The Emperor's Children Page 5

  “Yeah, but—I don’t know. My dad needed a hand with some research, and then he was going to a big dinner, you know, the other night, and he asked if I’d be his date, so I stayed for that … .” Marina frequently escorted her father to public events. Annabel almost never went, and sometimes people who were unaware of the bond between Murray and Marina mistook her for his trophy wife.

  Danielle didn’t approve of her friend’s uncritical devotion to her father, but there was no point saying anything. Marina would just grow surly. It was one of few topics that could elicit frank cattiness: once she’d even said, “If your father wasn’t a builder in Columbus with no clue about your life, I might think you had something to offer, here.” After which they hadn’t spoken for almost a month, until Marina called to apologize. Danielle’s father was a contractor, not a manual laborer, anyway. And just because he was more interested in practical matters than in the type of navel-gazing in which all New Yorkers (including Danielle herself) indulged, did not make him a figure of fun. Danielle’s father wasn’t easy, sure, but he wasn’t a joke. Her irritation lay in her voice when she asked, “How’s the book coming along?”

  Marina sighed. “Fine. You know. I mean, fine. How was Australia?”

  “Great. Tiring. And pointless.” Danielle told Marina about Moira and John—Marina didn’t much care for Moira, which Danielle suspected had to do with the fact that Danielle looked up to her—and their pretty house by the water. She talked about the meetings she’d had with Aboriginal leaders, with the multicultural affairs minister, about what she’d learned of the appalling history of race relations in Australia. And she told her friend about the meeting with her boss, Nicky, upon her return in which he’d told her that they’d changed their minds and decided to go instead with a program Alex had proposed about what had become of welfare mothers taken off the rolls. “He didn’t think the story was ‘timely’ enough.”

  “That sucks, Danny. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s timely enough over there, for God’s sake. And Jones’s book is coming out here in a few months—you know, the guy I told you about that puts the case for reparations here.”

  “Any chance he’ll change his mind again?”

  “Minimal. It’s all about funding. I think that’s the real reason—the cost of sending a crew all the way over there and putting everyone up. But that wasn’t the reason he gave.”

  “So now?”

  “Back to the drawing board. I’ve got an idea for something about the current wave of satirical press and its role in shaping opinion. You know, about the blurring of left and right politics in pure contrarianism. People who aren’t for anything, just against everything.”

  “Is there a wave of it?”

  “Well, The Onion moved here, and there’s the New York Observer, and McSweeney’s, and there’s a new paper starting up later this year, with this Australian guy I met over there.”

  “If you say so.”

  “My idea is that it’s kind of like Russia a hundred years ago, the nihilists, right? Like in Dostoyevsky and Turgenev.”

  “That’ll really fly with your bosses.”

  “I’m serious. Everybody thought they were just disgruntled misfits, and then there was a revolution.”

  “I don’t see it. Revolution in America?”

  “I didn’t mean that. It’s not like I think there’s going to be a Marxist regime in twenty years. But it’d be interesting to find out what they think they’re doing, what they think they’re doing it for.”

  “For laughs, no?”

  “Maybe. It’s just an idea, right now.”

  “Do you want to come over, go out for coffee?”

  “I’m at the office.” Danielle’s office was on Lafayette near Bleecker, far downtown. Marina always seemed to forget that Danielle was employed, that she had to be seen, by people who paid her, to be working.

  “Okay, dinner then?”

  “Where?”

  “I’m broke. I spent my money on a new pair of boots—I really needed them, but I can’t afford to go out. We could eat here, though.”

  “With your parents?”

  “I don’t even know if they’re around tonight. It might just be you, me, and the Pope.”

  “Is she okay these days?”

  “Not really, actually. There’ve been some unfortunate vomiting incidents. But she won’t throw up on your lap or anything. How about seven?”

