“I met her when she was just clear of that disastrous fling with Gus Whitehall. What a schmuck. Nothing but a backwoods greaseball under all that Armani. Whitehall? More like white trash. So there she was, single, with a two-year-old, and the subject of pure…venom in the tabloids. I mean venom. All that tiresome home-wrecker crap. We were in a forgettable movie about New York in the Roaring Twenties. And was I ever roaring back then. I probably didn’t have much real sympathy for her—how little I knew of what the future held for me!—but I liked her. Or I felt sorry for her. Not sure I was nice enough then to honestly like anybody….After that, she went back to London, hoping to make life as a mother work with a return to the stage. Desdemona, Titania, Electra; dusty classics at the Old Vic. But wherever she went, the harpies nipped at her heels. Along with Whitehall’s goon squad of lawyers.”
He asked Deirdre if that was why Emmelina had left acting, married a rich expat, fled the country.
Deirdre smirked at him, carving fissures in her makeup. “Now what do you think, bear cub? Or hell, what do I know? Maybe she found true love. There comes a point when you’ll trade anything for that. But what makes you think of her? You’d have been too young to see her act. And she never made a decent film. None that I know of, at least.”
“But I knew her. A little.” He felt a tug of remorse as he told Deirdre about his odd apprenticeship. “I was so thoughtless. I let the acquaintance slip away.”
“You were a little boy,” Deirdre said tartly. “What do little boys know? That’s one of the reasons she chose you. You would never judge her; wouldn’t even know what to judge her for. And you were a passing consolation. I hate to think about that boy of hers, how he was probably turned against her. Who knows what became of him? Barbaric, those tug-of-wars.” She paused. “Hm. Tugs-of-war? What do you think?”
And as they made their way back to the set, summoned for yet another take (the sun having achieved the precise altitude and angle of radiance desired by the cinematographer), Nick remembered how, when she had spotted him in the back of the theater that very first day, Ms. Godine had briefly mistaken him for somebody else, quite logically for another boy just about his age and stature.
Eight
THURSDAY
The house feels both too large and too small—and too dark. Its comforts have begun to chafe, a rough-knit sweater worn against skin. The trees block the circulating air as much as they shade the roof.
The heat and humidity are abruptly oppressive, August in early June. The picket fence at the front of the property has broken out in verdant acne, a mossy flocking that even bleach will not remove. Tommy called the painter they’ve used in the past, but his number is obsolete. If Morty were still around, he might joke that it’s an omen. Did she depend on Morty for humor? Is she wilting for want of laughter?
Once, she would have moved her laptop to the screened porch, found minor relief in its deep breezy shade. But she avoids the porch now because it looks directly onto the slate terrace where Morty fell to his death, where she waited, with his body, for help. She hasn’t even bothered to dust the pollen from the tables and chairs, never mind put out the cushions.
After too much vacillation, she made up the sofa bed in the den. Ordinarily, she would give him the guest room on the attic level—a slant-ceilinged loft with old quilts and hooked rugs (and the only air conditioner in the house)—but “ordinarily” does not apply. Tommy dislikes the idea of the actor sleeping above her. Why? It makes no sense; so little does.
I am going a little mad, she thinks. What would the actor say? A wee bit daft? A tad round the bend? His voice has seeped its way into her consciousness, from which it wafts up like the teasing scent of an expensive perfume. (She is dogged in particular by the courteous lilt of his request “May I possibly trouble you to show me the drawings of Ivo?” To which she had had to reply that, no, alas, they were temporarily on loan to a museum in the city.)
She shouldn’t be preoccupied with Nicholas Greene—he’s just a convenient, even ludicrous distraction—but she rationalizes that once his visit is past, she can bear down on the too many tasks she’s avoiding: that “temporary loan,” to name just one. For the past two nights, she’s awakened in what Morty called the netherland of night, sweaty despite her window fan, startled by dreams involving actors whose movies she doesn’t even know all that well….During intermission at a play in New York, she searches for the rest room. She goes up one staircase, but no. She hurries back down and enters a dim hallway. It leads her to a door that opens onto a stone terrace in broad daylight. Waiting for her there is Woody Harrelson. He wants to show her a beautiful tattoo on his forearm: it looks like a pirate map, a guide to finding buried treasure. Woody asks her, tenderly, if she has any children. She wonders if he is going to ask her to have children with him. In the dream, she’s not too old to consider it.
Last night it was Ben Stiller—not at all the comic, bug-eyed Ben Stiller but a sorrowful version, haunted, soft-spoken. He was in the kitchen while she was making dinner for Morty. He told Tommy that she didn’t need to give him any food, but he needed her to help him learn his lines. He was playing Hamlet. Maybe he wasn’t up for it after all.
She woke with a fiercely protective feeling toward Ben, as if his career depended on Tommy.
She got out of bed and went to the bathroom, drank a glass of water, and stared for a few minutes out the window, just to stitch herself back into the real world. The outer night was still, trees motionless around the stern silhouette of Morty’s studio. Yet when she returned to sleep, she was once again in the kitchen, and Morty was sitting down to dinner. She asked him if he had seen Ben Stiller on his way in. He told her that wasn’t possible. Hadn’t she read in the paper that Stiller was undergoing pancreatic surgery? In fact, he might have already died. They must check the obituaries the following day.
Again she awoke, and she had to fight the compulsion to go downstairs, turn on her computer, and search for breaking news about Ben Stiller.
In the heavy air of a morning that foretells a blazing afternoon, these absurdist dreams hover, like the musk of an animal that passed the house before dawn.
Lethargy, she thinks. “Whatever you do, do not let me turn lethargic,” Morty told her after Soren died. “Mourning is like quicksand.”
Well, now she knows.
It is beyond time to answer certain calls. Too late, she also realizes that it was a mistake to put off the “private” memorial at the Metropolitan Museum, allowing the public ceremony in the park to upstage it in the press. Not that she cares about Morty getting publicity—what does publicity matter anymore?—but the Times covered the Central Park gathering on Sunday. Tommy was a coward not to go, and had she gone, perhaps the reporter would have spoken to her—instead of Meredith Galarza.