CHAPTER

thirty-three

Forgive me, Teddy, you’ve been largely absent from my thoughts for weeks, but I’ve been such a busy girl and I’m working so hard—honestly, I am—sprinting toward the finish line. Jonathan extended the deadline once Garrett put his foot down, which was so kind of him, of both of them, and I have been a trifle wicked, taking advantage of unseasonably warm weather, lying on the beach, soaking in the early spring sunshine when I should have been dutifully pecking at the keyboard.

God, Teddy, doesn’t the previous graph read like a sweet little Catholic girl talking to her priest? “Father, forgive me, it has been two weeks since my last confession, and during that time I have…” Enough of that. Let me state instead that the days have been incredibly sunny and the sky a cloudless robin’s-egg blue. It would be utterly perfect if you were here.

But then if you were here, I wouldn’t be.

Weighed in the balance, I know my exquisite happiness doesn’t compensate for your death. I know you didn’t willingly die for me. Who would sacrifice their only, their unique life for someone else’s? I’ve read tales of loving parents tenderly laying down their lives for their children, fathers for daughters, mothers for sons, but I never met such parents.

My estate has changed: I’ve moved up in the world, ascended to the Big House. I have to pinch myself, to make sure I’m fully conscious, especially when I wake in my bedroom, my head cushioned by the coolness of an embroidered pillowcase, and lie quite still, looking out at a vast sweep of ocean instead of a cracked plaster wall.

It’s not “my” bedroom; I’m aware of that. It’s formally designated a “guest room,” and I often speculate, late at night, concerning the identity of previous tenants. Was this once Claire Gregory’s boudoir? It shares the same dramatic ocean view as the small office with the mechanical shades, although in some ways this view, elevated as it is on the second floor, is superior. Furnished for visiting royalty in pink and gold, the room has a huge brass bedstead and carpeting so thick it tickles my feet. I spend an immense amount of time here. There’s an elegant writing desk, but I prefer writing in bed, nested in crisp percale and soft down, pounding diligently at my laptop, inhaling Garrett’s piney scent.

While it lacks a connecting door to Garrett’s bedroom, it opens off the same short corridor, so the two rooms form a kind of suite, each with its own bath. Jonathan is terribly impressed by my “access” to the subject. What would he say if he knew?

Teddy, I have qualms, a jittery feeling in my stomach that registers somewhere in between too much champagne and incipient nausea. All my dithering about whether knowing the subject would influence my writing, and now this. Occasionally I convince myself that it’s helping me paint a fuller, truer portrait of the man, but I know I’m justifying behavior I would label unconscionable in anyone else. What can I say? It happened, and I’m not sorry it happened. It’s transformational, this closeness, almost like he’s my working partner now, my writing partner, like we’re truly in this together. Oh, it would have been better if he’d waited, better if the book were already done and published. So we’re keeping it quiet, as quiet and secret as mice. I’m completely invisible here, but then I’m used to being invisible.

How lovely to have secrets. It feels so powerful.

The sex, Teddy, the sex is wonderful, superb, beyond intense. How I live for the release, the afterglow. I love to come and come, and lose myself; how it quiets the nervous voices in my head. I pray it’s as good for Garrett as it is for me, but how can I know? How can I know for sure? He’s so worldly and experienced. His bath is a marble pleasure palace with a Jacuzzi big enough for an orgy and a steam shower stocked with scented massage oil. He does things to my body I’ve only read about in books, but I reciprocate enthusiastically. I am enthusiastic, but Teddy, oh Teddy, I am woefully inexperienced. There was only you, no one else, even after you stopped wanting to be with me. I never understood how you could be so cruel, but that’s dirty water under the bridge now.

Once the cast and crew arrive, we’ll need to exercise more discretion. But right now, at the planning stage, there aren’t many people to fool.

The PA, Darren Kalver, we don’t bother trying to fool him. Garrett treats him like a stick of furniture. As far as Kalver’s concerned, I’m staying at the house to “facilitate further interviews.” He’s knows it’s a lie, but it’s his job to make Garrett look good. He doesn’t want to lose his job, so he treats me the same way he always has.

We don’t have to fool Brooklyn Pierce, because we don’t see him. I don’t see him at all. Garrett drops by the shack occasionally to monitor his progress. When he’s like this, Garrett says, it’s better to leave him in peace.

Pierce’s drinking has been spiraling out of control for years. Remember how his agent kept claiming he was out of the country? Garrett says he’s been through a revolving door of self-help and rehab programs. When he can’t stick to a particular treatment plan anymore, when even Betty Ford boots him out, the beach shack is his last refuge. He holes up there alone, drinks and drinks, but eventually gets himself sober again. He claims he’s going there “to write,” but all he actually produces is a lot of half-page, half-baked “treatments,” usually titled in the Ben Justice formula: The Purple Bagatelle, The Scarlet Conundrum. Garrett said his personal favorite was The Periwinkle Paradox, but I assume he was joking. If all you got from Pierce was a drunkard’s scrambled ramblings, it makes sense that he’d want to retract them. And I suppose you might have destroyed the tape.

When I warned Garrett about McKenna’s shack surveillance, he said he’d take measures to protect the privacy of the place. I didn’t say I’d been in touch with McKenna, just mentioned that you’d shown me the man’s Web site. I didn’t want Garrett to think I’d been gathering gossip behind his back, not with everything so honest and open between us.

It’s like a dream, this sweet new life. Sometimes I find myself thinking—only briefly, only tangentially—about a future beyond work, beyond writing, a future that might, that could involve this breathtaking house, meeting Jenna, being a mother, perhaps, to her and possibly to another. Garrett’s not careful the way you were. Oh, don’t get me wrong, he’s never said anything about wanting another child, but he did want one once, and I know how much he loves Jenna. He’s never asked whether I’m on the pill. And we talk about everything.

He talks, really. And I listen, rapt and attentive, more Desdemona than Ophelia now. Remember how Othello says “She loved me for the dangers I had pass’d, and I lov’d her that she did pity them”? He loves the way I listen.

He knows Cape Cod like a native, knows how and where the coastline has eroded, knows the names of seabirds and shorebirds and beach grasses. He once helped rescue a stranded pod of dolphins. When he told me exactly how it felt to rub water on their rubbery skins and hear their skittery noises, I could see it as clearly as a scene in one of his films. How much, how much you can know about another human being and still you’ve only scratched the surface of the surface.

We don’t discuss our ages, or the way we fell into bed that first time, or the argument that preceded it. Of course, he’s much older than I am. And he’s been a bachelor far longer than he ever was a married man. But I don’t spend my time dwelling on that. I’m too busy working. I’m helpful, very helpful in everything from assembling the director’s book for Hamlet to pitching in and hemming a frock for a courtier.

Worker by day, muse by night, Teddy. An inspiration. Me.