“This doesn’t sound good.”
“It isn’t. Listen, there’s a book coming out.” His childhood friend Victoria had published the letters he’d sent her. Dear V.: An Unauthorized Portrait of Arthur Leander would be available for purchase in a week and a half. A friend who worked in publishing had sent him an advance copy.
“Am I in it?” she asked.
“I’m afraid so. I’m sorry, Miranda.”
“Tell me.”
“I mentioned you sometimes, when I wrote to her. That’s all. I want you to know that I never said anything unpleasant about you.”
“Okay. Good.” Was it fair to be as angry as she was? He couldn’t have known Victoria would sell the letters.
“You might find this difficult to believe,” he said, “but I have some sense of discretion. It’s actually one of the things I’m known for.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but did you just say you’re famous for your discretion?”
“Look, all I mean is, I didn’t tell Victoria everything.”
“I appreciate that.” A strained silence, during which Miranda willed the kettle to start whistling. “Do you know why she did it?”
“Victoria? I have to assume it was the money. The last I heard, she was working as a housekeeper in a resort on the west coast of Vancouver Island. She probably made more on that book than she’d made in the previous decade.”
“Are you going to sue?”
“It would just be more publicity. My agent thinks it’s better if we just let the book run its course.” The kettle whistled at last; he stood quickly, and she realized he’d been willing the water to boil too. “Hopefully when it comes out it’s only a story for a week or so, then it sinks and disappears. Green tea, or chamomile?”
“Green,” she said. “It must be infuriating, having your letters sold.”
“I was angry at first, I’m still angry, but the truth is, I think I deserved everything I got.” He carried two mugs of green tea to the coffee table, where they left rings of steam on the glass.
“Why do you think you deserved it?”
“I treated Victoria like a diary.” He lifted his mug, blew on the surface of his tea, and returned the mug very deliberately to the table. There was a studied quality to the movement, and Miranda had an odd impression that he was performing a scene. “She wrote to me at first, in the very beginning. Maybe two letters and three postcards, back when I first started writing to her from Toronto. Then a couple of quick notes telling me about changes in address, with a cursory note at the beginning, you know, ‘Hi, sorry for not writing more, I’ve been busy, here’s my new address.’ ”
“So all the times I saw you writing to her,” Miranda said, “she never wrote back.” She was surprised by how sad this made her.
“Right. I used her as a repository for my thoughts. I think I stopped thinking of her as a human being reading a letter.” He looked up—and here, a pause in which Miranda could almost see the script: “Arthur looks up. Beat.” Was he acting? She couldn’t tell. “The truth is, I think I actually forgot she was real.”
Did this happen to all actors, this blurring of borders between performance and life? The man playing the part of the aging actor sipped his tea, and in that moment, acting or not, it seemed to her that he was deeply unhappy.
“It sounds like you’ve had a difficult year,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“Thank you. It hasn’t been easy, but I keep reminding myself, people have much worse years than mine. I lost a few battles,” he said, “but that isn’t the same thing as losing the war.”
Miranda raised her mug. “To the war,” she said, which elicited a smile. “What else is happening?”
“I’m always talking about myself,” he said. “How’s your life?”
“Good. Very good. No complaints.”
“You’re in shipping, aren’t you?”
“Yes. I love it.”
“Married?”
“God, no.”
“No children?”
“My position on the subject hasn’t changed. You had a son with Elizabeth, didn’t you?”
“Tyler. Just turned eight. He’s with his mother in Jerusalem.”
There was a knock at the door just then, and Arthur stood. Miranda watched him recede across the room and thought of their last dinner party in the house in Los Angeles—Elizabeth Colton passed out on a sofa, Arthur walking away up the stairs to the bedroom. She wasn’t exactly sure what she was doing here.