The Emperor's Children

by Claire Messud

  Although he wouldn’t show it (not over such a trifle), he was irritated by the intrusion. It was a household rule that nobody entered Murray’s office without first knocking; and that unless the door was already ajar—which he was fairly certain it hadn’t been—one did not knock at all, except in dire emergency. Nobody touched his papers, nobody moved his piles, nobody entered the inner sanctum unbidden: as he had explained more than once, in this room his brain was laid out, in all its idiosyncrasy. To be in this room was to be in his head; and he relied upon his household to behave accordingly. Which, almost unfailingly, they did.

  On this evening, past midnight, Murray Thwaite had been so certain of his privacy that he had taken the file from his locked desk drawer, the book file he thought of as his life’s work, the project that, when it was completed, if it was ever completed (but what, then, would he do, if it were completed, if it was indeed his life’s work?), would at last and indisputably elevate his name from the ranks of competent, even courageous journalists and thoughtful columnists to the rare air of the immortals. It was a work—he hesitated even to form the word in his mind, and yet his sense of self, of what this was all for, depended upon that formulation—of philosophy. Partly aphoristic, partly essayistic, it was to be the distillation, crystalline, of all he had learned, and knew, and had come to live by. In his mind, although not on paper—he was not yet ready, even after all these years, to commit such intimacies to paper, let alone to the too readily accessible, alarmingly traceable computer—the book had a title: How to Live. Simple, pithy—and yet, he feared, grandiose, too grandiose for what was yet only an uneven pile of handwritten pages, blotched with coffee rings, dog-eared, marked-up, read a thousand unsatisfied times by one, and only one, pair of eyes. Annabel knew of this manuscript, the way a child knows about Narnia, with a mixture of hope and incredulity; and since returning home, Marina seemed to have surmised that some vital, unscheduled enterprise was secretly afoot (never mind that it had been begun almost a decade before, when she was away at Brown), something she referred to with an ironic obliquity as “Dad’s Thing.” Aside from these two, nobody at all knew, as far as Murray was aware, of this text. (How could he know, and why would he imagine, that Marina had in fact told Danielle and Julius and possibly others that her father’s next big project was a top-secret manuscript that not even she had yet seen; so that among her acquaintances there circulated rumors about “Murray Thwaite’s Thing,” rumors that suggested an exposé of the CIA or the Communist Party or, from one particularly silly corner, cookery—Brunch Recipes from Murray Thwaite’s Kitchen—but did not, of course, could not, come close to the truth.)

  The manuscript made him nervous: he didn’t know how to proceed with it. He’d never written anything like it before. The number of its pages grew or shrank depending only on his humor, as he could read the same passage twenty times, finding it splendid, illuminating, the first nineteen, and daft or banal, the twentieth. And even then, he would determine purely on a whim whether to discard the offending sheet or whether, indulgently, to put the page aside in hopes that a twenty-first reading, in a sunnier frame, would restore its luster to the offending prose. Because the manuscript made him nervous, he frequently avoided it, often for months at a time; a tic that, given his prolificity and the constant public demands upon him, was not difficult to justify. Only when he felt himself to be genuinely settled, not merely unmolested but, in some profound sense, unmolestable, did he take out this infinitely precious file.

  As he had felt, this evening, until his daughter—he loved her, adored her, of course he did; but he did ask himself, as he noted her faded pajamas, her curled bare toes, why this woman, no longer in her first youth, was living still, or again, in his house—had intruded.

  “Daddy,” she said, picking without looking at a small scab on her ankle. “Are you busy?”

  “Am I busy, pet?” He peered above his glasses with what he hoped was a loving sternness. “What does it look like?”

  “I know the door was shut—but I thought—I really need to talk to you—”

  “We could have talked at supper, my beauty.”

  “It’s, well, it’s not that it’s private, although it sort of is; it’s mostly that you’ll understand, and Mom … I wanted to talk to you on your own.”

  Murray removed his glasses, allowed them to dangle professorially while he chewed upon a stem. He did not say anything.

