This Beautiful Life

by Helen Schulman

  It has taken a great deal of calibrated effort to get all parties to agree to this sit-down—the West Harlem Development Corporation, the community activists, the whining college students, the coiffed wives of philanthropists, the local Parents’ Association, Richard’s own team of experts—and an endless amount of cajoling and arm-twisting to persuade Bertram Anderson, the senior assemblyman, to donate his Harlem offices for the purpose of this meeting (which is key, the location of this meeting is key); and yet it has all been done. These seemingly Herculean tasks have been completed.

  The various warring factions are now present and assembled peaceably in Bert’s conference room, around his long, chipped wooden table, with the rather worn black leather chairs that swivel (good thing), the wilting flowers, sweaty water glasses, and bound copies of all of Richard’s charts and agendas and projections, the PowerPoint presentation, the computer that goes wherever Richard goes, like a lapdog or an ancillary lobe of his brain. There is a low-level scent of activity in the air, the musky respiration of skin mixed with the aroma of various perfumes and deodorants; it is the olfactory background hum of meetings when they get going, and Richard noted its presence about an hour in, as a positive barometrical measurement of the assembly’s charge. No one was sweating profusely, no one was hot under the collar, there was no angry human stink.

  Richard had been halfway through the presentation when he received the call, and now, as he is listening to his distraught wife, it is quickly becoming clear that he has been thrust into battle on not one but two fronts: (a) work, which he is prepared for, naturally; and (b) this thing with his kid, which he decidedly is not.

  He is senior executive vice chancellor of the Astor University of the City of New York, and at the onset of the meeting he’d welcomed everyone individually and by name (prepping himself with Google Images the night before), thanking the skeptical, smug assemblyman for allowing them to gather in his offices, blowing a little sunshine up Bert’s ass as he went. From the get-go, Richard did his best to set the group at ease. He poured the water himself, passing glasses around the table. He’d taken off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, keeping it casual and friendly, biting into a donut off a plate of baked goods proffered by his deputy, George Strauss, before he’d even begun. In private, he is too vigilant to indulge in sweets—his father died of a coronary at forty-nine—but nothing puts off other people more than public displays of discipline. A little confectioners’ sugar had sprinkled onto Richard’s lap as he ate, and so he’d started to speak to the group with cast-down eyes—those lashes again—casually brushing the powder off with his hand.

  “Welcome, everyone,” he’d said. “Here’s a concept to embrace: no sugar donuts when wearing black jeans.” He looked up. “Here’s a better one: let’s take a rare, underutilized industrial area in the greatest city in the world and turn it into a state-of-the-art cohort campus to a first-tier university while creating jobs, schools, and affordable housing for the surrounding community.” He’d put the half-eaten donut aside on his napkin for emphasis.

  “Anyone who can accomplish the latter deserves the rest of that donut, Richard,” Bert said. A portly man in his sixties with a dusting of silver gray in his well-trimmed beard, Bert, to Richard, always looks like he has just come in out of the snow. Born and bred in Harlem, Bert has run the district for the last twenty-five years. He is as smart as and/or smarter than Richard, perhaps wilier, by virtue of Richard’s own rigorously honest assessment. “Lying to yourself gets you nowhere,” Richard’s father always said, so Richard does his best to adhere to that axiom. Bert wears his experience and his legislative weight the way he wears his signature well-tailored gold-buttoned vest. Snugly. With gravitas.

  The senior assemblyman is today’s linchpin. If Richard can get Bert’s support, the rest will follow suit, eventually. The few real estate holdouts they can always buy out at a premium. Richard has a slush fund set aside just for this purpose.

  “I tell you what, Bert, when we’re done here today, I’ll split it with you,” Richard had said, earlier, before the call, nodding playfully at the donut.

