He’d chosen Miami because when the station opened at five, it was the farthest and earliest one could go; and it was, in the bargain, a warm destination for his aching body. He paid in cash, picked up three doughnuts (two honey-glazed and one powdered, filled with strawberry jam) and some more Cokes and found himself a seat as soon as they were allowed to board. The bus pulled out at seven, setting off on its twenty-nine-hour journey, again to a different, and surely better, country.
But that hour, Friday afternoon, in the Clarion’s plastic bathtub, felt truly like his new beginning. A baptism. He’d decided to take a new name, to shed the agonies of the old. Ulrich was to hand, of course, from the Musil: not so far from Frederick, but pleasingly irreducible in comparison. As for a surname, he’d never cared for Tubb: Who would, or could? It was tempting to take Thwaite: he felt entitled to it, felt he could make of it what it ought to be. But then again, it was not new enough. New: there was a name. Ulrich New. What did he know? How to be New.
He rose from the grimed water and scrubbed himself dry with the paltry Clarion towels. It took three of them fully to do the job; but what luxury, to have three towels. What luxury, to have a room with a bed—so big—a television, running water. He had carpet underfoot, bristly, but still. It was the nicest room he’d had in months. He would find a job, he would keep learning, he would bide his time and rise from the ashes, like the phoenix, more powerful than before. Would they—would she—recognize him then? She might, in time, be ready to see him, to know him as he was. Or rather, as he would then be. Because Ulrich knew he was at the beginning of a long road—a long, hot road, he could tell in spite of the Clarion air-conditioning window unit—but at last it would be—without relations, unstuck—the right road. A road to the top of a mountain, as yet unnamed: power, or discovery, or truth, or all three. His own road.
He stood unabashedly naked at the window in the Miami afternoon sun, the towels on the floor behind him, and, to the whining soundtrack of the a/c, watched a battered blue Taurus pull into the parking lot, watched two black boys his own age get out, walk to the glass front door. They were in his mind like the falling towers, his own personal cinema. It was all about control. Ulrich would fashion the reality inside his head and then, when the time was right, would give birth to it, would make them all at last understand, would take them by surprise.
He would cast no shadow, in this new incarnation; but that was fine, just fine. He would be his own idol, the one he had never yet found. He would be all right.
NOVEMBER
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
Burying the Dead (1)
Judy organized the memorial service for the week before Thanksgiving because, as she told Joan, she badly needed some closure on this. And because she didn’t want to ruin Thanksgiving, and beyond that, Christmas, for Sarah’s kids, not any more than they would be ruined anyway. Everything was ruined forever, but you weren’t actually allowed to say that. She’d been to New York City, she’d been to that place, she’d thought it might help; but the vast hole just seemed like an extrusion of her own grief. She’d met other relatives, but mostly they seemed different to her, hard to talk to, in part maybe because they could claim that dreadful place, they knew why their husbands and daughters and brothers had been there: theirs no fleeting, horrible fluke, but a sense of bleak entitlement. She hadn’t met them, but felt kinship with the families of missing tourists, or of foreigners on whirlwind business trips: How could chance, fate, God, have been so maliciously aligned against my blood? Why mine? As for Murray and his lot, how could she not blame them, that callous, callow girl and her own monstrous brother, she wouldn’t speak ill of him out loud, but he’d always been that way, an ego the size of a house, their mother had made him that way, from the beginning, fed him on kisses and cream, her firstborn, heart’s love, sickening garbage if she let herself remember it, like some fatted calf, only he’d sent his nephew in his stead to the slaughter. Murray’s vanity had killed her Bootie, there were no two ways about it; and it wasn’t clear to her in her heart whether she would ever be able to forgive him: his whole life, and now hers, too. He had taken her heart’s love, her most precious.
She’d taken the epitaph for Bootie’s stone from a much older grave, at the other end of the grounds, and didn’t mind repeating it because it was so true: “Here is not a life, but a piece of childhood thrown away.” He’d had everything ahead, and his uncle to surpass. He’d had a future.
