Murray sighed. There were so many answers to this, none of them flattering. What had seemed a minor but not shameful undertaking for a girl of twenty-three was no longer appropriate for an adult of thirty. He had long ago stopped believing that she would complete it, and so had not worried about its futility: he had seen the project as a Beckettian emblem of Marina’s interminable, incontrovertible malaise. He couldn’t have known until he read the manuscript how fully silly it would be. He hadn’t judged the topic (or not wholly) but rather her interpretation of it. But what he said was, “You never asked for my opinion about the project. But you did ask my opinion about the book.”
Marina, looking down—but not, now, with charming false modesty—nodded. “I see,” she said.
“Don’t cry, my dear girl. Please don’t cry.”
“I’m not crying.” She looked him in the eye, and he could not rightly read her expression. “It’s just very interesting to me, Daddy.”
“What is?”
“Ludo warned me you’d be hostile. All this time, he’s said that you don’t really want me to succeed with my writing, that you want me in your shadow. I told him that was ridiculous. It’s just very interesting.”
“That is ridiculous. Nobody wants your success more than I do.” Murray watched while Marina, with great concentration, ate. She did not look up. Eventually he said, “Would you have wanted me to tell a lie? Would that have been the father you respect?”
“Ah, respect,” she said, and now there was certainly bitterness in her voice. It seemed to Murray as though the sound had a color: greenish. “How could I forget the Thwaite family watchword? Except it’s not clear to me, Daddy, that you have respect for anyone at all. I just don’t think you do.”
“You’re upset.”
“Of course I’m upset. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I’m not telling you what to do, I’m just letting you know what I would do. That’s all.”
“You’ve made your point. Can we talk about something else?”
They endured a strained and prolonged silence, in which Murray knew they both fought their impulses to speak. The hushed burble of other conversations became again audible around them. A waiter dropped a fork. But this was what restaurants were for: the public repression of strong emotions. Murray asked her again, in more detail, about The Monitor and its progress; and in stricken monosyllables, in a near whisper, she replied. Thus they dragged themselves to coffee, and through it. They would not be seen to argue; and both, perhaps wrongly, were aware once again of being seen. A talk-radio fellow, a handsome but minor man in his forties with a voice like a butter knife and a shirt the color of the Mediterranean, stopped by the table to glad-hand. He put his palm on Murray’s shoulder, stared frankly at Marina, was visibly thrilled to learn she was daughter rather than protégée, clearly because this, in some strange universe, gave him hope. His obsequious bobbing and grinning served, in some measure, to dampen the tension: Marina couldn’t help but smile at Murray after the man—whose name, to their mutual amusement, was Baz—retreated.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Weird
It doesn’t surprise me, I have to say. I’m afraid it doesn’t surprise me at all.”
Upon her return from lunch, Marina, her crisp, sleeveless shirt wilted by misery and the heat, had immediately shut herself in Ludovic’s office to await his return. Unshod, stretched on his leather sofa, she had contemplated tears, but decided to save them until the venting of her indignation inevitably brought them forth. She didn’t need tears to express her misery to herself.
When at last Ludo came back from his own extravagant lunch—something with the marketing department and advertisers: they were setting up a corporate sponsor for the launch party—free booze in return for a plug on the invitations—Marina told him what her father had said. This was when he claimed not to be surprised.
“What did I tell you about your book?”
“You said you liked it.”
“More than that. I said it’s brilliant. It’ll be a hit. Trust me. Your father is woefully out of touch.”
“He didn’t say it was no good. He said not to publish it. Ludo: he said it’s worthless.”
“How many times do I have to tell you that your father’s sense of his own importance is deeply involved with keeping you down? He’ll do anything to keep from feeling like a has-been, and using you—or in this case, abusing you—is just a minor necessity in his schema.”
“You make it sound as though he’s deliberately malicious.”
“I don’t mean to.” He held her to him and she turned her nose to his slender neck, a position simultaneously safe and awkward. Something was askew in the curve of her spine. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He thinks he has the best of intentions. But he’s a very angry and hostile person.”
“I don’t believe—”
“I’m serious. You need to break away from him. You need to ignore his bullshit—because that’s what it is.”
Marina nuzzled Ludovic’s shoulder. It smelled of ironing. He sent his shirts to the cleaners.
“Will you promise me that?” he said.
“What?”
“That you’ll break away from him.”
“I don’t even know what that would mean.”
“It would mean acknowledging the truth about him. Seeing that he’s not some great mythical god, but just a mediocre journalist with a mysteriously high-flown sense of himself.” Ludo paused for emphasis. “Your book is a more important work of thought and scholarship than anything he’s produced in more than twenty years.”
“Really, Ludo.” Marina took a deep breath, and they stared at each other in silence. Eventually, she said, “This shouldn’t be an excuse for you to attack my father. It isn’t about him, I don’t think. It’s about my book.”
“Exactly right. And you have to learn to call a spade a spade.” Which Marina, somewhat bemusedly, insisted that she would do.
