“Hilarious, Si. You know what I mean. No entourage. Just me. That’s what her note says. You get a day off. Go shopping. Drinking. Or sleep! You’re always moaning you never sleep. And blaming it on me.”
The note from Lear’s assistant, delivered by Silas, lies beside the telephone, barely ajar from its single, stalwart fold, embodying the cautiousness, the protectiveness, of its scribe. Her handwriting is equally guarded, each line straight, each eminently legible character discrete from its neighbors: no lazy loopings or punctured margins. If Nick is good at what he does, it’s not because he’s a born mimic or a chameleon or a practiced show-off but because he reads other people well. (Or so he believes; it is, in the dizzying moment of all this attention, sometimes hard to know what he believes anymore, especially about himself.) Two months ago, one brief phone conversation with the assistant—through which he gained access to Lear—told him everything he needed to know about what he is dealing with here. Whom he is dealing with. Though he could not have known, back then, how important she would be. This relationship—the one he hopes to have with a woman he has yet to meet in person—matters a great deal more than his manager or the shifting posse of clammy-handed handlers and smartly suited producers understand. They see her as a potentially cantankerous guard dog; Nick sees her as a daughter, mother, gatekeeper, and amanuensis merged into one grief-stricken, probably lonely, possibly frightened woman. She is certainly in mourning, likely still in shock.
“You really want to take time for this visit?” says Silas. “If he were still alive—”
“Yes, I do,” says Nick. “This is unfinished business for me. Research. Besides which, it’s only courteous. She mustn’t think we’ve abandoned her.” Nick is now seriously hungry. For a proper breakfast; also for time to think.
“She isn’t a widow,” says Silas.
“I’m not sure you’re right about that. Figuratively speaking.”
Clear as anything, Nick remembers the man’s voice, the gruffness of age tinged with a robust yet honeyed cynicism, the specter of a backstreet childhood irrepressible in his accent (classic Brooklyn, a vernacular Nick will somehow crack). Forget all the piles of honors, awards, black-tied ovations: the man was still the fragile, struggling, striving boy—and, to fall back on current euphemizing, he was still the survivor.
Was. And there’s the rub.
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.