The next swatch of the property was, when Tommy first saw it, a small meadow. It is now filled with the fruit trees they planted together. And looming over the return route toward the house are the biggest trees: two maples, an oak, and a colossal willow whose trailing fronds murmur like a waterfall whenever a wind kicks up. Out front, halfway between the house and the road, stands a katsura, the kind of tree that begs for a swing—or for a child to climb brazenly high into its boughs. In his books, Morty gave these trees a second life in which he fulfilled such anthropomorphic wishes.
But Tommy curtails her loop at the foot of the granddaddy maple, the one that imposes itself over the back of the house, the one whose branch Morty was trying to dislodge from the roof when he fell.
She shines the beam of the flashlight straight up. To her surprise, she can still see the raw, pale lozenge of inner tree where the limb broke off. Has it really been less than a month?
When she left the house that morning, Morty had just come downstairs, an hour later than usual. He blamed the champagne they had shared the night before. Tommy poured him a cup of coffee, then told him she wanted to get to the copy shop when it opened. “I’m going to be hogging the machines, as usual,” she said. Angelica had asked to see the first of the finished full-color drawings for Love Beneath a Watermelon Moon, Morty’s first original picture book in a couple of years. Most of it was still in early sketch form, and he had yet to finalize the text.
“Let’s splurge on a color copier,” said Morty. “One of our own.”
“You mean, could I research color copiers and find out which one’s the best and the most consumer-friendly—maybe the most eco-friendly too—and talk to the customer reps, and do all the footwork and phonework so you can splurge on it, right?”
“Tommy, you are so clever,” he said, beaming. “I do not deserve you.”
“No comment,” she said, and she left him alone with his coffee.
As she drove off, she acknowledged yet again how tiresome the ritual was: her doing whatever task was required; his lavishing her with praise; his saying he didn’t deserve her (or couldn’t function without her). She, according to script, would agree. But if it was irritating, it was effortless, like the redundant avowals of ordinary love passed back and forth between spouses. She knew she would never leave this job, because at some point it had simply become a life, and who would opt to leave a life?
Exactly two weeks ago today, she waited for Nicholas Greene’s first visit with such fearful, protective anxiety. The peonies were on the cusp of blooming; already, they are done. The short, fierce heat wave hastened their end.
She returns to the house, puts the flashlight in its place beside the kitchen door. She is about to go upstairs when she remembers something. Leaning over the table, she reopens the laptop. She clicks on the trash can, finds the menu she wants, clicks again.
Are you sure you want to permanently erase the items in the Trash? You cannot undo this action.
Erase, she instructs whatever invisible gnome runs the transfer station inside the computer. Morty told her they were called homunculi, the little people one likes to imagine inside the television set, the washing machine, the dashboard of the car—all the appliances that seem to have a mind of their own.
Morty was the clever one. That was no secret. But was it because of his cleverness that Tommy rarely minded his demands? It was invigorating to be indispensable to a man like Morty; at times it was a source of pride—even vanity. But equally vain was her notion that to meet his expectations would permit her to know him inside and out; to know, as the filmmakers believe they do, the inner Lear.
Does it matter that mysteries remain? Don’t they always?
Fifteen
THE FOLLOWING YEAR
It’s a school day, and the sprinklers are dry, but the playground is far more crowded than she expected, riotous with children and adults savoring with equal joy the lingering aftertaste of summer. She stops short just inside the gate, unsure which way to go, how to navigate the sea of toddlers, unsteady on their feet, careening around and then into one another, shrieking with glee. Two small boys are taking turns filling bright plastic buckets with water from the drinking fountain, then dousing each other. They are almost polite in this ritual; one fills while the other waits—and then they squeal and run.
Is he here yet? He might not even show up.
A stroller bumps into her calves from behind. “Excuse me, but this isn’t the place to stand,” an exasperated nanny tells her.
And then she sees a waving figure rise from a shaded bench beside the sandbox, beyond the dormant sprinklers and a trio of knee-high picnic tables. Though unidentifiable from here, the figure is definitely waving at Tommy. And, as usual, he arrived early.
