IF AELFRIC MANHEIM’S MONDAY-EVENING dinner had been reported upon in Daily Variety, the colorful trade paper of the film industry, the headline might have been FRIC CLICKS WITH CHICK.
On the grill1, the plump breast had been basted2 with olive oil and sprinkled with sea salt, pepper, and a delicious mixture of exotic herbs known around Palazzo Rospo as the McBee McSecret. In addition to the chicken, he had been served pasta, not with tomato sauce, but with butter, basil, pine nuts, and Parmesan cheese.
Mr. Hachette, the Cordon3 Bleu-trained chef who was a direct descendent4 of Jack5 the Ripper, didn’t work Sundays and Mondays, so that he might stalk and slash6 innocent women, toss rabid cats into baby carriages, and indulge in whatever other personal interests currently appealed to him.
Mr. Baptiste, the happy cook, was off Mondays and Tuesdays; therefore, on Mondays the kitchen was, in show-biz lingo7, dark. Mrs. McBee had prepared these delicacies8 herself.
By the softly pulsing light of electric fixtures9 tricked up to look like antique oil lamps, Fric ate in the wine cellar, alone at the refectory table for eight in the cozy10 tasting room, which was separated [186] from the temperature-controlled portion of the cellar by a glass wall. Beyond the glass, in aisles11 of shelves, were fourteen thousand bottles of what his father sometimes identified as “Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Pinot Noir, claret, port, Burgundy—and the blood of critics, which is a bitter vintage.”
Ha, ha, ha.
When Ghost Dad was home, they usually ate in the dining room, unless the dinner guests—the old man’s buddies12, business associates, or various personal advisers13 from his spiritual counselor14 to his clairvoyance15 instructor—felt uncomfortable having a ten-year-old kid listening to their gossip and rolling his eyes at their trash talk.
In Ghost Dad’s absence, which was most of the time, Fric could choose to have dinner not just in his private rooms, where he usually ate, but virtually anywhere on the estate.
In good weather, he might dine outdoors by the swimming pool, grateful that in his father’s absence no hopelessly dense16, tiresomely17 giggly18, embarrassingly half-naked starlets were there to pester19 him with questions about his favorite subject in school, his favorite food, his favorite color, his favorite world-famous movie star.
They were always trying to cadge20 some Ritalin or antidepressants from Fric. They refused to believe that his only prescription21 was for asthma22 medication.
If not by the pool, he might dine dangerously with fine china and antique silverware at a table in the rose garden, keeping his inhaler ready on a dessert plate in the event that a breeze stirred up enough pollen23 to trigger an asthma attack.
Sometimes he ate from a lap tray while ensconced in one of the sixty comfortable armchairs in the screening room, which had recently been remodeled using the ornate Art Deco-style Pantages Theater, in Los Angeles, as inspiration.
The screening-room equipment could handle film, all formats24 of videotape, DVDs, and broadcast-television signals, projecting them onto a screen larger than many in the average suburban25 multiplex.
[187] To watch videos and DVDs, Fric didn’t need the assistance of a projectionist26. Sitting in the center seat in the center row, adjacent to the control console, he could run his own show.
Sometimes, when he knew that no cleaning had been scheduled in the theater, when he was certain that no one would come looking for him, he locked the door to ensure privacy, and he loaded the DVD player with one of his father’s movies.
Being seen watching a Ghost Dad movie was unthinkable.
Not that they sucked. Some of them sucked, of course, because no star rang the big bell every time. But some were all right. Some were cool. A few were even amazing.
If anyone were to see him watching his father’s movies under these circumstances, however, he would be the National Academy of Nerds’ choice for Greatest Nerd of the Decade. Maybe of the century. The Pathetic Losers Club would vote him a free lifetime membership.
Mr. Hachette, the psychopathic chef related to the Frankenstein family, would mock him with sneers27 and by drawing sly comparisons between Fric’s sticklike physique and his father’s maximum buffness.
Anyway, in the only occupied seat of sixty, with the ornate Art Deco ceiling soaring thirty-four feet overhead, Fric sometimes sat in the dark and ran Ghost Dad’s movies on the huge screen. Drenched28 in Dolby surround sound.
He watched certain films for the stories, though he’d seen them many times. He watched others for blow-out-the-walls special effects.
And always in his father’s performances, Fric looked for the qualities, the charms, the expressions, and the bits of business that made millions of people all over the world love Channing Manheim.
In the better films, such moments abounded29. Even in the suckiest of the sucky, however, there were scenes in which you couldn’t help but like the guy, admire him, want so much to hang out with him.
[188] When citing the brightest moments in his finest films, critics had said that Fric’s father was magical. “Magical” sounded stupid, like gooey girl gush30, embarrassing, but it was the right word.
Sometimes you watched him on the big screen, and he seemed more colorful, more real than anyone you’d ever known. Or ever would know.
