The Emperor's Children

by Claire Messud

  “Baby, I’m sorry.” Julius hugged David, who was still sitting, from behind. “I had no idea. Poor you. That is the worst day. The worst.” It fleetingly occurred to Julius that he was not, for now at least, permitted to indulge his own unhappiness. It was, suddenly, time to buck up, be brave. With which he had not had much experience, to date.

  David mumbled something, drank a little more gin.

  “I’d offer to get you a drink, but I think you’ve been taking pretty good care of that yourself.”

  “I haven’t been drinking long. I got this bottle on the way home. I took the Circle Line tour. It was relaxing, and kind of beautiful. Reminded me of the elusive pleasures of Manhattan.”

  “Have you had anything to eat?”

  “A lot of peanuts. And this burger. I’m going to bed now.”

  “Let me help you.” Julius fumbled at David’s buttons, but David brushed him away. “We’ll have to go, you know,” he said, as he wandered toward the sea of cloth beyond the bedroom door.

  “Go where?”

  “If I don’t get another job right away, we’ll have to leave this apartment.” He paused, and spoke slowly and clearly. “The rent here is very expensive, Lady Muck.”

  “Let me clean up, quickly.” Julius bustled past him, with much swinging of limbs: put shirts back on hangers, socks, briefs, sweaters in drawers, while David looked on. He threw the shirts badly dampened by wet towels into the laundry basket. David stood by, pale and sleepy, occasionally rubbing his nose. When he was done, Julius hugged David against him. “I’m really sorry, beast. You should’ve called me.”

  David waved his hand.

  “I was home. You should’ve called me.”

  “I’m going to sleep. I drank a lot of that gin.” David belched quietly and shuffled into the bathroom. He peed noisily with the door open.

  It struck Julius that David, drunk, was moving like a fat man. The whole scene was vaguely depressing: the smell of hamburger fat and fries had followed them into the bedroom. He couldn’t imagine David without his job. It was a new type of nakedness, one that Julius felt he should not be displeased to see; but instead he was worrying, already: about bills, about rent, about the costs of restaurants and clothes. About his unwritten piece for The Monitor, a couple of grand right there. “We can always go to Pitt Street,” he said. “Kick Marina’s cousin out. If we have to.”

  David didn’t answer. He dropped his trousers, wrestled with his tie, climbed into bed with his shirt still on. He put his glasses carefully on the night table and turned his back to Julius who stood, still, in the middle of the room.

  “Can I give you a kiss?” Julius asked. “Just a little one?”

  “If you want to,” David said, without turning over. “I’ve had a really bad day.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Finished

  Not very long after announcing her engagement, not very long after her willful insistence that Danielle should join them for the Fourth, and immediately upon his return to New York and to work, Marina delivered to her father a modestly sized but apparently complete manuscript, upon the title page of which was typed THE EMPEROR’S CHILDREN HAVE NO CLOTHES. The page that followed this rather fatuous heading was, apparently, the dedication; and it, too, rankled: “For my parents, who taught me everything,” it said, and then, “And for Ludovic, who taught me more.” Murray could see perfectly clearly his daughter’s sentimental impulses, but this didn’t excuse the simple sloppiness of it. It didn’t make logical sense. Everything and more. It made no sense at all.

  His perturbation at these initial words constituted, to Annabel and to Danielle (albeit separately), his resistance to reading the book; but in his heart of hearts, he knew he hadn’t ever wanted to read it, had been perfectly content to imagine that it would never be finished. He couldn’t say to anyone—not even to young Frederick, whose rabidly exacting, almost demented standards amused him; here was a young man who could, and did, quibble with Tolstoy—that he shirked, for a fortnight, his duty to read the book because he suspected that it wouldn’t be any good. This wasn’t the same as thinking that it might bore him—the subject seemed at once so frivolous and so abstruse that Marina would have had to accomplish a major feat in order not to bore him. Rather, he realized that all his anxieties about Marina’s intellectual abilities, about her gravitas, clustered around this pile of paper like a lingering dank smell. Turning the pages, reading them, might clear the air; but then again …

  For over a week, Murray kept the manuscript at the top left-hand corner of his desk, with the copy shop’s elastic band still tight around its middle. Periodically, Frederick would ask him “Have you read that yet, by any chance?” and if he wasn’t already smoking, Murray would light a cigarette before replying. “Not quite. Very busy. You know.”

