CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
On the Grill
I somehow never pictured you barbecuing.” Seeley leaned against the doorjamb, his long, candy-striped torso curved against the oxblood wall. His shirt was crisp. Everything about him looked faggy.
“You’d be amazed at what falls to the paterfamilias,” Murray replied, without taking the cigarette from his mouth. Some ash floated down into the grill. Murray was sweating. “You’ll do it, too, in your time, even though you swear you won’t.”
Seeley narrowed his hooded eyes and appeared to smirk. As much as to say “never.” Murray felt like a bear beside him, felt like grabbing him by the collar and shaking him senseless. Danielle thought this guy was a snake; but all he could get out of Annabel was that mild, faintly PC acquiescence: whatever makes our baby happy.
“What are you going to do if that magazine of yours flops?”
“It won’t.”
“Of course it won’t. But it might.”
“There’s always another outlet. But The Monitor is going to change the scene.”
Murray flipped a slab of steak with his greasy tongs. Fat spattered on the front of his shirt. He felt that this in itself was manly. “You know,” he said, “there’s a very successful British sandwich joint that’s been trying to set up shop in Manhattan. But Americans eat differently. They want their food customized.”
Seeley adjusted the curve of his spine, crossed his arms over his narrow chest.
“I’m not saying it’s a good thing. We’re all obese over here, I know that. But it’s the way it is. Just because it’s a relatively new and changeable place doesn’t mean we don’t have a culture.”
“I’m Australian, not British.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, I know.”
Marina appeared around the side of the house with a colander full of beans. She had a muddy streak across her forehead that looked as though the makeup department had planted it there, to designate a young maiden fresh from the meadow. The beans were just picked, a dusty heap. “My two favorite men in the whole wide world.”
“Steak’s almost done. Chicken takes longer.” Murray dropped his cigarette end through the grill onto the coals.
“That’s disgusting, Daddy.”
“Gives new meaning to secondhand smoking,” Murray replied. “The meat will thank me.”
“Don’t do that when Danny comes, okay? She’s a very clean person, and probably wouldn’t be able to eat supper.”
“Your friend Danielle is coming here?” Murray reached for the scotch tumbler perched upon the patio wall. “I thought she couldn’t make it this year.”
“I bullied her. Just for the day on Wednesday. But I bet I can get her to stay the night.” Marina had put the colander on the table and wrapped her arms around Seeley’s waist. “I told her it was our engagement party, on Independence Day.” After a moment of silence in which the meat sizzled oppressively, Marina said, “I thought you liked her, Daddy.”
“I do. I like her very much. She’s an extremely pleasant young woman.”
“Pleasant? She’d cry, Daddy, to hear you call her that. She’s brilliant, actually. You got a sense of that, Ludo, didn’t you? She’s really brilliant, and her work is very important.”
“Something in films, isn’t it?”
“How can you never remember anything? She was going to make a documentary about Ludo, remember?”
“But thought better of it,” Ludo added, pulling himself upright and out of Marina’s embrace. “Let me get the platter for those steaks.” He slipped back into the house.
“Daddy, are you even happy for me?”
“Of course I am, princess. It seems very fast.”
“Romantic speed. It’s at romantic speed. But if we’re both sure, why would we wait?”
“Indeed.” Murray, fiddling with the tin foil around the corncobs, burned his fingertips. “Shit,” he said. “Shit, shit, shit.” Now he understood why his cell phone had shown four messages. He hadn’t yet had a chance to ring her back, but had been worrying—in a passive, intermittent way—that some injury had befallen her. That, and he’d been annoyed. Because they’d had an understanding that she wouldn’t call him this weekend, that he’d call if he could, but to please leave well enough alone. And there he’d been thinking that they can never wait, women, and never really listen. But he’d maligned her and now felt remorseful. As well as faintly unsettled. He knew he was up to the acting job—a role as much as any of his others, as much as the barbecuing paterfamilias or benignly doting papa—but for Danielle it would be a test. She seemed very truthful—it was one of the traits that had attracted him, and now he felt almost constrictingly fond of the girl, a low but constant flame that could easily be kindled—and she might not care for the drama—very sexy, he’d always thought—of deception. It was always about limits, the right ones: the quick, wordless clinch in the pantry being something to strive for, and the anxious exchange of glances to be avoided at all costs.
