The Emperor's Children

by Claire Messud

  “You must be exhausted,” Annabel had consoled his folded brow, his clamped jaw. “Maybe it was too much? Sleep in tomorrow—we all will.”

  But he’d woken at dawn, unexorcised, irked still although he couldn’t quite have said at what, and had planned his temporary escape. The Thwaites’ New York society, after all, was not what he wanted. (Or was it? He couldn’t be sure.) He wanted, instead, his uncle’s pure life of the mind. He hankered for something less cushioned, more real, for a state of a piece with the education at hand: self-reliance, after all, was the goal. Again reading, or at least pretending to, his paperback drawn up to his nose as if to parody his myopia, he wondered how he looked, on the bench near the park’s edge, to the Latina mother who did not smile, to the hurrying joggers, to the dawdling girls—always the women, he was aware; conscious that he didn’t imagine the men saw him at all—and as he wondered, furtively peering over his pages to see if he was being seen, and of course, too, to see, because therein lay all his interest (how dull novels were, after all; even this one, this Tolstoy, though it was better than most).

  Again, in the morning’s brightness, Marina shone. Even if he hadn’t known her, he would have looked, caught by the sheen of her. She wore shorts, a T-shirt, sneakers, like the rest of them, but they became her, somehow. To Bootie’s chagrin, she saw him, too, in spite of, or perhaps because of, Tolstoy.

  “Aren’t you the bookworm,” she said, toeing the dust before him. “What have you got in the bag?”

  “Just a book.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Not long.”

  “It’s the perfect place for Dad to spy on you from his study, you know.” She squinted into the trees, pointed at the building looming over them from across the street. “Better in winter, because of the leaves, but even now—that’s his window. When I was a kid, I’d spend ages spying on people from there.”

  Bootie shuffled his hands, his book, made as if to stand.

  “Don’t worry, he’s not looking. I’m just kidding. But he could see you, if he tried. Planning to spend the day here?”

  “Of course not. I—”

  “Because the bench probably isn’t very comfortable.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “I’ll tell you what. I’m just going to my favorite outdoor yoga class—it’s in, like, five minutes—but after that I’m headed downtown.” She paused, cocked her head so her hair fell over one eye. “Have you been downtown? SoHo? The Village?”

  He shook his head.

  “I could take you. I’m meeting a friend, because I’ve got to get something to wear for a formal thing next week, so you’ll probably want to wander around on your own”—it was as delicately phrased a dismissal as he could have imagined—“but I’ll show you where to go.”

  Aside from reading, he had no plans; and she glowed so. He nodded. “Thanks.”

  “I’ve got to run”—she was bouncing on the balls of her feet—“but I’ll meet you upstairs at ten-thirty.”

  “Downstairs, maybe?”

  “If you like. In the lobby.”

  “Or on the corner?”

  She looked hard at him, seemed almost to smile, her lips a tight line. “In the lobby,” she said again. “At ten-thirty. Okay?”

  She made a point of taking him on the subway. So he’d know how to get home on his own, she said. Bootie had never ridden a subway before, except once in Washington, D.C., on a school trip with twenty other kids when he was twelve, and this bore no resemblance to that memory. He was at once fascinated and repelled by the crumbling girders, the prison grilles, the roar and the reek of it, piss and rot in the air even though it was still spring, not yet fully hot, and the icy, plastified blasts that erupted through the train itself. Again, as in the park, he wanted to gawp at all the forms and faces: elaborate cornrows, electric manicures, scraggly goatees and acne-scarred or whiskered chins. A bald man in a fine suit, with his eyes to the floor, as if out of modesty. A grande dame, elaborately, coquettishly painted, with a naked and disconcerting glare: something, maybe, was not quite right. A little too much makeup, maybe; an infinitesimal droop of her lip. No, she wasn’t right at all. And maybe—yes, there were stains on her silk cuffs, her tweed skirt was fraying—maybe she was the one who smelled so. He stared back, slid his fingers up and down the smeared pole, aware of its peculiarly human greasiness. The train, or the air-conditioning, he wasn’t sure which, gave a rising gnatlike whine as they accelerated, and at speed they rattled and bumped like a fairground spin; but Marina—who pressed her back against the cloudy glass of the door between stations rather than touch anything with her hands—seemed, like the rest, unfazed. When they stopped inexplicably in a tunnel in midtown, and idled there, belching, Bootie felt a panic skittering in him: the black corroded walls loomed too near the windows, the air grew immediately sparse and more fetid. Momentarily, the lights went out, and the train, like some dying beast, exhaled. His throat was closing. His neck burned, and his ears.

