But Tommy is too preoccupied by the mystery behind this folio of drawings to follow that train of thought. All of them are unmistakably Morty’s, only in part because they are signed. M. Levy 1948—the y trailing into a curlicued flourish. In the lower left of a few, he wrote Drawn From Life. But then there are the fantastical pictures: a salamander as dragon, with a tiny knight drawn awkwardly before it, flame blasting from the lizard’s mouth. A potted plant becomes a tree filled with fanciful birds.
Nick cannot believe his eyes: Mort Lear was a bloody genius even as a nipper. Nor can he believe that Tomasina Daulair has yet to turn him out for his bad behavior, his prurience—his outright invasion. (With pleasant spite, he imagines how horrified Grandfather would be at his cocked-up manners.)
Tommy walks back and forth, round and around the table, just looking. She shakes her head. “Unbelievable.” She puts her hands over her face. “Un fucking believable. I am sorry.”
Nick holds his tongue. He’s forced himself to pull back, to sit on one of the chairs not serving as an easel. Wait till Andrew hears about this. But then, no, what difference would it make to the script, essentially? Though perhaps the drawings themselves—
“All right,” says Tommy. The look she aims at him verges on accusation. “Do you get this? Is there some kind of explanation in those files you opened?”
“You should read the lot of it yourself.” He thinks for a moment. “You’ll need to read his e-mails to me first. I haven’t a clue what you know of what he told me. Then read the files that…led me to the key.”
He motions toward the kitchen, where Lear’s laptop still sits on the table.
She follows him. “Would you make me a cup of tea? Any kind,” she says, pointing vaguely to the jar containing the tea bags. “Please. And then just…”
“Make myself scarce.”
“Sorry. But stick around.” When she opens the computer, her face lights up in reflection, though her expression is grim.
Nick heads outside. The afternoon sky has turned sympathetically glum, but the air is still warm, too close. He walks around the back of the studio to the swimming pool. Petals blown from the surrounding fruit trees lie on the taut blue cover, as if snow has fallen in June.
Nick unlatches the wooden gate and enters the enclosure. He sits on a skeletal chaise whose cushions must be stored in the cabana behind the diving board. Tomasina told him that Morty had the pool put in “just because.” Because, Nick inferred, that’s what people do after they earn a certain amount of lucre and are expected to entertain their friends accordingly. He thinks of Andrew’s ebony pool, his canary-haired wife doing her knifelike laps. Was she part of that compulsory entertainment?
A week ago he was on fire about this project: nervy with anticipation, yes, but as Deirdre would have put it, “all cylinders ablaze.”
He pulls his phone from his pocket. Oh God, how can the list of numbers be so bloody long when he often feels as if he can barely count his true friends on one hand? Though, of course, so many of these “contacts,” as the mobile calls them, were transient, never intended for keeping long-term. He must learn how to delete them. No doubt Deirdre would know.
Here she is, twice over: the mobile she had while they were in Sicily and the one she had in the States, when they were hot on the trail of those prizes, ricochet-rabbiting about on that shameless campaign—the campaign that paid off for him.
Wherever she is, the worst she can do is not answer.
“Hello?”
“Deirdre? It’s Nick. Greene.”
A pause, a spasm of laughter. “Bear cub, is that really you?”
“Deirdre, I wish you’d stop calling me that. I’m actually not so young.”
“Old enough to know better, is that what you mean? But fresh—you are still fresh, my friend. Don’t try to deny it.”
“Oh bugger, call me what you like. I’m glad to hear your voice. Where are you?”
“Beside a pool in Palos Verdes. Where I’m staying on the current payroll. And being a very good girl, I might add. Drinking extra-virgin Arnold Palmers and iced feng shui. Pretending I like yoga. Down, dog, down!” More of her consoling laughter.
“Fancy that. I’m by a pool in Connecticut! A dormant pool. No party here. Just me. What’s doing, what’s the project?” His knee is vibrating. He’s sixteen again, juicing up the courage to ask Veronica—what was her surname?—to that dance. Godawful, as it turned out, both the dance and the girl.
