Then it happened; Morty apparently couldn’t resist. (And why should it be a secret?) The three of them were eating Tommy’s cheeseburgers when she noticed that Morty had gone quiet and was staring at Dani. So abruptly that it startled her, Morty looked at Tommy and said, “Did you ever tell him?”
Dani turned to his sister.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t.”
“Finish up,” Morty said to Dani. “I want to show you something. But no—don’t rush. Slow down, my friend, or you are going to choke.” He got up from the table, took his plate to the sink, and told them to join him in the studio after they finished.
“What’s he talking about?” said Dani.
“You’ll see,” said Tommy, but she couldn’t meet his eyes.
After he had finished the last of his sister’s sweet potatoes as well as his own, they took the spiral staircase to the upper level. Morty’s bedroom was at the back; the rest of the floor comprised a glass atrium where he wrote and drew. To Morty, this aerie was ample justification for walking up four steep flights of stairs just to be home.
He was arranging a row of drawings across the wooden table at the center of the room. “Dani,” said Morty, “meet Ivo. If you haven’t already.”
—
Merry wants a martini—or three—but she’s sitting across from Sol, the smartest and least arrogant of the museum’s directors, so she orders a glass of Sancerre, vowing to sip it slowly rather than roll up her sleeve and ask the waiter to inject it directly into her arm. (She imagines pulling from her purse one of those blue rubber ties brandished by nurses. “Pump your fist, darling,” the fetching gay waiter would purr.)
“Sol,” she says, “I’m so grateful you could make it.”
“Merry, no one’s more shocked than I am. What the hell happened here?”
God, is he blaming this on her? Well, of course he is. Maybe, in fact, it is Merry’s fault. Maybe there’s a subterranean corollary between the failure of her marriage and Lear’s postmortem slap in the face. She tries to channel her mother’s fortitude.
Sol orders a martini.
She tells Sol how she’s pored over the correspondence and can’t see any sign of displeasure—or not enough that he would pull the rug out from under her. (She knows that she needs to stop taking this personally, but since she can never speak face-to-face with Mort again, what difference does it make?)
“The only thing I can think of is that he didn’t come clean with me about equal billing with Stu. I should have made it clear that his art was the deal breaker, not Stu’s. Maybe I didn’t handle that diplomatically enough.” Christ, was she being submissive? Enormous mistake.
“Did we ever have it in writing from Lear—his intention that we would have custodianship of the work?”
Merry would love to lie or obfuscate, but she can’t. “Apparently not.” She has plunged deep into the well of e-mail going back nearly a decade. Nothing. All those conversational assurances—at their lunches, at the museum fund-raisers—are pointless. (Didn’t he mention it in a keynote? Do they have that keynote on video?)
“A halfway house for runaway boys? Oy.” Sol shakes his head.
“Well, are you up for fighting such a cause?”
“We do have a lot of his work in our possession. That gives us bargaining power. We could salvage something if we negotiate with his executor—Tomasina, right? Please tell me you’ve done nothing to put her off. Because look, even if we find ‘proof’ of his promise at the back of some forgotten file, we can’t look like the litigious family of the little old lady who leaves her nest egg to the local animal shelter.”
The waiter conveys a brimming martini glass to their table with the concentration of an acrobat on a tightrope. The wineglass is, of course, barely half full.
Sol owns several blocks of the Meatpacking District—or what you might now call the Haven’t-we-met-on-Twitter? District. Not that he would know Gansevoort from Little West Twelfth. It’s all Monopoly to him. But people respect Sol, no one more than Merry. If not for Sol, the Contemporary Book Museum would still be a pop-up shrine in her broom closet (an amenity she can kiss goodbye in whatever future abode her jacked-up rent will force her to choose; or perhaps that abode will have to be a broom closet).
“I’m going to be honest, Sol,” says Merry, reminding herself to sip the wine. “I have always focused on Mort. I feel as if I am perfectly friendly with Tomasina, but we are nowhere near chummy, and I can’t remember the last time I saw her in person. I took a lot for granted, I have to confess.” Global understatement.
