She heard heavy breathing and the staccato crush of pebble under paw and looked up. Pullman charged, then, as if bowing for a minuet, adroitly backed off. He licked her hand and lay down like a griffin. Now, more crush of stone, with approach of a slower gait. Her son appeared, face flushed, a ragamuffin who looked like his ears had been boxed by the yew.
“Tull?” She stood. “What is it, darling?”
He inhaled, gathering ragged lungfuls, then stormed her, clutching and kneading her fashionable waist. That tiny, desperate, expensive waist … his small-mouthed frame shook, keened and bellowed, and for a moment she was afraid — for both of them — and even Pullman was roused, coming over to sniff the boy.
Abashed, she stroked her son’s head while he wept; the dog looked Trinnie square in the eye as if to shame her.
That night, in the exotic fortress of the Withdrawing Room, she told him everything.
Tull refused to sit. He stood throughout, as if enduring a reprimand in the study of the Four Winds headmaster. He didn’t feel at all well. Only hours ago, he had been at the school library searching on-line for the St. George Motel in blissful denial, mooning over Amaryllis; he fantasized trolling downtown streets in Mauck or Escalade until the girl was found. Yet his daydream had been overtaken by a combustible sense of urgency, and at the final bell, he fled campus, feeling Lucy’s ambivalent eyes on his back. He walked to the beach, then took a cab home from Shutters before finding his mother in the maze.
He stood before them — Trinnie and Grandpa Lou — chin quivering, jutting ticcishly forward so that it looked like Edward’s. (The impersonation comforted him.) He was oddly remorseful for having pursued any of this now — as if caught in one of those dreams where one feels like a patient trapped in some sort of nefarious clinic.
His grandfather paced languorously before the Piranesi backdrop, hands clasped behind him, suppressing a chuff, pretending to study the detail of his maquettes (he paused an inordinately long time before the Sir Norman Foster) while actually listening with great intensity to his beloved Katrina. Earlier in the afternoon, he’d been at the cemetery when Epitacio walked over to hand him the phone; an opportune time, to be sure, for at that very moment Dot was upon him, eager to impart a bit of recently gleaned pop paranoia. He waved her off with a cadaverous smile, which Sling Blade, raking leaves behind them, thought amusing. Without ceremony, Mr. Trotter climbed into the car and sped off.
As they made their way to Bel-Air, he listened to his daughter’s voice through the receiver, a voice he hardly recognized — deliberate and sorrowful, a slow elegy for brass. He had always known one day that his grandson Toulouse would come into “a piece of intelligence” and that it would be Trinnie’s duty to make full disclosure, the one responsibility from which he would not abide her run. Trinnie knew as much and long dreaded it. She would do what she had to, and if accounts were not settled, then at least the books would be opened — here, now.
Her mother, tipped off by Mr. Trotter, was initially averse to such overheated summitry — then indifferent. She elected to sit in bed with Winter, organizing the album of obits.
Trinnie looked dazed but sat erect. Her gown was abraded and still bore dust from when she chased her son as he fled the maze. Her long, pale arms were scratched; even her face had been smacked by tough little leaves. At first, still worrying her waist with small, slender hands, Tull stopped crying long enough to ask if his father was alive. When Trinnie said no, he pushed her over and sprinted. Pullman ran interference as she chased after — well, this was too much! She took off her shoes and swatted the Dane, shoving the animal aside with an oath more than once. Ralph loomed from the terrace in a rage over actors-turned-directors, and it wasn’t long before he saw something was amiss. Trinnie pushed him away, too, and he stood to one side with the chastened Pullman, partnered. She pinned her son to the ground, shouting at him to be still. By now, the entire staff — a disapproving Winter included — gathered to watch from afar. The boy wriggled but was quiet enough to hear her say that she would tell him what he wanted to know after supper. First they must eat, she said. And Grandpa would have to be there; she would need to call him. She took Tull to the house and gave him water. She felt ruffled and terrified and strangely empty, because she was about to be unburdened. (She did not feel like swallowing a drink or a pill.) She told him to take a warm bath. She would see him again in Grandpa’s study, she said, at eight o’clock. It was now a quarter past that hour.
“Your father didn’t die in a snowmobile accident.”
“Then why did you say it?”
“Your father was … the most amazing man I ever met.”
“Then why did you say he was dead?”
“Because — I was so hurt. And I’m sorry. I should have told you the truth.”
“But why? Why were you so hurt?”
“He was … older.” The declaration was meaningless, but Trinnie knew not where to begin. “I thought I’d found — I had found the person I wanted to be with. To spend my life with. And after a little while — a week or two — I moved in. He had a place in West Hollywood, on Alfred. We were so happy. Papa met him — Bluey too … I never introduced my boyfriends to them.”
He turned to his grandfather. “Did you like him?”
“Marcus was a good man,” he said without taking his eyes from Mr. Gehry’s metal gefilte fish. “But I wasn’t glad about what he did to your mother.”