DARIUS WAS WALKING as fast as he could short of running. Even so, his long strides were only a little more hurried than usual. He was headed down lower Broadway on Thanksgiving night. Office buildings echoed his footfalls in a higher register like the sound of a rockhound’s hammer. The deserted streets made for a dramatic contrast with his hurtling, chaotic emotions. He was panicking over his father.
Something about the acoustics and the tomb-like urban backdrop conjured up his old invisible companion, the marquis from Le Trap. But that had been a stroll. He’d been the victim. Tonight he hurried to play, he guessed, the savior, rescuer at least. The eerie, soot-dark defiles were filled with light like weak broth.
He’d taken this exact route, Warren Street to Cedar Street, many times since coming back from Paris. He was always scouting Oliver’s apartment. Despite a few trivial phone calls, he hadn’t once crossed the apartment threshold or seen his father. He’d tried the street door buzzer a number of times, always retreating from the building with an ultra-self-conscious pantomime: oh, I must have the wrong time or the wrong address for my appointment. Presumably the playacting was for the benefit of passersby. It was odd that being ignored by his father was also intense, unwanted attention, or felt like it. One time he’d taped a note to the buzzer panel explaining who he was and how to reach him in case of an emergency. Tonight, long after he’d forgotten about this message in a bottle, the building super or some neighbor—Darius wasn’t clear which—finally called.
The incredible fact that Darius had been living in Severine’s loft with Rolf blocks from his father for almost a year and hadn’t yet seen the man—that incredible fact could so enrage Darius that thought of it made him squeeze his eyes shut. His fingers swanned, his lips disappeared, and he went speechless with emotion. Rolf watched this fit with a look of horror.
Then the tension relaxed, and Darius could claim, in all honesty it seemed, that the situation didn’t bother him so much. Smiling, he shrugged at Rolf’s concern. “My father’s an odd guy,” he said. Or he joked, as he had tonight after hanging up the phone, “Looks like I’ve got a father emergency.”
Darius turned right at the foot of City Hall Park where a Staples had just gone in. Overhead the white pinstriped World Trade Center gave off no pathos of foreknowledge. The paired towers were all out of scale to the too narrow streets and couldn’t be seen whole from any angle. Observed in passing, they looked out-of-date, ratty, provincial. Huge but not great. Oddly enough, Darius routinely imagined them falling. He did so now when he noticed them from the sidewalk. The dream-image of disaster lasted an instant, and unlike the future reality, the towers fell as timber does. This vision was almost a tic, like replaying Colin Vail’s hanging every time he walked into the New Jersey house. On Cedar Street, a man stood propping an industrial door open. Without even a name check, he nodded at Darius, ushering him inside and upstairs.
For a long time Oliver Van Nest had been prey to a strange hallucination—a little more vivid than the falling towers were for Darius and more or less continuous. He thought he could increase or slow the rate time passed for him, while it passed at the usual rate for the world and everything around him. Since he never went out, you’d think it wouldn’t matter if a hundred seconds passed for him, while only one did for the faucet or the chair. The effect of seeing everything in extreme slow motion didn’t matter if nothing moved.
Oliver had discovered this wasn’t the case. When time passed quickly for him and slowly for the things around him, and when he looked hard, he perceived fluttering gray images lined up behind every object, and even, faintly, the walls. The first dozen might be discernible as images of, say, the chair, but after that, the infinite regression of images had the aspect of a phantom tail. These tails shifted about slightly as Oliver moved around the loft. He understood that each of the images forming the long tail was the chair at an indivisible moment of its long existence in time. Each of the images had an infinitesimal being associated with it because, unlike the real chair, they were alive and even had rudimentary, pet-like personalities. Indeed Oliver called the images infinitesimal beings. Only the chair of the present was mute, dead. When Oliver sped up, he found he wasn’t alone but in the company of multitudes, many multitudes, many infinities, in fact, of tiny personalities. One or another of them sometimes raised its voice, no more articulate than a mosquito’s whine.
