“The judge just might have agreed,” she said. “But I didn’t ask. It’s a moral failing, I feel, but—”
“It’s the Fourth of July. And Marina’s engagement.”
“Oh, there are so many reasons. But mostly it was the look on Murray’s face that I kept picturing. I don’t know that his sense of humor would extend to Independence Day in Stockbridge with DeVaughn.”
Danielle almost said something then—something innocuous like “I bet he wouldn’t like it”—but she worried that the tone might seem strange, or her inflection brittle, and so instead she looked through the windscreen at the asphalt ahead and smiled in a vague but agreeable way. She sensed that Annabel was deeply embarrassed with herself, that she felt she had failed a test.
“Ludovic was saying the other night that I’m wrong to impose my values, my belief, my culture on someone like DeVaughn. I disagreed with him then, but maybe he’s right. I think it would’ve been better to bring DeVaughn to Stockbridge rather than have him spend the holiday in jail—because that’s essentially where he’ll be—but for whom would it have been better? Certainly not for any of us—I suppose you could say I chose my daughter’s well-being over DeVaughn’s—and maybe not even for him. What do you think?”
“I think Ludovic is very good at making us all doubt ourselves and second-guess our decisions. But if it works, hey, who’s to complain?”
Annabel didn’t reply.
“I mean that if his fluid logic helps you to understand and feel okay about leaving DeVaughn in the system, then that’s great.”
Annabel still did not speak, perhaps because of a knot of traffic, but it was hard to be sure. Danielle, tortured, elaborated further. She wished she knew whether Annabel liked or disliked Seeley. She was always cagey about such things. “I don’t mean that you’re justifying—or, well, if I do, I don’t mean that you’re justifying without justification. It’s just that it seems to be a tactic of his.”
“What does?”
“Seeley—he seems to want to make you feel good. One, I mean. But actually, I always think he’s imposing his vision of the world while giving you the illusion that it’s your own. He wants to be Napoleon, you know.”
“My goodness. A bit late for that, isn’t it?”
“Not literally, of course. But that’s the effect. He wants people to follow him. He wants to revolutionize and control their whole lives.”
“Are we talking about the same Ludovic Seeley who is so good at helping in the kitchen and is going to marry my daughter?”
“I know it doesn’t seem possible. But he’s very frank about his ambitions. Ask him.”
Annabel laughed. “I think he wants to be the most successful magazine editor in New York. He wants to outdo Tina Brown at her height. That’s my impression.”
Danielle smiled again at the road, vaguely. There were a great many trees along the highway, and they were oppressively lush. The light was hazy. She marveled, faintly, at her own forthrightness with Annabel. Somehow, because of Murray perhaps, she felt she’d made a generational shift: as if she were Marina’s aunt, instead of her friend, or at the same time as she was her friend. Danielle felt she was a palimpsest, many people, all at once.
“Which is not to say that he has no substance,” Annabel went on. “Politically, obviously, he’s not in the same camp as Murray, or even me. But he has integrity.”
“Wow. I’m not sure that’s a word I would’ve used in connection with him.”
The trees loomed as they went by, trees upon trees, endless and verdant.
“If you feel strongly about him, maybe you should say something to Marina. She is planning to marry him, after all.”
“I know. It’s not very easy.”
“If I felt my best friend was about to make a fatal mistake—”
“Yes, but then you’d be guilty all over again of what Seeley accuses you of. You’d be imposing your point of view, without considering whether it was best for your friend.”
“So Seeley might, in your opinion, be a bad man but good for Marina?”
“I’m not saying that. I’m saying that he would say it was possible.” Danielle paused. “And I suppose I’m saying that right now I don’t think I’d say anything to her about my feelings. They’re just my feelings.”
“Feelings.” Annabel sniffed. “It’s all we’ve got to go on. And I’m feeling terrible about DeVaughn.”
“He would’ve been miserable in this car. And at your house. Miserable.”
“But we don’t know that.”
“Yes, we do.”
