“Now there’s a thought, Tommy. My story as told by Opie.”
They laughed at the absurdity—a life told in two hours or less; really?—and sat down to another meal at the kitchen table, followed by another bout of Scrabble or an early parting, each to read or catch up on e-mail or have a look at the news, always fraught with war and disease, fateful weather, unscrupulous bankers, and yet another TV show concerning zombies or vampires or aliens bent on colonizing our planet.
Years went by before Tommy answered her work phone and found herself speaking to someone in the office of a movie studio on the opposite coast.
—
Silas hovers, both peevish and deferential, as Nick climbs into the Town Car.
“I could stay in the car while you pay your visit.”
“You’d go mad,” says Nick. “This is not some charity drive-by. I plan on overstaying my welcome as long as I can. This woman knew him better than anyone else in the world. That’s obvious from all the tributes and rehashings.”
He practically wrenches the door from Silas’s hand in order to pull it shut. Once the car is moving uptown and turns a corner, Nick leans back on the barricade of black leather and sighs, twice, with deliberate volume. The driver, thank God, ignores him.
He brought along the big book, the lap-flattener published five years ago now: Chiaro Scuro, Childhood Hero: The Art of Mort Lear. Silly title, forgettably fawning text, but the pictures are sumptuous, and Nick has nearly memorized the annotated chronology at the back. From it he knows that Mort Lear hired Tomasina Daulair to be his assistant in 1982. She was twenty-two and had just finished university; Lear was forty-two, wealthy, revered, and turning out one successful, striking picture book after another. A few years later, with his lorryloads of royalties, he would buy the country house.
That was one of the many things Nick and Lear had e-mailed about, with surprising fluidity and frequency, in the month between their two conversations: how being showered with prizes does and does not change you; how it invigorates and imperils your work; how it leads to privilege yet also to the threat of paralysis; how even the oldest of alliances shift, like boats at the turn of a tide. (Ah, dear gifted young man, just you wait, Lear had written—his words and his tone, Nick now sees, echoing Deirdre’s.) Of course, they had touched on a great deal else—and it’s this, the “else,” that Nick can’t help wanting, needing, to pursue. The only person to whom he can turn is the cryptic Tomasina…although, unless the man was flattering Nick with false confessions, even she does not know the extent of the perversity Lear endured as a boy. Nor do the readers of the splashy profile that Andrew optioned, along with the rights to Colorquake.
According to the chronology in the book, Tomasina worked for Lear in the city, maintaining his office there until 1989, when she moved out to Lear’s Connecticut house to care for the author after surgery for an abdominal infection. Whether the living arrangement was meant to be temporary or permanent at the time is unclear, but Daulair stayed on and remains Lear’s closest professional affiliate to this day. (Leaving aside that Lear’s closest physical affiliate, for nigh on ten years, was one Soren Kelly, the younger lover who died of AIDS—or, correctly, of course, its “complications,” as the book duly notes—in 1999.)
The late eighties and early nineties were a time when Lear seemed infallibly productive, hoovering up the awards and becoming a household name—at least in households including a nursery. But sometime in the midnineties, Lear began work on Diagnosis, the first book in his trilogy, The Inseparables, aimed at a much older audience than the one he usually wrote for. Around the same time his lover’s health was failing, it won every conceivable prize for “young people’s literature” and was optioned by Disney, although it never rose from the cruel flames of development hell (flames that have scorched Nick himself from time to time). The critical consensus is that helplessly watching the love of his life dwindle and die somehow stoked Lear’s creative fires into a conflagration.
The first and last books of the trilogy are dedicated to the doomed and then deceased Kelly. In the first, a blank page bears simply the lover’s name, Soren, floating in the center like a lone boat on a vast sea. In the third, Remission, it reads To Soren, at peace. The middle volume, Metastasis, is dedicated to the memory of Lear’s mother.
Nick has done his homework—or, actually, he’s in the midst of it, having given himself a clear two months before the first day of shooting (which will probably be delayed while they decide whether Lear’s death necessitates another rewrite, even though the current narrative ends soon after Soren Kelly dies). These biopics of living geniuses are all the rage now, but they’re complicated by the very livingness of the geniuses in question—or of people who knew them well. Geniuses may have susceptible egos, debilitating vices, wicked tempers, any number of base afflictions, but they are not pushovers, nor do they suffer fools. Which is why, when Nick heard about Lear’s accident, his shock and sadness were followed by a spasm of shameful relief.
Lear was not a scientist or a politician; he was an artist. But you’d have to be daft to believe this made him less complicated than, say, that Nobel-winning fertility doctor who’d been the subject of Amar’s last film or Benazir Bhutto or Bill Gates. (And what was the deal with two films about the barely departed Steve Jobs?)
Then there’s the tricky bit of the backstory, the child actor who has to look enough like the storybook Ivo and enough like the flesh-and-blood Nick and be able to do a convincing job of portraying Lear as the boy in that shed. (For the most agonizing scenes, clever Andrew has dreamed up a half-animated sequence, inspired by Colorquake, that should bypass the demand for graphic sexuality and might even hold the rating at a palatable PG-13.)
And here is the problem for Nick. Before Lear’s unexpected disclosure to him about what really happened in that shed, Nick saw his primary challenge as interpreting the lifelong ripple effect of the trauma as depicted in the script, the one everybody talked about after the interview in the magazine…but now—he can’t block it out—that trauma has been swapped for another. In fact, if you read the interview closely—which Nick has done countless times—the “darkness in the shed,” as he thinks of it, is never described in any detail. Certain conventional assumptions were made about the nature of the violation that turn out not to be true.