THE FOLLOWING FALL, Stan called Darius and announced, with obscure laughter, that he was in Paris. He’d picked up his mother in Romania and brought her here to visit a specialist. She was ailing. The tourists had tapered off. Paris had a stretch of fine, warm fall weather to enjoy. Stan was oddly cagey about the hotel he and his mother were staying at (“a place of no character”), but he picked tony, two-star La Guirlande de Julie on Place des Vosges for dinner.
Stan intercepted Darius under the arcade where the restaurant had tables set up. It was the last gasp of summer before everything moved indoors. He looked scruffier than Darius remembered, more the wild-eyed revolutionary, not someone you’d want sticking you with needles unless you were blind. Black and gray hairs straggled down his hollow cheeks and throat as if the old Van Dyke had started to metastasize. After a fanatical smile of greeting, he confided, “I have serious news, Darius. But not for right away. Come.”
“Stan!” Darius protested. The last thing he wanted was Carpathian drama. But he followed.
Despite the warmth, a strong wind was rising. Many of the diners who’d taken tables outdoors looked like they regretted it. Stan threaded his way through the crowd with absurd bows to strangers. Darius wondered whether his outgoing flourishes meant he was nervous. Once, Stan paused, leaned back and whispered loudly, “If you talk English, they think you’re rich. We can behave as badly as we like.” Darius had been in Paris long enough to know nearly all the diners around them spoke English. Half of them were probably well-behaved Americans.
“Shut up,” Darius breathed. He was about to complain about the “serious news” tease, when Stan pointed to their table, the most tucked-away. A dowdy, grim-looking woman in a gray suit raised her eyes. Evidently Stan’s mother. Her sharp-browed makeup job didn’t fit her lumpish face. Nor did the too-tight suit fit her body. But she seemed to have a firm idea of how one turns oneself out in Paris. Her smile was mousey, dangerous, unfelt and vanished quickly after introductions had been pantomimed. She lowered her eyes. She patted one of the chairs. When Darius made a move toward it, her plump, pointy-fingered hand waved him away. Stan grinned in delight. “My mother,” he announced to the restaurant at large and took the seat she’d reserved for him.
Stan seemed to find perverse pleasure in the awkwardness of his mother’s presence. At the same time, he ignored her. He draped a pink napkin across his lap with giddy grandiosity. Chin up, he surveyed the crowd, though the other tables were largely blocked by one of the arcade piers. Whenever a strong gust of wind swept past, a general clattering arose as diners flinched to pin down linen, scarves, l’addition and hair.
Notwithstanding possible job-induced weight loss and red-rimmed eyes, Stan looked immensely satisfied. “A fancy-fancy place,” he judged, rubbing thumb and fingertips together. “You see how I treat you, Darius? For you—anything!”
“Who knew you were so—” Darius began, in spite of himself. He held back for the old woman’s sake, though it looked like she didn’t speak English. His snarky tone of voice was a recent acquisition. Every time he heard it coming out of him, he wondered what disappointment was turning his manners so bitter.
“That I was so—?” Stan wondered, enjoying being needled and needling. “That such largesse runs in my veins?” He pronounced largesse with a strong French accent. “Darius, I do know one thing. I know that you think your mother and I are greedy. I know this. Principally, you think it of me!” Dramatically, he splayed the fingers of one hand across his shirtfront. “It’s not true. I don’t understand why Americans must always laugh when anyone dares to claim, It’s not about the money. I have no idea of this, because—”
“Stan, do you think this is the right moment?”
Feigning to look around him for eavesdroppers, Stan leaned back expansively and went on. “Because it’s never about money. How can it be? What’s money? Money’s nothing.” His expression became kind for a moment. “I’ll tell you something. Your mother loves your father. I have no worry saying this myself. Notice, I say loves, present tense.”
“Stan, come on—”
“Of course, she did love him. Exotic, stern. You don’t think of that, do you? That we of the exotic east could find the WASP exotic? But even now, she loves—”
“Stan, let’s not talk about this right now.” Darius looked pointedly at Stan’s mother. Facetious though his tone was, all dark, half-swallowed vowels, Stan was serving up the only subject that mattered, the one Darius had tried to avoid all this time. Anything to do with his father had a premium reality that made the rest of his life look like a silly, dusty, glue-spotted Vail assemblage, or something equally airy-fairy.
