The Emperor's Children

by Claire Messud

  A big, physically awkward man with a square head and jowls, Frank Clarke had been a Green Beret in Vietnam, which was where he had met Thu, Julius’s mother, after whom the boy took. After the war, Frank and Thu had settled back in Danville, where Frank taught history at the high school and coached basketball, while Thu, whose English was charming but never proficient, worked from home as a seamstress and dressmaker. Julius was the second of three and the only boy, all of them dark and wide-eyed and frail like their mother, so that Frank, with his loud voice and hulking back, came into his home like Gulliver into Lilliput. In spite of local expectations—Julius had been a fruit from the beginning, and was teased as a sissy in grade school—tough Frank doted as much upon his boy as upon his more conventionally successful daughters, and now came as often as his schedule and his agoraphobic wife permitted, to visit Julius in New York. When he did, the incongruities were rife, and delightful: the sight of Frank, sitting in the armchair in Julius’s cramped and dark studio, poring over his son’s reviews, his thick thighs in their chinos like extra pieces of furniture protruding into the room; or father and son at the East Village diner Julius frequented, earnest Frank in his navy windbreaker, baseball cap on the banquette beside him, looking for all the world—Julius knew it even if his father did not—like his son’s suburban john, a married sugar daddy getting a bit of boy on the side. If it occurred to Frank that the patrons on Avenue A might interpret the scene in this way, then it didn’t bother him: he was affectionate with his son and fussed with the boy’s clothes and tousled his hair, his pride in Julius’s accomplishments seemingly endless, his delight that his son was a New Yorker evident for all to see—although for himself, make no mistake, Danville was home and just fine. (Needless to say, nobody had met Thu except a friend who had driven across the country after college and had swung through Michigan on purpose. But he had stayed on the West Coast, and the only reliable report he’d filed was that Thu was a great cook of both Vietnamese and Western food, a fact Julius’s friends might have inferred from her son’s talents.)

  What, then, were Julius’s accomplishments, those of which his father was so proud? The anxiety, surely, was that they were few, and fading. Known in college for his vicious wit, Julius had sashayed into New York—or, more precisely, into the offices of the Village Voice—with a youthful certainty that attitude could carry him. And for a long time, it had: everyone in the downtown literary set knew who Julius was, and pointed him out to newcomers at parties. His devastating but elegant book reviews were often cited; his less devastating but no less elegant film and television reviews rather less so; but still: throughout his twenties, he lived a life of Wildean excess and insouciance that seemed an accomplishment in itself, the contemporary example of the enfant terrible. The insouciance, of course, masked endless and wearisome neuroses, to which Marina and Danielle were privy. He was a failure at intimacy, if not at sex (he had no shortage of partners; but they were only shortly upon the scene). He was always broke (hence the threadbare cashmere), but it was vital, or so he maintained, that the secret of his penury not get about: “This is New York, guys. And people without money aren’t noble, they’re beggars.” He apparently did not suspect that everyone already knew. He was aware that at thirty he stretched the limits of the charming wastrel, that some actual sustained endeavor might be in order were he not to fade, wisplike, away: from charming wastrel to needy, boring failure was but a few, too few, short steps.

  His friends had suggested that he take on a job—editing something, or even a regular column, to stabilize his income—but Julius was loath to do so, claiming that regularity was bourgeois. Danielle and Marina had often discussed his life behind his back—between themselves, when they sometimes referred to Julius not by name but as La Grenouille, on account of his protruberant eyes and his flat, rather mushy nose, a nickname they had tried upon him years before and immediately retired because it so upset him. They couldn’t figure out what claimed so much of their friend’s time: he didn’t have cable television, and he had no cash to spend. They surmised, from apparently unwitting hints he dropped, that pornography and dirty talk over the Internet took up hours of each day; then again, further hours vanished in trysts arranged with his virtual correspondents. He had enough sex for all of them put together, Marina joked—indeed, she wondered whether in coming to Stockbridge he felt like a drunk in a dry county—and very occasionally, as with this fickle Eric over whom he was so undone, Julius attempted to push further, to forge some sort of relationship. All three friends had the impression that over the years, inadvertently, Julius was having sex—safely, mind you; that is, if Marina and Danielle believed his assurances—with his entire gay generation in New York, like pulling the string of a bag, little by little, so that eventually he would know everyone, would have a stronger professional network and better connections than anyone else. Danielle had even suggested—laughingly, of course—that perhaps this would be his sustained endeavor, his accomplishment.

