The Exiles

by Allison Lynn

  It was still early in the party (early for the Barbers, whose soirees tended to last well into the morning) when Emily found herself next to Sam Tully. He had propped himself against the buffet table (Edwardian, Emily thought) and was describing his new road bike to Nate. Sam said there was a shop on Fourteenth Street that would custom-design a machine to any rider’s body measurements and cycling stance. All it cost was a slim month’s rent. “A drop in the bucket” is how Sam described the price. Emily grinned when he said this and politely excused herself from the conversation.

  Nate, who’d seemed to be having the time of his life, pulled her back toward him and whispered in her ear, “Should we go?” Yes! She loved this man! She nodded even though they had the babysitter booked for another two hours.

  “Let me get my bag and swing by the bathroom,” she’d answered. “I’ll meet you at the elevator.” Emily would have liked to own a bike tailored specifically to her stance. She’d have liked an antique buffet table, too, and a budget with enough wiggle room to hire caterers for weekday parties. What she’d have liked, in truth, was the bank account to support these things—she knew she’d never buy that bike, this buffet table, but for the price of either she could make a difference in the world. She was sure of it. She kept thinking about the economy’s manic upswing. The pundits were claiming growth might hit record highs by the end of the year, growth that represented some sort of hope for a country rising in the new century, fighting back after a tragedy of epic magnitude. Though from what Emily could see, all the proceeds of that growth were being thrown toward the ridiculous—bespoke bicycles, personal airstrips, hand-massaged beef. None of it was coming her way (or the way of all of the children who were still starving, the middle class who were still fighting for health insurance). If the money were hers, she told herself, she’d build something to last. Whether in technology, in dairy, in philosophy, she didn’t know. But she’d at least, with the cash, have a chance at mattering.

  She grabbed her bag from the rack in the hallway and then tried the bathroom door—locked, a muffled “out in a minute” came from the other side. She continued walking west through the apartment, in the direction of Greenwich Street, as if these hallways were a part of the city’s landscape itself. She turned and stepped into the study, toward a second bathroom, where all was quiet. The party wasn’t large enough for people to be wandering this far into the abode. The study was solemn, unlike the living room and dining room, which were experiments in pop art, glossy white spaces punctuated with bursts of primary color and animal print. The study was dark and clubby, like a gentlemen’s den from the Barbers’ grandparents’ era. Leather armchairs abutted bookcases filled with worn hardcover volumes. A brushed-steel desk appeared to be more for show than actual work. Along the wall next to the desk, a stack of framed artworks leaned at a thirty-degree angle.

  Anna and Randy weren’t art lovers by any means. At other people’s parties, the guests joked about it, about how the Barbers had the most significant contemporary art collection of their crowd but didn’t seem to care about aesthetics. The couple had a consultant who bought works on their behalf, works that were an honor to own, pieces by newly crowned up-and-comers whose names had cachet. Most important, the works tended to hold onto their value. “Insurance,” Randy had said to Emily at a previous party, pointing to an oblong Byron LeRoi that hung in their entryway. “That’s a whole kid’s future, if they ever need it. Say my career tanks and Anna drinks her way through our reserves? We’ve always got backup in the art.”

  These people—Randy, Tristan, Sam Tully, and the rest—loved to talk about the dark side of their wealth, the looming truth that this economic upswing couldn’t last forever. That fear lent a frantic energy to their unabashed extravagance, as if they needed to cram in all of the enjoyment they could today, before the world as they knew it died tomorrow. Rather than save to protect against hard times, they spent lavishly in anticipation of them. Regardless, when the crash came, Randy would still have his art. What would Nate and Emily have? Even less than they had now. The thought made Emily’s heart crack. She imagined their future as a black hole.

  In the hush of the study, Emily knelt toward the stack of canvases. These were small pieces; Randy probably didn’t even know what was in this pile. The largest work was not much longer than two-feet across its long side. As she flipped through them, Emily didn’t recognize most of the paintings. A few were representative and realistic, almost embarrassingly so. They resembled the kinds of still lifes (pears, daisies, mixing bowls) found on hotel walls in the 1950s. For all Emily knew, they were intended to look like hotel art. Ironic compositions weren’t unheard of anymore. Even visual art had lost its ability to celebrate beauty for beauty’s sake.

