Not for the first time, Paul wondered if he might hate Julian a little. He wanted Julian to kiss him again; it wasn’t at all dissimilar from wanting to bite his mouth until he drew blood.
“Why am I here, Julian?”
At first he thought Julian was ignoring the question. He pushed Paul onto his back and let his fingertips graze the hollow of his throat. Paul hated himself for falling for it, for surrendering control instantly and without question.
“I’ve missed you,” said Julian, as if it were an afterthought. “And you’re going to help me escape.”
5.
“I can’t believe you never had to learn an instrument. What kind of a nice Jewish boy are you?”
“Not a particularly nice one, for a start,” Paul answered, and Julian pretended not to smile. “So I never had the patience.”
“I don’t either,” said Julian. “That’s why I’m not any good.”
There was an upright Steinway in the living room, varnish clouded with age. Julian was a splinter of nervous energy. He cycled through the first few bars of a Rachmaninoff concerto, pretending to ignore the party. But every few moments he looked through the glass doors that opened onto the deck, trying—thus far in vain—to catch sight of his parents alone.
They were busy with their guests, the “few close friends” carefully selected so that the Frommes could take credit for introducing important people to one another. Julian had told Paul that his mother didn’t drink, but that she led all her guests to believe she did. She swanned through the crowd with her club soda and lime, laughing as if her lungs were loosened by alcohol. She kissed the wives on each cheek to win them over with her Continental charm, and whenever a guest’s glass looked too empty she beckoned an attendant to come by with a drink tray. The guests hardly needed encouragement, but they accepted it with relish; these people drank so relentlessly that Paul couldn’t fathom how none of them were sick.
“You sound fine to me,” Paul said, though he could see what Julian meant. For all its precision, there was something too-smooth and bloodless in Julian’s playing that belied the sweeping bombast of the notes.
“That’s all I ever am is ‘fine,’” said Julian, pretending that this didn’t disappoint him. “It’s how I am with any art, and especially how I was with chess. I excel at theory and memorizing techniques, but in the execution there’s always something lacking—”
“I wish you’d listen to me for a minute,” Julian’s older brother cut in. He glanced toward Paul, impatient and almost pleading. “Are you sure you’re not drinking, Julian? Maybe your friend wouldn’t mind getting you something—”
“He’s not the help, Henry,” said Julian acidly, and began the concerto again from the top.
Henry had arrived with a few friends of his own, but after a conference with his mother he quickly abandoned them. He was angling to get Julian on his own, and seemed to have decided that the way to do this was to annoy him into submission. He followed Julian and Paul from room to room, cutting into their conversations no matter how vehemently they ignored him.
He leaned now with his arm draped over the top of the piano, holding a half-finished Southside with his fingertips. He’d been nursing it for so long that all the ice had dissolved. Henry didn’t look much like Julian at all—he was tall and athletically lean, with an angular look that was at once more classically handsome and far less interesting. But their voices were eerily similar in timbre and cadence, enough that if Paul wasn’t looking, he almost couldn’t tell which one was speaking.
“Julian.” The cascade of crashing chords had summoned Julian’s mother. She stood in the doorway with one hand on the hip of her pleated skirt. Her false laugh rang like a bell. “Darling, surely you can play something less Slavonic and grim!”
She lingered, watching them. Paul saw himself through her eyes, glaringly out of place in the new corduroy suit his grandmother had sewn for him. Under her gaze Paul became acutely aware of how little space there was between him and Julian as they sat elbow-to-elbow on the piano bench. Their bodies were supposed to abhor each other; they were supposed to be like Henry’s friends, who only touched when they punched each other’s shoulders.
When their mother left, Henry fixed Julian with a pointed, sanctimonious look. “Well, she’s right,” he said when Julian glared at him. “It’s hardly appropriate.”
“If you’re so sure what’s appropriate, would you like to take over?” said Julian with a vicious smile. “Or would you rather attend to your own guests?”
Henry grimaced around a mouthful of his tepid drink.
