DARIUS WAITED MONTHS but Barry’s watch-out-for-Darius remark was still nagging at him just before Christmas break. Finally, slyly, he asked Jane whether she observed anything dark or evil in his personality. Jane’s lips worked in a way that could have meant yes, but she said, “Of course not. You’re too innocent to be evil.” Darius persisted with his questions—me, me, me, she noticed—like every emotionally stunted rich kid. It sounded to Jane like someone had accused him of being evil. Somehow Barry came into it which aroused her suspicions. She became more inward, more distracted, more self-interrogating and even more clipped in her responses to Master Van Needy.
The weather had gotten cold. It had already snowed. Tonight was clear, though. A huge pink sun cast a glow over everything, wrong-seeming because it was warm to the eye. Pink snow and golden-quoined Georgian brick façades shone on the west-facing houses along the Van Nests’ street. Darius snapped tiny icicles from the gutter of his personal school bus shelter, built by a gardener long ago and never really used. Everything was so quiet and empty he might have been the last person left on earth—and it was more enjoyable than lonely! Time itself felt like it was winding down.
Darius remembered being drawn to the evil Borgias as a child and wondered if that meant something. Maybe he had a tendency to darkness and had never noticed it. This was a surprisingly disturbing thought. And surprisingly surprising.
He’d always been in trouble at Choate, racking up a fantastic tally of demerits for going on strike in various classes. If that wasn’t exactly evil, he’d also been called up twice before the somber-faced cherubs of the Student Judiciary Committee (for dorm burglary and vandalism). His concerned English teacher had noticed how the blood and gore continued in his writing even after Life Sliced. And now Sohaila complained that he was always gloomy, though he suspected, in her case, it was her own guilty fretting. The New Jersey household had an outlandish, depressive atmosphere with ignored son, deranged father, mother and mother’s lover, all living together for years at this point.
Stunned to hear from Barry an hour ago, Darius had come down to wait at foot of the drive, the midpoint between his house and normalcy. He didn’t want Barry to drive up and see the single garland of aqua lights Sohaila and Stan had strung over a bay window of that bloated, embarrassing Tudor monstrosity.
At the Paul house earlier that afternoon, a friend of Barry’s had showed in a Malibu with an untalkative girlfriend. The three decided on an evening together. They practiced spinning out in the snow of an empty church parking lot. Barry suggested they invite Darius along.
On the way over, Barry, who happened to be at the wheel, made a skidding detour down Jane Brzostovsky’s snow-muted street. Emboldened by his companions and weed and a novel car, he skied the Malibu to a stop in front of Jane’s pinkened concrete stoop. The entry had been kicked free of snow, not shoveled. He started a merry honking.
Jane opened the door, rebounded inside to get her Chilean vacation parka and strode toward Barry, stalked rather. A ridge of snow fell when the driver’s side window glided down. “Hi!”
Jane’s lips compressed. Without using words at all, she made it plain she was furious. Animal hums or snorts accompanied her fierce get-out-of-that-car gesticulations. She squinted impatiently at the puttering elbow of exhaust rising from the tailpipe of the rusty Malibu. After she’d drawn him aside, she hissed, “What the hell is this, Barry? Who’s in there?”
“Just friends.”
“Great. Who?”
“No one. We were going to pick up Darius and hang out.”
“Oh, that’s lovely. Bring ’em all by. Get a load of the teacher I fucked.”
Aghast with pot-headed slowness, Barry whispered, “That’s not what I was doing!”
“Oh, really? As a matter of fact, we need to talk, Barry. I don’t know how you want to handle it with your gang here. But I can’t stand this anymore.”
“Gang?”
“Come in. I’m getting cold.”
“Wait a second. What do you mean? Talk about what? I’m supposed to be doing something.”
“Hanging out? Please, come in. Now,” Jane said frigidly. Her lips were nearly white.
With a put-upon sigh, Barry turned and called, “Go ahead, you guys!”
A townie scrambled across the front seat. He stuck his head and a shoulder out the driver’s side window. “Huh?”