In order to hear the voice clearly, Oliver attended to the fantastical amplification of what he called a whispering device, the tiny slit metal bell at the end of a long lamp chain hanging from a lamp near his usual chair. Sometimes he peered into the minute brass maw as he listened. Frequently, he wrote down what he heard in cheap, spiral-bound notebooks. Though he wasn’t aware of it, what he wrote was a looping scribble, not even letters, unless they were long strings of e’s and l’s. Every few pages the scribble resolved itself into a word like “fuck,” or occasionally into something with a disturbing hint of clarity like, “you do not feel well.” He could sit writing, or scribbling, for an hour at a stretch. He kept notebooks he’d filled in a suitcase along with a vial of mercury (the type sold illegally for Santería), clipped articles about bizarre accidents, papers relating to his finances, a large hunk of red glass, travel brochures collected in the fifties mostly by his mother and, finally, old family cards and letters, including a diminutive envelope dating back to the eighteenth century. He often moved the suitcase from here to there in the apartment, going for the most secure placement.
His acceleration in time wasn’t entirely under his control. It came over him like drunkenness or flashbacks. It had an addictive quality. Though he wasn’t always certain when he was moving faster in time and when he wasn’t, he did think he was doing it more often and for longer periods. He suspected this put him in danger. As if he were using up the allotted moments of his life too quickly.
The wah-wah of time highlighted for him the terrible contingency of his heartbeat and breathing. Lately, premonitions of dying had gotten the better of him. That Thanksgiving night (pure chance it was Thanksgiving), fear caused him to open his apartment door, leaving it ajar in case someone had to come in and revive him or save him. A neighbor was disturbed by the open door and by a humid stink wafting from inside. She called the super who peered in and tried talking to a mostly non-responsive Oliver. The man went to his ground floor apartment for the note from Darius, which he’d thumbtacked to the wall in his kitchen. As he’d been meaning to for months, he called.
Oliver had the experience of coming to. He could hear the infinitesimal beings, but he couldn’t see them. So he was in doubt about the rate at which he was coming to—fast or slow. He was seated next to the whispering device. The lampshade was tilted toward him as if he’d been reading. His suitcase was there in a safe shadow along one wall of the vast room.
The truth was, Oliver wasn’t well. Even setting aside delusions and hallucinations, he wasn’t well. He had a lingering infection in his throat, which caused him difficulty swallowing. Arthritis made movement painful, though he’d analyzed it as a shearing effect of time on his body. His skin was as delicate as tissue paper and very slow to heal. If he scratched at a tickle or a mite’s bite, his skin often bled, and a coagulated scum of blood had accumulated under his nails. All over his bald calves blue veins made twisted heaps like earthworm castings.
He usually only cut the nails of his right hand to write. His thin fringe of hair, for ages unwashed, was sore at the roots. When scratched, his scalp bled, too. An amber smear of blood had gotten on one of the smudged lenses of his glasses. His bathrobe, in constant use, was foul-smelling and stiff in many places. The store tag had long ago fallen off but not its pricking plastic loop.
Hungry, straining to understand the infinitesimal beings, Oliver shuffled into the kitchen and made his usual meal of saltines and tuna fish. As always, he ate standing at the kitchen counter. With fanatical deliberation, he gathered every stray saltine crumb with a licked fingertip. He ate the crackers with one hand cupped under his lower lip. When he was done, he gently raked his beard over the hand, which he then licked clean like a cat’s paw. He also licked the empty tuna fish can as best he could without cutting his tongue too much. His mouth was chalky, full of the specks of his meal. He sipped from the running kitchen faucet three or four times. His neck cracked and hurt when he straightened up.
He wiped the tuna fish can dry with a paper towel before stacking it in a cupboard full of empties. Then he carried the towel to his unplugged refrigerator where he stored the refuse he’d judged (a while ago, when he was still judicious) would attract bugs. This time when he opened the refrigerator door, the packed mass of crumpled, discolored paper towels spilled out quietly on the kitchen floor. Old flecks of tuna fish dropped everywhere. This wasn’t a small mishap for Oliver. He’d have to get on his hands and knees to clean up the mess. The chore would be painful and might take a full short-of-breath fifteen minutes or half an hour. Which would bring him half an hour, or a hundred hours, closer to his death. He was too nervous to work. Anxiously, he left the towels and hobbled out of the loft.
To Darius, standing in the hall, nervous himself, his father looked awful but probably not as awful as he really was. The old man’s mumbled remarks sounded more or less coherent. Darius was even able to guide his father back into the apartment and close the door. The super had lingered at the far end of the hall, and Darius felt a deep shame about his father’s neglected appearance and the unpleasant, warm, sweetish smell, sharply demarcated several yards beyond the door. These were an injury against decency. And the injury had been caused by a son’s remoteness.