Had he done this before? Yes and no, never so egregiously. He wincingly transferred the corncobs to the steak platter, which prompted, from Marina, a cluck of affectionate exasperation, and she sent Seeley back to the kitchen for a second receptacle. He’d never had an affair with a friend of his daughter’s, everything so perilously—so delectably—near to the surface. And what was he thinking, to allow this reunion in Stockbridge, up till now always a sacred family ground? And the degree of his fondness: he was losing control, as he’d known that he must, as he always, on some level, wanted to do. Like taking the nth scotch against his better judgment. He loved thinking about her—the skin, a certain hopeful tenderness, the weight of her curls, the weight of her breast in his hand—and that was as it should be. But he should be capable of not-thinking, and there he was beginning to fail. Her voice should not be so readily breathing at his ear. Recklessness would lead to mistakes and in this instance—he glanced at his daughter, the smudge now wiped from her radiant brow, her hands again and with unseemly zeal upon the torso of her intended—the stakes were too high.
The air smelled of citronella, and the late light was pleasingly colorless. A swarm of midges hovered over the lawn. Annabel, across the table, looked down at her plate, at her cob and slab of steak, with a furrowed brow.
“What, besides the humidity and the bugs, could possibly be wrong, my love?”
She shook her head. “DeVaughn.”
“Again?”
“I just got the call. He’s been arrested for attempted arson. His stepfather’s car.”
“Maybe it’s a good sign,” Marina offered. Seeley appeared to stifle mirth.
“How so?”
“Well, don’t people burn things for insurance, usually? So maybe he was cooperating with his stepfather. And that would be a good thing.”
“Do you really think this is a time for jokes?” Annabel helped herself to the green beans, rather too energetically. “I’m going to have to go down there. He’ll be arraigned in the morning.”
“You can’t go down there,” Marina said. “This is our family holiday. The Fourth! Our engagement. It’s special.”
“Who’ll go if I don’t?”
“Hasn’t he got a social worker or something?”
“Well, actually, I am his lawyer.”
“I can’t believe this.”
“Marina,” Murray said, “you claim you want to do something important with your life. Your mother does something important. You’d do well to emulate her.”
“We’re celebrating my engagement. Ludo’s and mine. I am your only child.”
“I should be back on Wednesday. I could even bring back Danielle, you know. There’s always a silver lining.”
Marina pouted, in an exaggerated way, both to indulge her petulance and to seem to mock it.
“How many cases do you take on, at any given time?” Seeley asked.
“It’s not the number of them—there aren’t that many. It’s somehow the boy ha
s gotten under my skin.”
“Because you can help him?”
Annabel looked Seeley frankly in the face. “Because I can’t, actually. Because no matter what I do, it won’t be enough. His life is unbearable. He can’t be saved.”
“The appeal of the lost cause,” observed Seeley.
“We’re big on them at our house.” Murray picked at the corn in his teeth. He hated corn. “I don’t think we know any other kind.”
“That’s rather sentimental, isn’t it?”
Marina stared at Seeley as if she didn’t know him. Murray, however, was not surprised. “No sentimentalists around here, my friend. No religionists, either.”
“We can agree on that, at least,” said Seeley. “Although I’d maintain that there are those for whom religion is essential. That we want them to have it.”
“We? They?”
“Marx was quite right: an opiate. It’s necessary. Let’s not be sentimental, but practical, instead. Wouldn’t DeVaughn be better off if he got God? Wouldn’t his stepfather? If there’s any way out of their appalling quagmire, wouldn’t that be it?”
