A House Among the Trees Read online

  Tied up tonight.

  Tomorrow morning?

  I’m up early. 8 ET? Keep your phone on, bro.

  Has Silas been telling tales? Nick feels like a truant schoolboy caught at the park. He returns to looking at illustrations from Colorquake, which the animators will weave throughout the movie. At times, Nick’s acting will be green-screened, stitched into the backdrop of Lear’s imagination: a technical frontier he’s eager to cross, since every story in which he’s acted so far has been set in literally fabricated surroundings.

  By now, Nick has committed the book to heart, every picture, every word. It begins, famously, Ivo’s mother kept a perfect house, a house among the trees. In a lilting paragraph, printed in large white type on black ground—by far the most text on any one page—the perfection of the house is described. The sofas were serene, the bedrooms were bucolic, the rugs were resplendent….The final sentence on the page is Ivo’s mother called him her budding artist, her little Cézanne, and she loved him like no one else, but she didn’t want his colors to spill on her perfect armchairs, her perfect lamps, or her perfectly framed perfect paintings by artists more famous than Ivo who lived and died a very long time ago. All this perfection, visually if not verbally, is left to the reader’s imagination—and the vocabulary signals to any remotely clever child that there will be no condescension here. In a way, the words are beside the point, as if that daunting passage is nothing but a heavy door to be pushed aside, perhaps like the one that Ivo opens a short while later.

  A turn of the page reveals a wide double spread of intoxicating softly penciled color. Balanced on one bare foot, smiling gaily, brandishing a dripping brush, a wee lad stands in the middle of a windowless room whose walls are mostly (but not yet entirely) covered with a tropical fantasia: tall spiky trees and flowers, toucans, parrots, butterflies. On one wall, where he has only begun to paint this jungle, you can see his previous painting: a cityscape, about to be engulfed—or overgrown. The only piece of furniture in the room is a step stool, draped with a color-stained rag.

  Barely noticeable, hugging the bottom margin of the two pages, runs the text So Ivo’s mother gave him the cellar, all of it. It was his to decorate however he pleased. Sometimes Ivo stayed there all day long. Yet suddenly, perhaps deliberately, the words cease to matter so much, because to all but the most heartless reader, Ivo himself is utterly beguiling, from his stubby, paint-stained toenails to the multiple cowlicks that rise in inky tufts from a head as round as a billiards ball. (Every mother who sees him must long to hold him in her lap and comb his unruly hair.)

  Until the day of the earthquake.

  Ivo is so busy painting in his windowless cellar that he toils on without realizing that the house above him is shaking. In a trio of wordless illustrations, the reader sees him on tiptoe, rendering a passionflower; up on the stool, one leg raised, at work on a butterfly bigger than his head; and, crouching in a corner, frowning with concentration, bringing to visual life a coiled black panther. (In the first image, the lightbulb overhead swings to and fro; in the next, a jar holding Ivo’s brushes shatters, scattering them far and wide; take three, the stool tips onto its side.)

  The following spread is divided into four scenes:

  Ivo finds himself painting a large meaty sandwich.

  He stops and frowns. Why hasn’t his mother called him to lunch? (Any child can read this thought on Ivo’s deftly rendered face.)

  He goes upstairs. But the door at the top is stuck fast.

  Puzzled, he goes back down and forces open a medieval-looking wooden door that leads to a rising flight of stone stairs and, beyond, a modest garden.

  Another spread—this time one wide image, still wordless—shows Ivo from behind, paintbrush at his side, beholding a suburban landscape that is largely undestroyed (a few branches and shutters askew, a chimney leaning) but entirely monochromatic. Ivo himself is black and white.

  On the next page, he looks down in alarm and confusion at his own grayness and then at the paint on the end of his brush: now black when, two pages back, it was red.

  Ivo sets forth and encounters other children, emerging from their own homes, all equally puzzled by the sudden change in their world: the ashen flowers, the brooding black trees, the sun shining cold paper white. No one speaks; perhaps no one can. Ivo quickly leaves them behind, however, and plunges into a nearby wood. How long he wanders is unclear, but in a few pages he happens upon a panther—to the vigilant eye, exactly like the one seen lurking in the corner of his mural.

