CASSIE’S FRIENDS DIDN’T know what to make of it when, with a queenly chuck of the chin, she barked, “My father! What a killingly dull New Canaan WASP he was!” Or when she complained about a week with friends at the Manasota Beach Club in Florida, “What a WASP-y crowd! And all so old! Help!” She was always happy to get back to New York, where the woman she was—Park Avenue, rangy, impatient, snippy—was as likely to be a laborious act as to be, like her, the real thing, a self-caricature. The possibility of being seen as a fake was liberating. She loved to dress. Tonight she wore the pieces of two different Chanel suits in the blown-up houndstooth popular at the time, the Reagan twilight, and Kenneth Lane “pearls” the size of finch eggs. She’d added a red sash around her middle tied like a cummerbund. Somehow it worked.
Darius trailed his father into Cassie’s apartment, glum-looking and sickly-skinny in over-sized prep school shirt and khakis. His palpable unhappiness was perfectly familiar to Cassie. He was such a type: spoiled but miserable, heart already burned to ashes. And since she rarely saw anyone truly young, she also thought with a pang, God, I must look freakishly old!
Cassie always pretended to be in the middle of some little chore when guests arrived. She thought it put them at ease and was chic, besides. This time she was carrying a stack of yellowed newspapers she’d dug out of a basket by the fireplace. She meant to run them out to the pantry and replace them with new ones. Instead, she let them thump to the floor and put her hands on her hips exclaiming, “Darius! There you are! You don’t remember when we met a thousand years ago. Honestly, seeing you walk in, Darius, I realize this place is way too neat. I had a horrible vision of my Dad’s place in New Canaan. What a bore he was!”
“Let’s mess up!” Oliver seconded with a wooden jollity that made Darius cringe.
“Oliver! Mwah!” Cassie briskly mocked bisoux. She kicked the newspapers aside. “Mmm. That feels good. I’d like to give a swift kick to all those fucking—” she whisper-mouthed the words, so she would be easy to understand: “Tilted-Arc-haters downtown—did you read about that, Oliver? An office worker vote?! I’m a horrible, horrible talent snob,” she informed Darius. “Sorry! You’ll have to get used to it.”
None of them knew how this meeting would turn out. Their nervousness had a strange, high polish. Even Darius’s down-heartedness was polished. His uncanny youth drove Cassie a little wild with unease. A panicky suggestion about games came out and was immediately dismissed. Her bony hands knocked the Chanel jacket open and kneaded her red-wrapped loins. So as not to seem condescending, she offered the boy “the hard stuff.”
Oliver nudged him. “Go on! Pretend I’m not here.”
Unhappily, Cassie fixed an extremely weak vodka-cranberry-soda and two strong on-the-rocks martinis. “I can’t believe I don’t have any Coke,” she muttered in self-reproach. “Or anything good at all.”
Darius perched on Cassie’s Knole settee, as silent and watchful as a praying mantis. He wiped his glass on his knee, leaving behind a dark crescent.
He was a different boy than he’d been a few years earlier. First, at home, had come the great—glaciation, he liked to think of it. Both parents and his mother’s friend, Stan, inserted himself into the New Jersey household long before. Third Form, as they affected to call it (at Choate in Wallingford, Connecticut), had come as a shock to Darius. No longer master of a huge, solitary kingdom in the form of that fake Tudor New Jersey mansion, he was obliged to pay constant attention to his fellow Choaties. Though Darius was accustomed to his father’s singular and refined brutality, he was not used to a mob of boys squirming like a brood of puppies. Constantly snapping with their milk teeth. He greeted the psychological cacophony with narrow-eyed standoffish-ness, which any grown-up could have told him was a poor choice.
At Choate, Darius let slip to fellow Third-Formers that he’d spent the summer in the hospital, because—his poise was fantastic—doctors had found cancer in his spleen. He had perhaps four years to live, no more. It wasn’t true, needless to say, but he wanted a dark story as a kind of shield, the darker the better. Eyeing a concerned English teacher meaningfully, he answered the teacher’s prompt by saying the single word that best described him was “evanescence.”
