to get me off the scent in case I ever wanted to go look for the lady who gave birth to me. Fat chance is what I said to that idea. Irma was my mother, if you call being a mother raising you. That’s what Irma did. Irma was a waitress out there in that pisshole in the desert, and I guess with tips and all she could scare up the cost of a bus ticket to Chicago. Or Cleveland or Milwaukee or Atlanta or wherever it was that lady who gave birth to me took off to. She wanted a kid, Irma, without having to fuck to get it.
“Now to Jack Rabbitt. Of course Rabbitt wasn’t his real name. I’m not even sure that Jack was. He just said he was Jack, and that whole summer he wouldn’t tell me his last name, so I just called him Jack Rabbitt, with two
t
’s, like it was a real name, and not just a carrot eater.
“That Jack, he was a pistol. At least I didn’t marry him. Or I don’t think I did.”
It just appeared, this tape? I asked Arthur French. We were walking through the orchid house at Willingham. J. F. French had been dead for years, but Arthur still maintained Willingham despite the rarity of his trips to Los Angeles from Arizona, where he had lived for as long as I had known him. It was a mansion built at a time when mansions were mansions, with a nine-hole golf course and ponds that had been dug and aerated, with swans swimming in them, and entire English gardens imported from the Wiltshire countryside to bake and wither in the subtropical sun, only to be replaced again the next season. Arthur kept a skeleton staff of housekeepers and gardeners on duty, down from the nearly two dozen servants his father had terrorized when he was alive, and when Arthur showed up, always on short notice, there were fresh flowers in all the vases and phalaenopsis plants in the master bedroom and the linen was starched and the crystal and the china and the silver sparkled. There was no reason for Arthur to keep the place. He could have sold it or given it to a school and saved the prodigious upkeep and the equally prodigious taxes, but I think he just liked the pointless extravagance of it, and the way this pointless extravagance seemed to irritate people.
It was a pattern, Arthur French said. Through the years. She was always sending me things.
What sort of things?
Things. Newspaper clippings. Walker Franklin’s obituary. Chloe’s retrospective at the Biarritz Film Festival. Shelley Flynn getting married again. Things like that.
And you always knew they were from her? Even with no return address?
Of course. Who else would be interested in clippings about people nobody else knew. Or remembered. Or cared about. She knew I’d remember.
(He was equivocating. You had to wait Arthur out. Approach him from a different direction. Come back at a later time. And at a time after that, and after that time, too. Wait until he was ready to tell you, until he knew what he was going to find out in return. And as he was keeping things from me, I of course waskeeping things from him. Darker things. Things Melba Mae Toolate had intimated in Hamtramck, other things she had said straight out, perhaps true, perhaps not, perhaps true only in part. The problem was how to find out what to believe and what not to believe. Arthur knew I was equivocating, as I knew he was. Our discourse was like poker. Lose one hand, play the next. The trick was not to show your hole card. Arthur enjoyed the game more than I did, but then for Arthur, life was a game for which he seemed to have the only copy of the rulebook.)
Who is Jack Rabbitt? I said.
He shrugged. Never heard of him.
Never?
Maybe he was somebody she fucked. That wasn’t all that unusual with her. She didn’t even know his name. That wasn’t unusual either.
Is it true, the tape?
After a fashion. It jibes with things we knew.
Like what?
Irma wasn’t her mother, we knew that.
How?
The studio was not without resources, Jack. (With that high irony Arthur often affected. Meaning, or at least
“Now to Jack Rabbitt. Of course Rabbitt wasn’t his real name. I’m not even sure that Jack was. He just said he was Jack, and that whole summer he wouldn’t tell me his last name, so I just called him Jack Rabbitt, with two
t
’s, like it was a real name, and not just a carrot eater.
“That Jack, he was a pistol. At least I didn’t marry him. Or I don’t think I did.”
It just appeared, this tape? I asked Arthur French. We were walking through the orchid house at Willingham. J. F. French had been dead for years, but Arthur still maintained Willingham despite the rarity of his trips to Los Angeles from Arizona, where he had lived for as long as I had known him. It was a mansion built at a time when mansions were mansions, with a nine-hole golf course and ponds that had been dug and aerated, with swans swimming in them, and entire English gardens imported from the Wiltshire countryside to bake and wither in the subtropical sun, only to be replaced again the next season. Arthur kept a skeleton staff of housekeepers and gardeners on duty, down from the nearly two dozen servants his father had terrorized when he was alive, and when Arthur showed up, always on short notice, there were fresh flowers in all the vases and phalaenopsis plants in the master bedroom and the linen was starched and the crystal and the china and the silver sparkled. There was no reason for Arthur to keep the place. He could have sold it or given it to a school and saved the prodigious upkeep and the equally prodigious taxes, but I think he just liked the pointless extravagance of it, and the way this pointless extravagance seemed to irritate people.
It was a pattern, Arthur French said. Through the years. She was always sending me things.
What sort of things?
Things. Newspaper clippings. Walker Franklin’s obituary. Chloe’s retrospective at the Biarritz Film Festival. Shelley Flynn getting married again. Things like that.
And you always knew they were from her? Even with no return address?
Of course. Who else would be interested in clippings about people nobody else knew. Or remembered. Or cared about. She knew I’d remember.
(He was equivocating. You had to wait Arthur out. Approach him from a different direction. Come back at a later time. And at a time after that, and after that time, too. Wait until he was ready to tell you, until he knew what he was going to find out in return. And as he was keeping things from me, I of course waskeeping things from him. Darker things. Things Melba Mae Toolate had intimated in Hamtramck, other things she had said straight out, perhaps true, perhaps not, perhaps true only in part. The problem was how to find out what to believe and what not to believe. Arthur knew I was equivocating, as I knew he was. Our discourse was like poker. Lose one hand, play the next. The trick was not to show your hole card. Arthur enjoyed the game more than I did, but then for Arthur, life was a game for which he seemed to have the only copy of the rulebook.)
Who is Jack Rabbitt? I said.
He shrugged. Never heard of him.
Never?
Maybe he was somebody she fucked. That wasn’t all that unusual with her. She didn’t even know his name. That wasn’t unusual either.
Is it true, the tape?
After a fashion. It jibes with things we knew.
Like what?
Irma wasn’t her mother, we knew that.
How?
The studio was not without resources, Jack. (With that high irony Arthur often affected. Meaning, or at least
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