Stan leaned across the table toward Darius. “She can’t hear a word we say.” His foreknuckle chucked her tenderly on a jowl. Her gaze wandered back to the table. Her unpleasant smile returned for a moment. Then she looked out at the park again with its chess-like array of pollarded trees. Only the far corner of the Place glowed with a farewell polygon of yellow sunlight. The old woman carefully pulled a gray lock from the corner of her mouth. “She’s almost totally deaf. Especially in this wind.” Stan smiled. To prove his point, he visibly tried to think of something appalling to say and came up with “vulva,” which he pronounced loudly and distinctly. (That got a glance and raised eyebrows from an English-speaking diner.)
“All right. Then, what’s the news?” Darius challenged him.
“No, Darius. This is too serious for right away,” Stan replied, and he really did look serious. “Let us enjoy the fading glory of Western culture!”
“Fading? Paris has never been more beautiful or more put together. Everybody says it.”
“You see. It’s too much. It burns the most brightly at the very last moment. When all the fuel is spent.”
The wind had blown a corner of the tablecloth over their butter plates and wine glasses. Tugging it back into place, Darius shrugged. “How’s Mom?”
“As beautiful and as tender, as loving and—” Stan rhapsodized, looking at his own mother. She was watching the pollards, which shuddered like tuning forks as ochre dust devils ran among them. “You know, we went to Colorado, your mother and I. I saw a lovely thing. At this same hour, sunset, a doe disappearing—just walking, not running—dapple, dapple, dapple into a grove of aspen. I said, That deer reminds me of you, dear. She’s always so lovely and elusive, your mother. Never alarm, never loss of dignity. Though she has been very wounded—more than you can know by—ah, well.”
He talked all through dinner. But he didn’t return to Sohaila or Oliver. As each dish was served, he took one studious, super-critical bite. He did the same with Darius’s dishes, and with his mother’s for whom he’d ordered. But after the one bite, he devoured everything on his plate with happy gourmandise. Still, he talked, assaulting the table with emphatic fingers and elbows. The table kept tipping.
Darius kept a footman-like eye on everything. He saved a Bordeaux glass when the wind nearly toppled it. He tried to keep the flouncing tablecloth in order with his hands and knees. The wind had gotten much worse. One party relocated inside, and others were hurrying to finish. Great helices of dust, as tall as the trees, rose from the park’s earthen walkways. At the same time an unusual smattering of stars had come out in the almost ultramarine darkness directly overhead.
As Stan talked on and on, Darius was irritated by what seemed Stan’s chattering obliviousness to Place des Vosges, Paris, himself, the whole world. But he finally caught the Romanian’s eyes and realized Stan was actually observing—silently, as it were—even while he was emitting great plumes of speech to rival the plumes of dust in the park. Stan was smiling at Darius as if he knew all about the boy’s martyred self-control, knees pinning the tablecloth, a toe against the tipping table leg. Stan became even more uproarious and needling. He didn’t seem to mean any of it unkindly.
Stan came back to the eternal subject, pouting into the dregs of his Graves. “Your father is a remarkable man, do you know this?” His knife went vertical. “I have a theory. My theory is that Oliver began to lose his mind on purpose. On purpose! Then later, sadly, it got away from him. On purpose. Why would he do this? Because he was a searcher. As you are. Searching for—mmm—meaning, basic things, all that. His life had no needs or desires. It lacked them so completely, his only option was to begin thinking boldly in outlandish ways. To look where no one would look. Ta-da! It sounds banal. Almost, but it isn’t.”
Darius listened, his toe flexing against the table leg. He didn’t interrupt. The old facetious smile flickered but Stan was sincere about his theory. This was the man who’d given Darius a print of the Pollice Verso gladiators with a big wink when Darius was still a boy. He wasn’t as clueless as Sohaila and Oliver were. It was worth listening.
