Lord of All Things (16 page)

Maman had confessed only a couple of years earlier that she had never sent the letters Charlotte had written to Hiroshi after the sudden move to Argentina—long letters in careful English in which she had made an extra effort with her handwriting. Her mother had wanted Charlotte to forget “that boy.”

And she had been so disappointed when he had never answered!

After her mother’s confession, Charlotte had made one more attempt. But by then Hiroshi’s mother was no longer working at the embassy in Tokyo, and there had been no way to find her new address. So her final attempt had run aground, and then she really had forgotten Hiroshi. At least, so she had thought.

She would never have believed they still had so much to say to each other. In fact, she realized, that was what had made it such a very strange encounter. All right, enough pondering. She threw off the covers, jumped out of bed, wriggled out of her pajamas, and got into the shower. After a long, hot shower, she snuggled back into bed in her robe and called Brenda, her best friend. She always told her everything.

Brenda just laughed. “It looks as though you’re collecting everyone you’ve ever met in your life here at Harvard,” she commented.

“Yes,” Charlotte agreed. “So it seems.” She and Brenda Gilliam had first met in Delhi but then lost touch. When Charlotte had been awarded a spot at Harvard, they had reconnected, since by strange coincidence Brenda’s father happened to teach at the medical school. Perhaps there were fewer random coincidences in life than people thought.

She found herself looking at a framed photo on the shelf of her and James at a garden party. For the first time she wondered why she had put it there. “The question is, what am I going to do about Hiroshi?”

“That’s not hard,” Brenda said cheerily. “You two just pick up where you left off. That’s what we did, after all, when you turned up here.”

“But what if that doesn’t work?”

“Then you know that it’s over and done with.” Brenda was breathtakingly practical about such matters. She could have written for the problem pages. “If you can’t think of anything else to do, bring him along next Saturday. I can never have too many strong men around when I’m moving house.”

Charlotte realized she was holding the receiver much more tightly than she needed to be. She relaxed her grip and took a deep breath. Every time Brenda’s move came up, she couldn’t shake the feeling it had something to do with her.

The obligatory first year in a freshman dorm in Old Yard had been a nightmare for Charlotte. She didn’t doubt for a moment that living together with others built team spirit or that it was good for developing her study skills, exchanging ideas, and making friends for life. It was just she didn’t find that part easy. When she didn’t have a moment to herself—and in a shared room, no one had a moment to themselves—she felt on edge, defenseless, vulnerable, not in the least bit prepared to make friendships for life. Even if Al Gore and Tommy Lee Jones had been Harvard roommates. So in her second year she had sought out her own apartment in the city. Ever since then she had lived in Somerville, about two miles from Harvard. She paid significantly more in rent there, but if she ever managed to unpack the last of her boxes and buy some good furniture, she might really feel at home. She enjoyed more peace and quiet there than she ever had in Holworthy Hall. As for friends for life—apart from Brenda, and maybe Hiroshi as well—perhaps she just didn’t make friendships the same way everyone else did.

“Well, to tell the truth, Hiroshi is kind of scrawny,” Charlotte said.

“Bring him along all the same.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

She tried to imagine how James and Hiroshi might react to one another. James was always a little condescending about Brenda—mostly he called her “the plump girl,” which was definitely an exaggeration—but he had promised he would come and help. Or almost promised. She could never be quite sure what he would do; James had a marked tendency toward spontaneous decisions.

Well, maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea for the two of them to meet. “If he calls me, I’ll ask him,” she promised.

“He’ll call for sure, won’t he?” asked Brenda.

“All right then: when he calls.”

Of course he was going to call. After last night, Charlotte told herself, she would have to work hard to make sure Hiroshi didn’t fall in love with her.

Waking up was a painful business, and for the first few moments James Michael Bennett didn’t know where he was. Then he saw he was in his own bed, which came as something of a relief. Not that he didn’t enjoy those times when he woke up somewhere else entirely, next to a woman whose name he didn’t know…that could be one almighty turn-on. Far out. An adventure. But it had to be the right day for that kind of thing, and today was not that day.

