“I’ll leave the stair light on,” Tommy says. As she retreats—careful to rely on the handrail herself—she wonders why she was so afraid to speak to this woman. She likes Merry, and she feels sad that Morty turned on her.
Merry sits on the bed. Except for the AC (and thank God for that), the room does make her feel as if she’s tumbled into a fairy tale. The furnishings are old and dainty—egad, there’s even a spinning wheel in one corner!—and the textiles are intricately colorful, kaleidoscopic with pattern…or maybe it’s her mind that’s gone kaleidoscopic. According to the brass clock on the bureau, it’s nine o’clock. Is that all? She goes over to the clock and holds it up to her ear, to see if it’s working. It hums like a bee.
Linus! She fumbles for her phone, in the pocket of her jacket. She texts the girl next door, who texts back instantly to say it would be awesome to keep him overnight. Maybe she should give Linus to the girl….What a traitorous notion!
Her purse is still in the kitchen. She sighs. Never mind. She will lie down for a few minutes, and then she will go downstairs, use the bathroom, and retrieve her bag. She could use the bottle of water she packed, and she’ll have her comb, so that in the morning, when she has to show her face again, at least her head will not resemble a vulture’s nest.
Tommy returns to the kitchen. Glancing toward the den, she sees a seam of light along the bottom of the door. She stops to listen: nothing. Perhaps he’s fallen asleep with the light on. There’s no reason to feel she must outlast her so-called guest; what is the point when he’s made himself so outrageously at home? But she smiles at the singular mayhem Nicholas Greene has brought to her life. The coming week will be a trial by fire, or perhaps by ice (an element more appropriate to legal matters).
Dani is washing dishes.
“I asked you not to,” she says.
“Just want to do my share. Need to. Start the atonement before the guilt slams me tomorrow morning.”
“Well, that’s your share then. Done.” She reaches around him and turns off the water. “How about a cup of tea? Something.”
“Sure.” He reaches for the kettle and clears a burner to put it on. She gets out the mugs and the tea bags.
“I was remembering that time I came out here when you had that big party.”
“Which one?”
He laughs. “The only one I ever came to. One was enough. It was Soren’s birthday. I’m sorry, but he was insufferable. I don’t even know why I was invited. I shouldn’t have said yes.”
There had been half a dozen birthday parties for Soren. Like Morty, he liked it when friends remembered the occasion. Unlike Morty, he wanted everyone there.
“It was early on,” says Dani. “He wasn’t sick. Or maybe I just didn’t know if he was. You were pretty tight-lipped about all that.”
“I don’t think Morty was ever totally comfortable with those blowouts,” Tommy says. “I think he was just happy they made Soren happy.”
Dani looks at her for a moment, squinting. “He’s got to be a saint to you, no matter what, doesn’t he? Like one of your hats was excuser-in-chief.”
Today, she can’t really argue with that, even if she bristles at the accusation.
“So at that party,” says Dani, “I got to the point where I gave up struggling to make conversation—though I met a couple of cool people, I will say that. But I ended up mostly watching. Kind of spying on people right to their face. People didn’t care. They were too drunk or too high, a lot of them. Not like I was Mr. Sobriety.
“So some dude, a guy you could tell was totally in awe of being around this Great Man, smoking this Great Man’s pot, bingeing on cake with the Great Man’s forks touching his teeth, I watched him hovering for an opportunity to approach His Greatness. And he sidles up, and he gushes—and of course apologizes for his gushing, like people always do—and says he’s a portrait painter. I remember that because it was this little pop-up surprise, this hipster-looking dude doing something so…classic, stodgy. It made me sort of notice him more.”
Tommy has no idea who this young artist might have been; she still has no fix on exactly which of the too-many parties Dani is describing.
“And the kid asks the Great Man about his drawing. He says something like ‘Gosh, I just cannot believe how amazing you are at rendering, Mr. Lear. I mean there’s like nothing you can’t draw like a pro!’ ” Dani quotes the artist in a Tiny Tim falsetto.
“You are cruel,” says Tommy.
