“You look like hell,” she said. “Everything all right?”
“Tired,” Arthur said. “I had insomnia again.” He kissed her, and she perched on one of the sofas. The lightness he felt whenever he saw her. He was captivated, as always, by her excessive youth. She was slightly more than half his age. It was her job to look after the three little actresses who played child versions of Lear’s daughters.
“You forgot you were meeting me for breakfast, didn’t you?”
He slapped a hand to his forehead. “I’m so sorry. I’m not running on all cylinders today. How long did you wait?”
“Half hour.”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“Dead cell-phone battery,” she said. “It’s okay. You can make it up to me with a glass of wine.” This was something he adored about her, the way she let things go so easily. What a pleasant state of affairs, he’d been thinking lately, to be with a woman who didn’t hold a grudge. He found a half-empty bottle of red in the fridge—she liked it cold—and noticed as he poured her glass that his hands were trembling.
“You really look terrible,” she said. “Are you sure you’re not sick?”
“Just tired, I think.” He liked watching her drink wine, the way she concentrated on the taste. She had the appreciation for nice things that comes only from having grown up with little money.
“Do you have any of those chocolates left?”
“You know, I think I do.”
She smiled at him—the way her smile warmed him!—and set her glass on the coffee table. After a few minutes of rummaging through the cupboard by the sink, she emerged triumphant with a small gold box. He selected a raspberry dark-chocolate truffle.
“What’s this?” she asked, mid-chocolate, picking up Dr. Eleven, Vol. 1, No 1: Station Eleven from the coffee table.
“My ex-wife dropped those off a couple weeks back.”
“Which one?”
He felt a flicker of sadness. This was a sign of having gone seriously astray, wasn’t it? Having more than one ex-wife? He wasn’t sure where exactly he’d gone wrong. “The first one. Miranda. I’m actually not sure what to do with them.”
“What, you’re not keeping these?”
“I don’t read comic books,” Arthur said. “She gave me two copies of each, so I sent the other set to my son.”
“You told me you’re trying to shed your possessions or something, right?”
“Exactly. They’re lovely, but I don’t want more things.”
“I think I understand.” Tanya was reading. “Interesting story line,” she said, a few pages in.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I never really understood the point of it, to be honest.” There was relief in admitting this to someone, after all these years. “The Undersea, especially. All those people in limbo, waiting around, plotting, for what?”
“I like it,” Tanya said. “The art’s really good, isn’t it?”
“She liked drawing more than she liked writing the dialogue.” He was just now remembering this. Once he’d opened Miranda’s study door and watched her work for some minutes before she realized he was there. The curve of her neck as she stooped over the drafting table, her absolute concentration. How vulnerable she’d seemed when she was lost in her work.
“It’s beautiful.” Tanya was studying an image of the Undersea, a heavily crosshatched room with mahogany arches from Station Eleven’s drowned forests. The room reminded Arthur of somewhere he’d been, but he couldn’t place it.
She glanced at her watch. “I should probably go. My little hellions are due in fifteen minutes.”
“Wait, I have something for you.” A glass paperweight had arrived by courier two weeks ago, sent by Miranda from her hotel after he’d seen her. She’d explained in her note that Clark had brought it to the house in Los Angeles and that she regretted taking it, that she felt certain Clark had meant it for Arthur, not her, but when he held the glass lump in his hand he found there were no memories attached to it; he had no recollection whatsoever of Clark having given it to them, and anyway the last thing he wanted in his life was a paperweight.
“It’s gorgeous,” Tanya said when he gave it to her. She peered into the cloudy depths. “Thank you.”
“I’ll give you a call if Kirsten shows up here. Will I see you after the show?”
She kissed him. “Of course,” she said.
When she was gone, he lay on the sofa and closed his eyes, but Kirsten was at his door fifteen minutes later. His exhaustion was taking on the force of illness. Sweat beaded on his forehead when he stood. He let her in and sat down quickly.
“My mom bought a book with you on the cover,” she said. She sat across from him on the other sofa.
The only book in existence with Arthur on the cover was Dear V. He felt nauseous.
“Did you read it?”
“My mom won’t let me read it. She says it’s inappropriate.”
“That’s what she said? Inappropriate?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” Arthur said, “I think it’s inappropriate that the book exists. She’s right not to show it to you.” The one time he’d met Kirsten’s mother, she’d cornered him to ask if he had any projects coming up with a part for a small girl. He’d wanted to shake her. Your daughter’s so young, he’d wanted to say. Let her be a kid, give her a chance, I don’t know why you want this for her. He didn’t understand why anyone would want their child involved in movies.
“Is the book bad?”
“I wish it didn’t exist. But you know, I’m glad you came by,” he said.
“Why?”
“I have a present for you.” He felt a little guilty as he handed her the Dr. Eleven comics, because after all Miranda had intended them for him, but he didn’t want the comics because he didn’t want possessions. He didn’t want anything except his son.
