The neckties, however, are a circus in silk. There are regimentals, polka dots, and paisleys, the quotidian fare of businessmen, but scattered robustly among them are ties with scholarly totemic prints of open books, inkwells, quill pens, library shelves—and garishly clever ties depicting characters from cartoons and storybooks: Eeyore, Road Runner, Kermit the Frog, Ferdinand the Bull, Tenniel’s big-headed Alice, and those two notorious felines: the toothsome Cheshire Cat and his mischievous compatriot in the striped stovepipe hat. Most striking of all is an indigo tie that portrays Rapunzel. Her small, inscrutable face, leaning from a bright chink of window (her tower itself unseen), must fall just below the knot; luxuriant tresses of golden hair tumble and coil down to rest inside the tie’s angular end point. It’s an object that merges masculinity with the unbridled feminine.
Nick handles the ties tenderly, without removing them from the rack. To which occasions did Lear wear these fanciful bits of silk? Were they reserved for appearances with children, or might he wear Rapunzel to a posh charity banquet? For a few years, while he was with Soren Kelly, Lear was a conspicuous presence at auctions, luncheons, and staged events aimed at raising funds for nonprofits offering help to people stricken with HIV. But after Soren, he seemed to fall away from those snippets of gossip in the New York papers, the photographic collages on style and society pages documenting all the Most Important Parties (the parties at which Nick is now welcome, often expected). He saw a series of these pictures thanks to Ned, the film’s costume designer—who would probably keel over in rapture were he allowed to flip through these ties, this cupboard filled with Lear’s real-life wardrobe.
Were his phone not downstairs, Nick would be tempted to snap a quick photo and shoot it to Andrew.
The one shelf above the clothing holds stacks of neatly folded blankets and linens, though a straw panama is wedged in at the left. Nick pulls it down. He smiles. The price tag is still attached to the brim. Good intentions gone south.
Turning his attention to the shoes, Nick sits on the floor. Quite unlike the neckties, they are all practical: a graying pair of plimsolls with cracked rubber soles, two pairs of loafers, suede wing-tips, patent-leather dress shoes, doe-brown walking shoes, and a pair of blinding-white trainers whose unblemished state betrays, again, healthy intentions deferred. But among the shoes, there is nothing whimsical, no purchase made in a fit of delusional modishness. No velvet slippers.
He takes one of the plimsolls and holds it, sole to sole, with one of his own. Lear’s feet were smaller than Nick’s.
Nick closes his eyes. He must simply sit here for a time, inhaling the subtle effusions of all these neglected garments. A breeze from the open window behind him cools his neck; he hears the whisper of fabric stirred. Since fathers were never a part of his growing up, Nick had no experience of cupboards like this one until he had his own. Even when he was away at school, the boys hung their clothes together in doorless cupboards. In the communal crush, one or two unlaundered shirts and the funk became contagious. When the lot of them dressed up and sat shoulder to shoulder at vespers, a faint barnlike stench rose from the assembly. In school plays, from up onstage, he could smell it, too, the audience filled with boys who were mostly impatient to be elsewhere, bored and itchy in their soon-to-be-outgrown blazers.
He rises to his feet and closes the door to the cupboard.
—
Brooklyn makes sense. That’s where she will be working. Enough with the hysteria; no matter what happens with what she thinks of as the Lear Catastrophe, she is not going to lose her job. But even out here, the prices are insane. What is going on with this city? Are the rentals monopolized by Russian mafia princesses going to NYU and Parsons?
She called in sick—which she certainly was—then downed four ibuprofen with a carton of orange juice from the corner market on her way to take Linus for a good, long, penitential walk. After returning to the apartment, she did what she had been putting off: called that real estate broker in Park Slope whose card she had taken at a baby shower for their mutual friend Renee.
The broker took her to a dozen apartments in Prospect Heights, Ditmas Park, and Bensonhurst. “The crème de la crème of my very best deals for people who aren’t worried about their school catchment. When you don’t have kids, your choices are much wider—and, frankly, of better value. More bang for your buck.”
