“My driver’s here. Revving the engine politely. Call again, will you?”
“I will,” says Nick, and before he can thank her, she’s off.
He takes another two circuits around the pool before his mobile buzzes.
A text from Silas, with a link to TakeItFromSeptimus.com, a tar pit of celebrity gossip that makes the hair rise on Nick’s spine even when he isn’t the subject of the moment. Si’s text reads, Good job, 007! At client matinee till 5 but will call and stage extraction if necessary.
Clicking on the link yields—well, of course it bloody does—an amateur photo of Nick standing in the bank that morning, holding his cap and specs by his side, talking to the camel-clad cashier. (The evil thing about mobiles is that they take pictures without a click or a flash. Hundreds of people can snap away while you scratch your bottom or stare slack-jawed into the distance like a doddering basset hound, and you are none the wiser.)
Cheerio, now here’s a curio: What in the world could our Favorite Dishy Brit be doing in the hinterlands of Connecticut? A pastoral fling? A yen for hugging trees? Oh, but wait! Rely on Septimus to connect the dots. Because the second film role our FDB has poached from all the properly (or improperly) gay, properly American actors who might have nabbed it is that of none other than the King of Kid Lit, Mort Lear, who sadly up and died while doing a bit of home repair back in May. Where did Lear live? Orne, Connecticut. Where was this picture taken? Ladies of a certain sylvan town, straighten your Spanx and be on the lookout!
Were the pool uncovered, Nick might just toss his phone in the deep end. He starts back toward the house, but suddenly he’s paralyzed. What if the media marauders are on their way? (Or maybe they don’t bloody care. Surely they’re all in the city, stalking the hundreds of stars who walk those streets every day.) He rings Serge and asks him to come back again. “What I need is this,” says Nick. “Would you just, please, possibly, park at the road, keep an eye out for unwanted visitors?”
—
What is the definition of unbearable? To Tommy, it’s this e-mail from Morty to the actor, written back in March. She can read only a few sentences at a time before she has to look up at something, anything, in the kitchen: the tiles they picked together on their tour of the Moravian Tile Works, the glass jars Morty saw in a shop on the first trip she made with him to England, the oven mitts she bought from last year’s Crate & Barrel after-Christmas catalog sale. Those things are bearable—or are they?
After they are gone, I tell myself the woman’s voice, her laugh, could not have been my mother’s. My mother works all day. I know she gets breaks—sometimes that summer I have lunch with her—but why, of all places, would she come to Leonard’s shed? It wasn’t her, I’m sure, though I feel strange in her company that night. I go to bed early.
The second time, a few days later, I try to block my ears when the talk between them turns to something else. I cannot draw, of course, while my hands are held to my ears. And they do not block the loudest noises Leonard and the woman make together. It is in fact the “together noises,” as I think of them, that are the most upsetting.
The third time, I stand up and I edge sideways to a place where I can look furtively, just a knife-edge glance, and yes, that is my mother’s hair, my mother’s profile, though I have never before seen my mother’s bare chest. The flowered blouse on the floor is my mother’s. I know it because it’s her favorite.
I hunch back into my cubbyhole and do not know whether I hope they saw me or not. After Leonard leaves, after I leave, I stay away from home as long as I can, past sunset, till the moment I know my mother will panic. She is unhappy when I return; dinner is cold. I am not hungry, I tell her, and I go to bed with my book, pretending it’s so suspenseful that I cannot wait to dive back into its pages.
The next morning I say I do not feel well. I stay in my room all day. Maybe the next day, too.
But I go back, I can’t help it—it’s my closest-to-perfect place—and when I slip into the shed, I find new materials awaiting me on my makeshift desk. The cat is curled up on the couch. Leonard isn’t there and stays away all day. Maybe I am imagining these things. My mother has told me, more than once, that she worries my imagination will be my undoing. Maybe my drawings carry me away to some hallucinatory zone (though I do not know about “hallucinations” at that age; all I know are fantasies and dreams).
The next time—is it a day or two or three later?—I cover my ears, put my head on my drawing, and I am weeping silently. The drawing is ruined. I remember it: an attempt to draw a hawk against a cloudy sky.
I force myself to go home at the usual time. Over dinner, I tell my mother that I am drawing in Leonard’s shed. I tell her about the materials he gives me, about my little desk. Perhaps my voice is shaking.
She stares at me, as still as can be. She asks when I am there, how long I have been going. I don’t think I’m capable of answering her. All I remember is her erupting rage (which I do not understand is fear and shame), her telling me she never gave me permission to be in that shed, to take such gifts from strangers. (Doesn’t she remember that she told me we could trust all the people who work for the hotel?)
I cannot say anything. I think I will never say anything again. She sends me to my room, and I hear her go out. Later I hear her crying. The next day she forbids me to leave our apartment.
I never go to the shed again. My mother packs our things, she says we are going east for a new and better life, though she is not acting like someone who has much hope. The next day, we are staying in a hotel somewhere else, nothing like Eagle Rest. I am to stay in the room while she goes out, doing errands she does not disclose. A week later we are gone. She hardly speaks to me on the long trip, she stares out windows at the changing landscape. She wears sunglasses to hide her swollen eyes. I know I am to blame, I am the culprit. I know the life we’re headed for cannot be better, and it’s all my fault.
Should I wonder about my lifelong relations with women, because of what happened? And never, you can be sure that never, did my mother speak of what she knew I heard or saw. Once she had secure work, once she made friends with a few of our neighbors in Brooklyn, she began to look me in the eye again, to act as if we were just a mother and son making our way in a difficult world. But I was never fooled into thinking that she had forgotten—though maybe she thought I could have forgotten. Years and years later, when I was finally certain that she had lost all touch with memory, the kite string connecting her to memory snatched from her hand by the wind, I felt horribly, horribly relieved.
But women—especially women who flirt with me, and they do (they still do!)—are capable of filling me with fear….