“I’m sure he felt lucky to have you with him, right here, for support. And trust. When you’re…prosperous”—Tommy notes the care with which he chooses this word over, perhaps, famous or popular—“it’s hard to know whom you can properly trust.”
Tommy looks Nicholas Greene in the eye—which isn’t easy. “He would have had someone else, if not me. He didn’t want a family, he didn’t want to live in the city, but he didn’t want to live alone.”
“But he chose you.”
Tommy feels strangely proud to have him say this to her—but he would be saying this to anyone sitting in this chair at this moment in time. Actors live by their scripts. “I suppose he did. And I chose him.” She adds quickly, “He used to joke that he’d have chosen a cat instead, except that a cat would refuse to stand in line for stamps.”
“He wasn’t one for flattery, was he?” The actor deploys his golden smile.
Now it would take an industrial crane to lift her gaze from the plate. Over the past week, she has felt these inklings of dread, each like a subtle draft from an open window. She tells herself it’s simply the dread of all she faces in following through on Morty’s intentions. Tommy takes little comfort in the security of knowing she is now the “prosperous” one, especially because she is not the famous one, the gifted one, the like-nobody-else-on-earth teller of tales. Morty was anything but her twin, yet it’s as if she somehow believed that, like those three children he dreamed up, they were inseparable, mortality itself the source of their alloyed strength.
Tommy can’t help hearing her brother’s voice, one of the last things Dani said to her last year before she kicked him out of the house: You’re not his “friend.” You’re just a wife without the sex. Not even a modern, liberated wife. You know that, don’t you, Toms? Another problem she’s yet to deal with: Dani. If Dani knows about Morty’s death, it would be from the news at large, perhaps that one-two punch in the Times: first the sprawling obituary (a color photo above the fold; how Morty would have swanned about the house had he lived to see it) and the subsequent “appreciation” posted on the next day’s editorial page, adorned with a tiny engraving of a wreath.
“Am I tasting mint?” says Nicholas Greene, a forkful of salad midair.
“I toss a few herbs with the lettuce.”
“Lovely.”
They eat a few bites of food, sip their tea. Furtively, she watches him, the way he touches the corner of his wide mouth with his napkin. Impeccable manners, she observes, and she is reminded of the times she and Morty, after a night out at some public affair, would sit at this table and dissect the personalities.
“Can I ask what you’ll miss most about him?”
Tommy is startled. “Well. This will sound strange…but right now what I miss most is the sound of his breathing at night. Which was loud. My bedroom is—was—separate, of course, but I’m a light sleeper. The last few years, we left our doors open. He was afraid—” Why is she telling him all this? She takes another bite of salad.
“Afraid?”
“Of dying, in the middle of the night, alone, no one to hear if he called for help. And then, in the end, he dies in broad daylight, outdoors—but alone just the same.”
Nick, who rarely lets a conversation lapse into silence (of which he isn’t a fan; in truth, of which he’s afraid—there’s his fear unmasked), reaches for something polite to say. He wishes the vibration of his phone in his breast pocket would stop interrupting his concentration. (He promised to leave it on; he did not promise to answer.) “Lovely, this salad,” he says. (Didn’t he say the same thing two minutes ago?) “Very fresh.”
“If you were to visit in July or August,” says Tommy, “everything would have come from our garden. Except the avocado.”
“Yes. Quite!”
She must want him gone. He’d want him gone. But he is intent on winning her over. It’s not just that she seems guarded. She’s so…dignified. And she is younger, or seems younger, than he thought she would be. (Kendra told him he had the typically cruel eye of a caddish young man when it came to meeting women over fifty. “Like they might as well pack it up, hurl themselves down the nearest chute to oblivion. I see it in your shifty eyes,” she said after that endless carnival of drinks parties in Toronto. If he looked shifty, it was surely an expression caused by digestive mayhem and overimbibing. But Kendra had to drive her point into the ground, informing Nick that if his mother were alive, she would still be wearing heels and dancing. “Except that she bloody isn’t,” he snapped. Another rung down that ladder.)
Tommy can hear Nicholas Greene’s phone calling for attention inside his jacket. Should she be flattered that he ignores it? “I have to confess,” she says, unable to tolerate the pause, “we hadn’t seen Taormina yet. It was out of theaters by the time we heard that you were cast. As Morty.”
“?‘Out of theaters’!” Does his laughter always sound so much like braying? “I wish we still lived in an era when such phrases had meaning. Most people seem to get their entertainment pirated these days. And then they watch it on a laptop while marooned in some airport or up all night in a panic over paying taxes. People watch films on their phones.” How many calls is he ignoring? Will this person never give up? Probably Si. Nick is going to get hell.
“We didn’t exactly see movies in theaters much, either,” she says. “There’s a monster Cineplex twenty minutes away, and that’s about it. You can be in one theater watching a French love story, and if there’s a shoot-’em-up thriller showing next door, the gunfire comes right through the walls. I think we keep our local video store in business.” Will she continue to do that? She has a miserable vision of herself eating dinners, alone, in front of the flat-screen TV they purchased barely a year ago.
“Not to worry,” says Nick. “There are a million things to see out there and not enough time. Films are becoming almost quaint.” Should he offer to send her a screener, or would that seem cheeky?
“But people say your performance…” She stops, blushing.
“Whatever people say, it’s not a film that will change your life, I promise you that, Ms. Daulair.”
Tomasina Daulair—who still hasn’t asked him to address her with the slightest informality—is rather striking for a woman of fifty-five: slim, with long silver hair worn loose. Around her throat she wears a dark, silken beach stone in which a small pearl has been embedded. Her faintly striped blouse is tailored close, autumnal in color, and her long velvet skirt is more dreamy than prim. A slit along her left calf reveals a glimpse of orange stocking. All right, full disclosure to self: he expected a whiskered, gum-soled spinster, a secular nun. Kendra wasn’t entirely wrong.
“Do you want to answer that?” says Tommy, pointing at his hidden breast pocket. “Please go ahead, if you need to.”
“I do not need or even want to answer it,” he says with a vehemence that takes him by surprise. “What I’d like—and I hope it’s not too forward—what I’d really like is if you’d show me around a bit.”