The Exiles (12 page)

As for Trevor, there wasn’t much of Emily in the boy, either. Everyone—friends, work colleagues, the boy’s pediatrician—commented that the boy looked exactly like his father. Still, Trevor’s genes were only half Nate’s. It was a fifty-fifty lottery, procreation. That’s why he hadn’t wanted a kid in the first place—or why he’d thought he hadn’t wanted one—too much of a child’s future was left up to chance, and risk terrified Nate. That was probably why he’d never truly succeeded on Wall Street. His new bosses, however, were looking for a conservative money manager. For once, Nate fit the bill.

“Do you smell that?” Emily held Trevor’s butt up to her face.
“Oh, I guess not. He’s still fresh.” Trevor opened his mouth wide, the way he often did in the moments before launching a cry, but held silent. He twisted against Emily’s arm hold and she readjusted her grasp and said, “It must just be the salt from the water. It smells a little rancid.”

She stood Trevor on the ground and he clung to her leg.

“Em, seriously, we’re on a dock.” Trevor seemed to hear the edge in his father’s voice and fell to the ground. “You need to keep your eye on him.” Nate grabbed hold of the boy’s arm and steadied him.

“Sorry,” said Emily. “I’m just picturing our bright future.”

Emily spoke incessantly about the future. As if it were something a person could bank on.

“This isn’t Manhattan,” he said. “Newport has good public schools. Trevor doesn’t have to go to St. George’s.” Newport did have good publics, at least on the elementary level. This was supposed to be the appeal. Newport symbolized an escape from the rat race for both Nate and his son.

Newport’s anti-allure (other than the disappearance of their Jeep with their detailed financial histories inside) was Nate’s family history with the area. He’d never planned to move back to his father’s ancestral homeland and, as a result, had almost turned down the Newport job, sight unseen. That would have been foolish, he understood now. There weren’t any Bedeckers left in Rhode Island and their history here had been largely eradicated, given that, in public, George never spoke about growing up in Narragansett. He chose, instead, to portray himself as a self-made Midwesterner or a man rooted in old Europe. The only thing that remained of the Bedeckers in this part of the country was a boarded-up Narragansett homestead, empty and left to rot, for all Nate knew.

He watched a small motorboat, a whaler maybe, navigate
the narrow channel between docks. He touched Emily’s arm as she lifted Trevor and held him high, helping the boy see past the boats to the open harbor. Nate hated keeping information from her. Until recently, he’d hadn’t lied to Emily ever, never held back, but once he started he couldn’t stop. And now there was a
New York Times
clip burning a hole in his wallet. The folded-up article had been there for more than a month, for forty-one days. It was nothing, probably, just a small mention of Nate’s father. And yet the clip had awakened Nate’s dormant health fears and put him on high alert. He’d told himself that he was justified in keeping it from Emily, that he would talk to her about it when the time felt right. Still, he was increasingly glad that he’d missed his chance to have that talk last night. There was no reason to scare her, not until he’d done the preliminary investigating himself. Not until he knew whether there was anything, honestly, to say.

“Here, I’ll take him,” Nate said, holding his arms out for the boy. Trevor was growing heavy, no longer an easy carry. Emily handed him off and then looked out over the water, which was choppy in the midday wind, and Nate did, too. He looked past the docks and beyond the boats. Across the harbor, south of Jamestown, Nate saw land. On that strip of coastline, he knew, lay Narragansett and the Bedecker house, the old Bedecker house, his father’s childhood home.

CHAPTER
11

Where Do You Think We’re Going?

T
HEY
’
D ALREADY BEGUN
spending the cash. First on necessities: a jumbo pack of Pampers, two cans of ready-to-drink formula, five two-packs of Gerber Organics, and a bunch of bananas. Then, as lunchtime approached, Emily insisted on splurging—and she didn’t regret it—on two picnic sandwiches and an iced tea to split. They were down to $42.50, not even enough for dinner with wine, barely enough for a few hours of babysitting in New York. Emily knew that they could have saved the cash by eating at the hotel (they had to return to the Viking anyway, for Trevor’s nap), but it meant the world to Emily, when in dire straits, to be able to eat a sandwich in the open air. Under the thin October sun, she’d fed Trevor a small tub of pureed sweet potatoes along with the pack of oyster crackers that the deli had thrown in for free.

