The Emperor's Children

by Claire Messud

  Yes, that would be the way to bulk it out. A sort of mini-biography. He realized that he didn’t really know all that much about his uncle, in that way. Not where he’d lived or what he’d done, exactly, when. He knew other stuff: the family myth, the aura, the Thwaite household atmosphere. For the rest, he could ask his mother—which he wouldn’t do—or rely on the research of others. Leaving the lamby room for Murray’s study and its residual nicotine breeze, Bootie sat down to Google his uncle. Knowing the man as he now did, he felt disappointingly certain that Murray, sitting in this chair, would have more than once Googled himself. One of the items near the top of the list was a profile from the Columbia University student newspaper, by one Roanne Levine. When he read it, Bootie found himself wondering, given its gush, whether she, too, had been seduced by his uncle. He could almost hear her breathlessness in the article’s sentences. He, himself, needed a different, cooler tone.

  Bootie worked on his article all night and past dawn. Several times he foraged for sustenance in the kitchen, finding, among other things, a Mars bar so long hidden behind the phone book that the chocolate had turned white. As he ate it, he thought about whose it might be: which Thwaite hid candy? Perhaps it had once been Aurora’s. He consumed, also, two fruit yogurts, a bowl of cereal, and half of a large bag of potato chips, the expensive kind, in a heavy paper bag, of some elaborate flavor that approximated sour cream and onion. At about 6:30 a.m., before he finally went to sleep, he ambled back to the kitchen and finished the bag. Not because he was hungry, because at that point he was really only sleepy, but because it seemed a quiet aggression, a gesture against Murray that would never even be remarked. It satisfied him, anyway.

  After considering the possibilities carefully, Bootie had decided not to mention Danielle in the piece. It was his concession to Annabel, of whom he was quite fond; and to Marina, too. She didn’t deserve the double blow of her father’s and her best friend’s villainy revealed at once. He couldn’t leave it out altogether, but had drawn the line at vague innuendo. He was quite pleased with his formulation, slipped into a passage about Murray’s purported transparency, which in fact (according to Bootie) masked a willful and powerful obfuscation, not to say dishonesty. He’d put an entire little sentence in parentheses, between two other sentences: “(Murray Thwaite is similarly complicated and opaque when it comes to his personal life, a series of emotional entanglements pursued with Machiavellian efficiency for maximum personal benefit.)” Bootie liked the use of “Machiavellian,” which to him evoked a lot of gleeful hand-rubbing. He didn’t think any but the most astute would understand what he was really trying to say.

  Bootie hadn’t been asleep long when he was wakened by someone moving in the apartment. Opening and shutting doors, running water. Frankly banging things. At first he didn’t know where he was. Then he didn’t know what time it was—eight a.m.—and still further, he couldn’t place the noises. It occurred to him that perhaps one of the doormen—maybe Milos, the burly Serb—made use of the Thwaites’ apartment when they were away. But something about the racket struck him as angry. At the least, irked. Someone was making a point.

  Bootie put on his glasses and rubbed at his curls. He went to see. As he made his way down the hall, he observed that he had not perhaps comported himself like an ideal guest. His shoes and socks lay strewn across the corridor. In the living room, the sofa cushions were piled upon the floor—he’d tried, briefly, to find a comfortable position there in which to work. An empty yogurt container and a sticky spoon were stuck to the glass coffee table. He ventured over to the kitchen: someone had spirited his greasy plate from his bedroom and placed it by the sink. While he was sleeping. Someone had swept up the potato chips he had spilled on the floor, and had left them in a reproachful mound near the stove. The empty milk carton lurked balefully upon the counter, next to the coffeemaker, through which fresh coffee was actually trickling. Puffy, bleary, sickish, Bootie understood that someone—female—had come home. Unexpectedly.