The teacher pointed out that “evanescence” was usually a general noun. “Exactly,” Darius crowed. “I am a general noun.” The teacher was relieved to learn the cancer rumor was untrue, but alarmed by a short story Darius wrote in which the characters ended up in a bloody heap of severed heads and limbs. Darius preened about his alliterative prose style, an awkward pastiche of E. A. Poe, or, more precisely, Vincent Price. As to the content—the disturbing blood and gore—Darius gave a pert shrug. Nevertheless, he drank in the teacher’s attention. He was too voracious for love not to take a little worry as an opportunity, but it turned out his teacher didn’t like him enough. He had private conferences with other students and liked them, too. To be treated in so unexceptional a way could barely stir the ashes remaining of Darius’s heart. It almost angered him.
Life Sliced by Darius Van Nest
Damon knew from the inexperient days of his infancy that his parents, the notorious Orville and the lovely Sheba, would forever be useless to him […]
Darius was at an age when the powers of expression are at low ebb. The spontaneous, ponderably quirky things children say are plumped into the tedious opinions of adolescence. From a later essay: The ordeal in Viet Nam taught us that every people must be allowed to choose their own system of government. Choaties and teachers alike were bored by Darius’s emotional aperçu that unilateral disarmament would end war. To him the idea was fresh. “What are they going to do with an army if we refuse to fight them?” Darius was all enthusiasm, truly moved by this dream of peace. Another student brayed, “Uh, exterminate us? That’s just What if they had a war and nobody came? Passive resistance. What bull! Sorry, Sir.”
Cassie Vail was wrong to think Darius might find her tiresome and too tidy. Despite his appearance, Darius found everything about this weekend with his father a marvel. He was thrilled to get away from the tension at Choate to spend a few days in New York, where he planned to live one day. He became fuddy-duddy with excitement on the train down from Wallingford, checking over and over the contents of his backpack, his ticket, his money. The leafless woods streamed past like a venous fog. He nervously curled his long hair behind his ears.
His father’s sudden friendship with Cassie Vail was also momentous for Darius. It proved the skein of time did wind back on itself as he believed. The tangle of life did have a pattern. Cassie Vail was the woman who’d long ago come to pick up her brother’s things at the New Jersey house. It was she who’d allowed him to keep the artist’s bed. This visit was a wormhole to the mythic period of his life. He was only surprised that Cassie was alive at all, given how much time had passed. And she was still so young!
Oliver was making a museum-goer’s round of Cassie’s living room, eyeing the walls, even sidling behind the down-at-heel velvet settee to examine the bookshelves. He approved of the old money decor. Sohaila had a Persian infatuation with the gilded.
Oliver appreciated the pictures and book titles for about five seconds each, making meaningless grimaces. In front of a little Lyonel Feininger he started rubbing the flats of his hands together vigorously. “Now, I think this is really good. I like it.” His body pirouetted jerkily to take a large tumbler from Cassie. The awkwardness meant Oliver was on his best behavior. Darius found it worrisome to see his father so out of practice. Cassie, on the other hand, dazzled the boy with her urbanity. He remembered her being scarily severe, but that must have been the slashing hauteur of her tone of voice, obvious even when she was self-deprecating. “What an idiot I always am. No Coke! I’m so sorry, Darius.”
Darius tried exhaling the fuel taste of his drink discreetly. A splash of vodka had ruined it. Cassie sat aslant in the corner of the settee, arms and legs tightly crossed, listening to Oliver raptly but glancing at Darius. The volume of their conversation dropped. Darius took that to mean he was free to look around now.
He examined the model of an incomprehensible building which had been placed on a tall white column, basically the featureless rectangular prism museums use for statues or antique vases. Darius had never seen one in a regular home. Similar models were placed on bookshelves and several hung on the walls like reliefs. Oliver hadn’t given any of them even a full five seconds.