“It’s a tom-com. Excellent money for solid mediocrity.”
“What’s a tom-com?”
“Bear cub. Really. Think Risky Business. Or, well, I suppose Splash. Except the Toms are a good deal older now. Cruise in this case.”
“You’re in a Tom Cruise movie? Brilliant.”
“I’m his mom. I’m a tom-com mom!”
“But you’re not old enough to be his mother.”
“In Hollywood years I am plenty old to be his mother. According to retroactive Hollywood math, you could easily become a mother at eight. I think…I even hope!…that I’m consigned to another decade of moms. If I’m lucky. Then grandmoms if I hit the jackpot. Dowager queens! Better than oblivion. Which is not where you are headed, cowboy. Although I see you’re in mild danger of typecasting. Another creative homosexual American? I’d go for a Glaswegian meth-head next time around. Or a womanizing con man. You need a palate cleanser.”
“Looks like I’m on for a new Alan Ayckbourn. The West End. I think I’m homesick.”
“Is that why you’re calling? Haven’t you acquired a new squeeze by now?”
“Deirdre, you scared me off.”
“Off? Honey, I have no idea what you mean.”
“Your cautionary tales.”
“I was doing my high-horse thing, was I? Lord, but I can be tiresome.”
“No, no! You tell it straight, like just about nobody ever does, and it’s a massive relief, Deirdre. You are a sage.”
On the other end of the line, he hears what sounds like the crunching of ice cubes, then a tide of passing voices. Deirdre isn’t alone.
“I’m interrupting your life,” he says.
“Interrupting my life? Please. I’ve been interrupting my own life as long as I’ve been living it. You are giving me a taste of continuity. Talk to me, in your beautiful swishy-swanky accent, for as long as you like. I’m just heading indoors so I can hear you better. I mean it. You didn’t call to shoot the breeze. Hang on.”
He waits till she says, “I’m all yours, cub.”
He tells her about his back-and-forths with Mort Lear before the man died, how it matters to Nick, somehow it really does, that the story in the film be true to the story that he’s sure is the right one, however subtle the differences might seem to most.
“Hardly ‘subtle,’ ” she says. “I’m with you on the departure from truth. Though honestly, all these oh-so-serious, self-satisfied biopics depart from truth. People go to movies to part ways with truth. Wouldn’t you say?”
Nick is now pacing ovals around the pool, slaloming round the furniture as he listens.
“Bear cub, I have an appointment for a massage with a young man even more fetching than you are, and I’m about to be running late.”
“Sorry, Deirdre, I’ve hoovered up your time—”
“Nick,” she says, “you have no idea how much it means to me you called. You’re a gem, do you know that? But here’s a parting bit of advice, because advice is all I have to give: This is Andrew. As in the Holy See. Next in line to the Almighty. Not that Andrew doesn’t care what his actors think; far from it. That’s part of what makes him so great. He’s an actor, too. Remember? But what he wants, in the end, is what he gets. Have your say, let him listen—because he will—then follow orders.”
Nick hears her speaking quickly to someone else, her voice muffled.
“My driver’s here. Revving the engine politely. Call again, will you?”
“I will,” says Nick, and before he can thank her
, she’s off.
He takes another two circuits around the pool before his mobile buzzes.
A text from Silas, with a link to TakeItFromSeptimus.com, a tar pit of celebrity gossip that makes the hair rise on Nick’s spine even when he isn’t the subject of the moment. Si’s text reads, Good job, 007! At client matinee till 5 but will call and stage extraction if necessary.
Clicking on the link yields—well, of course it bloody does—an amateur photo of Nick standing in the bank that morning, holding his cap and specs by his side, talking to the camel-clad cashier. (The evil thing about mobiles is that they take pictures without a click or a flash. Hundreds of people can snap away while you scratch your bottom or stare slack-jawed into the distance like a doddering basset hound, and you are none the wiser.)
