“Well,” Arthur said, “I think it’s inappropriate that the book exists. She’s right not to show it to you.” The one time he’d met Kirsten’s mother, she’d cornered him to ask if he had any projects coming up with a part for a small girl. He’d wanted to shake her. Your daughter’s so young, he’d wanted to say. Let her be a kid, give her a chance, I don’t know why you want this for her. He didn’t understand why anyone would want their child involved in movies.
“Is the book bad?”
“I wish it didn’t exist. But you know, I’m glad you came by,” he said.
“Why?”
“I have a present for you.” He felt a little guilty as he handed her the Dr. Eleven comics, because after all Miranda had intended them for him, but he didn’t want the comics because he didn’t want possessions. He didn’t want anything except his son.
When he was alone again, Arthur put on his costume. He sat for a few minutes in his finery, enjoying the weight of the velvet cape, left his crown on the coffee table next to the grapes and walked down the hall to Makeup. The pleasure of being with other people. He must have eaten something bad, he decided. Maybe at the diner. He had an hour alone in his dressing room, where he drank chamomile tea and spoke lines aloud to his reflection in the mirror, paced, prodded at the bags under his eyes, adjusted his crown. At the half-hour call, he phoned Tanya.
“I want to do something for you,” he said. “This will seem very sudden, but I’ve been thinking about it for a week.”
“What is it?” She was distracted. He heard the three little girls bickering in the background.
“How much do you still owe in student loans?” She had told him once, but he couldn’t remember the number.
“Forty-seven thousand dollars,” she said, and he heard the hope in her voice, the not-daring-to-hope, the disbelief.
“I want to pay it off.” Wasn’t this what money was for? This was what his life was going to mean, finally, after all these years of failing to win Oscars, this string of box-office flops. He would be known as the man who gave his fortune away. He would retain only enough money to live on. He would buy an apartment in Jerusalem and see Tyler every day and start over.
“Arthur,” she said.
“Let me do this for you.”
“Arthur, it’s too much.”
“It isn’t. How long will it take for you to pay it off,” he asked gently, “at the rate you’re going?”
“I’ll be in my midsixties, but it’s my debt, I—”
“Then let me help,” he said. “No strings attached. I promise. Just come to my dressing room after the show tonight, and let me give you a check.”
“What do I tell my parents? If I tell them, they’ll want to know how I got the money.”
“Tell them the truth. Tell them an eccentric actor gave you a check for forty-seven thousand dollars, no strings attached.”
“I don’t know how to thank you,” she said.
When he ended the call, he felt an unexpected peace. He would jettison everything that could possibly be thrown overboard, this weight of money and possessions, and in this casting off he’d be a lighter man.
“Fifteen minutes,” the stage manager called from just outside the door.
“Thank you fifteen,” Arthur said, and began running his lines from the beginning. At “our eldest born, speak first,” he glanced at his watch. It was still only six a.m. in Israel, but he knew Tyler and Elizabeth got up early. He negotiated his way past his ex-wife—“Two minutes, Elizabeth, I know he’s getting ready for school, I just want to hear his voice”—and closed his eyes to listen to the rustling of the telephone being transferred into his son’s small hands. My eldest born, my only born, my heart.
“Why are you calling?” That suspicious little voice. He remembered that Tyler was angry with him.
“I wanted to say hello.”
“Then why weren’t you here for my birthday?” Arthur had promised to be in Jerusalem for Tyler’s birthday, but he’d made that promise ten months ago and had frankly forgotten about it until Tyler had called him yesterday. Arthur’s apologies hadn’t landed.
“I can’t be there, buddy. I would if I could. But aren’t you coming to New York soon? Won’t I see you next week?” Tyler had nothing to say to this. “You’re flying to New York tonight, aren’t you?”
“I guess.”
“Did you read those comic books I sent you?”
Tyler didn’t respond. Arthur sat on the sofa, and rested his forehead in the palm of his hand. “Did you like them, Tyler? Those comic books?”
“Yeah.”
“Ten minutes,” the stage manager said at the door.
“Thank you ten. I looked at the comic books,” Arthur said, “but I don’t think I completely understood what they were about. I was hoping maybe you could explain them to me.”
“What about them?”
“Well, tell me about Dr. Eleven.”
“He lives on a space station.”
“Really? A space station?”
“It’s like a planet, but a little planet,” Tyler said. “Actually it’s sort of broken. It went through a wormhole, so it’s hiding in deep space, but its systems were damaged, so on its surface? It’s almost all water.” He was warming to his subject.
“All water!” Arthur raised his head. It had been a mistake to let Tyler get so far away from him, but perhaps the mistake wasn’t unfixable. “So they live in the water, Dr. Eleven and his—his people?”
“They live on islands. They have a city that’s all made of islands. There’s like bridges and boats? But it’s dangerous, because of the seahorses.”
“The seahorses are dangerous?”
“They’re not like the seahorses we saw in the jar in Chinatown that one time. They’re big.”
“How big?”
“Really big. I think they’re really big. They’re these huge—these huge things, and they ride up out of the water and they’ve got eyes like fish, and they’ve got people riding on them, and they want to catch you.”
“What happens if a seahorse catches you?”
“Then it pulls you under,” Tyler said, “and then you belong to the Undersea.”
“The Undersea?”
“It’s an underwater place.” He was talking fast now, caught up. “They’re Dr. Eleven’s enemies, but they’re not really bad. They just want to go home.”
“Buddy,” Arthur said, “Tyler, I want you to know that I love you.”
The silence was so long that he would have thought he’d lost the connection if not for the sound of a passing car. The boy must be standing by an open window.
“You too,” Tyler said. It was difficult to hear him. His voice was so small.
The door to his dressing room opened a crack. “Five minutes,” the stage manager said. Arthur waved in response.
“Buddy,” he said, “I have to go now.”
“Are you doing a movie?”
“Not tonight, buddy. I’m going up onstage.”
“Okay. Bye,” Tyler said.
“Good-bye. I’ll see you in New York next week.” Arthur disconnected and sat alone for a few minutes. He had a hard time meeting his own eyes in the dressing room mirror. He was very tired.
“Places,” the stage manager said.
The set for this production of Lear was magnificent. A high platform had been built at the back of the stage, painted to look like a balcony with elaborate pillars, stone from the front, bare plywood from the back. In the first act, the platform was the study of an aging king, and Arthur had to sit in a purple armchair while the house was filling up, in profile to the audience, holding his crown. A tired king at the end of his reign, perhaps not as sharp as he had been, contemplating a disastrous division of his kingdom.
Below on the main stage, three small girls played a clapping game in soft lighting. At a cue from the stage manager they rose and disappeared backstage left, the house lights dimmed, and this was Arthur’s cue to stand and escape. He made his way into the wings in darkness, his path guided by a stagehand with a flashlight, just as Kent, Gloucester, and Edmund entered stage right.
“I don’t get it,” Arthur had said to the director, whose name was Quentin and who Arthur privately didn’t like very much. “Why am I up there?”
“Well, you tell me,” Quentin said. “You’re pondering the vagaries of power, right? You’re contemplating the division of England. You’re thinking about your retirement savings. However you want to play it. Just trust me, it’s a good visual effect.”
“So I’m up there because you like the way it looks.”
“Try not to overthi