  Manhattanville, east of Broadway and commercial Harlem, consists of mostly warehouses and parking garages, windswept river views, rubble-strewn lots, some auto body shops and gas stations—there is presently so little foot traffic that often in good weather some of the handful of proprietors and residents sit outside in the middle of the empty sidewalks on folding chairs, playing dominos on portable card tables. The neighborhood, if one can call it that, is home to La Floridad, the Cuban restaurant where Lizzie gets her café con leche en route to picking up the car (theirs is the cheapest garage in the city, and an expression of some residual shared frugality—they are both products of working-class families); Fairway Uptown, where she shops on Saturday mornings; and some of the most beautiful, antique iron latticework, huge trestles that—miraculously, considering their copious rot, those rusted stanchions—still manage to support the elevated subway line. The best landmark of all is a mysterious aerial road to nowhere that abruptly ends near the river where it meets up against the sky. On Richard’s maps, it is an abandoned arm of the West Side Highway, but in his mind that graceful, cast-off celestial boulevard is the “Stairway to Heaven” that he slow-danced to so many times as a kid. (He hears Jimmy Page’s electric guitar riffing in his head every time he walks beneath it.)

  Gazing up at the clouds through that intricate, corroded metalwork feels like peering through a veil of muddied silver lace, and the poetry of it all appeals to Richard, although once the university breaks ground the thing will have to go—unless he can turn it into a park, a green oasis, like the one a variety of developers plan for the High Line, the elevated railway that runs like a spine through the rough-and-tumble neighborhood of gas stations and art galleries in Chelsea, downtown. The possibilities here are endless! The pitfalls, myriad. Ergo, the complex, exhilarating joy of his job.

  Best, for all its raw, physical gifts, this most western reach of Harlem is virtually uninhabited—for New York, that is. Not that many people actually live there.

  In the nine months Richard has spearheaded the university’s plans to expand by building a new campus in Manhattanville, he has aimed to please, sensitive as he is to the university’s missteps almost four decades prior, when their efforts to build new dorms and an indoor stadium ended in race riots. It is important that they do this right. Richard has said this over and over again. First to Lizzie, when he was being wooed away from Cornell and was contemplating taking the job, late one night, after sex, when they did their best talking, when she wasn’t anxious and he was loose, when the breeze off the gorge was damp and sultry and the kids were asleep and the intense pleasure of living hovered over a waterfall that way—the music of it—was almost enough to make him spring naked to his feet, his dick still hard and wet, and pick up the phone and wake up the university’s chief operating officer in New York and say, no, no, I am too fucking happy here to risk changing my life. Lizzie had slipped on her skirt and T-shirt from off of the floor, and said, “Let’s sit on the porch; it’s such a beautiful night,” looking through the open window next to their bed. Outside, they’d talked, it seemed, for hours; he’d felt the need to make it clear to her that this job was about doing good—Lizzie liked that—that the challenge turned him on for sure, but that there was a vision here he’d like to fulfill. There was something about that night, the conversation, the excitement of this new venture, her willingness to give him what he wanted, that made him feel like he had when he’d first met her, unbeatable and unstoppable. Here was this smart, pretty girl eager to be his audience, witty but vulnerable; it was that vulnerability that always got to him. It amazed him that she was still ready to go with him where he wanted to go. It was his mission to make it worth her while. And so he says this often: “The university will expand correctly.” It is as if, if he says it enough, it will become true.

  To back this up, he is prepared to spend $150 million
of the university’s money (Lizzie loves to verbally insert the italics) over the next sixteen years to ensure not only the preservation but also the growth of the surrounding community as they build a campus that will catapult the university into the new century. He is in possession of a big fat economic gift, a gift he can give to Harlem; Richard firmly believes this. He never would have accepted the position if he did not. Richard is a dyed-in-the-wool Populist. His father was a postal worker. His mother, a homemaker. The youngest of three sons, he was the first in his family to graduate from high school. What had once only been simply fact, the architecture of Richard’s life, even in his own mind, has been elevated to myth.

  It is Richard’s mission to persuade the members of his audience to see what he sees, that Manhattanville is ripe for development, that developing Manhattanville will not only increase the academic, artistic, and economic reach of the university but, in doing so, will also cast significant academic, artistic, and economic light on the surrounding neighborhood, enhancing it without gentrifying it (gentrifying it too much, he qualifies internally; a little gentrification is good, he reasons: banks, drugstores, supermarkets, jobs) or destroying it. This is called “city planning.”

