The Exiles

by Allison Lynn

  “For emergencies?” Emily said.

  “Yeah,” he grinned. And then, after a pause, “Fuck.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” he said. But it was definitely something. “Every time I think about the truck being stolen, it’s like a slap in the face. I should have left you outside to watch it.”

  “To watch it? It’s an old Jeep.”

  “An old Jeep stuffed with our shit, with a computer, an iPod, my emergency cash, our complete financial life laid out in sickening detail,” Nate said. He touched his ears, as if feeling for the ghosts of his lost iPod earbuds. “We could call someone to lend us money, just enough to tide us over,” Nate said. “It might be good to hear a voice from New York. They’ll all get a kick out of our Cherokee theft.” He paused. “It’s, like, proof that all hell breaks loose the minute you step off the island of Manhattan.”

  The last thing Emily wanted was contact with New York. She’d been ignoring the messages on her cell—the calls from Tania Osbourne, Cath Oberling, and finally Tricia Haynes, a compulsively social friend who’d probably been the last to leave the Barbers’ party on Wednesday. Emily first met all three women during her early days in New York, when they’d traveled the young-Manhattanite cocktail circuit together, carefree, adulthood barely breached, the social playing field still level back then. Tricia’s message today, like the others, was a breathless recap of what she’d heard about the Barbers’ art theft. Everyone, it seemed, was talking about the painting. The news was spreading without prejudice, like radioactive contamination.

  Emily and Nate had arrived late to the Barbers’ apartment two evenings ago. Emily had been wary of showing up too early to the party, given that she and Nate barely knew Anna and Randy Barber—despite the dozens of dinners the four had co-attended, the relentless litany of holiday parties where they had crossed paths, discussed the dangers of mercury in sushi, critiqued the ethics of stealing wireless service. Still, Emily welcomed the invitation. The Barbers always threw a great bash and were generous with their guest list. They certainly had the funds for it.

  On the phone, Anna had told Emily that Wednesday’s fete would be a low-key affair, nothing elaborate. Emily saw through that lie as soon as she walked in the Barbers’ door. The party was staffed with a full catering team. Two separate bars were set up, and the Barber children (apparently there were three, though Emily had never seen them) had been stowed at their grandparents’ for the night. Anna was draped entirely in jersey and had gold bangles stacked up her arm, turning her almost robotic in appearance. Emily was underdressed. She was always underdressed, it seemed.

  “Our clothes are packed,” she told Anna at the door, hoping to justify her cashmere-tee and jeans combo.

  “Don’t we all,” Anna said, and laughed.

  “Excuse me?” Emily said. “Don’t we what?” But Anna was gone.

  Inside the apartment, everyone asked about Nate and Emily’s Rhode Island plans—yet the minute they brought up the topic, the same people changed the subject, as if Newport might be contagious and spreading. Nate went to the kitchen for more ice, and Emily found herself wedged into a corner discussing Peter Harvey’s recent airstrip acquisition. Jules Denny said she’d developed a midlife fear of flying. (Peter had laughed: midlife, my ass!) Tristan Volk said he’d lost his laptop in Heathrow last week, his fifth lost electronic device in four months. Emily noted how merely attending parties like the Barbers’—drinking syrupy cocktails with friends who’d acquired airstrips and second homes—had once made her feel lucky, feel as if anything might be possible in her own life, but it was getting harder and harder to feel wealthy by proximity. At this last party, she heard the voices of her former coworkers in her head, deriding the trust fund/Wall Street crowd and their easy lives. Meanwhile, Tristan wouldn’t stop talking about his lost laptop, about how he might as well buy two at a time, at the rate he was misplacing them. Emily politely nodded, nodded, nodded her head. She wanted to care, she did, but she was stymied by this thought: If she and Nate had these people’s mere problems, if they had Anna and Randy’s spread, their collection of art and artifacts and family silver and a staff to keep it all in place, if Nate and Emily had the cash to buy even one new laptop, if they had any of this they wouldn’t have to leave the city. There would have been no Newport move for all of the Barbers’ guests to avoid talking about.

