The Rise & Fall of Great Powers (12 page)

“Whatever, dork ass,” she responded.

The family exploded into laughter, Duncan above all, and Madlen beamed, staring in red-faced delight at each adult in turn.

“Keyboard’s filthy, you guys,” Duncan said. “Let’s try and not total that computer in, like, its first six months of life.”

“How do you spell ‘planets’?” Mac asked.

Bridget answered, “Like it sounds, honey: plan-ets.”

Mac whispered those sounds to himself, typing each letter as if depressing a key might explode something. He read it back, looking to his mother: “P-L-A-N-I-T-S?”

“With an
e
,” Duncan said. “She told you: plan-
ets
.”

“An
e
where?”

“An
e
 … aargh!” He dropped his spaghetti-spun fork and leaned over to type it himself. Aloud, Duncan skimmed the Wikipedia entry. “Only eight planets now? What the hell? When did that happen?”

Mac wandered away from the table.

“We’re still eating, Mac.”

Tooly helped clear the dishes and, on her second return trip to the kitchen, bumped into the triplets, who were taking turns licking the pasta scoop. “Can I try one of those chocolates I brought you?”

They stood before the fridge door, guarding their bags from her.

“Not even one?” Tooly remembered girls like this from school days—nasty little things in pretty little costumes. To be outfoxed by seven-year-olds again!

Bridget insisted on finishing the cleanup and dispatched Tooly and Duncan to the den, where he flipped among cable news channels.

She could have raised the matter of Humphrey again, but Duncan seemed intent on first asserting his current station in life, as if to efface how he’d been when she knew him. “So tell me more about what you do now,” she said. “I know law, but what, exactly?”

“Transactional-slash-corporate.”

“You slash corporations?”

“The corporations do the slashing. I’m their humble servant. Lots of preparing contracts, setting up stacks of paper for the business folks when they come in for their big meeting. When I’m in the middle of a major deal, I’ll do like a hundred-hour week.”

“You enjoy it?”

“I do, weirdly. Anything is interesting if you look at it long enough. The worst part is the people I’m hired to work for. Not unusual to get a call Friday afternoon from some jerk of twenty-three at a private equity fund going, ‘Sorry, guy, but I need you to spend every minute of your weekend doing this. Need it on my desk nine
A.M.
Monday.’ ”

Bridget entered. “Is he moaning about making partner?” She patted his thigh, inadvertently knocking the BlackBerry between his legs.

He collected it, reading emails as he spoke: “So, I made partner on schedule in January, right? It’s supposed to be the brass ring after eight years, okay? But now I’m getting shit on just as hard as I ever was.
Senior partners still telling me what to do. Haven’t gotten a significant raise.”

“What you’re witnessing,” Bridget said, “is the first time Duncan has been present on a weekend in four months.”

“Oh dear,” Tooly said. “Just as you guys get a break, I turn up and force you to host me.”

“No, no. It’s cool to have guests,” she said. Bridget had also studied law at NYU, but hadn’t worked as an attorney because of the kids. To her delight, she was about to start part-time at a firm on Wall Street, which explained her studying. “It’s piecemeal to start—paid by the hour to sit in a room with a bunch of other contract attorneys, scrolling through a database of millions of emails. But they could order me to do photocopies and I’d be, like, ‘How many?’ Actual conversations with actual grown-up human beings again. Yay!”

Duncan switched to a different news channel. “Yes, yes,” he muttered at the pundits. “Unsatisfied with ruining the economy, you dickweeds are now going to fix the world.”

“He’s not allowed to say things like that around people at work,” Bridget explained. “Hence the ranting at home.”

“Tragically accurate,” Duncan said.

As they sat there, sipping Shiraz, bathed in the light of cable news, Tooly contemplated him. It seemed so improbable that their two bodies had ever had sex. How did people get to that stage, the clothes-pulling part? The whole endeavor struck her as absurd for a moment.

“What’s the smile for?” he asked.

“Just thinking about your old place. With Xavi and Emerson.”

“Right.”

“And Ham the pig downstairs.”

“Hmm.” He returned his attention to the TV, evidently not wanting to discuss the old days.

They insisted that she stay overnight—it was late, and both McGrorys had drunk a bit much to drive her to the station. Duncan showed her to the basement suite, passing a workbench piled with dusty luggage and compact discs.

