“I feel fortunate to be here,” he says.
The more the actor speaks, the less Tommy feels capable of responding. There is something suffocating about being in the presence of celebrity, as if the man is literally taking in all the available air.
Christ, should she offer to take his jacket? His expensive scarf?
He winds the scarf deftly around a hand, like a skein of yarn, and pushes it into a pocket. “I really am grateful,” he tells her. “I’m eager to see everything you’ll show me, but I don’t want to intrude. All right, well, that’s not entirely true.”
Still speechless, she leads him into the kitchen. She sets the box on the table.
They stand on opposite sides, and simultaneously they speak.
She: “May I offer you tea, coffee—a beer? I could make you a lemonade.” He: “How boorish of me. I wanted to say, first thing, how sorry I am. I’ve read all the tributes and the obituaries and…it’s still so hard to believe. So awful.”
In the lull that follows their jumbled words, his outpacing hers, they laugh.
“Well,” says Tommy. “Thank you. It has been awful. And I’m sorry for you…that you missed meeting him. He was looking forward to…that.” To you.
She repeats her offer, determined to hold the upper hand. She mustn’t turn to sand just because the man is famous. Not so long ago, she reminds herself, he wasn’t, so maybe he’s not yet accustomed to being a Face. And it’s not as if hanging out with famous men is something new to her—though famous for looks is different from famous for brains. Not that one precludes the other….
“Tea would be great,” says Nick. “And you’ll join me?” He longs for the beer she offered, but if he can win her over, he’ll have that beer in good time. And tea—tea will make him feel more grounded. A beer would make him giddy. Even dead sober, he’s jabbering.
“I have lunch for us. A quiche and salad.”
“Thank you. That sounds brilliant. And too good of you.”
“Please sit,” she says. “And I’ll open this.”
She recognizes the box, by its trademark magenta, as coming from the gourmet purveyor in Greenwich Village that Morty often uses to send holiday gifts to his editors, agents, and other enablers of his creative life. (Used to send, she reminds her mind.) So the pears and chocolates aren’t a surprise to Tommy, but the book…
She takes it out and sits down. She hasn’t put the kettle on, but here she is, paging through this small book, her eyes welling up. This isn’t going well. She isn’t the slightest bit in control—not of her emotions and definitely not of the situation.
“Now I really am sorry,” says Nicholas Greene. “I’ve upset you. I bought the book before your boss had his accident. I read about his passion for—”
She looks up quickly. “I didn’t think of Morty as my boss, Mr. Greene.” She gets up, setting the book on the table, and goes to the stove to heat water—and to turn her face away. She feels herself growing red, moved yet also irritated by the postmortem gift. How could he not see it, now, as a purely obsequious gesture?
“Nick,” he says. “Please call me Nick. And I’d very much like to get to know…Mr. Lear as you knew him. Whatever you’ll share with me. I liked him so much, based on our early exchanges. I want to do him honor with this film. We all do. I mean, do you know—and I’m hardly the only one among us—I remember so clearly reading—or, I suppose technically, listening to Colorquake. My older sister read it to me, sometimes my brother. And the one about the fox and the balloon, the boy who—
“Listen to me. As if you need my ramblings to know what a genius he was.” He sounds like a dithering sod.
Deliberately, Tommy keeps moving. As she extracts the toweled bundle of greens from the refrigerator, she says, “No amount of praise was too much for Morty, especially from grown-ups remembering his books from when they were small. He lived to delight small children.” (Not primarily, but what does it matter?)
“I’ll show you his studio after lunch.” And then I will see you on your way. But already she’s mesmerized, suddenly averse to the thought of his leaving too soon. At thirty-four (which she knows from the profiles she and Morty read), Nicholas Greene is young enough to be her child, so the lure she feels is hardly romantic—but perhaps she understands now what makes a successful actor into a star: a literal radiance, something molecular. And then there’s his accent, which, to her gullible American ears, inspires an exasperating degree of knee-jerk reverence.
