The Emperor's Children

by Claire Messud

  “You seem pretty good at it to me.” This seemed the thing to say, whatever he’d intended; and in this initial intimacy, at last, she felt not frothing and fizzing but an ache in her core, unexpected and unstoppable, which prompted her to stroke his cheek, his brow, with a tentative finger, to pull her head back and say, “I want to look at you. Just for a moment. Really.”

  All of which she relayed to Danielle later that evening, lying on her bed with her legs up and the familiar giggle in her voice. “It all sounds like so many lines, you know. I know that more than anybody. Even when I said it they sounded like lines. But I meant them, too.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  Marina had the impression that her confidante was doing something else, and she strove not to be annoyed. “I think it was seeing him vulnerable, you know? He wasn’t really good at it, he was right. Not the kissing, I mean the whole maneuver. This is a guy who can juggle ten jokes in an editorial meeting, keep a dozen journalists cowed and laughing at the same time. And then all of a sudden, he’s a geek. So genuine. Honestly, tears welled up in my eyes. A tear, at least.”

  Danielle cleared her throat.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Danny?”

  “I just don’t know that ‘genuine’ is an apt word here. The guy is an operator.”

  “That’s my point. Publicly he so is, but this was different. I think he must really like me.”

  “I don’t think he likes your dad much, just so you know.”

  “What?”

  “I’d ask him about it, if you care. He just said some things to me—”

  “Plenty of people disagree with my father. You’ve disagreed with stuff he’s said or written, loads of times. You’ve told me I should be harder on him.”

  “True, but—”

  “What gives here, Danny? I mean, you’ve been weird about this since almost the beginning. What’s it really about?”

  “I don’t trust him. I’m not saying I don’t like him. I just—”

  “You don’t want me to get hurt. Thank you so much for your concern. Those are lines, too, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “And it’s not really about whether you trust Ludovic Seeley.”

  “It’s not?”

  “It’s about whether you trust me, about whether you think I’m capable of making the decisions that are right for me.” Marina paused. This, too, was a line. “I want you to be happy for me. Because I’m really happy right now. I’m floating.” She paused again. “Are you still there, even?”

  “Of course I am. And I’m happy for you. Really.”

  But Marina felt there was a strange quiet around Danielle’s words, a silence in the line; and she decided that Danielle was just saying she was happy because it seemed the thing to say, because not to say it would be egregious. Marina wasn’t sure whether there was merit simply in the saying: maybe sometimes pretense was the best you could hope for.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  I See You

  So what was she supposed to do, when Mr. Murray says always “Don’t touch, don’t touch,” but then he gives the boy, the nephew, the okay for this? Mr. Murray always says his mess is to him like the tidiest house—don’t talk about the stinking cigarettes and the bottle emptying in the drawer, he means he can find anything, he knows where it all is. And this boy, the nephew, maybe he says he can keep the mess as tidy as Mr. Murray just the same, but Aurora knows. She knows he’s moved the piles, mixed them up, she knows just from looking he’s opened the drawers, maybe the locks, and if something is wrong, Mr. Murray will come roaring, yes, to Mrs. Annabel, and he thinks Aurora doesn’t notice, he thinks because he doesn’t raise his voice with her that she doesn’t know he yells, and yells about her, Aurora this and bloody that, but she has heard him, of course she has. They all live in the house and pretend he is easy and lovable but really he is difficult, he is demanding and selfish and often angry, usually about selfish things, like where’s my sandwich and why isn’t the blue shirt in the closet, I mean the one for cuff links, and where are the cuff links, too, and Annabel, or Marina, I told you we had to leave half an hour ago and what the hell is going on. And what is amazing is how much everybody loves him anyway. Maybe this is not so surprising; he is charming and funny and sometimes in the kitchen he takes her, Aurora, by the waist with his long arm and dances her around, laughing and twirling, so she is a little bit dizzy, and although this should bug her it is actually nice, it makes her shake the tea towel and say, come on Mr. Murray, this is silly, stop that now. He makes all the girls feel pretty, even when they are not. She has seen it. And when he doesn’t make the effort, it is so clear to anyone who knows him and how he is, even a little. Like the friend of Mrs. Annabel who came yesterday with the boy, the woman she works with and the big black boy—DeVaughn, that’s it. Aurora saw the way he looked at the woman, the social worker, and yes, she was not pretty, with a face like a witch, all red and bones, her hair like old straw and the chin pushing up and out both, and a wart on it, too, but she was polite, she has been before, and Aurora can tell he does not like her. He did not smile, or flirt, or seem even to remember her name. Miss Roberts. He was not, with her, a nice man. Mostly he did not like the boy, the black boy as big as a man, strong in the shoulders and fat in the middle, and the woman seemed to want the boy to stay, to wait for Mrs. Annabel, who would not be home till who knew when. She was insisting, and he tried very hard to keep his voice low, Aurora could see it in the line of his mouth and the flicker of his tongue, in the way the hand went to his hair, to his pocket, but never out in the open, so Miss Roberts would not see it was a fist.

