7.

Malcolm was yet in his suite. He was speaking to Susan on the phone.

“Let’s eat food, for lunch,” she said.

“Can’t do that.”

“Let’s drink a drink in a bar.”

“No.”

Recalling certain past behaviors, she deduced he was in the grips of the hotel unwellness. In a patient tone, she said, “I want to see you, Malcolm. Tell me, how should I achieve this?”

“I think I could swim,” he said.

Ninety minutes later he was standing beside the pool in trunks, while Susan trod water before him. He crouched into a squatting ball, toes hanging over the pool’s edge. Tipping slowly forward, he flopped into the water. His body rose to the surface, facedown, lifeless. A long while passed; Susan watched, smiling. They had swum together many times and she expected a performance. Malcolm breached, gasping. “We called that one Dead Man’s Float,” he said.

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“My school friends and I.”

“You never had a friend.”

“I had four friends.”

“What were they like?”

“Rich brats, like me. One was sex obsessed, one was sporty, one was gay, I guess. One was weirdly content.”

“Who were you?”

He wondered how he should put it. “A lump of heartbroken clay.”

“Why were you heartbroken?”

“Well,” he said. “It was before Frances came around. I’ve told you all this.”

“Not really you haven’t.” They were facing each other, swimming in place. “Tell me now,” she said.

He took in a mouthful of water and spit it upward in a thick stream. “Who knows where to start.”

“Start at the end.”

“My father died and Frances showed up unannounced at the academy.”

“And you didn’t know her very well at this point, right?”

“Hardly.”

“Had you known your father?”

“Almost not at all.”

“But you were heartbroken about his dying?”

“No, I was ashamed of that.”

“Because of the way it happened,” she said.

“Of course. It was in all the papers, you know. Fragrant Frank Price. My father had made so many enemies, and they were having a lot of fun with the details. And my mother was made out to be some sort of monster.”

“Did the other kids know about it?”

“Yes.”

“And were they terrible?”

“Yes.”

A moment passed. Susan said, “Tell me why you were heartbroken, Malcolm.”

“I was heartbroken because Frances and my father never made the pretense of having even a passing interest in me. Most of us at the academy felt this to one degree or another but my parents were extreme. Not a word on my birthday. Not a card. Ten months had passed without my seeing either one of them, then my father died and Frances showed up in a fur coat, tipsy at eleven o’clock in the morning. ‘How are you, pal?’ she asked me.”

“Were you angry with her?”

“I was in awe of her.”

“And she took you away from the academy.”

“She asked me what I wanted to do and I said I didn’t know. She said, ‘Do you want to come away with me?’ and I said that I did.”

“How old were you?”

“Twelve years old.”

Susan’s arms were starting to burn but she continued swimming. There was no one around but them; the air was warm, the pool cool, the light dim, and all sounds were softened, doubled. Malcolm’s face had gone blank. It was rumored that after Frances took him out of school he’d never gone back, and she asked him if this was true.

“I never set foot in a classroom again,” he said. “But, there was Ms. Mackey.”

Ms. Mackey was Malcolm’s tutor. She came to the apartment each weekday for two years. In the beginning she taught him French; here was the reason Frances had hired her. Once this was accomplished, Frances did not dismiss her but asked that she stay and teach Malcolm “other things.” She asked Frances what this meant and Frances replied, “Things that are fascinating.” Ms. Mackey took this to mean she could teach Malcolm whatever she wished, and she did this.

She was a slender, melancholic woman of thirty-five with a gap in her front teeth and aching, pale blue eyes. Certain of their days were devoted to her unanswerable auto-queries relating to the mean stupidity of existence, the fallibility of romantic love, her suspicion that dissatisfaction and shortcoming were constants of the human condition. Once she said, “I keep trying to march in time but the drummer’s out to get me.” Occasionally she would fail to show up and Malcolm would call her at home. Her explanations ran to naked admissions; she was bowing to pressures larger than she could address. “But tomorrow I’ll be there, Malcolm, I promise. Are you missing me very much? I like it when you sit there scratching your belly at me, you little gentleman.” By the end of their first year together Malcolm was in love with her, and she knew it, and treated his love with care and caution. She was pleased to wield this power over him but she neither abused it nor cultivated it.

