“Please.” Danielle pulled a face. “It’s not Julius either, in case you wondered.”
“Do I know him?”
“I don’t think so. Let’s leave it alone, okay?”
Marina still had her hands on Danielle’s bare ankles, and she gave them a squeeze before letting go.
Before supper—if the curious holiday meal served in the late afternoon could be called supper: it represented a disruption of mealtimes that occurred also at Thanksgiving, and clearly at Christmas for those who celebrated it, and that always unsettled Danielle, who relied on a strong innate order in the unfolding of her days—expensive champagne was produced, with which to toast the happy couple. Danielle drank two glasses rather quickly and felt herself, in her dizzy float, better able to cope with, indeed to ignore, the surrounding strangeness. She helped Annabel to set the table outside, which first involved much mopping with tea towels, and then, in what, for all her detachment, approached desperation, she ambled over to Murray, who stood and smoked by the barbecue.
“You seem a dab hand at this,” she said.
He glanced at her, barely. “That I am. Marina probably told you, it’s my chief culinary expertise.” His voice sounded as though it were being recorded for radio, an iota too hearty. She wondered whether anyone else would have noticed.
“She did tell me, in fact.” Danielle couldn’t think what else to say. She waited for Murray to volunteer something.
“Shame you don’t smoke,” he said at last. “Marina said you’d object to my smoking over the meat.”
“It doesn’t really bother me. I find one can get used to anything.” She was looking at the grill, now, and not at him, but she thought his eyes were on her.
“That’s the spirit,” he said. “Adapt to the circumstances at hand.” She stood a moment longer, made as if to go. “She wants you to be her bridesmaid, I think.”
“Yes, I think so.”
“An honorary member of the family.”
“I hadn’t really thought of it that way.” She waited again, but he seemed to be done, wholly absorbed in the turning of chicken legs and hamburgers.
She drifted back into the kitchen, aware that her limbs moved loosely, that her demeanor projected—must project—cool indifference. This was the exquisite torture: not guilt, as she had anticipated. Not awkwardness either with Marina or her mother, as those relationships seemed—were!—unchanged. No, the alien was her intimate, the man she felt she so thoroughly understood, with whom she would now reluctantly have conceded she was in love (and how foolish was that?), who seemed, infuriatingly, impossibly, inevitably, to be able to turn her off like a switch, to relegate her to the realm of the irrelevant, a playmate for his daughter merely to be tolerated, and, ideally, escaped. She wanted to repeat his blandishments aloud at the table. The shock of it. She wanted to remind him, whether his family was there or not. She wanted. And wanted. And endured in her wanting: the damp seat, the dry chicken, more champagne, the headache the champagne brought, the midges, the chat, his failure, no, refusal, to look, look at me, I caused a thunderstorm with my passion and I sit here shaking under my skin and you don’t notice because you’re trying so hard not to notice, but of all the people at the table there are really only you and me and you know it, the air is charged with it, it’s a heat, a hot wind, and Marina and Seeley are a sham next to it, Annabel ceases to exist, is simply obliterated in the gale of it, this isn’t a fantasy, not my imagination, I can tell by the way you lift your fork, by the set of your jaw, by that sixth cigarette, you are smoking me, or would if you could; but how long can we sustain it, how long till the eruption, till the storm returns again and they can all see what it is, what it really is?
“You’re very quiet tonight, Danny,” observed Annabel.
“Must be the nap. I sleep so well here. I think I never woke up properly from my nap.”
“It may be the barometric pressure,” said Seeley. “It affects some people.”
“And some people claim that caffeine keeps them awake at night, too,” said Murray, extinguishing the sixth cigarette, like the rest, half-smoked.
Danielle suddenly saw, through the fog, or storm, of her will, how very little Murray liked the man his daughter was going to marry. They were not alone at the table, or in the world. Ordinary as it was, the recognition pained her—she didn’t want to admit the ordinary—and released her.