The waiter is hovering. Sol orders oysters for both of them, an elaborate list of two this, four that, six whatever. Which earns them a basket of hot corn bread. Merry decides that the stress she is under justifies corn bread. But no butter.
“Look,” she says. “I think I have to go out there and visit her. She’s not answering my messages. I suspect that with all she’s handling, we are nothing but a headache. I need to reassure her that we are her ally in preserving Mort’s legacy.”
“Do you suppose,” says Sol, “we could find a way to merge the interests of the boys’ home and the museum? A joint philanthropic-arts something or other?”
Merry almost coughs her ninth sip of Sancerre onto the shiny blank plate awaiting her oysters. “Like what, bunk the boys in our museum? Offer them internships with Enrico? I can’t imagine what you’re thinking.”
“I’m not thinking anything concrete,” says Sol. “I’m just creating portals of thought.” He winks and takes a large bite of corn bread.
Portals of thought? Is this really what Sol meant to say? And what was that wink about? She notices that he is looking trimmer than the last time she saw him. He is easily twenty-five years her senior, but he has the boyish luster of a prosperous man with a deservedly well-paid trainer.
“I wish this were a time for humor,” says Merry.
He sighs. “The summer gala…”
“I know. My thought, before all this, was that Mort would help us announce the rollout.” Their annual glad-handing party—extra lavish this year because they plan to introduce the architect to their patrons and show off a model of the museum—is a month away. They have reserved a new party space in Red Hook, overlooking the harbor, and plan to run a shuttle bus for those who want a glimpse of the nascent structure.
“There’s Shine. Who is, in some ways, bigger. Sexier.”
“That’s a stretch, Sol.” From a younger perspective than hers, what he’s said is true, however, and it’s also depressing—though not in a million years would she say so aloud. Shine is the pen name of Stuart Scheinman, a dystopian graphic novelist whose beefy biker body is as littered with eclectically grim tattoos as his speech (among adults) is with raw expletives. There are rumors that he was an Idaho skinhead in his teens, anything to hide that he was an outnumbered Jew. Only midway through his twenties, he’s built a vast, amoebalike fan base among urban and wannabe-urban teens of both genders (and the growing demographic of those in between). Progressive educators give him credit for steering the Snapchat generation back toward real, turn-the-pages books, just as J. K. Rowling did for the Nintendo crowd.
The idea of the rollout is to spotlight the children’s literature wing of the museum, the obvious media bait in a city now powered by adults for whom bright, accomplished children are the sine qua non of social status. They wax sentimental about the likes of Sandra Boynton, William Steig, Eric Carle, and Suzanne Collins, clever creative types who helped them (or their nannies) steer their children toward Stuyvesant High and the shimmering Gold Coast of the Ivies beyond. If Merry is cynical about the skewed ideals of these adults, she is not cynical about the books their children loved. She reveres those books and, to some extent, their authors—among whom Mort Lear is a god. Now that Merry has also been appointed the first director of the Consortium for Outer Borough Museums, it would be devastating if this snub were to tarnish the launch of the new museum.
She must she
d the fantasies she had of making her entrance on opening night with Mort at her side, her manicured hand on his sleeve, radiant in their mutual pride.
Sol wants to talk about plans to draw adequate traffic from the museum district of the Upper East Side and the gallery glut of West Chelsea all the way to nether-Brooklyn. Merry assures him that by the time the museum opens, they will be in a prime cultural location.
“Merry, this is the you I know and have confidence in,” says Sol. “Both delphic and positive in your predictions.”
“Thanks, Sol.” She hopes his patronizing praise is merely a side effect of his second martini. “I’m going to solve the Lear problem, but I think I need a change of subject now.”
They wind up debating whether Staten Island is the next Brooklyn, and in the lull between the main course and the cheese plate, Merry dutifully asks about Sol’s three fortunate children: one at Harvard Law, one tinkering with fitness apps out in Silicon Valley, one about to deliver twins.
Which leads to Sol’s mordant commentary on what it feels like to know he’s about to be bumped one generation closer to death.
