stumps, and a few children with no means of conveyance at all, who sat in

their minders’ laps, the backs of their necks cupped in their minders’ palms.
Those were the ones who reminded him most keenly of Hemming.
Some of the children on the motorcycles and the wheeled boards could
speak, and he would toss, very gently, large foam balls to them and organize
races around the courtyard. He would always begin these races at the head
of the pack, loping with an exaggerated slowness (though not so
exaggerated that he appeared too broadly comic; he wanted them to think he
was actually trying), but at some point, usually a third of the way around the
square, he would pretend to trip on something and fall, spectacularly, to the
ground, and all the kids would pass him and laugh. “Get up, Willem, get
up!” they’d cry, and he would, but by that point they would have finished
the lap and he would come in last place. He wondered, sometimes, if they
envied him the dexterity of being able to fall and get up again, and if so, if
he should stop doing it, but when he asked his supervisor, he had only
looked at Willem and said that the kids thought he was funny and that he
should keep falling. And so every day he fell, and every afternoon, when he
was waiting with the students for their parents to come pick them up, the
ones who could speak would ask him if he was going to fall the next day.
“No way,” he’d say, confidently, as they giggled. “Are you kidding? How
clumsy do you think I am?”
It was, in many ways, a good summer. The apartment was near MIT and
belonged to Jude’s math professor, who was in Leipzig for the season, and
who was charging them such a negligible rent that the two of them found
themselves making small repairs to the place in order to express their
gratitude: Jude organized the books that were stacked into quavering,
precarious skyscrapers on every surface and spackled a section of wall that
had gone puddingy with water damage; Willem tightened doorknobs,
replaced a leaky washer, changed the ballcock in the toilet. He started
hanging out with another of the teacher’s aides, a girl who went to Harvard,
and some nights she would come over to the house and the three of them
would make large pots of spaghetti alle vongole and Jude would tell them
about his days with the professor, who had decided to communicate with
Jude in only Latin or ancient Greek, even when his instructions were things
like, “I need more binder clips,” or “Make sure you get an extra shot of soy
milk in my cappuccino tomorrow morning.” In August, their friends and
acquaintances from college (and from Harvard, and MIT, and Wellesley,
and Tufts) started drifting back to the city, and stayed with them for a night
or two until they could move into their own apartments and dorm rooms.
One evening toward the end of their stay, they invited fifty people up to the
roof and helped Malcolm make a sort of clambake on the grill, blanketing
ears of corn and mussels and clams under heaps of dampened banana
leaves; the next morning the four of them scooped up the shells from the
floor, enjoying the castanety clatter they made as they were tossed into trash
bags.
But it was also that summer that he realized he wouldn’t go home again,
that somehow, without Hemming, there was no point in him and his parents
pretending they needed to stay together. He suspected they felt the same
way; there was never any conversation about this, but he never felt any
particular need to see them again, and they never asked him. They spoke
every now and again, and their conversations were, as always, polite and
factual and dutiful. He asked them about the ranch, they asked him about
school. His senior year, he got a role in the school’s production of The
Glass Menagerie (he was cast as the gentleman caller, of course), but he
never mentioned it to them, and when he told them that they shouldn’t
bother to come east for graduation, they didn’t argue with him: it was
nearing the end of foal season anyway, and he wasn’t sure they would have
been able to come even if he hadn’t excused them. He and Jude had been
adopted by Malcolm’s and JB’s families for the weekend, and when they
weren’t around, there were plenty of other people to invite them to their
celebratory lunches and dinners and outings.
“But they’re your parents,” Malcolm said to him once a year or so.
“You can’t just stop talking to them.” But you could, you did: he was proof
of that. It was like any relationship, he felt — it took constant pruning, and
dedication, and vigilance, and if neither party wanted to make the effort,
why wouldn’t it wither? The only thing he missed — besides Hemming —
was Wyoming itself, its extravagant flatness, its trees so deeply green they
looked blue, the sugar-and-turd apple-and-peat smell of a horse after it had
been rubbed down for the night.
When he was in graduate school, they died, in the same year: his father
of a heart attack in January, his mother of a stroke the following October.
Then he had gone home — his parents were older, but he had forgotten how
vivid, how tireless, they had always been, until he saw how diminished they
had become. They had left everything to him, but after he had paid off their
debts — and then he was unsettled anew, for all along he had assumed most
of Hemming’s care and medical treatments had been covered by insurance,
only to learn that four years after his death, they were still writing enormous
checks to the hospital every month — there was very little left: some cash,
some bonds; a heavy-bottomed silver mug that had been his long-dead
paternal grandfather’s; his father’s bent wedding ring, worn smooth and
shiny and pale; a black-and-white portrait of Hemming and Aksel that he’d
never seen before. He kept these, and a few other things, too. The rancher
who had employed his parents had long ago died, but his son, who now
owned the ranch, had always treated them well, and it had been he who
employed them long after he might reasonably be expected to, and he who
paid for their funerals as well.