“I’d like to talk to you, quite frankly, and I think you know damn well—listen, Paul,” he added suddenly. Paul thought he could see a trace of sympathy in his eyes, which made him feel a little sick. “It is Paul, isn’t it?—I hate to be inhospitable, I really do, and it’s nothing personal against you, but the circumstances are so irregular that—”
Paul tried to believe he was taking pity on Henry. It was less odious than admitting to himself that he would writhe out of his skin if his hip touched Julian’s for another moment. The heat was suddenly stifling, the coffered ceilings dizzyingly high. It seemed impossible that such a tastefully empty place could be so suffocating, far more than his own cluttered little home had ever been—this house was a shadowbox, blank-walled and airtight, never meant for living things.
“It’s all right,” Paul said over Julian’s protest. He buttoned his blazer as he stood, trying to conceal his body a little more. “He won’t ever let you alone otherwise.”
Julian threw a bitter look toward the crowd milling on the deck, but his mother was engaged again with her guests; his father, whom Paul had only seen from a distance, was completely out of sight.
“We’ve got to talk to my parents,” said Julian. “As soon as we get a chance to corner them.”
Paul could never replace an expression, only flatten it to blankness. It would be clear to both of them how much dread he was trying to hide.
“Talking to them” was as far as the plan went, and Paul hadn’t dared tell Julian that it didn’t sound like much. He decided he just didn’t understand it, for the same reason he didn’t immediately understand Julian’s chess strategies until they were already in motion. Paul didn’t know Julian’s parents, after all. Julian was going to ask for an early return to Pittsburgh, so he could shop for a few items for his new dormitory and check out some presemester reading at the library—an excuse they could give their friends, if they liked, because that was a favorable alternative to trying to say no and having him pick a fight in public. Paul was supposedly there as reinforcement, a latent threat of resistance in case they tried to physically prevent Julian from leaving.
“This place is a prison,” Julian had said. It was the only explanation he would give, no matter how urgently Paul pressed him. “I can’t stand another minute here. It doesn’t matter why.”
Paul left Julian and Henry behind, to whisper in their identical voices about details Paul wasn’t allowed to know. He couldn’t breathe with their secrets pressing at his back. He retreated into the garden, toward an imaginary solitude on the far side of the crowd—a secluded corner where he could quietly watch for moths. The party spilled down from the deck and out over the lawn, beneath white string lights that crisscrossed between the trellises like a ceiling of stars. Paul had planned for the other guests to ignore him—he survived parties full of strangers by being invisible, and he excelled at it. But these strangers were unaccustomed to letting anything go unseen. The whole point was to be visible to each other, to be recognized and to recognize. When he tried to sidle past them, they paused midsentence and turned to watch him. He couldn’t have been more conspicuous, and they wanted him to know it.
No one approached him, of course; Paul had the sense that even if Julian had been there to introduce him, they would still have been reluctant to address him directly. He passed a cluster of Henry’s Dartmouth friends, vile smirking specimens of Angl
o-Saxon boyhood who glanced between Paul’s glasses and thin wrists as if they were only a few years too old to try and snap them. The adults were no better—behind the glaze of polite smiles, the sentiment was the same.
The hors d’oeuvres table was set up in the gazebo—lit gold by the white lights that snaked up the support posts, and overflowing with inscrutable things that Paul couldn’t eat. Everything seemed to be wrapped in prosciutto or needlessly entangled with a shrimp; even the salmon-and-cucumber bites, which Julian claimed would be safe, had been topped at the last minute with a spiteful chip of bacon.
Paul could feel the other guests watching him from the corners of their eyes, as if they thought he might be contagious. It was all he could do not to put his hands on everything—to contaminate the hateful food so thoroughly that the other guests would be repulsed. Instead he just picked up a plain roll, careful not to touch the others, and pulled it in half to see if there was anything offensive inside.
“That can’t be all you’re having.”
