Andrew sits behind his desk and, as if Nick isn’t with him, begins scrolling through messages on his tablet. “Never, never, never ending.” He sighs. He still cuts the lean, agile figure he did, decades back, as an actor in a spate of highly praised films about moody young men (saboteurs, insurgents, tragic lovers), but in unguarded moments like this, Andrew’s age surfaces in the sun-carved lines of his face, the softening of his jaw. Abruptly, he looks up. “So. Your revelation. Let’s hear it. But realize that we’re on location in three weeks. I’m not counting out rewrite, but these animators are breaking the bank. Used to be done by artists, down from their garrets—honest-to-God classically trained draftsmen. Not that the new artists aren’t geniuses, too, but they’re computer geeks who expect to be paid what they’d make if they were designing search engines at Google. And listen: Toby’s mother has vetted the script so tyrannically that I think she might’ve missed her calling with the Stasi. So tell me what’s up.”
Nick sits in the upholstered chair facing the desk. It’s the sort of chair in which you sink so far down that your knees rise toward your chest, making you feel inescapably childlike, as if sitting opposite your headmaster, waiting for him to hand out punishment for bad behavior.
“I’ll just say it outright,” Nick says.
“Only thing we have time for.” Andrew’s smile is genuine but brief.
“Lear wasn’t sodomized by the gardener. The gardener never touched him. He was forced to witness, from a hidden space, the gardener having sex with various women. One was Lear’s mother.”
Andrew looks directly at Nick, but his face is devoid of emotion. After several seconds have elapsed, he makes an odd sound, like a grunt.
“He heard them more than saw them,” Nick says. “He was in a tiny room in the shed where he went to…draw pictures.”
“You’re claiming he was a juvenile voyeur.”
“No, no. And I’m not just ‘claiming.’ I’m telling you what he told me.”
“He told you this when?”
“We e-mailed back and forth. I was planning to—but you know that. I was supposed to meet him last week. I was hoping to talk about it in person.”
“Why would he tell you all this?”
“I don’t know. Which is why I know it’s the truth. Who would trade the easier version—the victim, plain and simple—for the stranger one, in which he might have refused, walked out, blown the whistle at the get-go? Theoretically. But the thing is, I understand how he couldn’t, how trapped he was. By so many things. I feel it.”
Andrew suddenly beams and waves; Nick realizes he sees his wife outside the window of the bungalow. Andrew blows a kiss.
“You see,” says Nick, “it’s like the cat’s out of the bag for me. It’s worlds different from what I’d imagined.”
Andrew eyes the ceiling, where reflections from the rippling surface of the pool cast a zebralike pattern. “I could point out that you’re not playing the child.”
“I know that, Andrew. But I’m playing that child grown into the man who can’t bloody forget what the child went through. It’s not as if he’d blocked the memory. He lived with it for half a century. He lived with a mother who knew what he knew.”
“The mother knew?”
“God yes! That’s what makes it especially frightful. The mother found out that he was behind that wall, though not before she’d been to the shed, with that evil man, more than once. Lear finally couldn’t stand it. He made his presence known. Later, he broke down and told.”
“You have all this in writing—the e-mails.”
Nick groans. “No.”
“No? Nick…” Andrew frets with his earring, toggling the tiny gold loop between thumb and forefinger. Nick can hardly stand it. He wants to reach out and pull Andrew’s hand away from his ear.
“He didn’t reveal any of this in the interview.”
“The interview is ancient. He clearly wanted to amend it, or why would he have—”
“Look. I don’t see how we can change this aspect of the story this late in the game. For so many reasons, some of them probably legal.”
“It’s not just an ‘aspect’!” cries Nick, then lowers his voice. “Andrew, it’s the crux of the story as we’re telling it.”
“I’m not sure I agree with you there.”
Andrew’s phone buzzes. He pulls it from his pocket. “Flora’s serving lunch. We have to wrap up the meeting in half an hour.”
“Are you just going to ignore this?”
