She wrote Nick a handful of postcards, and he wrote twice to an address she had given him—short, awkward notes, because what did he really have to tell her? Once she was gone, she seemed as unattainable as she had when she was a figure of mystery behind a window across a street, unaware of his prying eyes. But she had made her mark on Nick.
That year, his life changed in other ways. One night Mum had a beastly row with Grandfather. It was over the phone, and Nick was in his room, studying for exams. Even through the closed door, he heard every word his mother said to her father. It was obvious that Grandfather had suggested Nick should go away to school; he would pay for it, and why in the world should Mum refuse? He hadn’t offered this option to Nigel or Annabelle, but for unknown reasons, he had decided that Nick should attend an independent school. Nick knew that whenever money was involved, Grandfather always won the argument, because money had power—the power to buy not just things and services and privileges but, Nick had only recently grasped, time. And sometimes people. Listening to Mum’s raised voice, he could tell that Grandfather was calling her selfish, accusing her of holding Nick back.
The row on the phone ended with Mum shouting that the decision would be Nick’s. The flat was silent after that. Nick continued to study, but he kept waiting for Mum to knock on the door. She didn’t.
Unable to concentrate, he finally gave up and closed his book.
In his gut, he wanted to go. He didn’t want to leave Mum, not if it would make her unhappy, but the flat felt emptier than ever when she was at work. Nigel had just pushed off to university up north, and Annabelle was spending all her spare time working in a dress shop (where, as far as Nick could tell, she must be spending half her wages). Nick had a room to himself now, but if boredom was a tunnel, all it did was lead him only deeper into the earth; these days, boredom was more like a mine shaft. He had no knack for sports, and for spare-time reading, he’d begun to borrow plays from the school library—but to simply read a play felt a bit tunnelish as well. He imagined that a public school, surely richer than the one nearby that Nigel had attended, would give him a chance to try out the stage for himself. Ms. Godine had told him that the best foundation an actor could have was solid schooling, that he mustn’t think of shortchanging himself on that.
Mum cried when he told her he would like to accept Grandfather’s offer.
“You are all leaving me, all of you,” she wailed. “And you are all I have.”
Nick had no argument to offer because he feared that what she said might be true. He said, “I won’t go far. I’ll come home during holidays—every one, I promise. And now you won’t have to worry about me. Where I am, things like that.”
When she continued to weep, he said, “And when I’m done, I’ll stay near. Not like I’m going to desert you.”
Through his early twenties, he did his best to honor that promise: he went to university in the city, studying theater at Goldsmiths. For two years, he lived with fellow students, but when Mum moved to a modern flat with a lift and a lower rent, he joined her. It was smaller than the old flat, but there was a room off the kitchen just big enough for a bed and chest of drawers, and Mum wouldn’t let him pay her more than a token rent. This spared him wasting half his life on the crap jobs that other scrabbling actors were thankful to land; time was as crucial as talent. Bit parts on the stage and in radio adverts kept him hoping for more while keeping him close to home.
But then he was cast as Valentine in a West End production of Two Gentlemen of Verona; after that, he was virtually handed a plum role as an all-suffering frontiersman in a BBC drama to be shot in the wilds of Canada. His mother’s cancer was diagnosed two weeks after he crossed the Atlantic. Annabelle took Mum to her appointments and stayed with her on bad nights. Nick felt helpless and callow, especially when the time difference and the shooting schedule conspired to keep him from talking to Mum more than once or twice a week.
By the time the shoot had wrapped, Nick miserably awake and anxious on the three flights he took to reach home, Mum was weak from radiation and waiting for her place in the chemotherapy queue. Nick was desperate to help her, but it was, effectively, too late, in part because she had lost the will to fight the bureaucracy as well as the disease. Annabelle had been similarly depleted.
And then came the offer of a role in a new series about King Arthur and the legends surrounding his knights. The role was Gawain. Arthur was to be played by Sir Gwyn Pugh, who almost never left the realm of theater, where he reliably filled every seat in the house.
“Go back to your work,” Annabelle told him. “I’m not saying that out of bitterness. At this point, it’s what she wants for you. She’d murder us both, weak as she is, if she learned that you’d turned this down on her account.”
