He had admired the Rothkos. He had loomed shaggy and grand like a crumbling castle, a half ruin, in the semidarkness of her pristine apartment, his belt unbuckled and his bare torso monumental, and had held her to him so that she could hear his heart beating beneath the grayed fur against her cheek. When he spoke, his voice resounded in his chest, and entered her ear like an immense echo.
“They keep you sane, I’m guessing,” he said.
“Who do?”
“The Rothkos. That’s what they’d do for me. They stop everything, the washes of color, they pull you in. Keep you from jumping out the window.”
“It’s always a possibility,” she said, pulling her head back to look at him.
“I know it. Every day you find the reason not to. As he did—Rothko—in the pictures.” He paused. “Until the day he didn’t anymore.”
“Exactly,” she said. “I wonder about it, wonder if that’s why people have children, to stop asking the question.”
“It’s true it puts an end to it for a while. But only by ending it, if you see what I mean.”
“I don’t,” she said. “I don’t think.”
“You have a child and you stop questioning the futility, true. For one thing, you’re too fucking busy. For another, the question is answered, the futility is confirmed. You’ve passed it on to the next generation. They’re essential, you no longer are.”
“But you don’t really believe that.”
“I do and I don’t,” he said. She believed she knew exactly what he meant.
“All your work, everything you’ve written—”
“Every day the question. And sometimes, that’s the answer.”
“And sometimes this is?” She gestured at the room, at their half-clad bodies.
“Sometimes this is,” he conceded, then frowned. “But often not. Because it can have the opposite effect.”
“Does Annabel know?”
“She does and she doesn’t.”
“Don’t ask, don’t tell? How about Marina?”
His glance, here, was sharp. He turned to look out the window at the skyline, sparkling in the velvet night. “No, as far as I know. She doesn’t need to. It’s none of her business.”
“I’m not sure about that,” said Danielle. “But if it’s any consolation, I don’t think she does. She wouldn’t imagine you capable of such things.”
“Whereas you did.”
“I wouldn’t say that. I mean …”
“Of course you did. Or we wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be here.” He grinned the broad, guileless grin. “But aren’t you glad that I am?”
When he had left, Danielle lay on her bed, which smelled of them and faintly, too, of the gin-and-tonic cologne, and she thought first of Marina, and of what would have to be kept from her now. Danielle had never before had a secret that she couldn’t confide in anyone, but this, she knew, was such a secret. She couldn’t tell Randy, even, who so wanted her daughter to find love. If that was what she had found. She held in her mind two disparate realities: one was the fierce tenderness she felt for this disintegrating giant, the joy at his small kindnesses and vulnerabilities, the sense—overwhelming and surely false, even she could see—that she could anticipate all of them, that, like a blind person, she had developed some extra sense, where he was concerned, and could practically finish his sentences. The other was a certainty of wrong, a moral repugnance. This she experienced abstractly, with her mind; it was, consequently, the weaker of the two realities. She was fascinated by the internal conflict, or by the notion of it, because in truth, she didn’t really contemplate renouncing him. The disgust was an idea, something she knew she ought to conjure, the way an autistic child can learn to smile at his mother to show happiness. Her bones, her flesh, the tickle of her scalp and the pads of her fingertips all spoke without prompting a chorus of desire. Pressed to his chest she’d felt safe and exhilarated at once, as if swept by a great internal breeze; and there seemed little point telling herself that this was immoral. Marina—or even Annabel—didn’t come into it. This in the space of a week or two. She’d become a person she would never have anticipated being.
She couldn’t look ahead at a future to this union. Nor, suddenly, could she imagine an end to it, either. Which left only a present. He’d given her his cell phone number, one he said almost nobody knew. He’d said he wanted to see her tomorrow—the first day of June. He’d said he wanted her to wear again the dress from the awards dinner—the dress, she couldn’t help but think, that had had no effect on Ludovic Seeley. That was the night Marina had thrown herself at him; and now they were colleagues and lovers both. And Danielle, who should have seen it coming, had ditched her revolution project in favor of the plastic surgery piece. She was even considering tracking down a case of fatal liposuction. If you couldn’t expose Seeley you could always join him, enact the perversities of his cynic’s revolution and give the audience the trash they didn’t yet know they wanted. Murray would disapprove. Or he would have, if he’d known the history of it; but as it stood, he was trying to persuade her to chase this Guatemalan story, and thought that lipo was the pressure from on high, Nicky’s idea. She’d let him think it. She never would have pegged herself for a cynical dissembler, a liar so many times over. Thank goodness she wasn’t seeing much of Julius these days: he’d be able to smell it on her, a dog sniffing fear. And that other boy, the cousin: Frederick. Bootie. Bootie Tubb. Who worked for Murray now. Even meeting him just twice she could tell that he was canny, and proud, and that he held the world to impossible standards. In that sense, she’d recognized him, and he her; and so he would see the change in her, if he were to see her. He didn’t seem the sort to feel pity at another’s fall; rage, rather. He’d already, somehow, been disappointed, although he could barely have been twenty, and he wanted to make someone pay. Murray would disappoint him, sooner or later, she was certain; it was this sixth sense, this new prescience. She didn’t believe that Murray could disappoint her, because she knew him so utterly. Absently stroking her nape, she leaned against the wall as dawn broke in her window, watching the Rothkos bloom into their full colors; and she wondered idly whether maybe, suddenly, she’d been granted, along with passion, a gift of clear sight. She briefly considered, in the day’s first flood of light, turning out to the sky, the roofs and the towers stretching in front of her, that there was nothing she could not divine, and that this, surely, would keep her—would keep them all—safe. And then the flare of gold settled into a hazy summer morning, and she curled her back to the window and went to sleep.
