At her new desk—a long, slick blond surface made from sustainable bamboo—she tackles the increasingly challenging job of keeping her head above e-mail. This must be what it felt like at Cape Canaveral when NASA still sent rockets into space.
She scans the senders. Skip, skip, delete, flag for later, skip…
Shine Man.
The subject line reads F # # #.
Thanks to his genius grant, Stu has been in Antarctica for the past few months, “drawing the soul of apocalyptic winter.” Like a fretful mother, Merry wrote him last week that she did not like how close his planned return was to the museum’s opening. Everything else has fallen into place so well—especially the uncanny timing of the movie’s release—that she ought to have known the gods had a mischievous surprise in store: a broken-down helicopter, the very one that would have delivered Stu to a ship, which would have delivered him to a small plane, then a large plane, returning him to New York with less than twenty-four hours to spare. There is simply no way he will be here by tomorrow night.
She takes a deep breath. Dozens of other celebrity authors will be here, though none of them rock stars like Shine. Well then, a movie star will have to do.
This thought directs her to the e-mail from Alpha Zed Productions. The subject line reads Guest List: Final. Her heart is a hammer. She knows Nicholas Greene is coming because it was part of the agreement she made with Zelinsky’s studio, but what she’s been left wondering (and the magazines at the grocery checkout have been no help whatsoever) is whether he might bring someone. Someone female.
The list comprises five names, each identified in parentheses:
Joy Navarro (producer)
Jacob Steichen (screenwriter)
Nicholas Greene (actor)
Jim Krivet (actor)
Gully Iverson (computer graphics expert)
After opening remarks—oh God, right this minute Merry should be on the phone finding a replacement for Stu—guests will be invited to the museum’s amphitheater to view twenty minutes of clips from The Inner Lear and to ask questions of the actors and other panelists.
As of two months ago, all the drawings from Colorquake belong to the museum—as do drawings from a handful of earlier picture books. Tommy divided Morty’s published artwork and manuscripts into three lots, each donated to a different museum, but the earliest drawings, the ones from the safe-deposit box, she put up for sale as a single block, to be auctioned online. Funds from the purchase would add to the seed money for the boys’ home in Tucson.
Not since her longing for a baby had Merry wanted anything as badly as she wanted that collection of drawings. Thinking that surely the directors would agree that the purchase was essential, she arranged to make her case at the spring meeting. But when she stood before them, projecting the images, relaying the mystery of their concealment, she saw Sol quietly shaking his head. “You do realize,” he said after the awkward pause following her overly breathless (and overly confident) presentation, “that we’ve squeezed all the blood we can from our core donors, just to meet the surplus costs of construction. I know you believe Lear is the linchpin of your collection, but I think we need to say no.” Merry felt as if he had slapped her. She managed to admit, without arguing, that perhaps they shouldn’t put all their eggs in one basket. She let herself cry in the cab she took home, but when she got there, she resisted drowning her mortification in drink. She took Linus for a long walk in Prospect Park, her consolation prize for moving to a smaller apartment (which did feature lustrous old floors, a working fireplace, and a boy downstairs who loved dogs).
Nonetheless, Merry intended to watch the auction online, even if she couldn’t bid. And then, alarmingly, the auction was canceled. An anonymous party had offered a preemptive sum. Oh God, would the drawings go to Japan or Saudi Arabia, never to be seen again? That night, Merry hardly slept. The next day, at the museum, a courier delivered a letter to Merry from the auction house. The contents of the letter led to the ruination of her brand-new yellow suede pumps when she knocked a coffee cup off her desk. The drawings would come to her after all.
When she asked Sol if he could use his corporate-shenanigans know-how to unmask the anonymous donor, he gave her a disapproving look. “Gift horses,” he said, “do not like root canals.” And then, to her relief, he winked—a grandfatherly wink.
