Lear came back around the wall cradling a broad sheaf of papers, which he set down at the edge of a vast wooden table that was filled, from end to end, with manuscript pages and sketches, along with two stained mugs and a plate peppered with bread crumbs. He cleared a large space in the center and then, as she watched, laid out three of the drawings from Colorquake.
“Clever of you, showing up in person,” he said. “Also, coming while my assistant is out on errands. I won’t ask if you lurked at the foot of the driveway until the coast was clear.”
Would one drawing suffice? She could pick from the three that lay before her.
She shot up from her stool to join him at the table. The stool rolled a foot away. Quick, she thought, before the assistant returns.
“This one.” On impulse, she chose the largest sheet of paper, the one divided into three cells: Ivo in the basement, so engrossed in his painting that he doesn’t notice the earthquake. “Oh, thank you,” she added. “Really?” Why oh why, she thought, did she add that caboose of verbal insecurity? What a girl she sometimes was.
After a short, awkward silence, he said, “Tell you what, Meredith. I’d like to see your museum. So how about we make a lunch date. I’ll bring the drawing with me. You give me a tour. I promise not to change my mind. And lunch is on me.”
She wanted to snatch the drawing and bolt. Thank you! Yes! Contract to follow! Don’t want to miss my train! Not that he could ever have simply let her walk out with it. She reminded herself to breathe. “I suppose you need to consult your agent.”
For an instant, the look on his face alarmed her. “I don’t actually need to consult anyone, Meredith.”
When he beamed at her then, she had a strange dropping sensation in her gut, the kind of inner collapse that signifies falling suddenly and hard, a feeling she knew from Fede, her first grown-up boyfriend, and earlier flames; from, most recently, Benjamin. Lear was twice her age, but when he smiled like that, she could see in his face the roguishly magnetic younger man, the one whose picture was tucked inside all his books published after the first edition of Colorquake.
“You have gumption,” he said. “I look forward to our date in the city.” He asked for her card, which she fumbled from her wallet (which she fumbled from her bag). “I’ll call you,” he said. “I will.”
He saw her out. “No car?” he commented, looking around. “Or did you park out on the street, to be sly?”
“Well, yes,” she lied—although what if he insisted on walking her to the road?
He didn’t. She hurried, suddenly aware how lucky she had been not to be waylaid by the assistant. (When she said no, had the woman even consulted her boss?) As she turned onto the road, a car turned in behind her, from the opposite direction. Merry quickened her pace, afraid she might be stopped, but she wasn’t.
He did call her. He brought the drawing, with paperwork drawn up by the assistant. He took her to lunch, where they drank a bottle of wine (or perhaps he drank a glass and she drank the rest). Lunch lasted nearly the entire afternoon, and when Merry returned to Benjamin’s apartment, she was still tipsy. She made love to him that night with a ferocity that pleased yet alarmed him. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you’re falling in love with somebody else,” he said, afterward, in the dark.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, laughing through her innocent lie. Because she had in fact been imagining Lear beneath her, and not the younger, bygone Lear but the fleshy man in the tweedy jacket who had flirted over lunch the way only gay men flirt with women: safely (unless the woman harbors false hope) and dangerously (because he can still, if chastely, break her heart).
Over the next ten years, she had come to see her relationship with Mort like a meta-marriage. Even Benjamin could tell when she was dressing not just for work but for lunch with the Great Man. And once she knew she was losing Benjamin, she had assured herself, however pathetically, that she was secure in the consolation of Mort.
But clearly she wasn’t.
Through the window across from the bed, cars, unseen three stories below, cast a pulsing tide of bluish light onto the ceiling as they turn toward Gramercy Park. She shifts her gaze lower and sees the glint of the glass in the frame that protects the drawing she brought home last month, just as a covert loan. Now it taunts her. It’s the picture of Ivo in the forest, his outstretched arms adorned with flying creatures, their feathered and gossamer wings filling with color. If she were never to return it to the museum, especially now that the collection must be returned to Orne (or must it?), she wonders if anyone would guess its whereabouts. She would never sell it, of course. She could live out her husbandless, childless years, with Linus and then another dog, and one or two others beyond them if she’s lucky, and even if she were to leave the drawing displayed openly in her bedroom—her next bedroom, wherever that will be once she’s forced to move—who would ever see it?