  What follows, in a swift series of cardlike frames, is a kind of telepathic communication—not a conversation—in which Ivo, unafraid of the big cat, discovers that the creature is a man transformed by a curse to spend eternity speechless and colorless, pure jet black, unless he finds a fearless love.

  The panther, however, grew impatient and jealous as well as lonely. Despairing, he bargained away his redemption, surrendering his immortality to a fairy in exchange for a cataclysm that would steal color from the rest of the world as well. If he was to live life deprived of color, so would everyone else.

  The fairy, long departed, is never seen. For six pages, the boy and the panther seem to dance and tumble and spar with each other as the boy learns the cat’s story. Words, in this sequence, are few and far between. It’s clear that the story is being “told” through the ongoing tangle of boy with cat. Only on a recent read-through did it occur to Nick that, to a sophisticated adult reader, that tangle suggests Hercules wrestling with the lion, perhaps even Jacob with the angel. The boy and the panther seem to be fighting as much as playing, their limbs at times intertwined, their faces an emotional spectrum ranging from gaiety to grimace. A marvel, the way in which the images seem as sexual as they do purely playful—though how much is Nick projecting Andrew’s vision onto Lear’s?

  At last, the boy and the big cat fall asleep together in a clearing, but when the boy awakens, he is alone.

  Ivo was not dreaming, he discovers. The world is still like one of his mother’s old photographs: the leaves overhead a cloudy gray, the grass in shadow a mat of blackened bristle. He stands and stretches and closes his eyes, homesick and lonely. He stretches out his arms, from which his shirt hangs in shreds.

  The next image is the one that frightened Nick (and surely he wasn’t alone in feeling this way). As the flying and creeping creatures land on or brush against Ivo, they regain their color, and as they fly out into the world, their flight paths brush color back into the air, through the trees, across the horizon, just as Ivo’s paintbrush colored the walls of his cellar.

  Ivo searches for the panther but finds no sign of it. Emerging from the woods, he is greeted by the sight of the happy children of his neighborhood, their cheeks rosy again, their pinafores and pants cheerfully patterned once more. They are out in their gardens and on the pavement, jumping rope and playing marbles; they pay no heed to Ivo in his ragged clothing.

  The boy runs toward his house. As it comes in sight, he sees a tall man in a multicolored patchwork greatcoat knocking on the door. The man’s head is thick with black hair, and trailing from beneath the hem of the coat is a long, elegant black tail. He enters the house before Ivo reaches it.

  The last scene is the door of the house (a red door with a lion’s head for a knocker) opening wide. The doorway is filled with a prismlike explosion of color.

  The final page is, like the first, black, but the paragraph printed on it is, this time, in a rainbowed font. The page resembles those old-fashioned drawings made by scrubbing a thick layer of black crayon over a field of colored markings, then scratching through the waxy scrim.

  Ivo’s mother hugged and hugged him. To his amazement, the rooms were as perfect as ever: the sofa, the rug, the lamps, the potted ivy, everything in its place. Only this was different: Ivo’s mother was in love, and she was also in love with Ivo’s art. On the walls, instead of the perfectly framed perfect paintings by the perfect but long-ago artists, hung Ivo’s pictures: birds and
butterflies and grasshoppers. Ivo ate a big dinner with his mother and her true love, the man with the black hair and tail, and then he went back to the cellar.

  Everything was just as he left it, but…wait…where was his panther?

  And if the reader turns to the endpaper, there stands Ivo, facing the reader directly, a silencing finger raised to his lips, laughter in his eyes, a bright blue butterfly sitting on top of his head.

  Single mothers must love this story, Nick thinks, setting the book aside to gaze out the window. The car speeds along now, unimpeded, beneath a blur of trees. Green signs with rusticated borders announce exits leading to towns with an ethnic hotchpotch of names, some American Indian, some Anglo nostalgic, others just plain odd (is Mount Kisco an actual mountain?).

