So how could he have welcomed this intrusion? She looks at her watch: three hours. Maybe the actor will be hopelessly mired in traffic, decide it’s not worth his time to come all this way.
Morty left the crush of the city, decades ago, for a reason. He joked once that the worst thing about being a quasi-somebody in the city is being mistaken for another quasi-somebody—or simply for a not-quite-familiar nobody. Because his apartment building was next to a nursery school, more than once he was mistaken by one loitering parent for another. He enjoyed recounting the story in which a pretty woman saw him on his street from a distance, shouted “Wait! Wait!” and ran toward him. He assumed she was eager to praise him for his work, but when she caught up with him, she said in a breathless rush, “Aren’t you Richard’s daddy? My Damien is dying for a playdate, but Richard tells him you’re always in the country on weekends, so we were thinking, a sleepover maybe? We’d even be happy to keep him over two nights. And I hope you won’t be missing the auction. Is it true that maybe you’re donating a stay at your beach house? That would be awesome!” Which was how Morty ended up donating a set of autographed books. Turned out, when Morty told her his name, that the mother had actually recognized his face from the author photo on the back of a deluxe new edition of Colorquake. “One of my Damien’s absolute favorites of all time!” As if the child were holding him up against Faulkner or Dostoevsky.
In their Connecticut town, a hamlet just far enough from the city to discourage commuters, Morty could walk into the grocery store without risking a fuss over who he really was or enduring a case of mistaken identity. He was simply The Famous Author Who Lives Here, no big deal. At the video store, one of the sleepy teens who worked the desk might say, “Hey, Mr. Lear, when’s The Inseparables going to be a movie? Like I hear that kid from the vampire sitcom might be playing Boris? How cool is that.” This predictable sort of exchange he even enjoyed. But what demons had he unleashed by welcoming the notion of a movie based on that profile published nearly fifteen years ago in the Times? And now she wonders: Did he give them permission to shoot actual scenes on the property? There’s so much she doesn’t know, though she’s heard—and is relieved—that they have made her, Tommy, a minor character at best.
The magazine profile caused a sensation when it was widely e-mailed by weekend readers of the New York Times—and set off a gossipy implosion in the cliquish and envy-ridden yet self-protective world that Morty referred to as Little Reader Land. Tommy found the entire episode embarrassing not because Morty had been so open about a secret source of pain but because it must have looked like a tell-all cliché: the Beguiling Journalist coaxes the Esteemed Celebrity to share the Signature Trauma. Morty spoke almost blithely about details of his childhood that no parents would ever have shared with the Little Readers who bent and scribbled on, even chewed, the pages of his books.
“Was it the reporter?” Tommy asked when Morty told her, over dinner one night, a few days before the article was due to appear. Sheepishly, she remembered making fun of the reporter’s odd name: Calum Bonaventura. “Was he so likable that you just…decided to hand him your soul?”
Morty was silent for a moment, then laughed. “That’s a little cruel, don’t you think? Ouch.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Tommy,” he said, “secrets will out. Sometimes it’s better to out them before others do, just to make sure that the surprise isn’t yours.”
“You’re not running for office. You don’t have media gophers dashing around digging tunnels beneath your public life. Although,” she said, to soften what must have sounded like a scolding, “I’ll bet Rose said you’ll sell a ton more books.”
“Rose,” he said, “will learn about my indiscretion when everybody else does. When, as they say, it hits the stands. Or percolates up through the pixels. Whatever journalism does these days. If anybody even pays attention.”
Tommy felt a pang of mean satisfaction. Rose, the editor who took credit for “discovering” Morty by publishing Colorquake—though it was hardly his first book—had been polite to Tommy since Morty hired her, but she made Tommy feel less than essential, as if she had never evolved past the assistant who knew how to change the cartridges in the printer. More than once, in the early days, Tommy had overheard Rose referring to her as “Morty’s girl.”
“And look,” he said. “It’s just a magazine. Who bothers with magazines these days? They’re here to reassure us, falsely, that grown-ups really do still read. Two months from now, what will my story be? A pair of fleece socks or a roll of politically correct paper towels. Whatever recycled pulp becomes in our clever world of ‘Let’s just make more stuff!’?”
Yet it still bothered Tommy that he told this reporter—perhaps not casually, though that was how the article made it seem—something she hadn’t learned about Morty until she had been with him for years, until they went through the divisive trauma of Soren’s dying. That was when Tommy learned why Morty tended to avoid any talk of his boyhood in Tucson—why his hazy tales resembled those “looseline” sketches, smudgy pencil on cheap, disposable notebook paper.
The reason Morty’s mother had moved them east (Morty’s father dead five years already) was that a man who worked at the same hotel where she washed the linens—a man who had worked his way into her trust, possibly even her heart—had charmed Morty into a shed on the outskirts of the property and exerted his sinister persuasions on the boy. It had happened more than once—how often or for how long, Tommy isn’t sure and wouldn’t ask—but Morty’s mother had found out.
In the magazine, Morty discussed the usual things artists are expected to discuss—his early doubts, his sudden success, his reasons for leaving the creative hive of the city to live in the woods—but the heart of the story was his revelation of the abuse.
CB: Let’s talk about that hotel—the place where you first knew you wanted to be an artist, right?
ML: I suppose. But you know, I doubt most artists ever remember accurately when they foresaw growing into this kind of life—unless maybe they had parents who were artists. Because it isn’t real, this life. It can’t be imagined from the outside, not like being a doctor or a bus driver or a banker, the working adults a child sees in the course of an ordinary day. To most children, art is not a grown-up thing; it’s an indulgence, an escape.
CB: Which was it for you?
ML: Both, of course.
CB: What were you escaping from? Certainly, your father had died—
ML: I didn’t know my father. Or don’t remember knowing him. That tragedy was my mother’s, almost entirely. It was her loss and her burden. I never saw how much more work she took on. I didn’t know she had a “before.” I think she married because she was so desperate not to be alone, and then, well, it ended up being worse than alone. But nothing like that would have occurred to me then.