“Of course I like plays,” says Tommy. “I just don’t find these dog-and-pony shows all that interesting. I don’t even know who most of these people are.”
The televised view is now swooping into a vast theater, toward a stage where the curtains slide open to reveal a ranked platoon of dancers in skintight glitter.
Franklin says, “Did you go this afternoon?”
Tommy is tempted to lie, but she says, “No.” There’s little point in making excuses—not that she owes excuses to Franklin.
“You know, the longer you hole up, the harder it’s going to be.” After a pause, in which Tommy realizes (thankfully) that he doesn’t expect her to answer, he says, “Do you feel guilty? Don’t answer if that’s too personal. But you shouldn’t. Feel guilty.”
“Guilty?”
“Tommy, you know what I mean.”
“You mean because I’m getting it all? Except that I’m not, actually.”
“No. About being given control.”
“I don’t have that, either. I mean, come on. Morty’s the one exerting control. Wouldn’t you agree?”
In the ensuing pause, she can guess that Franklin thinks he’s gone too far.
“I didn’t mean to snap at you,” she says. “If I feel guilty, and maybe I do, right now it’s about not showing up for that thing in the park.” And for not answering Dani’s note, she thinks. “Listen, Franklin. You’re keeping me sane. I have no business scolding you.”
“Vent all you like, Tommy. I mean it. But you know what? The show is starting. I’m shameless here. Don’t tell my other clients I’m a sucker for show tunes.”
She thanks him and lets him go. She stands in the middle of the den and focuses on the arabesques and pirouettes of the chorus line, the entrance of the slim, athletic host. His tribe roars with self-satisfied approval.
Oh, tribes. She knows about tribes. Tommy went to at least a dozen awards ceremonies with Morty, before and then after Soren. Of course, they were book awards, not Oscars or Tonys. Some of the authors looked colorful, a handful elegant or eagerly stylish, but when literary stars turn out in their most celebratory attire, more than likely they fall shy of the mark. The tuxedos smell of mothballs; some of the dresses look as if they are past the days of fitting properly. Tommy owns three formal dresses, two black, one flowered, just for such occasions. Her mother bought her the flowered one. Though bald and bruised from treatments, she had taken Tommy shopping, as if Tommy were still a schoolgirl, another September looming. “Just in case you have to attend my funeral, I want you in something festive,” said Mom.
She clicks off the TV. She doesn’t need to wait for Nicholas Greene’s turn onstage. What she needs to do is write Dani. Somehow, she can’t bear the thought of speaking to him, not yet.
In his note, Dani included a picture of his baby, Joe—named for their father, a gesture that surprised Tommy when she received the birth announcement in March. She knew she should send a gift, with a note of congratulations. But wouldn’t it be duplicitous to acknowledge the birth of her nephew without offering reconciliation? She couldn’t bring herself to do that, not yet—not without Morty’s say-so. In March, she assumed she had all the time in the world to figure it out.
Their mother’s concerns about Dani had proved justifiable. Not that he became a troublemaker, a drifter, or a gutter-bound addict, but the work he did to make money through his thirties was odd-jobbish, nothing with security or benefits. He did carpentry and construction, working projects at which most of his coworkers shared a higher dedication of some sort, sculpture or song. The job he liked best was the stint he served, for several years, as a bicycle messenger, sprinting up- and downtown for financial firms back before e-mail and Skype made such work obsolete. “Closest I’ve ever come to flying,” he said. To Dani, a bike meant freedom.
But it was the freedom-loving Dani who moved back in with their parents when Mom had cancer; who watched over Dad in his loneliness after she died. Dani never wanted to leave the city, never even wanted to see what another city might feel like. He had a series of anti-conformist girlfriends and was happy to live in neighborhoods that were inconvenient to public transportation; he rode his bike everywhere, all seasons, all times of day and night. He liked to brag that he was a prisoner to nobody’s schedule but his own—and certainly not to the chronic delays of the subway.