  This, like so many other things, was not a joking matter for Julius, who preferred to instigate and to control his comedies. More than his friends, Julius was interested in power. It wasn’t a focused preoccupation: there wasn’t a type of power that he sought, just the absolute, brute fact of it. Political, social, financial—everything except perhaps moral power, so precious to Marina, which didn’t interest him in the least. He would as soon have had dinner with Donald Trump or Gwyneth Paltrow or Donatella Versace as with Marina’s father, Murray Thwaite, for example; and he was interested in Murray Thwaite only on account of his ability to shape public opinion, not because of any intrinsic value in the opinions themselves. He was good at seduction, itself a seductive power: he had it, he used it, it worked. He wanted his whole life to be that way. An inchoate ball of ambition, Julius knew that he had soon, soon, to find something to be ambitious for; otherwise he risked terminal resentment, from which there was no return.

  In his conscious mind, ever generous, he had come to Stockbridge, to this isolated house among deer and who knew what other wildlife (he’d seen plenty of wildlife in his Michigan childhood and, being thoroughly metropolitan, had no desire to see any more, just as he had no desire to be cold or to get his feet wet), to support his dear friend in need. He prided himself on making the extra effort—it was a quality Danielle and Marina had always commented on. And in this case, he knew that Marina was struggling with her manuscript, that she required bolstering and diversion, and he felt his journey (that interminable train ride, in a carriage that had smelled, faintly but inescapably, of urine) to be an altruistic duty. But then again: he’d been gravely hurt, this past week, by Eric’s rejection, and relished the chance to lick his wounds. And he would be fed at Marina’s house, he knew, and well, if he cooked, while in his own home he had only a frozen loaf of sliced bread, a jar of olives, and no money for even the farmers’ market. Marina, so naïve, or so oblivious (sometimes he wasn’t sure which), Marina, who thought she was impoverished when living off the fat of her parents—Marina got on his nerves as much as he got on hers. She didn’t seem to be aware of this, of the fact that he had to bite his tongue (as if her experience with fat Al gave her any authority to advise him in matters of the heart!), of the effort it cost him to make nice. It all came down to entitlement, and one’s sense of it. Marina, feeling entitled, never really asked herself if she was good enough. Whereas he, Julius, asked himself repeatedly, answered always in the affirmative, and marveled at the wider world’s apparent inability to see the light. He would have to show them—of this he was ever more decided, with a flamelike conviction. But he was already thirty, and the question was how?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Poetry Makes Nothing Happen

  As the seminar drew to a close, Murray Thwaite felt the tickle in his throat that was a demand for both a cigarette and a drink. Darkness had fallen outside the classroom windows and the students, in spite of the rebuke of the fluorescent light, slouched and slumped, undignified, in their plastic c
hairs. They’d lasted pretty well, for students, and had shown animation, even enthusiasm, for his firsthand account of the late sixties and early seventies antiwar movement—in fact, they’d seemed at once incredulous and thrilled to imagine the quad of their own dear institution, right outside these very windows, teeming with renegades, Murray, long-haired, among them—but after three hours they were drained, avid for their cafeteria suppers, the slovenly warmth of their dorm rooms, and the mindless chatter (what did these kids talk about?) of their peers.

  Thwaite’s friend and host, Eli Triplett, noting the clock upon the wall and the drooping lids of his flock—even, perhaps, hearing the urgency in Thwaite’s throat-clearing—graciously brought the discussion to a close. “And, my ducks,” he concluded, in his Manchester bass, “you’ve no idea how lucky you are to have had this opportunity. A heartfelt thanks to Murray Thwaite for taking the time to come up here.” There was a smattering of applause, heartfelt, Thwaite thought, and he delicately bowed his large, silvered head. “Remember we’re meeting in the AV center next week at seven, for the film.”