Paul started as if something had stung him, and he hated himself for it. It took him a moment to recognize the man as Julian’s father. Paul only knew him by his beige summer blazer, which Julian had pointed out to him at the far end of the crowd. He was deep into his fifties, at least a decade older than his wife, clean-cut and nondescript. His dark hair was silver at the temples and stranded throughout with gray; his eyes were sea-green like Julian’s, such an undeserved beauty that Paul wanted to cut them out of his face.
“I’m not that hungry,” said Paul, but Mr. Fromme pretended not to hear. His hand landed on Paul’s shoulder, and he leaned down, not letting go, to pick up a toothpicked morsel of steak.
“One of my wife’s specialties.” He affected the tone that intolerable men used when they spoke about their wives, that condescending cocktail of fondness and bemusement. “You’ve got to love the French—butter and garlic on everything, a little bit of red wine. It melts in your mouth.”
“I—no, thank you. I’m all right.”
He wanted to squirm away, but Mr. Fromme’s hand was firm on his shoulder. When Paul refused the offering, Mr. Fromme’s smile became abruptly less convincing. “I insist,” he said coolly. “My wife would never forgive me for letting one of our guests go hungry.”
“I’m fine. Thank you.”
It wasn’t even that Paul’s upbringing had been all that strict, but there was a difference between the occasional dubiously kosher egg roll and being bullied into an unambiguous transgression. That Julian’s father would even attempt it struck him as rather pathetic, but Mr. Fromme looked pleased, as if he’d caught Paul in a lie. Paul had imagined such unbreakable authority into this man, such bitter and confident volatility. But he was clear-eyed and sober—there was a palpable insecurity about him, straining for dominance without quite reaching it. He was more hateful than anything Paul’s fear had conjured for him.
“Let me tell you a story.”
Mr. Fromme didn’t let go of his shoulder; he walked Paul back down the steps and along the garden path. Paul watched his face and gestures with clinical fascination. He’d never before met a Jew who tried to pass, and had expected to find some affectation that made the effort visible. But Mr. Fromme probably skated through less by being particularly gentile-looking than by sheer blandness. He had the steam-pressed, Brylcreemed appearance of a witness at the Watergate hearings. In order to wonder if he was Jewish, his country-club acquaintances would first have to differentiate him from every career bureaucrat who looked exactly like him.
“In my Foreign Service days,” Mr. Fromme was saying, “we lived for a few years in Iran.”
“When Julian was little. He told me.”
“Julian and Henry,” Mr. Fromme assented; it was clear which name he favored. “In any case—on one occasion I was required, along with a number of my colleagues, to attend a state dinner at one of the palaces of the Shah. Now, by and large I’ve always found Persian cuisine agreeable, at least the savory dishes. But I also have a particular dislike for rosewater, and I was rather dreading this dinner—because, as you may or may not know, most of the desserts in that country carry at least the threat of it . . .”
Paul noticed with alarm that Mr. Fromme had led him out of earshot of the rest of the party, toward the stuttering reflections of the dock lights on the water.
“Sure enough, come dessert, we were served something they call faloodeh—a sort of noodle ice cream, absolutely swimming in rosewater. I would have liked nothing more than to turn my nose up at it. And to do that, to follow that impulse, would have been a grievous offense, not to mention a liability to my employers. So do you know what I did?”
He paused, as if he expected Paul to ask for the answer.
“I ate every bite,” he said. “Because that’s what you do, young man, when you have a vested interest in maintaining a diplomatic relationship with your hosts.”
Paul finally shrugged off Mr. Fromme’s hand and stepped back to put some distance between them.
“I’m only here for Julian, sir. I’m not trying to have a relationship with you at all.”
For a long, ugly moment, Paul almost expected Mr. Fromme to take a swing at him. For the first time, he looked capable of it. But he didn’t move. He watched Paul with an incredulous fury, and then he smiled.
“No,” he said. “I don’t suppose you are.”
