A House Among the Trees Read online

Nick oscillates between panic and relief. From the moment Andrew gave him the role, Nick counted on meeting the man he’s to become. He looked forward to studying close-hand Lear’s gestures, his unwitting tics and the rhythm of his breathing, how often he blinked, how tensely he held his shoulders. Nick counted on hearing about Lear’s life as lived from within, directly from the man’s lips—in short, to witnessing Lear. But then, were he still alive, there would have been the after. Among all the critics, schadenfreudians, crackpot bloggers, and bean-counting box-office vultures who must and will descend on Nick’s performance once it’s been primped and packaged for the world to see, the ultimate judge will not be present. Call him a coward, but Nick couldn’t help feeling a burden lifted when he realized that Lear would never see his own personification.

  “Silas? Do me a favor,” he says. “Could you please ring the kitchen for a pot of very black tea? And two poached eggs over boiled spinach? Toast? I’ll be a more reasonable people once I’ve been fed.”

  It’s not Nick’s habit to use his manager as a valet, but he wants Silas off the phone. Silas is a godsend (and charges accordingly), but in preparation for the day ahead, Nick needs a good dose of solitude, dearer to him now that it’s so hard to come by. Ten years, thirty-some projects, working (not unhappily—even sometimes gratefully) in the shadows of others…and then, just like that, the golden goose. Or golden noose, as his older costar joked after Nick’s third statuette in a single season, his second dive-bombing by the red-carpet harpies and rumoristas. Deirdre’s had it rough, of course: redundantly but crucially, she is a she in this business puppeteered by men. She’s been in rehab three times—common knowledge, hats off to the scrappers at the tabloids and dailies—and in divorce court twice. She blames her follies on her conspicuousness, the risky convergence of beauty, talent, and a bloodlust for fame. (She would even put it that way: Deirdre is blunt as a cudgel.)

  Nick wouldn’t argue—personal demons are just that, not another soul capable of judging—but if he had made similarly imprudent choices (like anyone, he’s a fool as often as not), he likes to think that he wouldn’t peg them as the wages of celebrity. All celebrity does is arrange and spotlight your foibles as if they were mannequins in a shopwindow, tart them up for all to see. You become a parade unto yourself, but if you are diligent and have a decent sense of direction, you determine the route.

  He can hear Deirdre, her sad smoky laugh. Oh, bear cub, just you wait. Oddly, he’s begun to miss her since all that tiresome campaigning came to an end. He may have told Silas that he doesn’t need mothering, but over their weeks of joint interviews, bungee jumping from coast to coast, one continent to the next, Deirdre very nearly became to him in life what she had been to him in Taormina: his mum. Except that the movie mother was a cyclone, a tragedy, a rendezvous with death, while the road-companion mother was a mentor, a calmer of jittery nerves, a sorely needed wit in the absurdity of the careful-what-you-wish-for life he found himself leading after the film premiered at Toronto, where one of the many clamoring critics called his performance a cinematic coup de foudre. “Enjoy it,” Deirdre said of his jack-in-the-box stardom, “but don’t get between the sheets and fuck it. And whatever you do, don’t fuck it up.”

  At the outset, speculative hearsay and even oddsmakers leaned toward their sweeping the big awards, side by side, but while Nick raked them in as predicted, Deirdre was passed over time and again, never more than a nominee, an almost, her steel grin shown repeatedly in close-up as another actress frolicked to the stage and took the prize of the moment. Hollywood might pretend to applaud comebacks, but second acts, Deirdre warned Nick, are secretly panned. “To vain, insecure people—oh, nobody we know—a rise from a fall is merely an impolite reminder that from most falls there will be no resurrection. The lesson? Don’t fall. It’s that simple.”

  He knows that the next thing he does—the next public thing—is crucial. Everybody (in Deirdre’s words, “your newspaperboy and your senile drooling wet nurse”) is watching.

  Nick strips to take a shower, but first he steps into the light from the window to cast a glance at his pricey view, over low industrial buildings and an avenue streaming with those cheerful American taxis, out across the Hudson River. If he isn’t careful, this is what he will begin to take for granted: standing above it all. As if the view is limitless, the future as wide and straight and cordoned off from chaos as one of those silly red carpets.