By dessert (unadorned berries for her, molten chocolate cheesecake for him), Merry is exhausted and wonders why she thought this meeting would produce any useful solutions to the crisis. All it’s produced is her reckless promise to solve it herself.
“I’m glad we’ve figured out what needs to happen,” says Sol. “You’re good with the artistic egos, the care and maintenance. That’s no minor talent.” He grins.
Is that her signature talent? Merry contemplates the epitaph: STROKED ARTISTIC EGOS WITH THE BEST OF ’EM. “I don’t want to think too hard about that,” she says. “What it means.”
“What it means, Merry, is that you’re astute. Likable. Unspoiled.”
Merry lets the conversation rest there. The truth is, she feels as if she has lost her balance. Getting it back is not so simple.
At the coat check, as Sol beckons her into her jacket, he presses a hand lightly against the small of her back, shocking her briefly with the cold touch of the zipper bisecting her dress. “A nightcap?” he says. “I’m staying in the city tonight.”
Merry moves toward the door and faces him only when they’re on the sidewalk. “Sol.” She tries for a tone more reasoning than shocked.
He smiles ruefully. “A man about to be a grandfather needs a little novelty now and then.”
Merry lays a hand against his tie and says, “You’d be in big trouble if I were ten years younger.”
“I know that.” He is already scanning the avenue, over her shoulder, for taxis.
“But believe me, Sol, I’m flattered.” Has she offended him? Christ.
“Merry,” he says, “let’s pretend I never went there. As you said earlier, let’s not take too much for granted.” He flags down a cab and says, as he opens the door, his smile now pure courtesy, “Here you are.”
The cab flies along like a speedboat, bouncing on potholes as if they were waves, passing through one just-green light after another. Merry thinks, Here I am. Here I am. Recently, her mother told her to appreciate her young body, to really feel how lucky she is to be where she is—in the prime of life—rather than fretting over all the things she doesn’t have (or won’t ever have in the future; like, say, grandchildren and the luxurious sense of mortality they bring). “When you are my age,” her mother said, “you will look back from the prison of your arthritic joints and your fading eyesight and totally untrustworthy mind and you will wish that you had been thankful for every single minute of your twenties and thirties—even your forties, which you have yet to enjoy!”
But what did Sol mean by repeating her foolish mea culpa, her confession of taking too much for granted? Oh God, here come the tears.
She is glad that she runs into no one as she takes the stairs to her apartment. As always, Linus somehow recognizes her footfall and launches his barking salvo when she is thirty feet from her door.
“Only me, only me,” she murmurs as she greets him, leaning over to rub his floppy ears (telling herself to appreciate that her spine and legs allow her to bend so far over without a twinge). She tosses her computer bag and her jacket onto the couch and goes to the kitchen to check the dog’s water bowl and give him a tiny biscuit.
She was going to sit down and write a real, heartfelt letter to Tomasina Daulair, but she is too discouraged as well as too tired. In the bedroom, she kicks off her heels and lies on her back on the bed without undressing. Linus jumps up beside her, and she folds him against her left side, into the crook of an elbow. Her dress will be covered with his reddish hairs, but never mind.
“Linus,” she says, “please tell me your day was better than mine.”
On days when she’s lingered in the apartment for hours, to read a good book or make a meal for friends, Merry has noticed how Linus follows a particular swatch of sunlight that migrates across the living room rug and up onto the couch. That patch of warmth, to him, is utterly sublime. For a few years, her marriage to Benjamin felt like that. Being with him at the end of a long workday, or through a lazy weekend, was like following a slice of sun across a soft, richly patterned carpet. Was she selfish to want a child so badly? Benjamin had told her, toward the end, that it didn’t matter to him whether or not they became parents.
Did she always want too much? Or was she beating herself up merely for her own perfectly respectable longings?
Merry met Mort ten years ago, when both she and the book museum were ingenues in their world: bright-eyed, yearning, optimistic. She had conceived of a small but gemlike show based on beloved child protagonists from illustrated children’s books: a gallery filled with original images, one each, of Eloise, Harold, Homer Price, Fern Arable, Harriet the Spy, and their literary compatriots. No animals (sorry, Frog and Toad, Horton and Lyle) and no adults (ditto, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, Miss Poppins, Doctor Dolittle). Some of the illustrators were long dead, but a few contemporary characters were crucial, and Merry had her heart set on Ivo.