  “But if you’ve got a deadline?” Her anxiety rang false. He knew that she didn’t care whether he had a deadline; she cared only about the conversation she wanted to have with him. In this sense, in her single-mindedness, he might even have said her bloody-mindedness, she was her father’s daughter. Only sometimes, such as now, did the trait annoy him. But he knew that she would have been, on approaching his inner sanctum, as apprehensive as she was determined; he could feel from afar the clamminess of her palms, the palpitations of her heart, and, with a sigh, the sigh of parental responsibility, he resigned himself. He shuffled his papers, slid them into their folder, turned it facedown, all with a nonchalance that suggested they were of no possible importance, and shifted himself in his chair, so that he could look properly at his daughter and, as she required of him, converse.

  “So,” he said, and held out his flat hands.

  Marina gave half a laugh. “You make me feel silly now, Daddy. It’s suddenly all formal, like there’s a script, and I don’t know—”

  He cut her off. “Do you want to ask me something, or do you want to tell me something?”

  Marina thought a moment. “Neither. Both. What kind of a question is that?”

  “Marina dear, you’ve got to think clearly. You’ve got to learn to articulate your thoughts clearly. Clarity is the key.”

  “You make it sound so simple.”

  “But it is. That, at least, is simple.”

  “You make everything sound simple. And it’s not. You’re always so certain of everything.”

  He sighed. “Don’t whine, Marina. It doesn’t become you. And don’t speak nonsense. There are those things about which I have sufficient information to be certain. And then there is a great deal, of course, that is a muddle.”

  Marina nodded, played with her toes, would not look at him. He was, in so many ways, extremely proud of her—not least of her beauty, which was, to him, each time a surprise, as though unwittingly he had thrown a perfect pot, or cultivated a perfect bonsai—but she could be, she was being, trying. They heard a siren approach on the avenue below, heard its rising shriek, and then the fall as it passed them, continued away. As if she had been waiting politely for it to finish, Marina began, “I just wanted to ask for your advice. About—you know. Things.”

  “Which ones? The book?” He was tiring of the pretense of her book; not least because it made him wonder whether his book—not The Fat Lady, which was doing very nicely, thank you, but the book, this book beneath his elbow—was as farcical a sham as his daughter’s.

  “No.” She peered up at him through her hair, which she had coquettishly encouraged across half of her face. “Or not just that.” She paused. “It’s the whole setup. I mean, I’m thirty now, aren’t I?”

  “You are.”

  “And when you were thirty you were already famous.”

  “Famous?” He shrugged modestly, a shrug as artificial as his daughter’s earlier anxiety. He could see her seeing the falsehood; they knew each other well. And then he said, and meant, “It was a very different time. It was a different world.”

  “Yes, but you were doing important things from the start. You had convictions.”

  “World events—there was an opportunity—I believed in a lot of things, some of which hold true today, and a lot of which, well … as we were saying, very little is certain.”

  “But Daddy, what am I going to do?”

  Murray Thwaite blinked. She was so lovely, and so charming, but she’d been these things for a long time, all her life; and he thought he had instilled in her th
e importance of being more than they. He did not want to suspect that she was not bright; he knew her, he knew she was bright. Not as bright, perhaps, as her friend Danielle, but intelligent enough for there to be no excuse, no possible excuse for this behavior. He manifested his displeasure by breathing, dragonlike, through his nose. He could feel his nostrils flaring. To give her time, he lit a cigarette, emptied the dirty ashtray into the wastepaper basket at his feet. Aurora lined the baskets with plastic shopping bags to facilitate her cleaning, and the butts and ashes rustled against the plastic like leaves in a breeze.

  “Danielle thinks I should get a job,” Marina said at last.

  “What kind of job did you have in mind?”

  “That’s the thing. First off, should I even have one when I’m trying to finish the book—and then, you know, a real job would be so demanding, after all, that’s what an interesting job is supposed to be; and an easy job, a dumb job, well, at that point, who am I kidding?”