“I said go! I can’t go. I can’t go. I’m staying.”
Jane snorted at the loudness of their voices. Everything in her life was teetering. She turned her back ostentatiously and yanked the parka tight. Barry explained to his friends how to find the Van Nest house where Darius would be waiting.
“You want me to come back in a while?” the townie asked.
“Maybe. I’ll call Darius.”
Jane laughed bitterly, softly.
“No,” Barry said. “Just forget about it. I can’t go tonight. Not yet. I’ll see you later.”
“How are you going to get home?”
“Just go!”
The townie was perfectly OK picking up a stranger, whose fancy bus shelter and driveway he eyed appreciatively. Darius was full of mild-mannered hesitation, which the townie found amusing. Jittering in the driver’s seat, he ad-libbed cajoling arguments and promised they’d pick up Barry later. “Hi,” the girl peeped when Darius got in. Darius sat in the back and watched them. The townie was a touch manic, which made the drive frightening at first. The girlfriend got a tiny ruby-barreled pipe of strong weed going.
Though Darius couldn’t understand much that was said in the front seat, he kept right-right-ing and smiling agreeably. The girl smooched the little pipe’s mouthpiece and shrank against her side of the car, so the smoke silently splashed against the glass. She was leaning as far as she could from the townie, but from the way she kept looking at him, glancing haughtily down her nose at his thigh, tugging on her bangs, snickering rudely when the back seat guy (Darius) said anything—from these clues Darius guessed at an intense, unhappy infatuation, which he was alarmed to recognize and identify with completely.
When a seed in the pipe popped, burping red sparks, they all laughed immoderately. Darius handed the pipe back to the front seat. He sank into a silence almost as deep as the girlfriend’s, cheerfully lethargic, a vision of black woods purling alongside the car.
They ended up at a large park. They lowered a chain which blocked the snaking main road, plowed at some point but snowed under again. The townie eventually swerved onto a different snow-shrouded surface. Lawn or road or bike path, it hadn’t been plowed at all. The Malibu handled the terrain better than expected, and they made it through a treeless opening in the woods to a dilapidated picnic shed, which the townie tried to set afire with his disposable lighter and hanks of vinyl torn from the back seat of the car. Stolen, the townie confided rather shyly. Darius was enjoying feeling less and less scared of him, but the townie’s wild sense of fun also had his stomach in knots.
When the sun was gone, the frigid night felt as alert as the inside of a kettle drum. Silence twisted off the snowy squeak of their steps. The coughing of their lighters and their stupid remarks fell quietly dead in the vast, cramped-sounding park. They listened to their bodies’ noises, to their heartbeats, which thrummed like a downpour thanks to drugs and the seething of blood in their ears
Later, the townie tried backing out at speed. Almost at once the Malibu slipped out of its wheel tracks. It fishtailed slowly, tires spinning, and lodged askew three feet from the original path. The tires beat up a froth of mud and snow. The woozy boys tried pushing the car while the girl took the wheel. They were outraged and laughing and a little worried. The car slithered a foot or two farther from the path and stuck fast.
All three went off to gather brush to wedge under the rear tires for traction. They tore branches from smaller trees and discovered several dead logs outlined under a pristine layer of snow. They uprooted an entire bush. Loaded like peasants, they trudged back to the car in single file. They didn’t talk. They were caught up in the sensual mixture of exertion and drugs.
Inward-looking as they were, they were slow to register a man standing by the Malibu. He jingled and held a high-powered flashlight. Though dim behind the foggy glare, they could see he was wearing a uniform. Everything about the drug-addled scene was strange. Was the man speaking to them or singing in a lovely baritone? When the light glared from side to side across their faces, the kids saw the black pallor of a ghost horse looming directly behind him. Shaking its head, its snout jerked up. Its tackle jingled. It blubbered a puff of breath at the stars with velvet nostrils.
