The Emperor's Children

by Claire Messud

  “Two mes?”

  “Two Most Importants.”

  “You know I’d love to.”

  “And my parents. They’re dying to see you. Mom was asking again yesterday if you’d be coming.”

  This suggestion had made Danielle shudder. She was relieved, in her amorous fog, still to have the decency to be appalled. “Please tell her I’m sorry. You know I wouldn’t miss it if I didn’t have to.”

  Marina was quiet for a moment. “I’m wondering why you don’t want to make the effort for someone so important to me.”

  “Oh, M.” Danielle could anticipate, then hear, her own faint-heartedness. “Please don’t be that way. I promise it isn’t about Ludovic. I’d do anything to be there this weekend.” And this, at least, she meant, “But I really can’t.”

  “You don’t have some tryst lined up, do you? Some secret blind date?”

  “How long have you known me?”

  “I just thought I’d ask.”

  And now, in the silence in the office, the phone rang, almost causing Danielle to upend her water onto the glossy, disconsolate buttocks and thighs. She had so willed his call that it never occurred to her that it could be anyone besides Murray. “Beloved,” she whispered into the receiver.

  “Glad to know you care,” Marina replied. “You’re busted, big time, baby.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that you may be working, just like you said, but I call expecting a sad sack and get a lovebird instead.”

  “Hardly.”

  “Who’s the mystery man? Who’s beloved?”

  “I thought it was going to be my mom. She’s feeling a bit down, and I told her to call me here.”

  “And Randy Minkoff is beloved?”

  “Is that so strange?”

  “Girlfriend, we’ve got some talking to do. If you’re in love, you’re excused from the Thwaites’ annual Independence shindig, no questions asked—I absolutely believe in love, especially these days, as you know. But there must be something wrong with the guy, if you haven’t told me about him.”

  “There is no guy.”

  “And your mother is beloved?”

  “You already asked me that. You’re haranguing me.”

  “I bet you’re blushing.”

  “Come on, Marina. I’m just trying to do a little work here, is all.”

  “And your mother is beloved.”

  “Yes.”

  “Bless her leopard-print heart.”

  “What did you want, besides to check that I was really here?”

  “That’s not very nice.”

  “I’m teasing. You tease me, after all.”

  “You know I don’t like to be teased.”

  “Who does?”

  “I wanted you to be the first person after my parents to know. We’re getting married.”

  “Oh, Marina.” And a deep breath. “I’m so happy for you. That’s—amazing news.”

  “Isn’t it? I always told Julius I was the uxorious type at heart.”

  “He’ll scream.”

  “He’d beat me to the altar if he could. Him and the Conehead. Who is Pierre, who is Natasha? Handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?”

  “So when’s it going to be?”

  “He can’t possibly beat me, if that’s what you mean. We’re having a whirlwind romance, if not a shotgun wedding. Labor Day weekend. And yes, in spite of everything, the bride will wear white.”

  “You sound almost high.”

  “I am almost high. Come off it, my life was in free fall, and now look.”

  “Don’t tell me that you owe it all to me?”

  “But I do. Ludo said so again just this morning.”

  “You don’t owe anything to me.”

  “Ah, beloved …”

  “Who are the bridesmaids? Julius and David?”

  “I only want one, and you know who she is.”

  “I’m honored.”

  “So get your butt in gear and get to the train station on Tuesday afternoon.”

  “Because?”

  “Because even if you don’t take four days, which even lazy me can understand, you can still take off the Fourth of July. There are going to be fireworks in Stockbridge. Consider it the engagement party.”

  “But I don’t—”

  “I don’t take no for an answer, here. There’s a train getting in to Albany at 7:42 on Tuesday. One of us will be there.”

  “But M—”

  “This you can’t deny me. I’m getting married in less than six weeks. We’ll see you Tuesday.”

  She could not deny her. Danielle considered it, bent again over the wattled, mottled limbs. Was there any way to call him? Did he know what was going on? Might he pick her up at the station? And could she stomach it?

