Terman agreed to study the director’s notes and the inane jottings of some producer’s reader, which is to say he kept his disagreement unspoken. A year ago almost to the day, Max had pronounced the screenplay “beautiful beyond my wildest hopes.” “A few cosmetic changes,” the director had said, “and we’re in business, son.” Three drafts later — it was a collaboration in which Terman did the writing and the director suggested other possibilities — they seemed only infin-itesimally closer to a shooting script. With each revision, new problems of strucure and conception arose. Someone who mattered — sometimes it was Terman himself — was always unsatisified.
He was revising the closure, had put Henry Berger, and the unnamed woman with whom he traveled, on a flight from London to New York. He was due at Heathrow himself in little over an hour. Before leaving for the airport, he called Isabelle at the most recent work number she had given him, wanting to heal the wounds of the previous night. She wasn’t at that number, he was told, after having been held on the line for ten minutes, was working today at some other studio. Did they have another number for her? They didn’t or were opposed to giving it out, kept him waiting as they debated the issue outside his hearing. If they wouldn’t give out her number, would they call her themselves and say that Lukas Terman was trying to reach her? The woman on the other end said that it was not a question of not wanting to give out a number but of not having a number to give out. He didn’t believe it, said, overstating, that it was an urgent matter, that the news he had for Isabelle was something she had been waiting to hear. “That’s not my problem, is it?” said the woman. “I’ll take down your number. That’s the best I can do.”
He wrote Isabelle a note in case she returned in his absence and propped it up with a paperweight against the phone in the kitchen.
Deciding she might go right by it if she were in a hurry, he took it up to their bedroon and laid it out on her pillow, though he was not fully satisfied with that placement either. After going down the stairs, after putting on his corduroy jacket, he returned to the bedroom to retrieve the note, reading it as if with Isabelle’s eyes.
Dear I,
Gone to Heathrow to get Tom. Sorry about last night. Put it down to gracelessness under pressure, or try to imagine it never happened. I regret my behavior and admire your forebearance. I mean to do better in the future. Love —
He was out the door with the note folded in his jacket pocket when he thought to go back and leave it on the kitchen table. The details of his return were exactly as he had imagined them: the undoing of the bolt lock, retracting the catch with second key, going through the front parlor (that enormous room), into back parlor, into dining room, taking a right turn into the kitchen, putting the note down on the table where it couldn’t be missed, a butter knife across it to hold it in place, then the same trip in reverse order, remembering to double lock from the outside, hurrying to his car.
Driving to the airport through unyielding traffic, he decided that the note was an ill-conceived gesture, that Isabelle would more readily forgive him if he hadn’t apologized than if he had. It was also possible that, taking him at his word, she wouldn’t return to the house at all. He had suggested (the suggestion seeming to make itself), that she spend the first night or two of Tom’s visit at her own place.
“It makes a lot of sense,” she said and went up to the bedroom to pack a few things.
He found her sitting on the bed in an uncharacteristically crumpled posture, an empty suitcase on her lap. “It’ll only be for a day or two,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said in a hurry.
“What are you thanking me for?” She tended to express gratitude at the most inappropriate moments, a source of small irritation to him.
“For being straightforward with me.” Her lip quivered. She was not given to excesses.
He took the suitcase from her lap and sat with her in silence, his arm draped around her shoulders, until it was time to go to bed.
“If you don’t mind, I want to stay at my own place tonight,” she said. “You won’t make it difficult for me, will you?”
“Does it make it difficult if I say I don’t want you to go?”
“Of course it does,” she said. “You damn well asked me to leave, didn’t you?”
He repeated her name in exasperation, a litany of Isabelles.
The signs pointing him to the airport led him there. As he entered the building, his doomsday premonitions slipped away. The first thing he did was to go to the bathroom to empty his bladder of, as it turned out, illusion. His hair was in terminal disarray, and he wet it down, combing it with his hand, which was no improvement. He had a rash on his forehead, a portent of bad weather from within. When he got out of the bathroom he followed the signs to Immigration and lined up on the other side of the rope to wait for Tom. There were four booths out of a possible nine in operation, passengers from a mix of two or three flights filtering through. Terman hated to wait, hated to stand in one place without other occupation, suffered loss of time as if it were (as it is) an incurable disease. He memorized the faces of people coming through, committed to not missing a thing, dimly worried that he might not recognize his son. Who can explain associations? It struck him that the grail (was that his idea of Tom?) only revealed itself to the pure in heart. He interrupted his vigil from time to time to check his watch which, it suddenly dawned on him, had had the same time for the past two hours. He could almost admire its constancy.
“I know you,” a woman said to him. She had come up to him from the blind side, surprising him in an unacceptable way. “You may not remember me.”
“No,” he said, not looking at her. “I don’t.”
“Aren’t you Lukas Terman? You knew me as Lila Parsicki. My former husband and I lived in the same building as you and your wife — I mean of course your former wife. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then.”
He looked at her for the briefest of moments, withheld recognition. “You have the wrong bridge,” he said, affecting a faint European accent.
“I’m sorry to have interfered with your privacy,” she said in a sarcastic voice, offering him a view of her back. Though physically round, heavy-breasted, moon-faced, big-hipped, her manner was all angles and sharp points. He remembered her with marked displeasure, and moved away into the underbrush of the crowd.
The moment he forgot about her, she was at his elbow again. “You shouldn’t lie to people,” she said. “It’s not the least bit nice.”
“Excuse me,” he said in his mock-German accent.
She thrust her face into his, as close as it might get given that he was six or seven inches taller. “I said I don’t like to be lied to,” she said.
He regretted his imposture, though he was unwilling to give it up, stared ahead blindly, neglecting his relentless vigil.
There was no sign of Tom as far as he could see and Terman reasoned the boy had missed the plane, or had decided at the last possible moment not to make the trip. His reaction to the possibility of Tom’s not coming at all — relief perhaps one aspect of it — was without definition. Terman also wondered whether it was conceivable that Tom had passed through without being recognized by his father.
Lila joined the people she was with, then — her tenacity frightening and marvelous — returned to his ear. “Is it that you’re hiding from someone?” she asked. “Believe me, I have no intention of revealing your innermost secrets.”