The Emperor's Children Read online

  Bootie had slipped comfortably into Donald’s household and its routines. The four young men—five, counting Bootie—lived in squalor in a white clapboard house near the center of the town of Amherst, in a little gravel enclave behind another building, off the street. The house, only desultorily furnished, smelled of dirty laundry and open garbage bags. Bootie slept in the living room on the brown checked sofa, which was pilled and cigarette-burned, hidden from the passing world by a pair of grubby bedsheets tacked over the windows. None of the young men laid claim to the housekeeping, and the kitchen and bathroom were permanently grimed, the former by dishes and the remnants of food, the latter by engrained soap scum, shaving bristles, and spatters of urine. The fridge in the kitchen, when opened, emanated a swampy stink, on account of the vegetables that had rotted to slime in the crisper not long after Bootie’s arrival. He had, gingerly, removed the bag of oozing lettuce, the split tomatoes, the squelching cucumber, and in so doing had felt sufficiently heroic: he had not, however, removed the crisper box and scoured it in the sink, as he knew his mother would have done—they were not, after all, his vegetables—and so merely plugged his nose when retrieving the milk jug (they bought it by the gallon, full fat) or the margarine tub. Like Donald, he lived largely on cereal (Frosted Flakes and Golden Grahams), and toast with peanut butter, and macaroni and cheese from a box, of the chemically orange sort. He, like his hosts, stayed up late, sometimes till first light, and slept until the early afternoon, barely aware of the orderly rhythms of the town outside their walls. But this student life did not depress him in the way dorm life at Oswego had: Donald and his three friends were not half-witted pretenders; they were serious students, whose hours at The Hangar were the reward for months of earnest labor, and who bent over their plastic cups of weak beer discussing Galileo and Hobbes, metaphor and prosody.

  Donald, small and wiry with an oversized head, with long arms and bulky forearms like Popeye’s, with an almost pretty, stubbled face, had grown his light brown hair to his shoulders and wore, daily, the same pair of Adidas sweatpants and the same crusty sneakers, changing only his T-shirts, of which he had a seemingly endless supply. When he talked about the Reformation, or about Fourierism, his eyes took on the beady zeal that Bootie recognized from his former roommates Lurk and Jerk—except that they had focused thus only on drink and girls. Joey, Ted, and Robert, who was known as Jump and who was, like Bootie, of a pale and spreading plumpness, were literature and philosophy majors, all ungainly, largely pimpled, and, to Bootie, at least at first, a delight.

  In the first fortnight, when they were all determinedly lugging around textbooks and writing lengthy term papers, Bootie had thought, in spite of himself, that this might be a place for him, that he had rushed to judgment in his determination to be eternally and only a student of the world. Perhaps he should investigate enrollment, he had thought, and find a room in a house such as this one, in which to hunker for the next four years. He spent afternoons in the hush of the university library, wandering the stacks and taking notes from heavy volumes that he abandoned, at the end of the day, for someone else to reshelve. It had been luxurious, blissful. But now that school was done, he could tell that his fellows’ interest was waning, that their intellects were slipping into hibernation, that their pedestrian summer jobs, soon to start, increasingly preoccupied them: Donald was to work for a local arts project, writing press releases and fund-raising grants; Joey, who claimed a devotion to the land, was signed up to assist on a farm in nearby Hadley, picking fruit and manning a roadside stand; and Ted and Jump were heading off to internships in Worcester and Boston. They had had, the previous evening, a displeasing, grade-grubbing conversation, during which Jump had confessed that he’d been to see his Western Philosophy prof to ask her to bump his grade to an A in order that he might maintain his GPA, and Bootie had been painfully reminded of the hypocrisy of all institutional education, not least because the professor, so Jump said, had listened not unsympathetically to his plea.

  Over breakfast, bowls of Golden Grahams eaten at lunchtime on the same sofa on which Bootie slept, his sleeping bag crumpled at their feet, Don had asked Bootie what his plans were: “You know, man, if you want to hang here for the summer, that’s cool with me, I mean, more than cool. And with Joey, too, you know, he thinks you’re great, man, worth it for the conversation alone, he said so, just the other day. And you can have Jump’s room, if you want, because Zach, you remember, the bearded guy at the bar, he’s going to take Ted’s room through Labor Day, assuming Ted comes back. But the thing is, man, it’s a question of logistics, of finances, you know?”