  Out on the street, the humidity squatted like a toad upon the afternoon. There would be rain, but not yet. She decided to walk, did not expect, on so quiet and heavy a day, to encounter anyone that she knew, but near Astor Place caught sight of Marina’s cousin, truffling toward the subway with a pile of papers under his arm. Even in the heat, he wore a dress shirt, though somewhat limp, with the sleeves rolled up, and his forehead was slick with sweat. When she called out to him—“Frederick? It is Frederick, isn’t it?”—he stopped, raised his head, blinked, like some underground creature just emerging into the light. “Marina’s cousin, right? It’s Danielle—we met.”

  “I know. Hello.” He stood without smiling, still blinking. His eyes were huge behind his glasses, thickly lashed like a cow’s.

  “You didn’t go to Stockbridge?”

  He pursed his lips. “You didn’t either.”

  “Too much work, you know. I usually do. It looks like I’ll go just for the Fourth.”

  Frederick Tubb shuffled his feet, adjusted his pile of papers. He looked back down at the ground.

  “You’re working for Marina’s dad now, aren’t you?”

  “For Murray.” He said his uncle’s name with a challenge in his voice. “Yes. I’m working for Murray these days. Probably not for long.”

  “How come?”

  Frederick shrugged. Danielle tried a different tack: “How are your studies coming along? Are you finding time for them?”

  “I’m writing an article. For Marina. For The Monitor.”

  “That’s great news. I—”

  “She said you told her to ask me.”

  “Well, all I did was suggest …”

  “So I guess I owe you a thank-you.” He didn’t sound grateful.

  “You don’t owe me anything at all. I’m glad it worked out.”

  “It hasn’t yet.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Nothing’s worked out yet. I’m writing the article, but it’s ‘on spec.’ Do you know what that means?”

  “I do.”

  “So maybe they won’t publish it.”

  “And maybe they will. What’s it about?”

  Now he looked her straight in the eye, and did not blink. “It’s a secret. It’s going to be big, though.” He nodded, solemnly.

  “Wow.” Danielle laughed, more a bark. “That sounds interesting.”

  “Yes. It is. You’ll see.” He wiped his brow with a balled cloth hankie pulled from the pocket of his shorts. Danielle noticed, looking down, that his shorts looked like truncated trousers, stained baggy twill reaching to just above his knees, and that he wore dark socks with his sneakers. His calves, pale, solid, hairy, and forlorn, loomed brightly. He looked as though he’d lost his long pants on his way to the office and was wandering the streets half-dressed. He looked a little crazy. Unwell.

  “Good luck with that, then.”

  He nodded, head down, and shuffled off.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Notes from Underground

  Bootie had been feeling soul-sick anyway and the unexpected encounter with Danielle made him feel worse. The apartment, after Julius and Lewis withdrew, had remained an infernal heatbox; o
nly it seemed, in addition, a place scarred by malevolence. Bootie had thought he could enjoy the space, in spite of its crumminess, but then its owner had caught him all but naked and had insulted him, had called him fat to his face; and as he lay in the darkness on the damp futon on the floor, hearing still the salsa music over the road and the fan’s bland whir and listening, in spite of himself and fruitlessly, for the scuttle of cockroaches, he had felt the room, with its flaking stucco and cloying furnace air, to be hostile. He couldn’t sleep—for his rage, for the heat—for a long time, and drifted off near dawn, when the music had finally stopped. He awoke around noon with a pall over him, not merely the coating of dried sweat, but the horror, swiftly recalled, of the night before. Julius had been on drugs, or drunk, but still, Bootie couldn’t fathom the ill will. It was like kicking a dog in the street. And the heat: the apartment felt hotter, if possible, as if it were a repository for the sticky stillness, a deliberate storage trunk for misery.

  He decided after some minor deliberation to go to the Thwaites’. At least for the day and possibly for longer. They were all away. He had a key. The air-conditioning would be on. He’d walk up to get a copy of Murray’s third book at the Astor Place Barnes & Noble, then take the subway, which could not alarm him on this quiet summer Sunday. He’d take his notes, the beginning of his draft, and he wouldn’t leave their apartment until his masterful analysis of Murray was complete.