  The fourth or fifth time they had this exchange, Frederick coughed, slightly, at Murray’s answer and said, “I think it would mean a lot to her.”

  “I’ll read it the minute I can.”

  “When you were at lunch yesterday, she came in to look at it. She didn’t say anything, but I know she could tell—I could tell she could tell—that it hadn’t been moved.”

  “Then let’s move the damn thing.” And Murray had picked it up, snapped off the elastic, ruffled the pages, and stowed it in his bottom drawer. “I cannot have the whole world breathing down my neck,” he said. “It makes for a very unnatural reading.”

  Frederick had raised his eyebrows and retreated, and this, too, had irritated Murray. He tried to explain it to Danielle when they met at her apartment at lunchtime the next day. “I know Marina’s waiting for my judgment,” he said. “She’s been waiting for it for her whole life, and now, it would seem, is the moment of truth. I cannot tell a lie—”

  “Can’t you?”

  “Not about something so important. Do you realize, she hasn’t even given you a copy? Just me and the boyfriend. That’s it.”

  “Of course I realize it. But you shouldn’t be so—First of all, what makes you think you’ll be anything but proud? She’s written her book, at last—it’s been almost all of our adult lives.” Danielle massaged Murray’s agitated shoulders with her thumbs, rubbed him with her small, cool palms. “That in itself—well. And even if you have reservations, you’ll have compliments, too; and then, I bet, without lying at all, you’ll be able to, you know, accentuate the positive. She really does want your feedback, not just your praise.”

  Murray made a face.

  “Okay, mostly she wants praise. But not only praise. She’s bigger than that.”

  They were quiet for a moment, and the midday honking and rumbling seeped through the room. The Rothkos seemed to Murray to have their eyes shut.

  “I’ll say this once and then never again. My only child has followed in my footsteps, than which there can be no greater flattery, and has written a book. But then again, my daughter has written a book about children’s clothes. A book. About children’s clothes.”

  “Come on, here. It’s about the significance of children’s clothes, the way they reflect our cultural mores. It’s not—”

  “It is a book about children’s clothes.” He sighed. “Which either means that the footsteps in which she follows are peculiarly, unexpectedly small, or at least that she sees them as small, in which case, how gravely I have failed, on all fronts. Or else it means that her own feet aren’t very big.”

  “Does this have to be about you, beloved?”

  “Her diminutive feet are not ‘about me.’ But they can’t help but disappoint.” He paused. “I shouldn’t say these things to you. You’re her best friend. You don’t want to know that her crusty old father thinks her book’s junk.”

  “You haven’t even read it. Have you gotten beyond the title page yet?”

  “The dedication. To her parents—that’s me—and the boyfriend. Or should I say the fiancé.”

  “Are you worried that he’s somehow changed it?”

  “The book o
r the girl?”

  “Both, really. I just wondered.”

  Murray sighed again. “How would one know? About the book.”

  “He spurred her to finish it. He named it. She told me. I think he’s read it along the way.”

  “But he didn’t write it.”

  “Didn’t he? Strictly speaking, he didn’t. But …” Danielle shrugged.

  “You think he’s a real Svengali.”

  “I think he’s Napoleon. And I think he’s your enemy. And I think Marina is his Trojan horse.”

  “Please go on, my child. This delicious mixing of martial figures. Are we at war? I wasn’t aware.”

  “He wants something from you. He desperately wanted to meet you. He liked the idea of Marina because she was your daughter, at least in part.”

  “So really he wants to go to bed with me, you think?”

  “I don’t know whether he wants to subdue and convert you, or to crush you, but in some unsayable way, I think it’s all about you in the end. Not about Marina.”