Later, at her yoga class, when the time came for shavasana, corpse pose, Marina finally found herself crying. The tears slipped out of the corners of her closed eyes and rolled hotly down into her hair near her ears. She cried silently, grateful for the dimmed lights, the soft drone of the teacher’s voice leading the group through relaxation. The sorrow Marina felt was like an internal howling, as though some organ had been plucked from her. Was this what it meant to grow up, this vast loneliness? And like her anger in the restaurant—that beautifully somber place, now forever spoiled for her—she could control the feeling, push it to one side, just as she could brush away the tears before the lights were turned back on; but she did not know if the force of it would ever abate.
“It was awful, Danny,” she said that night on the telephone. She sat on the kitchen floor, near the apartment’s service door, with her knees to her chest. Ludovic had shaken his head in dismay and taken his glass of wine through to watch CNN.
“What did he say?” Danielle seemed to be eating something while she listened to Marina’s account of the lunch. Marina tried not to let this annoy her. It reminded her of how much it irritated her to hear the change in her father’s breathing and realize he was smoking while speaking to her on the phone. These were selfish distractions: surely her best friend ought to be able to listen, and listen only, for the short time in which Marina needed her?
“I’m so sorry,” said Danielle. “I kind of can’t believe he would do that.”
“Only kind of?”
“You know what I mean. I believe you but it seems unbelievable.”
“Tell me about it.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“What do you mean? I’m going to send my book to my editor and let him decide.”
“Why do you think he said that?”
“I don’t know, Danny. Because he’s a self-absorbed asshole, is why. Because it’s not the kind of book he would ever write, so he doesn’t see the point of it.” She sighed. “Let’s not talk about it anymore.”
“But you don’t—I mean, I know you’re angry, but you don’t think he wanted to help?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. It seems sad, is all. You and he have always been so close.”
Marina made a snorting in her nose. “Maybe it’s been a proximity under false pretenses,” she said, feeling again and briefly the gape in her chest. “Ludovic points out that everybody else had to lose their illusions about their parents earlier, but because society—or our segment of society, at least—agrees with and reinforces my parental illusions, I’ve been able to hang on to them for much longer.”
“It’s an idea.”
“What would you suggest?”
“I don’t know, M. I’m just wondering whether you misheard, or misunderstood, or … I don’t know. Your father adores you. He’d never willingly hurt you.”
“You’re the one who always used to tease me about worshiping him. He’s not God, you used to say.”
“But he’s a smart guy, with your best interests at heart.”
“I don’t think it’s that simple, actually. I see things more clearly now.”
“Are you sure?”
“It just makes me wonder about the wedding. About having it in Stockbridge. I mean, maybe we should just go for a restaurant here in the city and be done with it.”
“How come?”
“Do I really want him to give me away, and on his property? Do you know what I’m saying? It’s not like I’m some crazed feminist, but under the circumstances …”
“I don’t know.” Danielle laughed. “Maybe you’re precisely ready for him to give you away.”
“That’s not funny. I’m not an old book, you know.”
“When can I read the book, by the way?”
“Soon.” Marina did and didn’t want Danielle to read the book. Or, put another way, she both cared and did not care what Danielle thought of it. “When it’s ready.”
After a pause, Danielle said, “I’m so proud of you, you know. You’ve done it.”
“Then why do I feel so depressed?”
“PPD,” Danielle said. “Not post-party, like in college, but the real thing. Post-partem. Perfectly natural.”
“None of this is natural,” Marina said. “This is the weirdest time in my life so far.”
“Good weird, or bad weird?”
“Just weird.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
“Murray Thwaite: A Portrait” by Frederick Tubb
The article had proven much trickier than Bootie could have imagined. He was obsessed with it: every evening for two weeks, leaving the Thwaites’ for the lengthy above-ground trip home to Pitt Street, he found himself thinking through the events and exchanges of the day, wondering whether he should amend his portrait in light of a kindness, or a brusqueness. He’d rewritten the piece, by hand, a dozen times, hunched at the table in the Pitt Street apartment, often with his shirt off, always half-expecting Julius to reappear. He didn’t think about its publishability—whatever that might mean—but focused instead on its truthfulness. If he could make it utterly true, then its force would necessitate its publication: as his mother always said, the Truth will out.
The Murray Thwaite he hoped he had drawn was rightly complex—but he’d reached a point where he was no longer sure. He knew, for example, that Murray’s entanglement with Danielle (he couldn’t really picture them going to bed together, although he’d tried; and who knew if it was an actual physical affair, and what did it matter? They were involved, regardless, in inappropriately intimate communication) had colored his emotions, and Bootie couldn’t tell whether his moral dismay had inadvertently suffused his prose. When Murray took so long to read Marina’s manuscript—and his own daughter had written a book!—Bootie felt his anger at his uncle seep through the week’s drafts; but then, when he did tackle her work, Murray simply cancelled all his appointments in order to devote himself solely to it, for which he regained some of Bootie’s respect. Then there was Murray’s reaction, regarding which Bootie was of two minds: he wanted only success for Marina, but he also suspected that Murray wasn’t exaggerating when he called the book silly (it was a silly topic, after all). He suspected, too, that Ludovic Seeley had falsely bolstered his girlfriend, and had probably had a hand in muddying the manuscript as well.
