by Jon Methven
“You know I cannot do that.”
“I wouldn’t ask it of you, Allie. I don’t want it for Iliza anyway. It’s a steep repercussion, but one she deserves. I was just wondering how sincere you were.”
I wander to the shed. Allie follows. “In two weeks, the most influential names in murder culture will arrive to take the first tour. Whatever they write will set the stage for the rest of our lives financially, vocationally, even where our kids go to college. It’ll be huge, Pisser. We cannot have this…” She waves a jeweled hand at whatever I am to her, “…bullshit continue. You tried to kill me with a crossbow. I know it was you.”
“You released naked pictures of me.”
“You ruined the lacrosse season. You know how important extracurricular activities are for college applications.” She runs a hand through the petunias to see if they are real. “Despite everything that has happened, we want you back. There will be a media storm. It’s unavoidable. It would help to have a public face on TV.”
“I don’t work there anymore.”
“Harry knows people. It won’t be a problem.”
Harry could have told me this himself. He is wise to send Allie, and also slightly afraid of me. She goes for my pants, cigarettes in the front pocket. We light one and listen to the waterfall and die a little.
“Thank you,” she says.
“For what?”
“Russ Haverly. Someone should have thanked you long ago. He was a shit toward the end. I was surprised you had it in you, Pisser.” Allie smiles, blows smoke, passing this information informally, two neighbors discussing recipes.
“Allie, there’s something you need to know about Russ.”
“I know about the video.” Her voice is lavish with irritation that I even bother to mention it. “Don’t make this about that damn play. We’re not pulling Tungsten out. You put us in this situation.”
I puff rabidly at this accusation, the tribe sucking its share of the nicotine and distributing it equally. I put the Sedlocks in the situation of having to blackmail my daughter out of her role in the school play to better their own daughter’s chances of getting into the ECI program. I did this by killing the man captured in a video fucking their daughter at a high school party and providing illicit drugs to my own child, along with dozens of others. I am a folk hero, a goddamn Davy Crockett of the private school community. They should erect a statue of me in the Gopa lobby.
“You’ll have no choice to pull her out if Toby Dalton releases the video,” I say. “That’s exactly what he intends.”
“No, he won’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I bought it from him.” Allie smokes angrily, watching my reaction. “I’m releasing the tape myself.”
Harry Sedlock is not the spirit behind Moveable Museums. Allie is. She is polite, always smiling, her hair in a perfect ponytail, a juggler of motherhood and perception to which every mom aspires. But she is cold and determined, a mother who has scaled the Gopa ranks, and who no one sees coming. They have strategized about the video, asked the advice of Connor Mack.
“Why would you do that to Tungsten?”
“Not to Tungsten. For Tungsten. She’s a victim, not ingesting drugs like other girls I won’t mention.” She checks her phone, shrugs that this is not personal, the things we do for our children. “Timing has to be right. Just before opening night would turn our little school play into a national event. A private school teacher—a dead private school teacher—assaulting a teenager in the townhouse of a GPS mogul. Geezus, Pisser, think of the lawsuits, the hush money. An entire news cycle devoted to a high school play.” She points the cigarette at my left eye. “That’s attention you cannot buy.”
“She looks like a little slut.”
“Watch your mouth, Pisser.” She’s disgusted with my review of her child’s sex tape. “She’s only naked for a few seconds. It’s mostly her breasts,” she continues, willing me to agree.
“She’s in a shower.” I recollect the critical scene, which alerts Allie that I have seen Tungsten naked. “Her hand is bleeding. She has a man’s penis inside her.” I toss the cigarette. “What about Iliza?”
“She shouldn’t do drugs.” Allie watches her phone. “Besides, my daughter is naked. I hardly think anyone will notice poor Iliza.”
“I noticed.”
“Of course you noticed. You’re the father. It’s your job to keep your daughter out of rooms like that.” She shakes her head, sighs, transforms into loveable, enviable Allie Sedlock. “Poor Harry. He feels just awful. People will assume he killed Russ. And rightfully so.” She smiles at me. “In some circles, he’ll be considered a hero.”
