The Emperor's Children Read online

  Moreover, Judy Tubb so doted upon Bootie that it pained him—she didn’t know how much. Sometimes it actually choked him, like a collar, a thick, ungiving collar at his throat. Or like Bootie’s life now: she didn’t understand it in the least, seemed to think that he’d left Oswego because of some broken romance, or because he hadn’t the athletic prowess of the roommates he’d dubbed Lurk and Jerk. But it wasn’t anything so primitive as that: it had been a revelation, one Tuesday morning at nine, two weeks before Thanksgiving, when he’d been making his way across the frost-tipped lawn listening to Ellen, a girl from his high school who lived two floors below him and who even at that sleepy hour was chirruping like a monkey and cracking gum between her teeth. They were on their way to microeconomics (“I can’t get no, marginal utility …”), to the raked concrete auditorium in which they huddled twice a week, and Ellen, no fool at least by Watertown standards, said, “I heard from Amy, you know, that sophomore? That Watson has this whole code for recycling exams? So, like, if we get the finals from the past eight years, they’re all in the library, right? So if we, like, sit down with them and figure out the code, or maybe Amy’s roommate has it in her notes from last year, right? Then we’ll know, like, exactly what’s on the exam. Cool, eh?”

  She had looked up at him in the powdery morning light, her breath a cloudy puff emerging from her mouth, her hair plastered, wet, doglike, to her scalp, her piggy, upturned nose red not just at its broad end but across its shallow bridge as well, and he’d looked at her and she had said, “Bootie? Are you even listening?,” and it was as if the morning sun had just crossed the horizon, although it was already fully day. He had a revelation. What he said was “Or else, Ellen, we could just study for the exam. Which might be as effective as Amy’s stupid scheme.” But what he thought, which didn’t come to him so much in words as with a visceral force, was “This is a farce. I am living, we are all living, a complete farce.”

  Over the course of that day and the days that followed, this initial realization opened, like a flower, and refined itself. In some muted way, its seeds had been with him for a long time, and certainly since the previous March, when he’d learned that Harvard had indeed given him a place (he could still feel the elation, if he allowed himself to; that, too, had been visceral; and so fleeting), but that they weren’t offering him a proper scholarship, just a load of complicated forms to fill out and the promise of a mountain of debt. He’d read these documents repeatedly and had even called the college admissions office from school for clarification, and when what he thought he’d understood proved indeed to be true, he resolved never to tell his mother that he’d been accepted to Harvard, simply to pretend it had never happened. He knew that she would try to make the numbers work, would frown over the papers and talk about second mortgages and selling her mother’s diamond ring (after all, Uncle Murray went to Harvard, didn’t he? he could hear her jaunty voice saying), and even then, he could see it ahead of time, she would end up with her head in her hands at the kitchen table because it simply couldn’t be managed. He told Mr. Duncan, the college counselor, that he really wanted to go to Oswego because it was close by, and he didn’t want some stupid, snooty private college, that he’d only applied to prove to himself he could get in, and please not to mention to his mom about Harvard because she’d be after him to go there, and Duncan was, of course, dumb enough to buy it and clapped Bootie on the back with some guff about how wise he was and the greatness of the Oswego football team. “They aren’t great,” Bootie thought. “They’re just local, and they’re all you know.”

  Not that there was anything wrong with Mr. Duncan’s enthusiasm. But the realization that had germinated in Bootie’s brain was that what might be good enough for Mr. Duncan, or for Ellen Kovacs, was not going to be good enough for Frederick Tubb. The Land of Lies in which most people were apparently content to live—in which you paid money to an institution and went out nightly to get drunk instead of reading the books and then tried to calculate some half-assed scheme by which you could cheat on your exams, and then, at the end of the day, presumably simply on account of the financial transaction between you, or more likely your parents, and said institution, you declared yourself educated—was not sufficient for Bootie. And no matter what his mother or his sister said (believing, of course, that he hadn’t gotten a place in the Ivy League), or Mr. Duncan (believing it to be Bootie’s heartfelt choice), it wasn’t just the same to go to Oswego as it would be to go to Harvard. The two weren’t remotely comparable. He knew that at Harvard there were probably some people caught in the Land of Lies, but he knew, too, that there would be—or rather, as it didn’t matter now, that there would have been—other people, serious people, like himself.

  So Bootie had called an end to the farce. He didn’t care about diplomas or exams or institutional endorsements (although, more than once since returning to his mother’s home and to his old bed, he had dreamed that he was at Harvard, long, full, sun-filled dreams in which he seemed, oddly, to wear a suit); he cared about learning. And so, with the application that had distinguished him throughout high school, that had transformed him into a figure of at least grudging respect, he was going to teach himself. But of course all his mother saw—all the world saw—was idleness and unemployment. She’d even asked him last week in an anxious whisper whether he spent all that time on the computer looking at pornography. She was clearly going to make his education difficult. All of Watertown was. Perhaps the entire world would, too. But it was obvious that Frederick Tubb needed to strike out on his own, to find a way and a place to pursue his autodidactic course unimpeded. He would shuck this life, a snake shedding its skin, and with it the great, fingering neediness of his mother. Let Sarah deal with that: Sarah who wanted nothing better than two kids and two cars and maybe Oprah in the afternoon. He would go somewhere where nobody would ever call him “Bootie,” and where he could have conversations about Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, about Camus and Kurt Vonnegut. He was thinking, as he lay in the bath with David Foster Wallace, turning the pages and pretending to absorb their contents, of going to New York. It seemed silly, even absurd, an unattainable aspiration. But part of him still unacknowledgeably rued his decision to turn down Harvard, to cleave to the attainable. And he didn’t want to be someone who thwarted himself, his own worst enemy.

