The Emperor's Children Page 10

  3. Besides which, she felt awkward with Marina in one other, albeit small, respect. It had to do with Marina’s father. Since her supper at the Thwaites’ back in March, Danielle seemed to have struck up an e-mail correspondence with her host. He had sent her, in the first instance and vaguely surprisingly, some data about Professor Jones, although she thought she’d explained that her “reparations” program had been axed. But she’d been flattered—how not to be?—by the thoughtfulness of one so important and so busy, and she had thanked him, wittily, she’d considered at the time, although she couldn’t now recall what she had said; and in order not to seem impolite, or self-absorbed (these were again, as ever, early lessons of her mother’s, regarding, in this case, the manners of correspondence, which replayed an endless loop in her head, along with—and why, she still wondered?—the maternal injunction, so difficult to follow, not to begin a letter with the word “I”), she’d asked him about his current projects, about whether he was teaching and what article he was working on; never expecting, of course—it was mere politesse on both sides—that he would reply to her, would jokingly ask her opinion of whether he should teach the following spring at Columbia or perhaps even Sarah Lawrence; that he would mention that he had been rereading William James for a chapter on which he was working and ask her opinion of The Varieties of Religious Experience; that she would go so far as to order the book from Amazon—there it was, behind her left shoulder, tucked among her other volumes as though it had always been there—and to read the section to which he referred in order properly to respond to his comments. Their exchanges felt to her innocent—he didn’t flirt with her, as she understood the word; if anything, his tone was professorial, avuncular. But there was something not quite right about it all, some touch of titillating betrayal in their pithy messages, whether the slightest flutter of the sexual or merely an inappropriate ascription of the father-daughter bond, Danielle could not have said. One thing was certain: not only had she, Danielle, felt no urge to mention the correspondence to Marina, not beyond the first exchange about which they had laughed together (“That’s so my dad!” Marina had said, not hearing what he had written, clapping her hands together with delight), but she was almost certain that Murray Thwaite had remained similarly mum. Marina was not guileful, and Danielle knew that if her father had spoken of their e-mails, Marina, in hurt surprise, would have said to Danielle, “How come you never said?,” to which Danielle would reply—she’d planned it, imagined it many times, the breeziness of her tone—“Didn’t I? I’m sorry. I thought we’d talked about it.” And surely, surely, there was something a little strange in even that imagined conversation, even though she couldn’t put her finger on it? It certainly sometimes made her pause when she was with Marina and they were confiding in each other, or even merely chatting, and feel a tingle of discomfort, of excitement, in her spine.

  4. Then there was the question of Randy Minkoff’s Thursday. She wanted to take her daughter to a nail salon on Madison Avenue about which she’d read in Vogue, and she had revealed, this evening, that she had secretly, unilaterally, procured appointments for them both at two-thirty. This although Danielle, having taken all Wednesday, had proposed to see her mother only in the morning on Thursday and had agreed to attend the regular series meeting at three. How to disappoint Randy (“You’ve no idea how stylish this place is—I booked it as a treat already a month ago, all the way from St. Petersburg. And if it wasn’t for Irene’s friend Malva, who’s a regular, we would never have got in!”) How, without revealing a professionally deleterious lack of commitment, to miss the scheduled meeting? How could her mother have put her in this situation? Or was it—she had to wonder—that she somehow allowed herself thus to be manipulated? Her mother wouldn’t do this to Jeff, who had a banking job in Dallas; she wouldn’t even try. They could both imagine the way Jeff would puff out his already full cheeks, purse his mouth like a blowfish, and say, “Sorry, Mom,” with a little shrug. “Fuggedaboudit. Not going to happen.” And although he was only five foot six and looked funny in suits, with his thick neck and short arms, although he was almost two years younger than Danielle, he would have about him an authority—was it just masculinity, however compromised?—that would make Randy Minkoff fold at once, barely regretfully, with a piercing brightness that suggested that she’d known all along he would have more important things to do. Why was that? Because if Danielle tried to put her foot down—and tonight, upon hearing about the appointment, she had blanched, even cringed, but had said only “Wow, Mom. I’ve got this meeting at work. But I’ll see what I can do”—she knew (how did she know? But she did) that Randy Minkoff would crumple and cry. Than which there was no more prolonged and exhausting scene in the Minkoff family repertoire, and which was hence to be avoided at all costs.