  He poured coffee for himself, sniffled, waited. She would certainly soon appear. He considered that everywhere he laid his head he was essentially unwelcome. With luck he would not, just now, be insulted. She would not call him fat. But he could with justification be accused of gross slobbery. He stepped on some Special K, pulverizing it beneath his bare heel. The abandoned Mars bar wrapper fluttered forlornly on the countertop in the air-conditioning wind. Poor Bootie, he thought. Nobody wants me. Poor Bootie. Then he thought of his mother, who did want him. He thought of her as a grasping, winged monster, her glittering, sorrowful eyes teary, her badly permed hair a fright, her spreading body swollen into all of Watertown, the ugly, dilapidated maw of it, trying to swallow him up, bring him home. He cleared his throat. He would rather be alone and unwanted than ordinary. He thought he would. But he hadn’t imagined a loneliness like this. He hadn’t known it could exist, nor that it would make him so sad and angry.

  “Bootie. You’re up.”

  “Annabel.” Recently showered, she was dressed for work, lean and beige, leafing through papers as she entered the room.

  “It was a surprise,” she said, without looking up. “I somehow thought you’d found a place.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s just—I was working on stuff and it’s a long way back, and it’s so hot.”

  “Better today, actually. I drove from Stockbridge this morning, and it was pretty fresh up there.”

  Bootie nodded, but she still wasn’t looking at him. She frowned, quite strongly, at something she saw in her papers.

  “I’m off to court right now,” she said. And here she glanced at him at last. “Are you here for supper?”

  “Not—I don’t think so. I mean, definitely not.”

  “Okay, well, we’ll see you soon, then. But could you please pick up before you go?”

  Bootie started to mumble—he wanted her to understand that he hadn’t known she would be coming, that he wouldn’t have made a mess if he had.

  “Because it’s, you know, a holiday for Aurora, too.”

  At the front door, she apparently relented, and called to him, “Are you absolutely sure you don’t want to come out to Stockbridge tomorrow? I’m driving back, probably with Marina’s friend Danielle.”

  He went to join her as she waited for the elevator. “Thanks, but I can’t. Too busy with this article.”

  “Article?”

  “For Marina. She asked. For her magazine.”

  Annabel, distracted, smiled halfway. “They’re getting married, you know. Isn’t that exciting?”

  “Who?”

  “Marina and Ludo.” The elevator doors opened, and Milos rose from his stool to hold the machinery still while they finished their conversation. “We’re celebrating tomorrow.”

  “They’re getting married?”

  “Not tomorrow. In September. Soon enough.”

  Bootie didn’t know what to say.

  “It’d be great if you could get that duvet cover in the machine,” Annabel added as Milos moved to close the door. “Just spray some Shout on it, on those stains.”

  “They’re lamb,” he said. It seemed important that she know. But she’d gone.

  Bootie, wounded by Annabel’s briskness, tried to tidy as effectively as he could. He knew—his mother always complained of it—that he had no talent for cleanliness. “It’s about learning to see the dirt,” his mother always said, as if dirt were language, or music.

  This news about Marina: he couldn’t let it go. He wanted to believe that there was some misunderstanding, but knew better. He had watched Marina—when was he not watching Marina? The pleasure, and the sorrow, that her movements caused him, was physical—and had seen her hands turn to birds at her throat, her eyes open wider and brighten, her broad mouth seem itself to lift—all this in conversation with Seeley, Ludovic, that long lying lover, his aristocratic slouch not unlike the first letter of his name, as though he were always oozing earthward, slinking away. At first, that very first night when
she’d met him, when Bootie had joined the group in the living room after Murray’s awards dinner, even then he’d seen on her face as she followed Seeley the particular eagerness, the luminous attention, which she tried—just as he, Bootie, always tried, when speaking to Marina—and failed, to conceal. He’d thought, then, that Danielle was envious, that the two women vied for Seeley’s attention; but in retrospect, he must have been wrong. He should have been keeping an eye on Murray. He’d been a naïf, all those weeks ago, and the possibility of such goatishness hadn’t occurred to him. He’d still been a believer.

