Linus barks at the sound of his leash slipping from its hook in the closet. Dogs, thinks Merry, really listen to the world. “I am ready, little man,” she says as she finds the loop on his collar. “Here we go.”
Outside, Linus pulls hard at the leash, aiming for the gated park, a luxury he takes for granted, as he does his mistress’s pure if sometimes negligent love. Merry orders herself not to cry as she unlocks the gate. She releases Linus from his leash, to hell with the rules. Let some enforcer ticket and fine her. She feels a wave of satisfaction, even joy, as she watches the small dog run ahead, pause to glance back, then streak headlong toward the tree that harbors the taunting squirrels.
Six
TUESDAY
Andrew has a brand-new wife, and it’s hard not to watch her, beyond the colossal picture window, as she glides and flips, glides and flips, bisecting the pool from one end to the other and back again. The pool is coal black, its surface sunstruck obsidian, and the wife’s suit is neon yellow (her hair just about the same color, gleefully artificial).
On this side of the window is the long couch on which Andrew and Jake are seated. Jake is the alpha screenwriter. Nick has been around long enough not to get attached. As Deirdre said, writers are the zombies of the business: just when you think a certain chap is riding high, he’s dead and buried—but then lurches to life in another project…until he’s mowed down again, consumed by the next of the writer-zombies. “It’s a cycle,” she said. “Every writer has his good seasons and his bad. Until he doesn’t. And it’s almost never a she, by the way. As if I need to point that out.”
Nick is on the twin couch, facing Andrew’s across an oval sheet of frosted glass the size of a dory, its surface virtually obscured by papers, tablets, phones, laptops, and small Japanese bowls filled with resistible snacks like desiccated soybeans and diminutive rice cakes. Next to Nick sits Hardy, whose exact job is unclear. He’s been discussing the animated footage they’ve already shot (or cyber-engineered, or super-digitized; however it is they make cartoons these days).
Andrew wants Nick to look at the sequences they have so far: Ivo wandering in the jungle, the panther following him, cunningly silent, at a distance. As in the correspondent part of Lear’s book, the images are black and white—although furtive twinges of color flash now and then beyond the trees, like distant detonations—as if, Andrew explains, color is trying to force itself back into the world, all on its own. Nick marvels at how well they’ve captured Lear’s way of drawing—yet turned the story so much darker than it is in the book. This film is not one for the nippers.
“The audience will believe that the panther is stalking the boy as prey. This is before we go to live action, the pivotal scene in the shed, with Toby and Sig.” Tobias Feld is the boy actor; Siegfried Knutsen plays the gardener.
Nick has been trying just to listen. He had expected to meet Andrew alone, at least to begin with, though he realizes how na?ve he was to believe that Andrew has much time to spend with any single person (except the wife—who, being new, probably gets as much of him as anyone possibly can).
“About the shed, we really need to speak,” Nick says.
The others turn to him, expectant.
“Because, as I mentioned to you last month, what happened to him—to Lear—as that boy—wasn’t what you’ve imagined. It’s…more complicated.”
“How much more complicated can it get than being sodomized?” says Andrew.
Nick pauses. “I just can’t ignore…I mean, to have it from the horse’s mouth that what people assume is the case isn’t the spot-on truth…I can’t ignore that.” When no one speaks, he adds, “I don’t mean just morally. I mean in terms of getting it right—which I see as my work.”
Oh God, how grandiose, even priggish, did that sound?
Andrew stares intently at Nick. The other men watch Andrew. They remind Nick of a pair of spaniels, waiting for their master to don his Wellies, take his gun from the rack. He also notices for the first time that Andrew has an earring, with which he fusses when he isn’t talking. He did not have that earring when they met up in London. Privately, Nick believes that getting an earring after age thirty—and Andrew’s more than twice that age—is unseemly, but he chalks it up to the influence of the new wife. Call it rejuvenation. She looks barely this side of twenty. As she passes through the living room, quite unself-conscious in nothing more than her scanty fluorescent swimming costume, all three visitors have a clear view of the red rose tattooed across her back, in succulent bloom from her tailbone to the nape of her neck. Their eyes follow her in awestruck unison.
Andrew extends an arm in her direction; she reciprocates. Their pinkies clasp. “Take a break,” he says. “Hardy. Jake. Have Flora fix you a juice. The oranges are killer.” He nods to Nick, rises, and heads outside, along a walkway sheltered by a tempest of bougainvillea.
Nick can only presume he’s to follow.
They enter Andrew’s office bungalow. Since Nick was last here—two years ago, the first and only other time he’s been here—the photographs on the wall have been rearranged, presumably to erase any history of Sasha, wife number two, who lasted nearly twenty years and mothered three of Andrew’s (thus far) five children.
Andrew sits behind his desk and, as if Nick isn’t with him, begins scrolling through messages on his tablet. “Never, never, never ending.” He sighs. He still cuts the lean, agile figure he did, decades back, as an actor in a spate of highly praised films about moody young men (saboteurs, insurgents, tragic lovers), but in unguarded moments like this, Andrew’s age surfaces in the sun-carved lines of his face, the softening of his jaw. Abruptly, he looks up. “So. Your revelation. Let’s hear it. But realize that we’re on location in three weeks. I’m not counting out rewrite, but these animators are breaking the bank. Used to be done by artists, down from their garrets—honest-to-God classically trained draftsmen. Not that the new artists aren’t geniuses, too, but they’re computer geeks who expect to be paid what they’d make if they were designing search engines at Google. And listen: Toby’s mother has vetted the script so tyrannically that I think she might’ve missed her calling with the Stasi. So tell me what’s up.”
Nick sits in the upholstered chair facing the desk. It’s the sort of chair in which you sink so far down that your knees rise toward your chest, making you feel inescapably childlike, as if sitting opposite your headmaster, waiting for him to hand out punishment for bad behavior.
“I’ll just say it outright,” Nick says.
“Only thing we have time for.” Andrew’s smile is genuine but brief.
“Lear wasn’t sodomized by the gardener. The gardener never touched him. He was forced to witness, from a hidden space, the gardener having sex with various women. One was Lear’s mother.”