She meant to take the subway, but on a day like this one, October masquerading as August, it’s hard to go underground and leave the sky behind. If she had time, she wouldn’t mind the long walk. Speeding north, she passes the little bistro where she met Scott for breakfast the day of their reunion. Before moving into the city last fall, she had forgotten that’s what it feels like to live here, how the streetscape itself is a horizontal stratification of memory, landmark by landmark, as meticulously contoured and detailed as a topographical map.
Just to hear Scott’s voice for the first time had made her feel winded, as if, with a single blow, the words had been knocked out of her throat. So they had not lingered on the phone, merely deciding on where to meet for breakfast. In person, it was the opposite, words tumbling from Tommy, almost haphazardly, until it became clear that the space of a breakfast was far too small to contain the stories she had to tell. Scott had stories, too, but his letter had outlined his own modest saga.
They walked for hours. At one point, they crossed Central Park from west to east, which they did by keeping an eye on their orientation to the sun. Neither of them knew the paths, which seemed deliberately confusing, as if designed to foil your sense of direction, not deviously but mercifully, as if the park were urging you, Listen! Life is not a mission. Get lost a little, will you?
Telling Scott where she had been and what she had done all those years felt like the breaking of a spell. And to see him for the first time since college—his skin loosened, his forehead broader, his thinning brown hair brindled with gray—was to look at all those years in the flesh. (Hadn’t he been taller, too?)
Had she offered up her story in a letter, or an e-mail, matching his, she wonders if it would have felt the same. Maybe she would have felt less embarrassed. She could tell, from his careful questions, that the choices she had made since college surprised him. By the end of that long afternoon, it was a relief to know that both of them were glad to be in touch, but it was also obvious that their attraction, the virginal chemistry they had shared, would always be a thing of the past. They parted knowing that they would see each other again, but Tommy sensed she wasn’t the only one to recognize that the unspoken question bringing them back together had met with an answer that disappointed them yet could not be altered.
Since then, they have seen each other whenever Scott comes to town, and Tommy has met the law-student daughter; Scott has met Dani. They feel most comfortable when they share each other with family or friends. One of those friends is Merry. And now, because of Merry, Scott comes east more often.
Tommy opens the window to enjoy the passing rush of air, then sits back and closes her eyes. Enough of the landmarks. She reaches into her shoulder bag just to feel the costly softness of Nicholas Greene’s orange cashmere scarf. She can’t pretend she forgot to return it. She had a feeling she wouldn’t.
—
Nick squeezes Fiona’s hand and gives her his full attention. “Miss Fiona,” he says, “do you know what I spied, just down that side street, before we arrived here?” He points across the avenue.
She looks up at him in her frightfully serious way.
“A patisserie,” he says, drawing out the syllables. “Posh cakes of every kind. Gateaux, as a matter of fact.”
She brightens dramatically. “But we haven’t had lunch.”
“What I’m suggesting is pastries for lunch. Uncle’s prerogative.”
If she doesn’t know the meaning of that word (she probably does!), she’s not going to risk probing.
Inside the pastry shop, he leans down beside her and rolls the savory French words around in his mind as he surveys the options, each identified in affectionate calligraphy on a miniature porcelain signpost. Mille-feuille, macaron, madeleine, dacquoise. Crème caramel, Reine de Saba, tarte Tatin, financier.
“Let’s each choose two,” he says, “and smuggle a fifth for your ma.”
He takes in Fiona’s covetous wonder, her roving glance reflected in the glass beside his. Feeling hungry, greedy, and childish all at once, he wants to choose everything here, yet these emotions make him dreadfully homesick, too. He cannot wait to complete the appointed tasks of the week—and to get through the necessary mortification of seeing Meredith Galarza, though she’s been nothing but completely professional in her e-mails—and then to get on that plane and return to what he hopes will be a stretch of time governed and shaped by the newly precious monotonies of hard work, home cooking, pints at the dim, familiar pub. Can he return to a life like that? Yes, he bloody can.
He is pleased that the clever lad he met on that visit to his old school has accepted an offer to be his backstage boy a few evenings a week—and the mum given her permission. (Her trust in Nick, and her pride in her son, gave him a mournful flash of the afternoon spent in the L.A. studio with Toby Feld and his Gorgon of a mother.) A note in the play’s program will dedicate Nick’s performance to Emmelina Godine, whom I first saw on this very stage when I was just an ignorant sprog.
He thinks of Tommy’s remark about Lear: trapped between solitude and celebrity. He pictures a bright sandbar dividing a river. Like Lear, he knows he mustn’t ever complain. Last week, when he moaned to Silas that sometimes he feels a bit like a chess piece, Si’s retort was that Nick should remember he has the privileges of a knight, whether or not he ever becomes a king. Somewhat ironically, the role of Lear, however, is not the role that will lead to Nick’s coronation. He can’t say his heart wasn’t in it: every fiber of his being was subsumed by the project, by Andrew’s vertiginously high standards, and Nick lost half a stone by the time they wrapped in New York. Yet Andrew’s decision, after contemplating Nick’s insistence on some kind of fidelity to the facts as he knew them, was to let the balance tip toward the fanciful, so that the darkest passages of Lear’s childhood were rendered by the animators, Nick and Sig and Jim all but enslaved to Ivo’s charisma (and to that dervishy cat). In the end, you could almost say it was Ivo’s film, not Nick’s. Already, though the film has yet to go into wide release, Nick is seeing new editions of Colorquake proliferate in bookshop windows and even airport kiosks hawking protein bars, neck pillows, and noise-abating earphones.