The Morels (21 page)

“Don’t you have an apartment?” I asked.

“Can’t afford it anymore. Found a guy to sublet it for plenty, though. I pay half of Dave’s rent now and with enough left over to see this movie into the hands of a distributor. Crawling to the finish line, just barely.”

The twin betrayals in this statement left me winded. I want to say that my face went “dark.” You read writers using this word to describe a character’s expression, but I couldn’t see myself so I can only say it felt this way. The usual tension in my facial muscles that holds my social exterior together, that tries to project a certain friendliness to make me appear, as people have said about me, eager to please—these muscles went slack.

Suriyaarachchi must have sensed this change, too, because he was already backpedaling defensively. “There’s no way you could afford what I was asking for my place. It’s a prewar one bedroom on Park Avenue, dude. I have a doorman! Anyway, aren’t you shacking up with your boyfriend and his wife, down the hall?”

I glared at Dave, who was standing in the kitchen with a bowl of cereal. “You knew I was looking for a place,” I said. “Haven’t you noticed the desperation with which I’ve been using your fax machine?”

Through a crunching mouthful, Dave said, “I don’t know why
you hang around that creep Arthur. Did you read what he wrote about his kid? What’s up with that?”

“It’s not what you think,” I said. “He’s trying to save literature.”

I gave my mother the pendant.

“She didn’t want it then?”

“She was married,” I said.

“Her loss, my gain, I suppose.”

I helped her with the clasp at the nape of her neck.

“I don’t know what I’m doing, Mom.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “Nobody does. The ones that say they do are just fooling themselves.”

“I meant about this clasp.”

“No, you didn’t.”

We were standing in the kitchen. My mother was tall, with a dancer’s graceful posture, though she had never been a dancer. She liked to boast of the casting directors who used to mistake her for one. I have a framed studio headshot of my mother in my room—a teenager from the fifties harboring dreams of becoming a starlet. She dismisses these childish ambitions when she talks about her past, of that time before she
knew who she was
, as though poetry were the inheritance to a kingdom and she were its heiress.

Mom checked herself out in the reflection of the toaster, letting her fingers play over the small jade teardrop against her chest. “It’s lovely, honey. Even if it is a hand-me-down.” She turned and kissed me on the forehead, patted my cheek. “I won’t tell you that it gets easier, because it doesn’t. It just seems to matter less, the older you get. It’s an improvisation. Think of it that way. And there are no wrong notes, because it’s your tune. You make it up. It’s not ideal, but what other choice do you have?”

In my room, sitting at the piano bench, silently sounding off notes on the keyboard, I thought of my An of the Byzantine frescoes and wondered how she was faring. The days when we were together seemed so far away now. Senior year we rented the parlor floor of
an old Victorian town house not far from campus. It was rundown, the landlord a reclusive man who lived on the garden level among a maze of bound magazines and stacked newspapers. The rent was cheap. His only stipulation was that we leave our shoes at the door, something I was already used to, as An had this stipulation, too, when I would spend time in her dorm room. I turned that place into a home. An argued against it, as we were only renting—the supplies cost a great deal, more than we could afford—but I couldn’t help myself; as I said, the nesting instinct is strong in me. I ripped up the old threadbare wall-to-wall and waxed and buffed the hardwood planks beneath to a golden luster. There was a set of French pocket doors dividing the living room from the kitchen that were permanently stuck partway open and in total disrepair. I spent weeks restoring those doors, stripping the paint and replacing the plywood squares with matching panes of frosted glass from a local glazier, getting each to run properly along the track. I installed custom shelves in the kitchen, hung a thrift-store chandelier in the bedroom, and planted a garden in the dead patch of dirt out back. I loved my life then, coming home to An, stretched out and reading on the couch, or waking up next to her on a Saturday morning, the weekend wide open before us. It was a much simpler time, compared with the thorny brush I was hacking through now.

I went into the living room for the old rotary and brought it on its long extension back into my room and closed the door. After three foreign sounding rings, An picked up—much to my surprise. And, much to my surprise, within moments I was blubbering about how much I missed her, how terribly I missed our life together. I confessed everything. I told her about Arthur and his book, about what I had done with his wife.

