10. The Emperor's Children, by Claire Messud, pp. 387-479

September. Chapter Fifty-four: An Evening on the Town; Chapter Fifty-five: Married; Chapter Fifty-six: Not Telling; Chapter Fifty-seven: A Speaking Engagement; Chapter Fifty-eight: The Morning After; Chapter Fifty-nine: The Monitor; Chapter Sixty: At Home; Chapter Sixty-one: Fort Greene; Chapter Sixty-two: Clarion Call. November. Chapter Sixty-three: Burying the Dead (1); Chapter Sixty-four: Burying the Dead (2); Chapter Sixty-five: Burying the Dead (3); Chapter Sixty-six: Burying the Dead (4); Chapter Sixty-seven: Take Them by Surprise.

_____

On the way back to the city, David claims that he was glad to have finally met Julius's friends. "Julius both believed him and didn't believe him, was at once pleased and disappointed. It seemed, indeed, that cohabitation, rather than a state of peace, was, for Julius at least, a state of constant, rather wearing, contradiction." They had had "a 'talk about us'" that weekend, prompted by the wedding that they can't yet have. Julius observes that "every gay couple precisely has to rewrite the rules" because, unlike heterosexual couples, they "don't get the rules handed down by society."

Julius has to take the lead in this conversation because David's responses are sometimes monosyllabic. "So what are our rules, then?" he asks. He prompts: "Mutual respect, tolerance, forgiveness.... And we know, like I said, not to confuse love and desire." David agrees on all of these, but it's not clear that he's agreeing to exactly what Julius has in mind: i.e., tolerance of and forgiveness for his occasional lapses into desire for sex with men other than David.

Julius understood them to have exchanged a moment of powerful honesty, an acknowledgment of their needs, of the need for Lewis, or for Dale. It was thrilling, quietly thrilling, to be able to speak not wholly openly but with such clarity about something so fraught. He felt relieved, and assumed that David, too, felt this way. 

But back in the city, at Julius's Pitt Street apartment, David's depression about losing his job deepens, and his complaints about the apartment continue. He tells Danielle "that without work and without money, David was not the blithe, fun-loving man he had once been." He spends three or four hours a day at the gym, which is where he showers because he says the one in Julius's apartment is filthy.

Julius takes on more work, including the piece for Marina, and in anticipation of getting paid for it, and to make up after a quarrel, he takes David out to their favorite restaurant. Afterward, they go for drinks at a gay bar on First Avenue, where they meet Jan, a friend of David's, who suggests they go to a rough dive on Avenue C. There they drink and dance, and Julius does some coke. And looking across the room at David "he realized ... that they were, as a couple, doomed." He tries to suppress the thought, "an only later would he remember thinking it, and wonder whether the thought had permitted, or caused, what came after."

At the bar he flirts with a guy and follows him to a lavatory stall. "Even afterward, he would know it to have been one of the most exciting sexual adventures of his life: the brazenness, the danger, the exoticism." But suddenly David is there, "dragging them both by their skin, viciously, out into the bathroom, their trousers flapping open, dicks out, and he was pummeling at Julius.... David had cut him, had punched him, and was still roaring, bellowing like an elephant ... and then David, like an animal, lunged, his mouth wide, and he bit. He bit Julius's cheek, and there was the sound of it, of the skin breaking."

Julius finds his way home, but as he's looking at his mutilated face, contemplating what has happened, a cop car pulls up, and a policeman calls him to the door. "David, whose face gleamed pale with demented triumph, lurked in the background, taunting him." David has charged Julius with theft because of the things Julius has in his apartment. "He says he doesn't want to press charges, but he's concerned for his safety, sir." Julius is astonished at the effrontery. "David was grinning." Julius stands aside as David retrieves his things, and then takes the cop's advice and goes to the emergency room.

A week after the wedding, Marina "felt as though she were married not to a man but to The Monitor; or rather, that he was married to The Monitor and she was not married at all." She confides this to Danielle, who reminds her of the story of the chef who was very famous in London. Ludo "could be Jesus Christ in Sydney, yet even in the era of the Global Village he was nothing in New York, not until he'd worked his miracles in Manhattan." Danielle also tells Marina what happened to Julius, and that he's coming over, so Marina decides to join them.

At Danielle's, Marina notices that Danielle is drinking Scotch, which she didn't use to do, and that she has the good sheets on her bed. Julius tells them that he's going back to the temp agency because David was paying the rent. They also learn that Bootie has moved to Brooklyn -- he left a forwarding address, but no phone number. Danielle thinks someone should check on him: "He seems poignant to me. I feel like in some way I am him, or he is me." After Marina leaves, Julius comments on the scotch and the good sheets. "I don't know, there's just something different about this place. It almost smells like cigarettes, though maybe that's just your neighbors." He begins to pick at her about who she's seeing, and she comes close to telling him about Murray. "But Julius was not discreet; and if she told him anything, she would eventually tell him who; and once she'd told him that, it would all be over."

On Monday Murray pretends to go to Chicago, but instead goes to Danielle's apartment. As for deceiving Annabel, he has a rationale:

He didn't delve too deeply  into her separate life, hadn't wanted to meet the famous DeVaughn, say (although he had, that once, in the summertime, without meaning to), or any of the other clients who drew so heavily and zealously upon his wife's angelic resources. He knew that this was justifying: there was no genuine comparison between her de facto secrets and his own. The point was to assuage this feeling, for which he had no purpose, which could only be named guilt.

He has a surprise for Danielle: He has booked a helicopter ride over the city at dusk. It's not such a welcome surprise; Danielle hates flying. But she holds tightly to him, and he sees that "the wide-eyed cast of her face was now of childlike wonder rather than fear." He thinks of them as "co-conspirators." And later, when she puts on a recording of "a Spanish soprano singing Cantaloube, her pure, agonized strains floating, their minor harmonies wavering in the small room," it's as if it is reminding "them both that beauty and loss were inseparably entwined."

In the morning she is showering when she hears him cry out. From her window he can see the World Trade Center towers: "they lived the next hour and a half in stereo, watching through the window -- their view spectacularly, hideously unimpeded -- and watching on the screen, as if they were simultaneously in Manhattan and anywhere on the planet." Eventually, he realizes that he has to call Annabel, who will think that he's stuck in Chicago. Then he decides to walk home. He assures her, "Whatever I say, you won't come into it." After he leaves, she stands at the window and watches "dust-covered, bewildered people, some crying, drifting up the avenue, lots of them, like refugees from war." And even through the sealed windows she can smell "the asbestos-smoke-gasoline fuel, slight airplane, slight bonfire reek."

Ludo has canceled the launch party for the magazine and tells Marina, "We are completely fucked."

The magazine cover of the issue that was to have been, with the title in black capitals and the logo -- he'd help design it -- of an all-seeing eye, lay on top of the pile. Already, with its vermilion, orange, and yellow graphic, a sunburst, a remarkable photograph of a sunburst, the idea having been that they were exploding upon the scene, illuminating truths, and different, down to the images, from the rest; already it looked out of date and faintly forlorn, like some child's abandoned artwork. 

Marina is the one who realizes that it isn't all about Ludo and his doomed magazine: "I think that boy DeVaughn's mother works in the towers." And later, when they walk to Union Square and see the "missing" posters that have begun to appear, he refers to them as "necrophiliac pornography.... what good does it do to pretend they'll all come home...? They're all fucking dead, Marina. Dead." He decides that it would make a good cover story:

"About how in this country everybody wants a happen ending. To the point of dishonesty, as if sticking up these posters can somehow undo, or fix, or change what's just happened. Who's going to say to them, 'Go home and face the facts! Your son, mother, niece, is dead, dust, gone.... But it's the fucking land of lies here, isn't it? So nobody's going to say that. And we're not going to say it, either, because we don't have a fucking magazine.... The bubble's burst, now. It's over. We're fucked."

In Watertown, Judy waits for word from Bootie. Finally, she calls the number for Julius's sublet, but gets only the answering machine with Julius's voice on it. Later she calls again, and Julius answers to tell her that he didn't know a thing about Bootie except that he has moved to Brooklyn and didn't leave a phone number. When she doesn't hear from Bootie by Thursday she calls Murray, who says he'll ask Marina to go check on him. And then she asks what it smells like in the city. He tells her that it's too far away from where they live, and she says, "But it's going to smell like death, isn't it? Soon, if it doesn't already? A great big grave like that. It's going to smell like death."

