The Emperor's Children Page 3

  And now here he was on the porch, no gloves, no hat, ski jacket over his pajamas, wielding the second rusty and old shovel, like a weapon, with the steam of his breath fogging his glasses.

  “Cut it out, Ma,” he called. “That’s enough, now. You’ve made your point. I’ll do the rest.” And with uncommon vigor, he set to throwing the loads of snow so that they sent up a fine spray, a second snowstorm across the drive, and she stood awhile staring at this unlikely apparition, pajama bottoms caked in snow, dark curls awry and glistening with flakes, and—forgive her, she couldn’t help it—imagining the neighbors, too, through their curtains, staring, wondering what had gone wrong with that brainy Tubb boy that he’d fallen so fast from phenomenon to freak; and without a word, she handed him her new, fine shovel and took back the decrepit one, and stomped back onto the porch, knocking snow from her boots and, cheeks burning from the cold and the shame, but surely he couldn’t, he mustn’t, see, she went back inside and heard the stiff-springed screen door snap bitterly behind her.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Reflexology

  Julius had been getting on Marina’s nerves, so she asked him to press her feet. The massage of her arches in particular—they were fraught with agonizing, knobbly bumps that an Indian acquaintance had informed her pertained to the spine; or was it the intestines?—seemed designed to cool her irritation. Not that Julius would stop speaking—he was saying something, as he flexed her foot this way and that, about War and Peace, about how he never knew in life whether to be Pierre or Natasha, the solitary, brooding loner or the vivacious social butterfly; or else that he never knew whether he was Pierre or Natasha, which in Julius’s case made as much sense—but that she would not, in the same way, have to hear him, being inundated instead by immediate sensations that reverberated upward from her extremities and filled the foreground of her mind.

  She had only herself to blame: after two weeks alone in her parents’ house outside Stockbridge, up every night till the small hours gaping out into the oddly restless dark, before retreating to her parents’ bed with a paring knife beneath her pillow and, on evenings when the deer, or bears, or who knew what, had snapped branches in the woods behind the house, with a chair propped, probably ineffectually, against the bedroom door, Marina had decided she needed company.

  The house, fifteen minutes’ drive from the village with its pillared inn, chintzy shops, and year-round tourists, lay at the end of a winding gravel drive, in a clearing among the trees. Largely evergreens, they loomed dark and furry against one side of the house, while leaving an uneven circle of lawn elsewhere, a lawn around which Marina’s mother, Annabel, had dug borders and planted bulbs and perennials, tasty snacks for the local fauna tired of foraging through the winter. At the bottom of the garden was a folly, a trellised, domed, screened enclosure in which, in summertime, Marina liked to loll with a book; but which, in winter, dark, bleak, and abandoned or, today, its screens smattered with snow and its trellises bare, looked more like a hunter’s blind or sniper’s lair, with alarmingly good sights upon the house.

  The house itself was a pseudo-colonial, a modern construction that aimed, insofar as was possible, to mimic the antique. Blockish, two-storied, glinting a researched barn-red, it presented to the gravel drive, which circled before it, a center porch and four leaded windows—neatly shuttered and hung with lace curtains—up and down, on either side. At the back, however, the house abandoned all historical pretense and, to Marina’s solitary dismay, offered French doors and long, tall, uncovered windows—a rash of terrifying permeability—to the sniper’s cupola and the blackened woods. When she fried an egg or watched television, when she squinted at herself in the bathroom mirror after dark, Marina was painfully aware that she was, if not watched, then watchable. Hence her parents’ bedroom: it faced the drive.

  With time, she discovered, she grew more rather than less anxious, as she deemed that her imaginary stalker had the opportunity—she knew he was imaginary, but still—to memorize her routines, to learn even where she slept (although, of course, she devised elaborate feints, turned and left on lights in unused rooms; changed the bathroom that she used; and sometimes performed ablutions or poured juice or cereal in the dark, so as to baffle and confuse). And one morning waking near noon after another pointless, exhausting vigil till almost dawn, Marina decided, with a certainty that was not panicked but was also not negotiable, that she could not possibly be alone any longer. Or rather, that she could hold out only for the length of time it would take someone to reach her, like a hiker in the desert who, with the certain promise of relief, can endure, extraordinarily, one more waterless day.

  And so she had summoned Julius. Danielle was off on the other side of the world and most of her other friends had jobs that prevented them from renting a car and driving to Massachusetts at a moment’s notice. Julius, of course, was prevented from renting a car by the fact that he did not drive, but he was freelance and could bring his work with him, and Marina had offered (rashly, she felt now, on the third day of his visit) to drive to the train station in Albany, more than an hour away, to pick him up. This meant, of course, that his departure was at once wholly in her hands and yet not in her control at all: she would have to take him, when the time came, but this very power ensured that she could not ask him to go, could not even suggest it without the risk of offense (he was nothing if not sensitive, her Julius); and now she was no longer certain which she dreaded more, the house’s hollow silence when she drifted through it alone like some pale ghost, or the echo of Julius’s chatter, which seemed constantly to fill even the vacant rooms and to linger there like some electronic hum so that still, upon waking, in the darkness of dawn, she could feel that she was not alone. And now it had snowed: overnight and all morning the flakes had fallen, muffling the landscape and muting the light. She would have felt safe, snowbound alone (because what mad intruder could plot an assault when evidence, the inevitable footprints, would lead directly to his capture?), but what to do? So she had put Ella Fitzgerald on the stereo and asked Julius if he would mind, terribly, exercising his reflexology skills.