  Maybe it would take a little time to sort out the details. He didn’t know many people in New York, beyond Uncle Murray and Aunt Annabel. He wanted them, to be close to them, to be granted access to their mysterious world. His uncle was, without question, a great man; and Bootie would try to be worthy of him. He had to try. He didn’t have any money to speak of. But he did still have his car, a red ’89 Civic with muffler problems and a curling trail of rust along its underbelly, the inevitable and almost endearing result of an automotive life spent in the snow belt, like smoker’s cough or a miner’s black lung. The car wasn’t worth much, and he would be loath to sell it, but it was something, a way out in the first instance.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Rumpelstiltskin

  Julius wore his one Agnès B. suit, a charcoal wool with fine, almost imperceptible pin stripes and narrow lapels that revealed, to the trained eye, its not inconsiderable age, and yet which he liked to think, in its slight unstylishness, showed him to be careless rather than modish, above fashion. At parties, he referred to it as his “signature suit,” hoping thereby to imply that there were others, perhaps a whole rack of them, to which he was not quite so partial. But of course in this context he did not refer to it at all: in this context, with a frayed but expertly ironed dress shirt (he was not his mother’s son for nothing) and a slender but amusing paisley tie picked up at a thrift shop, the suit was merely a uniform.

  Herded out of the subway and into the harried stream of suited men and women that flowed along the early morning canyons of the business district, Julius held himself upright and strove to maneuver with his usual grace. It was all about acting, merely playing a role, and nobody who
knew him needed ever to know. He slid into the office block on Water Street and presented himself to the receptionist at Blake, Zellman and Weaver on the thirty-eighth floor. She, a trim black woman with one blue eye and one brown one, scrutinized the suit and, he feared, the shirt’s peeling collar, before showing him to his desk.

  Rather than gawp at the office around him, at the spread of desks and low partitions that so resembled a human parking lot, he focused instead, as they proceeded, upon her high, full behind, clad in black silk, which rose and fell with each step, and on the rustling of her stockings as her thighs met beneath the cloth. It occurred to him that many men would find this sexy, would find sexy her brazen and uneven stare, and the close, high cap of her hair. She was probably flirted with, he thought, even harassed. Her life was lived in what was, to him, a foreign language.

  She, too, seemed to know this, as she turned to survey him once again, indicating the broad, fake-wood desk with its humming computer and said, “Here. Mr. Cohen will be in within the half hour.” She crossed her arms. “I don’t know if Rosalie left any instructions. I guess you’d better just wait. Or ask Esther.” She pointed at the desk next to his, or rather next to Rosalie’s, as if it were animate. “If you need me, dial one-nine-three,” she said, and swished away.

  Julius installed himself in the plump upholstered chair, fiddling with the plastic pump beneath its seat to adjust the height—Rosalie was clearly short—and resting his hands on the plastic armrests while he rolled the chair back and forth. Beneath the desk waited a pair of tiny black pumps with high heels—yes, she was short—and next to the computer stood a framed posed photograph of a man, woman, and small girl, this last in a pink tulle party dress with a broad sash. The mother was presumably Rosalie: next to the photo was a mug, clean (he checked), which said “#1 MOM” on the side. She had very white teeth, and dark curls like her daughter, and matte, olive skin. He imagined that she and her family were on vacation in Mexico or Cuba or El Salvador, taking the little one to see her grandparents. Although perhaps she was just at home in Brooklyn—no, Queens, perhaps even the Bronx—tending the girl in illness, or awaiting the delivery of a new fridge. No, they’d told him a week. They wanted him all week. So it was planned, a vacation, even if she was at home. Maybe they were moving house. Maybe Esther would know, when she arrived.

  Julius needed money this badly. He was temping. He’d sworn he wouldn’t do it again—he hated the condescending glares of women like the receptionist, the peremptory demands of his temporary bosses, the stale office air and the tedium of the hours—but now that he was forced to, he’d sworn to himself that nobody he knew would ever know. It would be only for a few weeks. It was too shaming: he couldn’t expose this vulnerability, this rank need for cash, even to his dearest friends. He knew it was a strangeness in him—as if Danielle, say, would criticize! But there was always Marina, and he didn’t know which was worse, her contempt or her compassion. No: let them think he was at the gym all day, or trawling the Web for trysts. Let them think he was sleeping, for all he cared, or taking drugs, as long as they didn’t picture this. Twenty dollars an hour. He could type fast, and he needed it.

