In the course of trying to bring his mother to her senses, Francis runs a gauntlet of post-Freudian heroic ordeals that (Nick quickly divined as he read the script) would immerse the chosen actor in scene after scene so emotionally rigorous that his performance would either combust into a critical bonfire or take flight like a phoenix. There would be no middle ground. The screenplay might as well have been the libretto for an opera.
On a second, slower read, he focused on “his” scenes as a kind of slide show: the moment, after flying halfway round the world, when he first spies his mother (on a high balcony in the palatial hotel); his stealthy nocturnal pursuit of her scheming lover through the town’s medieval alleys; the confrontation, in which the nefarious gigolo turns the tables and tries to seduce the son; the intimate dinner at which Francis tells his mother about Conrad, the love of his life (this tender scene one of falsely reassuring calm, the eye of the storm); the discovery of his mother, unconscious in the tub, her wrists ineptly gashed; the final, devastating row that ends with his chasing her toward a cliff overlooking the sea.
Nick passed the director’s pub test, as his agent called it, and then the screen test. They were to begin with the hard work first—the core of the film, the scenes set in Taormina. Later, they would shoot on location in San Francisco, finishing up on a studio set depicting the long, solitary journey Francis takes at the start of the film.
Before arriving in Sicily, Nick spent a fortnight pacing the perimeter of his flat, running his lines entirely alone. (A pouty Kendra was banished for hours on end.) Once he had committed his lines not just to memory but to heart and mind, he began to absorb them. The shock of it was to find himself reinhabiting his own self in the months before he had lost his real-life mother, to collide anew with the eviscerating sense of what was at stake if she could not be saved. Nick was still haunted by the fearful suspicion that surely there must have been a way to force the doctors to care for her more scrupulously—and it dismayed him to think that had she fallen ill just a year or two later, he would have had the income to buy her the kind of prompt, attentive treatment that ordinary citizens could not afford. He seethed whenever he thought of the money Grandfather had spent on his education and left in the trust he inherited the year after she died. It wasn’t a fortune, but it might have made a difference. It might well have extended, even saved, Mum’s life.
Nick polished his Francis as if he were an oyster perfecting a pearl, as if the role were both enclosed within and wholly separate from himself, solid and concise, luminescent. Like contraband, he packed it in a deep, protected pocket of his soul and carried it with him to Sicily. Because of Deirdre’s earlier commitments, the table reads were to be held on location, immediately prior to shooting.
It took him days to grow accustomed to the way his costar slipped in and out of her character as easily as a practiced swimmer slips in and out of a pool. The way her gaze met his, the rhythm of her sentences, even the feel of her skin when they touched, were all distinctly different from one self to the next, one instant to the next. Hadn’t he had this experience a dozen times before? Not quite. Her performance, he began to realize, was a masterpiece, but a casual masterpiece, and it stood to raise his own, the way a tide buoys up a fragile boat. For Nick, performance was an exertion, the transformation almost muscular; for Deirdre, it appeared to be organic, instinctive. He felt both humbled and grateful.
A lot of their time together involved waiting, the kind that had to be done at the verge of a scene, not hunkered away in a trailer or greenroom. They might be sitting on a rococo settee or in a sports car or across from each other at a table on a patio trellised with grapevine. Three days running, for hour upon tedious hour, they waited near the edge of the cliff from which their stunt doubles would leap into the Ionian Sea (loyal son pursuing depraved, grief-stricken mother) while cameramen, electricians, set decorators, and a swarm of technically obsessed foot soldiers negotiated the details, some fussing with cables and meters and lenses, others just idling about and praying to the meteorology gods for the right angle of sun, the right kind of breeze, the right view of the volcano (which had the irksome habit of gathering round it a frumpy shawl of rust-colored haze).
All the while, Deirdre maintained a motherly (though never matronly) persona, issuing volumes of unsolicited yet diverting advice on Nick’s career, his love life, even his diet. Pineapple, she told him, was good for the blood, ginger for the libido, nuts for the cerebral cortex. (“Which is to say, amigo, your better judgment. Nuts are essential for comely young men about to be too famous for their own good.”) She carried packets of shelled, unsalted pistachios in her purse, along with wintergreen Altoids and a tin of adhesive plasters printed with cartoon characters. “At this very moment, I have Tweety Bird on my left thigh,” she told him one morning. “A nick while shaving. Not you, of course. Though I wouldn’t have minded you there when I was half my age.”
The more time he spent with Deirdre, the more he thought about Emmelina Godine. In the anxious, self-centered, hormonally enervating years that followed his brief time as her “backstage boy,” Nick had almost forgotten about her. Recently, he had looked her up on the Internet and dropped a few heartbeats when he discovered that she had only just died: of a septic infection while traveling with her husband in Nepal. According to the Guardian obit, she had retired from the stage two years after Nick met her, to marry a Scotsman who invested in coffee plantations. She was survived by a son, James—one year older than Nick—whom she had lost in a custody battle with his father, a married film director with whom she’d had a scandalous affair.
On their third interminable day of waiting cliffside beneath a portable awning, clothing and makeup as stifling as divers’ neoprene suits in the heat, Nick asked Deirdre if she had ever met Emmelina Godine.
Deirdre groaned, and for an instant Nick thought she must have felt some actual sudden pain: stung by a bee or, God forbid, bitten by a snake. “Oh, Em,” she said. “Poor star-crossed Em. Was her life ever grist for the mill.”
“What do you mean?” asked Nick.