A House Among the Trees
Julia Glass
To the high school teachers whose voices still resonate:
Mr. McFarland
Miss Mendenhall
Mr. Perkins
Mrs. Shannon
Mr. Shohet
In the theatre, the tendency for centuries has been to put the actor at a remote distance, on a platform, framed, decorated, lit, painted, in high shoes—so as to help to persuade the ignorant that he is holy, that his art is sacred. Did this express reverence? Or was there behind it a fear that something would be exposed if the light were too bright, the meeting too near?
—Peter Brook, The Empty Space
Love art in yourself and not yourself in art.
—Constantin Stanislavski, Building a Character
One
WEDNESDAY
Today, the actor arrives.
Awake too early, too nervous for breakfast (coffee alone makes her more nervous still), fretful over what to wear (then irritated at caring so much), Tommy patrols the house that is now hers, shockingly and entirely hers—not just her bedroom and all it contains but everything she can see from its two windows: seven acres of gardens and grass and quickening fruit trees, fieldstone walls and stacks of wood, shed and garage and hibernating pool. The sky above: does she own that, too? Owning the sky would be easy. The sky would be a gift. The sky weighs nothing. The sky is unconditional.
She roams and circles through rooms she knows by heart: living room, dining room, kitchen, den, mudroom, pantry, porch. She cannot enter a room these days without beginning a mental inventory: What to keep? What to give away? (Worse, far worse, how much of it will she sell?) She goes to and from the studio, back and forth between this world and that—in that one, he simply must be alive—so many times that her skirt is now damp from brushing against the tight-fisted buds of the peonies flanking the path.
Will she have to change again?
The birds are in prime song, the sun beyond a promise, the day upon them all. Five hours to fill, and Tommy has no idea how.
She still finds it hard to believe that Morty agreed to this. But he did. He spoke to the actor more than willingly—to Tommy’s embarrassed ears, unctuously—only a few days before his fall. His eager remarks punctuated by a forced, nasal laughter, he said that he looked forward to welcoming the actor to his home and studio, showing him “everything—well, almost everything!”
Unlike many women around the civilized world, Tommy does not yearn to meet or spend time with or even catch sight of Nicholas Greene. That she will be alone with him—if he complies with her conditions, and he must (Yes, Morty, you are not the only one with conditions!)—is even more unsettling, but one thing she knows is that she will not allow a wolf pack of movie people to poke around the premises. It was bad enough letting the art director visit last month. “Just a walkabout to soak up the spirits,” he claimed. He arrived with a photographer and two assistants, who managed to trample flat a swath of crocuses emerging from the lawn. Morty behaved like a puppy, tagging along rather than leading them through, setting no limits to their invasion.
She has seen Nicholas Greene’s face on the racks at the CVS checkout (though a year ago, Americans hadn’t a clue who he was), and she did share Morty’s excitement when they watched the Academy Awards and saw the actor hoist his trophy aloft, thank his costars, his director, his agent, and (tearfully) his “courageous, unforgettable mum.” Even then, barely three months ago, Tommy was confident that this proposed “biopic” of Morty would, like countless other movie projects, wither on the vine. (How many books of Morty’s had been optioned yet never come close to the screen?) She has to wonder if Nicholas Greene’s Oscar galvanized the project, to which the actor had already been “attached”—as if he were a garage adjoining a house or a file appended to an e-mail.
There is something shamefully alluring to Americans about a British accent, whether it’s cockney or sterling-silver Oxbridge. Even Tommy is not immune. Given the choice, who wouldn’t rather listen for hours to Alec Guinness or Hugh Grant, over Johnny Depp or even a velvety vintage Warren Beatty? But why in the world, with all the platoons of hungry, gifted, handsome actors out there (Morty was handsome in his youth), would anyone sensible pick an Englishman to play a guy who grew up in Arizona and working-class Brooklyn? Maybe that’s why Morty was so enthralled. Maybe he couldn’t resist the flattery of seeing his life story told through the medium of a boyishly sexy, upper-crusty-sounding younger man who had been nurtured, almost literally, on Shakespeare and Dickens. Morty had a passion for Dickens. (She will certainly show the actor the glass-front cases containing Morty’s book collection; no harm there.)
Once Morty learned that Nicholas Greene had signed on, he asked Tommy to do a little research. As he leaned toward the computer over her shoulder, taking in the googled stills of the actor playing Ariel at the Globe, Sir Gawain in a defunct but cultishly admired TV series, and of course the doomed son in the film that just won him a slew of prizes, Morty’s face shed years in expressing his naked delight. It was a face he might have drawn for five-year-olds, a face to be duplicated millions of times, seen by children who spoke and sang and shared their secrets in two or three dozen languages.