“Don’t you recognize that man from somewhere?” Marina’s tone had shifted to the conspiratorial, as she pointed with her chewed forefinger to the slight, attenuated figure of Ludovic Seeley. His suit was impeccably cut, but he wasn’t wearing black tie; he hadn’t wanted, Danielle surmised, to grant this society the satisfaction.
“That’s Ludovic Seeley. The Australian guy who’s editing that new rag, The Monitor. You met him with me, when my mom was here.”
“He’s better looking than I remembered. He seemed a little scrawny, that day at the Met.”
“Or maybe success has made him seem more … well, more.” Danielle wasn’t convinced that Marina would hear her irony. She gave up, changed her tone. “He’s actually a pretty interesting guy. Something of a snake, I suspect, but interesting.” She paused. “I told him he should offer you a job.”
“What kind of a job, exactly?”
“One that would make your reputation, of course.”
“What did he say to that?”
“Ask him yourself,” said Danielle. “I think he’s on his way over.” And yet again she attempted, as surreptitiously as possible, to adjust her cleavage in its crimson casing, before Seeley was close enough to kiss the back of her hand.
“Danielle Minkoff,” he said, his eyes fully and firmly and almost passionately on hers. “It’s my lucky day.”
“Why’s that?”
“I just popped upstairs to go to the loo, and checked out the seating plan. Seems we’re at the same table.”
“Oh yes?”
“I took the liberty of switching cards, and now we’ll be side by side.”
“My, how flattering.”
“Don’t be flattered—I was sparing myself that dowager dragon from The Observer.” He turned to Marina, clicked his heels. “We’ve met, Ms. Thwaite—with Danielle, in fact. About a month ago. Ludovic Seeley.”
“Of course.”
Danielle could see something peculiar happening to Marina, a physical self-consciousness that made her more gangly, and less present. It was Marina’s particular equivalent of Danielle’s adjusting her neckline. Which meant she fancied him. And he? Danielle attempted to gauge the intensity of his gaze upon her friend, but deemed that, if anything, he proved less chivalrous, and less knowing—indeed, less flirtatious altogether—than he was with Danielle herself.
The three of them ascended the stairs together, pressed to intimacy by the bovine throng, which funneled from the lobby upward, spilling into the cavernous, chandeliered ballroom. Here, tables were so tightly crammed that to pass between them, once guests were seated, was all but impossible. In this larger space, the noise rose, echoed, fell again, like a blanket muffling all exchanges, and Marina’s words to Seeley were lost to Danielle, who heard only “Catch you later. I’m off to join my date.” Then Marina wafted off to the table of honor, behind which Murray Thwaite could be spotted hovering, unlit cigarette in hand, partially obscured by an explosive and garish display of flowers.
This arrangement—comprised of birds of paradise, waratahs and kangaroo paw (and this, mysteriously, in the brief season of peonies)—was repeated in smaller configurations at each of the tables, flowers that, in their bowed spindles and squat bulbosity, in their vulgar blips of red, orange, and violet, towered over the guests as if in parody of their grotesquerie.
“The dowager is more waratah,” whispered Seeley to Danielle, “and that one’s more bird of paradise.” He indicated a tall, bony woman of forty-odd as she passed in search of her seat. Led by her Sitwellian proboscis, she wore an unfortunate draped jacket of yellow tie-dyed crinkled silk. The dowager, it was true, resembled the waratah: stout and bristling, encased in a vermilion ensemble whose lines and hue served only to accentuate the immensity of her bosom. Silver-haired, stony-faced, with the pouting lip of a bullfrog, she was named, incongruously, Serena Ballou. “The balloon I can see,” remarked Seeley sotto voce. “The serenity unfortunately not.”
“Watch it,” said Danielle. “I’m wearing red myself.”
“Crimson is altogether different. It’s a beautiful dress; you look superb.”
“Please.” Danielle flushed. “Make fun of me outright. At least then I know what’s what.”