The ranger pointed his flashlight where he wanted them to drop their branches. He’d already laid a field-testing kit on the hood of the Malibu. Letting go of his branches, the townie ran. His running turned into a high-stepping waddle when he got to patches of deeper snow. He hit an open ridge, where the snow had drifted away and rimed straw showed through. He hit his stride. He headed for the woods, away from all paths.
The ranger was slow to react. He muttered in annoyance. He bobbled the flashlight. Darius felt the glare of it on his cheek. His eyes squinted shut. He thought he heard a terse question or two. “You OK? Don’t you move, you hear me?” And the ranger pressed the reins of his gorgeous, half-real horse into Darius’s hands. Hips clattering with the implements of his trade, the ranger jogged after the townie for a short distance. Stretching her neck, the ghost horse tested the firmness of Darius’s grip on the reins. She lowered her eye to him, as bulbous and black as the night. Their breath misted together in a hay-scented cloud.
Evidently the ranger didn’t want to leave his horse for long. He returned. Neither Darius nor the girlfriend betrayed the townie car thief, but they were arrested themselves. Parents were called.
At exactly the moment the ghost horse chucked her head at the night sky, Barry Paul was stalking Jane Brzostovsky’s living room in his underwear. He felt betrayed. He paced with a bouncy bowleggedness and threw his arms in the air like an angry basketball coach. But he wasn’t trying to look funny. He really was angry. His pacing came to a stop when he noticed a wet spot darkening the front of his jockey shorts. He pinched it between thumb and forefinger, slimy rather than wet. Therefore from sex, not from peeing afterward. He started pacing again, wiping his fingertips on his belly, then on the small of his back.
Jane was wrapped in her comforter, curled in a stuffed chair. It bothered her how withdrawn she was. She was exhausted almost beyond feeling. Not that she didn’t have compassion for Barry, but it was hard to watch him like this. For herself: nothing, not even regret just at the moment.
She said, “Of course I knew—I should have known—sex would make you think what I said earlier didn’t hold anymore. I’m sorry. It’s shameless the way I keep putting so much pressure on you, Barry. But, among many other problems, the age thing is impossible. It’s sad, but it’s real, and insurmountable, and I’m just—I just let myself pretend sometimes. I’m sorry. You’ve got to understand, or at least trust me that we have to, have to, have to do something to get out of this, and—”
“You were just—” Punching the air, he cut her off. “You were just willing to do anything to weasel it out of me. Did I talk to anybody? Did I tell Darius about it? That’s the only thing you cared about.”
“No. They were two separate issues. Yes, I wanted to know. Yes, maybe I had a panic attack about it. That’s why I made you stay. But—and I know it’s unfair of me to claim this and it excuses nothing—but, Barry, with you I’m helpless. I just let it happen without thinking of you. Or thinking of anything.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Well, look, have I asked you what you and Darius did talk about in the end? No. Am I asking now? No. I don’t care anymore. Because I can’t help seeing there’s something much more important we have to address.”
In a dull, defeated tone, Barry mumbled, “Of course, I didn’t tell him. I never told anybody anything.”
Her relief sickened her. She opened her mouth. Then she turned to the window. Or rather to the cadaverous blur of herself on the glossy blackness. She could make out the faint, cheesy odor from his sneakers, which he’d self-consciously left at the foot of the stairs so they wouldn’t offend her.
“What’d he even say that made you think—”
“Oh, Barry. It doesn’t matter.”
“It does. If you want me to fuck up my life to solve your problem, I’d like to know what started the whole thing.”
“Nobody wants you to fuck up your life, Barry. We just have to find a way of dealing with this finally and absolutely. My only idea for how to do that is what I was talking about before. But my idea did not, did not, come about just because Darius talked to me. Even if I did flip out and get angry at you.”
“And then seduced me. I didn’t want to have sex.”
“I know.”
“This time. And now you’re throwing me out like—like Trotsky.” He made a grousing sigh.
“Barry, I’m not sending you into exile. We can talk about it. It’s just an idea. Mexico was only a for-example.”
He flopped onto the couch and complained, “Just tell me what he said.”
