As if to provide an appropriate background to this heartache, too many of Morty’s friends and colleagues—Tommy’s, too—were dying. To look back on that sinister era feels now, to Tommy, like going to a history museum and gazing into a glass-front display, a sealed-off epoch as remote as the ones portrayed in the dioramas with covered wagons or roaming mastodons. Perhaps that’s a disgraceful thought, but barely twenty years after the panic began—the wildfire of fear and pointed hypochondria, the escalating number of phone calls with worsening news, the gridlock of funerals—it petered toward an end. Not an end to the entire epidemic, of course, but an end to its tyranny over their particular world, to the lengthening roster of its victims. Morty had pointed out, grimly, that if you knew your social circles well enough, you could have set up a solid betting pool, a kind of actuarial poker. “You could donate the proceeds to cover the health care of the uninsured, how about that?”
Between spates of touring and their separate day trips to the city, Tommy and Morty had lived an intensely focused life in the two years they had shared the house. One month Tommy’s life was a cram session of readings, parties, school visits, radio interviews, and—back when authors had any cachet—television talk shows. And then, for a season, it became a serial monotony of paperwork, phone calls, gardening, tending to the needs of a geriatric house. The longer stretches were almost monastic, but Tommy didn’t see it that way, because the small, hectic periods of travel and fuss, of managing so much attention (both welcome and intrusive), filled her days with more people than she might have met in the entirety of any other viable life.
So it surprised her one day when Morty said, “Do you realize what a pair of sorry introverts we are?” He had just pointed out that a visiting plumber was the first person either of them had spoken with, face-to-face, in nearly a week. “Maybe we should start making jam or cordials. Wear ropes around our waists.”
They were bound together as well by their mothers’ failing health, though they spoke only rarely about this kindred burden—perhaps because each of them felt inadequate, never attentive enough. Tommy had Dani and her father to cover for her periods of absence and negligence—and, in hindsight, it’s clear that Tommy’s mother did her best to minimize the trials of her treatment, always insisting that she looked much worse than she felt. As for Morty, he could tell himself that his mother hardly noticed when he came to visit—and surely wouldn’t remember once he left.
But at the time, Tommy had no intention, at least in the long term, of giving up on finding a separate life of her own. About children, she wasn’t certain, but who didn’t want to fall feverishly, lustfully, then lastingly in love? Since Scott, her Jamesian lover in college, she’d had two short liaisons, both disastrous, with men she met while she lived in the city. When they had each let her down, she had been grateful for Morty’s company during the day. There were times she could even comfort herself with the certainty that here was a handsome, talented man who knew her well and treated her with kindness, even affection. If Morty had been attracted to women, maybe, despite their age difference, they would have married.
But she and Morty did not talk about love, not the kind of love that involved coupling. For too many people around them, death had eclipsed that kind of love. Because Tommy began working for Morty at almost exactly the same moment when whispers of the rogue disease began to circulate, she assumed that Morty had sworn off passionate connections because they were simply too risky. (In Morty’s building on Twelfth Street, a downstairs neighbor was the first man Tommy saw whose skin had broken out in those lurid bruises. She saw him just a few times, trying hard not to stare, before she never saw him again.)
Or perhaps Morty kept his love life secret, partitioned into the hours Tommy went home to her walkup on Avenue A. After all, her two badly chosen boyfriends never set foot in Morty’s place. So what if discretion seemed quaint?
And then suddenly, if only for six months or so, she had Dani to look after, to distract her from making further bad choices in men. A few years later, after the month during which she stayed with Morty while he recovered from surgery for a burst appendix, he asked if she’d like to move in full-time. The house felt too big, he claimed. And he needed to have an assistant right there, someone who would know how his studio worked, have physical access to his files—and deal with the ceaseless ringing of the phone.
“Are you threatening to fire me? Or ‘lay me off’?” she said, trying to make it sound like a joke.
“Not in a million years would I do that,” said Morty. “But look around here. Wouldn’t you love to escape the mayhem of the city?”
Was it wrong to flee the political epicenter of the crisis? Though little more than an hour away, their affluent country village felt like a zone of both immunity and ignorance. But in the novelty of the move, she was happy to be unencumbered—she would figure out the mating business later—and she assumed the same was true of Morty. If there was a time she regretted her retreat from the city, it was after her mother’s death, which left her father alone and numb. Her guilt receded, just a little, when Dani moved back in with Dad. Tommy knew it was a move of convenience as much as compassion—Dani, back then, in a state of serial disemployment—but still, her weekly visits felt paltry. It grieved her to see how her father’s playfulness had died along with his wife. (The last silly song he wrote, during her second round of chemo, was a mock love ballad called “Cancer, Cancer, Necromancer.”)
A month or so after the awards ceremony and his mother’s acute decline, Morty told Tommy that he had agreed to teach a weeklong seminar at Pratt. He would be staying at a hotel in the city. Tommy couldn’t remember any teaching invitations from Pratt, but Morty told her the request had come through a friend of his on the faculty—a favor, really. “I’m filling in for someone who’s ill.” The way he said the word ill discouraged her from asking any other questions. Enough said. Increasingly, daily routines involved folding in tasks for the weakened and dying.
Tommy was also distracted. She had met someone, in the plainest of ways. She had chosen the seat next to his on the commuter train, returning from a visit to her father. After an hour’s conversation, before he got off, the man had invited Tommy to join him for dinner at a new French restaurant in Greenwich. Tommy chose an evening when she knew Morty would be visiting his mother; she didn’t need his teasing.
The conversation at the restaurant was as easy as it had been on the train, though Tommy did not discuss her living situation. “I work for the author Mort Lear,” she said, and even though John had no children, “Wow,” he exclaimed right away, “a local celebrity!” Perhaps she should simply invite him over for a drink; maybe it wouldn’t seem so odd, that she lived in her employer’s house at thirty-one—so long as Morty wasn’t around; because if he were, he wouldn’t be good at making himself scarce.
John was enchanted by the house and garden. He loved the crowded mosaic of artwork on the living room walls, the shelves bowed beneath too many books, the collection of lumpy clay figures that various children had made for Morty over the past decade, which he displayed on the deep wooden mantel over the fireplace. She made a point of referring to Morty, often, as her boss.
“So you live with your boss?” John said. “That’s devotion.”