Хлоя Бенджамин - The Immortalists

Raj and Ruby are coming for Thanksgiving. On Friday, Raj e-mailed Daniel and agreed.

They’ll arrive on Tuesday, two days before the holiday, so Daniel and Mira spend the weekend preparing. They wash the linens in the guest room and set up the fold-out in Daniel’s study. They clean the house: Mira the kitchen and living room, Daniel the bedrooms and bathrooms, Gertie the dining room. They go to Rhinebeck to buy produce at Breezy Hill Orchard and cheeses at Grand Cru. Before they drive back across the river to Kingston, they stop at Bella Vita for a centerpiece with tulips and pomegranates and apricot-colored roses. Daniel carries it back to the car. Against the dim November sky, the flowers seem to glow.

The doorbell rings two hours early, while Mira is teaching and Gertie is taking a nap. Daniel scrambles downstairs, still in his Binghamton T-shirt and furry moccasins, cursing himself for not having changed. Through the peephole: a man and a girl, or not a girl – a teenager, nearly as tall as her father. Daniel pulls the door open. It’s drizzling outside; a stream of droplets rests on Ruby’s lustrous, copper-black mane.

‘Raj,’ Daniel says. ‘And Rubina.’

Instantly, he feels self-conscious for resorting to her full name, a name listed on her birth certificate and rarely, to his knowledge, used since. But she appears so changed, looking not like the child he remembers but like an adult he’s never met, that what came to him was the equally adult, never-met name: Rubina.

‘Hi,’ says Ruby. She wears a fuchsia velour sweat suit tucked into knee-high Ugg boots. When she smiles, she looks so much like Klara that Daniel nearly winces.

‘Daniel,’ says Raj, stepping forward to shake his hand. ‘It’s good to see you.’

When Daniel last saw Raj, he looked anemically handsome, like a street dog: sharp chin, sharp cheekbones, slant of nose. Now he is trim and healthy, his upper body toned beneath a hooded cashmere sweater. His hair is neatly clipped. There’s a comb of gray at his temples, but his face has fewer wrinkles than Daniel’s. He holds a juice of an unappealing, green-brown color.

‘And you,’ says Daniel. ‘Come on in. Gertie’s sleeping and Mira’s teaching, but they’ll both be here soon. Can I get you something to drink?’

‘I’d love a glass of water,’ Raj says.

He pulls a silver Tumi suitcase through the doorway. Ruby has a Louis Vuitton duffel bag. She turns to hitch it onto one shoulder. Across the back of her sweatpants are two words, encrusted in rhinestones: Juicy , in elaborate capitals, and in smaller, less-eye-catching capitals, Couture .

‘You sure?’ asks Daniel, closing the door. ‘I have a great Barolo in the garage.’

Why is he trying to impress Raj? To make up for his schlubby T-shirt and moccasins? He’s already thinking of what he’ll cook for breakfast tomorrow morning: a frittata, perhaps, with fontina and what’s left of the heirloom tomatoes.

‘Oh,’ says Raj. ‘No need. But thank you.’

‘It’s no hassle.’ Suddenly, Daniel is desperate for a drink. ‘It’s just languishing down there, waiting for a time like this.’

‘Really,’ says Raj. ‘I’m fine. But feel free.’

A pause as their eyes meet, and Daniel understands: Raj doesn’t drink. A large silver watch slides down on Raj’s wrist.

‘Of course,’ says Daniel. ‘Water, then. And let’s get you settled. The guest room has a queen bed, and there’s a fold-out in my office. We’ve set up both.’

Ruby has been typing something on a skinny, pink flip phone – that Motorola Razr all the teenagers have – but now she snaps it shut. ‘Dad’ll take the fold-out.’

‘Incorrect,’ says Raj.

‘And I’ll have a glass of the Barolo,’ she adds.

‘Wrong again,’ Raj says.

Ruby slits her eyes and smirks, but when Raj raises his eyebrows, Ruby’s smirk becomes a real smile.

‘Silly old Dad,’ she says, following Daniel to the office. ‘Spoilsport old Dad. Spoilsport Daddy longlegs.’

The next morning, a Wednesday, Daniel wakes at ten. He curses. He hears the shower in the master bathroom – Mira – and hopes Raj and Ruby have slept in, too. Shocking to Daniel, how late they were up, even more shocking how well it went – a leisurely, two-hour dinner with his mother, his wife, his brother-in-law, and his niece, as if such a thing were normal for them, followed by chocolates and tea in the living room. Daniel broke out the Barolo after all, and even Gertie trundled to bed after eleven.

Daniel stayed up even later. His desktop computer is in the office, where Ruby was sleeping. Mira was in bed, too, so Daniel took the opportunity to retrieve her laptop from the bedside table and carry it into the master bathroom.

The Louis Vuitton suitcase sparked his curiosity. Most designer brands mean nothing to him, but he recognized those iconic brown and tan letters. Raj’s watch, too, was clearly expensive. And the cashmere hoodie: who wears such a thing? So Daniel investigated. He knew they were doing well – in 2003, when Roy Horn was mauled by one of the duo’s white tigers, Ruby and Raj replaced Siegfried and Roy as the Mirage’s main act – but what he learned via Google astounded him. Their home, a gated, all-white estate, has been profiled in Luxury Las Vegas and Architectural Digest . The gates are marked with an ornate RC and open onto a mile-long driveway that leads to thirty acres of interconnected mansions and walkways. There’s a meditation center, a movie theater, and an animal habitat where black swans and ostriches can be visited for a hefty entrance fee. For Ruby’s thirteenth birthday, Raj bought her a Shetland pony, a rather overfed specimen named Krystal with whom Ruby posed for the teen magazine Bossy – Ruby’s arms slung around the pony’s neck, her dark mane lying atop Krystal’s blond one. In the article, a pdf of which Daniel found online, Bossy identifies Ruby as the youngest millionaire in Las Vegas.

Why didn’t Daniel know all this? Is it that he didn’t want to? He’s avoided reading about Ruby and Raj’s act, mostly because it makes him think about the disaster of their last meeting and the guilt he feels about his distance from them. Now he couldn’t help but rethink the previous night. Daniel and Mira purchased their house in 1990, when they couldn’t afford Cornwall-on-Hudson or Rhinebeck and still believed Kingston was up-and-coming. Daniel imagined Raj and Ruby driving into town, expecting a historical site – Kingston was once the capital of New York – and finding a city still struggling to right itself after the closure of the IBM factory that employed seven thousand residents. He saw them pass the abandoned technology center and Main Street, fallen into shabby disrepair. How must they have regarded the fold-out cot in Daniel’s office and the expensive cheese – the former an embarrassment, the latter an attempt to make up for it?

He could not bear to contemplate his return to work on Monday, and what might happen if he holds his ground when it comes to the waivers. Days earlier, he submitted a request to review his case with the local Area Defense Counsel, a military attorney who provides representation for accused service members. He knows that Mira is right – it’s best to be aware of what options he has to defend himself – but the request alone was humiliating. Without a job, who would he be? Someone who sat on a bath mat with his back against the toilet, reading about his brother-in-law’s solarium, he thought – an image terrible enough to force him to bed, so that he could fall asleep and stop seeing it.

Now he dresses nicely and hurries downstairs. Raj and Ruby sit at the kitchen counter, sipping orange juice and eating omelets.