  His alarm must have shown, because in the black gloom, Marina leaned forward—a hint of her lemon scent in the miasma—and said, “It’s perfectly normal. We’re outside Penn Station.” And again, “You’re not frightened, are you?”

  To which he shook his head vigorously, faster, he thought, even than his heart was beating, and thus confused the jolt of the train starting, relit, reanimated, with his own, willful shock. He didn’t think he would come home this way—he didn’t think he could bear it—although he didn’t know how else he might span the island. Perhaps there was a bus; perhaps he’d walk; but this subterranean inferno, in all its constrictions, he could not tolerate. He didn’t say so, merely thanked her, blinked attentively as they climbed to the street, molelike, and set off into the light.

  He should have been watching the pedestrian throng, a different mix again on these narrower, more lowly built streets, almost bumping into him, casually oblivious, chattering, it seemed, in many foreign languages as they ambled in and out of the plate-glass fronted shops; but he found himself watching his cousin. Her gait seemed slightly altered, and her hand rose more often to flick at her hair, as if she were more aware of herself here, performing. She pushed her chin out a little, pouted her lips. It occurred to him for the first time that her floating little camisole, of a lace-trimmed rose, was not an unraveling leftover retrieved from oblivion but an item of fashion. He tried to figure out whose attention she thought to attract—not his, obviously—and only then took in that the neighborhood oozed youth and beauty, a wealth of golden-skinned, long-limbed specimens in whose company Marina seemed naturally, but not extraordinarily, to belong.

  The friend, then, came as a surprise: hunched over a bagel at Dean & DeLuca, she was small, bosomy, beaky, redeemed from plainness by the light of her eyes and her pillowy lips. When she grinned, lopsidedly, her face crinkled into something dearer, more accessible than beauty. He liked her then, and too, for the poorly blotted daub of cream cheese on her pale blue shirt.

  “How’re you liking Manhattan? First time, isn’t it?”

  “Not quite. First time as a grown-up.” Even the word “grown-up” sounded childish to him as he said it. He tried to stifle his blush. He wished he’d said “adult.”

  “Mom and Dad dragged him to the Beavors’ last night.” Marina rolled her eyes. “You know, they’ve got that penthouse over the park I told you about.”

  The friend—Danielle, her name was Danielle—smiled vaguely.

  “Awesome view. But everyone was so stiff. Poor Fred here looked like he was dying to escape.”

  “No, no. I was—Maybe a little—It was—different.” He looked at his hands. He could feel the color rising, unstoppable.

  “Hey, don’t I know it.” Danielle seemed to smile for him. Her teeth were very white. “I’m from Columbus, you know, not like Miss New York here, who couldn’t imagine life anywhere else—”

  “Not fair!” Marina protested.

  “But who, as far as I can tell,
had never been to Brooklyn until her junior year in college.” Both Marina and Danielle laughed at this. Their history; a private joke. Bootie waited. “Anyway, my point is that I know exactly what it’s like.”

  “What is it like, then?” Marina asked.

  “It’s disconcerting. It’s like you know it and you don’t know it, at the same time. You’ve seen it so often, the images, in movies, on TV—you feel as though it’s yours. But of course it’s different. The way something you’ve dreamed is different from the real thing.”

  “Is that true for you?” Marina appeared to wink at her cousin.

  “I guess so.” He moved his fingers off the table, where they loomed pale and enormous, and tucked his hands between his knees. “I mean, I’ve hardly been here. I took the car to Queens, and then—I haven’t seen much so far.”

  “You’d have to say it smells real, though, wouldn’t you? The subway?”

  “Sure. Absolutely.”