“You shun my efforts at gallantry? How shaming. But I’m utterly sincere. You’ve got the perfect eye for what suits you. Really.”
“Marina chose the dress.” Danielle spoke without thinking, then wished she hadn’t.
“A good and useful friend,” said Seeley. “Hang on to her.”
“I intend to.”
“I wonder if one could overlook the father for long,” Seeley went on.
“We’ve been over that, haven’t we?”
“Of course. But I have greater reason to malign him when the city’s media luminaries come together like so many sheep in order publicly to reward his mediocrity. A mutual lovefest. Most unsavory.”
“That makes it sound as though the media luminaries could have made a better choice.”
“Couldn’t they?”
“My point is that their choice is always despicable. We see the same thing from opposite sides: I approve of Murray Thwaite, and feel he’s diminished by accepting this award, because these people, this jury of so-called peers, is so appalling and mediocre. You think Murray Thwaite is mediocre, and so feel the award itself, and maybe the jury, too, are somehow less because he’s being celebrated. But that makes you a supporter of the establishment. Not a very radical position, is it?”
“Or perhaps I hold the award and its recipient equally in contempt, which makes me at least clear-eyed.”
“Then why are you here, Ludovic?”
“Why, indeed, are you?”
Danielle raised her glass. “It’s all grist to the mill, you know. You never know what you might learn, even here.”
“Quite,” agreed Seeley. “Observe the animals in their natural habitat.”
“And you’re the wolf in sheep’s clothing?”
“Just a man grateful to have any clothes at all”—Seeley adjusted the knife and fork at his place—“when it seems so many among us are utterly unclad.”
Danielle couldn’t help but glance downward, suddenly and absurdly afraid that her dress might have discomposed itself, and more fully revealed a breast. “The nudity—even metaphorical—escapes me somewhat,” she eventually replied. “Everyone dressed up to the nines.”
“And in their very caring, exposed. Even those who break the code do so to make a point—”
“That would be you.”
“Yes, yes, that would be me. And in seeking to make a point, we seek recognition from the crowd.”
“But then even the people who choose not to come at all, who stay home and watch TV—even they are implicated, by your reckoning. They’re making some other kind of point.”
“Exactly.”
“Well, if you can’t escape the system in any way, then what’s the good of even thinking about it?”
“You forget your Napoleon, Danielle, my dear.”
“Here we go again.”
“Don’t roll your eyes. If you can’t escape the system, you must simply become the system.”
“Alter it from within.”
“No, not at all. Not ‘within.’ The very notion is fallacious. We’ve been over this before: You become the system. You become what people want to be.”
“If you can guess what that is.”
Ludovic all but sneered. “Tonight, absurdly, it would seem to be Murray Thwaite.”
Danielle sat up very straight in her chair. The wine and the warmth of the room had painted high spots of color on her cheeks—she could feel them. “I’d be pretty happy to be Murray Thwaite, myself. He’s written a lot of important stuff, and honest.”
“My point exactly. Even you would embrace him, the idle old charlatan.”
“You wouldn’t care to meet him, then?”
Seeley stretched a long arm along the back of Danielle’s gilt faux-bamboo c
hair, and leaned toward her. His face, pale, oval, Nabokovian, had an unnervingly predatory air. “Are you offering?”
“Well, I could. But only if you promised to behave.”
“Believe me, I know nothing if not my manners. My mother was very particular on that score. But I do absolutely yearn to observe that particular animal in his natural habitat. Oh yes, I do.”
