LIGHTLY IT SNOWED. Late afternoon looked like evening. In the haloes of early streetlight, discrete, soundless, peach-colored flurries jerked and streaked. The motes vanished the instant they touched the street, but little drifts like swept sugar formed on the sidewalks and on the windshields of parked cars. Darius stood with his hands clasped in front of him. He did nothing to protect himself against the snow except hunch. The snow motes stuck to his lashes. An icy zing tickled his scalp, another his decolletage, another an inaccessible spot inside his ear canal. The last made him shudder. And at last she came.
Together Jane and Darius entered an overheated coffee shop at the cocktail hour. The time and the place were both off-kilter. The dusty orange-yellow snow hit the plate glass windows with a whispery clicketting. Quaintly mismatched tables and chairs were vacant. Walls of black-painted brick were hung all over with mirrors, giving the place an air of night’s storeroom stacked with lustrous extra ingots of darkness. Jane had suggested the place just because it was in her neighborhood. She hardly felt obliged to travel to see Darius. She wore an unteacherly scalloped bustier. At work, a jacket had covered it, but it was hot in here. One of Darius’s fingers pinned her soaked napkin to the table-top, so she could lift a large paper coffee cup clear. Slightly soupy breasts rose in pallid swells when she took a steadying breath. Her puckered lips sipped gingerly at the rim of the cup. Her lips were thin and dry, the top one scored by vertical hash marks.
There was more than the usual awkwardness between them at first. Once again, Jane found Darius a type of young man she just didn’t get along with—gay, she assumed. Without her former awesome authority she now struck Darius as a much more specific person, and surprisingly fragile. They both struggled to smile and make small talk. Both veered wildly from bland politeness to mechanical recollection of their shared past. After winding through news about David Caperini and Jane’s new Doctor Nathan and Darius’s Rolf, they’d gotten onto the subject of marriage. “I always dreaded it,” Jane said firmly. “I still do undoubtedly.” She backtracked. “No. I suppose some of my friends have decent marriages.” She laughed. To think she was having this typically American confessional conversation with little Darius Van Nest, the peculiar, insufferable one.
To Jane’s surprise, he quickly agreed. “I don’t know any yet—any marriages. Or even any long-term relationships. The inwardness. It sends shivers down my spine. I can’t think of a single case where the friends aren’t dropped like leaves. Always a kind of folie à deux. Like my mom and Stan. Though, I guess they need each other.”
“Folie à deux,” Jane echoed. Her stare was blank, neither friendly nor unfriendly. “One does begin to think being alone—well, in a certain way—is preferable. Don’t know what it’s like in your case, but I’ve never felt the pressure some women do. The baby clock. I don’t know why. You do think about it. But I was never driven like—well, that’s not anyone you know. None of this is really anything we need to talk about.” Jane shook her head at her lap. “Are you finding this as odd as I am?”
“A little,” Darius admitted.
Jane folded her arms. She repeated it more firmly, “I owe you ten thousand dollars.” The drawings had been the first thing she mentioned. She hadn’t shifted blame to David, but she let Darius understand the facts. She had sold the drawings, but they came to her from David and before that, as she understood it, from Darius’s own New Jersey basement. “And that’s just if we consider the small percentage I received. You helped pay for my graduate degree.”
“That’s not really the issue with me. Not now. I—” Talk of money would make this conversation much harder.
Jane warned parenthetically, “We’re going to have to talk about the money at some point, Darius.” Then she returned to marriage. “You know,” she admitted brightly. “Maybe I am thinking of marriage. Even at this late date. I guess, with Nathan—”
“I often feel sorry for straight people. They have to deal with all those expectations. You’re sure it’s not that? None of my business, I know.” He shrugged. “Why not get married, if you want to?”
“What about you and your friend? Ralph?” she asked with surgical care.
“Rolf. He’s German. But marriage?” Darius shuddered primly. “We’re not really together like that. And anyway, I think I’m too young. I hope I am.”
“Obviously, you are. Obviously! I can’t help prying. I’m sorry. But if anything ever does happen with him, I suggest you make sure it’s on your own terms. Well, not on your terms. With another person there’s always compromise. But—well, you hardly need my advice about that! I can’t shake the bossy teacher thing with you.” Not entirely friendly laughter flooded out of her like silver coins. “I’m not your teacher anymore,” she reminded herself. A forefinger with a short, neatly glazed nail stopped a drop of coffee in the center of her lower lip.
“Did you mean I might be too compromising or not compromising enough?”
More coins spilled. Jane hunted in her purse. “I can’t advise. I don’t think we’re alike. Enough about all that. Why am I asking about your love life? Awful way of putting it, huh? Love life. Why would I assume you had any at all?” She took lipstick from her purse. A few last coins of laughter tinkled, and she apologized. “I’m sorry, Darius! That sounded rude. Of course, you have a love life.”
“No. Don’t worry. I don’t. No love life.”
An expression of revulsion crossed her face almost too quickly to register. “No one?” she wondered blandly, trying to gauge the color of the lipstick in the darkness. “I remember you used to spend all your time with that boy? That was a sort of childhood crush, wasn’t it? Barry? You ever see him now? Or know what he’s up to? No?”
A slightly uncomfortable silence fell, during which she reached for the table’s votive candle and held it near the butt of the lipstick tube, which read, PassionFrost. Darius quietly dropped, “I did like him a lot.”
“Hunh!” She raised her eyebrows.
“No big surprise, maybe? That I liked him?”