Inside, Darius tried to get Oliver to change. He found clothes in a closet, which the loft’s original owner had cobbled together with plywood. When Oliver resisted, child-like except for his furious expression, Darius abandoned the smelly “fresh” clothes and tried to get him to come back to Severine’s dressed as he was. Oliver refused in a sibilant muttering. In a hoarse voice he managed a few lucid, depressing sentences, “I’m not completely in my right mind at the moment. I’m just going to stay here and rest, boy. That’s what I need to do.”
So Darius went to a deli and bought what supplies he could. He found the mess in the kitchen and put the paper towels into a garbage bag along with the towers of empty tuna fish cans from the cupboard. He straightened the bathroom. He extracted a promise—rather, he informed Oliver that he was coming back the next day for further serious discussion.
Holding the garbage bag, which still exhaled that humiliating, sweet, Oliver’s-apartment smell, Darius begged a key from the super. The super narrowed his eyes. He couldn’t keep a sour stubbornness from showing. But he relented—with provisos Darius paid no attention to. On the street going home it occurred to Darius that maybe the super wasn’t so awful. He only needed to be given some money the next day.
At Severine’s loft, Darius found Rolf sitting in a window embrasure smoking a cigarette. Beside him, the remains of their Thanksgiving dinner—just the two of them—were tickled by guttering candlelight. Rolf couldn’t hide his eagerness to hear everything. Darius stared, feeling a winded blankness, and put him off. He phoned Stan and Sohaila in Bermuda. He over-described and under-described Oliver’s condition to his mother, sounding alternately alarming and reassuring. The indefinite result of his description frustrated him. Rolf looked at the floor, eavesdropping gravely. After letting the sound of a foreign siren interrupt her, Sohaila started talking about money. She sounded shrill and worried. Though Darius hadn’t meant to upset her so much, she confessed for the first time, that no matter how a trip to Bermuda looked, she was this far—this far—from having to sell the New Jersey house.
When he got off the phone, Darius was exhausted. He submitted to Rolf’s hug, which ebbed to a hand rubbing his back, to it resting his shoulder, to nothing. They were alike in how they avoided physical intimacy outside of sex. This bleak likeness in itself was a tiny bit comforting.
The morning after this disastrous Thanksgiving, Darius realized he was going to have to consult someone. Someone experienced with older people who run off the rails. He had to do something about his father. The burden felt so heavy and strange to him that he feared paralysis. He was in tears admitting that he’d nothing but indulge himself over the course of his entire pre-paid life.
“I know you hate to be clear about things,” Rolf insisted in the Americanizing way he’d adopted. “I know you think I’m pushy, and I know you have important practical things you have to do right now. But when you can, please step back. I truly think this crise could be salutary for you in the end.” Rolf was dissatisfied with how that sounded as encouragement. “Listen, I want to help. I’ll do anything.” But Rolf had to go uptown to the UN job his father had arranged.
Stunned in a way that looked, to Rolf, vulnerably open, Darius weakly closed the apartment door after him. As soon as he was on his own, Darius felt a bit more capable. Unfortunately, even with a key, he was unable to get back into his father’s apartment. The place had a Fox Police Lock, circa 1930. A steel rod ran from a cast iron box on the back of the door to a slot in the floor. Firefighters, who had axes and rams after all, said it was the best, and occasionally deadliest, way of securing a New York apartment.
The super extolled the lock in a thick accent when Darius hunted him down. When the super finished his disquisition on the Fox Police Lock, Darius suppressed—barely—a spoiled rich boy’s whimper of frustration. The super looked at him without sympathy. He barely nodded when Darius pressed a hundred dollars in folded twenties into the man’s hand.
His father was alive, at least, because he’d spoken through the door: quite normal-sounding, inflexible and brusque. The tone of voice undermined Darius’s sense of emergency. The super warned him that a note under the door would do nothing. He’d tried it himself. Groceries left in the hall would be stolen. The man’s unsmiling discouragement was comprehensive. Darius xenophobically decided he must be Russian. (He was Maltese.) Still, Darius remembered to thank him lavishly and, despite the warning, left a box of groceries by the door. Gatorade, dusty, pull-tab cans of corn and beans and beets and Viennese sausages, as well as a few other items available at a twenty-four-hour deli and packaged for end times.