No matter how many times she passes it, the playground will always look smaller than her memory insists, but now that she stands inside for the first time in ages, it feels weirdly vast. She cannot recall ever having been here with so many other children. She has overheard people complaining that too many families are staying in the city rather than moving out, that the schools cannot handle the enrollment, and that the sidewalks everywhere, even in the business districts, are gridlocked with baby carriages, scooters, and roving assemblies of teens. (Tommy has noticed, with amusement and alarm, how the teenagers seem to enjoy walking heedlessly backward while engaged in conversation or, alone, dancing to the music wired straight into their ears.) Her apartment overlooks the entrance to a private school, but it’s a sublet, just a temporary foothold; she’s too grateful to mind the shrill commotion that interrupts her concentration two or three times a day.
“I had no idea this place would be such a circus,” Tommy says when she finally reaches him. She doesn’t know if she should hug him; he doesn’t offer the gesture. He sits down and pats the bench beside him.
“Oh, I like a good circus,” he says. “And your directions were flawless.” He removes his sunglasses but not the cap. Is he really a Yankees fan? Well, of course not.
A thin, studious-looking girl sits on his opposite side. She wears a flowered sundress and white, unscuffed sandals. She holds a book in her lap.
“May I present my niece, Fiona,” he says. “Fiona, Ms. Daulair.”
“Tommy. I’m just Tommy,” she says, shaking the girl’s hand.
“Are you going to talk?” Fiona says to her uncle.
“We are—but then I’ll take you to the shops to meet your mum. Do you want to queue up for the swings?”
Fiona nods and hands her book to Nick. She heads toward the swings with an air of dignified purpose. (How is it that so many British children look like adults-in-training?)
“Thanks for being my cover.” Tommy points at the sign declaring that only adults accompanied by children are permitted inside the playground.
“For you, Tomasina, anything.” He smiles steadily at her, as if expecting something.
As she feared, Tommy has forgotten how to feel comfortable in this man’s company. Once again, especially since the night of the screening, where she watched him navigate an avenue of frenzied photographers—“Nick!” “Nick!” “Look left, Nick!”—he is the actor, the star. (And what is she, now? No longer Morty’s proxy or protector, she sometimes feels the way one does in dreams of being naked in public. The uniform was invisible, but it was hers.)
Knowing how painfully predictable it sounds, she says, “First, I just have to say, it really, really was amazing. And I cried so hard at the end.”
“Thank you. If you mean it, really mean it, that matters to me more than a thousand critics’ praise.”
“And that’s what you’re getting. I went online—”
“Except for the sniping about pedophilia given ‘cartoon treatment.’ ”
“That was absurd. That was one review.”
“And there will be others. Of all stripes.” He looks over at the swings to check on his niece. Suddenly he smiles up at the trees. “But here! It was here? The place of o
rigin, the ground zero of Colorquake. Here?”
“I met Morty there.” She points to a spot farther down the long line of benches on which they’re seated, where a mother is nursing a baby beneath a tentlike blouse. “Though I’m sure they’ve replaced the benches. And we never had a sandbox this grand—or slides made out of this space-age rubbery stuff. We had an iron jungle gym, metal swings, a seesaw. Seesaws are a thing of the past. They’re considered too dangerous now.”
“How old were you then?” asks Nick.
“Twelve,” she tells him.
She hears a small intake of breath, as if she’s just given him a coveted password or made a confession. “Twelve?” he says. “Oh, twelve.”
“A painful age,” she says.
“Yes,” he says. “But rather an extraordinary age. A crossroads.”
Tommy isn’t sure how to answer. Other than her meeting Morty—something she might no longer recall if she had never met him again—the few things she remembers from seventh grade are uniformly difficult to think about. She was trying so hard to forge a deliberate identity; in retrospect, her efforts did little more than isolate her from others. She wanted to be like no one else, and as a result, almost no one else found her easy to befriend.
