«No!» said John. «Congratulations.»
Nylla rolled her eyes. «I feel like somebody's science project.»
Ivan said, «I like the name Chloris — what do you think of Chloris — if it's a girl?»
Before John could reply, Nylla asked, «Can Borgnine be a first name if you want it to be one?»
«How about Tesh,» suggested John. «It'd work for both.»
And so the two parents once again lapsed into banter and John pulled himself away ever so slightly.
John wouldn't dare mention to them the depression he felt when Ivan had told him he was getting married. It was a few years ago, during the emotionally murky period after having two films flop, and their industry currency had been much devalued. To John, two flops meant a time to change and evolve and go forward — but Ivan had chickened out. He'd invented himself as much as he was ever going to. He was going to take the Full Meal Deal and fade away and make medium-budget teen movies that opened big the first weekend and then died of bad word-of-mouth. It was like a slap to John, who had wanted to go on and on, reinventing himself, and had continued to try doing so.
John suspected that his recent crack-up was precipitated by being, if not abandoned by Ivan, then certainly relegated to second place. He felt selfish even thinking about it, and tried to put it out of mind.
But John
John loved Ivan and Nylla, and he valued the world they'd built for themselves. Yet he knew that fairly soon, there in the kitchen, after Mac was given to the nanny and hauled upstairs, Nylla would gently grill John about Susan Colgate. She'd be careful not to dwell on the negative — his recent past — and then both she and Ivan would try to steer John closer to the road's center.
John wasn't without hesitations in his feelings for Susan. He'd followed his instincts in big ways before, but with his two flop movies and his Kerouac routine, it seemed his instincts now only failed him despite
MacKenzie began to bellow like a Marine World exhibit, and Nylla and Ivan carted her up to her nursery. John picked up
Chapter Eight
John's mother, Doris Lodge, had fallen in love with John's father, Piers Wyatt Johnson, a solemn Arizona horse breeder without family or history whom she met at a stable in Virginia, and whom she bumped into again by accident in Manhattan outside the Pierre Hotel, where he'd emerged having just brokered his first five-figure sperm contract. She fell in love with him because she saw this coincidental meeting with him as fateful, but more specifically because of a fairy tale he liked to tell Doris after they'd made love in Doris's one-room apartment on the fifth and top floor of a Chelsea walk-up, an apartment of the sort that had been attracting young Mary Tyler Moores with tams on their heads since the dawn of the skyscraper era. The room, the rental of which had required much finagling on Doris's part, was her first place of her own («Mummy,
«You see, it's like
«What was her name?» Doris would ask at that point. It was part of the ritual.
«Marie-Hйlиne.»
«That's so pretty,» Doris would say.
«And she was indeed pretty. She was a
«It's hard to be a catch,» Doris would sigh. Sunlight would stream in through the window, which overlooked a generic brick alleyscape of water tanks and a syringe-poke of the Empire State building above, a bevy of trash cans below, all of which seemed to cry out for wide-eyed sad painted kittens, perched and yowling. Piers's body hairs would catch the sunlight, like light filtered through icicles.
«Absolutely,» Piers would add. «Abso
«What did she see? Tell me again.»
«When Marie-Hйlиne looked at the young hunter, a strapping lad, she saw him wink at her. And then he spoke to her. He said, “Marie-Hйlиne, come in here — come here inside this painting with me — this is your escape route — through this painting.” Marie-Hйlиne was frightened. She asked the hunter, “How can I come live in a painting? What will we eat?” This made the hunter laugh, and he said, “We'll have everything we'll ever need in here. It's not like your world. In paintings, you can go visit other paintings. We'll go visit the feast paintings the Dutch did in the 1700s. We'll go have coffee inside an Edward Hopper diner. Please — come on in. I'm so lonely.”
«Marie-Hйlиne said she needed to think about it, but the next day she came back to the painting, dressed in hiking clothes, ready for the forest. The hunter asked her, “Marie-Hйlиne, will you come into the painting and join me?” and she said, “Yes, I will.” »
Piers wore Eau de Cйdrat, a French citrus concoction that Doris said made him smell like Charles de Gaulle. His already sexy cigarette smoke would mix with his cologne like a spring fog alerting the bulbs beneath the soil to sprout. Piers would say, «The hunter then stuck out his arm and he pulled Marie-Hйlиne into the painting, into the forest, and slowly the two came together and Marie-Hйlиne planted a kiss on his lips. She pulled something out of her pockets, and the hunter asked her what it was, but she didn't reply. It was a book of matches and a bottle of her father's lighter fluid. She squirted the fluid out onto the floor of the mansion and lit a match and threw it onto the fluid. The house caught fire and Marie-Hйlиne said to the hunter, “Come on, let's go now. Don't look back.” So off they walked, away from the flames, and away from the world where Marie-Hйlиne could never return.»
«The catch fights back!» Doris would say.
Doris and Piers married against her family's wishes in a Manhattan civil ceremony. («Dor-Dor, he has no family —