Nothing changed over several days. Darius shuttled between Warren and Cedar, his mind spinning, even during unrestful sleep. The box of groceries was untouched until the third day, when it was gone. Oliver wouldn’t admit to taking it in. He gave Darius his short-tempered, formulaic, “I’m fine. I just want to be by myself today.” Darius suspected his father only talked through the door because he was wary of a rescue break-in. But after making his daily announcement several times—leave me alone—he stopped responding.
Darius needed to talk to someone. Oliver’s old lawyer friend would have been perfect, but neither Stan nor Sohaila knew his name. Darius thought of Cassie Vail, who, according to Stan, was quite prominent now. He guessed she would know the lawyer or another likely adviser.
Since getting back from Paris, Darius had seen little of old acquaintances. He read Alan Wilkinson’s arch book reviews in the Wall Street Journal, but he hadn’t called. The Paris Vail show, much enlarged, was due to be mounted at Cassie Vail’s gallery. If he went to the opening, he would see Cassie, of course. He also than Alan might be there, though probably not with Tom. He knew his old French tutor David Caperini was in New York and, because they used to talk about Vail together, Darius guessed he too might show up.
According to his program for this evening of old friends, Darius would be amusing and suave. He would tell Cassie her brother’s drawings were fake. (It never occurred to him that Cassie might not appreciate a bombshell like that in the middle of her opening.) Then—oh, yes—there’s something about Oliver. He’d mention that. Did she happen to know how he could contact Oliver’s lawyer friend or some renowned psychiatrist? The best in the city, please.
Darius brought Rolf along for support, but they separated early. The gallery was crowded. Darius was immediately thrown off his program, because Cassie, though very friendly, wasn’t as uncertain as she had been when he visited from Choate with Oliver. She had the same alarming El Greco thinness, but up close she was much older. She’d caked on what looked like opera stage make-up, perhaps as an outlandish fuck you to her Miss Porter’s past. “Darius!” she cried the moment she saw him. She raised her ornamented claws as if to seize his cheeks but didn’t touch him. “Darius!”
Cassie was trying to conduct two conversations at once. She’d been regaling a group of collectors with her shocking opinions, and on the side, speaking to an attractive young man who looked about the same age as Darius. She interrupted both conversations. “Oh, Darius, Darius! How in God’s name is your father?”
Darius wasn’t prepared for her to bring up Oliver right off. He deflected with a weak, suburban Oh, all is well. All is well. He cursed his traitor nerves but what else could he say?
The thunder of chat filling the room seemed to oscillate subtly, as if crowd noise were a property of the universe, not something generated by thoughts and remarks. The gallery walls had been given a fresh coat of chalky white paint. The room’s brilliant whiteness made for a sore throb in the eyes. Darius realized he wouldn’t be able to find friends or have a worthwhile conversation about anything here.
“This young man’s father is the uniquely nutty Oliver Van Nest! Whom I love!” Cassie crowed, her gaze sweeping the circle of collectors. She realized the name meant nothing to them. So she turned to the attractive young man, “Well, your parents—did they ever know Oliver and Sohaila in Noroton? I suppose the and isn’t current,” she added with a wry look at Darius. “Not for ages. I knew that.”
The young man lifted a clear plastic cup of wine in a shrug, or else he was trying to avoid being jostled by someone. “We’re in New Jersey, actually,” he corrected.
“That’s what I meant. Noroton—that’s the olden days. Darius! This is—I wanted my darling, darling school friend Bea Sayles to come, and this is her son who showed up!” She sounded both wildly enthusiastic and not entirely pleased. She blundered over the young man’s soft interjection reminding her his name was Flossy. “Which I’m very happy about! Yes, Flossy.” To Darius the young man looked more like a Caleb than a Flossy. Nobody was a Flossy. Cassie went on in a rush. “Yes, this is Flossy Sayles. I went to school with his mother. And this is the brilliant—world traveler—Darius Van Nest. My two very favorite boys.” She wanted to get back to the circle of collectors, who were all pretending to listen with eager pleasantness as if they were much younger and cared about two more young men.
Flossy and Darius turned to each other, separating themselves off from the larger group. “We’ll talk later, Darius!” Cassie shouted confidentially. Her hand, both feathery and hard like live coral, squeezed the back of his neck.
Face to face, smiling, Flossy and Darius spent a silent moment gauging whether they had anything in common. They seemed to settle on No. Flossy was too sporty and healthy-minded. Darius was appealing but in a hostile or unhappy way. He broke the silence anxiously, “I was hoping to find my friend Alan here.”