  The boy—fifteen, maybe?—black like ink, an island black or an African black, not an American black, she thought, with big eyes and plum-colored lips that trembled, just a little bit—looked scared and angry and embarrassed, too. He knew that Mr. Murray didn’t want him there, that nobody wanted him there (he didn’t belong there, anybody could see it), and this was all worse because he didn’t himself want to be there. It would be embarrassing not to be wanted in a place you didn’t even want to be wanted; Aurora felt bad for him. But she had salmon fillets marinating and ready to bake and the other boy, the nephew’s sheets to change, and Marina’s bathtub to scour because of the bubble bath scum, so stubborn, and that just to begin, so she could not stand around watching; but when Mr. Murray asked her she said—it was true—she did not know when Mrs. Annabel would be home and no, she said, they did not have a bedroom now, because of the boy Frederick. Then Miss Roberts, all nose and chin and that wart, wanted DeVaughn to spend the night. But he did not speak, she could tell he would not speak unless Mrs. Annabel came home, which she would not do, and she, Aurora, went to do the salmon and the bathroom and the sheets, to start, and she tried to listen and not listen at the same time, but they never left the front hall and Mr. Murray’s trick with his hand worked because he never raised his voice, and she did not know what they said but in between the sheets and the bathroom the bony red Miss Roberts and DeVaughn, too, were gone. By the time the bathroom was done, the other boy, the nephew, was back, and when she was mixing salad to put in the fridge (she hated washing lettuce, or actually she hated drying it, that spinning bowl), Marina came back, too, and Aurora did not know whether Mr. Murray would tell about the boy, DeVaughn, or whether he would be cross about the other boy, the nephew, moving things in the study; and she would not know unless she heard him yelling, and she would not tell anything unless they asked her, which they wouldn’t. But wasn’t it funny that everyone pretended that Mr. Murray was an easy man. Even with one another, they pretended.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  For Shame

  If shame is the result of the Fall, and clothes our answer to that shame, then the clothes in which we dress our children become our legacy to them, the shame that we pass on. Obviously, they are our pride, too—pride and shame being opposite sides of the same coin. When the Mrs. Ram
sey of American fin-de-siècle scandal (not to be confused with the Mrs. Ramsay of Woolfian high modernism, and an interesting opposite to her) dressed her daughter in ruffles and patent leather, with ribbons and bows, with rouge and mascara, little JonBenet whose baby Barbie face we all came to know embodied, as many noted at the time, both her mother’s shame and her pride. A former minor beauty queen herself, who had coarsened and thickened, with the shadow of a mustache along her upper lip, red-cheeked not with the fresh glow of youth but with the wear of middle age, the threat of broken capillaries over her nose, Mrs. Ramsey surely saw in the little girl, in her tutus and lace, her uncorrupted self, the perfection she could never attain. She invested enough, some contend, to kill: to need to bury her shame altogether. If you can’t be a winner, you can make a winner, and if what you made is not what you wanted, then what, in the end, are you?