  There was a time when Nate and Emily hadn’t needed these people, hadn’t jumped to accept their every invitation. When Nate and Emily were first dating, just a few months in but already implicitly exclusive, they had wanted nothing but each other. That first summer they stayed in town on weekends while everyone else fled to the Hamptons (or Rhinebeck or inherited great-camps in the Berkshires). Manhattan felt palpably vacant on those Saturdays and Sundays, and sometimes during the weeks, as well. Restaurants sat empty and doled out prime reservations as if they were kittens in need of a home. The city was Nate and Emily’s playground. They ate out nearly every night and made a habit of regularly charging meals they couldn’t afford. That was excusable back then. They had no kid, no responsibilities; it would all work out in the end. New relationships were expensive, always, and Nate had paid most of the time anyway.

  That summer had been dreamy, full of warm weather and ridiculous plates of food and giddy midafternoon sex and truckloads of we’ve-got-the-the-world-on-a-string attitude. We had the world on a string, Emily thought now as she eyed the nautical-print curtains in the Viking’s suite. Four years after that summer in the city, two days after the Barbers’ party, she and Nate were hanging on by a thread. She’d seen the looks of pity in the eyes of Anna and Randy’s guests. Poor Nate and Emily, financially evicted from Manhattan.

  Nate leaned against the suite’s minifridge and flipped open his phone.

  “Please,” she said, “don’t call New York.” They’d been gone from the city for less than a day. She felt dizzy and nauseous and closed her eyes briefly, trying to focus on the colorless void behind her lids. Sometimes she thought she should have kept her stupid job—the pay had been paltry, but it was something. Of course, post-tax, it would barely have covered daycare for Trevor. “Don’t call the city.”

  “Really?” he asked, his phone still open.

  “Really.”

  He eyed her skeptically.

  “Seriously, Nate. Don’t call. I mean, who are we going to contact? And to say what? ‘Hey, buddy, can you wire us a thousand bucks from your upcoming bonus so we can afford our stay at the Viking?’” Emily wanted to throw up at the thought. She imagined the gossip about their Jeep theft, their lack of cash, making the rounds with the same speed as the Rufino-theft news. Even Nate, who usually lay far out of the gossip loop, had heard about the painting. Sam Tully left him a message this morning and Nate picked it up when they stopped for gas outside New London. “I don’t get it,” Nate had said to Emily. “Someone took Randy’s Rufino.” Emily had nodded, said she’d gotten the same message from a few people already. “It’s not like Anna and Randy needed any more art,” Emily had said to Nate.

  “I don’t think people wire money anymore,” Nate said now. “It’s done online.”

  “Right,” Emily said, realizing, as she spoke, that a thousand bucks most likely wouldn’t be enough to cover their suite for three nights anyway. Of course the thing to do with that hypothetical thousand would be to leave the Viking, to buy new air mattresses and a change of clothes and the essentials they’d need to move into their new house—but the suite was so nice, and they could make it until Tuesday on $84.16 if they handled it right, and it wouldn’t bankrupt them (or bankrupt them more) to live in luxury so briefly.

  “We look desperate already, moving here,” Emily said. “Could we at least save face and not alert the masses that, two hours in, we’re carless, homeless, and bankrupt?” She needed to take deeper breaths, to keep the oxygen coming into her lungs. They were desperate. “We’ve got eighty-four bucks. Add in whatever we can charge to our room, and it�
��s more than enough for three days.”

  “Okay,” Nate said. He sounded hurt. She’d implied that they were losers, that he was a loser for landing them in this state. Trevor rolled over and crushed a slew of one-dollar bills under his splayed legs.

  “Em, you’ve got to stop doing this,” Nate said, picking up a wadded twenty-dollar bill. She had a tendency to crumple up her cash, condensing it into small balls. Nate’s bills lay flat and new, straight from the cash machine to his wallet to wherever they went next. It was like a symbol of their relationship, the kind of obvious trope that Emily would have derided as an undergrad. Technically she and Nate weren’t wed, and their finances were completely, visually separate.