“No, not really. Somebody told me he came back into town because his father was sick. I never hear from old students. I don’t think I was the popular type. Plus, I only taught a few years. I’m a much better fit at the Foundation.” Jane twiddled the lipstick, which she hadn’t put on yet. She brought it down on the table with a little rap of order. “Listen, when our annoying friend David Caperini called, he told me you wanted to ask Nathan something. Something about your father?”
“Yes—”
“Mm?”
“Yes, it’s about my father. I was over there—on Thanksgiving—”
A hint of a mocking drawl audible, she said, “I can imagine holiday dinners with your family—”
“No, no. No, my dad lives alone now. Downtown. A lot has changed. When I saw him, it was the first time in years. Literally years. He’s got some psychological problems, and they’re much, much more serious than when you came over for dinner that time.” Darius was starting to feel something worse than bashfulness. Grief maybe. It was rising suddenly the way emotion sometimes did when he disinterred little pieces of his story. it mostly happened with Rolf, who—thank God—was scheduled to rescue him from this immobile maelstrom of nostalgia. Indeed, Darius didn’t have much time left.
Jane was as attentive as he could wish now. With appropriate gravity, she asked whether something had happened to change Oliver’s state of mind. Or was it age?
Darius continued determinedly, “It’s mostly age I think. But considering where he started off… It’s actually good you met him. You have an idea of how he was, how he already had a lot of issues back then. But if you imagine turning the dial up on what you remember. Not to ten. Eight, maybe? I mean three or four higher. But eight or nine in all.”
She asked for specifics. She nodded for him to go on when he couldn’t speak for a second.
“He’s sort of—not clean.” She didn’t respond, so he added, “I think he’s blacked out the windows.”
She looked askance. “Newspapers?” She caught herself adding gently, “This happens.”
“No. No newspapers. Well, paper towels—I don’t know. I know he almost never goes out. Also some people have called me and told me that he wasn’t in his right mind. Which, of course, I knew, but now—”
“Who called?”
“A guy Ali I used to know. A fundraising guy. Some of the calls I have no idea who it is.”
“Anonymous! You’ve gotten anonymous calls? More than one? Are you kidding? Darius!” she exclaimed in a windy whisper.
“I think it was someone from his building. I’ve met the super. He’s at least aware of what’s going on. But this might have been a neighbor. I’m guessing. And a couple of calls had area codes from out of state. That may have been somebody Stan hired. Stan kept trying to get an investigator to look into my dad’s business. For mom. We thought Oliver might have secret business in Philadelphia or somewhere.” Darius snorted about the overwrought complexity of things and at the scattershot way he was trying to explain. He’d never been able to tidy things into a story. “Basically, I think I have to do something about him. Oliver. I have to.”
“What about your mom?”
“Well, you know. They’re divorced. A long time ago.”
“But still.”
“I think I may be the only legal—”
“Darius! Are you talking about having him declared incompetent?”
“No,” he whispered reflexively. He was almost breathless with shock. Is it what he’d been leading up to? The coffee shop barista stacked unsold plastic-wrapped sandwiches and slices of cheesecake in a fridge. He emptied the display counter of oval dishes and dropped them into a sink along with parts of an espresso machine and empty coffee pots. “They close early,” Darius fretted. “They probably want us out of here.” He turned, searching for Rolf. The barista looked up from the dishes and waved a soapy hand for them to stay.
Jane asked, “I wonder who it was? This anonymous investigator guy? That’s so—”
“Please. I was just hoping you could talk to your—to Nathan. To see if he has any ideas.”
“It sounds like you need a lawyer. I mean, needless to say, I’ll talk to Nathan.”
Though Darius, he minimized the job. “I only need to know what he would recommend in a case where someone is older and shut off and refuses to see people and just—refuses all help.” Like a child Darius was secretly asking for everything to be taken care of.
“I’ll ask, Darius. Of course, I’ll ask. This is right up his alley. That’s perfectly true. It’s a joke of ours. He handles the oldsters and I deal with the kids—meaning my work at the Ford Foundation, not teaching. Darius, do you remember—? This almost reminds me. Do you remember—you couldn’t have been more than twelve? Before you left Lawrence for Choate. Maybe the year you had me over for dinner. You kept coming to me to ask about legal emancipation. You were obsessed with it for months!”
Darius responded to this with chills. Luxurious and slow at first, they ran along his inner arms and the backs of his thighs. He had no memory of what Jane was talking about.
She continued, “Well, you were obviously much too young. I had no idea how seriously I should—in the end, I just remember thinking it was—it was—” Even now she was having a hard time showing compassion for the boy, as if that entailed a loss for her. She’d meant to say she remembered thinking his request was sad. But she finished, “—that it was really unfortunate.”
Soon Rolf came. They all stumbled outside, hunching and pulling up collars. Voluble Rolf greeted Jane with his usual friendly animation and without teasing Darius too much. He obviously liked her. He chatted about his UN job, and she talked about a Ford Foundation study on art therapy for ex-child soldiers. They shared their outrage over an American diplomat who’d recently claimed on TV that Africa had bigger problems than mental illness. Without exactly being jealous, Darius observed Rolf and Jane, two distant parts of his life, interacting. He walked quietly on their wing, hands clasped behind his back, occasionally lifting a shoulder to rub at a ticklish snowflake on his neck. When he looked at Jane’s profile for a long time, trying to see her as the new person Rolf was meeting, she sensed his stare. She looked at him, and for a second, it seemed, they recognized each other the way rivals sometimes do, not with mutual dislike but with a pitiless fondness.