If characters brought to life by crayons and brushwork could win awards, Ivo would hoover up the statuettes next spring. It was comical how, once Nick saw the finished film, he had a fiercely schizophrenic feeling toward Ivo. The boy—a being of pen and ink, not flesh and blood—seemed indeed to have stolen the limelight from all the live, human actors around him. It was hard not to see “him” as cheeky and insubordinate. Yet Nick also felt a tender possessiveness toward him, a sense of triumph and ownership, as if, through becoming Lear, Nick became Ivo—and, in turn, Ivo became Nick, became the twelve-year-old boy whose idle hours in a cramped flat led to his spying on a beautiful woman, then following her through the streets of London, and then, thanks to her kindness (or her longing for a lost son; did it matter?), finding the place where he belonged, a place that welcomed his fatherless, unsettled self, his longing to try on other lives.
His twin alliance with Ivo and Mordecai, Morty’s earliest self, also compelled him to buy that trove of childhood drawings, though he did not want to own them. He wanted to send them to a home where they would be cherished. He owes Si, yet again, for making that happen.
He thinks of the final scene in the film, which ends in the place meant to emulate Lear’s Connecticut home. And suddenly, reminded of Tomasina, Nick feels ashamed of himself. Just now, in the playground, did he ask her a single thing about herself, her life? Hungry to get as close to Lear’s approval as he could, he hadn’t. He had treated her, again, as if she were little more than a conduit, the bearer of a legacy whose luster Nick yearned to share. He pictured her living alone in that tranquil house with its fine old furnishings, tending her flowers and fruit trees. Lo, the lettuce is legion. How selfish he could be. He won’t have time to make up for it at the museum; he must remember to write her a proper letter after he returns home, tell her how much her trust has meant to him.
Fiona is asking the man behind the counter about a brick of dense, glossy chocolate, probably a mousse cake. (What are the little purple things on top? Candied violets, the man tells her.) Nick marvels repeatedly at her earnest independence, and yet, strangely, it worries him.
He leans down one more time to finalize his own decision. He does love that mocha ganache filling the genoise du jour (imagine: a different sponge each day!). As he sees his face and Fiona’s reflected side by side again, it’s obvious: the worry over her independence is all about him. If he were the star of a book by Mort Lear, it would be called The Boy Who Was Afraid of Ending Up Famous but Alone.
Some girl, Deirdre wrote in a recent e-mail, replying to his mawkish natterings about a matchup gone awry, will drink up your sweet sentimentality like a good old-fashioned bottle of Lambrusco. Any minute now, bear cub. Just you wait. Be sure to let me know I told you so.
Deirdre herself has up and married again—her investment adviser, of all people. Along with the rest of the world, including the trash-trolling tabloids, Nick learned about it only after the fact. He has almost talked himself out of feeling wounded that she didn’t confide in him—and out of feeling boorishly jealous. After he wrote her a bona fide pen-on-paper note of congratulations, she replied in an e-mail, Steve is a fine upstanding Jewish intellectual: I wish his brain were contagious. What he sees in me, the gods only know (oh those giveth-and-taketh gods!). I love how he doesn’t give a hoot about booze: might as well be mashed turnips. If anyone can keep me in my traces, he will. Books are his drug of choice. That is a direct quote! Not a word about romantic love, but where did romance fit, as a destination, in a life with a road map as twisty as Deirdre’s? Romance is a superhighway, an autobahn strewn heedlessly with breakdowns and wrecks.
There is a girl Nick plans to ask out when he returns to London, when he has a moment to catch his breath. In a queer way, she reminds him of Meredith Galarza: her humor blunt; her gestures wide; her laughter uninhibited, verging on brash. He has to be careful, however, because she is a friend of Annabelle’s, and he’s only just making headway with his siblings. The friend is earning an advanced degree in agricultural economics and has a passion for seed banking. Seed banking! Nick loves how literally down-to-earth it sounds.
And economics, the sense and sensibility of earning and spending, is something he could use in his life just now, having virtually emptied the till—his paycheck for the film—on that costly donation. But it seemed the just and fateful thing. And fate is a master to whom he owes a king’s ransom at this particular moment.
“Box them all up, if you please,” he says, a bit too loudly, to the man behind the pastry counter. “What do you say, Fiona, the red ribbon?”
She nods and says (so solemnly!), “Yes, we like the red. Thank you.”
—
She keeps returning to the long wide hallway that leads into Ivo’s Room, just so she can walk back and forth, yet again, along the cases displaying the drawings that she knows will attract the most attention. All the galleries on this floor, painted and primped and (in the nick of time) ready to go, are filled with the most glorious illustrations, objects, and books in her favorite realm of the museum’s collection, but this hallway, painted a soaring blue, is her pride and joy. It matches the sky at the end of Colorquake, the sky once its color is fully restored. All thirty-two drawings—two parades of sixteen, one to either side of the hall—lie flat, pinned to runners of chocolate-colored acid-free linen. They are lit indirectly, the temperature in the cases constant.
At times, she is amused by the absurdity. Ranging from frustrated scrawlings to scrupulous renderings, ingenuous yet grandiose, they are just the drawings of a child, under ordinary circumstances to be praised by a parent, then tossed aside or clamped to the fridge (perhaps with feeble intentions to have them framed). Mordecai Levy was no more important than any other child on the planet when he made them, but the next half century turned him into an adult whose reputation, as if through some cunning trick of physics, could reach back in time to claim these sheets of paper as objects of esteem and value. Why Mort kept them hidden away is a mystery, or so Tommy says. For the moment, Merry doesn’t care. Let some snoopy biographer tackle that one. (One such individual has already written her an earnest letter asking for permission to interview her and study her “Lear archive.” Oh, all those letters. All that ultimately hollow flirtation.)