“I saw your movie last night. Taormina,” she says when they are seated.
“God, talking of mothers. Please say you didn’t feel you had to watch it.”
“Of course I did. And I see why you won all those prizes. You’re amazing. And the actress who plays your mother—”
“Is a miracle. Right? She ought to have taken every trophy in the bloody book.”
“But…you die. Your character. I wasn’t expecting that. I’m not sure I felt it was right. It was too much. Morty used to talk about how too much drama can crack the beams of a plot. Threaten to pull the house down. The story.”
Nick is nodding emphatically. “That story’s quite baroque. It is. But I came to feel that the idea, the weight of the drama…” He’s stopped eating for the moment. Tommy watches, fascinated, as he runs both hands along the edge of the table, then grasps it firmly, leaning toward her. “It’s the only way the mother can break into reality again, the way she surfaces from the lagoon and looks everywhere for Francis. She knows, before they even find his body, that she’s lost him. That it’s her bloody fault. And by the time she gets to San Francisco, she is fully inside her senses again. There is no escape, no avoidance. No way to atone, really.”
“So her life is over.”
“No, no,” says Nick. “It’s not. When you see her together with Conrad—the boyfriend, the fiancé—you know she sees her son in him. And he sees Francis in her. They mirror each other. And then you find out about the adoption, the child who would have been mine.”
“But would you forgive your lover’s parent for putting him through all that—leading him to his death? Literally?”
Nick waves his fork in the air. “Remember, Conrad doesn’t know half of what went on in Taormina: the horrific bathtub scene, the attempted seduction, the circumstances that led to the jump from the cliff….”
“All the same, it’s devastating.”
“It is. But what makes it supportable is entirely, absolutely, Deirdre’s performance in that last scene. That wordless performance, when she’s with the child. The camera’s on her for nearly five minutes, a single take, during which she utters not one bloody syllable….Deirdre taught me a lot about using certain parts of my face as well as the rest of my body. Just watch her shoulders in that scene. Genius. I am such a creature of words that I can only aspire to such a performance.”
And aspire he must. In a key scene close to the dénouement of The Inner Lear, after Soren Kelly’s death, Lear revisits the desert hotel where he lived as a child, walks the grounds in search of the gardener’s shed, only to find that it no longer exists. The dread he had felt gradually becomes a yearning; he finds himself looking around the property, intently, perhaps frantically. He needs to find the shed. Wouldn’t its nonexistence, its very erasure, be a blessing? Why does it feel like a heartbreak, a curse? When Nick mentioned the notion of voice-over, Andrew gave him a scolding look. “Voice-overs, unless you’re Hitchcock making Rebecca, are for directors on training wheels.” And so, for several minutes, the camera will track a solitary, speechless Nick.
“What about this movie—the movie about Morty? Will this one be devastating, too?” Her voice is solemn.
“No,” he says. “Sad in places, but it ends on a high note. Same as Colorquake. The nightmare is over. He is home. And home is—well.”
He stops abruptly; is he holding something back? Yet Tommy is grateful for a break in the conversation, a chance to enjoy her food. Nick is a natural cook. The lemon dressing on the asparagus, which Tommy watched him mix with a fork in a juice glass, is perfect. She’s afraid to tell him so, however, for fear that the recipe comes from his mother and that she’ll open that grab bag of emotion all over again. She thinks of her parents’ twin graves, in northwestern Connecticut—the small town where Dad grew up—and once again (again; again; it will never stop) wishes that she were the kind of daughter to make a pilgrimage there. Does Dani ever visit? She doubts he does, but that she doesn’t even know dismays her.
She refills Nick’s water glass from the pitcher he put on the table (one, in fact, that belonged to Tommy’s mother). “So tell me what you need from me. I have a lot to do this weekend—I’ll be out in the studio a lot of the time—but I want to be available. You have questions, I’m sure.”
“Have I questions?” Nick leans toward her; would this be his devilish smile? He seems to have quite an arsenal. “But right now, Tomasina, all I need is a room assignment and a loo and a Wi-Fi password, if you don’t mind. And I hope you might let me wander about. May I see the upstairs? His bedroom?”
