Sol came by this morning for a final inspection. The look of admiration in his eyes as he strolled through the galleries devoted to children’s literature, a look he finally extended to Merry herself, was more gratifying than she might have guessed. She knows the museum is beautiful. Delphic prophet that she is (or that Sol claimed she was, however seamy his motives that particular night), she knows that by next month, when the final touches go on the educational center and they open the little café in the “skyroom,” the cultural eggheads will have declared it a sculptural triumph, a new urban landmark, a work of fanciful genius (she loves dreaming up the clichéd epithets)—she knows all this as certainly as she’s known anything in recent years—yet it seems she can never quite shake off the instinctive relief she feels when a male authority gives her the sign of professional approval. And that’s our work, her new therapist would say.
She also knows that the speed of construction—a four-story building completed in less than two years, as promised—came at a rather scandalous price: perhaps not just in overtime wages but in barrels of Ritalin, rumored to be the architect’s stimulant of choice. A few exterior eyesores remain (the strips of “lawn” flanking the pathway to the entrance are dirt with a greenish stubble; the steel railings on the roof-deck overlooking the canal have yet to be installed), but the board did not want to delay the opening until the weather turned unpleasant. Who would venture down from Carl Schurz Park to the banks of the Gowanus in a November sleet storm?
At her new desk—a long, slick blond surface made from sustainable bamboo—she tackles the increasingly challenging job of keeping her head above e-mail. This must be what it felt like at Cape Canaveral when NASA still sent rockets into space.
She scans the senders. Skip, skip, delete, flag for later, skip…
Shine Man.
The subject line reads F # # #.
Thanks to his genius grant, Stu has been in Antarctica for the past few months, “drawing the soul of apocalyptic winter.” Like a fretful mother, Merry wrote him last week that she did not like how close his planned return was to the museum’s opening. Everything else has fallen into place so well—especially the uncanny timing of the movie’s release—that she ought to have known the gods had a mischievous surprise in store: a broken-down helicopter, the very one that would have delivered Stu to a ship, which would have delivered him to a small plane, then a large plane, returning him to New York with less than twenty-four hours to spare. There is simply no way he will be here by tomorrow night.
She takes a deep breath. Dozens of other celebrity authors will be here, though none of them rock stars like Shine. Well then, a movie star will have to do.
This thought directs her to the e-mail from Alpha Zed Productions. The subject line reads Guest List: Final. Her heart is a hammer. She knows Nicholas Greene is coming because it was part of the agreement she made with Zelinsky’s studio, but what she’s been left wondering (and the magazines at the grocery checkout have been no help whatsoever) is whether he might bring someone. Someone female.
The list comprises five names, each identified in parentheses:
Joy Navarro (producer)
Jacob Steichen (screenwriter)
Nicholas Greene (actor)
Jim Krivet (actor)
Gully Iverson (computer graphics expert)
After opening remarks—oh God, right this minute Merry should be on the phone finding a replacement for Stu—guests will be invited to the museum’s amphitheater to view twenty minutes of clips from The Inner Lear and to ask questions of the actors and other panelists.
As of two months ago, all the drawings from Colorquake belong to the museum—as do drawings from a handful of earlier picture books. Tommy divided Morty’s published artwork and manuscripts into three lots, each donated to a different museum, but the earliest drawings, the ones from the safe-deposit box, she put up for sale as a single block, to be auctioned online. Funds from the purchase would add to the seed money for the boys’ home in Tucson.
Not since her longing for a baby had Merry wanted anything as badly as she wanted that collection of drawings. Thinking that surely the directors would agree that the purchase was essential, she arranged to make her case at the spring meeting. But when she stood before them, projecting the images, relaying the mystery of their concealment, she saw Sol quietly shaking his head. “You do realize,” he said after the awkward pause following her overly breathless (and overly confident) presentation, “that we’ve squeezed all the blood we can from our core donors, just to meet the surplus costs of construction. I know you believe Lear is the linchpin of your collection, but I think we need to say no.” Merry felt as if he had slapped her. She managed to admit, without arguing, that perhaps they shouldn’t put all their eggs in one basket. She let herself cry in the cab she took home, but when she got there, she resisted drowning her mortification in drink. She took Linus for a long walk in Prospect Park, her consolation prize for moving to a smaller apartment (which did feature lustrous old floors, a working fireplace, and a boy downstairs who loved dogs).
Nonetheless, Merry intended to watch the auction online, even if she couldn’t bid. And then, alarmingly, the auction was canceled. An anonymous party had offered a preemptive sum. Oh God, would the drawings go to Japan or Saudi Arabia, never to be seen again? That night, Merry hardly slept. The next day, at the museum, a courier delivered a letter to Merry from the auction house. The contents of the letter led to the ruination of her brand-new yellow suede pumps when she knocked a coffee cup off her desk. The drawings would come to her after all.
When she asked Sol if he could use his corporate-shenanigans know-how to unmask the anonymous donor, he gave her a disapproving look. “Gift horses,” he said, “do not like root canals.” And then, to her relief, he winked—a grandfatherly wink.
Merry is ashamed that one of the reasons she didn’t invite Scott to the opening is that she is worried about how she’ll behave around Nicholas Greene. It’s true, as she told Scott, that she will be all business and no fun, with less than zero time for friends—least of all a new “boyfriend” with whom she has yet to devise a two-city balancing act. And she can’t get too optimistic by flaunting him in front of her associates. Most important, however, she cannot risk even the minor breakdown she just might have the minute Nick walks in the door (or out).
There are so many questions she wishes she could ask Nick, all out-of-bounds. She can step forward after the screening and fawn over his performance; that’s the limit. In fact, her job demands that she aim a question or two at the animation expert and the producer. How in the world did they bring Colorquake to life? Tell us about the science behind the magic!
But what she will be thinking about is another kind of magic: how, that one long night in that hot room on that miserly fold-out couch, his body felt so slick and silken, yet so angular and sharp (sweat pooling in the hollow at the base of his throat); how ticklish he was; how much they laughed. Several solitary months later, when she and Scott first went to bed together, the inevitable comparisons that flashed through Merry’s mind—the readjusting, the surprises, the awkwardly different pleasures—were not with Benjamin, the man she had slept with for years (in the end with more purpose than passion) but with Nick.