“Oh, Barry it was nothing. He asked whether it was true that I didn’t like him. Or if I thought he was evil.”
“You don’t like him.”
“I’ve never said that.”
“Well, but what did you two say about me?”
“Oh—”
“Say! Tell me!”
“He asked—was it true that I’d asked you, Barry, to watch out for him? And he told me he thought I had it backwards. He said you influenced him more than he did you.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“Oh, Barry, who cares? It was just the same maundering, self-conscious, me, me, me whining that he’s always done. It’s what he’s all about. Am I evil?!” she scoffed.
“See, I told you, you didn’t like him.”
“He’s just a child. A kid still. I’m sure he’ll grow up.”
“So, what do you want me to do? What am I supposed to do?”
“I haven’t really thought the whole thing through,” she admitted bitterly. “It’s probably a crazy idea. And you’re right. Maybe it is unfair. The idea was that if I left suddenly, it would look strange. Everyone would ask questions.”
“I wouldn’t tell.”
“I know, Barry, but people may have noticed something. I don’t know. It would open up a whole can of worms, because it would look strange for me to disappear. People would wonder. But then I thought if you went off for a while. Not forever. You wouldn’t be fucking up your life or anything of the sort. And I’m perfectly confident you can handle yourself. But if you went off for a while. Then, say, at the end of the school year, you come back, and by that time I’m gone. I can tell them I burned out. But it would look more normal for me to leave at the end of the year, easier to find another job. I could drop hints about being tired. People will have forgotten that you left. No one will make the connection. And then you can come back and start again at school, and it’ll just be this blip for you. This tiny blip.”
“But where do I go? How am I supposed to live?”
“I have money.” She lost her composure. Out of nowhere a wracking sob burst from her chest. She belched and panted for breath. A sore, hiccuppy flexion paralyzed her abdominal muscles for a while. She pulled the comforter to her jaw. Her hands smarmed her face, the nails pricking a nostril and an eyelid. Where did this ocean of grief come from? And where were the tears? Nothing trickled between her fingers. When poor Barry got up and tried to reassure her, stroke her hair with awkward manliness, she shoved him away. She shoved him roughly, though not as roughly as she wanted. She held back, because in some recess of herself she knew that, even at her weakest, even grief-stricken, she had much more power than was right.
After phone calls from a ranger’s station outside Camden, Darius and the girl were picked up by the girl’s tight-lipped father, a former Navy Seal. He assumed Darius was the instigator, basically a rapist, a case of mistaken identity that should have been laughable. In seething silence the not-so-old soldier dropped Darius off at home. Though a lot had happened, it wasn’t late, only midnight or one.
Darius came in the front door. In the tiled vestibule, he kicked off his boots. In the extravagant heat, snow had melted from the laces and the duct-taped seams. Stray clots of snow dropped from his wet socks as he padded into the front hall. Overhead, the big lantern cast a yolky blur of light, its lowest setting. As always Darius registered that this was where Colin Vail had hanged himself, and as always, without real thought, like telling the rosary, he ran through the possible mechanics of that confounding suicide. Had the rope been tied to the lantern or to the wrought iron ring above or to the balustrade of the landing? How long was it? Had Colin jumped or lowered himself? The idea of a counterweight was absurd.
Plaster ribbed arches intersected over the lantern and were supported by oaken corbels carved with the Wales, Medici, Bourbon and Barberini crests as if the pudgy industrialist who built the place had planned on a renaissance summit meeting. Could the corbels have supported a rope? Koechlin’s dreamy Nuits Persanes blasted from the front drawing room. Sohaila had turned up the volume of the CD in order to blot out everything.
Darius spotted her partway up the stairs, hugging her knees. She was hardly larger than the banister telamones. She wore a satin robe the color of skin, collar and cuffs embroidered in gold. She slapped her hand to the banister and pressed herself to her feet. She came downstairs heavily. Making a tense, snaky, after-you gesture with her forearm, she ushered Darius through the front drawing room. Les Nuits Persanes swelled and subsided.
