The Emperor's Children Read online

  Danielle spoke this way in line for lunch with her mother at the Metropolitan’s swankier restaurant, pitching her voice low against the cathedral echo of the other patrons and the ambling hordes. They were waiting, too, for Marina to join them—Randy loved Marina, little suspecting that Danielle’s dear friend told her own mother that Randy was “really sweet, but, you know, vulgar in that Miami way”—and after the meal they would stroll through the park to the children’s zoo, which, like so many other celebrated landmarks in New York that hold such resonance for so many it is a wonder they don’t ring like bells, was very special to her: “Don’t you remember? Our first family visit to New York, and little Jeffy fell off the Alice in Wonderland toadstool and got a giant purple bump on his forehead, and you, you, Danny, saw a chimp, was it, peeing in its cage and you went straight ahead and wet your pants, do you remember? You stood there gaping at the monkey and then all of a sudden we realized that your little white tights were sopping wet, and even your shoes …” Danny claimed not to recall this early humiliation, but had had the vivid picture drawn for her so many times that she could not be sure: it was emblazoned now in her memory. Today, and not for the first time, Marina, too, would be party to the recounting of this myth; but not yet, not till after lunch.

  Already, Randy and Danielle had spent the morning in the museum, a sun-filled Wednesday morning in May, when Danielle had taken the day off work especially (her mother was visiting midweek because the rates and fares were cheaper: she knew property, and she knew travel, and above all she knew a bargain), only to find herself wandering the penumbral catacombs of the Met’s fashion galleries, ogling the dimly lit cases of evening gowns and brocaded slippers, of embroidered skirts and feathered hats, all elegantly posed upon faceless, hairless mannequins in what was, to Danielle, a titillating but disturbing travesty; and to her mother, unabashedly the museum’s greatest attraction. Randy liked the jewelry second-best, the Roman earrings and bracelets that she could then find reproduced in the museum shop; but Danielle drew the line at these, which were, for her, like the corridors of antique china, a matter of complete indifference.

  Museum pace, the idling drag of it, had tired and frayed them both, although particularly Randy, whose three-inch heels (“A small woman, Danny, should never wear less,” she often said, casting a glance of mock reproval at her daughter’s flats) had made the soles of her feet hurt and pinched her bunioned toes. They had therefore retreated earlier than anticipated to the restaurant, only to find the crowd far greater than they’d expected, and so they had joined the line.

  Danielle had finished explaining the outline of her “revolution” program, and was listening, half-heartedly, to her mother’s enthusiastic prattle about their cousin Melvin’s infatuation, in the sixties, with the libertarian party in Illinois—before, of course, he got interested in organics and bought his farm in northern California, twenty years ahead of the curve (what was the link here, Danielle wondered, amazed as ever at her mother’s capacity for wildly lateral thinking and endless shaggy dog stories, barely aware that these, like so many others, were gifts she had inherited), when she glimpsed, or thought she did, the high, clear forehead of Ludovic Seeley. He stood ahead of them in line, almost near the front, his long and slender frame bending forward with the gesture of intimacy she had remarked upon their first meeting. It was by this angle that she first knew him. She craned her neck to see who he was talking to, and found his interlocutor was young, female, and attractive, Eurasian perhaps, with big dark eyes, tiny hands, and—Danielle stepped frankly out of line, and looked down—doll’s ankles, which wavered above shoes whose heels made Randy’s look modest. Their conversation was animated, almost heated. You could tell that Seeley was trying to persuade the woman of something, and that although she was polite, maybe interested, even, she didn’t agree. Danielle decided that they didn’t know each other well; and in spite of her automatic suspicions, she decided they weren’t an item. Or not yet; maybe that was the reason for his focused suasion.

  “Which is why I think Karen has her weight problem, don’t you?” Randy touched her daughter’s arm with her manicured copper-colored nails.

  “Mom?”

  “Mel’s oldest, Karen. The one who wanted to be an actress.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “But she’s gotten obese. I mean, not just plump, obese. And I think it’s the organics, don’t you?”