  An astonishingly massive cruise ship glides into view as Nick stands in the riverine glow, the gooseflesh rising palpably on his skin. Crikey, how deep can that river be? That ship is the size of a cathedral. Distracted by a burst of honking below, he presses his forehead against the plateglass and peers straight down. He can just see a margin of the sooty yet fashionable street ten stories below, but he cannot see the entrance to the hotel. Not photographers, please not the bloody photographers, he prays. He tries always to be gracious, but today is not the day. (Yesterday, in the lift, a woman took a Biro from her handbag and asked him to sign her bare arm. And he did. What choice did he have?)

  A knock sounds on his door. That’s exactly how he found out about his first nomination: a knock one morning on a hotel door. But all he wants from this knock is breakfast. “Hang on!” he calls out, and makes for the closet, the hotel robe.

  Nick loves breakfast. He loved it as a small child because it was the slim chink of the day when he had his mother to himself: after his older siblings had gone off to their school, before Mum dropped him off at his and went to work. He loves it now because it’s the only meal he seems ever to have alone. Since a certain Sunday night at the end of February, company of any kind requires all the adrenaline he can muster. He recalls the last time he was alone with Deirdre, in the car after their final interview, the day before the Oscars. The studio sent them everywhere in cars the size of tanks, and sometimes, stepping out from a twilight-windowed, climate-controlled leathery interior, for a second Nick would find himself baffled by the temperature—whether arctic or balmy—because he’d dozed off and lost track of whether they were in New York or L.A. or Chicago or London. For a flash, he would scramble to find the proper public face (it was different, just a bit, from one city to the next). How delicious it felt—how brilliant—when, that very last time, in Beverly Hills, as the car peeled away from the curb to join the wave of traffic flowing in the direction of their hotel, Deirdre put a hand on his sleeve and said to Nick, “Guess what? You can stop sparkling now.”

  —

  Over the past twelve days, Tommy has spent too much time standing in this spot, just behind the swivel stool at Morty’s drafting table. She does not sit on the stool—she never has and cannot imagine doing it now—but looks at the drawings and notes, still undisturbed, that he must have been working on the afternoon before their champagne-and-linguini supper (after which they went to the den and watched a documentary about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, at least until they nodded off). Or did Morty get up the morning after and work for an hour or two before his fatal decision to move that limb?

  Two sketches are tacked to the top of the slanted surface: one depicts a pair of galloping horses, the other a tall skinny girl in a pleated dress carrying an absurdly tall stack of books. They are new images, foreign to Tommy. Is it possible that they were Morty’s first inklings of what he had been aiming toward for decades: a new, extravagantly illustrated version of Alice? This was a project he had talked about (or talked around) for as long as Tommy could remember. He joked that it would be his “final masterwork”—except that she knew he wasn’t really joking. Which was why he kept putting it off.

  So who is this roughly hewn girl? Are the horses part of her world or something entirely other? A new picture book? Instinctively, Tommy wants to search for Morty, to find out. Is he checking the vegetable garden for early pests? Reading on the porch? Sneaking a piece of leftover cake while she is away from the kitchen? She has to remind herself that there is no Morty to track down.

&nb
sp; Both sketches represent the stage of Morty’s process that he called “looselining”: soft gray pencil on lined paper ripped from a cheap college-ruled notebook. For years, Tommy has bought those notebooks in bulk, first from a school-supply company in Queens, then from a stationery store here in town (before it closed), more recently from Staples. These drawings were often ruthlessly smudged from the passage of Morty’s hand across the lines, prone to casual tears and humid puckerings.

  Enrico, the paper conservator at the museum, scolded Morty for doing so much of his work on such a cheap, impermanent surface when he could afford better. Morty’s answer was “Don’t ever want to take myself that seriously. Like who am I here, da Vinci?”

