The Emperor's Children

by Claire Messud

  “I know.”

  “Not easy in this town. Not because there aren’t jobs—although most of them are soul destroying, of course—but because it’s so damned expensive. So why not go back to Watertown, where you can live at home and read in peace?”

  Bootie pushed his glasses up his nose, took a deep breath. “I’m quite prepared to do a soul-destroying job,” he said. “I’ll clean toilets, or be a stevedore, or flip burgers. That’s fine with me. But the point is to be in the city. To learn from the city. To learn from life, as much as from books.”

  “And there’s no life in Watertown?”

  “No, none. Not of the kind I’m after.”

  Murray smiled broadly, tipped his chair back. “Good for you, Fred. Good for you. I knew you’d say that. Getting out of that town at the first opportunity was the most important thing I ever did.”

  Annabel smiled, too, her eyes on the wall, but said nothing.

  “So, Fred,” continued Murray, “I’m your uncle. I can help you, if you’ll let me. First, I’ve got a life lesson to impart, although it’s not usually my way. You want to take them by surprise. That’s the crucial thing. Always remember it.” He cleared his throat for emphasis. “But you need to be well prepared. I want you to hear me out, and I want you seriously to consider what I propose. It occurred to me a few days ago. I know you, I know how you think, so let me say that it isn’t charity. Not for a second.”

  Murray went on to say that he’d been needing a secretary for years. That he had long ago exhausted his wife’s goodwill (Annabel smiled again here, patiently; by which Bootie knew that she was fully party to this proposal, had perhaps even devised it) and the housekeeper’s, and had been saved only by the return of Marina to her parents’ apartment. “She’s done the work,” he said, “and I think she even likes it. But it’s perfectly clear to all of us—including Marina, I might add; I’m not betraying any confidences here—that she isn’t going to finish her book until all impediments, but I mean all of them, are removed. Any excuse to procrastinate; and her aged pa has provided a very good excuse indeed.”

  Bootie nodded.

  “I’ve told her she needs to get a job. But above all, Marina needs to stop working for me. I’ve spoken to her about this—she’s got irons in the fire; you’re not stealing from your cousin. I know you’d be too honorable for that.” Murray paused again. “So I’d propose to hire you as my secretary. My amanuensis, shall we say. Like Pound and Yeats. At a living wage, of course. A real job. We’d have to find our way to it, you know, define it as we went along, because in all these years I’ve never had a secretary. It might take a little while to get the balance right. At the outset, mostly what I’m sure of is what I wouldn’t want you to touch, if you see what I mean. No unrequested tidying in my study. No moving piles around. I’ve always said that being in my study is like being inside my brain. You’ve got to be respectful of that—I count on it. You’d have to learn the mess—memorize it—until it seemed as orderly to you as it does to me. But that’s a challenge. And you might learn something along the way. You might meet some interesting people.” Murray fell silent, stared at Bootie, who stared back expressionless, blinking frequently behind his glasses. “What do you think?”

  “Amazing, sir.”

  “No ‘sir.’ You know better than that.”

  “Murray. Uncle Murray. It’s an amazing offer. I’m overwhelmed, is all.”

  “He means it,” said Annabel. “Murray’s very big on not saying things he doesn’t mean.”

  “Of course I mean it. And don’t worry about Marina. She might feel tinily usurped for a day or two, but she’s got big plans, I’m told. It’ll be for the best.”

  Bootie nodded.

  “You’ll do it, then?”

  “I—I’m just—”

  “Give the poor boy a minute,” said Annabel. “Don’t pressure him over dinner. I’m getting ice cream all around, okay?”

  But Bootie had known, as soon as it was offered, that he would accept. Far more than passive observation, it seemed the ideal way to learn from his uncle, to learn his uncle, indeed, as though his uncle were a book. It was at once exhilarating and frightening: to have such help, not to be alone. To be able, really, to take them all by surprise.

