She is now talking to the dog and the television. What next, the recycling bin? She is nothing if not the classic modern old maid. Well, not exactly a maid, in that she’s been soundly deflowered.
She has only herself to blame for choosing the specific forks in the road that led to her becoming a living, breathing urban cliché, the kind of woman who finds herself portrayed generically and tragically, every five years or so, in a New York magazine soft-sociology cover story. One afternoon, killing time in a Williams-Sonoma (a decent saucepan cost how much?), she stopped at a display of boxed cookie cutters under a pink-lettered sign: PLANNING A SHOWER? One set was designed for wedding-themed cookies (bell, bouquet, bride-affixed-to-groom), the other for infant-affirming sweets (teddy bear, pram, onesie). Well, she mused, how about a set designed for a party celebrating initiation into the class of women Merry thought of as BUMPFs: barren upwardly mobile professional females. You could bake a sugar-glazed briefcase, a chocolate-chip stiletto, or how about a shortbread cookie shaped precisely like the bell curve graphing an ovulation cycle?
She’s still clicking through row after row of dismal, obscure movie options when the phone rings. She looks at the caller ID. A Manhattan cell number. Oh please not Sol, Sol the cost-benefit czar, Sol the storm cloud approaching her career. No; Sol has a Westchester number.
“Hello?”
“Hey, is this Meredith?”
A man. Maybe she’s wished the fictitious suitor into reality.
“Yes.”
“It’s Danilo Daulair. We met at the Mort Lear thing. Central Park. Last Sunday.”
The caretaker’s brother.
“You gave me your card,” he says.
Merry takes a gulp of water. “Nice to hear from you. I guess you made it home in that deluge. I barely did. Lost my shoes.” She tries to laugh.
“Yeah. Well, I was on my bike.” He laughs even more awkwardly. “So I know you want to connect with Tommy—with my sister. And I’m thinking maybe I’m going to pay her a visit this weekend. Out in the country.”
“Oh.” Was she supposed to ask him to put in a good word for her?
“And I thought. Maybe. You’d like to go with me.”
“Are you driving?”
“I thought I’d rent one of those Zipcars.”
“I have a car,” she says. “I can drive. I’m happy to drive.”
“Great,” he says. “I was thinking Sunday? I have Sunday off.”
“Sunday’s great,” she says. “Sure. I’ll call you Sunday morning, that all right? I have to go just now.”
She barely makes it to the bathroom. Everything comes up, and when she finally sinks back onto the cold tile floor, laying a cheek against tufted scarlet bath mat, she feels despair and release in equal measure. “Let’s not do this again,” she says, admonishing the toilet seat above her. Linus comes into the bathroom and regards her anxiously. She sits up and gathers him into her lap.
“Linus,” she says, “we are going to pull ourselves together. Yes, we are.”
Nine
FRIDAY
“Tomasina? Hello?” The voice, irresistibly cheerful, is his and no other. She realizes, too, that she hasn’t asked him to call her Tommy—the gesture seemed impossibly assertive, even when he asked that she call him Nick—and now she finds that she likes the sound of her old-fashioned name in his melodic voice, as if he’s given her a newly dignified persona.
But here he is, early again.
She is on her knees in the path between the peony beds, weeding. Pivoting clumsily, she stands in time to see him round the corner of the house. “I wasn’t expecting you till two.”
“I know, forgive me, tell me to bugger off if you like, but I had an idea, since we made such good time, that you’d let me fix you lunch. I rang, but I got no answer, and we were driving in circles—”
“It’s fine,” she says. Though she doesn’t like the sound of that we.
They trade meticulous smiles. Yet again, Tommy finds it irritatingly hard to stop staring at him. Today he’s wearing a shirt with dainty gray pinstripes, tails loose over white jeans, the same blue sneakers—their jubilant hue balanced by the same tangerine-colored scarf. His sunglasses nest in his artfully untidy hair.
“Let me just introduce you, quickly, to Serge.”
“Serge?”