  And yet, calmly en route to his destination, the N and R stop at Eighth Street, he’d been waylaid by Danielle. He wanted to loathe her—in principle, he knew he loathed her—but her manner was kind, and sincere, and even though he maintained his chill (surely to her mystification, because how could she guess what he knew?), he’d felt guilty about it. He’d wondered whether the e-mail he’d read—inadvertently, of course—had been a figment. Perhaps he didn’t know what he knew he knew? And if he did, then was she not doubly a villain, to smile and chat in the July haze on that steaming street-corner, as though the world were still in its place? It was like the endless news, the scandal in Washington, the missing intern—Chandra Levy—and the congressman. He married, she just a picture, dark curls and a charming white smile. Now look. He should have said to Danielle, “Think of Chandra Levy. It isn’t worth it.” He should have warned her. Because in the end, one way or another, the man was always the culprit. Just like some greedy child, demanding a second dessert while still hoarding the first, taking a mere bite, discarding it. Danielle ought to know this. She shouldn’t have let him, shouldn’t be hurting her friend, or her friend’s mother, in this way. He, Bootie, bore a responsibility in this mess. Knowledge brought responsibility. But he wasn’t yet entirely sure of how to proceed. What was public, and what private? What his to contend with, and what his simply, painfully, to know?

  And why, in the summer, was the air beyond the turnstiles quite so fetid, a blooming composite reek of piss and sweat and enveloping garbage rot, borne on furious steaming gusts through the foul tunnels? The woman beside him covered her nose with her manicured hand, squinting toward the tunnel mouth. Flat and small, she wore a red sundress pulled tight across her breastbone, carried a beachbag; perhaps she, too, was on her way to an illicit tryst. The entire city was doubtless rife with deceit, with rot, like the rot in the subway air. Murray Thwaite claimed that honesty was paramount; but the word had, for him, only his own meaning. He claimed that he fought injustice, that his life had been devoted to what he deemed a “moral journalism.” He claimed that he lived for and by his independence, his own wits. He presumed to opine on paper about how life should be led, about the very meaning of the word, when he was evidently—Bootie meant this in all seriousness: Bootie had evidence—someone for whom words had no fixed meaning. Somebody needed to make this clear, and public.

  Sitting on the train, the malodor around him leached somewhat by the climate control, Bootie perused the papers in his lap. He had copied out quotations from Murray’s manuscript, some inspiring, some silly, but all of them problematic in context, and tried to make order out of them. Interspersed among the Thwaiteisms, Bootie had recorded his own comments, ranging from the exploratory (“Is it actually possible for intention and actuality fully, purely, to overlap? Can we really be who we want to be?”) to the vituperative (“MT is a liar. This is a bare-faced lie”). When Bootie had begun his article draft, the day before, he had done so in a state of high emotion. He could see that now. As the train rattled along its track, he reread his introduction and caught in its rhythms the keening of sentimentality, the weakness of a disciple wronged. No: for the article to be any good, it had to do precisely the things of which Murray wrote so admiringly and with such promise, but which he himself did not live up to. It had to be precise, and calm and clear. It had to be patient, frank, substantiated. It had to be accessible and germane. It had to be true.

  He realized his adjectives had been chosen to match the train’s music. He realized that the train was slowing, in the tunnel. That the train was stopped.

  He looked up, peered through the greasy window at the tunnel wall, its close blackness. They must be outside Times Square, where he would change trains. He always remembered, in such moments, Marina’s soothing nonchalance as she assured him, on that first subway ride, that the trains always stopped in the tunnels outside the big stations. It was perfectly normal.

  Perfectly normal, too, when the lights flickered, then went out. It had happened before, and while he didn’t much care for it—did not like it at all—he could handle it. He concentrated on his breathing, the swish in his nostrils, which had replaced the fans’ whirring. The fan, like the lights, had died. A wan emergency bulb strobed near him, an epileptic’s nightmare. Down the carriage, in the gloom, two older women spoke quietly to each other in Spanish. The woman in the sundress coughed—it was a fake cough, Bootie thought, nerves—and rummaged in her bag. The lights did not come back on. Already, the carriage grew hot, a particular windless, stagnant heat. There were no fetid gusts, no bursts of furnace air, just a slow seepage of weight, a feeling that the air sat on them, on his legs and arms and above all his neck, the heat licking at his throat and closing it, little by little, making it hard to breathe. Still the lights did not come on. No trains rumbled past in neighboring alleys. There was no audible movement outside the carriage.

