah,” Ray said grimly. “Well, let’s all have a stretch and a drink, then, before we sit down again.”

  “I’m afraid we won’t be able to stay for the second act,” one of the Saudis said. “An early flight. Thank you. It was a most enjoyable evening, most unexpected.”

  So the rest of us had a stretch and a drink and sat down for the short second act.

  The curtain rose over a blasted landscape. The bodies of the king and the queen swung stiffly from barren trees. With a moaning and creaking of machinery, the ruins of the castle rose unsteadily from the earth. Heaps of smoking corpses clogged the moat.

  Three generals, formerly in the service of the hanged royal couple and now in the service of the absent executives, appeared at the front of the stage. One sang of the dangers to prosperity and social health that the conquered rebels had represented. A second joined in, with a lyrical memory of his beloved father, also a general, who had died in the line of duty. And the third sang of a hauntingly beautiful serf rebel, whom he had been obliged to kill.

  There was more mechanical moaning and creaking, and up from the earth in front of the castle rose a line of skeletons—serfs, bats, and donkeys—linked by heavy chains. The generals, now in the highest turret, swigged from a bottle of champagne, and as the grand finale, the skeletons, heads bowed, sang a dirge in praise of martial order.

  The curtain came down again, heavily. There were another few moments of confused silence, and then Marya and I began to clap loudly, and the others joined in a bit, after which Marya disappeared quietly into the kitchen, to put out the scrumptious dinner she had prepared, and Ray stood up. “Well,” he said. “So.”

  * * *

  I rarely go to parties any longer, but I did go to one the other evening, and there were Ray and Christa, looking wonderful. The milling crowd jostled us together for a moment, and they each gave me a quick kiss on the cheek and moved on, not seeming to remember me, exactly.

  In the morning I called Amos, with whom I have coffee now and again, and we arranged to meet up that afternoon. He had just gotten back from touring The Hand That Feeds You in Sheffield, Delft, and Leipzig, where it had a modest success, apparently. “Gosh, I’d love to see that show again,” I said. “Yeah,” he said, “it’s changed. I’ve worked out some of the kinks, and of course I got together some people who can actually sing to record the music, but I can’t get it put on here. Too expensive. And my former producer says the stuff about serfs is a cliché.”

  He was thinner than ever, drawn, actually, and I noticed for the first time that his wonderful, pallid luster had dimmed. “Amos, hey, I really cleaned up with my last show,” I said. “Let me take you to a decent dinner.”

  “Sure,” he said, in such a concertedly neutral tone that I realized I’d upset him.

  “Wow, Christa and Ray,” I said, retreating to more comfortable ground. “I think about them sometimes, don’t you? It’s odd—no matter how you feel about a place, it’s as though you exchange something with it. It keeps a little bit of you, and you keep a little bit of it.”

  “I know,” he said. “And the thing you mostly get to keep is leaving.”

  A while after we’d both returned home, or so Amos had heard, the last of Ray’s eucalyptus trees had been torn out to prevent further fires, and then the bluffs collapsed, sweeping away the remaining huts of the village in mudslides, and Ray and Christa had shut up the place and left, shortly before it was torched. So we wouldn’t be seeing it again, obviously, and nobody else would, either.

  And in fact it was hard to believe, as we sat there in the rather grubby coffee shop about halfway between our apartments, that the place had ever actually existed, and that Amos had first done his show there that evening when the rains finally stopped and the sky cleared and the stars came out and the moon made a path on the sea that looked as though it led straight to heaven.

  No one had mentioned the show at dinner, but there was plenty to talk about that night anyway—a new drug against hair loss that was being developed in Germany, an animated film about space aliens that was grossing an immense profit despite its unprecedented cost, and a best-selling memoir detailing a teenager’s abusive upbringing that turned out to have been written by a prankster. And after we’d all had a lot of very good wine and Marya brought out an incredible fruit tart, the man from Jaipur stood to raise his glass and said, “Let us be thankful—let us be thankful for our generous hosts, for art, for this beautiful evening, and for the mild, sunny days ahead!”

  Taj Mahal

  I was a difficult little boy, and when my mother’s chronic illnesses made it impossible for her to care for me, she packed me off to her errant father, the filmmaker Anton Pavlak.

  Friends have joked that it was an opportunity for her to punish us both. And when I tell people that I was sent to stay with Pavlak during the heyday of his Hollywood period and I name some of the actresses who were likely to star in the breakfasts I had with him at his home, they look at me as if I’d said that my mother used to send me out to play with lions and tigers.