Tommy knows that seeing Morty’s room, contemplating and handling his private things, is a logical purpose of the actor’s field trip—and as it happens, Morty’s room is exactly as he left it (bed neatly made, a habit his mother enforced from early on). The thought of going through Morty’s clothing and the books he kept close at hand feels obscene to Tommy, even if it’s not a task she would delegate to anyone else.
“Of course.”
—
The texts, expressing a mounting impatience, are from Si. Andrew’s on the warpath because Toby Feld’s mother is threatening to withdraw him from the picture. Domineering bitch, thinks Nick. But they cannot lose the boy. So Andrew’s now wondering, What if Nick phones the mother directly? Pull out all the stops on your Rule Britannia charm.
It won’t be the first time Nick’s been asked to deploy a kind of persuasion to which Americans alone seem epidemically susceptible: the Colin Firth Special, Nick privately calls it (not that he wouldn’t kill to share a stage or screen with that man). At least he can be genuine about his desire to work with Toby. The boy is talented and, because of his looks, virtually irreplaceable. The thought of placating that woman, however, sets Nick’s teeth on edge.
Sitting on the couch, he assesses the room. It’s the room with the main telly, with the bookshelves containing the least personal books: tree-felling tomes of Master Artists, showy references on everything from geography to gardening. There’s also a shelf holding at least a hundred DVDs.
On the wall between a pair of windows looking out toward the studio hangs a large framed black-and-white photograph: a winding alley in some medieval-vintage European village. The photographer signed it—nobody Nick’s ever heard of, but what does that mean?—with a penciled note: Let’s go, M, shall we?
A lover? There had to be others, before and even after Soren Kelly.
Soren Kelly was the last major role Andrew cast; the two actors at the top of his original list were superstitious about dying of AIDS on-screen—and the script does get a little grisly. Finally, in one of those counterintuitive strokes of genius, Andrew landed Jim Krivet, known to most people only for his buffoonish role in that series about the out-of-work solicitors who start a moving company in L.A. In the one reading they’ve done together, Krivet was a marvel. Extraordinary how, by the end of the reading, the prospect of making love to this other man, if only (only!) on-screen, seemed quite plausible to Nick.
There’s no cupboard, but Tomasina set out a rack for his suitcase, and a narrow dressing table stands against the wall beneath the photograph. After putting a jug of those divine peonies on top of the dressing table, she said she would take him upstairs in an hour; she has to make certain calls before the end of the business day.
Nick texts Silas and Andrew that he’ll do what’s necessary to appease the devil mum, but can it wait till Monday? He then idles through the DVDs: old classics, new (or newish) classics…a lot of American comedies, from Ernst Lubitsch and Preston Sturges to John Hughes and Albert Brooks; a boxed set of Bleak House, another of the Peter Sellers Pink Panther films. (Whose taste is represented here? Probably not just Lear’s.) No sci-fi or horror. To the far right on the shelf, he finds a few copies of the PBS documentary on Lear, which Nick has watched three times. He’ll watch it again while he’s here. He looks around for the remotes.
Another text: Needs to happen this weekend. Tomorrow if not today.
Sorry.
Andrew himself this time.
Leaving his phone in the den, Nick goes out into the living room. It’s not a bright room, but it’s lovely and cool, antique chestnut-colored paneling from floor to rafters, ceiling and windows low. Without even straightening his arms, he can easily clasp his hands around one of the coarsely hewn beams. Just beyond the two dozen panes of each window, delicate trees grow close to the house, the sun casting through their fresh foliage a mosaic of watery light.
He walks the perimeter, taking in watercolor landscapes, a small collection of American Indian baskets and pots, and, on the mantel, pots of a rather different spirit: children’s lumpen representations of Lear’s fictional characters, mostly Ivo and the panther. Then he arrives at the built-in glass-front case of very old books, leatherbound, nearly all of them by or about Charles Dickens. Tomasina opened it when she showed him around last week, pulling out a couple of her favorites. Is he allowed to handle the volumes on his own? The case isn’t locked.
