She looks up at him and, for another long moment, is evidently struggling at what to say. “This box belongs to Mr. Lear,” she says. “I know he’s recently deceased, and I imagine it falls to his executor to claim the contents of the box. Do you by any chance have…a letter, or…”
Her expression is one of sheer muddlement—and Nick is confident that the one on his face isn’t much different.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t let someone visit Mr. Lear’s box without proof of claim or permission. And I’m afraid I know you’re not Mr. Lear.” She blushes profoundly.
“Well, gosh, how obvious is that,” says Nick. “I’m the sorry party here.” Crikey, will she call the coppers? Did he sound sarcastic just now?
“I’m sorry,” she says again, “but aren’t you Nicholas Greene?”
He whispers, “I am, and I’d be so very grateful if you’d keep that to yourself. I am gobsmackingly mortified here, and I’m hoping you can just forget that I ever so much as walked into your establishment.”
She whispers back, “No problem. Wow. I am a really big fan.”
“Thank you. That’s kind of you. I…well, I’m just going to go out the way I came.”
She’s still holding the key. Will she confiscate it? But she passes it back to him. “Okay,” she says. “We’re cool.”
“You are an angel,” he says.
She sees him to the door; outside, he dashes across the street to the car. “Bloody, bloody hell, what the bloody hell was I thinking?” he says as Serge opens the door. Nick throws the hat and shades onto the seat and climbs in as quickly as he can.
“I cannot answer that, sir,” Serge answers, barely repressing a smile.
—
Tommy sees the car pull up to the house not twenty minutes after it left. She forces herself to continue making her piles; the actor’s errands are none of her business. One constructive thing she has managed to do is to give the heave to dozens of envelopes containing receipts and canceled checks that are twenty, even thirty, years old. “Morty, you pack rat,” she’s muttering when the door to the studio opens.
Nick Greene stands in the doorway, looking even more unkempt and sounding out of breath.
“I’ve gone completely round the bloody bend,” he says to her, “and I have a ghastly confession to make.”
She’s unsure what to say. She knows what he’s going to confess—his nocturnal snoopfest—but what difference does it make? Or perhaps he’s broken something in the house? She wonders if he’s been drinking.
“Can you please come into the house with me? Please.”
Now Tommy feels unnerved. People say that all actors—all good actors—have to be unhinged to some extent, and suddenly she’s not sure that the idea of being alone with him was such a good one. Not that she feels in danger, but she hasn’t a single mote of energy to spare for somebody else’s mental instability.
Over his shoulder, she sees Serge standing in the driveway beside that grandiose car. Supposing Nicholas Greene wanted to kidnap her? She envisions Serge tying her up, duct-taping her mouth, bundling her trussed-up body in the trunk. (In the presence of an actor, maybe drama is contagious.)
“Please,” he says again.
She follows him. In the kitchen, he asks her to sit, to wait for just a minute. He leaves the room but comes back carrying a silver notebook computer.
“You’re probably going to give me the boot, but I honestly can’t bear this much longer.” Sighing heavily, he sits across from her at the table, both hands flat on the computer, as if she might reach over and snatch it. “So,” he says, then eyes the ceiling.
“Tomasina”—and here are his famous eyes, focused imploringly on her—“you know that I had a correspondence humming along with Mr. Lear before he died. I can’t quite figure out why—or yes, perhaps there was something simpatico about our boyhoods that drew him out, I was hoping to solve that mystery by meeting him—but the thing is, he told me a great deal about…Arizona, that gardener, the shed…things that weren’t quite…well, not the same as the story in the film we’re making. Or the story people take from that interview.”
Tommy waits through a silence. What’s the fuss here? Morty was starstruck. His back-and-forth with Nicholas Greene was a platonic fling of sorts. That much she has figured out. She says, “Morty surprised a lot of people, even me, when he said what he did in that interview. It changed how I saw him—I mean, the way he decided to tell the whole world.”
“I doubt we’d be making this film if he hadn’t! But listen. Because—so last night I went into his bedroom, just to…you know, to soak it all in, to inhabit what’s left of him there. I couldn’t sleep and I thought it might not be so bad if—”
“It’s fine, really,” says Tommy. “I get it.”
“What’s not fine”—he pushes the laptop toward her—“is that I spent a good two hours going through his personal files. I wanted to see our e-mails again, because I’d deleted a lot of them, his, which he asked me to do, but then I just had to look at some others that—”
“Wait.” Tommy looks at the computer sitting in the center of the table, their four hands extended toward it as if it might be a Ouija board, ready to offer an oracular answer to all their concerns. “Is that Morty’s machine?”
“Yes.”
“I forgot about that.”
She has never looked at this computer. Sometime after Soren’s death, she noticed it in Morty’s bedroom; she assumed he got it to keep himself occupied through the insomnia particular to mourning. Whenever he started typing at three or four a.m., she would awaken, then drift back to sleep, more reassured than worried. She should have remembered this computer, looked for it, already.
“I want you to look at some of what he wrote to me,” says Nick, “if just to corroborate. I’m letting it fuck with my psyche, and I’ve gone widdershins about the disparity between…” He groans. “But there’s more.” Now he fumbles beneath the table and produces a key attached to a tag, which he slides across the table.