“My driver. He’ll push off to that place you recommended, the Chanticleer. It looks just the ticket—we drove by—but I don’t want you startled if I need him to show up here.” When he sees her expression, he says, “He won’t hang about. I just need to have him on call.” As if Nick Greene is the host and Tommy the guest, he beckons her toward the front of the house.
Serge, who fills every seam of his black suit, looks more like a bodyguard than a chauffeur, his reflection in the car’s spotless hood magnifying his mass. His handshake is declaratively firm. “Pleasure,” he says, with so thick an accent that it might well be his only word of English.
Serge removes a leather suitcase and four grocery bags from a trunk large enough to hold several bodies. Tommy recognizes, on the paper bags, the name of a gourmet shop three towns closer to the city.
The two men carry everything toward the kitchen door. Tommy holds it open.
“Thank you!” Nick says to Serge once they’ve set the groceries on the counter. “For everything. And”—playfully, he points a finger at Tommy—“I mean what I said about lunch. I’ll just see Serge off in the proper direction, make sure we have our coordinates set, watches synchronized, all that James Bond rigmarole….”
The screen door bangs shut behind him. She goes to the sink and washes her hands, then looks inside the grocery bags. Why would movie-star food look different?
And then, as she listens to the car depart, it’s as if the calendar’s flipped backward to exactly nine days ago, almost to the hour, for here they are, again, alone together in her kitchen: Morty’s kitchen to Nick Greene, who’s already taking in his surroundings with the hungry eye of a genteel burglar—though even in Morty’s day, this room was hers.
“So. So!” He is blushing. “First thing is where you’d like me to stash the goods. I brought my own food, but I’m happy to share. And how’s a frittata? Red pepper and goat cheese? Do you fancy sun-dried tomatoes? Does asparagus vinaigrette appeal?”
She wants to ask him to slow down; his effusiveness is wearing her out. But the energy is nervous, and his ardent if bumbling attempts to ingratiate himself are touching. She is also having a hard time reconciling the man before her with the man she watched in the movie last night—the deeply disturbing movie.
It hadn’t occurred to her he’d bring his own food—or so much of it. “Why don’t you put things in the back fridge?” She points to the pantry.
“Super,” he says.
She represses a laugh. Why are the English so English? she wonders nonsensically. “I’ll just go outside and finish up.”
“Excellent. And not to worry—I’ll find my way around the pots and pans. Upside of living like a nomad.”
In truth, he’s been living mostly in and out of hotels the past year or so—hardly tents or caravans—where he’s fed by unseen restaurant minions. Last time he was in his own kitchen, there were signs of mice taking over.
As she heads back outside, she realizes that she didn’t show him his room. But through the kitchen window, she sees that he is busy enough. She simply has to trust him. He is just an ambitious young man doing his job. He asked to stay for three nights, and when she said yes, she forgot that Sunday is when Franklin’s paralegals are showing up to take Morty’s business files.
She rakes the weeds and the wilted blooms into a pile, throws them by handfuls into the basket. She hears the house phone ringing and lets it be.
Cooking—simple cooking, nothing fancy—calms Nick. Clever, his sudden idea at the shop of making Tomasina a meal. Two birds with one stone: his unraveling nerves and her completely rightful sense of invasion.
How perfect to be alo
ne in Lear’s kitchen. He removes his jacket and muffler and hangs them on an empty peg on the rack by the door. He runs a hand along one sleeve of a plain brown canvas coat that must have been Lear’s. The sleeve is frayed at the wrist. It’s the one Tomasina put on when she took him to the studio last week. (He wonders if she freely wore Lear’s clothes when he was alive, that sharing of garments a kinship usually claimed by a lover or spouse.) Nick reaches into the pocket: yes, the key. Not that he’d use it without her permission.
Glancing out the window to make sure Tomasina is still occupied, he takes down the coat and puts it on. As the air held within it is displaced, the coat gives up its hoarded aromas: wool, laundry powder, hay. It fits him like a barrel around the middle, but the shoulders sit square on his. Nick stands a bit taller than Lear ever did; in his prime, however, Lear was also slim.
Time to get to work—the easy, immediate work. He replaces the coat on its peg.