Marina and Julius go to Fort Greene to look for Bootie, but the neighbor doesn't know where he is and only reluctantly agrees to look for the passkey to his room. They are shocked to find it contains only the rumpled sheets that he still from Julius, a computer and a few postcards on the wall. His suitcases are in the closet. They decide to try the temp agency. Marina tells Julius that she had said to Ludo that they were bound to know someone in the towers, and that DeVaughn's mother, who worked on the hundred and first floor is missing. She takes a Kleenex from her pocket and observes, "Do you realize, when I put this Kleenex in my pocket, the world was a completely different place?" At the temp agency they learned that Bootie was supposed to have gone to work at a financial firm on Cedar Street, a few blocks from Ground Zero, the day after Labor Day. A manager had let him have an advance of his pay because he was so desperate.

In fact, Bootie is starting a new life in Miami. On Sept. 11 he had been late to work and when he got off the subway he discovered what had happened. "That was when Bootie started walking. He had Musil in a plastic bag, his fingers slick upon the handles, and he had fog, or dust, or something on his glasses, but he loosened his tie and undid the top button and he walked, uptown." He had in his pocket the remaining cash from the advance he had been given. He thinks of the events as "The Tower of Babel tumbling. An end to false idols. And ... surely even Murray, above all Murray, would be toppled by this." And he realizes that it's also a way of putting an end to Bootie Tubb.

He spends the night in Central Park and when the Port Authority bus terminal reopens, he buys a ticket for Miami: "it was the farthest and earliest one could go; and it was, in the bargain, a warm destination for his aching body." When he reaches there, he changes his name: He takes the first name Ulrich from Musil, and decides that the most appropriate last name is New: Ulrich New. "Ulrich would fashion the reality inside his head and then, when the time was right, would give birth to it, would make them all at last understand, would take them by surprise."

The week before Thanksgiving, Judy arranges a memorial service for Bootie. She has decided to sell the house and leave Watertown. Murray, Annabel and Marina will be attending, but not Marina's husband, who is in England. Marina is upset that Ludo won't be with her, but he is interviewing for a job, since The Monitor has been scrubbed: "nobody wanted such a thing in this new world, a frivolous, satirical thing.... So much for taking New York by storm. So much for revolution. The revolution belonged to other people now, far away from them, and it was real." To add to Ludo's woes, Murray has had "a resurgence of celebrity" because of demands for his opinions.

Danielle has taken everything very hard: She is in therapy and on antidepressants. "Marina felt that she had lost her, that the Danielle she had always known had been vacuumed out, and only a flat, monosyllabic shell remained." Marina had asked her to go with them to the memorial service for Bootie, but Danielle rejected the idea, saying that she was planning to go away somewhere for a while.

Julius seems to have recovered mentally from his experience with David. "He seemed in all aspects more sober ... -- more cynical if that were possible.... The welt on his cheek, still fairly fresh, gave him a rakish aspect that amused him when it didn't depress him. He said it clearly made him more alluring -- men commented on it, as if it were a beauty mark," though it bothers him that he would always "carry David's mark on him, a brand." He also agrees to come with her to Watertown, because he'd called Bootie fat and because he'd had to make him move out.

"Do you think," Julius said, "that he's somehow a better person than we are because he's dead?"

"Because of how he died, you mean?"

"Because he was miserable, and now he's dead. Whereas we -- well, in the great scheme of things, let's face it, we've always been fucking lucky, and have just kept right on."

"I know Danielle thinks he was a better person.... From how she talks about him. 'Gravitas,' 'ambition,' 'integrity.' You know."

"She's idealizing adolescence. That's so her. You know, torn between Big Ideas and a party. She's always been that way.... We just want to be at the Party of Big Ideas. Ideally, to throw it." 

Murray had gone home on 9/11 and waited for Annabel to arrive. She did so in the evening, with DeVaughn, whom she helped make a poster of his mother. But when Murray tried to explain why he was there rather than stuck in Chicago, she said, "No. You chose to come home. That's all I need to know.... It doesn't matter. Maybe someday, okay? But not now." She busied herself with DeVaughn instead. He called Danielle several times, and left a message the first two times.

In the days that followed, he was eaten by her silence, more invasively than he might have been by any words; and although, by the time her message came -- on his cell, a week later: "Please could you leave me alone" -- he was not surprised, neither was he liberated. He found himself, unhealthily, obsessed.

He finds himself punished by both women's silence, wondering what Annabel "thought, or knew, or imagined." So he turned to writing and speaking about the events, arguing "in favor of understanding rather than blind hostility." When a TV interviewer asked him why he was not more bellicose because of Bootie's presumed death, his calm response was seen as "a mark of the man's immovable integrity; and Murray couldn't help but be aware of the irony that Bootie's death had granted him greater nobility." He also went back to work on his book, aware that "the tragedy would completely reshape his endeavor: how to live was a different question, now. More urgent. Less answerable. He would begin again, and would write, he knew, a better book because of it." At the memorial service, he becomes aware of people he had known in Watertown, and of the drabness of the place that he and Bootie had both felt compelled to flee.

Danielle's depression leads her to the brink of suicide, starting to swallow pills she has collected by washing them down with what's left of Murray's Scotch. But she decides instead to call her mother, who arrives and takes her to South Beach, where she begins to recover.

She had a film about liposuction to make. It seemed, in some lights, trivial, but it wasn't really. By the time it was finished, people would be tired of greater tragedies, and would be ready to watch it again. Mostly, people's tragedies were small. She'd be doing the right thing.

One evening they go out to dinner and she notices one of the waiters: "A gesture. A particular, fisty way of pushing glasses up by the nose. A particular arc of the arm. He was standing in the gloom by the doorway to the lobby, in a uniform, black and faintly zen, with a mandarin collar. No curls, his head almost shaven, and thinner; but it had to be." She accosts him: "Bootie Tubb. What are you doing here?" He claims his name is Ulrich, and finally, after she ask how he can leave his family thinking he's dead, he responds: "I'm just ... surviving. I'm doing what I've got to do to survive.... Frederick doesn't exist; and for me, for Ulrich, you don't exist. I don't have to explain anything." She insists that he does.

He was angry now, she could tell. He almost spat at her. "I needed to go. I would be dead, otherwise. I needed -- I haven't done anything wrong. If I would've killed myself otherwise, then I'd be dead, really dead. Maybe that would be better. Then would you be satisfied?"

She says no, and he apologizes for "the confusion." He says of Murray, "he isn't who you thought he was, is he?" She replied, "I don't even know that. I'm not sure I know who I think I am." He wishes her good luck and she returns to her table where she tells her mother it was "Just someone I thought I knew."

He goes back to his room and packs, preparing to move on. He leaves the volume of Musil behind.

This time, he was ready. This person in motion was who he was becoming: it was something, too: a man, someday with qualities. Ulrich New. Great geniuses have the shortest biographies, he told himself; and take them by surprise. Yes. He would.

9. The Emperor's Children, by Claire Messud, pp. 325- 386

July. Chapter Forty-four: Weird; Chapter Forty-five: "Murray Thwaite: A Portrait" by Frederick Tubb; Chapter Forty-six: The Cuckoo in the Nest. September. Chapter Forty-seven: The Man Without Qualities; Chapter Forty-eight: Getting Ready; Chapter Forty-nine: Home Again; Chapter Fifty: Lady in Waiting; Chapter Fifty-one: "Vows by Lisa Solomon" Special to the New York Times; Chapter Fifty-two: Bedtime; Chapter Fifty-three: Tiger Woods.

_____

Marina returns from her lunch with Murray having "contemplated tears, but decided to save them until the venting of her indignation inevitably brought them forth." Ludo claims not to be surprised at Murray's reaction: "How many times do I have to tell you that your father's sense of his own importance is deeply involved with keeping you down?... Your book is a more important work of thought and scholarship than anything he's produced in more than twenty years." But Marina rejects his attack on Murray.

She finally breaks into tears in her yoga class, and that night she calls Danielle for sympathy and denounces Murray herself as "a self-absorbed asshole." Danielle reassures Marina that Murray "adores" her and would "never willingly hurt" her. Now Marina thinks about having the wedding in a restaurant in the city rather than in Stockbridge: "Do I really want him to give me away, and on his own property?" And when Danielle asks if she can read the book, Marina puts her off: "she both cared and did not care what Danielle thought of it."

