She made a salad, a jar of dressing; took a loaf of French bread from the freezer and removed the foil. The ambulance had sped away an hour ago by then. She left everything out on the counter and stovetop, went into her den-bedroom, and turned on the television news. Somewhere the weather was tropically warm, a dog had rescued a toddler who fell off a sailboat. Bill Clinton was still making excuses for his appalling behavior. Snow, mixed with rain, would bedevil the city and several surrounding counties the next day but would likely hold off until after the morning rush.
She vetoed the news and picked up her book. She read two or three pages without absorbing a single syllable. She should call her father, but she told herself she shouldn’t tie up the phone until Morty called. If he called.
Some indefinable amount of time later, she was in the kitchen, idling through a book on Mexican vegetarian cooking, when the phone began ringing. She decided to wait for a voice on the machine; she wouldn’t pick up for anyone but Morty—yet, as it turned out, she didn’t pick up for him, either. He said her name three times, and then nothing. She thought he’d hung up until he said, “Soren won’t be coming home. Ever. Don’t wait up. I’ll get a cab.” His voice was deep and subdued, almost cavernous.
She should wait up, never mind what he said—or go to bed and get as much sleep as she could. Instead, she went upstairs for the first time in nearly a week. She switched on a lamp in Morty’s bedroom, which had become Soren’s alone in the last several weeks. It looked like a crime scene.
She turned off the humidifier, unplugged it, and moved it to the hall. Slowly, she stripped the bed down to the mattress—which, before Stan had suggested the waterproof cover, had already been ruined, its surface a Rorschach of bruiselike stains.
She rolled up the bed linens and pushed them into a black plastic garbage bag. Into another, she swept from the two bedside tables every eyedropper, syringe wrapper, gauze pad, and wrinkled tube of salve, along with dozens of soiled, crumpled tissues. She emptied a plastic carafe of urine into the toilet and put the emptied container in the garbage bag, too. She tied the bags, dragged them downstairs, and took them out the back door. The driveway floodlight flashed on as soon as the door slammed behind her.
She went back to the bedroom and vacuumed the old rug under the bed (it would have to be sent for a cleaning). She mopped the bare wood around it. Next, she attacked the bathroom. Although it was February, she opened every window on the second floor and let the cold night air invade. The furnace cranked up in protest.
She carried the shower stool and the portable commode downstairs and out to the garage. She should wash them with the garden hose, but the outside valves had been shut off till spring.
When she returned to the second floor yet again, she could see her breath. Frost had glazed the bathroom mirror. One by one, she closed and latched the windows. The furnace growled from below.
So it was over. Or, rather, Soren was over. He had carved eight turbulent years out of their lives, the way wind carves a dune, but now he was gone. Tommy also knew that she was there to stay.
Eleven
SATURDAY MORNING
Nick goes into the kitchen at six, thinking he just might be the first one awake. But on the table is a note from Tomasina: Working in the studio. Coffee in coffeemaker—just push button. Help yourself to anything. I’ll be in for lunch, but please no bother.
What does she mean? Don’t bother her in the studio? Don’t bother about her lunch? He supposes that, in general, he is a bother around here. He frowns. Does he want coffee? It’s the easy option—and easy is what he needs after a scant hour or two of sleep. He pushes the button, then sits at the table to think.
If it weren’t Saturday, he’d Skype with his agent in London. It’s far too early in California to speak with Andrew.
Oh bother all the not-bothering. Solitude is not his first choice at the moment.
The coffeemaker burbles a few more seconds, then releases the mawkish sigh that signifies it’s finished its wearisome task. He attempts to mimic the sound, trying three or four times. The last voice coach he had, for Taormina, made him try to imitate a number of nonhuman noises: a kettle whistling, a spigot dripping, a jet passing overhead, the wheeze and roar of a Hoover in the hotel lobby. He thought it silly at the time, but he’s picked it up as a habit. The object is to challenge the limited patterns of mobility to which any native language restricts the various working parts of one’s mouth. Like the most pathetic schoolboy, Nick cracked a joke or two about the other advantages to “limbering up” one’s tongue—which the coach (a clever but humorless bloke) ignored.
