“It’s a cultural exposé.”
“It’s an insane rant against my father.”
“I don’t see it that way at all. That wasn’t my intention. Maybe the tone isn’t clear?” He thought a second. “I’ve never written for publication before. I thought you could help me edit it.”
“You didn’t really think I’d publish this, did you?”
“Somebody’s got to tell the truth. And people who do, usually get punished. It’s not the way to make friends, I know that.”
“What’s the truth here, Frederick? Except that you don’t like my father?”
“I actually sometimes like him a lot. He’s been really kind to me, like with the job. It’s a nuanced portrait.”
“Nuanced?”
“I thought you of all people would be able to see it.”
“Because I’m angry with him right now, you mean?”
“Because you see him.” Bootie sat hunched on the floor holding the phone between his shoulder and head, examining his toes while he spoke. He ran his fingers around them as if he were tracing them with a crayon on the floor. He felt that this helped him from getting too upset. “Has Ludovic read it?” he asked.
“He has, actually.” She made a sort of low whistling sound, an intake of breath through her teeth. “I’ll have you know you’ve caused one of our biggest disagreements ever.”
“You fought about me?”
“He has some idea that your article—I don’t even want to call it an article—is, not the truth, but a truth, your truth. That’s what he says. He sees validity in that. He figures The Monitor should run it, get people talking. It’s a start, he says.”
“And you don’t?”
“Frederick, hello? You’re attacking my father for a manuscript he’s working on that nobody has seen. I haven’t seen it. My mother hasn’t seen it. It’s private.”
“It was right there in his desk drawer. It still is.”
“You’re family. He trusted you. Don’t you get it? You’re just like Ludo. It’s not that you can’t ruin his life, it’s that you choose not to, because you care about him, about our family. Haven’t we been nice to you?”
“Extremely.” Bootie traced his feet faster and faster. “I don’t think it’s going to ruin his life.”
“He cares more about this book than about anything. It’s his life project, and you make fun of it.”
“He wasn’t so nice about your book, as I recall.”
“That’s got nothing to do with it.”
“You forgive him, if you do, because he believed he was helping you.”
“He didn’t publish his opinion in the paper. He took me out to lunch. And no offense, Bootie, but you’re a long way from being my father. He has a right to his opinions.”
“And on life’s fundamental questions, he has no opinions to speak of,” said Bootie, holding his feet as if to stop them running away. “That isn’t an opinion, it’s a fact.” He paused. “Nobody wanted that manuscript to be brilliant more than me,” he said, quietly. “He’s been my hero for my whole life.”
“At least he never needs to know,” she said. “We can put an end to this right now.”
“Oh no,” Bootie said. “He has his own copy.”
“He what?”
“I gave him a copy. I left it with him yesterday afternoon when I was going home. Today he told me he’d try to get to it tonight.” In the silence that followed, Bootie imagined that Marina was trying, like something out of Tom & Jerry or Road Runner, to figure out how she could steal the folder back without Murray ever reading it. “He knows it’s for you,” he said. “He knows other people have it.”
“Does he know what it’s about?”
“I didn’t mention, no.”
Murray Thwaite didn’t call Bootie at Julius’s that evening, although Bootie sat up until two in the morning just in case. He didn’t want to be caught napping. Bootie assumed this was because Murray hadn’t had a chance to read it, or didn’t feel like it, in any event. The way he’d skated over Marina’s book for so long. But when Bootie arrived shortly after nine, swaggering as cheerily as he was able, Murray met him in the hallway and asked him to come into his office and sit down. By which Bootie knew he had been read.
Murray appeared grave, but eminently avuncular: reassuringly rumpled, he leaned back, crossed his long legs, lit a cigarette, fiddled for a while with a bit of silver paper from the cigarette box, tossed it in the wastepaper basket, missed. Bootie didn’t realize at first that the glass from which Murray intermittently sipped was filled, copiously, with scotch. Bootie was aware of his own physical disadvantage: of his glasses slipping down his nose, of his broad thighs sticking out awkwardly, of his inability to sit comfortably on the small sofa among piles of papers. At least he could rest his feet firmly on the floor; but they were shod in sneakers, and could not console him.