  Bootie lingered in the living room after picking up the cushions, the yogurt container, its attendant spoon: remembered the quality of the lamplight, that early evening, the enticing way the women’s hair gleamed in its glow, the peachy pool, like warmth, on the white sofas. He had come out of his room when he’d heard the voices, the laughter, and had slid down the hall in shadow, had lurked, eavesdropping, in the kitchen; until Marina, surprising him there, had invited him to join them. It had felt like Christmas. He’d known she was just being polite, but her kindness, like Annabel’s, moved him, made him feel as though something, some small cog in his chest, actually shifted. He’d been that grateful. And then he had watched, watched everything from a hard chair just outside the illuminated circle, had hovered, unnoticed, like some privileged ghost. He’d half-listened, too, but his excitement and anxiety had been such, and the voice in his head so loud—This is it. This, at last. Here the heady salons of wisdom and the freedom of intellectual discourse; the thrill of the life of the mind, of the life so long imagined, so meatily conjured, just like this, when lying in the mustard yellow bathtub in his mother’s house in Watertown, always fearing that Life would never come to him, or he to it, and here It was, in its subdued but beautiful splendor, a small group, all ages, talking, laughing, smoking, listening, as if in Madame de Staël’s living room, or in the court of Catherine the Great, or at Rahv’s house after a Partisan Review meeting. The thinkers of the ages had always done this, the Life, this, its purpose—that he had barely taken in what was actually discussed. Nobody spoke to him, after the introductions, but Danielle had smiled encouragingly his way a few times, in that manner he found both reassuring and irritating. Even the exchange between Danielle and Ludovic hadn’t spoiled it for him. They had all seemed witty and he’d felt as though he were slightly deaf, or listening to a language he knew only imperfectly, as though he were missing phrases, references, piecing together a brightly colored, impressionistic whole from only partial information. He couldn’t have known how partial: how much he’d learned about Murray since that star-struck night; and here, not so very long after, Marina and Ludovic Seeley were to marry.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  The Fourth of July (1)

  Julius couldn’t quite believe he hadn’t gone. Or rather, he had gone to bed for what was to have been an hour, and had been wakened four hours later by David, on the cell, from the Metro North station out in Westchester, wondering where the hell he was, his sexy irascibility erupted into full-blown ire. Julius had been able honestly to croak, to cough, to lament his throbbing headache, his fluctuating body temperature, his streaming nose.

  “It’s some kind of summer flu, you know? It’s really bizarre. I was up most of the night. I set the alarm to call you, but I must have slept through.”

  “So you didn’t work on your article after all?” David’s contempt was clear.

  “Come home and take care of me, baby. I’m sick as the proverbial dog.”

  “This is unbelievable. My mother—”

  “All mother-son relationships are sick. She’ll be thrilled to have you to herself.”

  “You have no idea how much trouble she’s gone to.”

  “Look, if you really want Typhoid Mary, I can drag myself out of my rank bed, here, and lurch toward you on winds of vomit.”

  “Great.”

  “Even sick, I am your love slave.”

  “That’s good to know. But you’re hugely letting me down.”

  “I’ll make it up to you. You know I will.”

  “You can come tomorrow.”

  “Exactly. I can come tomorrow.”

  But on the morrow, Julius claimed to be no better. He couldn’t entirely have explained why. He stayed in, he cooked an omelet, he had a long, cool bath. The day after, he contemplated again reneging, but, recognizing that his momentary yen for peace and solitude could easily result in the end of his relationship, he relented.

  The Cohen celebration of July Fourth was less difficult than it might have been. They had a swimming pool, which helped, and a selection of seven cousins aged from nine to seventy-three, many of them good-looking, like David. A number of neighbors were also in attendance, bearing trays of smoked salmon and bowls of potato salad. The Cohens served Prosecco alongside the canonical beer, and in the brief hour before it began to rain and they all moved inside, Julius was able to joke, to a still grumpy David, that lounging poolside with a flute of bubbly made him a queen in mud. This was when David coined the nickname Queen Muck, or Lady Muck, which he subsequently, and to Julius’s irritation, eagerly employed, almost like a weapon.