  Marina felt that she was at last coming to the book anew. She believed obscurely, and unacknowledgeably, that when she and Ludovic had undressed, a new transparency, a luminous nakedness, had come into all her life. She felt she finally understood what “clothing” was about, in an Adamic—or would that be Edenic? And why not Evic?—sense: the masquerade, the charade of it all. The simultaneous need for the charade and its painful, embroiling futility. And how much more so with one’s children: any parent, along with their society, foisted baggage galore upon a child, sartorial baggage being simply the most visible of an immense, stifling web of parental, or societal, projections and constructs. To be your own person, to find your own style—these were the quests of adolescence and young adulthood, pushed, in a youth-obsessed culture, well into middle age. She saw suddenly how strange it is that adults long to be young, when the young have not had time to become themselves and are therefore largely what the adults make of them, want them to be. What terrible pressure. What relentless falsehood. She remembered Danny once joking, as she packed up for the Salvation Army a set of tight angora cable-knit sweaters in aqua and tangerine and watermelon, gifts from Randy, that it wasn’t until her twenty-seventh birthday that, in the face of a particularly egregious garment from her mom, Danielle had finally realized not only that she could choose her own wardrobe but that she had a moral obligation to do so. The necessary break with one’s parents—only now, as she talked things over with Ludovic, did she see how necessary it was—could take many forms. By the same token, just because Marina herself had felt free to come and go, free to dress as she pleased, since earliest adolescence (she’d had an eye for it, from early on—even her mother had said so) did not mean that she had fought her battles. It didn’t mean she was free.

  A new transparency: she felt that with Ludovic, beginning a new relationship from scratch in a way she hadn’t for years (all her friends were old friends; and her first meeting with Fat Al irretrievably lost, as was Fat Al himself, in the mists of time), she had a chance, they had a chance, to be perfectly open with each other, to be pure and clear. They had talked about it, or at least, she had. She didn’t know why it had come to her so urgently, this need for utter frankness, but he seemed wholly to understand. He’d seen at once that it had to do with her father.

  “If we’re talking about transparency, about light, really,” he’d said, “then the metaphors, the clichés, they’re all ready and waiting. You’re in your father’s shadow. You’re hiding your light under a bushel. Need I go on?”

  “Meaning what, exactly?”

  “That it’s impossible to see you clearly—for your own self, most of all—on account of the distortion of light created by your father.”

  And from there, deep in the night, on the giant, raftlike bed in his Gramercy Park apartment, with the windows open wide to the sweaty air (Ludo didn’t care for a/c; he thought it was fake), and a faint, vegetal stink rising from the street-corner garbage or the communal garden or both, they had got talking about Marina’s book, about its subject (“Extraordinary,” said Ludo, with his lips to her bare shoulder. “I mean it. Such a rich topic—the surfaces and their depths; it’s what we’re all about. The tenor of our times”) and about its necessity.

  “Of course you’ve found it impossible—remember, your father’s shadow? And you stepped right back under it. But how can you ever be free if you don’t get this off your back? And again, the words are speaking for us: get this off your back, will mean getting him off your back. A relief almost sexual. Certainly emotional—depression, of course, being the monkey on your back. This is the way you’ll escape the expectations you imagine that he has for you, and work your way toward being, well, free-standing.”

  “And what would that mean?”

  “Who can know? And how thrilling.”

  “Seems a little scary to me.”

  “You won’t be alone. You can always lean on me.” His lips were between her breasts, where she knew her skin tasted of salt.

  “I wouldn’t be free-standing then, would I?”

  He paused, shrugged, smiled in the gloom. “It’s all a manner of speaking, my beauty.” He sounded to her, in that moment, oddly like her father.

  “But isn’t that what we’re trying to do, you and I, with each other, but also with the magazine, isn’t that the point of The Monitor? I mean, to not speak in a manner of speaking? Precisely not to fall into the known pathways? You’re the one who said the emperor has no clothes, right?”

  “A particularly useful analogy, I would’ve thought, for your book. Perhaps that should be its title.”

  “It’s a book about children, the way children are dressed.”

  “Well, there you go. The Emperor’s Children Have No Clothes.”

  “Doesn’t that make it sound like it’s about the starving offspring of a Third World despot?”

  “It’s catchy. It’s intriguing. Trust me.”

  “But does it make any sense?”

  “You’ll make it make sense. That’s what writing—manipulating language, for God’s sake—is all about. You just need to explain it to your reader. Who wants to trust you, by the way.”

  “Okay, smartypants, you explain it to me, then.”

  “It’s not my book.”

  “But I want you to. Please?” She batted her eyes at him.

  “Ah, Lady Violet Eyes—irresistible. For you I’ll try. But I haven’t actually read your book, my dear.”

  “Nobody has.”