  “What is it again?” asked a surly boy in overalls, who had fiddled endlessly with his goatee throughout the class, and had seemed to munch upon his facial hair with his upper teeth, giving new meaning, Thwaite thought, to the “goat” in “goatee.”

  “Costa-Gavras. Missing. We’re on to our government’s South American involvements next, Adam. A whole new set of horrors.”

  “Our government, Eli?” Thwaite murmured as the students wrapped themselves in their swishing outerwear. “You surprise me. Have you sworn an allegiance I’m unaware of?”

  Triplett laughed. “They take it amiss, you know, the Bolshie ones, if I suggest I’m not implicated. It’s one thing to criticize your own family, as you well know, and quite another to criticize someone else’s.”

  “So you’re lying to them, essentially?” Thwaite, still seated, raised an admonitory eyebrow.

  A girl lurking by the corner of the table tittered audibly.

  “Roanne. Murray Thwaite, Roanne Levine. One of the department’s best.”

  Murray Thwaite stood, a full six foot three, and extended a hand to the young woman, who was as small as a girl, her face shadowed by voluminous black curls. “Thank you for your question about Lowell,” he said. “It’s a relief to find a young person who knows that once upon a time, poetry did make things happen.”

  Roanne giggled again and tucked her hair behind one ear, revealing a round, smooth face and a wide mouth. “Auden, right? I’m a double major, English and History.”

  “They overlap more than you think.” Thwaite turned to Eli, aware out of the corner of his eye that the girl lingered. She was quite pretty, and she had remained alert to the last. “Where’s your watering hole, then?”

  “Just a couple of blocks down. Not far, not far.”

  “Professor—I mean, Mr. Thwaite?”

  Cigarette already in hand, though unlit (he was by now familiar with the infuriating regulations of institutional buildings, enforced with the same draconian rigor as those in airplane bathrooms), Thwaite started for the door, with a swift glance over his shoulder to encourage Ms. Levine.

  “I just wondered—I have a few questions—for the school paper—a profile?” She was at once pushy and timid in a way that appealed to him.

  “A budding journalist as well?”

  Roanne Levine laughed again. The laughter might, in time, grate; but Thwaite was, by his own admission, ever curious. And she was pretty. “Why don’t you join us for a drink?”

  Eli cleared his throat.

  “I don’t know—Professor Triplett? I don’t want to—Well, just quickly, maybe, if you don’t mind? Or another time, if that would be better?”

  Vaguely irritated by Eli—was this, too, a rule, like the smoking? But he didn’t even teach here; what could he care?—Thwaite said, “No, now is good. We have eternity for sleeping.”

  The bar was Irish, and old-fashioned, with sticky wooden tables and chairs and a sticky concrete floor. Ill lit, it relied for much illumination upon the neon sign in the window. There was an ashtray on every table, and beer mats with shamrocks on them. Thwaite and Eli ordered scotch and water, while Roanne, after some hesitation, asked for a White Russian.

  “More a food than a drink, my dear girl,” Thwaite observed.

  “I know, I know, but they make the best ones here. It’s what I always have.”

  “Quite right, then, that you should have it now. Be true to yourself, I always say.”

  There was a slightly awkward silence. Thwaite could tell that Eli was struggling not to fill it, that he hoped the discomfort might hurry the girl on her way. Undeterred, she took a notebook from her backpack and flipped through it with artificial busyness. “I wrote out some questions,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind?”