  Bootie had said nothing, had concentrated on his spoon, flimsy and overly bent, on his bowl, chipped, shallow and wide-mouthed, and on fishing for the floating specks of cereal that remained in his puddle of milk.

  “The thing is, man, the rent? I can help you get something, if you’re interested, maybe over at the Monkey Bar, I know the manager, or at the supermarket, the Big Y on Route 9, or even the Stop & Shop, maybe, but it’s three-fifty a month for Jump’s room, and, like, we can’t get by without it, you know?”

  Bootie nodded, carefully placed his bowl on a pile of books on the floor, and toyed with his socks.

  “Thing is, I’ve got to know soon, because there’s this chick, Wendy, I don’t think you know her, but she’ll take the room if you don’t want it, and I told her it was up to you, but she needs to know, you know? She’s got to move in a week, out of where she is now, so—”

  “I got you.” Bootie looked up, blinked through his smeared glasses at his friend, noted the speck of cereal at the corner of Don’s full and girlish lip, the greasy curl of his hair at his chin. “I hear what you’re saying.”

  “You don’t have to decide right this second, man.” Don was sympathetic, clearly a little awkward, but Bootie did not feel like making it easier. “Maybe you could let me know tonight, yeah?”

  “Sure, man. Tonight.”

  And he had stayed on the sofa, in his brown flannel pajamas, while Don padded down to the bathroom for a shower. He had watched the sun rippling on the bedsheet curtains, had surveyed the disorder of the room around him, the entrail spillage of his open duffel bag against the wainscoting behind the door to the kitchen, and next to it, the pile of hardware and cables that was his computer, waiting face to the wall. He heard the water running, heard Jump’s—or was it Joey’s?—thunderous tread overhead, and the distinct quaver of a bird outside the window. He had, he realized, deferred his plans, had, since his arrival, escaped not Watertown but himself. In the months in Watertown, he’d grown accustomed to long hours of isolation, to silent days interrupted only by the buzz of the furnace, the hushed patter of snow and his mother’s occasional tender nagging. Here, in this house, he had allowed himself to pretend that Don’s life was his, had taken it on like a suit of clothes, rather than plotting, as he had expected to do, his next step. For weeks, he’d behaved—it was so easy, so reassuring—like someone bolstered by the falsity of course work and student ID cards. He had wanted, instead, to be living like a philosopher, the way Emerson said that Plato had, alone and invisible, known to the world only through his work, through his considerable thought. He had to get to New York, for this: to his as yet unalerted teacher and mentor. To Murray Thwaite.

  What was it Emerson had written? He reached for the fat, thumbed paperback from the stack on the floor, tipping over his cereal bowl in the process, and he watched, idly, as a rivulet of milk slithered along the blue rug. He mashed it into the pile with his bare foot, wiped his foot with his hand, wiped his hand on the sofa beside him. He riffled the book’s pages, found what he was looking for, the sentences highlighted in fluorescent ink: “Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and so their house and street life was trivial and commonplace.”

  Now, as the working world’s day drew to a close, Bootie sat on the steps of the imposing Catholic church in th
e center of town. After walking the length of the village green and back, after buying himself a tuna-salad bagel—in defiant extravagance, with a five from his manila envelope—he had settled there to eat, and then to think. He watched the devout pick their way up and down around him, mostly women, mostly Spanish-speaking, some Filipino, a few with small children, none of them, he surmised, on the way to mass (could there be mass at four-thirty in the afternoon, or five?) but rather, like he himself, seeking space for contemplation and answers to their unanswerable dilemmas. It was warm in the sun, and he rolled up the sleeves of his shirt to take the heat upon his milky arms. He had tried to think, and then had tried not to think, merely to observe the passersby, the young in their end-of-term jollity, their midriffs and thighs bared and their gaits newly lazy, and the adults, still harried, forging professionally through. But he kept coming back to the Emersonian pronouncement, and repeatedly, particularly, as if it were a sign, to the sentence, “Their cousins can tell you nothing about them.”

