There is no guaranteed all-American movie-concocted melodramatic resolution out there, my ever so appropriately ambitious and unimpeachably sincere young man from the northbound L & N Railroad outskirts of Mobile, Alabama. Take it from old Geronimo, your newfound fellow trailmate from the South Side of Chicago. There is only the ultimate actuality of the entropy (repeat, entropy) of the void, upon which we impose such metaphorical devices as AND, as in (andoneandtwoandthreeandfourand) and one, and two, and three, and four and so forth and so on and on, from which we also get “and it came to pass and so on it went time after time after time, as has been recorded here, there, and elsewhere.
Picaresque, my dear fellow journeyman, he also used to like to repeat from time to time. Don Quixote and Candide, each in his own way, equals farce, the dynamics of coping with chaos, slapstick for slapdash: Buster Keaton’s deadpan, Charlie Chaplin’s ever so elegant nonchalance.
In all events, however modest that garden Candide so earnestly promises to cultivate, it had better include an adequate crop of ever more elegantly refined or at any rate resilient pratfalls, if you know what I mean.
So there you go.
XXXIII
So there you go, fellow, Eric Threadcraft said on the phone from Hollywood. Man, old Papa Joe and the crew were in town last night on a stopover on their way up the coast to Monterey, and he gave me the double rundown on what you’re up to and also heading into. Fantastic, old buddy. Like I always say, I’m still getting special kicks out of the fact that old Papa Joe was the one who had the idea that the two of us should get to know each other and stay in touch. Anyway, man, I must say that campus gig couldn’t have been more timely. And, of course, you know that the Bossman’s proposition knocks me out. Man, who else but him would realize how slick it is to begin with Royal Highness. Hey, that’s just as slick as it is deep, fellow, and so obvious that you hardly notice it.
Then before I could ask about Celeste, he said, And now comes the update on the situation chez old Mice: We are just about to do it, fellow. Man, I’m taking the plunge. So there it is, old buddy. You’re the first to know.
Then he said, Man, you remember that studio thing about foreign employee clearance that had me so nervous about political intrigue and extortion and stuff that morning when I got you to meet me at the Algonquin and then didn’t bring it up anymore because I was already so far gone on this lady that I just decided to play it as it lays.
And guess what? It turns out that what those studio-foreign background checks came across and mistook for some kind of political extortion and payoff turns out to be a very personal family matter. Man, Celeste is a very young widow with a daughter whose father was what she describes as a café au lait painter from North Carolina, who was killed in a racing car accident. So guess what all the suspicion about political shake-down was about? Celeste didn’t want her child to come into this screwed-up racial situation over here until she’s gone far enough in school in Paris to have become indelibly French. Anyway, fellow, the suspicious “extortion payoffs” were all for child care. It was as simple as that. No international political intrigue at all. Hell, fellow, not even a case of small-town family illegality.
Then before saying, Buzz you later, he said, Oh, by the way, I’ve done my etymological homework on your Miss Fine People. So Eunice means happy victory! So what can I tell you? She couldn’t have happened to a more deserving person.
XXXIV
My old roommate had already said what he said about whoever turned out to be the one who was the one for me, when he replied to the letter along with the snapshot of me and Eunice that I had sent to him at Yale to tell him about what had happened to me and her between that third September and wisteria blossom time that next spring.
Man, he responded within the same week, you make it all sound like it’s those Gulf Coast area boy blue skies above those crepe myrtle yard tree blossoms and dog fennel meadows, not to mention those playhouse times all over again. But man, watch out this time around. We’re talking castles and perhaps even chapels perilous again, my man, he wrote. Because this, after all, is about fairy-tale princesses in the first place, is it not—without whom your castle may not be any more than just another earlier version of Fort Apache, if you know what I mean. Man, I know good and well that I don’t have to tell you that without a fairy-tale princess your castle is no more relevant than any old ultradeluxe wayside inn.
It is she, my good fellow, who is the embodiment of the quintessential. That fifth essence(!). Without her, there is only air, earth, water, and fire. She is the element, my man, that gets us back outside the soundless fury of the planetarium and into the realm of the blisses of the so-called commonplace!
Nor, as any competent student of architectural design and engineering should be able to testify, does the perception of the so-called blisses of the commonplace have any less to do with the dynamics of enchantment than do nursery rhymes, fables, and Mother Goose tales. After all, to us a multimillion-dollar mansion is no less a stage set for being registered