Merry is ashamed that one of the reasons she didn’t invite Scott to the opening is that she is worried about how she’ll behave around Nicholas Greene. It’s true, as she told Scott, that she will be all business and no fun, with less than zero time for friends—least of all a new “boyfriend” with whom she has yet to devise a two-city balancing act. And she can’t get too optimistic by flaunting him in front of her associates. Most important, however, she cannot risk even the minor breakdown she just might have the minute Nick walks in the door (or out).
There are so many questions she wishes she could ask Nick, all out-of-bounds. She can step forward after the screening and fawn over his performance; that’s the limit. In fact, her job demands that she aim a question or two at the animation expert and the producer. How in the world did they bring Colorquake to life? Tell us about the science behind the magic!
But what she will be thinking about is another kind of magic: how, that one long night in that hot room on that miserly fold-out couch, his body felt so slick and silken, yet so angular and sharp (sweat pooling in the hollow at the base of his throat); how ticklish he was; how much they laughed. Several solitary months later, when she and Scott first went to bed together, the inevitable comparisons that flashed through Merry’s mind—the readjusting, the surprises, the awkwardly different pleasures—were not with Benjamin, the man she had slept with for years (in the end with more purpose than passion) but with Nick.
Pay attention, she tells herself. Stop pining like a groupie.
Resisting the urge to tell him I told you so, she types a mollifying reply to Stu. As it’s going out, up springs a message from Scott, asking her how the countdown is going, whether she’s remembering to eat, whether she’s able to sleep. She will phone him when she gets home, even if it’s not till midnight. He’s usually up that late grading papers or tests, and he’s kind about letting her vent when she’s anxious.
She kicks off her shoes and massages her toes. She eyes the much more demanding stilettos, on a shelf, that she will put on, like Cinderella, before the circus begins. Already, her dress for tomorrow night hangs on the hook behind her door.
In stocking feet, she wanders back into the gallery space, unable to stay away from Mort’s work—and from Mort. He is eminently present, in the form of a five-foot-square photograph, his face many times larger than life. Beneath it is a quote from the PBS documentary: No, I do not qualify as a storyteller. A storyteller is a raconteur, a Homeric bard, a performer. I can’t even tell a decent joke. I think of myself as a storymaker—a builder, a mason. Every choice my characters make is a brick, every relationship a layer of mortar. The pictures I draw? Windows and doors. If, when I’m all done, the lights go on and the roof doesn’t leak, I’m in luck. I’m home.
Merry took the photograph. A few years ago, she put together a group show for which she asked five author-illustrators to choose a bygone role model. (Cleverly, perhaps too cleverly, Mort chose Edward Lear.) In the photo, he is looking directly at Merry, smiling that confiding smile, the one that always made her feel as if, in some parallel life, they would certainly be lovers. She turns away from his gaze before she can let it take her down.
“No, you don’t,” she says quietly, firmly. “Oh no you don’t.” She returns to her office, reminding herself that everything she’s made here, this sublime oasis of books and art and stories suffused with the wonder particular to children, she has made (she, too, is a maker) despite Mort and his intentions. Even if there is no genuine consolation for his betrayal, she has won.
—
She promised to buy sandwiches on the way. Only now, almost there, does she remember. The
past few months, she has been so preoccupied with reading up on the legal ins and outs of artistic estates, Franklin feeding her one article or case study after another, that it’s the everyday details, the easy ones, she tends to forget. Next week they will look for an office to rent: something small, but they agree it’s got to have a good view. Probably, also, an expensive couch, probably from Milan. Aesthetics will matter to the clients they hope to attract. Until their enterprise takes off—the starship, Dani calls it—Franklin will commute between the city and his practice in Stamford. Tommy will visit galleries and publishers and theaters, advertising their counsel.
The road that cuts north into the park is inexplicably closed, and the driver turns east. Knowing that this will mean an expensive, byzantine detour, Tommy asks him to drop her at the Plaza.