“Do you like avocado?” she asks.
“Avocado? It’s one of the best things about spending time in this country,” he says. “I am mad for avocado!”
“It was one of Morty’s favorite things. That he could afford to eat it every day. Sometimes he’d have half an avocado with lime juice for breakfast. Maybe with an egg white, scrambled.”
“You cooked for him.”
She sets the table around him. She likes that he doesn’t offer to help, an offer that would only confuse her. “Not always. Though usually dinner,” she says. “And there was a time when we entertained a lot. We’d cook together—or hire somebody. There was a local caterer everyone loved back then.” Now she is the one who’s rambling.
“Back when Mr. Kelly lived here, too?”
“Yes. That was a very social time.” She reminds herself that Soren, as a character, will be in the movie. Which brings up yet another source of anxiety. Will the movie show Morty’s most private moments, the way he ran wild after his mother’s dementia set in? What happened in Tucson—the reason the director is probably making this film in the first place—is worrisome enough.
“I hope you’re willing to talk about what it was like then—and before. And since then, too. Not that…I don’t want to turn this into some sort of interrogation.”
“But you’re here to ask questions, and I do want to help,” says Tommy. And it’s beginning to feel as if, despite herself, she does.
“Look, I’m sure part of your job—I mean, a natural part of living with him—was to guard his privacy.”
Tommy concentrates on the food for a moment. Nicholas Greene is right, of course, but when she thinks back to those days, the “very social time,” she recalls how pathetically powerless she was to “guard” Morty from anything. Against his very nature, Morty pandered to Soren’s longing for the limelight. The gatherings of artists and writers in this house were legendary; invitations to the parties—almost always mailed—became objects of envy. The most opulent, a fund-raiser for Act Up held under a tent in the garden by the pool, was the subject of a Vanity Fair article. “Of Titans in Tuxes and Tomtens in Trees,” it was called. Among the photographs of Morty and his wealthy guests (many of them younger men who would die in the next few years) was an image of one of the hand-colored engravings in the limited-edition book that went to the most lavish donors: Morty’s Christmas tribute to Astrid Lindgren, The Tomten in the Orchard. Wearing his conical red hat, the bearded elf perched high in a tree whose gnarled branches were laden with apples yet traced in snow. The tomten reached up into the night sky with a long-handled butterfly net, aiming at the brightest star. Tommy saw the tone of the article as subtly mocking, but Morty found it flattering. He invited the reporter to the next party they gave.
The parties stopped after Soren’s illness outfoxed the best treatments Morty could buy. That was a terrible time for all of them, but the hardest part for Tommy (harder even than Soren’s rage, directed so often at her) was how distant Morty became, how he kept things from her that normally she would have been the first to know. After Morty told her about Soren’s diagnosis, it took her a month to find a way to ask Morty about his own health; his reaction was angry, as if this were none of her business. Hadn’t it occurred to him that he would be her first concern? Worse still, she had no idea if Soren’s being diagnosed so long after he’d moved into the house meant something she couldn’t bear thinking: that he had been unfaithful to Morty or that, contrary to everything Tommy assumed, the relations
hip between the two men had openly admitted others. How naïve she had been to assume that Morty had no life beyond what she could see.
“You’ve known Mr. Lear in just about every era of his life,” says Nicholas Greene. “How astonishing. And, really, what a privilege.”
“I don’t think about it that way,” she says, “though maybe I should.”
Tommy sets down the salad bowl, then the plates with their wedges of steaming quiche. The fragrance of tarragon pervades the kitchen. Coins of sunlight, scattered through the leaves of the cherry tree, form a quavering pattern across the table setting.
Nick spreads his napkin over his lap. “You were with him when he lost his mother, then his lover—and the editor he told me he loved so much.”
“Rose.” Morty cried more after his editor’s death than he had after his mother’s.
“I’m sure he felt lucky to have you with him, right here, for support. And trust. When you’re…prosperous”—Tommy notes the care with which he chooses this word over, perhaps, famous or popular—“it’s hard to know whom you can properly trust.”