  “Not even your father?”

  “At this stage, not even him.”

  “Well, then.” Ludovic sat up against the headboard, cleared his throat. “As parents, we visit our complexes, whatever they may be, upon our children—our neuroses, our hopes and fears, our discontents. Just the way our broader society is like a parent, and visits its complexes upon the citizenry, if you will.”

  “So far you haven’t gone beyond the premise of the book proposal.” She tweaked his pink nipple.

  “Give me time. I’m just explaining the title, after all. Where was I? Marina Thwaite’s groundbreaking debut book demystifies these complexes, unraveling them through the threads of our clothing, and more particularly of our children’s clothes. In this brilliant analysis of who we are and the way it determines how our kids dress, Marina Thwaite reveals the forms and patterns that both are and lie beneath the fabric of our society. In so doing, she bares children, their parents, and our culture at large to an unprecedented and frank scrutiny, and in her truth-telling, shows us incontrovertibly that the emperor’s children have no clothes.”

  Marina laughed, applauded. Then, in mock celebration, she went to get them each a bowl of black currant sorbet and a shot of iced vodka from Ludovic’s otherwise empty freezer.

  In the wake of this discussion, then, Marina had found new confidence in her endeavor. She tried to work regularly on the book, for a couple of hours each morning—she even installed her laptop in one of the largely empty rooms in Ludo’s apartment, where very quickly she was spending most nights—and she tried to talk over its progress with Ludovic in the office at the end of the magazine’s gr
ueling day. For Ludovic, she could tell, it was a strain, sometimes, to focus his mind on the book, when the magazine demanded so much; and she worried a little that the creative energies he had intended her to expend on The Monitor’s culture section were being at least partially siphoned off by The Emperor’s Children. But he was the person who assured her that she had to finish it; he was the one who, more than she herself, more than Murray, to be sure, had faith not only in the manuscript but in its author. And she was doing well for the magazine, too, coming up with ideas, suggesting contributors, matching topics and journalists. Whenever she faltered, or felt doubt—when, for example, she thought Lettie Abrams sneered at her proposed auction house corruption feature in the middle of the editorial meeting—Ludovic would summon her to his office, close the door, and bolster her with his evident desire. They didn’t fool around behind his desk—they were far too professional for that. But he wooed her, during the day, with words, with dizzying blandishments. He seemed even to adore her breasts, tiny hummocks that she had always felt verged on the plaintive; he praised their daintiness, and the tight points of their areolas when excited, “like some perfect, juicy little fruit,” he said. “You’re one of those rare creatures who was made not to wear clothes at all. Prelapsarian, my sweet. Everything about your beautiful, beautiful body should be celebrated, and illuminated, and adored.”

  “Oh, stop it, Ludo. You’re making fun of me.”

  “Not at all. It’s a supreme irony that you should be writing a book about clothing. You, of all people.”

  “It’s about nakedness now, too, I think. Thanks to you.”

  “Then I’ve done something right with my life.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Merge

  Against her better judgment, she let him do it. That was the sentence she repeated in her mind, but she knew it in no way represented the truth. It represented “the truth” she would save for Marina, if ever it came to that. Which she couldn’t seriously contemplate, and knew she would have to prevent. But Marina was her first thought after he left. How could Danielle ever explain to anyone how distinct her relationship with Murray was, how separate, and yet—so swiftly—how intense? Through their correspondence—tentative but revelatory, never inappropriate—and then over drinks (twice), lunch (once), and (most fatefully) supper, she’d come to know him by that last day of May, that star-filled evening of supreme calm, in which he walked with her from the restaurant on Cornelia Street back up to her building and asked, as ever with great ease, as if nothing could be more natural, if he might come up (and, she noted, without pretext: he didn’t say “for coffee,” or “to see the view” or “to pick up that book I loaned you,” which he might have; by which she further knew him, she felt, for a fundamentally honest man)—by then, in so short a space of time, she considered that their connection was almost eerie, a meeting of minds, a Platonic reunion of divided souls. To whom could you say such a thing? She might have said it frankly to him, were it not for Marina, and for Annabel. Not that he was afraid to talk about them—she loved this in him as well, and marveled to find herself loving anything, let alone so many things, in a man who had been for her so many things for so long, but not plausibly an object of passionate love.