Danielle’s opportunity to introduce Seeley and Thwaite did not arise for some time. First there were the prickly little salads and their raspberry vinaigrette, and their antennae-like cheese straws; then there were the filet medallions, glistening in their gravy, and the somewhat hardened turret of potatoes au gratin. There were wines red and white, waters flat and fizzy; and then, before dessert, a movement to speeches. A shrill man’s voice silenced the room—it was, Danielle could see, the bald editor in velvet who had claimed Murray Thwaite during cocktails—and in echo droned and squeaked an annual recitation about the Journalists’ Association and its marriage, back in the sixties, with the Writers Guild, giving birth to this unique organization in which writers of so many stripes might unite—“Where the waratah and the bird of paradise conjoin,” whispered Seeley, nodding at Madame Ballou, whose weakened chin appeared to tremble over her red jacket and whose eyes grew heavy-lidded as the speech wore on; while behind her, several tables away but in an unimpeded visual line, sat the yellow silk torso he had noted earlier, topped by its long, eagerly quivering nose. From an angle midway between Seeley and Danielle, the nose would appear to sprout from Serena Ballou’s gunmetal crop. The pompous little man—only a vice chairman, as it transpired, because he had yet to introduce the blue sequined battleship who was the society’s chairman (“or should I say, in her honor, chairwoman,” he corrected himself, with a nasal whinny)—meandered from the history to the present mission (“Aha,” whispered Seeley. “You see: there is a mission! That in itself could be hijacked. Why not my mission, I wonder?”) to the annual award, so carefully selected, to the individual whose contribution to the published word … (“A confusion of the mission,” hissed Seeley, “or are you televisuals not eligible?”) The little man, whose name was supposedly known, and so never once mentioned, eventually withdrew, slinking back to his seat beneath the acoustically augmented echoing roar of dutiful applause, to be replaced at the podium by the battleship, who spoke in a smiling lockjaw, as if her sentences were dragged from between powerfully resistant lips. Seeley mocked this too, quietly, and the prominence of her glittering shelflike bust. At least she held forth only briefly, an encomium to Murray Thwaite, and then sailed calmly back to berth behind the largest flower arrangement, at Thwaite’s right hand.
“Bottom’s turn,” Seeley murmured. Danielle glared at him; flirtatiously, of course, but with a pang of guilt at her coyness. She experienced some confusion as she leaned back in her chair, and felt the feathered, unacknowledgeable presence of Seeley’s hand at her nape. She was reminded of the evening of their first meeting, in Sydney, and of the way she’d seen him bend toward Moira—and of what she, Danielle, had experienced then. To countenance mockery of Murray Thwaite, quite in this way and from this man, surely constituted treachery, both to her dear friend and to the object of derision himself, so newly communicant and hence real to her; and yet, for the prospect of this hand, this sardonic smile, she was apparently more than willing.
In truth, Murray Thwaite’s speech wasn’t particularly remarkable, or didn’t seem so when heard in Seeley’s shadow. Danielle could picture Marina’s rapt expression—one she knew well—and caught it mirrored in many of the women’s faces around her, including, surprisingly, Serena Ballou’s. Murray Thwaite spoke about the importance of integrity, about pursuing truth even when it wasn’t fashionable. He spoke of changing times, of a culture increasingly preoccupied with form over substance, with the anointing of celebrities whom audiences were all too keen to worship.
“Please don’t misunderstand me,” he said. “I’m honored to be standing here tonight, and grateful beyond measure for the recognition you’ve all so kindly bestowed upon me.” He paused, looked meaningfully and handsomely out at the assembly, with a raised eyebrow that prompted Seeley to hiss, “Kitsch. Pure kitsch,” and went on: “But I grew up questioning the very notion of awards and prizes, the promise that any received ideas or individuals could be trusted. I was young in the fifties, and really came into my own in the sixties—a time some of you here are old enough to remember with me—when we believed in tearing it all down and beginning again. When any establishment, and certainly any organization like this one, was suspect. Recall, if you will, that slogan from Paris ’Sixty-eight: ‘Rêve plus evolution equals Révolution’—dream plus evolution equals revolution. Heady stuff, back then. Naïve, too, and maybe ultimately, in its naïveté, pernicious; but there was a lot of good in those times, those views, and they’ve undeniably shaped me and the way I’ve pursued my calling.” He paused again, coughed his impressive smoker’s cough.
