The Keep

by Jennifer Egan

  Howard was telling Danny how he’d bought this castle from a German hotel company.

  Howard: They renovated maybe a third, not even, just two levels of rooms in the south wing—which is where we’re all sleeping—then this kitchen, the great hall, and two tower stairwells. Then they started having cash-flow problems and the work was stop-and-start for a couple of years, and when they were just about belly-up they flipped the property to us.

  Ann (from the floor): For less than two-thirds of what they’d paid, plus all the equity they’d put in!

  Howard: It was a deal we couldn’t walk away from. But it meant we had to pass on Ann’s favorite castle. In Bulgaria.

  Ann: God, it was pretty.

  They were making conversation, being nice, explaining themselves the way people do when you first meet them. And normally Danny was easy with people. It was another one of his invisible skills: he had radar for how people wanted to be talked to and could switch from one person’s way to another person’s way without thinking. But right now Danny’s radar was down, he was out of range, or maybe he just needed to be reset and programmed in this new place, like his satellite dish. Bottom line: Danny felt uncomfortable around Howard. But uncomfortable sounds mild and what Danny felt was not mild, it was miserable. He couldn’t define the misery. He couldn’t even name the symptoms, except one: he wanted to get away. Now.

  This caught Danny by surprise. He’d had multiple phone calls and e-mails with Howard setting up this castle job, and all that had been fine. But being in the guy’s physical presence was different. Something froze in Danny the minute Howard turned up in his room this morning.

  Howard: Oh, man, look at you!

  Danny: Look at you!

  Howard: I don’t know if I would’ve recognized you, buddy.

  Ditto on this end.

  God, it’s been a long time. I don’t even know how long.

  Danny: Scary long.

  Howard: I don’t want to know—it’ll make me feel old.

  Danny: Let’s just leave it at long.

  And that whole time, one sentence was screaming through Danny’s brain: What the fuck am I doing here?

  He wasn’t sure where to stand in Howard’s medieval kitchen, so he stuck by the window. He felt a prickling on the skin of his arms that gave him hope. Another invisible skill (it was a long résumé): Danny could feel on the surface of his skin when wireless Internet access was available. His biceps, mostly, and the back of his neck. This talent had served Danny fantastically in New York, where he managed to check e-mail all day long without paying for it. And this morning he’d woken up in his big medieval bed and had the feeling right off, like goose bumps or a limb that’s been asleep. But it turned out Danny was wrong: when he opened his laptop there was no service, not a flicker. Not even a phone jack in the room. First thing after breakfast he planned to set up his satellite dish—on top of that tower, if possible.

  There was a telescope next to the window, and Danny moved it into position and looked through. The tower’s pocked sandy stones snapped into view like they were inches away from his face. The corners looked gnawed on. The windows were small and pointed. Danny edged the telescope toward the top window, looking for the red light he’d seen last night, but if it was still on he couldn’t see it.

  Danny: What kind of tower is that?

  Howard didn’t hear, but his old friend did—Mick, who was filling up glasses with water at one of the long tables. He came to the window and looked out.

  Mick: That’s the keep.

  Danny: Was it a dungeon?

  This question got the first smile out of Mick that Danny had seen. It broke open his grim face and made him handsome, even through the years of junk.

  Mick: No, not a dungeon. The keep is the place where everyone holed up if the castle got invaded. Kind of a last stand. The stronghold.

  Danny looked back through the telescope. He felt tension coming off Mick, even standing still. Danny had no take on the guy beyond the fact that he was Howard’s number two. Although that was something, a big something, because the randomness and chaos (his pop’s words) of Danny’s eighteen years in New York disappeared when you looked at them in terms of filling up that number-two slot: he’d scraped into those empty places next to powerful people again and again and again, until by now it was second nature. But Danny was giving that up. For one reason or another it never worked out, and it always seemed to end in violence.

  Danny caught something moving in a window of the keep—not the top part but one level down. He tipped the telescope a hair and waited. There it was again, a curtain moving, and then it pulled aside and Danny saw a girl: young, with long blond hair. Just a flash and she was gone. He turned to ask Mick who she was, but Mick had moved away.