JULY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Booted
The room was hot. Sweat down your bare neck, steam on your glasses, air unmoving as an oven hot. The ceiling fan didn’t work, and there was no possibility of cross ventilation as the apartment’s three windows sat side by side, staring out at the narrow, airless street. In the cupboard next to the door, he’d found one oscillating fan (so close to “osculating,” and yet so far; a word he’d recently learned and had no occasion to use), a smallish one, that he propped on a pile of books and trained closely upon himself, so that it dried, in patches, the sweatsoak over his skin. He kept a cup of ice on the table beside him, and sucked a cube periodically, which hurt his carious molar but at least lent him, however briefly, the illusion of being cool. The ice was ancient, and tasted of dust and the freezer.
This was, at last, Bootie’s first night of his first weekend in the studio, the Saturday of this long-awaited weekend preceding Independence Day; and the temperature hovered up around 100 degrees. His mother had hoped he’d come home, but he’d sold the car to pay his rent (this he hadn’t yet told her; she was liable to cry), and besides, it seemed appropriate, in the wavering experiment that his life seemed to have become, that he should spend Independence Day independently. Murray and Annabel had invited him up to Stockbridge, where they were going to their fancy house with Marina and her creepy boyfriend, Ludovic, but he could tell they didn’t reall
y want him to come. Besides, given what he was writing, he wouldn’t have felt comfortable with them anyway. Not that he had anything against Annabel; and not that Murray had any inkling, yet, of what his nephew thought of him. Not, indeed, that even Bootie had known until, just the other day, the full extent of his rage. After all, as Murray himself said, you want to take them by surprise.
Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Even their cousins know nothing about them. He would have given a great deal to return to a state of blissful ignorance where Murray was concerned. Every revelation only diminished further his uncle’s fading glow. If Oswego had been a fiasco, what, Frederick wondered, was the word for this? He’d taken to thinking of himself again, quite consciously, as Bootie, because he intended to put the boot in, to give his uncle the boot. Marina had asked him—it seemed it had been originally Danielle’s idea, in this seething nest of vipers: she, with the maternal smile, the chummy, condescending manner, and the most hideous secret—if he’d like to write an article on spec for The Monitor. He’d had to ask what “on spec” meant, and had at first been tongue-tied and overwhelmed that Marina had thought enough of him to extend the invitation. Then he’d found out about Danielle, and grown suspicious. Marina had said he could write about whatever he chose, as long as it fit the general rubric of “cultural exposé.” She’d made a big deal about The Monitor’s being a new type of magazine, a no-holds-barred organ of truth in which anything—anything true, that is—would be welcome. That was weeks ago, before everything, certainly before he’d read all of the manuscript, and before he’d found even the first e-mail. He hadn’t known what to suggest. “Don’t worry.” She’d flashed him that long-necked, gawky smile that was, on her, beyond alluring, intimate and mysterious at once. “Something will come to you. It’s going to be great.”
His first idea had been to write an essay about Murray Thwaite, and everything his uncle signified. He would keep it a secret, until it was done. He’d imagined it at first as a gift to the Thwaites, had imagined Marina’s pleasure, and—when it was published, if it was published, his uncle’s, too. Not an exposé, exactly, or only—so he’d thought—an exposé of his own heart. Maybe a personal, almost autobiographical account of what it was like to grow up in the long shadow of such a man, to know by his existence of what might be possible in life—to know, even as a boy in Watertown, what a life of the mind might be—and yet to feel always that this tantalizing possibility was too far removed really to touch. He’d envisaged it, at first, as a story with the happiest of endings: about coming, at last and alone, to the metropolis, about depending upon the kindness of relatives who were near strangers, of discovering, in their company, not so much the comfort of the body but the comfort—or maybe comfortable unease (or would that be dis-ease?)—of the mind: here, in Murray, was an interlocutor and a mentor, here was greatness held close. The image in his head then, at the beginning of June, was of a kindly but formidable giant scooping up a mere boy in his enormous palm, and teaching him, little by little, to grow.