“And, according to my theory, this is why he had to have flyers, always flyers, from everywhere. Was he looking for a deal? Of course not. No. Nothing to do with that. The question is—why not books, properly issued by the publishing companies? Or newspapers, which madmen especially love? Why not? No. They couldn’t be books or newspapers. Nothing from the normal world would work for him. They had to be flyers and handouts, because flyers come from below, from outside the system. You see? He would take the flyers looking for secret, crazy messages from outside.”
“And what was he looking for—d’après toi?” Darius asked. His discomfort came out as affectation.
“The craziness! It’s not obvious? Of course it is. Darius, your father was never permitted to be a human being. He was identical to his money, and money has the lowest entropy of anything. He needed to do things, explode, spread out. Spend! But the only way he saw to do it was by becoming crazy. Where do you think all that money came from?”
“His grandfather.”
“Correct. And even before that, there were Dutchmen in Albany doing whatever it is that Dutchmen do with beavers. (Dutchmen have the lowest entropy of any modern people, you know, Darius, except for Finns.) Funny—is it not?—to think your money, ultimately, had its source in the beaver. All of us have our source in beaver.” He glanced sadly at his mother. “But you—whose money came from beaver—well, you probably came from beaver, too, like the rest of us. But because you’re adopted, we can’t say this for sure. Not one hundred percent. Is that distasteful? If so, I’m sorry. But, yes, it was the grandfather capitalist who made his gilded age pile of money. By the time Oliver came along, what was there? No beavers, no herds, no railroads, no farms, no factories, nothing but stocks and bonds. Everything had been reduced. Low entropy! So what did poor little rich boy Oliver have in the end? This fantastic potentiality was all he had, all he ever knew. Rich Americans are the saddest of all. His life is waiting to happen, but like all Americans, he must snigger at every unreality except unreal money. He is in a loop! This sniggering, by the way, is true even of nice Christian Americans, because they, with the usual schizo American insanity, have more faith in money than in God! It is why we simpleton Europeans are far more religious! We don’t go to church, because it actually matters to us—like children!—that there’s no God. But! Darius. As unhappy and—I’m sorry—pathetic as he is, your father is, or was, in a small way, a brilliant man. Because he was a sniggering American, and yet he wanted to turn his money into something through his craziness. This, I’m afraid, was not possible for him. Even though he had this great insight, a truly great insight, it wasn’t possible. We are all so weak in the end, no? Even you.”
Darius refused to buy into any of this. He tried a smart-alecky retort, but his voice surprised him when it came out, tremulous, almost whining, “All the same, you and Mom seem pretty interested in money. For something you think is unreal. I’m not accusing, but—”
Stan smiled. Barely ironical, certainly not offended. “That’s the money in you talking, Darius. You’ll have to be very careful, I think. Snigger, snigger, I hear it. You decided to come here to run away from it all, exactly like Oliver trying to go crazy. Maybe it will work in your case. I don’t know.” He heaved a great sigh and pinched at a leaf fragment the wind had gusted into his water glass. Darius batted a corner of the tablecloth back between his knees. “But sadly, Darius, none of us will last. So even our deepest thoughts are just scribbles. I know this because a bacterium is being genetically engineered, or perhaps it already has been—nanotechnology, you know?—and it will be released, and—it’s rather simple—this entire planet will turn to sludge. All this dust made me think of it. I read a book by a great expert, Eric Drexler.”
The change of subject was so abrupt, Darius thought Stan was setting up a joke.
But Stan insisted. “Yes, yes, yes. Say, they’ve finally made the bacterium to eat oil spills, to clean them up, but very soon, what will they eat? All carbon? Poof! Exponential reproduction, and within days the entire biosphere will become like—what?—like ash, phlegm? I don’t know. Just a nothingness, no people, no animals, trees, plants, fungi. Poof. It may have started this morning. I’m not sure.”
Stan didn’t try to make his absurd vision of imminent doom seem plausible, or even arguable. So Darius laughed. “You sound almost like Dad talking about poison gas or something, Stan. Happy Armageddon! I like the concept. We’re going to be overrun with man-eating bacteria in a few days.” Chuckling, he imagined aloud the headlines, “Infection Earth! Y2K a blip next to this!”