She gets up and turns on a lamp. She goes to the framed drawing, takes it from the shelf, and carries it back to her bed, where she holds it in her lap. “Ivo as Saint Francis,” some people call this image. But what a beautiful child. So—there—she would have a child after all, wouldn’t she?
Three
1972
Tomasina was twelve when she decided she would rather be Tommy. This was the year she became fully conscious of how much she disliked being lumped together with other girls, being seen as typical in any way. Her mother called her an “obstinate nonconformist,” making it obvious that her daughter’s individuality pleased her. “I’m an ist, too,” she said. “A leftist optimist activist feminist!” Tommy’s father laughed, kissed his wife, and said, “Call me a recidivist hedonist satirist anarchist!” Out came his guitar—he loved any clever exchange that might inspire a song—and he improvised some verbally gymnastic goofball lyrics. The singer-mathematician Tom Lehrer was his idol.
Tommy’s parents loved making music, but to “pay the avaricious piper,” as Dad put it, they ran a travel agency on Bleecker Street. They worked every weekday till six o’clock and took turns on the weekends. After school, Tommy looked after her brother. He was in kindergarten that year, and it seemed like all he ever wanted to do was run, climb, and leap—often from a sidewalk into the street. Looking after Dani was like being in charge of a raccoon or a cheetah, a wild animal prone to mischief and speed. Dani couldn’t stand the confines of their apartment, so Tommy took him as often as she could to the library (her preference) or the playground (his).
So of course she hated that she hated math, because girls were supposed to hate math. This was the source of her quiet fuming as she sat on one of the playground benches, watching Dani go up the ladder, down the slide, up the ladder, down the slide, over and over until Tommy began to wonder if she could hypnotize herself simply by watching. But the alternative—dividing fractions—might just kill her.
She had become aware that a man sitting a few feet away from her was sketching her brother—or possibly pretending. She couldn’t see the paper. It was well into April, but the day was cloudy and bitter, so there weren’t many children or mothers around. Tommy had been drilled by her parents on the necessary suspicion of strangers, no matter how nice they seemed (especially if they seemed too nice), and already (if only because the man had a ponytail, a silver bracelet, and wore a girlish paisley jacket she might have liked to own herself) she had assessed this one as a possible pervert. She didn’t feel unsafe—the playground was a fishbowl, surrounded by sidewalks and traffic—but she was on alert.
She slumped back and raised her eyes to the branches that crisscrossed overhead. Their tiny budlets had sprung forth just this week; furtively glancing sideways, she saw how the limey glow tinted the man’s blond hair ever so slightly green. He had a squarish little beard to match. The word beatnik drifted through her mind. She’d heard her father say, to one of his musician friends, that the era of the beatnik was over. He sounded sad.
She nearly slipped off the bench when the bearded man spoke
.
“Looks like you’re avoiding something.” He did not look up from his drawing, but he was speaking unmistakably to her. They were the only people on the bench.
“Excuse me?” she said, because pervs could not be ignored.
“The book in your lap,” he said. Now he laid his sketch pad aside, between them, and Tommy could see that the drawing was a good one, even upside down.
“I’ll get to it,” she said, using her oldest voice.
“I don’t mean to be nosy,” he said, “but I saw your name. It’s the same as the last name of some famous authors. Who wrote a book about Greek myths.”