  A little boy crashed into the kitchen wearing a gray plastic visor and breastplate and carrying a plastic sword. A girl who seemed to be his babysitter came in behind him. Howard introduced her to Danny as Nora. She had white-girl dreadlocks and a pierced tongue—Danny caught the flash and click when she said hello. Her hands were shaking hard. Danny was so relieved to see a fellow style refugee that he had to fight back a grin. Girls with dreads were not into grinning.

  Danny: Did I meet you somewhere before?

  Nora: Only in your dreams.

  She sneaked a smile (not a grin) and peeked at Danny from the sides of her eyes. Here’s what Nora saw: a lot of black clothes covering up a lot of white skin Danny made even whiter with Johnson’s baby powder. Straight dyed-black hair an inch past his neck. A pewter hoop in one ear with a ruby stuck in it. Today (not always), mud-colored lipstick. That was Danny’s style, one of many he’d had over the years. At the beginning he’d thought of his style as being his essence, the perfect expression of who he was inside, but lately the styles had started to feel like disguises, distractions Danny could move around behind without being seen. He looked clearest to himself standing buck naked in front of the mirror so he could see the dregs of the many IDs he’d tried on: an ace of spades tattooed on his ass from his days as a bisexual club promoter, a cigarette burn on his left hand from when the photographer he’d assisted got pissy in the darkroom, a gash on his forehead from jumping into the fin of a wall-mounted sailfish on the day the dotcom he worked for went public, a nut on one temple where the loan shark he’d gone to rather than ask his pop for money whaled on him with a set of keys, a permanent click in his wrist, grease burns on one forearm, a lump on his balls from an infected piercing, a left pinky that wouldn’t bend, a torn earlobe…you get the picture. And now this limp, which Danny was praying wasn’t permanent. Giving Martha Mueller, his ex-girlfriend, the guided tour of these scars made Danny feel macho—his war wounds, he was thinking, so it surprised him when Martha said, You poor boy and kissed his forehead oh so softly, which would be a perfectly normal thing for some girlfriends to do, but not Martha. You poor boy. And for no reason, Danny came close to blubbering.

  The kid whacked his sword against the table next to Danny and screamed Hyahhh! Danny jumped. The kid looked up at him, which meant tipping his head back to a point where it looked like it might snap right off at the neck.

  Kid (in a muffled voice): I’m King Arthur.

  Danny didn’t answer. The kid lifted up his visor and Danny got a lurch in his gut: white skin, soft brown curls. Howie.

  Kid: Does he not speak English, Mommy?

  That got a laugh from the room.

  Ann: Of course he speaks English. This is Daddy’s Cousin Danny. Danny, this is Benjy.

  Benjy: Why doesn’t he talk?

  Another laugh. Danny felt the pinch of anger that came when he was supposed to think a kid was cute.

  Danny: I guess I don’t have anything to say.

  Benjy: You could say hello.

  Hello, Benjy.

  Hello, Danny. I’m four and a quarter.

  Danny had no response. He didn’t like kids, and parents of kids weren’t high on his list, either. It didn’t matter how cool you�
��d been—you had a kid and you were one more sucker spooning goop into an angry little mouth, a guy with pacifiers in his pockets and snot trails on his sleeves and a happy-goofy look Danny could only think was some kind of shock, like those people who sit around cracking jokes after their legs get blown off.

  The kid kept peering up at Danny. Danny tried to hold his gaze, but he couldn’t. Kids made him nervous.

  Benjy: How come you’re wearing lipstick?

  That got the biggest laugh of all.

  Ann: Benjy! But she was laughing, too.

  Danny: Why does your babysitter have purple dreadlocks?

  She likes the way they look.

  Well, there you go.

  Do you like the way your lipstick looks?

  I do.

  Benjy: I don’t like it.

  Ann: Benjy, that’s enough. That’s rude. She leaned down and spoke into the kid’s face. Say you’re sorry.

  Benjy: No.

  Ann: Then you’re having a time-out.

  Benjy: No!

