THE VAN NEST place was a Tudor style proto-McMansion, circa 1925. The massively gabled house had patinated somehow over the years until it almost looked like a real dwelling in its gloomy copse behind a vast front lawn. Huge rhododendrons clogged the narrow path to an unused front door, so Jane entered through the kitchen with a twinge of irritated pride. Over the door leading to the rest of the house a now-defunct register used to inform the servants where they were needed. Arrows cocked permanently to “Front Drawing Room” and “5th Guest Bed.” made desuetude look like an Agatha Christie plot. Jane sized things up with distaste, all but ready to be shown to dinner in the nursery.
But the dining room table was set for the right number, four, plus one extra. The extra place was taken by a nervous, dwarfish young man who held his shoulders askew. He was Darius’s French tutor, David Caperini. David had joined the household when Princeton, where he was an occasional graduate student of some kind, came into session. Employing him was Sohaila’s inspiration. As a girl in north-eastern Iran, she’d had French tutors, a scatter-brained Armenian couple she’d adored. Jane doubted anyone adored David. Darius had never mentioned his tutor and ignored him throughout dinner.
But David was sociable. He greeted Jane with ridiculous joviality. “Ah, the—the celebrated, the swooned-over Ms.—uh—Ms. B!” She gave him a thin smile. Though he talked more than anyone during dinner, everything he said had a strange rhythm, a submissive scurrying-out-of-sight. When he wasn’t talking, his fingers twitched and his shoulders jerked.
They dined by candlelight. Dishes were carried from the kitchen by a maid or housekeeper, who was as lethargic and careless as an embittered Denny’s waitress. Though the places were set with paper napkins and everyday stainless, the regal china must have cost a fortune. The first few times Jane glanced at Oliver at the head of the table, she thought, “Heinrich Himmler.” (Ironically, given the Holocaust denial secret.) It was simply the caricatural pairing of a receding chin and old-fashioned wire-rims. Maybe Oliver’s preppy blue Oxford looked vaguely uniform-like, as well. Quirkily he fastened the top button. Jane wondered if the blue shirt hid a skin condition. Oliver was silent at first. Rude. He flared his nostrils. He sat perfectly still and seemed to count something by means of the nostril-flarings. Or he looked like a lizard, motionless except for its reptilian dewlap flexing.
He wasn’t utterly rude. With an elaborate contortion he held his cigarette halfway behind his chair so as not to cause offense. At intervals the arm came flying around, and he energetically flicked the cigarette in the region of a dainty crystal and silver ashtray. The ashes flew everywhere. Onto his own plate and that of his son. The arm was then politely dislocated again. He set down his fork and used that hand to slick back the hair mostly absent from his bulbous forehead. Picking up the fork again, he made an idle gesture with it but still didn’t say anything.
She had plenty of opportunity, but Jane gave up hunting for the right moment to unload the comments she’d prepared about Darius’s progress in school. There was something odd, willed almost, about the awkwardness. It couldn’t be made better by ordinary efforts at chit-chat. Sohaila wore a drowsy smile. Her painted cat eyes wandered the room, maybe judging the effect of this or that detail of the décor.
“And I—I—he told me the whole yellow rain chemical warfare to-do is going to collapse now, because he—he—Mikelson and they found out it was—of all things—bee pollen. Which I must—doesn’t sound entirely convincing? Somewhat mysterious when it’s so—so—dreamlike. No? Really—giant swarms of honeybees letting loose a—a golden shower? Really?” David maladroitly bumped the forks and knives of his place setting and repositioned them helter-skelter. Tiredly Jane counted the number of forks and courses.
Oliver snorted at what David had said. And Darius mouthed, “Golden shower.” Exactly as the Westerbrook woman had whispered, “Concubine.”
“Does the pollen drop off them when they fly or when they land?” Sohaila asked.
Jane pointed her chin toward David in a semblance of interest and was startled when he winked. Unless it was a big twitch.
“It falls from their leg hairs,” he explained delicately. “In the air. And—and the mycotoxin, which—which they—they thought—wrongly apparently—”
The moment after she vowed not to speak, Jane weighed in. “A chemical attack wouldn’t surprise me. They like playing games with the media. Consider the source.” She went on broadly, “Is anything Al Haig has ever said not disinformation?” At that she was able to stop herself.
