A House Among the Trees

Tommy enjoyed cooking—like her apartment, her skills were modest but made her feel grown up, the way reading Thomas Hardy had made her feel grown up a decade before—and though he never said so, it was obvious that Dani was just as grateful as Morty to be fed.

It was unsettling, however, to see Morty and Dani together. It forced her back to her childhood, to those afternoons at the playground. As they ate together in the kitchen (Morty sometimes standing by the counter, on the phone), she could tell that Dani had no recall of the connection—but what if a memory was tripped by this renewed proximity? And Morty treated Dani almost too kindly. Once he even said, out of the blue, “You know, if you graduate and can’t figure out what to do with yourself, I’ll find you something, somewhere. I have plenty of friends with interesting jobs. You don’t need to worry about moving back in with your parents. That’s a fate worse than an IRS audit.”

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.

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