“Darius,” Stan said rather quietly. Darius didn’t notice at once that—stranger and stranger—the Romanian was hurt or angry. “I know you think Bucharest is backwards. And I’m a histrionic Slav. But I’m almost a scientist—nurse. You don’t believe my story? Yes, the bacterium is out there. Yes, it will eat up the world. I’m a serious person. I know this.”
“Eat up the world? Stan, I’m sorry. Listen to yourself.”
Sighing, acting very much defeated, Stan took out his credit card. “Snigger, snigger! You have no awe.”
Darius batted down the tablecloth again, blinking and rubbing his eyes when he was spritzed by dust. He had a slightly wobbly sensation in his chest, which he sometimes got when he thought he may have won an argument but wasn’t entirely sure he was right. He was convinced by now that the “serious news” Stan had to impart had never existed. Another of Stan’s manipulative fantasies.
Darius felt a wave of pity for the man, watching him help his mother rise with ragged dignity. The only diners remaining were sheltering behind an arcade pier. The table itself lurched and clattered. A waiter hurried over, made their flapping tablecloth into a sack and carried all their dishes away together. Stan’s mother held her lapels, her hair, her hem against the wind.
Orienting himself with one pointing arm like a scarecrow, Stan judged his hotel was straight across the park in the direction of Bastille. Halfway into the square’s rising windstorm, it occurred to him that he’d forgotten his credit card. He twined his mother’s arm around Darius’s, squeezed them both and waved them across the park. He said he’d catch up. He had to raise his voice.
The old woman pressed her bosom against Darius for a moment, but as soon as Stan was gone, she disengaged, pointlessly dusted her suit, shielded her eyes and tottered forward, her palms warding Darius off as they had before.
The wind was so strong now, Darius was alarmed for her. Occasional gusts gave him a hint of weightlessness. Gigantic whorl after whorl of dust rose into a yellowish fog, all the more impenetrable because it was dark now. Only the floodlit mansards of the Pavillon de la Reine—or was it du Roi?—were visible above the layer of dust. And a few wan stars remained at the sky’s zenith. Darius kept having to shut his eyes against the dust. Head lowered, the old woman staggered off at her own azimuth. His eyes reopening with a fluttering squint, Darius realized Stan’s mother had disappeared.
His heart pounded. He hurried a step or two forward. He scanned the ground all around in case she’d fallen. The first figure he made out in the cloud was gangly Stan. The dust clogged his beard, so he looked red-haired like Odysseus. He had to shout to be heard above the wind. “What, have you lost my mother?”
Darius yelled No but started calling, “Madame Constantinescu!”
Stan hit him on the shoulder. “Don’t be an idiot,” he yelled, pointing at his ear. “This is like a sandstorm,” he complained, trying to stay calm. “Why did you let go of her? She isn’t well.” Stan was turning his head, and Darius saw, or imagined he saw, not fear, but wild love. Something he hadn’t expected from Stan.
It was a relief to Darius that he spotted her first. She was sitting on the edge of the fountain, looking like a statue, her suit reddening to the color of sandstone. Her jacket was pulled up over her hair, and her hand was making its only gesture, not warding them off but the opposite, this time.
Not long after rescuing her, Darius waited downstairs in an unpleasantly cozy hotel lobby while Stan got his mother settled in bed. The lobby was really too small for the meticulous clerk to ignore Darius politely, but he did so anyway. Darius examined a huge engraving of The Tennis Court Oath (the unclothed version). The wind hurled bits of this and that against the windows. Curtains resembling old candlewick bedspreads had been pulled closed.
Stan loped in and apologized, sounding more natural than he had all night. “I’m sorry about her. She’s not well. Before, it was blood cancer, now the start of pancreatic cancer, I’m afraid. So, yes, what can we—? I know it was tedious. I really did want to see you and not just to be carrying a message.” His stare took on a touch of his usual Slavic irony. “I have no dislike at all for your lifestyle, you know.”
“I know, Stan.”
The room was so small that once Stan took a seat, he could easily drum his fingers on Darius’s knees. He actually did this as a sort of flirtatious prelude to business. He then leaned back and crumpled his dusty beard into his shirtfront. “It’s not quite an emergency. He’s fine. Well, I think he’s not exactly fine—I mean, other than the mind, which is obviously not fine. I think he may have—I’m not sure what. No more than bruises probably. That’s all beside the point.”
