One of them actually had the nerve to ring the police, claiming that his shoulder had been sprained by a “thug.” Thank heaven Tomasina knew the copper who showed up. The bloke had no sympathy for a pair of nosy wankers shoving their mugs against other people’s windows. And it wasn’t as if Serge had cracked somebody’s skull. A bit of knocking about, message delivered. Tomasina said she couldn’t wait to see the police log in the weekly paper.
After that, the meal they scrummed up became a rowdy affair—or maybe it’s simply been a dog’s age since Nick has felt so relaxed in the company of people he’s only just met. They talked about the drawings first, though no bloody way would Nick have blurted out what he knows about where they came from. Tomasina gave him a severe look—a mild insult, but fair enough—when Merry said, “Did he keep them under a mattress or what?” They exhausted a wide and rather loopy range of speculations as to why Lear would have concealed the artifacts of the shadowy childhood he had so deliberately shared with the world.
Talk of children led to talk of Dani’s new baby, which led them to talk of fathers. Nick’s heart plummeted; this was precisely the sort of share-all he wanted to avoid, on this topic practically more than any other (except, perhaps, his anything-but-rosy love life). There was a wistful go-round about how sad it was that Dani and Tomasina’s dad had missed meeting his grandson, his namesake, by just a couple of years.
“My dad was around for too long,” said Merry. “He should’ve left my mother after she broke the news that one kid was plenty. That would be me.” She toasted herself. “Dad wanted the big Catholic brood. He never said so—not to me—but he always looked too long at the families on the beach where that jolly kind of pandemonium reigns. The parents who have kids to create their own self-contained society.”
“What an odd concept,” said Nick.
“Oh, but it’s a true phenomenon. At least in this country. Maybe not in England. I suppose if you have a lot of kids in England, it’s to ensure the lineage,” she teased. “No lineage in my mongrel genes.”
“Your mum,” said Nick, “she was Catholic, too?”
“Oh no,” said Merry. “She was a smart college girl who threw her lot in with the wrong guy far too soon. I’ve seen smart women throw their lot in with the wrong guy because they figure it’s about to be too late, the sands of the hourglass are dwindling fast, but Mom simply fell for Dad’s Latin charm. Even she admits it. The Ricardo Montalbán factor, she says. And to give him credit, he thought her braininess was sexy. Or so he liked to say.”
“Latin?” said Dani.
“Spanish. A wine importer. She met him while buying champagne at a liquor store for a pal’s wedding shower. Adios, terra firma.”
“But maybe she wanted ‘just one’ so she could work,” said Tomasina.
“Or because you were perfect and quite enough,” said Nick.
Merry shook her head. “The problem was, Mom studied art history in college. She needed graduate school to do what she had in mind.”
“Don’t tell me,” said Dani, “she wanted to work in a museum.”
“I’m afraid,” Merry said, “that I kind of co-opted the life she had dreamed for herself. Except, in my case, no kid. But you know what? She doesn’t mind it. She likes it when she can visit the city and we do the Old Masters tour. She loves the Frick.”
“The Frick’s brilliant,” said Nick. Safe subject, art museums. “It must be everybody’s favorite, don’t you figure?” Disagreeable as it was to recall, Kendra was the one who first took him to the Frick, back when they were in the shimmery phase and everything they did together took on a sacred glow.
Tomasina laughed. “You said that yesterday, about peonies.”
Was that only yesterday? Though he’d slept barely two hours the night before, he was wide awake as they sat in the kitchen, consuming a bewildering range of foodstuffs.
“My mother,” said Merry, “gets weepy every time she sees that painting of Saint Francis. It’s magnificent, obviously, but you know, I think she sees in it her lost opportunity to convert for my dad, be the good Catholic wife. Not that she’d say so.”
“Which picture is that?” asked Nick.
“The huge Bellini.” She pushed back her chair, stood, and struck a beatific pose, arms spread, palms out, eyes toward the ceiling. “The painting is a whole cosmos unto itself, every single leaf and flower and cloud a tiny masterpiece. Like the painter is pointing everywhere at once, telling you, God created this and this and, dude, can you believe it, even this!” She looked at Tomasina. “Do you remember the donkey?’
“I do. Morty loved that donkey.”
“Now that you mention it,” said Merry, “I have a feeling he’s the one who brought it to my attention. Though we never saw it together.”
Nick’s focus shifted to Dani, who looked back and forth between the women not as if they were daft and snockered but with a cheerful, boyish wonder.
From fathers and art and donkeys, the conversation meandered to living in the city versus living in the country, to the difficulty of making a decent living in any creative or independent enterprise.
“Unless you’re a film stah,” Merry said in a dime-store British accent, smiling at Nick.
“I did have my decade of cadging and scrimping.” He tried not to sound defensive.
“A whole decade,” said Merry. “Poor you! So tell me this, star man. What was the craziest, most jackassed thing you ever did to get ahead?”
Nick stared at her for a moment. Not a single interviewer, over the months of campaigning for Taormina, had ever asked him a question like that. Along that circuit, there was an implicit code of courtesy, a no-fly zone. Even Deirdre’s history of toppling off the wagon was clearly taboo.
“That’s easy,” he said. “Decide to spend the weekend here.”
The others laughed, and someone uncorked another bottle of wine.
Then it started: the questions about his favorite roles, the perks he gets, the attention from strangers. He didn’t mind their curiosity, though he was grateful nobody asked if he has a girlfriend. When they asked him about the Oscars (and he told them how tediously regimented the whole affair turns out to be), he was almost surprised that Merry didn’t come up with something like “Whatever happened to that blonde on your arm, the one in that spectacular purple gown?” How well he remembered that gown, the complex fuss required to get it off Kendra’s body after four hours of manic celebration.
Merry, he suspects, is a woman who works so hard at what she loves that she has forgotten to attend to other passions. But what does he know? And who is he to take a pitying stance toward someone who hasn’t figured that bit out?
After reading Deirdre’s note, he sets the phone aside to take off his shoes. Then he sits on the couch and, bracing himself, opens the first message from Si.
News from Andrew: Toby Feld may be off the project.
His second: The kid is out of the picture. This is not good. Nobody blaming you, btw.
Which means that surely somebody is.
He skips over other, less important senders en route to Si’s next missive, sent an hour after the second: See this, from Andrew.
Forwarded is a message from the almighty pontiff: Losing the boy was fortuitous. The animation will carry those scenes.
“Fortuitous?” he hears himself utter. That’s it?