The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

1999

TOOLY LOITERED OUTSIDE the building, seeking a pretext to return. She figured it out.

“I have a question,” Tooly said, when Duncan opened his front door. “Can you introduce me to the pig?”

“Hey. You again.”

“The one that lives here.”

“Despite appearances, no pig lives in my actual apartment.” Though studying, Duncan welcomed any distraction from case law. Plus, he rarely had female company, and tended to do whatever it commanded.

He also happened to know the animal’s owner, Gilbert Lerallu, having provided advice in his dispute with city authorities over whether the Vietnamese potbellied pig, Ham, should be defined as “livestock” and thus banned from residential premises. Gilbert was a composer of harpsichord music, his latest self-released album, Moonharps, having sold eight copies worldwide, including those purchased by his aunts. They tried his door.

Taking a walk was entirely Ham’s decision, according to Gilbert. Since the pig failed to communicate opposition, they borrowed a leash and led the porker outside. It was near freezing. Duncan wore only a hooded Eddie Bauer sweatshirt, but insisted he was fine. Ham’s bristly back steamed. When Tooly touched the pig’s nose, he snorted — and prompted her to hop back in fright and pleasure.

They crossed the Columbia campus, the snuffly pig waddling between them, his snout beaded with condensation. The neighborhood had never acclimatized to this swine in its midst, so students stared as Ham promenaded past Low Library. Duncan seemed at a loss for what to say, their only common reference being her previous visit. They’d talked for a while then, and with seeming freedom, yet she had revealed nearly nothing. “Is walking a pig different from walking a dog?” he said finally. “Do you think?”

“I have the impression Ham wouldn’t fetch like a dog.”

“Would he sit?”

“Sit!” she commanded.

Duncan looked at her — indeed, he appeared the more likely to obey. They tried other commands and, upon reaching Riverside Park, toyed with taking Ham off his leash to let him run free, as were several dogs, a couple of which sniffed the air near the swine, then bolted.

“Maybe let’s keep him on the leash for now.”

They resumed their walk. He asked what had brought her to these parts again. “I thought you were passing through town.”

“I’m passing through again.”

Before he could pursue this, Tooly had questions of her own. As a method of self-concealment, hers was powerful: few people, when presented with the possibility of discussing themselves, preferred to hear of another. From sincere curiosity, she asked him about law school. “I imagine everyone doing mock court cases where you stand up and cross-examine hostile witnesses, and they deny being there on the night of the murder.”

“That has not been part of the curriculum,” he said, shivering, hood up, the cords yanked tight, leaving a pale oval of face peeping out. Law school, as he told it, was largely a matter of poring over judicial opinions. “Basically, you read these things without any understanding of what the topic is, or why it’s relevant. Then it all boils down to one exam. And those grades determine a hundred percent of what you do for the rest of your life.”

“Sounds highly stressy.”

“It is highly stressy.”

“Are the teachers horrible?”

“Depends. A lot never practiced law — law schools don’t like to sully themselves with professors who’ve done stuff. It’s like most of these professional schools — a matter of paying your fees and surviving. We’re not learning how to practice law,” he concluded. “We’re learning how to be lawyers.”

As for which legal discipline to pursue, he was leaning toward something noble, because the NYU do-gooder ethic pushed students that way. Public defender was a possibility. Still, he wasn’t sure. If you had brains, they said, you did international corporate law.

He shuddered so intensely that she undid her duffle coat and draped it over his shoulders, forcing her residual warmth onto him. Duncan objected weakly while trying not to look directly at her figure, now more evident without the coat. He fastened his attention elsewhere — tree bark, the pig, a fence — then found her, head cocked, looking directly at him, smiling. “Nice and bracing,” she said. They remained there for a minute, breath clouds alternating, his gradually synchronizing with hers.

He tried further questions, asking where she was from, noting her odd way of talking, inquiring about her age. Tooly gave her birth date, which surprised him — he’d taken her for older. His other queries she dodged, which punctured the exchange and left them in silence till they reached his building. This time, Tooly wasn’t talking her way in; to do so twice would look suspicious.