Annabel and Danielle arrived at Stockbridge just before noon. It had started to spit with rain, and the blown branches were showing their undersides, heralding a storm.
“Not quite what we envisaged,” Annabel said as they pulled up the drive. “No barbecue today.”
“No naps in the pergola, either,” said Danielle. It had always been one of her favorite things to do at the Thwaites’ country house, to retreat behind the screens with a book and a glass of lemonade and end up dozing on the bench, which was at once uncomfortable and oddly pleasing. “Maybe we’ll all play Monopoly.”
“Maybe,” said Annabel. “Something like that.”
At least Murray wasn’t around when they went in. Ludovic was reading in an armchair by the French doors to the garden, and Marina lay stretched along the sofa, eating half a bagel. She licked the melting butter off her fingers like a cat.
“You’re here!” She sprang up and, without relinquishing the bagel, threw her arms around Danielle’s neck. Danielle wondered if she was getting butter in her hair. “It’s such a relief. There’s practically a tornado watch on.”
“Your mother drove like the wind.”
“She never does. I was betting Ludo you wouldn’t make it before lunch.”
“Where’s your father?” Annabel was already on her way upstairs.
“Working, I think. In your room.”
It was easier not to witness the Thwaites’ reunion. Danielle wanted their affection—or lack of it—to be hidden from her.
“Got anything for lunch?” she said, half as a joke—on account of the bagel—aware, as she did so, that she and Ludovic had not directly greeted each other. As if he knew what she thought of him. Or as if he thought the same of her. She touched his shoulder, deliberately. “Hey, congratulations, you two.”
He all but clicked his heels. Hard to do, in flip-flops, she wanted to tell someone but couldn’t.
“September, eh? That’s very soon.”
“We’re going to hear that a lot. But the plan is to have a JP, have it here, so it shouldn’t be difficult to organize.”
They were discussing plans at the kitchen table when eventually Murray came downstairs. Danielle heard his tread, thought she could feel herself flush. When he came into the room, she stood and turned, but slowly, in order fully to compose herself, and found herself mysteriously, guttingly, faced with the Murray Thwaite she had known for years, the amiable, distracted patrician patriarch whose unfocused but benevolent gaze seemed to slide over her like water. He shook her hand and kissed her cheek, and in these gestures she sought some acknowledgment—an extra pressure, a single whispered word, even a lingering glance—but his mask was so complete, so impenetrable, that Danielle wondered, fleetingly, if their intimacy were merely her imagining; wondered, too, if he thought she was a whore—somehow there was an insult implicit in the very success of his play-acting—and whether this whole thing, in all its madness, were invention. He moved on, poured coffee, lit a cigarette, asked about arrangements for the afternoon (“If I’m not grilling, I need to know what my task is”), asked Ludovic what he’d been reading, planted a kiss effortlessly (enviably) upon the crown of his daughter’s head—in so doing he allowed his eyes, for an infinitesimal moment, to meet Danielle’s, a moment that, in optimism, she took to designate the kiss as hers although it fell upon Marina—and vanished back up the stairs.
Only after he had left
the room did Danielle breathe normally again; or so it seemed. She could smell his gin-and-tonic smell even after he had gone. She realized that she didn’t know what Marina was saying, and that she’d been holding her mug of iced tea to her mouth possibly for minutes, as if it were warm and as if it were winter, as if steaming her cheeks. The prospect of twenty-four hours seemed suddenly long indeed.
“What color flowers for the bouquet?” she asked. “Or what kind of flowers, anyway?”
“Well,” Marina said, “I’m torn between a bunch of late wildflowers—you know, Queen Anne’s lace and coneflowers and salvia, something like that that’s really from here, you know, that shows the beauty of this place; or else something more sophisticated, like, I don’t know, half a dozen calla lilies tied with a ribbon.”
As she said “lilies,” Seeley, yawning, nodded and pointed a finger.
“I’m not sure the groom is supposed to decide on the bouquet.”
