Tommy returns the book. “She’s how old?”
“Barely six, if you can believe it.”
“She’s just falling in love with tragedy. A little early, but then she’ll get it out of her system earlier, too.”
As if having guessed she’s under discussion, Fiona deftly halts her swing, gets off, beckons to the next child in line, and strides toward them. She sits next to Nick. “What time are we meeting Mum?”
“Half one,” Nick says, sliding an arm around her shoulders. “Can you hold out a trice more?”
She nods and repossesses her book.
“I suppose,” says Tommy, “you must be working on another movie by now.” How, she wonders, will they bring this meeting to an end? Has she kept him too long?
“Oh no. I mean, eventually, yes; taxes must be paid! But for now, I’m all about the stage. All about sticking close to home—once I’m done with this tour. And talking of tragedy, I am all about comedy this go-round! I’m a rapscallion playboy whose ex-lovers collaborate on a surprise party for his fortieth. Pure farce. But genius. The play, I mean. At one point, I cross the stage—well, I enter and careen about for a minute—on my hands. We’ll see if I’m fit enough to do that night after night! My character’s description includes ‘nimble as a flea.’ Did I ever fool those producers.”
Fiona, overhearing, looks up from her fairy tale. “You can walk on your hands?”
“Oh, Fee, wait’ll you see your old uncle. Except I’ve a hunch your mum’s not going to let you see this play. Things get a little randy.” He turns back to Tommy. “Best thing is, I wake up every day in my own damn bed. The mice are finally clearing off.”
Tommy wonders if he wakes alone or with a lover. She feels a twinge of envious longing, though she’s not sure if it’s for someone to wake up with or for Nick’s wide horizons. He’s at that age when the most fortunate people cannot possibly appreciate how young they still are.
Fiona now merely fidgets with her book, opening and closing its cover.
“I think we’d best be clearing off ourselves,” says Nick. He lays a hand on Tommy’s knee—the hand that portrayed Morty’s at the outset of the film. “Thank you.”
Two women sitting in the sandbox with their children are peering repeatedly at him, turning their heads to and fro like birds.
“But!” he says as he stands and takes Fiona’s hand. “I’ll see you at the museum thing, right? I have to rush off after the screening, but I’ll search you out before.” He smiles winningly. She’s sorry to be confronting a double reflection of her own face where she’d rather be looking into those indelible eyes.
“Yes. I’m taking Dani and his wife.”
“Your brother,” Nick says, probably uncertain.
“I’m off to have lunch with him now.”
“You’re so different, the two of you. Well, as siblings often are.”
He begins to walk toward the gate, and Tommy tries to stay beside him. But they have to choose separate detours to avoid collision with oblivious children, small construction vehicles, and a zigzagging tricyclist. Tommy barely dodges a soccer ball kicked forcefully through the air by a boy who’s really too old to be here. She shoots him a warning look. “Hey!” The boy startles. She retrieves the ball from under a bench and carries it over, hands it back. “Not a good idea,” she says as gently as she can.
She catches up with Nick at the gate. He holds it open.
“I want you to know,” he says once they’re out on the sidewalk, “that it wouldn’t have been the same at all, I wouldn’t have been the Mort Lear I was, without your being so open to me. I wanted to tell you in person, Ms. Daulair.”
“Mr. Greene,” she says, “can you please stop thanking me?”
“I can, but I probably won’t.” He shakes her hand.
She laughs at the formality. If only to bring an end to the awkwardness, she raises her arm at the sight of an available taxi. “You want this one?” she asks.
“All yours,” he says.
She meant to take the subway, but on a day like this one, October masquerading as August, it’s hard to go underground and leave the sky behind. If she had time, she wouldn’t mind the long walk. Speeding north, she passes the little bistro where she met Scott for breakfast the day of their reunion. Before moving into the city last fall, she had forgotten that’s what it feels like to live here, how the streetscape itself is a horizontal stratification of memory, landmark by landmark, as meticulously contoured and detailed as a topographical map.