  5. And finally, not pressing but niggling, there was the matter of Julius. Of what might have happened to Julius, exactly. She missed him. Since forever he had been, in his funny, intermittent way, a gold strand in the dull fabric of her days. He made her laugh; he made life glitter. And so suddenly, he’d vanished. Not that she thought he’d been brained by a pineapple finial and left to bleed to death on his studio floor; nor that he’d been sold into the white slave trade, nor taken hostage by radicals—no, she’d received sufficient signs of life to know that he was well, even, perhaps, better than he’d ever been. Or so he had claimed, in a postcard from a fancy hotel in Miami, the Delano, where he’d gone for the weekend with his new boyfriend, this mysterious David, who’d been on the scene for what? Two months now? Was it longer? But whom nobody, or nobody among their friends, had yet been privileged to meet. Danielle and Marina had joked that perhaps David didn’t exist, that perhaps he was yet another of Julius’s impressive illusions, like the imaginary appointments that had kept him so hard to catch for years. It would, after all, be a good ruse, and not entirely at odds with the fantasist in Julius, the imp whose more extravagant whims had grown less and less common as they’d all grown older (back in college, he was always lying grandly, outrageously, about where he’d been and who he’d been with; just as he would adopt everyone’s best anecdotes and brazenly tell them back to their former owners as his own, only somehow embellished, improved, somehow better; but he didn’t do this anymore); but Danielle had seen the Miami postmark on the card, which itself was hotel stationery, and she knew that in order for Julius even to be there, David had to be real. Had they met on the Internet? Or in a nightclub? Julius wasn’t telling, when she could reach him, which had her believing that their first encounter had been sordid. (Sometimes, Danielle thought that the antics she imagined for her friend were more outlandish and unlikely than anything anyone would really do; and yet, whenever Julius did provide her with graphic details, rarely now, they made her feel a complete innocent, made her feel like her mother.) Danielle knew that she ought, foremost, to feel a vicarious thrill, an excitement that Julius seemed to be enjoying better luck in love than ever he had before; but she felt instead anxious and suspicious, all the more so because this David—how old was he? What did he do? Where did his money come from?—did not, so it would seem, deign to meet her, or Marina, or anyone else for that matter. Julius, when she did speak to him, said elusive and exclusive things like “We’re going to ‘our’ restaurant tonight. A sort of mini-anniversary dinner”—as if in two short months a lifetime’s history had been grafted between them, and had summarily erased all Julius’s years in New York with his friends. How could they have “a restaurant” already? Did they also (most probably) have a song? A time of day? An avenue? But Danielle wasn’t a fool, even in her irritation. Above all what she wanted was to retrieve Julius, whose sharp tongue could cut to the comic quick of any situation, who could mimic anyone (he did a great Murray Thwaite), who would come over at two in the morning if you called him, and who always made her feel the glums were surmountable. And her mother had always told her that you didn’t catch flies with vinegar. To get Julius back, this David must be won over, and soon;
and she and Marina would have to devise the Trojan horse with which to do it. If only she could glean useful facts about him, beyond the last name Cohen and the fact that he, like Julius, despised facial hair. If David were conquered, then Julius would stop hiding. That was the logic. And on her mind because that morning, before leaving to meet her mother, she’d had an e-mail from Julius containing another rebuff: he would have loved to see her mother on Friday night, Randy’s last in the city—he called her “the inimitable Randy Minkoff,” and he loved to tease Danielle about how her mother could train drag queens—but that he and David were going out to the Hamptons for the weekend to see some friends of David’s. Julius, in the Hamptons? Julius at a barbecue, or walking, even fully clad, along a beach? “What about the sand?” she’d said to Marina at lunch, when her mother was in the bathroom. “He’s far too fastidious for sand!” But the long and the short of it was that by now her pride was wounded, on behalf of her mother as well as herself; and she was, she could admit it to the Rothkos at least, vaguely indignant that Julius, of all people, who had always seemed to her far shakier a romantic prospect than anyone else she knew, had finally, apparently, withdrawn so firmly from the running. She couldn’t let on to anyone that she was annoyed—she didn’t want to be the sort of person who was—but the fact remained that irritation was in her, incontrovertible as a crumb in her throat.

  Unable to think of a sixth thing, Danielle moved from sofa to bed, but not without hanging up her skirt and rolling her blouse in a small ball for the laundry; not before flossing (she didn’t want to; but felt virtuous when she had) and brushing and coating her skin in a costly cream flogged to her by her dermatologist who, in coming out with a sales pitch at all, had stunned her into surprised submission. Thus purified, bland as a lamb, Danielle lay naked between her fine sheets, bodily weighted and, she hoped, cleared in spirit; and still, for a good hour, in the semi-darkness, she thought she could detect her worries darting like wisps in the corners of her blameless room.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Great Geniuses

  By the second week of May, Bootie Tubb had been away from home for three weeks. He had finally left at the time the crocuses and snowdrops, late that year but still ahead of the grape hyacinths of which his mother was most fond, were unfolding their hesitant bright colors in the flowerbed along the front of the house. Spring was so late coming that ridges of mud-blackened ice still lingered at the edges of the lawns and curbs as he’d pulled out of town, a rimed lacing of the landscape that, in its persistent ugliness, made him glad to go.