  Danielle watched the maître d’ escort Seeley and his date to a secluded table for two. She couldn’t see either of them once they had sat down, which she thought wistfully would make it difficult to seem by chance to run into him. Danielle had known that Seeley had arrived—she’d been told by someone, technically a rival of his, at Condé Nast, that he’d rented an apartment on Gramercy Park within three days of landing, in early April—but she hadn’t contacted him. She’d been meaning to: he was, or would be, an essential part of her revolution program, if and when she got the green light. She was fairly certain that he’d agree, as the publicity for his paper could be tremendous; but the series director wanted to wait till September, when The Monitor was to be launched, before making a final decision. Still, it wouldn’t be inappropriate, under these circumstances, for her to pop over, so briefly, to his table, simply to reintroduce herself. Not with her mother, though—she didn’t want Randy involved in this encounter. Nor Marina either, if she thought about it. Perhaps it would be better to e-mail him—she’d already obtained that address; indeed, she knew it by heart—than to allow all the variables there present free range.

  “That’s how I feel about refined sugars myself,” Randy Minkoff was saying. “And I think it’s quite common.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “Are you even listening to me, Danielle Minkoff?”

  “Of course I am, Mom.”

  “So how heavy is your father these days?” Randy liked to hear that her ex was losing the battle of the bulge.

  “I haven’t seen him for ages, Mom. But he’s on Atkins, and he says he’s lost twenty pounds.”

  “Hmm.” Randy drew herself up and adjusted her suit jacket over her leopard-spotted bosom. “That I’d like to see.” She seemed to be muttering to herself. “Twenty pounds? Twenty pounds.”

  Danielle rolled her eyes, albeit discreetly. She had long been the go-between, and knew her mother’s behavior for deliberate theater. Even when they were married, Randy had pestered her husband about his weight: he was a big man, who snacked in his office on bologna slices, straight from the packet, or on string cheese, the kind for little kids. His embrace had winded Danielle when she was small—“You don’t know your own strength,” Randy used to scold him, with Danielle in tears. The sort of man, not blubbery but thick, solid, hairy, like a bull, on whom twenty pounds either way wouldn’t make much difference.

  “Marina’s here, Mom. Here she comes.” And Marina breezed toward them, carrying on her fresh cheek the springtime air and the impression, if not the scent, of blossom. She swung before her a tiny bright box of a purse—clearly an extravagance, or a gift—and waved it aloft like a censer as she approached.

  “Mrs. Minkoff,” she breathed, with what sounded to Danielle, impossibly, like muted jubilation, her arms wide, “it’s so great to see you!” And Randy, charmed, a little daunted, as ever, by the Thwaite aura and sophistication, by a warmth that nevertheless carried about it an untraceable but distinct tinge of superiority, opened her mouth in an “O” and looked coyly through her lashes.

  Hunched forward over the table against the cavernous cacophony of the restaurant, the three women were playing the dessert game—each trying to hide her sentiments about the course while simultaneously attempting to gauge those of her companions; a routine in which the younger two rightly surmised that Randy was more hopeful for a sweet than they were anxious to avoid one, so that they ordered, eventually, a single chocolate pot de crème and three spoons—when a shadow, the lean shadow of Ludovic Seeley, blocked their table’s light. He seemed, strangely,
to bring a silence with him; or at least, a silence seemed to fall.

  “Isn’t it Danielle? Danielle Minkoff?”

  Danielle made as if to stand.

  “Please, don’t move—I’m sorry to interrupt; but I saw you—here, of all places!—and did want to say hello.”

  “Hello.” Danielle smiled, prettily, she hoped. “How long have you been here?”

  “Almost a month, already. I wanted to e-mail you, but I lost the address.”

  “I totally understand,” Danielle said, thinking to herself that if she’d been able to procure his address, he could have found hers if he’d wanted to. She didn’t know quite what to say next. He hovered, smiling politely at the table. “I’m sorry,” she said, “how rude of me. My mother, Randy Minkoff; and Marina Thwaite.”

  He bowed his head as he shook their hands. She wouldn’t have been surprised to hear him click his heels. Danielle couldn’t see anywhere behind him the Eurasian beauty.

  “Are you here with friends?” she asked.

  “A colleague—or rather, someone I hope to take on as a colleague. At the moment she’s with the competition.”

  “Are your offices near here, then?”

  “No.” Seeley gave a clipped laugh. “This isn’t our, how to put it? Demographic. This isn’t our demographic.”

  They all smiled—inanely, Danielle felt. The silence hung.

  “Let me give you my details,” she said at last. As she told Marina afterward, “I couldn’t figure out why he was just standing there.” She rummaged in her bag for paper, a pen. “And I’d love to have yours. I’ve been wanting to be in touch anyway about a project I’m working on—so this is actually very …” She trailed off, trying to make the pen write.

  “Serendipitous,” finished Marina, showing her teeth, looking straight at Seeley. “I think that’s the word.”