“Well, I should go,” she said, touching his hand, which was cold and fettered with the leash. She took back her coat, stooped to pat Ham, and strolled off. At the corner of Amsterdam Avenue, she glanced back, catching sight of him struggling to push the pig toward the building. Ham remained doggedly, or perhaps piggedly, in place. Amused, she turned away.

But Tooly did not complete her pivot on that icy sidewalk.

Her legs kicked up, her arms flailed, her behind slammed into the concrete. Rather than springing gracefully to her feet, she waited, her breaths dissolving upward, backgrounded by the nimbus of a streetlamp.

A pig snout entered this tableau.

“You okay?” Duncan asked breathlessly, having run over.

“I’m broken for life.”

“Seriously?”

“Not seriously. I’ll just have a purple bruise that, when I try to admire it in the mirror later, will be too far around to see.”

The pig sat on her.

“Argh!” she said, laughing. “Crushing me!”

Minutes later, Tooly was inside his room, just as she’d planned.

Duncan dropped a compact disc onto the tray of his stereo, which swallowed the album and sighed to life. “I’m obsessed with this song right now,” he said.

She closed her eyes to appear appreciative, but had a long-standing aversion to music, dating back to school days. When she looked up, Tooly found herself being observed and turned away — shyness still caught her out sometimes. “Can’t figure what he’s saying,” she said, sipping a beer Duncan had pilfered from the shared fridge. “Is it ‘Comma — please arrest that girl’? Seems a bit extreme to imprison her for using a comma.”

“It’s ‘Karma police/Arrest this man.’ ”

“No way. And even if, in the most crazy of situations, you were right—”

“We can check the liner notes.”

“Don’t. I hate ruining my opinions with facts. Even if your version is right, what’s it mean? It’s madness!”

He smiled, began to say something, then went for another disc, stacking CDs on the stereo, finger hovering above the Play button. She let him beaver away there with his cueing and reviewing, and kicked off her Converse, sitting cross-legged on his unmade single bed. The space looked so different. Perhaps it was the effect of sitting here, viewing everything from the inside, rather than as she’d met this place, peering in.

He kept starting tracks, promising they’d be amazing, then losing confidence and switching discs. To her, some songs sounded pointy and others round. When Duncan discussed music it was by reeling off band names, singers, guitarists — legends to him, nobody to her.

What occupied Tooly was not the sounds but the sight of his animation. He wobbled his head, mouthing lyrics that he lacked the courage to sing aloud, telling her, “You need to hear it a bunch of times before you get into this. It’s this bit here — listen. Where the drums kick in? Whenever I hear that, it’s …” Anticipation thrilled him: to know what neared, the chorus approaching, almost there, and then — yes! He spun to look at her, eyes warm.

How did this boy see her? For that matter, how was she this time? With any new man, Tooly exhibited a self slightly different from that presented to the previous guy (not that there had been so many). She found herself inhabiting a new character, uncertain whether this edition was more or less true, and whether there was a pure state of Tooly-ness at all. Even when alone, she wasn’t sure what she was like.

Given her lack of musical knowledge, Duncan wanted to burn her a mix CD. However, she had no compact-disc player at home. There was a radio at her apartment, but with a tape recorder?

“I’ll do you a cassette. But you have to tell me what you’re into.”

The only music she knew was from parties, jukeboxes at bars, muzak in stores. She never remembered the name of anything. “I used to like the Ghostbusters song.” He took this as a joke, though it hadn’t been.

Tooly gave a little shiver. “Now I’m getting a bit cold.” She lifted his hooded sweatshirt from the floor. “Would it be okay?”

“No prob. Go for it,” he answered, bashful at the implied intimacy, looking hard at his stereo.

