“So what does that mean? That you’ll do this again? Because next time, I don’t think I can come to the rescue.”
He continued to shake his head. “I don’t know what it means.”
She pulled her chair around the kitchen table to sit beside him. She put her right hand over his left. She felt older than she ever had before—and more fearful than she’d ever felt except beside her mother’s hospital bed on her very last day. “Take a break from everything,” she said. “You can afford to. Deserve to. Maybe take a trip that has nothing to do with books?”
“I can’t do that,” he said. “It’s not in my nature. Not now.”
“Is it in your nature to self-destruct?”
“Tommy, let me be. Just let me…go through what I have to go through.”
She stood up and moved away from him. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll do that. Go be yourself. Last I looked, you had no other choices.”
Over the next two months, Morty would sometimes pack a small bag and drive into the city. He would tell her how many nights he planned to be gone; it was never more than three. He would return looking exhausted, often gaunt, and sleep late for the next few mornings, working after dinner to appease his conscience. Rose, in a conversation with Tommy concerning foreign rights, made acerbic reference to a city gossip column that noted a “Lear sighting” at a warehouse-turned-nightclub on Rivington Street.
And then one day when he returned, he wasn’t alone. Tommy heard the car pull up outside. She stood at the kitchen window, to get a stealthy look at Morty’s physical state when he emerged from the car—but the first person to get out, from the passenger side, was a tall blond man. Alert and confident, he turned in a circle to take in his surroundings. Until he spoke, he reminded Tommy of a beautiful long-legged hound, tensed for the start of a hunt or a race.
“Where in the world am I?” he exclaimed. “Did I die and go to heaven? Though wait—that’s not the place holding my reservation.” His laughter was raucous, almost brutal.
Tommy watched as the young man went around the car and opened Morty’s door, pulling him out with both hands joined, as if leading him toward a dance floor.
—
Andrew wasn’t kidding about this child actor’s overbearing mother. Toby is a perfectly composed little boy, far older than his years, and if Mum would just leave them alone to collaborate, Nick knows they would get on winningly, forge their destined alliance. But the mother sits in a chair by the door, watching them intently.
The boy is assured and graceful in his movements—his “Ivo dance.” What’s equally impressive, if benignly spooky, is how closely Toby resembles Nick. He looks more like the grown Nick than photographs taken of Nick when he was nine years old.
A rough, herky-jerky cut of the animated jungle scene is projected on one wall of the dance studio. Ivo is moving through the trees, mimicking different animals as he encounters them; behind him, the panther creeps along in quiet pursuit.
The idea is for the animated Ivo to transform gradually into the Toby-Ivo, and then—though this will happen a few scenes later in the film—Toby as the young, traumatized Lear will, in a complex sequence to be filmed on the Arizona set and in a Burbank soundstage, turn into Nick as Lear the young man, the ambitious artist making his way in New York.
Toby and Nick wear identical leggings and cotton vests. They stand barefoot on the studio’s padded floor, facing a panoramic mirror in which they can see the projection on the wall behind them. Nick stands behind the boy, his looming shadow.
“What he’ll actually wear won’t be so revealing,” says Toby’s mother. “Right?”
“You can take that up with Andrew or Ned,” Trish says brightly.
“We need to have a conversation about the scenes in the shed,” says Mum.
Nick cringes. Wasn’t that exactly what he said an hour ago, to Andrew?
“I’m just working on coordinating their body language, their way of moving through space,” says Trish. “That’s my job here.”
Nick sees her patience thinning. He wonders if Toby, who moves not a muscle during this exchange, is embarrassed. All Nick can see of him is his head of strawberry hair, just shy of Nick’s sternum. On the other hand, the boy must be used to this. Likely the mother is a failed performer. She has the semistarved look of a ballerina.
Trish stands behind Nick; he can feel her breasts beneath his shoulder blades. She interlaces her fingers with his and lifts his arms gently till they are parallel to the floor. “Your hands are the butterflies, weightless, your fingers their translucent wings.”
He shuts his eyes, briefly, to feel himself inside the drawing that spooked him as a child but to feel it as a brightening, a benediction, the world quenched with rain after a drought. Then, eyes open, he dances as if stitched to the small boy before him: step, spin, bend, on tiptoe, arms raised, face open—
The mother’s mobile rings. She answers it.
Nick stops and turns around. “Would you mind taking that outside the room?”
She asks the caller to hang on.
“It’ll be short,” she says to Nick.
“No,” he says. “It will be outside the room. Please.”
She stares at him, deciding. Trish and Toby say nothing. “This isn’t a shoot. It’s a rehearsal. My son doesn’t rehearse without me in the room.”
“Then turn off your mobile.”
She says something inaudible to the caller, ostentatiously turns off the phone, puts it in her pocket. “Fine,” she says, settling back in her chair.
They resume, but Nick feels his heart beating too insistently. Was he wrong to give her orders? Trish is holding him by the waist now, steering him this way and that. “Relax,” she says softly. “Nick, relax.”
He steps away from her and shakes out his limbs.
“It’s cool,” Toby says to him. “Let’s break.” The boy puts a hand on Nick’s bare arm, and the warmth of it is soothing.
“Thank you,” Nick says. “Just a few minutes and I’ll be a hundred percent. Must be a spot of jet lag.”
They head for a pair of chairs against the opposite wall from the mother.
Next to Nick, leaning over, elbows on his knees, Toby whispers, “She’s just protecting me. After she gets to know everybody, it’s fine.”
Nick holds off from telling Toby that even at this early stage, her interference is counterproductive.
Sure enough, the mother is approaching them. Foolish Nick wonders if she’s coming over to apologize. He stands and makes an effort to look friendly. When she’s directly in front of him, she says, “We haven’t met before, but just so you know, it’s in his contract to have me present, so you’ll need to get used to it.”
Nick says, “He seems to know what he’s doing.”
“Sure does,” she says. She’s smiling, but her arms are crossed tightly. “That’s why he’s here, Nick.”
“I’m sorry, your name again?” Nick can see Trish, the look of concern on her face. But she keeps her professional distance.
“Rebecca,” says the mother. Pointedly, Nick is sure, she does not extend a hand.
“A pleasure,” he says, as if he means it.