Tommy looks Nicholas Greene in the eye—which isn’t easy. “He would have had someone else, if not me. He didn’t want a family, he didn’t want to live in the city, but he didn’t want to live alone.”
“But he chose you.”
Tommy feels strangely proud to have him say this to her—but he would be saying this to anyone sitting in this chair at this moment in time. Actors live by their scripts. “I suppose he did. And I chose him.” She adds quickly, “He used to joke that he’d have chosen a cat instead, except that a cat would refuse to stand in line for stamps.”
“He wasn’t one for flattery, was he?” The actor deploys his golden smile.
Now it would take an industrial crane to lift her gaze from the plate. Over the past week, she has felt these inklings of dread, each like a subtle draft from an open window. She tells herself it’s simply the dread of all she faces in following through on Morty’s intentions. Tommy takes little comfort in the security of knowing she is now the “prosperous” one, especially because she is not the famous one, the gifted one, the like-nobody-else-on-earth teller of tales. Morty was anything but her twin, yet it’s as if she somehow believed that, like those three children he dreamed up, they were inseparable, mortality itself the source of their alloyed strength.
Tommy can’t help hearing her brother’s voice, one of the last things Dani said to her last year before she kicked him out of the house: You’re not his “friend.” You’re just a wife without the sex. Not even a modern, liberated wife. You know that, don’t you, Toms? Another problem she’s yet to deal with: Dani. If Dani knows about Morty’s death, it would be from the news at large, perhaps that one-two punch in the Times: first the sprawling obituary (a color photo above the fold; how Morty would have swanned about the house had he lived to see it) and the subsequent “appreciation” posted on the next day’s editorial page, adorned with a tiny engraving of a wreath.
“Am I tasting mint?” says Nicholas Greene, a forkful of salad midair.
“I toss a few herbs with the lettuce.”
“Lovely.”
They eat a few bites of food, sip their tea. Furtively, she watches him, the way he touches the corner of his wide mouth with his napkin. Impeccable manners, she observes, and she is reminded of the times she and Morty, after a night out at some public affair, would sit at this table and dissect the personalities.
“Can I ask what you’ll miss most about him?”
Tommy is startled. “Well. This will sound strange…but right now what I miss most is the sound of his breathing at night. Which was loud. My bedroom is—was—separate, of course, but I’m a light sleeper. The last few years, we left our doors open. He was afraid—” Why is she telling him all this? She takes another bite of salad.
“Afraid?”
“Of dying, in the middle of the night, alone, no one to hear if he called for help. And then, in the end, he dies in broad daylight, outdoors—but alone just the same.”
Nick, who rarely lets a conversation lapse into silence (of which he isn’t a fan; in truth, of which he’s afraid—there’s his fear unmasked), reaches for something polite to say. He wishes the vibration of his phone in his breast pocket would stop interrupting his concentration. (He promised to leave it on; he did not promise to answer.) “Lovely, this salad,” he says. (Didn’t he say the same thing two minutes ago?) “Very fresh.”
“If you were to visit in July or August,” says Tommy, “everything would have come from our garden. Except the avocado.”
“Yes. Quite!”
She must want him gone. He’d want him gone. But he is intent on winning her over. It’s not just that she seems guarded. She’s so…dignified. And she is younger, or seems younger, than he thought she would be. (Kendra told him he had the typically cruel eye of a caddish young man when it came to meeting women over fifty. “Like they might as well pack it up, hurl themselves down the nearest chute to oblivion. I see it in your shifty eyes,” she said after that endless carnival of drinks parties in Toronto. If he looked shifty, it was surely an expression caused by digestive mayhem and overimbibing. But Kendra had to drive her point into the ground, informing Nick that if his mother were alive, she would still be wearing heels and dancing. “Except that she bloody isn’t,” he snapped. Another rung down that ladder.)
