“No. In fact, Andrew wants you back in L.A. now, before Phoenix. He wants you back in the studio, with Sig this time. And Trish. Your decks are clear the next week or two, right?”
“I’d miss going home.”
“Could you?”
I am a boat without a mooring, Nick thinks, though how maudlin is that? He must be channeling Deirdre’s message: Toss an anchor overboard. “I could.”
“Beautiful. I’ll let him know.”
“Si?”
“Nick.”
“I’m going to bed now.”
“It’s nine-thirty. Keeping country hours?”
“I know what time it is, Si.”
“I’ll let you go.”
“Please.”
Nick lays the phone on the mattress beside him. He stares at it, as if it’s a novel object, something he just found. In that small box reside just about all his relationships. A halfhearted breeze from the window brushes his back. He looks around and notices a portable fan beneath the spindly chair on which he tossed his shirt; somehow this reminds him of Mort Lear’s laptop. He looks around anxiously before he remembers giving it over to Tomasina. So much for forwarding those e-mails—though Andrew’s had enough of his natterings by now. Happenstance will keep him honest.
Just as he finds a place to plug in the fan, he hears the door open behind him.
“Oh God sorry! I thought you were the loo!”
“I’ve borne a number of insults in my life,” says Nick, “but that’s original.”
Merry starts to retreat, but she hesitates.
“You’re not made of glitter after all,” she says.
Nick looks down briefly. He folds his arms across his bare chest. “Alas, just flesh and blood, skin and bone.”
Still she stands there, in her skirt and blouse, bare-legged, her boisterous hair sprung free from the pins that tamed it earlier on.
“May I come in?” she asks in a girlish voice.
“Whyever not?” Nick means this sarcastically, but in fact, though he’s knackered, he’s not eager to be alone with his madly colliding thoughts and concerns.
She looks around for a place to sit. His clothes and two scripts occupy the only chairs. All of a sudden, she hikes up her skirt and sits on the floor, cross-legged. It’s a funny, boyish act, as if they’re mates settling in for a catch-up on football or who’s snogging whom.
“I want to ask you something,” she says, “while I have the nerve.”
Oh God, what now? But he likes her, this blurty, broad-tempered woman. Charming, the way she’s modest yet unbridled all at once.
Though he does not encourage her to go on, she says, “So this movie you’re making. The one about Mort. I was thinking, because we hope to open the museum by the end of next year, the fall if we’re lucky…and isn’t that maybe when your movie might come out? Probably that’s an insane question. But what if maybe, if I could coordinate with your producers, and you, you too, we could build a thing—listen to me, Jesus!—build a special event around the movie and have you talk about…you know. The movie. Being Lear. Inside him. Understanding him.”
Nick sighs. “I’m not at all sure I understand him. Less and less, I fear….But I’d love to see your museum, and I could speak with Andrew, my director, about…”
Is she beginning to cry? Nick stares at her for a moment, puzzled. “Merry?”
“The truth is,” she says, “I for one will never understand him. That man broke my heart and I owe him fucking nothing.” She wipes her eyes with both hands. “I am so angry at him, most of all because I fell in love with him. Which is the stupidest thing of all. And seeing these crazy beautiful drawings he did when he was just an innocent little boy—it’s sort of wrecking me. Because I want them. I feel like I would kill just to…Oh Christ.”
“I’m so sorry,” says Nick, the only thing to say.
“I am such a fool.” She is struggling to get to her feet. She makes it onto one foot and a knee, but her skirt is not cooperating.
Nick rises quickly and crosses the room to steady her before she keels over.
She grasps his bare arms with her hands.
“Oh God,” she says as she stands back, straightening her skirt, “why are you so easy to talk to? Does everybody use you this way? I honestly didn’t mean to barge in.”
You must not fucking fall down, Merry instructs her woozy self. Leave the room.
But all she can manage is to brace herself against this man—who is almost shockingly slight in build. (Christ, she could knock him over!) She is looking straight at his freckled throat, the faint V where the sun has traced what must be the line of an open-throated shirt, such civilized attire. She can see the shadowed hollows behind his collarbones. As she regains her balance, he says, “Here. Just sit for a minute. You’re wobbly.”