“Get out,” she said. “Get out while you still can. This situation you’re in now is destructive. You can see that. Why don’t you move out of the city? Start over somewhere else. Baby, listen to me. Just get on a bus and go!”

She was kind. She let me reminisce, participated in the reminiscing herself. She did not tell me about the boyfriend she no doubt
had. Or how wonderful the alpine air in Baden-Württemberg was this time of year.

Lying in bed, awake, I resolved to quit. An was right. The movie was done. There was no reason I should be spending my days there anymore. The time had come to move on. But what would I do? I had no marketable skills, other than those I had picked up as an usher—sweeping, counting change, making announcements over a loudspeaker. Skills that might have served me well in Communist Poland but that made me at the age of thirty in the entrepreneurial capital of the world an increasingly pathetic figure. My only option at this point was grad school. A doctorate in music composition. I could teach, get the occasional local symphony commission. It seemed almost glamorous now, after being confronted with the realities of moviemaking and the realities of being an iconoclastic novelist with a wife and a child.

T
HE FOLLOWING MORNING, AFTER I
offered my resignation, Suriyaarachchi said, “But you’d be turning down a full-fledged producer credit, which would be a real shame.”

“On
Dead Hank’s Boy
?”

“That ship has sailed, my friend, no. I’m talking about our new project.”

“A documentary,” Dave said.

“About?”

“Your boyfriend down the hall. Dave, show the man.”

Dave held out a copy of yesterday’s
New York Post
. “Page nine.”

I looked from Dave to Suriyaarachchi to the
Post
in my hands. The headline: “Brick Suspect Rips Rudy’s Homeless Policy.” I thumbed past the movie listings. Page 9. There were three stories here. One involved a retired television weatherman convinced that a coming storm would wash away the sins of the city and was building an ark on the roof of his Cobble Hill brownstone. The neighbors had filed a court injunction against it. The man’s name was, improbably, Fludd. Another was an update on the kidnapping of a Queens woman’s two-year-old—it turned out the whole thing was a hoax. To what end was not made clear.

The third story was about Arthur: “Local Writer Sued—by His Own Family.” The article began, “Herald Square resident Arthur
Morel, who has made waves in literary circles, now finds himself in deep water with his family upon the release of his latest effort,
The Morels
. Franklyn Wright, Mr. Morel’s father-in-law, has filed a defamation suit on behalf of his daughter and grandson. Mr. Morel’s openly autobiographical book makes explicit mention of an act of incest between himself and his then-eight-year-old son. Mr. Wright claims the portrayal of his daughter and grandson in such a manner constitutes unfair and damaging use of their names for the express purpose of furthering Mr. Morel’s own career. Mr. Morel could not be reached for comment.”

“And?” I said, handing the paper back to Dave.

“And!” Suriyaarachchi spread out his hands and jumped.
Ta-da!
“There is no
and
. This is it, baby! This is the movie that’s going to make us famous.”

“But we’re out of money. You said it yourself.”

“Let me worry about that. Tell me you’re not itching to get out there and shoot again. Look at me and tell me honestly.”

“But a documentary? They lack something. Michael Moore on the red carpet looks like a boom operator who wandered in by mistake. And you’re forgetting what production was like. We’re not equipped.”

“But we are equipped. A camera, a subject, a place to edit. That’s the beauty.”

“What about my script?” I said.

Suriyaarachchi gave me a look:
What script?

“The one I’ve given you three times already but you keep losing!”

“That one. I don’t know. Dave, what did you think?”

“It was a little derivative.”

“Too many long speeches. And Mexican standoffs. Leave that stuff to Tarantino and John Woo. I keep telling you, you want to make your mark, you’ve got to do something different.”

“Anyway,” Dave said, “that’s a narrative feature. It would be months before we could begin shooting. Even if we did it on the cheap.”

“With this documentary we could be shooting tomorrow. Tomorrow! And be wrapped with a final edit in time for next year’s festivals. We wouldn’t have to reenter a movie that’s already been rejected”—the envelopes were already coming back to us—“we would have this new effort, a film that would be even stronger for us having been through
Dead Hank’s Boy
. And if we got the attention of a distributor? It could only be good news. It’s leverage.”