Bootie knew it was irrational, but he was inclined to blame Ludovic Seeley for many things—even more so than Murray Thwaite. Uncle Murray, after all, paid Bootie for times he didn’t work, and plied him with review copies of books, and had even—oh, long abandoned project!—offered to read his autodidact’s essays, if ever essays there were.
But writing about Murray, over and over again, had become Bootie’s most consuming project. There was no time for fat library books with scolding titles, let alone for the hectoring tomes of Musil that glared at him from Julius’s bookshelf. He had come to think of Murray as his, somehow, as an idea rather than the man, and sometimes the man surprised him, like something forgotten and rediscovered: the smell of him, the echo of his voice on the telephone.
By the end of July, he’d reached the point where his written Murray, blurred though he was, superceded the man in the room, became stronger than he. This was the time, Bootie realized, to let him go, to send this Murray Thwaite out into the world. He felt it was crucial to be honest, fully honest, as he took this step. He didn’t want anyone to feel he’d been hypocritical or deceptive. He must precisely redeem the shortcomings of his uncle. He typed up his final version on his own computer, in Julius’s apartment, and e-mailed it to himself, so he could print it at Kinko’s. It seemed more honest, for example, to print it at Kinko’s rather than at the Thwaites’, when they might not be pleased with its contents: he would not use their printer, their electricity, their paper. He then had three copies made and, allowing himself to indulge a small vanity, had them bound in plastic covers, one red, one navy, and one black. The red one was for Marina, because he wanted her to take note of it, of him. The navy one was for his mother, because it seemed a safely sober color, an announcement of the seriousness of his endeavor. And the black one was for Murray (and for Annabel, of course, should he choose to share it), because he wanted, in all things, to be straightforward, and it was imperative that Murray should know what Bootie had been up to. Black seemed appropriately mournful: it expressed the sorrow with which he delivered his blow.
Strangely, he would think afterward, Bootie didn’t consider that this gesture of openness might cost him his livelihood, and indeed, his family connections. He couldn’t have said what he thought might happen, because he didn’t waste time imagining the outcome. He did what he needed to do.
Curiously, his mother responded first. He sent her the essay by Express Mail, and she, doubtless impressed by the urgency of the packaging, read it at once. She rang him at Julius’s, in the evening, caught him dozing flat on the futon.
“What in the Sam Hill has gotten into you, Bootie?” she asked.
“How do you mean?”
“Well, I haven’t read Murray’s unpublished book, but I’d guess he didn’t want me to. That’s not what he hired you for, I don’t think: to bite the hand that feeds you. Are you going crazy on me, Bootie? What on earth is going on?”
“Nothing, Ma.” He explained that Marina had asked for a cultural exposé, and that this was it. He did not explain that he still, secretly, harbored the hope that this essay might make Marina love him. Even though he knew better than to hope, he was sure, in his fantasy, that if only she really looked his way, understood his mind, then this could not fail to transpire.
“I’m going to call your uncle. Has he seen this?”
“I gave it to him. I doubt he’s read it yet. He took ages to read Marina’s manuscript.”
“He’s a busy man, Bootie. Jeez. You know, it’s time for you to pack in this crazy nonsense and get back to school. They sent some papers from Oswego. I opened them. It’s time to register. I can write the check tomorrow
.”
“I’m so far beyond that, Ma.”
“Beyond a college education? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know how to explain it, except to say that I’m in the middle of life. But really in the middle of it. There’s no turning back now.”
“You’re losing your marbles. Bootie, do I need to come and get you?”
“I’m an adult. I am all grown up. I am living my life.”
His mother sighed. “There is no need to raise your voice at me,” she said. “I think this is all crazy, but I love you just the same.”
“I love you, too, Ma.”
“He’s going to be very upset, you know. I sometimes don’t think I know my brother too well, but I know that much. He can have a miserable temper. He always did. And what you’ve done is terrible.”
“Somebody has to tell the truth. Somebody has to call it like it is.”
“What makes you so sure it’s the truth? And why does it have to be you, I wonder? Are you trying to ruin your life?”
“It’ll be fine. You’ll see. It’ll be fine.” He was accustomed to reassuring her in this way, although it did occur to him then that it might not be entirely fine.
Marina called him two hours later. He was reading Emerson when she rang: “This goiter of egotism is so frequent among notable persons that we must infer some strong necessity in nature which it subserves; such as we see in the sexual attraction. The preservation of the species was a point of such necessity that nature has secured it at all hazards by immensely overloading the passion, at the risk of perpetual crime and disorder. So egotism has its root in the cardinal necessity by which each individual persists to be what he is.”
“Frederick,” she said. “Is this some kind of joke?”
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