  His, it was true, could not have said where he was, nor what he was doing nor had done. Marina Thwaite was his only cousin, or the only one he knew of—nobody was sure what Uncle Peter, his father’s brother, got up to out in Los Angeles—of an age to have dandled him when he was an infant with all the brief enthusiasm of a young adolescent, and then, thereafter, a sulky sophisticate, to have paid him and his sister little heed on the Thwaites’ rare visits to Watertown. Soon, of course, she had been off at college, and then never in Watertown at all. He had only been once, within memory, to see the family in New York, with his parents and his sister, years before. He remembered their apartment, as big as a house, opulently furnished, and the wilderness of the park at its doorstep, in which he had longed to lose himself but had refrained, made nervous by his mother’s furrowed brow and her warnings of muggings in broad daylight, of bludgeoned corpses in the thickets or sprawled under the picturesque bridges, forgotten like garbage.

  He had not glimpsed even his uncle Murray since his father’s funeral, when the three of them, Murray, Annabel, and Marina, had flown up from the city in a bitter late November squall and had stood in their rich cloth coats in the sleet at his father’s graveside, their hands clasped, impressively he’d thought, before them. Afterward, at the house, Uncle Murray had made much of him, had leaned by the fireplace in the living room with an elbow on the mantel and a scotch in hand, and had quizzed Bootie—he’d called him Fred—about what his plans were, after high school, and whether he’d thought about journalism. Bootie, in retrospect, could see himself as he had been, newly tall and—so briefly—almost thin, his cheeks bright from embarrassment and the heat of the fire, his tweed jacket, short in the sleeves, clutched nervously about him by his crossed arms, at once proud and ashamed, above all aware that this man, whom he barely knew, was widely celebrated and admired, famous before he was a relative at all. Marina, too, had made him shy on that visit, almost as tall as he and slender, her brilliant eyes wide with compassion as she’d hugged him and whispered condolences in his ear. He remembered the lemony scent of her neck, and the frailty of her ribcage, and the surprising smallness of her breasts, which he could barely feel pressed against his chest. He’d been fifteen, had anticipated the swell of them, had been quietly disappointed. Even Annabel, in her very niceness, had discomfited him, because he didn’t feel he could believe it, the way she had rubbed his back and kissed Sarah’s tearful cheek, not minding, apparently, taking the dampness on her painted lips, all the while standing, in her elegance, like a reproach to his plump and gray-haired mother, whose suit, like his own, had been purchased for a smaller self, and pulled visibly at the upper arms. He remembered, of Annabel, above all the glittering diamond on her ring finger, and the posh singsong of her high voice.

  And yet, he thought, as he watched a couple, surely students, pause to neck on the sidewalk in front of the church, almost as if making a point against religion and restraint, he knew—had known all his life—that his uncle’s family was his only hope, his ticket out. His uncle was a man who had chosen the path of the mind, who had opted for integrity over glory, even if it had brought him fame rather than the obscurity advocated by Emerson (then again, whatever he said about Plato, Emerson himself had been hardly obscure), and Bootie thought, on the church steps, of how to present himself to Murray Thwaite—as a kind of disciple, an independent follower. This line from Emerson surely was a sign, pointing him to his cousins, who did not yet know him.

  One thing at least was certain: he hadn’t left Watertown for the Big Y on Route 9, which was no different from the possibilities—Annie’s Truck Stop, for example, off the Interstate—with which he had taunted his mother at home. He knew Don was trying to help, but his manner still, somehow, offended, as if suggesting that Bootie had outstayed his welcome, was sponging off his friend, was the subject of hissed conversations between the roommates upstairs after he had fallen asleep. Who did Don think Bootie was, after all? A busboy or checkout clerk in the making? His friend had missed the point of him entirely, was no true friend. Let Wendy, whoever she was, contend with the slime in the refrigerator drawers; let Wendy try to tackle the defective flusher on the toilet, which required frequent arm-dunking into the murky cistern to retrieve the detached flusher chain, glinting like pirates’ treasure at the bottom of a well. While he could accept the trivial in his daily life, Bootie felt he could do so only with the knowledge that the sacrifice had purpose: only a transcendental good could override the indignities. And Don made clear—and Jump, too, in his grade-grubbing, had made clear—that here there was only the illusion of transcendence. Like Una in The Faerie Queene, who had to know wickedness even in the guise of good, Bootie, too, needed to discern the route to wisdom. He was, he decided, like a pilgrim in the old days, a pilgrim in search of knowledge.