  But Tommy knows that’s simply the way he started drawing, long before she met him: in the margins of his school notes and composition books. (Or so he described it, since the evidence is long gone, well composted decades ago in some Staten Island landfill.) And, almost proudly, Morty was prone to superstition. Some of his habits verged on fetish: his stationery, the brands of his pastels and paints, the timing of meals. After Soren, he took to dressing in the same jeans (summer) or corduroys (winter), the same shirt or sweater, with little variation. His life, for several years now, had ticked like a metronome.

  Just beyond the drafting table, through the window, the branches of the fruit trees have begun to fog over in flowers, masses of blossom that seem to bring the boughs closer to the ground, obscuring the view of the pool. Tommy will have to decide whether to uncover it, whether to call the pool people, ask them to swing by and perform their chemical ministrations. She doesn’t use it much, and neither did Morty—but he liked being able to offer that luxury to guests.

  Whether she likes it or not, there will continue to be guests. This is something she must discuss with Franklin soon: whom to consult in order to carry out Morty’s final wishes.

  Against the wall to the right of the window is the desk with Morty’s computer. Two days after his death, Tommy put an autoreply on his e-mail account, but Franklin tells her she must start looking through his correspondence, working backward, or hire someone to do it for her. Tommy has always handled the business side, using a separate, more public e-mail address, devoting two hours a day—on her own computer, in the house—to answering queries about book signings, charity events, conferences, commencement speeches, awards juries….Morty said yes less and less often—not because his energies had diminished but because, as he told her a year or so before, the older he got, the more privacy he craved.

  So how could he have welcomed this intrusion? She looks at her watch: three hours. Maybe the actor will be hopelessly mired in traffic, decide it’s not worth his time to come all this way.

  Morty left the crush of the city, decades ago, for a reason. He joked once that the worst thing about being a quasi-somebody in the city is being mistaken for another quasi-somebody—or simply for a not-quite-familiar nobody. Because his apartment building was next to a nursery school, more than once he was mistaken by one loitering parent for another. He enjoyed recounting the story in which a pretty woman saw him on his street from a distance, shouted “Wait! Wait!” and ran toward him. He assumed she was eager to praise him for his work, but when she caught up with him, she said in a breathless rush, “Aren’t you Richard’s daddy? My Damien is dying for a playdate, but Richard tells him you’re always in the country on weekends, so we were thinking, a sleepover maybe? We’d even be happy to keep him over two nights. And I hope you won’t be missing the auction. Is it true that maybe you’re donating a stay at your beach house? That would be awesome!” Which was how Morty ended up donating a set of autographed books. Turned out, when Morty told her his name, that the mother had actually recognized his face from the author photo on the back of a deluxe new edition of Colorquake. “One of my Damien’s absolute favorites of all time!” As if the child were holding him up against Faulkner or Dostoevsky.

  In their Connecticut town, a hamlet just far enough from the city to discourage commuters, Morty could walk into the grocery store without risking a fuss over who he really was or enduring a case of mistaken identity. He was simply The Famous Author Who Lives Here, no big deal. At the video store, one of the sleepy teens who worked the desk might say, “Hey, Mr. Lear, when’s The Inseparables going to be a movie? Like I hear that kid from the vampire sitcom might be playing Boris? How cool is that.” This predictable sort of exchange he even enjoyed. But what demons had he unleashed by welcoming the notion of a movie based on that profile published nearly fifteen years ago in the Times? And now she wonders: Did he give them permission to shoot actual scenes on the property? There’s so much she doesn’t know, though she’s heard—and is relieved—that they have made her, Tommy, a minor character at best.

  The magazine profile caused a sensation when it was widely e-mailed by weekend readers of the New York Times—and set off a gossipy implosion in the cliquish and envy-ridden yet self-protective world that Morty referred to as Little Reader Land. Tommy found the entire episode embarrassing not because Morty had been so open about a secret source of pain but because it must have looked like a tell-all cliché: the Beguiling Journalist coaxes the Esteemed Celebrity to share the Signature Trauma. Morty spoke almost blithely about details of his childhood that no parents would ever have shared with the Little Readers who bent and scribbled on, even chewed, the pages of his books.