It had something to do with last night. Gradually, he remembered most of what had happened. How he had come home in the early hours of the morning when the night sky was just beginning to pale, the skyline starting to show through the dark blue haze. He hadn’t felt too good—in fact, he had felt terrible—and driving his car had probably been one hell of a risk. Those damn drinks they served at Epsilon Omega! Maybe he should find out what on earth they put in them. He’d run into someone in the front hall. Ah yes, George. The butler had helped him upstairs and brought him some kind of tablets with a glass of water. James couldn’t actually remember whether he’d taken the things, but if he had they hadn’t helped much.

He finally managed to get up and stagger into the shower, after which his head was almost clear. Clear enough at least to be able to think about whether he wanted breakfast—or whatever you might call it at this time of day. What time was it, anyway? Half past one already. Well, great. Breakfast, or a couple of lengths in the pool first, or maybe a jog in the park? No, he’d start with breakfast. He dropped his towel and walked stark-naked through his bedroom, a large room flooded with sunlight at this hour. George had put out fresh clothing and also Saturday’s mail on a silver tray, just the way he liked it. Look at that: a big fat letter from England. He picked that up first and checked the sender’s address. It was indeed from the genealogist in London, a heraldic expert whom he had hired a while ago to research the Bennett family tree. He tore the envelope open.

He glanced through the letter that came with the report. Thick, creamy paper with an imposing crest, embossed gilt lettering, but also the words “with regret” and the news he had been unable to find any link to the nobility of Great Britain. There were indeed some branches he had not been able to document thoroughly, despite all his efforts, the expert wrote, but in his professional opinion they were unlikely to yield any promising results. The last line of the letter requested that James pay the itemized expenses at his earliest convenience.

James flipped through the pages of the report. Lists of names, lines of descent, collateral and cadet branches. It was no different from all the other expert reports so far—a bunch of ancestors who turned out to have been coopers, sextons, tavern keepers, sailors, and shoemakers. No dukes, no earls, no viscounts—not even a baronet. He yanked open a desk drawer and shoved the pages inside. The London researcher had been recommended to him as the very best in his field, but he was obviously no better at his job than all the rest of them.

He got dressed and went down to the kitchen. Madeleine was there; in fact, it looked like she had been waiting for him. She asked what he wanted for breakfast.

“Ham and scrambled eggs, and a cheese sandwich.”

James fished Saturday’s newspaper out of the magazine rack; he hadn’t had time to read the sports pages yesterday. “Make the coffee as strong as you can. And orange juice, a whole jugful.”

“Yes, Mr. Bennett,” Madeleine answered. “Right away.” Madeleine was from Louisiana, and one of her best qualities was she still knew how servants should behave. It was a shame she was due to retire soon; it would be no easy matter to find a suitable replacement.

She brought in the big glass jug full of fresh-pressed orange juice, and James gulped down the first glass while reading the latest baseball stats. He still had a pounding headache. When at last the coffee appeared on the table, he became aware of the hustle and bustle in the house.

“What’s going on today?” he asked as Madeleine put the ham and eggs in front of him.

She cocked her head. “Perihelion meeting. Mercury, on Wednesday.”

“Oh yeah.” James massaged his temples. “That, too.”

The Perihelions were a group of his father’s friends who had a thing for astronomy. At some point they had come up with the wacky idea of having Sunday meetings when a planetary perihelion was due—except for the perihelion of Earth. And what was a perihelion? If he remembered right, it was the point in a planet’s orbit when it was closest to the sun. James wasn’t totally sure about this, but whatever it was, the rule was that everyone had to work out for themselves when it was due. There were no invitations or announcements, and any member who got his calculations wrong had to pay a fixed fine into the “Lost in Space” box, or sing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” to the assembled group.

The whole thing was objectionable for several reasons. The first problem was the perihelion rule was pretty crazy in itself—sometimes they wouldn’t see one another for ages, and then they would be meeting one Sunday after another for weeks on end. As far as James understood any of it, Mercury set the pace, since it had a perihelion every eighty-seven days. Other planets didn’t matter at all; Uranus, for instance, wasn’t due for perihelion until March 2050.