Lear’s kitchen isn’t especially large, which meets with Nick’s approval. He’s been to parties at posh American homes where a glimpse through the swinging door, as the servants hustle about, reveals a space the size of a small airline hangar, lighting harsh, surfaces cold and metallic. This room has a cottagey atmosphere, colors earthen, the light cast by wall sconces, not by industrial floodlights.
The pots hang from hooks on the ceiling, knives are sheathed in a block by the cooker, tea towels hang on a rack next to the sink. A sensible kitchen. He pauses to touch and admire the rustic ceramic tiles set in the wall behind glass apothecary jars holding flour, sugar, tea bags. The tiles are glazed an iridescent forest green, the odd fellow embossed with a stag or a boar or—ha!—is that a hedgehog? A porcupine? The counter is copper aged to a mottled umber.
Open any of the drawers or cupboards in Mum’s kitchen and you’d confront an unpredictable hotchpotch—at least until the end, her last place, where Nick made an effort to sort and organize, discard the chipped tumblers and splintered wooden spoons. If Mum had precious little time to cook, she had even less to establish physical order.
In his London flat, Nick’s kitchen is plain, the surfaces wooden, cupboards white. But this is a storybook kitchen—the kitchen, in literal fact, of a storybook writer. Framed on the only bit of exposed wall is a drawing of a bear—no, an etching. The bear looms in an open doorway, stooping a bit, snowflakes swirling around his bulk. In the foreground, seen from behind, a girl with long black hair raises her hands in fright. Penciled beneath is the line “Have no fear! I will not harm you. I am only cold and would wish to warm my coat beside your hearth.”
Cradling the bowl of eggs and milk in his left arm, whisking with his right, Nick stands before the print and wonders about its origins. It’s not Lear’s work. Lear illustrated few fairy tales—though there was speculation he was aiming toward a new edition of his beloved Alice. One of Andrew’s early concepts for the film had been to weave visual references to Alice through the scenes of Lear’s life in the city. “Too much, and probably too twee,” he finally concluded.
Nick’s last conversation with Andrew was better than the one in his office, that awkward meeting with Jake and Hardy, followed by lunch with the pixieish wife (who turned out to be an intellectual property lawyer; imagine that prenup!). California is not a place Nick could ever envision as home. After a few days in L.A., he’s homesick for the restorative gloom of January in London, pigeon-colored skies and blustery damp. Kendra loved California, told him he was a snob. She was thrilled when a photo popped up on some gossipy website showing the two of them sharing a kiss at that place with the stars embedded in the pavement. When the notices for Taormina began to build, Kendra took out a Google alert on Nick; nearly every day she’d receive at least a crumb of news including his name. She would hold her phone up to Nick, saying something like “You are gaining traction, love.” At first he couldn’t deny how exciting it was to see himself becoming a Somebody. It was like sitting for a portrait, watching his likeness accrue and intensify as something separate from yet fully dependent on his flesh-and-blood being. But then he grew weary of Kendra’s daily crowing at her tiny screen. And after the Oscar, once the actual thing, the shiny, rather steroidal-looking fellow, had sat on his dining table for a month, once the press siege had begun to abate, Nick found himself wondering whether anything essential had changed in his life. The answer was no. Not that nonessentials couldn’t drive you mad.
He met Andrew on neutral ground this time: lunch at a Brazilian tapas lounge on Sunset, a hipster hangout by night, sleepy by day. Andrew acknowledged that the story line of the trauma in the shed needn’t be set in stone, so long as they kept to the same location and sets. He also liked the idea of giving a more pivotal role to Jessica, the actress playing the younger Frieda, Lear’s mum. She had just received a run of good press for her leading role in a black-comedy series about a mobster’s wife who receives a blood transfusion that gives her the knack of knowing, absolutely, whether someone is lying or telling the truth.
“But how do you think it will affect your character in the later story?” said Andrew. “The New York scenes, the ones with Magda when you realize she’s losing touch with reality. Which we’d have to reexamine, too.” Magda is the actress playing Lear’s mother as her mind begins to falter.
“Spot-on question,” Nick answered. “I need to get back east, I really do want that time in Lear’s house, his studio.”
“A little sleuthing?” Cunning smile.
