“Sweetheart, this sounds like typical teen stuff,” he says into the phone when Lizzie asks if he can meet her at the car.
“You mean you’re not going to come?” she says, hope deflating out of her voice like a loss of pride.
There is silence.
She is his wife. She knows him. As much as anyone knows anyone.
Lizzie says, “Fine. I’ll pick him up, and I’ll have Jakey apologize to the girl and her parents—” and now it is his turn to interrupt her. Richard does not want his son apologizing for anything, not yet.
“No,” he says, authoritatively. “We’ll sort this all out together at home.” He whispers, “Just get him the hell out of there.” Then he says the next part clearly enough for his audience to hear him signing off. “See you later, honey.”
“Okay,” says Lizzie, sounding a little less desperate. Either Richard has successfully talked her down or she is wisely giving up and beginning to orchestrate her own next move.
That is her problem. He has his.
Richard needs to take his meeting back. He puts the phone down and instinctively reaches for a live grenade.
“Steven brought up the words eminent domain at the start of our meeting,” Richard says, with a nod toward the fat kid in the corner, “for which I’m grateful. So let’s talk frankly now about the elephant in the room.”
After the meeting is over Richard feels amazingly light. The spring breeze is cool against his neck, his collar blessedly open. As these things go, the whole day has gone swimmingly. He has layered down a foundation of promise and goodwill, building the groundwork for consensus, a strong basis for moving forward. He remembers how he outmaneuvered Steven Schwartz so that even the boy, sputtering with free-floating, inarticulate rage, understood he was behaving like a clown. “White privilege,” said Schwartz. “Culturally insensitive . . .”
“Take a closer look at the proposals, Steven,” Richard said patiently, passing him piles of paper. “The education will be top-notch and inclusive—it’s a new and exciting option for the neighborhood kids as well as Astor U. families—which are as diverse a group as any you can find in New York.” Here he shook his head a little. “It’s a bit antiquated to assume our faculty is homogeneous . . .”
Now Richard feels like he is floating in his skeleton, taller, stronger, and more alive, lambent; this is the way he always feels after a significant achievement. It is the sensation itself, he sometimes thinks, that he is addicted to. He tries to preserve it as he walks back to his apartment, perhaps not as quickly as the situation with Jake warrants (the situation suggests a cab, a car service, a subway; a phone call stating, “I’m on my way home, honey”). But the moment consists of a rare fusion of solitude and satisfaction, and he isn’t quite ready to surrender it just yet.
At home, in the kitchen, both his wife and son will be in need of shoring up. There will be phone calls to make, parents to placate, school administrators to stroke or to intimidate, he isn’t sure which tactic to take yet. During the meeting, Richard had been the executive vice chancellor of the Astor University of the City of New York; at home he will be “the dad,” the husband. The responsibilities of these roles are enormous. Right now, in the intermission between acts, he has no part to play. He belongs to no one. He feels good. He wants to preserve that feeling for a while longer.
Richard decides to crisscross through the projects, making his way toward Broadway, soaking up the cool sunshine, deftly sidestepping little logs of dog shit and slaloming through the garbage that tumbles out of the overflowing bins and wafts through the spring breeze as if it has wings. There are teenagers gathered in the small prison run of a playground, listening to loud music. Making out. Two fat old ladies sit on a park bench, the flesh around their knees overhanging their support hose. Laundry dangles from lines off the little rusting terraces. The air smells like fried food. It is a smell that once made him salivate and now makes him gag. There are so many people outdoors in the middle of the day you’d think this was the weekend. Doesn’t anyone around here have a job? School? They need Richard and his programs and his progress.
He nods at a man with a gold front tooth. The guy’s arm muscles, which look carved out of ebony, are resplendent beneath his sawed-off sweatshirt. There is more skin than shirt here, and Richard thinks if he had that physique himself he’d want to flaunt it, too. He really should be lifting heavier weights.
The meeting went well, extraordinarily so. The local school board representatives were particularly impressed. Schwartz be damned—Who doesn’t want better schools for their children? Richard thinks, and for a moment, in an uncharacteristic excess of self-esteem and ambition, he allows himself the indulgence of contemplating what he could accomplish if he were someday to take over the New York City School System perhaps, or the university itself . . . Once the Manhattanville operation is in full swing the sky will be the limit in terms of his future employment. Public or private sector. This might be the time to make real money.
Just twenty minutes ago Bert himself put a hand on Richard’s shoulder and said, “If you can pull half of this off, we’re all in better shape up here, just as long as no one is forced from their homes, son.” He’d called Richard “son.” Bert is one sharp cookie, instinctively zeroing in on his Achilles’ heel, Richard’s lingering hunger for his own dead father. It was a vote of confidence and a warning, and Richard vows to heed it, at least as long as it is possible and prudent to do so.
He suddenly feels a light, pulsating pressure on his shoulder, right where Bert had touched him more firmly; it is like the massaging fingers of a Japanese hostess, featherlike, goose-bump-giving, reverberating through his bones with a dangerous chill racing through his synapses and up to his teeth. He whirls around—it had been imprudent for him, a well-dressed white guy carrying a computer, to wander through the projects. What an imbecile! Is it the dude with the muscles? Richard is instantly in fight-or-flight mode, adrenaline pumping. It takes only a second to realize his situation and laugh out loud. This will be the last time he hears his own laughter in weeks.