She slipped it on, excused herself to the bathroom, and drew his wallet from the kangaroo pocket — she’d noticed him stowing it there when they were outside. Tooly read his college ID, the Connecticut driver’s license, his credit cards. She wasn’t taking them. Stolen goods were shabby, like walking around with evidence against yourself. But information had worth, held invisibly in your head — provided you could memorize long numbers. To Venn’s chagrin, she wrote things down. “Hey,” she said on her return to Duncan’s room. “You have a pen I could borrow?”

“Got tons.” He opened a box, inadvertently spewing ballpoint pens everywhere. He scrambled around on all fours, collecting them off the floor. “I’m an idiot. Sorry.”

His shame punctured her. She watched a moment, then took off his hoodie and folded it in his closet, the wallet inside.

“Why’d you need a pen?”

“Just to write down the song names.”

“I can do that. If you’re into it, I can put down notes on each band.”

“Actually, I should go.” No point sticking around. Yes, anyone could be mined, but not everyone should be.

He looked up, spurned. “You don’t want your tape?”

She sat on his bed, sipping his roommates’ beers, while Duncan toiled. Making a mixtape took longer than expected, particularly when its creator believed that each track implied something and that the compilation as a whole contained greater meaning still, the entirety of himself distilled onto a ninety-minute Maxell XLII. Tooly grew tipsier and sleepier and chillier, dipping her feet under his duvet, then pulling it up to her knees, her waist, finally drawing the covers to her chin.

She awoke in darkness, a sheet over her nose quivering as she breathed. She recalled a song ending but none replacing it, lights turning off, covers shifting. The two of them remained fully dressed, chastely back-to-back, he compressed into a gentlemanly sliver of mattress against the nightstand. She blew the sheet away, swallowed dryly, and gazed at the ceiling. The room was boiling now, radiator pipe hissing snakishly.

She got out and stood in the apartment corridor. Voices came from the room of the student she hadn’t met yet, Emerson, who was bickering with his girlfriend. All was dark save a thread of light under Xavi’s door, a rustle of textbook pages, the squeak of highlighter pen. Was he worth looking into? Just kids here. Tooly looked through a window at the street — how forbidding her cold walk home. She touched her behind, bruised from the choreographed crash landing on the pavement, and sneaked back under the covers, pulling herself close to him.

The next morning, she found a cavernous hollow under the sheet where Duncan had been. He tiptoed back into the room, hair wet, patting his jean pockets, readying for class. “Time I got up,” she said, pushing off the covers, only to pull them back. “When do you leave?”

“Well, my class is at Vanderbilt,” he said, thinking aloud. “I’ll need to take the one or the nine train down to Christopher Street, so … out of here in nineteen minutes.”

“I’ll be gone in eighteen.”

“I dreamt someone arrested me,” he said.

“It’s about time someone arrested you. Hey, when’s your class start?”

“Ten.”

“You’ve got ages!”

“Do you even know what time it is?”

“No. But I think you’re too late for it anyway — they’re starting without you. You should come back under the covers. It’s cozier than the subway.”

“Can’t.”

“It’s an emergency.”

He hesitated, then pulled off his dress shoes and slipped in beside her, sticking to his side of the bed, one foot touching the floor. She sat up, leaning the point of her elbow into her pillow, and considered Duncan. She reached her hand toward him. He started, embarrassed by his own surprise when she flattened her palm across his cheek.

The strangeness of other people — so solid when near; alive, but objects, too. This close, his features lost detail, absorbed in fuzziness. A sensation rose in her, a surge outward and a crush in, a need to push him away, pull him back, to rush to the window and throw her clothes onto frosty 115th Street, leap naked back into the bed, goosebumped and shivering. Instead, she held still.

This time she left with plans to meet again, and with his number, too, which she’d add to her phone book.

“What’s yours?”

“Don’t know,” she said. “I’m moving and don’t have my new line yet.”

“Moving where?”

“To be decided,” she said, twitching her nose at him.

His lips parted, but he didn’t ask more.

