Station Eleven (39 page)

The weather reports had been full of an approaching snowstorm and he sensed it in the air, in the dove-gray weight of the late-morning sky. He’d definitely decided: when
Lear
closed, he was moving to Israel. The idea was exhilarating. He would shed his obligations and belongings and start over in the same country as his son. He would buy an apartment within walking distance of Elizabeth’s house and he’d see Tyler every day.

“Looks like snow,” the girl in the coffee shop said.

Arthur nodded hello to the hot-dog guy who always stood on the same corner halfway between the hotel and the theater. The hot-dog guy beamed. A pigeon walked in circles near the base of the hot-dog stand, hoping for dropped garnishings and crumbs. The beauty of the pigeon’s luminescent neck.

He arrived at the theater at noon for notes, but the notes devolved into an extended argument and went on well past schedule. Arthur tried to pay attention, but the coffee wasn’t performing as well as he’d hoped. In the late afternoon he lay on a sofa in his dressing room, hoping to revive himself with a nap, but for all his exhaustion the room seemed oppressive. His thoughts raced. He eventually gave up and left the theater. Ignoring the bored photographers outside the stage door, who took pictures and called out questions about Miranda while he waved at passing taxis. Had he dragged her back into the tabloids when she’d visited two weeks ago? He felt the old guilt. She’d never asked for any of it.

“Queen West and Spadina,” he told the driver of an orange-and-green cab, and rested his forehead on the glass to watch their passage down Queen Street. This had been one of his neighborhoods once, but all the shops and cafés he’d known were gone. He was thinking of a diner near Queen West and Spadina, a place he’d frequented with Clark when they were seventeen. He couldn’t recall exactly where it was but he found it eventually, a little farther east than expected.

All these decades later, the place was eerily unchanged. The same line of red upholstered booths, stools down the length of the counter, an ancient clock on the wall. Could this possibly be the same waitress? No, he was misremembering, because the fiftyish woman who’d served him burnt coffee when he was seventeen couldn’t possibly still be fiftyish. He remembered being here with Clark at three or four or sometimes five in the morning, during what seemed at the time like adulthood and seemed in retrospect like a dream. The dream lasted just a moment, but the moment was bright: both of them taking acting classes, Arthur working as a waiter while Clark burned through a small inheritance. Clark had been magnificent, actually, in retrospect. Six foot two and skinny with a penchant for vintage suits, half his hair shaved off and the other half floppy and dyed pink or occasionally turquoise or purple, eye shadow on special occasions, that captivating British boarding-school drawl.

Arthur’s grilled cheese sandwich arrived. He thought of calling Clark, a quick “You’ll never guess where I’m calling from!” moment, but decided against it. He wanted to call his son, but it was four a.m. in Israel.

Arthur finished his dinner and took a cab back to the theater, where there was still a little time remaining. He sat on a sofa in his dressing room and looked over the script—he knew his lines backward and forward, but it was his habit to try to pick up some of everyone else’s lines too, because he liked to know what was coming—but before the end of the first act there was a knock on the door. When he rose the room didn’t spin, exactly, but it wasn’t as steady as it should have been. Tanya brushed past him into the room.

“You look like hell,” she said. “Everything all right?”

“Tired,” Arthur said. “I had insomnia again.” He kissed her, and she perched on one of the sofas. The lightness he felt whenever he saw her. He was captivated, as always, by her excessive youth. She was slightly more than half his age. It was her job to look after the three little actresses who played child versions of Lear’s daughters.

“You forgot you were meeting me for breakfast, didn’t you?”

He slapped a hand to his forehead. “I’m so sorry. I’m not running on all cylinders today. How long did you wait?”

“Half hour.”

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“Dead cell-phone battery,” she said. “It’s okay. You can make it up to me with a glass of wine.” This was something he adored about her, the way she let things go so easily. What a pleasant state of affairs, he’d been thinking lately, to be with a woman who didn’t hold a grudge. He found a half-empty bottle of red in the fridge—she liked it cold—and noticed as he poured her glass that his hands were trembling.

“You really look terrible,” she said. “Are you sure you’re not sick?”

“Just tired, I think.” He liked watching her drink wine, the way she concentrated on the taste. She had the appreciation for nice things that comes only from having grown up with little money.

“Do you have any of those chocolates left?”

“You know, I think I do.”

She smiled at him—the way her smile warmed him!—and set her glass on the coffee table. After a few minutes of rummaging through the cupboard by the sink, she emerged triumphant with a small gold box. He selected a raspberry dark-chocolate truffle.

“What’s this?” she asked, mid-chocolate, picking up
Dr. Eleven
, Vol. 1, No 1:
Station Eleven
from the coffee table.

“My ex-wife dropped those off a couple weeks back.”

“Which one?”

He felt a flicker of sadness. This was a sign of having gone seriously astray, wasn’t it? Having more than one ex-wife? He wasn’t sure where exactly he’d gone wrong. “The first one. Miranda. I’m actually not sure what to do with them.”

“What, you’re not keeping these?”

“I don’t read comic books,” Arthur said. “She gave me two copies of each, so I sent the other set to my son.”

“You told me you’re trying to shed your possessions or something, right?”

“Exactly. They’re lovely, but I don’t want more
things
.”

“I think I understand.” Tanya was reading. “Interesting story line,” she said, a few pages in.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I never really understood the point of it, to be honest.” There was relief in admitting this to someone, after all these years. “The Undersea, especially. All those people in limbo, waiting around, plotting, for what?”

“I like it,” Tanya said. “The art’s really good, isn’t it?”

“She liked drawing more than she liked writing the dialogue.” He was just now remembering this. Once he’d opened Miranda’s study door and watched her work for some minutes before she realized he was there. The curve of her neck as she stooped over the drafting table, her absolute concentration. How vulnerable she’d seemed when she was lost in her work.