If he had the money and the time—and, of course, the inclination and the focus—what would Nick collect? He doesn’t have that urge. Nor does he own anything he would consider an heirloom. When Grandfather’s house was finally sold, Nick told Nigel and Annabelle to take the lot of it. He was still too heartbroken after Mum’s death, too angry at the injustice.
In the front hall, walls are colonized with framed sketches by Lear’s fellow illustrators. Several are scribbled with fond, jaunty notes. In one ink drawing, Nick recognizes Lear’s house, a moon overhead, a scrum of animals beside a glowing window. Typed across the bottom,
A light in the dark.
Woodland creatures gather close.
Hark: the genius snores!
There is also a beaky caricature of Lear himself; it might have appeared in some literary journal. A platoon of tiny children frolic in his grizzled hair.
Many of the pictures are hung along the large triangle of wall flanking the staircase leading upward. Nick leans over the banister and glances toward the top, where another wall displays yet more pictures, the odd photograph or letter.
Pictures everywhere. Each one a window onto its own whimsical world. Was Lear a romantic? Did he love children or simply see them as his source of bread and butter? As a gay man, he was too old, as he admitted to Nick, to contemplate seriously the possibility of becoming a father. But what if he had?
Nick opens the front door and steps out under the trellised weave of roses, the sharp glossy leaves brimming with spearlike buds, some revealing a wink of crimson. (Rose Red: that was the fairy tale with the bear who comes in from the cold.) He walks out a few meters and turns to look back at the house. After browsing the gallery of sketches, so many made in a childlike spirit, the house reminds him of a cottage drawn by Beatrix Potter. Annabelle took the few Beatrix Potter books that Mum had saved all those years; they’re Fiona’s now.
Nick can’t help feeling ashamed that he has let the ties with his siblings fray so badly. Someone might say, Well, it takes two…, but he knows that now, after all his good fortune, it’s entirely up to him if they’re to remain connected. When he finishes shooting this film, should he invite Fiona to spend a weekend with him in London? Is she too young for that?
“Leaving so soon?”
Tomasina stands in the open door to the house.
“Oh! Of course not. You won’t be rid of me so easily!”
“Your phone’s making disgruntled noises in the den.”
“Bollocks.”
“Do you still want a tour upstairs?”
“I do! And now is perfect—if it’s good for you, Tomasina.”
He reenters the house. She shuts the door behind him.
They stand awkwardly in the front hall.
“You had a look at all these pictures, I assume.”
“Yes. They’re brilliant,” he says. “I imagine lots of these artists are quite famous.”
“In Little Reader Land,” she says. “But that is not the world at large.”
He sees her repressing a smile. She is thinking that of course he, Nick, is famous in the world at large.
He says, “I think I’d rather be quietly, lastingly famous—I mean, deservedly so—in Little Reader Land than famous for a minute in the world at large.”
“I’m very happy with all-around obscurity,” she says as she starts up the stairs.
Was that a rebuke? Nick wonders.
At the top, the stairs split into a T, three steps leading left, three right.
“My room’s at the end, up there.” She points right and heads in that direction, but she stops at a closed door near the entrance to her room. “This is a room we hardly ever used. Barely big enough for a bed. It’s mostly full of books now, all Morty’s, in unopened boxes. We called it the nursery. As if one day we might have had a child.”
Had she been in love with the man, possibly wished they could have had a child? Nick resists the fretful urge to make a joke.
She returns toward him, ignoring a set of narrow ladderlike stairs that must end in an attic. She stops at the door beside him. “Morty’s bathroom.” She opens it briefly, giving a glimpse of a claw-foot tub, a toilet, a sink. Closing it again, she passes Nick and takes the three steps leading up to his left. She opens the final door. “Morty.”
The first surprise is that the room is fairly small. The one solid interior wall is covered by a built-in bookcase, flush against it a wooden bed with a plain headboard. The coverlet is powder-blue chenille. Two side tables flank the bed, on each a tall reading lamp and a precariously towering stack of books. On the near stack lie three pairs of reading specs tangled together.