“You are a very young man,” Murray said. “Which is a fine thing. Ambitious, serious, independent.”
Bootie kept his face expressionless, blinked behind his glasses.
“You don’t think much of me. That’s your job, your generation’s job, but as my nephew, closest thing I’ve got to a son, it’s specifically yours, too.” He smoked, coughed slightly. He was drawing this out on purpose, torturing Bootie. “In time, you’ll do your great things,” he said; and Bootie thought that he had been right to reassure his mother: it would be fine. “Or else you won’t,” Murray went on. Then he stopped and stubbed out his cigarette and leaned forward so his elbows were on his knees and he turned his eyes on Bootie and his look was mean, a mean glimmer in the puff and sag of his older man’s face, beneath the impressive shelf of his eyebrows. “But where the fuck do you get off, you little nullity, you common little piece of shit, snooping around in my papers and crapping all over them? What has been going on here all this time, exactly? Hmm?” He leaned forward. “Hmm? Hmm?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“Quite clearly nothing. Nothing in the line of real work. I’ve paid you a king’s ransom, my wife opened our house to you, my daughter took you under her wing and this is how you repay us?”
“No, sir.”
“What the hell does that mean? And don’t fucking call me sir.”
“I’m very grateful. What you’ve done for me—I can’t—”
“Oh, I see. It’s just that you had to go through my private papers and publicly voice your highly authoritative opinion to the fucking world? Do you know what you are? You’re a little shit, a nothing, you have the intellect of a moth. You’re a speck of filth from Watertown, New York, which is itself a speck of filth. You’re a nothing. And do you know how I know? Because I was just like you, Christ, I was you, except I wasn’t fat. But I knew my place, I knew what I had to earn, I buckled down and kept my mouth shut and I listened and I learned and I worked, you little asshole, I worked until I’d made something of myself.” He paused, drank a thick gulp. “And people paid attention to me not because I was some trumped-up little shit-head, not because I was related to so-and-so or kissed the ass of this one or that one. They paid attention because I’d done my homework and I knew my stuff. Facts, not opinions. You’re not entitled to have opinions until you know the facts.”
“With all due respect, sir—”
“Respect? That would be precisely what you’re lacking, I believe.”
“Please, I just want to say that my opinions were formed on the basis of facts.”
“Facts?”
“Your manuscript—How to Live—it’s a fact.”
Murray looked stunned, for only a moment. He sat up, and leaned forward again. His hands, to Bootie, loomed enormous. “A fact? A fact? The earliest notes toward a long-term project, scattered scratchings that may never see the light of day, that will certainly never, in their current form, see the light of day? This, you call a fact? And if I rummaged through the insalubrious sea of detritus you cart around with you and turned up your diary, I suppose that would constitute a public document?”
/>
“A book manuscript exists. If you died tomorrow, someone would publish it.”
“I would see to it that they couldn’t. But that’s beside the point.”
“To your readers, the manuscript is very precious. Even more precious because it’s not published. I’m just telling people what it is.”
“No, young man. You’re shitting on me from a great height. Which, you don’t seem to understand, I can immediately put a stop to. A wave of my hand, and you simply cease to exist.”
“So I’m fired?”
“It means simply this: that as far as I’m concerned, and, with me, the thinking portion of this city, and by extension, of this nation, you will simply cease to exist.”
“What will you tell my mother?”
“What will you tell your mother?”
Bootie, numbed, nodded slowly, stood up to leave. He didn’t have anything to gather together but made a semblance of looking, playing for time. He hadn’t imagined that things would turn out this way. Then again, he simply hadn’t imagined. He had been very certain, certain at least that Marina would want to publish his article. He had worked so hard to make it true. The rest, he’d thought, would fall into place, as long as he conducted himself honorably. Before he got to the door, he said, “You know that Ludovic Seeley isn’t on your side, don’t you? You know that he’d like to publish it?”