BACK HOME IN Brooklyn, she took a nap, weary after a night in that cramped single bed. When she awoke, a hush had fallen, the storage space trembling as an overloaded truck rumbled down the Gowanus Expressway. Humphrey entered her room with a cup of instant coffee, a trail of brown drops specking the concrete floor all the way back to the kitchen.

She sat up and took the mug with thanks. No need to explain her overnight absence — he covered his ears if she alluded to romances. Humphrey declined to acknowledge her transition from little girl to grown woman, still treating her as he had when she was young: like his comrade and intellectual equal. Anything else was private. Which was fine, since she preferred to keep sexuality to herself, persisting with the neutered fashions — mothball-scented men’s clothing and boyish sneakers — that she’d adopted in early adolescence. By now, these outfits made her comfortable; a dress was unthinkable.

“What is your name again?” Humphrey asked, sitting at the foot of her mattress.

“Tooly.”

“Who you are?”

“Shut up,” she said, smiling.

“You remind me of Leibniz.”

“Of who?”

“German philosopher from years 1700 and after. He has messy haircut like you also, and dies after foot stuck in avocado.”

“How do you die from an avocado?”

“If you cannot understand, I’d rather don’t explain. If you are not intellectual, is not my business.”

She shut her eyes, entertained, then stood right there on the mattress, stretched her arms toward the ceiling, squeaked. “I walked a pig today,” she said. “Or yesterday. When is it now?”

“Tomorrow. Now go wash,” he told her. “I have items to discuss.”

She knew this ruse well. He wanted company, had been lonely overnight without her, probably waiting up till after midnight, listening for the door. They had lodged together for years, sharing homes in a dozen cities. The cause of each move had been Venn. Abruptly, he’d be leaving town and invited Tooly to meet him a few weeks later in his next city (best not to travel all together). Humphrey liked to accompany her, no matter how this complicated matters — all his books to ship! In some cities, Tooly met up daily with Venn, and was his companion, confidant, ally. He even cooked for her sometimes, or took her out with his associates, guys who would otherwise have snubbed her but whom he silenced to let her speak. He and she might walk for miles, people-watching and kidding around — such vivid periods, those were, that days passed and she read not a word. At other times, it was just Humphrey for weeks.

She showered and, given the late hour, got right into her pajamas. Humphrey awaited her at the Ping-Pong table, the right pocket of his slacks stuffed with balls to save himself stooping when one bounced away — if any shot required rapid movement, he called it “out.”

“It’s not out just because you don’t bother returning it, Humph.”

“If not then,” he asked, “when?”

But after just two points he put down his paddle and returned to the couch. “We need to go somewhere else.”

“Go where?”

“We go somewhere civilized together. Why,” he continued, “we must follow Venn always?”

“What would you and me do,” she teased, “if we went our own way?”

“Like now: items and activities.”

“Ping-Pong, reading, and chess?”

“What more there is in life?”

“And where, even if we had money?”

He looked at his shoes.

“Come on, Humph. Don’t get mad at me.”

“This is most stupid thing.”

“What is?”

He found no cause for anger, so became low. “Don’t be exasperate with me.” Humphrey toed his way through heaps of reading material, picking up decrepit works and dumping them on the couch. He sat heavily, books leaping from his impact and landing open, as if waking with a start. Fingers laced over his belly, he turned to her. “Sit, sit.”

She was on the verge of doing so when he raised his hand with alarm. “You nearly sit on John Stuart Mill!”

She removed the volume by this esteemed gentleman, then plopped herself on whosoever happened to have the misfortune to remain under the shadow of her bruised backside. “Don’t care if it’s Plato or Aristotle.”

“Is not my fault you are not intellectual,” he lamented, and handed her a copy of the closest book to hand, The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig.

Since they met more than a decade earlier, Humphrey had supplied her with books in this random fashion. Works on the Bronze Age, the cosmos, the First World War, the Renaissance, Greek myths, the race to build the atom bomb, Roman emperors, Voltaire and Locke, Muhammad Ali and David Niven, architecture, diaries of the infamous, gambling scams, economics, Groucho Marx. They passed thousands of hours pleasantly page-turning together, he determining which facts and mystifications were to constitute her education.