The second problem was his dad was horribly democratic when it came to his friends. James Michael Bennett regarded any random roommate or teammate from Harvard as a lifelong friend, regardless of whether they had made a success of themselves or failed at everything they tried. At these meetings filthy rich lawyers found themselves sitting next to long-haired librarians, successful entrepreneurs rubbed shoulders with blue-collar workers, famous authors alongside spaced-out hippies. Dad welcomed winners and losers alike and loved to behave as though everybody were equal. He even had an expensive facsimile of the Declaration of Independence hanging in his office—“All men are created equal” blah blah blah—and as if that wasn’t enough, he also liked having friends of all colors. White, black, yellow—it was all the same to him. Dad had friends who were Mexican, Russian, and Jewish, and if James Michael Bennett III ever breathed a word against any of this, he received a lecture about cosmopolitan values, global citizenship, and the Enlightenment.

“We have to talk.”

James sat bolt upright as his mother’s voice broke in on his train of thought. The way she spoke made him think her next words would be about some girl who had turned up pregnant claiming he was the father.

“Good morning,” he said with studied calm, waiting for what might come next.

“I really don’t care when you get up,” his mother declared, sitting across the table from him, “but please don’t wish me a good morning at two o’clock in the afternoon.”

She was tanned an astonishing shade of brown, which made her blond hair look almost unreal, as though she dyed it—which she didn’t; indeed, she never even used lipstick.

“I’ll try to remember that,” James replied. Perhaps it was about something else, then. So far he’d always been lucky. Or had good condoms.

“It’s about your engagement party,” his mother said, coming to the point at last. “We’ll have to arrange it. You can’t drag these things out forever. We’ll have to set a date, send out invitations.…It all needs organizing; it all takes time. The good restaurants with big enough banquet chambers are booked out months in advance.” She opened the folder next to her on the table.

“I understand,” James said. With an effort he restrained himself from rolling his eyes. Did it have to be today? Given the way he was feeling right now?

He would have his work cut out for him. He knew his mother at least that well.

All day long Hiroshi was wrapped in a strange silence—no, filled with a silence that never left him. It wasn’t the silence of the outside world. Rather, it felt as though his ears were blocked, or somebody had rolled him up in yards and yards of cotton wool. He was tired, his throat tickled as though he was catching cold, and his stomach grumbled and cramped from the unaccustomed quantities of alcohol and cheap food, but even so he was overflowing with a warm feeling of contentment.
Overflowing
was the only word that came near describing how he felt. He couldn’t get over his surprise at what had happened. He saw his whole life spread out before him, saw the paths that he had taken and how they had finally led him here, to this place, to this moment. All at once everything made sense. Meeting Charlotte so unexpectedly in such an unlikely way seemed a kind of confirmation that fate was at work here. Nothing more, nothing less. A sign he had a task.

They had spent most of the night telling each other their life stories from the day they had been so suddenly separated. Charlotte had gone with her parents to Argentina, to Buenos Aires. After that her father had been posted back to Africa, to Dakar in Senegal. There, Charlotte had learned to speak Wolof, Diola, and Pulaar. She had liked the place even though she had suffered constantly from some kind of stomach trouble and hadn’t coped well with the antimalaria tablets.

She told him about a place called the House of Slaves, a museum on an island called Gorée, off the Senegalese coast. Gorée claimed to have been the main transit market for slaves from Africa to America, but Charlotte said she had felt nothing of that in the building. In fact, it had only been set up as a trading post years later and had mostly dealt in ivory and gold; there had never been a single prisoner held in the so-called dungeons down in the cellar. The whole museum was just a replica of other places where the actual slave trade had taken place, but of course they never said as much to visitors.

Hiroshi asked her whether she still had her gift of reading the history of things. Yes, she told him, but it was on the wane. She had to be very deeply in love, or really angry about something—in some state of extreme emotion. Otherwise, things said nothing to her, or she couldn’t understand what she felt from them. All the same, she still didn’t like going to libraries; old books that had passed through hundreds of hands were sometimes too much to handle. She could hardly bear being near them.