“He was in an accident.”
“No,” Stan said crisply. “Let’s say, for him, he’s fine. Which is—he’s back in that disgusting hole he lives in downtown.”
“But it’s a huge place. I thought it seemed clean enough. And safe, I guess.”
Stan eyed him skeptically. “Darius, did you notice he’s blacked out the windows?”
Darius tried to remember. “I think the shutters were closed. He hasn’t blacked them out.”
“Darius, what is it—oilcloth? Or what photographers used to use. I don’t know. He’s blacked them out.”
“You were there?”
“Ah yes. That’s why I have to talk with you. This is the news. Your father got into very serious trouble. He was arrested. And before you—” his hand made a blessing to silence the boy. “You weren’t told, because we didn’t know until the whole thing was over. So why have a phone call? I was coming over to visit, and blah, blah, blah.”
His breath shuddering, Darius said, “OK. You say he’s fine.”
“Fine. Yes. Here is what happened. Your father—this is interesting—it seems he did leave his apartment every so often. Maybe to conduct business. Who knew? I’ve figured out that he can take the C or the A train to Penn and then Amtrak to Philadelphia where the family bank moved. Easy, so who knows? Anyway, after making one of his mysterious trips, he is returning on the C or A train to his hole. I can’t remember which line it was. C, perhaps. About his mysterious business, I make no comment.” He shrugged, dropping a long, meaningful look. “He is coming home on the C train, let us say. And there is a young woman standing next to him, wearing tights, I believe, and some Tarzan/Jane bit of suede that passes for a skirt. So the madman—I’m sorry—but the madman Oliver is sitting here below her.” Stan’s head tipped to the left, his chin still resting on his shirtfront. His eyes rolled up to the paired tulip-glass shades of a sconce on the wall over Darius’ head. “And God knows what’s in that man’s mind! He reaches out and grabs her—very aggressively, I understand—between the legs. This—in his defense—I can almost understand, because if one is heterosexual, you understand, this area, this little mound with vulva is insanely ergonomic for the hand. And yet, obviously, it’s forbidden. The girl, dressed like that—not to be anti-feminist—is not at all shy about screeching and making such a commotion that the brute stockbrokers on all sides assault Oliver and drag him from the car at the next stop. Which is City Hall or very close. And from there, police headquarters. And from there—I don’t know—the Tombs, probably, also very close down there. You see?”
“He was in jail?” Darius closed his eyes.
“He was in jail. The whole intake procedure. One of them even makes the famous one phone call for him. Lucky for Oliver he has a very evil lawyer friend who jumps on top of them and is able to get him home the next day. All during this fiasco, incidentally, I think no one realized what they had in Oliver—a mysterious WASP zillionaire with his nutty subway trips on unknown business.”
“First of all, if it’s who I think it is, his lawyer isn’t evil. He’s great. He’s loyal and he’s a very decent—”
Stan’s gaze finally fell. “Perhaps. I thought he was utterly heartless—”
“Stan. He’s not. He was great to me.”
“Whatever. I think you have too boundless a liking for men, maybe. I thought him a skunk, false, grinning. But he performed his machinations very well indeed, and the affronted woman dropped charges. I’m certain a lot of money was involved. Also certain that she had very weak lawyers on her side for them not to discover who Oliver was and go after him in court seeking much, much more. If it had come to a trial, the whole thing—also for your mother—would have broken open, because I’m fairly sure the issue of competence would have come up. This is something the divorced wife cannot think about. Though the son, perhaps—”
“You think I should try to get him declared incompetent?”
“No. I don’t say. He is incompetent, this we all know. But to be declared? I don’t say. I’m not at all sure, for one thing, if that would solve the problem for Sohaila. Would it be retroactive to the time of the divorce or before? I don’t think so. It could make things harder for her.”
“Do you think she’s ready to sue on her own account?”
“No. She’s only nervous and sad. I would like it, as you know.”
“Jesus. What are you suggesting I do?”
“Darius.” He smiled. “I’m not. I’m the messenger. You have to be told about this. I don’t know what your interests are, so I couldn’t say.”