Admittedly, the models looked cheap and poorly made. Mostly cardboard. They sported bridges that went nowhere and arches that supported nothing but a glued strip of paper, a cryptic sentence cut from some book or magazine. Other sentences ran up stairways. Many of the rooms were also pasted with collages of pictures and words. Through one tiny doorway Darius glimpsed a blue marble. Dusty plastic flowers and cheap necklaces, a fork, a matchbook, a glass microscope slide ornamented the rooves.
Oliver’s indulgent chuckle rose from his subdued conversation with Cassie. He slouched on the lolling tongue of a stuffed chair, the shoulders of his blazer canting up, which made him look shriveled. He rested his lips on steepled hands. Outside, an idle-orchestra patter of car horns gave the muffled room an air of waiting-to-begin. Oliver was smiling smugly. He had been talking about the Nazis again. Darius tried not to listen.
Cassie loosened her knotted body slightly and drew herself back to mark a change of subject. “You ever think of taking a place in town again, Oliver? That would be fun.”
“I was—uh—never a city person—” He took off his glasses and twiddled them, frowning and doing something rabbity with his mouth. “Darius says he is.”
Cassie said, “I can’t imagine having a big old house. Apartments are simple. They free you up to think about other things—other than the furnace. It’s easier to travel.”
“Mm. Mm. Mm,” Oliver said. His mind had blanked as far as chit-chat went. Saying something more about the Nazis wouldn’t do. Annoyance made him argumentative. “Grass, I suppose. Nice-ish. You don’t have that. Play on the lawn—red rover, red rover—kids—you liked it, didn’t you, Darius? But. Yes. I do see how one could—you know, on the other hand, sometimes I think, as this one grows up and gets more on his own, I might even enjoy being in the thick of things. Like you said. Pied-à-terre. Certainly with—” He’d been about to say, “the way things are with Sohaila.” His expression became unpleasant.
“Let me get you another drinky-poo, Darius,” Cassie barked. “Maybe just the cranberry this time.” She lowered her chin to examine him across the room even though she wasn’t wearing her reading glasses. “Getting a kick out of that thing?”
Darius was bending over the model to look inside, his long hair hanging to one side. “Yes!”
“Fantastic name: Darius. Darlin’, can I get you another something to drink?”
“No. Thank you, though. Very much,” Darius said.
“Though if you live in the city, you have to listen to constant special pleading by all your Jew friends,” Oliver murmured softly enough the other two could both ignore him.
“You know what those are, Darius? Did you ever tell him much about Colin?” Cassie asked Oliver.
“Mmph?” He feigned a start and looked at Darius. “No. Oh, we mentioned him—just in outline, because of the—” He drew a finger across his neck. “Depressing story.”
Cassie stilled. She looked more bewildered than angry. Oliver couldn’t have meant to refer to her brother’s suicide just now with that cutesy throat-cutting gesture!
But he had. Flustered, aware he’d misstepped, Oliver muttered under his breath, “Hang it!” This time the words barely passed his lips, too soft to be heard but outrageously offensive if they had been. “Hang it” was a correction. Colin hadn’t cut his throat. He’d hanged himself in the front hall of the Tudor monstrosity in New Jersey. Oliver rushed on. “Those could’ve come from our basement, right?”
Cassie drawled, “No. Not those. There were never any models in your basement (his). Or maybe there were a few incomplete things. I can’t remember. The Madonna was there. Those models, I’ve had them since before he died. He gave me most of them. Honestly, I considered them pretty foolish at first. I had to be educated.” Cassie strode over to Darius. She clasped her arms almost girlishly behind her back. “Those were all made by my brother, Colin, who used to live in your house. You knew he was an artist? I guess he claimed architect, but that was a pose. He never built anything. They’re all fantasies. He wanted people to think he was all bougie not bohemian. Opposite of most rich kids. You like them?”
“This one, especially,” Darius answered.
Oliver knuckled his nose, sniffling and blowing roughly out his nostrils. The sound was too self-absorbed to be mocking laughter repressed.