Tommy can hear Nicholas Greene’s phone calling for attention inside his jacket. Should she be flattered that he ignores it? “I have to confess,” she says, unable to tolerate the pause, “we hadn’t seen Taormina yet. It was out of theaters by the time we heard that you were cast. As Morty.”
“ ‘Out of theaters’!” Does his laughter always sound so much like braying? “I wish we still lived in an era when such phrases had meaning. Most people seem to get their entertainment pirated these days. And then they watch it on a laptop while marooned in some airport or up all night in a panic over paying taxes. People watch films on their phones.” How many calls is he ignoring? Will this person never give up? Probably Si. Nick is going to get hell.
“We didn’t exactly see movies in theaters much, either,” she says. “There’s a monster Cineplex twenty minutes away, and that’s about it. You can be in one theater watching a French love story, and if there’s a shoot-’em-up thriller showing next door, the gunfire comes right through the walls. I think we keep our local video store in business.” Will she continue to do that? She has a miserable vision of herself eating dinners, alone, in front of the flat-screen TV they purchased barely a year ago.
“Not to worry,” says Nick. “There are a million things to see out there and not enough time. Films are becoming almost quaint.” Should he offer to send her a screener, or would that seem cheeky?
“But people say your performance…” She stops, blushing.
“Whatever people say, it’s not a film that will change your life, I promise you that, Ms. Daulair.”
Tomasina Daulair—who still hasn’t asked him to address her with the slightest informality—is rather striking for a woman of fifty-five: slim, with long silver hair worn loose. Around her throat she wears a dark, silken beach stone in which a small pearl has been embedded. Her faintly striped blouse is tailored close, autumnal in color, and her long velvet skirt is more dreamy than prim. A slit along her left calf reveals a glimpse of orange stocking. All right, full disclosure to self: he expected a whiskered, gum-soled spinster, a secular nun. Kendra wasn’t entirely wrong.
“Do you want to answer that?” says Tommy, pointing at his hidden breast pocket. “Please go ahead, if you need to.”
“I do not need or even want to answer it,” he says with a vehemence that takes him by surprise. “What I’d like—and I hope it’s not too forward—what I’d really like is if you’d show me around a bit.”
“You still have time?”
“All the time in the world, Ms. Daulair.” To reassure her that she has his full attention, Nick remove
s his mobile from his pocket and turns it off. Damn whoever this is, pestering him. He will call Silas from the car when he returns to the city. He will sit back and take whatever bollocking he’s due.
And though she still does not put him on less formal terms, Ms. Daulair leads the way toward a back door. She takes a man’s barn jacket off a nearby hook and shrugs it on before he can offer an assist. It occurs to him that she’s taken excellent care of herself as well as Mort Lear, that dependent as she may have been on the prosperity of another, she is also independent as can be.
As she strides ahead of him along a flagstone path through the garden, a flash of orange leg catches the sun. Nick has to jog a bit to keep pace.
“You’d like to see the studio most of all, I’m sure,” she says, and he heartily agrees, as he would if she had proposed they tour a potting shed—which only reminds him of the bind he’s in, the things he knows that he’s beginning to wish he didn’t.
He watches her take a key ring from a pocket in the jacket (Lear’s?) and unlock two separate locks. “Morty never worried that anyone would steal his work,” she says as she pushes open the door, “but he kept some valuable items in here. As you’ll see. Even out here in the country, you can’t be too careful.”
Stepping into the cool interior, Nick sighs. “Wow,” he says, sounding as childlike as he feels. All around him—on the walls, on the surfaces of tables, no doubt in the many drawers and cabinets—are hundreds, probably thousands, of artifacts defining a life. Not just any life, and not just the life of a famous man, but the next life Nick will wear like a masterfully tailored suit. A bespoke role. A self as captivating and rich in varied destinations as an entire country.
“I know,” says Ms. Daulair, “and it’s the real thing. Or so we believe.”
Only then does he see the Greek vase, in a fixed case, on a shelf above the great man’s desk. “Oh, all of it,” he says, “looks like the real thing to me.”