The tremor he feels is his BlackBerry, once again set on vibrate. He’d shoved it into his interior sport jacket pocket after Lizzie’s earlier call, and that pocket is now resting on his shoulder.
He reaches in and pulls out the phone. Clicks On without bothering to verify the caller and says, “I’m on my way. I’ll be home in ten minutes, honey.”
There is silence on the line.
“I want you to be an asshole,” Lizzie says.
In all the years he has known her, Richard has never heard Lizzie sound like this before. Harsh, strategic, uncompromising. Like she is declaring war. Like she is declaring war on anyone and everyone who has threatened their child. Like he, Richard, is the general who has to fight it.
I want you to be an asshole.
Richard thinks back, back to all the years when Lizzie wanted him not to be an asshole, when she questioned his humanity, worried that life and work were changing him, making him hard, turning him cold. Where was the caring, compassionate visionary she’d married? she’d ask him wryly from time to time. Then she’d gently nudge him back on track. It was one of the reasons he’d picked her: she made him a better person. Who will Richard be if Lizzie, of all people, gives him permission to be an animal? Without her reining him in, how far will Richard go?
Now Lizzie wants him to be an asshole.
He will give her what she wants.
They are in the lawyer’s offices, one o’clock. Wednesday afternoon, Jake looking almost comical in a too-large blue blazer and one of Richard’s ties. The boy’s limbs are long and gangly and they hang awkwardly from his torso as he slumps down into the plush leather chair. The cuffs of his white shirt rattle around his forearms like bangles. He’s still got that dumb string thing tied around one wrist; Richard makes a mental note to cut it off when they get home.
The conference table is long and burnished. The wood so rich and dark it glistens; it’
s been deeply oiled and it looks like the surface might ripple to the touch. The boy leans forward and stares at his reflection in the shiny wood. With his neck bent that way—like a crane swooping down for a drink—his head appears bigger, weightier, more orbicular and bobbling than it ever has before. Jake seems to Richard to be too skinny and too tall and too small in that chair, all at the same time. He doesn’t fit his own frame, and his frame doesn’t fit the seat. He looks almost spindly, as if his arms and legs could be blown around like a weathervane. The knot of his tie is off-center. It’s Richard’s tie: a dark blue silk with a thin turquoise stripe—a little schmancy maybe, Lizzie said, for the venue, but the most youthful one in Richard’s closet. No matter how many times Richard or Lizzie has reached over to straighten it today, it invariably lists left again.
Richard had tied that knot himself, and he’d had a moment when he did so, standing behind his son in front of the bathroom mirror that morning—Jake looking for a second like the Hindu god Vishnu, with all those multiple arms. That’s how Richard’s own father had taught him; Dad could only tie a tie as if he were performing the ritual upon himself, and so Dad had stood behind Richard, as he had both of Richard’s older brothers before him, and it hadn’t occurred to Richard to teach Jake any other way. While he was adjusting the knot, Richard had suddenly noticed how truly broad Jake’s shoulders had become. Like a wire frame hanger from which the rest of his lean body simply hung.
Richard had teared up a little then, and the boy had taken notice. “I’m sorry, Dad,” said Jake, his eyes muddy swollen green, like a pond all stirred up after a series of summer storms.
“It wasn’t a smart thing to do, was it?” Richard said.
“I didn’t know, I didn’t realize, I had no idea, Dad . . .” Jake said. “I didn’t think.”
“That’s the problem,” said Richard. “You have to think. You always have to think.”
“It was a mistake, Richard,” said Lizzie, from the doorway. Neither of them had seen her standing there. She was in her “Richard’s interview suit,” a black Armani she’d bought in Ithaca, on eBay, to charm the provost and the COO, with stockings, low heels, and lipstick; her wavy auburn hair slicked back in a French twist. “Jake would never intentionally hurt anyone. He couldn’t possibly have known what would happen—”
“You should never send an email you don’t want the whole world to see. How many times have I said that?” said Richard.
“She asked for it,” Lizzie cut in. “She made the video, she emailed it—what would Dr. Freud say,” she said, shaking her head. “That poor, wretched, stupid girl. Marjorie says the mother’s always away somewhere, that even when she was little she was always picked up by a nanny.” Her eyes met Richard’s in the mirror. “He needs to shave, Richard.”
“He can do that himself,” said Richard. “He needs a haircut.”
“My hair?” said Jake. It had taken forever for it to grow this long.
“Short,” said Richard. “So your ears stick out.”
“I still can’t believe they made us watch that thing together in Treadwell’s office.” Lizzie stole a look at Jake, and then whispered, “Did I tell you, she waxed? Down there . . .”
Richard felt the skin on his face tighten. Whether it was because Lizzie was being inappropriate in front of Jake or because she’d bungled it so big time at Wildwood, he wasn’t sure. He honestly wasn’t sure why he felt so angry.
“You shouldn’t have agreed to it,” said Richard.