“Okay, okay. The guy was just being a fan. Which is cool. But then he goes on to name some specific books, Lear’s books. I hadn’t even heard of a couple, and he asked if Lear used models, if he went out and sketched landscapes or did any kind of picture research at libraries, that kind of thing. So Lear goes, ‘I haven’t drawn from life since I was a child. I did so much drawing in school that I grew my own picture library here.’ ” Dani taps his forehead. “The kid was blown away by this, right? And I thought, You fucking liar. Like you can’t even give credit to the world around you for posing the way you want it to?”
The water is ready. Tommy was about to pour it into their mugs, but she is mesmerized by her brother, by his emotion.
“Dani, that was just the easy answer. And you know, by then, he did most of the drawing automatically, from memory, from the experience in his hand. Sometimes he’d ask me to get him a book on horses or city architecture or he’d go out into the garden and sketch one of his favorite trees again, but he did carry a whole virtual suitcase, a warehouse of images inside his head by the time he died.”
Dani throws his hands in the air. “There you go again!”
“There I go where?”
“Oh come on, Tommy. You’re like a human moat.”
She pours hot water into the mugs now, speaking to her brother while her back is nearly turned. “Dani, you’re obsessed with this imaginary debt, as if you were some kind of…primitive from New Guinea who thinks a camera steals your soul, or like you had a magic lamp and Morty released the genie and took it home for himself.”
“Yeah, well, he kind of did. Because”—Dani waits till she hands him his tea, so he can look her in the eye—“because you know what I realize? He stole you.”
—
Like a miniature riptide, messages flow steadily, ominously, into the in-box when he turns on the phone—too many from Silas. But floating in the current is an e-mail from Deirdre, a welcome bit of driftwood. The subject line reads I AM A NINNY.
I cannot believe I cut you short just to run off for a massage. Your voice was far more therapeutic than any rubdown could ever be, even from Mr. Hunkadelic. And I was touched you’d turn to me about anything more than how to fold a cocktail napkin or pry the last olive out of the jar. I forgot to say two things. 1. Erice! At least pretend we have a standing date, someday, for that mother-son field trip we never got to take, thanks to Sam’s draconian call sheets. He should’ve stayed on to run Italy itself. They’d be a superpower! 2. I think it’s time you think about making a nest. I don’t mean get married, and I don’t mean buy a penthouse. (Do not ever buy a penthouse. Photographers have learned how to dangle from choppers.) It looks like I scared you off L-O-V-E when we spent all that crazy time together on that fucking cliff. So what do I mean? Maybe I mean toss an anchor overboard. You sound so *at sea*. You are a smart boy. Smart MAN. You get my drift. (All this nautical metaphoring. OK! Basta!) Please call me any time you like. ANY TIME. In general, all the wrong people do. Good luck with your Andrew masterpiece. Because it will be. Count on it, bear cub. xoxD
L-O-V-E. On the list of perks for which people envy and, in truth, despise lucky buggers like Nick, wouldn’t that come first, ahead of mansions and yachts and grateful haberdashers and first-class travel with free-flowing Dom Perignon? The logical conclusion being that when you’re beautiful and talented and loved by all, you will be loved by “any.” Anyone will say yes; anyone will marry you, have your children, be yours to gaze at every morning, never leave your side. And conv
ersely, if, like Deirdre, you suddenly disappoint the masses, then doesn’t all that love simply vaporize, the way treasure won through deceit or larceny crumbles to rubble in a fairy tale? Or maybe love turns black and white, like Ivo’s world in Colorquake.
It stuns him, the story about Tomasina’s brother. Why wasn’t it in that tome about Lear? Merry was the one who told him, in the dining room, after they left the kitchen to look, really look, at that miraculous trove of drawings.
Merry gave him the best laugh of this entire, farcical day when she shouted, after the four of them had returned from the front garden (where they had rushed from the house to witness Serge tackling the two lurkers with the cameras), “Oh my God you really are a fucking movie star!” Tomasina and her brother gazed at Merry as if she were a madwoman, but her shameless delight, her exuberance at the obvious, gave Nick a surge of joy, as if she had released him from some invisible truss.