  Murray Thwaite had little patience for this. He suddenly saw his daughter as a monster he and Annabel had created—they and a society of excess. He was about to begin “When I was your age …”; but suddenly could hear his own father’s voice in his head, intoning these words that he had sworn to himself—he remembered it, his irritation—he would never speak to his own children. He said instead, “You know you’re welcome here as long as you like. A bed, a roof, your dinner, you’ve got, and a little cash too, as long as your mother and I can manage it.”

  Marina nodded, as if chastened by his generosity, waiting for what might follow.

  What, he wondered, should follow? “But the question is, what do you want to do with your life?”

  “I want—you know, what I’ve always wanted, Daddy. To do something important.”

  Could she not hear herself? Even that student at Columbia—what was her name? Anne? Maryanne? Roanne, that was it—even she had surely not been so naïve, and ten years younger, too. “Meaning?” he pressed.

  “With writing. I’d like to write something—articles, a book—that mattered.”

  “But on what subject? What do you believe in?”

  “Not children’s clothes, that’s for sure,” she snorted, ruefully. “I don’t know. There are so many things. You, of all people, know what it’s like—”

  “Different issues are important to different people, my girl, as you are well aware. It’s not just a matter of picking something off a list, of following someone else’s ideas. If I’ve taught you anything, surely I’ve taught you that? You’ve got to find your subject. Or a first subject, something to start with.”

  “But how?”

  “Maybe in the first instance your friend has a point. Maybe you should get a job of some kind.”

  “In journalism?”

  “In anything that interests you. Teach school. Work for an aid agency. Work for an ad agency, for God’s sake. Just a job.”

  “I suppose what I worry is”—Marina gave her father a self-deprecating smile, to his mind one of her most bewitching expressions—“I worry that that will make me ordinary, like everybody else.”

  “My beauty”—he stood to give her a hug, pointedly cutting short the interview, and she, too, unfurled from the divan, stepping as daintily as a dancer over the piles she had relocated to the floor—“nothing under the sun could make you ordinary. Nothing, ever. Now, I need to work. Because, you see, I do have a job. It concentrates the mind.”

  He let her get as far as the door before he spoke again: “Will you finish this book, then, after all the work you’ve done on it?”

  She had her hand upon the doorknob. He could tell from the way that she held it that she was feeling its cool brass, and the shape of her palm, her fingers, around its surface. He felt that he knew her—the line of her spine, the curve of her eyes—and that he did not really need her to answer his question.

  “I don’t know yet,” she said. “I’m still trying to figure it out.”

  He nodded. She was in the hallway, the door not quite shut when he called, a final time, her name: “Marina?”

  “Yes, Daddy?”

  “Do you know your friend Danielle’s e-mail, offhand? I said I’d forward some stuff to her about that Jones fellow, you know, the one she wants to make a flick about.”

  “That’s so sweet.” Marina smiled, showing only her head around the door. “It’ll mean a lot to her.”

  Once Marina had gone, Murray Thwaite sat again before his open folder. He took a clean sheet of paper and wrote at the top: “Chapter Ten: Counseling an Adult Daughter.” He crossed this out, wrote “Conversations with an Adult Daughter”; and then, “A Grown Child Ponders How to Live.” At the last, he settled upon “Talking to a Grown Child,” which words sat in the middle of the page in black ink, in his long, narrow capital letters. He smoked several cigarettes while looking at this phrase, and emptied the tumbler of scotch that rested on his blotter, its sweat sunk into the green paper in a solemn little ring. Eventually, he put this sheet of paper on top of the manuscript pile and returned them all to the folder, and to the drawer, which he locked carefully. She had—this was, of course, what one’s children did—ruined his stride, spoiled his momentum.