Unease, dis-ease: over the course of that infernal, stifling month, Bootie came to understand the situation in a different way. Things looked different; Murray looked different: still an imposing façade, to be sure; but a hollow monument. Bootie didn’t like Ludovic Seeley any more than when first he’d met him, but he came to wonder—uneasily—whether the Australian had a point. In which case, Seeley’s magazine was the obvious place to make that point. Marina, he came to believe, either already saw the truth about her father, or should be made to see it. It was her only hope for freedom from him—really to let go of his myth. No matter what, she would be—should be—grateful that someone, that he, Bootie, had the dispassionate rigor to speak out. This, Bootie believed, was what The Monitor was for. This was his destiny.
It was cumulative. First, of course, he’d wondered about the commencement in Connecticut. He couldn’t have said whether that, or Danielle and Seeley’s whispered exchange, or both together, had sowed the tiny seed of doubt. And then there was the time, in perhaps the second week of working for Murray, when his uncle called to him to hunt the clippings files for several articles he’d written, years before, about Bosnia. He was writing about the Hague, the War Crimes Tribunal, and he wanted, he said, to check some of his earlier facts and details. But then Bootie, who read the earlier pieces, also read Murray’s new article, and found that in it, not merely phrases but entire sentences and, in one case, a great, meaty paragraph, had been lifted wholesale from the already published work and transplanted to the new.
Bootie worried overnight, found himself deliberating the degree of deceit, or inadequacy, represented by this theft. He wanted—as when hearing about Julius’s drug use, for example—to be able to feign worldliness, or at least indifference. But as he lay beneath the snowy eiderdown he couldn’t let it go; and the next morning, fingers trembling, he stood in Murray’s office and cleared his throat.
“Fred.”
“Murray. I just. I have a question.”
“Yes?”
“Your article.”
“Yes?”
“The tribunal article. The one you just finished. With the history of the Bosnian conflict in it.”
“Yes?”
“You wrote about that before. The conflict, I mean.”
“I spent weeks in Sarajevo. I went to Kosovo. Srebreniça. Yes.”
“But you wrote the same things.”
“How do you mean? I thought the same things, more or less, then and now.”
“But your descriptions.”
“I saw these places, these events. I’m not sure I follow.”
Bootie could see the papers in his hands trembling, so difficult did he find this. “But you used the same words. Exactly. The same descriptions. You plagiarized them.”
“I wrote them.”
“But then you wrote them again, the same.”
Murray laughed, leaned back in his chair. “Oh, that’s very good. I did. Yes, I did. I wrote them again the same.” He lit a cigarette, tried—it was obvious he was trying—to keep a straight face. “Plagiarized. That’s beautiful. Can one plagiarize oneself? Plunder, yes; recycle, certainly; but plagiarize?” When he laughed, his chest emitted a discreet rumble, as though a digger were turning over the earth inside him. “Do you really imagine,” he said eventually, “that there are enough words in the world for them always to be new? Novelty among the young is greatly overrated. If you’ve worked to find the right words for what you want to say, then surely it would be foolhardy to discard them merely because of some sense of etiquette—some sense that it was rather shabby to repeat yourself. Do I ever give the same lecture twice? Of course I do. Do I have the same conversation more than once? It goes without saying. I am guilty of the tedium of repetition. I’m sorry—you’re disappointed to find your uncle is an old bore. Alas.” He said this last with a broad, winning smile, and in the moment Bootie felt he’d been ridiculous, muttered an apology, and moved on.
But later, he realized, it stayed with him. He went back to Emerson, whom he felt understood these things. “All persons exist to society by some shining trait of beauty or utility which they have. We borrow the proportions of the man from that one fine feature, and finish the portrait symmetrically; which is false, for the rest of this body is small or deformed.” It was a disappointment, a deformation, albeit minor. His uncle was perhaps a little lazy, a little lax. He could forgive it, but he wouldn’t forget.
And then there was the next thing, a scant week later. Murray, out for the afternoon, left him a list of things to do, among them a telephone call to a fund-raising dinner for a Harlem youth program at the end of June, at which he was to have given a speech. He asked Bootie to cancel it, to express his profuse regrets, but something urgent, he was to say, had come up. And then there was, next on the list of things to do, another phone call, an acceptance to a dinner given by the publisher of The Action, in honor of two Palestinian activists who were coming to town. Bootie had
even heard of one of them, had read about him in the newspaper, knew he was important—and yet. And yet the two events were on the same day. Murray didn’t say anything about it in his message, but he was blowing off the youth program for the Palestinian bigwigs, it was as easy as a simple sum. Bootie found himself deeply unsettled: each deformity was slight, but he began to worry that they added up to a grotesquerie. He didn’t raise it with his uncle, who, he was sure, would only laugh charmingly again; but quietly, he adjusted his sights. Murray Thwaite looked less and less the shining giant.
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