Maybe he’ll go back into his assigned room and figure out the telly, watch the PBS documentary again. He feels as if he needs to reanchor himself in a more public version of Mort Lear than the one currently clouding his thoughts. He has to think carefully about what he’s found. It’s just as well that Tomasina is elsewhere. Nick is prone to blurting things out before he’s thought them through. That’s what made his rupture with Kendra so messy.
Thinking of Kendra leads him nowhere productive. He awoke this morning with, as usual, a painfully belligerent erection. (Talk of pathetic schoolboys!) Confounding his growing mistrust of himself when it comes to romantic entanglement, he’s fully aware that his celebrity gives him carte blanche to bonk just about any woman he chooses (well, maybe not any), and as a result he feels paralyzed. Every time he passes another magazine rack blaring boldface gossip about Lorna’s fertility woes or Jonnie’s cock-up with his children’s nanny, he pictures himself on those shiny covers instead, cavorting with some starlet on a beach or a red carpet or just holding hands on the street. (Cavorting! Where did that vision emerge from?)
And he thinks of Deirdre’s warnings.
He continues to miss Deirdre, which is unsettling. Long about his third or fourth chummy sojourn on a film set, from which he had departed feeling sure that these latest colleagues were his mates forever, he began to understand that each new project resembles the society of some island marooned in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, one of unavoidable intimacies, intensified aversions, and exaggerated (if productive) loyalties. The long bone-breaking hours, the necessary posturings and psychological bartering, even the financial pressures and the consequent impersonal discourtesies, only distort the relationships further. So now he’s an old hand at the beginnings and endings of such associations—which is why he’s surprised at the sense of loss whenever he thinks of Deirdre.
The wall phone in the kitchen rings, and he almost answers it. It rings only a few times, then stops. Tomasina must be picking up the call in Lear’s studio.
He pours himself a second cup of coffee and decides to go outside, soak up some good unambivalent American sun. He heads toward a trio of rosebushes, two of them effusing blooms, one a boisterous yellow, the other precisely the pale pink of a ballerina’s satin toe shoe. As he bends to smell them, he hears Tomasina call out, “Good morning!”
She invites him into the studio and asks if he’s had something to eat.
“I’m all set,” he lies, feeling hungrier for company than for breakfast.
The wooden countertops that outline the studio are covered with stacks of papers and files.
“Facing the music. The legal music,” says Tomasina. “Tuneless though it may be.”
“The protocols of death are merciless, positively sadistic!” Nick offers, more ardently than he intended.
“You’re telling me.”
For a beat, it’s clear that they are sharing the unspoken fellowship of their parallel losses, their mothers’ unjustly early exits. He notices that Tomasina has grown easier around him—and that she’s aware of it, too. (Yes, Silas, I really am still a people!)
Tommy feels shamefully gratified to see the actor looking less than photogenic this morning, obviously tired after his middle-of-the-night snooping. His hair is flattened and dull on one side, and the skin around his eyes looks puckered and grayish. She’s tempted to mention
that she heard him last night in Morty’s room, but it would only make things awkward all over again.
“Would I be in your way if I loitered a bit and looked at the drawings again, just the ones on those panels in the back?” he says.
“Please. It’s lonely, even with my pals on NPR.”
A radio show murmurs in the background, a discussion of the American Supreme Court and the decisions it’s soon to render on matters both public and private. Nick feels homesick. He hopes to have a week in his flat before shooting starts.
Dozens of Lear’s drawings and watercolors are pinned on large, soft panels affixed to a wall hinge. One can “page” through the panels and see fifty years of his evolution as an artist. Nick lingers at some of the illustrations for the charming tale about the fox who accidentally went up in a hot-air balloon and got to see the world beyond his forest: the cities and villages and rivers, the motorways clogged with lorries, the sea reaching toward the horizon. The supple, changing expressions on the fox’s face are what make the book so affecting. It’s a book of very few words—which occur entirely toward the end of the journey, when a seagull alights on the basket.