Darius wasn’t prepared for Stan not to be manipulative. “Just off the top of your head. Really. What do you think?”
“You could go home. You could—do the opposite, vanish, go off on your own. Ignore us all. You could—” Stan’s expression of thought turned into a shrug. “I don’t know.” He shook his head.
“Are you avoiding recommending anything because of some legal—I don’t know—caution about the future? Your future?” Darius couldn’t believe how harsh he sounded. He hadn’t meant anything so accusatory to come out. The look of suspicion, almost fear, he could feel on his face, made it seem his most primitive nature had risen to the surface—as if he were just waking up again, enraged, after his night with the Marquis.
Stan couldn’t help but smile gently. “No, Darius. No, Darius. Think of your future. You’re steeped—steeped—in this idea of money.”
Even angrier, his voice rising unselfconsciously, Darius blurted out, “Stan, you’re the one who’s been fighting for it! What have I done? I’m telling you, I’ve never given a shit about all that.” He almost panted. “Seriously. Practically. What would you do?”
“I’m not playing a game, Darius. I’m not like you. What I would do in your place—what does it matter? You’re not me. I’m not you.”
“Just tell me.”
“No,” Stan clucked with perfect poise. Again, not unkindly. “No.”
To Rolf, they had become a couple. More or less. To Darius, not quite. He was conscious of sheltering with Rolf from everything the Marquis or Oliver represented. Rolf wanted to move to New York, but he also wanted to be near Darius, and for a long time he’d put his life on pause. He sometimes raised the possibility of them going together. His friend, Severine, had a Manhattan apartment she was willing to sublet to them. Soon after his evening with Stan, Darius finally consented. That is, he consented in his heart. He said nothing to Rolf at first, but the decision had been made, instantaneously and in perfect secrecy. He would go back to New York. For several days he seemed to hold Rolf’s future in his hands, a power that should have filled him with guilt, whether or not it was the future Rolf most desired.
The millennium New Year came a few months later. It seemed like it should be celebrated in a particularly memorable way. Rolf invited Darius, his roommates, Severine and two of her sporty American girlfriends to spend the holiday in Switzerland at his family rustico, which turned out to be several of them—old stone shepherds’ huts—on the narrow terraces of the country’s wild but ultra-cultivated crags. The huts had been joined together and remodeled in the fifties. A pool had been put in. Far below, Lago Maggiore twisted out of sight between other tremendous mountains, which condensed into existence every morning and dissipated every night.
The place had its own, odd high-altitude season of hot, almost microwave, sunlight and frigid shadow. While it was warm enough to eat outside bundled in a sweater, under the table your hands went numb. The daytime gibbous moon was an icy filigree, its maria the same pale blue-gray as the sky.
On December twenty-ninth, they were snowbound. The dizzying mountain switchbacks were impassable under several feet of snow. Even the Swiss would be hard-pressed to clear it for a day or two. In high spirits, a group of them headed down the mountain in the morning and returned at dusk with food and a magnum of Champagne bearing the festive label, “Édition Deux Mille.”
Roger-Pôl’s friend, Moktar, though he was barely twenty, was an important figure in Mauritanian exile politics. He had to answer his cell phone constantly, coughing out the inevitable invocation to Allah before settling down to political conspiracy. Darius enjoyed the atmosphere of intrigue.
On the second snowbound day, the Mauritanian made them tea with elaborate ceremony. He confessed his goals: to abolish slavery in his country, to establish true democracy there, to become the president. With lovely, unnecessary motion, his slender fingers fussed over little juice glasses of tea. This Saharan tea ceremony was taking place in Heidi’s own inglenook in the Alps, while on the terrace outside, next to the tarped, kidney-shaped pool, Severine and her two girlfriends shrieked as they built a sexually explicit snowman. The futuristic jumble of people and cultures felt melancholy like a Sade song.
Despite his straightness, Moktar barely deigned to notice the girls. Perhaps he’d had problems with women ever since his father, the king, had introduced him to sex with a slave when he was twelve years old.
Even the tea ceremony was interrupted by a phone call. Moktar had been waiting all weekend to hear from Doha for a live interview with Al Jazeera. Those elegant fingers propped the cell phone to his ear: “Wa ʿalaykumu s-salam.” He bowed to the tea drinkers, withdrawing to another room.