And then, ten years ago, as he was inching up on forty, he met Jane. Jane was a bona fide grown-up, a pediatric speech therapist who happened to ride her bike everywhere, too, mainly because her work took her to a number of doctors’ offices, even to patients’ homes. They met when Jane stopped after seeing a cabdriver clip Dani’s back wheel and drive off without so much as a glance in his mirror.
Tommy was hardly her brother’s confidante, but when he mentioned Jane for the first time, Tommy knew he was fishing for advice. They were in touch fairly often back then. It was the beginning of their father’s breakdown, the loosening of his grip first on short-term memory, then on everyday logic.
“I told her I was thinking of starting a business.”
“Are you?” said Tommy.
“Don’t make it sound so unlikely.”
“I’m not making it sound like anything. I’m just asking.”
“So, a bike shop. In a neighborhood that doesn’t have one. There’s this guy I met who thinks maybe, with all the crazy upscaling of way-west Chelsea, all that luxury ‘greening’ of the riverfront—I guess that’s the word these days….Gareth thinks we could get a space on Tenth or Eleventh. We’d have to get a loan. Trying to get my head around that. A loan. As if, next thing, I might own a station wagon, a lawn mower….Jesus, in the old days Dad would have written a song.”
“I love that idea,” she said. And despite the passing shadow of their diminished father, Tommy felt a surge of disproportionate relief, as if Dani were her son, not her brother.
Within the month, Tommy had gone into the city for dinner with Dani and Jane. Jane was so unlike Dani’s previous girlfriends—so much more, in a way, like Tommy—that their conversation progressed in fits and starts, as if it were a job interview. And maybe, for Tommy, it was. Maybe she felt as if she were inspecting not just a future sister-in-law but a stand-in for their long-lost mother. Maybe Jane was looking for a genetic affirmation of Dani’s fitness to become a fellow grown-up—though Tommy could hardly picture him as a husband or father.
The bike shop became a reality. Dani seemed at last to be settled, to have found the perfect urban vocation. Tommy attended the opening, a boisterous gathering of Dani’s, Jane’s, and Gareth’s friends that spilled out onto the far-from-glamorous sidewalk of Eleventh Avenue, adjacent to the West Side Highway crush. The shop was a virtual forest of shiny, tropically colored bicycles hanging from elaborate racks that lined the ceiling. Tommy enjoyed herself, but she stood mostly apart, watching. She knew none of her brother’s friends (though had she ever?).
If Tommy hardly heard from Dani once the shop was up and running, she made the no-news-good-news assumption, glad that the only family member she had to worry about was Dad. Once in a while, she spoke to Jane, who told her how hard they were working, both of them. She was paying off her student loans; Dani and his partner were gaining a foothold in a neighborhood whose luxury value seemed to rise by the minute.
But a few years into the venture, something went wrong—not that he told her, no. If he had told her, she might have helped him. That he didn’t ask for her help was, she came to realize, far more hurtful than his stealing, or trying to steal, that book.
—
Merry stands in her dim kitchen, peeling off her sodden clothes while trying to appease poor Linus, left alone far longer than she expected. Through the window, a perfect June twilight deepens toward night, the hour-long tempest forgotten…except by those caught in its fury.
“Hold on just a little more, my all-suffering friend.”
She is stark naked, barefoot on the cold linoleum, bleary from the glass of
wine she had at that bar to wait out the rain (so crowded, thank God, that nobody noticed her unshod state), when she sees the blinking 2 on her wall phone. With a sense of defiant foreboding, she pushes PLAY.
“Hi, Merry.”
Oh, Benjamin. When it rains, it pours.
“I was wondering if you’d give me a call. I’m sure you’re not dying to speak with me, but maybe there’s a way we can be, like, not totally out of touch. I was hoping to tell you some news in person or, okay, at least over the phone. Which these days I guess is the new ‘in person.’ Anyway. If you could call. Thanks, Merry. Take care.”
What, does he think she’s an idiot? She knows the news without his telling her. He’s getting married again. Or he’s dashed right around the game board, express to GO, collected his two hundred dollars without having to pay rent on any of the expensive pastel-colored properties. (How she loved the colors of those little property deeds when she was a girl.) Except that the payout isn’t two hundred dollars; it’s a baby! Or a baby in progress.