“You’ve got a bed of his, remember?” Cassie said.
“Of course!” Darius said.
“You would have liked him,” she said. “He’s become a tiny bit famous lately. If you’re interested.”
Darius nodded.
“OK. Well, here’s a catalogue.” She tipped an oversized paperback from the bookshelf. Tickling the cover, she said, “This one gives you an idea. They’re made-up buildings. That one you’ve been looking at is called The Battle of Desires and Bitternesses.”
“The Battle?” Darius frowned.
“I know. And it’s BitternessES,” Cassie shrugged, tossing the book on a chair, not insisting. “I guess we’re supposed to think about it.” She took his glass.
Darius blurted, “But they’re sort of—” He hadn’t thought of anything they were like. He only wanted to express enthusiasm. “I do like them. All the eyes!” The Battle of Desires and Bitternesses was a cluster of Japanese-seeming pavilions linked by unlikely aqueducts. The interior surfaces of the pavilions were plastered with tiny images of eyes, apparently clipped from magazines.
Cassie sighed, “He’s an oddball.” She drawled, “Joseph Cornell is someone they compare him to. Although Colin was doing this much later, sixties, seventies. But unfortunately—well, Colin probably had too much money to function as an artist in the usual way.”
“And then it happened!” Oliver lowed from across the room. “The terrible—oh, forget it!”
As soon as Cassie had gone to the kitchen, Oliver leapt up and crossed the room toward Darius and the model. He tottered unsteadily, because he was massaging a tendon in his neck, playing it molto vibrato as he walked. “I think my collagen is starting to degenerate,” he tossed off. Looming over Darius he said, in the nasty whisper that was his most intimate tone, “Isn’t sociable chitter-chattering the most enervating—?”
Darius pored over The Battle of Desires and Bitternesses, ignoring him.
Not offended, pleased, if anything, Oliver commented, “You’re ignoring us.”
“No. I just like this. It’s cool.”
Oliver heard a clank from the kitchen, an oven rack, maybe. A warm, muddy, spicy odor made him imagine some South Asian dish he wouldn’t like. His fingers idly hunted bristle on his chin. “You and I both have large heads. Which is interesting. A pure coincidence.”
“We’re both smart,” Darius murmured absently.
“Speaking of large heads. They were suggesting to your mother—and she mentioned to me—somebody at school or somewhere was talking about your seeing a shrink—talk therapy—personally I never wanted them to get near me. They probably thought I was ripe to stick a pin in the old voices and hallucinations, but I would never stand for that.” He chuckled.
“Dad!” Darius’ body stiffened.
“Is that a No Thanks? Well. Nothing to be embarrassed about.” When Darius didn’t reply for a long time, Oliver commented, “It’s not real architecture, you know. It’s all sort of a fanciful. Personally—”
“I really like it in a weird way. You know if they explain anywhere about the symbolism or whatever?” Darius pointed his chin at the catalogue.
“Nothing to explain. There’s no key. That’s how they decide it’s art. Not very well-made, if you ask me. I remember him. Big hulking fellow, hunched up, and he mumbled, which I can’t stand. When you leaned in, you could hear he had a very fancy, English-y way of talking, which a lot of people used to have in New York—nice people—my parents!—though you don’t hear it so much anymore.”
“Who cares if he mumbled?”
“He ended up hanging himself in our front hall. I don’t think we ever told you that. Sohaila must’ve thought it was too spooky and depressing for a kid. I would have told you. Just so you knew the kind of man he was.”
“Don’t be heartless.”
“I’m not saying anything against him, boy. But who knows what to make of all this? Kind of artsy-mumbly. Glorified model train town, if you ask me. Whatever happened to that Lionel outfit we got for you? That was fun.”
“Dad, I think this is great,” Darius insisted with a flicker of temper. “It’s got—it’s full of contumely.” Darius did know what this word meant, more or less.
“Contumely? Contumely! Where’d you get that? My lord, you sound like one of them. I see that smile! Contumely! Or is contumaciousness better? Probably more modern.”