  MAY

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A Mother Knows Best

  Whenever Randy Minkoff came to town, there were three things she always wanted to “do”: a Broadway show; a walk—and once, even, with much giggling and protestation, but ultimately much delight, a carriage ride—in Central Park; and, most important, the Metropolitan. She tried to visit other museums as well, different ones each time, and on this visit she proposed the Frick and the Pierpont Morgan, or perhaps the Public Library; but it was to the Met that she returned, as awed each time she climbed the marble steps as she had been, she always told her daughter, when first she came to New York City, a girl of eighteen in her freshman year at Ohio State, traveling with a group of girlfriends over spring break, to her own parents’ noisy displeasure.

  “The charm never wears off,” she would announce gaily, in her throaty, unfiltered voice. “I wish sex was as reliable.” And she would laugh, heartily and from her chest, roundly amused at her own daring.

  Not that Danielle’s mother was having much sex, as far as Danielle could tell. After the divorce, she’d moved to St. Petersburg at the urging of her old friend Irene Weinrip, also a divorcée and comfortably installed in a condo by the water. Randy Minkoff hadn’t worked anywhere but for her husband’s company for years, but as she told Irene, or Irene told her, it was never very clear in the recounting, one thing Randy knew was property. You weren’t married to a developer for all those years without knowing property. So she had taken her real estate exam, had launched into the bright world of St. Petersburg housing, and had found new joy in her life. Small, dark, and beaky, like her daughter, she had thickened with age and carried her significant breasts before her, but she didn’t let what some might have seen as the infelicities of her physique deter her fashion sense.

  “Men like something to hold on to, and as long as you’ve got a good corset, you can look great in anything,” she informed Danielle. She favored wide-legged pantsuits, herself, with clingy tops—occasionally patterned after the pelts of endangered species—and high heels. She liked gold jewelry, or even jewelry that looked like gold—she was not snobbish in her tastes, and had more than once picked up an item she adored from QVC—and she chose garments that would flatter her naturally lovely skin and the artificial golden copper wave of her hair. She was ebullient, even overbearing, with a voice that seemed to contain within it a lifetime of heavy smoking (although she had quit when Danielle was eight) and a certain adipose resonance. As a real estate agent, particularly for retirees, silver-haired snowbirds from Canada and the northern Midwest, she was popular, frankly successful; as a girl among middle-aged girls, dynamic and a joker; but when it came to men, Danielle knew that her mother talked about dates but did not go on them, that she referred jauntily to sex but could n
ot, since the divorce—it hadn’t been her idea, after all—look without wariness upon any of the opposite sex but her son. And perhaps even he was suspect.

  Danielle liked to believe that in matters of the heart she was different from her mother, even though they shared so many other traits. But Danielle’s intimate life, while more peopled than Randy’s, was not more evidently fulfilled. Nor, of late—since an intermittent long-term beau named Tim had left her in order, swiftly, to marry a nineteen-year-old college dropout—any more promising than Julius’s. Danielle rather pitied her mother, stout and plucky and “done,” beetling toward sixty as though she enjoyed it, as though she’d never felt more fully herself; and yet Danielle worried, when Randy Minkoff landed in New York and installed herself at the Days Inn on Eighth at Forty-seventh in a room that, she brashly insisted, was no smaller than her daughter’s studio (“It fits two queen-size beds, Danny. Two of ’em!”), that her mother pitied her. Certainly, Randy worried about Danielle (“When I was your age, sweetie, you and Jeff were running around the house buck naked, screaming, if you can believe it. Such delicious tushes …”), and projected—so Danielle believed—all her unacknowledged lack of fulfillment onto her child. She didn’t seem to be as impressed as many, as even Danielle was sometimes, by her position as a documentary producer for a prestigious series. Randy Minkoff thought this unreliable work, because one was dependent for its success upon so many uncontrollable factors. This contradicted one of her kooky self-help beliefs, adopted in the new, the reborn, post-divorce Floridian era; and so Danielle had not told her mother that the Australian project was dead (Randy had been impressed by the voyage to the Antipodes, by the paid business-class ticket), but had instead suggested that it was on hold, temporarily. She spoke breezily about her current idea, with an indifference she didn’t feel, to try to imply that this was a mere trifle, a notion batted about until the financing for two months in New South Wales was fixed.