It shouldn’t matter, but it does. It bothers him. And he has to wonder whether he should complicate matters by telling Andrew the different story—because Nick would, in effect, be asking for a rewrite. The last thing anybody wants is further delay.
Nick was moved by Lear’s forthrightness in their correspondence—and doubly glad that they had dismissed any notion of a go-between. The level of trust, without intermediaries, was, by the end, staggering. Lear had asked that Nick delete his e-mails after reading them and, though his cursor finger had paused as the quivering arrow approached the little dustbin, he had done so. Could you honestly portray a man with whom you hadn’t been honest?
“You’ll learn to be the wily fox soon enough, and you’ll have to, baby,” Kendra said to him, the day after the Oscars. She lay on their hotel bed, in nothing but her pink lace knickers, reading aloud to him samples of how the papers, tweeters, and blog-floggers had variously praised and mocked the sincerity of his speech, even questioned his tears (which, let the world think otherwise, erupted against his will) as he dedicated the hefty golden chap to single mothers who scrimped and saved for their children to follow their passions (not that Nick’s mother would have had to scrimp so much if she’d exercised common sense—though if she’d done that, Nick would not exist). At any rate, that remark of Kendra’s was the beginning of their end. Kendra’s edges are too sharp.
For advising Nick to hold off a marriage proposal till after awards madness waned, Silas deserves every green dollar he earns and then some. Which is why Nick tolerates his American manager’s tendency to meddle in bloody everything now that Nick has to worry about encounters with the sort of people who make their living by popping out from behind the shrubs wielding a camera—or, these days, any old anybody whipping out a phone in a tube station (not that his way of making a living is really any less peculiar).
In dense traffic, the car inches north on the motorway skirting the river. The George Washington Bridge looms to the left. Nick heaves the book into his lap and opens it to the introduction, which he could practically recite by heart. It’s illustrated with pretentiously sepiaed photos of Lear: as a teenager in a school play, brandishing a wooden sword; as a striving young illustrator bent over a drafting table, his hair long and flaxen; with Soren Kelly and Tomasina Daulair at a posh party in New York sometime in the nineties; as a much older man, leaning against the door of his brick farmhouse. In this final image, only fugitive traces remain of his youthful beauty, but the triumphs of his long career are evident in his cocksure smile and, metaphorically, in the voluminous blooms of a rose trained in an arc around the fanlight over the door.
Flipping deeper into the book, Nick finds himself at the chapter devoted to Colorquake, the book that launched Lear like a NASA space shot. It wasn’t his first, though most people wouldn’t know that now, not even the thousands of women who have named their sons Ivo, after the impish, stout-limbed lad at the center of the story. Quietly, doggedly, over the crucial years many would consider a young man’s prime, Lear published a handful of earnest storybooks aimed at children with the usual aversions: to manners, to sleep, to the dark, to vegetables, to the sermonizing of grown-ups. All were quirky and finely drawn, but the young heroes and heroines had a bland, generic appearance a little like the children of Edward Gorey, as if drawn by an adult who had never enjoyed being a child and certainly wouldn’t want to raise one. All that changed with the perennially beloved Ivo.
Nick turns a page and starts reflexively at the image that once terrified him (though he would never have admitted it to whichever sibling was reading aloud at the time): Ivo standing in the forest clearing, barefoot, his clothing in tatters, his eyes closed. He stands with his arms stretched out to either side, and from every direction, birds, butterflies, and insects alight on his body as if he were a tree, while squirrels and moles convene at his feet. To young Nick, it wasn’t just the squeamish notion of having grasshoppers and crickets perched along his arms that gave him the willies; it was the way the boy’s pose reminded him of the crucifix he’d glimpsed on the wall of a playmate’s house. His mother had explained the Easter story to him, but not till he left home for school would he come to realize how odd his religious ignorance was.
Nick has always wondered whether Colorquake appeals more to the adults who read it aloud than it does to their children. In the forty years since its publication, endless theses have been published on the allegorical power of the story, claiming allusions to the Holocaust, to Saint Francis, to sexual awakening, even to the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Lately, there have been murmurings that Lear was even, presciently, writing about the potential disaster of climate change. Good Lord, how could Lear have tolerated all that lily gilding, that cerebral fuss? That is one of the questions Nick would have asked him today.
His mobile hums. Andrew. He cannot ignore Andrew, whose faith in Nick won him the role over far more bankable actors—and, notably, before the awards. Now Andrew buzzes with glee, gloating to the formerly fretful execs that he knew all along; he knew Nick would prove his mettle, would go fucking platinum. Andrew could practically have cast a random nutter plucked from the street; that’s the clout of three Oscars (one of which he won as a young actor, two as a director). Back in more barbaric times, he would have had a gold-tasseled casting couch, the exclamation point concluding an epic line of women stretching from his sentried gate on Mulholland clear to Venice Beach.
A text: Can Nick fly out for a meeting tomorrow?
Impossible. So sorry. Heading out to Lear’s house. Speak tonight?
Tied up tonight.
Tomorrow morning?
I’m up early. 8 ET? Keep your phone on, bro.