Cheerio, now here’s a curio: What in the world could our Favorite Dishy Brit be doing in the hinterlands of Connecticut? A pastoral fling? A yen for hugging trees? Oh, but wait! Rely on Septimus to connect the dots. Because the second film role our FDB has poached from all the properly (or improperly) gay, properly American actors who might have nabbed it is that of none other than the King of Kid Lit, Mort Lear, who sadly up and died while doing a bit of home repair back in May. Where did Lear live? Orne, Connecticut. Where was this picture taken? Ladies of a certain sylvan town, straighten your Spanx and be on the lookout!
Were the pool uncovered, Nick might just toss his phone in the deep end. He starts back toward the house, but suddenly he’s paralyzed. What if the media marauders are on their way? (Or maybe they don’t bloody care. Surely they’re all in the city, stalking the hundreds of stars who walk those streets every day.) He rings Serge and asks him to come back again. “What I need is this,” says Nick. “Would you just, please, possibly, park at the road, keep an eye out for unwanted visitors?”
—
What is the definition of unbearable? To Tommy, it’s this e-mail from Morty to the actor, written back in March. She can read only a few sentences at a time before she has to look up at something, anything, in the kitchen: the tiles they picked together on their tour of the Moravian Tile Works, the glass jars Morty saw in a shop on the first trip she made with him to England, the oven mitts she bought from last year’s Crate & Barrel after-Christmas catalog sale. Those things are bearable—or are they?
After they are gone, I tell myself the woman’s voice, her laugh, could not have been my mother’s. My mother works all day. I know she gets breaks—sometimes that summer I have lunch with her—but why, of all places, would she come to Leonard’s shed? It wasn’t her, I’m sure, though I feel strange in her company that night. I go to bed early.
The second time, a few days later, I try to block my ears when the talk between them turns to something else. I cannot draw, of course, while my hands are held to my ears. And they do not block the loudest noises Leonard and the woman make together. It is in fact the “together noises,” as I think of them, that are the most upsetting.
The third time, I stand up and I edge sideways to a place where I can look furtively, just a knife-edge glance, and yes, that is my mother’s hair, my mother’s profile, though I have never before seen my mother’s bare chest. The flowered blouse on the floor is my mother’s. I know it because it’s her favorite.
I hunch back into my cubbyhole and do not know whether I hope they saw me or not. After Leonard leaves, after I leave, I stay away from home as long as I can, past sunset, till the moment I know my mother will panic. She is unhappy when I return; dinner is cold. I am not hungry, I tell her, and I go to bed with my book, pretending it’s so suspenseful that I cannot wait to dive back into its pages.
The next morning I say I do not feel well. I stay in my room all day. Maybe the next day, too.
But I go back, I can’t help it—it’s my closest-to-perfect place—and when I slip into the shed, I find new materials awaiting me on my makeshift desk. The cat is curled up on the couch. Leonard isn’t there and stays away all day. Maybe I am imagining these things. My mother has told me, more than once, that she worries my imagination will be my undoing. Maybe my drawings carry me away to some hallucinatory zone (though I do not know about “hallucinations” at that age; all I know are fantasies and dreams).
The next time—is it a day or two or three later?—I cover my ears, put my head on my drawing, and I am weeping silently. The drawing is ruined. I remember it: an attempt to draw a hawk against a cloudy sky.
I force myself to go home at the usual time. Over dinner, I tell my mother that I am drawing in Leonard’s shed. I tell her about the materials he gives me, about my little desk. Perhaps my voice is shaking.
She stares at me, as still as can be. She asks when I am there, how long I have been going. I don’t think I’m capable of answering her. All I remember is her erupting rage (which I do not understand is fear and shame), her telling me she never gave me permission to be in that shed, to take such gifts from strangers. (Doesn’t she remember that she told me we could trust all the people who work for the hotel?)
I cannot say anything. I think I will never say anything again. She sends me to my room, and I hear her go out. Later I hear her crying. The next day she forbids me to leave our apartment.
