The Rise And Fall Of Great Powers Part 30

"I didn't say that."

"So mysterious! But I'm getting somewhere. You're using Duncan, and you're in love with a mysterious superhero. Only kidding! Hey, should we get more tea? You have to come to my place sometime-I have all sorts of awesome herbal teas. Are you into drinking tea and bad-mouthing guys sometime? We have to do that."

"Name the date."

"Tooly, why don't you apply here to college? You totally should."

"I can't go to college. I was a disaster at school."

"What were your grades like?"

"I got C's."

"I don't believe that."

"I'm glad you have this misconception about the size of my brain. If I could open up my skull, you'd find a little peanut in there. I never even graduated from high school."

"Bulls.h.i.t."

"I only went till I was ten."

"What? How is that even legal?"

"My life to date hasn't been entirely legal."

"Divulge. Right now."

Tooly shook her head, laughed downward.

"I'll pry it out of you, young lady!" Noeline said. "How the h.e.l.l do you talk like you do if you dropped out at ten? You're, like, the only person I know who says words like 'scoundrel' in conversation and makes it sound normal. My students-kids who can, like, reel off SAT words-never say things like 'scoundrel.' "

"I read a lot, I guess. Lots of words that I say, I've only seen in print-I'm probably misp.r.o.nouncing half the stuff."

"I noticed. But all college is, Tooly, is reading. It's reading lists, plus professors checking that you read the reading lists. Well, that's not entirely all. But a lot of it. You've never been to my place on West End Avenue, right? You have to come over."

"Can I see your books?"

"That is my favorite question ever. Tea and books?" She clinked Tooly's cup. "Then, afterward, I can see your place, right?" she teased. "Somehow, I don't think that's happening-I don't get to visit the batcave, do I. How about you introduce me to your mystery man?"

"Wouldn't be a good idea."

"I'd fall in love with him?"

"Very possibly."

"I have to meet him, then. And you guys live together, right?"

"No."

"Just testing. But you grew up in that apartment on a Hundred and fifteenth, which was how you came to meet Duncan, right?"

"I lived there for a few years when I was a kid, yeah."

"That composer dude with the pig downstairs, Gilbert-I was talking to him one time, and he's been there thirty years. He's the last remaining rent-control resident from before Columbia bought the building. I mentioned how I knew this girl-meaning you-who lived in the building as a kid. I calculated that it must've been in the eighties. He said that's impossible; the whole building was single-room-occupancy back then. No kids allowed. You weren't allowed to sleep more than one person per room."

"That's weird."

"More than weird," Noeline said, smiling. "Come on-I just confessed to, like, forging a thesis or whatever. That's the end of my career, if anyone knew."

So Tooly confided part of the truth: that she had never lived in that apartment; that she was fascinated with seeing inside strangers' homes, so she had a hobby of talking her way in. Originally, her house visits were conducted with that guy, the aforementioned male friend, who occasionally needed to look around someone's home. "Way easier for a little girl to get in than a grown man."

"But sorry-why were you guys doing this?"

"It's interesting meeting complete strangers, seeing what their apartments are like. Haven't you ever wished you could just peek into someone's place?" Tooly said. "And people are different at home. You can figure out stuff."

"What stuff? Which things to burglarize?"

"We never did that. I never did that."

"So why, then?"

"Opportunities come from knowing people."

"Is that why you hang around at Emerson's place? Opportunities?"

"Maybe."

"Wow. You are cold. Well, if you end up burglarizing their place, please take Emerson's tofu. It's the object that means most to him in the world."

Tooly laughed.

A week later, they b.u.mped into each other again. Noeline stepped from the bathroom at 115th Street in pajamas, sheepishly bypa.s.sed Tooly in the corridor, and hastened into Emerson's bedroom.

2011.

SHE TOOK HIM.