Flossy said nothing but his expression modulated. Am I supposed to know him? He studied the puddle of wine in his plastic cup, swirled it. “You a fan of the artist?”
“Yes. Actually, I slept in—yes.” Darius scanned the crowd so as not to look at Flossy.
Flossy asked him, “How do you know Cassie? She’s my godmother. I think. Though I’m not sure she remembers me.”
“Really? She dated my father a million years ago. I remember she dazzled me.”
Flossy nodded, somehow both warm and uninterested.
The possible faint rejection made Darius narrow his eyes. He decided to run. “I guess I’ll get something to drink.”
Flossy toasted him on his way.
They turned separately into the crowd. Darius could see Rolf across the room bending forward, crouching almost, to examine the Vail drawings. Rolf was unbothered by the throng. Darius recognized no old friends. Caught in the mob’s undertow, he began to feel quite helpless. He bobbed from room to room. His prepared remarks about his father kept coming to him. They sounded all wrong. His father’s situation was incommunicable in the circumstances, like news of a giant asteroid due to hit in four days. Darius blamed himself for serving Oliver poorly, for getting brushed off like that by Cassie.
He was beginning to float over toward Rolf when he did see someone, but that too felt all wrong. David Caperini stood in a corner. Perhaps it was the brilliant warmth of the lighting, but something was a touch heightened about the ex-tutor’s disheveled appearance. His clothes, his splotchy skin, the stray ear hairs, the bitten nails, the flaky scalp—they were all oddly beautiful in the glorious light. David was talking to an older man in leather and chains, who looked ill, perhaps drug-addicted. His yellowish skin with bluish shadows seemed enameled. Darius positioned himself directly in front of his old tutor. David returned a long, unfriendly stare.
Fear-like recognition scrambled David’s expression. He babbled. After a squeal of greeting, he immediately started recapitulating his conversation with the old addict. They’d been talking about how upset they were, because an ordinary but legendary East Village coffee shop was being renovated and ruined. “So many names were scratched into the leaves of their dusty old rubber plant! But Darius! Darius!” David gasped with a joyful artificiality like Cassie’s. After taking a huge breath and clamping his lips closed, he gave Darius an aggressive poke in the shoulder. “Ssssssss! You’ve gotten so hot—so hot, Darius!” He blew on his fingertip to cool it off. “You were in Paris or somewhere?”
Darius had no idea how badly his sudden appearance spooked David. Once David had recovered, he talked even faster, even more incoherently. He didn’t wait for Darius to answer his questions. He laughed self-consciously about his jitters. “Ah, Darius, I have terrible ADD. Diagnosed! But only after I left you. I can barely afford the Adderall. Not to sound pathetic and penurious! Actually, I’m well. Being creative! But I thought you were in Paris! Do you remember talking Vail for hours on end in the old days, and en Francais, n’est-ce pas?”
“Candi Fury was on a rubber leaf,” the drug addict recalled bafflingly.
David continued, “You know, Vail has been an incredible influence on me. That year at your house—imagine.” He turned to the old addict. “Darius lives in Vail’s old house! Or used to.”
Darius looked at the drug addict warmly, waiting for an introduction. For a moment the man stared back at Darius, or at his lips or the bridge of his nose. His aim was off. With an almost inaudible uh-huh he left them. David whispered, “Don’t worry about him. But seriously. For years now—all by my lonesome—I’ve been slaving over a graphic novel about the life of Piero Cannata—not the filmmaker.”
“I don’t—”
“No, of course not. No one knows him. This one attacked Michelangelo’s David with a hammer. Broke the toe off. 1991. Then as soon as he got out of a psychiatric hospital, he attacked a Filippo Lippi with black magic marker! At the cathedral in Prato! And that wasn’t the end of it. But—yes, I somehow tried to build on the—on Vail’s self-consciousness about his own work. Did you see the drawings? Do you know them?”
“I saw them in Paris as a matter of fact. I don’t think they’re authentic. But, Shh! I haven’t told Cassie.”
“What? Not autograph works? Incredible! Are you sure? I quite liked them. I even wondered whether they hadn’t come through you somehow,” he steered close to the truth. “From the house or from your father. Of course, Cassie won’t care one way or the other. I happen to know they were sold in a lot to another gallerist, Arthur Greenblatt, but he’s in Zurich.”
