“It sounds like you guys are close.”
“She’s my non-evil parent. She and my dad got divorced when I was six, and we were always kind of a team. He’s dead now.”
“I’m sorry.” We sat. He’d put out cloth napkins, a bowl of flaky salt with a little spoon in it, a carafe of ice water.
“It’s okay. I hated him, insofar as anyone actually manages to hate a parent.”
“I’m still sorry.”
“Thanks. I hate him less now that I don’t have to interact with him.”
“That sounds complicated.”
“I don’t know. Sometimes things are simple.” Redwood told me that his father had been chief counsel for a chemical company that was an offshoot of Liberty Oil and had spent his days fighting lawsuits brought by tumor-ridden plant workers, towns with contaminated groundwater, chemists whose discoveries had been stolen, environmental groups concerned about air and water and frogs and birds. Then, in one of those instances of random, abrupt mortality that create the illusion of cosmic justice, he’d dropped dead of a brain aneurysm at sixty-four.
“My parents died when I was two,” I said. “Small-plane crash.”
“I know. Google.”
“Right.”
“I’m sorry, too.”
“It’s okay. I didn’t know them.”
“That’s what I’m sorry for.”
“We’re getting right into the dead-parents convo. Wow.”
He smiled, chewing, a little squinty, and there was something about the way he was looking at me, something skeptical and amused, that made me think he might not be as much of a dupe as we all thought. He said, “By dessert we’ll have worked around to small talk. Hey, was it hard cutting off all your hair?”
I’d stared into the mirror at the salon like an arsonist watching a house burn down. I ran a hand over my head. “It was a relief. I feel lighter.”
“Maybe I should cut mine.”
I tilted my head and studied him. “Not yet,” I said. He smiled. I said, “So, if you’re—perchance—sort of ambivalent about your mom’s book, why didn’t you just commission the Day brothers to adapt Marian’s?”
He made a face. “I mean, all things being equal, I would have, but I didn’t want to hurt my mom’s feelings.” Marian was a shared obsession of theirs, he said. Carol had read Marian’s book aloud to him when he was a child. His father had given her the book when they were dating, and Redwood thought she might have married him partly because of it, because she fell in love with the idea of Matilda Feiffer and the family connection, the family legend. “I think she wanted to be part of the story,” he said. “Like of the Josephina Eterna and Marian and all the titans-of-industry stuff. But that story’s over, so she just ended up in a really different, really not great one.”
He said the Day brothers had surprised him by being unexpectedly fired up about his mother’s book. All the overwrought conjecture gave them something to work with, tonally. Redwood said he’d imagined a more conceptual film, something about the ambiguity of disappearance, maybe like a spiritual/metaphysical Terrence Malick take （of course he had）， but what the Days had written would be cool and high-concept in a different way. Like a tiny bit camp.
“Right,” I said. “Hundred percent.” And I needed to believe him, even though what he was describing wasn’t quite what I’d imagined.
We worked on our salads.
He said, “How does the process work, figuring out how to play a part?”
I wanted to say that I just put the plastic pony in the plastic stable and smiled the way they told me to. But I said, “I imagine myself as someone else. That’s pretty much it.”
“I asked Sir Hugo the same question, and he talked for an hour.”
Fucking Hugo, so sure people would want to listen to him talk. Of course, people did want to listen to him talk, to that voice, all smoke and whiskey and the north wind. Just try to find a nature documentary Hugo hasn’t narrated. Just try to find an animated villain he hasn’t voiced.
“I’ll sound ridiculous if I try to explain it,” I said.
“Like me with the northern lights.”
“Like me with the stupid glowworms.”
He pinged his glass lightly against mine. “To mystery. May we not ruin it.”
Twelve
After lunch, Redwood and I moved to the chaises by his pool, kept going with the wine, gossiped about people in Hollywood, trotted out our best anecdotes, ventured small confidences. The pool tiles were tiny and square and cobalt blue, and the water was perfectly smooth, dense-looking like gelatin.