Of course, now that Toulouse’s hormones were racing, Amaryllis was no longer interested — well, she was, but not in the kind of explorations that had taken place some months ago in the penthouse of La Colonne. Then, Toulouse had been a gentleman, wise and respectful beyond his years; now, thinking back on that precocious moment, he merely wished to shoot himself. He’d become obsessed with her, and the evil thing was that she knew it. She fussed over him just enough (her attentions falling sadly short of the cockpit grapplings with his English cousin, which now seemed stupendously pornographic) to keep him from going bananas.
They saw each other at least twice a week. Toulouse lived for Friday afternoons, when he found himself being driven over the Shakespeare Bridge to the home of his true love, now legally known as Amaryllis Kornfeld-Mott (the hyphen had been her idea). He stood at her door, warmly greeted by Lani or Gilles, feeling spiffy in his sporty Costume National Homme. The object of his devotion invariably summoned him to her room to present a clipping or two — this week, her particular favorites being the piece in the Journal about a woman whose actual job was to sniff the leather of new Mercedeses, and an item in the Times detailing the amount his uncle had lost in a recent week of trading ($237,198,940, to be precise — Toulouse gulped, but did his best to remain cool). They would then stampede to the Silver Seraph and be delivered to Cañon Manor, where their sagacious host had spent all day preparing the most heavenly food known to man. When Trinnie was there, it was fun, but a different kind of fun, because Marcus was always sweetly mindful of her and charmingly distracted; in other words, she came first. Toulouse thought that was how it should be, and it gave him pleasure to see them laughing and joking and holding hands. Though in fine general spirits, his mother still walked beneath a cloud, as if not yet fully recovered from the years. The boy was certain — the children were certain — she’d come around.
On other nights, Trinnie’s absence was sorely felt but soon blotted out by food and revelry and the spellbinding tales of a shadowy world — a street world, one that Amaryllis of all people had shared. Toulouse was envious; when his father spoke of carrying her on his back through the night, he may as well have been describing a magic carpet ride. Sometimes the details were so vivid Toulouse felt he might somehow insert himself so that Marcus would remember a time when the three of them had had some such adventure. Just when the boy’s desperation nearly drove him to recount some pathetic anecdote from his own life (shoplifting from 7-Eleven came to mind), Marcus sagely saw fit to weave another web, only this time one whose weave Amaryllis had not been part of. She would listen enrapt, her eyes wide as her suitor’s, even reaching for Toulouse’s hand during the telling — then all would be right with the world again.
The ride back to Franklin Hills would be quiet, with a kiss stolen here and there in the rare moments Epitacio avoided peering into the rearview.
Weekends were devoted to the babies. There was usually a large group — Gilles and Lani, Candelaria and her niños, Cody and Saffron and their foster parents, along with their other three wards — and off they’d go in a minivan to Downtown Disneyland or the San Diego Zoo. Sometimes they made a day of it at Stradella, and Trinnie hired a circus with acrobats and elephants and sword-swallowers too. After barbecue they would trip to the Majestyk for a noisy matinée. Of course Winter brought Ketchum, and everyone was glad to see Joyce looking so well again.
It was good for Toulouse to wander Olde CityWalk. Since Lucy left, there hadn’t been much reason to visit; he’d even built up something of an aversion to the place, as in the time Amaryllis vanished from her hideaway. But now it was like walking inside one of the dreams he still had about Edward — dreams that left him feeling warm and reassured when he awakened, and without melancholy. He would grab Amaryllis and break away from the crowd, stealing into the Boar’s Head to survey the workshop, where masks still hung as if awaiting selection by their master for the new school day … then they would creep upstairs to the “apartments” where so many schemes had been hatched and secrets revealed.
Toulouse poked open the trapdoor, and they climbed to her old safe house.
She looked around with a shiver of nostalgia. He kissed her and she let him.
“Amaryllis,” he said.
There was a catch in his throat, and she noticed how he’d gone a little pale.
“I wanted to ask you — I wanted to know if you would think about the idea — or the possibility … and it doesn’t have to be, well, it couldn’t be something that would happen now or even very soon but — something that would happen maybe in the future … well, I wanted to know if you would think about thinking about the idea of us — of us eventually getting married. I mean, years from now. When we are older or after college or whenever you — whenever you thought that might be something you wanted to think about or maybe say yes to in the future but not necessarily now.”
She took his hands and looked him in the eye.
“I do love you, Toulouse,” she said. “I always have. And I always will.”
She kissed him and ran to the ladder to rejoin the group, now in general tumult over a tightrope walker’s derring-do.
That night he lay in bed more tortured than ever. No amount of careful analysis could yield a definitive result: had she said yes or no? Was it an undying — or a sisterly — proclamation? Luckily, sleep laid siege to the conundrum and put it to rest until the fresh misery of morning.
It was true that Dodd Trotter had fallen in love with his secretary, but one could not hold it against him. He had been loyal to Joyce for as long as humanly possible, and remained so in his fashion; unlike his wife, he had no dumpster babies with which to sublimate his grief. Frances-Leigh was a good woman. She was devoted to his happiness.
Trinnie asked her brother for help. She had decided to sell La Colonne Détruite, or rather sell the property where the broken tower resided, for no buyer could be expected to preserve such a monument. Nor would she wish it preserved — to that end, she had even considered tearing it down before putting the park up for auction. Strangely, Trinnie found she could no longer set foot in the place. Bluey was right; they should have sold and subdivided years ago. All the furniture and items so mathematically arranged were carted off to storage, to be sold on another day. Next on the list was Saint-Cloud — everything must go. She wanted no more shrines or mazes in her life.
Dodd had an agenda of his own. He decided to move the corporate headquarters out of Beverly Hills. His son and father were dead and his daughter was living in England; his mother did not know anymore who he was; and the last of his worries — his rolling-stone sister — was safely anchored by Marcus and Toulouse. It was all right now for him to begin afresh, away from the nexus of his old life. To her credit, Frances-Leigh argued against the move. Conservative by nature, she felt it more symbolic than practical.
The dream of revamping Beverly Vista was dead too. There would be no rooftop gallery, no Puckish cafeteria, no starstruck planetarium or fiber-optic learning center powered by truck-size servers buried underground — no Sage Hill, no Ross Institute, no Cary Academy — no footprint or imprint, only misprint. There would be no thinking outside the box, only thinking inside the box. Probably what his dad was doing right about now, he darkly joked (Frances-Leigh didn’t think it so funny). That’s all the imperial Beverly Hills school district knew how to do anyway, he said: think inside the box.