She lets him lead her to the couch—except that it’s a bed.
They sit at opposite corners of the opened mattress. When she looks at him, this time at his face, she senses that he shares her mirth. Not that he’s laughing at her; more like he’s—but there’s no way he could be thinking what she’s thinking. No earthly way.
She begins to laugh, quietly. “I’m having this insane fantasy that I’m going to…”
But Nick is thinking what she’s thinking, and he knows it. He could tell himself how unwise it is, an impulse he should resist, but there’s something exquisite in the way she now inclines her head toward her lap, her hair obscuring her face like some lush Edwardian hat. “This is silly,” he hears her say to herself.
“You don’t quite see it, do you?” Nick says. “How rather lovely you are. Strike the rather.” She is lovely. Or he is lonely. Good God, does it matter?
“You are mercifully soused, and so am I,” she says, looking up and turning toward him.
“I’m not sure I bloody care.” Now he’s the one who’s laughing, which gets her laughing again, and then he’s actually leaning rather confoundedly far over in order to touch her irrepressible, irresistible hair and then pull it aside in order to kiss her.
She stops laughing. Her eyes shine, still teary, but she says, “If you don’t, then I most certainly do not.”
—
Sleep is a high shelf, just beyond reach, but for now Tommy doesn’t mind. She lies in the dark listening to the sounds in Morty’s room. Last night it was Nicholas Greene’s sleuthing; tonight it’s the muffled murmur of Dani talking on the phone to, she’s certain, Jane. He laughs occasionally, is silent for brief spells. He is doing most of the talking, and from what she can tell, it’s calm talk, idle talk, just-be-with-me talk. Tommy imagines he’s trying to tell her about the day. Were Tommy telling someone, she would not know where to begin.
She has taken four aspirins and set her alarm for five o’clock to be certain she’s the first one awake. Wondering if there will be further intruders, she also made sure to lock the doors and downstairs windows. Lieutenant Keane told her he’d keep an eye out. (Serge volunteered to stay, but Nick sent him back to the Chanticleer.)
She hopes everyone will leave first thing tomorrow—though now she recalls that Nick is staying till Monday. Well, fine, let him pursue his Goldilocks routine, so long as she doesn’t have to entertain him. She has far too much to do, which she’s known for days; only now she’s ready to do it. She is almost so antsy to get on with it that she would go back downstairs and begin her lists, send Franklin an e-mail, tell him she wants a second, independent legal opinion on the liberties she can and cannot take with Morty’s will—though who, really, would show up to contest her actions?
Amusing, the notion of her gaining any sense of control, harnessing this octopus Morty has left in her charge. Except that the tentacled creature to be tamed is Morty. It’s Morty’s beautiful, complicated, secretive, shadowy, selfish life—or the story his life will become. And now it’s hers. Or does she, at least for the moment, share it with Nicholas Greene—like an unruly foster child thrust into their care by authorities unseen? She m
ight as well have thrown off her clothes and jumped into bed with the actor, because it’s as if they’ve engaged in an act of rough yet mutual intimacy—as if, through Morty, they will know each other better than they ever meant to.
Is this always what it’s like at the end of any richly consequential life? Do the heirs always uncover inconvenient, even inconceivable, secrets? Is there always a shoe box of letters at the back of a closet, a cache of forbidden images deep in a drawer, a code to a lockbox the decedent didn’t have time or mind to throw in a nearby river? These are not things people talk about freely—except perhaps in dense, thick, full-fathom-five biographies.
And yes, those inquiries have begun to trickle in through Angelica. But when it comes time to choose the worthiest supplicant, the knight permitted passage across the moat (Dani nailed it there), Tommy will no longer be the warden at the drawbridge. What she knows tonight—maybe the only thing she knows—is that the life Morty left to her, his, will not become hers. If he wants his artistic legacy widely dispersed, so be it. Though now that she has spent a few hours with Merry, she feels both callow and guilty. Merry loved Morty, that much is clear. Typical Morty, he met her halfway—and then he stepped back.
