Tomorrow, Tomasina has promised to give him a “tour” of the sketches stored in the flat files, of handmade books, papier-mâché masks, ceramic figures, and other whimsical objects crafted by Lear that very few people have seen. He does want more time in the studio and, childish though it may seem, wonders if he might try out the “napping chair.” But this house is the place that feels like it must have held Lear’s heart. No wonder he abandoned the city. This was his hive, his burrow, a place where the modest size of all the rooms makes a reassuring kind of sense. Not for Lear a palace or villa or manse but a haven of peace, a daily retreat, the monk’s cell, the badger’s den.
If only Nick’s flat felt like such a refuge—though what can you expect of a place you must repeatedly neglect?
His mobile tells him it isn’t even three o’clock. He goes to the water closet tucked behind the stairs. The sink and the shower are fit for a sailboat, which Nick finds amusing, as if the room were borrowed from one of Lear’s picture books, a Lilliputian loo. When he washes up, the fragrance of the sandalwood soap makes him feel more awake still.
Latching the door as quietly as he can, he pauses in the dim blue glow leaking through the sidelights of the front door. He considers the stairs. They are carpeted.
She mentioned that she sleeps lightly, but if he leans up and listens closely, he can hear that she has a fan on in her room. Would it be a crime to find out what it’s like to lie on Lear’s bed in the middle of the night? Before he can change his mind, he ascends, tread to tread, stealthy as a cat (as a panther!). Left, up three more, along the soft runner to Lear’s door—miraculously, still ajar.
Once inside the room, he closes but does not latch the door. He climbs onto the bed, transferring his weight from floor to mattress one ounce at a time. Here is where dance training comes in handy: no creakings.
The pillows are soft: feathers, not foam. The ceiling above him is awash in faint leafy shadows, the curtains back, the windows wide open. The air is dead still, but he can smell the adolescent greenery of June, sense how everything alive is burgeoning, not resting, in its reprieve from the blaring sun. Connecticut smells more like Dorset or even a London park than it does like L.A., but still it’s entirely new to Nick.
He sits up and gazes around. Wait—there. Down to his left, in the lowest of the bookshelves against which the bed resides, his roving glance snags on a pinpoint of pulsing green light. He leans sideways to feel for it, though he knows what it is: a laptop—kept beside the bed and, he knows as well, within the insomniac’s reach.
This would be trespass, but something too tempting crosses his mind. What if his correspondence with Lear—the e-mails he promised to delete and did—are on this computer? Could he at least reassure himself that he is right, read them again?
No doubt the access is locked, password protected.
He crouches beside the bed and delicately extracts the laptop, which is wedged between a stack of books and the shelf above, its cord snaking under the rug. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, he balances the computer on his thighs and flips it open. The image that springs to the screen, background to dozens of neatly ranked azure file folders, is a photograph of Lear’s house at the height of autumn, trees ablaze.
He is a cat burglar at his first heist and here is his first jewelry box. The touch pad wakes the little arrow, which, like the intruder’s gloved hand, roams covetously over the contents, pausing, hovering, questing for something of particular value. If he had all night, he could take everything, but he must choose. As he guides the cursor to the sound icon at the top of the screen, as he slides it to mute, he has the disembodied sense of watching his own conscience drift out the nearest window into the night.
Celia. Abe. Rosie. Coleman.
Arbitrarily, he chooses Coleman: just a peek. Inside the folder is a line-by-line list of dates.
He closes Coleman, returns him to the jewel box. Scanning the screen more closely, he sees what he’s looking for.
NG.
Date by date by date, over just the couple of months they wrote back and forth, here are the e-mails Lear sent him—almost always in the middle of the American night—copied into files. Or did he write them as files and copy them into e-mails?
Does it matter?
He closes the folder and, as he does, spots another one in a remote corner of the screen labeled Leonard.