Interrupted, David twitched even more. He seemed to shrink in his seat slightly as if he thought Jane had done something naughty and might be punished. He shot her a private look. Jane wondered if it weren’t a nerdy come-on of some kind. Except that he was obviously gay. Maybe he was why Darius was so screwy. Possibilities of abuse drifted through her mind like mass murder.
Oliver was staring at her. The instant Jane noticed, his gaze buzzed off. She thought to dilate soberly, “On the other hand, we have to be so careful when it comes to chemical weapons.”
“Why?” Oliver whispered under his breath to a vacant corner of the room. The too soft word came bracketed by a sniffle and wasn’t clearly part of the conversation. Everyone felt safe ignoring him.
By now Jane had gotten used to uncomfortable student/family dinners like this—the pressure to make a good impression, to praise the boy, to be polite without going overboard. Tonight, strangely, the discomfort was different. The oddity of the Van Nest ménage undermined intimidation. Oliver’s childish silence, David’s absurd flirty glances. She felt none of her usual Belgian Shoes inhibition, and in fact she’d slipped them off under the table and was cracking her toes on the carpet. But rather than enjoying a sense of liberty, she was wary, afraid of herself almost. Before she’d finished her first glass of wine, outlandish ejaculations like “Faggot!” (to David) and “Nazi” (to Oliver) darted through her mind tauntingly like minnows.
Expecting a contemptuous basso, Jane was surprised when Oliver finally did speak aloud. His voice was thin and high and wavered unsurely. He said, “I don’t believe a word they say. Any of them.”
David’s mouth formed a stagey O of alarm. Jane was surprised herself. Here was a Lawrence parent who wasn’t giving Reagan the usual comfy benefit of the doubt. Unlikely he held any progressive opinions allied to her own, though.
“Consider the source,” Jane said quickly. “Who made the original yellow rain accusation? Who but General ‘I’m-in-control-of-the-White-House’ Al Haig?” From the corner of her eye she could see David had raised his glass to her. Thinking she hadn’t noticed his toast, he leaned forward to tickle the back of her hand with a forefinger. She flashed him a chilly smile and pulled her hand away with a shiver.
A vulpine half-smile spread on Oliver’s face, and he closed his eyes in, it seemed, intense pleasure. His arm swung around, and he scattered ashes vigorously, muttering, “Yellow rain! Yellow rain! What crap!”
A titter escaped David, because he’d been thinking that yellow rain was bee crap in a sense. Jane suppressed a smile for a different reason. Oliver looked like he was making a chemical attack on his own dinner table with his flailing cigarette. Humor is better the closer it is to unfunny, and Oliver was unfunny. Not a man to be teased, however ripe for it.
“What kind of a chemical attack is it if nobody dies?” Sohaila wondered. “I haven’t heard that people died. Did people die?”
“I think there were, besides—besides health problems, some people—did—” David managed to squeeze elaborate hesitations into the most hurried remarks.
Oliver didn’t let him finish. “Of course not,” he lashed out. “Even if people did die, how would they know what they died of—with all the—crap that’s been dropped on these countries?”
“Regular bullets kill so many more,” Sohaila said with feeling. “And landmines!”
“Exactly the point!” Oliver agreed harshly. He wasn’t at all unsure of himself, despite the reedy voice. “This isn’t about chemical whatever. It’s about truth. About truth.” An ironical smile ghosted his face, too fleeting for Jane to be certain it had been there at all. “These—assholes are drunk on what they think is secret knowledge. They’re as ignorant as we are when it comes down to it. I know. I’ve been in government.”
Jane frowned. Oliver was going off on a tangent. Curiously she probed, “But it seems the issue here is a conscious U.S. propaganda attack against the Soviet Union.” She tacked on, “Right?” But she didn’t come off sounding politely uncertain as she’d meant to do. Everybody was silent. Jane was afraid she’d gone too far.
“Think so?” Oliver mumbled at last. He shrugged impolitely. “Point is, when they do get these chemical weapons up to speed, there won’t be any maybe-maybe-who-knows-I’m-not-sure. Scads and swathes’ll be dead. Just like that! Scads and swathes of ’em. Everybody’ll know it. And that’ll be good. I mean, obviously bad. But long-term, not-obviously, in the way of very bad things, it’ll be good. We’ll know the truth and what they’re capable of.”
