Nick strips to take a shower, but first he steps into the light from the window to cast a glance at his pricey view, over low industrial buildings and an avenue streaming with those cheerful American taxis, out across the Hudson River. If he isn’t careful, this is what he will begin to take for granted: standing above it all. As if the view is limitless, the future as wide and straight and cordoned off from chaos as one of those silly red carpets.
An astonishingly massive cruise ship glides into view as Nick stands in the riverine glow, the gooseflesh rising palpably on his skin. Crikey, how deep can that river be? That ship is the size of a cathedral. Distracted by a burst of honking below, he presses his forehead against the plateglass and peers straight down. He can just see a margin of the sooty yet fashionable street ten stories below, but he cannot see the entrance to the hotel. Not photographers, please not the bloody photographers, he prays. He tries always to be gracious, but today is not the day. (Yesterday, in the lift, a woman took a Biro from her handbag and asked him to sign her bare arm. And he did. What choice did he have?)
A knock sounds on his door. That’s exactly how he found out about his first nomination: a knock one morning on a hotel door. But all he wants from this knock is breakfast. “Hang on!” he calls out, and makes for the closet, the hotel robe.
Nick loves breakfast. He loved it as a small child because it was the slim chink of the day when he had his mother to himself: after his older siblings had gone off to their school, before Mum dropped him off at his and went to work. He loves it now because it’s the only meal he seems ever to have alone. Since a certain Sunday night at the end of February, company of any kind requires all the adrenaline he can muster. He recalls the last time he was alone with Deirdre, in the car after their final interview, the day before the Oscars. The studio sent them everywhere in cars the size of tanks, and sometimes, stepping out from a twilight-windowed, climate-controlled leathery interior, for a second Nick would find himself baffled by the temperature—whether arctic or balmy—because he’d dozed off and lost track of whether they were in New York or L.A. or Chicago or London. For a flash, he would scramble to find the proper public face (it was different, just a bit, from one city to the next). How delicious it felt—how brilliant—when, that very last time, in Beverly Hills, as the car peeled away from the curb to join the wave of traffic flowing in the direction of their hotel, Deirdre put a hand on his sleeve and said to Nick, “Guess what? You can stop sparkling now.”
—
Over the past twelve days, Tommy has spent too much time standing in this spot, just behind the swivel stool at Morty’s drafting table. She does not sit on the stool—she never has and cannot imagine doing it now—but looks at the drawings and notes, still undisturbed, that he must have been working on the afternoon before their champagne-and-linguini supper (after which they went to the den and watched a documentary about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, at least until they nodded off). Or did Morty get up the morning after and work for an hour or two before his fatal decision to move that limb?
Two sketches are tacked to the top of the slanted surface: one depicts a pair of galloping horses, the other a tall skinny girl in a pleated dress carrying an absurdly tall stack of books. They are new images, foreign to Tommy. Is it possible that they were Morty’s first inklings of what he had been aiming toward for decades: a new, extravagantly illustrated version of Alice? This was a project he had talked about (or talked around) for as long as Tommy could remember. He joked that it would be his “final masterwork”—except that she knew he wasn’t really joking. Which was why he kept putting it off.
So who is this roughly hewn girl? Are the horses part of her world or something entirely other? A new picture book? Instinctively, Tommy wants to search for Morty, to find out. Is he checking the vegetable garden for early pests? Reading on the porch? Sneaking a piece of leftover cake while she is away from the kitchen? She has to remind herself that there is no Morty to track down.
Both sketches represent the stage of Morty’s process that he called “looselining”: soft gray pencil on lined paper ripped from a cheap college-ruled notebook. For years, Tommy has bought those notebooks in bulk, first from a school-supply company in Queens, then from a stationery store here in town (before it closed), more recently from Staples. These drawings were often ruthlessly smudged from the passage of Morty’s hand across the lines, prone to casual tears and humid puckerings.
Enrico, the paper conservator at the museum, scolded Morty for doing so much of his work on such a cheap, impermanent surface when he could afford better. Morty’s answer was “Don’t ever want to take myself that seriously. Like who am I here, da Vinci?”
But Tommy knows that’s simply the way he started drawing, long before she met him: in the margins of his school notes and composition books. (Or so he described it, since the evidence is long gone, well composted decades ago in some Staten Island landfill.) And, almost proudly, Morty was prone to superstition. Some of his habits verged on fetish: his stationery, the brands of his pastels and paints, the timing of meals. After Soren, he took to dressing in the same jeans (summer) or corduroys (winter), the same shirt or sweater, with little variation. His life, for several years now, had ticked like a metronome.
Just beyond the drafting table, through the window, the branches of the fruit trees have begun to fog over in flowers, masses of blossom that seem to bring the boughs closer to the ground, obscuring the view of the pool. Tommy will have to decide whether to uncover it, whether to call the pool people, ask them to swing by and perform their chemical ministrations. She doesn’t use it much, and neither did Morty—but he liked being able to offer that luxury to guests.
Whether she likes it or not, there will continue to be guests. This is something she must discuss with Franklin soon: whom to consult in order to carry out Morty’s final wishes.
Against the wall to the right of the window is the desk with Morty’s computer. Two days after his death, Tommy put an autoreply on his e-mail account, but Franklin tells her she must start looking through his correspondence, working backward, or hire someone to do it for her. Tommy has always handled the business side, using a separate, more public e-mail address, devoting two hours a day—on her own computer, in the house—to answering queries about book signings, charity events, conferences, commencement speeches, awards juries….Morty said yes less and less often—not because his energies had diminished but because, as he told her a year or so before, the older he got, the more privacy he craved.