Every single option cost more than her current rent (the one about to be launched to the moon), and not one came with a perk like her key to Gramercy Park—never mind the responsible twelve-year-old girl next door who was practically willing to pay Merry just to spend time with Linus. Okay, she’d been spoiled. Except that right now she feels anything but spoiled. She feels embattled.
After parting ways with the broker (Yes, wasn’t Renee’s little Cressida the most adorable baby ever?), Merry pulls out her phone and orders an Uber. She needs to remind herself what it’s all for, why it’s worth staying in this magnificently heartless, ego-crushingly fabulous city.
“Yes, really,” she says when the driver, an overly friendly twenty-something, doubts her destination.
“Whoa,” he says when they arrive at the building site. “You dumpster diving or something?”
“Do I look like I’m dumpster diving?” she says, barely omitting the young man with which her mother would append that question.
He actually leans over backward and looks at her attire. “Yeah, well, no way.”
“Could you wait? I’ll just be ten minutes.”
“No prob.”
Because she cannot enter the building site itself (where, reassuringly, workmen are marching around giving orders and operating a lot of manly machinery), Merry asked the driver to drop her at the adjacent site, the one that’s destined to become a parking lot. She walks carefully through the broad stretch of industrial flotsam to the edge of the canal. Chain-link fencing prevents casual swimmers or desperate depressives from jumping in—not that the water looks enticing—but a year from now, this plot of wasteland, obscured by pavement, should stand in the shapely shadow of the zero-carbon-footprint palazzo from which she will reign, Lear or no Lear. And Jonas Hecht’s design is virtually all glass on the canal side, its top floor just high enough to offer views of New York Harbor.
What if she were to invite Tomasina Daulair to visit the site? Take her for a cozy-groovy girls’ lunch in Dumbo (but no: almost overnight, it’s turned into Broville Central) or Cobble Hill (much better), then grab an Uber (hopefully not this dweeby upstart) and share a thermos of iced tea while Merry shows her the architect’s renderings on her smartphone and explains her own vision. Maybe she can dragoon Hecht into coming along, giving them a hard-hat tour.
Worth a try. She picks up a small stone and tosses it over the fence into the water. She makes a wish: that a few years from now, wherever she’s living, she’ll feel a lot less ungrateful toward the world.
“Manhattan,” she says when she gets back into the car. “Gramercy Park.”
“You do the extremes, don’t you?” says her driver.
“That is one way to see my life,” she says, then makes a show of pulling out her phone and texting, though it’s nothing but pretend. The weather is sublime today; maybe she’ll take Linus and have dinner at that Park Avenue bistro with the sidewalk tables. Coq au vin, potatoes dauphinoise. Then she will walk Linus over to the West Side, admire the lights of New Jersey casting their confetti on the Hudson, circle back home. Which reminds her that it’s high time to visit her mother, who rarely complains about Merry’s chronic negligence. Perhaps she should drive out and take Mom to the garden center next weekend. The woman loves to plant shrubs. You’d think she has stock in azaleas.
Merry laughs at the thought of her life as one of extremes. Tame, tame, tame—but there are comforts in that. There’s stability in that. Call her a bourgeois fool.
—
Just as she’s begun to feel moderately calm about the weekend, certain that the actor is what he appears to be (
as her father might say, a fine young man, artistic to boot!), now this: a letter sent to her care of Morty’s agent. Angelica included it in yet another batch of correspondence from people not yet aware of Morty’s demise. The letter is dated ten days ago, though it feels as if it’s caught up with Tommy from decades gone by, as if it’s been chasing her down, a messenger from her past, inept but resolute.
Dear Tommy,
I don’t know when I last wrote a real personal letter to anyone, but even if you were on Facebook (good for you, resisting that social dominatrix), it wouldn’t feel right getting back in touch that way.
As you can guess, I saw your name in one of the many articles I’ve read about Mort Lear’s death. My daughters loved all his books, and so did I. They’re among the ones I turn to when I’m feeling nostalgic about my life as a dad. (Keira, Dominique, and Jo are all out of the nest, to my perpetual astonishment.)