“All true art is contumacious,” Darius intoned.
“Contumely would have to do with the Bitterness part, I suppose. BitternessES.” Oliver lowered his voice, “Though really he was a Caspar Milquetoast, no matter how hulking he was, the poor guy. Colin. Cassie got the balls in the family. Colin must’ve been more than a little—uh—disappointed in things. No career. Never did much with his life. It’s nice, though, he had friends to underwrite a show—and this festschrift, memorial thingy—” He waved his hand down at the catalogue. “If it turns out you’re homosexual, I strongly advise trying to take the dominant role in the proceeding. Try to be the top. You’ll have a much happier life, I can promise you.” Slicking his pate with an odd smile, he left for the kitchen. Darius froze, his cheeks flaming. Even after Oliver was gone he didn’t move. He had to remain perfectly still for a good long time to ensure remarks like that would pass through him harmlessly, unconsidered almost.
Again Darius walked around Colin Vail’s The Battle of Desires and Bitternesses. He was trying to understand both this work and art in general, to feel them as deeply as possible. But he sensed he was forcing things. He wanted to love art but only seemed able to, in a sense, press himself against it. The same had happened years ago when he tried praying for an obvious miracle or an immediate response from God, or when he tried seeing ghosts in attic windows or communicating with spirits in darkened mirrors. None of that had ever worked, of course.
Also, his back was pricking. His back was to the kitchen door. Were they kissing in there? Old faces like that pressing into one another? Or were they talking about him. Or Sohaila? Or Stan? Or Colin? His attention to the art was becoming intermittent, which seemed lazy. Art’s breath of eternity was turning into a yawn. He had a sudden, extremely painful awareness that a gray, everyday blah was the true stuff of his life.
In the kitchen, bent over, Cassie directed a hostile simper at the oven window. She straightened. “Not too much longer, Oliver. Oh. Here, why not let me? The icemaker has a personality, unfortunately.” Gingerly, she edged between Oliver and the refrigerator. The machine wheezed ice cubes at her special touch. “We’re going to end up getting smashed.” She turned and gave Oliver the glass. They stood barely a foot apart. “Oliver?”
He fingered aside her houndstooth lapel and touched her nipple through the blouse. He pressed carefully, trying to invert it.
“You don’t believe all that—”
“What?”
Cassie rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean. That holocaust business. That Nazi stuff. It makes you sound—”
“What?” Oliver took a moment to switch tracks. “Oh, of course. I do. What could be more plausible? They snatch an old geezer—mental defective certainly—have him potter around Spandau for decades. Decades! And no interviews in all that time? No interviews at all? No one ever talks to him? Fascinating. And now he’s dead, so we have to take it on faith that everything happened exactly like they say. Shouldn’t I be able to talk freely? I hate how no inquiry is allowed anymore. It’s all manipulation and no—no—listen, I hate to be a bore, but I need a cigarette. If you like I can try blowing it out the window.”
Cassie reached into a cabinet for a monogrammed shell of crystal. When it hit the counter with an angry-sounding shock, she whispered, “Sorry. That slipped. I’m fine if you smoke.”
The cigarette end bobbed in the flame as Oliver mumbled. “Secret history of that Armenian genocide hasn’t disappeared. There’s no keeping the truth down. That was the opposite situation. Really happened versus didn’t. You wouldn’t think there could be so much Rashomon about genocide. And you know what? That’s because there ain’t!”
Cassie didn’t want to argue. She wanted him to stop. She interrupted, “Darius is so lovely.” She finished their third round of drinks. “Take this fresh one, Ollie. Your lemon looks like it has some brown I-don’t-know-what on it.” He took the fresh lemon slice and dropped his bad one into her palm. With a pained-looking, lop-sided squint, hunching his shoulders mischievously, he lightly clinked Cassie’s raised glass with his own. Very lightly, almost not at all. His long-fingered hands held his glass and cigarette in greedy proximity to his mouth. He smiled, childishly satisfied now. Both sipped.
