“It is. But what makes it supportable is entirely, absolutely, Deirdre’s performance in that last scene. That wordless performance, when she’s with the child. The camera’s on her for nearly five minutes, a single take, during which she utters not one bloody syllable….Deirdre taught me a lot about using certain parts of my face as well as the rest of my body. Just watch her shoulders in that scene. Genius. I am such a creature of words that I can only aspire to such a performance.”
And aspire he must. In a key scene close to the dénouement of The Inner Lear, after Soren Kelly’s death, Lear revisits the desert hotel where he lived as a child, walks the grounds in search of the gardener’s shed, only to find that it no longer exists. The dread he had felt gradually becomes a yearning; he finds himself looking around the property, intently, perhaps frantically. He needs to find the shed. Wouldn’t its nonexistence, its very erasure, be a blessing? Why does it feel like a heartbreak, a curse? When Nick mentioned the notion of voice-over, Andrew gave him a scolding look. “Voice-overs, unless you’re Hitchcock making Rebecca, are for directors on training wheels.” And so, for several minutes, the camera will track a solitary, speechless Nick.
“What about this movie—the movie about Morty? Will this one be devastating, too?” Her voice is solemn.
“No,” he says. “Sad in places, but it ends on a high note. Same as Colorquake. The nightmare is over. He is home. And home is—well.”
He stops abruptly; is he holding something back? Yet Tommy is grateful for a break in the conversation, a chance to enjoy her food. Nick is a natural cook. The lemon dressing on the asparagus, which Tommy watched him mix with a fork in a juice glass, is perfect. She’s afraid to tell him so, however, for fear that the recipe comes from his mother and that she’ll open that grab bag of emotion all over again. She thinks of her parents’ twin graves, in northwestern Connecticut—the small town where Dad grew up—and once again (again; again; it will never stop) wishes that she were the kind of daughter to make a pilgrimage there. Does Dani ever visit? She doubts he does, but that she doesn’t even know dismays her.
She refills Nick’s water glass from the pitcher he put on the table (one, in fact, that belonged to Tommy’s mother). “So tell me what you need from me. I have a lot to do this weekend—I’ll be out in the studio a lot of the time—but I want to be available. You have questions, I’m sure.”
“Have I questions?” Nick leans toward her; would this be his devilish smile? He seems to have quite an arsenal. “But right now, Tomasina, all I need is a room assignment and a loo and a Wi-Fi password, if you don’t mind. And I hope you might let me wander about. May I see the upstairs? His bedroom?”
Tommy knows that seeing Morty’s room, contemplating and handling his private things, is a logical purpose of the actor’s field trip—and as it happens, Morty’s room is exactly as he left it (bed neatly made, a habit his mother enforced from early on). The thought of going through Morty’s clothing and the books he kept close at hand feels obscene to Tommy, even if it’s not a task she would delegate to anyone else.
“Of course.”
—
The texts, expressing a mounting impatience, are from Si. Andrew’s on the warpath because Toby Feld’s mother is threatening to withdraw him from the picture. Domineering bitch, thinks Nick. But they cannot lose the boy. So Andrew’s now wondering, What if Nick phones the mother directly? Pull out all the stops on your Rule Britannia charm.
It won’t be the first time Nick’s been asked to deploy a kind of persuasion to which Americans alone seem epidemically susceptible: the Colin Firth Special, Nick privately calls it (not that he wouldn’t kill to share a stage or screen with that man). At least he can be genuine about his desire to work with Toby. The boy is talented and, because of his looks, virtually irreplaceable. The thought of placating that woman, however, sets Nick’s teeth on edge.
Sitting on the couch, he assesses the room. It’s the room with the main telly, with the bookshelves containing the least personal books: tree-felling tomes of Master Artists, showy references on everything from geography to gardening. There’s also a shelf holding at least a hundred DVDs.
On the wall between a pair of windows looking out toward the studio hangs a large framed black-and-white photograph: a winding alley in some medieval-vintage European village. The photographer signed it—nobody Nick’s ever heard of, but what does that mean?—with a penciled note: Let’s go, M, shall we?
A lover? There had to be others, before and even after Soren Kelly.
Soren Kelly was the last major role Andrew cast; the two actors at the top of his original list were superstitious about dying of AIDS on-screen—and the script does get a little grisly. Finally, in one of those counterintuitive strokes of genius, Andrew landed Jim Krivet, known to most people only for his buffoonish role in that series about the out-of-work solicitors who start a moving company in L.A. In the one reading they’ve done together, Krivet was a marvel. Extraordinary how, by the end of the reading, the prospect of making love to this other man, if only (only!) on-screen, seemed quite plausible to Nick.
There’s no cupboard, but Tomasina set out a rack for his suitcase, and a narrow dressing table stands against the wall beneath the photograph. After putting a jug of those divine peonies on top of the dressing table, she said she would take him upstairs in an hour; she has to make certain calls before the end of the business day.
Nick texts Silas and Andrew that he’ll do what’s necessary to appease the devil mum, but can it wait till Monday? He then idles through the DVDs: old classics, new (or newish) classics…a lot of American comedies, from Ernst Lubitsch and Preston Sturges to John Hughes and Albert Brooks; a boxed set of Bleak House, another of the Peter Sellers Pink Panther films. (Whose taste is represented here? Probably not just Lear’s.) No sci-fi or horror. To the far right on the shelf, he finds a few copies of the PBS documentary on Lear, which Nick has watched three times. He’ll watch it again while he’s here. He looks around for the remotes.
Another text: Needs to happen this weekend. Tomorrow if not today. Sorry.
Andrew himself this time.
Leaving his phone in the den, Nick goes out into the living room. It’s not a bright room, but it’s lovely and cool, antique chestnut-colored paneling from floor to rafters, ceiling and windows low. Without even straightening his arms, he can easily clasp his hands around one of the coarsely hewn beams. Just beyond the two dozen panes of each window, delicate trees grow close to the house, the sun casting through their fresh foliage a mosaic of watery light.