  Danny: Hey, don’t worry about it. He waved his hand like it was nothing, but he was furious. Benjy glared up at Danny, and Danny glared right back down at him.

  Howard: All right, folks. Let’s eat while it’s hot.

  Mick rang a bell outside one of the windows, and the sound rolled through the air. More graduate students poured in, maybe twenty in all. Everyone filled their plates at the stove—eggs scrambled with mushrooms, baked toast, three kinds of melon—and carried them to the long tables. Danny took his plate to the table where the graduate students were sitting, away from Benjy, Ann, Nora, and (he hoped) Howard, who was still at the stove. Danny watched his cousin, searching for some link—in the way this guy moved, the sound of his voice, something—to the Howie he remembered. But he couldn’t find one.

  The eggs were the tastiest scrambled eggs he’d had in his life.

  Danny scanned the graduate students, trying to figure out where he fell in the age spread. He liked being the youngest in a room, but at thirty-six (as of last week) this was getting pretty hard to pull off. Danny was past the point of denying that there were younger people in New York who were technically adults, meaning they had jobs and apartments and boyfriends or girlfriends or even husbands or wives. At first it was just four or five of these adults who were younger than Danny, then all of a sudden it was hundreds, thousands, a whole fucking generation, and this terrified him: the girls especially, with their black bras and purses stocked with multicolored condoms and exact ideas of what they liked in bed. It terrified him because if these were adults then he must be, too. He was some kind of adult, but what kind? Danny’s friends were all young—they stayed young, because at the point when they got married and started having kids the friendships died off and new ones with people who weren’t doing that shit took their place. It was Danny’s nature to be new to the game of living in New York—he needed to be young or nothing about him made any sense and he was a failure, a loser, a guy who’d done nothing—all the things his pop said. But Danny avoided those thoughts. They were dangerous.

  Someone was speaking to him, a graduate student on his left, one of the older ones (that alone made Danny like him), a little salt and pepper on his temples. Steve. He had a mighty handshake.

  Steve: You’re part of the team?

  Danny: I—I guess so. I’m Howard’s cousin.

  Steve grinned. So you’re joining the revolution? The end of life as we know it?

  Danny: You mean…the hotel?

  Yeah, the hotel. Except—well, obviously that’s just the beginning.

  Danny: Beginning of what?

  Steve went blank, registering the fact that Danny knew nothing. Then he got careful. He said: Just that Howard has other goals than pure profit. A lot of us are into socially responsible business, so this is a chance to watch that happen from the ground up.

  Danny: How long have you been here?

  Steve thought a minute, then called down the table: Mick, how many days?

  Mick (instantly, not looking up): Thirty-eight.

  Danny: And what’ve you been doing, exactly?

  Steve: Uh, it’s hard to point to one thing. We’ve…had a lot of meetings, we’ve talked, we’ve done some work on the business plan—

  Carpentry! Someone else said that, and it got a laugh.

  Steve: Yeah, carpentry. Just this and that, wouldn’t you agree, Mick?

  Mick looked up, still chewing. His eyes were very blue. The other graduate students all seemed to be listening. He said: I would agree.

  There was a pause that felt pressurized.

  Danny: So you’re, like, physically renovating the place.

  Another pause. Steve looked at Mick.

  Mick: It’s been a little diffuse so far. What we’re doing.

  Howard (from the stove): What’s that?

  Mick had his back to Howard, but he didn’t turn. Instead he answered loudly, in a tone that Danny had a feeling was supposed to be light and flip but landed hard: Your cousin was wondering what we’ve been doing here all these weeks. I told him things’ve been a little diffuse.

  Howard turned to look at Mick. Diffuse how?

  The room went quiet, listening. Mick seemed to struggle. In the sense that we’re doing little things, a lot of little things, but nothing really big.

  He was breaking a basic rule of dealing with powerful people: you didn’t cross them in public. Danny had learned that one a few times.

  Howard walked to the table, holding his spatula. His eyes moved over the group in a way that seemed uneasy, and Danny felt a flicker of something—a connection between this Howard and the Howie he remembered.

  Howard: What big things would you like to be doing, Mick?