Cassie immediately set her glass down. Pulling on hen-and-rooster oven mitts, though nothing was due out of the oven right away, Cassie rebelled. “But he does show—Darius does—how you’re not the most reliable reporter in the world. Honestly, I expected a brat. He’s shy!”
“What? Oh. First impressions. You have to look past the surface. I see what you mean, but—take my word for it—he has these passive, orphan-boy resources. I’m utterly under his thumb, truth to tell. Even this visit.”
“Orphan-boy! Oliver!”
Oliver smiled behind a thicket of fingers and smoke.
“Oh, you’re not—”
He stubbed out his smile. “I am serious. Just because I have a wry manner, I get no credit for my simple truthfulness. I know Darius quite well as a matter of fact and—” He stopped. “Although!—and you’re the first person I’ve ever told this, so shhh!—when Sohaila got him home the first time, I had a powerful nudge-it-out-of-the-nest reaction. Intense! That kid ain’t mine!” He chuckled. “No Darius used to be a fine name until it got taken over by the blacks. Luckily, the rejection panic didn’t last. I warmed up to him.”
“I didn’t mean anything,” Cassie apologized. “I was only wondering—but the two of you ought to be allies! With adoption, I would think some of the awful parts of family don’t apply. No?”
“He’s been colonized by his mother. And the boyfriend. Stan. Maybe my fault, because I keep those two underfoot in New Jersey. But it’s perfectly natural for him to be close to the mother at his age. I couldn’t care in the slightest.”
“I think he’s smitten with you. Or whatever the word would be.”
This thought brought Oliver unexpected pleasure. He repressed any sign of it. He took a puff and exhaled. Was it a bit pushy of Cassie to start interpreting somebody she’d just met? He looked down his nose at the ashtray, clubbed its edge daintily. “You’re nice to have us over,” he monotoned dismissively. “Adds a third factor to the equation. When it’s just him and me, what am I supposed to say? You have a thousand demerits. You’re fucking up at school? That’s so prep school predictable. We all know that story, and it’s a bore. Maybe a shrink would help. Oh—something humorous, speaking of smitten. Yesterday we went to some idiotic ladies’ place for lunch. They had a fruity Filipino—I guess—waiter there, and, you know, I really think he assumed Darius and I were—well, that Darius was my catamite. Surprised myself that I was actually a touch ill-at-ease about it. Maybe because his hair’s gotten so long. And there’s no resemblance at all, naturally.”
“Don’t harp on that,” Cassie whispered.
Oliver ignored her. “Waiters should be old men. I’ll say that for the Veau d’Or. It’s sad when you think about it: that old waiters are so rare nowadays—or father and son eating together—that people would think that first thing. Pedophile. Glad I’m not his age, getting hit on. It’s a magnet if you’re sullen acting like he is.” Behind the lenses of his glasses, his eyes flicked about.
In the living room Darius stood by a tall window. Though aglitter with city lights, the black glass was also smeared with indoor reflections, including the little ones of Cassie and Oliver just entering the room. The boy kept his hands in his pockets. He turned to them. “Don’t you think this weekend feels like the dark ages? Like we’re the most obscure and forgettable people who ever lived? Like peasants. Suddenly I feel that way. Or like we’re driving together on the Jersey shore.” He freed one hand and dragged it through his hair, an elegant motion.
“See?” Oliver said to Cassie as his son’s hand wafted down and snuck back into a pocket. “What was I just talking about? You’re a languorous creature, boy. You’re no peasant. More like the designer type.”
“I know,” Darius admitted glumly.
“Darlin’!” Cassie exclaimed. “That’s a wonderful thing. And we aren’t peasants. You’re not. None of us! You’re memorable.” Yikes! she thought. Peasants of the dark ages? Were the father and son both deranged? Darius let his head fell forward tragically, and two wings of silky hair slipped from behind his ears folding closed against his cheeks.
Oliver observed, “Now he looks like a fallen angel boy. He’s meek, but he manages these domineering scenes. You’d be surprised.”