Later, by herself, she sat at the table and watched the fireflies flicker across the lawn in the dusk, and breathed the damp blue air. Murray, fetching the grill tongs to be washed, paused a moment behind her in the dark, and placed his hand full on her crown like a warm cap. He said nothing, and was gone; but it was all she had wanted; benison.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
The Fourth of July (3)
I think Danny’s in love with you,” Marina told Ludovic as they undressed.
“With me?”
“She’s in love with someone inappropriate, she says. It’s unrequited. And she won’t tell me who he is.”
“Maybe ‘he’ is a ‘she’?”
“Seriously, Ludo. It just occurred to me—all her talk about you before we met, and she wanted to make that movie about you, and then when we started going out, she maybe couldn’t bear it—that would explain how weird she’s been.” Marina was rubbing lemon-scented lotion into her calves. “You know, Julius even suggested it. He asked me if Danielle was in love with you, and I laughed. My God, I feel so bad.”
“Why would you feel bad?”
“She, you know, entertained hopes. She still does. She’s in love, she told me so.”
“It may well be some other inappropriate choice. I’m sure there are plenty of them.”
“But if it’s you?”
“Then she fails to take into account the emotions of the person whom she loves. She is, therefore, a poor lover, and your sympathy should be limited.”
“That’s not very nice of you.”
“Seriously. It’s narcissism, to love a wall and resent it for not loving you back. It’s perversity. Love is mutual, it flourishes in reciprocity. You can’t have real love without a return of affection—otherwise, it’s just obsession, and projection. It’s childish.”
“So in fact, I should feel mild irritation at her, for not growing up.”
“Something like that.”
“You have a way, don’t you? You turn everything on its head.”
“I have a way, yes.” He laughed, drily. “Your friend Danielle calls it my revolution. It’s just my desire that people should see things more clearly.”
“Or your way. Depending on how you look at it.”
“It always depends on that. For the record, I don’t think your friend is in love with me. I’m not just being modest. There seemed an initial, faint signal of interest, which I nobly and appropriately ignored—”
“Why?”
“Because she’s not my type. Because I was waiting for you. And since then, nothing. A heart of stone. If anything, she’s angry with me.”
“Now that’s preposterous.”
“For taking you away from her. No, I’m not saying anything strange here. She’s your best friend, accustomed to having unlimited access and, let’s face it, in some ways accustomed to having a life more fully organized than yours—the apparently successful job, the apartment. And then suddenly, you’re not just more beautiful and more interesting, you’re also engaged and employed and on to the next stage. You don’t need her advice anymore. It has to be painful.” Leaning back in bed, Ludovic put his hands behind his head. “Maybe you’re her inappropriate love object. Did you ever think of that? Not sexually, necessarily, although I wouldn’t rule that out. But either way, you were at the center of her world, and now you aren’t.”
“Have I been a bad friend?”
“For the first time in living memory, you’ve been following your own path. There is only right in that.”
“You’ve saved my life.”
“The mission i
sn’t accomplished yet. After all, we’re still in your father’s house.” He embraced her, stroked her brown arm. “But not for long, my sweet. Not for long.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Let Go
Recovering from the misfortunes of the Fourth was, for Julius and David, a somewhat mixed effort. On the one hand, their routines resumed—David’s long hours at the office; the passionate reunions in the evenings; the summer social whirl of cocktails, suppers, parties—and on another, Julius, at least, felt that things were altered. Perhaps his own ardor had cooled. Or rather, one branch of it had. He no longer tingled with the same anticipation, no longer found David’s possessiveness, his Othello-like grip, erotic. It felt, instead, the tiniest bit oppressive. It was like waking from a dream: he looked back and could see the way he’d felt, but couldn’t exactly feel it again. He couldn’t be a stay-at-home wife forever: somehow, he and David would have to renegotiate their dynamic. He needed more room. And yet still, inevitably, the thought of David with someone else appalled, infuriated; and the evenings when David was late, failed to call, Julius fretted, then pouted, and, when he was cooking, deliberately sabotaged the meal. Burned stew, soggy asparagus, separated sauces: look what you made me do.