“I suppose I am!” said Nick, as the two trespassers fled toward the road.
One of them actually had the nerve to ring the police, claiming that his shoulder had been sprained by a “thug.” Thank heaven Tomasina knew the copper who showed up. The bloke had no sympathy for a pair of nosy wankers shoving their mugs against other people’s windows. And it wasn’t as if Serge had cracked somebody’s skull. A bit of knocking about, message delivered. Tomasina said she couldn’t wait to see the police log in the weekly paper.
After that, the meal they scrummed up became a rowdy affair—or maybe it’s simply been a dog’s age since Nick has felt so relaxed in the company of people he’s only just met. They talked about the drawings first, though no bloody way would Nick have blurted out what he knows about where they came from. Tomasina gave him a severe look—a mild insult, but fair enough—when Merry said, “Did he keep them under a mattress or what?” They exhausted a wide and rather loopy range of speculations as to why Lear would have concealed the artifacts of the shadowy childhood he had so deliberately shared with the world.
Talk of children led to talk of Dani’s new baby, which led them to talk of fathers. Nick’s heart plummeted; this was precisely the sort of share-all he wanted to avoid, on this topic practically more than any other (except, perhaps, his anything-but-rosy love life). There was a wistful go-round about how sad it was that Dani and Tomasina’s dad had missed meeting his grandson, his namesake, by just a couple of years.
“My dad was around for too long,” said Merry. “He should’ve left my mother after she broke the news that one kid was plenty. That would be me.” She toasted herself. “Dad wanted the big Catholic brood. He never said so—not to me—but he always looked too long at the families on the beach where that jolly kind of pandemonium reigns. The parents who have kids to create their own self-contained society.”
“What an odd concept,” said Nick.
“Oh, but it’s a true phenomenon. At least in this country. Maybe not in England. I suppose if you have a lot of kids in England, it’s to ensure the lineage,” she teased. “No lineage in my mongrel genes.”
“Your mum,” said Nick, “she was Catholic, too?”
“Oh no,” said Merry. “She was a smart college girl who threw her lot in with the wrong guy far too soon. I’ve seen smart women throw their lot in with the wrong guy because they figure it’s about to be too late, the sands of the hourglass are dwindling fast, but Mom simply fell for Dad’s Latin charm. Even she admits it. The Ricardo Montalbán factor, she says. And to give him credit, he thought her braininess was sexy. Or so he liked to say.”
“Latin?” said Dani.
“Spanish. A wine importer. She met him while buying champagne at a liquor store for a pal’s wedding shower. Adios, terra firma.”
“But maybe she wanted ‘just one’ so she could work,” said Tomasina.
“Or because you were perfect and quite enough,” said Nick.
Merry shook her head. “The problem was, Mom studied art history in college. She needed graduate school to do what she had in mind.”
“Don’t tell me,” said Dani, “she wanted to work in a museum.”
“I’m afraid,” Merry said, “that I kind of co-opted the life she had dreamed for herself. Except, in my case, no kid. But you know what? She doesn’t mind it. She likes it when she can visit the city and we do the Old Masters tour. She loves the Frick.”
“The Frick’s brilliant,” said Nick. Safe subject, art museums. “It must be everybody’s favorite, don’t you figure?” Disagreeable as it was to recall, Kendra was the one who first took him to the Frick, back when they were in the shimmery phase and everything they did together took on a sacred glow.
Tomasina laughed. “You said that yesterday, about peonies.”
Was that only yesterday? Though he’d slept barely two hours the night before, he was wide awake as they sat in the kitchen, consuming a bewildering range of foodstuffs.
“My mother,” said Merry, “gets weepy every time she sees that painting of Saint Francis. It’s magnificent, obviously, but you know, I think she sees in it her lost opportunity to convert for my dad, be the good Catholic wife. Not that she’d say so.”
“Which picture is that?” asked Nick.
“The huge Bellini.” She pushed back her chair, stood, and struck a beatific pose, arms spread, palms out, eyes toward the ceiling. “The painting is a whole cosmos unto itself, every single leaf and flower and cloud a tiny masterpiece. Like the painter is pointing everywhere at once, telling you, God created this and this and, dude, can you believe it, even this!” She looked at Tomasina. “Do you remember the donkey?’