Bootie finishes his article about Murray, his disillusionment colored by Murray's delay in reading Marina's manuscript. "There was no time for fat library books with scolding titles, let alone for the hectoring tomes of Musil that glared at him from Julius's bookshelf." He prints out three copies at Kinko's and has them bound in red, navy, and black. The red is for Marina, the navy for his mother.

And the black one was for Murray (and for Annabel, of course, should he choose to share it), because he wanted, in all things, to be straightforward, and it was imperative that Murray should know what Bootie had been up to. Black seemed appropriately mournful: it expressed the sorrow with which he delivered his blow.

His mother is the first to reply, and she's furious: Murray didn't hire him to read his secret manuscript, she says. He's biting the hand that feeds him. "Are you going crazy on me, Bootie? What on earth is going on?" She warns him that Murray has "a miserable temper. He always did. And what you've done is terrible." Marina calls him two hours after his mother has chewed him out, describing the article as "an insane rant against my father." But she also says that Ludo has read it and it has caused a fight between them:
"He has some idea that your article -- I don't even want to call it an article -- is not the truth, but a truth, your truth. That's what he says. He sees validity in that. He figures The Monitor should run it, get people talking. It's a start, he says." But she's especially furious that he read the secret book. At least, she tells him, Murray doesn't need to know about it, so "We can put an end to this right now." She's stunned when he tells her that he gave him a copy.

Murray calls him into his office the next morning and begins by calling Bootie "Ambitious, serious, independent.... He was drawing this out on purpose, torturing Bootie." But he moves in swiftly for the kill: "where the fuck do you get off, you little nullity, you common little piece of shit, snooping around in my papers and crapping all over them!" And more: "You're a speck of filth from Watertown, New York, which is itself a speck of filth. You're a nothing. And do you know how I know? Because I was just like you, Christ, I was you, except I wasn't fat. But I knew my place." Bootie retorts that his "opinions were formed on the basis of facts.... Your manuscript -- How to Live -- it's a fact." He has waved a red flag, and Murray threatens, "A wave of my hand and you will simply cease to exist."

Bootie ... hadn't imagined that things would turn out this way. Then again, he simply hadn't imagined. He had been very certain, certain at least that Marina would want to publish his article. He had worked so hard to make it true. The rest, he'd thought, would fall into place, as long as he conducted himself honorably. Before he got to the door, he said, "You know that Ludovic Seeley isn't on your side, don't you? You know that he'd like to publish it?" 

He is pleased that Murray seems to be disconcerted by this, but he also expects Murray to "break into a grin, clap him on the shoulder" and say that it was all a joke. He doesn't.

Marina tells Danielle about the article, and finds the irony in it: "Daddy did this to me, you know, just a week ago, and now it's officially forgotten and all lovey-dovey, and I'm just supposed to suck it up. But Bootie's given him a dose of his own medicine, hasn't he? He's essentially telling Daddy not to publish this book. His secret book." She admits that the article made her wonder if her father wasn't just "a little bit shallow. And what if he's right?" She points out that Ludo thinks her father is shallow, but Danielle warns her that Ludo is not a "disinterested authority" where Murray is concerned. "I don't know what his motives are, but they're not straightforward." But she comes to realize "that Seeley's sway had all but turned" Marina, who says,

"All this time, if we believe Bootie, Daddy's been holed up reinventing the wheel. Live decently. Don't lose your temper. Embrace Beauty and Truth. Above all, Truth. Blah blah blah. Please. He's offering up tired maxims as if they were original gems. Just because he imagines he's a thinker doesn't mean he can suddenly turn into one." 

Bootie has reminded her father that he's mortal, she says, which is a good thing.

Danielle asks what happened to Bootie, although she already knows: "In a differently slanted account of events, Murray had, with a type of laughter that communicated his discomfort, told Danielle about kicking the boy out." Murray had rejected her sympathy for Bootie: "The kid's a creep." But he also admitted that "there's a tiny part of my brain wondering whether this kid is right. Whether he's the only one brave enough and dumb enough to tell me the truth." He tells her that he won't publish the book now: "It's a self-parody, as he says. It's a fake."

Marina also tells Danielle that Julius is looking for work because David has lost his job, so she's assigned him a piece about downtown parties: "He's agreed to do it -- our Julius, writing lifestyle garbage like that."

On the last day of August, Bootie moves out of the Pitt Street apartment because Julius and David are moving in. Julius has suggested that Bootie look for an apartment in the Village Voice classifieds, and he has found one to share in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. "He'd pretended to his mother, who had of course exhorted him to come home, that he was gainfully employed," but after three days as a busboy he had dropped a load of dishes. But Julius has also connected him with the temp agency that had sent him to work for David, and Bootie "was slated to begin work with some downtown financial agency the day after Labor Day." Julius and David arrive in a taxi, which Bootie takes to the place in Brooklyn. He has no furniture, but "had swiped a sheet from Julius, so that he could make a bedroll in which to sleep." He feels a pang because the wedding of Marina to Ludo is taking place that afternoon. "It couldn't be stopped, and yet it couldn't happen."

Marina is afraid that Bootie might actually crash the wedding, "might burst upon them on the day and wreak some sort of vengeance. Set the house on fire. Shoot her father. Kidnap her." Annabel assures her that Bootie won't do anything of the sort. "I think his article about Daddy was as close as he could come." Ludo, meanwhile, is more concerned about the launch party for The Monitor than about the wedding, complaining that Susan Sontag hasn't responded to the invitation. "But at least Renée Zellweger is a yes."

Marina has met with her book editor, who is "thrilled with the manuscript" and plans to publish it the next September. He thinks they might run first serial in Vogue or The New Yorker, and book her on Rosie McDonnell's show or on Oprah. "She wouldn't tell her father -- not yet, anyway. The wound, still unscabbed, couldn't take it."

David is miserable in Julius's old apartment, and he doesn't want to go to the wedding. Julius reminds him, "'I've been to plenty of things for you.' Now, more than ever, Julius was aware of this. Aware of all he had relinquished -- willingly, it was true; but still. The wedding was non-negotiable." He tells David that he needs him to drive the car, which they are supposed to pick up in an hour. The drive is two and a half hours, and the wedding starts at six, and Julius wants to check into the hotel first. David still dreads it: "It's like all your friends are members of Mensa or something. Like you have to pass some stupid test to join the club." But he agrees. When they step out on the street, Julius puts his arm around him, "but pulled it immediately away because he thought he could feel David flinch, because he knew David didn't want their intimacy to be seen."

Danielle is dreading the event almost as much as David. The dependency that both Murray and Marina have on Annabel reminds her that she's not part of the family. "Murray turned to her not heliotropically, but in the small and sorry spirit of diversion." In fact, "Murray kept well out of things." He is "supposedly finishing a newspaper column, or was it a magazine essay," Marina tells Danielle. When he appears and joins her in the pergola, she tells him it's probably not a good thing to be seen together. He replies, "My family would think it odd if I didn't flirt with you just a little. I have a reputation to live up to." She makes him promise that they will have a night together, to which he says, "Don't you know yet that the more we have, the more we'll want?" Which pleases her. He tells her that he was supposed to lecture in Chicago on Monday, but the event has been canceled. It's still on his calendar, however: "I'm officially out of town."

A gushing article on the wedding appears in the New York Times.  Julius is quoted as saying, "The whole wedding was so Marina." The article mentions her "forthcoming book" and the fact that her father is "the celebrated journalist Murray Thwaite." Danielle, "a producer for public television," is mentioned as having introduced Marina to Ludo, who is "to take the helm of the new Merton Publications weekly, The Monitor, which launches on September thirteenth."

After the wedding, Murray stretches out on the bed and talks to Annabel, who mentions that "Danielle left with Julius and his boyfriend. I told her to stay, but I guess she thought it would be weird, to have breakfast with just you and me." When Murray comments that Ludo has "hooked our Marina, and ended up related to me at the same time," Annabel comments, "That's a little self-absorbed even for you, my darling." But Murray is still worried that Ludo is going to publish Bootie's article.

Danielle spends the night on the floor of Julius and David's hotel room because she doesn't want to stay with Murray and Annabel, or to ride back to the city with them. In the morning as she showers, she remembers the quarrel Marina and Ludo had over the reporter from the Times, which Ludo wanted to do because "It's good for The Monitor." To Danielle, this was Ludo "revealing his true cynic's colors. For him, even the wedding was about advancing his career.