“Oh, I’ll have my finger in every pie,” Seeley replied, with his languid smile. “As you know, it’s my little way.”
“Will you choose the dress, too?”
“If I could.” He grinned, took a cherry from the bowl in the center of the table, and placed it roundly in his mouth. “But Marina is a paragon of taste, and if she’s choosing the right bouquet, she’ll definitely get the dress right.” He spat the pit into his closed hand and magicked it away. “It’s everyone else’s attire that perturbs me.”
Danielle was hardly listening, and her smile felt stuck. It was the most peculiar sensation: Was this what going mad was like? She might have imagined his glance, not seen it; and failing that, he hadn’t in any way acknowledged her. She told herself she hadn’t expected him to, but how could she not have? Till now, she hadn’t fully accepted the force of her desire, and in this context it was not only shameful, as an adulterous affair must be, but just plain embarrassing, too. As if she were in love with her father. Marina’s father is who he was here, not the ironic, ursine courtier who visited her apartment alone and at odd hours, or who half-rose from his chair in his shambolic aristocratic way when she entered a bar or restaurant. Danielle was blushing—the memory of her cheek upon his chest, the texture of his earlobe, with its minute fuzz, the edible smell of him—and Seeley laughed.
“I’m not impugning your fashion sense,” he said. “Granted, you’re not at your best today, Danielle, but by and large you do quite well.”
“That’s big of you.”
“Although you should wear heels. You’re small.”
“Thanks a lot. That’s what my mother says, too.”
“Danny’s mother is a trip. Her name is Randy.”
“Randy by name, randy by nature.”
“If you can believe it, the joke’s been made before. But it couldn’t be further from the truth.”
“I met her,” said Seeley, ingesting another cherry. “At the Metropolitan. When I first met you.” He gazed, with affected longing, at Marina.
“Oh fateful day,” Danielle said. “It sure seems a long time ago.”
“Even though it isn’t,” Marina said. “It isn’t long ago at all.”
All afternoon, Danielle had the weird, sparkling sensation that something was about to happen. Because how could it not? So much emotion was pent up in her that surely it must—like telepathy, like ghosts—move furniture, people, events. A catalytic emotion. But this anticipation was hers alone: she could sense, albeit dimly, that for the rest of the household (except, of course, for Murray, conveniently sequestered, at work on a piece), this was truly a day of rest. Intermittently, Marina and Seeley twined themselves together like snakes. They read. Played Monopoly. Watched the rain. Engaged in desultory chat. Annabel came and went; made an apple pie; put on an anorak and plastic clogs and fetched lettuce from the garden. They all gathered in the great room (again with the exception of Murray; she dreaded seeing him among them, but couldn’t bear not to. How could he be in a room directly overhead, seconds away, and so utterly inaccessible?) to watch the biggest afternoon thunderstorm. The trees bent double. The screens in the pergola flashed. The house was so tightly sealed—“Like a ship,” Annabel said. “We had them build it like a ship”—that the storm seemed strangely silent, a dumbshow of writhing foliage and driving rain, punctuated only by the thunder, which seemed to boom through the floorboards and vibrate in their feet. It was simultaneously involving and irrelevant, Danielle thought, as the firmament flickered. Above all, explosive. Like her feelings for Murray. Perhaps this was her telepathic effect; in which case, while not auspicious, it was at least not wantonly destructive. As she thought this, a large branch at the bottom of the garden snapped and dropped, narrowly missing the pergola.
Murray emerged only later, like the brief flash of sunshine that slid between the afternoon clouds. He stood, cigarette in hand, on the slick stone patio, surveying the garden. “Looks like I’ll be called upon to grill after all,” he said. “So I’ll go get in another hour before I do. Joseph wants to run this piece about the ramifications of pulling out of Kyoto ahead of the talks in Bonn.”
“Your father is obsessed with the barbecue,” Seeley observed when he’d gone.
“It’s the only cooking he’s ever done, and he’s very proud of it.”
“I might go have a nap.” Danielle thought it was now or never.