—
She couldn’t stop thinking about Scott, couldn’t stop cartwheeling in and out of those memories until she felt dizzy. How was she going to reply to his letter? Well, let it take its place in the long line of other letters she had yet to answer.
So she was wide and painfully awake when she heard Nicholas Greene ascend the stairs. His footsteps were inaudible, but she heard his breathing. So many years of listening for Morty’s breathing in the middle of the night—even through the hum of her window fan or the restive grumble of the furnace—have made her unwittingly alert to human otherness in the house she’s begun to inhabit alone. She realizes that Nick is the first person to sleep in the house, with her, since Morty died.
She rises onto her elbows, preparing to go out and intercept him, but what kind of a confrontation will that be? She feels herself redden at the thought of saying anything whatsoever to Nicholas Greene under these circumstances: surprising him in the dark hallway, catching him there in whatever it is he wears to sleep (or to sneak around people’s houses when he thinks they’re sleeping). Forget the thought of his seeing her in the skimpy threadbare nightgown she reserves for the hottest nights.
When she thinks of how loquacious he is, she’s surprised at his gift for stealth. Now that he’s in Morty’s bedroom, Tommy hears nothing.
Her back aches from the tension of her indecisive posture. She lies back down.
What crime would she prevent by apprehending the actor, who is—in whatever unorthodox, meddlesome fashion—simply doing his job? Lying there in the dark, she is astonished at herself for two reasons. She is completely unafraid of this virtual stranger and his sneaky behavior, and she is fed up with this never-ending urge to protect Morty—as if he were a child in one of his own stories. Or no, not at all—because those children always figure out how to take care of themselves. The grown-ups around them are distracted, unreliable, or simply moot. Those children even know how to take care of others. So often, they’re in the business of saving the world.
Morty wasn’t one of those children. He never had been one of those children, not even when he was a child.
Ten
1995
She was in the kitchen, the three layers of Morty’s cake cooled on the counter before her, when she heard their voices rise—Soren’s first, as always—and hoped in vain that it wasn’t the start of an argument. Or, just as likely, a tantrum.
“It’s not a metaphor, honey. It is a gift. G. I. F. T. Gift. Do you have to be such an artist all the time?” Ten minutes before, not a squall on the horizon, the three of them had been drinking champagne in the living room, toasting Morty’s fifty-fifth birthday. Tommy would serve dinner as soon as she finished frosting the cake.
Morty’s reply was hard to discern, but she was sure she heard him say, “Rapunzel.”
“In case nobody’s informed you,” Soren said, “Disney now owns all the fairy tales. They’ve been washed clean of all that archetypy Bettelheim bullshit. They are just stories with ripping good plots, excellent villains, and sexy heroes—like the princes come in three-packs!—and merchandise potential up the fucking wazoo.”
Morty answered again, his voice low but insistent, this time entirely unintelligible.
The pitch of Soren’s voice approached a whine. “Oh, so it’s like, who is the captive maiden and who the wicked witch? Well, if you want to see it like that, then you are no maiden, honey.”
The door to the kitchen slammed open, and Morty stalked through the room. He was out the back door before Tommy could even say his name.
Soren was on his heels, but he stopped in the
kitchen. He faced Tommy, indignant. “That went well.” From his right hand dangled a necktie. He held it out to Tommy. “Isn’t it gorgeous? Do you read it as more than a fucking necktie, and may I say, however bitchy it sounds, a damned expensive necktie?”
Tommy did not reach for it—her fingers were slick with icing—but she could make out the fairy-tale image. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said truthfully.
“Right. Exactimento,” said Soren, as if this gave him the moral high ground. “And what do you give the guy who has everything—or can buy it if he doesn’t have it? Something unique. Something whimsical.” Soren examined the tie, frowning.
Tommy did think it was stunning, but Soren had to know by now, four years into their never-placid relationship, that Morty would hardly wear such a tie. It would be the equivalent, to Morty, of wearing a Robin Hood hat or a long purple cape. He didn’t even like wearing costumes. Halloween was an occasion whose rituals fell to Tommy. (The house of a famous children’s book author, even at the end of a long driveway, could not go dark that night.)