  Later, after the walk in the park, after the umpteenth recounting of the tale of young Danielle’s wet pants, after Marina had gone home and Danielle and her mother had returned, following a coffee break (sleeved cups with domed tops full of whipped cream and plastic packet of chocolate-covered graham crackers in hand), to Randy’s room, where Danielle sat on the edge of one of the queen-size beds and swung her feet petulantly back and forth while her mother, propped against the headboard of the other bed, shoes off and feet up, surfed channels with the mute on—at this late point in the day her mother said, “I liked him, sweetie.”

  “Who?”

  “That guy, at lunch. The one with the sexy accent.”

  “I hardly know him.”

  “Whatever you say, sweetie.”

  “Mom, look: he’s a guy I met at a dinner party in Australia who just moved here for work. That’s all.”

  “He seemed very”—Randy wriggled her shoulders as if beset by a frisson—“intimate.”

  “Oh, please. He’s that way with everybody.”

  “Do you think so?” Randy let the television rest on the Cartoon Network. Shaggy and Scooby were alone in a basement when the lights went off, leaving only four blinking eyes on the darkened screen. “A mother sometimes knows best, Danny. I’m just mentioning, for the record, that I liked him.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Danielle’s List

  When she got home near midnight, Danielle found a message from Marina on her answering machine, to which she listened as she put on her electric kettle (a British-inspired luxury learned from Moira, who was never without one) for a cup of mint tea.

  “Great to see your mom, Danny. She’s so funny! And the way she adores you is so, you know, touching. If it’s not too late, call me when you get in? I’m dying to know more about that Australian guy—he’s your revolutionary, right? Call me, okay?”

  Danielle took off her shoes. She put them tidily away in the cupboard, in their space on the shoe rack. The only way to live sanely in her tiny space was to live pristinely. Her mother teased that her studio hardly looked inhabited; but Danielle loved it. She felt, in her aching legs (how many miles had they walked that afternoon?) a trembling of relief simply to be there. It was small, but not depressing. She lived on the fifteenth floor of a white-brick 1960s building, the tallest of its kind for some blocks in all directions. It had a clean, inviting lobby and a doorman, and when she opened her front door—one in a long row of identical doors along a brightly lit, blue-carpeted hallway that somehow successfully absorbed the odors and sounds of communal living, at least for the most part—she entered a rectangular oasis, framed at one end by a large, south-facing picture window, waist high, unembellished, that in the daytime, even in winter’s darkest weeks, filled the room with light, and at night opened, like a complex painting, onto a vista of twinkling lights and changing sky, of silhouetted buildings and their jumbled rooftops. Just as her neighbors’ lives were muffled from her consciousness by the solidity of the building’s construction, so, too, the window’s double glazing shut out all but the most enraged sirens, so that her room felt deliciously hermetic, still new, still clean.

  In order to have her sitting area by the window, so that she might read and write and think bathed in light and the sparkling illusion of the city, she had chosen to set her bed near the kitchen and the door. She knew that to most people this decision would seem unaesthetic, peculiar (and even she worried, sometimes, about the proximity of food to her bedclothes), but she only rarely allowed visitors, and those that she did knew her well enough not to comment upon her choice. The apartment was entirely, was only, for her: a wall of books, both read and unread, all of them dear to her not only in themselves, their tender spines, but in the moments or periods they evoked. She had kept some books since college that she had acquired for courses and never read—Fredric Jameson, for example, and Kant’s Critique of Judgment—but which suggested to her that she was, or might be, a person of seriousness, a thinker in some seeping, ubiquitous way; and she had kept, too, a handful of children’s books taken from her now-dismantled girlhood room, like Charlotte’s Web and the Harriet the Spy novels, that conjured for her an earlier, passionately earnest self, the sober child who read constantly in the back of her parents’ Buick, oblivious to her brother punching her knee, oblivious to her parents’ squabbling, oblivious to the traffic and landscapes pressing upon her from outside the window.

  She had, in addition to her books, a modest shelf of tapes and CDs that served a similar, though narrower, function: not like Julius, fanatical about music, nor particularly educated, she was aware that her collection was comprised largely of mainstream choices that reflected—whether popular or classical—not so much an individual spirit as the generic tastes of her times: Madonna, the Eurythmics, Tracy Chapman from her adolescence; Cecilia Bartoli, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Mitsuko Uchida; more recently Moby and the posthumously celebrated folk-singing woman from Washington, D.C., who had died of a melanoma in her early thirties, and whose tragic tale attracted Danielle more than her soft covers of familiar songs.