At the far end of the room, past a shallow Tudor arch, was a further large sitting area. In enfilade beyond that was yet another room, a library, which was now outfitted as a bedroom. This apartment was Sohaila and Stan’s realm. The door to the library/bedroom was open, and Darius could see, as if through the wrong end of a telescope, Stan propped up in bed reading. Even in miniature, Stan’s Mephistophelean Van Dyke and flyaway, mad professor hair were unmistakable. The bedroom was bright, and Stan probably couldn’t see them in the dimness. He shook a fingertip in his ear with violent unselfconsciousness.
Sohaila sat on an upholstered bench outside the door. She couldn’t bring herself to look at Darius. Her gaze wandered the floor, the chair legs, his floppy socks. “Dah-li-ush,” she kept repeating his name. “I’m so mad,” she whispered.
She wasn’t wearing makeup, and half-erased, she didn’t resemble Sophia Loren or herself. Her suffering anonymity was impossibly poignant for Darius.
The arrest was meaningless to him. And it should have been meaningless to her. He tried explaining it. “Listen, Mom, I promise you this was a nothing—truly no big deal.” He couldn’t fathom his mother’s particular bleakness. He hated the spacey music.
She opened her mouth and stopped, as if she remembered only her first language tonight. She leaned forward and tugged a rumpled Kilim flat on the beige carpet. “You would say that,” she whispered. “Nothing touches you. A nothing, Mom,” she muttered in a mocking singsong. “It’s a nothing, Mom!”
“Can we turn the music down?” he complained.
“I need it on.” Her eyes glittered over tightly crossed arms. She briefly uncrossed them to touch the top of her forehead, a tragic gesture from antiquity or from beyond the Caucasus. She said, “I know you hate this life of ours. And so do I.” She stood up and turned her back on Darius. Now she was looking into the bedroom at Stan, who couldn’t see her and wasn’t looking back.
Darius’s childish American crime made her own crime all the more obvious to Sohaila. She felt an antique self-disgust about divorce, adultery, concubinage, even about the unnaturalness of adoption. The steps leading her to this emotional midnight looked shallow, despicable, un-Islamic. Oliver’s blandishments, her taste for sybaritic tranquility, Stan’s protective energy. Poor Darius, a whim of her husband’s originally (each of them believed adopting a child had been the other’s idea) would end up being destroyed.
Without turning around, she said, “You can’t imagine what it’s like having a foreigner for a son. I don’t ever understand. I don’t ever understand.” A sob or chill caused a long tremor. Her spine and shoulders moved under the satin. Sohaila despised her own luxurious sense of guilt, her inability to act even the tiniest bit American. “I don’t understand you at all,” she repeated as monotonously as Koechlin.
Darius, petrified by his mother’s anguish, finally came up with words that were particularly American and inadequate. “Mom, Mom—Jesus, this is really not serious. I’m not involved in anything you need to worry about. I’m telling you.”
Sohaila looked past him through the front drawing room, back into the front hall where she’d glimpsed Oliver. She made a minuscule noise of revulsion. “I know. I know. I love you,” she sighed. “Now you have to talk to your father. Or he’ll talk to you, of course.” She lifted a rigid, recurved palm, touching but not cupping, her son’s cheek, a final, exotic gesture before she returned to her bedroom.
Oliver stood on the hall threshold, backlit by the yolky lantern, his drink tinkling in a languid grip. “Don’t get down here much,” he said when Darius came to him. He seemed perfectly calm. Before Sohaila had quite closed her door, he waved and called, “Yoo-hoo, Stan.” The tiny figure in the bed leaned forward and squinted. The door closed.
Oliver sat on an Elizabethan-ish side chair in the hall and crossed his legs briskly. He rested the musical highball glass on his knee with an odd sprightliness. He seemed cheerful. “Can we turn that off?”
“Mom wants it on. I think it helps her sleep.”
Oliver peered across the hall threshold at the stereo-CD set up and more generally at the recently redecorated drawing room. “They’ve made a mess in there, haven’t they?” He made a face. “Not my style at all.”