I sometimes wonder if you ever forgave me for more or less vanishing, but I’m not so vain as to think you dwelt on what was probably an inevitable parting. Still, I owed you more than an over-the-shoulder wave. To explain, not excuse, I let law school swallow me whole, and when I scrambled out of the whale’s gullet, I found myself engaged to a classmate and tackling the treadmill of pursuing partnership in a big firm that handled stuff like mergers and acquisitions. Mortgaged my soul to the devil, I know. My wife, Louise, worked in family law, giving me the lame justification that somehow she could balance our collective karma. (Not that I believe in such things.)
Three children and one college tuition later, I got my comeuppance during the Big Bang. Our firm shriveled from a plum to a prune. I was one of the cruise-line passengers thrown to the sharks. I went back to square minus-one and now I’m teaching high school English. (After leaving the law, I felt like a dog off leash for the first time in years. I even wrote poetry for a while. And I still take too many bad metaphors out for a spin. Professor Matz would be horrified.)
I am happier and poorer, as you’d expect. And I’m still in Chicago, to which I boomeranged right after Stanford. Louise was from Milwaukee, and our families made us a deal we couldn’t refuse: down payment on a tiny house in Oak Park.
Here, Tommy sets the letter down and wonders why in the world he is telling her all this, thrusting his life with its bumpy but more-or-less stars-aligned trajectory in her face. Yet back she goes for more.
I’m now in a condo in the city, Louise in the larger house to which we “upsized” in my professional prime. You were right about me: I didn’t have much faith in happy endings. I won’t blame it on poor Henry James, and I suppose the “divine justice” in my fate is that the restrictive curriculum of my public school system compels me to teach The Turn of the Screw, year after year. Louise and I split up five years ago, after Jo, our youngest, left for Barnard. Pretty amicable—though I hate that word—for a pair of attorneys. Maybe we gave up too soon—but she’s remarried.
You must think me selfish just to send you my life story like this…
As a matter of fact, Tommy has begun to fume, just a little.
…but for the past week I’ve been thinking about you and wondering if it might be a good thing to meet up again the next time I’m in New York. Daughter Jo went straight from Barnard to NYU Law. She’s crazy about New York, and I try to visit her at least two or three times a year. A classmate of ours (do you remember Josh Stark?) lets me crash in his guest room. I go to museums and bookstores while Jo fills her head with legislative lore and lard. She assures me she’ll put it all to work for the Right Causes. I’m probably jealous.
Would you consider meeting me for lunch the next time I head east? I’ll be there next month. Are you still living in the city? I remember your stories about growing up in Greenwich Village back in the hipster days, so I can’t imagine you anywhere else. And I’m sure you have a family of your own. (I do read the alumni notes, even though I never write in. I see you never do, either. But we loved it there, didn’t we?)
I realize this letter might not even reach you, but if it does, I would enjoy hearing your news, now that I’ve forced too much of mine on you. Whether we meet again or not, know that my memories of our year together seem sweet from this vantage point, like looking at Planet Earth from the moon. Or maybe I’m just turning into a sentimental fool. My students tease me that I’m incapable of reading Keats aloud without a box of Kleenex at the ready. I’ll stop there.
It’s not as if Scott has slipped her mind. In one context or another, she probably thinks of him once a week or so. Back when Google was a novelty, a party trick to be practiced again and again (generally late at night, when sleep is elusive and what-ifs loom large), Tommy searched for Scott online. That was before social media, before LinkedIn, and what popped up was the website of his big, muscular law firm. It offered no folksy pictures of the partners, just the sense that they were the sort of people who made the world safe for capitalism. You need not see their faces or know their hobbies to trust in their power.
She reads the letter a second time. The water for the corn has boiled, and she’s turned it off. The salad is made. The chicken breasts are in the oven, done. Once Nicholas Greene said he’d like to join her, she felt insecure offering little more than salad.
She should get up from the table, set it, and summon her guest. But Scott’s letter leaves her emotionally winded. Why does it make her feel both angry and affectionate toward him? He never did her wrong; they both walked away. Not even away; their paths did not diverge on purpose. And surely “they”—twenty-two-year-old Tommy and Scott—are barely cousins to fifty-five-year-old Tommy and Scott.