Tommy knew it was time to go. It gave her the willies that he was looking at her name on the cover of her workbook. She would have to drag Dani off the slide and bribe him to go back home or he would protest; they’d hardly been there fifteen minutes. Dani knew how to make a scene like nobody else. She would have to use her allowance to buy them a Sky Bar or a jumbo Tootsie Roll. But because she hated the man’s condescension, she answered him. “I have that book. Everybody I know has it. The name is different. It has an apostrophe and an e at the end.” Decisively, she put her workbook into her book bag.
The man laughed softly. “So it does.”
She stood and called out, “Dani, let’s go! It’s too cold.” She pulled down her skirt, conscious of her yellow tights. Her father was always saying her skirts were too short, her mother telling him not to “die on that hill,” an expression that Tommy found ominous. It sounded like war talk, like something her social studies teacher would mention when he talked about Vietnam during current events.
Predictably, Dani ignored her, not even pausing in his ascent to the top of the slide. He sat, stretched his arms out wide, and pushed off.
“Your brother?”
Tommy struggled not to answer the man. This did not deter him.
“He’s quite nimble. And fearless.”
“Dani!” she called. “I’ll buy us something chocolate!” She wondered if the man would now offer to buy them both chocolate: the classic lure. If he did, should she go to the package store across the street and ask the man at the counter to call the police?
“People who aren’t parents or guardians aren’t supposed to be here. There’s a sign on the gate,” she said. Better to warn him off directly.
“Who says I’m not a parent?”
Maybe he was a perv, but he also had the look of one of her father’s artistic friends, the people he jammed with on Saturday nights: from the peace-sign patch sewn onto his jacket to the black high-top sneakers. Were the paint stains on his ragged jeans for real, or were they a ruse?
“Where’s your kid then?” She felt her own pulse, hot in her throat.
He smiled steadily at her, but he raised his hands in surrender. She noticed how smudged they were with pencil and ink. “Well, you caught me there, my friend. I come here just to draw. I’ve seen you and your brother before.”
Enough. Tommy walked over to the slide. “Hey. Come on. Really. You can choose the candy.” Finally, she had her brother’s attention. She was thankful when he took her hand and let her lead him toward the gate.
“But I get two and you get one,” he said. “Or I get the big half.”
It took an enormous effort not to look at the stranger again as they left the playground. He remained on the bench, but she could feel his eyes following her, along with his amusement, as she latched the gate. She could tell he knew exactly what she was thinking. That didn’t mean it wasn’t true.
The next day she made Dani go with her to the library, where, as he did too often, he angered the librarian: this time not by playing with the buttons on the elevator or racing up and down the aisles but by sneaking away while Tommy was hunting for a book, setting off a ruckus that was instantly identifiable as a cascade of volumes tumbling from their shelf.
The day after that, a day of buoyant warmth, she had no choice more logical than the playground. Dani found a schoolmate in the sandbox, and they set about digging a pit with the friend’s toy tractors. Tommy took from her book bag the one novel she had managed to check out of the library before they were given the boot: The Return of the Native, ostentatiously above her grade level. She settled onto the shadiest bench along the iron fence. Dani’s friend was with his mother, so she could immerse herself happily in the sure-to-be-tragic scene of Egdon Heath.
“Hello.”
The voice came from above and behind her, on the other side of the fence.
The man with the sketch pad.
She frowned and tried to resume reading.
“I brought you something—or, really, it’s for your brother.”
“We don’t want anything from you,” she said, without turning around again.
But he was slipping something through the rails of the fence, to her left: a book with a colorful jacket. Attempting to hide her curiosity, she took it. The title was The Boy Who Was Afraid of Being Afraid. The author’s name was Mort Lear.
“Would you let me come in without calling the cops on me?”
“Why should I?” But she twisted to face him.
“That’s my book. I mean, I wrote it.”
Tommy turned the book over; opened it. There was no photograph of the author. “How do I know that?”
“My word,” he said. “And this.” He extended his sketch pad through the fence. Hesitantly, she took it. At first she saw no sense to the gesture. And then she realized that he meant her to compare his sketches with the illustrations in the book.
