The Emperor's Children

by Claire Messud

  Over supper—she’d ordered lamb chops, potatoes dauphinoises, and had herself sautéed the spinach—he grew for a time quiet. He’d forgotten, and then remembered, the sin of what he was doing.

  “What are you thinking about?” she asked, her smile a trifle too bright.

  “I was just wondering how my talk was going. The imaginary one, that I’m giving right now.”

  “You’re going to call her later.”

  “I have to.”

  “What will you tell her?”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll go down the hall. Or downstairs. It doesn’t matter.”

  “But you’re thinking about it.”

  He shrugged.

  “You’re not regretting?”

  “Never regret, my dear. I never regret. It’s so wasteful.”

  But the shadow settled on them, obliquely, and was shuffled off only when Danielle rose to put on music, a Spanish soprano singing Cantaloube, her pure, agonized strains floating, their minor harmonies wavering in the small room, as if to remind them both that beauty and loss were inseparably entwined.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  The Morning After

  In the morning, when they woke—late-ish, for both of them, both by habit and separately early risers—Danielle put the croissants in the oven, and went to take a shower. They would have, at least, the better part of the day: he wasn’t due at LaGuardia for his limo home until three. She was planning their walk—could they walk safely in Lower Manhattan? Surely Marina and Ludo would be ensconced at the magazine without interruption; but Murray was known, could run into anyone who might then speak of the encounter to Annabel—when she heard him cry out. Her first thought, as she hastened to dry herself and rushed to rejoin him, was that he’d had a heart attack, that she’d have to call an ambulance, that everything would be exposed. But when she emerged, he stood at the window, in his boxer shorts, his grizzled chest bare to Lower Manhattan—she was going to make a joke about it, about a striptease, maybe, when she saw that he was pointing: “Look at that,” he said. “They’ve got some colossal fire going. It must be a bomb or something, so high up.”

  She grabbed the remote and waved it at the television, and they lived the next hour and a half in stereo, watching through the window—their view spectacularly, hideously unimpeded—and watching on the screen, as if they were simultaneously in Manhattan and anywhere on the planet, Columbus, even, and everything they saw seemed somehow more and less real on the television because what they saw with their own eyes they couldn’t quite believe. Danielle thought, at one point in the blur of it, that it was like witches, who couldn’t be photographed—that had always been the belief, at any rate, in her childhood lore—by which you knew they were witches, and that by the same token what took place outside the window could have been credited as sorcery, some trick of the light, almost comical, so absurd, were it not for the fact that it was being filmed—the filming of it the assurance of its reality: the whole world was seeing this, and the Pentagon, too, and this was how you knew that it was really true. The sirens on the screen echoed, with a disconcerting lag, the sirens out the window. The cacophony on the television was more bearable, more reassuring, because it was contained in a little box; because unlike the sirens and yelling and the visceral rumbles outside, you could imagine, at least, that you could just turn it off. Better to have them both going, to indulge the illusion that they could, if they chose to, call a halt to the whole catastrophe.

  It took a long time for either of them to dress. They stood watching, all but naked, arrested. The croissants, untended, blackened at the edges and grew hard, but it didn’t matter; they weren’t hungry.

  “I need to call her” was the first thing Murray said after a silence so long that they were both surprised by his voice.

  “Of course you do,” Danielle said.

  “I can go outside if you like.”

  “What will you tell her? Will you tell her you’re here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He tried to ring from the corridor, but the circuits were all busy.

  “You could try from my phone,” she said. “That might work.”

  “I’d be—She’d have—The number comes up on the phone.”

  The television explained that flights all over the country had been grounded. That flights from Europe had turned back over the Atlantic. That nobody was going anywhere. Danielle thought Murray might cry.

  “I’m in Chicago,” he said, in his shirt and undershorts and dark socks, sitting on the edge of the bed, looking not at her but at the television screen. “Nobody’s moving. I’m supposed to be in Chicago.”

  “You can stay with me,” she said. “Until, you know, you can get home from Chicago.”

  “She’s probably trying to call me there right now.”

  “She’d call your cell. You can’t get through. Nobody can get through.” She went over to the window, leaned up against the glass and peered down at the street. “There are tons of people out. The streets are—well. Maybe we should go outside.”

  “Why?”

  “Because. I don’t know. Because it seems crazy to stay cooped up in here.”

  “I need to go home.”

  “How do you mean?”

  He was standing, now. He had put on his trousers, fastened his belt. It was a relief to her, Danielle realized: she, who thrilled to his vulnerabilities, did not want him vulnerable on this morning. She wanted him to put his shoes on.

  “Annabel,” he said.

  “Yes, but you’re in Chicago, remember?” Danielle knew what he was telling her, but it seemed too appalling to contemplate.

  He sighed. “I might have to not be.”