Andrew sighs, toys with the earring for a long excruciating moment. “Nick, I don’t want to. I wish you’d spilled the beans sooner.”
“I wanted to talk with him first.”
“What Lear might have wanted, whatever his peculiar motives were in making this confession, none of that matters to me. Not to insult you, Nick, but this is my film, not his, not yours—and I am not sure I would have bought the version you’re giving me.”
“You don’t believe him?”
Andrew shakes his head, but he is already out of his chair, aiming for the door. “I mean ‘bought’ in the literal sense. It’s…there’s something over-the-edge about it. Too kinky. Ambiguous. The studio—”
“Kinky and ambiguous never scared you off before.” Nick follows Andrew back onto the trellised walkway.
Andrew pauses and turns around. “Let’s talk tonight or tomorrow morning. Right now I have to finish up with Jake and Hardy—but stay for lunch, will you? You’ll still have time to go back to your hotel before meeting with Toby and Trish. You’ll love Trish—she’s just out of ABT. And let’s get a couple of images for the bloggers to nosh on, shots of you and Toby while I’ve got you together. Can’t have you going stale. I’m tired of those Taormina stills, which is what your growing army of fans get right now whenever they IMDb you—you and, if you’ll forgive me, the not so gracefully aging Deedee. I’d rather have them find the surprise of you with the fresh-faced Toby. Oh—and I forgot to say, you were great on Sunday. That was the perfect nibble. Thank you for that.”
Nick silences himself. For now. Shading his eyes, he looks toward the pool, its inky darkness elegant yet forbidding. At a table sheltered by a wide ivory parasol sit Jake and Hardy, between them Andrew’s wife, who has donned a translucent caftan in that same virulent yellow. Her matching hair erupts from her head in blunt, effusive tufts. She touches the two men frequently on their shoulders, arms, and hands, making them laugh freely.
She reminds him of Kendra, those easy public charms. At moments, just isolated moments, he misses Kendra, the way she could weave a kind of warm, protective aura around him, especially in social situations like this one.
“Sir.”
He turns, startled, to see a dark-skinned older woman in a flowered dress holding a tray occupied by a single glass of deep red liquid.
“Blood orange,” she says. “You must try.”
I am in a fairy tale, he thinks, and now I will drink the blood. The sangfroid, he muses as he grasps the icy glass.
Of course you will, Deirdre would say. And listen up when the wizard speaks, or you just might lose your head.
How searingly lonely he feels in this instant: how far from home, far from certain, far from any sort of lasting love.
—
Franklin finally gave in and agreed to a gin and tonic. “Oh, corrupt me.”
“I’m bribing you.”
“No need, Tommy. Morty’s still paying me plenty, even from beyond the grave.”
Today they are attending to what Tommy thinks of, with no small dose of irony, as “the easy stuff,” beginning with Morty’s wish that they auction off his small but precious Dickens library, as well as the Alice ephemera. They’ve just arranged for representatives from two separate auction houses to show up the following week. This will be the first of the seed money allocated directly to Ivo’s House.
“I have no idea what it’s worth, any of it,” she says. “I’m sure Morty didn’t. He collected the things he did
like a kid collects stamps.”
“I don’t think kids collect stamps anymore,” says Franklin. “Mine didn’t.”
“I collected toy harmonicas.”
“You’re musical?”
“No. My parents were.” She thinks of her abandoned piano lessons, Dani’s resistance to the guitar.
Dani. Her brother, like so much else, will have to wait.
“I played the sax in high school,” says Franklin. “Badly but with hormonal passion. Or desperation. ‘Sax gets you sex,’ some older punk told me when we were choosing instruments. Talk about false marketing.”
“Tell me you still play.” Tommy pictures a smaller, bow-tied Franklin playing “Watermelon Man” or “How High the Moon” in an adolescent jazz band.
“Not even in my dreams. Thank God.”
Franklin turns back to the statements from Morty’s investment funds. “I mentioned the life insurance, yes? Payable to Soren Kelly, in the beginning, but then to you. Five hundred K. On top of this property, of course, which he didn’t want you to feel you’d have to sell.”
Tommy is growing weary of the figures. She wasn’t hired to handle figures, shift beads on an abacus. She was hired to handle art and words and people and travel plans and prize ceremonies; in the end, to keep an aging man company, deflect his fear of death by leaving her bedroom door ajar at night.
“I don’t know how I’m going to make all this happen,” she says.
“You won’t. Not by yourself. We’ll get through probate, pay the taxes, sell whatever you decide to sell. We’ll find the people to make the rest happen. They can fund-raise their hearts out if Morty underestimated the grandeur of his plans.”
“Franklin, you sound like a therapist.”
“The best lawyers are therapists. We just charge more.”
“I thought you told me that assessing mental fitness wasn’t in your job description.”
“No diagnosis. Just a lot of constructive listening.”
“Which you’re awfully good at.” Is she flirting with Franklin? How long has it been since Tommy’s flirted with anyone?
“Friday the actor’s coming,” she says after an awkward silence. “Again.”
“Greene?”
“I’m letting him stay for the weekend.”
Franklin whistles. “A weekend tryst with Nicholas Greene?”
“I’m old enough to be his mother. And you know what? He’s very well mannered. Or he’s fooled me into thinking so. I suppose the best actors, like the best lawyers, are therapists of a sort as well.”
“Do you want me to stop in and check up?”
“I’ve got you on speed dial now. Speed text.”
“Use me as needed.” Franklin tips his glass back, draining the last bit of liquid from the ice. He gets up and puts it in the sink.
She might have asked him to stay for dinner, but she is planning on watching the actor’s latest movie, the one that raked in the awards. Tommy feels illogically sheepish, as if it’s obsequious to “study up” on Nicholas Greene.
She walks Franklin to his car. From behind the wheel, he says, “Maybe I’ll stop over anyway. Do a little stargazing. Who gets to meet movie stars here in the Connecticut boonies?”
“Plenty of movie stars live in the Connecticut boonies.”
“Must wear camo. Or come out after dark.”
After he drives off, Tommy walks toward the studio. She is drawn there, unavoidably, several times a day. She realizes that she hasn’t been filling Morty’s bird feeders, which stand outside the window that provided the view from his drafting table. At least it’s spring; nobody’s starving in the snow. She goes back to the shed and takes down the two kinds of seed: thistle for the finches; for the rest, what Morty called aviatrix—short for “avian trail mix.” The shed is stunningly hot inside. It smells of terra-cotta and the fancy brand of seaweed compost Morty liked for the gardens. The shelves are dusty, fragments of broken flowerpots strewn on the floor; he refused to hire any professionals. He mowed while Tommy weeded. Together, they planted and pruned.
It strikes her only now as obvious—or is it?—why he never wanted to hire a gardener. To most people, gardeners are nurturers, growers, experts on how to keep the planet photosynthesizing at a healthy clip. Not to Morty.
Will she have the nerve to ask Nicholas Greene about the script? About how they plan to “handle” that material? She’s no fool: that’s why they optioned the magazine piece. It wasn’t for Morty’s reminiscences about how he discovered his talent or how he got famous or even, at least not primarily, how he fell in love with a beguiling, opportunistic man like Soren Kelly. However unkindly, Tommy will never really think of Soren as a man. Looking back at 1991, the year Soren made his entrance, Tommy sees it like a spike on an EKG, but at the time it felt like an accrual of crises, unfolding one small drama at a time.
Morty had just won a second Caldecott, for Rumple Crumple Engine Foot, in which a small boy, playing on the floor beside his writer-father’s desk, pulls discarded wads of typescript out of the wastebasket and holds them up to the light from a window, imagining each one as a different object. The boy crafts an entire story of his own from the balled-up waste of the story his father is failing to write. (The reader sees only the father’s feet, on the floor beneath the desk, side by side in wing-tip shoes. Every so often, the top margin of the book exudes brief, child-friendly cursing and noises of adult frustration.)
