What about me?! Tommy is shrieking inside as she reads this melodramatic, self-pitying account. Or why didn’t Morty ever seek out a therapist, if he felt this tortured?
She looks up again and laughs. Maybe he did have a therapist. Turns out he had a mental footlocker stuffed with secrets, a bank box stuffed with hidden drawings, why not a clandestine shrink?
She thinks of the time she found the guts to confront him about whether he, too, might be HIV positive. He had won her faith, yet again, when he said, I have no significant secrets from you.
So what makes a secret “significant”? she wonders now, having shut the laptop in a stew of embarrassment and fury. The computer’s battery charge is down to a sliver of red; she’ll have to ask Nick what he did with the cord.
Where is he? She stands and looks out the window over the sink. No sign of him. Is he snooping again, now in the studio? Christ, what else is there to find? Is there some law of physics stating that the larger the life lived, the more surprises there will be to discover once that life comes to an end? And was Morty’s life large—or, despite his fame and endless supply of frequent-flier miles, surreptitiously small?
Wheels on the gravel; no doubt the bodyguard has been summoned for another errand.
Tommy walks through the door into the rest of the house. What now? She has no stomach for sorting more papers. She goes upstairs and into Morty’s room. Dusty sunbeams illuminate the bed. The day is accelerating; it must be two or three o’clock by now. She’s had nothing to eat since that piece of toast at five-thirty. Maybe she just needs food to lift her spirits.
She has the sudden urge to open and empty the bureau drawers, pull up the rug in search of loose floorboards, trapdoors. She can’t help thinking of Mimi’s Masterpiece, one of Morty’s earliest picture books, in which a family of mice who live beneath the floor of an artist’s studio tease scraps of paper and broken pencil points down through the cracks between the boards, making their own fanciful art—which looks completely different from the work of the artist above.
All she does, however, is continue to stand at the foot of the bed.
She is so clenched up that she gasps when she hears a voice calling her name from downstairs. A man, but not Nick, not even the enigmatic Serge. Franklin?
“Tommy? Are you here? Toms?”
She goes to the top of the stairs. “Dani?”
“We tried to call you from the road, but I got the voice mail.”
We? Can no one arrive at this house without an escort? But of course he’d bring Jane…and Joe. She’ll finally meet her nephew. She is struck by a wave of shame. How petty is she not to have made the effort—
She and Dani converge in the living room. Immediately, he puts his arms around her. Her face fits just under his chin; it’s the same sensation, physically, as being embraced by their father, Dani the same wiry kind of tall.
“I know,” he says. “I should’ve asked if I could come. I’m sorry, but you haven’t—”
“And Jane’s here, too?”
“No. I came out with someone else, who offered me a ride and who’s been trying to get ahold of you, too. It’s like you’ve disappeared off the face of the planet, Toms. I’ve been worried.”
“Didn’t you get the note I sent you?”
“No.” He looks defensive. “We moved, you know. We couldn’t keep our old place after…”
He still can’t seem to tell her. “After the shop closed,” she said. “Oh, Dani, I don’t get why you didn’t tell me about that. I found out after you were here in the fall.”
They stand a foot apart now, Tommy aware of how defensive they both look. “I meant to,” he says. “And then, I don’t know. This place isn’t good for me. It’s always pissed me off. Like I’m the pauper and he’s the king. Except…fuck. Never mind.”
Tommy remembers that he isn’t alone. She glances through the kitchen but sees no one coming in. Dani reads her mind.
“Okay, so this might piss you off,” he says, “and I really didn’t get the full story till we were halfway here, but the person who drove me is Merry Galarza. She’s outside. She didn’t want to come in until I told you. She’ll drive right back to the city if you want, but she’s desperate to talk with you.”
“I’m about to have a nervous breakdown.” Tommy sits on the nearest couch.
“I can tell her to go. I can go with her.”
“Don’t be silly, Dani.”
He smiles, flinching. “I wonder how often you’ve said that to me.”
“Can you just let me think for a moment? A lot is going on right now.” She sees her brother look around, as if a troupe of acrobats might emerge from a closet, as if she’s referring to a physical commotion of some sort. She doesn’t need him to ask about the drawings.
“Dani, go tell her she can stay. Did you have lunch? I have no idea what time it is, but I need to eat. And if I put food together, I stand a chance of calming down.”
—
Merry loiters in the driveway by her car, feeling as foolish as she is. When was she last here—four, five years ago? Mort gave her the grand tour. She thought it was such a privilege. How na?ve, how vain, was that?
The two hours she just spent in the car with Dani Daulair felt, at once, like a shaming and a liberation. Her fraying nerves turned her, as usual, into a profligate chatterbox. Before they even hit the Sawmill Parkway, she was well into her narrative of betrayal. “It’s like that will of his was a suicide note,” she found herself saying. “A final fuck-you before tumbling on purpose off that roof. I know that’s a bitchy, selfish thing to say. But if I don’t vent before we get there, I’ll end up cooking my goose. Or shooting myself in the foot. Pick your cliché. I’m it.”
Merry pulled herself up short. This righteous soliloquy had begun to sound uncomfortably comfortable to her, playing itself out in her head so regularly now that she could practically set it to music. “Listen to me. Wow. I’m sorry. You’re just trying to see your sister and I’m…”
“I have a beef with him, too,” Dani said sharply. “It’s stupid.”
“Stupid?”
“Stale, I guess.”
Merry might talk too much, but she knew when to shut up and listen.
“Forget it,” he said.
“Please,” she said. “Tell me.”
“I’m Ivo.”
Merry waited for more. What was he talking about? “Ivo, Mort’s Ivo.”
“I was the model.”
She glanced quickly at him. He was looking ahead, no real expression. She tried to guess at his age, do the math. No one thought of Lear as an artist who used live models. In endless interviews, he spoke about his pictures, along with his stories, as emerging from deep within, words and images drawn up from a well in a bucket, brought into the light.
She thought, surprisingly, of Lear’s reverence for all the history and lore surrounding Charles Dodgson’s inspirational Alice Liddell.
“You modeled for Mort?”