“It’s beautiful.” Tanya was studying an image of the Undersea,
a heavily crosshatched room with mahogany arches from Station Eleven’s drowned forests. The room reminded Arthur of somewhere he’d been, but he couldn’t place it.

She glanced at her watch. “I should probably go. My little hellions are due in fifteen minutes.”

“Wait, I have something for you.” A glass paperweight had arrived by courier two weeks ago, sent by Miranda from her hotel after he’d seen her. She’d explained in her note that Clark had brought it to the house in Los Angeles and that she regretted taking it, that she felt certain Clark had meant it for Arthur, not her, but when he held the glass lump in his hand he found there were no memories attached to it; he had no recollection whatsoever of Clark having given it to them, and anyway the last thing he wanted in his life was a paperweight.

“It’s gorgeous,” Tanya said when he gave it to her. She peered into the cloudy depths. “Thank you.”

“I’ll give you a call if Kirsten shows up here. Will I see you after the show?”

She kissed him. “Of course,” she said.

When she was gone, he lay on the sofa and closed his eyes, but Kirsten was at his door fifteen minutes later. His exhaustion was taking on the force of illness. Sweat beaded on his forehead when he stood. He let her in and sat down quickly.

“My mom bought a book with you on the cover,” she said. She sat across from him on the other sofa.

The only book in existence with Arthur on the cover was
Dear V
. He felt nauseous.

“Did you read it?”

“My mom won’t let me read it. She says it’s inappropriate.”

“That’s what she said? Inappropriate?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” Arthur said, “I think it’s inappropriate that the book exists. She’s right not to show it to you.” The one time he’d met Kirsten’s mother, she’d cornered him to ask if he had any projects
coming up with a part for a small girl. He’d wanted to shake her. Your daughter’s so young, he’d wanted to say. Let her be a kid, give her a chance, I don’t know why you want this for her. He didn’t understand why anyone would want their child involved in movies.

“Is the book bad?”

“I wish it didn’t exist. But you know, I’m glad you came by,” he said.

“Why?”

“I have a present for you.” He felt a little guilty as he handed her the
Dr. Eleven
comics, because after all Miranda had intended them for him, but he didn’t want the comics because he didn’t want possessions. He didn’t want anything except his son.

When he was alone again, Arthur put on his costume. He sat for a few minutes in his finery, enjoying the weight of the velvet cape, left his crown on the coffee table next to the grapes and walked down the hall to Makeup. The pleasure of being with other people. He must have eaten something bad, he decided. Maybe at the diner. He had an hour alone in his dressing room, where he drank chamomile tea and spoke lines aloud to his reflection in the mirror, paced, prodded at the bags under his eyes, adjusted his crown. At the half-hour call, he phoned Tanya.

“I want to do something for you,” he said. “This will seem very sudden, but I’ve been thinking about it for a week.”

“What is it?” She was distracted. He heard the three little girls bickering in the background.

“How much do you still owe in student loans?” She had told him once, but he couldn’t remember the number.

“Forty-seven thousand dollars,” she said, and he heard the hope in her voice, the not-daring-to-hope, the disbelief.

“I want to pay it off.” Wasn’t this what money was for? This was what his life was going to mean, finally, after all these years of failing to win Oscars, this string of box-office flops. He would be known as the man who gave his fortune away. He would retain only
enough money to live on. He would buy an apartment in Jerusalem and see Tyler every day and start over.

“Arthur,” she said.

“Let me do this for you.”

“Arthur, it’s too much.”

“It isn’t. How long will it take for you to pay it off,” he asked gently, “at the rate you’re going?”

“I’ll be in my midsixties, but it’s my debt, I—”

“Then let me help,” he said. “No strings attached. I promise. Just come to my dressing room after the show tonight, and let me give you a check.”

“What do I tell my parents? If I tell them, they’ll want to know how I got the money.”

“Tell them the truth. Tell them an eccentric actor gave you a check for forty-seven thousand dollars, no strings attached.”

“I don’t know how to thank you,” she said.

When he ended the call, he felt an unexpected peace. He would jettison everything that could possibly be thrown overboard, this weight of money and possessions, and in this casting off he’d be a lighter man.

“Fifteen minutes,” the stage manager called from just outside the door.

“Thank you fifteen,” Arthur said, and began running his lines from the beginning. At “our eldest born, speak first,” he glanced at his watch. It was still only six a.m. in Israel, but he knew Tyler and Elizabeth got up early. He negotiated his way past his ex-wife—“Two minutes, Elizabeth, I know he’s getting ready for school, I just want to hear his voice”—and closed his eyes to listen to the rustling of the telephone being transferred into his son’s small hands. My eldest born, my only born, my heart.

“Why are you calling?” That suspicious little voice. He remembered that Tyler was angry with him.

“I wanted to say hello.”

“Then why weren’t you here for my birthday?” Arthur had
promised to be in Jerusalem for Tyler’s birthday, but he’d made that promise ten months ago and had frankly forgotten about it until Tyler had called him yesterday. Arthur’s apologies hadn’t landed.

“I can’t be there, buddy. I would if I could. But aren’t you coming to New York soon? Won’t I see you next week?” Tyler had nothing to say to this. “You’re flying to New York tonight, aren’t you?”

“I guess.”

“Did you read those comic books I sent you?”

Tyler didn’t respond. Arthur sat on the sofa, and rested his forehead in the palm of his hand. “Did you like them, Tyler? Those comic books?”

“Yeah.”

“Ten minutes,” the stage manager said at the door.

“Thank you ten. I looked at the comic books,” Arthur said, “but I don’t think I completely understood what they were about. I was hoping maybe you could explain them to me.”