  He hadn’t extricated himself as frankly as he would have hoped, but he hadn’t had to sell his car, either. Instead, he’d spent a month, the last of that endless winter, working hourly shifts for his brother-in-law, Tom, who, in addition to state plowing contracts, had a sideline in private drives and walkways. Riding the red snowblower reminded Bootie of playing dodg’ems at the county fair, and Tom, who charged eight an hour, let Bootie keep half of that. It wasn’t much, but as his mother never made good on her threat to charge him rent, and as he was paid in cash, Bootie pocketed the lot, a fat and floating stack of tattered ones and fives that he kept, secured by an elastic, in a brown manila envelope in his dresser drawer.

  He had, when he left Watertown, four hundred and eighty-eight dollars there, along with the six hundred and some dollars remaining in his savings account, the money his mother said was from his father and which she’d once told him she hoped he would use to travel to Europe. With this much money—it seemed to him an important sum, even though he knew that it wouldn’t go far, and certainly not as far as he imagined—he’d decided to keep the Honda, a portable hotel, as he saw it, and even to take his desktop computer. In so doing, he caused in Judy Tubb a sorrowful confusion after he’d departed, when she stepped into his bedroom and found his desk bare. Bootie had not quaintly imagined this maternal dismay: his mother had told him of it during their first phone conversation after he left.

  “Is there something you’re not telling me, Bootie?” she’d asked.

  He was annoyed, hunched at a pay phone at a rest stop on the New York State Thruway, near Utica, where he’d pulled over for a cup of coffee and a slice of bad pizza, but he didn’t let on, merely narrowed his eyes at the plastic case full of carnival toys in front of him (a game, whereby for only a dollar you could vainly attempt, with a metal claw, to retrieve the purple plush monkey or the bug-eyed Raggedy Ann), shuffled his feet on the ash-smeared tile and said, “No, Ma. There’s nothing.”

  Because what he’d told his mother before he left, which wasn’t untrue, was that he was going to Amherst, in Massachusetts, to visit his friend Donald, a year ahead of him in high school and now a sophomore at U Mass, studying History. He didn’t tell her about New York, about the need to stake a claim with Murray. She wouldn’t have liked it, or allowed it. She would have stymied his escape.

  “What does Donald want you for now?” his mother had asked, only vaguely incredulous, as she shredded lettuce into the salad bowl. “It’s basically exam time.”

  “He’s got papers, not exams, Mom. And he lives off campus, in a big house. He invited me”—this was true: Donald had—“so I’ve got to assume I won’t be in the way.”

  “How long will you be gone?”

  “I don’t know exactly. Maybe a little while. He’s got some plans, maybe, for the summer.”

  “The summer?”

  To which Bootie told his only bare-faced lie: “He’s got some plans for me, to help me get into U Mass, maybe, for the fall.”

  “With your school record, I wouldn’t think there’d be any problem,” said his mother, cheering visibly.

  “Yeah, but he can help me, maybe, get some credit for the stuff at Oswego.”

  “Really?”

  “So I’d only be, you know, a semester behind.” Bootie was almost sorrowful at how pleased his mother looked at this news, her blue eyes crinkling in her round face, and a glimmer of eager tooth showing between her lips. She was a schoolteacher, for God’s sake; if she’d stopped to think properly about what he was saying for even a minute she would’ve known it for horseshit. There was no way magically to turn Oswego incompletes into U Mass credits—no way without enrolling in summer school, a prospect he hadn’t mooted. “Never mind now,” he went on. “I’ll let you know what pans out, if anything. I mean, I’ll be calling you all the time—it’s not like I’m going to Africa or anything.”

  “No, sweetie. I know.” She said she thought it was good that he had a project, and great that he was going to see Donald, who’d been such a good friend over the years, and that she’d miss him but she knew it wouldn’t be for long. He didn’t mention New York, nor did he mention his autodidactic program, nor did he mention the word “forever.” He left clothes in his drawers and hanging in the cupboard, and he left most of his books, including the David Foster Wallace, which he’d never finished and had never returned to the library, and Gravity’s Rainbow, at which a quick glance had told him he would not read soon, but not Emerson, nor War and Peace, and even a half-used tube of toothpaste and his red toothbrush, on purpose, because they were easy to replace and he could imagine her, in the bathroom that they shared, taking nightly consolation in these items in the mug on the sink’s rim, a small suggestion of his impending return.

  Three weeks later, Bootie was only marginally closer to New York than he had been, and he was considerably poorer. Almost all of his snow-blowing money had been spent, much of it in a dimly lit barn of a bar on the edge of the U Mass campus called The Hangar. More than once he’d found himself standing rounds for Donald and his roommates, as only seemed fair when he made no other contribution to his room and board. The school semester was basically over, and Donald and his friends felt the need, again understandable, to celebrate their successes.