  So Richard began this morning the way he always begins, by stating his objectives simply and directly. (With Jake he’d say, “Today you are going to clean up your room,” and then list a vast array of directives: “You will make the bed and change the linens. You will cull through and straighten out your dresser drawers. You will attack that mess on your desk and make sense of it. You will alphabetize your underwear, my underwear, and the dog’s underwear,” the last delivered with a grin and a noogie—there was no dog—and then the two of them would end up wrestling on the floor.) He’d then proceed to get as wonkish and as detailed as possible, dazzling his audience with data, bringing them to their intellectual knees. As he outlined the various stages in the development of Manhattanville, Richard did what he did best: he delegated, he delegated, and then jumped in (that is, he interrupted politely, self-effacingly, bursting with enthusiasm, as if he could barely contain his excitement) with a flurry of addendums, proving himself as expert as the army of experts he has scattered around the table. He has seated his team strategically among the community activists, the philanthropists, the local apparatchik, the assemblyman and his aides.

  “No ‘us versus them,’ ” Richard had warned prior to the meeting. “We are one, guys. A single human organism.”

  This morning, he’d called upon his colleagues on a first-name basis, no matter how accomplished or renowned (“Here’s where you come in, Marcus,” and “Maria, take it away”), as he proceeded point by PowerPoint throughout his talk—employing the architects and their computer-enhanced drawings, representatives from the School of Education to discuss the new Public Intermediate School that was a keystone of their proposal; the head of Relocation Services was there, too, Luz Esquilar, with her background in finance and social work (Yale Law), to talk about moving the few actual residents of “inarguably underutilized and industrial” Manhattanville into comparable or better housing for the same dollar or less. (How they really were going to accomplish that move in this real estate market was one of the sticky issues that Richard chewed over and over again. He had his eye on several buildings in Hamilton and Washington Heights, East Harlem—not Harlem, exactly, but close. Was it close enough? he wondered.) Richard had his whole team at the ready to run through their spiels, their words of comfort and renewal, their battle cry for change and opportunity and a new order, when he’d noticed his phone whirring on the conference table.

  Lizzie had had the wherewithal to text him first. Richard was laughing along with the rest of them at one of his own jokes (“Is it time to eat the donut, Bert?”) and glanced down and saw the word URGENT on the screen of his phone. When they’d first arrived, all the members of the meeting had rested their phones on the table like a bunch of gunslingers sitting at a bar. “Surrender your weapons,” Richard had said jovially when he’d joined them. He’d not hesitated one millisecond in taking Lizzie’s call when the phone vibrated again. He was calm, but tabloid headlines did a ticker-tape crawl along the bottom substrata of his thoughts. Often, when asked about his ability to multitask, the image that reaches Richard first is the post-9/11 screen on CNN. He is capable of entertaining several fractured narratives at once.

  Lizzie would not interrupt him unless she had to. And Richard Bergamot, by definition, is the kind of man who takes his wife’s “urgent” phone call in the middle of a high-powered meeting—he is a family man. That’s what the articles say about him, and it is true. Phi Beta Kappa at Princeton, Stanford MBA and PhD in Econ. He is the kind of guy (even as a kid) who always has a clean shirt, in his briefcase or his locker. It was the clean shirt that got him started—he worked after school and summers in a fast-food restaurant slinging Macho Burritos in San José, and the wardrobe of pristine white polo shirts beneath his uniform impressed the franchise owner, who’d sent his own rather feckless boy back east to boarding school. “The rich rule the world; you better learn how to deal with them early,” Mr. Harrison said, and so he guided Richard through the application process, helping him negotiate a free ride.

  St. Paul’s paved Richard’s pathway to Princeton, where he became interested in finance, all those wealthy prep school friends of his tempting him with the grace and ease of their gracious, easy lives. At Stanford he remembered his roots, inspired by his thesis advisor, vowing to live a life of public service—public service with money. He was a golden boy who grew up to be a golden man, a family man. Richard Bergamot loves his family. All his ambition and striving is in service to that love.

  So when he hears the tremulous tone in his wife’s voice as she struggles to convey the information that sounds as if it is rapidly whirling inside her head, he tries very hard to brush away his impatience. Lizzie isn’t making sense.

  “He’s physically all right?” Richard asks. “Yes, yes,” Lizzie says. “But honey, they are suspending him. They want us to come up to school and get him right away.”

