The Emperor's Children

by Claire Messud

  One morning, after a night of abortive and awkward attempts at intimacy, in which David had all but rebuffed him, Julius had to bully his lover to get dressed. David lay sprawled on his belly, crucified on the futon naked, in what amounted to the middle of the room. Julius, wanting to get dressed and organized—he’d decided to take his laptop to a café to work, because he wanted to get the piece for Marina finished (okay, the differing ethoses of gay club generations was hardly Proust; but it would pay the bills) as quickly as possible—had to step around and over his boyfriend’s protruding limbs at least half a dozen times. Finally, David snarled, “Leave me the fuck alone, okay?”

  “I’m trying to leave you alone, although why you want to be left alone in this apartment you hate so much is beyond me.”

  David grunted.

  “You could get up and come out for breakfast. We can sit on the terrace at the Time Café. Egg white omelet? Chai latte?”

  “I said fuck off.”

  Julius put his hands on his hips. “If you don’t sit up and look at me right now, I’ll walk, you know. I’ll walk.”

  And David sat, bleary, pale, his eyes webbed with misery and sleep.

  “Now stand,” Julius said.

  David didn’t move.

  “You’re coming to breakfast. Stand up.”

  “Fuck off,” David said again, but he stood, and, without washing, dressed, and, a mass of sweat and glower, followed Julius out the door. He didn’t speak and he didn’t come to breakfast; but instead brusquely detached himself and went off to lift weights. He maintained that the very shower in Pitt Street was infested with cockroaches and too filthy to use, and insisted upon washing at the gym. To which he retreated obsessively in the week after Labor Day, for three, sometimes four, hours in a day. As if he had appointments. As if he were CEO of the cross-trainer, a Nautilus Nero. By Friday afternoon, Julius snapped: “Do you think you’re going to find a job there? Maybe you see yourself as a future personal trainer?” In the wake of which, remorseful, he then suggested supper at their restaurant.

  “Paid for by you, I suppose, Lady Muck?” David said.

  “I’m almost done with this thing for Marina, and I’ve got a column for the Voice to do, and probably a piece for Slate, too. I’m just waiting to hear. So yes, paid for by me, actually. We need a treat.” It had been only a week since Stockbridge, but they did. He did. “And if you’re a very good boy, I’ll take you out for a drink afterward as well.”

  And if only they had come home directly from supper, everything would have been fine. Okay, not fine, but survivable. The restaurant—their restaurant, to which, until a month before, they’d gone each week—welcomed them with open arms: the funny, bow-legged maître d’ scurried over to them with a grin on his toadlike face; and Inge, their waitress, the long, horsy girl from Berlin with the nose ring and the fabulous Marlene Dietrich voice, hissed at them gloriously, “Vere have you been, you guys? Drinks on ze house for you, yes? To say velcome back?”

  David delicately implied that they’d been traveling for the month of August, to Europe, no less, which made Inge roll her eyes dramatically and hiss, “Sso nice. So very nice.”

  They ate salad—frisée with lardons—and they ate steak frites, which was what David always ordered; and they drank two scotches apiece and two bottles of expensive Barolo, and the restaurant, intime as it was, with the tables clustered together, buzzed and thrummed around them (no music, though: it was one of the reasons David was so fond of it, that there was no music, that and its mittel-Europa, mid-century aura), and by the time Julius signed on his credit card for the—to him—astronomical sum, they were both floating in good humor, even comedy, and Julius was thinking “This, this is why we’re together, I knew it. For this.”