Morty’s birthday, however, was a holiday he took seriously. He liked the celebration itself to be intimate—no blowout parties, definitely no schemes involving dozens of friends hiding behind the furniture—but he cared about such niceties as cards and gifts, and, like a five-year-old, he relished ordering up three specific meals: usually, eggs, bacon, and French toast for breakfast; for lunch, an avocado BLT, with corn chowder if the local crops still held, and definitely chocolate-chip oatmeal cookies. For dinner, he’d want either lobster with potato salad or roast beef with Yorkshire pudding. “Surprise me with the cake,” he always said.
Soren started toward the back door.
“I wouldn’t,” said Tommy. “He’ll come back any minute. He’s not going to skip his birthday dinner.” She wondered why she ever bothered offering Soren sound advice (not that he ever asked); more and more often, she wished the relationship would simply implode. She would gladly pick up the shrapnel.
“He’s being ridiculous,” Soren said, fishing for agreement.
Tommy did her best to avoid discussing Morty with Soren, though her pointed restraint did not stop him from trying to win her approval whenever the two men were on the outs.
“You pushed a button. I think you know that.”
“You mean the ‘I write for children so I get to be a child’ button?” Soren snapped. “That one?”
I’m not sure who’s more of a child was the obvious retort, but she said, “Would you do me a favor and bring in the champagne glasses? And would you light the candles on the dining room table?”
Morty liked formality on his birthday, too: linens, china, the Murano goblets he’d bought on his first European book tour, and the silver flatware he’d stumbled on at a local estate sale, the same pattern his mother had owned—and sold to help pay for their move across the country. He hadn’t told Tommy much about that move, but she knew it had been urgent. On the rare occasions he reminisced—usually when questioned by some adult at a public event: Tell us about your childhood!—he described his neighborhood in Brooklyn; his klatch of bookish friends; the branch librarian who let him stay after she locked up, then walked him safely home; the pleasure he found in turning his favorite stories into plays. What about the art? Where did you learn to draw? someone might ask, and Morty would say that while he did like to draw as a small child, he took a break for a few years—until the art teacher in high school brought him “back to the fold.” Word for word, Tommy knew these codified memories by heart.
The one time she had asked him outright about his time in Arizona, he sighed and shook his head. “You know, the older I get, the less I remember. When it comes down to it, my life didn’t really begin until we got here.”
Tommy thought it was amusing that he used here to signify a neighborhood of tenements and plain-Jane houses near Brighton Beach as well as an affluent woodsy Connecticut town—as if he hadn’t traveled even further to get from one to the other than he had from west to east.
—
There was no formal move-in day, no U-Haul truck filled with furnishings, not even a delivery of steamer trunks or dented cardboard cartons. It happened quickly, Soren’s storming of the castle. The keep—Morty’s heart—had been far more vulnerable than she thought. She kept reminding herself that Morty was in love, for the first time she had ever witnessed in the nine years she had worked for him. That had to be good news, didn’t it? He started going to the gym at the Y and lost the paunch he’d acquired since moving away from the city and its compulsory-fitness culture. Tommy was also pleased to see Soren badgering him into eating more vegetables.
So she told herself that maybe the cause for all the drama in the relationship, right from the start, lay in Morty’s long dry spell, his inexperience at the necessary give-and-take of love. Maybe it would take time to work out the kinks.
When it became clear to her that Soren was living with them, not just visiting, Tommy proposed to Morty that she transfer her bed and belongings downstairs, that they move the television into a corner of the living room—or even upstairs—and make the den her bedroom. At first, Morty balked. He pointed out that she wouldn’t have any true privacy downstairs, certainly not when they were entertaining.
“Actually,” she said, “upstairs is where I have no true privacy.” She gave Morty a look that warned him not to pursue the debate.
