All three of her guests insisted on “helping.” Patching together leftovers from the fridge, greens and early peas from the garden, the canned soups Morty had insisted they stock for “blackouts and bombing raids,” the small chicken she’d bought to roast for dinner, the expensive cheeses and two layer cakes Nick had picked up on his way to Orne, they found themselves with an accidental surfeit of food. Nick christened it a “petit bourgeois bouffe.”
She and Dani are the only ones left in the kitchen. Merry is poring (or swooning) over the drawings still laid out in the dining room—more important to put away, Tommy reminds herself, than any of these wayward dishes. Nick excused himself first of all, and she’s guessing he is holed up in the den, on the phone with one of his minions. Tommy is both tired of him and enthralled by him—tired of his somersaultingly effortful courtesies (though they do feel genuine), enthralled by his attention and his enthusiasm (which also feel authentic). The inescapably mournful look on his face during any talk of family makes her wonder how much there is to envy about the life he leads. And yet, she thinks—now that she and Dani are alone, with no more excuses to avoid their reunion—the actor is easier to be with than her own brother. Dani has finally confessed, though it’s no surprise, how much he’s resented Mort Lear for decades. He is convinced there would be no Ivo without the boy that Dani was. And without Ivo, there would be, he’s certain, no Mort Lear Empire, no estate in the country, no movie, no ridiculous, petty tug-of-war over reams of paper (which Merry seems to have filled him in on, no bias spared).
“And,” he says, “no sister enslaved to his greatness. Yes, I know this all reeks of self-pity, and I’m just like a kid who thinks the world should be fair, but fuck it, sometimes the world can be fair. Sometimes people are fair. Do you know what I mean, Tommy?”
“Dani, we’ve had way too much to drink.”
“So what? I speak the truth, and I will not regret any of what I am saying tomorrow, even if I do have a splitting headache. I am sick of being pathetic.”
“You are not pathetic.”
“Oh, fuck you, Tommy. You of all people know I am. For a nanosecond there, I had a respectable business, but I chose to share it with a guy who turned out to be an embezzler. An embezzler and an addict. Our loan payments went straight into his veins. Great judge of character, that’s me.”
Tommy wants a respite from conversation of any kind—is it too early to go to bed?—but this confrontation has been sitting off the horizon, like a freighter of a storm cloud, for years, though she has refused to look in that direction.
“Did he ever, ever acknowledge any kind of, even, gratitude for the stroke of fortune I was?” asks Dani. “Can I just ask that?”
Tommy wonders how much truth to tell. “If Morty felt he owed anybody, I think he saw Ivo as my gift to him.”
“Yours?”
“I’m the one who let him draw you. I was your…watcher, I guess. Gatekeeper. Guardian. Whatever. But this is a pointless topic!” Once more, she takes in the chaos of her kitchen. As Dani would say, fuck it. “I should tell you, Dani, that I’m the one who couldn’t forgive you, or thought I couldn’t, for what happened last fall. When you were here. Morty would have let it go.”
“Of course he would. That only proves he felt guilty. But I was an asshole. I’m sorry. I was desperate. More proof of pathetic. Look at me calling somebody else an embezzler, a thief.”
“I don’t think you’d have gone through with it—trying to sell the book. Which I don’t think you could’ve done, by the way.”
“Stupid as well as desperate.”
“Dani! Listen! We both know you got the short end. With Mom and Dad—”
“They loved me; what do you mean?”
“Yes, but they worried about you from the start. In that self-fulfilling-prophecy kind of way. They loved you with all these warnings attached, about all the things you would and wouldn’t be if you did or didn’t do this or that. Behave. Do well in school. Practice your guitar. Stay away from the wrong crowd. They made your life look like an obstacle course. At least that’s how I see it. Now; looking back.”
Dani rotates his empty tumbler, tilts it sideways to watch a drop of red wine roll around the bottom. “I thought they were liberal. Loose. For parents. They let us be us.”
“That’s not really true, Dani. I think what they wanted was for us to be them. Whether they knew it or not.”
“That’s ludicrous, Toms.”
It strikes Tommy that Dani must be thinking a great deal about their parents—because now he is one.
“You’re a father,” she says, and she means it in wonder. This is the first time they’ve seen each other since Joe was born. Dani is leaner, and he does look older.
He returns her stare, defiantly. “I hope I know that.”
“Do you have some crazy notion,” she says, “that when Mom and Dad had me, their lives were all pulled together?”
“No. But they were younger than we are.”
“They didn’t figure out how to support themselves till after I was born, even though they were in their thirties. They had to support themselves because I was born. They were still trying to make a life of performing, that bohemian coffeehouse life. Hand to mouth and proud of it. If Mom had believed in a god, it would have been Joan Baez. Boy did I ever tie them down.”
“What difference does all this make?”
“You’re getting there, is what I’m saying.”
“Thanks for the condescension.”
“Stop it, Dani. Stop protecting yourself with bitterness. I don’t think you’d be with Jane, or have Joe, if you meant it.”
The silence settles for long enough that Tommy hears a slow drip from the kitchen spigot, its faint repetitive plink on something metallic.
“Earlier,” she says, “I was going to say that you got the short end from Morty, too. He was always kind to you—do you remember how much he enjoyed it when I brought you over to Twelfth Street, back when you were living with me half the time? He liked seeing you do your homework at his kitchen table. You remember when he showed you the drawings. When he told you about Ivo. He didn’t have to, and I didn’t ask him to. I wouldn’t have dared. It was a burst of conscience…and then he didn’t know where to take it. Whatever favor I might have imagined I did for him, he paid me back ten times over by making that job up for me out of thin air.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“No one does. But then it turned out he needed someone. And there I was. He became grateful, and then he became dependent. No one likes being dependent. Not for so long anyway.”
“Tell me about it,” says Dani. “I owe way too much to Jane. She’s kept her cool through all the shit. She’s probably going to have to support us, if I can’t get a job better than the one I have.”
“What job?” she says.
“I’m a porter. Fancy word for janitor at a big-ass apartment building. I mop the halls. I do the garbage. How did I know about Lear dying? Tying up the newspapers, putting them out on the curb. I can’t believe Jane hasn’t left me.”
“She won’t do that. I know you think I don’t know her, and I don’t, not the way I should, but I can see this: she made room for you. Happily.”
Dani is hunched over, looking at the surface of the table, his glass shoved aside.
“Like I have to make for Joe. I mean, want to.”
“You already have.”