  “You’re going to tell her? You can’t tell her.” For a fleeting second, she thought she saw a new path, a path down which she and Murray could properly be together: he would tell Annabel, they would part, it would be natural and right. But as quickly, she knew it was absurd: he would tell her only because he wanted so much to go home to her. He had made his choice.

  “I can walk uptown,” he said. “It’s only a few miles. It’s probably the best way to get there.” He combed his hair with his fingers, haphazardly. It was still messy. He was unshaven, his silver bristles gleaming slightly in the bright sun. “And don’t ask me what I’m going to say because I couldn’t tell you.”

  She bit her lip.

  “Whatever I say, you won’t come into it. A chance encounter at the airport. Something.”

  “You don’t have to go.”

  They both looked out the window at the black smoke still hovering where the buildings had once been.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Are you going to be okay?” To which there was no possible answer. Incredulous, she almost laughed.

  He kissed her before he left, a small, chaste, final kiss. His cheek was rough, hers damp, and she had the impression of feeling everything, of her skin being suddenly all sensation, almost unbearable. He said again that he was sorry, and he went. For a time, she stood at the window, her fingertips to the glass, looking down—she did not see him go, as if he’d vanished—but she watched and there were still dust-covered, bewildered people, some crying, drifting up the avenue, lots of them, like refugees from war, she thought, remembering the famous Vietnam photograph, the little naked girl fleeing the napalm, crying, her forearms oddly raised at her sides; and on television behind her they were talking about the planes, just imagine the size of them, it was all too big and too much to take in and she wanted, now, to turn it off, just to turn it all off—and then she kicked off her shoes and with her skirt rucked up, climbed back into her beautiful bed and pulled the duvet—such soft cotton, so very fine, Murray’s special sheets, and they smelled of him—over her head, as she used to do as a child, and she thought she should cry, she thought that perhaps later she might cry; but just as a few minutes before she had felt, so intensely, now she was as if anesthetized, she felt nothing, nothing at all, you could have amputated a limb
and it wouldn’t have mattered. She had seen the second plane, like a gleaming arrow, and the burst of it, oddly beautiful against the blue, and the smoke, everywhere, and she had seen the people jumping, from afar, specks in the sky, and she knew that’s what they were only from the TV, from the great reality check of the screen, and she had seen the buildings crumble to dust; she could smell them even inside, even with the windows sealed, the asbestos-smoke-gasoline fuel, slight airplane, slight bonfire reek of it, she had seen these things and had been left, forever, because in light of these things she did not matter, you had to make the right choice, you had to stay on the ground—but God, the sky last night had been gorgeous, the colors, the lights, the towers, and after she let go of her terror, the joy of it—you had to stay on the ground and there was no call to feel anything, there was nothing to feel because you weren’t worth anything to anyone, you’d had your heart, or was it your guts, or both, taken out, you’d been eviscerated, that was the word, and the Spanish woman singing last night, she had known, she had known all along, and now there was nothing but sorrow and this was how it was going to be, now, always.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  The Monitor

  By noon on Tuesday, Ludo had taken the decision to cancel the launch party. He gathered everyone in the office who had come and stayed—which was a surprising number, considering—and he spoke eloquently about how everybody needed to be with their loved ones rather than in an office, it put things in perspective, and it was hard to know how things would unfold from here, but the important thing was for people to be sure that their families and friends were safe and if anyone wasn’t, God forbid, The Monitor would be there to support them, and of course there’d be plenty of time to regroup and reassess, and it wasn’t clear when they’d launch—in fact, the printer was unreachable and in Brooklyn, so they couldn’t have gotten the issues printed anyway, that’s just how things were—but not to worry, because they were a team, a strong one, and ready for adversity.

  In the privacy of his office, he put his head in his hands at his desk and said to Marina, “We are completely fucked.”

  “Everything’s fucked” was all she could say. The television was on in the corner, CNN with the volume down. They were playing again and again the same images that had been airing all morning, interspersed with anxious but eager talking heads. “So what now?”

  Ludovic straightened in his chair. Only now she noticed how drawn he looked, his beautiful eyes ringed as if with soot, his skin of a yellowish pallor. She could see a blood vessel beating beneath the fine skin at his temple. He hadn’t slept properly since before the wedding.

  “Damned if I know,” he said.

  “You were great. You said all the right things. It feels as though the world has stopped.”

  “It has.” He rearranged papers on his desk. The magazine cover of the issue that was to have been, with the title in black capitals and the logo—he’d help design it—of an all-seeing eye, lay on top of the pile. Already, with its vermilion, orange, and yellow graphic, a sunburst, a remarkable photograph of a sunburst, the idea having been that they were exploding upon the scene, illuminating truths, and different, down to the images, from the rest; already it looked out of date and faintly forlorn, like some child’s abandoned artwork.