She could lie awake till dawn simply contemplating how much more, and how much less, she suddenly knows about the man from whom she had allowed herself to become, unwittingly, inseparable. How could it have taken her so long to wonder why, of those three heroic but deeply unfortunate children, Morty had killed off the girl?
Fourteen
WEDNESDAY
“I saw the police log. Paparazzi in Orne, world watch out!”
“The idiots in our yard were hardly worthy of such a glamorous word.”
Tommy unlocks the studio; Franklin follows her in. Most of the surfaces are startlingly clear, the counters fully exposed for the first time since the day the final coat of varnish dried, their once-perfect finish now splattered with ink stains, nicked by blades, and graffitied with notes and reminders. The drafting table and workboards are equally bare, except for a scattering of tacks. All the boxes of documents from the file cabinets are now at Franklin’s office, being parsed and pored over by a gang of freelance paralegals. Only the contents of the flat files and the bookcases remain undisturbed, awaiting whatever future Tommy determines they will have.
And the mahogany box on the sill. Tommy wonders if Franklin has guessed what it contains. She hasn’t moved it yet, ostensibly because she has no idea what to do with Morty’s so-called cremains—though there is a certain petty pleasure in thinking of the box as Morty himself, relegated to the role of mute, immobile witness to all the dismantling. Be so very careful what you wish for, she tells the box, silently, again.
Franklin runs an idle hand along a row of multiple identical books, all by Morty. He kept his own books shelved by the dozen, in chronological order, beginning with the tiny, charming Thank You, Thea. Stop It, Seth. And Yes, Yolanda, PLEASE!, ending with Lear on Lear (Apologies to the King), an exhibition catalog including an essay that was sketched out by Morty and polished by Tommy.
“I think last weekend might go down as the most insane forty-eight hours of my life, and that’s nothing trivial,” Tommy says. “The last few nights, I’ve been sleeping nearly nine hours. I feel like I’ve been drugged.”
“The actor left on Monday?”
“Actually, he left Sunday. He left just after Dani and Merry. I was almost sorry. You know what? He’s sweet.”
“Give him time.”
Tommy never did get to interrogate Nicholas Greene about the movie, the details of its narrative. She had meant to ask if he would let her look over the script, which she had seen him toss on a chair in the den the day he arrived. How much she agonized about that only a few days ago; now, how little she cares.
“So.” Franklin’s back is to the picture window, its postcard view of the house and the bright sky surrounding him; Tommy can’t read his expression. Yesterday she spent two hours with him in his office, explaining what she hopes they can accomplish together—and how she hopes to free herself, within a year if she can.
Now she claps her hands, just to break the portentous silence. “Let’s do this thing, shall we? I called the alarm company ten minutes ago. And remind me to text them the code right after.”
Franklin lifts the case off its shelf, high over Morty’s main desk. He places it in the center of the empty conference table where, after a dry run with Tommy, Morty always presented a new book to his agent, editor, and art director.
She produces the futuristic key and the card bearing the combination. The numbers on the tumbler are small, and her eyesight is growing miserly. She borrows Franklin’s reading glasses to unlock the plexiglass box. Franklin removes the vessel. Once it’s sitting in the open, they both exhale audibly, a mixture of awe and relief—as if it might have slumped into a pile of shards once released from its prison.
“Who gave it to him?” asks Franklin. “I still can’t believe it was a gift.”
“Before my time,” says Tommy. “Sometimes I forget I haven’t always been with Morty. I missed all the fuss when Colorquake came out. It must have included a lovestruck shipping tycoon. Or a cunning art thief. I asked him once, when he decided to have it alarmed.”
“What did he say?”
“Something dismissive, like ‘A profligate scoundrel. Another life. You wouldn’t want to know.’ ” Tommy hears herself mimicking Morty as she’s done for decades, even to his face. She imagines she’ll be quoting him, reaching for the gruff voice of his last years, for the rest of her life. It’s the voice he left her with.
Franklin peers into the narrow mouth of the vase. The body of the vessel is nearly a globe, eight or ten inches across at the middle, its neck a shallow collar. Using three fingers like pincers, he draws out a sheet of paper folded several times. As Tommy expected, though only based on Morty’s say-so, here is the certificate of provenance, printed on letterhead from a gallery with addresses in Athens and Mykonos.