She had finally met David, who

seemed, to Danielle, a ... young -- definitely younger -- perfectly polite, handsome-enough, sort of boring seeming guy from Westchester, a businessy type, the kind of guy, back in college, to whom you cheerfully said hello at the salad bar, with a genuine smile, even, but with whom you never bothered further, because you sensed -- from the clothes, the friends, the haircut, the major (probably Political Science, or Economics), even from the tenor of his voice -- that he didn't have anything interesting to say.

She still can't divine the reason for the "intensity" and "prolonged secrecy" of Julius's relationship with him. When she comes out of the shower he is awake and offers to drive her to the train. She realizes that he wants to get rid of her, so she agrees. The station is almost an hour away in Albany, and they talk about the grimness of Julius's apartment, about Bootie, about his majoring in political science and her majoring in English -- each of them confirming the other's stereotype. She talks about how she can't remember what's in the books on her shelves, or even reading them, and he tells her to throw them away, which shocks her. "What is it about books?" he asks. "Perfectly rational people get crazy about their books. Who has time for that?" Then he confirms another stereotype of Danielle's when he says he plays golf. (He has earlier said that he thinks Julius looks like Tiger Woods.)

Danielle reflected that growing up, coupling, was a process of growing away from mirth, as if, like an amphibian, one ceased to breathe in the same way: laughter, once vital sustenance, protean relief and all that made isolation and struggle and fear bearable, was replaced by the stolid matter of stability: nominally content, resigned and unafraid, one grew to fear jokes and their capacity to unsettle. Where there had been laughter, there came a cold breeze. What, after all, was Julius doing shacked up with a golf-loving businessman? ... It seemed hard to credit that this person made Julius's joy, that he was either Pierre or Natasha to Julius's Pierre or Natasha.

When he drops her at the station, he seems to cheer up, "so pleased was he to be rid of her." And left alone in the station her thoughts turn once again to Murray. "She wanted him to be wanting her, even now, in bed with Annabel, to be wanting to reach for his cell phone, to establish a connection: their connection."

8. The Emperor's Children, by Claire Messud, pp. 267-324

July. Chapter Thirty-five: Notes From Underground; Chapter Thirty-six: On the Grill; Chapter Thirty-seven: After Supper; Chapter Thirty-eight: "Murray Thwaite: A Disappointed Portrait"; Chapter Thirty-nine: The Fourth of July (1); Chapter Forty: The Fourth of July (2); Chapter Forty-one: The Fourth of July (3); Chapter Forty-two: Let Go; Chapter Forty-three: Finished.

_____

Shaken by the encounter with Julius, and then by meeting Danielle on the street, Bootie decides to go to the Thwaites' apartment for a day or two. He is puzzled by Danielle: "He wanted to loathe her -- in principle, he knew he loathed her -- but her manner was kind, and sincere, and even though he maintained his chill (surely to her mystification, because how could she guess what he knew?), he felt guilty about it."

Murray Thwaite is not the only source of Bootie's disillusionment. He now sees New York as "rife with deceit, like the rot in the subway air." On the train he rereads the introduction to his article and finds it sentimental.

No: for the article to be any good, it had to do precisely the things of which Murray wrote so admiringly and with such promise, but which he himself did not live up to. It had to be precise, and calm and clear. It had to be patient, frank, substantiated. It had to be accessible and germane. It had to be true.

But to add to his foulness of mood, the train breaks down. "They were stopped twenty-three sweltering minutes, like lost miners, like spelunkers without egress, like dead men." He is so panicked by being trapped in the subway he draws blood by digging his nails into his left palm and develops "a headache of migraine proportions from the screaming inside his head."

In Stockbridge, Murray and Ludo are making conversation tensely. "Murray felt like a bear beside him, felt like grabbing him by the collar and shaking him senseless." And Marina tells him that Danielle has agreed to come for the day. "He'd never had an affair with a friend of his daughter's, everything so perilously -- so delectably -- near to the surface. And what was he thinking, to allow this reunion in Stockbridge, up till now always a sacred family ground?" Then Annabel tells him that DeVaughn has been arrested and she has to go to the city for the arraignment the next day. Ludo calls her a "sentimentalist" for trying to help someone so obviously a lost cause, which annoys Murray, especially when Ludo suggests that perhaps what DeVaughn needs is spiritual guidance: "I'd maintain that there are those for whom religion is essential.... Marx was quite right: an opiate. It's necessary." Annabel says she can't "encourage anyone to put store in something that seems to me clearly a figment. It would be a false hope." But Ludo argues, "I don't happen to believe. But clearly, for those who believe, it can. Put it another way: Could DeVaughn be any worse off?"

Marina succeeds in derailing this potentially explosive discussion by changing the subject. Later, in bed, she chides Ludo: "You wanted so much to meet him, but you disagree with him about everything.... You know,  before you marry me, you'll have to accept that I'm my father's daughter in most things." He retorts, "You need to separate yourself from your father. Put some distance between you." She asks if he means moving to Australia, but what he really means is agree with him.

Bootie is working on his article, the introduction to which asks the question, "Why is Murray Thwaite such a disappointment to me?" He is conscious of never having written an article before. "He wasn't quite sure what should be in it, wasn't sure either about the balance of facts and opinion." He Googles Murray and comes across the article by Roanne Levine, and finds "himself wondering, given its gush, whether she, too, had been seduced by his uncle."

He has decided not to mention Danielle in the article. "It was his concession to Annabel, of whom he was quite fond; and to Marina, too." He has left a mess in the apartment, and is surprised when Annabel shows up there. She, too, is surprised to find him, and asks, "could you please pick up before you go." Then she tells him that she's driving back to Stockbridge with Danielle and offers to take him, too. He declines. She also tells him that Marina and Ludo are engaged, which surprises him. He had thought that Danielle and Marina were vying for Ludo's attentions before he found out about Danielle and Murray. "He'd been a naïf, all those weeks ago, and the possibility of such goatishness hadn't occurred to him." He reflects further on the disillusionment he'd experienced since he felt like he'd been admitted to "the heady salons of wisdom and the freedom of intellectual discourse." It was like being "in Madame de Staël's living room, or in the court of Catherine the Great, or at Rahv's house after a Partisan Review meeting."

Julius had overslept and missed the train to Scarsdale, and when David calls he claims he was sick. Finally, after another day of putting off the trip he agrees -- "recognizing that his momentary yen for peace and solitude could easily result in the end of his relationship, he relented." The Cohens ignore it when he and David hold hands by the pool, something that he would never have dared in front of his own parents, and Julius behaves himself nicely. But on the train back he and David quarrel over his failure to show up earlier. And when he displays affection, David discourages him. So Julius reads the Arts section of the New York Times and learns "that one of his erstwhile rivals in the Village Voice office has published a favorably reviewed novel. "He wanted very powerfully, in that moment, to be with Marina or Danielle. With people who would understand all the different ways at once in which he felt horrible."

Danielle had not been looking forward to riding to Stockbridge with Annabel, but it turns out "that Daneille's repressive mechanisms were Yale-tight," and she "deemed it both pleasant and uncomplicated to inhabit Annabel's prelapsarian vision." They talk about the fact that the hearing on DeVaughn had not gone well, and Danielle "sensed that Annabel was deeply embarrassed with herself, that she felt she had failed a test." It turns out that Annabel is thinking about the argument with Ludo and the possibility that he was right. Danielle observes that "Ludovic is very good at making us all doubt ourselves and second-guess our decisions." She says, "He wants to be Napoleon, you know.... He wants people to follow him. He wants to revolutionize and and control their whole lives." This surprises Annabel, who says that despite their political disagreement, Ludo "has integrity." It's Danielle's turn to be surprised: "I'm not sure that's a word I would've used in connection with him."

Danielle is glad that Murray is not present when they arrive. "It was easier not to witness the Thwaites' reunion. Danielle wanted their affection -- or lack of it -- to be hidden from her." When she hears him coming downstairs, she "thought she could feel herself flush." But he's good at concealment: "his mask was so complete, so impenetrable, that Danielle wondered, fleetingly, if their intimacy were merely her imagining; wondered, too, if he thought she was a whore."