They scan the playground in unison. Nick has replaced his sunglasses.
The movie opened on a blank field of white. Following a significant silence, there were sounds of scuffling, of objects being shifted on a table, and then, startling the audience by revealing the scale of the white field, a vast hand entered and filled the screen. The hand, freckled, knuckles darkened by ink, picked up a thick pencil and began to sketch, at first lightly, tentatively…then gradually committing itself to firm, true lines. It began to draw a boy’s general form, then limbs, then face and hair. To draw Ivo.
The movie did not show or even suggest a model for Ivo; he emerged from that field of white like a traveler arriving from out of a dense fog. (Later that night, while undressing, Tommy would think of what Morty called the Mother Story: a stranger comes to town. “Goes all the way back to Eden. There’s Adam, living his bucolic life. Enter Eve. Boy oh boy.”)
Ivo was, in a way, the true star of the movie, at times upstaging the flesh-and-blood Nicholas Greene. Whether Nick had shared the story about the playground with his colleagues, Tommy isn’t sure. She only knows how shocked she was to hear from him last month: a casual e-mail in which he wondered if, while he was in New York for the East Coast previews (and had she received her invitation?), she might find time to show him the place where she had met Lear. Why now? she had wondered. What would it contribute to work long finished?
“You know,” he says, “I also wanted to see you because I never said a proper goodbye last year, thanked you the way I meant to…after that rather lunatic weekend. I behaved badly and then fled like a refugee. Your letting me in…your not giving me the boot when I…” He sighs loudly. “You were ridiculously gracious.”
“You wrote me a very nice note. That was plenty,” she says. It’s true, however, that he left Orne with a haste that puzzled, even wounded, Tommy. She had to assume that he was dodging the meddlesome fans who had literally come crashing through a hedge. (Two reporters from regional newspapers called Tommy that week to ask about the actor’s visit.)
Now he’s just looking at her—or she presumes he is. She wishes she could see his eyes.
“I know it’s vanity, and pathetic of me to ask, but what do you think he’d have thought of the film? I mean really thought of it?”
For the past day and a half, Tommy has thought almost constantly about the movie—she knows she needs to see it again, alone, without the hoopla, without the fear that others might be watching her as she watches the screen—yet she hasn’t thought much, at least not yet, about how Morty might have reacted. What Tommy doubts she will ever tell anyone is how stunned she was to witness how remote, almost irrelevant, she was to the story. Oh, she was there—played by one of those dime-a-dozen bland blond beauties, Hollywood’s moths-to-the-flame—but her few lines were pallid, servantlike. She was almost always in the background, no more significant to the veerings of the plot than the absurdly funky furnishings with which the art director had filled the fictional house. (Someone had decided that real artists do not favor classic New England antiques.)
This—her virtual erasure from Morty’s life on-screen—hurt her so deeply that she is not even sure she could put it into words. How silly and false she was to pretend that she genuinely hoped the screenwriter and director would demote her, push her to the sidelines. Equally shameful is the way in which this slight makes her feel as resentful toward Morty as she does toward the faceless creators of the movie. It’s not his fault that Tommy was inconvenient to the story, once it was reduced to its thematic essence. Perhaps, it comes to her as she sits in this park, that is exactly how Dani felt in all the years after finding out how much he once mattered to Morty’s story—yet ultimately didn’t.
So what would Morty have thought? Only now does she stop to contemplate this question head-on. Remembering the way he behaved the night before he died, she has to imagine that vanity would have overruled any objections to the inaccuracies (some blatant), that he would have basked in the literal glow of the screen, its spotlight on his sufferings, his genius, and his perseverance more significant than the integrity or verisimilitude of the figure standing in that column of powerful radiance. How silly, yet again, that Tommy was the one who had worried about what such radiance might reveal as well as distort.
“Am I making you sad?” Nick says when she doesn’t speak at once. “Forget my asking; it’s nothing but my ego whining here.”