“Disgusting old ashtray,” Seeley said. “And as time has amply shown us, dreaming brings about no revolution at all, matey.”
“If I don’t believe it, I won’t say it, let alone write it. If I spot an untruth or an injustice, it’s my job to correct it, or at least to try. I don’t believe something’s important simply because I’m told it’s important; and the inverse, perhaps more crucially, is also true: something isn’t unimportant simply because it’s been largely overlooked by others. I’ll stop lecturing, because I also believe in not being a bore”—here, everybody laughed, rather more energetically, Danielle thought, than was wholly appropriate—“but I have to take heart from this generous award”—he nodded at the battleship, who appeared to return the favor—“and hope that this old-fashioned way of seeing the world, of trying to see it truly, still holds some sway. Or at least, that you still need a few grumpy old naysayers like myself around, if only to liven things up.” He grinned, appeared to wink. “Now I for one am going to say thank you and good night, because I’m desperate to step outside and have a good old-fashioned smoke.”
“Was that really necessary?” asked Seeley during the applause. “Of a piece with the whole—so tired.”
“I don’t know,” Danielle said. “The smoking is tired, the speech perhaps a little, too, but if he means it? Isn’t he right?”
“Means it? Please, my dear. It’s not even what he thinks people want to hear—it’s precisely what he thinks they don’t want to hear, some sort of cod liver oil for the soul. They don’t want to hear it, so it must be good for them. Preposterous. Studiedly insulting, which seems to me far worse than unwittingly insulting. He no more believes it than you or I.”
“I thought I did believe it.”
“You make me laugh.”
Danielle reflected upon Marina’s earlier comment about her father, her implication that his persona was less, or more, than unself-consciously authentic—something Danielle had, over the years, more than once obliquely suggested to her friend. What had only this evening become clear was that Marina saw transparently her father’s bravado, his artificiality, had always seen it, and didn’t care. Perhaps everyone saw it and didn’t care, even though his principal virtue was supposed to be his vaunted authenticity. Was she herself attracted or repelled? Was Thwaite a hero or a hypocrite? Or both?
“You have to understand the game,” Seeley was saying. “They—we—all want the cod-liver oil from Murray. We want him to chide us for our lack of seriousness, and we want to shake our heads and take our castigation manfully because then we feel absolved, supremely free to watch the Oscars on TV and enjoy it. The way Catholics are entitled to a good piss-up on Saturday night, as long as they’re taking their wigging in the pew the next morning. Lets everybody feel serious and still have fun. He’s a stooge. He knows it and we know it. We’re all complicit. Now, do you think he’s done with his fag? Could you take me over to pay my respects?”
As they made their way slowly through the throng—which had risen en masse from
the faux-bamboo chairs and now swarmed more tightly even than it had in the lobby below—Danielle was aware of something like a spell upon her: what Seeley’s genuine feelings about Thwaite might be she could not fathom, as he appeared so powerfully to disdain the older man, yet clamored to meet him. She was also dimly conscious of a category mistake, in her presumption—automatic, Thwaiteanly old-fashioned—that Seeley might be possessed of such things as “genuine” feelings; that, indeed, when it came to Seeley, “genuine” was a word with any currency at all. She couldn’t fully gauge what ethics powered such a man, although some code had to be in place, and although, too, she suspected that his way, opaque to her though it might be, was increasingly the common way. As she shouldered past the bird of paradise woman, a fixed smile on her face, Danielle thought, “Code. Napoleonic code,” and this seemed, although in somewise far from apt, nevertheless perfectly to explain the man. This alternative morality, this still—to her at least—unreadable code, was Seeley’s means to domination. To get everyone to see another way, his way, and then to make that way the standard. Then to have them—all of society’s little Napoleons, all of us, she thought—under his sway. Her eagerness to dismiss Murray Thwaite’s speech as absurd, to interpret his genuine courage in questioning the academy as a self-interested manipulation—this, she thought, was Seeley-speak seeping unbidden into her brain.
The Emperor's Children Page 18