David had used Cassie’s first name in the familiar way Americans talk about someone famous. In passing, Darius thought it odd that David knew about the disposition of the drawings. Without suspicion he admitted, “I do think there’s a chance they were taken from our house a long time ago.”
David was silent. His expression was like a dragonfly landing.
“Maybe by some workman Mom hired or who knows?”
After a long pause David asked, “Why would there be fakes in your house?”
“That part I haven’t exactly figured out. I’m pretty sure they were there, though.”
“Well, that’s—whoof—wow!”
“David,” Darius began. “There’s actually something important I’d love to ask you about.”
David made an indulgent moue. He brushed long thinning hair over an inflamed corner of his forehead. He had a serious tremor in his fingers. It was particularly noticeable when his hand came near his face, brushing his hair out of the way, as now, or rubbing at a fugitive itch or touching his nose when he lied. Darius had always thought David nervous and vulnerable partly because of this tremor. Appealing to David now felt strange, because he had to abandon his old condescension toward adults. “I’m not sure I understand,” David began after Darius had broached the subject of Oliver. “He was always—”
“He’s really been going downhill. The whole time I was in Paris. It started even before that. Seven years, maybe. And it’s serious. He’s not like he used to be. Like when you knew him. He’s turned into—almost—one of those germophobe shut-ins. None of us can get in to see him. And frankly, he could drop dead, and none of us would know. I’m sure he’s got high cholesterol and high blood pressure and he’s definitely not taking anything.”
“How is this your responsibility? I mean, if he’s been able to function—and I guess he can function now in some minimal way? A lot of people don’t go to see the doctor when they should—”
“No. I’m not really asking your opinion. Sorry, David. I’m wondering if you know anybody who’s dealt with the same thing.”
“I have an aunt with dem—”
“I mean in a professional way.”
“Like a shrink?”
“Uh—yeah, I guess,” Darius squirmed. This wasn’t going well. He’d somehow imagined a glamorous profession existed that exactly suited his father’s desperate need. A solution was going to have to involve love and understanding, amateur qualities. He worried because no one could love Oliver.
“Hmm. I want to help,” David said as if about to continue with a but. Compassionately he said, “Let me put on my thinking cap. Hm. Hm. Hm.”
“Oh, don’t worry. I can always try Cassie,” Darius waved aside his own plea. “They sort of—almost—went out for a while a long time ago.” He sounded disconsolate.
“Well, I can think of one person, but I don’t know if he’s right. Do you remember the teacher of yours who came to the house once? You brought her to dinner.”
“Ms. B?”
“Yes, Jane. Right.”
“You remember her?”
“We met up again here in the city and got friendly for a bit. Very briefly. I haven’t talked to her for ages now.”
“But David, she wouldn’t know anything about this. In fact, I’m pretty sure she hated Oliver.”
“She did,” David said with his first natural smile. “But I’m not talking about her. Last I heard she was living with a doctor or—I think—a kind of specialist geriatric psychiatrist. The guy himself is actually very young.” With a token lowering of his voice, he gossiped, “She likes young. You know, when I met her she was hooking up with a hunky Hispanic waiter—or dishwasher! And it was obviously all about you know what.” Returning to the problem at hand, David wondered, “I’m pretty sure the new guy is a psychiatrist, and not a regular doctor. I’m positive about the geriatric part, because that was funny to me. Ironic.”
“Wait! Wait! I’m trying to imagine Ms. B with a dishwasher!” Darius shook his head.
“Yeah. But now she’s moved in with this Doctor Nathan Something. And if he isn’t the right person, he’ll know of someone. Of course, Cassie probably has a better idea.”
“I’m finding it hard to imagine Ms. B having sex at all.” Darius said clinging to his jokey shock, an unfelt emotion that felt natural to him.”
“But she’s a very sexual creature,” David said knowingly. “She was your—special favorite, right? Your favorite teacher?” David asked, causing Darius to blush. “She doesn’t teach anymore. She took care of a PhD dissertation and ended up with a job at the Ford Foundation. Congolese child soldiers. Something like that.” David remembered to add, “Young—see?”
To have Jane Brzostovsky drop into all of this was disorienting. In truth, Darius hadn’t thought much about her over the years. His infatuation with her had cooled long before she left Lawrence. Or so Darius remembered it.