  “Here, hand it over,” Emily said, reaching for the room-service menu. Food would ground her. “I’ll call down and order.” She scanned the list of entrées as she walked from the bedroom to the living room, where she’d be able to talk on the phone without waking the boy. It was a miracle that he hadn’t roused already. “Oh God, these people love their hollandaise,” she said.

  Nate groaned in assent from the bedroom. “Get wine!” he said, just loud enough to hear through the open doorway. “A bottle of wine.”

  “Yes, sir!” Emily said. And as she picked up the phone to dial for room service, she noticed on the small desk the slim volume of Newport’s phone book. This was something else she’d loved during her corporate-travel days: the phone books in every room, each one like an old-fashioned gateway into an unexplored city. The Viking’s volume appeared new. Its perfectly aligned pages were as crisp and virgin as Nate’s dollar bills, and a pen lay in the open crease, making the scene appear like a still-life, a tableau whose stylist had briefly stepped away to serve tea. She focused on the open pages that arched up off the table where they met the book’s spine. The pages were turned, she saw, to the BEs. It was as if, while Emily had been laying Trevor down to sleep and counting out their cash, Nate, who’d lagged behind in this living room, had passed the time by looking up his own last name.

  PART II

  Saturday

  CHAPTER 5

  The Drive from Chicago

  THE ONLY THING THAT lay ahead of George Bedecker was time. Not building plans or competitions or commissions. All that remained was the simple act of endurance, a steady plod until his allotment of days was up. George took comfort in the fact that he could see his own end in sight. He would watch himself suffer in solitude until his body and mind finally gave out. He would not be taken by surprise.

  He sat hunched on the edge of the bed, its quilt rough to the touch. Through the motel room’s venetian blinds, the early-morning sun glowed in harsh, parallel strips. George hated venetians. He cringed at the way today’s homeowners rushed to buy houses with sweeping views and then installed blinds that sliced the panoramas to pieces. He designed his own structures with built-in, unobtrusive shade systems. It was the ultimate goal: to build a residence so airtight in its design that future inhabitants would in no way be able to mar it with their own attempts at furnishings, at hardware, at window dressing.

  George stood and moved away from the bed. The sun was up early today. Or, no, that wasn’t possible. George was simply used to rising earlier, well before daylight. It was almost 8:00 a.m. It was time to get on the road. He had one more day and a half of driving to go.

  He wasn’t a fast driver. Even as a young man he’d been cautious. Even back then he preferred for someone else to sit behind the wheel, an assistant or a contractor, whoever was in the car. And driving fast wasn’t necessary now. He didn’t have anyone on his tail. Architecture was a field covered not by investigative reporters but solely by critics. An architect, in the press, was observed after the fact and from afar, judged from a distance beyond human scale but still close enough to throw stones.

  George had been in the business for more than forty years and had a reputation, of sorts. He’d received international accolades for both the Glasgow Conservatory and his residential works and had fended off his share of hurled rocks, but his status as a master of the field remained in debate. He was no Philip Johnson, certainly, and no Mies van der Rohe, but, to be frank, Johnson hadn’t been Johnson for most of his life. After his peak, Johnson sank and devalued himself. He’d spent these later years building monochromatic skyscrapers and juggling styles the way croupiers shuffle cards. Was this something to aspire to? Maybe. Johnson’s obituaries would surely garner more ink than most architects would earn over the course of an entire career.

  Yet even at his peak, Johnson’s daily movements were never tracked by the media. Even the true icon, Frank Lloyd Wright, had only been followed as a person when his life took tragicomic twists worthy of Hollywood: when his homestead burned down with his mistress inside, or when he was arrested for transporting a woman across state lines with lewd intention. Considerably less attention was paid to the movements of merely somewhat-esteemed architects. So the chances were slim that anyone would notice George Bedecker, the George Bedecker, as he drove slowly from Chicago straight past Cleveland and farther east. He had no reason to worry. He shouldn’t be so anxious, yet he felt like a man on the lam.