“Is that what he said?”
“Not directly. But I have it on good authority.”
“Rubbish.”
But Bootie thought that Murray looked disconcerted, which, childishly, pleased him. He’d been made to feel like a scrabbling animal. It made him want to bite. “Just one last question, sir? Before I go?”
“What?” Murray, standing, menaced. He was lighting another cigarette, and wielded the match as if he wanted to set Bootie’s clothes, or his hair, alight.
“Didn’t you leave it there for me?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I have to say I thought I was only doing what you wanted me to. Following instructions, almost. It’s just that I responded differently to your manuscript than you’d hoped.”
Beneath his great brows, Murray said nothing, blew smoke through his nose like a dragon. Bootie almost laughed, partly from nerves, partly because the situation struck him as funny, absurd. He was waiting for Murray to break into a grin, clap him on the shoulder and say something like “Enough of this silliness. Now let’s get back to what matters, okay?” It would irritate Bootie a little (nobody likes their efforts to be dismissed), but would pleasingly restore order. In order to help this scenario unfold, Bootie offered—although it felt silly even as he spoke—“You’ve always been my hero, you know. I said so in the piece.”
Murray emitted a snort that brought further trails of smoke from his nostrils. “I think you’d better get out,” he said, and moved toward Bootie, forcing Bootie to retreat backward into the hall. “Right now.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
The Cuckoo in the Nest
Marina said that she’d cried when she read it, had raged at Bootie when he called, but felt sorry for him, too, because he really didn’t know what he was doing. Marina also said that she and Seeley had had their worst-ever argument—she may have even said “first real argument”—and it was clear that the discord still rankled: the possibility lingered that the piece might yet appear. Seeley was, after all, The Monitor’s editor; he was, in this matter, Marina’s boss. Marina said, too, that the most uncomfortable part about it was her own schadenfreude: “Daddy did this to me, you know, just a week ago, and now it’s officially forgotten and all lovey-dovey, and I’m just supposed to suck it up. But Bootie’s given him a dose of his own medicine, hasn’t he? He’s essentially telling Daddy not to publish this book. His secret book.”
“I guess it isn’t brunch recipes after all,” Danielle had said. Neither Murray nor Marina would show her Bootie’s article.
“And another thing,” Marina went on. “Another thing I keep thinking is that Bootie—Frederick—is weird and sometimes even creepy—the way he looks at me, if you could see—but he also isn’t stupid, you know? He actually seems pretty smart, even though his article’s a bit confusing. It’s confusing because it’s like he was writing in code, for people who already know the manuscript and know my dad, and of course nobody has actually seen it, not even me. Bootie, you know, stole it from Daddy’s desk. But my point is that I found myself wondering whether his criticisms are legitimate, and maybe actually in this book the great Murray Thwaite really does reveal himself to be, I don’t know, less thoughtful, or less interestingly thoughtful—I mean, he suggests he’s even a little bit shallow. And what if he’s right?”
“Don’t you think someone might have noticed it before now?”
“Ludo thinks Daddy is shallow, as a pundit, and narrow, too. Like he says, it doesn’t interfere with his affection for him, it’s not about the man but his work.”
“And Ludo’s some disinterested authority?”
“Ludo would love to admire Daddy’s work. He says he admires the older stuff, before Daddy got lazy.”
“Your father isn’t lazy.”
“Don’t you think I know him better than you do?”
“All I know, M, is that Ludo wanted to meet you because you were Murray’s daughter. And he went on and on about despising Murray before that.”
“What’s your point?”
“No point. But I think you have to take what he says with a grain or two of salt. I don’t know what his motives are, but they’re not straightforward.”
“This is my husband-to-be you’re talking about.”
“I’m sorry, Marina.”
“You’ve been in love with him since you first met him in Sydney, and you’ll do anything to try to ruin it for me.”
