Nick scrolled quickly ahead, just to see how long the e-mail would be. Interminable, it seemed. He was knackered and, though he felt ashamed (hadn’t he asked for the full-on saga?), impatient. For a children’s writer, the man was anything but concise.
And yet it was ominously gripping. Lear wrote about the plants he chose to draw, how he imagined entire landscapes around them, with wild creatures and birds. Once he found a sun-baked lizard on a walkway. It was stiff, brittle as a dead leaf. He carried it carefully to the shed and drew it several times over. He turned its likeness into a dragon, a prickly succulent into a fantastical forest. He found ways to use pencil, chalk, and his Christmas watercolors (nearly gone) along with the velvet pastels, which loved the heat, turning soft and slick in his sweaty hands. He found the right blue-violet mix for shadows, the most convincing blend of ochers and greens for the desert grasses. He began to sign his work, the way artists had signed the paintings inside the hotel, even the weird painting of the dead rabbit.
And one afternoon I am lost in my shadings, speaking silently to the colors, commanding them to do my bidding as another boy might have commanded toy platoons, when I hear the outer door open—not unusual, as Leonard comes and goes with some regularity, mostly ignoring my presence, humming to himself. But the murmurings I hear aren’t his alone: his whisperings are mixed up with those of a girl, high-pitched giggling and shushing. At first I tell myself that I’m mistaken, that the rackety fan is the source of these noises. Maybe something’s caught in the blades and Leonard will fix it. Or maybe the cat is playing with a mouse.
But no.
I am unsure whether to speak—Leonard greeted me just an hour ago and surely knows I am there—but I wouldn’t dare, because the girl’s giggling quickly becomes something else: groaning and sighing. I hear the scrape of furniture legs and the wheezing give and take of old upholstery, stiffened springs.
I hold my colored stick above the paper and listen. I know, though I don’t want to know, that the deeper groans I’m hearing are Leonard’s. I hold extremely still. The sounds might be sounds of pain, but I know that they aren’t. I know, by instinct, that this is pleasure I’m hearing, however alien a pleasure it is. I imagine that I am not supposed to know about it, but I do, and that only deepens my alarm and shame.
A silence arrives, followed by quick shallow breathing and, again, giggling, whispering.
I hear Leonard say, his voice a rasp, “You’d better go, baby.”
The sound of scraping furniture legs. The outside door opens and closes. I wait for a time I cannot possibly quantify, until I know I am alone in the shed. I pack my pastels into their box. I put it, with my drawings, into the drawer. I go out into the main room, surprised that sun is still streaming through the dusty skylight, the sun stained pink like everything else. I go home and am relieved that my mother isn’t there.
Whether because he was too stunned or too cold (the temperature in the flat, on an icy April night, dropping swiftly), Nick set aside the laptop and reached for a jumper slung across a nearby chair. Some noise in the street drew him to the window. For a moment, he wished he had never started this correspondence; would Olivier or Guinness have considered it necessary, or even desirable, to know the flesh-and-blood counterpart to any of their creations? Would Peter O’Toole have longed to get pissed with T. E. Lawrence, soak up tales of his rugged beginnings? Maybe Nick was in over his head. And yet, at the same time, he realized how badly he wanted back in: to work, to public exposure, to what just might be the role of his career.
When he entered his flat after dark, sometimes he was startled at the alien glitter of his trophies lined up on a shelf that fell within a bar of streetlight projected through a window. They caught his attention often by day as well (too often, really), but at night they threatened to come alive, a quartet of eccentrically handicapped friends. Top dog—yet clearly of questionable intelligence—would have to be the opulently body-conscious Oscar, his sidekick the anguished, hollow-eyed BAFTA bloke. Here, too, was Mr. Verdigris from SAG, incapable of speech, caught eternally and nakedly in a moment of sartorial indecision: comedy or tragedy, oh what to wear! Finally, the stalwart G.G., odd man out (because he wasn’t a man at all), his domed, columnar silhouette undeniably akin to that robot in Star Wars.
Clearly, Nick had too much time on his hands.
He needed to embed himself anew, burrow deep. And The Inner Lear would be nothing like Lawrence of Arabia. Andrew wasn’t interested in the spectacle history could make of a man; the spectacular, to Andrew, lay within the soul. He had said to Nick that what he wanted to make was not so much a film as a kaleidoscope: a prismatic portrait of Lear’s childhood, love life, and art, how a great artist’s fully recognized existence is a mosaic, its sundry components entirely interdependent. The best actors, said Deirdre, become both engorged and engulfed by a role, containing and carrying it all at once. “A hack impersonates,” she said. “A master inhabits.”
Nick went to his kitchen and flicked the switch on the electric kettle. He took a mug from the sink and rinsed it, reached for the cannister of tea. He had a feeling that, inhabiting Lear already, he would be awake long beyond the owl and the fox.
Five
SUNDAY
Has spring ended before it’s even begun? The first Sunday in June and it must be ninety degrees in the park.
Children with white balloons weave among the trees behind Alice and her cohorts; some of the children are dressed like Ivo in Colorquake. Adults mill about awkwardly, trying to find places to settle on the wooded slopes that surround the small plaza carved out for the sculpture. Three women confer beside it, holding folders; she recognizes Katelyn. The ceremony is set to start in twenty minutes. Factoring in the probable delay, Merry isn’t eager to spend half an hour making tense small talk. She is fairly sure that the news about Lear bolting from his commitment to the museum isn’t out yet, but Katelyn is as connected as anyone in their parochial world—and even if everything were humming along the way Merry would have assumed as recently as last month, she finds that working with Katelyn always sets her teeth on edge.