  Mick: I can think of fifty. We could start renovating the north wing. We could drain the pool and get to work on the marble around it. We could excavate the chapel—we’ve done some clearing around the gravestones, but the thing is still half underground. And then there’s the keep—

  Howard: We can’t touch the keep.

  I know we can’t go in it, but we could work on the outside. We could clear around the bottom, we could—

  We can’t touch the keep, Mick.

  Benjy’s high, worried voice cut through: Dad, are you having a fight?

  Mick: I’m thinking about morale, Howard.

  Daddy, are you—

  Howard: Whose morale? Yours?

  Daddy—

  Ann: Shhh. There was pain in her face. Danny felt responsible, like he’d started this thing. He noticed he was sweating.

  Howard: Okay, look. Let’s get this on the table, everyone. How’s your morale?

  There was a pause—too long, Danny thought.

  Finally Steve, next to Danny, spoke up: It’s good.

  Good, said someone at the other table, followed by a very good and then great and excellent and pretty soon it was a whole happy chorus, because it felt so good to say these things that they wanted to keep on saying them, especially when it gave Howard such a look of relief.

  Howard: I think this is your problem, Mick.

  Mick: Okay.

  No one moved. Howard stood there like he was waiting.

  Finally Ann spoke up: Still, I mean, isn’t the goal for everyone to be satisfied?

  Howard: Only one person isn’t satisfied.

  Did he really believe it? Danny couldn’t tell. Power was lonely—that was a universal rule. Which was why the number two was so important.

  Mick stood up. He looked whipped. He carried his dishes to a giant dishwasher, loaded them in and left the room through the swinging door. Some kind of tension went out with him, and people started talking again.

  Benjy: Mommy, is he sad? Is Uncle Mick sad?

  Ann: I don’t know.

  Is he angry?

  I don’t know.

  I want to find him.

  Ann: Fine. Go.

  The kid bolted out of the room, forgetting his sword. His voice echoed down the
hall, Uncle Miiiiiiiiiiiiick, and then there was some kind of answer.

  The graduate students were gathering at the stove with Howard, refilling on eggs. They agreed with Mick, but Howard had the power.

  Finally, Howard brought a plate to the table and sat. After all that cooking he knuckled down the food like it had no taste and was nothing but a way to fill up. He kept one arm curled around his plate, as if someone might yank it away. Danny watched his cousin, disturbed. He felt he was seeing an earlier version of Howard, a part that didn’t mesh with what he was now. Ann slid along the bench toward Howard and put her arm around him. He finished eating and shoved his plate away.

  People were starting to leave. Danny carried his plate to the dishwasher and stood there, wondering if it would be rude to walk out of the room. He didn’t want to be alone with Howard, but he had nowhere really to go—wasn’t even sure how to find his way back through the halls and doorways and turns to the room where he’d slept.

  Howard: Danny, wait.

  Danny came back to the table slowly. Ann was still there, and Nora, and four or five graduate students. The baby was using the bench to hold herself in a standing position. The knees of her pink pajamas were dirty.

  Danny sat down across from Howard.

  Howard: How’re your folks, Danny? The argument with Mick had taken something out of him, and his voice was dull and flat.

  Danny: They’re good, I guess. I don’t see a lot of them.

  Howard: I always liked your dad.

  Danny: Yeah. I’m not too high on his list these days.

  Howard looked up: How so?

  Shit, why had he even said it? Why try to explain to Howard, of all people, how he’d broken his pop’s heart not just one time but again and again, starting when he refused to go to Michigan (Pop’s alma mater) and went to NYU instead, which was challenging and thrilling and all that crap but also dangerous, because “self-exploration” is always dangerous for that nice outline you thought was you. And Danny’s outline turned out to be fainter than most people’s—it looked as pointless in New York City as the Polo shirts he unfolded from his suitcase in a dorm room off Washington Square and never wore again. And when his parents came to visit, his pop had stood in that dorm room in his light green sweater, holding Danny’s soccer balls in their netted bag, and said: Our hotel’s right by Central Park. We could knock these around on Sunday morning.