His work, this time around, took him to a punishingly cold, rain-drenched forest in Romania. (Why couldn’t he snag a role in a drawing-room comedy? Was it something to do with his bony, hungry-looking physique? Perhaps it didn’t help that he had been properly schooled in swordsmanship and riding.) So he cleared off, obedient, sheepishly relieved, and found himself so consumed by the daily marathon of racing against a straitlaced budget that his mother’s illness began to seem as if it must have been a mirage—until, just a few weeks later, Annabelle called again.
As it turned out, he was the one sitting beside their mother when she died in hospital. Annabelle was running errands on her way there, Nigel pulled out of the room by an urgent call from his wife. Nick sometimes wonders if his half sister can’t quite forgive him, though Mum was hardly present much herself at the end of her life.
—
Nick sees his career thus far as a steady progress, marked by only a few truly galvanic moments, bone-jarring cracks of thunder, strokes of fate. Following Emmelina Godine to that theater was one; his arrival at boarding school was another; the most recent had to be the moment, two summers ago, when he came down from his room to the lobby at the San Domenico Palace, in Taormina—addled by travel delays (a missed flight connection in Milan), unsettled by bad airport food (whatever possessed him to buy prawns?), and missing Kendra—to collide, almost literally, with his costar, Deirdre Drake.
“Well met, cowboy,” she said in her prairie-wide American contralto.
“I’m so happy, so honored, so gobsmacked,” he heard himself gushing. They had met once, for a screen test in L.A. to see how Nick partnered, visually, emotionally, with the woman around whom the film would revolve. They had made no small talk, and a literally gut-wrenching brew of superstition and terror had left him both tongue-tied and nauseated beyond the boundaries of the audition itself.
In the hotel lobby, she took him by the arm and, leaning so close to him that he could feel her breath on his ear, said, “If I’m going to be your mother, boyo, we’ve got our work cut out, don’t we?”
She then set off in a resolute direction, compelling him along. “We’re having dinner, yes? Let’s skip the bar, though I hear it’s in some chapel straight from Il Gattopardo. If I cannot drink, and alas I cannot, I’ll take pasta, pronto. Pasta with some of that lobster imported to these waters as part of the Marshall Plan. Did you know that this is the only part of the world where the lobsters are as good as you’d get in Maine?” She raised her eyebrows; Nick managed to shake his head. “Sicilian food is unique. You get couscous. North African fishes. And the best of the white wines—if you have doctor’s permission—are molto fabuloso. As for me, no vino means I get to order dessert. Give me tiramisu or semifreddo. The least pretentious sweet they offer at this pop stand.” Her soliloquy flowed seamlessly along as she led him among the tables on a stone terrace, its walls enrobed in pink bougainvillea, its vista one of sun-blazed blue water stretching toward…was it Libya or Greece? Nick had looked at maps before leaving home, but in the compass-tilting glare of Deirdre’s presence—and in her opulently perfumed wake—he hadn’t the faintest notion of his place on any map.
“We are unfashionably early,” she said—obvious
from the empty tables, all set but still awaiting diners, “or, if we prefer, we simply don’t give a high hoot what customs everybody else observes.”
He was twelve all over again: weak-kneed, swollen-hearted, speechless in the grip of a confused veneration. This wasn’t the same quietly coiled actress he had met in front of that camera on the opposite side of the world.
Thank God the maître d’ (who finally caught up with them) pointed out a table set for five. Once in their chairs, Deirdre spread her napkin in her lap, leaned over, and said, “One thing. No matter what you hear from these other jokers, do not call me Deedee. I can’t stand it, but the name sticks to me like Bazooka to a shoe. Call me by my proper name and you will not be punished.” Up went her artfully shaped brows; crikey, what did she mean by that?
Before he had time to wonder further, they were joined by two producers and Sam Schull, the director. Nick said very little, concentrating on the food, the view, and the incredulity of his being here, on the terrace of this ancient monastery tastefully tarted out for the rich, in thrall to a bona fide American movie star (her radiance only burnished by her resilience in the wake of bad behavior). He found himself listening reverently as she talked about another town in Sicily, high on a small steep mountain, the site of an ancient temple to Aphrodite.
