Nick owns a photocopy of his own letter and the posted reply from Lear, handwritten on four sheets of paper the color of sunflower petals. After that, their correspondence slipped into the ether of e-mail—but somehow (he wishes he knew how), Nick turned a key in Mort Lear’s psyche. And, to be honest, Lear turned a key in his own. Divided by some forty years, an ocean, and most of a continent, their boyhoods had been remarkably similar, at least in their emotional essence. With their single mothers too busy working—and Nick’s siblings so much older that their lives were almost self-contained—each of them had spent countless hours alone at home, creating and inhabiting other worlds: Nick in books and, later on, plays; Lear in drawing—with and on any materials he could find. (When the maids at the hotel aired vacant rooms between guests, he would sneak in and steal a single sheet of stationery, hoping that no one would notice such a minor theft.) Had either been a sporty lad, there would have been scant if any support from the sidelines. For you, a cricket bat, for me a Louisville Slugger, right? wrote Lear. Nick replied, Well, at school, I did take a whack at squash. A literal whack—my racquet landing on the back of my poor opponent’s skull! At which point I was banished to the poncy stage.
Lear confessed that he envied anyone who had siblings. Nick wrote back that while they practiced all the holiday-card formalities, he had seen his brother and sister only a few times in the years since their mother’s death. My fault entirely, he explained. I turned down one too many invitations. For about ten years there, I was terrified that if I stepped away from London—unless it was to step on a flight for New York or L.A.—I’d miss the Fateful Call. I’m still trying to figure out which call that was!
Lear assured Nick that his best family years were ahead of him: that he’d find a wife, have children, and even reconnect with Nigel and Annabelle. (Nick startled at seeing their names in Lear’s e-mail; he hadn’t recalled sharing them.) For obvious reasons, that wasn’t an evident path for me, wrote Lear. Nowadays, young homosexual men are pairing off with the very intention, from Day One, of furnishing and filling a nursery. I am in awe. I do not wish to stop and wonder if, given the chance, I might have gone that way myself. I suspect not. Certainly not with the men I kept company with. But the “company” was of a rather different nature than the kind that leads to sharing fatherhood.
Their initial dialogue comprised a cheerful volley of such observations, as if they were engaged in an old-fashioned epistolary courtship, eloquent yet timid and banal, touching by fingertips only. Nick, however, was alert to the proper moment when he might ask Lear to tell him more about the incidents in the garden shed.
Except that he did not have to ask. Nick was still in London, still in a low-key hiatus after convalescing from the cyclone of parties and awards and talk shows and photo shoots and more parties, taking deep, savory drafts of a rather spartan indolence that, if you were lucky, could last a month or more between commitments. He was messing about with the friends he thought of as “civilians” (anything but actors!), reading everything he could find by and about Lear, and contemplating a future role in a new Alan Ayckbourn play while holding fast against accepting the sort of pretty-boy rom-com pirouettes that had funded the purchase of his flat. He was also holding fast against the urge to ring Kendra and patch things up. Late nights, alone in the flat, tired of skimming some half-cooked treatment of a Jane Austen remake or a script about space explorers in peril, trying to resist another whiskey, presented him with far too many foolish doubts.
He had also been avoiding e-mail all day. So when he finally broke down (as a desperate alternative to making that foolish groveling phone call), Lear’s message came as a rather seismic surprise.
You will receive this in broad English daylight, but I write to you in the godforsaken hours when even owls and foxes are well tucked in. Insomnia is having its way with my aging self. Not that I’m in pain, but the mental gears do not disengage as easily. I am never inclined to draw at this hour—I am spoiled by the daily luxury of working in natural light—and to compose narrative of any kind I consider the business of morning. My verbal acumen is the sort of flower that opens wide soon after dawn and begins to droop by noon. (Are these details useful to you? Your interest in my everyday habits could lead me to bore you silly. What I am going to tell you, I think—what I am about to type into this machine and suspect I will send—is, on the other hand, far from silly. I do not yet know how it will feel to “get it down,” but the urge to do that is upon me.)
For most of my life, I hewed to the belief that what happened in Tucson would stay in Tucson. And then it became clear to me, whether because of the age we live in or the age I was accruing, that when it comes to the sordid, just about nothing stays where it should. I finessed the story in that magazine interview. The cub reporter they sent out here might have spun the whole sorry thing from me like cotton candy from one of those centrifugal tubs at a county fair…but he was shocked (and satiated) by the bit he got. And perhaps I was only flirting with the truth; I wasn’t ready, as you youngsters say, to commit.
What am I going on about?! Myself. Ah yes. Again. Is Ivo ME? Note the boy’s navel-gazing initial I: aha! Can you believe I never saw that until some forensic bookworm brought it up in the New York Review of Books or some such rarefied rag? Honest Injun, as my Brooklyn street chums used to say. And is the panther a ped-oh-phial? My answer is that cats were the animals I could draw with the most confidence back then. I could never have managed an anteater or a bison or even a monkey. I drew boys, girls, plants, and cats (and birds and insects and lizards). I employed the menagerie I knew best.
Well, who doesn’t believe in the unconscious and its sly-dog tricks these days?
TELL THE STORY, you are thinking as you peer into your screen. Just tell the bloody story, old man. Thus:
My mother is a laundress at a stately, remote inn, the sort of place called a retreat, where senators and stars of the silver screen meet their mistresses—sent ahead in large, plush-upholstered automobiles, thus allowing them to greet their illicit lovers already posed in swimsuits by the rose-bordered pool or lying in opulent wait on a large dark-wood bed, possibly fashioned by my own father. Discretion is a costly but plentiful commodity here.