They worked mornings in the library, then would eat lunch together in a restaurant or café. Frances wanted Malcolm to eat out daily because, as she told Ms. Mackey, “Waiters know more about life than anyone else in the world.” Malcolm felt grand when they dined; he began to settle the bills himself and he respected currency for the role it allowed him. If a waiter flirted with Ms. Mackey, Malcolm would not tip him a penny. If he treated Malcolm as an equal, the man was richly rewarded. Ms. Mackey lamented this behavior, pointing out that money was too often used in lieu of verbal communication. But she couldn’t deny that she was charmed by Malcolm, and she told him as much.

On his fourteenth birthday, Ms. Mackey did not arrive for their lessons, didn’t answer his calls or return his messages. The next day it was the same, and in the afternoon he took the subway, for the first time in his life, to her apartment. Malcolm described the scenario to Susan: “She answered the door in a robe with a stain down the front. She seemed scared; she pulled me in like I was late to meet her. Her apartment was dismal: a mattress on the floor, bedsheet tacked to the window, and her fridge was leaking water across the kitchen. The realization that she was poor was very shocking to me. I hadn’t seen anything like that before, and I was actually frightened by it. She was speaking English; she wouldn’t respond to me in French. She sat me down and asked, strangely cheery, ‘What can I do for you?’

“‘It’s my birthday,’ I told her.

“‘Your birthday was yesterday.’

“It was painful that she’d known but hadn’t reached out. I asked why she hadn’t come and she politely said, ‘I’m inside of something at the moment, Malcolm.’

“‘When are you coming back?’

“She thought about it. ‘Two days.’

“So, I went home and waited. Frances noticed I was alone and asked where Ms. Mackey was. I said she was sick but that she’d be back soon. There must have been too much emotion in my response; Frances smelled a rat and started interrogating me. Pretty soon she had me admitting Ms. Mackey was my heart’s desire. I felt like I was sharing good news but when I finished, Frances called Ms. Mackey and fired her. I never saw her again. I was devastated but it took me a month to work up the courage to go back to her apartment. The super said she’d moved, he didn’t know where. Frances asked me if I wanted to go back to school and I said I didn’t and she said that that was fine, but that I’d need to spend regular time in museums and libraries.”

“What’s ‘regular time’ mean?” said Susan.

“Five hours a day, five days a week. The Met, the Cloisters, the Frick, the Morgan Library. Place to place to place.”

“For how long?”

“Four years.”

Susan said, “You went to museums, alone, five hours a day, five days a week, for four years?”

“Yes.”

“Weren’t you lonely?”

“I was lonely.”

“Frances never went with you?”

“Almost never. I wanted her to. Once she said, ‘What if they decide I’m a sculpture, and won’t let me come home?’” He smiled at the memory, then pushed off the wall of the pool and began swimming lazy, crooked laps.

Susan thought of the time they’d met. It was during a gully in her life; she’d finished school and was home, wondering at the nullity before her and acquainting herself with a creeping sense of lack, chiefly in the area of love. Men had always chased after Susan, and she found the attention pleasing but ultimately unfulfilling. And it was stifling, as her suitors, at the slightest reciprocation, were so quick to assume ownership of her. She did not love these people. She had known something like love during the final year of her studies but it was oversimple, both the man, named Tom, and his plan. His speedy acceptance of her as his lifelong mate was suspicious; he selected her as if off a rack. She tried to think of him as decisive as opposed to robotic, but failed, and she could never achieve a deeper admiration for him. She broke off the engagement in the moments preceding the graduation ceremony. Tom’s face as he crossed the stage to accept his diploma expressed a whole contempt, and just afterward he spoke to her in a bellow over the cacophony of screaming students surrounding them: “I know it’s boring and I should probably just suck it up but I want you to know you’re a definite shithead.” Graduation caps swooped through the air like bats; Susan watched from behind oversized sunglasses.