  As he stood and stretched his cramped legs, extending his arms fully to the sky, he felt his stomach growl. He would buy his own box of mac and cheese at the CVS on the way home. He would call his uncle at dinnertime. He would tell Don thank you for the offer but that he was moving on. And if he did end up at The Hangar, he wouldn’t buy anyone’s drinks but his own; not because he was an ingrate, but because in New York he would need every penny that he had.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  All for Love

  Julius Clarke, you are such a girl! Miss Julia Clarke, paging Miss Julia Clarke!” David was making fun of him, which Julius had trouble pretending he enjoyed. They were trapped in the Sunday afternoon traffic, in their sealed, air-conditioned Neon—vermilion outside, beige synthetic in, and a rental, needless to say—on their way back from Long Island. It had been a rather grueling weekend for Julius, among David’s friends, not because he wasn’t accustomed to the moneyed—Lord knew, he’d courted them long enough, from his first days at Brown onward—but because he wasn’t accustomed to sacrificing all glamour, all thrill to the god Mammon. The clutch of barking drones who had peopled the only moderately lavish rented house, uncounted blocks from the water, had seemed an antigay advertisement: perhaps more muscled and better groomed than their heterosexual counterparts, certainly more scantily clad, more readily inclined to offer lines of coke along with the cocktails, and in these senses more apparently generous in both body and spirit, they were businessmen nevertheless, jabbering endlessly, exclusively, about the Nasdaq and the interest rates, about arcane internal politics at their tedious corporations. Not one of their fellow guests had raised a familiar eyebrow when Julius was introduced, as clear an indication as he could have wanted that there were no Village Voice readers in their midst: they were merely a posse of Wall Street Journalers who might sneak a risqué peek at Out on weekends.

  Somehow, he hadn’t expected to be so fully David’s sidekick, even though this was “the meeting” with at least a segment of David’s social set. He’d imagined that his name would have some currency, however unfixed; that his persona might provoke a ripple of interest. But he was, instead, a wife, smiled upon and then ignored,
unless it was a question of aesthetics or of which downtown bars were hippest or of where to find the best bathing suit. He’d been asked where he got his hair cut, what gym he went to, and whether he had a regular massage—as if primping were his career, as if he were some eighteenth-century Parisian courtesan. So that when, eventually, a very pale, very young stockbroker named Ian finally made, on Sunday morning, the social effort for which Julius had ostensibly been waiting, and drawled, as they stood side by side at the kitchen island dicing onions and peppers for omelets, “So, David tells me you write reviews. That must be fun. What do you review?,” Julius could barely restrain his surging irritation and replied, “I’m a chef, actually; and if you don’t mind, I’ll take over on the chopping front, here.”

  Ian, mildly baffled, had retreated, apparently unaware of any slight; and in the end, this brunch that Julius had almost single-handedly prepared rendered successful all of itself his entrance onto David’s scene.

  But on the way home, Julius, although he knew the importance of this weekend, of his success in it, could not fully mask his pique: he didn’t dare utter anything so naked as a complaint against irritating Ian, or boring Bob, or tedious Thomas, or buffoonish Barry, their plump and voluble host, who was the only other openly gay man on David’s floor at Blake, Zellman and Weaver, and a year or two older than Julius—no, instead he couched his complaints in faint praise, in hidden jibes about the cars and clothes, the quality of the food (his own preparations excepted), and the roughness of the sheets. It was this last comment—“I thought they were frankly prickly, didn’t you? If I were Barry, I’d say something to the landlord—I mean, for the fortune he’s probably paying …”—that had prompted David to hoot with laughter and slap the steering wheel and pronounce Julius a girl.