As he browses through the drawings, Nick hears Tomasina on a phone call.
“I am not dying to go to Phoenix,” she says. “But I know it has to happen soon.”
Long silence.
“I really appreciate that, Franklin. I don’t care if you think it’s your job. But I mean, didn’t Morty get how overwhelmed I’d be?”
Shorter silence.
“Delegate, delegate. Yes, I know. Unfamiliar turf. I was the delegate. The whole delegation.” To whatever this Franklin chap says next, she laughs. “Of all the places we went together, we never once went to Arizona. He never toured there. I’m positive. I barely stopped to think about why. He did have invitations….Why couldn’t he just create a new book prize or endow a children’s library?”
Nick looks at the framed pictures and documents on the wall, though none of them really holds his interest. (Awards, proclamations, group portraits…) He walks over to the locked case containing the Greek vase, an earthen orange painted with black silhouettes of male figures, some interlocked, at first glance wrestlers. Well, wrestlers of a rather particular kind. Talk of cavorting!
Tommy hangs up the phone. She watches the actor for a moment. He’s examining the vase. Another task she hasn’t tackled: appraisal of this ostensibly priceless object. She almost hopes it’s a fake. Because even if it’s not, what if it’s stolen, if the certificate of provenance is forged? Either way, what if it has to be “repatriated” to some temple in Macedonia? Yet another inconceivable task.
“Are you getting what you need?” she asks.
He turns, looking cheerfully startled. “I’m rather in shock. There’s so much to absorb. But I would still—later, if you don’t mind—like to ask you some things. I don’t want to intrude on your work, I want to be respectful….” How can he be respectful and tell her what he knows? Why does he feel he must?
“Later is fine. I don’t know if you want to have dinner again. We could go into the village.”
“Yes to dinner.” He pauses. “But no to the village. If you don’t mind.”
“Oh, of course. You’re…well.”
“It’s awful, embarrassing really, that I’d vainly assume anybody would recognize me—or care about it. I’m just not up for that today. The autographs and photos. Because I always want to oblige. And then I have to become…my outer self.” Which, he sometimes thinks, threatens to become his dominant self.
“I’ll make us something easy.”
“You won’t lift a bloody digit. And now I’ll leave you in peace. I probably ought to make some calls of my own.” At the door, he turns to say, “Someday, you know, my encroaching like this on your privacy might make a good story.”
“Mr. Greene,” she says, “I don’t have much privacy these days.”
“Nick,” he says. “Please, please, call me Nick.”
“Nick,” she says, feeling absurdly special.
Inside the house, he goes to the den to face his phone. Nothing. Nothing! Miracle of blissful miracles.
He opens Lear’s laptop, which he smuggled down from the upstairs bedroom—afraid that if he left it behind, it might vanish, along with the proof that, no, he wasn’t imagining the famous man’s midnight confessions.
But this time he ignores that correspondence and returns to the Leonard file. He opens the first of the folders, a letter dated October 10, 1999. The year, he recalls, that Soren died. Is that relevant somehow?
Dear Reginald,
I do remember you and that we played together a few times. I have to say, I’m surprised that your father made the connection. I lived there a very long time ago and then, of course, my mother changed our name when we left. I’m sorry for you and your sister that your father’s death has left you with such a difficult situation. A parent’s foolish choices should not burden his children beyond the grave.
I imagine those drawings he kept all these years, though I do not know why, are indeed mine. I did sign my art when I was small. I was pretentious that way. They also sound like images I would have drawn. I often drew the plants and animals I saw in the garden at Eagle Rest.
Are they of value? I suspect the answer to that question is a qualified yes. It might depend on the condition they’re in. You need not bother to send me photos. From your descriptions, they sound like mine.
