She carried the shower stool and the portable commode downstairs and out to the garage. She should wash them with the garden hose, but the outside valves had been shut off till spring.
When she returned to the second floor yet again, she could see her breath. Frost had glazed the bathroom mirror. One by one, she closed and latched the windows. The furnace growled from below.
So it was over. Or, rather, Soren was over. He had carved eight turbulent years out of their lives, the way wind carves a dune, but now he was gone. Tommy also knew that she was there to stay.
Eleven
SATURDAY MORNING
Nick goes into the kitchen at six, thinking he just might be the first one awake. But on the table is a note from Tomasina: Working in the studio. Coffee in coffeemaker—just push button. Help yourself to anything. I’ll be in for lunch, but please no bother.
What does she mean? Don’t bother her in the studio? Don’t bother about her lunch? He supposes that, in general, he is a bother around here. He frowns. Does he want coffee? It’s the easy option—and easy is what he needs after a scant hour or two of sleep. He pushes the button, then sits at the table to think.
If it weren’t Saturday, he’d Skype with his agent in London. It’s far too early in California to speak with Andrew.
Oh bother all the not-bothering. Solitude is not his first choice at the moment.
The coffeemaker burbles a few more seconds, then releases the mawkish sigh that signifies it’s finished its wearisome task. He attempts to mimic the sound, trying three or four times. The last voice coach he had, for Taormina, made him try to imitate a number of nonhuman noises: a kettle whistling, a spigot dripping, a jet passing overhead, the wheeze and roar of a Hoover in the hotel lobby. He thought it silly at the time, but he’s picked it up as a habit. The object is to challenge the limited patterns of mobility to which any native language restricts the various working parts of one’s mouth. Like the most pathetic schoolboy, Nick cracked a joke or two about the other advantages to “limbering up” one’s tongue—which the coach (a clever but humorless bloke) ignored.
Maybe he’ll go back into his assigned room and figure out the telly, watch the PBS documentary again. He feels as if he needs to reanchor himself in a more public version of Mort Lear than the one currently clouding his thoughts. He has to think carefully about what he’s found. It’s just as well that Tomasina is elsewhere. Nick is prone to blurting things out before he’s thought them through. That’s what made his rupture with Kendra so messy.
Thinking of Kendra leads him nowhere productive. He awoke this morning with, as usual, a painfully belligerent erection. (Talk of pathetic schoolboys!) Confounding his growing mistrust of himself when it comes to romantic entanglement, he’s fully aware that his celebrity gives him carte blanche to bonk just about any woman he chooses (well, maybe not any), and as a result he feels paralyzed. Every time he passes another magazine rack blaring boldface gossip about Lorna’s fertility woes or Jonnie’s cock-up with his children’s nanny, he pictures himself on those shiny covers instead, cavorting with some starlet on a beach or a red carpet or just holding hands on the street. (Cavorting! Where did that vision emerge from?)
And he thinks of Deirdre’s warnings.
He continues to miss Deirdre, which is unsettling. Long about his third or fourth chummy sojourn on a film set, from which he had departed feeling sure that these latest colleagues were his mates forever, he began to understand that each new project resembles the society of some island marooned in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, one of unavoidable intimacies, intensified aversions, and exaggerated (if productive) loyalties. The long bone-breaking hours, the necessary posturings and psychological bartering, even the financial pressures and the consequent impersonal discourtesies, only distort the relationships further. So now he’s an old hand at the beginnings and endings of such associations—which is why he’s surprised at the sense of loss whenever he thinks of Deirdre.
The wall phone in the kitchen rings, and he almost answers it. It rings only a few times, then stops. Tomasina must be picking up the call in Lear’s studio.
He pours himself a second cup of coffee and decides to go outside, soak up some good unambivalent American sun. He heads toward a trio of rosebushes, two of them effusing blooms, one a boisterous yellow, the other precisely the pale pink of a ballerina’s satin toe shoe. As he bends to smell them, he hears Tomasina call out, “Good morning!”
She invites him into the studio and asks if he’s had something to eat.
“I’m all set,” he lies, feeling hungrier for company than for breakfast.
The wooden countertops that outline the studio are covered with stacks of papers and files.
“Facing the music. The legal music,” says Tomasina. “Tuneless though it may be.”
“The protocols of death are merciless, positively sadistic!” Nick offers, more ardently than he intended.
“You’re telling me.”
For a beat, it’s clear that they are sharing the unspoken fellowship of their parallel losses, their mothers’ unjustly early exits. He notices that Tomasina has grown easier around him—and that she’s aware of it, too. (Yes, Silas, I really am still a people!)
Tommy feels shamefully gratified to see the actor looking less than photogenic this morning, obviously tired after his middle-of-the-night snooping. His hair is flattened and dull on one side, and the skin around his eyes looks puckered and grayish. She’s tempted to mention that she heard him last night in Morty’s room, but it would only make things awkward all over again.
“Would I be in your way if I loitered a bit and looked at the drawings again, just the ones on those panels in the back?” he says.
“Please. It’s lonely, even with my pals on NPR.”
A radio show murmurs in the background, a discussion of the American Supreme Court and the decisions it’s soon to render on matters both public and private. Nick feels homesick. He hopes to have a week in his flat before shooting starts.
Dozens of Lear’s drawings and watercolors are pinned on large, soft panels affixed to a wall hinge. One can “page” through the panels and see fifty years of his evolution as an artist. Nick lingers at some of the illustrations for the charming tale about the fox who accidentally went up in a hot-air balloon and got to see the world beyond his forest: the cities and villages and rivers, the motorways clogged with lorries, the sea reaching toward the horizon. The supple, changing expressions on the fox’s face are what make the book so affecting. It’s a book of very few words—which occur entirely toward the end of the journey, when a seagull alights on the basket.
As he browses through the drawings, Nick hears Tomasina on a phone call.
“I am not dying to go to Phoenix,” she says. “But I know it has to happen soon.”
Long silence.
“I really appreciate that, Franklin. I don’t care if you think it’s your job. But I mean, didn’t Morty get how overwhelmed I’d be?”