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.

5. The Emperor's Children, by Claire Messud, pp. 158-187

May. Chapter Twenty: Julius's Dilemma; Chapter Twenty-one: Awards Night; Chapter Twenty-two: Enough About Us.

_____

David has gone to Scarsdale to see his family, and Julius has yielded to temptation and made a date with "another, unknown man, summoned over the Internet and known only as Dale, a stallion (or so he promised) and a fitness instructor (or so he claimed), a guy whose moniker was SweetCheeks and who had promised an encounter both sensational and discreet." But now Julius is worried that David will return before the encounter can be consummated. He knows he is endangering his relationship with David, but he also finds casual sex a habit that's hard to  break: "Could one not be Pierre and Natasha at the same time?" Besides, he likes the "titillation of the risk of being caught," which reminds him of when he was a teenager and "his parents had thought him at the movies at the mall, while in reality he trawled the parking lot behind a bar called The Hub."

Dale turns out to be "a pasty-faced man of Julius's own age, with a near-shaven head, a bristly dun tickler on his chin, and a speckling of metal studs around his lobes." They bathe together, take some of David's cocaine, put some porn on, and have sex on the living room floor. Julius bathes again, tidies up, and waits for David. "In the wake of this encounter, Julius felt not sated, not guilty -- opposing but mutually viable emotions. Rather, he felt sad, and tired." He makes a "Grand Marnier-frothed mousse" for David, who arrives late, at ten-thirty. Julius makes a little scene, which then results in "eminently satisfying sex, a tad rough perhaps, but excitingly so, with the man who was absolutely his lover and -- at least for now, as Dale's visit had amply proven -- all that he should want."

Murray is receiving an award at an elaborate function, and Danielle is wearing a cleavage-exposing crimson dress that Marina had picked out for her. The event is a "Hollywood version of old New York" with everyone gathering in a hotel lobby that "had a slightly faux Victorian aura." Marina arrives on her father's arm, "and at the sight of his lips practically upon his daughter's hair, Danielle felt herself envious anew. She haddn't allowed herself fully to consider how she might respond to father and daughter together, now that she had, in some small, clandestine way, separate relationships with either of them." Actually, she's not entirely certain what sort of relationship she has with Murray, with whom she is to meet for a drink two days later. His e-mail correspondence has succeeded in being ambiguous enough that she wonders if she "had just imagined, invented -- how pathetic! -- the underlying flirtation."

When they get together in the crowd, Danielle asks Marina if Julius is coming to the event. "He didn't mention it, so I guess not. Part of the ongoing Invisible Man act -- imagine him, missing this? I'm seeing him later this week, though." Which annoys Danielle a little, who says, "I think I'm being cut out of his loop." When Marina observes that Julius's relationship with David must be really serious for him to give up "all this," Danielle scoffs at the event: "Look at these people. Do we really want to be like this? All smarmy and self-congratulatory?" Her denunciation of the superficiality of the occasion continues in a tone that reminds one of Bootie's criticism of the grade-grubbing students at Oswego and Amherst: "Look at all these preening clowns, dolled up in their Sunday best, everyone wanting to be more important than the next guy -- it's gross?" And she is annoyed when Marina responds with "an obtuse devotion to the more obvious tokens of status": "Don't you want to be more important than the next guy? You, of all people?"

Danielle is also annoyed at Marina's defense of the scene by pointing out that her father pretends not to care about such things, but actually does because "you have to care, or you won't succeed.... You won't succeed, for example, carping like that." Danielle has just suffered a setback at work because her boss has turned down her proposal, drawn from her conversation with Ludo, that a "revolution" is in the works, telling her: "There isn't revolution in a little clever sarcasm, Danny. It takes a lot more than that."

At this point, Marina spots Ludo, who looks less "scrawny" than he did when she first saw him at the Met. Danielle tells her that she suggested to Ludo that he should offer her a job. Ludo sees them and makes his way through the crowd. He tells Danielle that he saw the seating plan for the dinner and switched cards so that she is sitting next to him. He then turns his attentions to Marina.

Danielle could see something peculiar happening to Marina, a physical self-consciousness that made her more gangly, and less present. It was Marina's particular equivalent of Danielle's adjusting her neckline. Which meant she fancied him.

The tables in the ballroom are decorated with big showy flowers -- "birds of paradise, waratahs and kangaroo paw" -- "vulgar blips of red, orange, and violet [that] towered over the guests as if in parody of their grotesquerie." Ludo points out women in the crowd who remind him of the flowers. When she protests that she's wearing red, he compliments the dress, which she tells him Marina chose. She "spoke without thinking, then wished she hadn't." He compliments Marina's taste, but says he wishes he could overlook her father: "I have greater reason to malign him when the city's media luminaries come together like so many sheep in order publicly to reward his mediocrity." She mounts a defense: "I approve of Murray Thwaite, and feel he's diminished by accepting this award, because these people, this jury of so-called peers, is so appalling and mediocre." They continue to talk about the people there and their role in creating false values.