Only one form of book did Humphrey disdain: made-up stories. The world was far more fascinating than anyone could imagine. In made-up stories, he contended, life narrowed into a single tale with a single protagonist, which only encouraged self-regard. In real life, there was no protagonist. “Whose story? Is this my story, with my start and finish, and you are supporting character? Or this is your story, Tooly, and I am extra? Or does story belong to your grandmother? Or your great-grandson, maybe? And this is all just preface?”

“I’m not having kids.”

“Sure you are. And then whose story? Your grandson’s? Even what we say now, this is only background to his story, maybe. What about that? No, no, no — there is no hero. There is only consciousness and oblivion. Nothing means anything.”

“Nothing?”

“Be afraid of people who say there is meaning from life. Meaning only comes when there is ending.”

“I don’t agree with that.”

“Because you read too many tall stories when you are short girl. You believe things end in beauty. You think loose strings tie up.”

“Not necessarily.” She stretched out on the couch, stuffing her socked feet under him for warmth. “Did you talk to anyone yet today?”

“Many persons.”

“Who?”

“John Stuart Mill, for example. Also Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Maybe you hear of them?”

“I don’t count dead philosophers. And before you tell me those aren’t philosophers but eighteenth-century thinkers, then—”

“John Stuart Mill not even born till nineteenth century, darlink.”

“Did you talk out loud to anyone today?”

“I talk to you now. Are you not counting as twentieth-century thinker?”

“Not sure I qualify as a great thinker of the twentieth century, no.”

“Whatever century you are not a thinker in, I talk to you. Satisfied?”

She grabbed him around the middle. He fought weakly to escape, Ping-Pong balls popping from his pockets, bouncing everywhere. “How long cuddling must last?”

“Torture, is it?” She knew herself to be the last person on earth who still embraced this musty old man. She gave him a peck on the cheek.

“Incredible what I put up with around here,” he grumbled. “I wouldn’t believe, if I did not see it with my own ears.” He looked at her. “Tooly, I must tell you serious items.”

“Items and activities?”

“Stop teasing. I have things to say.”

“About?”

“About …” He stood unsteadily, turned as if caged, took his seat.

The history of Humphrey was a convoluted one. In certain accounts that she had heard, he’d escaped the Soviet Union as a young man and left his parents behind, never to see them again. But in another story he was playing poker with his father, mysteriously present in South Africa. Confusing the situation were myths that circulated: that he’d lived in China and worked for Mao (too industrious to be credible); that he’d been a croupier in Macao (surely not — his arithmetic was abysmal); that he’d dealt in stolen penicillin in postwar Vienna (he did seem to know a lot about pharmaceuticals); that he was privately rich (no evidence of this); that he was destitute (ample signs); that he was a Jewish aristocrat whose Mitteleuropa family had lost everything in the war (there was nothing aristocratic about the man).

According to Humphrey himself, he grew up in Leningrad in the 1930s, in a secular Russian-Jewish family. Like most Soviet citizens, they suffered appalling privation during World War II. However, wartime constituted something of a gap in his tale. One of his chess friends when they lived in Marseille, a rabbi who’d served two years in prison on a charge of money laundering for a Colombian drug cartel, once asked Tooly what sort of war Humphrey had had. “He’s a Jewish person from Europe,” the rabbi noted. “He’s the right age. In my community, you often don’t know what sort of a war they had till after they die. Then someone mentions something at the funeral.”