“That’s preposterous.”
And then Marina had cried, but at least she hadn’t hung up, and Danielle had finally persuaded her that they should talk about things face to face, and they had met at Union Square and walked about under the trees, back and forth, back and forth for well over an hour, eventually arm in arm, while Danielle listened to Marina speak about how difficult it was to be her father’s daughter, and how wearing it was when people were always envious of you, in fact there was nothing to be done about it but you couldn’t help but feel resentful because your problems were genuine but nobody wanted to believe in them. Marina came back to the matter, ultimately unexplored over the telephone, of whether Bootie might actually be right; and Danielle could tell that Seeley’s sway had all but turned her.
“Think about it: there’s nothing worse than pretension, and false pretension is the bottom of the barrel. Daddy despises my book because he thinks its goals are too frivolous, somehow not fitting for his child. Meaning, by the way, that it’s not about me but about him. Which is another story. He’s like the monster that ate Manhattan, he thinks it’s all, always, all about him.” She sniffed. “But my point is that isn’t it worse to be doing something pretentious and bad, rather than unpretentious and totally decent? I don’t think I’m Flaubert, here, or, I don’t know, Dr. Spock or Gloria Steinem or whatever, making groundbreaking pronouncements. But he does. All this time, if we believe Bootie, Daddy’s been holed up reinventing the wheel. Live decently. Don’t lose your temper. Embrace Beauty and Truth. Above all, Truth. Blah blah blah. Please. He’s offering up tired maxims as if they were original gems. Just because he imagines he’s a thinker doesn’t mean he can suddenly turn into one.”
Danielle made only a vague noncommittal noise at this juncture.
“Ludo believes in debunking. He always says—and he’s so right—that it’s a nobler thing to do to write a good book about, say, cheese—a useful, plain-speaking guide to cheese—than another crappy novel. Or worse, than some pompous tome of pseudo-philosophy.” Marina had stopped circling the park to deliver this, and fluttered her arms in the air. A homeless woman lying on a nearby bench, alarmed by the outburst, mut
tered obscenities.
“So what are you saying?”
“I don’t know.” Marina started to walk again. “I’m saying that nobody ever does to Daddy what Bootie’s just done. Nobody reminds him that he’s mortal. He gets away with murder. And so it has to be a good thing. That’s what I’m saying, I think.” She stopped again, momentarily. “Which doesn’t mean I think the article should be published. I’m my father’s daughter, for God’s sake. It isn’t even a very good article. But I’m glad Daddy had to read it. Glad for Daddy, in the long run. Not glad for Bootie.”
“No. What happened to him?” In truth, Danielle didn’t need to ask what had happened to Bootie. In a differently slanted account of events, Murray had, with a type of laughter that communicated his discomfort, told Danielle about kicking the boy out.
“Filthy manners,” he’d said. “That’s what it comes down to. I don’t know what happened up in Watertown, but not socialization as civilized people understand it. The kid’s a creep. He stayed with us for ages. Ate our food. We took him around. Marina found him a place to live. I fucking hired him, because he was my nephew. And when Annabel had to come back to town around the Fourth, she found him holed up in our house, and everything turned upside down. That’s what she said. We should’ve known. The cuckoo in the nest. We just laughed about it. And then he felt free to shit on us, I mean, really shit on us. Pathetic little fucker.” Murray had been physically restless in the recounting, huge in Danielle’s studio, the same way Marina was restless out of doors. Both paced.
“I’m so sorry,” Danielle had said.
“Why? Why would you be sorry? I’m sorry to learn that my own flesh and blood is a sociopath. Or a psychopath. Or maybe it’s plain old Asperger’s, what do I know? But he’s a cursed little shit, either way.”
“He was trying to get close to you, don’t you think?”
“Is that how you win friends and influence people? Pardon me for my poor response. I guess I went to the wrong schools.”
“No,” Danielle said. “You know perfectly well that he did.”
The Emperor's Children Page 34