  As she peered at him, curled cross-legged at the other end of the sofa in shadow, her foot in his lap and the white snow light like a halo behind his head, Marina felt sorry for Julius. The Pierre/Natasha riff was born of another disappointment in love, another boy who had at first appeared to relish Julius’s flittering intensity, had called his frog-face beautiful (even in the gloom his dark, googly eyes were shimmering), and yet who had, with humiliating speed, turned from him, against him, deriding him as hopeless and his affection as stifling. Julius, baby-faced, scrubbed, wore a pink cashmere pullover and a silk cravat, even here, even in Stockbridge, and had gelled his black bird-fluff hair. His ears stuck out as if in outrage at this most recent betrayal and his tongue slid out periodically to lick his lips in a tic as consistent as it was unconscious.

  “I’ve told you before, you need an older guy,” Marina broke in, a little unsure of where her friend had rambled in his monologue. “A much older guy. Someone settled.”

  “But that’s my point.” Julius flicked his tongue. “Eric was older. I mean, not a ton, but thirty-eight, old enough to know what he wanted. And he didn’t want me.”

  “Maybe you pushed things too fast?”

  He made a spitting sound. “Puh-lease. It’s not like I tried to move in with him or something.”

  “But how long had it been? A month? Less?”

  “Three weeks.”

  “When I’d been seeing Al for three weeks, we were barely dating. I mean, he was seeing other women, still, and I was at least pretending to see other guys.”

  “But you were twenty-four then.”

  “But just because we’re thirty—I mean, you’re a guy, sweetie. There’s no biological imperative for you.”

  “Besides, look where it left you, in the end.”

  Marina withdrew her foot and sat up straight. “We did go out for five years,” she said. “We li
ved together. We made it work.”

  “Until it didn’t anymore.”

  “Until then, yes.” Marina sniffed. “But it wasn’t—it doesn’t mean—”

  “I know. But I don’t think that right now you’re in a position to tell me how to play it.”

  Marina stood and proceeded to turn on the large beaten-copper lamps around the living room, revealing suddenly a bath of color, of pinks and oranges and terracotta, the burnt umber of the sofa—all her mother’s creation, supposedly Mediterranean in atmosphere, it did seem to make the room warmer, and the garden beyond correspondingly unwelcoming. She could glimpse, in its leached gray gloom, the shadow of the snow-covered folly, its contours now—on account of Julius, she had to admit—forlorn rather than menacing.

  “I don’t mean that,” Julius conceded. “I don’t know. The situations aren’t really comparable.”

  “No, they’re not.” Until last August, Marina had been living with Al—Fat Al, her friends called him, because he had a belly on him, of which she had claimed to be fond—but they had finally called it quits, officially because she needed to be on her own in order to “get her life together,” but actually because Al was tired of supporting her financially (or else, as Danielle had suggested to Marina, Marina had made him tired by her constant vocal neurosis about this fact), and also, and more gravely, because he’d been to bed, and possibly more than once, with a colleague of his at Morgan Stanley. It wasn’t, Marina had protested to Danielle (and pointedly not to Julius, who, if he knew, did so secretly and did not let on), because he’d screwed somebody else, but because the woman he had chosen was so demeaningly dull. And if he could do that, Marina had said, it meant she’d been wrong about him all along, and all her friends, who had for so long tactfully refrained from saying so, had been right.

  This rupture, both unexpected and, in some more profound way, preordained, had greatly altered Marina’s outline in the world. She sometimes felt as though she were a changeling, as though someone completely new had taken on the identity of Marina Thwaite—or rather, as if someone who was seen from the outside to be completely new had done so, while beneath the surface she remained unchanged. Not unlike that process of kitchen cabinet refinishing, in fact, whereby you simply glued a new sheet of plastic or plywood onto your old cupboards without even needing to remove the canisters of flour or sugar or the box of soggy Cheerios.

  In truth: after splitting up with Fat Al (who didn’t, most painfully, even try to keep her), Marina had struggled powerfully, and continued to do so. From being the most settled among her friends—none of them, at twenty-five, had been close to marriage, whereas she and Al had already bought a queen-size bed—she suddenly became the least rooted. She had no apartment of her own, no money with which to procure one, and so, not long before her thirtieth birthday in November last, after wearing out her welcome on sofabeds around the city, she had moved back to her childhood room in her parents’ Upper West Side apartment. As if that weren’t humiliation enough, she’d had to accept an allowance from them, merely in order to live.