How would you sell them? That is trickier. I am sure there is an auction house in Phoenix or even Tucson that will sell them for you. But I think it would be easier if I were to buy them directly from you.
You say you have thirty-two. I am willing to pay you a thousand for each. I assume that is acceptable. Let me know if it is not.
Yours sincerely,
Mort Lear
The next piece of correspondence in the file is a short note, pure business, to a bank agent, requesting a transfer of thirty-two thousand dollars to Reginald’s checking account. This is for a purchase of art, the note explains.
There are only two more documents in the folder, both letters written by Lear, both dated over a year later, in December 2000.
Reginald:
It’s not a good idea to threaten blackmail in print. I have your recent letters in my files. I have a smart, expensive lawyer. (The expensive ones win.) I am sorry for your troubles, but I believe I was generous with you. I do not ever go to Arizona, so there would be no occasion for our meeting, even if we had a remotely cordial relationship. I have no idea what “stuff” you remember or what kind of photographs your father took. I do not wish to know. If you write me again, you will hear back, but not from me.
Dear Bruce,
I hope Penny and the brood are thriving. Did I promise B.J. an autographed copy of the latest Insep? Either way, I’ll have Tommy send one to the house pronto. And please tell Penny her birthday gift of the purple clematis is still blooming up a Shakespearean tempest.
Your time is precious (and don’t I ever k$ow it!), so I’ll cut to the car chase. I think I’m possibly about to be blackmailed, though I promise you I have committed no crime. Scout’s honor. Before you call out the dogs (meanwhile, I can only hope, resisting the urge to alert Page Six), it’s something small and sordid, out of my neolithic past. But maybe we could have an actual in-person convo. I estimate fifteen billable minutes max!
Hey, I could kill two birds with one slingshot: I’ll bring B.J.’s book along. How’s next Wednesday or Thursday? If you’re not too busy trimming a tree or throwing the office shindig.
Also make note, for the record, that I have taken a safe-deposit box at the local moneylender, just for the cold storage of an odd batch of papers. I’m not big on these boxes, but it’s an “out of sight out of mind” situation. I’m putting the key in my sock drawer. Nothing precious to anyone, really.
In gratitude and haste (I hear the meter ticking!),
Mort
Nick scrutinize
s this final item, as if it will solve his moral dilemma. Actually, it’s not a dilemma. If he had a principled bone in his body, he would, jolly well now, put the key back into the box from which he withdrew it, the one containing a tangle of old-fashioned baubles, costume jewelry from decades long gone, shoved to the back of that sock drawer. But instead, he fiddles with it inside his left-front pocket, twisting it this way and that, like a fetish. He thinks, oddly, of Andrew’s earring.
His mobile rings. An actual call, not a text.
As if he’s telepathically summoned the man, it’s Andrew.
“Nick. Where the devil are you?”
“I’m at Lear’s. Si told you that.”
“Yes, right. But I’ve got a situation here. Sandy just called. About Toby Feld’s mother. She’s prone to tantrums, apparently, but Sandy thinks this one’s serious. What the fuck did you say to that woman?”
“All I did was ask her to silence her mobile. We were in rehearsal!” Sandy is the casting director.
Nick listens to silence for a moment. Andrew finally says, “I almost wish I’d gone with the other kid, the one whose mother stays home, where mothers belong.”
Nick says nothing.
“You know what I mean,” Andrew adds. “In any case, we’ve decided you shouldn’t call her. But can you and I get square on a few things? It’s like you’ve gone rogue on me out there.”
“I found them.”
“Found what?”
“Lear’s e-mails to me. About what went on in that shed.”
Andrew sighs loudly. “Nick, you are a dog with a bone.”
“I am.” Nick’s heart is pounding.
Andrew’s laugh is all-suffering. “All right then. Send them. Let me have a look.”
I can’t, Nick thinks. “All right,” he says.
“You’re out of there when?”
“Monday. I’ll be back in the city, then I’m yours.”