But she wasn’t like her brother, one selfishly to turn her back in her trouble, to pretend they weren’t related. You couldn’t escape that, no matter how you tried. So when he’d asked if they could come, she’d said yes, because they could come unforgiven: they were, aside from Sarah and Tom and the children, all the family she had left now.
And it would be a fitting good-bye to Watertown. She was finishing up the year at the school, because she wasn’t a quitter, never had been (she’d taken only one term off when Bert was at the very end, and afterward had heard terrible things about the substitute, a boy just out of college who stuttered and couldn’t keep order), but she’d already decided, with Sarah, she couldn’t stay in the house, would put it up for sale come spring, because how many ghosts could a person live with, even if she loved them more than anything?
His shoes! How many times since that day had she held those abandoned dress shoes, one in each hand, to her breast? She couldn’t polish them, though they needed it, because that would mean covering the surfaces his hands had touched. She played with the laces, spoke to them—it was crazy, but what else did she have of him? And that was what they would bury, all there was, because the rubble had, as yet, returned no trace. Some shoes, a stone: a piece of childhood thrown away. She’d gone to the desolate room in Brooklyn, not with Murray but with Annabel, who had been gentle, careful, her soft, high voice alternately a balm and an irritant, and she’d wept to see to what Bootie had been reduced: sleeping on the floor, in a tangle of borrowed sheets, probably not eating, or barely, his few belongings a meager and inadequate testament to his short life.
They had repacked his cases, put the books and cards in a paper grocery bag, and had stowed the computer in a carton, wrapped in the sheets and towel. At first she’d thought simply to give it away, because Annabel, given her work, would know a deserving young person; but then it occurred to her that he might have left something on it that would tell her, would reveal to her, who he had been becoming, in this strange and lonely journey upon which he had fatefully, fatally embarked months before. Having kept it, though, she still hadn’t found the courage to turn it on, had left it packed in its box on the floor of his Watertown bedroom. Annabel and Murray had invited her to stay with them on that trip, but she had declined, gone instead to a motel on the far west side, a place where she didn’t feel very comfortable walking around outside. Still, it had been the better choice; and she wasn’t going to have them stay in her house, either, when they came. She’d booked them rooms at the Hampton Inn across town. It was just like Bert’s funeral: the same season, for one; and the three of them coming, Annabel, Murray, Marina. The new husband was off overseas—England, was it?—which did seem a bit odd, just now, but who was she to say? Then again, it was like Bert, in so many ways. Bootie had been a boy then, but a rock for her, so calm and strong. He’d been what made her get up in the morning, the reason she bothered to wash her face. She didn’t have that from anyone, now. If she wasn’t careful, she’d lose sight of the point of it all, would forget, not just why but how to live. She’d been so sure of it, once.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
Burying the Dead (2)
Marina was dreading going to Watertown. The whole thing was so unbelievable, so darkly absurd—Beckettian, she’d said to Julius—and Watertown, such a dump, seemed the crowning surreality. But maybe that was fitting: that they should witness the laying to rest of her strange, troubled, unlucky cousin (“It was just dumb luck. Dumb bad luck,” Ludo had said several times, to try to assuage her guilt.
“If you won the lottery, would you look around for someone to blame for it?”) in that strange, unlucky place. She remembered the graveyard from her uncle’s death: weirdly close to downtown, with a fast-food joint—KFC, was it?—right next door. A blustery, forlorn field of stones—her father had shown her her grandparents’ graves—and a big, cold sky. Of course, Bootie wouldn’t really be there. They’d be burying some idea of him, because that was all that was left. It was for Aunt Judy’s sake. When Marina’s father had asked her to go and she’d demurred, only slightly, about the horridness of it, he’d said, tight-lipped, “You do it for your aunt Judy”; but then, that was guilt talking. She knew he was permeated by it, because so was she. But she’d never really known her aunt, and couldn’t imagine how to speak to her about this. When she’d seen her in New York, a few weeks ago, Judy had seemed smaller, her clothes loose, her round head bobbing on a crepey neck, and she’d looked at once old and much younger than Marina remembered, as if something, some essential part, had been removed. Which, of course, it had.