  Which was why he suggested the bar on First Avenue, a fairly sedate gay bar with granite tables and leather banquettes, rendered lurid only by its crimson lighting, so that everyone in it appeared bathed in blood, a host of extras from some Stephen King movie. And that wasn’t a problem, that place was just fine, they ran into a friend of David’s, Jan, a Nordic guy, a sometime model with a silly accent—at the time, rather blurry though things already were, Julius had thought they’d have a round of silly accents when they got home, a grand, pre-bed diversion to blot out their surroundings—and it was Jan, eventually, near one, who proposed the dive on Avenue C, rougher but, he said, more fun, too, than this bland if ever noisier spot. The dive was a sort of club, with a bouncer at the metal door and the thrill of going downstairs, as if into a bunker. It was hot and close and teeming with dancing men, some in states of near undress, perfect torsos and biceps like new fruit, along with plenty of others, less lovely, who kept their shirts on. Jan found them a table; he hailed another friend of his, a tiny man with a close-cropped black beard, a cross between a munchkin and a devil, who looked as though the Subterra had spawned him but whose voice emerged as high and fluting as a boy’s. He sported a leather collar above his T-shirt, and Julius longed to tell him that it just looked silly: you’re the size of someone’s pet, he wanted to say, and planned to say to David afterward: don’t insist upon it. They drank, and danced, and in the bathroom did some coke, in turns—it was either Jan’s, or the little guy’s, he couldn’t be sure, and maybe they both had some, and in the end what did it matter as long as it was there? And the music was very loud, insistent, persistent, sexy in its way, a thrumming and thudding that reverberated through you, and at some point, he didn’t know when, Julius thought that this was how his head would feel in the morning; and then, too, a little later, in a flash of clarity, like the clearing in a thicket into which the sun, immense and crystalline, suddenly permeated, he realized, looking across at David, sweaty in the blue gloom, that they were, as a couple, doomed. The thought flitted off as fast as it had come to him, something at once known and unknown, inadmissible, and only later would he remember thinking it, and wonder whether the thought had permitted, or caused, what came after.

  He’d gone up to the bar to order another round of drinks when he saw the man, he never knew his name, a slender but muscled dark-eyed man, perhaps ten years older, his hair all but shaven, his lips as full and dark as if they’d been painted on. He looked Mediterranean, Greek maybe, or Italian, and when he smiled, slightly, Julius could see that one of his front teeth was crooked, and this, the protruding tip of his tooth, suddenly made him the most alluring vision possible. While he waited for the drinks, Julius glanced again, and then again, and each time was met with the smile, the flash of tooth, the dark eyes heavily lashed, like a Gypsy’s or a pirate’s.

  From there to their tryst in the lavatory stall was a matter of perhaps a quarter of an hour: in memory, the indications, the unspoken assignation, conveyed through the throng and then with David, Jan, and the tiny Satan imperturbable around him, were difficult to recapture. It seemed somehow miraculous, to flirt so outrageously in plain sight and apparently unnoticed by the others, by David in particular; but the swill of drink, the music, the heat had perhaps numbed him—he, Julius—more than he realized; and when he excused himself to go pee, although unaware of it, he wasn’t unmonitored.