  The questions, it transpired, were largely personal, and hence had the effect, perhaps desired, of making Thwaite look more closely at the girl and listen less to what she asked, let alone to his answers. He loved to talk—as he’d told Triplett before coming to the class, he loved to teach—but talking about himself did not interest him. He noticed that she had a habit of pulling her sweater cuff down over the wrist of her left hand and clutching at it while she scribbled. Her legs, in long black boots, were not merely crossed but fully entwined beneath the table. And she looked up at him from behind the curtain of her hair like a doe or a rabbit. She seemed younger and more charmingly ignorant with each question, but earnest, which he found winning. And he could tell—surely by now he could tell—that she found him attractive, and not just in an avuncular way. They all had a second round, and were nearing the ticklish question of a third, when Eli, who had grown increasingly restless, felt the professional need plumply to intervene.

  “I bet you’ve got enough now for a full biography, Roanne,” he said, pushing back from the table. “I’m just going to settle this tab, and maybe you could finish, here. Mr. Thwaite doesn’t have all night, and I’m sure you have other things to do, too.”

  “Don’t worry about him,” said Thwaite when Eli had stepped away. “He’s just looking out for you.”

  “Well, I did have some more questions, just a few, but—”

  “Tell you what,” he interrupted her. “Why don’t you give me your number, and I’ll give you a call later.” He watched for her reaction, but there was none. “Or tomorrow, and we can finish up then.”

  She wrote her details in a spiky hand and pulled the sheet from her pad. “Thank you so much,” she said breathily. “This has been amazing.”

  He wouldn’t call her, of course, and she wouldn’t really mind. But this way, she would feel that a genuine connection had been made, that she had impressed herself upon him, which was surely her desire. He stuffed the paper into the pocket of his coat, already bulging with taxi receipts, matchbooks, and slips such as this one. Who knew? Maybe he would call, some other time if not tonight. It was important to leave open the possibility.

  Roanne Levine, with a wave at her professor, slipped out into the mucky night—the little bit of snow had melted and the sidewalks glistened wet—and Thwaite agreed to follow Eli—and perhaps some others? Eli had his cell phone—to a bistro down in their neighborhood, on Amsterdam.

  When he got home, well past one, Annabel had left on only the table lamp in the hall. Unable, briefly, to remember whether his daughter was in residence or not, and certain that his wife, whom he had not telephoned, would be annoyed if wakened, Thwaite did his best to tiptoe along the Oriental. Whether on account of his gait or the gloom or, indeed, the sloshing quantities of scotch and burgundy he had consumed he could not later have said, but he simply did not see the mound of vomit until it had surrendered moistly and noisily beneath his right shoe.

  “Fuck,” he hissed. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” It was, he knew, the cat again: the Pope, their seventeen-year-old bony Abyssinian, ever haughty and standoffish and now, frankly, decrepit and repellent. She had
been a gift to Marina, then an adolescent yearning for a pony or a dog, and Thwaite still considered the creature his daughter’s responsibility. Never mind that she was—now he remembered—up in Stockbridge for the month. It still was not, nor could it ever be, his role to clean up cat sick. He kicked off his right shoe with the help of his left, then bent gingerly to remove his left with his hand. As he resumed his stealthy progress down the hall, the sullied brogues remained side by side, startled, as if their wearer had spontaneously combusted.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Pope Is Sick

  When Danielle had been back a week, long enough to emerge from the fog of jet lag and long enough to discover—she had known it all along—that her Australian project wouldn’t fly in spite of all the work she’d put into it, she called the Thwaites to get Marina’s phone number in the country. She’d thought to reach Annabel, perhaps (a nonprofit family lawyer and usually out during the week, but sometimes, mysteriously, at home), or more likely Aurora, the housekeeper. Murray Thwaite, by whom she was still, after all these years, intimidated, had his own line in his study and didn’t pick up the house phone. But it was Marina herself who answered, her soft, rather tentative voice apparently webbed by sleep.

  “Did I wake you up? It’s after eleven.”

  “Mmm.”

  “What are you doing back here, anyway?”

  Marina explained about Julius’s visit, the big snowstorm, how they had both felt freaked and claustrophobic in the house, and how she had offered to drive him home to town. “I thought I’d go right back up there,” she said, “but it just seemed as though there was a bunch of stuff to take care of here, you know?”

  “Like what?”

  “You know—messages, e-mails—”

  “But you had your computer up there, didn’t you?”