They were all put up at Leaf House, the marquess of Went’s little spread in the country. It was a lovely sight to see at dusk the caravan of children and caretakers moving swiftly over roads of packed gravel on bicycles retrieved from the belly of the Boeing, vintage Schwinns and Trussardi Classics, the latter trimmed in Napa leather.† Edward took over the bathroom suite. Tended by a host of country elves, he soaked to heart’s content in the marquess’s $42,000 hand-crafted Archeo copper tub while Lucy fork-fed him grilled white peaches sprinkled with cardamom and sugar. For dinner, there were hamburgers and Black Sphinx dates; fresh sheep’s-milk ricotta with warmed lemon-lime marmalade; french fries and fragile fraises des bois dipped in crème fraîche.
The next few days were occupied with incursions to sundry frescoed palazzi and Palladian villas along the Riviera del Brenta, between Padua and Venice. A canal side trip to the deserted fourteenth-century private chapels of Abruzzo, Ovid’s birthplace, provided the occasion for a filibuster by their very own medievalist on the subject of architecture, Marcus Vitruvius Pollio and “The First House — Myth, Paradigm and the Task of Architecture,” to be more exacting. Half those present nearly fainted from boredom.
But we wouldn’t wish such doldrums to overtake us here; for time is precious and must be moved along, and there are pressing concerns in the County Los Angeles.
To summarize, these are the places the silver BBJ bullet alit, though not necessarily in the order presented: the Temple of the Tooth in Sri Lanka (resting place of the sacred molar of Buddha, snatched from the flames of his funeral pyre in 483 B.C.); the Londolozi game preserve in South Africa (where children sat on pearwood-and-leather folding chairs from Hermès under Missoni maharajah’s tents, drinking Diet Pepsi from Asprey steel flasks while adults, engorged with satiny Bresse chicken, truffles en gelée and lavender sorbet, lazily confined themselves to Henry Beguelin chaises on faux Aubusson rugs); the Old City of Jerusalem (where Boulder, within a stone’s throw of the Wailing Wall, was actually asked to sign autographs — prompting Tull to make a crack on the Via Dolorosa about the “Shroud of Tourists” which so convulsed the First Cousin that his anxious handlers began plotting routes to the nearest hospital); two sprawling villas in Marrakesh (one of which, informed Mr. Hookstratten, happened to be built by the descendants of Tolstoy; Mr. Giorgio Armani and his party had decamped only the night before), the base from which they sallied forth to souks, Berber villages and desert camelback excursions in the shadow of the Atlas Mountains — though Edward, hard at work weaving a “bespoke djellaba,” spent most of his time sipping blood-orange juice and soaking in the tadelakt bath — returning late in the afternoon, where, surrounded by palm groves, yellow roses, periwinkles and plum trees, all sat on the terrace of a place called Orchard of the Shooting Star, and partook of partridge soup and swathed jellies on cloth-covered dough that had baked all night buried in sand.†(One evening they ate in the heart of the medina, scant tables away from King Mohamed VI.)
At each stop, they endeavored to give food and alms to the poor, and Tull always imagined to espy the face of the girl called Amaryllis, and wondered why the feeling of her had stayed with him so long.
Their last destination fittingly brought them to one of the navels of the world, where Tull underwent a great trial.
About fifteen years earlier, NASA had been kind enough to provide Easter Island with an emergency shuttle landing strip — more than commodious for the trusty 737. At descent, the children gathered excitedly by the windows to view the stone moai, which, poised upon ahu altar shelves, looked more like Polynesian-themed salt and pepper shakers than icons of mysterium. Everything smelled of sea and horses when they deplaned, and it seemed the entire town and not a few travelers had appeared to observe the peculiar invaders, of which Edward and his AirBuggy — a Sun King and his golden chariot — were the prime attraction. They took over the four-star Hanga Roa as planned.