She loves this entrance to the park. The path dips down into a horseshoe cleft containing a pond, then traces the contour of the water’s reedy edge. Maybe it reminds her a little of Orne, its woodsy trails and pocket ponds, though she hasn’t had a moment of remorse since selling the house—or not about giving up the house itself. To empty the studio was the only task that gave her pause. Removing the last vestiges of Morty’s working presence felt like a far greater act of treason than taking the furniture out of the house. The buyer is an architect who plans to make her office in this space. Tommy envisions the surfaces monopolized by computers, scanners, and printers—after the woman has scrubbed away all the ink stains, absentminded notations (phone numbers penciled by Morty on doorframes), and the ubiquitous scorings, like ski tracks in snow, left by X-Acto knives. Or she’ll simply gut the space, pry loose the counters, discard the fixtures, replace the drafty casement windows.
A friend of Morty’s who works at the Met advised Tommy to sell the Greek vase to a museum in Athens whose curator had access to private money. Fine, Tommy said, and the friend made it happen. The money (an astonishing sum) went toward the growing fund for Ivo’s House. Perfect, Tommy said. Wow, yes! she exclaimed when the auction house relayed the generous bid for the Arizona drawings, taking them off the block. She likes it now when the answers she gives are affirmative and plain. Sometimes she wills them to overrule the more complicated, querulous answers that would normally come to mind (But what if…Aren’t you worried that…I’m not sure it’s exactly ethical to…).
Morty’s correspondence and sketchbooks went to the library at Tempe, the university eager to claim him as an “indigenous son.” After the auction of his Dickensiana and Wonderlandia, his ordinary books went, in dozens of shopping bags and cartons, to the Orne Public Library, which held a special sale to fund a new roof. As Franklin put it, Morty’s estate scored major community goodwill and a big fat tax deduction.
But it is the gushing stream of royalties—more like a waterfall, a Niagara of revenue—that, on top of Morty’s ample savings, will continue to fund the home he chose as the mark he wanted to leave on the world. And, as he expected, his gesture drew in other benefactors. Tommy can see herself attending the opening of Ivo’s House, but beyond that, and beyond her gratitude for the sale of the Orne property, her dedicated inheritance, she will have stepped away from all things Mort Lear.
Despite his self-assurance, Morty underestimated what he was worth—literally and yet, Tommy thinks, perhaps on a human scale as well. Only after his memorial service, seeing all the tears, hearing all the memories, did Tommy remember how many younger writers and artists he had nurtured decades before. If he had withdrawn from those relationships, for that he could be forgiven. Maybe Shine wasn’t the only talented young Turk who stirred in Morty the complex anguish of envy. Had he recognized in it the longing toward an earlier life of his own?
When all was said and done (and signed and notarized and taxed), it turned out that his stubborn, contrarian wishes could be fulfilled without selling off too much of his prime work. If he had wanted to see his own deification as an all-or-nothing proposition (he was Rembrandt or he was no one!), he hadn’t left instructions tyrannical enough to see it through. Nor had he anticipated that Tommy would defy him—within the letter of the law. Did widely disperse mean divide a hundred ways or send to a few carefully chosen, mutually distant points on the map?
She follows the path that bends through the zoo. Even here, Morty once held court, when he was asked to join a tongue-in-cheek advisory panel convened by New York magazine to offer suggestions on how to cure Gus, the resident polar bear briefly renowned for his neurotically obsessive swimming. The magazine had drafted an executive from Steiff, the company famous for its stuffed toys; a woman who designed organic baby footwear under the label Bearpaws; and a wrestler nicknamed Kodiak. To round it out, Morty’s editor was asked to enlist a children’s illustrator. After Tommy passed the phone to Morty, she heard him say to Rose, “I don’t even draw bears. Have you noticed?”
But Soren insisted he accept. “It’s all about the cute factor. And you are nothing if not cute.” And wouldn’t it make a great excuse to book a room at the Pierre, overlooking the zoo, for the night or two after Morty’s media moment? Soren was still healthy then, still eager to scheme as much time in the city as Morty would tolerate.
So Soren went along in Tommy’s place, saying he could handle the logistics. It wasn’t a disaster—even Morty admitted that the piece in the magazine was charming—but when he returned home, he said to Tommy, “You would never have permitted those idiots to lock us up in the putrid penguin house for nearly an hour. Where was Soren? Barneys. Lunch at the frigging Stanhope.”