  She anxiously tries to explain something about Jake and an email, a love letter, the school, suspension, the poor, poor mother of that pitiable little girl . . . Richard jotting down notes on his legal pad as she rambles: Turn the meeting over to Bert, PowerPoint presentation to Kate, meet L.B. at the garage, and his father’s most cogent axiom: Don’t ever let them see you sweat . . . He actually writes this down. Jotting notes gives Richard something to do and confers upon his reluctant audience an aura of significance to the phone call. Richard looks around the boardroom, at the polite but impatient faces—busy, important people, all of them—turning away from him now and toward each other in a Kabuki-like effort to offer him some false modicum of privacy. He does not want to leave this meeting before he’s won them over.

  Ironically, Richard’s garage, MTP (the initials stand for More Than Parking—“What more?” said Lizzie. “Bikini waxes?”), is located in Manhattanville, and is also one of the first businesses slated to be turned over to the university because the university, as of six months ago, under Richard’s tutelage, is now MTP’s landlord. It was one of Richard’s first acquisitions. The garage is a fifteen-minute sprint from the assemblyman’s 125th Street offices—five minutes if Richard can catch a cab, which is not always possible on 125th Street. Maybe a car service, or a gypsy, but you can’t count on a yellow taxi, not yet, not until the arrival of the Manhattanville campus, that is—which leaves him with very little time to extricate himself from this meeting, if extricating is indeed what he is going to do. Certainly this is what his wife is asking for.

  He lets Lizzie go on, because she needs to; it is always wiser to let her perseverate a little, if time allows (she is more logical and reasonable once she’s had a chance to “talk it out”), before weighing in. Usually he likes to help her; it makes him feel good. But in the moment, his moment, he feels a brief surge of annoyance—why can’t she just handle thi
s? Still, there is no time for irritation now; he loves her, he is her husband, it’s their boy they are discussing, and he needs to settle her down.

  “The secret of Richard’s success is a cool head,” Lizzie always says, wryly, out of the corner of her lovely mouth, when one friend or another marvels at Richard’s latest accomplishment, or at some dinner thrown in his honor. She compliments him in public with pride, but pride with an edge, like so many married women of her generation, because she isn’t totally above a little jealousy. She isn’t 100 percent above feeling envious of his stature, she admits, even when she counts upon it, quality-of-life-wise. She hasn’t accomplished all she’s wanted to accomplish, she confesses repeatedly, after a glass or two of wine, publicly leaking her neurosis, what with her PhD, her two kids, her tug-of-war between the family and the workplace, dipping in and out of academia, the occasional bones Cornell threw her, a class here, a symposium there, before running back to the kids. Who wouldn’t like that kind of freedom? Richard sometimes thinks when he stays late at the office, Lizzie calling to remind him of the importance of face time with the family. Men were never allowed the space to mull over whether they wanted to work—they just worked, period. What she admires most about Richard, Lizzie always says when she has officially drunk too much, is the fact that he isn’t conflicted—he is a straight and independent arrow tirelessly shooting toward success.

  So let me accomplish something here, today, Richard thinks. Lizzie, honey, don’t make me fuck this up.

  Jake and the girl are teenagers. Teenagers flirt and embarrass themselves. They are biologically programmed to do so. Wasn’t he young once, too? How big a deal could this be? When he was a teenager he thought about sex all day long. Even while he was getting some, he was thinking about when he could get some next.

  Richard looks up and catches the eye of the smug, self-satisfied young community organizer, Steven Schwartz, a graduate of the university, recently a teenager himself. Is he getting any? Schwartz has a slightly schlubby young Bolshevik edge, via Williamsburg. A goatee and a shaved head. Ten extra pounds. Richard is a quarter century older than this kid, but he carries about a third of his body fat. Schwartz brought up the term “eminent domain” at the start of the meeting: a preemptive strike. His shoulders shaking with postadolescent rage and barely contained excitement—jumping the gun, tone-deaf to the rhythms and parries of a well-timed and executed assault. Even Bert had glared at the kid; Richard assumed the assemblyman had wanted to launch that particular salvo himself at the proper moment in the charged, fast-paced allegro of the post-presentation Q&A. Richard gives that fucker Schwartz a cool smile and a nod. Richard raises his right forefinger. One minute, he’ll be off the phone in one minute. He hates being forced off his game.