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.

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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.

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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."

1. The Emperor's Chidren, by Claire Messud, pp. 1-33

March. Chapter One: Our Chef Is Very Famous in London; Chapter Two: Bootie, the Professor; Chapter Three: Reflexology; Chapter Four: As for Julius Clarke. 

_____

On her last evening in Australia, Danielle Minkoff, who has been there to research a television program on the Aborigines, attends a dinner party in Sydney hosted by Lucy Leverett and her husband, Roger. There she meets Ludovic Seeley, who is about to move to New York to edit a magazine, The Monitor, owned by the Australian media magnate Augustus Merton (think Rupert Murdoch). Lucy Leverett owns a gallery that specializes in Aboriginal art, and Roger, her friends Moira and John tell her, is a novelist -- not a good one but celebrated and powerful in Australia. Danielle realizes what that means, and says:

"There's a nasty-looking little Chinese restaurant in the East Village with a handwritten sign in the window -- a dirty window, too -- that says 'our chef is very famous in London.' But not in New York, or anywhere outside of London."

"And probably not in London either, eh?" John had said, as they approached the Leveretts' front door.

"Roger Leverett is very famous in Sydney, sweetheart, whatever you say."

Danielle finds Roger Leverett to be "jovial and solicitous" but also "a narcissist, delighted by the sound of his own voice and the humor of his own jokes." Ludo Seeley speaks with an "Australian inflection so slight as to be almost British.... His face, so distinctive, struck her as that of a nineteenth-century portrait, a Sargent perhaps, an embodiment of sardonic wisdom and society, of aristocratic refinement."

Danielle herself is a New Yorker, though she grew up in Columbus, Ohio. "There was, for Danielle Minkoff, only New York. Her work was there, her friends were there -- even her remote acquaintances from college at Brown ten years ago were there -- and she had made her home in the cacophonous, cozy comfort of the Village."

Watertown, New York

So in the first chapter of The Emperor's Children, we are in the bright and chatty upper reaches of the creative classes. But that tone changes abruptly in the second chapter, which takes place at the "spacious but crumbling" home in Watertown, N.Y., of Judy Tubb and her son, Frederick, whom she calls, to his embarrassment, "Bootie." Judy is a widow -- her husband, Bert, died of pancreatic cancer four years earlier -- and her daughter, Sarah, has married and moved out. We also learn that Judy has a niece named Marina.

Judy is trying to get her bookish, overweight son to get up and help her shovel snow. "He'd been a chubby boy, and bespectacled, but always respected, even admired, in a funny way. He'd been valedictorian." After he graduated from high school last year, he went off to the state university at Oswego, but came "home at Christmas with twenty or thirty pounds on him and a fistful of incompletes saying that college was bullshit, or at least Oswego was bullshit, that his teachers were morons and he wouldn't go back." So Judy tackles the snow-shoveling herself until it guilts her son into coming out and finishing the job.

Stockbridge, Massachusetts

We are a long way from a literary dinner party in Sydney. But now we move again, to Marina Twhwaite's parents' house in Stockbridge, Mass., where she is holed up trying to work on a book about children's fashions for which she has already spent the advance.

 She has been working alone, but the solitude has caused her to have anxiety attacks, so she has summoned her friend Julius Clarke to stay with her. She would have called Danielle to stay with her, but Danielle is in Australia. Now she and Julius are getting on each other's nerves. He is massaging her feet and is trying to decide whether he is Pierre or Natasha in War and Peace: "the solitary, brooding loner or the vivacious social butterfly." The debate is brought on by his breakup with a boyfriend. Marina has also broken up with the man she had been living with, "Al -- Fat Al, her friends called him, because he had a belly on him, of which she had claimed to be fond." She had been "the most settled among her friends" and was now the least. Her father, Murray Thwaite, had initiated the book project by arranging for her to meet with "a powerful editor." She was now on the third editor, and her mother had suggested the retreat to Stockbridge to finish the book.

Julius was from Danville, Michigan. His father, Franklin Clarke, "had been a Green Beret in Vietnam, which was where he had met Thu, Julius's mother, after whom the boy took." Julius and his two sisters were all "dark and wide-eyed and frail like their mother," whereas their father was "A big, physically awkward man with a square head and jowls." But even after learning that his son was gay -- "Julius had been a fruit from the beginning, and was teased as a sissy in grade school -- tough Frank doted as much upon his boy as upon his more conventionally successful daughters." When he visited Julius in the East Village and went out to dinner with him, Julius realized that his father looked "like his son's suburban john, a married sugar daddy getting  a bit of boy on the side."

Julius had become a successful critic just out of college at Brown, where he had made friends with Marina and Danielle, by sashaying "into the office of the Village Voice -- with a youthful certainty that attitude could carry him. And for a long time, it had.... His devastating but elegant book reviews were often cited; his less devastating but no less elegant film and television reviews rather less so; but still:  throughout his twenties, he lived a life of Wildean excess and insouciance.... He was aware that at thirty he stretched the limits of the charming wastrel, that some actual sustained endeavor might be in order were he not to fade, wisplike, away: from charming wastrel to needy, boring failure was but a few, too few, short steps."

Marina, feeling entitled, never really asked herself if she was good enough. Whereas he, Julius, asked himself repeatedly, answered always in the affirmative, and marveled at the wider world's apparent inability to see the light. He would have too show them -- of this he was ever more decided, with a flamelike conviction. But he was already thirty, and the question was how? 

So much for exposition: We have met Danielle, Marina, and Julius, as well as the so-far apparently only tangentially related Judy and Bootie Tubbs. Now we wait to see how their stories merge and develop.