Her boss, the museum’s original director, was skeptical that Lear would cooperate. He was at the height of his fame and yet, perhaps not so ironically, in retreat from the social limelight. He also seemed to have retreated from picture books. The Inseparables trilogy continued to ride a wave of conspicuous favor. To Lear, the director told Merry, Ivo was surely a relic of his past, no matter how immortal that book might become.
A return letter from Lear’s assistant, expressing cordial regret, confirmed this speculation—which only deepened Merry’s resolve. So she took the train to Orne on the following Saturday, a festive October day of splintered sun and skittering leaves. From the station, she walked the two miles to Lear’s house. She felt absurd as she walked along the driveway, carrying a shopping bag containing a gardenia plant—what was she thinking?—and she half expected some alarm to go off. But she reached the house without deterrence or even apparent notice. She was about to follow the walk to the front door when she saw the building out back, clearly an artist’s studio. Through the window, she could just see the artist himself, working.
What would he do, shoot her? Call the police? She did not have to summon the courage to knock, because he opened the door.
“A visitor,” he said, sounding neither pleased nor disapproving. He glanced at her bag. “Bearing gift, it would appear. Was I expecting you?”
“Not really,” she said. “No.”
He did not invite her in, but he did not close the door. She noticed, first and foremost, the horizontal smudge of charcoal across the pale blue shirt, bisecting his subtle paunch, a mark left by a table’s edge. He wore loose jeans and a pair of ramshackle moccasins.
“I’m Meredith Galarza. I’m from the museum that wants you to lend us a drawing of Ivo. I know you said no, you turned us down, but I thought that maybe, if I could just talk to you, tell you how much it would mean to us, to me, then…” Then you might say yes, she couldn’t quite say. Really, how ludicrous.
“Come
in,” he said. “I happen to be in search of distraction. You’ll keep me from eating another candy bar. Would you like a candy bar?” He waved at a bowl of miniature chocolate Hershey’s bars.
She took one and thanked him. But then she felt too self-conscious to take off the wrapper. “Go ahead and eat it,” he said. “I like that you didn’t assume the safe stance of refusal.”
Had she been a child and told that she was in Santa’s workshop, she wouldn’t have been half as enchanted and amazed as she felt stepping into this room, not large, low-ceilinged, but impossibly, exquisitely cluttered and crowded with sketches, constructions, jars of brushes and pencils….There were even sketches taped to the ceiling above a drafting table. Sketches of clouds, washed over in pale blues and pinks.
“Tell me about your show,” he said. “After you finish your little chocolate bar. And please eat more. I stole these from the ammo supply for Halloween. I love chocolate. I loathe Halloween.”
“Oh, I hate it, too,” she said, relieved that she could mean it.
He took her tiny crumpled wrapper and pointed to a rolling stool in the middle of the floor. He asked her what she had in the bag.
“It’s a plant. I was brought up to bring something when you go for a visit.”
He took the bag and removed the gardenia. He pulled away the tissue, closed his eyes, and inhaled the fragrance of the forced blossoms. “Heavenly.” He set the plant on a wide windowsill. Then he settled in a large leather armchair and regarded her, waiting.
She told him about the characters so far featured in her show—as if they were the artists, not the creations. “So I want Ivo,” she said, finally. “I want him very badly. I want him as the star.”
Mort Lear smiled casually through her gushing, inane soliloquy. After a pause, he stood up and walked past her. Was he going to kick her out, just like that?
He disappeared behind a half wall toward the back of the room. Listening astutely, Merry trembled with anticipation when she heard him opening drawers to a flat file. She knew that precise sound, that soft rolling grumble, from life in a museum. To Merry, a flat file was a treasure chest. She loved the casual privilege she had to slide open such drawers, whenever she liked, to take out and marvel at any of the works they contained.