“It was early on,” says Dani. “He wasn’t sick. Or maybe I just didn’t know if he was. You were pretty tight-lipped about all that.”
“I don’t think Morty was ever totally comfortable with those blowouts,” Tommy says. “I think he was just happy they made Soren happy.”
Dani looks at her for a moment, squinting. “He’s got to be a saint to you, no matter what, doesn’t he? Like one of your hats was excuser-in-chief.”
Today, she can’t really argue with that, even if she bristles at the accusation.
“So at that party,” says Dani, “I got to the point where I gave up struggling to make conversation—though I met a couple of cool people, I will say that. But I ended up mostly watching. Kind of spying on people right to their face. People didn’t care. They were too drunk or too high, a lot of them. Not like I was Mr. Sobriety.
“So some dude, a guy you could tell was totally in awe of being around this Great Man, smoking this Great Man’s pot, bingeing on cake with the Great Man’s forks touching his teeth, I watched him hovering for an opportunity to approach His Greatness. And he sidles up, and he gushes—and of course apologizes for his gushing, like people always do—and says he’s a portrait painter. I remember that because it was this little pop-up surprise, this hipster-looking dude doing something so…classic, stodgy. It made me sort of notice him more.”
Tommy has no idea who this young artist might have been; she still has no fix on exactly which of the too-many parties Dani is describing.
“And the kid asks the Great Man about his drawing. He says something like ‘Gosh, I just cannot believe how amazing you are at rendering, Mr. Lear. I mean there’s like nothing you can’t draw like a pro!’?” Dani quotes the artist in a Tiny Tim falsetto.
“You are cruel,” says Tommy.
“Okay, okay. The guy was just being a fan. Which is cool. But then he goes on to name some specific books, Lear’s books. I hadn’t even heard of a couple, and he asked if Lear used models, if he went out and sketched landscapes or did any kind of picture research at libraries, that kind of thing. So Lear goes, ‘I haven’t drawn from life since I was a child. I did so much drawing in school that I grew my own picture library here.’?” Dani taps his forehead. “The kid was blown away by this, right? And I thought, You fucking liar. Like you can’t even give credit to the world around you for posing the way you want it to?”
The water is ready. Tommy was about to pour it into their mugs, but she is mesmerized by her brother, by his emotion.
“Dani, that was just the easy answer. And you know, by then, he did most of the drawing automatically, from memory, from the experience in his hand. Sometimes he’d ask me to get him a book on horses or city architecture or he’d go out into the garden and sketch one of his favorite trees again, but he did carry a whole virtual suitcase, a warehouse of images inside his head by the time he died.”
Dani throws his hands in the air. “There you go again!”
“There I go where?”
“Oh come on, Tommy. You’re like a human moat.”
She pours hot water into the mugs now, speaking to her brother while her back is nearly turned. “Dani, you’re obsessed with this imaginary debt, as if you were some kind of…primitive from New Guinea who thinks a camera steals your soul, or like you had a magic lamp and Morty released the genie and took it home for himself.”
“Yeah, well, he kind of did. Because”—Dani waits till she hands him his tea, so he can look her in the eye—“because you know what I realize? He stole you.”
—
Like a miniature riptide, messages flow steadily, ominously, into the in-box when he turns on the phone—too many from Silas. But floating in the current is an e-mail from Deirdre, a welcome bit of driftwood. The subject line reads I AM A NINNY.
I cannot believe I cut you short just to run off for a massage. Your voice was far more therapeutic than any rubdown could ever be, even from Mr. Hunkadelic. And I was touched you’d turn to me about anything more than how to fold a cocktail napkin or pry the last olive out of the jar. I forgot to say two things. 1. Erice! At least pretend we have a standing date, someday, for that mother-son field trip we never got to take, thanks to Sam’s draconian call sheets. He should’ve stayed on to run Italy itself. They’d be a superpower! 2. I think it’s time you think about making a nest. I don’t mean get married, and I don’t mean buy a penthouse. (Do not ever buy a penthouse. Photographers have learned how to dangle from choppers.) It looks like I scared you off L-O-V-E when we spent all that crazy time together on that fucking cliff. So what do I mean? Maybe I mean toss an anchor overboard. You sound so at sea. You are a smart boy. Smart MAN. You get my drift. (All this nautical metaphoring. OK! Basta!) Please call me any time you like. ANY TIME. In general, all the wrong people do. Good luck with your Andrew masterpiece. Because it will be. Count on it, bear cub. xoxD
L-O-V-E. On the list of perks for which people envy and, in truth, despise lucky buggers like Nick, wouldn’t that come first, ahead of mansions and yachts and grateful haberdashers and first-class travel with free-flowing Dom Perignon? The logical conclusion being that when you’re beautiful and talented and loved by all, you will be loved by “any.” Anyone will say yes; anyone will marry you, have your children, be yours to gaze at every morning, never leave your side. And conversely, if, like Deirdre, you suddenly disappoint the masses, then doesn’t all that love simply vaporize, the way treasure won through deceit or larceny crumbles to rubble in a fairy tale? Or maybe love turns black and white, like Ivo’s world in Colorquake.
It stuns him, the story about Tomasina’s brother. Why wasn’t it in that tome about Lear? Merry was the one who told him, in the dining room, after they left the kitchen to look, really look, at that miraculous trove of drawings.
Merry gave him the best laugh of this entire, farcical day when she shouted, after the four of them had returned from the front garden (where they had rushed from the house to witness Serge tackling the two lurkers with the cameras), “Oh my God you really are a fucking movie star!” Tomasina and her brother gazed at Merry as if she were a madwoman, but her shameless delight, her exuberance at the obvious, gave Nick a surge of joy, as if she had released him from some invisible truss.
“I suppose I am!” said Nick, as the two trespassers fled toward the road.