“The priestesses spent their days doing priestessy things: ablutions, devotions, sacrifices, prayers. But at night they gave shelter to beached sailors from all points around the Mediterranean. And fucked them, of course. But nobly, in service to the ideals of the love-and-beauty goddess. The women who live there today are the most gorgeous women in the world. Part Greek, part Moroccan…Spanish, Egyptian, Mes-o-po-tamian. You’re laughing? Go and see, my friends. No, no, don’t be pigs and look it up on your phones.” She rolled her eyes, and then, to Nick, she said, “You and I should take a little side trip. Seriously. If these slave drivers give us a day off.”
Listening, marveling, eating his swordfish (which tasted intensely of orange and an unexpected spice; cinnamon?), drinking his effervescent wine, he understood that he was there: where all aspiring actors long to arrive. He might have been one of those sailors, having disembarked safely from a rough voyage and climbed that peak to the temple. So here he stood, at the threshold. Deirdre might have been the high priestess herself. Nick could easily see her playing Catherine the Great or Cleopatra. In fact, the more he gazed at her—you could tell she was used to being gazed at, comfortable as the object of attention—the more he saw in her a middle-aged Elizabeth Taylor, seducing with her insolence as much as her beauty. The patina of her aging allure, her very nature, reminded Nick (well, metaphorically!) of oxidizing copper.
When his agent had come to him with the script, Nick had been suspicious that it was little more than art-house melodrama—though when he heard Deirdre’s name, he knew he’d be an idiot to turn it down….Or would he? Perhaps actors with far shinier names than his had said no for the very same reason. (Might she implode again, as everyone knew she had, five years before, on the set of Never, Ever Stop?) In her twenties and thirties, however, she had been aflame with talent, every camera she faced besotted with her hybrid appearance: delicately freckled skin, thick dark hair, and otter-brown eyes. In her prime, a critic had called her “the love child of Max von Sydow and Maria Callas.” Nick’s complexion, if nothing else, made their on-screen kinship plausible.
“Listen,” said Nick’s agent, “think of it as Tennessee Williams hijacking Lost in Translation, with an assist from Bertolucci and a sideways glance from Hitchcock. You’re lucky they’d take a chance on you. But they liked you in that Lonergan play and know you can do spot-on Yank. Just spend an afternoon in some grotty pub with Schull. That’s the way he makes up his mind. Has to know you’re not a wanker or a New Age hippie ascetic. Do not so much as whisper the words yoga or vegan or mindful.”
Nick’s character was Francis Wren, a successful American architect who lives in San Francisco with Conrad, the man he plans to marry; together, they hope to have children, settle in a house with a garden, live a conventionally responsible life—the opposite of the life Francis knew as a boy, raised mostly by nannies at the fiery fringe of his wealthy parents’ marital hell. But this was all backstory, emerging mostly through minimal flashbacks, concise bits of dialogue. The film opens with a journey: Francis setting forth, on three successive flights, to arrive at last in Sicily, the place his mother chose to exile herself after her bitter divorce from his father—the homeland of her parents, where people speak the language into which she was born.
The only present dialogue in the first ten minutes of the film is a series of brief, routine exchanges between Francis and various airline personnel. But each time he glances through an airplane porthole, over the panoply of surrounding clouds or down toward the fugitive landscape, a memory emerges, each a small home movie: of hearing from his younger mother her plans to move abroad, of making love to Conrad for the very first time…of learning, when he tried to ring her on her latest birthday, that his mother’s Italian phone was disconnected.
A son’s quest for his mother, hardly offbeat. But the story line accelerates when, in Taormina, he discovers that she’s been seduced by a much younger man—younger even than Francis—and has sold her small house to live with the handsome scoundrel in a baroque hotel suite, where he keeps her virtually captive while spending her money to live a louche life out on the town. Yet she seems content, benumbed by the easy, coddling life in a grand hotel…possibly even drugged.
In the course of trying to bring his mother to her senses, Francis runs a gauntlet of post-Freudian heroic ordeals that (Nick quickly divined as he read the script) would immerse the chosen actor in scene after scene so emotionally rigorous that his performance would either combust into a critical bonfire or take flight like a phoenix. There would be no middle ground. The screenplay might as well have been the libretto for an opera.