A storm comes up, and they watch as "a large branch at the bottom of the garden snapped and dropped, narrowly missing the pergola" where the wedding is going to be held. But then the weather improves and when Marina awakens Danielle after she takes a nap, the sun is out. Marina asks Danielle why she doesn't like Ludo, and Danielle denies it. Marina thinks that Danielle is too involved in her career to fall in love. "Danielle couldn't bear it. 'What if I told you I am in love.'" Which confirms the suspicions aroused in Marina when Danielle answered the phone "Beloved." She presses Danielle for more details, but all Danielle can say a that the relationship is "inappropriate." Which of course only provokes Marina further: "Do I know him?" "I don't think so. Let's leave it alone, okay?"

Since the weather has cleared up, Murray is barbecuing. Danielle, after two glasses of champagne, goes to talk to him at the grill, telling him, "You seem a dab hand at this."

He glanced at her, barely. "That I am. Marina probably told you, it's my chief culinary expertise." His voice sounded as though it were being recorded for radio, an iota too hearty. She wondered whether anyone else would have noticed." 

She returns to the house where she thinks, "I caused a thunderstorm with my passion and I sit here shaking under my skin and you don't notice because you're trying so hard not to notice" and wonders "how long can we sustain it, how long till the eruption, till the storm returns again and they can all see what it is, what it really is?" Later, when she is sitting in the dark, Murry comes up behind her "and placed his hand full on her crown like a warm cap. He said nothing, and was gone; but it was all she had wanted: benison."

In their room, Marina tells Ludo that she thinks Danielle is in love with him -- that he's the "inappropriate" person. Ludo tells her, "Maybe you're her inappropriate love object. Did you ever think of that? Not sexually, necessarily, although I wouldn't rule that out. But either way, you were at the center of her world, and now you aren't."

Julius and David have made up after the quarrel, although "Julius, at least, felt that things were altered." Two weeks after the trip to Scarsdale, on a Friday night, David doesn't come home and doesn't call, even though they are supposed to go to a party together. Julius calls David's cell phone and his office and gets no response. Furious at being neglected, he tosses clothes around, kicks a stack of magazines about, and dumps the contents of dresser drawers. Finally, at 11:30, he leaves for the part. "David was six unannounced hours late." No one at the party has seen or heard from him either, and Julius realizes, "It said something unnerving about him that he hadn't considered the possibility that something was wrong.... He realized he'd assume that David's absence was due to philandering because his own -- a few weeks earlier, for example, with the handsome Lewis -- had been due to just that."

He returns home at one. "The apartment smelled of French fries and gin. David sat at the table, his sleeves rolled up, his violet tie loosened and spotted with ketchup that looked like blood." A half-empty bottle of Tanqueray is open on the table. "I've had a bad day," David says. Julius, still not comprehending how bad, continues to fuss at David for not calling, for not being there for dinner or for the party. Finally, David tells him, "I got fired."

The firm is not making enough money, and nine people were let go. Julius still doesn't quite comprehend the magnitude of the situation although he apologizes and hugs David, who is very drunk and wants to go to bed. Then David tells him, "If I don't get another job right away, we'll have to leave this apartment." Julius begins to understand the situation, and says they can kick Bootie out and go back to his old place.

Marina has given her father the manuscript of her book, which is finished. But Murray doesn't want to read it. He's offended particularly by the dedication: "'For my parents, who taught me everything,' it said, and then, 'And for Ludovic, who taught me more.'" He is scornful of the lack of logic, but also upset because "in his heart of hearts, he knew he hadn't ever wanted to read it, had been perfectly content to imagine that it would never be finished." He can't admit this to anyone, "not even to young Frederick, whose rabidly exacting, almost demented standards amused him."

Bootie, in fact, wants Murray to read it -- "I think it would mean a lot to her." He tells him that Marina had come in to his office while Murray was at lunch and noticed that he hadn't even moved the manuscript. So "Murray had picked it up, snapped off the elastic, ruffled the pages, and stowed it in his bottom drawer." Danielle also wants him to read it, and suggests, "even if you have reservations, you'll have compliments, too; and then, I bet, without lying at all, you'll be able to, you know, accentuate the positive. She really does want your feedback, not just your praise." He says that he's flattered that Marina has followed in his footsteps and written a book. "But then again, my daughter has written a book about children's clothes. A book. About children's clothes." And he complains to her about the dedication. She asks if he's worried if Ludo has "somehow changed it." "The book or the girl?" he asks. "Both, really, I just wondered."

Finally, he reads it in a bar, taking two days. "He couldn't detach himself, couldn't entirely tell whether he would have thought badly of the book if he hadn't expected to think badly of it." He concentrates on what he sees as the triviality of the subject:

There were the depradations [sic] of rampant capitalism, the atrocities in Bosnia or Rwanda, the melting polar caps to attend to: and his daughter was busy investigating the cost of velvet-collared winter coats at Best and Company. 

At the same time, he is conscious of "his own hidden manuscript, a work that similarly, as he now saw it, walked the line between seriousness and popularity, more successfully, if he were fortunate, but confronting some of the same risks."

Danielle tells him, "Your opinion means everything to her.... Be careful." He replies, "If that were true ... then she wouldn't be marrying the fiancé. She wouldn't say he'd taught her more than everything." He meets her in a restaurant and tells her he's read it. "'There's some great stuff in there,' he said. 'You write beautifully.'" She knows there's a "but" coming and tells him so. When he's through, she says, "You're telling me that I shouldn't publish my book?" He suggests she rework it into a couple of magazine articles. And she repeats, "You're telling me not to publish my book." When he confirms that he thinks the topic trivial, she asks why he didn't say so before. "You've had seven years, Daddy. It's quite a long time." He has a variety of ways to answer this: that she had been twenty-three when she started what he saw as "a minor but not shameful undertaking" for a girl of that age, but not one of thirty; that he hadn't really expected her to finish it; and so on. He thinks she's crying, but she isn't.

"Ludo warned me you'd be hostile. All this time, he's said that you don't really want me to succeed with my writing, that you want me in your shadow. I told him that was ridiculous. It's just very interesting."

Reaching an impasse, they are silent for a while. "But this was what restaurants were for: the public repression of strong emotions." Finally, they are approached by a minor media type, a figure from talk radio, who "stopped by the table to glad-hand.... His obsequious bobbing and grinning served, in some measure, to dampen the tension: Marina couldn't help but smile at Murray after the man ... retreated."

7. The Emperor's Children, by Claire Messud, pp. 229-266

May. Chapter Thirty: Merge. July. Chapter Thirty-one: Booted; Chapter Thirty-two: Exposé; Chapter Thirty-three: Affianced; Chapter Thirty-four: Fireworks in Stockbridge.

_____

Danielle has begun her affair with Murray, and now "considered that their connection was almost eerie, a meeting of minds, a Platonic reunion of divided souls. To whom could you say such a thing? She might have said it frankly to him, were it not for Marina, and for Annabel. He admires the Rothko posters she has framed on her walls: "They keep you sane, I'm guessing.... That's what they'd do for me. They stop everything, the washes of color, they pull you in. Keep your from going out the window." She admits that's "always a possibility."

"I know it. Every day you find the reason not to. As he did -- Rothko -- in the pictures." He paused. "Until the day he didn't anymore."

But Danielle is troubled by her secret and by the necessity of keeping it from Marina especially. She "had never before had a secret that she couldn't confide in anyone, but this, she knew, was such a secret. She couldn't tell Randy, even, who so wanted her daughter to find love. If that was what she had found." He wanted to see her again wearing the dress she'd worn to the awards dinner -- "the dress, she couldn't help but think, that had had no effect on Ludovic Seeley. That was the night Marina had thrown herself at him; and now they were colleagues and lovers both."

She feels grateful that she and Julius never see each other: "he'd be able to smell it on her, a dog sniffing fear. She even worries about Bootie, who now works for Murray. "Even meeting him just twice she could tell that he was canny, and proud, and that he held the world to impossible standards." She fears that Bootie would see the change in her, and that "Murray would disappoint him, sooner or later, she was certain."

In July, Bootie moves into Julius's sublet, and is sweating out a heatwave there on the weekend before Independence Day. He had been invited to spend the Fourth in Stockbridge with the Thwaites, "but he could tell they didn't really want him to come. Besides, given what he was writing, he wouldn't have felt comfortable with them anyway."