But Humphrey had not suffered the worst horrors of that period, had certainly never been in a Nazi camp. He said dryly, “I did not have privilege of going through Hitler holocaust.” Whatever had happened, he remained after the war in the Soviet Union, where he grew to adulthood with increasing disenchantment toward the government, his wisecracking ultimately leading to a stint in jail. Subsequently, he escaped the USSR, ending up in South Africa after a fool advised him to stow away on the wrong ship. This young intellectual of the Russian-Jewish tradition found himself at the southern tip of Africa, surrounded by the dim-witted cruelty of the apartheid regime. He couldn’t stand it, so left, and traveled the world. Uprooted, transient, and with the wrong mother tongue, he never achieved much. As Humphrey put it, he’d been “cornered by history.” That is, his youthful intent to consort with the Great Thinkers had been destroyed by the idiocy of his era.

“I must talk to you,” he reiterated. He found a near-empty bottle of vodka in the freezer, emptied the last drops into a wineglass, inhaled its fumes. At the Ping-Pong table, he bounced a ball.

“Well, talk.”

“You think I joking,” he said, and downed his vodka. “But I am worry. Something can happen to you. Very soon.”

“Yes, yes, I know — disaster if we don’t run off together.”

Humphrey fetched the empty vodka bottle, miming as if to wring it for another drop. He drank modestly — rarely more than a single shot — and disdained drunkenness, which he considered the domain of trivial beings. Today, however, he needed another slug, so ventured into the Brooklyn night for more vodka. “When I come back,” he pledged, “I have important items to tell you.”

“I’m on tenterhooks.”

“You don’t going anywhere.”

“Won’t.”

Minutes later, the buzzer rang — he must have forgotten his keys.

But it was a woman whose voice crackled over the intercom. “Helloooo! Anybody there?”

Amazing: she just followed them, wherever in the world they went.

“Ahoy,” Tooly answered, and held down the button to spring the building door.

Regally, Sarah Pastore entered, kissing Tooly on the head and embracing her with a rub of the back, after which she twirled her cherry-red dyed hair, piling it up, then letting it cascade down her back. She pointed to her right cheek, directing Tooly to plant a peck into the bull’s-eye center, which she did. “Cute as ever,” Sarah said, sizing up Tooly.

The same was not true of Sarah. She was a worn forty-two, her proportions out of proportion, bony nose almost manly, the fedora self-consciously eccentric now rather than sexy. For years, she’d been an eternal twentysomething. Now Tooly had reached that decade herself and inadvertently chased Sarah from it.

“How long’s this stopover?” Tooly asked, and placed another kiss on Sarah’s cheek, more firmly now, as if to impress there the affection she struggled to summon.

“Tra-la-LA-la, DEE-DUM. Tra-la-LA-la, DEE-DUM,” Sarah sang, striding away to explore this latest abode. “Who can say?” Sarah was a recurrent feature of their lives, residing with Tooly and Humphrey for spells, even traveling with them. But months could pass without word of her. Then Venn took pity, apprised her of their latest whereabouts — and there she was.

“What brings you this time?”

Sarah sang, “Happy birthday to you/Squashed tomatoes and stew/You look like a monkey/And you smell like one, too.” She took out a cigarette. “You’re turning twenty-one soon.”

“I’m aware.”

“Where’s Rumpledstiltskin?”

“Out buying supplies.”

“And everyone else?” By this she meant Venn. “Don’t know why, but the birthday song has been tra-la-LA-la-DEE-DUMing in my head ever since I was at this department store on Madison and Sixty-first. What’s that place, the expensive one?”

“No idea,” Tooly said. “My clothes originate from a slightly lower class of shop.”

“You know what we’ll do?” she said, taking Tooly by the wrists. “Go on a shopping spree. Your birthday present from me. Shall we?”

“But paying for things, please.”

“Of course paying for things. What are you even talking about?” She considered Tooly’s outfit: pajamas with a motif of racehorses, collar buttoned to the top, dressing gown. “It’s a crime to leave you to your own devices. In pajamas at — what time is it?”

“Yes, what time is it?”

“But you’re lucky,” Sarah said, scrutinizing Tooly like a car tire. “With that shape, you could wear anything. Bitch.”

Tooly twisted away. “So could you.”