Thinking about the past, however, just because it was past, filled Darius with melancholy. More so, perhaps, because David’s advice made Darius feel keenly what a clueless childhood he’d had. He couldn’t imagine finding a solution to his father problem by examining the years of his own preposterous immaturity, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about approaching Jane at all. David gave him the number and finished breezily, wickedly, “If it’s awkward calling her, feel free to try the common-law boy doctor directly. I’m sure he’s listed. He’s moderately well known.”
When the opening began to sputter and the gorgeous assistants were gathering cups and napkins, Cassie led Darius into a sterile, under-furnished office, not at all what he’d imagined. She posed herself on the red pad of a cheap wire chair and offered him the same. Uncomfortable. She was clearly exhausted. Things felt awkward between them now they were in private. “How in God’s name is Oliver?” Cassie repeated a touch robotically. Her lack of intonation suggested she was at the limit of her energy. Darius was reluctant to burden her. At the same time, he understood she was a thousand times more capable than he was even in a reduced state.
“He’s not doing very well, to be honest,” Darius said.
Cassie sighed with fatigue or weltschmerz. She stared through the office’s single window, all bright reflection of the office interior, except for a faint brick wall showing through their own silhouettes, an airshaft. “You know, I haven’t seen him in I don’t know how long,” she began.
“I know,” Darius said guiltily. “I wanted you to know. That’s all. I didn’t think you’d be able to do anything.” This was untrue, of course. Feeling thwarted, he leaned back, and the cruel steel chair knuckled his spine.
“That’s right, but maybe I could get the word out among his old friends. If he really is so—”
“He is. That would be a huge help,” Darius said without hope. Neither of them could immediately call to mind any old friends of Oliver’s.
“You know, I said nutty, but that was just a tease,” Cassie said. Darius looked confused. “I called him a nut, because—well, he’s an eccentric in the grand old tradition, isn’t he?”
“We don’t really have that tradition in America. But I wasn’t offended. Nutty is fair to be honest. I’m stuck because I can’t think who—well, are there any old guys from Lawrence who knew him?”
“That’s possible. I’m afraid I never knew that crowd. I was always here in the city. And prep schools—” Nor did she know the lawyer Darius tried to describe.
One of her assistants put her head through the door with poised submission.
“What?” Cassie snapped. Without waiting for an answer, she ordered, “Yes, go! Tell Adam to wait. Everybody else can go.” Noticing that Darius was a little taken aback by her harshness, she said, “They’re NYU students. We all hire them. Or someone’s daughter. They’re ultra-privileged, and people like to pretend they’re dumb, or just prestige ornaments for the gallery. They actually work incredibly hard. They’ve all been crushed underfoot by rich parents. Especially the girls.” Cassie eyed Darius and recrossed her arms and legs with a faint jingling. “This isn’t the best ambience for a discussion, is it?”
“I know. I know.” Darius made a move to get up.
“Darius! Hold on, will you?” She jingled loudly. “I’m saying maybe I should arrange something else. It’s quiet out on Long Island at this time of year. Bleak. But that wouldn’t bother you, would it? You used to be all in for mournfulness and—tragedy.” Cassie said this without irony.
Darius admitted it was true. He added the missing hint of irony to his tone.
She returned a flicker of a smile. “What did you think of that boy who was here?”
“Your godson?”
Cassie frowned.
“He told me he was your godson.”
“He is. I was just thinking—godson sounds so quaint. Is it even a thing anymore? I don’t think I ever did anything for him. Maybe a present when he was a baby.”
“I don’t have any godparents.”
“You wouldn’t. Oliver was—well, your mother was Muslim, wasn’t she?”
“And I was adopted.”
“That doesn’t matter for godparents, does it?”
Darius shrugged. He wasn’t above trying to use his adoption as a kind of special pleading. “Mom used to say the Prophet was an orphan boy, too, so—”
“Poor baby!” Cassie deftly cut him off.
Darius responded with silly laughter. Her impatience amused him.
“My friend Bea,” Cassie went on. “That boy’s mother says all he cares about is money. He’s gay. Did you get that?”
“No. I didn’t. At all. But we barely talked.”
“Would you be interested in going out to Long Island for a day or so if I arranged it? My Carl—my man friend—stays out all winter. He’s terribly old and vague, but he might have an idea or two about our problem. He’s the same generation as Oliver. I’d try to make it—not too boring.”