She was breaking up and there wasn’t a sunspot, canyon or high-tension pole in sight.
Tovah had a place near Beverly High, on Moreno. It was the first time he’d been over and that excited him. The two-bedroom was smallish, immaculate and bright. The decor was flowery, with a touch of Judaica; he would have thought a middle-aged woman lived there. She showed him the Pratesi duvet and he kissed her, parting the robe to touch her bush. Tovah smiled, then modestly covered herself, retreating to the bathroom while Perry undressed.
“I have some meetings set,” she said.
“I haven’t even mentioned it to Jersey.”
“Oh. Do you think she’ll have a problem?”
“I don’t know. She shouldn’t. But I’ve been thinking…why don’t we aim our sights a little higher?”
“Meaning—”
“Why don’t we do it as a feature, with an A-list director — a Barry Levinson or a Jonathan Demme.”
Tovah came back in and sat on the bed, hair spilling down around shoulders. “We can absolutely do that. You know who would really spark to this? Penny.”
He nodded approvingly. “Or — I don’t know. Maybe someone like Jane Campion. Do you think she’d be interested?”
“I love Jane — we represent her. She’s shooting, but we can get it to her in a second.” She put her hand around his neck. “Perry, that’s a wonderful idea.”
“I just want to get the best people. Or at least see if the best people might want to be involved.”
They pitched the story of Montgomery’s life and death over the next few months. Nothing in Hollywood was a slam dunk, especially the story of a nine-year-old boy who, upon prognosis of death, became a most peculiar savant.
He noticed his son’s abilities one day when Jersey called out from the hall to ask the time. Montgomery responded to the second, from a feverish sleep. He had become a living chronograph, a perpetual calendar, a minute repeater — the boy with a caged tourbillon heart and titanium soul. The passage of hours suddenly had color and music and texture so that time was jazz and symphony, algorithm and blues, a drum and a psalm, a hootenanny that began in his forehead, washing over enamel of skin, his very joints the jeweled movement, head a cabochon crown, eyes the sapphire glass that read the jumping hours, organs the ébauche: the very expression of his being the grandest of complications. This child, who knew nothing of calendar arithmetic, gave the name of the week to dates ten thousand years in the past or thirty thousand in the future for each and every day of every year man had breathed or would give breath stilclass="underline" knew the sundial length and breadth of those days, and all the sidereal noons and midnights — and more, had perceived the very moment of his death. Seven months and a handful of days before it arrived, Montgomery wrote it down in cool, untrammeled hand and laid it in a drawer.
Perry sat in the library. Jersey slept. Perhaps it was time to end his affair; he hated having used the cancer as an excuse to betray her. So graceless. He knew now that he was getting well.
A special two-hour block of Streets was on. He watched it in MUTE, sipping his gin. Tonight, the cops were in Venice chasing a creep who’d killed his girlfriend’s kid. Christ, he looked like a kid himself. They brought him back to the house so she could ID him. The girlfriend peered through squad car glass, but the perp stared down till they forcibly raised his head. “That’s Taj,” said the woman, dead-eyed. Just then, the paramedics wheeled out the victim and loaded her into the ambulance, with the mom climbing in. Good show — you couldn’t beat closure like that. Emmy time.
He slit the envelope and removed the card. There it was, in his son’s sinistral scrawclass="underline" March 7, 1989, 4:07:20 A.M. He weighed the paper in his hand like a collector’s curio — a watch that would remain unwound. It was heavier than anything Henri might have strapped to his wrist. The Monsieur said chronograph was Greek for “I write the time.”
Perry stuck his finger in the gin and dripped a bead down. It bubbled over the ink. He rubbed until the numbers ran, smearing to illegibility. He smiled shakily, lower lip jigged by unseen leprechauns, holy creatures of time and space.
March 7, 1989, 4:07:20 A.M. — Montie’s death, on the nose.
How’s that for closure?