"Well, if you can't escape the system in any way, then what's the good of even thinking about it?"

"You forget your Napoleon, Danielle, my dear."

"Here we go again."

"Don't roll your eyes. If you can't escape the system,you must simply become the system."

"Alter it from within."

"No, not at all. Not 'within.' The very notion is fallacious. We've been over this before: You become the system. You become what people want to be."

"If you can guess what that is." 

Ludovic all but sneered. "Tonight, absurdly, it would seem to be Murray Thwaite." 

Danielle offers to introduce him to Murray after the speeches which are beginning, and which demonstrate perfectly -- even Murray's -- the banality and mediocrity of the event. He says the usual things about "integrity" and "pursuing truth" and "changing times, ... a culture increasingly preoccupied with form over substance, with the anointing of celebrities whom audiences were all too keen to worship" -- himself being an anointed celebrity there to be worshiped, eliciting a hiss from Ludo: "Kitsch. Pure kitsch." He does the usual self-deprecation of someone who is about to be given an award: "I grew up questioning the very notion of awards and prizes, the promise that any received ideas or individuals could be trusted."

He quotes a slogan of the Parisian revolutionaries of 1968: "'Rêve plus evolution equals Révolution' -- dream plus evolution equals revolution." This causes Ludo to scoff: "And as time has amply shown us, dreaming brings about no revolution at all, matey." During the applause he tells Danielle, "It's not even what he thinks people want to hear -- it's precisely what he thinks they don't want to hear, some sort of cod liver oil for the soul. They don't want to hear it, so it must be good for them. Preposterous. Studiedly insulting, which seems to me far worse than unwittingly insulting."

But Danielle also realizes that although Ludo is scornful of Murray, he's also eager to meet him.

Danielle thought, "Code. Napoleonic code," and this seemed, although in somewise far from apt, nevertheless perfectly to explain the man. This alternative morality, this still -- to her at least -- unreadable code, was Seeley's means to domination. To get everyone to see another way, his way, and then to make that way  the standard. Then to have them -- all of society's little Napoleons, all of us, she thought, under his sway. Her eagerness to dismiss Murray Thwaite's speech as absurd, to interpret his genuine courage in questioning the academy as a self-interested manipulation -- this, she thought, was Seeley-speak seeping unbidden into her brain. 

This is a good time to remember that this scene in the novel is set in May 2001, just as the Bush administration, with its cadre of neoconservatives, is beginning to take hold and to enforce the idea articulated by Karl Rove in response to reporter Ron Suskind, whom Rove labeled a member of the "reality-based community": "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."


Afterward, Danielle, Marina, and Ludo await Murray's arrival. Marina arranges for Ludo to sit up front in the town car they will take home. The "dapper driver" is named Hussein. Finally, Murray arrives, "surrounded by well-wishers who fell away one by one as if choreographed":

"Like some kind of god," whispered Seeley. Danielle looked at him, and looked at Marina looking at him, and wondered what on earth he was really trying to say.

A few days later, Marina keeps her date with Julius, who is severely hung over and whose itchy, runny nose betrays his increasing coke use. She is telling him that Frederick is creeping her out: She found him lurking in the kitchen after they returned from the awards ceremony with "six or seven people, pretty drunk, by then, in a festive way." He claimed that he hadn't been asleep and that he had come to get a drink in the kitchen, which was still dark, "so finally I said did he want to come join us -- weird enough in itself, but manners dictated -- and he says yes. Isn't that creepy?" Julius points out that he's "entitled to flash of glamour" and that he's young.


They find a coffee shop, and she brings up the fact that they don't see him much anymore: "Danielle and I have been thinking we're not male enough, or not gay enough, for your David." He avoids the issue, claiming that David is busy and that they're still discovering their relationship. She persists, and he brings up "the Natasha/Pierre distinction" again:

"Well, remember what happens to Natasha at the end? And nobody ever likes it, they all say, 'But where did the real Natasha go?' But the point is that she likes it. She's happy. That's the point."


Marina sighed. "How many times do I have to remind you, Julius? I haven't read the fucking novel."

Thus confirming Bootie's suspicion.


Marina now reveals that she's "interested in someone," who turns out to be Ludo. And that Ludo has asked if she would be interested in a job. It hasn't gone any further than that yet. "Do you want to go to bed with him or work for him?" Julius asks, and she replies, "Couldn't I do both?" Which reminds Julius of the start of his relationship with David, so he advises her, "not the best way to begin, maybe." And then he asks her a key question, "How does Danny feel about this guy?" Which Marina tries to evade, but finally asserts, "I don't think she feels anything about him at all.... She doesn't fancy him, as you put it. She'd have told me, if she did." Julius is not completely convinced of that, but advises Marina to follow through on the job offer.