  Even afterward, he would know it to have been one of the most exciting sexual adventures of his life: the brazenness of it, the danger, the exoticism. His lover at the table on the other side of the wall, barely thirty feet away, the slightly dank and sordid bathroom—unwindowed, purple concrete, metal stalls like some hideous junior high school—made it better, not worse. It pressed the urgency of their meeting. They were quick about it, grasping, opening, panting, both of them slightly off their heads, the beautiful man surprisingly strong and moaning at the prospect of him, like a salivating animal, and Julius was so caught up in it that at first he didn’t realize that David was in the room, in the stall, was dragging them both by their skin, viciously, out into the bathroom, their trousers flapping open, dicks out, and he was pummeling at Julius, and the other man scrabbled to get his clothes right again, and he had
blood on his chin, from a split lip, it was running down his chin, David had cut him, had punched him, and was still roaring, bellowing like an elephant, and Julius was trying to get to the door and David wouldn’t let go, he was clawing him and scratching his arms, his chest, then he’d grabbed—it was his hair, Julius’s hair, and there was a searing pain, at once specific and across the whole side of his head, and a sound, a terrible sound, almost a crunching sound, and then wetness at his scalp, it was blood, was it, seeping, because David had pulled out a hank of his hair by the roots, and Julius put up his hand to try—to try to stanch the pain, if not the blood, if it was blood at his scalp—he couldn’t tell if there was blood or just the sensation of it, and that was when he realized the walls were concrete and purple, eggplant purple, because David slammed him up against one and there was a pipe, a plumbing pipe against the small of his back, hurting him, bruising his kidneys, and the purple wall next to his eye, and his damaged head, its sticky hairless patch against the cold stone, and he realized the other man, the beautiful man, was gone, there was nobody else in the bathroom—how could that be?—and still the elephantine bellowing, like no human sound, but it was David, it was words—“You fucker! You fucker! You fucker!”—and still tearing at him and slamming him against the wall, the pain in his kidneys bursting to the fore, worse than his scalp, though maybe not, all of him in agony, suffering, and then David, like an animal, lunged, his mouth wide, and he bit. He bit Julius’s cheek, and there was the sound of it, of the skin breaking, of the teeth in his flesh, it wasn’t fast as you’d imagine it would be, it was oddly, horribly, painfully slow, appallingly slow, as if he were prey in the jungle, a condemned meal, destined to be eaten alive.

  David pulled back, spat, breathed. “You fucker,” he rasped again, and Julius saw his chance, saw it wasn’t going to end, and as hard and fast as he could he kneed David in the balls and kicked at him as he fell and then staggered, bleeding, bleeding, crying, too, though he was hardly aware of it, snot and tears running down his face and into his mouth, staggering through the heat and the noise and the bodies and up the stairs, onto the street.

  He made his way past the loiterers; he made his way out of the light; and like an insect, shuttled home in the shadows with his trembling fingers—wet, red, like the light in the bar so long ago—to his ruined cheek.

  It wasn’t over then, although he’d thought it would be. He looked at himself in the mirror, the gouged flesh still bleeding, his left eye black and swollen, the hairless patch at his temple suppurating, throbbing; and he barely recognized his face. Othello, he kept thinking: the rage had been there, as he’d always suspected, and here it was, on him and in him, he was lucky to be walking, lucky to be home, the whole world upside down, and bleeding. How, he wondered, could he go on from here? And as he stood, transfixed by his distorted image (how could this be he, Julius? How had things come to such a pass?), he heard a car pull up outside, saw the blue and red lights reflected against his wall, and was called to the door by an officer of the law. David, whose face gleamed pale with demented triumph, lurked in the background, taunting him.

  “This young man claims you’re in possession of his belongings—”

  “I don’t see—”

  “Stand back, sir, please stand back and let us in.”

  “But I don’t see—”

  “Are there items belonging to this man in your apartment?”

  “Of course there are—he’s—he lives here.”

  “His claim, sir, is that he needs protection in order to remove the belongings safely, sir.”

  “That’s ridiculous. I’m not—”

  “He claims you assaulted him, sir.”

  “I assaulted him?”

  “If you could step back, sir, I’m just going to stand here while this gentleman picks up his things, sir. He says he doesn’t want to press charges but he’s concerned for his safety, sir.”

  David was grinning.

  “His safety? His safety?”

  “We won’t be long here, sir. Please keep calm.”

  And Julius stood with his back pressed to the open door and the fleshy cop’s clanking chest not six feet away, his thick, freckled hand playing upon his holster, while David winnowed methodically among the piles of clothes and papers, tidily packed his bag, all the while smiling, utterly silent. It may have taken twenty minutes; it seemed forever, and the throbbing of Julius’s head grew to a roar, a roar that sounded like David’s earlier bellowing, the different sites of agony seeping and melding into one another, into one universal and intolerable roar. He thought he might be sick, but he wasn’t; he waited and watched David’s peculiar calm, and was certain, again, that there was triumph in that calm—the cat that ate the canary, the cream, the whole kit and kaboodle, the whole kitten kaboodle, maybe. Julius could see it. Where he didn’t hurt, he tingled, the adrenaline impulse to flight, so that even though he stood unmoving—and the cop, except for his deep, inflating breaths that made his badges rise and fall, stood also unmoving—he felt as though everything, each last cell and particle, were in orbit.