“I do. Morty loved that donkey.”
“Now that you mention it,” said Merry, “I have a feeling he’s the one who brought it to my attention. Though we never saw it together.”
Nick’s focus shifted to Dani, who looked back and forth between the women not as if they were daft and snockered but with a cheerful, boyish wonder.
From fathers and art and donkeys, the conversation meandered to living in the city versus living in the country, to the difficulty of making a decent living in any creative or independent enterprise.
“Unless you’re a film stah,” Merry said in a dime-store British accent, smiling at Nick.
“I did have my decade of cadging and scrimping.” He tried not to sound defensive.
“A whole decade,” said Merry. “Poor you! So tell me this, star man. What was the craziest, most jackassed thing you ever did to get ahead?”
Nick stared at her for a moment. Not a single interviewer, over the months of campaigning for Taormina, had ever asked him a question like that. Along that circuit, there was an implicit code of courtesy, a no-fly zone. Even Deirdre’s history of toppling off the wagon was clearly taboo.
“That’s easy,” he said. “Decide to spend the weekend here.”
The others laughed, and someone uncorked another bottle of wine.
Then it started: the questions about his favorite roles, the perks he gets, the attention from strangers. He didn’t mind their curiosity, though he was grateful nobody asked if he has a girlfriend. When they asked him about the Oscars (and he told them how tediously regimented the whole affair turns out to be), he was almost surprised that Merry didn’t come up with something like “Whatever happened to that blonde on your arm, the one in that spectacular purple gown?” How well he remembered that gown, the complex fuss required to get it off Kendra’s body after four hours of manic celebration.
Merry, he suspects, is a woman who works so hard at what she loves that she has forgotten to attend to other passions. But what does he know? And who is he to take a pitying stance toward someone who hasn’t figured that bit out?
After reading Deirdre’s note, he sets the phone aside to take off his shoes. Then he sits on the couch and, bracing himself, opens the first message from Si.
News from Andrew: Toby Feld may be off the project.
His second: The kid is out of the picture. This is not good. Nobody blaming you, btw.
&
nbsp; Which means that surely somebody is.
He skips over other, less important senders en route to Si’s next missive, sent an hour after the second: See this, from Andrew.
Forwarded is a message from the almighty pontiff: Losing the boy was fortuitous. The animation will carry those scenes.
“Fortuitous?” he hears himself utter. That’s it?
Baffled, he opens Si’s fourth and final communication: Call me, would you please?
Nick becomes aware of how stuffy the room is; all at once, he’s unbearably hot. He also has tears in his eyes. Well, this sort of tension is the payback for stepping out of the stream for several hours.
He manages to wrench open both windows beside the chest of drawers. The third seems stuck fast. He yanks off his shirt, almost angrily.
This is absurd. He worked with the boy for a few hours, posed for a handful of pictures. Yet at the news that Toby’s out, and then that there may be no replacement, he feels a creeping sort of…what, loneliness? As if Toby was a genuine ally. As if Nick failed to protect him.
He pulls the cushions off the couch, hauls out the bed frame. He retrieves the feather pillows from the chair on which he threw them that morning. He sits on the edge of the mattress, takes a deep breath, rings Si.
“There you are. I wondered if we’d lost you.” Si’s voice is kind, bemused.
“What’s going on?” says Nick. “Enlighten me?”
“So Andrew had been thinking, before the snarl-up with Toby and his mother—God help that boy, never mind his career, of course what am I saying, he’s nine….Anyway, it turns out Andrew’s been talking to the graphic team about dropping the live action with the boy, going with Sig on green screen, so that Lear himself is just Ivo, just the boy in the illustrations, during those scenes. This would bring you in sooner, take advantage of how young you can look. Use your voice for the boy as well.”
“Did Andrew talk about my…our conversation?”
“What conversation?”
Nick hesitates. “Not to worry.” Andrew has moved on, beyond Toby, beyond Lear’s confessions. “Does this mean delays in the schedule?”