She’d been home a number of weeks and was sulking in her parents’ bedroom, avoiding the cocktail party downstairs, when Malcolm emerged from her dead father’s closet winding a wristwatch. When she cleared her throat, he flinched, wearing the face of a man caught out. She approached and asked if he was, as it appeared, stealing her father’s watch. He admitted he was, then asked her on a date. She said she was thinking of screaming; he told her to hold her horses and she did hold them. Malcolm assured Susan that if she ate with him they would have a conversation of some interest, and that he would return the watch at meal’s end, and perhaps they could forge a friendship into the bargain. She knew better than to go along with it but she was, as stated, unexcited by the cocktail party; and beyond that, she knew just to look in Malcolm’s eyes that he hadn’t an evil thought in his head, and was no more dangerous than a walk in the park.

They lunched. Halfway through the meal she realized he was the son of the deceased Franklin Price, and now his already intriguing persona was doused in scandal. After he paid the bill she requested that he return the watch. “Oh, please, Susan, can I keep it,” he said softly. She was endeared by his solemn desire, but admitted he was making her uncomfortable.

“I’m uncomfortable almost all of the time,” he confessed.

“Do you know that my father is dead?”

“I didn’t. Were you close with him?”

“Not very close.”

“Did you hate him?”

“No.”

“But you didn’t love him, either, did you?”

“He was my father,” she answered.

He relaxed in his chair and shut his eyes, as though sunning. “It’s good, when fathers die,” he said, pressing the watch to his ear.

Susan was smiling but wasn’t sure why. “I might let you borrow it,” she said.

“Ah-ha,” said Malcolm.

Their relationship was initially platonic. They went to the movies. Malcolm loved the movies, all movies, even badly written, directed, and acted ones. Actually he seemed to have no opinion of any one film he saw; he would only say afterward, “I love going to the movies.” He would not speak nor field a word the moment the lights dimmed. When the film was over, they walked, hours-long strolls in all manner of weather with no destination, and Malcolm spoke easily, though not of anything particularly revealing.

He described himself as an avid swimmer but Susan found he did not swim so much as float; he did not wish to exercise, but to experience submersion and wetness.

He drank, at times to excess, but there was nothing dark about it; he was looking not to kill a thought but to reset the clock, to force an occurrence. He called her one morning after a late night, and though obviously in great physical pain he spoke with earnest regard of the unassailable justice of the hangover. She’d not met anyone like him before and she admired him for his uncommon, complicated, almost entirely untenable belief systems. He never said a dull word, she learned, and he summoned in her a curiosity that her usual friends never had.

But did she introduce him into her circle? The thought was impossible. Malcolm was unafraid of social discomfort, which is not to say that he courted it; but it was common enough that he assumed it requisite, and endured it without grievance. As his position in her life became more prominent, Susan imagined the disastrous collision of worlds: Her girlfriends happening upon her and Malcolm in a restaurant, and insisting they all eat together. Malcolm would not remove his sunglasses. He would order his eggs “really loosely scrambled,” then drown them in tomato juice. He would not speak unless spoken to and then only briefly, and a frost would take the group, an agonizing silence. The worst part of this scenario was the thought of the discussion that would transpire once Susan and Malcolm had gone. There would be shrieking, Susan knew. She endeavored to avoid the scenario at all costs.

Malcolm was unaware of Susan’s concerns. He had no room in his mind for thoughts of her life beyond the time they shared together, and so he could never be offended by her refusal to bring him around to meet her peers.

Susan thought of Malcolm as an exotic pet, a stopgap antidote to postcollege doldrums, but then something terrible happened, which was that she fell in love with him. It was like an illness coming on; it loitered at the edges of her consciousness, then pounced, gripping her mind and heart. She thought it must be temporary, and waited some days before addressing it, when all at once she couldn’t bear to keep quiet.