“Smells divine in here.”
Enter stage left, again, the movie star. She wishes it didn’t startle her every time.
“Anything left to do? Always happy to help.”
“No, no. Or—set the table? I’m afraid I got distracted. I’ll just finish the corn.”
“Another of the reasons I love eating in this country,” says Nick. “Have you had that Mexican street corn? I had it in L.A. last week. Brilliant.”
“Mayonnaise slathered on just about anything makes it brilliant,” says Tommy. She tucks Scott’s letter in the bedlam drawer and reignites the burner under the water. The ears are already shucked.
“How about candles? I’m a sucker for candles,” says Nick.
Tommy points him to a shelf in the pantry.
“I’ve got to ask you about that extraordinary collection of neckties,” he says as he sets the candlesticks on the table. “Did he actually wear the ones with all the various characters? Road Runner? The Cheshire Cat?”
Tommy slips the corn into the water. “They were all presents. He accepted them as if he was thrilled, and then, with me, he pretended to despise them.” She smiles, remembering the time he came downstairs wearing the Cheshire Cat. Rose had given it to him, so he claimed that he was wearing it to a certain party only because she would be there. But Tommy saw him preen, just a little, before the front-hall mirror.
“When he was young, when I met him, he dressed like a hippie. Shirts in crazy patterns, jeans self-consciously patched. Back then, that was a kind of conformity. If you lived downtown. But later on, he liked to think of himself as having the plainest, least extravagant taste in clothing. Mostly that was true. But he had his vanities.”
“Don’t we all.”
Is he inviting her to ask about his? The candlelight disorients her, lending their shared meal the aura of a date. She wonders what it would be like to go on a date, essentially a romantic audition, with a man so idolized that you couldn’t possibly get a straight view of his self, perhaps not even of his face. There would always be something askew in any attempt to know him.
But this is not her problem. “Please. Sit down before it’s cold. I’m afraid I may have overdone the chicken.”
“Better than underdone.” Playfully, he seizes his ear of corn and takes three quick, lunging bites. After setting it back on the plate, he says, “This. N
ow this is bloody perfection.”
Bloody perfection, thinks Tommy. (And it is.) Well, she got one thing right. Perhaps it’s a start.
“I’m all yours,” she says. “Ask me anything.”
He looks up, his eyebrows raised, as if she’s said something unexpected. Kernels of corn speckle his chin and lower lip, the butter gleaming in the candlelight.
He wipes his mouth and says solemnly, “I want to ask you about the interview. Mostly, really, about Arizona, what happened there.”
She sighs. “You know, he didn’t tell me much. I barely knew about it before he decided to tell that story to the world. The first I knew of it was after Soren Kelly died. I think his death sent Morty down a chute, back to—I know this sounds trite, but the death of his innocence. He would roll his eyes if he could hear me.”
“It doesn’t. Sound trite.” The actor’s hands are in his lap, and he sits up straight, ignoring his food.
“I have to tell you, he didn’t go into the gory details. He just said that he had undergone a…sexual humiliation.” Tommy suddenly worries for Morty. Nicholas Greene’s alertness seems too acute. “Can I ask how graphic it’s going to be, the movie?”
“Not,” he blurts out. “What I mean is, it’s going to be…handled indirectly. Aesthetically. Folded in with the book. With Colorquake. Andrew’s no Quentin Tarantino. What I mean is…Look. What I’m asking you is more for me, privately. The script’s written. I just wondered if there were things he shared with you that…maybe weren’t in that magazine. Journalists mess things up, as everyone knows!”
She shakes her head. “I think I’m going to disappoint you. Morty wasn’t much of a ‘sharer.’ He kept a lot to himself.”
And a lot he didn’t, thinks Nick. Oh Christ.
—
He cannot even approach the brink of sleep. It isn’t the mattress on the foldaway, which is surprisingly decent, and the feral chitchat of the nightlife in the woods is soothing. It’s the sense of sleeping under the roof of a house that is more than a house. Wandering through its rooms that afternoon and evening, Nick understood that it is one of those rare homes which appropriate the personae of their owners.