Just to hear Scott’s voice for the first time had made her feel winded, as if, with a single blow, the words had been knocked out of her throat. So they had not lingered on the phone, merely deciding on where to meet for breakfast. In person, it was the opposite, words tumbling from Tommy, almost haphazardly, until it became clear that the space of a breakfast was far too small to contain the stories she had to tell. Scott had stories, too, but his letter had outlined his own modest saga.
They walked for hours. At one point, they crossed Central Park from west to east, which they did by keeping an eye on their orientation to the sun. Neither of them knew the paths, which seemed deliberately confusing, as if designed to foil your sense of direction, not deviously but mercifully, as if the park were urging you, Listen! Life is not a mission. Get lost a little, will you?
Telling Scott where she had been and what she had done all those years felt like the breaking of a spell. And to see him for the first time since college—his skin loosened, his forehead broader, his thinning brown hair brindled with gray—was to look at all those years in the flesh. (Hadn’t he been taller, too?)
Had she offered up her story in a letter, or an e-mail, matching his, she wonders if it would have felt the same. Maybe she would have felt less embarrassed. She could tell, from his careful questions, that the choices she had made since college surprised him. By the end of that long afternoon, it was a relief to know that both of them were glad to be in touch, but it was also obvious that their attraction, the virginal chemistry they had shared, would always be a thing of the past. They parted knowing that they would see each other again, but Tommy sensed she wasn’t the only one to recognize that the unspoken question bringing them back together had met with an answer that disappointed them yet could not be altered.
Since then, they have seen each other whenever Scott comes to town, and Tommy has met the law-student daughter; Scott has met Dani. They feel most comfortable when they share each other with family or friends. One of those friends is Merry. And now, because of Merry, Scott comes east more often.
Tommy opens the window to enjoy the passing rush of air, then sits back and closes her eyes. Enough of the landmarks. She reaches into her shoulder bag just to feel the costly softness of Nicholas Greene’s orange cashmere scarf. She can’t pretend she forgot to return it. She had a feeling she wouldn’t.
—
Nick squeezes Fiona’s hand and gives her his full attention. “Miss Fiona,” he says, “do you know what I spied, just down that side street, before we arrived here?” He points across the avenue.
She looks up at him in her frightfully serious way.
“A pâtisserie,” he says, drawing out the syllables. “Posh cakes of every kind. Gâteaux, as a matter of fact.”
She brightens dramatically. “But we haven’t had lunch.”
“What I’m suggesting is pastries for lunch. Uncle’s prerogative.”
If she doesn’t know the meaning of that word (she probably does!), she’s not going to risk probing.
Inside the pastry shop, he leans down beside her and rolls the savory French words around in his mind as he surveys the options, each identified in affectionate calligraphy on a miniature porcelain signpost. Mille-feuille, macaron, madeleine, dacquoise. Crème caramel, Reine de Saba, tarte Tatin, financier.
“Let’s each choose two,” he says, “and smuggle a fifth for your ma.”
He takes in Fiona’s covetous wonder, her roving glance reflected in
the glass beside his. Feeling hungry, greedy, and childish all at once, he wants to choose everything here, yet these emotions make him dreadfully homesick, too. He cannot wait to complete the appointed tasks of the week—and to get through the necessary mortification of seeing Meredith Galarza, though she’s been nothing but completely professional in her e-mails—and then to get on that plane and return to what he hopes will be a stretch of time governed and shaped by the newly precious monotonies of hard work, home cooking, pints at the dim, familiar pub. Can he return to a life like that? Yes, he bloody can.
He is pleased that the clever lad he met on that visit to his old school has accepted an offer to be his backstage boy a few evenings a week—and the mum given her permission. (Her trust in Nick, and her pride in her son, gave him a mournful flash of the afternoon spent in the L.A. studio with Toby Feld and his Gorgon of a mother.) A note in the play’s program will dedicate Nick’s performance to Emmelina Godine, whom I first saw on this very stage when I was just an ignorant sprog.