“I wouldn’t call it that. I simply plan to ask everything I can of Tomasina Daulair. Draw her out.”
“The caretaker woman.”
“Oh, she was—is—more than that.”
“Nick, you are such a well-behaved boy.” Andrew’s voice was kind, but Nick felt belittled.
“Andrew, I’m going to give you the performance of a bloody lifetime,” he said. “Don’t expect me to ‘behave.’ ”
“Countin’ on it. Bankin’ on it. Nobody goes to see movies like this otherwise.”
At which point they were interrupted by two young women who wanted a selfie with Nick. They were oblivious to Andrew, the far more powerful, talented man. (Perhaps Andrew was relieved at his generational anonymity.) After the women retreated, Andrew said, “Or maybe some people will see it no matter what, pretty boy.”
Nick no longer denies it: that he’s the object of fantasies, crushes, minor obsessions—and not just by women. His agent alerted him, regrettably, to the website addictedtonick.com. This sort of fandom (“fanzy,” Si calls it) comes as a surprise to him, however. Even when he landed his first decent roles, he was gawky more than lean, wan more than fair, a skinny boy-man who could easily play five or eight years younger. Not that he didn’t have his followers, his autograph hounds.
What had changed? Was it Taormina, the place as well as the film? Seeing himself in the first dailies had been more unsettling to Nick than the very first time he’d seen himself on-screen. Did he really, all of a sudden, look so much older, or was it the weight of the character? Had he broken through to a deeper level of transformation? Or was it merely the sharpening effect of the strong southern light in all those exterior scenes? Fretting about it isn’t wise, because if there is any kind of “magic” to his work, he mustn’t question the enchantment. He has little patience (or is it discipline?) to adhere to any method. Acting, when it succeeds, feels to Nick like crossing a membrane or swimming underwater. The passage might be unpredictable, even sudden, but the otherness of where you arrive is real.
Tomasina comes into the kitchen, in her arms an exuberance of peonies. “You’re tall. Would you mind grabbing that jar?” She nods toward a high shelf.
It’s a jar that looks to have held jam for a giant. He takes it to the sink and puts it under the tap. “Magnificent, those,” he says as he watches her trim off excess leaves. “Aren’t they everybody’s favorite flower?”
“My mother liked sunflowers best,” she says as she places the jar on the table.
“And I su
ppose mine liked heather. There you go. White heather. Supposed to bring luck,” he says. “Didn’t bring her much.”
Tommy thinks, But she had you.
She recalls his speech at the Oscars, the tears; it might be prudent to steer clear of talk about mothers.
Too late. He says, “She worked too hard and she died far too young.”
“I’m sorry.” Tommy hesitates, then says—what the hell—“My mother died young, too. Or younger than she should have.”
“I know,” says Nick. “Breast cancer, just like mine. Not a terribly exclusive club, is it? Children orphaned by that disease.”
“ ‘Orphaned’ is a bit dramatic. I mean, we weren’t children anymore,” says Tommy. How does he know about her mother? She sees him read her face in a flash.
“I’m sorry. I get obsessive with my research. Turn over more stones than I should. If I weren’t an actor, perhaps I’d be a detective. Except that I’m not all that sneaky. And I’m rubbish at keeping secrets.” (Bugger, why did he say that?)
“Don’t worry about it,” she says. “I am sorry about your mother. Both our mothers. Here—I’ll set the table.” She needs a task, a way to reorient herself, yet as she arranges the forks and knives, the napkins, puts the salt and pepper in their customary places, it’s all as if in a dream—come to think of it, not unlike those dreams with Ben Stiller and Woody Harrelson. “How long ago? Did you lose her, I mean.”
“Five years. I was twenty-nine. Not so young to lose a parent, I know. But maybe since I never had a dad, I felt I was owed twice as long with a mum.”
“Makes sense to me.”
“Oh blast—” He turns to the stove, grabs a mitt, hastily opens the oven.
The eggs are perfect. Tommy sees the pleasure on his face. He might be ten. Thinking of him as a child, she realizes that she might be just the age his mother was when she died—though of course she hasn’t been obsessive about her research.