April
Timothy
It was Timothy Fleming’s landscaper, Kyle, who suggested the koi pond. At first Timothy resisted.
“You should do it,” Kyle persisted. “People find a lot of peace in koi ponds. Some people really get to know their koi.”
“They get to know their koi?”
“They do.” Kyle flashed his teeth, almost blinding Timothy. “You’ve made it, Mr. Fleming. You made it a long time ago. What do you have, two Oscars?”
“Yes,” admitted Timothy. In his head: Plus a Tony.
“So why not enjoy it? Spend the money!”
It wasn’t the money. It was more that sometimes the boy who grew up in a small ranch house on Block Island, nearly as far away from Benedict Canyon as one could get while staying in the same country, came to whisper at Timothy like a spirit in a haunting. “Who do you think you are?” murmured the ghost of the boy. “Hooo. Do you thiiiiiink. You aaaaaare.”
Kyle was what, twenty-eight? Skin fresh, cheeks full, body muscled. He was waiting for his big break, like everyone in Hollywood: the guy who drove your bus on the Universal Studios tour, the girl who foamed the milk for your cappuccino. So much collagen! “Okay,” he said finally. “Okay, Kyle. What the hell. Bring on the koi.”
“Yeessssss, Mr. Fleming!” Kyle’s smile was so wide and so genuine, and his fist pumped the air so willingly, that it nearly warmed Timothy’s cold, cold heart.
“But give my assistant, Alexa, the instructions on feeding. Left to my care, they’ll die.”
“Of course.”
That was back in February. Now it’s April, which means in New England it’s mud season, and in Los Angeles it’s—April. On Block Island there will be ruts in the dirt, potholes in the road, a chill in the air. Timothy doesn’t miss it, except when he does, and then he misses it a lot.
Sitting and watching the koi, surrounded by blue elderberry and bush sunflower and figwort and whatever else Kyle had decided to plant, Timothy readily admits that Kyle was right. All seven koi have survived—nay, thrived. Timothy named them after the Seven Dwarfs, and the difference in their markings has always made it easy for him to tell them apart. A parent is not supposed to have favorites, he knows this, despite not being a parent himself, but secretly he favors Grumpy, whose orange and white stripes are more or less even in size. Doc has a splotch of black on his head that closely resembles a beret, Bashful a bovine design of black and white, and so on, all the way to the completely orange Dopey. Timothyhasfound a lot of peace in watching them, the C-curves their bodies make, the swish of their translucent tails as they pass over and under one another, even their trusting, gaping mouths at feeding time.
He peers more closely at the koi. Is everything all right? Grumpy seems, well, grumpy. Sneezy and Sleepy, normally quite close, appear to be in an argument, origins unknown. Along with the koi, Kyle convinced Timothy to acquiesce to a multilevel waterfall, and sometimes Timothy wonders if his yard calls to mind the New England miniature golf courses of his youth (you had to leave the island to play mini golf, of course, as you had to leave theisland to do most things back then), where a ball hit too hard from the seventh hole might land at the bottom of an over- or under-chlorinated water feature.
California: the land of milk, honey, and koi. Sneezy and Sleepy are probably okay. Right? He supposes that koi relationships, like any others, have their ebbs and flows.
His phone buzzes, shattering both his reverie and his concerns. It’s Gertie, his ex-wife. Speaking of ebbs and flows; speaking of relationships.
“Timothy! Are you busy?”
“A little,” he says, untruthfully but convincingly. He came by the Oscars and the Tony honestly.
“Do you want me to call back another time?”
“No. No, that’s okay,” he says magnanimously. “I have a few minutes.” Timothy hasn’t been truly busy for a long time.
Timothy Fleming is old, by Hollywood terms, but not so old he’s ready to be put out to pasture, by himself or anyone else. Talented—yes. The talent is indisputable, well-documented, even inevitable. He’s wealthy. If not wealthy beyond his wildest dreams, certainly wealthy within their boundaries, because in fact his dreams have always been oversize. And yet, and yet. Like everyone else on this green Earth save the fictional Benjamin Button (a role, by the way, Timothy Fleming turned down,that’show many offers he had in the mid-aughts) he isn’t getting any younger. He’s been waiting for the right new project to come along for twenty-seven months now, and in those twenty-seven months he turned sixty, sixty-one, then sixty-two. There had been Covid, of course, and Covid hit the entertainment industry hard. But work is well underway again; Hollywood is abuzz with activity; he has many friends and acquaintances and also people who, truth be told, he doesn’t care for who are back at work, busier than ever. Or at the very least claiming to be.
“Okay, good,” says Gertie. “I need a favor.”
“Shoot,” he says.
“I need a theater,” she says.
“Okay,” he says. “You know I don’t have a theater, right?”
“For the summer. I’m doing Shakespeare! I’m doing summer theater, finally! Before I go to shoot in Portugal. I’ve always wanted to do summer theater.”
“You have?”
“Well, sure. You know I’ve always hoped I’d be able to get back to my roots.” Gertie is a Juilliard graduate, classically trained. “And I’m forty-two now. The camera isn’t going to love me forever. I need to think about my next steps. I’m going to be Beatrice inMuch Ado.”