He thinks of Tommy’s remark about Lear: trapped between solitude and celebrity. He pictures a bright sandbar dividing a river. Like Lear, he knows he mustn’t ever complain. Last week, when he moaned to Silas that sometimes he feels a bit like a chess piece, Si’s retort was that Nick should remember he has the privileges of a knight, whether or not he ever becomes a king. Somewhat ironically, the role of Lear, however, is not the role that will lead to Nick’s coronation. He can’t say his heart wasn’t in it: every fiber of his being was subsumed by the project, by Andrew’s vertiginously high standards, and Nick lost half a stone by the time they wrapped in New York. Yet Andrew’s decision, after contemplating Nick’s insistence on some kind of fidelity to the facts as he knew them, was to let the balance tip toward the fanciful, so that the darkest passages of Lear’s childhood were rendered by the animators, Nick and Sig and Jim all but enslaved to Ivo’s charisma (and to that dervishy cat). In the end, you could almost say it was Ivo’s film, not Nick’s. Already, though the film has yet to go into wide release, Nick is seeing new editions of Colorquake proliferate in bookshop windows and even airport kiosks hawking protein bars, neck pillows, and noise-abating earphones.
If characters brought to life by crayons and brushwork could win awards, Ivo would hoover up the statuettes next spring. It was comical how, once Nick saw the finished film, he had a fiercely schizophrenic feeling toward Ivo. The boy—a being of pen and ink, not flesh and blood—seemed indeed to have stolen the limelight from all the live, human actors around him. It was hard not to see “him” as cheeky and insubordinate. Yet Nick also felt a tender possessiveness toward him, a sense of triumph and ownership, as if, through becoming Lear, Nick became Ivo—and, in turn, Ivo became Nick, became the twelve-year-old boy whose idle hours in a cramped flat led to his spying on a beautiful woman, then following her through the streets of London, and then, thanks to her kindness (or her longing for a lost son; did it matter?), finding the place where he belonged, a place that welcomed his fatherless, unsettled self, his longing to try on other lives.
His twin alliance with Ivo and Mordecai, Morty’s earliest self, also compelled him to buy that trove of childhood drawings, though he did not want to own them. He wanted to send them to a home where they would be cherished. He owes Si, yet again, for making that happen.
He thinks of the final scene in the film, which ends in the place meant to emulate Lear’s Connecticut home. And suddenly, reminded of Tomasina, Nick feels ashamed of himself. Just now, in the playground, did he ask her a single thing about herself, her life? Hungry to get as close to Lear’s approval as he could, he hadn’t. He had treated her, again, as if she were little more than a conduit, the bearer of a legacy whose luster Nick yearned to share. He pictured her living alone in that tranquil house with its fine old furnishings, tending her flowers and fruit trees. Lo, the lettuce is legion. How selfish he could be. He won’t have time to make up for it at the museum; he must remember to write her a proper letter after he returns home, tell her how much her trust has meant to him.
Fiona is asking the man behind the counter about a brick of dense, glossy chocolate, probably a mousse cake. (What are the little purple things on top? Candied violets, the man tells her.) Nick marvels repeatedly at her earnest independence, and yet, strangely, it worries him.
He leans down one more time to finalize his own decision. He does love that mocha ganache filling the genoise du jour (imagine: a different sponge each day!). As he sees his face and Fiona’s reflected side by side again, it’s obvious: the worry over her independence is all about him. If he were the star of a book by Mort Lear, it would be called The Boy Who Was Afraid of Ending Up Famous but Alone.
Some girl, Deirdre wrote in a recent e-mail, replying to his mawkish natterings about a matchup gone awry, will drink up your sweet sentimentality like a good old-fashioned bottle of Lambrusco. Any minute now, bear cub. Just you wait. Be sure to let me know I told you so.