“You’ve got at least an hour.” Marina gave her one of her smiles. “I’ll come and wake you up. We can have some girl time.”
“Talk about me, you mean,” said Seeley.
“You wish.” Marina kissed him on the cheek.
Danielle knew where he ought to be, in which room. It was at the opposite end of the hall from hers, around a corner. There was no other reason to go there but him. Inevitably, the door was shut. Danielle stood outside it, aware of the thick pile of the carpet beneath her feet, looking at the clouds blowing past through the hallway’s small, high window. She listened. She contemplated knocking. But if Annabel were there—she might just have heard voices behind the door, softly, although he could always be speaking to himself; she’d heard him do it—then what would she say? She couldn’t pretend to be lost, after all these years visiting. She could have a question, but didn’t. If he knew she were in her room for an hour he would come to her, wouldn’t he, even for a few moments? Just for an innocent word. Just for a fleeting embrace. Or not. Because it was possible he’d all but forgotten that she was there, or that her being there was significant. Men were good at this sort of thing, Randy always said. “Look at your father,” she used to say. “Compartmentalizing. It’s like cows having four stomachs. It seems like sophistication but actually it’s the sign of a more primitive organism.”
Danielle sighed (audibly, she hoped, even as she hoped not) and retreated to her little blue bedroom, with its toile de Jouy draperies and cushions, its turned-post single bed, the blue rag rug underfoot a little more frayed than the previous year, all of it suddenly a cozy celebration of her spinsterhood, her supposed celibacy. There was another unused bedroom, at the front of the house, a green room, with a double bed. But they’d never put her there. It had never seemed pointed until now.
When Marina woke Danielle she was drooling and had the quilt stitching imprinted on her cheek. The weather had passed and the late sun sent shafts of fierce light across the lawn. Danielle opened the window, and the air smelled washed, in the momentary way of high summer after a storm. Marina plumped herself at the end of the bed, fiddled with the bedposts, while Danielle fought her way back to alertness.
“Why don’t you like him?” Marina asked.
“Who?”
“Come off it, Danny.”
“I like him, I like him. I don’t know him, for God’s sakes.”
“You really wanted me to meet him—and now you wish you hadn’t arranged it.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I feel as though we’re drifting, you know?”
“You’re in love, silly. You forget: it’s consum
ing. And if we drift a little, well, isn’t that in the nature of things?”
“We’ve known each other more than ten years.”
“Look at Julius. Maybe it’s just that time of life. You know. People get married.”
“Not you, though.”
“Not yet. Who knows, maybe never.”
“But you’re not even trying.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? I didn’t realize you’d been trying.”
“You know what I’m saying. I worry that you’re too wrapped up in your career to let go.”
“You mean, I’m too uptight to fall in love?”
Marina, legs crossed, cocked her head prettily. She looked intolerably smug. Danielle couldn’t bear it. “What if I told you I am in love?”
Marina grabbed at Danielle’s ankles with both hands. “I knew it. ‘Beloved! Come to me, beloved!’ Who is he?”
“That’s absurd. That’s my mother I was expecting. No, the point about being in love—it’s inappropriate.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s—it’s—unrequited. That’s the word I want.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“No, don’t be. It’s also—I mean, it’s also inappropriate. So better that it’s unrequited.”
“Is he eighteen?” Marina’s voice took on a gleeful pitch. “Is he older? He’s not married, is he?”
Danielle shrugged. “I shouldn’t have said anything. It doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it does. You can always talk to me.” Marina, Danielle could tell, was itching to hear more, partly because she felt genuine anguish for her friend (if only she knew) and partly because she loved gossip.
“End of story. There is no story. Just don’t think I have no heart, or anything. It’s just that my affections are misdirected.”
“That sounds serious. I’ll get it out of you, you know.”
“Why don’t you find me someone suitable instead?”
“Because if you’re really smitten, that will never work, will it? It’s not Nicky, is it?”
The Emperor's Children Page 30