Sarah walked to the back window, surveying the unedifying view: vehicle lights inching along the expressway. “Beautiful winter’s night,” she said, running her finger along the windowsill, across the wall, across the kitchen cupboard. “Love your new place.” She righted a toppled chess piece, pawed without interest at periodicals and books on the couch, organizing them into piles, then entered Tooly’s bedroom, plucking a sweater off the floor. “Where do you find this stuff? The Salvation Army?”

“Yes.”

Sarah gave a false smile, sustained by impatient muscles. “Was thinking the other day of the ice bar. And my Honda Dream. Remember that big cop?”

“You were cool as a cucumber.”

“Oh, hooray! How nice to hear.”

Sarah cited old times to affirm their bond, as if shared events united people, regardless of the content. Yet the occurrences Sarah cited were not exactly those that had taken place. Hers was a record of merriment and constancy, populated by heroes and villains, rather than the ambiguous blurs that others constituted. She erased scenes, especially disasters precipitated by her mistakes, attributing those to enemies, a growing army as years passed. If someone disputed these accounts, dark clouds formed in her eyes. Venn alone baldly refuted her claims and survived. But Sarah herself barely made it through such exchanges, taking his comments like so many stabs.

By now Tooly was less interested in the statements than in the person before her, who had once been so mesmerizing, a scintillating woman in a world composed largely of men. How often Tooly had wished for Sarah to swoop in like this and spirit her off for an adventure that — at the time — seemed the pinnacle of sophistication. Buzzing around some Mediterranean city on the back of a motor scooter, attending parties in Prague, learning Sarah’s postural rules of attraction: you know a man is attracted if he turns his body toward you when passing in a narrow corridor; if he studies your face when you speak, though you are looking elsewhere; or if he stands straighter as you approach. The prospects for any affair, Sarah stated, were all in the degree to which the male slouched.

How captivating Sarah had been. Yet whenever Tooly had most longed for her company was when Sarah proved most elusive. She would turn up promising adventure, then be gone by nightfall. It happened in Jakarta, after Sarah traveled in on the same flight as Tooly and Humphrey, only to disappear at the airport. Then she’d joined them in Amsterdam, with the emotional pull-push that became the hallmark of her dealings with Tooly. In Malta and Cyprus that summer, she sought to transform the teenage girl into a mini-Sarah. But when she found them in Athens she gave Tooly the cold shoulder for two weeks. In Milan, Tooly witnessed Sarah snorting cocaine for the first time, and heard incessantly about her turbulent relations with a married millionaire. She and Sarah clashed in Budapest, made up in Prague. The woman had exploded in rage in Hamburg, smashed a window with her little hammer and stormed out, then located them months later in Marseille, as if nothing had happened.

For years, Tooly’s opinion of Sarah had swung between adulation and contempt. But recently had Tooly recognized her mistake: all these comings and goings, of which she had long believed herself the principal object, concerned her only peripherally. Sarah returned for Venn, sought a pretext to be with him, even though he had rejected her years before. Each time Sarah failed anew, she shifted her attention to Tooly, meddling with the girl to bother Venn, knowing how close they were.

Today, she talked and talked. Tooly shut her eyes, concealing the thoughts behind them.

“What?” Sarah asked. “What’s funny?”

“Nothing’s funny,” she answered, shaking her head. “Just thinking.”

“See, you’re the same — still laughing at life! That’s what’s extraordinary about people. Nobody changes! At heart, everyone’s the same at eight as at eighty.”

Tooly nodded as if this were surely true (though surely it was not). Abruptly, Sarah switched rails, careening into a convoluted account of misfortunes that, by no fault of her own, had led here. “And when I went in — this will stun you — they’d taken everything. Changed the locks even, pricks.”

“So how did you get in at all?”

“I didn’t. I told you — they changed the locks.”

“So how’d you know they took everything?”