That very day, our constituents visited the crater that provided tuff, the dense volcanic stone of the famous stoic statuary (the right tuff indeed), and it was agreed that Rano Raraku was most certainly a quarry to give the normally unflappable Grandpa Lou meditative pause. Edward was amazed and delighted to find the place littered with hundreds of discarded, unfinished moai, some without eyes, ears, mouths or arms. Lucy pronounced it all “Très Olde CityWalk — Workshop of the Gods!” Boulder was bored and had to be sweet-talked by Tull, which Lucy liked not a bit, into tagging along to the lapidarian caves of Orongo, anticlimactic site of the ancient Bird Man cult. (The young star’s spirits sagged then rose again with Edward’s allowance of a call to her theatrical agent via his Thrane & Thrane TT-3060A satphone.) Mr. Hookstratten said they used to pick clan chiefs by having warriors swim to the rock that jutted a mile offshore; the first to come back with a tern’s egg strapped to his forehead became Boss Man until nesting season. It was immediately proposed that a new Four Winds principal should thus be selected, and much urging of Mr. Hookstratten to hit the drink followed. He refused. When it looked as if Slouching Tiger and the chess-master-cum-alpinist might dive for competing honors, the children lost interest and began whining for supper.
It was a good thing the Boeing was well stocked, because all the island could offer were pastries, bananas, grocery-store meats and the ubiquitous pollo con agregado. Mutiny nearly ensued when the taciturn chefs proceeded to whip up bisque de homard and tournedos Rossini, along with braised Swiss chard, bone marrow and cardoons and what looked to be an obscene quantity of squid garnished with whorled, warty celeriac. The brave Mr. Hookstratten (one could almost see egg of tern on his brow), backed by troupes of loyal students and faculty, protested they’d all had enough and would like hamburgers and hot dogs instead. A heretofore timid, rubicund sommelier stepped forward to testily note how “the goose foie gras is from Ducasse family flocks in the Landes!”—a response which made the protesters think the cooks had lost their minds. Even Reed was discomfitted. With the latter’s help (and this endeared him to the students, at least for the night), Mr. Hookstratten staged an intervention involving female staff. The women promptly got stoned. In short order, the cooks were lured to tents deliberately pitched in the shadows of what the medievalist deemed “fertility moai” and over the course of a few otherworldly hours, six bottles of blended L’Esprit de Courvoisier were consumed, along with Laura Scudder’s ridged chips, Southern-fried chicken and a pot-brownie baker’s dozen.
Around midnight, Tull fell into sweat-soaked sleep. A rapping at the door of his room slowly brought him to awareness. When he answered, the bully whom Lucy had once stood up to on Tull’s behalf appeared at the door with a half-platoon of pint-size soldiers behind him. They bade him throw on some clothes, which he did in a fugue state before following them to the towering head that overlooked the cooks’ bacchanal with a kind of remonstrating hauteur.
They crept up a grassy slope and peered downward at this tableau: most of the adults had disbanded, while a few still spoke softly from within the same candlelit tent that only a week ago had been pitched over South African soil. The detritus of plates, dishware, foodstuffs and empty bottles was all around. A body — perhaps it was Slouching Tiger’s, perhaps one of the pilots’, perhaps Professor Hookstratten’s — lay fifty paces from the ahu, snoring vigorously. Attention was elsewhere drawn, though a wobbly Tull did not immediately join his scampering guides. What did comfort him was the sight of Lucy squatting nearby like a bushgirl and watching along with everyone else while a couple, half dressed, were “doing it.” It scarcely mattered who they were — steward or nurse, maven or techie — it was what they did that entranced. Tull slunk to his cousin, who acknowledged him with a glance before turning back to the dark, primitive spectacle. The woman moaned and seemed, like a crab, to scuttle away. She muttered a few words in low, anguished tones, which slowly grew louder until the phrase “fuck it” was vaguely discernible; a phrase repeated in varying stages of dishabille (“it” became “me” and “me” became “you” and “you” became “me” again — and so forth). At a certain point, her demands grew so furied that those in the tent grew silent, then burst into a hail of guttural laughter before going back about their sociable business.