As a matter of fact, Tommy has begun to fume, just a little.
…but for the past week I’ve been thinking about you and wondering if it might be a good thing to meet up again the next time I’m in New York. Daughter Jo went straight from Barnard to NYU Law. She’s crazy about New York, and I try to visit her at least two or three times a year. A classmate of ours (do you remember Josh Stark?) lets me crash in his guest room. I go to museums and bookstores while Jo fills her head with legislative lore and lard. She assures me she’ll put it all to work for the Right Causes. I’m probably jealous.
Would you consider meeting me for lunch the next time I head east? I’ll be there next month. Are you still living in the city? I remember your stories about growing up in Greenwich Village back in the hipster days, so I can’t imagine you anywhere else. And I’m sure you have a family of your own. (I do read the alumni notes, even though I never write in. I see you never do, either. But we loved it there, didn’t we?)
I realize this letter might not even reach you, but if it does, I would enjoy hearing your news, now that I’ve forced too much of mine on you. Whether we meet again or not, know that my memories of our year together seem sweet from this vantage point, like looking at Planet Earth from the moon. Or maybe I’m just turning into a sentimental fool. My students tease me that I’m incapable of reading Keats aloud without a box of Kleenex at the ready. I’ll stop there.
It’s not as if Scott has slipped her mind. In one context or another, she probably thinks of him once a week or so. Back when Google was a novelty, a party trick to be practiced again and again (generally late at night, when sleep is elusive and what-ifs loom large), Tommy searched for Scott online. That was before social media, before LinkedIn, and what popped up was the website of his big, muscular law firm. It offered no folksy pictures of the partners, just the sense that they were the sort of people who made the world safe for capitalism. You need not see their faces or know their hobbies to trust in their power.
She reads the letter a second time. The water for the corn has boiled, and she’s turned it off. The salad is made. The chicken breasts are in the oven, done. Once Nicholas Greene said he’d like to join her, she felt insecure offering little more than salad.
She should get up from the table, set it, and summon her guest. But Scott’s letter leaves her emotionally winded. Why does it make her feel both angry and affectionate toward him? He never did her wrong; they both walked away. Not even away; their paths did not diverge on purpose. And surely “they”—twenty-two-year-old Tommy and Scott—are barely cousins to fifty-five-year-old Tommy and Scott.
“Smells divine in here.”
Enter stage left, again, the movie star. She wishes it didn’t startle her every time.
“Anything left to do? Always happy to help.”
“No, no. Or—set the table? I’m afraid I got distracted. I’ll just finish the corn.”
“Another of the reasons I love eating in this country,” says Nick. “Have you had that Mexican street corn? I had it in L.A. last week. Brilliant.”
“Mayonnaise slathered on just about anything makes it brilliant,” says Tommy. She tucks Scott’s letter in the bedlam drawer and reignites the burner under the water. The ears are already shucked.
“How about candles? I’m a sucker for candles,” says Nick.
Tommy points him to a shelf in the pantry.
“I’ve got to ask you about that extraordinary collection of neckties,” he says as he sets the candlesticks on the table. “Did he actually wear the ones with all the various characters? Road Runner? The Cheshire Cat?”
Tommy slips the corn into the water. “They were all presents. He accepted them as if he was thrilled, and then, with me, he pretended to despise them.” She smiles, remembering the time he came downstairs wearing the Cheshire Cat. Rose had given it to him, so he claimed that he was wearing it to a certain party only because she would be there. But Tommy saw him preen, just a little, before the front-hall mirror.
“When he was young, when I met him, he dressed like a hippie. Shirts in crazy patterns, jeans self-consciously patched. Back then, that was a kind of conformity. If you lived downtown. But later on, he liked to think of himself as having the plainest, least extravagant taste in clothing. Mostly that was true. But he had his vanities.”
“Don’t we all.”
Is he inviting her to ask about his? The candlelight disorients her, lending their shared meal the aura of a date. She wonders what it would be like to go on a date, essentially a romantic audition, with a man so idolized that you couldn’t possibly get a straight view of his self, perhaps not even of his face. There would always be something askew in any attempt to know him.
But this is not her problem. “Please. Sit down before it’s cold. I’m afraid I may have overdone the chicken.”
“Better than underdone.” Playfully, he seizes his ear of corn and takes three quick, lunging bites. After setting it back on the plate, he says, “This. Now this is bloody perfection.”
Bloody perfection, thinks Tommy. (And it is.) Well, she got one thing right. Perhaps it’s a start.
“I’m all yours,” she says. “Ask me anything.”
He looks up, his eyebrows raised, as if she’s said something unexpected. Kernels of corn speckle his chin and lower lip, the butter gleaming in the candlelight.
He wipes his mouth and says solemnly, “I want to ask you about the interview. Mostly, really, about Arizona, what happened there.”
She sighs. “You know, he didn’t tell me much. I barely knew about it before he decided to tell that story to the world. The first I knew of it was after Soren Kelly died. I think his death sent Morty down a chute, back to—I know this sounds trite, but the death of his innocence. He would roll his eyes if he could hear me.”
“It doesn’t. Sound trite.” The actor’s hands are in his lap, and he sits up straight, ignoring his food.
“I have to tell you, he didn’t go into the gory details. He just said that he had undergone a…sexual humiliation.” Tommy suddenly worries for Morty. Nicholas Greene’s alertness seems too acute. “Can I ask how graphic it’s going to be, the movie?”
“Not,” he blurts out. “What I mean is, it’s going to be…handled indirectly. Aesthetically. Folded in with the book. With Colorquake. Andrew’s no Quentin Tarantino. What I mean is…Look. What I’m asking you is more for me, privately. The script’s written. I just wondered if there were things he shared with you that…maybe weren’t in that magazine. Journalists mess things up, as everyone knows!”
She shakes her head. “I think I’m going to disappoint you. Morty wasn’t much of a ‘sharer.’ He kept a lot to himself.”
And a lot he didn’t, thinks Nick. Oh Christ.