Pullman snored, insensate, blocking Ralph’s access to the Sub-Zero. He was sleeping more than usual; his master had been meaning to take him to the vet.
“You know what they say about Danes, don’t you?” asked Ralph rhetorically, gently pressing the spotted rump with the soft point of a demi-boot.
“Go ahead, Ralph. Tell me. Get it off your chest.”
“Two years a young dog, two years a good dog and two years an old dog. The rest is a gift.”
Pullman raised his head and derogatorily chuffed before pressing his muzzle to the humming grille of the restaurant-size freezer.
“Whatever,” said Tull.
“It’s plain unfair,” he went on. “If you’re a man, you’re going to die in your seventies. Maybe. And if you’re fucking koi, you can push the envelope at two hundred — two fucking centuries, Tull, swimming about in a scummy little pond! And they love it!”
“I thought your script was really funny.”
“You’re a dear boy, but it’s awful.”
“It isn’t, Rafe,” he said, giving the name its rightful pronunciation. “I wouldn’t shit you. I even have notes.”
“Oh, by the way, it’s Ralph — with an l.”
“Ralph?”
“That’s what I call myself now. Ralph: simple and American as they come.”
“You’re kidding. When did that happen?”
“What difference does it make?”
“But what about … Mirdling’s Name Theorem?”
“It went the way of all flesh — don’t let’s dwell on it.”
Tull hoisted himself onto the stainless-steel counter. “I did think the script was funny.”
“It’s worthless — I’ll seal it in an envelope and pull it out in ten years. Have a good laugh. Actually, though, it did serve its purpose.”
“What do you mean?”
“Guess I had to get something like that out of my system. Took long enough! Hey, you know who I showed it to?”
“Who?”
“Ron Bass.”
“Whoa!”
“Nope. He actually read it — gave it a nice read, too. We’ve become pretty good friends. He’s all right. I’m still not crazy about his work, but … you know, Ron’s the one who turned me around. Gave me a whole new ‘P.O.V.’ Your mom and I had dinner with him, at 5 Dudley: great French onion soup. We met him at that sick-animal thing, you know. Very charming, tons of energy. And he does care about ‘the work.’ That’s saying a lot.”
“You showed Ron Bass your script?” he said, still disbelieving.
Ralph nodded eagerly, tucking into a king-size wedge of four-day-old mud cake. “He said I had no business writing that sort of thing, it was more like something he would write, but he would have written it better. I’m telling you, Tull, he’s a very funny guy! ‘Mirdling,’ he said — that’s what he calls me—‘Mirdling, if you’re going to do something third-rate, then for Chrissake at least do something true to yourself.’ ”
“I’m amazed. Next thing you know, you’ll be buddying up to Robert Towne.”
With that, he showed a flash of the old Rafe. “Oh Christ! I read yet another Mr. Chinatowne piece today. The Master was going on about his movie again — it’s an absolute mania, the man can’t stop! A ‘classy’ little essay in Architectural Digest … on and on he went about his ‘nocturnal ramblings’ on Western and Vermont, with the Santa Anas and the water company and all the intense bullshit — Raymond Chandler channeling … ugh! And how he took himself to a little bungalow in Catalina to hammer out that legendary first draft — oh Christ, I just want to vomit down his throat! And what about William Goldman? That vain, pontificating ass! He’s worse than ol’ Chinatowne! Oh please get cancer, Mr G., oh won’t you please? With his ‘nobody knows anything’ … well, I know something: someone should run them both over—”
“So you’re just going to … throw the script away?”
“I might do a number on it — put up some scaffolding and give it a po-mo makeover. Something closer to Charlie Kaufman. Spike and Charlie are the New Wave Wilder and Diamond. Let’s hope Spike isn’t as nasty as Billie, though — what a fucking monster he was. But smart. Managed to get his furry old dick pretty far up Cameron Crowe’s ass, huh. I do think someone should teach him how to dress, though. I mean, Spike. You’d think Sofia would — or maybe your mother! By the way, how are you two getting along?”
“Okay.”
Tull was about to do a little cathecting, but Ralph spoke first.
