—
He cannot even approach the brink of sleep. It isn’t the mattress on the foldaway, which is surprisingly decent, and the feral chitchat of the nightlife in the woods is soothing. It’s the sense of sleeping under the roof of a house that is more than a house. Wandering through its rooms that afternoon and evening, Nick understood that it is one of those rare homes which appropriate the personae of their owners.
Tomorrow, Tomasina has promised to give him a “tour” of the sketches stored in the flat files, of handmade books, papier-maché masks, ceramic figures, and other whimsical objects crafted by Lear that very few people have seen. He does want more time in the studio and, childish though it may seem, wonders if he might try out the “napping chair.” But this house is the place that feels like it must have held Lear’s heart. No wonder he abandoned the city. This was his hive, his burrow, a place where the modest size of all the rooms makes a reassuring kind of sense. Not for Lear a palace or villa or manse but a haven of peace, a daily retreat, the monk’s cell, the badger’s den.
If only Nick’s flat felt like such a refuge—though what can you expect of a place you must repeatedly neglect?
His mobile tells him it isn’t even three o’clock. He goes to the water closet tucked behind the stairs. The sink and the shower are fit for a sailboat, which Nick finds amusing, as if the room were borrowed from one of Lear’s picture books, a Lilliputian loo. When he washes up, the fragrance of the sandalwood soap makes him feel more awake still.
Latching the door as quietly as he can, he pauses in the dim blue glow leaking through the sidelights of the front door. He considers the stairs. They are carpeted.
She mentioned that she sleeps lightly, but if he leans up and listens closely, he can hear that she has a fan on in her room. Would it be a crime to find out what it’s like to lie on Lear’s bed in the middle of the night? Before he can change his mind, he ascends, tread to tread, stealthy as a cat (as a panther!). Left, up three more, along the soft runner to Lear’s door—miraculously, still ajar.
Once inside the room, he closes but does not latch the door. He climbs onto the bed, transferring his weight from floor to mattress one ounce at a time. Here is where dance training comes in handy: no creakings.
The pillows are soft: feathers, not foam. The ceiling above him is awash in faint leafy shadows, the curtains back, the windows wide open. The air is dead still, but he can smell the adolescent greenery of June, sense how everything alive is burgeoning, not resting, in its reprieve from the blaring sun. Connecticut smells more like Dorset or even a London park than it does like L.A., but still it’s entirely new to Nick.
He sits up and gazes around. Wait—there. Down to his left, in the lowest of the bookshelves against which the bed resides, his roving glance snags on a pinpoint of pulsing green light. He leans sideways to feel for it, though he knows what it is: a laptop—kept beside the bed and, he knows as well, within the insomniac’s reach.
This would be trespass, but something too tempting crosses his mind. What if his correspondence with Lear—the e-mails he promised to delete and did—are on this computer? Could he at least reassure himself that he is right, read them again?
No doubt the access is locked, password protected.
He crouches beside the bed and delicately extracts the laptop, which is wedged between a stack of books and the shelf above, its cord snaking under the rug. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, he balances the computer on his thighs and flips it open. The image that springs to the screen, background to dozens of neatly ranked azure file folders, is a photograph of Lear’s house at the height of autumn, trees ablaze.
He is a cat burglar at his first heist and here is his first jewelry box. The touch pad wakes the little arrow, which, like the intruder’s gloved hand, roams covetously over the contents, pausing, hovering, questing for something of particular value. If he had all night, he could take everything, but he must choose. As he guides the cursor to the sound icon at the top of the screen, as he slides it to mute, he has the disembodied sense of watching his own conscience drift out the nearest window into the night.
Celia. Abe. Rosie. Coleman.
Arbitrarily, he chooses Coleman: just a peek. Inside the folder is a line-by-line list of dates.
He closes Coleman, returns him to the jewel box. Scanning the screen more closely, he sees what he’s looking for.
NG.
Date by date by date, over just the couple of months they wrote back and forth, here are the e-mails Lear sent him—almost always in the middle of the American night—copied into files. Or did he write them as files and copy them into e-mails?
Does it matter?
He closes the folder and, as he does, spots another one in a remote corner of the screen labeled Leonard.
—
She couldn’t stop thinking about Scott, couldn’t stop cartwheeling in and out of those memories until she felt dizzy. How was she going to reply to his letter? Well, let it take its place in the long line of other letters she had yet to answer.
So she was wide and painfully awake when she heard Nicholas Greene ascend the stairs. His footsteps were inaudible, but she heard his breathing. So many years of listening for Morty’s breathing in the middle of the night—even through the hum of her window fan or the restive grumble of the furnace—have made her unwittingly alert to human otherness in the house she’s begun to inhabit alone. She realizes that Nick is the first person to sleep in the house, with her, since Morty died.
She rises onto her elbows, preparing to go out and intercept him, but what kind of a confrontation will that be? She feels herself redden at the thought of saying anything whatsoever to Nicholas Greene under these circumstances: surprising him in the dark hallway, catching him there in whatever it is he wears to sleep (or to sneak around people’s houses when he thinks they’re sleeping). Forget the thought of his seeing her in the skimpy threadbare nightgown she reserves for the hottest nights.
When she thinks of how loquacious he is, she’s surprised at his gift for stealth. Now that he’s in Morty’s bedroom, Tommy hears nothing.
Her back aches from the tension of her indecisive posture. She lies back down.