  “Frederick, if you don’t mind my asking—are you here, like, on vacation? Or is this something more long-term? Marina was a bit vague.”

  “I guess I’ve been vague. I’m the one. I mean, I don’t want my mom to know—just in the sense that she’s obsessed with school, she thinks I can’t accomplish anything without some stupid, meaningless diploma, so …” He paused, regrouped, began again. “I’d like to stay. Not with your folks, obviously—I mean, Murray and Annabel have been amazing, it’s not—But you know what I mean. The idea is to get a place sorted out, you know, and some kind of—”

  “Job?” offered Danielle.

  “Yeah, of course. But then to be studying.”

  “Oh, right. Great! Where?”

  “Not in a school. I mean—” His knee started to jiggle, rocking the table. It shouldn’t be so difficult to explain; surely the notion wasn’t so radical? “I mean, I don’t really trust institutions at this point. I think I get more out of it, you know, on my own.”

  “Wow,” Danielle said, and Bootie couldn’t tell what she meant by it. Marina just stared, with a fixed, bright smile, as though he had spoken gibberish.

  “Do you have, I don’t know, a sort of program in mind? Or is it more general, really?”

  “You mean, is it bullshit? No, I have a program. My own reading lists. And I take notes, and I write stuff up, but you know …”

  “Who reads it?” Marina asked.

  He blinked. “So far—well, I guess so far I haven’t really sorted that out. Me, so far.”

  “Maybe my dad could read your essays.”

  He scanned her face, the red lips, the violet eyes—was she laughing? Not that he could tell. “Do you mean it?”

  “Well, I can’t speak for him—”

  “But almost,” Danielle broke in.

  “But I definitely think you should ask. Or I can ask. I mean, you’re his nephew. And he loves—What’s it called? Mentoring. He loves nurturing young minds, all that. Keeps him young, you know.”

  “What kinds of things are you studying?” Danielle had that patient, almost maternal look again. It rankled. “I mean, is it literature, or neuroscience, or whatever?”

  He frowned. “Mostly whatever,” he said, and felt bad as he did and so went on. “Right now, it’s Emerson and Tolstoy.”

  “A little light reading.” Marina laughed. “But great stuff, seriously. Which Tolstoy? I love Anna Karenina. It’s one of my all-time favorites.”

  “War and Peace, actually.”

  “Right.”

  From the vigor of her nodding, Bootie wondered if she had perhaps not read War and Peace. He didn’t want to catch her out, so he drank his coffee instead.

  “On a completely different subject,” Danielle said, reaching out to touch not Bootie’s forearm but Marina’s, “we might know somewhere for Frederick to live.”

  “Might we?”

  “Think about it—what about the now vacant home of our incredible disappearing friend?”

  “He does want to sublet, I remember him saying.”

  “What’s this?”

  They told Bootie about Julius, and about the recent domestic reversals. “It’s like they’re on some permanent honeymoon—you can’t get through to them,” Marina explained. “Or else it’s us. This David guy—none of us has ever met him, and you know, Julius likes to compartmentalize, he always has, but this is ridiculous, it’s like he doesn’t think we’re good enough for David, or something.”

  “Or else David’s not good enough.”

  “Then why cling to him? No, no, it’s about, you know, giving his lover what he wants. Which makes me hate the guy, even though I don’t know him.” Danielle had raised her voice, clapped her hand to her mouth. “What kind of man doesn’t want to meet his lover’s oldest friends? I mean, really. To spend some time with us and then reject our company would be one thing; but just to refuse to have dinner—”

  “Has he refused to have dinner?” Bootie asked. He hadn’t been party to such conversations since his sister was in high school—the endless, fruitless analysis struck him as deeply female, uncomfortably intimate, like lacy underthings.

  “Not strictly speaking, no,” explained Marina. “We just keep getting the brush off from Julius, and it’s not entirely clear why. So we blame the Conehead, as we call him. His name’s David Cohen.”

  “The cokehead is more like it,” Danielle said. “That’s my sense of things, anyway.”

  Bootie was moderately shocked and knew that he ought not to be, so said only, “Really.”

  “Well, Julius, even though he’s pretty straight—except for being gay, of course, but you know what I mean—has always liked to imply that his life’s a little, um, risqué. The sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll thing seems, is, glamorous to him.”