He would have given a great deal to return to a state of blissful ignorance where Murray was concerned. Every revelation only diminished further his uncle's fading glow.... He'd begun thinking of himself again, quite unconsciously, as Bootie, because he intended to put the boot in, to give his uncle the boot. Marina had asked him --- it seemed it had been originally Danielle's idea, in this seething nest of vipers: she, with the maternal smile, the chummy, condescending manner, and the most hideous secret -- if he'd like to write an article on spec for The Monitor. 

And then he read all of Murray's secret manuscript and accidentally came across the first e-mail from Danielle. So now his article, which he'd planned as "a story with the happiest of endings," had turned into a scabrous exposé. He has come around to Ludo's opinion of Murray.

The first crack in Murray's façade had come when Bootie found Murray plagiarizing himself -- lifting sentences and even a whole paragraph from his earlier writing for a supposedly entirely new article. Murray had dismissed this discovery as trivial: "If you've worked to find the right words for what you want to say, then surely it would be foolhardy to discard them merely because of some sense ... that it was rather shabby to repeat yourself." Bootie decided that he had been wrong, but the instance stuck with him. And then shortly after, he was asked to cancel an appearance Murray was to make at a fundraiser for a Harlem youth organization so Murray could instead attend a more prestigious event. "Murray Thwaite looked less and less the shining giant."

And then he began reading more and more of the secret manuscript "in fervent snatches, over lunch hours when Murray was in restaurants and in a long evening when all the Thwaites were out together." And he discovered that this magnum opus was "both pretentious and trite." He now was convinced that Ludovic Seeley was right: "Murray Thwaite was one great con trick, a lazy, self-absorbed, star-fucking con trick." Then he accidentally opened Danielle's e-mail: "And while the message said nothing scandalous, he just knew, he suddenly knew. From the tone, from its brevity. He was young but he wasn't a fool. He just knew. And the deformation was irrevocable and complete."

He was convinced that Marina really wanted him to write the "devastating" article that he was now working on. So he is sitting in his jockey shorts in Julius's sublet, "penning the article that would change the world. Or change his world, for sure. This was revolution for you. More Dostoyevsky than Tolstoy (he'd still not made it to the end of War and Peace, but Crime and Punishment, now there was a novel!)."

Suddenly the door opens and Julius enters with another man. Bootie covers his "near nakedness" with his hands and moves toward the futon where he left his clothes. Julius demands, "Who the fuck are you? ... And what the fuck are you doing in my house?" Bootie calls him "Julian" when he realizes who Julius is, and is corrected immediately, though Julius says, "I know who you are. Shake Your Booty. Marina's cousin, right?" Then he asks his real name and apologizes: "I'm sorry. I totally forgot. I thought it was next week. That you were coming."

Bootie gets dressed, and Julius introduces the man with whom he was entwined when they burst into the room as Lewis. "Bootie blinked solemnly at the muscular youth, at his fine, shaven head, his mocha skin, his bare biceps.... He couldn't tell whether Julius was drunk, or high." Bootie explains that he has nowhere else to go, but Julius doesn't respond. It's Lewis who manages to get Julius to leave, but not before Julius says, "She never mentioned you were fat." Lewis protests, "Man, that isn't necessary," and scolds Julius for "harassing the kid." He leads Julius out and then sticks his head back in to apologize. "Bootie knew that Lewis was not Julius's boyfriend.... Where was he? And who was Lewis?" But he returns to thinking about his manuscript.

Julius wakes with a hangover and regrets -- regrets for picking up Lewis, for the fact that Lewis lives just three blocks from David's apartment, and that he had been rude to Bootie. "The whole thing a colossal fuck-up."

Julius wallowed in the despair of his hangover: What the fuck was he doing with his life? With himself? He had meant to be sorting out his career this year; had been diverted -- so thoroughly -- by love; and now he wasn't even any good at that. He was an asshole, a selfish, screwed-up jerk. He was supposed to take the ten-thirty train out to Scarsdale for an extended weekend of Cohen-charming.

He had stayed in the city so he wouldn't have to spend as much time around David's mother, Adele, who can't remember where Julius is from -- "Is it Ohio?" she'd ask. "Illinois?" -- that his mother is Vietnamese and not Korean, and that his father is a football coach and not a bus driver. He claimed to be working on the piece Marina had asked him to write for The Monitor, but David had warned him that the cocaine he was using was not "going to help you write any piece at all, or even to get started." This fueled "the beginning of the anger that, well fueled, had him insulting Marina's stupid cousin."

He has four hours to go before he catches the train to Scarsdale, and he realizes that to justify staying in the city he has to come up with at least a subject for his article. "Or maybe he would do a little more of the stuff and power straight on through." He sees "a man leaning against the wall outside his apartment building who looked at once familiar and unfamiliar.... He reminded Julius of someone." He thinks it might be a spy hired by David. His thoughts are rambling and addled, and finally he decides he needs just an hour of sleep.

Marina has brought Ludo to Stockbridge where they share a bed "without parental comment." In the morning she sees her mother walking across the lawn and goes out to join her. She tells Annabel that she's going to finish her book and that she's going to marry Ludo. Her mother gives her a muted congratulation that Marina realizes is tinged with reservations. Marina tells her, "We're completely transparent and honest with each other. Not like our house, where we all pretend that we're honest but actually it's all bullshit." But Annabel assures her that she's happy for her: "You're alight with it. You're beautifully alive."

Marina tells her that they plan to marry on Labor Day weekend. "The magazine launches about ten days after that." And here we should remember that the novel is set in 2001. Once you learn that fact, and that the novel is set in New York City, you've seen Chekhov's gun: the one that, if it's shown in the first act, has to go off in the third act. Labor Day 2001 was September 3, eight days before 9/11.

They talk about how Annabel and Murray never argue. "Danielle had long ago joked -- to Marina's abiding annoyance -- that Annabel seemed, sometimes, like Murray's mother." And Annabel admits that "although I thought I knew him well when we married, my picture was colored by what I believed him to be.... I had to learn to see him clearly, and learn not to be disappointed." But Marina "did not want to have this conversation." They talk instead about the wedding, which Marina wants to have in Stockbridge, and about whether his family is coming: Ludo has only his mother and a younger brother named Darius, a journalist in Sydney with whom he doesn't get along. As for bridesmaids, Marina just wants Danielle: "It's weird, though. She basically set us up, Ludo and me, but she's been very strange about it all. About us.... Snippy. As if she's envious, or as if she doesn't like him. Or both." She thinks Danielle is "sorry that I have a job, and ... that I'm going to finish my book." She's also hurt that Danielle declined her invitation to spend the Fourth with her.

Murray then comes out, but Marina is not ready to tell him about the engagement.

Danielle is working in her office on a program about plastic surgery gone wrong, and is looking at pictures of buttocks deformed by liposuction. "If she did this well, if the ratings were good, Nicky would let her have any story she wanted:  reparations for Aborigines; nihilist revolution in the media; heck, why not a full hour on something crazy, like women terrorists?" She realizes that because of her relationship with Murray, she will probably never spend the Fourth of July in Stockbridge with the Thwaites again.

Her life has been "upended" by the affair and she feels like an addict. "She smelled him on her clothes, the biscuity waft of cigarettes that now permeated her once-clean studio and all its contents." She keeps a bottle of single-malt Scotch and a carton of Marlboros in her cupboard. She knows that Marina didn't believe her when she said she had to work instead of coming to Stockbridge, but that she "thought it was all about Seeley."

Then the office phone rings and, thinking that only Murray would be calling her, "'Beloved,' she whispered into the receiver." Unfortunately, it's Marina, who wants to know who the beloved is. Danielle lamely says, "I thought it was going to be my mom," which Marina, knowing Randy Minkoff, certainly doesn't believe. But Marina delivers the news: "I wanted you to be the first person after my parents to know. We're getting married." Danielle takes "a deep breath" and says she's happy for her. "That's -- amazing news." And Marina insists that she come for the Fourth: "There are going to be fireworks in Stockbridge. Consider it the engagement party." She won't take no for an answer, so Danielle reluctantly consents.

Later, on the street, Danielle sees Bootie "truffling toward the subway with a pile of papers under his arm." She calls out to him, and reintroduces herself. They observe that neither of them went to Stockbridge. He also confirms that he's "working for Murray these days. Probably not for long." But when she asks why he only shrugs. He tells her that he's writing an article for Marina and that she said Danielle had suggested it. "'So I guess I owe you a thank-you.' He didn't sound grateful." He assures her, "It's going to be big." As they part, Danielle observes,

He looked a little crazy. Unwell. 