Marina was angry at Ludo for being in London, and not by her side on the way to Watertown, but knew he had no choice. He was interviewing for a job on a paper over there; he’d had to go. Not only was it a matter of income—her parents could help, for a while—but of his career, of course. He’d said so only days after the events: “They won’t want foreigners here now. Time to call in my UK connections. I can’t lose momentum, here, you understand?”
“And what about me?” she’d asked.
“What about you?” he’d said. “What momentum have you got to lose? You’re still your father’s daughter, aren’t you?”
She hadn’t known how to take this. What it seemed he was saying was too hideous—rendered him too hideous—to contemplate. But she decided that he was speaking from some baffled, pain-filled place, and so forgave him, even consoled him. She loved him, didn’t she?
And it was very possible, in not so long, that she’d have no choice, either, that they’d have to settle on the other side of the Atlantic. She couldn’t begin to think about that: she knew she didn’t want to go. She couldn’t leave Manhattan, especially now. But The Monitor, as Ludo had predicted, was not to be, not now at least. According to Merton, all the hundreds of thousands already spent were better written off: nobody wanted such a thing in this new world, a frivolous, satirical thing. Ludo said Merton had made it sound like a fashion magazine he was dismissing, instead of an organ for radical cultural commentary. But even Ludo, master debater, hadn’t been able to persuade him to change his mind, so that was an end to it. So much for taking New York by storm. So much for revolution. The revolution belonged to other people now, far away from them, and it was real.
Marina knew how disappointed Ludo was, and how angry: he’d traveled all the way from Australia for this, had labored day and night for months to create from (almost) nothing this magazine that would, he knew, have made his global reputation once and for all. He had considered many scenarios along the way, including the adverse, but none as bad as this. Nobody could have foreseen this. He didn’t talk about it to anyone but Marina, and to her only sparingly—because they both knew that Bootie’s death made a free discussion somehow impossible, immoral—but his misery seeped into his face, his voice. He sniped at her, told her her clothes looked bad, carped about her father—for whom the nation’s tragedy had brought a resurgence of celebrity, as Murray Thwaite opined in the press, on television, on what Ludo called the “blasted” radio—and even about her friends.
Her friends: Ludo didn’t like Danielle anymore, if he ever really had, perhaps because she had taken it the hardest of all of them, and he felt she had least cause. In the days after 9/11, Marina and Julius had literally had to pry her out of her bed: they’d all spoken, of course, on the Tuesday night, checking in; but when first they’d actually stopped by to see her, on Wednesday afternoon, she had clearly not been outside since it happened, her hair and clothes disheveled, her eyes gummy and small. The three of them stood at her picture window and gaped at the hole in the skyline, at the clear air, and Danielle wanted at once to get back into bed. Maybe, Marina had said to Ludo, maybe seeing it all unfold so clearly was more traumatic, even at some distance away; but Ludo thought the problem was pure self-indulgence. Since then, Danielle had been peculiar, elusive, had gone into therapy, was on antidepressants, now, doubtless like half of the city; but more than that, Marina felt that she had lost her, that the Danielle she had always known had been vacuumed out, and only a flat, monosyllabic shell remained. Danielle never called Marina, these days, and when Marina rang, their conversations were strained and curtailed. Marina had stuck her neck out—she’d thought it would be good for both of them—and asked Danielle if she would accompany Marina to Bootie’s memorial. After all, Danielle had always been solicitous of him, had seemed to see through his unnerving loner persona to some wounded, striving soul, had tried to help him, or at least had urged Marina to. But Danielle had curled her lip in what amounted to a sneer, and said, “I don’t think I’d belong there, do you? It’s not a party, it’s a wake.” And as Marina opened her mouth to speak, she’d gone on, “Anyway, I don’t think I’ll be here.”
