She begins to laugh, quietly. “I’m having this insane fantasy that I’m going to…”
But Nick is thinking what she’s thinking, and he knows it. He could tell himself how unwise it is, an impulse he should resist, but there’s something exquisite in the way she now inclines her head toward her lap, her hair obscuring her face like some lush Edwardian hat. “This is silly,” he hears her say to herself.
“You don’t quite see it, do you?” Nick says. “How rather lovely you are. Strike the rather.” She is lovely. Or he is lonely. Good God, does it matter?
“You are mercifully soused, and so am I,” she says, looking up and turning toward him.
“I’m not sure I bloody care.” Now he’s the one who’s laughing, which gets her laughing again, and then he’s actually leaning rather confoundedly far over in order to touch her irrepressible, irresistible hair and then pull it aside in order to kiss her.
She stops laughing. Her eyes shine, still teary, but she says, “If you don’t, then I most certainly do not.”
—
Sleep is a high shelf, just beyond reach, but for now Tommy doesn’t mind. She lies in the dark listening to the sounds in Morty’s room. Last night it was Nicholas Greene’s sleuthing; tonight it’s the muffled murmur of Dani talking on the phone to, she’s certain, Jane. He laughs occasionally, is silent for brief spells. He is doing most of the talking, and from what she can tell, it’s calm talk, idle talk, just-be-with-me talk. Tommy imagines he’s trying to tell her about the day. Were Tommy telling someone, she would not know where to begin.
She has taken four aspirins and set her alarm for five o’clock to be certain she’s the first one awake. Wondering if there will be further intruders, she also made sure to lock the doors and downstairs windows. Lieutenant Keane told her he’d keep an eye out. (Serge volunteered to stay, but Nick sent him back to the Chanticleer.)
She hopes everyone will leave first thing tomorrow—though now she recalls that Nick is staying till Monday. Well, fine, let him pursue his Goldilocks routine, so long as she doesn’t have to entertain him. She has far too much to do, which she’s known for days; only now she’s ready to do it. She is almost so antsy to get on with it that she would go back downstairs and begin her lists, send Franklin an e-mail, tell him she wants a second, independent legal opinion on the liberties she can and cannot take with Morty’s will—though who, really, would show up to contest her actions?
Amusing, the notion of her gaining any sense of control, harnessing this octopus Morty has left in her charge. Except that the tentacled creature to be tamed is Morty. It’s Morty’s beautiful, complicated, secretive, shadowy, selfish life—or the story his life will become. And now it’s hers. Or does she, at least for the moment, share it with Nicholas Greene—like an unruly foster child thrust into their care by authorities unseen? She might as well have thrown off her clothes and jumped into bed with the actor, because it’s as if they’ve engaged in an act of rough yet mutual intimacy—as if, through Morty, they will know each other better than they ever meant to.
Is this always what it’s like at the end of any richly consequential life? Do the heirs always uncover inconvenient, even inconceivable, secrets? Is there always a shoe box of letters at the back of a closet, a cache of forbidden images deep in a drawer, a code to a lockbox the decedent didn’t have time or mind to throw in a nearby river? These are not things people talk about freely—except perhaps in dense, thick, full-fathom-five biographies.
And yes, those inquiries have begun to trickle in through Angelica. But when it comes time to choose the worthiest supplicant, the knight permitted passage across the moat (Dani nailed it there), Tommy will no longer be the warden at the drawbridge. What she knows tonight—maybe the only thing she knows—is that the life Morty left to her, his, will not become hers. If he wants his artistic legacy widely dispersed, so be it. Though now that she has spent a few hours with Merry, she feels both callow and guilty. Merry loved Morty, that much is clear. Typical Morty, he met her halfway—and then he stepped back.
She could lie awake till dawn simply contemplating how much more, and how much less, she suddenly knows about the man from whom she had allowed herself to become, unwittingly, inseparable. How could it have taken her so long to wonder why, of those three heroic but deeply unfortunate children, Morty had killed off the girl?
Fourteen
WEDNESDAY
“I saw the police log. Paparazzi in Orne, world watch out!”
“The idiots in our yard were hardly worthy of such a glamorous word.”
Tommy unlocks the studio; Franklin follows her in. Most of the surfaces are startlingly clear, the counters fully exposed for the first time since the day the final coat of varnish dried, their once-perfect finish now splattered with ink stains, nicked by blades, and graffitied with notes and reminders. The drafting table and workboards are equally bare, except for a scattering of tacks. All the boxes of documents from the file cabinets are now at Franklin’s office, being parsed and pored over by a gang of freelance paralegals. Only the contents of the flat files and the bookcases remain undisturbed, awaiting whatever future Tommy determines they will have.
And the mahogany box on the sill. Tommy wonders if Franklin has guessed what it contains. She hasn’t moved it yet, ostensibly because she has no idea what to do with Morty’s so-called cremains—though there is a certain petty pleasure in thinking of the box as Morty himself, relegated to the role of mute, immobile witness to all the dismantling. Be so very careful what you wish for, she tells the box, silently, again.
Franklin runs an idle hand along a row of multiple identical books, all by Morty. He kept his own books shelved by the dozen, in chronological order, beginning with the tiny, charming Thank You, Thea. Stop It, Seth. And Yes, Yolanda, PLEASE!, ending with Lear on Lear (Apologies to the King), an exhibition catalog including an essay that was sketched out by Morty and polished by Tommy.
“I think last weekend might go down as the most insane forty-eight hours of my life, and that’s nothing trivial,” Tommy says. “The last few nights, I’ve been sleeping nearly nine hours. I feel like I’ve been drugged.”
“The actor left on Monday?”
“Actually, he left Sunday. He left just after Dani and Merry. I was almost sorry. You know what? He’s sweet.”
“Give him time.”