  He’d lied to Philippa, the one person who currently showed concern over his whereabouts, about his intended destination—but his and her relationship had never been entirely forthright. He had almost no clothing with him, only the suit he was wearing and a small leather satchel that held an extra shirt and underwear and toiletries. A full closet was waiting for him at his destination. He hadn’t brought any current work papers, either. His office was still operating but purely in the literal sense. It had been some time since they’d won a prestigious commission. His assistants continued to clock in every day but were increasingly building their own projects on his dime, giving him a token slice of the minimal cash that they earned off these minor constructions.

  The motel’s bathroom was cold and clammy, and George balanced himself against the door molding as he brushed his teeth. He checked himself in the mirror, taking a close look at the shallow folds around his eyes. An inch above the thick plastic rims of his glasses, his temple was bare and slick where there had once been hair. He looked remarkably his age, a child of the first half of the last century. He and his buildings, aging into obsolescence in tandem. George was closing in on seventy, the age when most architects finally began to design their most indelible work.

  He concentrated on keeping his hand steady, the brush moving mechanically up and down across his teeth, but as the bristles swept past his upper left incisor, the inevitable happened and his arm jerked from the shoulder, the brush cutting up into his gum and then, with another jerk, firmer this time, as if his elbow was being securely yanked by a marionette string from above, the brush, still gripped tightly in his hand, slipped out of his mouth. Not yet seventy and George Bedecker had designed his last building. He braced himself against the doorway and held his own near-impotent frame as motionless as he could, waiting for the tremor to pass. His doctors had been clear: His nervous system would go first, then his muscle control, and next, if he was lucky, perhaps his brain would slip away, too. George knew exactly what he was in for, but it would take some time, his slow descent, and right now he only needed to make it as far as Rhode Island, where he had a home waiting for him, and where he’d be able to lay his head down and rest.

  CHAPTER 6

  Wake-up Call

  EMILY LIFTED THE bedside phone to her ear and listened. The clock’s digital readout flashed 8:00 a.m. Next to her Nate didn’t move. He didn’t even appear to have heard the phone ring.

  “Good morning, it’s the front desk, wake-up call—”

  “A what?” Emily interrupted the clerk. She sat up, noticed the damask upholstery. Yesterday hadn’t been a dream. “I didn’t ask for a wake-up call,” Emily’s voice croaked in a languid, low register. She hadn’t arranged for a call, had she? Had Nate? They had nothing to wake up for.

  “Bedecker, Primrose Suite, eight o’clock a.m. I have it
on my list. I’m sure it was arranged,” the woman answered.

  What happened to ‘the customer is always right’?

  “I’m sorry for the misunderstanding,” the woman said, like one run-on non sequitur to Emily’s ear. And she hung up.

  I’m sure it was arranged? Emily craned her neck and looked at Trevor, asleep, crashed out in the Viking’s excuse for a crib. It was a portable Pack ’n Play, but Trevor slept soundly, confirming Emily’s long-standing hunch that most of the specialized equipment new parents were conned into buying was unnecessary. A crib, a Pack ’n Play, a Moses basket, and a bassinet? For adults, technology was speeding ahead with the release of new, multi-use, all-in-one gadgets each season. For kids, corporations were draining parents of their hard-earned income by doing the opposite—separating out functionality, one device at a time.

  “Em? Hon?” Nate said. Emily rolled over and looked at him. His eyes were shut. Seeing was customarily the last of his bodily functions to wake. “You awake?”

  “It’s early, go back to sleep,” she said. His breath grew steady again.

  Emily gathered the sheet around her as she reached to the floor for her corduroys. She rifled through the pants and found a quarter piece of nicotine gum in one of the back pockets. Tiny, the size of a birth control pill but with more immediate effects, she tucked it into her mouth. She’d barely ever smoked, only socially at parties. She’d always assumed she didn’t have an addictive personality, but somehow the gum had gotten to her. She first tried it on a whim, two years ago, when it was making the rounds at the office. Someone (who? she couldn’t remember) had brought a pack to a late-night brainstorming session. Emily wasn’t addicted, she didn’t need it. She’d given the gum up entirely when she was pregnant. It simply made her feel good, and there were worse vices. She slid into her pants, tossed her underwear aside—they had only the clothes that they’d worn yesterday and would have to do a hand-wash soon—and pulled her tank top over her head.