  Esther, when she arrived, proved not to be the buxom, forty-something Jamaican woman he had imagined, but rather an earnest white girl of about his own age, dressed in an oddly Victorian blouse with ruffled cuffs and a sort of pinafore. Shy, but amiable, with a soft, high voice, she showed him the men’s room, the coffee machine, the Xerox room. She introduced him to the guys in the mailroom, two sharply dressed black youths who looked—or so he thought—admiringly at the Agnès B., and to Shelley and Marie who, along with himself and Esther, shared the dividing walls of their enclave. He wanted to ask her what, exactly, the offices of Blake, Zellman and Weaver were for, what Mr. Cohen himself did all day; but before he was able to, Mr. Cohen arrived.

  Again, Julius’s expectations were confounded: Cohen—“David, please”—was not a fifty-year-old with a paunch, a wedding ring embedded in his puffy fourth finger, and the whiff of Metro North on his clothes, but rather a slender, familiar-looking young man with trendy glasses and a bespoke suit who met Julius’s gaze with a quizzical expression. Above all, Julius was aware of two discomfiting facts: Cohen—David—was younger than he, Julius; and he was gay.

  Did Julius find David attractive because he was—with wiry dark hair and pale skin, a strong nose and jaw, deep-set dark eyes—or merely because of the thrill of potential, the unlikelihood of being coupled to such a person in the teeming, heterosexist corporate culture? Perhaps the frisson was born of the taboo, amid all that fluorescence, the acres of discreet carpet, of the sense that Julius might have to convince David of his own worth in this setup, which cast him as dogsbody rather than an enviable and ethereal man-about-town? Perhaps, he knew Danielle would have said, it was Pavlovian, merely an obsessive introduction of desire into an environment in which it had no place, Julius as ever seeing the world in terms of Eros, a particular power play in a world of other, more concrete powers? Or maybe he felt the infinitesimal lingering of David’s gaze upon him, a look not merely of recognition but almost (could he have imagined it?) of appreciation … and yet, in no time, David was piling tasks upon his desk, pink slips with notes scrawled upon them and fat legal documents with emendations that required Julius to find the original files in the orderly but mysterious morass of Rosalie’s computer.

  The company, it seemed, engaged in middle man activity, the procuring of rights—of abstractions—that permitted, elsewhere, the actual trading of information (also abstract) for huge sums of money. Which was, of course, itself abstract. It was as though the entire office were generating and moving, acquiring and passing on, hypotheticals, a trade in ideas, or hopes, to which value somehow accrued. Why was it, Julius wondered as his long fingers chattered at the keyboard, and Rosalie and her family grinned at him in the corner of his eye, that no value seemed to accrue to his own ideas, his own hopes? Were they simply not abstract enough? But that wasn’t entirely true: some value did adhere to him—people who read his pieces knew his name; indeed, he couldn’t be entirely sure that David didn’t know his name, which would be half relief and half humiliation—but it wasn’t a monetary value. He couldn’t ever, on the strength of his opinions, have ordered a bespoke suit like David’s; and yet David, procuring and negotiating rights for what amounted to someone else’s intellectual property, probably would have been shocked to realize that his secretary was, in some public way, more powerful than he. Julius could stop thousands of people from buying a book or seeing a film. He did it all the time.

  Julius was not someone who still believed, the way Marina and even, to some degree, Danielle did, in a moral or intellectual value inherent in something that society did not want. He knew too well—he’d had to know it, ever since the days of Danville, Michigan—that if nobody wanted it, a thing—even genius, a word he had used unsparingly about himself in youth—was useless. But he couldn’t seem to gauge the connection between desire and reward. He knew how to create desire in others—desire for himself, that is—and in darker moments, of which there were plenty, he exploited that knowledge, because it made him feel better, and because he could. But he couldn’t figure out where desire (other people’s) turned to riches (for him).

  If nothing else, David, all of twenty-eight at the most, must have some understanding of how to turn air—or straw, for that matter—into gold. He determined to attach himself to David, to exploit the delicate current of electricity that ran between them, and in the course of his week at Baker, Zellman and Weaver, to learn from his boss. He might even be able to pull a brief but sparkling affair from the escapade (the frame, beneath the suit, looked compact and enticing; then again, it was a very good suit). Julius decided to charm David, to stifle his own stirrings of embarrassment at his minion’s role, and to strut out on Mr. Cohen’s arm before Friday night. Let the receptionist see it, too.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Talking to a Grown Child
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  Because his desk faced the window, Murray Thwaite did not at first realize that his daughter had opened the door to his study, directly behind his back, had entered, and had sat, cross-legged, upon the divan against the wall. To have accomplished this silently was no mean feat, because the divan, untouched by Aurora in accordance with his instructions, was piled end to end with manuscripts and file folders, with stacks of hardcover volumes riffled by Post-it notes, with yellowing newspapers, clipped and unclipped. In order for Marina to have sat—and to have sat in her yogic position—she had to have moved at least two piles onto the floor.