“A two-picture deal.”

“I was up all night thinking about it.”

“The only problem is your subject,” I said.

“Arthur?”

“He’s awkward.”

“He is awkward,” Dave said.

“And,” I said, “he’s a writer. This lawsuit aside, I don’t think you’re going to find he’s much of a subject. It’s not like he’s Salman Rushdie or anything.”

“Rushdie would be a subject,” Dave said.

“I think he’s still in hiding.”

“He came out for a cameo on
Seinfeld
.”

“That wasn’t Rushdie. I saw that episode. That was someone who Kramer
thought
was Rushdie.”

“It wasn’t Rushdie? Are you sure?”

“Look,” Suriyaarachchi said, “you don’t have to have a price on your head to be interesting.”

“It doesn’t hurt,” Dave said.

“What about the crazy weatherman,” I said. “I think he’d make a great subject.”

I was dissembling, of course. From the moment Dave handed me the paper, I knew where this was headed, and I didn’t want any part. Despite Suriyaarachchi’s claim, we couldn’t start shooting tomorrow because, for one, we didn’t have Arthur. And this was where I came in: the one who could bring him around. Luckily, I was still feeling hurt and angry at the both of them from the day before, or I wouldn’t have had the presence of mind to refuse. It struck me as unseemly, trying to capitalize on the very real
turmoil the Morels were going through. And then there was the mess with Penelope; just thinking about it tightened a knot in my chest. But Suriyaarachchi worked on me all day long. He bought me lunch, kept calling me “the man,” laughing hysterically at any little thing I said.

“Just think,” he said, “this would be your project. No more running errands, no more ‘associate’ producer. You’d be a full partner in this. An equal voice in all creative decisions. And I’m planning on funding it without my parents’ help, which would make your license in these decisions that much more free.”

A few days later, against my better judgment, I went to knock on the Morels’ door. To say that I had
refused
Suriyaarachchi may be an overstatement. In fact, I told him that I would have to
think about it
and, having thought about it some, came around to the idea of a documentary about Arthur. Although they lacked the glamour of narrative features, there was something pure about documentaries; they were more serious, higher-brow. And despite what I had said to Suriyaarachchi, Arthur did seem to be a good subject—the perfect subject, in fact. He said and did things that got him into trouble. What could be more entertaining than that? And to the question of using the misfortunes in his life for our gain, I thought: this is what artists do. No need to make it sound so sinister. It offered a way for me to face Arthur again, a way for me to make it up to him. In my fantasy—a fantasy that Suriyaarachchi encouraged—this movie would make Arthur famous. I would be doing him a service, I reasoned, while atoning for my sins.

The door was open. A red suitcase blocked my way in. I stepped over it and called out, “Hello?” There was someone here. I could hear sounds coming from elsewhere in the apartment. I called out again and walked down the short corridor toward the bedroom. The light was on in the bathroom, door partway open, and when I peeked in I saw Penelope crouched at the cabinet under the sink. Stuffing things at random, it seemed, into her purse. I tapped my knuckle on the door.

She screamed, wheeled around. “What are you doing?” She stood up, then elbowed past me out of the bathroom.

I followed.

She said, “I thought I told you to stay away.”

I told her I had been, but something had come up, an opportunity—she could be a part of it. That I’d like to make her a part of it, if she was willing.

She didn’t appear to be listening. “Look,” she said. “Something’s happened, and I’m just, I’m on my own. I have to deal with it on my own.” She was in the bedroom now, pulling open dresser drawers and tossing clothes by the handful into an open suitcase on the bed. I want to say she had been crying, but her eyes weren’t red or puffy. I might say they were a little shiny, and in her high sweet voice there was a new throatiness, a new depth.

I said, “I read about the lawsuit in the paper. How are you holding up?”

“The lawsuit,” she repeated. “Oh, the lawsuit. That’s just my father being crazy.” She zipped the suitcase and jerked it up off the bed onto the floor. “Will!” The place was ransacked. The dresser’s drawers remained yanked open, a pair of stockings spilling out. The closet was empty but for a few full-length dresses.