  “I thought you just said that it wasn’t all about me. You were quite adamant.”

  “Don’t make fun of me.”

  “I’m not making fun. Far from it.”

  “You don’t see the danger, do you?”

  “What danger could there possibly be? Or, put it another way: What could be more dangerous to me than this?” He gestured to the bed, themselves in it, the bright summer sunlight through the window, painting broad golden stripes along the floor.

  “Forget it, then. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.”

  “When the sky falls in, Chicken Little?”

  Danielle pulled on a T-shirt, crossed her arms. “You’ve got to read the book,” she said. “As soon as you can.”

  So Murray, in the two days that followed, read the book. He took it out of the apartment in a plastic supermarket bag and he set himself up in a bar over on Amsterdam, with fish and chips and a scotch, and he stayed the first afternoon in his gloomy, sticky booth until he had reached the midpoint, and he stayed the second afternoon until he’d turned the last page. His emotion, as he stacked the pages back together, wheedled their elastic round, and wrapped them in plastic, was akin to anger, although it wasn’t anger proper. He couldn’t detach himself, couldn’t entirely tell whether he would have thought badly of the book if he hadn’t expected to think badly of it. At certain points, he’d been impressed by her facility, her turns of phrase, and had thought that she could really write, could even find the apt metaphor without stretching too far. But that was neither here nor there, in light of the content. A lot of frothy waffle, repetitive opining swirling around a string of utterly unrevealing facts, about the size of the children’s clothing market in North America, or about the age at which children now bare their midriffs versus when they have sex, or trite garbage, introductory sociology garbage, about the nineteenth-century invention of childhood (how before that they were just miniature adults, as we can tell from the portraits) and about how we now, as a nation, never want to grow up. That was exactly what he yearned to bark at his daughter: Grow up, grow up! There were the depradations of rampant capitalism, the atrocities in Bosnia or Rwanda, the melting polar caps to attend to: and his daughter was busy investigating the cost of velvet-collared winter coats at Best and Company. The book as a whole struck him as an artfully wrapped gift box, a flurry of elegant paper and ribbons that, when opened, proved to be empty. Perhaps not entirely empty: a few glittering, worthless marbles rolled around in the bottom of the box. This was the analogy he prepared for Annabel, for Danielle, for Frederick, if he were interested.

  For Marina, he required a subtler approach. Praise—he must begin with praise. He’d done enough teaching to know this. And then, adulterated, the truth. He couldn’t avoid telling her the fundamental truth, which was that she should not publish the book at all. There was no way to sugarcoat this news; but somehow, he needed to deliver it in such a way that she would follow his advice. She owed herself more than this—perhaps that was the formula. She was capable of so much more. She had so illustrious a future in store (maybe this was overstating the case—she was, after all, thirty years old, with precious little to show for it) that she shouldn’t undermine her (as yet nonexistent) reputation merely for the sake of a little attention. Once a book is published, it can’t be taken back, he would tell her. It will always be your first book.

  Or your last. Impossible not to think, in the booth, in the bar, in those moments before the tab was tallied and the check delivered, impossible not to recall his own hidden manuscript, a work that similarly, as he saw it, walked the line between seriousness and popularity, more successfully, if he were fortunate, but confronting some of the same risks. There would be no one to tell him not to publish, no reader upon whose frankness he could rely. In this sense, he consoled himself for the brutal blow he had to deliver, Marina was lucky. To have a reader who so loved her, and who cared so much.

  He called her at Seeley’s. She was almost always at Seeley’s, now; and Murray found that he missed her, the little attentions, her sweet-smelling wake. He missed some sense of urgency that she carried with her, a feeling that he had to live up to her expectations, had to be the myth. He got this a bit from Danielle, this unvoiced but discriminating adulation, but with Danielle it was different. Danielle, after all, wasn’t permanent, wasn’t family. He called Marina at Seeley’s and invited her to go to lunch with him. He made a reservation at San Domenico, where the curious and surely lascivious publisher had taken her all those years before. On the morning, exceptionally, he shaved before noon, and was careful to comb his hair. He asked Annabel what he ought to wear, and she chose for him a jacket and a shirt, both of which, in earlier years, Marina had given him as presents. (Without Annabel, needless to say, he would not have remembered this.) Annabel worried that he would upset Marina, but he promised her he would be tactful.

