I'll Let You Go

by Wagner, Bruce

• ISBN13: 9780375500022
• ISBN10: 0375500022
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-01-02
• Publisher: Villard

Summary

"[Wagner] slices open the self-satisfied bosom of Los Angeles yet again in his third novel, a sprawling family saga that trades the usual mush-mouthed sentimentalities for cascading shards of knife-edged vignettes. A masterful, modern-day fantasy of millionaires and madmen, fathers and sons, reality and dreams." --Kirkus Reviews Bruce Wagner'sI'm Losing Youwas hailed as "outrageous -- dead-on in every way" by Janet Maslin inThe New York Times.New Yorkmagazine's Walter Kirn called it "the year's best book." And John Updike, inThe New Yorker, wrote that Bruce Wagner "writes like a wizard." InI'll Let You Go, Wagner offers a stunning novel that surpasses anything he's done before. Twelve-year-old Toulouse "Tull" Trotter lives on his grandfather's vast Bel-Air parkland estate with his mother, the beautiful, drug-addicted Katrina, a landscape artist who specializes in topiary laby-rinths. He spends most of his time with his young cousins Lucy, the girl detective, and Edward, a prodigy undaunted by the disfiguring effects of Apert Syndrome. One day, an impulsive revelation from Lucy sets in motion a chain of events that changes Tull -- and the Trotter family -- forever. Though the story unfolds in contemporary Los Angeles, the reader hears echoes of Proust and 1,001 Nights as Toulouse seeks his lost father, a woman finds her lost love, and a family of unimaginable wealth learns that its fate is tied to those of the orphan Amaryllis (who officially aspires to be a saint) and her protector, a courtly giant of a homeless schizophrenic -- both of them on the run from the law. Along a path shaded by murder and mysticism, we meet such unforgettable characters as Fitzsimmons, a deranged former social worker; the enterprising Monasterio family of servants (Candelaria, Epitacio, and Eulogio); "Someone-Help-Me", a streetwise devil; and Pullman, a seemingly ageless Great Dane. Complexly wrought, deeply moving, and scathingly ironic,I'll Let You Godazzles the reader with the unique blend of gorgeous prose, acerbic wit, and deep emotion that are the specific province of Bruce Wagner.

Author Biography

Bruce Wagner is the author of the novels Force Majeure and I’m Losing You. He recently wrote and directed Women in Film, adapted from his novel I'm Losing You. Women in Film was shown at the Sundance and Venice film festivals in 2001. He lives in Los Angeles.

Table of Contents

Born Toulouse	3	(3)
The Digger's Tomb	6	(6)
Saint-Cloud Road	12	(7)
The Labyrinth	19	(7)
A Lucy Trotter Mystery	26	(6)
The Great Race	32	(6)
Song of the Orphan Girl	38	(7)
Concentric Circles	45	(12)
Squatters	57	(9)
Shelter	66	(5)
Last Looks	71	(8)
The Well	79	(8)
Imaginary Prisons	87	(8)
Little Search Engines That Could	95	(13)
Revolution's Eve	108	(13)
Advocates	121	(10)
When a Child Dies in the Home	131	(10)
Little Girl Lost	141	(15)
Gatherings	156	(15)
Inventories	171	(9)
The Secret Agent	180	(13)
The Disorderly World	193	(12)
To Redlands and Beyond	205	(13)
Pixies and Tigers	218	(12)
Carved Fungi	230	(9)
Globe-Trotters	239	(11)
For the Child Who Is Not Present	250	(9)
The Book of Hours	259	(12)
Doggish Days	271	(6)
To the Four Winds	277	(12)
Harvest	289	(10)
Les Miz	299	(7)
Assisted Living	306	(9)
An Early Winter	315	(9)
Probable Cause	324	(9)
Reunions	333	(9)
Twin Towers	342	(15)
Awakening	357	(10)
Thanksgivings	367	(12)
Phantoms and Convocations	379	(21)
Worries and Wrinkles	400	(11)
An Epistolary Homecoming	411	(11)
Words Alone	422	(15)
Close to Home	437	(10)
Termination of Parental Rights	447	(11)
Forgotten Prayers	458	(12)
The Wheel	470	(16)
Aftershocks	486	(8)
Pied-a-Terre	494	(10)
Misery House	504	(10)
Restless	514	(14)
At the End of the Day	528	(11)
Coda	539

Excerpts

Chapter 1
Born Toulouse

The boy took long walks in the countryfied Bel-Air hills with Pullman, the stately Dane—ears like membranous tepees, one eye blue, the other a forlorn and bottomless brown, jowls pinkening toward nose, arctic-white coat mottled by “torn” patches characteristic of the harlequin breed, the whole length of him an inkspot archipelago—even though the animal didn’t seem particularly fond of such locomotion. Great Danes were majestic that way. They could take their jaunt or leave it.