This super-real quality couldn’t be explained by the giant size of his projected image or by the visual genius of the cameraman. Nor by the brilliance31 of the director—most being no more brilliant than a boiled potato—nor by the layered details achieved through digital technology. Most actors, including stars, didn’t have the Manheim magic even when they worked with the best directors and technicians.
You watched him up there, and he seemed to have been everywhere, to have seen everything, to know all that could be known. He seemed to be wiser, more caring, funnier, and braver than anyone, anywhere, ever—as though he lived in six dimensions while everyone else had to live in only three.
Fric had studied certain scenes over and over again, scores of times, maybe a hundred times in some cases, until they seemed as real to him as any moments he had actually spent with his father.
Once in a while, when he went to bed drag-ass tired, but was able to settle only on the twilight32 edge of sleep, or when he woke incompletely in the middle of the night yet continued to skate upon the surface of a temporarily frozen dream, those special movie scenes with his father did seem real to Fric. They played in memory not as though he’d viewed them from a theater seat, but as though they were true-life experiences that he and his father had shared.
These dreamy spells of half-sleep were some of the happiest moments of Fric’s life.
Of course, if he ever told anyone that those were some of the happiest moments of his life, the Pathetic Losers Club would erect33 a [189] thirty-foot statue of him, emphasizing his uncombable hair and his skinny neck, and they would spotlight34 it on the same hill that held the HOLLYWOOD sign.
So on this Monday evening, though Fric might have preferred to eat in the theater while watching his father beat the crap out of bad guys and save an entire orphanage35 full of waifs, he dined in the wine cellar because in the pre-Christmas bustle36, little privacy could be found elsewhere in Palazzo Rospo.
Ms. Sanchez and Ms. Norbert, the maids who lived on the estate, had been away on an early Christmas leave for the past ten days. They would not return until Thursday morning, December 24.
Mrs. McBee and Mr. McBee would be gone Tuesday and Wednesday, to have an early Christmas with their son and his family in Santa Barbara. They, too, would return to Palazzo Rospo on December 24, to ensure that the biggest movie star in the world was met with the proper pomp when he arrived from Florida later that afternoon.
Consequently, here on Monday evening, the other four maids and the porters were working late, under the firm direction of the busy McBees, alongside a few outsourced services that included a six-man floor-cleaning crew specializing in the care of marble and limestone37, an eight-person holiday-decorating team, and an emergency feng-shui facilitator who would make certain that various Christmas trees and other seasonal38 displays were arranged and festooned in such a way as not to interfere39 with the proper energy flow of the great house.
Madness.
Far from the hum of floor-polishing machines and the jolly laughter of the Christmas-besotted decorating team, Fric took refuge deep underground in the wine cellar. Within these brick walls, under this low, vaulted40 brick ceiling, the only sounds were those he made swallowing and the clink of his fork against his plate.
And then: Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo.
Muffled41 but audible, the phone rang inside a keg.
[190] Because the temperature in the tasting room was too high for wine storage, the barrels and bottles in this chamber42, on the warmer side of the glass wall, were strictly43 decorative44.
Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo.
Stacked floor to ceiling along one brick wall, several of the enormous barrels featured hinged bottoms that could be swung open, doorlike. Some barrels had shelves inside, on which were stored wineglasses, linen45 napkins, corkscrews, other items. Four contained televisions, allowing a wine connoisseur46 to view multiple channels simultaneously47.
Ooodelee-ooodelee-oo.
Fric opened the phone keg and answered his private line in the usual Frician style, determined48 not to sound intimidated49. “Pete’s Pest Control and School of Home Canning. We’ll rid your house of rats and teach you how to preserve them for future holiday feasts.”
“Hello, Aelfric.”
“Do you have a name yet?” Fric asked.
“Lost.”
“Is that a first name or last name?”
“Both. Are you enjoying your dinner?”
“I’m not eating dinner.”
“What did I tell you about lying, Aelfric?”
“That it won’t get me anything but misery50.”
“Do you eat in the wine cellar often?”
“I’m in the attic51.”
“Don’t seek misery, boy. Enough of it will find you without your help.”
“In the movie business,” Fric said, “people lie twenty-four hours a day, and all it gets them is rich.”
“Sometimes the misery follows swiftly,” Mysterious Caller assured him. “More often it takes a lifetime to arrive, and then at the end, there’s a great roaring sea of it.”
Fric was silent.
[191] The stranger matched his silence.
At last Fric drew a deep breath and said, “I’ve got to admit, you’re a spooky son of a bitch.”
“That’s progress, Aelfric. A little truth.”
“I found a place where I can hide and never be found.”
“Do you mean the secret room behind your closet?”
Fric had never imagined that any creepy creatures lived in the hollows of his bones, but now he seemed to feel them crawling through his marrow52.
