Anyway, I had become convinced that Aubrey and Norris, if not among the project’s members, had at least bought some of the stolen items. I had a waking dream of Aubrey shaking out my grandmother’s quilt, the one that had been meant for me and which, like every other soft good my grandparents had owned, was burned in a fire after they died. （No, I hadn’t liked my grandparents, nor they me; no, that was not the point.） I had a vision of Norris wearing an 18th-century feather cape of the sort my grandfather had had to sell to a collector decades ago in order to pay for my schooling.
I didn’t have any actual proof of this, mind you: I just threw out the accusation one night, and suddenly I had unleashed years of resentments, which we batted between us. How I had never really trusted Aubrey and Norris, even after they had given Nathaniel purpose and intellectual stimulation when he’d been left stranded in New York because of my job; how Nathaniel was too trusting and na?ve, and had made allowances for Aubrey and Norris that I had never understood; how I hated them just because they were rich, and how my resentment of wealth was childish and silly; how Nathaniel secretly wanted to be rich, and I was sorry that I had been such a disappointment to him; how he had never begrudged me anything I wanted to do professionally, even if it meant sacrificing his own career and his own interests, and how he was grateful for Norris and Aubrey because they took an interest in his life, and what’s more, David’s life as well, especially when for months, for years, I hadn’t been there for our son, our son who was now being expelled for “extreme insubordination” from one of the last schools in Manhattan that would have him.
We were hissing at each other, standing on opposite sides of the bedroom, the baby asleep in his own room next door. But as serious as the fight was, as real as our anger was, there ran beneath our conversation another, truer set of resentments and accusations, things that if we ever dared say them to each other would end our life together forever. How I had ruined their lives. How David’s disciplinary problems, his unhappiness, his rebellion, his lack of friends, were my fault. How he and David and Norris and Aubrey had made their own family and had excluded me. How he had sold his homeland, our homeland, to them. How I had taken us away from that homeland forever. How he had turned David against me.
My other father says.
Neither of us said any of these things aloud, but we didn’t need to. I kept waiting—I know he did, too—for one of us to say something unspeakable, something that would make us both tumble down and down, crashing through the floors of our shitty apartment building until we reached the pavement.
But neither of us did. The fight ended, somehow, as these fights always do, and for a week or so after, we were careful and polite with each other. It was almost as if the ghost of what we could have said had forced its way between us, and we were afraid of antagonizing it, lest it become a demon. In the following months, I almost wished we had said some of what we both wanted to, because then at least we would have said it, instead of just constantly thinking about it. But if we had—I had to keep reminding myself—then the only thing to do afterward would have been to break up.
It seemed both inevitable and right that the result of this blowup was that Nathaniel and David began spending more time at Aubrey and Norris’s. At first Nathaniel claimed it was just because I was working so late, and then he said it was because Aubrey was a good influence on David （which he was; he soothed him somehow, which I never understood—even as David became more and more of a Marxist, he continued to consider Aubrey and Norris exceptions）， and then he said it was because Aubrey and Norris （Aubrey, especially） had become increasingly housebound, frightened that if they left their home they’d catch the illness, and that so many of Aubrey and Norris’s friends their age had died that Nathaniel felt responsible for their well-being, especially after they’d been so generous to us. Finally, I was made to go down there myself, and we had an unmemorable evening, the baby even consenting to a game of chess with Aubrey after dinner, as I tried not to look for evidence of recent acquisitions, while finding them anyway: Had that kapa weaving always been there, framed and hung over the stairway? Was that lathe-turned wooden bowl a new purchase, or had it just been in storage? Had Aubrey and Nathaniel exchanged the briefest of glances when they saw me noticing the framed shark-tooth ornament, or had I been imagining it? The entire night I had felt like I was an intruder in someone else’s play, and after that, I had stayed away.
One of the reasons we had gone tonight was because Nathaniel and I had agreed that we needed Aubrey’s help with David. He still had two more years of high school and nowhere to complete them, and Aubrey was friendly with the founder of a new for-profit school that was opening in the West Village. The three of us—Nathaniel, David, and I, that is—had had a shouting match in which David made it clear that he didn’t intend to return to school at all, and Nathaniel and I （united again, in a way we hadn’t been for what felt like years） told him that he had to. In a previous age, we would have told him he had to get out if he wouldn’t go to school, but we were afraid he’d take us up on it, and then our nights would be spent not going to meetings with his principal but searching the streets for him.
And so, after we ate, Norris and Nathaniel and I went to the parlor, and Aubrey and David remained in the dining room for a game of chess. After thirty minutes or so, they rejoined us, and I could tell that Aubrey had somehow convinced David to go to the school, and that David had confided in him, and despite my envy of their rapport, I was relieved, and heartbroken, too—that someone had reached my son; that that someone wasn’t me. He seemed easier, David, lighter, and I wondered again what it was that he saw in Aubrey. How was Aubrey able to comfort him in a way I wasn’t? Was it just because he wasn’t his parent? But, then, I couldn’t think that way, because doing so would remind me that it wasn’t his parents David hated—it was just one parent. It was me.
Aubrey sat down on the sofa next to me, and as he poured himself some tea, I noticed that his hand was trembling, just a bit, and that his fingernails had grown slightly too long. I thought of Adams, and how he would never have allowed his employer to pour his own tea, or to come down to dinner with guests, even us, in such a state. It occurred to me that, as much as I might have felt trapped in this house, Aubrey and Norris actually were trapped. Aubrey was richer than anyone else I knew, and yet here he was, just a few years from eighty, stuck in a house he could never leave. He had made a series of miscalculations: Three hours north, the Newport property sat unoccupied, now surely run over by squatters; out east, in Water Mill, Frog’s Pond Way had been declared a health hazard and razed. Four years ago, he had had an opportunity—I knew from Nathaniel—to flee to a house he had in Tuscany, but he hadn’t, and now Tuscany was no longer inhabitable, anyway. And it increasingly seems that, eventually, none of us will be allowed to travel anywhere. All his money, and nowhere to go.
As we drank our tea, the talk turned, as it always does, to the quarantine camps, in particular the events of last weekend. I had never considered Aubrey or Norris particularly interested in the plight of the common man, but it seemed they were part of a group that was arguing for the camps’ shutdown. Needless to say, so were Nathaniel and David. On and on they went, comparing outrages and quoting statistics （some true, some not） about all the things that went on in them. Of course, none of them had ever actually seen the inside of one of these camps. No one has.