Now Trevor was sound asleep in the Pack ’n Play. He’d caused a scene in the lobby when they got back to the hotel, kicking his legs against Ollie’s footrest and emitting one chest-rattling cry, a single extended husky tone. Emily had smiled at the other
guests in the foyer, hoping an awkward grin might substitute for an apology. By the time they reached their suite, the tired boy’s neck had begun to go limp against the side of his stroller.

It was Emily’s fault, hers and Nate’s. They’d kept Trevor out for too long, almost an hour past his nap time. Children were ruled by bodily schedules, the triple demons of sleep and excrement and food that Emily, with her contrary internal timetable, battled against every day. When Trevor was a newborn, she and Nate had taken him out to eat almost every night. With Trevor strapped to Nate’s chest, they’d dined at nearly all of the low-key cafés near their apartment (linoleum-countered joints that most of their friends walked by without a second glance), always arriving early to avoid the throngs of first-year analysts and lawyers who crowded their neighborhood as if they’d been seeded in the window boxes. These dinners out were slow and languorous, Nate and Emily so tired that they could barely lift their forks to their mouths, but at least they were outside the apartment! They’d fooled themselves into believing that they were still in charge of the household. They’d been the first in their crowd to Ferberize, as well, letting Trevor cry himself to sleep at five months.

Today, with Trevor out cold in the Viking’s bedroom, Emily lay on the outer room’s plush loveseat, letting her legs sink into the understuffed cushion. The chicken salad from her sandwich sat heavy in her stomach. She shouldn’t have eaten it; stress and food were a dangerous mix. She watched Nate, who was hunting through the suite’s minifridge. He squeezed a bag of salted almonds and flashed it toward her before stuffing it into his pants pocket.

“These will be good for later. Next time we’re out, we won’t have to shop,” he said as he popped open a Diet Coke. He set the can on top of the TV and peeled off his button-down, smelling
the underarms before hanging it in the closet. He stripped out of his T-shirt, too. He was still almost as slim as when Emily first met him four years ago. Even the small bulk that had accumulated around his waistline, the only bulge on his lithe frame, held its own well-defined shape.

“Later? Where do you think we’re going?”

“We’ll go as far as we can get with a Bugaboo and a boy. What’s the record for that?” Nate picked up the soda and took a long swig.

“Not far,” Emily said. “Unless you’re planning to sneak into Doris Duke’s mansion.” She closed her eyes, giving her retinas a break from the room’s overwhelmingly floral decor. The room could use fresher textiles, exposed hardwood, maybe some stolen art to perk it up.

“Doris Duke’s
mansion?
They call them cottages, babe, not mansions,” Nate said. “It’s the local lingo. Cottages. How fucking cute.”

“We can’t afford them anyway. The admissions prices would eat up our whole stash.” Emily had a feeling that they’d spend the rest of the weekend in this room, hoarding the cash they had left. As for the one daytime adventure that was free of charge, the Newport Cliff Walk, it wasn’t ideal with a baby.

“Stretches of the path are jagged and au naturel,” the concierge downstairs had said, smiling condescendingly. “They’re in the process of renovating the final leg, smoothing out the largest of the boulders. It’s not safe with a stroller.”

Emily had a horrifying vision of Ollie tumbling off the Cliff Walk or into a bottomless crevasse, Trevor spread-eagled as he fell, his mouth open in a silent cry—finally he masters the silent cry! But it’s too late!—à la Hitchcock. The horror! Emily had studied fear in college, from a philosophy standpoint. She’d
focused on the ways traditional images of disaster snuck into eighteenth-century theories on existence. We’re all haunted, it turned out, by our own idiosyncratic but also shockingly familiar doomsday prophesies: This was her lecturer’s point of view. Even at the time, Emily had wondered if that was historically correct or simply the kind of thesis (fear! universal fear!) that the scholars at Michigan knew would get undergrads all worked up and keep them academically interested. It was a pedantic fireball. It was the kind of knowledge that was regurgitated at frat parties to impress the humanities-deficient econ majors. Econ majors: those guys would have turned into great cheese makers, all concerned with exactitude and numbers and toeing the line. Who knew back then?