When people learned what each was named, they usually said the two had it wrong—better the noble, gigantine champion to bear the burden of whimsy (Best of Breed to Trotter’s T. Lautrec) while his master coupled to Pullman, steady, scholar’d, sleeping car Pullman, nostalgically trestle-trundling under bald hills and starstruck sky, velour shadow of midnight passengers murmuring within. Not that “Pullman” fit so well for the boy, though it might: twelve-year-old Toulouse was thin and dreamy, with the requisite bedroom eyes. His tousled red hair verged on blood-black, and his skin was so clear that the freckles seemed suddenly evicted, their remains the faintest of blurred constellations.

So: Toulouse—etymology unknown. He suspected it had something to do with his dad, as most things cryptic or unspoken usually did. They had christened him Louis, after Grandpa Lou (Mr. Trotter, to the world), and his grandfather was the only one ever to call him that. For all the rest he was Tull. His mother had started it. An abbreviation in his own life, she was a connoisseur of abridgments. Toulouse: the boy always used that name in his head, the way one thinks in a different language. A father tongue.

There are no sidewalks in Bel-Air to speak of, and though his mother, Trinnie, forbade it, the boy and his dog regularly ventured from Grandpa’s estate on Saint-Cloud Road to walk the musky, sinuous asphalt lanes—baked warm as loaves—against traffic, so as not to be run down by neighborhood denizens in careering, souped-up Bentleys and polished, high-end SUVs or by celebrity-hunting tourists, who traveled at less speed but were likelier to remain at the scene of an accident. If Pullman was struck, Tull suavely imagined, there’d be victims galore. Like plowing into a mule deer.

They always found themselves at the strange house down the hill, on Carcassone Way. Well, from the road there was no house at all, no sign of the living, not even a graveled drive; merely a filigreed gate with the obscure and rusted barely discernible motto La Colonne Détruite. The entry’s metal wings, fastened with a cartoonishly oversized padlock, were under siege by a dusty, haughtily promiscuous creeper, evoking melancholy in the boy—the crass finality of a dream foreclosed. They discovered another way in. He rode the dog’s back through a desiccated hedge, the scratchy privet andromeda of a once finely pruned wall, until Pullman reached a clearing—quiddity of lawn smooth as the brim of some kind of wonderland bowler hat.

Inside, the sudden magical oddness of a centuries-old park. The empty, vaulted space, so queerly “public”-feeling, was serenely at odds with the neighborhood’s proprietary nature. Intersecting rings of a sundial armillary sphere sat atop a pedestal of English portland stone, and though Pullman drew near, it was not to relieve himself. Rather, he became instantly mindful and mannered; each time they broke in, the animal invariably yawned, downplaying his bold, jungly efforts. Tull Trotter’s heart sped, as it did with any adventure to this meadowy place, dipped as it were in trespasser’s spice. Mother being a landscape architect of world renown, his catchall mind knew its flora—there, in the green all-aloneness, he communed again with the elegantly attenuated pyramid of the Cryptomerias and pines; the billiardist whimsy of great clipped myrtle balls so carefully, carelessly scattered; a cutting shed made of morning glory; the junipers and wisteria that flanked the still, square ponds; then began his saunter toward the ominous allée of flat-topped Irish yews.

He knew where those ancient columned soldiers led.

As he entered, the air chilled and darkened. Pullman had vanished as surely as a magician’s offering. Tull walked through a phalanx of sentries until far enough in to see the wild, weird thing, two hundred yards off, set apart on a hillock . . . a stout, ruined column, fluted as Doric columns should be, rent with fissures, at least fifty feet in diameter, proportions suggesting it was all that remained of a temple forty stories tall. Whatever peculiar god had made this base had provided it with crazily bejeweled windows too, oval, square and pentagonal, then snapped the tower off five floors up, where tufted weeds sprang from its serrations like hair from an old man’s ear. What could he make of it? The boy had never even gotten close enough to peer in. Now he moved inexorably nearer, at once cool and febrile, the capricious breath of open fields rushing at him like a breezy compress on the forehead during a sickbed hallucination.

Now he could see white, tented forms—furniture?—in the rooms within, but was interrupted when a daymare shape came from nowhere shouting, “Little fucker!” Tull was startled enough that he couldn’t read any features, though it was wearing bib overalls, the perfect parody of a ghoulish Mr. Greenjeans. In a blink, the figure rudely tumbled, care of a certain Dane; the terrified man, having met a fair match for the Olympian pedestal’s remains, retreated to the severed column while Tull made a sprinting Hardy Boy getaway. Regal and unruffled, Pullman strutted a beat in his master’s direction, then paused, slyly turning with calm eye and tarry muzzle to fire a last warning shot toward the groundskeeper—the astonished head of whom already appeared in an upper portal of the cylindrical mirage. Then, like a Saturday-morning-television creation, the aristocratic beast leapt toward his charge, through the chilly gantlet of yews, past the huge myrtle balls leading to the brambled entry that would carry them back to Carcassone Way and the homely, reassuring traffic of the world.

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Excerpted from I'll Let You Go by Bruce Wagner
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.