I never go to the shed again. My mother packs our things, she says we are going east for a new and better life, though she is not acting like someone who has much hope. The next day, we are staying in a hotel somewhere else, nothing like Eagle Rest. I am to stay in the room while she goes out, doing errands she does not disclose. A week later we are gone. She hardly speaks to me on the long trip, she stares out windows at the changing landscape. She wears sunglasses to hide her swollen eyes. I know I am to blame, I am the culprit. I know the life we’re headed for cannot be better, and it’s all my fault.
Should I wonder about my lifelong relations with women, because of what happened? And never, you can be sure that never, did my mother speak of what she knew I heard or saw. Once she had secure work, once she made friends with a few of our neighbors in Brooklyn, she began to look me in the eye again, to act as if we were just a mother and son making our way in a difficult world. But I was never fooled into thinking that she had forgotten—though maybe she thought I could have forgotten. Years and years later, when I was finally certain that she had lost all touch with memory, the kite string connecting her to memory snatched from her hand by the wind, I felt horribly, horribly relieved.
But women—especially women who flirt with me, and they do (they still do!)—are capable of filling me with fear….
What about me?! Tommy is shrieking inside as she reads this melodramatic, self-pitying account. Or why didn’t Morty ever seek out a therapist, if he felt this tortured?
She looks up again and laughs. Maybe he did have a therapist. Turns out he had a mental footlocker stuffed with secrets, a bank box stuffed with hidden drawings, why not a clandestine shrink?
She thinks of the time she found the guts to confront him about whether he, too, might be HIV positive. He had won her faith, yet again, when he said, I have no significant secrets from you.
So what makes a secret “significant”? she wonders now, having shut the laptop in a stew of embarrassment and fury. The computer’s battery charge is down to a sliver of red; she’ll have to ask Nick what he did with the cord.
Where is he? She stands and looks out the window over the sink. No sign of him. Is he snooping again, now in the studio? Christ, what else is there to find? Is there some law of physics stating that the larger the life lived, the more surprises there will be to discover once that life comes to an end? And was Morty’s life large—or, despite his fame and endless supply of frequent-flier miles, surreptitiously small?
Wheels on the gravel; no doubt the bodyguard has been summoned for another errand.
Tommy walks through the door into the rest of the house. What now? She has no stomach for sorting more papers. She goes upstairs and into Morty’s room. Dusty sunbeams illuminate the bed. The day is accelerating; it must be two or
three o’clock by now. She’s had nothing to eat since that piece of toast at five-thirty. Maybe she just needs food to lift her spirits.
She has the sudden urge to open and empty the bureau drawers, pull up the rug in search of loose floorboards, trapdoors. She can’t help thinking of Mimi’s Masterpiece, one of Morty’s earliest picture books, in which a family of mice who live beneath the floor of an artist’s studio tease scraps of paper and broken pencil points down through the cracks between the boards, making their own fanciful art—which looks completely different from the work of the artist above.
All she does, however, is continue to stand at the foot of the bed.
She is so clenched up that she gasps when she hears a voice calling her name from downstairs. A man, but not Nick, not even the enigmatic Serge. Franklin?
“Tommy? Are you here? Toms?”
She goes to the top of the stairs. “Dani?”
“We tried to call you from the road, but I got the voice mail.”
We? Can no one arrive at this house without an escort? But of course he’d bring Jane…and Joe. She’ll finally meet her nephew. She is struck by a wave of shame. How petty is she not to have made the effort—
She and Dani converge in the living room. Immediately, he puts his arms around her. Her face fits just under his chin; it’s the same sensation, physically, as being embraced by their father, Dani the same wiry kind of tall.
“I know,” he says. “I should’ve asked if I could come. I’m sorry, but you haven’t—”
“And Jane’s here, too?”
“No. I came out with someone else, who offered me a ride and who’s been trying to get ahold of you, too. It’s like you’ve disappeared off the face of the planet, Toms. I’ve been worried.”
“Didn’t you get the note I sent you?”