  At the back of the stack Emily spotted a Matt Rufino. The canvas was covered with a thick layer of paint in a rich orange-rust hue, cut through by a few large swaths of slate gray. She’d made fun of Rufino in the past. He’d seemed such a fleeting fancy, with his broad brushstrokes that hinted at shadows but weren’t clearly anything at all. His work didn’t evoke emotion the way the best nonrepresentational art should, in Emily’s estimation. Rufino had bragged openly about his most recent series: twenty-four paintings done in one twelve-hour workday, devoting only thirty minutes to each, from conception to completion. The Rufino in the Barbers’ pile seemed to be an earlier work but equally hastily made. However quickly he’d painted it, it was worth a mint, and here it lay, hidden in a stack as if it didn’t matter.

  Even to Emily, who actually believed Rufino’s work didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, this was an insult. This piece might be worth nothing in a hundred years, but today it could fund nearly anything. Paint slopped on a piece of stretched cotton by an imbecile, yet the person who owned it possessed a slice of power. Power: Emily had so little of it herself that she’d been essentially evicted from Manhattan, the epicenter of power. Here, though, was capital on a canvas. As Emily gazed at the Rufino—she’d slowly lifted it out of the stack for a closer look—more than anything, she simply wanted a piece of the power. She simply wanted a taste. She simply wanted a whiff of what fell in everyone else’s lap. She simply wanted.

  Emily, curled tight on the Viking’s small sofa, felt a tug on her sleeve and opened her eyes. She found herself eye-to-eye with Trevor. The boy clung onto the sofa’s upholstery, his fingers were white with tension as they gripped the damask, but the tug had come from above. She looked up. Nate.

  “Hey, sleeping beauty,” he said. “Trev’s awake and clean and fed.”

  “You fed him?”

  “You were asleep. I squeezed six ounces of formula and a tub of pears into him. That’s enough, right? He acted like he’d had his fill.” Nate had his shirt on again.

  “A whole tub of pears? He never eats a whole tub.” She’d only bought the pears because they were paired with the peas. “He’s pear-resistant.”

  “He did. I opened up sweet potatoes, too, but he wouldn’t touch them. His system must be out of whack.” Nate reached down for Emily’s arm and started to pull her to her feet.

  “Come on, we should get some dinner,” Nate said. “Let’s get out of this room.”

  “Let’s just order in, on our room tab,” she said. “Please. We can’t go out for dinner; we have a cash-flow problem.”

  “It’s early, we can eat in the restaurant downstairs. If Trevor gets antsy we’ll leave. I’m stir-crazy. Our neighbors were cranking their TV and my head is throbbing.”

  The shades in the room were open and Emily looked out at a straight shot of sky, gray twilight like a sheath of Irish tweed. She’d slept for hours.

  “Okay,” Emily said. Trevor let out a soft “bah” in affirmation, popping a hand over his mouth as soon as the sound was out. He was starting to look filthy in the wrinkled overalls and long-sleeve T-shirt she’d dressed him in yesterday morning. The small folds in his neck were red with sweat; she’d have to wash Trevor’s outfit in the sink before they went
to bed tonight. They should have bought detergent when they shelled out for the diapers. Should have, should have, should have: She could fill a composition book with all of her recent should haves. “Let’s have a drink at the bar first, before we eat. We’ll bring an extra bottle for Trevor and hope the formula makes him sleepy,” she said. A drink would set her head right. Or maybe not, but it couldn’t possibly make things worse.

  “I’ve already packed the bag with a bottle and pacifier and that soft toy thing, the red-and-yellow dinosaur you keep in the stroller.”

  “It’s supposed to be a lamb.”

  “Deadly, that little lamb.” Nate growled, a raspy rumble, and Trevor smiled, the corners of his mouth pulling up deep into his high cheeks.