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.

3. The Emperor's Children, by Claire Messud, pp. 68-115

March. Chapter Ten: Talking to a Grown Child. May. Chapter Eleven: A Mother Knows Best; Chapter Twelve: Danielle's List; Chapter Thirteen: Great Geniuses; Chapter Fourteen: All for Love.

______

Marina does the unthinkable: She enters her father's study, where he is working on his secret magnum opus that "would at last and indisputably elevate his name from the ranks of competent, even courageous journalists and thoughtful columnists to the rare air of immortals." It is to be a work of "philosophy," and is titled How to Live. "Annabel knew of this manuscript, the way a child knows about Narnia, with a mixture of hope and incredulity." Marina merely thinks of it as "Dad's Thing." Rumors of it have also leaked from Marina to her circle of friends, who think of it as "Murray Thwaite's Thing."

Marina is there because she has been unsettled by Danielle's suggestion that she get a job. And although she has broken an unwritten household rule by disturbing her father in his study, he is not upset:

He was, in so many ways, extremely proud of her -- not least of her beauty, which was, to him, each time a surprise, as though unwittingly he had thrown a perfect pot, or created a perfect bonsai -- but she could be, she was being, trying.

She points out to him that she is thirty, and at thirty he was already famous. She mentions Danielle's suggestion that she get a job, but she doesn't have anything particular in mind, which makes him "suddenly [see] his daughter as a monster he and Annabel had created -- they, and a society of excess." When he asks what she wants to do with her life, she remains vague: "something important." He thinks immediately of Roanne, who was ten years younger than Marina and not nearly so naïve. And when he suggests that she find a job in something that interests her, "Just a job," she tells him, "I worry that that will make me ordinary, like everybody else."

When she leaves, he asks her for Danielle's e-mail address, and then locks away his manuscript. "She had -- this was, of course, what one's children did -- ruined his stride, spoiled his momentum."

Three months later, Danielle's mother, Randy Minkoff, has come to New York from her home in Florida on a visit, and Danielle is taking her through the Metropolitan Museum. Randy is "ebullient, even overbearing," and "Danielle rather pitied her mother, stout and plucky and 'done,' beetling toward sixty as though she enjoyed it." Randy is impatient with Danielle's progress toward settling down, belittling her daughter's tiny studio apartment and reminding her that when Randy was her age she had two children "running around the house buck naked, screaming, if you can believe it."

Marina has been invited to join them for lunch "at the Metropolitan's swankier restaurant." Randy is unaware "that Danielle's dear friend told her own mother that Randy was 'really sweet, but, you know, vulgar in that Miami way." As she and Randy are standing in line for the restaurant, Danielle suddenly spots "the high, clear forehead of Ludovic Seeley," who is there with a young Eurasian woman. She has already scoped out the fact that Seeley is in town, and even located his e-mail address, partly on the pretext that she might write an article about the new magazine, The Monitor, that he is to be editing.

Marina arrives just as Danielle is telling Randy that her father, from whom Randy is divorced, claims to have lost twenty pounds on the Atkins diet. Randy is "charmed, a little daunted, as ever, by the Thwaite aura and sophistication, by a warmth that nevertheless carried about it an untraceable but distinct tinge of superiority."

While the three women are choosing a dessert, Ludovic Seeley suddenly appears at their table. Danielle introduces him, and finds out that the Eurasian woman is being interviewed for a job. He claims to have lost Danielle's e-mail address, or he would have contacted her sooner, so she provides it, claiming that she wanted his too, so she could get "'in touch ... about a project I'm working on -- so this is actually very ...' She trailed off, trying to make the pen write. 'Serendipitous,' finished Marina, showing her teeth, looking straight at Seeley. 'I think that's the word.'"

Later, in Randy's motel room, Randy indicates to Danielle that she liked "That guy, at lunch. The one with the sexy accent." And she says, "A mother sometimes knows best, Danny. I'm just mentioning, for the record, that I liked him." That evening, in her apartment "on the fifteenth floor of a white-brick 1960s building, the tallest of its kind for some blocks in all directions," Danielle also listens to a message from Marina on her answering machine: "I'm dying to know more about that Australian guy."

Danielle's apartment is her oasis, with its "wall of books, both read and unread, all of them dear to her not only in themselves, their tender spines, but in the moments or periods they evoked," including some "which suggested to her that she was, or might be, a person of seriousness, a thinker in some seeping, ubiquitous way." Her collection of CDs reflects "not so much an individual spirit as the generic tastes of her times: Madonna, the Eurythmics, Tracy Chapman from her adolescence; Cecilia Bartoli, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Mitsuko Uchida; more recently Moby and the posthumously celebrated folk-singing woman from Washington, D.C., who had died of a melanoma in her early thirties, and whose tragic tale attracted Danielle more than her soft covers of familiar songs."