  Her self, then, was represented in her books; her times in her records; and the rest of the room she thought of as a pure, blank slate: her fine white sheets and puffed pillows (she had a weakness for linens, and had even bought a set from Frette, an extravagance for which she punished herself by using them only on special occasions, such as her birthday); her olive loveseat, big enough for her to lie in, with her knees tucked up; her broad desk, a sheet of polished wood on trestles, which faced the window and held upon it all the elements of her “home office.” She had splurged on the office chair, an ergonomic marvel that her mother had encouraged her to buy and had helped her to pay for (“Believe me, sweetie, nothing is more important than a healthy back. Nothing! Remember that trip to St. Thomas over spring break when you were twelve, and your father threw his back out? He slept on the floor for two months after that, baby. Two months! And I don’t think his back’s ever been the same since. Not that I’d know now, of course. Let’s buy the chair”). She did not display photographs or mementoes of any kind. She abhorred tchotchkes. On
the walls, she had hung four Rothko reproductions, large, discreetly framed posters that reminded her of the Rothko chapel in Houston, which she had once visited with her family when it was still a family. The bleeding washes of color—green, gray, blue, lavender, purple—still invited her to contemplation, still soothed her, each time she sat before them. She still felt—or could, if she kept the overhead light off and the posterish flatness of her pictures remained unrevealed, the way an aging woman’s wrinkles are melted in the shadows—that she might lose herself in the verdigris palette, a slightly different hue for each mood.

  This evening, with her mint tea, she crawled onto the olive sofa and gazed at the purplest panel, the moment before dawn or the evening celebration, as she alternately thought of it. Perhaps she ought rather to have been moving into olives and grays, toward sleep; but just as her legs hurt, so too did her brain, which felt jangled and frazzled by the day as if by a constant humming. She felt the need to sort through her competing anxieties, to find a hierarchy and a rhythm for them, to make an internal list: sunrise, sunset, sunrise, sunset. Breathe in, breathe out.

  1. It was after eleven. She did not want to call Marina. She did not want to call her mother, either, knowing her tucked beneath her acrylic fleece blanket at the Days Inn uptown, but had promised that she would (“I just need to know my baby’s home safe. You understand?”) and so did, a hasty murmured good night couched, on both sides, in rote protestations of love.

  2. She not only did not want to telephone Marina, she found herself irritated at the very prospect. Was it because of Marina’s use of the word “touching,” perhaps? Or was it not at least partly also because she did not want to talk to Marina about Ludovic Seeley? Oh, of course she had already talked a fair bit to Marina, to everyone, about Seeley-the-idea, but not about Seeley-the-person; and there was, had been, at the very sight of him, at the front of the line at the restaurant, a pull that Danielle felt to be inevitable, personal, even spiritual—a magnetic attraction. Her mother, she knew, believed in such things; believed in such a thing in this very instance—and which she vividly recalled having felt, and felt keenly, even in Sydney; had, if she were honest, allowed so strongly to hold sway that the very idea for her revolution program had been, was—it was true, and too embarrassing ever to acknowledge—simply a pretext to contact him again, and more than that, actually to spend time with him, to force herself (though not literally, of course) upon him. And having made this decision, instinctive and barely conscious, already over two months ago, Danielle had allowed the idea of her connection to Seeley to flourish, in the privacy of her imagination, in the privacy of this delicious studio; and now, most problematically, inevitably, and perhaps thrillingly, he was again real, flesh, blood, and hooded eyes, with those long, cool fingers and the pressing, withholding glance. He was real, and in New York to stay. That was enough, surely, to have to contend with without throwing into the dilemma the fatuous wheedling and prying of Marina-on-the-prowl. Because surely Marina had seen, as Danielle’s mother had seen, Danielle’s discomfort; she had surely felt the voltage in the air of their mundane exchange? Or worse, perhaps Marina hadn’t seen or sensed it, perhaps, then, this current was pure figment, a one-sided attraction so entranced by its own force that it could not gauge—that Danielle could not gauge—the indifference with which it was met? (After all, he did lean in, lean over, every woman: it was by his angle that she had known him first, and only then by the brow, by the aristocratic profile.) Either way, whatever way, Danielle did not want to talk to Marina tonight. She did not want to talk to her about Ludovic Seeley. She would have to, perhaps even tomorrow; but not now.