They were sitting on the Great Lawn in Central Park. Malcolm was pointing to a hummingbird hovering above them. The bird performed an oblong circle, and again, then paused, shot away. Malcolm had followed these actions with the tip of his finger. He was pointing at an empty sky when Susan told him, “Well, Malcolm, I’m sorry to break up the party but it looks like I’m in love with you.” He removed a cheese sandwich he’d been secretly carrying in his jacket pocket and ate this in silence. After, they moved through the park. She reached for him, clamping her fingers awkwardly around his wrist. He stopped walking and laced their fingers together.

“This is how we’re going to hold hands,” he told her.

Malcolm did not not mention Frances, but there was a resistance to Frances-as-topic. Susan repressed alarm when she realized Malcolm and his mother still lived together; and though he spoke of her as one in need of assistance, the volume of their activities contradicted this. When she called him to meet, as often as not he said he was busy. Busy doing what? “I’d like to meet your friends, someday,” she told him. “Oh, I don’t have any friends,” he replied. There was no remorse in this. It was stated the way someone else might have said, “I don’t have a car.” Further investigation brought the situation with Frances into sharper focus. Susan was made uneasy by the timbre of Malcolm’s voice when the subject of his mother arose. He was so plainly and relentlessly smitten with the woman, it was impossible for Susan not to view Frances as antagonistic to her happiness. “I want to meet your mother,” she finally told Malcolm, who winced and hissed and drank his drink. Frances was difficult, he said; she could be meddlesome. But these warnings, along with Frances’s infamously bizarre behavior following the death of Malcolm’s father, served only to entice Susan. One and a half years into their relationship, and in the wake of dogged badgering, Malcolm resignedly organized a dinner for the three of them at his and Frances’s home.

Susan arrived at the appointed time, fist poised to knock when Frances opened the door. In her youth she had been renowned for her beauty and style, and these attributes were still in evidence, but she had a searching, malevolent flicker in her eye that marred her person and kept Susan at a remove. Frances told her, “Stand up straight and let’s see what you are.” Susan already was standing up straight, however. Actually it seemed most everything Frances said to Susan that night was, upon consideration, an insult. “Was it a gift?” she asked about an admittedly daring bracelet Susan wore. And when Susan didn’t lick her plate clean, Frances commented, “I’m too old to even think of dieting.”

Martinis were served in the library after dinner. Frances sat across from Susan, drunk to the point of stillness. Occasionally she would look over at Susan and softly laugh, murmuring some bitter remark to herself. Then she began to stare. It was just the same way a leopard might peer out at spectators in a zoo, the eyes explaining, If it weren’t for this pane of glass I would eat you up. Malcolm was a hologram that night, granting Susan nothing but the occasional partly sympathetic nod: You asked for it, he seemed to be saying, which was true, of course, and obnoxious.

The evening was a catastrophe, in short. When the pain of silence became acute, Susan stood and announced her departure. Malcolm was sleeping or pretending to sleep; Frances walked Susan out, caressing her hand, and demanding she return when she was feeling “more like herself.” After Frances shut the door, Susan stood on the sidewalk staring up at the apartment. She was ill at ease to a degree that seemed outsize to what had occurred that night. An unknown voice spoke to Susan, and it said to her, Be careful. Frances appeared in the window; Susan walked away.

The mother of the man she had accidentally fallen in love with did not approve of their union: this was so. But it was a common problem, wasn’t it? It was a trope. She quieted her instinct. It could never have occurred to her that Frances would actively try to dismantle their relationship, and furthermore, that she would succeed.

In the swimming pool at the Four Seasons, Susan learned Frances had done just this. Malcolm explained he was leaving for Paris. His departure was imminent and for all he knew permanent. Susan’s numerous panicked questions were met with Malcolm at his vaguest and most maddening. The inquisition trailed off; there was nothing more to say; the time had come for Susan to give up once and for all. She felt struck. In a powdery voice she asked Malcolm, “Why don’t you love me correctly?” Possibly he heard; he didn’t answer her. “The Sinking Sword,” he said. Plunging underwater, he hung upside down. Raising his right leg ceiling-ward, toes rigid as a dancer en pointe, he exhaled. The hairless leg began its slow submersion, soon disappearing altogether, and there was nothing on the water’s surface but a low, rolling boil.