  These episodic visits to my grandfather lasted from the time I was ten until I was nearly fifteen. And it was certainly an eye-opening experience for a child who was used to a sickroom atmosphere and its lonely hush. Even now I find it hard to credit that my joyless, ailing mother was Anton’s child, and that Anton had ever been married to my grandmother, a terrifying old lady with a heavy accent, draped head to toe in black, who appears only in my earliest memories, hovering around my mother’s kitchen like a vulture.

  My grandmother had been part of some other life of Anton’s, an era and a continent away, back when the two of them and their infant daughter, my mother, were fleeing Europe’s gathering storm. The Anton I knew was indeed a brooding, complex figure, but he lived under the bright California sun, in a whirl of colors and flowers and activity.

  In Anton’s house I was exposed to brawls, tears, romances, scenes, and wild reconciliations. It was a tumultuous time for the tightly knit group of friends who served as the instruments to enact on film my grandfather’s dark visions with all their implied violence.

  My grandfather could be a tyrant; he was a womanizer. He was often moody and capricious, as his detractors assert. But he was kind to me, though he worked long and intense hours and the daily tasks of seeing that I was fed and clothed fell largely to his household staff.

  Whatever my mother’s intentions, my times in my grandfather’s irregular household were among the brightest of my life. And on nights when I find it difficult to sleep and I sit up watching old movies on TV, the faces of such Olympians as Zoe Sills and Duncan Macgregor appear in the air around me like guardian angels.

  I met them there, at my grandfather’s: Zoe Sills, Duncan Macgregor, Evangeline Feld, Peter Lofgren, Coral Durance, Greta Seifert, Roman Karsk, Pansy Resnik, Tara Foley, Luther Kaminsky, and Austin Arles. All of them, and so many others. They were playful and self-indulgent, and, probably because they spent most of their time like children, pretending, they were great fun for a child to be around, even blighted as they were by the famous self-destructive habits and narcissism of actors.

  The youngest of them are now old, those who are left. My grandfather passed away decades ago. Evangeline, Pete, Tara, and Zoe are long gone too, and the others are fading away. But I still think of the little gestures of kindness those friends of my grandfather’s made to the lonely child I was, and I wish I could repay them now, so many years later.

  In fact, this attempt to memorialize my grandfather and his friends, to record these intimate glimpses of their lives, began out of an old debt to Pansy, who found me
crying one day when I’d skinned my knee. She took me to her home and cleaned the cut gently and carefully, although I could smell the alcohol on her, and she put a Band-Aid on it. And then we merrily ate too much peppermint ice cream together.

  The memory returned to me suddenly not long ago when I attended a Christmas party where peppermint ice cream was served, and I resolved to look Pansy up. After many efforts, I traced her to the dilapidated apartment complex where she was living, neglected, in one room with only a hot plate to cook on. And though she seemed to confuse me with someone else, she clung to my hand and there were tears in her old eyes, as if some distant memory was sending its sunny rays into her cloudy mind.

  * * *

  What to do about all this horseshit? Nothing, really, nothing. But still, the ones who are left, those who happen to be in New York—Duncan, Coral, Roman, and Luther—have collected, on this glassily brilliant autumn day, in the noisy bar of a restaurant that Roman likes. Emma has been included, too, although if it weren’t for this so-called memoir, these old friends of her mother’s would no doubt have forgotten all about her. Even in the book her existence is confined to pages 48, 49, and 316.

  “You see, he’s inserted himself into the story,” Luther says, jowls trembling with indignation. “Clement Rouse—who is this putative grandson of Anton’s? Whoever he is, it’s not his story. He’s inserted himself into it.”

  “Rather a shame his mother didn’t send him out to play with lions and tigers,” Coral says, as the maître d’ shows them to their table with a flourish that suggests he’s produced it from thin air.

  Roman, all wiry eyebrows now, grunts. “Actually it is his story, the Clement Rouse story, the story of a guy who thinks he should have gotten to hang out with some people who hung out with his grandfather instead.”

  “I think I should have gotten to hang out with William Shakespeare,” Luther says. “Maybe I’ll write a book about my intimate glimpses of William Shakespeare’s life. For heaven’s sake—‘Luther Kaminsky and Austin Arles, Luther Kaminsky and Austin Arles’! All through the damned book it’s ‘Luther and Austin,’ ‘Luther and Austin.’ What about Luther and Greta, please!”