  After the storms had passed, they gathered, damp but unbowed, and watched the local fireworks, he and David hand in hand on the lawn by the Scarsdale pool, theirs an intimacy that the Cohen parents graciously ignored (Frank Clarke loved his boy, but Julius knew no self-respecting Midwestern football coach could stand for two boys holding hands in public. On his own familial territory he would never have dared such a thing), and they slept—in twin beds—in David’s childhood room. Julius put on his best show of manners, charming Mrs. Cohen’s aunt and giving piggyback rides to the littlest cousin, a sturdy boy with buck teeth, named Owen.

  In the train on the way back, on Thursday morning, Julius told David he’d had a wonderful time. “Your parents couldn’t have been more welcoming. Thank you.”

  David looked up from the Business section of the Times. “They could have been more welcoming, actually. They would have. They wanted to. Two days’ more welcoming, as you well know. But you didn’t show up.”

  “That’s not fair. I was sick. I wasn’t making it up.”

  “Fine, you were sick. But you don’t seem to appreciate what a big deal this was for my mother.”

  “Or for you, it seems like.”

  David’s hair was rumpled, his eyes behind his glasses wide, his skin office-pale. “Or for me. I guess that’s right.”

  “If I’d known I had the power to enrage you, I would’ve done it sooner. It’s very attractive.”

  David looked over his shoulder at this.

  “Afraid Daddy’s on the train? Or Daddy’s Westchester golf buddies? Don’t worry, sweetheart, they all know you’re a big old fag.”

  “Please,” David said, looking back to the paper. “Not here. Not now.”

  “You surprise me,” Julius persisted. “Are you afraid of being outed to a bunch of men in suits? Or is it that you might know them? What is it, Davey? You can tell me.”

  “If you don’t shut up right now, I’m going to move seats and pretend that I don’t know you. Seriously.”

  Julius could tell he wasn’t joking. “Two can play at that game, sweetheart,” he said, and held the Arts section up to his nose. He saw at once that one of his erstwhile rivals in the Village Voice office, a plain, plump woman named Sophie—still plain and plump, in her headshot—was having her first novel reviewed. Favorably. She was three years younger than he. He wanted very powerfully, in that moment, to be with Marina or Danielle. With people who would understand all the different ways at once in which he felt horrible. But just then, it felt that he would never get them back: he’d made his bargain, had chosen David, and now that’s all there was. No career. No novel, that was for sure. No friends. Just David, who didn’t understand.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  The Fourth of July (2)

  Danielle had been anxious about the car ride w
ith Annabel. She didn’t know what they’d say to each other, given how changed, and how charged, their relationship, or nonrelationship, now was. Danielle felt overwhelmed by Thwaites, and by guilt, of course. Annabel had always been kind to her. She contemplated taking the train instead, but decided both that this would seem too peculiar, and also that fate must have thrown her together with Annabel for a reason. Certainly her mother would have thought so.

  In the event, she need not have worried. It transpired, in the car at least, that Danielle’s repressive mechanisms were Yale-tight: if Annabel had no doubts, and if, for Annabel, their relationship remained unchanged, then surely it remained, for all intents and purposes, precisely that? It was, yet again, a matter of fact and perception, and the question of which constituted reality. Danielle deemed it both pleasant and uncomplicated to inhabit Annabel’s prelapsarian vision, and discovered, to her surprise and satisfaction, that she was able to do so entirely without complication, without, indeed, any sense whatsoever that she was perpetrating a deception. Their ride together was, inspiringly, as their conversations had ever been.

  Danielle in fact remembered their talk, the spring night of the Chinese food, the night, as she saw it, when “it” all began, a chat about Annabel’s client, the troubled boy, and recognized the outlines of that case in the scenario Annabel was here describing. The previous morning, before the judge, had not gone so well, and the boy was in the custody of the court. The only way this could possibly have been avoided, Annabel thought, would have been for her to offer to take him home for the week.