Today Will Be Different(32)
“Remind me of her last name,” Bucky said.
“Flood. She’s related to President John Tyler.”
“A direct descendant?”
“Her mother’s name was Tess Tyler,” Lester said, looking over at Eleanor to make sure that was correct. “Eleanor has a pair of John Tyler’s derringers in her apartment to prove it.”
“A direct descendant of a U.S. president in show business? I must witness such a travesty firsthand. Inform her I’ll be attending her little fête.”
It was the captain of Khaos himself, riding his comet to New York City. Eleanor’s team did what all feral and procrastinating animators did: they came up with a wager.
Everyone put in a twenty and whoever came the closest to drawing an accurate Bucky would win the pot. (The Internet has since fiercely debated why the Looper Four were so sloppily rendered in the “Guitar Zan” episode. The answer: Bucky Fanning.)
Most of the Buckys submitted were stump-sized. Some bow-tied gentlemen-of-yore. One a drooly, fly-swarmed hayseed. Eleanor settled on average height, balding, driving moccasins, no socks, wool pants, floral button-down and lavender cashmere sweater tied loosely around the shoulders. She threw in oversized Versace aviators with gradient lenses.
The day arrived. Bucky strode into Eleanor’s office. Bucky in the flesh.
He was indisputably handsome: tall, perfect skin, sensual lips, luxuriant wavy hair. (Lester had often insisted Bucky was attractive. “So why can’t he get a date?” Eleanor had asked. “He doesn’t want a date,” Lester explained. “He wants someone who won’t leave him.”)
Bucky wore black. Black bomber jacket, black cashmere crewneck with a black silk T-shirt peeking above, black leather ankle boots with the red Prada stripe up the heel. Slightly ridiculous, but only if you knew Bucky was a social cripple with no job. Otherwise, he looked like any other wealthy hipster on the streets of SoHo.
More than anything, Bucky had an imposing presence. He wasn’t fat, exactly. He reminded Eleanor of how papayas swelled during the rainy season or the way Greg Gumbel looked like someone had taken a bicycle pump to Bryant Gumbel.
Bucky’s eyes immediately landed on the twenties spilling out of a wire in-basket.
“What’s the bet?” he asked.
Panicky eyes swung to Eleanor.
“There’s no bet,” she answered too quickly.
“There’s a bet,” Bucky said calmly.
Beside Eleanor on the couch sat a coffee filter filled with honey-mustard pretzel nuggets. Her hand reached for one. Bucky took in Eleanor for a beat and nodded, as if that told him all he needed to know. He turned to Lester.
“I made us a lunch reservation at Balthazar, Mr. Lewis. I presume that is up to your middling standards.”
It should have come as no surprise to Eleanor that at Lester’s party, her baby sister, Ivy, Ivy the willowy, translucent one with a fluttery aura (she was the air and Eleanor was the earth), Ivy six foot one in ninth grade, who, a month before high-school graduation went to model in Paris and then Japan but had no luck in New York, where it mattered, who followed an acting coach to the Berkshires which ended up being a cult and had to be rescued by Eleanor and her then-boyfriend Joe, Ivy who miraculously booked a Dior campaign so her face was all over the subways one summer but lost all that money and her modeling connections in an ironically named Ponzi scheme, “Friends Helping Friends,” Ivy who hitchhiked to Telluride for an ayahuasca ceremony and stayed three years shacking up with the shaman, Mestre Mike, next finding religion in Fat Is a Feminist Issue, Toxic Parents, and Healing the Shame That Binds You, this Ivy, who became a certified masseuse but quit because the constant transfer of bad energy was making her weak, she was allergic to wheat and cut out sugar before anyone was allergic to wheat and cut out sugar, she also refused to eat meat because it was biting into animal screams and she avoided nuts because viruses clung to nuts, the Ivy whose skin had become flaky and eye sockets saggy, who couldn’t shake her angry dry cough, who Eleanor’s by-then-husband Joe, a surgeon who knew a dying bulimic when he saw one, checked into an eating-disorder unit on Second Avenue where Ivy was forced on arrival to eat a sloppy joe on a white bun, despite sobbing and gagging and collapsing on the linoleum floor, Ivy who was now answering phones for David Parry, rock-and-roll manager and husband of Violet, the head writer of Looper Wash, as a personal favor to Eleanor, Ivy who was now thirty-three and healthy if getting a little old for her act, it was this Ivy who came to Lester’s party, it was this Ivy who met Bucky, captivated Bucky, went back to the St. Regis with Bucky, and to New Orleans the next day.
A year later they were married.
The engagement party was held in New Orleans.
One of Joe’s rules: The first thing you do in a new city is take the public transportation. He and Eleanor chugged along St. Charles in the overstuffed streetcar. From afar, the live oaks seemed to drip with Spanish moss, but up close, they were just Mardi Gras beads, months old, stuck there.
Eleanor and Joe hopped off at Third Street and crossed. The Fanning estate was on the good side of the avenue, the river side.
2658 Coliseum stretched the entire block, its iron fence skillfully wrought into stalks of sugarcane. A plaque told the history, but it was too dark out to read.
The mansion glowed from within. Eleanor balked at the gate.