“I was trying to work with the school,” said Lizzie. There was both incredulity and a little heat on her words.
“There is no working with the school,” said Richard.
“I know that now, Richard,” said Lizzie firmly. “I wonder if you, too, would have realized it in the moment had you been there.”
Her brown eyes met his green ones in the mirror—no surprise Jake’s were the color of algae. She did not have the right to chastise him, especially in front of their son. Richard had been at work; he’d been supporting the family. And then it was as if their argument played out in the short form telepathically: they volleyed back and forth from eyes to eyes locked in the mirror, marital shorthand from years of experience, one upping the ante, testing to see who would concede this time, and indeed it seemed that in this instance Richard had won. Because Lizzie got a little softer then. She thought he was right, maybe; or she was timing her battles; maybe she was just gearing up for the big one, a more important confrontation that would inevitably come; maybe she wanted to protect Jake; maybe she just knew Richard enough to recognize a good moment to back down. Whatever it was, their dispute played out rapid-fire and died out.
This was marriage, Richard thought, pragmatically compressed into emotional haiku.
“They could have turned it all into a teaching moment,” Lizzie said. “A school is supposed to help children and their families, by definition a school—”
“If he were eighteen he could be charged with disseminating child pornography,” said Richard, and instantly regretted it. He sounded like a robot and he knew it. He didn’t want to fight now, either. But someone had to assess the situation, assess it properly, keep cool. And once again, it seemed that responsibility was his. He’d been on the phone, the Internet. He’d begun his due diligence. He’d already talked to lawyers. The video had found its way to a music-sharing website—that is, one of the kids had sent it, thank God not Jake; Richard grilled him every way to Sunday, and Jake swore he had not posted it, because that could lead to further legal woes—and it had reached thousands, if not hundreds of thousands. Possibly it had already reached a million viewers. A million. The staggering consequence of a flick of his son’s index finger, the amazing irrevocable reach of his unleashed power—it was sort of stunning, really, what his son could actually do.
Kids have fucked up before, Richard thought, again and again. Kids have fucked up since time immemorial. It is their biological mandate to fuck up, Richard repeated to himself inside his own head. But not like this. Up until now, there was an element of containment to their fuck-ups. You could keep it to yourself pretty much and pay to have the rest swept away.
“McHenry is seventeen,” said Jake, looking like he might be sick. “Luke is eighteen,” he said slowly.
Lizzie looked at Jake with an inspector’s gaze.
“I’ll shave him,” said Lizzie.
“I’ll do it myself, Mom,” said Jake. His eyes were brimming, but he held those broad shoulders square.
Which now accounts for the two red scratches on his peachy face. The marinelike haircut. His ears twitching on both sides of his head like a fawn’s. Richard had marched Jake into a Latino barbershop on Amsterdam after he’d called into the office. “Not a buzz, but almost as short.” Richard stayed to watch as the long chestnut locks hit the linoleum in graceful spirals, like streamers the day after the party. He had nothing better to do this morning. Yesterday he’d gone into work. Yesterday Richard had “tried to set the gears in motion to make good on the goodwill of the meeting,” but it had been a lost cause. Yesterday he’d still had some stupid, ridiculous hope that this thing might actually die down.
All morning Richard’s BlackBerry and his landline had rung like crazy. His email, his IM were going nuts. Yesterday, Lizzie dropped Coco off at school in the a.m. as per usual, but he had had to pick her up in the afternoon, because Lizzie called him midday semi-hysterically and said she didn’t want to leave Jake alone at home, the poor kid was torturing himself, and she just couldn’t face the scene, again, that day, at pickup. Everyone was buzzing, she said. Everyone wanted to have coffee. Everyone wanted to talk. “No one ever wanted to have coffee before,” said Lizzie. “They want the dirt,” she said. “They want to trash-talk that girl.”
She gave him a list of instructions: arrive at 2:45, and the kindergarten class will be assembled on the sidewalk and half of them will already have left and he won’t have to kibitz with anyone. Also: “Bring a snack for Coco, she’l
l need protein first, not sugar, so a nut bar or a squeezy yogurt; you can pick up a mini-ham-and-cheese at the foodie place on the corner with the big windows, unless you are trying to avoid people . . .” And then: “Poor Jake; the kid is curled up on the couch like a worm. I hate that girl.”
It wasn’t Richard’s style to hide. He’d arrived on time and sauntered across the sidewalk, nodding a bright hello at almost anyone who looked vaguely familiar, and swung Coco up up up into the air and then onto the royal perch of his shoulders. “It’s my dad,” shouted Coco, in utter amazement. She bellowed this into the crowd. “It’s my dad,” as if he’d materialized out of thin air. When he heard her squeal of delight, Richard realized he’d never picked his daughter up from school in the city before. In Ithaca, Coco would come back with him up the hill to his office on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when Lizzie taught that grad seminar on Goncharova, Picasso, and Braque. Sometimes he’d let Coco run loose on the Arts Quad, glancing out his window from time to time to make sure she wasn’t annoying any of the lounging undergrads and keeping them from their seductions or their studies. But in New York, pickup had been her mother’s purview.
This Beautiful Life Page 9