It is this moment in my backyard, contemplating the economic benefits of sex tapes, the failures of fatherhood, the hijacking of my worthy contribution, that it occurs to me that we, as a community, have lost our way. I am more like Allie Sedlock than I admit. She would do anything to enhance her daughter’s distinction. I would kill for my own. And if Allie does not vacate my backyard, my tribe might do it again.
“Get out, Allie.”
“Think about it, Pisser.” She taps my ass as she passes. “Let’s be an example of collaboration in the face of adversity. For our children’s sake.”
Hypocrites Anonymous
Tonight is Iliza’s drug prevention class. It is held in Brooklyn Heights, in an unremarkable neighborhood where other students in the private school community who have been caught using drugs can attend clandestine lectures on the perils of addiction. The place is easily reachable from Slancy, though we take a ferry into Manhattan and two different trains. I want her to experience the monotony of addiction, the cost in both time and patience that comes from abusing narcotics, the waste of life. The C Train is filled with chaos, commuters and vagabonds vying for dirty seats, odors of perspiration and fast food combining with the rickety shake as the cars pull themselves through the moil of urban existence. I do not believe Iliza has a drug addiction. But I want her to forever associate this experience with abomination, the embarrassment of being accompanied by a parent to these lessons, the knowledge that I am judging her in every effort I pretend to ask about her day. “How was school?” I silently play back my daughter snorting drugs on a sofa that belongs to Toby Dalton’s parents, exhaust of recreational euphoria exploding behind hair I once ran a hand over through retellings of Mother Goose tales. “How is physics?” I killed a man because I thought he was raping you when he was only raping the neighbor’s daughter, another father’s felony. This is how you love something over which you have no control. This is how you protect a child who you gifted life, who you cannot stop loving, who in two years will be a woman and will do whatever she chooses regardless of my judgment.
I sit in the hallway of a public school, a chair too small to contain my girth. I can smell my being, feel the failures of open combat on my healing face. This is therapy for my own addictions. While it has been several days since I used Luderica, my tribe has not disbanded, hanging around to mentor me through my unwinding. I wait until the drug counselor has exhausted his threats, until my daughter is sufficiently broken. Even though she just wants to go home and climb in bed, I insist on a milkshake, a ritual we once enjoyed and which now reeks of imposter and bribery.
“Try mine,” I say, part of the ritual. “It’s delicious.”
“No, thank you.”
“You love peanut butter.” I hold the straw to her mouth, the end brown and ready to drip. As a child she loved to share, and just before it reached her mouth, I would tap the end on her nose with the wet cream, causing her to burst into laughter.
“I’m okay.”
“Just one taste.”
“Dad, stop.” We sit at a counter that looks onto a crowd of young people, freedom my daughter craves. “You’re going to stick the straw on my nose. It was funny when I was six. It’s embarrassing now
.”
“I won’t. For real this time. Take a taste.”
Iliza does not trust me, the beginning of an agonized smile that is more exhausted than enjoyed. She leans, her pink mouth open as she goes for the straw, and at the last moment I tap her nose with the moisture. It is a risky endeavor for sure, but it works, the evening’s tension perishing into laughter.
“You jerk. I knew you were going to.” Iliza emits a rare heave of levity. “I really wanted a taste.”
“Here.” I pass her the milkshake. “I don’t want it anyway.”
“So what are we doing here?”
“I wanted to talk. Like old times.”