  “I’ll be ready in a sec. It’ll be just like old times,” Emily said as she stood, straightening her own wrinkled clothes and thinking about laundry detergent, about all of those little cafés they’d gone to with Trevor in the BabyBjörn, about their innocent past and about the days ahead, the years ahead, when Trevor would be long past his toddler stage and old enough to order food for himself, to sit at the dinner table across from his parents, unwittingly bridging them like a genetic lariat. She imagined him with his driver’s license, behind the wheel of a junker coming to visit her in whatever pit her life had landed. Or on the lam with both of his parents, living in the wilds of rural Eastern Europe. Or safe and successful in New York again, perhaps. Or right here. She imagined there would be a day in the future, a day she could almost fathom if she thought hard enough, when Trevor would be an adult and Emily’s dreams, and Nate’s, would either have come true already or faltered for good.

  CHAPTER 12

  Here Are the Things Nate Knows

  BEING IN NEWPORT WAS starting to wig Nate out. The mere fact that he was thinking in terms like wig out, a phrase he would have used decades ago, had him suspicious that Emily knew something was up. It was inconceivable that she hadn’t picked up on his recent evasiveness, his skittishness, his generalized angst (a condition more characteristic of her, in the past), the fact that he could barely match his own socks in the morning. She probably thought he was on drugs. Everyone was on something these days, though Nate had no clue what would make a man act as edgy as he’d been. Coke? Maybe. Possibly crystal meth, though Emily would know he’d never have the nerve to do meth (his fear of dentists would keep him off it, if nothing else). Maybe she simply thought he was drinking too much. They both liked to drink, but didn’t everyone?

  Across the Viking’s lounge, Emily and Trevor were nestled into a small couch while Nate hovered at the bar, trying to flag the bartender. He wanted another Guinness, one last drink for the night. He thumbed a tower of cocktail napkins, the paper squares stacked tall like a silo beside a tray of garnishes (lemons, limes, olives, pickled green beans), and thought about his father, about that house just across the water, the old house, the house where Nate’s grandparents had lived, where George had grown up. It was a house not built by George, but surely as much a part of him as the houses that he had created.

  Nate had no clue how many structures his father had designed in total. Fifty? Two hundred? Most of them were either inconsequential (midsize office sprawls) or were prohibitively located in remote European industrial centers and small Asian travel hubs. In his entire life, Nate had been inside only five of his father’s buildings.

  The first, of course, was the Bedeckers’ house, known as Bedecker House, where Nate had been sequestered for his entire childhood. Second was the Bedecker-designed Faculty and Married Students Housing Park at the University of Virginia. Nate had spent a night there back in 1992—he’d slept on the floor of a friend’s room while in Charlottesville for a wedding. The park dated from the mid-1970s, when George was already established and probably thought he should be building university libraries, not dorms. To Nate’s untrained eye, these dorms were nothing special. Ditto for the Seacrest Tower in La Jolla.

  Nate hadn’t known the Seacrest was his father’s building when he’d walked through its front door, in 1998, for a client meeting. He’d entered through the simple glass entryway, rung for an elevator (the elevators were in the front of the lobby, he’d run smack into them even before encountering the reception desk, an odd choice of placement), and risen to the ninth floor, where his meeting was held in a room with windows that spanned the entire top half of the wall. The bottom half of the wall was pockmarked, made of ruddy stone. The room, like the building, had a 1960s aura about it. “Nate Bedecker,” his client said after the meeting was over, as if testing Nate’s name for a sour taste. They were in the elevator, on their way back to the ground floor. “The building we’re in was built by a Bedecker. Any relation?” Nate felt the air leach out of the elevator. The car seemed to plummet briefly and Nate reached for the wall, a slick stretch of metal with nothing to hold onto. “My dad,” Nate nodded, pretending it was no big deal.

  It wasn’t until Nate attended a concert (the first of two: one Mahler, his mother would have been proud, and one Schoenberg, just a year ago) in the Houston Arts Center, again during a work trip, that he understood the scope of his father’s work. The Arts Center was beautiful, glorious. Its acoustics were sharp. The ceiling lifted toward the horizon, its sweep giving the immense hall a feeling of airy lightness. Leaving the building after the Mahler concluded, reentering the outside world, Nate felt that he’d emerged from a warm cavern of sound into a society that was somehow better than he’d left it. The structure felt unintentionally elegant, and in this, it reminded Nate of his mother, Annemarie. The building, and the experience of hearing music in it, was thrilling.