  Nick’s own single mum had little time to read to him; she was too busy trying to scramble a living to support three children whose two fathers had each, in succession, gone his merry, scoundrely way. When all three of them were old enough to sit still at a table, their grandfather took them to lunch once a month—somewhere posh, with stiff napkins and stiff-backed waiters (and, for Grandfather, stiff drinks). He would lecture them on manners, money, and the importance of attending university (which, somewhat miraculously, all three of them did). He made a show of planting seed money in trusts for each of them, which they were told they would inherit when they were “too old to be as foolish as your mother was.” As for helping Mum directly, he did so only through the stingiest of loans, never enough to alleviate her air of suppressed panic, artificial cheer, and almost unrelenting fatigue. Nick wonders if, as the youngest, he was the only one home often enough to overhear the arguments Mum and Grandfather had on the telephone—though of course he had no idea what life had been like when Nigel and Annabelle were small and their father had yet to decamp. Was Grandfather more or less condemning back then?

  Children do not try to make sense of their grandparents’ actions. Whether they behave endearingly or tyrannically, grandparents, like dinosaurs and Vikings, are outmoded and illogical beings, exempt from the rules of physics or decent modern behavior. Any eccentric or even brutal actions they perpetrate are excused by their being so ancient. (Perhaps in their time it was normal to shame your children, just as it was normal in the era of the Norse gods to pillage and burn.) Not until Nick came into his trust, at thirty, did he realize how cruel his grandfather had been not only to his daughter but to her children as well, by refusing to give her enough support to spend more time with them.

  Or maybe that was the point. Maybe Grandfather, more than punishing Nick’s mother for her impulsive bohemian couplings (no legal strings attached), wanted to ensure that she had scant opportunity to expose the carriers of his genes to her possibly contagious and definitely intemperate romanticism. Poor Mum outlived Grandfather by little more than a year. She died of breast cancer, her unfavorable spot in the chemotherapy queue no doubt abetting its fatal metastasis. Grandfather had expired while snoozing in a leather chair at his club one afternoon. Nick despairs at the injustice, not just at the loss of the years his mother might have had—enough to see him up for an Olivier or cast in that BBC docudrama as Sir Walter Raleigh (she was reading history at Cambridge when her affair with Nigel and Annabelle’s father led her astray)—but at the inequitable distribution of the physical pain: all of it, and plenty, suffered by his mother alone.

  By the time Mum died, Nick’s brother and sister—Nigel now a barrister in Glasgow, Annabelle a wife and mother in Dorset—had established workaday lives of their own, quite separate from Nick’s. They were eight and six years older. He invited them to an “intimate reception” (was there such a thing?) that his agency arranged the week after the BAFTA win. By post, each of them declined, their notes congratulatory but brief. Nick’s disappointment was overshadowed by guilt; their courteous snubs only served him right. What efforts had he made through his scrabbling, hand-to-mouth years, before the trust kicked in? (He hasn’t laid eyes on his niece, Fiona, since her christening. She must be four or five by now.) Their formal regrets arrived on the same day, reminding him how much closer they are to each other than to him. Not only are they full siblings, but they can remember the early rows between Mum and her parents; they can even remember Grandmother, who died the year Nick was born. (Anyone could guess that Grandfather blamed her demise on Mum.)

  Well, this is rich. He’s managed to work himself into a cavelike funk just as the road signs are beginning to herald the town where Lear lives—or lived: Orne, a curious name that comes out like an utterance forced through a mouthful of cotton wool at the dentist’s.

  As if to reassure himself that it’s all real—these woods, this car, the visit he’s been anticipating for months—he lays a hand on the beribboned box beside him. It contains a basket of blood-red pears, fancy chocolates, and—two weeks too late—a slim red volume of tributes written to Charles Dickens by other great writers, some of them modern, others his peers. Silas is to thank. He, too, has done his homework.

  —

  Will she give him lunch here, in the kitchen? She made a quiche, has the ingredients for a salad with avocados. Morty never tired of avocados; he ate them nearly every day. As he told Tommy years ago, any man who spins his success from thin air should have a favorite daily indulgence with which to pat himself on the back. But now, she wonders if it would be better to suggest they go out, to the village center, the one decent restaurant that’s open for lunch. It’s quiet then. The waitresses are efficient matrons who aren’t likely to recognize Nicholas Greene—or are they?