When she passes under the archway with the clock, she sees that she is going to be late by nearly half an hour. She should have taken the subway. One rule of city physics she’s learning all over again: the farther away your destination, the more likely it is that the subway will get you there faster.
Dani came to her, over the winter, to tell her about his idea. He might be able to get a grant from the park conservancy, but he needed a loan. His credit had been “cooked,” as he put it, by his first business partner’s devotion to drugs. He showed her his idea for the kiosk design, the estimate from the friend who had designed the racks for the shop. Of course, Tommy said, keeping her answers simple. Franklin helped him go through the licensing process and draw up contracts for two employees. I’m so grateful, she told Franklin, who let himself be taken out for dinner.
The kiosk is an electric tropical-butterfly blue, an umbrellalike contraption holding bicycles, large and small, suspended in rows above the ground. On top of the whirligig structure, a bright orange sign reads KICKSTAND, in smaller letters Rent—Buy—Lessons. From across the pond, it looks as if a tiny spacecraft has landed off to the left of the Wonderland statue. The first time Tommy saw it, she imagined the Times headline: “Alice Abducted by Aliens.” The Post: “From Rabbit Hole to Black Hole.”
As she hurries along the rim of the pond, she sees three parent-child couples waiting for their turn, circling the kiosk, inspecting the colorful choices. But the young man helping them isn’t Dani. He’s too short.
Has she made a mistake? Today’s not the day or, worse, she’s supposed to be downtown in that park on the Hudson, at the other Kickstand.
But no—there he is, sitting on the edge of the bronze mushroom, backed by Alice and her cohorts, face tilted up to the sun. Tommy stands immediately in front of him, nearly touching his knees, before he opens his eyes. “Hello,” he says, smiling, unstartled. “Hello there, Sis.”
“Sorry I’m late.”
Dani extends one leg to prod Tommy’s hip with the toe of a sneaker. “But you come with a feast…yes?” He eyes her bag.
“I forgot the sandwiches. I’m sorry. Maybe a hot dog?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Sorry.”
“I get the bigger half,” he says.
“Dani, I’ll buy you your own. Two of your own. With a pretzel. A Dove bar. Have you lost weight?”
“More like two or three years of my life.” He slides off the mushroom. Sh
e waits while he speaks with the boy in the blue apron. Still stirred by the anxious thrill of her rendezvous with Nick, she isn’t in the mood for meeting anyone new.
She lets her brother lead the way. Around the first bend in the path he chooses, they see a cart. While Tommy negotiates food, Dani checks his phone. “Jane says hi.”
“Hi to Jane.”
“Joe is giving her a workout. Did you know a bookcase can double as a ladder?” He puts his phone away to take his food. “Visions of backyards dance in our heads.”
They sit on a bench beside the path.
Dani eats quickly, licking mustard from his fingers. Tommy eats slowly; she has yet to finish her single hot dog when he’s already done with two.
“Man, did that hit the spot,” he says.
She listens to him talk about Joe’s latest words and physical feats, Joe’s new sitter, Jane’s job at the clinic. The only complaint they have about their new neighborhood is that it lacks a good playground or decent grocery store. He wakes from dreams featuring the joyful discovery of lawns and ponds where, in real urban life, acres of deserted railyards await purchase by some deep-pockets developer.
“Are you saying you’re headed to Connecticut now that I’m back here?”
“God, no. But now I get Connecticut. Conformicut. Predictable, right? Change of subject required….So Franklin. Franklin. How is Fraaaanklin?”
“Franklin and I are partners. We are business partners.”
“He’s a good catch. For an old maid like you.”
“That isn’t funny.”
“Come on, Toms. Loosen up.”
“Or it is, but not always. Not today.”
“What’s up today?”
“Nothing. The Indian-summer blues.”
“Please don’t start making up a song. Please.”
“Oh God. Last week, dealing with more paperwork, I thought of the one he wrote when they were audited. ‘Tasmania, Taxman?’ ”