Darius, although his Qajar connection was imaginary, was giddy with all the aristocracy bouncing around the rustico. He looked a little dreamy after Prince Moktar had gone. He smiled at Count Rudolfus, who frowned back suspiciously but maintained his perfect, impenetrable manners.
When the German talked politics or had his late morning Bloody Mary, he could become exuberant, overbearing even, until the flicker of manners came over him. Then, a sad or frustrated caution showed in his eyes. Darius wondered whether the inhibition was just post-1945 Germanness. Like a lot of Germans of his generation, Rolf claimed he wasn’t very German at all. But he had a streak of the national literal-mindedness, a Teutonic slowness to grasp silly fun (which is as tender when it’s tender as it is scary when it’s scary).
Darius decided it was being an aristocrat that caused Rolf’s restraint. If such a thing as good breeding could last from the Crusades to now and still matter, still be noticeable, however faintly, it almost made you believe in eternity. Always a welcome belief for Darius. The most welcome one.
When the Count smiled drily, as he did when Prince Moktar bowed to them, the sharp corners of his wide mouth curled up in an expression that was—though you didn’t recognize it at once because Rolf didn’t have those traits—arrogant, even cruel. Perhaps the traits were fossilized in him. Part of the allure of his kindliness was an ancestral capability to become a monster.
Darius and Rolf had decided to feed the apple scraps from last night’s tarte tatin to a neighbor’s dwarf goats in a barn several terraces down. When they got there, they had to elbow aside an aggressive alpaca so the bleating, shaggy dwarves trotting in excited circles could get their fair share of brown apple skins. Rolf hugged the alpaca, immobilizing it while the dwarves finished eating. With a Count’s hard-to-recognize bashfulness—it looked like severity toward the alpaca—Rolf brought up the issue of his future. He admitted, “I have this slight Departure from Cythera depression about it, but—” He released the animal and straightened.
“Meaning Cythera is like childishness, childish things?”
“I don’t think I’ve been childish during my time in Paris,” Rolf countered with dignity.
“I’m probably thinking more of my own case,” Darius appeased—honestly, as it happened.
“But I don’t think I want to hold off leaving any longer.”
“I get it. Even for me, I see how this is the perfect moment. All of our information is going to get erased, right? Y2K,” he added with weak irony. “A fresh start.”
“You might be finished here yourself, then? You would go back?” Hardly breathing, Rolf tacked on, “I wonder?”
“My father—”
With repressed eagerness Rolf interrupted. He mentioned Severine’s news about the Manhattan loft. She was now being sued by the landlord, who wanted to get rid of all the tenants and renovate the building. But New York had loft laws. A pro bono artist’s attorney had tied the whole thing up for a year at least. After that, going to New York wouldn’t be as easy. And a U.N. opportunity Rolf’s father had lined up wouldn’t last forever. So perhaps as a temporary arrangement? Darius smiled and reached up to touch Rolf’s shoulder. He had already decided, of course. He knew Severine’s loft was a mere few blocks from Oliver’s “hole” on Cedar Street.
On December thirty-first, a neighbor’s son came to plough the drive, tires jangling with chains, Eminem blasting from the cab. That night they broke out the magnum of champagne. In sweaters, overcoats, holding flutes in gloved hands, they waited for midnight on the terrace, drunkenly warm, eyes weeping from the cold. At the all-important millennium, fireworks piddled from several spots in the mountains and along the black lake, which reflected the glittering, languorously collapsing trails of sparks.
Church bells started ringing along the valley in glorious relay. This was as spectacular as the fireworks had been sad. The obvious accents of eternity, not faith, exactly, but the gesture of it, could be heard in the broken, wiry-sounding notes and in the imagined creak of timber leaping through the icy air before the laggard bass tones came rolling on. At the brink of heaven up there, at the ragged margin of the world amid romantic crags, everything seemed lovely and eternal to Darius. But part of his weeping pleasure—this was clear even to him—was in not being alone, or in being as close as he could get to not being alone. The mountain and the bells were poignantly beautiful, and—He shivered under his heavy coat.
PART THREE