I shove my stool close and ask about school. About friends. I inquire into rumors of a boyfriend, and she brushes me back to my side of our lives. About the play and how angry it makes her, that in many ways it is a relief because she no longer enjoys pretending. She has no one to talk to, not me or Laura or Tungsten any longer, no outlet on which to unload except Josey Mateo, who is a proponent of not pretending any longer, too much reality to occupy our pursuits. It occurs to me that in our eagerness to raise a pragmatic and independent daughter, we neglected to equip her with a faith system, a God to whom she could reason out the confounding illusion of control. Real estate is hard to come by on the island. Slancy lacks a church of any denomination, a sacred dwelling to get us through the rough times. We thrive on our secular savvy, our smarts, but we are missing something vital that other people call on in times of duress. “Religion is feral to us as creatures, God an unblemished source of survival and renewal,” I will later write on the Gopa message board, inciting an argument with the parent body that will cause yet another handle to be revoked. “We do not need lectures or milkshakes. We do not require further testing or additional committees to discuss the merits of our children’s school day. We need church.”
“Can I ask you something?” Iliza says.
“Of course.” My daughter has access to the same nanny chain. She is familiar with rumors that I bludgeoned Tilly, which she does not believe; that I had a hand in stealing the equipment bus, which she dismisses as insanity; that I may have lost my job for swiping a prosthetic leg. “Ask me anything.”
“It’s embarrassing. I heard it from my friend Amanda who said it came from the nannies.” The muscles in my neck strain with anticipation. “Are you…”
Guilty of murder? On the verge of bankruptcy? Planning a terrorist attack on the neighbors? “What is it, honey? Just ask.”
“Are you and mom having sex again?”
Sometimes the nanny chain gets it right.
Thundersnow
It arrives on the final week of May, the storm few news agencies predicted but nonetheless claim as their own for the few hours it corrupts the commute and makes global warming a fanatical topic. Lustfizzle ceases publishing articles about “24 Men Who Painted the Tips of Their Erections” and “The Most Intriguing Torture Methods of the Last 100 Years,” instead sending intrepid reporters into the squalls armed with raincoats and cameras. From our bedroom, Laura and I watch the storm on television as we listen to trees split, the lack of decades old roots felling our woods, an effortless gale of giant fingers flicking toothpicks into shreds. We dwell on the wedding, if the Slancy Clubhouse will be in any shape to host four hundred guests in another week. Until it is too late, the radar never revealed this storm would climb out of the Atlantic and combine with low pressure systems out of the west and north, biting into coastal regions. The result is a massive heap of fog and anxiety, moisture and sirens. Many weather outfits reference my prediction as a guess, having mentioned the possibility before reliable models were available. I could sense it was there, the way Clint Eastwood knows to hunt and will never starve because of it.
It is my cat, my therapy animal, that has me wandering through dangerous conditions in the black dawn, clouds of orange and purple malfeasance illuminating the wet island. I can do nothing to prevent Laura from accompanying me, our argument awakening Gus, who will not be deterred from the hunt, dressing quickly in a poncho, scarf, and, strangely, a helmet.
“We have a cat?” he asks.
Clint Eastwood is an important cog in my therapeutic transformation, I explain to Laura as we trespass through neighbors’ yards. It rains and snows, not enough to cause accumulation, but still an incredible phenomenon so close to summer. Every cracking branch makes us clinch our necks, Laura and I reaching to cover our helmeted son. A falling tree will take wires, electrifying the ground, and there is little we can do to protect Gus. We grip one another at a sudden crash, the McClutchens’ yard, where a branch slices in two the treehouse that hangs sullenly from a maple.
“What was that?” Gus asks.
“Termites.” From thirty yards away, I sense the bugs scurrying. I drilled the holes and purchased the insects on VillageShop using Tug’s phone. It seems so long ago, a tender period when the McClutchens were my only enemies. “They get into the wood and rot it out.”
“Not that. Listen.”
“I hear it,” Laura says. “Like a rumble.”
We cannot see anything above the tree line, the precipitation making the sky heavy and somber, black in places where first light should arrive. It is an indecisive weather pattern, cold and warmth vying for skin.
“It’s called thundersnow. When a cold front passes over a warm front it drops precipitation as snow. The snow drowns out the acoustics of the thunder, which is why it sounds so intimate, directly overhead. It will start hailing soon.”