Danielle sets out to make a list of all the things that are on her mind, "her competing anxieties, to find a hierarchy and a rhythm for them.

• First, though she doesn't want to, she has to call her mother and wish her good night in her room at the uptown Days Inn. 
• Second, she doesn't want to call Marina because she doesn't want to talk about Ludovic Seeley. 
• Third, she "seemed to have struck up an e-mail correspondence" with Murray Thwaite. "Their exchanges felt to her innocent -- he didn't flirt with her, as she understood the word; if anything, his tone was professorial, avuncular. But there was something not quite right about it. 
• Fourth, her mother has made an appointment for both of them at a nail salon that Randy read about in Vogue, and it conflicts with a meeting at work, and she's afraid if she tells her mother that she can't make the appointment, "that Randy Minkoff would crumple and cry. Than which there was no more prolonged and exhausting scene in the Minkoff family repertoire." 
• Fifth, "there was the matter of Julius" and "his new boyfriend, this mysterious David, who'd been on the scene for what? Two months now? Was it longer?" She was "vaguely indignant that Julius, of all people, who had always seemed to her far shakier a romantic prospect than anyone else she knew, had finally, apparently, withdrawn so firmly from the running." 

Bootie Tubb has been in Amherst, Mass., for three weeks. He finally got a job with his brother-in-law and saved up four hundred and sixty-eight dollars which he added to the six hundred and some dollars in his savings account. He put the money in a manila envelope, took his desktop computer, and "decided to keep the Honda, a portable hotel, as he saw it." He told his mother that he was going to visit his friend Donald from high school and see if he can get admitted to U Mass.

he left most of his books, including the David Foster Wallace, which he'd never finished and had never returned to the library, and Gravity's Rainbow, at which a quick glance had told him he would not read soon, but not Emerson, nor War and Peace. 

After three weeks in Amherst he has blown a lot of his money buying drinks for his friends at a bar near the U Mass campus. He is living in a squalid old house with four other students, including Donald, existing "largely on cereal (Frosted Flakes and Golden Grahams), and toast with peanut butter, and macaroni and cheese from a box, of the chemically orange sort." But now school is ending and two of the young men in the house are leaving town, so if Bootie is going to stay he will have to start chipping in on the rent -- "three-fifty a month for Jump's room, and, like, we can't get by without it, you know?"

So Bootie is faced with getting a job as a waiter or a grocery store clerk or pursuing his dream of New York by getting in touch with his uncle Murray Thwaite. In his copy of Emerson he reads, "Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and so their house and street life was trivial and commonplace." This inspires him to get in touch with his uncle, even though he had not seen Murray Thwaite since he, Annabel, and Marina had come to Watertown for his father's funeral. Bootie was fifteen then.

Uncle Murray had made much of him, had leaned by the fireplace in the living room with an elbow on the mantel and a scotch in hand, and had quizzed Bootie -- he'd called him Fred -- about what his plans were, after high school, and whether he'd thought about journalism.... This line from Emerson surely was a sign, pointing him to his cousins, who did not yet know him.

Julius and David have been to Long Island for the weekend, but Julius has been uncomfortable with David's friends: "Not one of their fellow guests had raised a familiar eyebrow when Julius was introduced, as clear an indication as he could have wanted that there were no Village Voice readers in their midst: they were merely a posse of Wall Street Journalers who might sneak a risqué peek at Out on weekends." But Julius maintained his composure for David's sake because "he was consciously striving, in this instance, to be Natasha rather than Pierre, to remain a sparkling, light-handed companion behind whose mercurial liveliness he had to trust David could discern, when he was ready, the makings of a devoted partner."

Pitt Street, Lower East Side

David was everything he had always known he wanted, with, to boot, an alluring edge of temper. He liked to drink; he liked, in an almost naïve way, the excitement of cocaine, the mechanics of it and the illicit aura. Julius, less naturally inclined to drugs, was interested, rather, in David's interest. And David thrilled to the notion that he was "keeping" Julius, that Julius was his "geisha" -- it was a word used by David, vaguely offensive to Julius, Eurasian after all, in its random Orientalism, but he let it pass without comment.

But now David asks Julius to move in with him, which means Julius has to sublet his studio apartment. He packs up his clothes, but leaves behind his college edition of Proust in French and "the untouched two-volume Musil filched, years before, from the books department at the Voice; and he left, too, the long-abandoned manuscript of his novel, begun at about the time Marina had signed her famous book contract."

Chelsea

Julius's apartment is on Pitt Street, on the Lower East Side, and he needs to sublet it to "someone prepared to lie to the landlord, to keep the answering machine message unchanged, to receive mail elsewhere." He piles all his belongings into the cab and rides "uptown, across town, to the comparative social Everest that was Chelsea."