What crime would she prevent by apprehending the actor, who is—in whatever unorthodox, meddlesome fashion—simply doing his job? Lying there in the dark, she is astonished at herself for two reasons. She is completely unafraid of this virtual stranger and his sneaky behavior, and she is fed up with this never-ending urge to protect Morty—as if he were a child in one of his own stories. Or no, not at all—because those children always figure out how to take care of themselves. The grown-ups around them are distracted, unreliable, or simply moot. Those children even know how to take care of others. So often, they’re in the business of saving the world.
Morty wasn’t one of those children. He never had been one of those children, not even when he was a child.
Ten
1995
She was in the kitchen, the three layers of Morty’s cake cooled on the counter before her, when she heard their voices rise—Soren’s first, as always—and hoped in vain that it wasn’t the start of an argument. Or, just as likely, a tantrum.
“It’s not a metaphor, honey. It is a gift. G. I. F. T. Gift. Do you have to be such an artist all the time?” Ten minutes before, not a squall on the horizon, the three of them had been drinking champagne in the living room, toasting Morty’s fifty-fifth birthday. Tommy would serve dinner as soon as she finished frosting the cake.
Morty’s reply was hard to discern, but she was sure she heard him say, “Rapunzel.”
“In case nobody’s informed you,” Soren said, “Disney now owns all the fairy tales. They’ve been washed clean of all that archetypy Bettelheim bullshit. They are just stories with ripping good plots, excellent villains, and sexy heroes—like the princes come in three-packs!—and merchandise potential up the fucking wazoo.”
Morty answered again, his voice low but insistent, this time entirely unintelligible.
The pitch of Soren’s voice approached a whine. “Oh, so it’s like, who is the captive maiden and who the wicked witch? Well, if you want to see it like that, then you are no maiden, honey.”
The door to the kitchen slammed open, and Morty stalked through the room. He was out the back door before Tommy could even say his name.
Soren was on his heels, but he stopped in the kitchen. He faced Tommy, indignant. “That went well.” From his right hand dangled a necktie. He held it out to Tommy. “Isn’t it gorgeous? Do you read it as more than a fucking necktie, and may I say, however bitchy it sounds, a damned expensive necktie?”
Tommy did not reach for it—her fingers were slick with icing—but she could make out the fairy-tale image. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said truthfully.
“Right. Exactimento,” said Soren, as if this gave him the moral high ground. “And what do you give the guy who has everything—or can buy it if he doesn’t have it? Something unique. Something whimsical.” Soren examined the tie, frowning.
Tommy did think it was stunning, but Soren had to know by now, four years into their never-placid relationship, that Morty would hardly wear such a tie. It would be the equivalent, to Morty, of wearing a Robin Hood hat or a long purple cape. He didn’t even like wearing costumes. Halloween was an occasion whose rituals fell to Tommy. (The house of a famous children’s book author, even at the end of a long driveway, could not go dark that night.)
Morty’s birthday, however, was a holiday he took seriously. He liked the celebration itself to be intimate—no blowout parties, definitely no schemes involving dozens of friends hiding behind the furniture—but he cared about such niceties as cards and gifts, and, like a five-year-old, he relished ordering up three specific meals: usually, eggs, bacon, and French toast for breakfast; for lunch, an avocado BLT, with corn chowder if the local crops still held, and definitely chocolate-chip oatmeal cookies. For dinner, he’d want either lobster with potato salad or roast beef with Yorkshire pudding. “Surprise me with the cake,” he always said.
Soren started toward the back door.
“I wouldn’t,” said Tommy. “He’ll come back any minute. He’s not going to skip his birthday dinner.” She wondered why she ever bothered offering Soren sound advice (not that he ever asked); more and more often, she wished the relationship would simply implode. She would gladly pick up the shrapnel.
“He’s being ridiculous,” Soren said, fishing for agreement.
Tommy did her best to avoid discussing Morty with Soren, though her pointed restraint did not stop him from trying to win her approval whenever the two men were on the outs.
“You pushed a button. I think you know that.”
“You mean the ‘I write for children so I get to be a child’ button?” Soren snapped. “That one?”
I’m not sure who’s more of a child was the obvious retort, but she said, “Would you do me a favor and bring in the champagne glasses? And would you light the candles on the dining room table?”
Morty liked formality on his birthday, too: linens, china, the Murano goblets he’d bought on his first European book tour, and the silver flatware he’d stumbled on at a local estate sale, the same pattern his mother had owned—and sold to help pay for their move across the country. He hadn’t told Tommy much about that move, but she knew it had been urgent. On the rare occasions he reminisced—usually when questioned by some adult at a public event: Tell us about your childhood!—he described his neighborhood in Brooklyn; his klatch of bookish friends; the branch librarian who let him stay after she locked up, then walked him safely home; the pleasure he found in turning his favorite stories into plays. What about the art? Where did you learn to draw? someone might ask, and Morty would say that while he did like to draw as a small child, he took a break for a few years—until the art teacher in high school brought him “back to the fold.” Word for word, Tommy knew these codified memories by heart.
The one time she had asked him outright about his time in Arizona, he sighed and shook his head. “You know, the older I get, the less I remember. When it comes down to it, my life didn’t really begin until we got here.”
Tommy thought it was amusing that he used here to signify a neighborhood of tenements and plain-Jane houses near Brighton Beach as well as an affluent woodsy Connecticut town—as if he hadn’t traveled even further to get from one to the other than he had from west to east.
—
There was no formal move-in day, no U-Haul truck filled with furnishings, not even a delivery of steamer trunks or dented cardboard cartons. It happened quickly, Soren’s storming of the castle. The keep—Morty’s heart—had been far more vulnerable than she thought. She kept reminding herself that Morty was in love, for the first time she had ever witnessed in the nine years she had worked for him. That had to be good news, didn’t it? He started going to the gym at the Y and lost the paunch he’d acquired since moving away from the city and its compulsory-fitness culture. Tommy was also pleased to see Soren badgering him into eating more vegetables.