A pine dressing table, a rectangular wood-framed wall mirror, a weary upholstered armchair backed into a corner.
“Mine’s the master bedroom, the one with its own bathroom,” says Tommy. “He claimed he felt safer in a small room, but I think it was his way of giving me the best room. He would let his studio go to bedlam, especially when he was finishing a book, but this place he kept shipshape. Made his bed every day. Put his clothes away or in the hamper.” She points to a wicker basket. “I still haven’t done his last laundry.”
Nick is quiet, hoping she’ll say more. When she doesn’t, he says, “It’s very, very hard, figuring out what to do with the things that were closest but that nobody has any use for.”
“You and I both know about that,” she says.
He nods toward the closed door across the room. “His cupboard?”
Now she’s tearing up. “Would you mind awfully,” he says quickly, “if I just stayed in here on my own? I feel as if I’m subjecting you to torture.”
“No, no. I just realized I’ve hardly set foot in here since…I need to crack the windows, pull down the screens. At least that.”
“Can I help?”
The windows are stubbornly shut, swollen from disuse and heat, and it’s Nick who forces them up from the sill. Tomasina jiggers the screens into place.
“Thank you,” she says. “All right. All yours. Look at whatever you like in here. I’ll be downstairs. I eat around seven these days. I’m making a big salad. The lettuce in the garden is, as Morty liked to say, legion.”
“Lo, the lettuce is legion,” Nick declaims in a theatrical baritone.
She laughs. “Anyway, I’m happy to have you join me—or not. Whatever you prefer. Obviously.”
Should he say yes? This is all more awkward than he had imagined.
“You can interrogate me then if you like.”
“Then yes,” he says. “But let me do the washing-up. And I bought plenty of veggies, so please nab anything useful.”
She leaves him alone. For a long moment, he simply looks around, takes in the faded, balding kilim (worn clean through to the floor around the legs of the bed), the astonishing crush of books in the bookcase, volumes jammed in willy-nilly, horizontal atop the vertical. But there isn’t a single book on the floor, the dressing table, or the chair. Nor is there anythi
ng beneath the bed—not even a pair of slippers. There, the kilim’s zigzagging pattern is darker: the rug’s been here forever.
On the dressing table, a red lacquerware box and yet another pair of reading specs sit on a delicate white runner embroidered with daisies—a keepsake from Lear’s mum? Many of the room’s appointments seem old-ladyish. Nick reminds himself that the Lear he will become is far younger than the Lear who last slept in this bed, who regarded himself in this looking glass that now reflects Nick in his place.
He can’t help it: he opens the box. It contains a cache of chemist vials—medications related to pain and digestion, as best he can tell—along with a few safety pins, spare change, a ticket stub from The Book of Mormon (two years old), and a claim slip for shirts from a laundry service.
As quietly as he can, he opens the top drawer: underpants, all white; socks, an array of sober neutrals. A dark velvet jeweler’s box holds a set of prim gold studs and cuff links. Slipped in sideways, face to the wall of the drawer, a framed photograph. Pulling it out, Nick guesses before properly seeing the picture that it’s Soren. Strong, beguiling, healthy. He puts the picture back and pulls from behind it a wooden cigar box. This time he hesitates.
Enough, he thinks, replacing the box and closing the drawer. Or enough for now, perhaps.
He goes back to the cupboard and opens the door. Ignored for weeks, it must have gathered in the summer’s early heat—which radiates into the room, conveying with it a thick, muddled odor of dusty wood, leather, ripe old plimsolls, and a chimeric trace of cologne, a properly masculine scent like coffee or tobacco leaf.
Shirts, trousers, suits, neatly hung; affixed to the inner door, a rack of neckties; on the floor, half a dozen pairs of shoes. Lear was no dandy, but his garments were well kept. The shirts, many still sheathed in polystyrene, are of three varieties: white or pastel cotton, short-sleeve stripes and tartans, thick wintry fleeces and woolens. There is a standard-issue evening jacket, lapels narrow, and suits in olive seersucker and gray wool; khaki trousers (cuffed), a navy blazer. Nothing monogrammed or bearing a logo.