When he was alone again, Arthur put on his costume. He sat for a few minutes in his finery, enjoying the weight of the velvet cape, left his crown on the coffee table next to the grapes and walked down the hall to Makeup. The pleasure of being with other people. He must have eaten something bad, he decided. Maybe at the diner. He had an hour alone in his dressing room, where he drank chamomile tea and spoke lines aloud to his reflection in the mirror, paced, prodded at the bags under his eyes, adjusted his crown. At the half-hour call, he phoned Tanya.
“I want to do something for you,” he said. “This will seem very sudden, but I’ve been thinking about it for a week.”
“What is it?” She was distracted. He heard the three little girls bickering in the background.
“How much do you still owe in student loans?” She had told him once, but he couldn’t remember the number.
“Forty-seven thousand dollars,” she said, and he heard the hope in her voice, the not-daring-to-hope, the disbelief.
“I want to pay it off.” Wasn’t this what money was for? This was what his life was going to mean, finally, after all these years of failing to win Oscars, this string of box-office flops. He would be known as the man who gave his fortune away. He would retain only enough money to live on. He would buy an apartment in Jerusalem and see Tyler every day and start over.
“Arthur,” she said.
“Let me do this for you.”
“Arthur, it’s too much.”
“It isn’t. How long will it take for you to pay it off,” he asked gently, “at the rate you’re going?”
“I’ll be in my midsixties, but it’s my debt, I—”
“Then let me help,” he said. “No strings attached. I promise. Just come to my dressing room after the show tonight, and let me give you a check.”
“What do I tell my parents? If I tell them, they’ll want to know how I got the money.”
“Tell them the truth. Tell them an eccentric actor gave you a check for forty-seven thousand dollars, no strings attached.”
“I don’t know how to thank you,” she said.
When he ended th
e call, he felt an unexpected peace. He would jettison everything that could possibly be thrown overboard, this weight of money and possessions, and in this casting off he’d be a lighter man.
“Fifteen minutes,” the stage manager called from just outside the door.
“Thank you fifteen,” Arthur said, and began running his lines from the beginning. At “our eldest born, speak first,” he glanced at his watch. It was still only six a.m. in Israel, but he knew Tyler and Elizabeth got up early. He negotiated his way past his ex-wife—“Two minutes, Elizabeth, I know he’s getting ready for school, I just want to hear his voice”—and closed his eyes to listen to the rustling of the telephone being transferred into his son’s small hands. My eldest born, my only born, my heart.
“Why are you calling?” That suspicious little voice. He remembered that Tyler was angry with him.
“I wanted to say hello.”
“Then why weren’t you here for my birthday?” Arthur had promised to be in Jerusalem for Tyler’s birthday, but he’d made that promise ten months ago and had frankly forgotten about it until Tyler had called him yesterday. Arthur’s apologies hadn’t landed.
“I can’t be there, buddy. I would if I could. But aren’t you coming to New York soon? Won’t I see you next week?” Tyler had nothing to say to this. “You’re flying to New York tonight, aren’t you?”
“I guess.”
“Did you read those comic books I sent you?”
Tyler didn’t respond. Arthur sat on the sofa, and rested his forehead in the palm of his hand. “Did you like them, Tyler? Those comic books?”
“Yeah.”
“Ten minutes,” the stage manager said at the door.
“Thank you ten. I looked at the comic books,” Arthur said, “but I don’t think I completely understood what they were about. I was hoping maybe you could explain them to me.”
“What about them?”
“Well, tell me about Dr. Eleven.”
“He lives on a space station.”
“Really? A space station?”
“It’s like a planet, but a little planet,” Tyler said. “Actually it’s sort of broken. It went through a wormhole, so it’s hiding in deep space, but its systems were damaged, so on its surface? It’s almost all water.” He was warming to his subject.
“All water!” Arthur raised his head. It had been a mistake to let Tyler get so far away from him, but perhaps the mistake wasn’t unfixable. “So they live in the water, Dr. Eleven and his—his people?”
“They live on islands. They have a city that’s all made of islands. There’s like bridges and boats? But it’s dangerous, because of the seahorses.”
“The seahorses are dangerous?”
“They’re not like the seahorses we saw in the jar in Chinatown that one time. They’re big.”
“How big?”
“Really big. I think they’re really big. They’re these huge—these huge things, and they ride up out of the water and they’ve got eyes like fish, and they’ve got people riding on them, and they want to catch you.”
“What happens if a seahorse catches you?”
“Then it pulls you under,” Tyler said, “and then you belong to the Undersea.”
“The Undersea?”
“It’s an underwater place.” He was talking fast now, caught up. “They’re Dr. Eleven’s enemies, but they’re not really bad. They just want to go home.”
“Buddy,” Arthur said, “Tyler, I want you to know that I love you.”
The silence was so long that he would have thought he’d lost the connection if not for the sound of a passing car. The boy must be standing by an open window.
“You too,” Tyler said. It was difficult to hear him. His voice was so small.
The door to his dressing room opened a crack. “Five minutes,” the stage manager said. Arthur waved in response.
“Buddy,” he said, “I have to go now.”
“Are you doing a movie?”
“Not tonight, buddy. I’m going up onstage.”
“Okay. Bye,” Tyler said.