Mac was scheduled that morning for floor hockey, a sport at which he demonstrated absolute inept.i.tude and corresponding dread. Tooly clicked him under the pa.s.senger-side safety belt, tossed a bag of their belongings on the backseat of the minivan, and drove right past the Y, taking the turnoff for interstate south. He looked at her. "Is this the right way?"

"No."

"Oh, good. Today was quarterfinals." He stared out the window, incurious about the change of plans. Mac tracked their mileage through Westchester, checking the odometer against the highway signs. After a silent patch, he said, "Trees don't count as being alive because they don't have heads." He returned to his open window, warm air fluttering his belt strap, the late-July sun intensified through the windscreen.

"Don't you want to know where we're going?" she asked.

He shrugged. They drove that whole morning, playing car games and listening to the radio. She inquired about his moviemaking cla.s.s, and he explained his Flip videocamera, with the combination of patience and inexact.i.tude that young children exhibit when informing their elders about the present day. He fell asleep for a couple of hours, miles rushing beneath them, past Philadelphia and Wilmington, southwest around Baltimore, before they turned off for Lodge Haven, Maryland.

That name had always felt privately hers, the place of birth listed on every form and pa.s.sport of her life. But she remembered nothing of the place, just a Washington, D.C., suburb that she'd left as an infant and never seen since. She woke Mac gently, houses sliding past, a neighborhood of long lawns, bas.e.m.e.nt romper rooms, college stickers on car windows.

"It's okay that I kidnapped you?" she asked him.

"It's okay."

"We can travel around and I can show you all sorts of things. No piano lessons required, and no Seroquel."

He looked down, ashamed of his medications. "I like my piano lessons."

"In that case, we'll find a piano teacher and kidnap him, too."

"Where are we right now?"

"We're going for lunch with my father."

"With the banana split?"

"No, not him. My real father," she said, scanning the street for the address.

At a distance, she spotted him kneeling on the lawn outside his home, pruning a flower bed beneath the bay windows, his back to her, trowel in hand, a long strand of white hair on his balding head flapping back and forth in the wind, like an arm waving Mayday. She lowered her window. Paul turned, smoothing the hair across his head, raising the trowel in greeting. "That you there?" he asked, shading his eyes with gardening gloves, his arms sun-freckled, polo shirt tucked into khakis. "Park in the driveway, or on the street. n.o.body tows here."

An urge to stamp on the pedal and zoom away came over Tooly. She pulled to the curb, cut the engine, and reached over to Mac. "Shake my hand for luck."

"Why?"

"Just an old habit."

But he wouldn't, so she unclicked his seatbelt. "Hungry for lunch?"

As they crossed the road, she watched Paul's thin mouth, which wavered rather than spoke, as if the lips were engaged in a dispute over how to greet her. "So," he said, "you found the place."

During all these years apart, Paul had existed for Tooly as a character in her story, one who had left the stage. Now he stood before her, a little man around sixty, awaiting a response. Custom suggested she inform him that the drive was easy, the traffic spa.r.s.e, his flower bed lovely. Instead, she said, "It's such a pleasure for me to see you again," and touched his forearm, whose slenderness discomposed her, a warm, brittle limb. He was so much smaller than he ought to have been. His arm tensed at her touch.

Paul ushered them inside his home, where he ran a consultancy of which he was the sole employee, working on contract for U.S. government departments like Homeland Security, Defense, and State to produce white papers on risks to the telecom grid: How easy would it be for foreign nation-states to hack in? Could we have a Stuxnet here? What effect would a disaster like the tsunami in j.a.pan have on systems at American nuclear plants?

In the front room, framed prints of sparrows and owls hovered on the wall. The bay window overlooked a mowed front lawn, bird feeder hanging from the oak tree. He a.s.signed Tooly and Mac seats and inquired about refreshments-milk or ginger ale?-then went to prepare lunch.

"Can I help with anything?" she called to him.

"No, you can't. You can wait there."