“No, you should ask,” Tommy says, perhaps harshly. She gazes around at the dozen or more children in the sandbox, all busy excavating worlds within their control.
“I know,” she says to Nick, “that he would have been in raptures about the animation—I think I forgot to breathe when Ivo was being stalked by the panther—and the music…well, you know how beautiful it was. I’m still hearing passages in my head. Was that an oboe where…”
His smile seems to have tensed. None of this is what he wants to hear.
“But you,” Tommy interrupts herself, “you would have made him feel—I mean your performance, which was just incredible, as everyone’s saying—would have made him feel…” What can she say that she will mean, that isn’t trivial? And then it comes to her. “Vindicated.”
Nick leans away from her, against the bench. He glances at the swings, back at Tommy. “Vindicated?”
“You know—I think you of all people do know—that he felt wronged in so many ways. But at the same time, he knew he had no right to feel wronged. That all his good fortune was like one big admonition never to complain, never to admit feeling as alone as he did. He was trapped between solitude and celebrity.”
She thinks of all the big parties thrown by and for Soren. In the movie, the art director gave them the fantastical, Dionysian feel of Fellini or Cocteau (one of them was even a costume party, which Morty would never have condoned), when, in reality, they felt more like gatherings of extremely privileged people trying on mildly bad behavior for fun—and eating too many deviled eggs. But the movie was art, glorying without excuse in its simplifications and necessary lies as a means to a particular, pointed truth. (Soren’s movie demise—at the house, in a bedroom far larger than the one in which the actual Soren had slept, with a weeping Morty sketching his lover’s face in death—had a revisionist nobility that might have gratified Morty; perhaps he would have come to regard it as gospel. Not that the two of them ever discussed Soren’s physical death, that final night at the hospital.)
Morty, of all people, would have embraced all the fancification—especially because, at the end of the story told in the movie, Mort Lear is a figure whose ordeals have brought him not merely survival but wisdom, generosity, and joy. In the final scene, after his solitary scattering of Soren’s ashes from a crumbling pier on the Huds
on River (more wholesale invention), Nick-as-Morty returns home by taxi, train, and on foot, through falling leaves—Soren’s fictional death occurring in the autumn, not a callow, colorless winter—to spy Ivo lurking in wait, high in the branches of a vast, vibrant tree, a twin to the granddaddy maple. Morty watches Ivo (no matter how supple, always a drawing, never a true boy) clamber down the trunk and then follows the phantom boy into his studio. He watches as Ivo brings to life—and to exquisite, almost supernatural color—all the figures, human and animal, depicted in the monochromatic sketches and drawings pinned on easels, stacked on tables, framed on walls—among them the boy from Rumple Crumple Engine Foot; the fox in the balloon; the inseparable, not-quite-invincible trio of Boris, Stinky, and Greta. Even the clay figures made by Morty’s youngest fans come to life.
Nick gazes at Tommy, silently, through his dark lenses. Tommy remembers him as someone who talked almost relentlessly; has she offended him? She says, “Do you know what? I think seeing you become him, the Morty of years ago, when he was so much younger, I think it would have made him feel less alone—like bumping into a lost twin. I didn’t even realize until after he died how essentially lonely he was.”
“Thank you,” Nick says after a moment. “Really, quite truly, thank you.”
Another awkward silence settles in—especially difficult because it’s hemmed in by so much ambient din and hectic, carefree play. Tommy reaches for the book that lies facedown in Nick’s lap. “What’s she reading, Fiona?”
“Oh, she’s ripping her way rather precociously through Andersen’s fairy tales. Broody, depressing stuff, if you ask me. Hans Christian didn’t much like little girls, I suspect. I’m not even sure he liked people. Sometimes I think she’s only pretending to read it. That, or she’ll be growing some very thick skin!”
The jacket depicts an elaborately stylized, Rossetti-esque portrait of the Little Mermaid. Nothing more tedious than a modern artist putting on Old Master airs: Morty’s sharp, often barbed observations still braid themselves into her own.