  Inside the carriage, though, passengers moved in small, furtive, anxious ways. A cocoa-skinned youth in massive, dragging jeans stood, muttered, made as if to move, sat again, stood and stomped to the end of the aisle. As he yanked the door, and the next door, making his way to the trapped room beyond, he cursed. “Fuck this shit, man. Fuck this shit.”

  Bootie checked his watch. It had been only a few minutes; less than five. The carriage held its breath. The air weighed. Bootie licked his teeth, again and again, the inside of them, with the tip of his tongue. His glasses, slick, slipped down his nose. His fingers slithered against one another. The woman in the sundress had been fishing, so furiously, for her Walkman, and now clutched the headphones to her ears. She kept her eyes shut, and the muffled bounce of her music filtered along the carriage. Something sunny. Maybe she was pretending to be at the beach.

  Bootie, like the others, started at the crackle of the PA. A fresh clamminess sprang along his palms. A man’s voice, sharp and high like a dog’s, spoke largely unintelligibly. His last words were “as soon as possible.” These he repeated two times. When silence fell again, Bootie could hear people asking one another, quietly, what had been said. He did not himself ask. It wasn’t clear that anyone knew the answer. He, like the woman with the Walkman, closed his eyes. He concentrated again on his breath, tried to measure his breath to slow his heart. His heart made more noise, more sweat, than anything else in the carriage. He couldn’t let himself think about all the possible outcomes—fire and explosions chief among them—that might be causing their stop. He must not think about the walls pressing in, about the earth weighing down, about the train like a burrowing earthworm, arrested, eminently
squashable. Bootie’s throat was very tight now, the noise in his ears thunderous, so loud that when the barking conductor came again over the PA, Bootie was barely aware of it. He screwed his eyes shut; he dug his nails into his palms; he tried again to concentrate on his lost breathing. He was still breathing.

  Twenty-three minutes. They were stopped twenty-three sweltering minutes, like lost miners, like spelunkers without egress, like dead men. For Bootie, it was a mind-altering experience: he wasn’t at once sure exactly how he had been changed by it, sure merely that he would always be different. He knew something he hadn’t known before, about himself and his limitations. He would never, never allow that to happen to him again. But at least, he thought as he walked, at speed and with great determination, up Sixth Avenue the two good miles to the Thwaites’ apartment, gulping almost the thick air, so relieved to find it around him, in abundance, however soupily, at least he hadn’t given in and screamed. He had drawn blood on his left palm from the force of his gouging, and had brought on a headache of migraine proportions from the screaming inside his head; but he’d kept his mouth closed and his eyes closed, had concentrated on the swish in his nostrils (he could still hear it, the way a shorebound sailor feels the roll of the earth), and had made it through. That nobody in the carriage could tell how close he had come to eruption, insanity—not even, he imagined, the young woman in the red sundress, who had smiled conspiratorially at him as they disembarked—struck Bootie as a near miracle.

  He’d often imagined, as a boy, that his parents or teachers, Big Brother–like, could penetrate his skull and eavesdrop on his thoughts, could even, conceivably, usurp his self; and even in adulthood, he carried a vestigial faith in and fear of transparency. But his Earthworm Hour, as he came to think of it, reinforced for him the opacity and isolation of his soul, and of everyone else’s. It made clear to him the need to speak clearly, to try to be heard above all the blood rushing in people’s ears. Nobody should be allowed to be the woman with the Walkman, willfully, artificially blocking out experience and truth: it was Bootie’s job to engage, and to speak. Not unintelligibly, like the conductor, but in the clear voice of reason. But the whole thing drove him half crazy, no two ways about that.