  Then, too, there was the ticklish question of a salary. Murray, in further discussions, seemed to think that $30,000—a sum astronomical to Bootie—was a living wage, for starters. And the matter of living at the Thwaites. It was the one thing Bootie kept coming back to: he couldn’t see himself living and working, all the time, in that apartment. Because he never felt at home there anyway, and because it seemed somehow—unhealthy. Almost unsanitary. To breathe always the same (cigarette-filled) air. He’d need to find another place to crash.

  Here, too, the gods had smiled upon him. He had again mustered himself to confront Marina, the elusive, violet-eyed Marina, about her friend’s place—was it James? Or Julian? And she’d looked blank at first, twirling a curl between index and forefinger, chewing lightly at her plump lip; but had erupted, delightedly—she seemed, quite suddenly, prone to delight—when she’d recalled the mention of Julius. His name, it seemed, was Julius, and his apartment was east of Alphabet City, miles downtown (this meant little to Bootie) with, she said, a dog of a commute to get up here.

  They were standing in the Thwaites’ pristine kitchen as they spoke. “You’d have to cross town and come all the way up—take the F from Delancey all the way to Rockefeller Center, and then the B up Central Park West. You’d have a little bit of a hike from his place. It’s not even on a bus line, I don’t think. I’ll have to ask him how he ever got anywhere when he lived there. But if you didn’t mind that?”

  “Of course I wouldn’t. Anything. It sounds perfect.”

  “It’s a dive, actually. I went there only once, and that was enough. But it’s cheap.”

  Bootie had nodded, trying not to betray his eagerness. He didn’t want her to think he was irrationally attached to this possibility, even though it seemed, somehow, his only possibility.

  “I have to warn you that even though he doesn’t look it, Dad gets to work super early.”

  “Like how early?”

  “You must have heard him in your room. Or smelled the first cigarette, at least.”

  “I’m a heavy sleeper.”

  “Well, by eight-thirty at the latest.”

  Bootie had hesitated, thinking of the rush-hour subway, that subterranean horror.

  “But he might not want you around then. Usually that’s his quiet writing time. Maybe he’d be happy for you to come at noon, or whatever.”

  “I’m sure we’ll work it out.” Bootie couldn’t pretend any longer not to care about the apartment. “Do you really think your friend would rent me his place? Starting when, do you think?”

  “I’ll ask him,” she said, “when I speak to him. But you know, it’s empty now.”

  Bootie had been waiting only a couple of days but it seemed forever. He didn’t want to plague Marina, but found that the matter of the apartment rose, in his mind, like a cork, whenever their paths crossed. So that now he was trying to avoid seeing her, lurking in his bedroom if she came down the hall, or darting out of the kitchen the back way, through the dining room, if he heard her coming out of the elevator, her particular ringing step on the parquet. He thought that she sensed his flight, once or twice, and figured she attributed it to his crush on her—because he knew that she knew his weakness. It was an unspoken conversation between them, and he knew it amused her. She wouldn’t even think of the apartment, of how important it was to him. Perhaps she’d forgotten that discussion altogether. She might need to be reminded. And then he’d remember that exasperated expression. He didn’t want to elicit it again. He turned in circles, following the trajectory of his anxiety, coming repeatedly back to the same place. This was not self-reliance, he knew. This was not the spirit in which he intended to live. Were he independent, he thought, he would scan the Village Vo
ice classifieds, and craigslist, and find a flat to share with persons unknown. But somehow he couldn’t bring himself to do it: his life felt unreal already, his very flesh a tenuous thing, grounded here and now only by the Thwaites, by the small, growing, strangely delicious degree to which he was known. He couldn’t help but imagine himself disintegrating, falling away atom by atom into a million infinitesimal pieces, were he to allow himself to drift out the door into the vast unknowing unknownness of New York City. The sensation was new to him—the way his claustrophobia in the subway had been new to him, and akin, although diametrically opposed, to that experience. In both cases, it was about feeling self-less, an Alice in Wonderland feeling, an appalling, thrilling, unsustainable feeling, a hollowing out. And just as he’d realized that he needed to remain above-ground, he’d realized, too, that he needed to claim an apartment to which he had some logical, some traceable connection. Something that would keep him from drowning, or vanishing, or killing himself there. (You wouldn’t slit your wrists in the home of someone you knew, or of someone who knew the people you knew. It wasn’t done.) Not that he was suicidal; not at all. But afraid of—how to put it? Afraid of having no shadow, of leaving no trace. But he couldn’t say this to Marina: I need that apartment in order to leave a shadow. That sounded like pure craziness.