Gus clutches himself inside the poncho. “Will I have school today?”
“It’ll be over in an hour. The sun might even shine.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“It’s unusual so close to June.” I listen for branches. “We should get indoors.”
“What about Clint Eastwood?”
It would be nearly impossible to capture the pregnant cat without being clawed half to death on a normal morning. In this weather, bloated and exhausted, we might encounter the feline’s last stand. I am certain she has found shelter to wait out the storm. I take a final look in the woods. There are no chipmunks, only several of the sopping rabbits dashing through the mulch, this cataclysm preferable to the Gopa cages.
“We’ll come back tonight. After it passes.”
Messy Commute
A lacteous residue covers the city as the storm slinks quietly north. Garbage cans and branches scatter across roads. My backyard is in relatively good shape, although the golf course took a beating, much of it under a deep soak. The morning commute is delayed. Gus and Iliza are furious that school is not canceled; I am also disappointed. I was looking forward to all of us hunkered inside the house, a giant afghan concealing us in musty warmth while we watch on television as the world has its way.
The Gopa lobby is excited and distracted, parents having dug out the winter clothes to dress their children, everyone swapping stories, embellishing close calls, exchanging hand sanitizer, and hydrating children with eye drops and spring water. Another student was rushed to the hospital, having overdosed on Luderica, although this time it was lethal. Rory Stokes, the first inductee into the ECI program, had been taking the drug for nearly a year by his mother’s recommendation. Not only does Gopa have a serious drug problem, but also it appears an ECI spot has been vacated.
“Nearly lost power and her boots don’t fit and this weather feels anxious,” we tell each other, all of us prognosticators, “the city is on edge and my nanny says someone was named to ECI, although it’s probably the teacher’s kid because of what happened…”
Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn were hit harder than the Upper East Side, with some moms claiming they were not even aware there was a storm, as if the thundersnow made its decision based on status. We separate into our respective circles, Laura finding the Fergusons to assure them everything is set for the weekend, Iliza and Gus merg
ing into the stream of excited students. Due to the restraining order, I am not permitted on school grounds, though I can drop off my kids and wait on the sidewalk, where one of Misch’s men keeps an eye on my cigarette. Ray McClutchen arrives with the trike over his shoulder. His pants and jacket are wet, a nasty tumble.
“Too many puddles,” he says, out of breath. “Had to walk it a mile.”
“You shouldn’t be riding in this weather. Stop being proud and take the bus with the rest of us.”
“Car exhaust causes global warming. Global warming is why we have weather like this. It’s why I bike everywhere.”
“It’s a tricycle, Raymond.”
“Urban trike. And call me ‘Clutch.’” He has an edge to his voice as he reaches across and takes the cigarette, shaking loose a puff before he flicks it onto the street. “What’s happening with you?”
We both fidget. “Everything is fine.”
“I mean with Moveable,” Ray says. “I want to know the plan.”
Ray has provided valuable intelligence on the investment meetings, information to which Little Petty, in his tour guide role, was not privy. But I cannot separate that he was trying to fuck Laura. I also believe Ray is undecided about how to proceed with Moveable. He could easily be reporting back to Harry whatever I tell him.
“Ray, I want you to listen closely.” He fancies himself an important man, a homeowner, a respected public figure. I know because I was him weeks ago. Ray has a career that he enjoys. He has a wife, for now, and two kids he loves, but it is a love that has not cost him something essential. He might rebel and join me. He might keep his head down and live off the profits of his investment and optimism, make nice with Olivia, write a few more books, even marry someone more pleasant. He does not know what I know. He has not shaken hands with the man who sullied his daughter. Jason Isbell sings about losing the things that matter. There’s a man who walks beside me, he is who I used to be, and I wonder if she sees him and confuses him with me. We do not shed our old selves like snakeskin. They follow us around, waiting to reenter the sepulcher if we neglect to mind the door. “You keep asking about something you do not understand.”