  No, that’s a stupid idea. And rude. Never mind whether he’d draw attention. (Would Tommy secretly like that? Had Morty not gone out on the roof, he would be here to tease her about their visit from a man deemed one of the past year’s most eligible or sexy or talented, depending on which magazine was concocting the list.) If they go out, the actor will insist on treating her, and she will owe him something. Better to be the one extending favors. That’s what Morty would say—at least, the Morty of ten and more years ago, who endorsed so many young writers’ first efforts, who made Tommy deliver bags of apples and plums from their little orchard to all their neighbors, even the ones who refused to honor civilized hours for construction or mechanized lawn work.

  And just like that, here it is: the crunch of tires on gravel, earlier than expected. Unless it’s Franklin—but Franklin always telephones first. It’s been eerily quiet since the day they spent together making the most important calls: the funeral home, the credit card hotlines, the banks, and the broker. “Call this the eye of the storm,” Franklin told her, standing in the driveway before he left. “I’ll give you a week off before we tackle the work ahead.” Next month, in the city, there will be an obscenely large memorial gathering for “colleagues and friends” in the American Wing at the Met. To keep Morty’s agent distracted, Tommy asked her to take on that affair, not just the logistics but the politics. Let Angelica juggle the fragile egos, take the heat for leaving anyone off the list. Apparently, there will also be a public gathering at the Central Park Alice. City booksellers planned that one, and Tommy is hoping for a graceful out.

  She should meet Nicholas Greene at his car, but she remains seated at the kitchen table, stilled by the sudden certainty that she should have said no. I’m so sorry, but everything’s changed, and it’s simply not a good time. Oh, and I do admire your work, Mr. Greene. We both did. Morty, you vain old fool, she thinks.

  Too quickly, there’s a single strident rap of the front-door knocker. Through the dining room, the living room…She pauses after catching a glimpse of blue shoulder through one of the sidelights. Followed by a face, shadowed by two hands cupped against the pane.

  She rushes to open the door. He mustn’t see her hesitating, peering out.

  “Ms. Daulair?” His hand, his blue sleeve. He wears a velour jacket with crisp narrow jeans and a white button-down shirt. Draped around his long neck is an orange scarf, bright as a burst of song.


  “Yes,” she says. “Me.”

  Me, she thinks, meet Him.

  Because it is Him, the man from the magazines and movies, yet it isn’t. Nothing could prepare you for this: how…indelible he is. Not sexy or dishy or hunky or any of those insufficiently two-dimensional teenybopper adjectives. And he’s too thin to be “handsome,” strictly speaking. But what he is—like a rose in a color you’ve never laid eyes on before or a dress in a store window that suddenly you dream of wearing on a wedding day you haven’t even planned—is impossible to stop looking at, demanding memorization. Both his hair and his eyes are a blondish brown, his nose long and slightly skewed, his pale skin vivaciously freckled—all these features reminiscent of Morty’s looks around the time Tommy met him.

  “May I trespass?” His laugh sounds genuinely nervous or shy. (But he’s an actor! Who can tell what’s “genuine”?) He leans over and picks up a box from the brickwork at his feet (blue Converse sneakers, toes unscuffed). He hands it to her. “A bribe. Please tell me entry does not require a password. I’m hopeless at passwords. Shakespeare monologues, a cinch. Logging in to my e-mail account, a perpetual trial.”

  Hugging the box to her chest, Tommy stands planted just inside the front door: what is the matter with her? “Yes,” she manages. “Please.”

  He thanks her. “Old,” he says, stepping inside. “I love old houses. Houses that have really been lived in. Lived in again and again. I have a flat in a crumbling old row house. In London. Where I rarely ever am these days. I miss it!” And this room makes him miss it more acutely still. In the wide, warped floorboards, the faded Oriental rugs and dependably aging sofas, he sees immediate similarities between their outer lives, their tastes. The similarities between their inner lives, those he’s seen already.

  Realizing how rude he must seem, looking greedily about as if he’s an estate agent calculating a value, he turns quickly back to his hostess. She seems every bit as off-balance as he is. Is she shy? Her reticence might be distrust.