Mr. Fromme pulled a checkbook from his breast pocket and flicked it open, then returned to the pocket for a pen. It seemed a nonsensical gesture until its meaning landed hard below Paul’s ribs.
“What does your father do?”
“He’s dead.”
Mr. Fromme didn’t blink; he didn’t even look up from his checkbook.
“My condolences,” he said blandly, writing as he spoke. “That must be difficult for your mother. Maybe you’d like to make it a little easier—or keep the money for your own purposes, that’s your prerogative. And of course we’ll pay for the flight back to wherever you came from, first class . . . Spell your name for me, if you would?”
Paul held his hands steady against the urge, just shy of irresistible, to knock him down onto the pebbled shore and hold his face underwater.
“Go to hell.”
“I’ll let you write it in yourself.” Mr. Fromme signed the check with a flourish and freed it delicately from its perforated edge. “Just as well. I’d forgotten your name already; I don’t particularly care to remember it.”
“I don’t want your money.” He was too repelled even to stammer. “You’re not going to buy me off, I’m not—”
“Of course I am. Don’t be ridiculous.” Mr. Fromme smiled and held out the check between his first two fingers. “Everyone has a price. I think you’ll find this is well north of yours.”
The curiosity was too powerful, even through the mortification. He looked down; he immediately wished he hadn’t.
“You’re abhorrent.” He hated how his voice sounded, exactly as uncertain and malleable as Julian’s father thought he was. Nothing in him wanted to accept the money, but it was humiliating to be so shaken that he needed to tell himself that at all.
“I grew up the same way you did, you know.” That Mr. Fromme would admit this was a sign of how insignificant Paul was to him. “I know what this would mean for you. You wouldn’t get anything better from Julian, even before this mess. And if he comes away from this with anything at all, which is severely in doubt,” he added with grim satisfaction, “do you really believe that four years from now he’ll even remember your name?”
The final sentence eclipsed everything that came before.
“Four years,” he said before he could stop himself. “What happens in four years?”
He shouldn’t have spoken. Mr. Fromme’s insincere smile had given way to unconcealed triumph. He gave a low, faint chuckle; it took all Paul’s resolve not to recoil.
“He didn’t tell you.” His eyes flitted past Paul’s shoulder, and the smile became a gri
n. “What a singular oversight. Julian—perhaps you had better set the record straight.”
Julian couldn’t have been there long. He was a little out of breath, as if he’d rushed through the crowd, but he’d stopped short a few feet uphill. His back was straight, face blank and white as paper. His mother sauntered after him, serenely unhurried, her high heels dangling from one hand.
“Go ahead,” said Julian’s father. “Bring him up to speed.”
“Julian,” said Paul in an urgent undertone, but Julian only glancingly met his eyes. As he approached, he took hold of Paul’s forearm; Paul couldn’t decide which of them the gesture was meant to steady.
“It isn’t going to happen,” Julian said. “There’s nothing to tell.”
“How do you figure?” His father didn’t give him a chance to answer; he turned again to Paul. “It’s a great opportunity, really. Julian’s grandfather has offered to host him for a year at the Sorbonne. Under close supervision, of course, to prevent any further foolishness. And after that, well—”
“He’s always had such a difficult time being away from home.” As she drew near, Mrs. Fromme touched her son’s face with mocking affection, and Julian tensed as if he were trying not to recoil. “He is emotional, our Julian. He will be happier if he can live here with us his last three years of college, until he’s ready for law school . . . Georgetown, I think, we decided was a better fit?”
“Better school, too. Much more in line with your qualifications, which matters in the real world, believe it or not.”
Julian swung forward to catch his gaze, but Paul could hardly see him. The world shimmered at its edges.
“Don’t listen to them,” said Julian. “It isn’t going to happen—Paul, that’s why you’re here, that’s what we’re telling them, remember?”
His voice had no right to waver. He’d known all along and said nothing, had knowingly put Paul in a position to be blindsided. It was monstrous for him to be afraid when Paul desperately needed him to be brave.
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