Mac remained seated but Tooly stood, tensely browsing his books. These volumes were the scenery of her childhood. On the first page of each, he had written his full name, including middle initial, proclaiming that this book, on his shelf, in his front room, did indeed belong to him. Flipping through The Complete Birder, she discovered his pencil notations in the margins, marks too faint to read but for a single comment, "Interesting warbler," followed by the impress of an exclamation point that he had erased.

It was clear without asking that he'd been alone all these years-his solitude evident in the television squared to a seat at the far end of the couch, a line of HB pencils on the coffee table sharpened to p.r.i.c.king points and awaiting bird books in urgent need of his name. Within the folds of the curtain, a telescope crouched, its capped nose turned down as if too timid to peep outside. His binoculars rested on a high shelf, which she could reach these days, and did, sliding them from their satin-lined case and trying them at the window, finding neither birds nor planets, only a garage across the road, the wavering sky lined with power cables.

"Lunch is served."

She torqued around, caught playing without permission. He waved away her apologies and led them into the kitchen. From a deep serving bowl, Paul ladled coconut-cream soup, with tiny eggplants bobbing, sweet basil, Kaffir lime leaves, lemongra.s.s. Every course was Thai-tom yum soup, red curry with rice, sliced green mango-in bittersweet tribute to the last point of their acquaintance.

"I left out the hot peppers," he a.s.sured Mac, "not knowing how you took it. Some young people don't appreciate spice. Some old people don't, either."

"Nice?" Tooly asked Mac.

He nodded fast, swallowing.

"I thought of you recently," Paul told her. "The wrestler 'Macho Man' Randy Savage died."

"Do you always think of me when you hear about wrestlers?"

"Yes, actually."

"Me, too," she said. "Did you actually enjoy that stuff? Or was it just to be nice to me?"

"I found it relaxing," he answered, preparing himself a spoonful, his rimless gla.s.ses steamed from the soup. He removed them and, with much deliberation, wiped each lens with a corner of the tablecloth, blind eyes blinking, pink dents on either side of his nose where the spectacle pads had pressed.

The sight of this-for reasons that escaped her-made Tooly too sad to speak. She tried to eat, but swallowing was impossible.

For a minute, the only sound was the boy's slurps. Each time he made this noise, she looked to Paul, expecting irritation, finding none.

"You used to avoid foreign food," she told him.

"I've come around," Paul said. "Only, not the very spicy stuff." He'd taken cooking cla.s.ses in Thailand, he informed her.

"I'm impressed." She would never have imagined him taking a course. "I'd love to do something like that. I'm crazy for cla.s.ses."

"You used to hate them in school."

"Maybe that's why I like them now."

After the soup, he asked, "And can you still count a minute?"

She smiled, not having thought of this childhood trick in nearly a quarter century. "When I was little," she explained to Mac, "I could guess exactly how long a minute lasted by counting in my head. Shall we test me after lunch?"

But Paul unstrapped his watch right then and dangled it before the boy. Mac stared, nonplussed at the antiquity of calculator functions. "It's this b.u.t.ton," Paul explained, and Mac pushed it, liquid-crystal numerals cycling onscreen.

Tooly scrunched her eyes, counting silently to sixty. "Now?"

"Thirty-seven seconds," Mac informed her.

"Terrible!" she said.

The boy gave it a try. Long after what seemed a minute to Tooly, he raised his finger.

"Fifty-five seconds," Paul reported. "Very good."

Paul had remained in Thailand for eight years after her departure-by far his longest overseas residence. Without Tooly around, he no longer needed to keep moving. He had married, and his wife lived here with him. "You remember Sh.e.l.ly, don't you?"

"Our housekeeper?"

"Well, not in a long time." Sh.e.l.ly had stepped out to the Costco in Beltsville to give them time alone, and to supply herself for the yearly trip to her home province, Nong Khai, where she and Paul owned a house. "Year by year, I'm phasing out my work. She wants us to retire there. Within five years, I won't have to be here at all."