  “Was it the reporter?” Tommy asked when Morty told her, over dinner one night, a few days before the article was due to appear. Sheepishly, she remembered making fun of the reporter’s odd name: Calum Bonaventura. “Was he so likable that you just…decided to hand him your soul?”

  Morty was silent for a moment, then laughed. “That’s a little cruel, don’t you think? Ouch.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Tommy,” he said, “secrets will out. Sometimes it’s better to out them before others do, just to make sure that the surprise isn’t yours.”

  “You’re not running for office. You don’t have media gophers dashing around digging tunnels beneath your public life. Although,” she said, to soften what must have sounded like a scolding, “I’ll bet Rose said you’ll sell a ton more books.”

  “Rose,” he said, “will learn about my indiscretion when everybody else does. When, as they say, it hits the stands. Or percolates up through the pixels. Whatever journalism does these days. If anybody even pays attention.”

  Tommy felt a pang of mean satisfaction. Rose, the editor who took credit for “discovering” Morty by publishing Colorquake—though it was hardly his first book—had been polite to Tommy since Morty hired her, but she made Tommy feel less than essential, as if she had never evolved past the assistant who knew how to change the cartridges in the printer. More than once, in the early days, Tommy had overheard Rose referring to her as “Morty’s girl.”

  “And look,” he said. “It’s just a magazine. Who bothers with magazines these days? They’re here to reassure us, falsely, that grown-ups really do still read. Two months from now, what will my story be? A pair of fleece socks or a roll of politically correct paper towels. Whatever recycled pulp becomes in our clever world of ‘Let’s just make more stuff!’ ”

  Yet it still bothered Tommy that he told this reporter—perhaps not casually, though that was how the article made it seem—something she hadn’t learned about Morty until she had been with him for years, until they went through the divisive trauma of Soren’s dying. That was when Tommy learned why Morty tended to avoid any talk of his boyhood in Tucson—why his hazy tales resembled those “looseline” sketches, smudgy pencil on cheap, disposable notebook paper.

  The reason Morty’s mother had moved them east (Morty’s father dead five years already) was that a man who worked at the same hotel where she washed the linens—a man who had worked his way into her trust, possibly even her heart—had charmed Morty into a shed on the outskirts of the property and exerted his sinister persuasions on the boy. It had happened more than once—how of
ten or for how long, Tommy isn’t sure and wouldn’t ask—but Morty’s mother had found out.

  In the magazine, Morty discussed the usual things artists are expected to discuss—his early doubts, his sudden success, his reasons for leaving the creative hive of the city to live in the woods—but the heart of the story was his revelation of the abuse.

  CB: Let’s talk about that hotel—the place where you first knew you wanted to be an artist, right?

  ML: I suppose. But you know, I doubt most artists ever remember accurately when they foresaw growing into this kind of life—unless maybe they had parents who were artists. Because it isn’t real, this life. It can’t be imagined from the outside, not like being a doctor or a bus driver or a banker, the working adults a child sees in the course of an ordinary day. To most children, art is not a grown-up thing; it’s an indulgence, an escape.

  CB: Which was it for you?

  ML: Both, of course.

  CB: What were you escaping from? Certainly, your father had died—

  ML: I didn’t know my father. Or don’t remember knowing him. That tragedy was my mother’s, almost entirely. It was her loss and her burden. I never saw how much more work she took on. I didn’t know she had a “before.” I think she married because she was so desperate not to be alone, and then, well, it ended up being worse than alone. But nothing like that would have occurred to me then.

  CB: But her burden—by extension, it had to be yours.

  ML: Daydreamers are generally pretty oblivious. It would be a mistake to see those children as logically empathic. “Sensitivity”—that old cliché—is not the same as compassion.

  CB: It’s obvious you’re pretty hard on your youngest self.

  ML: No. I endured plenty. I had every reason to grow a coat of armor, and after we moved from Tucson, I made a conscious decision to do that. I had to.

  CB: Okay. So I know we talked about the gardening shed—the gardener who took advantage of you.