The second voice is Sol’s. “Meredith. Sorry about that fiasco at the park. I wanted to catch you at the end, with Stu. He’s been conferring with me and a few of the other directors. He has an interesting proposal. Would you give me a call this evening if you can? I’m in meetings all day tomorrow.”
This cannot be good. There is no way this can be good. Not that Stu’s work isn’t vital to Merry’s overall mission, but whenever she’s with him, she knows she’s dealing with one of the most bullish egos ever to intersect with the writing of books for children (or children who think they’re adults). Six months ago, Stu snake-charmed half the board simply by setting foot in the tiny conference room—though she cannot deny that giving him the audience was her own idea. At the time, Merry understood how important his “modern” persona would be to the fiscal interests of the new museum—in crude terms, milking money from the hipster elite—but she also calculated that Sol’s conservative distaste for the Shine Phenomenon was a fortunate shield against an aesthetic takeover. If not for Sol, Stu might have had a say in the choice of architect. (He wanted them to hire Bodley Brigand, a dystopian soul mate whose buildings look like glorified coastal surveillance towers from World War II: acres of concrete, long slits for windows, an allegiance to unforgiving angles.) As Merry’s mother might say, the man is getting too big for his biker britches.
Wearing no britches whatsoever, she heads to the bedroom and opens her underwear drawer. Linus follows her, whining.
“Sorry, shmoo. I’m getting there.”
The day the divorce came through, she ransacked her drawers and closet and discarded every piece of clothing that Benjamin had given her—or that she had bought with him in mind: a garter belt from the days he called her his hot date (a garment that had, perhaps prophetically, already lost its elastic zing), a dozen lace camisoles (in festive Monopoly-board colors), the zipperless red dress that made her feel, every time it dropped over her body, as if she were being washed in silk (and, every time Benjamin took it off, as if she were receiving absolution).
Her wedding gown, preserved in a specially sealed box to keep it from discoloring, lives in her mother’s suburban attic. Neither of them mentions it. It will go to charity whenever her mother leaves that house. Merry cannot bear the thought of seeing it again.
Nor does she ever want to return to the South of France, least of all to that tiny timbered inn, surrounded by wanton explosions of yellow broom, where the two of them so blithely assumed they were conceiving the first of their children (the first of at least two, maybe three). They lay in bed till noon one day, sparring over which of the suburban options they would choose, knowing they could never afford to buy a Manhattan apartment large enough for a family.
“Maplewood.”
“Oh God, not Jersey. Hastings.”
“You are a snob. And Hastings is already too expensive.”
“Yonkers.”
“Yonkers? Be serious.”
“Okay. Forest Hills.”
“Have you ever lived on the F train? You might as well move to Moscow.”
“Dobbs Ferry.”
“At this rate, how about Nova Scotia?”
“Christ, can you tell we live in New York?”
“We can find something in Brooklyn. We are not that desperate.”
“Let’s just drill for oil in the building airshaft.”
Their assumptions were so bourgeois, so smug.
None of that matters now, of course. The problem is, Merry never fell out of love with Benjamin—even after they came to dread touching each other, to dread looking at the calendar she kept inside her closet door. At the end, they even, or especially, came to dread the couples counselor. Merry still shuts her eyes when the Lexington Express hurtles through that station.
But dread is not the opposite of love.
Linus barks at the sound of his leash slipping from its hook in the closet. Dogs, thinks Merry, really listen to the world. “I am ready, little man,” she says as she finds the loop on his collar. “Here we go.”
Outside, Linus pulls hard at the leash, aiming for the gated park, a luxury he takes for granted, as he does his mistress’s pure if sometimes negligent love. Merry orders herself not to cry as she unlocks the gate. She releases Linus from his leash, to hell with the rules. Let some enforcer ticket and fine her. She feels a wave of satisfaction, even joy, as she watches the small dog run ahead, pause to glance back, then streak headlong toward the tree that harbors the taunting squirrels.