“Good-bye. I’ll see you in New York next week.” Arthur disconnected and sat alone for a few minutes. He had a hard time meeting his own eyes in the dressing room mirror. He was very tired.
“Places,” the stage manager said.
The set for this production of Lear was magnificent. A high platform had been built at the back of the stage, painted to look like a balcony with elaborate pillars, stone from the front, bare plywood from the back. In the first act, the platform was the study of an aging king, and Arthur had to sit in a purple armchair while the house was filling up, in profile to the audience, holding his crown. A tired king at the end of his reign, perhaps not as sharp as he had been, contemplating a disastrous division of his kingdom.
Below on the main stage, three small girls played a clapping game in soft lighting. At a cue from the stage manager they rose and disappeared backstage left, the house lights dimmed, and this was Arthur’s cue to stand and escape. He made his way into the wings in darkness, his path guided by a stagehand with a flashlight, just as Kent, Gloucester, and Edmund entered stage right.
“I don’t get it,” Arthur had said to the director, whose name was Quentin and who Arthur privately didn’t like very much. “Why am I up there?”
“Well, you tell me,” Quentin said. “You’re pondering the vagaries of power, right? You’re contemplating the division of England. You’re thinking about your retirement savings. However you want to play it. Just trust me, it’s a good visual effect.”
“So I’m up there because you like the way it looks.”
“Try not to overthink it,” Quentin said.
But what was there to do up there on the platform, if not think? On the opening night of previews, Arthur had sat in the chair as the house came in, listening to the whispers of the audience as they noticed him there, gazing at the crown in his hands, and he was surprised by how unsteady he felt. He’d done this before, this loitering on stage while the audience entered, but he realized that the last time he’d done this, he’d been twenty-one years old. He remembered having enjoyed it back then, the challenge of living in the world of the play before the play had properly started, but now the lights were too close, too hot, and sweat poured down his back.
In his first marriage, he and Miranda had gone to a Golden Globes party that had gone wrong at the end of the night. Miranda, who’d had perhaps one cocktail too many and wasn’t used to high heels, had stumbled and sprained her ankle in a blaze of camera flashes as they were leaving, Arthur just out of reach, and he’d known as she fell that she was going to be a tabloid story. In those days he knew a couple of actors whose careers had flamed out into an ashy half-life of rehab and divorces, and he knew what being a tabloid story could do to a person, the corrosive effect of that kind of scrutiny. He’d snapped at Miranda, mostly out of guilt, and they’d both said unpleasant things in the car. She’d stalked into the house without speaking to him.
Later, he’d walked by the open bathroom door and heard her talking to herself as she removed her makeup. “I repent nothing,” he’d heard her say to her reflection in the mirror. He’d turned and walked away, but the words stayed with him. Years later in Toronto, on the plywood second story of the King Lear set, the words clarified the problem. He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light. This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret. He had done some things he wasn’t proud of. If Miranda was so unhappy in Hollywood, why hadn’t he just taken her away from there? It wouldn’t have been difficult. The way he’d dropped Miranda for Elizabeth and Elizabeth for Lydia and let Lydia slip away to someone else. The way he’d let Tyler be taken to the other side of the world. The way he’d spent his entire life chasing after something, money or fame or immortality or all of the above. He didn’t really even know his only brother. How many friendships had he
neglected until they’d faded out? On the first night of previews, he’d barely made it off the stage. On the second night, he’d arrived on the platform with a strategy. He stared at his crown and ran through a secret list of everything that was good.
The pink magnolias in the backyard of the house in Los Angeles.
Outdoor concerts, the way the sound rises up into the sky.
Tyler in the bathtub at two, laughing in a cloud of bubble bath.
Elizabeth in the pool at night, at the beginning before they’d ever had even a single fight, the way she dove in almost silently, the double moons on the surface breaking into shards.
Dancing with Clark when they were both eighteen, their fake IDs in their pockets, Clark flickering in the strobe lights.
Miranda’s eyes, the way she looked at him when she was twenty-five and still loved him.
His third wife, Lydia, doing yoga on the back patio in the mornings.
The croissants at the café across the street from his hotel.
Tanya sipping wine, her smile.
Riding in his father’s snowplow when he was nine, the time Arthur told a joke and his father and his little brother couldn’t stop laughing, the sheer joy he’d felt at that moment.
Tyler.
On the night of his last performance, Arthur was only halfway through the list when his cue came and it was time to exit. He followed the white tape arrow and the stagehand’s flashlight and descended to stage right. He saw Tanya in the wings at the far side of the stage, herding the three little girls in the direction of the dressing rooms. She flashed him a smile, blew him a kiss. He blew a kiss back—why not?—and ignored the murmurs that rose in the backstage area.
Later, a woman from Wardrobe placed a crown of flowers on his head. He was in his costume of rags for the mad scene. He saw Tanya across the stage again—already in the final week of her life, the Georgia Flu so close now—and then a stagehand appeared near him, holding Kirsten’s hand.
“Hi,” Kirsten whispered. “I love the comic books.”
“You read them already?”
“I just had time to read the beginning.”
“Here’s my cue,” he whispered, “I’ll talk to you later,” and he wandered out into the sound-effect storm.