“She’s so upset.” Darius breathed. “It’s like I died.”
“You fucked up. Arrested.” Oliver snorted. “But I’m not sure—” He interrupted himself with a bland noise of disgust. “Euch, I loathe big speakers and TVs, all that techno—more suited to a bachelor pad in a high-rise, if you ask me. But all this is more your mother than it is Stan.” He waved at the drawing room décor professorially. “Look at that mirror. Iranians are obsessed with gold. This isn’t Stan’s taste. He’s a Slavic peasant. That’s an odd thing about your mother. She sort of yields her way into getting her way. An enviable trait, I guess, as far as it goes, but then the man always goes crazy in the end. I used to have quite a lot of trouble—” his tone changed to one of suggestive amusement. “—exercising my rights.”
“Dad.” Darius’s eyes fell closed.
“What? You think I’m going to bawl you out for this? Undignified is probably what we should call it. The Choate what-all was much more serious. Not that I was immoderately angry about that, was I?” His gaze jumped around the hall and back toward the drawing room. Horny and yellow, his bare foot wagged with adolescent energy.
“Dad—”
“I rarely worry about your behavior. Maybe not at all. Drugs? Look!” He held up his drink for a second. “Go out. Have fun. You and I have a deal. You’d never damage our relationship. Your mother doesn’t know that. I think you even love me. We both know what you’re probably after in the long run.” He smiled. The glass was tinkling very loudly on his shaking knee. “It’s comforting. Like a pact.”
Darius argued irritably, “We don’t have a pact, Oliver. What are you talking about?”
“Yes, we do. We both know what you’re waiting for. And why you’ll always be an obedient bad boy. It doesn’t matter if you give your mother and me trouble along the way. In fact, I’m often glad I decided to let her get you in the first place. Does that surprise you?”
Oliver’s cryptic remark stopped Darius cold. “Get me? Like—an espresso machine? And I know you’re talking about money and your secret stash.” Almost involuntarily, Darius had lowered his voice. He glanced up at the lantern. Still seated, Oliver followed his gaze dumbly.
During all these years the notion of Oliver’s fantastic wealth had come to seem more like his mother’s dreamy Qajar connection to the Peacock throne, a fantasy. He knew his family were what most people considered rich. But that was it. Oliver’s jiggling gaiety tonight didn’t make vast secret wealth seem any more plausible. Nevertheless, Darius was shocked to notice his father’s face drop from the lantern wearing an extremely crafty expression. Darius seemed to snap the pieces together in his mind: it all might, might, be true. His sudden silence was humiliating.
“I see you see,” Oliver chortled.
“Dad, watch the glass.”
“Ah,” Oliver said. He screwed his giddy mood tighter by a turn. He crowed, “All part of the plan! All part of the plan!” He waved an arm around, perhaps gesturing at everything, the house, his hidden piles of gold. He particularly wiggled his fingers toward the drawing room and Sohaila and Stan’s door beyond. The manic hand returned to his thigh with a slap. With a little twist of his other wrist, he emptied his glass on the front hall rug. He looked blankly at the dark splotch flecked with ice. “Don’t tell me to watch my glass,” he argued dully. “Marking my territory,” he explained.
“You told me you gave the house to mom.” Darius made an appeasing sort of a challenge. Then he looked scared.
“And I did.” Oliver sobered up a bit. He waved away Darius’s sudden alarm. “Oh, come on. Don’t nursemaid me. It’s a little vodka and ice water. No stain. I’m just playing.” Unable to suppress the insane change of subject, he lowered his voice and went on. “You know, Darius, I’ve never understood why everybody thinks Mutually Assured Destruction is a crazy system. I mean, why do they think that’s such a bad way to live with nukes, if you
have to live with nukes? It always seemed perfectly sensible to
me. That’s the way people really do deal with each other most of the time, isn’t it? As long as everybody does the right thing and behaves, everybody else withholds their terrible power.”