“I’m aware that for many people in tough circumstances, faith is what pulls them through,” Annabel said. She spread her ten fingers wide and flat on the table, and seemed to be pressing hard against its surface. “And I have great respect for that. I don’t believe, myself, and I’d never encourage anyone to put store in something that seems to me clearly a figment. It would be a false hope.”
“But why?” Seeley leaned forward over the glass table, his long fingers appearing to caress the citronella air. “Why is any hope not better than none? Who’s to say you’re not wrong? And who are you to deprive DeVaughn even of that?”
“To hand him a Bible in his prison cell? There are priests whose job that is. For me, it would be unprincipled. If I’m not an honest broker, then what am I?”
“Ah.” Seeley sat back, smiled. “As I say, you’re a sentimentalist.”
Annabel shook her head.
“Because, really, you think you know what’s best for him. Or worse: you presume that what’s best for you would be best for him, would somehow serve some figment—your word—of objective truth to which you subscribe; when in reality, his life and yours are so far divorced that the same truths simply cannot pertain.”
“Pure sophistry, my friend,” Murray said, folding his napkin. His bonhomie was as real and as fake as Marina’s earlier petulance. “Marina, it’s not too late to change your mind.”
She glared at him. Seeley laughed. “I’m not trying to distress anyone. Far from unprincipled, I’m advocating the prescription of a proven cure. Religion can perform miracles.”
“But not for you?”
“I don’t happen to believe. But clearly, for those who believe, it can. Put it another way: Could DeVaughn be any worse off?”
“Can we talk about something else?” Marina stacked the plates. “Did any of you see the little fawn and her mother that are living just in the woods over there? And who wants watermelon?”
“I’ve got one thing to say to young Ludovic, here—”
“Daddy, you don’t always have to have the last word. I asked about the deer.”
“They’re living at the back of the Jaspers’ property,” Annabel said. “Evelyn was complaining because nothing keeps them out of the vegetable garden. They’ve ravaged her lettuces, in spite of the chicken wire.”
“But not our beans? That’s weird. Do you think they don’t like beans?”
Murray could see that Seeley was still trembling slightly, and his eyes had a feverish glow. Like an animal interrupted in the middle of a hunt. “More beans for us,” Murray said, with a broad smile that could be seen as conciliatory. “Isn’t that right, Ludovic? All the more beans for us.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
After Supper
You mustn’t mind Daddy,” Marina said. “He’s old-fashioned, in his way. He’d be furious to hear me say it.”
“I don’t mind him at all. He entertains me greatly.”
“I did think you were a bit hard on my mom,” she said. She inspected his features for some response. They were lying in bed, naked but under covers in spite of the heat: Murray, to Ludovic’s unvoiced but discernible annoyance, had turned on the air-conditioning, and the house was hermetically chilly. The windows had been sealed against the tree frogs’ song, the rustling branches.
“I didn’t mean to be,” Seeley said. “I was merely trying to explain my point of view.”
“Your point of view is a very moveable thing.”
“Mutability is my hallmark. It’s healthy. It’s vital.”
“If you say so.”
“She wasn’t offended, was she?”
“Would you care if she was?”
“Of course I would. I think she’s a very dignified woman.”
“And my father?”
“You know.”
“You’ve never said. You wanted so much to meet him, but you disagree with him about everything.”
“Do I?”
“You know, before you marry me, you’ll have to accept that I’m my father’s daughter in most things.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I agree with him, mostly. I understand him better than anybody else.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think I understand him?”
“I don’t think you resemble him. Not at all. I think that’s an illusion he has tried very hard to maintain, because it suits him.”
“How so?”
“We’ve talked about this. About how well you reflect on him. About how problematic it is to be reflecting at all. You are a beautiful, highly intelligent, talented woman in your own right. I wouldn’t be about to marry you if you weren’t.”