  “And glamour counts, for Julius—he’s insecure that way,” Marina said.

  “But this time,”—Danielle shrugged—“this time there’s something more—what would you say, M? Authentic. There’s something unnervingly authentic about his references to drugs.”

  “We’ll be worried when he doesn’t mention them at all anymore,” Marina said with sudden brusqueness, gathering the empty coffee cups and crumbed waxed paper scraps from the table before them. “But right now, Danny, we’ve got to go buy some dresses.”

  Bootie joined the movement to stand, aware once again of his fleshiness and height, as Danielle, when upright, proved quite small. He was aware, too, that the prospect of a place to live—Julius’s place—had slipped from the conversation and hence from his grasp. He didn’t yet have a job, had no money for such a thing; but still, it felt like a small loss; which, in the river of petty gossip about Julius’s love life, signaled how far askew Marina’s—and Danielle’s—priorities had drifted. This was no better than Amherst, than Oswego—and this in a world he had imagined, somehow, to be higher. His hopes lay still with his uncle. But Marina, here before him, was so much prettier, a gazelle, a confection. And if she’d invited him to go dress shopping, instead of briskly pecking his cheek and pointing him in the direction of the World Trade Center—“You can take the elevator up to the top. Take pictures of the view. Everybody in New York should do it once”—he would readily have acquiesced. But she was keen to escape, he could sense it, in the slide of her violet eyes, in her slight breathlessness; and it was Danielle who said, with a laugh, “Or you could traipse through Armani and Anna Sui with us, if you want. Because I’ve never been up the Twin Towers myself, and as a girl from Columbus, I always think it’s not doing the tourist things that most makes you a New Yorker.”

  To which Bootie smiled, and blinked behind his glasses, rebuffing, for his cousin’s sake, the amiable overture. “It’s better if I go,” he said. And because this was not immediately logical, made no apparent sense, he lied: “I’ve always wanted to see it. The view, I mean.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Julius’s Dilemma

  The nerves tingled to the ends of his fingers, and his blood pulsed in his ears. Julius was misb
ehaving, radically, and it thrilled and frightened him in equal measure. Sunday evening, still light, and he was waiting, on the one hand, for David to return from a family visit to Scarsdale; waiting, although not imminently, for the click of the key in the lock. And yet, it could be imminent, couldn’t it? David could always take an earlier train, could always choose to forgo his parents’ routine Sunday Chinese, lured by the prospect of his endlessly available and—so Julius liked to fantasize—relentlessly inventive lover, whose hairless olive-tinged skin was drenched and scented by expensive bath oils, then pamperingly wrapped in a stolen hotel bathrobe. And at the same time, somehow and perversely no less in the realm of Julius’s fantasy, although it was, in this instance, by far more certain, or at least more imminent, he awaited with equal excitement the arrival of another, unknown man, summoned over the Internet and known only as Dale, a stallion (or so he promised) and a fitness instructor (or so he claimed), a guy whose moniker was SweetCheeks and who had promised an encounter both sensational and discreet, with the added advantage that he lived (or so he asserted) a mere three blocks away, and so could be in and out (as it were) in the blink of an eye, and certainly—although who could be entirely certain? And wasn’t that the point?—before David returned.

  If Julius could have explained this behavior, he would have departed in several different directions. He was happier, in his love life, than he could remember ever being; and there was no clear motivation for his treachery, if you looked at it one way—the stolid, staid Marina or Danielle way; and yet; and yet. First of all there was the matter of habit: some people were addicted to eBay, and maybe Julius was addicted, similarly, to this—drawn, just like the bidders who purchased jelly jars from Alaska or Oriental rugs till they were thick on the ground, by the lure of possibility, the sense, each time, that the undiscovered held the Answer, that this mate, this flank, this heaving torso, this rough jaw might prove the long-sought panacea. How could anyone, how could Julius, be expected to relinquish all this, all these, for a single known trajectory, however fond he was of the curls at David’s nape or the line of his buttocks, however thrilling their intimate life might be? Could one not be Pierre and Natasha at the same time?