Six
TUESDAY
Andrew has a brand-new wife, and it’s hard not to watch her, beyond the colossal picture window, as she glides and flips, glides and flips, bisecting the pool from one end to the other and back again. The pool is coal black, its surface sunstruck obsidian, and the wife’s suit is neon yellow (her hair just about the same color, gleefully artificial).
On this side of the window is the long couch on which Andrew and Jake are seated. Jake is the alpha screenwriter. Nick has been around long enough not to get attached. As Deirdre said, writers are the zombies of the business: just when you think a certain chap is riding high, he’s dead and buried—but then lurches to life in another project…until he’s mowed down again, consumed by the next of the writer-zombies. “It’s a cycle,” she said. “Every writer has his good seasons and his bad. Until he doesn’t. And it’s almost never a she, by the way. As if I need to point that out.”
Nick is on the twin couch, facing Andrew’s across an oval sheet of frosted glass the size of a dory, its surface virtually obscured by papers, tablets, phones, laptops, and small Japanese bowls filled with resistible snacks like desiccated soybeans and diminutive rice cakes. Next to Nick sits Hardy, whose exact job is unclear. He’s been discussing the animated footage they’ve already shot (or cyber-engineered, or super-digitized; however it is they make cartoons these days).
Andrew wants Nick to look at the sequences they have so far: Ivo wandering in the jungle, the panther following him, cunningly silent, at a distance. As in the correspondent part of Lear’s book, the images are black and white—although furtive twinges of color flash now and then beyond the trees, like distant detonations—as if, Andrew explains, color is trying to force itself back into the world, all on its own. Nick marvels at how well they’ve captured Lear’s way of drawing—yet turned the story so much darker than it is in the book. This film is not one for the nippers.
“The audience will believe that the panther is stalking the boy as prey. This is before we go to live action, the pivotal scene in the shed, with Toby and Sig.” Tobias Feld is the boy actor; Siegfried Knutsen plays the gardener.
Nick has been trying just to listen. He had expected to meet Andrew alone, at least to begin with, though he realizes how naïve he was to believe that Andrew has much time to spend with any single person (except the wife—who, being new, probably gets as much of him as anyone possibly can).
“About the shed, we really need to speak,” Nic
k says.
The others turn to him, expectant.
“Because, as I mentioned to you last month, what happened to him—to Lear—as that boy—wasn’t what you’ve imagined. It’s…more complicated.”
“How much more complicated can it get than being sodomized?” says Andrew.
Nick pauses. “I just can’t ignore…I mean, to have it from the horse’s mouth that what people assume is the case isn’t the spot-on truth…I can’t ignore that.” When no one speaks, he adds, “I don’t mean just morally. I mean in terms of getting it right—which I see as my work.”
Oh God, how grandiose, even priggish, did that sound?
Andrew stares intently at Nick. The other men watch Andrew. They remind Nick of a pair of spaniels, waiting for their master to don his Wellies, take his gun from the rack. He also notices for the first time that Andrew has an earring, with which he fusses when he isn’t talking. He did not have that earring when they met up in London. Privately, Nick believes that getting an earring after age thirty—and Andrew’s more than twice that age—is unseemly, but he chalks it up to the influence of the new wife. Call it rejuvenation. She looks barely this side of twenty. As she passes through the living room, quite unself-conscious in nothing more than her scanty fluorescent swimming costume, all three visitors have a clear view of the red rose tattooed across her back, in succulent bloom from her tailbone to the nape of her neck. Their eyes follow her in awestruck unison.
Andrew extends an arm in her direction; she reciprocates. Their pinkies clasp. “Take a break,” he says. “Hardy. Jake. Have Flora fix you a juice. The oranges are killer.” He nods to Nick, rises, and heads outside, along a walkway sheltered by a tempest of bougainvillea.
Nick can only presume he’s to follow.
They enter Andrew’s office bungalow. Since Nick was last here—two years ago, the first and only other time he’s been here—the photographs on the wall have been rearranged, presumably to erase any history of Sasha, wife number two, who lasted nearly twenty years and mothered three of Andrew’s (thus far) five children.