Just over two weeks after their trip to Scarsdale, on a Friday, David did not come home, nor did he call. They’d planned to dine in, take it easy, then to stroll over to a party at a neighborhood bar, the Florentine, around eleven. Julius, after a couple of glasses of wine, after a line or two, dialed David’s cell phone and hung up on the tinny digital recording. Eventually, after eating half of the green duck curry he’d prepared, and after tossing the rest maliciously in the garbage, Julius, in high dudgeon, rang the office. But it was Friday and everyone had gone home. He tried David’s cell one more time, and one more time after that. He dressed for the party—it was a party given by David’s friends Ned and Tristan, so surely David would put in an appearance there—in true Natasha style: he tried on six shirts before he found one that pleased him, one of David’s, Italian and close-fitting with a gleaming azure cross thread, and he left the other five not simply on the floor but trampled underfoot. He threw towels on the bathroom floor; he deposited gelatinous globs of shaving cream, speckled with beard bristles, in the sink, along with chalky toothpaste spittle. He tried on jackets as he had tried on shirts, collecting, at his ankles, a swirling flood of expensive cloth that he kicked at with his shiny black shoes. For good measure, he shot his foot at a stack of glossy magazines on David’s side of the bed, and they slipped, with the ease of a trickling fountain, into the fray. He opened dresser drawers—the chic, handleless dresser with modern lines to which David was partial—and discarded their contents and left the drawers open.
Contained in the bedroom, the signs of his pique were discreet, Julius felt. David, fickle and self-absorbed, merited worse. By the time Julius left for the Florentine, at half past eleven, David was six unannounced hours late.
David’s friends never skimped—there were Belvedere martinis at the bar, and kir royales for the faint-hearted; there were bowls of immense, pinkly gleaming shrimp and extended martial rows of black and white sushi. A cornucopia of cut fruit spilled artfully onto a table at the back of the room. Even in the blue gloom, Julius could tell that the flower arrangements were elaborate. The music, at first, allowed conversation; and then, as if the DJ concurred with Julius about the pointlessness of talking to this group, he turned up the volume. Dancing was presumably encouraged: a woman, no longer young, with a salt-and-pepper mane and a prominent nose, a woman squeezed into a T-shirt manifestly too small, from which her arms bulged, seized Ned by the wrist and dragged him to the room’s most open space, where she twirled him like a puppet. It was, Julius recalled, Ned’s birthday.
After midnight and a couple of lemon vodka martinis, Julius wandered outside and stood, along with a few inveterate smokers, on the street corner. The neighborhood, on a Friday, was much traveled, and groups jostled enthusiastically, as if heading somewhere. A friend of David’s, now out of the din, touched Julius’s shoulder and asked after him.
“I don’t know. I thought he’d be here.”
“That’s weird,” David’s friend said. “That’s not like him. Punctilious David.”
Was it unlike him? Julius hadn’t considered David’s absence as anything other than a fact; but he supposed, if he did, that David was considerably more reliable than he himself, by the world’s standards, and that it was strange indeed that he had not appeared.
“Is he, like, sick?”
“I don’t think so.” He shrugged. “I’m sure something just came up.”
“Hmm.” The fellow—Julius couldn’t summon his name—eyed Julius with apparent suspicion and then drifted back inside. Julius, who didn’t smoke, bummed a cigarette from the little woman next to him (her tiny wife-beater, her slicked hair, her attempt to be butch, struck him as poignant) and crossed the avenue to smoke it by himself, while pretending to examine the contents of an antiques store window.