“You haven’t met these people,” she responded. “I’m telling you, the woman is psychotic. You don’t realize how things are in that part of the world. People will take you into the forest, machete you, and sell you for bush meat. The police are corrupt. You have no recourse. I was told — you’re not going to believe this — I was told they’d put me in prison (imagine a prison there!) for up to six years. I’d not even done anything. It’s enough to make you … No?” A classic end to a Sarah story: she, unjustly cast out, mistreated, slandered. Amazingly, she believed what she said, which became truer by repetition. But to claim victimhood again and again without seeming a fool obliged her to depict humanity as increasingly malign. Needfully, her worldview darkened year after year.

Sarah’s latest plan was to move to Rome and reconquer a city abandoned a half century earlier by her father, a former Fascist now long dead. There was a leather-goods store that belonged to an Italian friend, Valter, a married accountant whom she’d often mocked because he loved her. Sarah had an eye for fashion, she said, so would run the place. “Best part is you’re coming with me! You’ll be my assistant. Aren’t you excited? You’re almost twenty-one now. Time to move on. You’ll fly back with me, agreed?”

“Sarah, I’m not luggage.”

“What a thing to say! I’m trying to help you. Came all this way for you.”

“I’m fine here.”

“Well, never say I didn’t have your best interests at heart. Okay? Anyway, I’m staying a few days.”

“I need to check with Humph.”

“Check what?”

“Just let him know you want to stay.”

“You’ve got a huge mattress — there’s not space for me for a couple of days? Remember when we used to share your tent? Seriously, I don’t see why you’re making a big deal of this. Are you trying to humiliate me?”

“No, Sarah. Last thing I want.” Tooly reached for her, was pushed away, then placed her hand on Sarah’s upper arm, stroked it, as if soothing an animal.

“You’re so happy to see me!” Sarah said. “How cute!”

Tooly had spent so many years adjusting to the storms of Sarah that the habit of tranquilizing her overpowered the wish not to. To break the pattern, Tooly stepped away and rested her hand on the kitchen counter. Sarah placed hers atop, nails blood red.

“You all right?” Tooly asked.

“I’m fine.” She cleared her throat. “God, I don’t know.” At times like this, verging on the confessional, she evoked an aging actor before the dressing-room mirror, regarding the sagging vacancy. There was vulnerability in Sarah.

“I hope,” she said. “I hope that bitch gets her comeuppance. I really do.”

Tooly had lost track of all the bitches, found no need to seek clarification on this one, another among the legions opposing Sarah. And it was partly true. The world did thwart her, but not because it conspired to that end. Obstacles materialized because they did for all. Her paranoia was a form of egoism, that merciful failure of the imagination. But the truth of her condition was worse: nobody plotted against her because nobody thought of her at all.

“How happy you were when I saved you!” Sarah said.

“How do you mean?”

“In Bangkok, when I saved you.” Sarah perceived the flicker of irritation. “Oh, come on — don’t act like you’re still loyal to Paul.”

“Anyway,” Tooly said.

A bang came from the door downstairs.

“Probably Humph,” Tooly said. “I’ll go check.” She hastened downstairs, frigid air rushing in from the open door.

“Hello, darlink,” Humphrey said. “You come out in pajamas? I would not believe it, if I do not hear it with my own eyes.”

She leaned in to whisper, “The empress is back.”

His expression transformed to disappointment, then annoyance. “I have to talk to you about important things,” he said. “Why empress is coming now? She is staying?”

“Seems so.”

He stared miserably.

Sarah opened the apartment door. “Talking about me?”

“No, no,” Tooly said.

“Liar.”

In the following days, Sarah rarely left, reading fashion magazines purloined from nearby stores. She was short on money, until a wire transfer came from Valter in Italy. After this, she vanished into a bar on Hoyt Street, finding overnight lodgings with the younger men carousing there, followed by awkward scenes in the morning when they said versions of “Gotta run to work; mind leaving?” Sarah returned to the apartment, where Humphrey hid behind his books, and she chain-smoked at the window overlooking the expressway, waiting for Venn to call.