  Yet nothing compared to Nate’s spontaneous visit to Copenhagen’s Central Court. In 1999, after the rage in Eastern European tourism passed and all of Nate’s friends had already swung through Prague (twice), Scandinavia was briefly hot as a destination and Nate found himself in Denmark. On the last day of his trip, he left his friends in a bar for the afternoon and, alone, walked the straight and narrow Copenhagen streets. Deep in the folds of his memory, he recalled that fifteen years earlier, his father had spent time in Denmark, building a courthouse. Municipal buildings were difficult, George used to say, yet he ate up the work (all work, even municipal commissions) without discrimination, as if fearing imminent famine. When building the court, he’d lived in Denmark on and off for almost two full years. During those years Nate only got word of him sporadically through his mother (who herself seemed to be in tangential touch with her husband by then, just a few years before her health declined) and, once, from a travel magazine article that suggested tourists in Copenhagen steer clear of the court’s neighborhood due to excessive construction noise and dust.

  A decade and a half later, in 1999, Nate wandered off the street and found himself inside the court, in person. The lobby in no way resembled the marble entryways familiar from government buildings in the rest of the world. There were no columns, no neo-Roman facades. The ceiling was low, so rather than feeling as if it soared up—the sense Nate was accustomed to feeling in lobbies—the expanse felt shallow yet wide, as if here, in this space, time spread laterally instead of vertically, as if life had become a parallel track where a man had to watch his head. It should have been disturbing, the shortness of the walls, but the space felt soothing and endless in its horizontal sprawl. If there was something of Nate’s mother in the Houston Arts Center, this down-to-earth space with a deceptively limitless span evoked Nate’s brother, as if the boy had been built into the walls.

  Nate, the only man in the lobby not wearing a suit, was so clearly a tourist that the woman behind the security desk motioned him not through the security line but to a plaque on the wall near the front door. George Bedecker’s name and the date, 1986, when the building was completed, were etched onto the brass. Next to the plaque an audio headset hung on a peg beside a row of buttons. A CD player was embedded in the stone. Nate slid the headphones over his ears and pressed the button marked Englesk/English, and, over t
he next fifteen minutes, he listened to his father’s voice narrate the construction of the building and the emotional toll it took on the crew involved. Nate had traveled across the Atlantic and heard, for the first time in his life, his father talking at length.

  That’s what Nate was hoping to discover across the water in the Narragansett house, when he finally got there: a taste of his father, the feeling he got in the Houston Arts Center and the Copenhagen courthouse, something bigger and better than the man himself. Plus some facts. Nate was looking for something that would give credence to his health worries (disease in the family? papers of some kind?) or to help him discount them once and for all.

  He’d already been doing research of his own. Over the past month and a half, Nate had been searching the Internet at night while Emily was asleep, and had also been sneaking into chain bookstores after work but before coming home (but there was so little information in the stores). He hadn’t spoken to anyone in person yet. He feared that actually talking about the disease with another human would be an overt acknowledgment of the danger he might be facing.

  It all started last month, when Nate stumbled upon the small mention of George in the New York Times Metro section. The pertinent part of the clip was barely a sentence. “The great builder, flailing and staggering, unable to grip even a doorjamb, stumbled,” the New York Times said in the midst of a small piece about an architecture gathering. The writer implied that George had been inebriated. Nate stumbled, too, when he read it. If he could be sure of one thing, it was that George hadn’t been drunk. The man had spent his entire adulthood refusing alcohol, afraid to cede control. He would never take a drink at a party filled with reporters, as well as with so many of his competitors and colleagues. The article painted a George so unlike the quietly superior, reticent, physically unassuming man Nate knew. The George in the paper was a buffoon, a fumbler. When Nate read the clip, what he heard in his head was his mother’s voice that day in Rhode Island, “It’s hunting, sons.”