  “You’ve never been much of a diplomat,” Annabel said. “Would you like me to come along?”

  “She’d smell a rat,” he said, and laughed; but in the taxi, his hands were shaking a little. Danielle, too, had prepped him: “Your opinion means everything to her,” she’d said. “Be careful.”

  “If that were true,” he’d replied, “then she wouldn’t be marrying the fiancé. She wouldn’t say he’d taught her more than everything.”

  “A little boy in a sulk,” she’d said. “Try to be a good father, as well as a good reader.”

  “Crap,” he said to himself, smoking a last cigarette before crossing the threshold. Marina was already there, although she hadn’t yet seen him. Her dark hair fell over her face as she scanned the menu. Even from afar, through glass, he could admire the line of her back, the elegance of her slender bare arm upon the table. She was, indubitably, lovelier to behold than Danielle. Less sexy, perhaps, but lovely. It was incredible to think, still, that this dark swan was of his making.

  She stood, when he approached, and smiled her big, goofy smile. “Did you ever think, Daddy, that I’d come from my office to meet you for lunch? Did you ever think I’d have a job?”

  “And a book, both.” He embraced her. “You’ve done it.”

  Her downward glance was modest, a false modesty he knew because she was so like him; and the very poignancy of that false modesty struck him as the hardest thing to bear. Far easier to have her angry with him—throwing plates, even—than to have to witness—to cause—the dismantling of her careful defenses.

  But it was a matter of principle, and of parental responsibility, and he would do it. After talk about The Monitor, after some discussion—cursory—of the wedding plans, after the ordering and the first drink, he said, “I’ve read your book.” He paused, she straightened, he could tell she thought he paused too long, and that this was an ill omen. He wanted to reassure her, but couldn’t. “There’s some great stuff in there,” he said. “You write beautifully.”

  “But?” Her smile was wide, and tight. “There’s always ‘but.
’”

  “You’re right. There’s always ‘but.’ At least, when someone loves you as much as I do, there’s always a ‘but.’ Because I think I’ve raised a girl who wants to know the truth.”

  “I want to know what you think, yes. It means a lot to me.”

  And so he told her. He tried to couch his opinion as best he could; but then again, it was important that she not go away with the impression that a little tinkering, or even a good bit of tinkering, would suffice.

  “You’re telling me that I shouldn’t publish my book?”

  “I’m suggesting that with a little revision to make them stand alone, one or two chapters, appearing in magazines, might more effectively and economically convey what you have to say.”

  “You’re telling me not to publish my book.”

  Murray took a deep breath. “I am being completely frank with you because you are my only, adored child. It is simply not clear to me that there is a book in your book.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Call me old-fashioned, but in my world a book—if only on account of the trees chopped down to produce it; but for many other reasons as well—should justify its existence. It must have a raison d’être. I just don’t see one here. I’m sorry.”

  “You’re saying that you think my editor will reject it?”

  “No, of course not. Not for a second.”

  She looked momentarily relieved.

  “I’m saying that in spite of the fact that I’m sure they would cheerfully publish it, I think you should find the inner fortitude to resist the temptation. I don’t think you should allow this book to be published.”

  “Because you think it’s trivial?”

  Murray raised his shoulders, stuck out his lower lip: “C’est evident.” He was desperate for a cigarette, but drank his drink instead. Their lunches were in front of them, largely uneaten. It was as if the food, and the restaurant, had been swept away and they were conducting their conversation in a vacuum.

  Marina had not raised her voice, nor did she do so now. But the sounds came as if strangled out of her mouth. “If you thought it was a worthless project, why didn’t you say so before? You’ve had seven years, Daddy. It’s quite a long time.”