The illustrations were, she had to admit, graceful and enticingly dark: not goofy or clunky like the condescending art in so many children’s books. She turned around and said, “I don’t know why you keep pestering me. I’m too old for this book anyway.”
“Well, first, Miss Daulair, the book is for your brother, not you. And my ‘pestering’ is also about your brother, not you. All I want is to draw him for a few days. Here. In the playground. Without your treating me like I’m a hoodlum.”
“Why does it have to be my brother?” she said. “Don’t you have friends with kids?” She barely held back from saying, Or maybe you don’t have friends.
“I like the look of your brother,” said the man who claimed to be Mort Lear. “Or what I mean is, I like the look of him for a new book I’m writing—and drawing.”
“Are you going to try and make him pose? Because good luck with that,” said Tommy. “He’s not going to do what some stranger tells him. Not even if I tell him.”
Why was she cooperating?
“Will you let me come in without blowing the whistle on me?” Mort Lear said in a low voice. He reached through the fence to take back his sketch pad.
“Do what you like,” said Tommy. “I don’t really care.”
When he came around through the gate, he walked up to her and said, “So let me try this again. Clean slate.” He held out his hand. “I’d like to introduce myself. My name is Mort Lear, and I live over on Greenwich Avenue and Bank Street, and I like drawing kids because I like making up stories for kids. And I’m lucky enough to have a publisher, even if they don’t pay me a whole lot.”
Reluctantly, she shook his hand. “Tomasina Daulair.”
“Ah. Well, it is pronounced the same way.”
Dani’s friend’s mother was watching her now. “Everything cool, Tommy?”
“Sure!” she said.
She handed the sketch pad and the picture book back to Mort Lear, but he wouldn’t take the book. “That’s for your brother. But you might like it, too. I don’t think anybody ever outgrows a good story.” He glanced at the book in her lap. “I’m pretty sure Thomas Hardy would agree. Is that your first of his? I’m partial to Tess. Dickens is much better, though. Or try Middlemarch. That’s a masterpiece.”
“Look,” said Tommy, who had never read another word of Hardy, or a single word of Dickens, though all these names were familiar to her from the classics shelves at the library. “Okay. You can stop
trying to make me like you. Draw Dani if you really want to. But only when we’re here. We are not going anywhere with you. And I’m not saying anything to him, because believe me, somehow I’ll get in trouble.”
“That’s perfect.” And just like that, he opened the sketch pad, took a pencil box from the pocket of his paisley jacket, and started to draw. After a moment, when she hadn’t stopped staring at him, he said, “Back to your Victorians, Tomasina Daulair.”
As the trees in the playground grew leafier and the sun leaned in closer and jackets were shed, Mort Lear was a frequent (if barely conversational) companion, as close yet indifferent as a shadow. Dani began to notice him, but when he asked his sister, “Who’s that man?” she said, “Oh, a friend of my art teacher.” This satisfied Dani, whose current obsession was learning to swing as fast as possible, chimpanzee-style, from rung to rung on the overhead bars.
The book Mort Lear had given her, she kept to herself. If she gave it to Dani, their parents would ask where it came from. It was a strange story, about a boy who was so cautious toward the world around him—so fearful of running into things that might scare him—that his parents didn’t know what to do. Finally, they arranged for him to spend time with different adults who did jobs that most people would find pretty scary: a beekeeper, a cave explorer, a mountain climber, a helicopter pilot, and a firefighter. Hardly ever were the adults pictured; only the boy. But the captions to the pictures—in which he wore an odd headdress and gathered golden honey (which he then spread on toast); discovered a glowing underwater cavern with beautiful fish; scaled a cliff to visit a family of mountain goats; flew over a city made rosy at sunset; and quelled a forest fire (from which flocks of birds rose in gratitude, spelling their thanks on the sky)—were the words of the wise people who did these jobs every day. Somehow they were always offstage—or tiny figures, way in the distance.