  The Thwaites lived on Central Park West in the upper Eighties, in a building that, while manifestly grand, particularly to someone from Ohio, was by no means the most elegant among its neighbors. Its lobby, for one thing, was little more than a wide corridor, with two drably upholstered wing chairs propped against a wall and, between them, a glass table upon which rested an elaborate but unaesthetic arrangement of silk flowers. The light in the corridor was greenish, dim and lavatorial, barely illuminating the shallowly carved figures that marched, in pseudo-Egyptian fashion, along the pink stone tiles as far as the elevator. The floor, incongruously, was of a black and white parquet, upon which all but the softest slippers echoed ominously. And the elevator itself—paneled, with brass fixtures and a single tiny red velvet stool, presumably for its operator’s comfort—seemed again of a different, though no less ancient, era.

  And yet, after the inauspicious public space—it was, perhaps, a New Yorker’s rare attempt at understatement?—the Thwaites’ apartment, which Danielle had now known for more than a decade, was a delicious and resplendent haven. The elevator opened directly into its front hall, a luxury that still struck Danielle as grand, and from the foyer elegant rooms were visible on all sides. To the right, through a generous archway, lay the long, broad swath of the living room, its silk-curtained row of windows giving onto the park, its floor covered by a single immense Oriental rug. There was space enough for the gleaming black lacquer Steinway that nobody seemed to play (Marina had rebelled and refused lessons after the age of eleven), and for a plump and inviting array of sofas and armchairs all covered in ivory and gold, brightened by jewel-colored pillows. On the walls hung modern pictures, which Danielle had been led to understand were largely gifts from artist friends of Marina’s parents, although among them was, unexpectedly, a pastel portrait, on brown butcher paper, of Marina as a girl of eight or nine, her black hair pinned up with a ribboned barrette and her puff-sleeved blue dress tightly smocked across her chest: this, surely, was a commission, and one that Danielle could not fully place, as it seemed, in style and tone, to date from the forties or fifties, a moment of frank conservatism in this officially liberal house.

  Off the corridor to the left, through a swinging door that remained largely closed, lay the kitchen, and next to it, again through an archway, the dining room, a tribute to Roche Bobois or some other seventies designer. The armless chairs were of sleek black leather, as unembellished as office chairs; the table, unembellished too, was of a burnished wood inlaid with jet trim; and the lighting, which made the sisal rug glow as if gilded, emanated from demi-lunar frosted sconces set about the walls like sentinels. Above the slender sideboard—which, miraculously, was suspended or cantilevered in such a way that it had no legs—hung a substantial canvas, a wavering sea of golds and browns, which was Danielle’s favorite picture in the apartment.

  From these known public rooms, the Thwaites’ world stretched back along the broad hallway—bedrooms, Marina’s first, a library, bathrooms, endlessly, till at the very last lay, she knew, Murray Thwaite’s inner sanctum, the study in which he worked (overlooking, like the drawing room, the vast inspiration of the park) and which, after all these years, she had never penetrated.

  When Danielle arrived at the Thwaites’, however, and was shown up by the doorman—a fat-shouldered Serb with a flamboyant mustache and a mournful physiognomy, who seemed to have been squeezed into a uniform two sizes too small—she was greeted not by Marina but by Murray Thwaite himself. He stood in the foyer in his shirtsleeves, his feet in crimson leather slippers, tumbler in han
d.

  “Mr. Thwaite,” Danielle began, in some surprise.

  “Murray, my dear. How many times do I have to tell you? Murray, please. You’ll make a man feel old.” He bent and kissed her cool cheek, pressing his bristled jaw to her smooth one. He smelled of tobacco and a cologne that mimicked gin and tonic (was it Eau Sauvage?), not powerfully but pleasantly. He took her coat and hung it lopsidedly on a hanger.

  “Would you like me to take my shoes off? Because it’s wet out, and I know some people—”

  “Only if you care to reveal your pretty feet.” He grinned at her, his square, familiar, and forbidding face in its frame of silver hair suddenly softer, even cute. He had what was called in old novels a twinkle in his eye. He had also, she could see, the drinker’s creeping blood vessels across his cheeks. “Actually, I’d keep them on if I were you. There’s some nasty stuff around on our floors, lying in wait.”

  “The cat?”

  “Marina told you? I was ambushed myself the other night. But come in, sit down, let me get you a drink.”

  “Is Marina here? I don’t know if she mentioned, but she invited me for dinner.”

  “She didn’t mention, but it doesn’t matter. Welcome. She’s run out at the last minute—something about a haircut.”

