“Well, we look forward to that, Nick. And congratulations on all your success this year. You are the man. It is,” she says, looking hungrily into the camera, “the Year of Nicholas Greene.” And then, in a gesture that would be rude in any other context, she pivots her mike toward the next aggressively good-looking person in line.
“Franklin?” Tommy is still holding the phone to her ear. “Where are we?”
He laughs. “The Tonys. Come on, Tommy.”
“I’ve never watched the Tonys in my life, Franklin. Well, okay, maybe when Morty designed that set. You watch the Tonys?”
“Without fail. I love the theater. It’s part of why I sold out, why I like making money. I’m a front-of-the-orchestra snob. You don’t like plays?”
“Of course I like plays,” says Tommy. “I just don’t find these dog-and-pony shows all that interesting. I don’t even know who most of these people are.”
The televised view is now swooping into a vast theater, toward a stage where the curtains slide open to reveal a ranked platoon of dancers in skintight glitter.
Franklin says, “Did you go this afternoon?”
Tommy is tempted to lie, but she says, “No.” There’s little point in making excuses—not that she owes excuses to Franklin.
“You know, the longer you hole up, the harder it’s going to be.” After a pause, in which Tommy realizes (thankfully) that he doesn’t expect her to answer, he says, “Do you feel guilty? Don’t answer if that’s too personal. But you shouldn’t. Feel guilty.”
“Guilty?”
“Tommy, you know what I mean.”
“You mean because I’m getting it all? Except that I’m not, actually.”
“No. About being given control.”
“I don’t have that, either. I mean, come on. Morty’s the one exerting control. Wouldn’t you agree?”
In the ensuing pause, she can guess that Franklin thinks he’s gone too far.
“I didn’t mean to snap at you,” she says. “If I feel guilty, and maybe I do, right now it’s about not showing up for that thing in the park.” And for not answering Dani’s note, she thinks. “Listen, Franklin. You’re keeping me sane. I have no business scolding you.”
“Vent all you like, Tommy. I mean it. But you know what? The show is starting. I’m shameless here. Don’t tell my other clients I’m a sucker for show tunes.”
She thanks him and lets him go. She stands in the middle of the den and focuses on the arabesques and pirouettes of the chorus line, the entrance of the slim, athletic host. His tribe roars with self-satisfied approval.
Oh, tribes. She knows about tribes. Tommy went to at least a dozen awards ceremonies with Morty, before and then after Soren. Of course, they were book awards, not Oscars or Tonys. Some of the authors looked colorful, a handful elegant or eagerly stylish, but when literary stars turn out in their most celebratory attire, more than likely they fall shy of the mark. The tuxedos smell of mothballs; some of the dresses look as if they are past the days of fitting properly. Tommy owns three formal dresses, two black, one flowered, just for such occasions. Her mother bought her the flowered one. Though bald and bruised from treatments, she had taken Tommy shopping, as if Tommy were still a schoolgirl, another September looming. “Just in case you have to attend my funeral, I want you in something festive,” said Mom.
She clicks off the TV. She doesn’t need to wait for Nicholas Greene’s turn onstage. What she needs to do is write Dani. Somehow, she can’t bear the thought of speaking to him, not yet.
In his note, Dani included a picture of his baby, Joe—named for their father, a gesture that surprised Tommy when she received the birth announcement in March. She knew she should send a gift, with a note of congratulations. But wouldn’t it be duplicitous to acknowledge the birth of her nephew without offering reconciliation? She couldn’t bring herself to do that, not yet—not without Morty’s say-so. In March, she assumed she had all the time in the world to figure it out.
Their mother’s concerns about Dani had proved justifiable. Not that he became a troublemaker, a drifter, or a gutter-bound addict, but the work he did to make money through his thirties was odd-jobbish, nothing with security or benefits. He did carpentry and construction, working projects at which most of his coworkers shared a higher dedication of some sort, sculpture or song. The job he liked best was the stint he served, for several years, as a bicycle messenger, sprinting up-and downtown for financial firms back before e-mail and Skype made such work obsolete. “Closest I’ve ever come to flying,” he said. To Dani, a bike meant freedom.
But it was the freedom-loving Dani who moved back in with their parents when Mom had cancer; who watched over Dad in his loneliness after she died. Dani never wanted to leave the city, never even wanted to see what another city might feel like. He had a series of anti-conformist girlfriends and was happy to live in neighborhoods that were inconvenient to public transportation; he rode his bike everywhere, all seasons, all times of day and night. He liked to brag that he was a prisoner to nobody’s schedule but his own—and certainly not to the chronic delays of the subway.
And then, ten years ago, as he was inching up on forty, he met Jane. Jane was a bona fide grown-up, a pediatric speech therapist who happened to ride her bike everywhere, too, mainly because her work took her to a number of doctors’ offices, even to patients’ homes. They met when Jane stopped after seeing a cabdriver clip Dani’s back wheel and drive off without so much as a glance in his mirror.
Tommy was hardly her brother’s confidante, but when he mentioned Jane for the first time, Tommy knew he was fishing for advice. They were in touch fairly often back then. It was the beginning of their father’s breakdown, the loosening of his grip first on short-term memory, then on everyday logic.
“I told her I was thinking of starting a business.”
“Are you?” said Tommy.
“Don’t make it sound so unlikely.”
“I’m not making it sound like anything. I’m just asking.”
“So, a bike shop. In a neighborhood that doesn’t have one. There’s this guy I met who thinks maybe, with all the crazy upscaling of way-west Chelsea, all that luxury ‘greening’ of the riverfront—I guess that’s the word these days….Gareth thinks we could get a space on Tenth or Eleventh. We’d have to get a loan. Trying to get my head around that. A loan. As if, next thing, I might own a station wagon, a lawn mower….Jesus, in the old days Dad would have written a song.”
“I love that idea,” she said. And despite the passing shadow of their diminished father, Tommy felt a surge of disproportionate relief, as if Dani were her son, not her brother.