Deirdre herself has up and married again—her investment adviser, of all people. Along with the rest of the world, including the trash-trolling tabloids, Nick learned about it only after the fact. He has almost talked himself out of feeling wounded that she didn’t confide in him—and out of feeling boorishly jealous. After he wrote her a bona fide pen-on-paper note of congratulations, she replied in an e-mail, Steve is a fine upstanding Jewish intellectual: I wish his brain were contagious. What he sees in me, the gods only know (oh those giveth-and-taketh gods!). I love how he doesn’t give a hoot about booze: might as well be mashed turnips. If anyone can keep me in my traces, he will. Books are his drug of choice. That is a direct quote! Not a word about romantic love, but where did romance fit, as a destination, in a life with a road map as twisty as Deirdre’s? Romance is a superhighway, an autobahn strewn heedlessly with breakdowns and wrecks.
There is a girl Nick plans to ask out when he returns to London, when he has a moment to catch his breath. In a queer way, she reminds him of Meredith Galarza: her humor blunt; her gestures wide; her laughter uninhibited, verging on brash. He has to be careful, however, because she is a friend of Annabelle’s, and he’s only just making headway with his siblings. The friend is earning an advanced degree in agricultural economics and has a passion for seed banking. Seed banking! Nick loves how literally down-to-earth it sounds.
And economics, the sense and sensibility of earning and spending, is something he could use in his life just now, having virtually emptied the till—his paycheck for the film—on that costly donation. But it seemed the just and fateful thing. And fate is a master to whom he owes a king’s ransom at this particular moment.
“Box them all up, if you please,” he says, a bit too loudly, to the man behind the pastry counter. “What do you say, Fiona, the red ribbon?”
She nods and says (so solemnly!), “Yes, we like the red. Thank you.”
—
She keeps returning to the long wide hallway that leads into Ivo’s Room, just so she can walk back and forth, yet again, along the cases displaying the drawings that she knows will attract the most attention. All the galleries on this floor, painted and primped and (in the nick of time) ready to go, are filled with the most glorious illustrations, objects, and books in her favorite realm of the museum’s collection, but this hallway, painted a soaring blue, is her pride and joy. It matches the sky at the end of Colorquake, the sky once its color is fully restored. All thirty-two drawings—two parades of sixteen, one to either side of the hall—lie flat, pinned to runners of chocolate-colored acid-free linen. They are lit indirectly, the temperature in the cases constant.
At times, she is amused by the absurdity. Ranging from frustrated scrawlings to scrupulous renderings, ingenuous yet grandiose, they are just the drawings of a child, under ordinary circumstances to be praised by a parent, then tossed aside or clamped to the fridge (perhaps with feeble intentions to have them framed). Mordecai Levy was no more important than any other child on the planet when he made them, but the next half c
entury turned him into an adult whose reputation, as if through some cunning trick of physics, could reach back in time to claim these sheets of paper as objects of esteem and value. Why Mort kept them hidden away is a mystery, or so Tommy says. For the moment, Merry doesn’t care. Let some snoopy biographer tackle that one. (One such individual has already written her an earnest letter asking for permission to interview her and study her “Lear archive.” Oh, all those letters. All that ultimately hollow flirtation.)
Sol came by this morning for a final inspection. The look of admiration in his eyes as he strolled through the galleries devoted to children’s literature, a look he finally extended to Merry herself, was more gratifying than she might have guessed. She knows the museum is beautiful. Delphic prophet that she is (or that Sol claimed she was, however seamy his motives that particular night), she knows that by next month, when the final touches go on the educational center and they open the little café in the “skyroom,” the cultural eggheads will have declared it a sculptural triumph, a new urban landmark, a work of fanciful genius (she loves dreaming up the clichéd epithets)—she knows all this as certainly as she’s known anything in recent years—yet it seems she can never quite shake off the instinctive relief she feels when a male authority gives her the sign of professional approval. And that’s our work, her new therapist would say.
She also knows that the speed of construction—a four-story building completed in less than two years, as promised—came at a rather scandalous price: perhaps not just in overtime wages but in barrels of Ritalin, rumored to be the architect’s stimulant of choice. A few exterior eyesores remain (the strips of “lawn” flanking the pathway to the entrance are dirt with a greenish stubble; the steel railings on the roof-deck overlooking the canal have yet to be installed), but the board did not want to delay the opening until the weather turned unpleasant. Who would venture down from Carl Schurz Park to the banks of the Gowanus in a November sleet storm?