“What is it?”
“Read the stone.”
“—oh my god it’s Curtis’s grave. You went there?”
“I went everywhere I could. I went up to Seattle to find the buildings he and Clara lived in — I went out to the reservations. I went to the Smithsonian, the Morgan Library. Then finally I drove to Forest Lawn one day. And sat down next to him.”
“—our Forest Lawn?” Alison asks.
“He’s buried in Glendale. You should go. Before you make your movie.”
“—why?”
“Because that’s where the story is.”
She tilts her head, looks at the photograph, then back at me: “I need more.”
“He was an absent husband and a disappearing father,” I explain. “A shit to everyone who loved him all his life.”
“Geniuses always are.”
“Well, you can believe that if you need to.”
“—don’t you?”
“For a long time, I couldn’t figure out if there was anything that Edward Curtis ever loved.”
“Why did he have to love something?”
“Because it makes a better story.”
“Well then — he loved taking photographs of Indians.”
“—then why did he stop?”
“You tell me.”
“I have. That’s what my book’s about.”
The room goes suddenly astonishingly quiet. It’s almost like a stunned reaction to my saying That’s what my book’s about. It’s frightening. You can hear a pin drop. It’s as if every sound has been sucked out of the room and then I feel A PRESENCE loom and a beautiful tanned hand falls on Stacey’s shoulder. Don’t mean to interrupt, the car is waiting for us, and there He is. Like a vision. Probably the most beautiful human I have ever seen and Stacey is saying You know Jon and Jon is shaking hands with Him and Stacey is saying And this is Marianne who’s going to write the Curtis project for us and He flashes me a smile and extends his perfect hand in my direction saying I’m really looking forward to hearing your ideas, and I lift my hand and slide it into His, look up into His eyes and tell Him, “Ga.”
Thousands of women have probably said exactly the same thing to Him since He was twelve so He fields my stupefaction with impeccable grace and then Stacey tells Jon she’ll call him to confirm a meeting for next week and she tells me that she’s looking forward to reading The Shadow Catcher on the weekend, then they’re gone and Jon and I are left there all alone, at the table, in His life-altering absence.
“Ga?” Jon asks. “—that, and being fifty minutes late,” he summarizes. He picks up my Polaroid of the Curtis gravesite. “Worth the trip?”
“Did you know He was going to be here?”
“He’s been living in hotels. Since the separation.”
“You might have warned me.”
“So you’d come on time? Or so you’d come with better hair. I meant this. Is-it-worth-the-trip-to-Forest-Lawn? I’m curious what you found there. ’Cause it’s not in the novel.”
“I thought I owed it to him.”
“And, so…what? — he spoke to you?”
“They did.”
“The…Indians?”
“His children.”
“I thought they were dead.”
“—and buried. Right there. All four of them. Two on either side of him. Not even with their own spouses. It’s as if they thought they might finally get his attention. For all eternity.”
“They idolized him,” he estimates.
“There must have been something wonderful about him, for all four grown-up kids to want to be there.”
“My daughters won’t want to be buried by my side, and I’m pretty wonderful.”
“Yeah but, you haven’t disappeared.”
“—those adventuring types: I’ve always been suspicious. What are they running from? Do any of those guys who discover the North Pole ever have a wife and kids?”
“Sure, but the archetype of THE COWBOY is a loner. Man, a horse, the open country — that’s the movie these birds want to make. I could tell them fourteen different ways it’s not the story of Curtis’s life, they’ll still want to make a cowboy movie out of it.”
He walks me out and pays the valet and sees me to my car. “Know where you’re going?”
“I’m gonna stay on Sunset to the 405.”
“I’ll call you when I know something,” he says. “Take care,” he adds.
I start the car, he backs away.
I wave.
And suddenly he signals, STOP.
“On second thought—” he calls out:
“—take Sepulveda!”
reds
The 101, which you have to take from the 405 to get to where I live (unless you take Ventura Boulevard), runs North to South from Ventura County toward Los Angeles, but then as it passes through Los Angeles, it doglegs inland in a true West-to-East direction, even though the signs still say 101 North and 101 South. So when I’m driving home from downtown L.A., from anywhere in the basin or from the other side of the hills, I’m always driving WEST, which in the afternoon means I’m driving toward the sun or, to put it another way, into the infrared. Into the western sunset, into the RED of western sky. Sunset where I live is only rarely red—it’s generally burnished rose or fatty salmon-colored — but I understand the Newtonian inarguables of Earth’s refraction and the truth that: at the close of day the world goes red. This fact of life is even more stunning if you happen to be in one of those places on Earth where the exposed rock is of the Triassic era, a time in Earth’s history when it’s believed there was more oxygen in the atmosphere than in previous eras, owing to the lack of plant life on the surface. Superoxidation, it’s believed, produced the kind of ferric red you see in rocks containing iron in places like Red Rock Canyon, for example. Or Sedona, Arizona. Or the Utah flats. Or around the Solway Firth in Scotland, for that matter. Red earths, red rocks, the color of dried blood. Earthly redbeds everywhere are a symptom of Triassic time, and anywhere they surface on Earth’s skin, as if on a living body, their color is the same: blood. It’s said that red was the first color hu mankind could differentiate. I don’t know how this could be proven but I suspect it has to do with Newton again and probably with the shape of the human eye as it evolved in the human skull, perhaps being, prismatically, more bullish on the carmine wavelength. I collect these little facts about the color red because my daughter is a redhead; and because my Greek grandmother’s maiden name was KOKINOS (the Greek adjective for RED). She, herself, was not a redhead, although her twin brother Sam was reported to have been one, which I find confusing. RED is associated with ALARM (no doubt because it’s the color of mammalian blood), and it is officially the most alarming color on the current Homeland Security Alert color chart. If I had to choose the human hair color that I find the most beautiful, it would be red because it’s frankly stunning and alive and volatile (besides my daughter, Da Vinci was a redhead; so was Jefferson; and so was Curtis), but outside the spectrum of human beauty, I don’t particularly like the color. I don’t particularly like garnets or rubies (or strawberries for that matter.) I don’t wear the color well, having a high complexion, anyway; and I don’t even grow red-colored flowers, with the exception of three explosive bougainvilleas that I inherited when I bought my house. I went through a red period in London when I decorated with Moroccan carpets and Turkish kilims, but here in California I don’t have a single piece of crimson fabric in the household. So when I come home from the meeting at the Hotel Bel Air and the red light’s flashing on my answering machine, it’s noticeable right away, even from the doorway. For me to have 9 MESSAGES in a single afternoon is (here it comes:) a red letter day: