Or perhaps Morty kept his love life secret, partitioned into the hours Tommy went home to her walkup on Avenue A. After all, her two badly chosen boyfriends never set foot in Morty’s place. So what if discretion seemed quaint?
And then suddenly, if only for six months or so, she had Dani to look after, to distract her from making further bad choices in men. A few years later, after the month during which she stayed with Morty while he recovered from surgery for a burst appendix, he asked if she’d like to move in full-time. The house felt too big, he claimed. And he needed to have an assistant right there, someone who would know how his studio worked, have physical access to his files—and deal with the ceaseless ringing of the phone.
“Are you threatening to fire me? Or ‘lay me off’?” she said, trying to make it sound like a joke.
“Not in a million years would I do that,” said Morty. “But look around here. Wouldn’t you love to escape the mayhem of the city?”
Was it wrong to flee the political epicenter of the crisis? Though little more than an hour away, their affluent country village felt like a zone of both immunity and ignorance. But in the novelty of the move, she was happy to be unencumbered—she would figure out the mating business later—and she assumed the same was true of Morty. If there was a time she regretted her retreat from the city, it was after her mother’s death, which left her father alone and numb. Her guilt receded, just a little, when Dani moved back in with Dad. Tommy knew it was a move of convenience as much as compassion—Dani, back then, in a state of serial disemployment—but still, her weekly visits felt paltry. It grieved her to see how her father’s playfulness had died along with his wife. (The last silly song he wrote, during her second round of chemo, was a mock love ballad called “Cancer, Cancer, Necromancer.”)
A month or so after the awards ceremony and his mother’s acute decline, Morty told Tommy that he had agreed to teach a weeklong seminar at Pratt. He would be staying at a hotel in the city. Tommy couldn’t remember any teaching invitations from Pratt, but Morty told her the request had come through a friend of his on the faculty—a favor, really. “I’m filling in for someone who’s ill.” The way he said the word ill discouraged her from asking any other questions. Enough said. Increasingly, daily routines involved folding in tasks for the weakened and dying.
Tommy was also distracted. She had met someone, in the plainest of ways. She had chosen the seat next to his on the commuter train, returning from a visit to her father. After an hour’s conversation, before he got off, the man had invited Tommy to join him for dinner at a new French restaurant in Greenwich. Tommy chose an evening when she knew Morty would be visiting his mother; she didn’t need his teasing.
The conversation at the restaurant was as easy as it had been on the train, though Tommy did not discuss her living situation. “I work for the author Mort Lear,” she said, and even though John had no children, “Wow,” he exclaimed right away, “a local celebrity!” Perhaps she should simply invite him over for a drink; maybe it wouldn’t seem so odd, that she lived in her employer’s house at thirty-one—so long as Morty wasn’t around; because if he were, he wouldn’t be good at making himself scarce.
John was enchanted by the house and garden. He loved the crowded mosaic of artwork on the living room walls, the shelves bowed beneath too many books, the collection of lumpy clay figures that various children had made for Morty over the past decade, which he displayed on the deep wooden mantel over the fireplace. She made a point of referring to Morty, often, as her boss.
“So you live with your boss?” John said. “That’s devotion.”
“It’s temporary. Just so I can try out living in the country,” she said. “Decide if I want to go back to commuting from the city or find something of my own out here.”
“Oh, for me there’s no choice,” said John. “I love my job, but I also love waking up to the birds. I’d commute two hours if that’s what it took to have both.” John was a banker. He was thirty-seven and had been married, briefly, no children, in his twenties. He was bald, with an unlined, almost childlike face, but he was also tall, with expressive hands and a habitual, trustworthy smile. His brown eyes filled with tears when Tommy mentioned losing her mother the previous year.
The second time they saw each other, they went out to dinner at a café across from Orne’s village green. When John kissed her good night, in his car, in Morty’s driveway, she loved how the kiss felt half polite, half amorous. “How about a movie next time?” he said. “I know it sounds textbook, but I never get to the movies. Does anybody?” He raised his hands in a gesture of endearing wonder.
Tommy knew that if she told Morty about John, Morty would want to meet him—and would judge him as “too conventional.” So Morty’s week of teaching in the city felt auspicious: a chance for Tommy to begin something—to be courted, as her favorite authors would have said—in private.
In hindsight, however suitable her suitor was, however sweet (and really, did she know him long enough to know him at all?), he was probably more a wish than a real possibility: a wish for the mainstream life she had never led, a life made symmetrical by the gravitas of PNL balance sheets and train schedules and, from what John had told her, a clean modern house on a clean plot of grass. Archetypitis, Morty called it, the longing for relationships without nooks and crannies. But what was so bad about that? “The simple life,” said Tommy’s father, “is woefully underrated.”
As it happened, Tommy never had a chance to find out. The Friday of that week—Morty was to return from his teaching stint on Sunday—John proposed that they meet at the train station when he returned from the city. They could drive from there to the Cineplex halfway between their towns. But when they consulted the schedule and, e-mailing back and forth, couldn’t agree on any of the nine movies playing, Tommy suggested they rent one. If he drove the extra distance to Orne, she would make dinner for them. Hitchcock, she suggested. “You’re on,” replied her suitor.
John met her at the video store. Without a bit of fuss or debate, they chose Vertigo. She had already made a lasagna. He brought a bottle of Bordeaux and a bakery box containing two red-velvet cupcakes.
They ate the cupcakes while kissing. The DVD never left its case. Tommy loved saying John’s plain, old-fashioned name, whispering it, as they lay in her bed, grappling and laughing in the dark of a moonless night. “Blind sex, don’t you love it?” said John when their foreheads collided.
They were both asleep when the phone rang. Tommy woke disoriented and tripped on John’s leg as she got out of bed. The upstairs phone lived on a table in the middle of the hall, halfway between Morty’s bedroom and hers.
“Let it go,” John whispered, reaching for her as she switched on the hall light.
Tommy stood in the open door, aware that John was watching her. The only call she would absolutely need to take would be one from her father or Dani….She waited out the ringing, waited out her own voice telling the caller that no one could come to the phone. After the beep, not so much as a pause.
“Tommy, Tommy…Tommy, are you there? You have to be there. I need you. I messed up. Oh God, I’m a mess.”
Morty’s voice was strange—a growl at first, rising to a whimper.
“Please answer, Tommy. Please…I’m sorry if I—”
She rushed to pick up the receiver.
An hour later, she was driving to the city, glad the roads were empty, glad to find a station that played nothing but jazz, few ads, few words of any kind. By the time she reached the Henry Hudson Parkway, dawn had defined the horizon. To her right, the George Washington Bridge carved its somber geometry into a lavender sky.
Morty was in his hotel room, dressed except for his shoes. Only the bathroom light was on. After answering the door, he collapsed back onto the bed. When Tommy switched on a lamp, she saw him curled in a turbulence of sheets and pillows. The pillows were streaked with blood.
She was speechless with terror. Even caring for him after his surgery, she had not seen him in
this much pain. His nose was clearly broken, the visible ear cut and bleeding, and his cheek was bruised from jaw to temple.
She sat on the edge of the bed and rested a hand on one of his calves.
“Just take me home,” he said. “No questions.”
“I say we go to a hospital.”
“They ask questions.”
“Morty.”
But he refused to let her do anything more than drive him home. She drove without breaking her silence, which tasted like fear, then anger, then disgust. His breathing, through his broken nose, was loud and ugly. He went straight to his bedroom and slept till late afternoon, and when he came downstairs to the kitchen, his left eye was swollen shut. It was Saturday, so Tommy left a message with his doctor’s service and took him to an ER in Stamford.
As they drove home in the dark, she said, “You weren’t teaching, were you. All this week.”
“No.”
She sighed. How far should she go? If she had ever needed to think of him as merely her boss, this was the time.
He said, “I went…out a few nights.”
Morty was never this short on words. She knew his jaw hurt, but that wasn’t it. When they got home, she made him scrambled eggs and mashed up an avocado.
She wanted to ask if he was lonely. She now knew, against all previous evasions, that this was true for her. (She also knew she wouldn’t hear from John again. Not that she felt like calling him, either, not after what he’d overheard, not after her abrupt, panicky departure.)
“I just wish you had told me what you were doing.”
He looked at her coldly for a moment. “Tell you I was going to the city to…prowl the streets?”
“Escape, maybe. Lose touch a little. You didn’t need to make something up.”
He shook his head. “You can’t know everything.”
“Right,” she said. “But I can’t be expected to wake up at four a.m. and drive two hours to pick up your pieces from a bar brawl. If that’s even what it was.”
He stared at his food.
“Morty, I’m not your mother. I’m not your wife. I don’t even get to be your lover.” She paused. Why had she put it that way? He looked at her then.
“Tommy, I’m sorry. I don’t treat you fairly. I…keep you here, hold you back from…”
“Leading a normal life? That goes without saying. But I’m not your prisoner, either. I’m here because I like it here. Maybe this is as normal as life gets for me.”
The look he gave her then was tender. “I think I’m going a little mad.”
“I won’t disagree.”
“And I’m not cured.” He shook his head vehemently.
“So what does that mean? That you’ll do this again? Because next time, I don’t think I can come to the rescue.”
He continued to shake his head. “I don’t know what it means.”
She pulled her chair around the kitchen table to sit beside him. She put her right hand over his left. She felt older than she ever had before—and more fearful than she’d ever felt except beside her mother’s hospital bed on her very last day. “Take a break from everything,” she said. “You can afford to. Deserve to. Maybe take a trip that has nothing to do with books?”
“I can’t do that,” he said. “It’s not in my nature. Not now.”
“Is it in your nature to self-destruct?”
“Tommy, let me be. Just let me…go through what I have to go through.”
She stood up and moved away from him. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll do that. Go be yourself. Last I looked, you had no other choices.”
Over the next two months, Morty would sometimes pack a small bag and drive into the city. He would tell her how many nights he planned to be gone; it was never more than three. He would return looking exhausted, often gaunt, and sleep late for the next few mornings, working after dinner to appease his conscience. Rose, in a conversation with Tommy concerning foreign rights, made acerbic reference to a city gossip column that noted a “Lear sighting” at a warehouse-turned-nightclub on Rivington Street.
And then one day when he returned, he wasn’t alone. Tommy heard the car pull up outside. She stood at the kitchen window, to get a stealthy look at Morty’s physical state when he emerged from the car—but the first person to get out, from the passenger side, was a tall blond man. Alert and confident, he turned in a circle to take in his surroundings. Until he spoke, he reminded Tommy of a beautiful long-legged hound, tensed for the start of a hunt or a race.
“Where in the world am I?” he exclaimed. “Did I die and go to heaven? Though wait—that’s not the place holding my reservation.” His laughter was raucous, almost brutal.
Tommy watched as the young man went around the car and opened Morty’s door, pulling him out with both hands joined, as if leading him toward a dance floor.
—
Andrew wasn’t kidding about this child actor’s overbearing mother. Toby is a perfectly composed little boy, far older than his years, and if Mum would just leave them alone to collaborate, Nick knows they would get on winningly, forge their destined alliance. But the mother sits in a chair by the door, watching them intently.
The boy is assured and graceful in his movements—his “Ivo dance.” What’s equally impressive, if benignly spooky, is how closely Toby resembles Nick. He looks more like the grown Nick than photographs taken of Nick when he was nine years old.
A rough, herky-jerky cut of the animated jungle scene is projected on one wall of the dance studio. Ivo is moving through the trees, mimicking different animals as he encounters them; behind him, the panther creeps along in quiet pursuit.
The idea is for the animated Ivo to transform gradually into the Toby-Ivo, and then—though this will happen a few scenes later in the film—Toby as the young, traumatized Lear will, in a complex sequence to be filmed on the Arizona set and in a Burbank soundstage, turn into Nick as Lear the young man, the ambitious artist making his way in New York.
Toby and Nick wear identical leggings and cotton vests. They stand barefoot on the studio’s padded floor, facing a panoramic mirror in which they can see the projection on the wall behind them. Nick stands behind the boy, his looming shadow.
“What he’ll actually wear won’t be so revealing,” says Toby’s mother. “Right?”
“You can take that up with Andrew or Ned,” Trish says brightly.
“We need to have a conversation about the scenes in the shed,” says Mum.
Nick cringes. Wasn’t that exactly what he said an hour ago, to Andrew?
“I’m just working on coordinating their body language, their way of moving through space,” says Trish. “That’s my job here.”
Nick sees her patience thinning. He wonders if Toby, who moves not a muscle during this exchange, is embarrassed. All Nick can see of him is his head of strawberry hair, just shy of Nick’s sternum. On the other hand, the boy must be used to this. Likely the mother is a failed performer. She has the semistarved look of a ballerina.
Trish stands behind Nick; he can feel her breasts beneath his shoulder blades. She interlaces her fingers with his and lifts his arms gently till they are parallel to the floor. “Your hands are the butterflies, weightless, your fingers their translucent wings.”
He shuts his eyes, briefly, to feel himself inside the drawing that spooked him as a child but to feel it as a brightening, a benediction, the world quenched with rain after a drought. Then, eyes open, he dances as if stitched to the small boy before him: step, spin, bend, on tiptoe, arms raised, face open—
The mother’s mobile rings. She answers it.
Nick stops and turns around. “Would you mind taking that outside the room?”
She asks the caller to hang on.
“It’ll be short,” she says to Nick.
“No,” he says. “It will be outside the room. Please.”
She stares at him, deciding. Trish and Toby say nothing. “This isn’t a shoot. It’s a rehearsal. My son doesn’t rehearse without me i
n the room.”
“Then turn off your mobile.”
She says something inaudible to the caller, ostentatiously turns off the phone, puts it in her pocket. “Fine,” she says, settling back in her chair.
They resume, but Nick feels his heart beating too insistently. Was he wrong to give her orders? Trish is holding him by the waist now, steering him this way and that. “Relax,” she says softly. “Nick, relax.”
He steps away from her and shakes out his limbs.
“It’s cool,” Toby says to him. “Let’s break.” The boy puts a hand on Nick’s bare arm, and the warmth of it is soothing.
“Thank you,” Nick says. “Just a few minutes and I’ll be a hundred percent. Must be a spot of jet lag.”
They head for a pair of chairs against the opposite wall from the mother.
Next to Nick, leaning over, elbows on his knees, Toby whispers, “She’s just protecting me. After she gets to know everybody, it’s fine.”
Nick holds off from telling Toby that even at this early stage, her interference is counterproductive.
Sure enough, the mother is approaching them. Foolish Nick wonders if she’s coming over to apologize. He stands and makes an effort to look friendly. When she’s directly in front of him, she says, “We haven’t met before, but just so you know, it’s in his contract to have me present, so you’ll need to get used to it.”
Nick says, “He seems to know what he’s doing.”
“Sure does,” she says. She’s smiling, but her arms are crossed tightly. “That’s why he’s here, Nick.”
“I’m sorry, your name again?” Nick can see Trish, the look of concern on her face. But she keeps her professional distance.
“Rebecca,” says the mother. Pointedly, Nick is sure, she does not extend a hand.
“A pleasure,” he says, as if he means it.
“This is going to be massively cool,” Toby says.
Nick turns his attention from the overbearing mum to the diplomatic boy.
Toby is smiling up at him, and for a second Nick is looking in a small mirror at his small self. He has a sudden urge to hug Toby, though there is no way Rebecca would tolerate that gesture—and of course it would alarm the boy. He turns toward Toby (which means turning his back on the mum) and says, “It is going to be awesome.”