Station Eleven

Heller had called him again a half hour later to confirm that Clark had notified the family, which of course Clark hadn’t, because three forty-five a.m. in Los Angeles is also three forty-five a.m. on the west coast of Canada, where Arthur’s brother lived, and Clark felt that there were limits to how early one should call anyone for any reason. Now it was still only nine a.m. in New York, six a.m. on Heller’s coast, and it seemed obscene that this man who’d apparently been up all night was still up and working. Clark was beginning to imagine Heller as a sort of bat, some kind of sinister night-living vampire lawyer who slept by day and worked by night. Or maybe just an amphetamine freak? Clark’s thoughts wandered to a particularly exciting week in Toronto, eighteen or nineteen years old, when he and Arthur had accepted some pills from a new friend at a dance club and stayed up for seventy-two hours straight.

“You want to take the call?” Tabitha asked.

“Fine. Put him through, please.”

For just a beat Tabitha did nothing, and after seven years of working together in close quarters he knew that this particular brand of silence meant “Tell me what’s going on, you know I like gossip,” but he didn’t oblige, and he knew her well enough to catch the note of disappointment in the perfectly professional “Hold for your call, please” that followed.

“Clark? Heller here.”

“So I gathered,” Clark said. There was something obnoxious, he thought, in people who introduced themselves by their surnames while calling one by one’s first. “How are you, Gary? We haven’t spoken in a solid ninety minutes.”

“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 …”