It said something unnerving about him that he hadn’t considered the possibility that something was wrong. He had imagined—he still imagined—that David simply fancied a change, a little irresponsibility. Lord knew, Julius was familiar with that feeling, even if he didn’t readily pardon it in others. Of late, Julius seemed to experience nothing but that feeling, a constant push, a jangling restlessness that tickled at his skin from the moment he woke in the morning. If he thought about it, he supposed he was unhappy, but couldn’t make sense of this, because he had, at last, almost all that he had wanted. It was true that even as he’d been perfecting his soufflés, he hadn’t been improving his chances for greatness. He had written few pieces since the beginning of the summer, and had let certain commissions slide. He needed to make calls, to butter up the magazine editors scattered around New York and the country upon whose goodwill his livelihood depended. He hadn’t given a thought to his future, aside from his domestic future. He, who always read, wasn’t even reading a book.
Julius didn’t like to think that David might, however unwittingly, be responsible for this unhappiness—because, as Julius examined through glass the outlines of an art deco armchair with cowhide upholstery, he gave his physical anxiety the name “unhappiness,” thereby allowing it immediately to grow and change shape—and nor did he care to think that David might also be unhappy. If he, Julius, was unhappy, did it mean that they both were? Or was that merely projection? It didn’t seem likely, somehow, that Julius would be unhappy and David perfectly content, but how could one tell? He realized he’d assumed that David’s absence was due to philandering because his own—a few weeks earlier, for example, with the handsome Lewis—had been due to just that. But David’s nameless friend was right: David didn’t usually fail to show up altogether. Unhappy though Julius might be, he had a responsibility to his lover. He might need to call police stations, hospitals.
It was getting on for one when Julius turned the key in the lock. The apartment smelled of French fries and gin. David sat at the table, his sleeves rolled up, his violet tie loosened and spotted with ketchup that looked like blood. David’s eyes behind their glasses were blurry. He had before him a huge hamburger and fries upon a sheet of crumpled wax paper, and a glass of Tanqueray on ice. Julius knew it was Tanqueray because the bottle was also open on the table, and almost half empty.
“Look what the cat dragged in,” said Julius, hands on hips.
“I could say the same to you.” David daubed vaguely at his chin with an already greasy napkin.
“I’ve just been representing both of us at Ned and Tristan’s odious party,” snapped Julius. “You’re the one who’s been AWOL.”
“I’ve had a bad day.”
“Well, clearly not as bad as it could have been. Not bad enough to actually call and tell me about it. Here I’ve been, worried about whether you’d been hit by a car.”
“Not too worried to go to the party.” David narrowed his blurry eyes. “
Not too worried to trash the bedroom. Or to wear my shirt without asking.”
“Are we eight years old, to be so proprietorial?”
“No,” said David, with parodic dignity. “We are merely observing a fact.” He took a careful swallow of his drink, clicking the ice cubes against his teeth. “What’s with the bedroom?”
“It doesn’t matter now. I made dinner, you know. Duck curry.”
“That’s funny. There wasn’t anything to eat when I got here. I went out again to get this.”
“I can’t believe we’re having this conversation. Like I’m some kind of fifties housewife, and you have a right to be pissed off because when you show up over six hours late there isn’t dinner on the table? Is this a joke?”
“All I said was that there was no dinner when I came in. Just a place that looked like it had been ransacked by thieves. And no Julius. Which, given how my day’s gone, wasn’t very nice.”
“You keep harping on it, so you’d better come out and tell me why your day was so bad. Did Rosalie burn your coffee? Have the markets been in turmoil?”
“I got fired.” David said this with a mouth full of hamburger, and Julius thought he might have misheard. He held his hands out in a gesture of incomprehension. David calmly finished chewing, swallowed, took a gulp of gin. “You heard me. I got fired.”
“How come?”
“Not ‘I’m so sorry’?”
“Of course I’m sorry. You know I am. But what’s the reason? Can we fight it?”
“Did they fire me because I’m gay? Sorry, not this time. They fired me because they’re not making any money. They fired nine of us on the floor.”
“How did they decide? Why you?”
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t know. There’s no way to know. Was I too expensive? Unproductive? I don’t think so. Bad personality? Tell me, no.”
“Maybe they fired you for being best dressed.”
“Maybe.”
The Emperor's Children Page 31