Marina sighed, wriggled slightly beneath the sheet. “You certainly know how to make a girl feel special.”
“Seriously, my darling. You need to separate yourself from your father. Put some distance between you.”
“Move to Australia?”
“Not at this point, but maybe, someday. You need to take a stand.”
“On principle?”
Seeley shrugged. “Because I say so. And because I’m always right.”
“I see. How could I forget?”
“I don’t rightly know.”
“I’m cold.”
“Then come closer. I am ready to envelop you.”
“To what?”
“Give in, my girl. Give in.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
“Murray Thwaite: A Disappointed Portrait”
In the interests of full disclosure, let me say that Murray Thwaite is my uncle. My mother’s older brother. He is also, at the moment, my employer. I serve as his amanuensis (his word) or secretary (mine), working in his office, which is located in his apartment on New York’s Upper West Side. It is a very nice apartment. Let me say, too, that he and his wife, my uncle and aunt, have been nothing but kind and generous with me. They have housed and fed me (although I live on my own now) and, obviously, they have employed me. And so the question is, Why is Murray Thwaite such a disappointment to me?
Even though our families were not especially close when I was growing up in Watertown, New York, I have always been proud of my uncle’s accomplishments. His intelligence and erudition impressed me from an early age, and I have been a devoted reader of his books and articles since I could begin to understand them. is fair to say that he has been my hero.
Bootie felt okay about this introduction, although he wasn’t entirely sure about the word “hero,” which seemed to imply feats of daring. He’d considered “idol,” a word in which the falsity was inherently implicit, the connotation always already faintly pejorative, but he wanted to convey the innocence and sincerity of his admiration. “Hero” was better for this, suggesting as it did the Greeks, or firefighters. He was not in Murray’s study, nor at the dining room table, but comfortably set up in his former
bedroom, in the grave quiet, on the broad bed. He’d found a leftover lamb stew in the freezer for supper, which he’d microwaved; and some melon chunks in a plastic box that, though slightly fizzy on the tongue, were perfectly edible. Their remains lay congealed on a plate on the dresser top, and the bedroom had taken on a faintly gamey smell. He had also spilled a few drops of stew on the white duvet: after wiping, they looked unfortunately like trails of excrement.
Murray Thwaite has built his reputation on being a straight shooter. On telling it like it is. From the civil rights movement and Vietnam right down through Iran Contra and Operation Desert Storm, from education policy to workers’ rights and welfare to abortion rights to capital punishment—Murray Thwaite has voiced significant opinions. We have believed him, and believed in him.
Bootie hesitated over the section that followed: he wanted to make specific mention of Murray’s most influential contributions, as far as he, Bootie, was concerned. It was hard not to make it sound like a laundry list or a fanzine; but maybe it would be okay to seem to be a wholehearted disciple. Maybe it would be rhetorically powerful, and strengthen the effect of the second half of the piece.
Of course, even though he felt passionate about it, the whole undertaking had a strangely artificial feeling. Bootie had never written an article before, let alone for a real publication. He wasn’t quite sure what should be in it, wasn’t sure either about the balance of facts and opinion. It seemed that he could put forward his opinion pretty succinctly, in a few hundred words, and that in some fundamental way it would not require any substantiation: the authority of his conviction ought to suffice. For example, everybody would know what he meant when he called Murray “a straight shooter,” or “the country’s liberal conscience.” Perhaps they needed some guidance in order to comprehend Murray’s lesser known idiosyncracies—his comparative fiscal conservatism, which dated way back; his particular closeness to and popularity among the black community, at least on paper, which was a holdover from the old civil rights business; but basically, Bootie figured you could take a lot for granted. Or not? Maybe Monitor readers would have only the vaguest sense who Murray Thwaite even was. Which would mean that Bootie should begin at the beginning, in Watertown, and provide all the background stuff: more fact, less opinion.
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