“Still big on music?” she asked.

“Oh, yeah,” he said sarcastically, “I’m so cutting-edge that I learn about bands from my daughters.”

Mac, who had followed them down to the basement, stared up at his father.

“How much do I have to pay you to get a repeat performance of ‘Free Bird’?” Tooly asked Duncan, smiling.

“Not happening.”

She clasped her hands pleadingly. “Just a bit? You have to! Your son needs to see this!”

Duncan shook his head gruffly, as if she’d done something offensive.

“What’s ‘Free Bird’?” Mac asked.

“Nothing, nothing.”

The boy looked to Tooly, then back at his father.

“Seriously, Mac. Time for bed. No discussion.”

The boy trudged upstairs.

“Now,” Duncan said uneasily at the door to the suite, “before
you
go to bed, I should hear what you’ve been up to these years. You just vanished.”

She had ample practice derailing such inquiries. But Duncan, having known a younger Tooly, retained access to that version of her. Plus, she’d eaten his food, drunk his wine, was staying in his basement. So she found herself summarizing the past eleven years. How, in her early twenties, she’d worked her way across America, taking all manner of short-term jobs: waitress, clerical, shop clerk. She spent a year in Chicago, three more on the West Coast, then traveled around Latin America, falling for each new place, poring over property sections in the local newspapers. Until, weeks later, she yearned to escape that place, and did. At one stage, she participated in a one-month expedition down the Amazon, but left when the man who’d invited her proclaimed one morning, “The sight of you making your tea, getting it just right, makes me want to pull my hair out. I’m sorry. I had to say it finally.” She tried Europe, working briefly at an expat listings
magazine in Paris, then went to Brussels, where she took a job at a souvenir shop and dated a Congolese musician. Next, she toured Spain alone, developing an ache she couldn’t explain. At a flamenco hall in Seville, she met an Argentine woman and they spoke all night about books and travel. Afterward, as Tooly walked back to her hotel, tears came into her eyes. So, so lonely. In defiance, she hadn’t met with the woman as planned, instead traveling onward to Portugal. She stood on a train platform in Lisbon one evening without any reading material, so picked up a scrunched literary journal whose articles were so dull that she perused the classifieds, happening upon one that stated, “Bookshop for Sale.” She had been nearly thirty then—perhaps time to try something rooted.

“I get to read all day long,” she said.

“Cool.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you saw my life—very
un
cool.”

From professional habit, she ran her finger down a stack of glossy hardcovers on the workbench, each volume a recent doomsaying bestseller about the profligacy of a culture whose capitalist soul Duncan himself serviced. This was his “apocalypse porn,” Duncan said. Nonfiction titles like
Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America; Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed; That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back
.

“They look unread,” she noted.

“Delirium amazonus,” he said. “I buy off Amazon in the middle of the night. Stuff turns up two days later and I’m, like, ‘I’m not reading this!’ Help yourself.” He paused. “What’s your number here, by the way?”

“How do you mean?”

“Your cellphone.”

“I don’t have one; I’m the last person on earth without.”

“This must be rectified.” He fetched an old mobile and charger they kept as a spare. “If you have a problem in the night, phone us upstairs.”

“Thank you, Duncan, but I’ve been making it through the night without help since approximately age thirty.”

“Feel free to call home or whatever. It’s just a Nokia dumbphone, but it’s got credit on it.”

“Thank you. Very kind.”

“The bed down here is squeaky, we were told by the last occupants.”

“I’ll get in and remain motionless.”

“So,” he said, standing taller, “before I go back upstairs, we need to touch on the big issue.”

“Yes, absolutely, please. This mugging,” she said. “What happened, exactly?”

“He doesn’t even remember it, so we’ll never know. To give you the background, I’d been dropping over to your dad’s once in a while, just checking in on him. Sheepshead Bay is way the hell out there, and I was—”

“But wait. I still haven’t heard the whole story of how you two know each other. You said you found him after I left New York?”

It was Xavi who had figured out where Tooly lived, from a marked-up map she had misplaced at their apartment. They’d trekked out to this street in Brooklyn near the Gowanus Expressway and found some old guy looking out the window. They waved for his attention, pressed the buzzer. Did he know where Tooly was? Was he a relative? Her father?