  “What should we do? Now, I mean? You and me?” She sat on the edge of the desk, reached to stroke his hair.

  “I guess we should go in the streets. Walk downtown. See it.”

  “Because we’re journalists?”

  “Or because it’s history. Because you can’t just walk home and pretend it hasn’t happened.”

  “Is it right, do you think, what everyone’s saying—all those people, on TV—that nothing will be the same again?”

  Ludovic didn’t answer. He put on his jacket, fussing to keep his turned-up cuffs from bunching up to his biceps. Then he started sorting papers, stuffing some of them into his briefcase to take home. As if it were a normal day.

  “Do you think we’ll know anyone?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “It’s hard to believe we won’t. People I went to college with, or their parents … I think that boy DeVaughn’s mother works in the towers.”

  “Who?”

  “DeVaughn. The boy my mother’s always worried about. The fire starter, you know?”

  “The fire starter?”

  “Yes. His mom. A mailroom, she runs the mailroom in one of those sorts of companies.”

  “It may not be in the towers. Downtown Manhattan is surprisingly capacious.”

  “Up to fifty thousand people in those buildings, Ludo. We’re bound to know someone.”

  Later, from their apartment, they walked over to Union Square, where vigils had started, candles flickering in clusters even before dark. People thronged and milled about, as if in aspic, as if their limbs could move no faster, many of them configured into new human forms by their embraces, like the walking wounded, two women supporting a third, dissolved, between them, a man holding a somber child precariously upon his hip, two clean-shaven young men clasping each other by the neck, their heads touching, like Siamese twins of sorrow. The posters, thick and thickening like some mad foliage, each with its photographs, its carefree snap at a wedding, a beach, a picnic, and its plea, shone white in the dusk, and people circulated, quietly, wet-faced, examining them. Marina, too, crying as they walked, paused to read a clutch of details (“MISSING! MISSING! MISSING! Has a star-shaped tattoo on her lower back. Wearing a gold crucifix and pendant earrings. Has three tear-shaped chicken pox scars on his left cheek. Last seen wearing a white shirt and tie with elephants”), walked on again.

  “This is disgraceful,” Ludo muttered, as they approached a tree the trunk of which had already been almost wholly papered. “This is necrophiliac pornography.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What are you thinking?” he burst out. “They’re all dead. Of course they’re all dead. Okay, maybe fifteen, or twenty, or even a hundred of these people may be dug out of that mess. But what good does it do to pretend they’ll all come home, that they’re all just wandering around Manhattan in a post-traumatic daze? They’re all fucking dead, Marina. Dead.”

  “Keep your voice down.” She could see two women, a young man, peering, shaking their heads.

  “This is what we should have a cover piece about, this,” he went on, in an apparent seething fury. “About how in this country everybody wants a happy ending. To the point of dishonesty, as if sticking up these posters can somehow undo, or fix, or change what’s just happened. Who’s going to say to them, ‘Go home and face the facts! Your son, mother, niece, is dead, dust, gone. There’s nothing left’?”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “Don’t we? Let’s face the facts, here.”

  “I know you’re upset, sweetie, but this isn’t the place.”

  “But it’s the fucking land of lies here, isn’t it? So nobody’s going to say that. And we’re not going to say it, either, because we don’t have a fucking magazine.”

  “We will. Don’t be silly. We’re all upset. It’s been a hard day. It’s been unreal. We need to go home now.”

  “You think we will because next week might be a good time to launch? Or next month? Or maybe next year? Come off it, don’t kid yourself. The bubble’s burst, now. It’s over. We’re fucked.”

  “We’ll just have to wait and see.”

  “Do that if you want. I prefer to see and wait. And what I see is what happens, I promise you.”

  Marina led him away, he reluctant and slow, fidgeting in her embrace, she at once firm and affectionate with, she knew, an air of patience about her, and she could tell from the sympathetic glances around them that people thought he had been posting a flyer, that one of the smiling lost faces along the barrier belonged to him—a mother, maybe? A sister or brother? A wife?—and that he was trying, with only moderate but nevertheless laudable success, to release his grief to her care.

&nbs
p; CHAPTER SIXTY

  At Home

  On that terrible day, she waited for him to call even though she knew pretty quickly—someone said so on the TV—that he couldn’t. The lines were busy, the lines were crossed, the signal had been on top of the towers, something like that. She was in the school parking lot when she heard, gathering handouts from the trunk for her second period class. Joan came hurrying up and told her, and Bootie was the first thing she thought of. School was canceled, in Watertown, but even after the kids had all cleared out, she stayed in the teachers’ lounge for a while and watched the television. It made her sweat, that footage, and once the towers had fallen they showed them falling over and over again, the same bits of film, in all of them the exquisite blue sky—it was sunny like that in Watertown, too, though it could have been a million miles away.