  For all she had no visible job, Marina wasn’t idle. She was merely inefficient, or so her father, the famous Murray Thwaite, master of efficiency, assured her. At about the same time as she’d started seeing Fat Al, a time now so distant as to seem mythological, Marina had taken on a book project. She’d been a young intern at Vogue at the time, and as a celebrated native beauty (surely this wasn’t of no account? She would vehemently have denied it; and yet, as Danielle had more than once complained to Julius, Marina had no idea of what it would be like to be anything less than beautiful: “Sometimes I just want to say to her, what if you walked into a room, Marina, and nobody stopped talking, and nobody turned around? What if nobody offered to cut your hair for free or to carry your luggage? What then?”) and as her celebrated father’s adored daughter, a hot commodity, she had been invited to lunch by a powerful editor, a man of her father’s age and a sometime family friend, who was pleased to be seen in San Domenico with such a babe—Brown University graduate, mind you, not all good looks and no substance—and who urged her to submit a proposal to his firm. After casting about for a month or more, which seemed, at the time, like forever, a time during which she’d been always afraid he might retract his invitation, Marina had come up with an idea for a book about children’s fashions and—for this was the spin—about how complex and profound cultural truths—our mores entire—could be derived from a society’s decision to put little Lulu in a smocked frock or tiny Stacey in sequined hotpants. At the time, the proposal had had more heft than this, of course; but that was years ago and Marina now, at least in part, a different (or “refinished”) person, was no longer particularly interested in her book, nor impressed by its thesis, nor could she remember ever having been, and she labored on largely because she had long ago spent all the advance money received, and she would not see the rest until a suitable manuscript was delivered.

  For some, this might, of course, have speeded the process; but Marina would not put her name—on her first book, and she her father’s daughter—on something of which she was not proud, even as she had come to doubt that pride in this effort was possible. The breakup had slowed her considerably, as had her subsequent itinerant state, and, if she were honest, her installation at home. Her editor—the third in charge of the book, as the years rolled by; a round-cheeked, freckled boy whom she was certain was younger than she, with an upturned nose and the puppyish name of Scott—had in recent months begun to pursue her, and had uttered ominous pronouncements about final deadlines. Marina now was worried that if she did not turn in the manuscript they would ask for their money back (such things certainly did happen, had happened to people she knew), a not insubstantial sum now dispersed to the ether. At her mother’s suggestion, then (her father being someone for whom work was inseparable from society, to whom the isolation of Stockbridge without children or houseguests was anathema), Marina had retreated to the quiet of the country for what had been dubbed—not by her; she knew it wasn’t so—“the last push” on the book.

  It was now mid-March, and she had committed to stay until May, but if anyone had actually asked she would have conceded that she did not think she would last that long. Like with Fat Al: if anyone had ever asked her if this was the man for the rest of her life, she would at once have said he wasn’t enough. So, too, this work in the house in Stockbridge was but a pretense of work—all the odder, of course, for the fact that there had been, until recently, nobody to witness that pretense. Now, with Julius, Marina was embroiled in a pretense, almost convincing to herself, of not being able to work any longer because her oh-so-productive solitude had been broken. She both wanted Julius to leave and, for fear of the quiet, of course, but also of the work undone, the work undoable, she wanted him to stay. Besides which, he was a very good cook.

  “On account of the snow,” he said now, in the alarmingly cheerfully lit living room, by way of making amends for his earlier comments, trailing his long fingers along the rusty chenille of the sofa’s back, “on account of this super-dreary weather, I think we should have comfort food for supper, don’t you?”

  “Like baked beans on toast?” She was still annoyed.

  “I thought a cheese soufflé, actually, m’dear. With sautéed potatoes and a little steamed spinach on the side, just so there’s something good for us. And if you’re still peckish, I’ll whip up a sabayon, if you promise to talk to me while I stir.”

  “It’s a lot of egg, Jules.” Her reluctance was feigned: sabayon was her favorite dessert.

  “We’re not that old yet,” said Julius. “We can count cholesterol next year.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  As for Julius Clarke

  As for Julius Clarke, he was not what you might expect him to be. He was not from New York, and he was not from California, or Washington—state or district—or even Oregon. Nor was he, in spite of his unplaceable Anglo accent, from the British Isles nor from any point in the transatla
ntic. He hailed from Danville, Michigan, a small town an hour from Detroit. His friends knew this only if they had known him since his first year in college, when, in the freshman face book, a provenance, a home address, was ignominiously posted next to each photograph. He’d worked hard to erase the traces of his past—viz the paisley cravat, the pink cashmere (albeit worn through at the elbows), the fluting voice—and yet somehow, at some moment or another, everyone, it seemed, had met his father, Franklin Clarke, to whom it seemed impossible that Julius should have any connection and who was his past incarnate.