“I think I’ve entered a very fecund moment,” he said. “I’m walking around with a thousand ideas. I’m telling you, man, I can’t stop the flow! I’m gonna direct something on DV any minute now, I can feel it. How do you like this: there’s a guy from Iran who’s been trapped at the airport in France for ten years because of some bureaucratic snafu. True story. A fantastic subject, very Herzog, as in Werner — or maybe it’s very Tati. Or maybe Lynch, but the Straight Story Lynch. Make a fantastic film. Then I was reading in The Enquirer about a travel agent who helps people disappear. Tells you how to fake your death, open a Swiss account — all totally legal! That could be very Japanese.”
“How could it be legal to fake your death?”
“It is if you don’t rip anyone off. Then there’s this ensemble piece I’m thinking of, about a bunch of despots — you know, from imaginary countries — living on a wealthy street in London. They’re all neighbors, kind of an outcast’s Notting Hill. So-called kings who looted their treasuries and tortured people. Idi Amin and Papa Doc types. That could be for HBO. I’d love to create a Sopranos, but the dictator thing might be too harsh.” Pullman hobbled out of the room in disgust. “Oh! And I want to do a comedy about a girl who’s a ‘G.T.A.’—know what that stands for? Genital Teaching Associate. That’s a model who teaches pelvic-exam techniques to med students. I’m serious, Tull, that job actually exists! Ya gotta learn somewhere, baby, I am telling you — it’s like I’ve been freed: my mind’s completely opened up. When I look at those ‘Rafe’ scripts I wrote, it’s like holding third-rate artifacts from another time. And I owe it all to Ron Bass!”
Let us pick up from where we left Katrina.
She is wearing a sixties Lanvin python jacket and Miguel Adrover chain-mesh halter top; setting off seriously green eyes is a multicolored pearl necklace bought at Piranesi, in Aspen, a few years back, for a quarter-million. She sets aside her Colonne excavations, nostalgically distracted by her father’s collection of photographs.
The familiar images erupt, shuffled out of sync, a mess of time: Bluey, in ’51, at Count Carlos (Charles) de Beistegui’s costume ball at the Palais Labia on the Grand Canal, the Venetian summer before she met Louis. Cecil Beaton took the picture: her friend Daisy Fellowes came as Marie-Antoinette, and Bluey went as lady-in-waiting, dressed like a milkmaid — they stood with the count, sweetly absurd in his sausage-curl wig. A half-dozen years later: Bluey standing with her dapper, slightly intimidated husband in the downstairs gallery of Peggy Guggenheim’s astonishing palazzo among the astonishing Pollocks. Her mother first met Merce Cunningham there — and André Breton, who Trinnie later learned had been obsessed with “the Broken Column” himself, camping with the Surrealists at the Désert de Retz. A snapshot of her father in Guam, 1945; another of Louis pointing to the pig tattoo on a sailor’s foot (he told her the popular mariner’s notion that, like David Copperfield’s caul, the mark could prevent one from drowning); again Louis, on the terrace of a Fifth Avenue penthouse showing off his Bronze Star; at the Paley wedding; then both parents, years later, with the Paleys and Cushing sisters at Round Hill. Summertime clambakes in Nantucket; messing around at Bouldereign (Carefree, Arizona); Jamaica and New Orleans; with Valentino and the Buckleys in Gstaad, and Carol Burnett at Snowmass; grinning madly at the Malaparte cliffhouse in Capri; with Jackie Gleason and Oona O’Neil at Villa Nirvana, Las Brisas … Palm Springs with the Nixons and Annenbergs; a hoedown at the deMenils’; Bluey in someplace like Laguna with a handsome man Trinnie had always suspected to be a lover; Louis and Bluey at their own wedding in Palm Beach. Then — standing on the pontoons of a seaplane on the lake outside their Adirondacks Great Camp, arms raised in a toast; Louis in his duds on digging machines in front of various yawning, mile-wide quarry pits; Louis during somber late-life travels to far-flung graveyards. Then came the kids: blurry black-and-whites of Dodd and Katrina behind nursery glass, haunting, smudgy little faces, swollen post-natal eyes and bundled bodies held aloft by smily-eyed, half-masked attendants for all the world to see.