  While he waited to hear from her—waited for her to catch him, deliberately, in the kitchen, or to knock on his bedroom door—he tried, as Murray had instructed, to memorize the mess in his uncle’s study. This, it became immediately clear, was a prerequisite for any assistance he might, in time, be able to provide, just as it was obvious that he couldn’t undertake his memorization while his uncle was at work—at least not while Murray was at his desk. Mercifully, Murray’s “work” entailed frequent engagements and appearances, limousines to television stations and luncheons and drinks, not to mention foreseeable junkets out of town, lectures on campuses and at libraries, and in public halls across the country, a host of labors that seemed, to Bootie, antithetical to any spirit of contemplation or ratiocination, and inimical, in some way, to the very notion of labor itself. But he didn’t judge him for it (although he could hear, in the back of his mind, Seeley’s judgment). This worldliness, he deemed, as he sat uncomfortably cross-legged on the floor of his uncle’s study, was the price exacted for a serious and independent life. You couldn’t ever be entirely free, and Murray’s pound of flesh was gouged out in hours stolen by colleagues, editors, unknown congregants. The pile of correspondence in Bootie’s hands was comprised of importunate letters, a year’s worth, all unfiled, out of order, begging Murray’s attendance at dinners from Los Angeles to Calgary to Austin and beyond, in classrooms in Northampton, Massachusetts, or Ann Arbor, Michigan, at retreats in rural Kentucky and Southern California, and at conferences of businessmen in Miami or religious believers in Arkansas. Upon each page, however crumpled, Murray had marked, in his marginally legible hand, the nature of his reply, along with its date; and a large calendar along one wall was blackened, equally meticulously, in a spreading swarm of ink, by the agreed obligations. It was not as if, Bootie knew, a man wanted to do this. It would not be excusable, morally, to want this.

  On this day, Murray was addressing a graduating class at a college in Connecticut, as commencement speaker. Bootie had wondered at the necessity of this engagement: the institution was very minor, and its coffers presumably only modestly full; so if neither for the honor nor the cash … it had fleetingly occurred to Bootie that his uncle could be considered, in this, complicit with the farce of failed education. But he didn’t dwell on it. He wondered instead whether Marina knew these piles as he was learning them, and wondered, too, whether she was in fact hiding from him even as he hid from her, annoyed by his usurping her role.

  The study smelled of old cigarettes and musty papers and, too, of cooking dust arising from the computer that was never turned off. Aurora, he knew, was permitted only to empty the wastebasket and, in consequence, the rug, unvacuumed, was matted into pilelessness, grayed with ash and crumbs. Papers in hand, Bootie moved himself to his uncle’s chair. Its leather creaked a little, was cool through his trousers. Murray’s desk was almost invisible for the folders and papers, the scatterings of ash, the ashtrays and tumblers all but stuck to the pocked mahogany. The disorder, and his express instructions not to right it, depressed Bootie a little: it was a strange kind of work, as strange as Murray’s, to examine someone else’s mess and leave it as he found it. But if that was his work, he would undertake it thoroughly.

  This was how he found the manuscript, on his third official day, while Murray commenced in Connecticut. It occurred to him—how could it not?—that he was overstepping, probing more deeply into Murray’s brain than he was meant to. But it was confusing: the pile of keys was on the desktop; the desk drawer, locked, cried out for investigation; the smallest key on the chain fit, turned, like magic. As if the whole thing were fated. After all, Bootie told himself, he needed to know his mentor’s mind as fully as possible. As long as he didn’t disrupt, as long as he was just looking, learning.