“Where are you going?”
“I don’t know. Away. I think I need to go away.”
Marina was flummoxed by the whole exchange, by its coldness, somehow. Far more acutely than the loss of Bootie, which struck her only intermittently and often as an idea rather than a yawning maw—she couldn’t quite believe he wasn’t still out there, in Brooklyn somewhere, just not speaking to them all—she felt she had lost her best friend. You couldn’t feel the same kind of grief about someone you barely knew, Ludo had pointed out about Bootie, even if he was a blood relation. You felt guilty: that was different, visceral, miserable but not personal, somehow. As for Danielle, you just had to hope that with the drugs, or after the drugs, she would come back to herself. Though why or how anything should ever be as it had been before was anybody’s guess.
Julius was the same, at least. Or rather, Julius had come back. More or less. It gave Marina hope. He seemed in all aspects more sober for his Conehead interlude—more cynical, if that were possible. And he still didn’t know what he was doing, wasting his talents on trivia, like the piece on nightclubs that he’d resold to Interview. The welt on his cheek, still fairly fresh, gave him a rakish aspect that amused him when it didn’t depress him. He said it clearly made him more alluring—men commented on it, as if it were a beauty mark—but on off days he confessed that he couldn’t quite believe he would look this way always, would carry David’s mark on him, a brand.
“Think about it,” he said over coffee at the beginning of November. “You don’t think of yourself as scarred. You forget. And you think you can just keep being your same self. But everyone sees you, and they see a changed person, and the ones who know the story see you as changed in a very particular way, which isn’t so nice. And then they remind you, over and over again, and then, I think, eventually you get changed, from the outside in, you have to absorb it, somehow.”
“It’s like my book, a bit,” Marina had said. “Change the clothes, you change the person. Seems silly, but it’s true.”
“M,” Julius had retorted with some exasperation, “a scar on your face is not like a new T-shirt or a pair of cowboy boots. It isn’t optional.”
“No, I didn’t mean it that way,” she’d said, but could tell he was still annoyed.
He’d agreed to come with her to Watertown, bless him. Because he felt guilty, too: that same afternoon, in Starbucks, he’d told her about the Lewis incident, about calling Bootie fat.
“You were high, you were drunk. It wasn’t good, but you’ve got to forgive yourself,” she said.
“He ended up in that flophouse because I turfed him out of Pitt Street, you remember.”
“Darling,” Marina said, “Pitt Street is a flophouse.”
“Thanks.”
“It is. Our goal for next yea
r will be to get you into a proper apartment.”
“And get me a proper job, too?”
“I’m unemployed myself, remember.”
“With a book coming out, thank you very much.”
“Well, but …”
“It will change everything. It’s huge.”
“Or will slip into the bookstores and out of them just as fast. And it won’t change anything.”
Julius raised an eyebrow.
“I’m not being precious, you know. It’s entirely plausible. Happens all the time. If you get a bad review in the Times, that’s the end.”
“It’s a long way off—what, September next year? Couldn’t you just be excited about it?”
“Sometimes I wonder about you, Julius. Morally, I mean. Hello? Where have you been? Right now it seems like it’d be a miracle for us even to make it to next September.”
“Oh, come on.”
“I’m serious. If Ludo gets a job in England, then who knows where I’ll be, or what I’ll be, by then. And if we stay in Manhattan, there could be another thing, a dirty bomb, whatever, and bam.”
“You’re not going to live like that, with that mentality. Because I won’t hang out with you anymore. I mean, at that point, go live in Michigan, with my parents.”
“Or in Watertown, New York?”
At which point they had exchanged glances and fallen briefly silent.
“Do you think,” Julius said, “that he’s somehow a better person than we are because he’s dead?”
“Because of how he died, you mean?”
“Because he was miserable, and now he’s dead. Whereas we—well, in the great scheme of things, let’s face it, we’ve always been fucking lucky, and have just kept right on.”
“I know Danielle thinks he was a better person.”
The Emperor's Children Page 44
