She recognizes the box, by its trademark magenta, as coming from the gourmet purveyor in Greenwich Village that Morty often uses to send holiday gifts to his editors, agents, and other enablers of his creative life. (Used to send, she reminds her mind.) So the pears and chocolates aren’t a surprise to Tommy, but the book…
She takes it out and sits down. She hasn’t put the kettle on, but here she is, paging through this small book, her eyes welling up. This isn’t going well. She isn’t the slightest bit in control—not of her emotions and definitely not of the situation.
“Now I really am sorry,” says Nicholas Greene. “I’ve upset you. I bought the book before your boss had his accident. I read about his passion for—”
She looks up quickly. “I didn’t think of Morty as my boss, Mr. Greene.” She gets up, setting the book on the table, and goes to the stove to heat water—and to turn her face away. She feels herself growing red, moved yet also irritated by the postmortem gift. How could he not see it, now, as a purely obsequious gesture?
“Nick,” he says. “Please call me Nick. And I’d very much like to get to know…Mr. Lear as you knew him. Whatever you’ll share with me. I liked him so much, based on our early exchanges. I want to do him honor with this film. We all do. I mean, do you know—and I’m hardly the only one among us—I remember so clearly reading—or, I suppose technically, listening to Colorquake. My older sister read it to me, sometimes my brother. And the one about the fox and the balloon, the boy who—
“Listen to me. As if you need my ramblings to know what a genius he was.” He sounds like a dithering sod.
Deliberately, Tommy keeps moving. As she extracts the toweled bundle of greens from the refrigerator, she says, “No amount of praise was too much for Morty, especially from grown-ups remembering his books from when they were small. He lived to delight small children.” (Not primarily, but what does it matter?)
“I’ll show you his studio after lunch.” And then I will see you on your way. But already she’s mesmerized, suddenly averse to the thought of his leaving too soon. At thirty-four (which she knows from the profiles she and Morty read), Nicholas Greene is young enough to be her child, so the lure she feels is hardly romantic—but perhaps she understands now what makes a successful actor into a star: a literal radiance, something molecular. And then there’s his accent, which, to her gullible American ears, inspires an exasperating degree of knee-jerk reverence.
“Do you like avocado?” she asks.
“Avocado? It’s one of the best things about spending time in this country,” he says. “I am mad for avocado!”
“It was one of Morty’s favorite things. That he could afford to eat it every day. Sometimes he’d have half an avocado with lime juice for breakfast. Maybe with an egg white, scrambled.”
“You cooked for him.”
She sets the table around him. She likes that he doesn’t offer to help, an offer that would only confuse her. “Not always. Though usually dinner,” she says. “And there was a time when we entertained a lot. We’d cook together—or hire somebody. There was a local caterer everyone loved back then.” Now she is the one who’s rambling.
“Back when Mr. Kelly lived here, too?”
“Yes. That was a very social time.” She reminds herself that Soren, as a character, will be in the movie. Which brings up yet another source of anxiety. Will the movie show Morty’s most private moments, the way he ran wild after his mother’s dementia set in? What happened in Tucson—the reason the director is probably making this film in the first place—is worrisome enough.
“I hope you’re willing to talk about what it was like then—and before. And since then, too. Not that…I don’t want to turn this into some sort of interrogation.”
“But you’re here to ask questions, and I do want to help,” says Tommy. And it’s beginning to feel as if, despite herself, she does.
“Look, I’m sure part of your job—I mean, a natural part of living with him—was to guard his privacy.”
Tommy concentrates on the food for a moment. Nicholas Greene is right, of course, but when she thinks back to those days, the “very social time,” she recalls how pathetically powerless she was to “guard” Morty from anything. Against his very nature, Morty pandered to Soren’s longing for the limelight. The gatherings of artists and writers in this house were legendary; invitations to the parties—almost always mailed—became objects of envy. The most opulent, a fund-raiser for Act Up held under a tent in the garden by the pool, was the subject of a Vanity Fair article. “Of Titans in Tuxes and Tomtens in Trees,” it was called. Among the photographs of Morty and his wealthy guests (many of them younger men who would die in the next few years) was an image of one of the hand-colored engravings in the limited-edition book that went to the most lavish donors: Morty’s Christmas tribute to Astrid Lindgren, The Tomten in the Orchard. Wearing his conical red hat, the bearded elf perched high in a tree whose gnarled branches were laden with apples yet traced in snow. The tomten reached up into the night sky with a long-handled butterfly net, aiming at the brightest star. Tommy saw the tone of the article as subtly mocking, but Morty found it flattering. He invited the reporter to the next party they gave.
The parties stopped after Soren’s illness outfoxed the best treatments Morty could buy. That was a terrible time for all of them, but the hardest part for Tommy (harder even than Soren’s rage, directed so often at her) was how distant Morty became, how he kept things from her that normally she would have been the first to know. After Morty told her about Soren’s diagnosis, it took her a month to find a way to ask Morty about his own health; his reaction was angry, as if this were none of her business. Hadn’t it occurred to him that he would be her first concern? Worse still, she had no idea if Soren’s being diagnosed so long after he’d moved into the house meant something she couldn’t bear thinking: that he had been unfaithful to Morty or that, contrary to everything Tommy assumed, the relationship between the two men had openly admitted others. How na?ve she had been to assume that Morty had no life beyond what she could see.
“You’ve known Mr. Lear in just about every era of his life,” says Nicholas Greene. “How astonishing. And, really, what a privilege.”
“I don’t think about it that way,” she says, “though maybe I should.”
Tommy sets down the salad bowl, then the plates with their wedges of steaming quiche. The fragrance of tarragon pervades the kitchen. Coins of sunlight, scattered through the leaves of the cherry tree, form a quavering pattern across the table setting.
Nick spreads his napkin over his lap. “You were with him when he lost his mother, then his lover—and the editor he told me he loved so much.”
“Rose.” Morty cried more after his editor’s death than he had after his mother’s.