No one said anything for a while. “Uh—uh—” David began. “Mr. Van Nest has a theory that—that—that the convenience and lethality of weapons—no?—that it gives—that there’s a paradoxical civilizing—”
“That it forces us to be aware. To think. March of civilization blah-blah.” Oliver impatiently fed him the line.
“So you believe in progress?” Jane couldn’t help teasing as if his argument were tantamount to believing the earth is flat.
“Oh, Mr.—believes many—thinks about these—things in a—well, he experiments with ideas.” David looked at Jane too meaningfully. His tone of voice was indulgent to Oliver, yet also insulting. Jane wouldn’t have been surprised to see him fired on the spot. She didn’t dare say a word herself. The wrinkled green leather of five aged dining room chairs creaked in unison. Strangely Oliver was perfectly complacent. David swabbed the sweaty rings under his eyes with his fingertips and addressed his employer. “Remind me to give you a fascinating J.B.S. Haldane article. Along these—lines. Chemical—after the Mustard—in World War One.” Now he sounded prudently sincere.
During this whole conversation, which held little interest for him, Darius couldn’t sit still. The seat of his chair made a continual breathy squeaking. He ate and, at the same time, methodically cleaned his father’s ashes from his plate with the tip of an index finger. The ashes that landed in his food didn’t seem to bother him. Only the flakes that dirtied the gilt-edged porcelain.
When the housekeeper came from the kitchen to clear the plates, conversation about yellow rain was abandoned. Morose, slatternly, the woman’s limping trips around the table filled Jane with an inward cacophony of anger and self-contempt, all the more unbearable because she somehow looked like she was in it with them.
David asked Darius in a cloying tone, “Are you enjoying having Ms.—Ms. B, all right if I call you—too?—with—having her here with us?”
“I’m going to marry her,” Darius raved promptly. A grin, cute but sour, appeared on his face and vanished. His fingers touched Jane’s shoulder like swarming butterflies. She’d felt them several times already this evening and tried not to flinch.
David’s mouth made the O again, humorous this time. He laughed by tipping his head absurdly from side to side. His skin was dusky in the candlelight. Maybe a blush lingering after the faux pas with Oliver, or, Jane suddenly guessed, he was drunk.
“You’ll have to earn a tremendous lot of money to support a grown-up woman,” Sohaila commented.
Darius turned to Jane. “Are you OK with that? I mean, I’m sure you want to marry me. Obviously! I have everything.”
“That’s fine, Darius,” Jane said. “Is that how we should pronounce it?” she asked the table as a diversion. Sohaila shrugged.
Under his breath, Oliver muttered, “We only learned later on what a big ghetto name it was. We’d never have chosen it.”
“It’s a popular Black person’s name,” Sohaila explained innocently. “For me, it was just Persian.”
“Uh, marriage?” Darius insisted.
Finally Jane laughed a little to hide her annoyance. “That’s fine.”
“All settled!” Darius piped, crossing his arms and his legs.
Jane didn’t want to look at him but did. Starred by candlelight his eyes seemed impossibly haughty. She wanted to feel warmth instead of simmering dislike, but these people hardly merited consideration. Unless Darius alone deserved it. A boy, still. She forced a smile. This shred of a kindly thought brought her enormous relief. Even before coming she’d known she would find his situation more pitiable than anything. Her anger suddenly rose up against the so-called grown-up desires—the personal indiscipline!—that led a couple like the Van Nests to adopt a child. The selfishness!
Oliver left the table without a word, only sneaking a last glance at Jane. Below the neck, she was almost certain. David bowed when he got up, shook her hand. His grip mixed twitch and mannered politeness. His lips moved but only garbled formulae came out. All the while his gaze implored her—it could have meant anything.
Darius pushed him aside and begged Jane to visit his bedroom. Infuriatingly Sohaila waved them off. She drifted across a cavernous entry hall into the unlit front drawing room as imperturbably as a tiny planet jostled out of orbit. Jane followed the châtelaine’s gray figure until it disappeared. No light came on in the living room. Only tiny red, green and slowly blinking lights of electronics shone in the pitch darkness.