"Good luck with that, then."

He nodded, head down, and shuffled off.

4. The Emperor's Children, by Claire Messud, pp. 116-157

May. Chapter Fifteen: Do You, Napoleon? Chapter Sixteen: The Fat Man Cometh; Chapter Seventeen: No Place Like Home; Chapter Eighteen: The Pope's End; Chapter Nineteen: Bootie Takes New York.

_____

Danielle meets Ludovic ("Ludo, please") for lunch at an expensively trendy restaurant:

their hors d'oeuvres, a diverse pair of glistening, wispy constructions adrift on oceans of white porcelain, hers a supposed chèvre-and-bell pepper mille-feuille (or Napoleon) and his recognizable as a salad only by the three emerging spears of well-oiled endive that stood guard over their huddled, intestinal beetroot and marinated onion core.

Their conversation proceeds with the charged archness and hyper-self-consciousness of a couple in Henry James. "She didn't want him ever to suspect that his movements had an almost physical hold over her, as if she were unwillingly his marionette." So they fence a while about what his plans are for The Monitor and whether she will write about them, until Ludo comes out with it: "Forgive me the circumlocutions, please. What I'm saying, all I'm saying, is that we might speak more clearly and understand each other better if you were to tell me what it is you're hoping I can do for you."  Which is her cue to ask, "What makes you think I would want you to do something?" She is "truly taken aback, unsure of whether to take offense. And yet: to be direct had been her goal. Directness above all."

Julie Chen

And so it goes, as they dance around a word he had used in Sydney: "revolution." But he is not particularly forthcoming on that matter, so instead of talking about the publication, or the film she might make about it, or about ideas, they talk about people. The woman he was with at the Metropolitan, she learns, was Julie Chen, who declined an offer of employment with him. So Danielle brings up the possibility that he might have a job for Marina. On learning that Marina is Murray's daughter, he denounces him as "That lazy wombat of a man. He's been riding on reputation for as long as we've been alive. Hasn't got an original thought in his head.... There's nothing clear-eyed about his analyses; they're rants, just empty rants. And people buy them because they subscribe to some antiquated notion that a passionate reporter is more valuable than a dispassionate one. Bollocks."

Ludo invokes the name of Napoleon: "An important chap, my dear, particularly here, particularly now.... It was said that 'if Napoleon is France, if Napoleon is Europe, it is because the people whom he sways are are little Napoleons.'" Danielle is, somewhat understandably, puzzled by the quotation, and Ludo continues:

"Show people that Murray Thwaite is the Wizard of Oz, a tiny, pointless man roaring behind a curtain. They learn what they are, and show them themselves. What could be more compelling than that?" 

And Danielle, "both alarmed and attracted by Seeley's outburst," observes that perhaps Ludo isn't the best potential employer for Marina. And back in her apartment that night she remembers "the electricity of him, the charisma, the focus. As if he were alight. And the hand, delicate but firm, not directing but engaging, somehow, a sensation that carried within it, surely not just for her, the promise of something -- was it sex" Y' think?

Marina is sitting on the floor outside her father's office, "collating and labeling the articles she had downloaded and printed out for her father," when Annabel walks down the hall, chides her for sitting on the floor and straining her eyes, and "swept into her husband's room with a peremptory rap on the door." Murray asks if it can wait and she says it can't: "That was your nephew on the phone." Bootie has called (sorry about that) to say that he's coming to New York and "needs a place to stay while he figures things out." Marina says, "He's like one of your clients." After observing that they'll be "off to Stockbridge in a few weeks," so they won't have to put up with him for very long, Murray agrees to his visit. Both Marina and Annabel are skeptical about the prospect of a nineteen- or twenty-year-old houseguest, but Annabel observes,

"It may work out. Maybe he'll become your father's indispensable right hand."

"Careful, Mom. That's my job."

"Oh, really? I thought it had been mine, all these years. You're welcome to it, though."

Murray goes back to work after dinner, but his mind is on other things: his daughter, his nephew, and Danielle. Aside from the fact that Danielle has "dark curls, soulful eyes, and fine breasts," he thinks he should enlist her in working on Marina's future, so he writes Danielle another e-mail, carefully drafting and rewriting for "the right inferences, connotations, shades of possible meaning. Because he wanted her to read the message several times, to worry -- as he expected she would -- about its propriety, only to be reassured, in  every phrase, that there was nothing untoward to be found, that it was a message Annabel might as easily have written." But he also wanted her to sense the subtext: "that he needed her presence more than her advice."

Then he decides, even though it's almost eleven p.m., to call his sister in Watertown to inquire about her son. Judy is surprised to hear that he's coming to New York, since she believed he was staying in Amherst to enter summer school at U Mass. The conversation goes somewhat at cross-purposes for both at them, and after he hangs up, Murray thinks about his mother, who "dreamed for herself and her son: of wider vistas, of glittering cocktail parties on Park Avenue, of fancy hotel rooms and travel to Europe. Most important, of Harvard." She had "succeeded in ... turning her boy into someone, something, she couldn't understand."

He compares his own childhood -- "in which you could barely open the front door on account of the stairwell ahead" -- to that of Marina, who was "raised as he'd wished to have been raised, and stymied, now, by the very lack of smallness, by the absence of any limitations against which to rebel." But he rejects the idea of her giving up her "life of privilege, moving to some Watertown of the heart." He also remembers how his father had discouraged his ambitions: "You see, Murray, I know you want to go out and write books, or something like that. But only geniuses can be writers, Murray, and frankly, son...." He reflects that he "had slain his father, no question about it, so that the memory of him was slightly pathetic." So he feels compelled to find out what his nephew might be like.

And then he checks his e-mail and finds Danielle suggesting they meet for a drink. This excites him until he hears a scream from Marina across the hall.

Marina has been trying to work on her book, but finding that it's been so long since she did anything on it that her notes mean nothing to her. They "were several years old, and didn't readily serve their madeleine-like purpose of conjuring intellectual arguments entire." It was like "the archaeological excavation of a lost culture -- the lost culture being, of course, her own earlier thoughts." She thinks of how others would regard her failure: Danielle and her mother would try to "buck her up," and Julius would take her out for "a round of afternoon martinis, an enjoyable enough remedy but one she knew, from now considerable experience, to be ineffective." And her father would look at her notes and tell her, "See? It's all here, right in front of you. You've done all the hard work, now just get on with it!"

So she wanders around the house, thinking that she should be careful about stepping in cat vomit, and then enters the guest room that Frederick will be staying in and finds the cat dead in the middle of the bed. "And although a part of Marina was not particularly shocked, and registered simply: 'Oh, so this is death,' another part of her -- the child, she would chide herself -- recoiled, and emitted the choked cry that brought her father running."

They decide that they will leave the cat there for Annabel or Aurora, the maid, to deal with, though Marina worries, "Don't dead things, you know, leak?" Murray reassures her that it's not a problem in the short term. She also worries if it's a bad omen for Frederick, who'll be staying in the room, and he tells her, "I don't believe in omens. And you shouldn't either. No self-respecting atheist should believe in omens." Still, in her room that night, though she recognizes that "the cat was an invalid and an eyesore, scrawny, patchy, yowling, and of course vomiting," she sheds tears, partly for the cat but also for "the burdens she still had inexorably to confront, while the cat, still and free and cushioned by the finest goose down, by the ironed Irish linen, had found repose."

Bootie has arrived and now sits on a bench in Central Park trying to read War and Peace. (This might be a good point to observe how references to War and Peace keep cropping up in the novel: Not only Bootie's efforts to read it, but also Julius's ongoing question whether he's Pierre or Natasha. And then there's Ludo's fascination with Napoleon. Someone who has read the novel more recently than I could probably come up with others.) But the distractions of New York keep catching his attention. He had gotten up early to get away from the Thwaites: "He couldn't quite bear their bonhomie, the warmth and near indifference of their welcome, the way they assumed ( and the very rightness of the assumption rankled) that he was there because he wanted to be assimilated into their lives, to be a part of them." 

He had gone with them the previous evening to a barbecue in "a penthouse apartment with a wraparound terrace" with a "fabulous view." But he was "predictably, unbearably -- baffled and flushed at the gathering, his shirt stained first by sweat and then by the red wine he fumblingly spilled on it." (Like Pierre in War and Peace, Bootie is fat and socially awkward.) "The Thwaites' New York society, after all, was not what he wanted. (Or was it? He couldn't be sure.) He wanted, instead, his uncle's pure life of the mind."

