She leaves him alone. For a long moment, he simply looks around, takes in the faded, balding kilim (worn clean through to the floor around the legs of the bed), the astonishing crush of books in the bookcase, volumes jammed in willy-nilly, horizontal atop the vertical. But there isn’t a single book on the floor, the dressing table, or the chair. Nor is there anything beneath the bed—not even a pair of slippers. There, the kilim’s zigzagging pattern is darker: the rug’s been here forever.
On the dressing table, a red lacquerware box and yet another pair of reading specs sit on a delicate white runner embroidered with daisies—a keepsake from Lear’s mum? Many of the room’s appointments seem old-ladyish. Nick reminds himself that the Lear he will become is far younger than the Lear who last slept in this bed, who regarded himself in this looking glass that now reflects Nick in his place.
He can’t help it: he opens the box. It contains a cache of chemist vials—medications related to pain and digestion, as best he can tell—along with a few safety pins, spare change, a ticket stub from The Book of Mormon (two years old), and a claim slip for shirts from a laundry service.
As quietly as he can, he opens the top drawer: underpants, all white; socks, an array of sober neutrals. A dark velvet jeweler’s box holds a set of prim gold studs and cuff links. Slipped in sideways, face to the wall of the drawer, a framed photograph. Pulling it out, Nick guesses before properly seeing the picture that it’s Soren. Strong, beguiling, healthy. He puts the picture back and pulls from behind it a wooden cigar box. This time he hesitates.
Enough, he thinks, replacing the box and closing the drawer. Or enough for now, perhaps.
He goes back to the cupboard and opens the door. Ignored for weeks, it must have gathered in the summer’s early heat—which radiates into the room, conveying with it a thick, muddled odor of dusty wood, leather, ripe old plimsolls, and a chimeric trace of cologne, a properly masculine scent like coffee or tobacco leaf.
Shirts, trousers, suits, neatly hung; affixed to the inner door, a rack of neckties; on the floor, half a dozen pairs of shoes. Lear was no dandy, but his garments were well kept. The shirts, many still sheathed in polystyrene, are of three varieties: white or pastel cotton, short-sleeve stripes and tartans, thick wintry fleeces and woolens. There is a standard-issue evening jacket, lapels narrow, and suits in olive seersucker and gray wool; khaki trousers (cuffed), a navy blazer. Nothing monogrammed or bearing a logo.
The neckties, however, are a circus in silk. There are regimentals, polka dots, and paisleys, the quotidian fare of businessmen, but scattered robustly among them are ties with scholarly totemic prints of open books, inkwells, quill pens, library shelves—and garishly clever ties depicting characters from cartoons and storybooks: Eeyore, Road Runner, Kermit the Frog, Ferdinand the Bull, Tenniel’s big-headed Alice, and those two notorious felines: the toothsome Cheshire Cat and his mischievous compatriot in the striped stovepipe hat. Most striking of all is an indigo tie that portrays Rapunzel. Her small, inscrutable face, leaning from a bright chink of window (her tower itself unseen), must fall just below the knot; luxuriant tresses of golden hair tumble and coil down to rest inside the tie’s angular end point. It’s an object that merges masculinity with the unbridled feminine.
Nick handles the ties tenderly, without removing them from the rack. To which occasions did Lear wear these fanciful bits of silk? Were they reserved for appearances with children, or might he wear Rapunzel to a posh charity banquet? For a few years, while he was with Soren Kelly, Lear was a conspicuous presence at auctions, luncheons, and staged events aimed at raising funds for nonprofits offering help to people stricken with HIV. But after Soren, he seemed to fall away from those snippets of gossip in the New York papers, the photographic collages on style and society pages documenting all the Most Important Parties (the parties at which Nick is now welcome, often expected). He saw a series of these pictures thanks to Ned, the film’s costume designer—who would probably keel over in rapture were he allowed to flip through these ties, this cupboard filled with Lear’s real-life wardrobe.
Were his phone not downstairs, Nick would be tempted to snap a quick photo and shoot it to Andrew.
The one shelf above the clothing holds stacks of neatly folded blankets and linens, though a straw panama is wedged in at the left. Nick pulls it down. He smiles. The price tag is still attached to the brim. Good intentions gone south.
Turning his attention to the shoes, Nick sits on the floor. Quite unlike the neckties, they are all practical: a graying pair of plimsolls with cracked rubber soles, two pairs of loafers, suede wing-tips, patent-leather dress shoes, doe-brown walking shoes, and a pair of blinding-white trainers whose unblemished state betrays, again, healthy intentions deferred. But among the shoes, there is nothing whimsical, no purchase made in a fit of delusional modishness. No velvet slippers.
He takes one of the plimsolls and holds it, sole to sole, with one of his own. Lear’s feet were smaller than Nick’s.
Nick closes his eyes. He must simply sit here for a time, inhaling the subtle effusions of all these neglected garments. A breeze from the open window behind him cools his neck; he hears the whisper of fabric stirred. Since fathers were never a part of his growing up, Nick had no experience of cupboards like this one until he had his own. Even when he was away at school, the boys hung their clothes together in doorless cupboards. In the communal crush, one or two unlaundered shirts and the funk became contagious. When the lot of them dressed up and sat shoulder to shoulder at vespers, a faint barnlike stench rose from the assembly. In school plays, from up onstage, he could smell it, too, the audience filled with boys who were mostly impatient to be elsewhere, bored and itchy in their soon-to-be-outgrown blazers.
He rises to his feet and closes the door to the cupboard.
—
Brooklyn makes sense. That’s where she will be working. Enough with the hysteria; no matter what happens with what she thinks of as the Lear Catastrophe, she is not going to lose her job. But even out here, the prices are insane. What is going on with this city? Are the rentals monopolized by Russian mafia princesses going to NYU and Parsons?
She called in sick—which she certainly was—then downed four ibuprofen with a carton of orange juice from the corner market on her way to take Linus for a good, long, penitential walk. After returning to the apartment, she did what she had been putting off: called that real estate broker in Park Slope whose card she had taken at a baby shower for their mutual friend Renee.