Station Eleven

“Hanging in, hanging in.” Clark mentally added this to his private list of most-hated banalities. “I went ahead and notified the family,” Heller said.

“Why? I thought we’d agreed—”

“I know you didn’t want to wake up the family, but with this kind of thing, a situation like this, you have to wake up the family. You actually want to wake the family, you know? Actually more decent. You want the family to know before someone leaks something, a photo, video, whatever, and then Entertainment Weekly calls the family for comment and that’s how they find out about it. Think about it, I mean, the man died onstage.”

“Right,” Clark said. “I see.” The saxophonist had disappeared. The gray of the November sky reminded him that he was about due for a visit to his parents in London. “Has Elizabeth been notified?”

“Who?”

“Elizabeth Colton. The second wife.”

“No, I mean, she’s hardly family, is she? When we talked about notifying family, I really just meant Arthur’s brother.”

“Well, but she is the mother of Arthur’s only child.”

“Right, right, of course. How old is he?”

“Eight or nine.”

“Poor little guy. Hell of an age for this.” A crack in Heller’s voice, sadness or exhaustion, and Clark revised his mental image from hanging-upside-down bat lawyer to sad, pale, caffeine-addicted man with chronic insomnia. Had he met Heller? Had Heller been at that ghastly dinner party in Los Angeles all those years ago, just before Miranda and Arthur divorced? Maybe. Clark was drawing a blank. “So hey, listen,” Heller said, all business again, but a faux-casual style of all-business that Clark associated overwhelmingly with California, “in your time with Arthur, especially recently, did he ever mention anything about a woman named Tanya Gerard?”

“The name’s not familiar.”

“You’re sure?”

“No. Why? Who is she?”

“Well,” Heller said, “just between the two of us, seems our Arthur was having a little affair.” It wasn’t delight in his voice, not exactly. It was importance. This was a man who liked to know things that other people didn’t.

“I see,” Clark said, “but I admit I fail to see how that’s any of our—”

“Oh, of course,” Heller said, “of course it isn’t, you know, right to privacy and all that, none of our business, right? Not hurting anyone, consenting adults, etcetera, and I mean I’m the most private, I don’t even have a Facebook account for god’s sake, that’s how much I believe in it, in privacy I mean, last guy on earth without a Facebook account. But anyway, this Tanya person, seems she was a wardrobe girl on King Lear. I just wondered if he’d mentioned her.”

“No, Gary, I don’t believe he ever did.”

“The producer told me it was all very secret, apparently this was the girl who did costumes or actually maybe it was babysitting, something to do with the child actresses, costumes for the child actresses? I think that was it, although child actors in Lear? That one’s a head scratcher. But look, anyway, he …”

Was that sunlight on the other side of the East River? A beam had pierced the clouds in the far distance and was angling down over Queens. The effect reminded Clark of an oil painting. He was thinking of the first time he’d seen Arthur, in an acting studio on Danforth Avenue in Toronto. Arthur at eighteen: confident despite the fact that for at least the first six months of acting classes he couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag, or so the acting instructor had pronounced one night over drinks at a bar staffed exclusively with drag queens, the instructor trying to pick up Clark, Clark offering only token resistance. And beautiful, Arthur was beautiful back then.

“So the question, obviously,” Heller was saying, “is whether he intended to leave this girl anything in the will, because he emailed me last week about changing the will, said he’d met someone and he wanted to add a beneficiary and I have to assume that’s who he meant, really what I’m thinking about here is the worst-case scenario, where there’s a shadow will somewhere, some informal document he drew up himself because he wasn’t going to see me for a few weeks, that’s what I’m trying to get to the bottom of here—”

“You should’ve seen him,” Clark said.

“I should’ve seen … I’m sorry, what?”

“Back at the beginning, when he was just starting out. You’ve seen his talent, his talent was obvious, but if you’d seen him before any of the rest of it, all the tabloids and movies and divorces, the fame, all those warping things.”