The movie opened on a blank field of white. Following a significant silence, there were sounds of scuffling, of objects being shifted on a table, and then, startling the audience by revealing the scale of the white field, a vast hand entered and filled the screen. The hand, freckled, knuckles darkened by ink, picked up a thick pencil and began to sketch, at first lightly, tentatively…then gradually committing itself to firm, true lines. It began to draw a boy’s general form, then limbs, then face and hair. To draw Ivo.
The movie did not show or even suggest a model for Ivo; he emerged from that field of white like a traveler arriving from out of a dense fog. (Later that night, while undressing, Tommy would think of what Morty called the Mother Story: a stranger comes to town. “Goes all the way back to Eden. There’s Adam, living his bucolic life. Enter Eve. Boy oh boy.”)
Ivo was, in a way, the true star of the movie, at times upstaging the flesh-and-blood Nicholas Greene. Whether Nick had shared the story about the playground with his colleagues, Tommy isn’t sure. She only knows how shocked she was to hear from him last month: a casual e-mail in which he wondered if, while he was in New York for the East Coast previews (and had she received her invitation?), she might find time to show him the place where she had met Lear. Why now? she had wondered. What would it contribute to work long finished?
“You know,” he says, “I also wanted to see you because I never said a proper goodbye last year, thanked you the way I meant to…after that rather lunatic weekend. I behaved badly and then fled like a refugee. Your letting me in…your not giving me the boot when I…” He sighs loudly. “You were ridiculously gracious.”
“You wrote me a very nice note. That was plenty,” she says. It’s true, however, that he left Orne with a haste that puzzled, even wounded, Tommy. She had to assume that he was dodging the meddlesome fans who had literally come crashing through a hedge. (Two reporters from regional newspapers called Tommy that week to ask about the actor’s visit.)
Now he’s just looking at her—or she presumes he is. She wishes she could see his eyes.
“I know it’s vanity, and pathetic of me to ask, but what do you think he’d have thought of the film? I mean really thought of it?”
For the past day and a half, Tommy has thought almost constantly about the movie—she knows she needs to see it again, alone, without the hoopla, without the fear that others might be watching her as she watches the screen—yet she hasn’t thought much, at least not yet, about how Morty might have reacted. What Tommy doubts she will ever tell anyone is how stunned she was to witness how remote, almost irrelevant, she was to the story. Oh, she was there—played by one of those dime-a-dozen bland blond beauties, Hollywood’s moths-to-the-flame—but her few lines were pallid, servantlike. She was almost always in the background, no more significant to the veerings of the plot than the absurdly funky furnishings with which the art director had filled the fictional house. (Someone had decided that real artists do not favor classic New England antiques.)
This—her virtual erasure from Morty’s life on-screen—hurt her so deeply that she is not even sure she could put it into words. How silly and false she was to pretend that she genuinely hoped the screenwriter and director would demote her, push her to the sidelines. Equally shameful is the way in which this slight makes her feel as resentful toward Morty as she does toward the faceless creators of the movie. It’s not his fault that Tommy was inconvenient to the story, once it was reduced to its thematic essence. Perhaps, it comes to her as she sits in this park, that is exactly how Dani felt in all the years after finding out how much he once mattered to Morty’s story—yet ultimately didn’t.
So what would Morty have thought? Only now does she stop to contemplate this question head-on. Remembering the way he behaved the night before he died, she has to imagine that vanity would have overruled any objections to the inaccuracies (some blatant), that he would have basked in the literal glow of the screen, its spotlight on his sufferings, his genius, and his perseverance more significant than the integrity or verisimilitude of the figure standing in that column of powerful radiance. How silly, yet again, that Tommy was the one who had worried about what such radiance might reveal as well as distort.
“Am I making you sad?” Nick says when she doesn’t speak at once. “Forget my asking; it’s nothing but my ego whining here.”
“No, you should ask,” Tommy says, perhaps harshly. She gazes around at the dozen or more children in the sandbox, all busy excavating worlds within their control.
“I know,” she says to Nick, “that he would have been in raptures about the animation—I think I forgot to breathe when Ivo was being stalked by the panther—and the music…well, you know how beautiful it was. I’m still hearing passages in my head. Was that an oboe where…”
His smile seems to have tensed. None of this is what he wants to hear.
“But you,” Tommy interrupts herself, “you would have made him feel—I mean your performance, which was just incredible, as everyone’s saying—would have made him feel…” What can she say that she will mean, that isn’t trivial? And then it comes to her. “Vindicated.”
Nick leans away from her, against the bench. He glances at the swings, back at Tommy. “Vindicated?”
“You know—I think you of all people do know—that he felt wronged in so many ways. But at the same time, he knew he had no right to feel wronged. That all his good fortune was like one big admonition never to complain, never to admit feeling as alone as he did. He was trapped between solitude and celebrity.”