  “François?”

  “That’s it.” François was a fashionable stylist who had cut Marina’s hair for free since she was seventeen. In return, she let him take occasional publicity pictures of her coiffure, and once, years ago, she had participated in a fashion show. The only inconvenience was that he did her hair only when he had a spare moment—a cancellation, or after hours. Clearly an opening had suddenly presented itself. “She’s already been gone almost an hour. She should be back soon.”

  “And Annabel?”

  “Held up at the office. Some kid beaten black and blue she has to keep from being sent home tonight. Filthy job.”

  Danielle was plumped in the center of the large white sofa. Feeling small and embarrassed, she smoothed her skirt and smoothed the white cushions around her, and smoothed, unnecessarily, the tights upon her calves before accepting a glass of wine—white, at her request—from Murray Thwaite, who remained standing.

  “Please,” she said, “don’t let me keep you from whatever you were doing—I’m sure you’re busy—I can just wait here till she comes.”

  “Don’t be silly. I can’t think of a nicer interruption. I was just getting fed up with the state of the union one more time. It can wait till later. So tell me what you’ve been up to, since last we spoke?”

  Danielle wondered when they had last spoken, or spoken for longer than it took to exchange the most trivial of politenesses. She could not know, of course, that she resembled Roanne Levine, but with a slightly smaller mouth, better breasts, and without the aggravating laugh. She could not know that Marina’s father was seeing her as if for the first time.

  “I’ve been to Australia,” she said brightly, grateful to have something of at least possible interest to her host. “To research a program I was working on—but which seems to be doomed.”

  Murray Thwaite then asked about the program, and the reasons for its fate. He said he knew Jones, the author of the book Danielle had read, and that he was interesting but a hothead and a lover of the limelight. “I’m not sure he wrote it so as to get whites actually to do anything. More a question of getting famous, and getting his ass in an endowed chair out at—where is it he teaches again?”

  They did, in fact, have a conversation, one in which Danielle forgot, in time, to be nervous, and lost the urge to fidget. Murray Thwaite perched first on the arm of a chair, then on the piano stool, his long, restless body folding over toward her so that it seemed, if he leaned any farther, that his chin might meet his knees. He was distracted only by the Pope, to whose plaintive and apparently unmotivated yowl he growled, “Scat. Scat, you damned creature, scat.”

  Annabel came home before Marina did, bearing a bag of groceries and with her trenchcoat flapping. “Christ,” she called to Murray from the hallway, before she knew that Danielle was there, “what a god-awful disaster of a day.” When she rounded the corner to the living room and spied her daughter’s friend upon the sofa—or rather, by then standing, as Danielle had risen, almost guiltily, at the first sound of Annabel’s arrival—her face unfurrowed and the rasp in her voice melted away: “Danielle, sweetheart, it’s been ages! Let me drop my coat and then I want a proper hug … .”

  Danielle then endured a further twenty awkward minutes in the Thwaites’ kitchen while Annabel—her graying blond hair slipping slightly from its bun, but her oyster-colored pantsuit (Armani, Danielle thought) impeccable in spite of the god-awful disastrous day—dithered amiably, but with what Danielle identified as covert irritation, over whether the pork chops she’d brought back could be stretched to feed four; until she decided, at Murray’s urging, that they ought simply to order Chinese and be done with it.

  As this minor domestic drama was played out, Danielle had the peculiar sensation of having usurped her friend’s role in the Thwaite family, and more than that, of having usurped it at some moment in the distant past, a decade or more ago: she felt like a teenager, as she used to feel in the kitchen of her parents’ house in Columbus (before the divorce, of course), and she was suddenly, powerfully aware of the profound oddity of Marina’s present life, a life arrested at, or at least returned to, childhood. Danielle couldn’t imagine eating nightly with her parents, not only because they now lived in different states and didn’t speak to each other, but because she was entering the fourth decade of her life and hadn’t been through the wearying rigamarole of family life for anything more than a few almost supportable days since she was seventeen and had gone off to college.