Mysterious Caller said, “The place with steel walls and all the hooks in the ceiling—is that where you think you can hide?”
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1
grill
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| n.烤架，铁格子，烤肉；v.烧，烤，严加盘问 | |
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basted
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| v.打( baste的过去式和过去分词 )；粗缝；痛斥；（烤肉等时）往上抹[浇]油 | |
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cordon
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| n.警戒线，哨兵线 | |
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descendent
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| adj. 下降的, 降落的, 世袭的 n. 后代，子孙 =descendant | |
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jack
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| n.插座，千斤顶，男人；v.抬起，提醒，扛举；n.（Jake）杰克 | |
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slash
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| vi.大幅度削减；vt.猛砍，尖锐抨击，大幅减少；n.猛砍，斜线，长切口，衣衩 | |
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lingo
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| n.语言不知所云，外国话，隐语 | |
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delicacies
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| n.棘手( delicacy的名词复数 )；精致；精美的食物；周到 | |
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fixtures
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| （房屋等的）固定装置( fixture的名词复数 )； 如（浴盆、抽水马桶）； 固定在某位置的人或物； （定期定点举行的）体育活动 | |
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cozy
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| adj.亲如手足的，密切的，暖和舒服的 | |
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aisles
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| n. (席位间的)通道, 侧廊 | |
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buddies
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| n.密友( buddy的名词复数 )；同伴；弟兄；（用于称呼男子，常带怒气）家伙v.（如密友、战友、伙伴、弟兄般）交往( buddy的第三人称单数 )；做朋友；亲近（…）；伴护艾滋病人 | |
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advisers
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| 顾问，劝告者( adviser的名词复数 )； （指导大学新生学科问题等的）指导教授 | |
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counselor
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| n.顾问，法律顾问 | |
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clairvoyance
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| n.超人的洞察力 | |
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dense
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| a.密集的，稠密的，浓密的；密度大的 | |
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tiresomely
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| adj. 令人厌倦的，讨厌的 | |
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giggly
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| adj.傻笑的，吃吃笑的 | |
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pester
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| v.纠缠，强求 | |
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cadge
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| v.乞讨 | |
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prescription
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| n.处方，开药；指示，规定 | |
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asthma
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| n.气喘病，哮喘病 | |
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pollen
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| n.[植]花粉 | |
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formats
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| n.（出版物的）版式( format的名词复数 )；[电视]电视节目的总安排（或计划） | |
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suburban
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| adj.城郊的，在郊区的 | |
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projectionist
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| n.电影放映员，幻灯放映员 | |
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sneers
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| 讥笑的表情（言语）( sneer的名词复数 ) | |
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drenched
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| adj.湿透的；充满的v.使湿透( drench的过去式和过去分词 )；在某人（某物）上大量使用（某液体） | |
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abounded
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| v.大量存在，充满，富于( abound的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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gush
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| v.喷，涌；滔滔不绝(说话)；n.喷，涌流；迸发 | |
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brilliance
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| n.光辉，辉煌，壮丽，（卓越的）才华，才智 | |
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twilight
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| n.暮光，黄昏；暮年，晚期，衰落时期 | |
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erect
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| n./v.树立，建立，使竖立；adj.直立的，垂直的 | |
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spotlight
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| n.公众注意的中心，聚光灯，探照灯，视听，注意，醒目 | |
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orphanage
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| n.孤儿院 | |
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bustle
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| v.喧扰地忙乱，匆忙，奔忙；n.忙碌；喧闹 | |
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limestone
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| n.石灰石 | |
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seasonal
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| adj.季节的，季节性的 | |
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interfere
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| v.(in)干涉，干预；(with)妨碍，打扰 | |
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vaulted
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| adj.拱状的 | |
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muffled
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| adj.（声音）被隔的；听不太清的；（衣服）裹严的；蒙住的v.压抑，捂住( muffle的过去式和过去分词 )；用厚厚的衣帽包着（自己） | |
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42
chamber
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| n.房间，寝室；会议厅；议院；会所 | |
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43
strictly
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| adv.严厉地，严格地；严密地 | |
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decorative
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| adj.装饰的，可作装饰的 | |
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linen
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| n.亚麻布，亚麻线，亚麻制品；adj.亚麻布制的，亚麻的 | |
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connoisseur
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| n.鉴赏家，行家，内行 | |
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simultaneously
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| adv.同时发生地，同时进行地 | |
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48
determined
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| adj.坚定的；有决心的 | |
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49
intimidated
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| v.恐吓；威胁adj.害怕的；受到威胁的 | |
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50
misery
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| n.痛苦，苦恼，苦难；悲惨的境遇，贫苦 | |
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attic
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| n.顶楼，屋顶室 | |
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52
marrow
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| n.骨髓；精华；活力 | |
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