Darius reached for Jane’s hand to lead her upstairs. She ran her other palm along the oak banister, smearing David’s sweat on it. The foot-wide banister made her hand feel childishly small. The uprights were roughly carved telamones, their original bad taste intact. Jane managed to grumble something cheerful enough to Darius as she followed him up the shallow steps.
“I do love you,” he laughed, sprinting ahead. “Adore you!” he added with somewhat stronger but seemingly arbitrary irony. He sang out nonsense syllables in a demented falsetto. She looked down at David, who’d reappeared at the foot of the stairs. He gave her a twiddly wave.
Darius was lost to sight. The stairs kept switching back, slightly less grand after each turning. Jane said, not loudly, “Darius, I can’t follow if I don’t know where you’re going.” He returned at a run. His arms flailed. He grabbed her hand again.
“Here,” Darius announced. He was so overwrought he buried his face in his hands. They stood in the open doorway of a book-lined gable room. A tiny room. A former maid’s room packed with scuffed family furniture, castoffs. Everything was old. The worn cloth-bound books must have belonged to a grandparent at least. A gray window fan, possibly as old as the house, thrummed in a cage of zig-zag wire covered in oily dust. This loud, dismal fan produced a weak current of air in which strands of a bamboo curtain clacked gently in the doorframe of a huge walk-in closet. The closet was nearly as big as the room.
The woodwork was painted the same functional gray as the fan. But its matte surface looked dry and porous like whitewash. The non-fan window was open. Jane looked down a steep roof at a swimming pool, black as petroleum. Darius was humming-moaning. Through the shimmying bamboo strands Jane could make out more furniture in the closet, and a grim-looking steel chain threaded with plastic roses hung from a hook in the ceiling.
“That’s my closet. I guess I could show you.”
“No, Darius. I don’t want to be—”
“No, that’s OK,” he said bravely. He strode across the room and pulled the curtain aside.
“Darius, I don’t want to,” Jane let out. But she couldn’t not see the sloping walls he’d painted in garish acrylics. Starbursts, hearts, Peace and Love in a pillowy sixties lettering. The bizarre chain of roses was inexplicable, but Jane refused to ask about it.
“I painted all that when I was a kid,” Darius said. “I know it’s stupid.” He was nervously gathering the strands of the bamboo curtain into a huge chirruping cable.
“We all—” Jane began seriously. “It’s not stupid at all. Peace and love? Come on!”
“No. It is. I mean I did it as a joke, of course.” He was tugging a little too hard on the bamboo curtain. The flimsy tension rod popped from the top of the doorframe. Darius flinched. His hands covered his head. Yellow trickles of bamboo sluiced over him.
“That’s embarrassing,” he announced. He was blushing and wore a pouty, angry expression. Mock-dignified, he undraped himself and kicked at the bamboo on the floor. His pique suddenly disappeared. “That reminds me! I used to wear this thing! I just remembered. Maybe when I lived in the basement. I wonder how I did that?” He tried pulling the woody curtain around his shoulders like a cloak. One hand pinned it around his neck. With the other hand he flounced the cloth of bamboo and gestured sacredly. “I thought it made me look like some weird kind of priest. Or king. This is pretty good. Better than my other cape.”
“Darius. What are you doing?”
“What?”
“Why don’t we hang that back up? Straighten up in here?”
“Why? Someone else will take care of it. Let Tina do it. We don’t have to do anything.” He said this so provocatively Jane averted her eyes. Tina was the limping housekeeper. Darius let the bamboo cape clatter from his shoulders. He fixed on Jane’s throat and whispered, “Tina is my slave.” His hand at once covered his mouth and he guffawed, because, even for his family, that was going a little far. He leapt onto his bed wailing, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Here,” he tried distracting her. “This is my bed.
“Darius.” She said it without indulgence. She turned her back on him. “I’m going down.”
David stood in the doorway, quite clearly glassy-eyed and flushed in the full light. “I thought I heard a—Darius—a big clatter. Having a—a tantrum or something?” He said it with what he meant to sound like fond irony.
“Shut up!” Darius muttered.