In their deaths, Willem was able to remember that he had loved them
after all, and that they had taught him things he treasured knowing, and that
they had never asked from him anything he wasn’t able to do or provide. In
less-charitable moments (moments from just a few years prior), he had
attributed their lassitude, their unchallenging acceptance of whatever he
might or might not do, to a lack of interest: what parent, Malcolm had asked
him, half jealously, half pityingly, says nothing when their only child (he
had apologized later) tells them he wants to be an actor? But now, older, he
was able to appreciate that they had never even suggested he might owe
them a debt — not success, or fealty, or affection, or even loyalty. His
father, he knew, had gotten into some sort of trouble in Stockholm — he
was never to know what — that had in part encouraged his parents’ move to
the States. They would never have demanded he be like them; they hardly
wanted to be themselves.
And so he had begun his adulthood, the last three years spent bobbing
from bank to bank in a muck-bottomed pond, the trees above and around
him blotting out the light, making it too dark for him to see whether the lake
he was in opened up into a river or whether it was contained, its own small
universe in which he might spend years, decades — his life — searching
bumblingly for a way out that didn’t exist, had never existed.
If he had an agent, someone to guide him, she might be able to show
him how to escape, how to find his way downstream. But he didn’t, not yet
(he had to be optimistic enough to think it was still a matter of “yet”), and
so he was left in the company of other seekers, all of them looking for that
same elusive tributary, through which few left the lake and by which no one
ever wanted to return.
He was willing to wait. He had waited. But recently, he could feel his
patience sharpening itself into something splintery and ragged, chipping
into dry little bits.
Still — he was not an anxious person, he was not inclined toward self-
pity. Indeed, there were moments when, returning from Ortolan or from a
rehearsal for a play in which he would be paid almost nothing for a week’s
work, so little that he wouldn’t have been able to afford the prix fixe at the
restaurant, he would enter the apartment with a feeling of accomplishment.
Only to him and Jude would Lispenard Street be considered an achievement
— for as much work as he had done to it, and as much as Jude had cleaned
it, it was still sad, somehow, and furtive, as if the place was embarrassed to
call itself a real apartment — but in those moments he would at times find
himself thinking, This is enough. This is more than I hoped. To be in New
York, to be an adult, to stand on a raised platform of wood and say other
people’s words! — it was an absurd life, a not-life, a life his parents and his
brother would never have dreamed for themselves, and yet he got to dream
it for himself every day.
But then the feeling would dissipate, and he would be left alone to scan
the arts section of the paper, and read about other people who were doing
the kinds of things he didn’t even have the expansiveness, the arrogance of
imagination to dream of, and in those hours the world would feel very large,
and the lake very empty, and the night very black, and he would wish he
were back in Wyoming, waiting at the end of the road for Hemming, where
the only path he had to navigate was the one back to his parents’ house,
where the porch light washed the night with honey.
imagining). They fought about buildings they loved and buildings they
hated. They debated a photography show at this gallery, a video art show at
another. They shouted back and forth at one another about critics, and
restaurants, and philosophies, and materials. They commiserated with one
another about peers who had become successes, and gloated over peers who
had quit the business entirely, who had become llama farmers in Mendoza,
social workers in Ann Arbor, math teachers in Chengdu.
During the day, they played at being architects. Every now and then a
client, his gaze helicoptering slowly around the room, would stop on one of
them, usually either Margaret or Eduard, who were the best-looking among
them, and Rausch, who was unusually attuned to shifts in attention away
from himself, would call the singled-out over, as if beckoning a child to the
adults’ dinner party. “Ah, yes, this is Margaret,” he’d say, as the client
looked at her appraisingly, much as he had minutes before been looking at
Rausch’s blueprints (blueprints finished in fact by Margaret). “She’ll be
running me out of town someday soon, I’m sure.” And then he’d laugh his
sad, contrived, walrus-bark laugh: “Ah! Ha! Ha! Ha!”
Margaret would smile and say hello, and roll her eyes at them the
moment she turned around. But they knew she was thinking what they were
all thinking: Fuck you, Rausch. And: When? When will I replace you?
When will it be my turn?
In the meantime, all they had was play: after the debating and the
shouting and the eating, there was silence, and the office filled with the
hollow tappings of mice being clicked and personal work being dragged
from folders and opened, and the grainy sound of pencils being dragged
across paper. Although they all worked at the same time, using the same
company resources, no one ever asked to see anyone else’s work; it was as
if they had collectively decided to pretend it didn’t exist. So you worked,
drawing dream structures and bending parabolas into dream shapes, until
midnight, and then you left, always with the same stupid joke: “See you in
ten hours.” Or nine, or eight, if you were really lucky, if you were really
getting a lot done that night.
Tonight was one of the nights Malcolm left alone, and early. Even if he
walked out with someone else, he was never able to take the train with
them; they all lived downtown or in Brooklyn, and he lived uptown. The
benefit to walking out alone was that no one would witness him catching a
cab. He wasn’t the only person in the office with rich parents — Katharine’s
parents were rich as well, as, he was pretty sure, were Margaret’s and
Frederick’s — but he lived with his rich parents, and the others didn’t.
He hailed a taxi. “Seventy-first and Lex,” he instructed the driver. When