Morty seemed relieved at this solution—relieved of guilt. Perhaps he didn’t want Tommy to see that in fact, against his original instincts, he had grown to enjoy the ribald gatherings of uninhibited, self-consciously attractive men and women. He admitted that the company often made him feel younger, even pampered, as if the best of city life were being exported to his house expressly for his provincial pleasure. “And it makes Soren happy,” he said, as if to remind himself.
One weekend in Brooklyn, after Dad went to bed early and Dani left to join friends at a bar, Tommy decided to go through the books in her room, most of them untouched since before she’d gone to college. Her mother had been a reader and, to keep books from clogging up the small house, made a habit of frequent donations to a local thrift shop, but she had been sentimental about her children’s favorite books.
Tommy sat on the floor with a dustcloth and pulled the books from the shelves, wiping them one by one. She smiled when it occurred to her that she now knew a few of these authors whose words and pictures she had imbibed over and over and over again without even thinking of Horton or Ping or the Moominvalley creatures as beings dreamed up by real live people. And then, pushed back between If I Ran the Zoo and a spineless copy of Burt Dow, Deep-Water Man, Tommy found the small book that Morty had passed to her, through a fence, more than two decades ago, in order to prove that he wasn’t a playground pedophile.
It should have brought her a surge of joy—made her eager to take it back home, show it to Morty and ask if he remembered that day—but instead she felt as if a cold salty wave were washing over her head. She paged slowly through the book, further chilled by its story: a child scared of so many things that he feared fear itself.
In other words, he was scared of life. Was she?
How Tommy had once pitied her parents for what she saw as the smallness of their existence, yet by the time they were her age, they had so much that she did not. Most of all, they had each other. They had married late, had children late—and, as a result, seemed to fully feel the pleasure in life that other people were constantly reminding themselves they ought to feel.
Was Tommy small-minded, even greedy, to yearn for a change? She sat on the aqua shag amoeba she had chosen as a rug at age thirteen and realized it was time to tell Morty how much she felt she owed him—and how it was time to think about what she owed herself. But there was no reason to be impatient. The kindest thing would be to wait until Morty’s mother died. Frieda Lear had folded in on herself by this point, all her appetites shriveled, her attention a void, and though no one wanted to give Morty a firm timeline, her caretakers believed that she was too frail to last more than another year. Tommy would see Morty through whatever rituals he needed to complete, and then she would give him generous notice. He could hardly disagree that it was time for her to move on, could he?
What would she do then? She laughed at the thought of going to work as the assistant to another genius; how about a scientist next time around? One change she decided she would welcome was a return to the city. She imagined herself living in the Village again (though it was probably unaffordable to lowly genius-assistants) or maybe, just for a time, sharing an apartment with Dani in Hell’s Kitchen or the increasingly unfashionable Upper East Side. Maybe they could find a responsible student to live with Dad in exchange for room and board.
For a brief heady moment, she imagined a move to San Francisco, her favorite stop on Morty’s touring circuit. It was a city with dozens of bookstores, and they both enjoyed lingering there. They were spoiled, of course, chauffeured from Berkeley to Danville, from Laurel Village to Corte Madera, then back to the hotel Morty loved on Russian Hill. On her own, she wouldn’t have such privileges—but the weather was humane, the culture more permissive toward daydreamers, gardeners, anyone who believed in the virtue of time to spare. This fantasy lasted as long as it took her to hear her father issue an exclamatory snore on the other side of her bedroom wall. New York was fine, she consoled herself, always holding the possibility of something unexpected.
When she entered Morty’s house that Sunday evening, she felt much calmer than she had in months. She greeted Soren with genuine cheer, and she made the three of them a supper of Italian wedding soup and spinach salad. Morty and Soren told her about the latest party. “Do not, repeat do not,” said Soren, “count the bottles in the recycling bin! And don’t ask who went home with whom.”
Then he told her who, as well as whom.
“Did you visit Frieda today?” she asked Morty after clearing the table.
“Same as ever,” he said. “It’s agony. For both of us, I suspect. Except for her, it’s a permanent state of being.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“It can’t be long,” he said.
“I suppose not.”
“Your father?” he remembered to ask.
“Same as ever,” she said. “But he’ll go on for a long time, I think. I just wish he knew what to do with himself.”
Maybe, she thought, her father would be game to go with her to San Francisco. He would love all the open-air music.
—
Two years later, Frieda was still alive—if respiration was the defining characteristic of living—and Tommy found herself frosting a three-layer devil’s food cake in the kitchen while Morty sulked in his studio and Soren stood in the driveway, smoking and pacing and ranting to someone on his cell phone. Rapunzel’s long tresses dangled from the back of a kitchen chair.
Tommy was thirty-five. When she read the alumni notes in her college magazine, she now saw pictures of classmates with children as old as ten. That, it seemed to her, was the one matter of urgency: whether she wanted to be a mother. Never mind that she was nine years younger than her mother had been when Dani was born. One of Morty’s friends, another picture-book author he had known when he lived in the city, had decided, on her thirty-ninth birthday, that she was done with looking for Mr. Right and would adopt a child before it was too late. Now she lived in Milwaukee with a baby girl from India. Her breakout book was called When I’m Big Enough to Be a Mom.
Out back, through the door left open to the cool September air, she heard the studio door close and, through the window, glimpsed Morty heading toward the driveway, where Soren paced. She tried not to listen. She knew how it would go: Morty would apologize, Soren would shower him with affection, and later that night they would have profligate sex.
At dinner, the earlier outburst no longer in the air, Morty told them about the story he’d begun to tease out in the studio that week, more words than pictures. In fact, he wondered if pictures would be superfluous. At the very least, they would be marginal, perhaps occurring only at the chapter breaks—or not at all. Perhaps, for the first time, no pictures whatsoever.
Having finished his lobster, he placed his elbows to either side of his plate, folded his hands, and rested his chin on his knuckles. He looked content.
“Three children,” he said.
“The magic number!” Soren exclaimed (now the cheerleader, having won his apology).
“Lifelong friends. Neighbors in a nice but square, cookie-cutterish town. Yards, swing sets, the whole bourgeois package.”