Tommy texts the designated code to the alarm company, then picks up the paper. She’s reading the English translation typed below the original Greek when she looks up to see Franklin still peering into the vase.
He teases out a small envelope, the size that fits a personal check or a mannerly thank-you note. He hands it to Tommy, but he’s still looking inside the vase. “Huh.”
A second envelope emerges, a third.
All are addressed to Morty, here in Orne, all postmarked Tucson. The handwriting looks pained and skews downhill. The return address is a post-office box.
Tommy sets them aside and tells Franklin she’ll look at them later. “I doubt they have anything to do with the pot.”
Franklin looks at her skeptically but shrugs. “All yours.”
The auctioneer is due in an hour. He will look at this object, first and foremost, but also at the Alice collection, a few pieces of early American furniture in the house, and then, because it suddenly occurred to Tommy (how obvious) that a market would emerge for Mortabilia, too, the whimsical necktie collection. She has Nicholas Greene to thank for bringing it to her attention.
Tomorrow, when only Tommy will be here—God, so she hopes—the broker will come. Tommy doesn’t want Franklin to know, not yet, that she’s thinking of selling the house, not that she can do it until the estate clears probate. He assumes she regards it as her home for the near future, if not indefinitely. A glance out the back of the studio toward the useless, accusatory pool reminds her that she regards it as neither.
—
Nick wakes to the repugnant sensation of his cheek mashed flat and numb against the cold, sticky window. He peels his face away from the plexi and rubs the nerve endings back to life. The landscape below is flat and obstinately brown, divided into rectangular plots like a counterpane made of worn-out tweeds. He’s flown this route so many times by now that even without the tracking map on the seatback in front of him, he could place a hefty wager on their being two a
nd a quarter hours short of L.A. The fellow beside him (well scrubbed, thank heaven; the state in which some people travel is hygienically hazardous!) leans close to his computer, mesmerized by muted gunplay in some film—more likely a television show. These days, films seem almost parenthetical.
“I envy you,” the man says to Nick without taking his eyes off the screen. “You can actually sleep on a plane.”
“Occupational necessity,” he says, and then, “Oh God, did I snore?”
The man laughs, pulls out an earbud, and looks directly at Nick. “Wouldn’t know. But can I ask you something?”
Nick smiles politely. “Quarters are too close for me to say no.”
“Are you somebody important?”
“Hardly, mate.”
“Three of the flight attendants joined forces to watch you for a few minutes while you were out. I gave them the evil eye and they backed off.”
“I’m one of those people who’s cursed to look like somebody else,” Nick says. “Like your Uncle Mick or a bloke from the office.”
The man gives him a smirk of disbelief. “You don’t look like anybody I know.”
Hoping to deflect attention from his face, Nick asks what the man is watching. It’s a series Nick’s heard of but hasn’t seen. He lets his neighbor tell him all about why he can’t afford to miss it. “And I’d watch anything with Derek Unwin. Even though I’ve read he’s one of those creepy Scientologists.” The man glances at the frozen image on his screen. He points to another actor, who looks like he’s about to shoot Derek Unwin square in the face. “And he’s supposedly bisexual. Jesus, you could not pay me to do what these guys do, I don’t care if they can get any babe they want—or, I guess, any guy. No judgment, of course. To each his own.”
“I hear you,” says Nick. “Well, go right on back to it. I’ll be sure to give the show a once-over when I’m home.” If he’s ever home again.
Nick now rates an airline escort whenever he boards a flight. Deliberately businesslike, the attendant sees him directly down the Jetway into first class, where he settles in a window seat close to, but never at, the front. Ironically, this special treatment makes him feel more conspicuous than ever, so he does not remove his shades or cap till the last passenger’s on, then spends a few minutes pretending to be fascinated by the goings-on out the window, the hustling of baggage and forklifting of beverage-cart supplies. Invariably, however, someone will pass his row and stop to tell him they admire his work. In general, he doesn’t mind, but today he’s keen to give it a miss. He’s grateful for a seatmate with tastes too masculine to have seen so much as a trailer for poncy Taormina or tune his telly to the networks recycling British fare.