She missed the innocent intellectualism of that time, entire years when she was expected to do nothing more than discuss Yeats and Rousseau, when she was surrounded by scholars who understood that these men’s words mattered, that there was a larger world, that we were all cogs in the light of history. In the years since, Emily had drifted so far from this former self. Her life of the mind had morphed a life of the material—and the maternal—without her noticing it happen. That drift had hit her hard, smack-hard, at the Barbers’ party. Standing in Anna and Randy’s expensively spare living room, she couldn’t deny who she’d become.

It was still early in the party (early for the Barbers, whose soirees tended to last well into the morning) when Emily found herself next to Sam Tully. He had propped himself against the buffet table (Edwardian, Emily thought) and was describing his new road bike to Nate. Sam said there was a shop on Fourteenth Street that would custom-design a machine to any rider’s body measurements and cycling stance. All it cost was a slim month’s
rent. “A drop in the bucket” is how Sam described the price. Emily grinned when he said this and politely excused herself from the conversation.

Nate, who’d seemed to be having the time of his life, pulled her back toward him and whispered in her ear, “Should we go?” Yes! She loved this man! She nodded even though they had the babysitter booked for another two hours.

“Let me get my bag and swing by the bathroom,” she’d answered. “I’ll meet you at the elevator.” Emily would have liked to own a bike tailored specifically to her stance. She’d have liked an antique buffet table, too, and a budget with enough wiggle room to hire caterers for weekday parties. What she’d have liked, in truth, was the bank account to support these things—she knew she’d never buy that bike, this buffet table, but for the price of either she could make a difference in the world. She was sure of it. She kept thinking about the economy’s manic upswing. The pundits were claiming growth might hit record highs by the end of the year, growth that represented some sort of hope for a country rising in the new century, fighting back after a tragedy of epic magnitude. Though from what Emily could see, all the proceeds of that growth were being thrown toward the ridiculous—bespoke bicycles, personal airstrips, hand-massaged beef. None of it was coming her way (or the way of all of the children who were still starving, the middle class who were still fighting for health insurance). If the money were hers, she told herself, she’d build something to last. Whether in technology, in dairy, in philosophy, she didn’t know. But she’d at least, with the cash, have a chance at mattering.

She grabbed her bag from the rack in the hallway and then tried the bathroom door—locked, a muffled “out in a minute” came from the other side. She continued walking west through the apartment, in the direction of Greenwich Street, as if these
hallways were a part of the city’s landscape itself. She turned and stepped into the study, toward a second bathroom, where all was quiet. The party wasn’t large enough for people to be wandering this far into the abode. The study was solemn, unlike the living room and dining room, which were experiments in pop art, glossy white spaces punctuated with bursts of primary color and animal print. The study was dark and clubby, like a gentlemen’s den from the Barbers’ grandparents’ era. Leather armchairs abutted bookcases filled with worn hardcover volumes. A brushed-steel desk appeared to be more for show than actual work. Along the wall next to the desk, a stack of framed artworks leaned at a thirty-degree angle.

Anna and Randy weren’t art lovers by any means. At other people’s parties, the guests joked about it, about how the Barbers had the most significant contemporary art collection of their crowd but didn’t seem to care about aesthetics. The couple had a consultant who bought works on their behalf, works that were an honor to own, pieces by newly crowned up-and-comers whose names had cachet. Most important, the works tended to hold onto their value. “Insurance,” Randy had said to Emily at a previous party, pointing to an oblong Byron LeRoi that hung in their entryway. “That’s a whole kid’s future, if they ever need it. Say my career tanks and Anna drinks her way through our reserves? We’ve always got backup in the art.”

These people—Randy, Tristan, Sam Tully, and the rest—loved to talk about the dark side of their wealth, the looming truth that this economic upswing couldn’t last forever. That fear lent a frantic energy to their unabashed extravagance, as if they needed to cram in all of the enjoyment they could today, before the world as they knew it died tomorrow. Rather than save to protect against hard times, they spent lavishly in anticipation of them. Regardless, when the crash came, Randy would still have
his art. What would Nate and Emily have? Even less than they had now. The thought made Emily’s heart crack. She imagined their future as a black hole.