In the same week, however—almost literally overnight—Morty’s mother stopped recognizing him. Her Alzheimer’s had been progressing at a dismally steady rate, and Morty had less and less time to get to Brooklyn, where, for several years, he had paid for Frieda to live in the best transitional home he could find near the places she knew. During those years, however, her friends had died or simply stopped visiting, and the places she knew became places she no longer knew. So what was the point, Morty felt, of keeping her there?
That week, he had moved her to a new place, just ten minutes from the Connecticut house. It was a superficially elegant (and breathtakingly expensive) “memory-care haven,” with a staff better equipped to care for Frieda, but her Brooklyn doctor had warned Morty that taking her to live somewhere entirely new was risky. It might drive her further into the darkness.
As if to provide an appropriate background to this heartache, too many of Morty’s friends and colleagues—Tommy’s, too—were dying. To look back on that sinister era feels now, to Tommy, like going to a history museum and gazing into a glass-front display, a sealed-off epoch as remote as the ones portrayed in the dioramas with covered wagons or roaming mastodons. Perhaps that’s a disgraceful thought, but barely twenty years after the panic began—the wildfire of fear and pointed hypochondria, the escalating number of phone calls with worsening news, the gridlock of funerals—it petered toward an end. Not an end to the entire epidemic, of course, but an end to its tyranny over their particular world, to the lengthening roster of its victims. Morty had pointed out, grimly, that if you knew your social circles well enough, you could have set up a solid betting pool, a kind of actuarial poker. “You could donate the proceeds to cover the health care of the uninsured, how about that?”
Between spates of touring and their separate day trips to the city, Tommy and Morty had lived an intensely focused life in the two years they had shared the house. One month Tommy’s life was a cram session of readings, parties, school visits, radio interviews, and—back when authors had any cachet—television talk shows. And then, for a season, it became a serial monotony of paperwork, phone calls, gardening, tending to the needs of a geriatric house. The longer stretches were almost monastic, but Tommy didn’t see it that way, because the small, hectic periods of travel and fuss, of managing so much attention (both welcome and intrusive), filled her days with more people than she might have met in the entirety of any other viable life.
So it surprised her one day when Morty said, “Do you realize what a pair of sorry introverts we are?” He had just pointed
out that a visiting plumber was the first person either of them had spoken with, face-to-face, in nearly a week. “Maybe we should start making jam or cordials. Wear ropes around our waists.”
They were bound together as well by their mothers’ failing health, though they spoke only rarely about this kindred burden—perhaps because each of them felt inadequate, never attentive enough. Tommy had Dani and her father to cover for her periods of absence and negligence—and, in hindsight, it’s clear that Tommy’s mother did her best to minimize the trials of her treatment, always insisting that she looked much worse than she felt. As for Morty, he could tell himself that his mother hardly noticed when he came to visit—and surely wouldn’t remember once he left.
But at the time, Tommy had no intention, at least in the long term, of giving up on finding a separate life of her own. About children, she wasn’t certain, but who didn’t want to fall feverishly, lustfully, then lastingly in love? Since Scott, her Jamesian lover in college, she’d had two short liaisons, both disastrous, with men she met while she lived in the city. When they had each let her down, she had been grateful for Morty’s company during the day. There were times she could even comfort herself with the certainty that here was a handsome, talented man who knew her well and treated her with kindness, even affection. If Morty had been attracted to women, maybe, despite their age difference, they would have married.
But she and Morty did not talk about love, not the kind of love that involved coupling. For too many people around them, death had eclipsed that kind of love. Because Tommy began working for Morty at almost exactly the same moment when whispers of the rogue disease began to circulate, she assumed that Morty had sworn off passionate connections because they were simply too risky. (In Morty’s building on Twelfth Street, a downstairs neighbor was the first man Tommy saw whose skin had broken out in those lurid bruises. She saw him just a few times, trying hard not to stare, before she never saw him again.)