  At the end, when they left, David, still smiling, creepily, though not at Julius, and the cop without having cracked the bland cement of his tiny, tight features, Julius started to shiver, a febrile shimmy, and barely heard the policeman say “Good night, sir. Thank you for your cooperation, sir. I’d get to an emergency room, sir, if I was you, with that gash.”

  “He bit me,” Julius whispered, but the cop didn’t turn around, and nor did David, and as Julius watched the dark curls at his long nape disappear in the stairwell, he felt a hot wash of anger and sorrow and, still, of desire, and he knew that he would never see David Cohen again.

  Back in the apartment, pale dawn fingered the room’s paltry objects, the length of the wall, and far away Julius detected the sounds of the city, Saturday morning breaking. He washed, and dressed, gingerly, suffering, and set out to walk to the emergency room at St. Vincent’s, a fair trek away, but the nearest one he knew.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  Married

  Maybe it would feel different to be married after the hubbub of the launch, she told Danielle. But for right now, on the Sunday evening a week after the wedding, it just felt as though she were married not to a man but to The Monitor; or rather, that he was married to The Monitor and she was not married at all, because it was after nine p.m. and she had packed in hours ago—the issue in all its glory wouldn’t be sent to the printer until Tuesday night and her part was done, for this first time at least, and the pieces for her section in the second issue edited and ready to go, and only Ludo still had tweaking and fussing and frankly obsessing to do, because the issue was finished, even for him, there was nothing to be done, it was Sunday night for God’s sake and the final checks could be made on Monday, or even Tuesday, even till late Tuesday night if need be. This was just his mania, his control-freakishness; she’d known him all along for a perfectionist. She admired his high standards. She’d fallen in love with them, after all. But to be honest, he’d snapped harshly at her when she announced she was going to go home, even brutishly, when she suggested he could leave with her—his tone had been different, a new tone, exasperated, that she’d not heard before, or not heard directed at her before, that was for sure, and now she was wondering was this what it meant to be married?—and on the walk back to the apartment, she’d felt like crying, really, just weeping, because in any normal relationship they’d be on their honeymoon now, on a beach in Thailand, say, instead of spending every waking minute, day and night, in that stupid, canned-air office with its beige wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling windows and his horrible snippy prim secretary Lizbeth, who still managed to look at Marina as though she were an Ebola carrier, even though she was now frankly and legitimately Mrs. Seeley (though of course actually she was keeping her own name—nothing political but Thwaite was just a better name than Seeley, don’t you think?).

  “Oh, Danielle,” she said, “is it going to be like this
every damn Sunday? Have I made a terrible mistake, what have I done?”

  And Danielle said of course not, that they’d known all along that this week would be bedlam, how could you blame him for wanting it all perfect, it was the moment, this Thursday, would be the moment he’d been working toward all year; and it wasn’t just the magazine launch, it was his own American launch, you know, our chef is very famous in London. Which she then had to explain because Marina didn’t remember the reference; but the point was that he could be Jesus Christ in Sydney, yet even in the era of the Global Village he was nothing in New York, not until he’d worked his miracles in Manhattan, which was as far as most New Yorkers ever cared to look.

  “He’s got to dazzle them this time, or he’s missed his chance,” she said. “You understand.”

  Marina sighed. “Of course I understand, in principle. And you know, Mom said to be sure not to idealize things, to be realistic. But a week, you know? It’s only been a week.”

  “Just wait till you’ve got a copy in your hands, not a dummy issue but the real thing.”

  “Yeah. Can’t wait.” Marina turned on the television with the sound off. “What are you doing, anyway?” she asked, wishing almost at once that she hadn’t. Poor Danielle couldn’t expect anyone to come home.