  By the time Marina appeared on the scene—with a perfect but sensuously rumpled bob that only her black not-quite-straight hair could successfully have carried—Danielle had decided that her friend needed to be rescued. Her own life—a studio on West Twelfth Street in which the foot of her bed ended only four feet from her so-called kitchen—seemed to her Spartan enough, in an era in which so many of their peers had sprouted paper fortunes and idled in giant lofts, or even brownstones, pretending to develop dot-coms of inexplicable function. The idea that at thirty Marina couldn’t point even to a futon or a folding chair and claim it as her own was perhaps, in some vanished ethos, admirable; but it was also faintly pathetic.

  Yet Marina, in her parents’ kitchen, did not appear pathetic; the thought didn’t seem to have crossed her mind. She twirled to show off what she—or rather, François—called “the bounce” of her haircut, and then propped herself against the counter within reach of an open bag of potato chips, occasionally dipping in a dainty hand and plucking a lone chip upon which to nibble. (Danielle noticed this because her own tendency was to grab a handful at a time and methodically crunch her way through them; as a result of which she forebore from taking any Thwaite potato chips at all.) Marina related amusingly what she had seen in François’s salon, a spat she’d witnessed between two colorists over the highlights in a blond woman’s hair. “She had half her hair in foil, half not, and she was watching these two guys behind her in the mirror like a tennis match. You should’ve seen the expression on her face,” Marina said, waving a chip. “It was priceless.”

  While Marina spoke, Annabel took out the placemats and cutlery, the plates and glasses. The only interruption she offered was a generalized “Chopsticks?,” which was met with approval; so she took four sets of chopsticks from the cutlery drawer as well. Danielle helped her to set the dining room table, so that Marina was really speaking only to her father. He uttered benign appreciative sounds and even laughed, but was simultaneously reading an article in The New York Review of Books that had arrived in the mail and been brought up by Annabel. Marina, unfazed by this divided attention, spoke on.

  Was Annabel annoyed? Danielle wondered, as she folded a napkin (cloth—Aurora even ironed them) at each place. Neithe
r her husband nor her daughter did anything to help, and yet Annabel was the only one among them who had put in a day at an office—well, Annabel and she herself, the unexpected guest, now diligently lending a hand. Annabel didn’t look annoyed; she looked distracted. Danielle remembered the beaten child Murray had referred to.

  “Did you have a long day?”

  “Sorry?” Annabel almost started. “Long day? Yep. Tough case. The kid’s really a problem. He wants to go home, and his parents—his mother and stepfather, that is—want him home and no foster family will touch him because of his record—he pushed a foster mother down the stairs and she broke both legs—and you’d think the obvious answer would be just to send him home, make everyone happy. But he’s had a dislocated shoulder, a broken wrist, and two black eyes in the past six months. That’s what being at home is like. He wants to be there to protect his mother.”

  “What’s your job in all this?”

  “I represent the kid. That’s what my agency does.” Annabel had founded the organization, when Marina was just a little girl, a nonprofit that worked with social services. “Somebody’s got to look out for him.”

  “The kid? Wow. How old is he?”

  “Fourteen. And big. Not so much tall—big. But the stepfather’s a lot bigger, in every way that matters.” She paused in her work, put her hands on her hips, surveyed the dining table. Next door, in the kitchen, they could hear Murray talking now, something about his recent book tour. Marina was silent.

  “He loves to knit—can you imagine it?” Annabel began again. At first, Danielle didn’t know what she was talking about. “Somewhere in all the sadness and violence, there’s this gentle kid. His grandmother taught him how, and he does it in the waiting room—a big stripy scarf, or a hat with purple snowflakes on it. He’s bent over those needles, waiting, his tongue sticking out while he works away. So earnest. His grandma’s in a home now. Alzheimer’s. And I feel like all he wants is to crawl into her lap, or my lap, or anybody’s lap, who could please, for once, just take care of him. This big, scary kid, capable of all kinds of mayhem, and he loves to knit.” Annabel sighed. “It’s awful—he could be tried as an adult, these days, if he did any real damage. And I frankly think that’s his aim. Not the trial, of course. The damage. He hates his stepfather—who wouldn’t, after all? The guy’s an abusive brute and a drunk. And I think he wants to kill him.”