Yes, maybe he was her father, but who were they? They explained themselves, and Humphrey buzzed them in.

“So weird to think of you, him, and Xavi playing chess there,” she said.

After that first meeting, Duncan went back alone, hoping to interrogate Humphrey. But he had no more success—the old man truly didn’t know where she’d gone. When law school got crazy, Duncan quit looking. He met Bridget, and that helped. He graduated, passed the bar, joined Perella Transom Fife LLP, started a family, moved back to Connecticut, and never thought of this guy, the father of an
ex-girlfriend. Until, one afternoon, they bumped into each other at a hospital. Duncan had been visiting someone there, while Humphrey had minor surgery scheduled. They spoke briefly, then the old man—mortified—asked a favor. The hospital required an emergency contact number. Could he use Duncan’s?

“I was the only person he knew in the whole city to put down,” Duncan said. “He honestly did not have one other number. A few days later, I’m at the hospital again. He’s recovering from surgery, so I drop in. He promised that, once he got better, he’d take me for dinner. I said, ‘Sure,’ in the way that you do, not expecting people to follow through. After the operation, he actually calls me. Since he’s too sore to travel, I drive down to where he’d moved in Sheepshead Bay. That’s when I saw how he was living. You’ll get a look tomorrow. After that, we kept in touch here and there.”

“Incredibly nice of you. I know how busy you are.”

“It was either me or nobody,” he said pointedly. “Anyhow, I hardly ever went down there. But flash-forward to last year. I happened to be in Brooklyn one Saturday morning, so decided to drop in. I get there, and find your dad sitting in the stairwell of his building. He goes, ‘They’ve taken everything!’ He doesn’t have his hearing aids in, so he can’t hear me. I have no way of asking anything. He’s got these marks on his throat like someone choked him. I get a piece of paper and pen, and write in big letters, ‘What happened?’ He looks up and goes, ‘Your writing is terrible. You’ll never get a job as a secretary.’ ”

She smiled sadly. That was Humphrey, all right.

Since the attack, he had declined. “I’m not saying he’s lost it,” Duncan specified. “Part of the problem is his hearing and his sight. That cuts him off. When a place is noisy, he can’t hear properly, which he finds upsetting. He stays mostly at his apartment. Goes deep into himself. I need a fishing line to reel him back to the world.”

“This is sounding way worse than you described in your messages. How is he even managing on his own?”

“There’s a Russian woman I pay a few bucks to clean up, get his groceries, hang out with him most mornings.”

“That’s really generous of you.”

“Basic decency,” he said.

“And I guess they can talk Russian together.”

“Didn’t know your dad spoke Russian,” he said. “I apologize, by the way, if I downplayed the situation. Just, this thing has consumed way too much time these last few months. My wife is upset, my kids are upset. I’ll be honest: I was getting desperate. Tried everything to find you.”

“How did you?”

“He mentioned how your actual first name is Matilda. I typed that in.”

“With his last name.”

“With Ostropoler, yeah,” Duncan confirmed. “Sorry if you were trying to get away from him, but you need to be involved.”

“Wasn’t trying to get away.”

“Well, sort of unusual not to talk to your dad for years, or even know where he was. Or him you.”

This made her sound so callous. She wanted to justify herself. But that required saying too much about their own past. Neither wanted to get into that.

“Sometimes I used to tell Bridget—I’m not even kidding—I told her I was working late on a case and actually snuck to Sheepshead to check on him,” he said. “It’s like I was having an affair. I’m the only guy in the tristate area who cheats on his wife by visiting a man of eighty-three!”

“But he knows I’m here, right?” she said. “And he wants to see me?”

“Of course. And it should be fine.” Duncan paused on the stairs, uncertain whether to say more. “But still,” he warned her, “you might want to brace yourself.”

1988

L
UXURY CARS BLOCKED
the entrance to King Chulalongkorn International School, engines snarling as a pair of sweat-soaked Thai guards checked credentials and pointed families toward the parking lots. The vast complex—elementary school, middle, and secondary, over acres of southeastern Bangkok—was on display for International Day, an annual celebration of the diversity of bankers, diplomats, journalists, shady expats, and spies rich enough to send their children here.