The walls of the house were solid—stalwart brick facing out to the wind, well-plastered lath and horsehair enclosing the oldest rooms within—but not solid enough to withstand Soren’s voice when he was piqued or angry or, to Tommy’s particular dismay, at the height of sexual arousal. He had once fancied himself an actor, and no one could deny that he had the knack for both emoting and projecting.
When she met him—on the day he pulled Morty from the car like a bride—he claimed to be twenty-eight years old. But something in the set of his less-than-joyful expressions made Tommy suspect he was ten years older. Even so, he was still a much younger man than Morty, and if his charm and wit were too often outflanked by his temper, Tommy could see that Morty forgave a great deal in exchange for his lover’s youth.
Morty also used Soren’s youth as justification for all the parties they began to host. Within six months of the invasion, Tommy had overheard two testy exchanges in which Soren tried to convince Morty to move back into the city—at least rent a studio as an “escape hatch.” In this ongoing skirmish, Morty would not retreat.
“You want the city, commute,” Morty told Soren. “Or bring the city here. In moderation.”
“That’s a tall order, honey. The city doesn’t come in moderation. It’s why God invented the suburbs. For moderate folks.”
All at once, nearly every weekend Morty wasn’t traveling, there was a dinner party. Most of the guests came out from the city, most of them men, many even younger than Soren. Before the first of these gatherings, a sit-down dinner for sixteen, Morty spoke to Tommy over lunch—a meal Soren rarely shared with them, sometimes because he was still in bed, sometimes because he was fasting to “maintain his figure.” (He also spent long days in the city every week or two, claiming that he was still going to open calls. Tommy, however unkindly, didn’t believe him.)
“I think Soren envisions some kind of salon,” Morty said. He made a weak attempt at laughter.
Tommy pictured a scene from Sense and Sensibility: gentlemen callers, cards on silver trays, vigilant matrons in bonnets and bustles.
“People dropping by when they feel like it? Or just during posted hours?” she said sardonically.
“Sometimes I think he forgets that I work for a living.”
Or that Morty appeared to be supporting him.
“Parties,” said Morty. He said it the way he might have said surgeries.
“So much for the life of the introvert. Which you implied made you happy.”
“Yes. So much for that.” Morty’s smile was, as too often now, an apology. “But
, Tommy, you won’t be lifting a finger. You’ll be a guest—no, a host. Of course a host! I found a caterer in town here that all the right people seem to worship. Why not spread the wealth around? What am I saving all this money for? And doesn’t our dining table have two more leaves? Where are they?”
At least he made Soren climb into the medieval crawl space beneath the house to retrieve them. They were wrapped in dusty tarpaulins and coated with grime. It was a miracle they hadn’t warped. Eagerly, Soren volunteered to oil them, along with the table and chairs.
Tommy wasn’t about to protest, even if she was filled with dread—and resentment—at the thought of putting on feasts for Soren and, as she envisioned it, some entourage of aspiring fashion models. She might not have to cook, but she would have to make sure the house was presentable.
She attended the first two parties as if she were a live-in guest. To behave like a host seemed absurd, most of all because she hadn’t been a part of deciding whom to invite. She showed the caterer around the kitchen, and then she had little choice but to join the true guests on the terrace. Two of them were old friends of Morty’s, both authors she had known for years, so she relaxed. It was fine after all. But then, at dinner, she was seated between two extremely young men—barely men—who knew Soren through the acting studio he attended (or had, until he met Morty). There was one other woman at the table—the wife of one of the authors—but when it became clear that most of the guests were drinking with androgen-fueled abandon, Tommy tried to retreat to the kitchen.
The kitchen was filled to capacity. Tommy apologized and turned around.
To slink away to her room seemed churlish and immature (and pointless, since her room now adjoined the living room). She stuck it out until just before midnight, when a joint began to circulate. (Would cigars have been better or worse?) Two hours later, in bed but unable to sleep, she heard the last guests depart.