  The only sheaf of handwritten pages: Bootie knew at once it was important; he knew it was a secret. He couldn’t not know. And before he started to read, he even flickeringly imagined it might be pornography, or sentimentalism, or, more shocking still, an intimate diary, disclosing outré opinions about Murray’s colleagues and peers, or about Annabel’s breasts, or Marina’s—or, indeed, about Bootie himself. (He imagined, if this were the case, that he’d be referred to as Bootie. He couldn’t help it.)

  Afterward, he wondered whether he had considered not opening the file, and was forced to acknowledge that he hadn’t. Not really. Which suggested an ethical lapse of which he wasn’t necessarily proud. But in the spirit of the free exchange of ideas, in the quest for truth and knowledge, he allowed himself to imagine that this would be what Murray would want. So that Bootie, his pupil, might learn the better from him, shape himself more finely in his uncle’s image.

  And the truth of the pages wasn’t a disappointment: far from it. It intrigued. This unnamed manuscript, Bootie could tell, from the first sentences, was his uncle’s greatest secret, his genuinely private endeavor, riskier by far than gossip, professional or personal, could ever be.

  How to Live: isn’t this the question that plagues each of us, albeit intermittently, from our first awakening into consciousness? To ask, as William James did, whether life is worth living, is to prompt the joker’s reply: “It depends on the liver”; and my own, of course, is almost shot. But the spirit of the riposte is, at the least, correct. Only if you can settle satisfactorily the issue of how to live can you then decide whether this vale of tears is worth the trouble. Mercifully, the issue is endless and irresolvable—in a way that I hope this book will not be endless and irresolute—and thus we are carried, upon the crucial questions, well past life’s midpoint and often to its end. Certainly in most cases, life can reach a Beckettian decrepitude, a cold grubbing for survival, spiked by the embers of loves lost, without the liver’s giving out. Let it be said that the questions of suicide, of whether ’tis a nobler thing, etc., cannot concern me here; not because they are not germane, but because the a priori of what life is, of what one should do with it—these first questions must be, it seems to me, answered first. And in these pages, that is what I am attempting to address.

  Murray Thwaite was here revealing himself—not his ideas, but his thought; himself—and this, if only Bootie could read it, would prove the measure of the man. But Bootie scanned only the first paragraph before hurriedly snapping the folder, replacing it, with infinite care, slightly crooked in the drawer. He feared discovery—not by Murray, who was surely chomping canapés and quaffing bad champagne at the college graduation along the farthest reaches of the Metro North line; but by Aurora, or, worst of all, by Marina. But he feared, above all, his own discovery: he feared what he might find. It might thrill and succor him, than which he had no greater desire. But—although he coul
dn’t have articulated it, just then—he couldn’t run the risk of disappointment.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Floating

  Marina accepted the job with Ludovic Seeley a full week before their first kiss. He was ironic and suave in accepting her acceptance, wry in the way she had swiftly come to expect of him: “I’m thrilled. Because I have complete confidence in you. Because I know that you’ll want what I want. Because I know how to make you want what I want, and I know that if I don’t, you’ll make me believe that I did. Which is, after all, the trick of it.” The trick of it, in that moment, and in the full week following, had been successfully to skirt the recurring subtext of their professional exchanges. It was an exquisite torture, a kind of test. She wasn’t entirely sure that he felt the same internal fizzing and frothing as she, but she was almost sure. Then, too, she was trying to gauge whether he would feel any advance to be a weakness, would consider the actual connection of their fingers, or limbs, or mouths, to represent the base failure of their minds fully to have clicked. She decided that she couldn’t take the risk, couldn’t make a first move. After what seemed an interminable stretch, during which she reported to Danielle each evening and in exhaustive detail their interactions in the office that day, when he did finally press his lips to hers, Marina was moved almost to tears by his awkwardness, by the rise of flush along his cheeks and the swiftly apparent clamminess of his fervent hands.

  “I’m good at most things, but I’m not so good at this,” he murmured, as he pressed her against the inside door of his office, as if cleaving to a tree trunk in a thunderstorm. She didn’t know if he meant the pass itself, or the kiss, or something broader, such as sexuality in general.