On a second, slower read, he focused on “his” scenes as a kind of slide show: the moment, after flying halfway round the world, when he first spies his mother (on a high balcony in the palatial hotel); his stealthy nocturnal pursuit of her scheming lover through the town’s medieval alleys; the confrontation, in which the nefarious gigolo turns the tables and tries to seduce the son; the intimate dinner at which Francis tells his mother about Conrad, the love of his life (this tender scene one of falsely reassuring calm, the eye of the storm); the discovery of his mother, unconscious in the tub, her wrists ineptly gashed; the final, devastating row that ends with his chasing her toward a cliff overlooking the sea.
Nick passed the director’s pub test, as his agent called it, and then the screen test. They were to begin with the hard work first—the core of the film, the scenes set in Taormina. Later, they would shoot on location in San Francisco, finishing up on a studio set depicting the long, solitary journey Francis takes at the start of the film.
Before arriving in Sicily, Nick spent a fortnight pacing the perimeter of his flat, running his lines entirely alone. (A pouty Kendra was banished for hours on end.) Once he had committed his lines not just to memory but to heart and mind, he began to absorb them. The shock of it was to find himself reinhabiting his own self in the months before he had lost his real-life mother, to collide anew with the eviscerating sense of what was at stake if she could not be saved. Nick was still haunted by the fearful suspicion that surely there must have been a way to force the doctors to care for her more scrupulously—and it dismayed him to think that had she fallen ill just a year or two later, he would have had the income to buy her the kind of prompt, attentive treatment that ordinary citizens could not afford. He seethed whenever he thought of the money Grandfather had spent on his education and left in the trust he inherited the year after she died. It wasn’t a fortune, but it might have made a difference. It might well have extended, even saved, Mum’s life.
Nick polished his Francis as if he were an oyster perfecting a pearl, as if the role were both enclosed within an
d wholly separate from himself, solid and concise, luminescent. Like contraband, he packed it in a deep, protected pocket of his soul and carried it with him to Sicily. Because of Deirdre’s earlier commitments, the table reads were to be held on location, immediately prior to shooting.
It took him days to grow accustomed to the way his costar slipped in and out of her character as easily as a practiced swimmer slips in and out of a pool. The way her gaze met his, the rhythm of her sentences, even the feel of her skin when they touched, were all distinctly different from one self to the next, one instant to the next. Hadn’t he had this experience a dozen times before? Not quite. Her performance, he began to realize, was a masterpiece, but a casual masterpiece, and it stood to raise his own, the way a tide buoys up a fragile boat. For Nick, performance was an exertion, the transformation almost muscular; for Deirdre, it appeared to be organic, instinctive. He felt both humbled and grateful.
A lot of their time together involved waiting, the kind that had to be done at the verge of a scene, not hunkered away in a trailer or greenroom. They might be sitting on a rococo settee or in a sports car or across from each other at a table on a patio trellised with grapevine. Three days running, for hour upon tedious hour, they waited near the edge of the cliff from which their stunt doubles would leap into the Ionian Sea (loyal son pursuing depraved, grief-stricken mother) while cameramen, electricians, set decorators, and a swarm of technically obsessed foot soldiers negotiated the details, some fussing with cables and meters and lenses, others just idling about and praying to the meteorology gods for the right angle of sun, the right kind of breeze, the right view of the volcano (which had the irksome habit of gathering round it a frumpy shawl of rust-colored haze).
All the while, Deirdre maintained a motherly (though never matronly) persona, issuing volumes of unsolicited yet diverting advice on Nick’s career, his love life, even his diet. Pineapple, she told him, was good for the blood, ginger for the libido, nuts for the cerebral cortex. (“Which is to say, amigo, your better judgment. Nuts are essential for comely young men about to be too famous for their own good.”) She carried packets of shelled, unsalted pistachios in her purse, along with wintergreen Altoids and a tin of adhesive plasters printed with cartoon characters. “At this very moment, I have Tweety Bird on my left thigh,” she told him one morning. “A nick while shaving. Not you, of course. Though I wouldn’t have minded you there when I was half my age.”