As he's sitting there in Central Park, Marina runs by on her way to a yoga class and stops to talk. She invites him to go downtown with her, where she's meeting Danielle and plans to go shopping, and they agree to meet in the lobby of the apartment house at ten-thirty. The subway ride scares him, and he vows not to take it back uptown. "Perhaps there was a bus; perhaps he'd walk; but this subterranean inferno, in all its constrictions, he could not tolerate." They meet Danielle "hunched over a bagel at Dean & DeLuca," and he is smitten: "she was small, bosomy, beaky, redeemed from plainness by the light of her eyes and her pillowy lips. When she grinned, lopsidedly, her face crinkled into something dearer, more accessible than beauty. He liked her then, and too, for the poorly blotted daub of cream cheese on her pale blue shirt."

She consoles him for his discomfort at the penthouse party and in New York in general. "I'm from Columbus, you know, not like Miss New York here, who couldn't imagine life anywhere else --" Marina protests, but Danielle explains that for someone who isn't a native New Yorker, the city is "disconcerting. It's like you know it and you don't know it, at the same time. You've seen it so often, the images, in movies, on TV -- you feel as though it's yours. But of course it's different. The way something you've dreamed is different from the real thing."

Danielle asks Frederick why he's here, and he says he wants to study, but not "in a school.... I mean, I don't really trust institutions at this point." He wants to study on his own, he says. Danielle responds, "Wow," and "Marina just stared, with a fixed, bright smile, as though he had spoken gibberish." He explains that he has "a program" and his "own reading lists. And I take notes, and I write stuff up." Marina suggests, "Maybe my dad could read your essays.... I mean, you're his nephew. And he loves -- What's it called? Mentoring." Danielle asks what he's studying, and after saying, "Mostly whatever," he feels bad and says, "Right now, it's Emerson and Tolstoy." When Marina says that Anna Karenina is "one of my all-time favorites," he tells her he's reading War and Peace. "From the vigor of her nodding, Bootie wondered if she had perhaps not read War and Peace. He didn't want to catch her out, so he drank his coffee instead."

And then Danielle says that they might know someplace for him to live. They tell him about Julius, and the apartment he needs to sublet. They go off into worrying about whether Julius is getting too caught up in the drugs that David takes. He "has always liked to imply that his life's a little, um, risqué" as a touch of glamour -- "And glamour counts, for Julius -- he's insecure that way" -- but "this time there's something ... unnervingly authentic about his references to drugs," Danielle says, and Marina adds, "We'll be worried when he doesn't mention them at all anymore."

But Danielle and Marina's chatter, "the river of gossip about Julius's love life" has turned Bootie off. "This was no better than Amherst, than Oswego -- and this in a world he had imagined, somehow, to be higher." They take their leave to go shopping, and suggest that he take the elevator to the top of the World Trade Center for the view.

2. The Emperor's Children, by Claire Messud, pp. 34-67

March. Chapter Five: Poetry Makes Nothing Happen; Chapter Six: The Pope Is Sick; Chapter Seven: "Introducing Murray Thwaite" by Roanne Levine (newspaper staff); Chapter Eight: An American Scholar; Chapter Nine: Rumpelstiltskin.

_____

Marina's father, Murray Thwaite, gives a lecture (at Columbia, we deduce later) on the antiwar movement of the '60s and '70s and afterward is introduced to a student, Roanne Levine, who wants to interview him for the student newspaper. The fact that she is "quite pretty" holds Murray's attention, so they go to a bar accompanied by her professor, Eli Triplett, where she asks him questions and he criticizes her choice of drink, a White Russian: "'More a food than a drink, my dear girl,' Thwaite observed." When she leaves, he asks for her phone number. Then he returns to his apartment on Central Park West, where he steps in some cat vomit left by "the Pope, their seventeen-year-old bony Abyssinian."

Central Park West

Danielle has returned from Australia, and when she has has recovered from jet lag and learned that her project on the Aborigines was a no-go, she telephones the Thwaites to get Marina's number in Stockbridge. But Marina answers the phone and explains "about Julius's visit, the big snowstorm, how they had both felt freaked and claustrophobic in the house, and how she had offered to drive him home to town." Then she decided to stay because her father had invited her to accompany him to a dinner party. Her mother, Annabel, seldom went to public events, "and sometimes people who were unaware of the bond between Murray and Marina mistook her for his trophy wife."

Danielle tells her that since the Australian project has been canceled, she's thinking of doing "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.... 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.... My idea is that it's kind of like Russia a hundred years ago, the nihilists, right? Like in Dostoevsky and Turgenev."

Marina invites Danielle to come to dinner at her parents', but when Danielle arrives, Marina is having her hair cut. The Thwaites' apartment, on Central Park West in the upper Eighties, is "a delicious and resplendent haven." Murray greets her, and they chat while wait for Marina to return. "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."

Annabel Thwaite arrives before Marina, and they discuss what to do about dinner. They decide to order Chinese. "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)." She feels like she needs to rescue Marina from living with her parents. "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.... 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."

Annabel does all the prep work for dinner, with Danielle's help, but without Murray's or Marina's, even though Annabel was "the only one among them who had put in a day at an office." She was the founder of a non-profit organization that works with social services, and she tells about the day spent with a fourteen-year-old boy who was in foster care because of an abusive stepfather, but who himself pushed a foster mother down the stairs and broke both her legs.

After dinner she and Marina go to Marina's bedroom. "'I feel guilty,' Danielle went on, 'making extra work and then not helping.' What she meant was that she felt guilty about how little Marina had helped." She asks Marina if everything is going okay: "This. Everything. The book. Living at home, for God's sake. It can't be easy." She suggests that Marina could get a job, which is the furthest thing from Marina's mind. But they wind up talking about Julius.

Roanne Levine's article about Murray appears in the newspaper, and Messud perfectly captures the stiff and formulaic style of a journalistic profile. We learn some important details from it, however: Murray is sixty years old, a monthly columnist for The Action, a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, and has "written or edited twelve books, including Rage in the System and Underground Warfare in Latin America. He was born in Watertown, New York, in 1940, and the subsequent reference to the recently inaugurated George W. Bush dates the action of the novel in 2001. He graduated from Harvard in 1961 and had a Fulbright to Paris and traveled around Europe for a year afterward, during which he began writing as a freelancer for the Boston Globe. He married Annabel Chase in 1968 and Marina, their only child, was born in 1970. He detests Bill Clinton -- "This guy has set us back twenty years" -- as well as Bush -- "our puppet dictator by decree" who "has fewer brains than my Abyssinian cat. An exceptionally gifted feline, by the way."

Frederick "Bootie" Tubb, who is Murray's nephew, is soaking in the bathtub reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. His mother, who is Murray's sister, is teaching high school. He felt "at once safe and oppressed in his bath, wanting to stay there all afternoon and wanting to escape forever at the same time."

His left wrist wavered under the full burden of the book, but he did not drop it. Maybe he could read just half of it? Would that be enough? Because he had a stack of several other novels he'd assigned himself to get through by June, and they were long, too: Moby-Dick, Gravity's Rainbow, War and Peace. The very thought of them made him sleepy.

Bootie had dropped out of college at Oswego after a revelation: "This is a farce. I am living, we are all living, a complete farce." He had gone to Oswego even though he had been accepted at Harvard because Harvard had failed to offer him a scholarship, "just a load of complicated forms to fill out and the promise of a mountain of debt." But he never told his mother he'd been accepted, because he knew she would try to find a way to make it work but "she would end up with her head in her hands at the kitchen table because it simply couldn't be managed." So he told the high school guidance 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." At Oswego he realized his mistake:

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 he decided to educate himself. And now he decides that the only place to complete his education is New York. "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." But he has no money, and now he is thinking of selling his '89 Civic.

Julius has taken a job as a temp, working in an office with a "spread of desks and low partitions that so resembled a human parking lot." He feels degraded but needs the money: "It was too shaming: he couldn't expose this vulnerability, this rank need for cash, even to his dearest friends." And then he meets his boss, David Cohen:

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 [i.e., the commuter train to Connecticut] 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.

The firm is "engaged in middle man activity, the procuring of rights." And Julius reflects that David "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 buy a book or seeing a film. He did it all the time." And so Julius "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.... 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."