“Just the bead curtain,” Jane said. “I’m going down.”
Darius refused to see them downstairs, so David and Jane descended flight after flight in silence. David lagged and made several conversation-broaching noises, but Jane tried to keep the pace up. Coming to the last flight David finally spat out, “You know—you know—they’ve closed up shop. Gone to bed. The Van Nests. They won’t—no need to say goodbye.”
“Really?”
“Nightcap?” He finally produced his fuddy-duddy invitation. “A strange family.”
“Clearly. Does he see somebody?”
“Ritalin, I think. The tantrums are real, by the way. He’s been known to topple a whole bookshelf—why I came up—just kicked it over.” David smiled. “You know what makes them like this, don’t you?” he whispered. “It’s just the money.”
“Probably. Ultimately, yes, I’m sure that’s it,” Jane said warily. She didn’t really want to befriend David. His expression begged her to speak, however, so she went ahead. “Is he really as awful as he seems?”
“Oliver? Yes. He’ll—well, he’ll say anything. All to—just anything for—shock effect.”
“He doesn’t believe in that poison gas scads-and-swathes’ll-be-dead-and-it’s-somehow-good theory?”
David shrugged. “Probably not. Low-grade self-entertainment, I’d say.” He looked around before trailing off in the smallest whisper possible, “But racist, anti-Semite, all that seems pretty authentic—”
Darius went down to his parents’ bedroom to say goodnight. Propped up by pillows, they lay on either side of a room-sized bed. Oliver sipped a beer. He was studying an inflammatory flyer about a Chinese restaurant boycott (Jade Tree on the Bowery), which someone had handed to him in the city. The boycott seemed to be about employee working conditions. A pouting lower lip made his chin vanish entirely. The Wall Street Journal waited its turn propped against yellowish knees.
Sohaila wasn’t concentrating on her magazine. She kept thinking she heard music. She was certain she hadn’t left the CD player on downstairs, and even if she had, she couldn’t be hearing it up here. The illusion was interesting. Each phrase of the music was new, unknown but somehow remembered. She turned the glossy pages of Metropolitan Home from time to time, but she was trying to listen straight through. The music was brilliant, a little like Debussy.
His parents’ symmetry on the bed pleased Darius. He knelt exactly between them, salaamed and rested his cheek on the down comforter. He faced his father for three beats, then he turned his head and faced his mother for three beats. He asked whether they’d enjoyed the evening. His father’s soprano grunt was quick. Sohaila lagged. “Very nice!” After a voluptuous pause, she asked, “Why are you turning your head?”
“I have to. Do you like her? I’m going to marry her.” He only mouthed the cute joke now, neither offering nor finding any humor in it. He seemed dulled.
“Well, I don’t know if she’s the best person for you.”
“You don’t like her? But I love her. She’s my favorite teacher.”
“I don’t know if I think she cares about you in the way a really nice and loving person should—someone you’d want to marry.”
Darius’s head shot up. Then he mechanically recommenced turning his head on the comforter, one beat per side now. “Mom, I’m madly, madly, madly, madly, in love, with, her.”
“Oho! You are, are you?” She smiled finely.
Oliver turned his head. He directed a very unpleasant expression at their two-thirds of the bed. He tugged the comforter slightly from under Darius’s knees. The newspaper fell from his lap, and he snatched it up irritably. He slapped the salmon-colored boycott flyer to his bedside table, muttered “Fuckers!” This was followed by a strange peep of laughter.
Unperturbed Sohaila said, “Dah-li-ush? You know your little friend Barry?”
“Uh-huh. What about him?”
“The little blond boy.”
“Not little, Mom. Bigger than me.”
“Oh, you know the one, though. Your friend, right? You want to know something? He isn’t blond. Not really.”
Darius’s head shot up.
“Maybe I shouldn’t say. You mustn’t tell. It’s interesting, though, isn’t it?”
Darius turned his head trying to think of a response. He stopped after a moment, settling on, “Yes, he is.”
“No. He’s not blond. His mother dyes his hair to be like hers. Like if I dyed your hair black. Would you like that?”
“I’m not sure,” Darius said. “I don’t think so.”
“Not that it matters. He looks good as a blond boy, don’t you think?”
“I guess.” Darius frowned.