Maybe it’s because Tommy lived with Morty for twenty-five years and knew him better than anyone else possibly could (even Soren) that she cannot actually see why he would be chosen as the subject of a feature film; not a documentary, which made sense—there were two of those already, one for children, one for adults—but the kind of movie you watch in order to be swept away by crisis or intrigue or menace or laughter or the conquering power of love. Maybe she’s too close to Morty’s everyday life—“the monotony of quiet creativity, imagination fueled by routine and isolation,” he mused aloud in the PBS series—to see it as a source of entertainment. At the same time, she is dead sure that Morty would not want certain details of his life offered up as fodder for strangers’ titillation or tears. God forbid they should delve into the mercifully obscured months of his clubbing binge, for instance, the breakdown that led to Soren. Maybe that’s why she can’t stop rushing about, as if she’s taken some kind of mania-inducing drug, fretfully scanning shelves of mementos and knickknacks, walls crowded with framed photos and cartoons and letters, searching for anything that might expose unnecessary personal matters to a curious stranger passing through.
Morty’s lawyer, Franklin, has passed through several times, as well as Morty’s agent, Angelica, who is still in shock over the will. Franklin has always treated Tommy as an equal and seems to like her—or at least he’s done a convincing job of pretending. What upsets her (though logically, why should it?) is that Franklin knew about Morty’s latest will for weeks. He assures her that Morty meant to sit down with her and explain the reasons for the seismic shift in his intentions. He was simply waiting for the right time—because time, he had good reason to assume, was something of which he still had plenty.
Tommy never doubted that Morty would be generous to her, but she had no idea he would leave her the house and the surrounding property outright; even less than no idea that he would name her his literary executor, assigning her a series of detailed responsibilities as variously remote from her experience as foraging for mushrooms or Olympic diving. And some of them will be deeply unpleasant: first and foremost, telling the people at the museum in New York that no, he will not be leaving them the bulk of his artwork and letters and collections and idiosyncratic belongings, as Tommy knows he led them to believe he would do. Now, she must somehow repossess the drawings, manuscripts, and annotated book proofs that have been on loan with the general understanding that the loan was a prelude to a gift…a very large gift. Tommy has yet to answer the e-mails and phone messages from the distressed director. Even though Franklin is confident that the museum has no legal grounds for challenging the will, Tommy herself is the one who will have to face up to those messages. She can only hope she won’t have to tell the woman why Morty turned sour on them. She doesn’t like remembering how easily his ego was bruised these past few years.
She wishes that somewhere among all the legal surprises, Morty had also left directions to cease cooperation with the movie people. But up through the very last night of his life, he was beyond delighted; he was as close to rapturous as Tommy ever saw him. Silly of her not to have realized that as he aged, his ego was as readily inflated as it was bruised.
As usual, he spent that afternoon working and napping in the studio, then joined Tommy in the kitchen at six. And, as had become his habit in the few days since his second transatlantic conversation with Nicholas Greene, he wanted to talk not about the story or drawings in which he was immersed (how deeply Tommy already misses seeing new images, listening to Morty read out loud new constellations of words—to her before anyone else) but about what it would mean, what it would feel like, to be the subject of a “real-deal movie.” Morty never cared much for drink, but that night he went to the back fridge, the extra one they had installed in the early years of Soren (the party years), and rooted out a bottle of true champagne, then stood on a stool to reach a pair of dusty flutes. Tenderly, he soaped and rinsed and polished the glasses, insisting that he and Tommy share a “properly classy toast.”
After Tommy returned to sautéing garlic for the linguini with clam sauce that neither of them knew would constitute Morty’s last supper, he sat at the table, refilled his glass, and rambled on in earnest wonder about the prospect of being played (“Like an instrument!” he exclaimed, miming a violinist) by an actor who had won both an Oscar and whatever the British equivalent was. “Tommy,” Morty said—uttering her name with such gravity that she turned away from the stove—“just think: you’ll be on my arm at the premiere…or I suppose, considering my infirmities, I’ll be on yours, my dear.” He raised a second toast, to her.
“What infirmities?” she said.
“You know how long these projects take. I’ll be eighty by then.”
Tommy still saw Morty as essentially youthful, but she had become aware that his agility and sense of balance were diminishing, that he should hire younger men to climb tall ladders or scrunch down into a crawl space. He did not agree. (Last fall she caught him on the phone, trying to cancel the handyman she had hired to clean the gutters.) And so, the next morning, while Tommy was off at the UPS Store, copying and shipping a batch of color sketches for Angelica, Morty climbed out an upstairs window onto the steeply pitched roof above the screened porch, intent on removing a limb that had fallen from the granddaddy maple, his favorite of all the fine old trees for which he had bought this property—a tree whose likeness he had rendered in his books again and again. Tommy knows he waited until her car was out of sight.
Far too often now, she must force her mind to detour sharply away from the predictable ambush of her suffocating sorrow (not guilt, because she was away doing her job, and he was being foolish) whenever she imagines Morty lying on the flagstones for God knows how long before she reached the end of the driveway and saw him there, out cold—the bough having tumbled down after, landing across his legs. He was already dead, she would learn, but for the time she sat beside him on the damp frigid stone, wishing she could just hold his head in her lap, and for the time the EMTs tried to bring him to consciousness, she had a wish that generally only a wife or a parent would have: Take me instead.
When had she crossed that line, from being the big sister of his favorite model, the boy whose doppelg?nger put him on the literary map, and then his indispensable helper, his fifth limb (maid, cook, driver, party escort, website warden, proxy on difficult phone calls, repository of names), to finding herself so inescapably devoted to the man, the porcupine as well as the genius, the hermit as well as—something surprisingly new, perhaps even to him—the starstruck fan?
—
Breakfast. Please let this mean breakfast, he thinks as he wakes to the ringing telephone on the side table in the unfamiliar wash of radiance across the unfamiliar ceiling above the unfamiliar bed. Another hotel room, that much is certain. The needle of his inner compass spins, quivers….Right, yes: New York again.
He rolls over and grapples the receiver to his ear.
“Nick, your cell phone’s off.”
He yawns and clears his throat. “The object is not to be reached. Even by you, Silas. Especially by you.”
“That’s not an option, I’m afraid.”
“Si, please. No lists or lectures.”
“I know: don’t be a mum. But listen. We’re to be picked up in an hour.”
“We?”
“We have to allow three hours to get there.”
“There is no ‘we’ today, Silas. She said no people.”
“Last I heard, Nick, you are still a people.”