Pass It On (24 page)

“I need to make a call.” David went down to the street to call from there, because he was realizing that if his dad didn't believe in secrets, then nothing in his house could be truly private. So he took the elevator down to the lobby and stepped outside.

There, in the back of a black car, was Amanda. He walked over as the window went down, and looked in at her. She was alone.

“I'm just coming back from Ginger's.” Amanda's voice was low and calm. “My parent's are already in Sagaponack. I was going to stay home alone tonight.”

The door to the black car opened. David looked back at his building, which seemed far less warm and inviting than this car.

“But we're not going to get engaged. I don't think that makes any sense,” David said, once he'd settled himself in the seat next to her.

“You're right. It's just taken me a long time to deal with the fact that someone as cool as you could like someone like me.”

“Are you serious?” David asked, realizing this was exactly the sort of reason his father would use to explain why Amanda had often been so awful to him.

“I know,” Amanda said, quietly. “It's crazy isn't it? But it's true.”

And they drove the few blocks to her house in
complete make-out mode, with no regard for the driver, which was okay, because he was talking loudly on the phone to a cousin in eastern Pennsylvania about how to make the cranberry sauce for that night's Thanksgiving dinner.

David and Amanda went into her house, and then into her bedroom, where David had had such a terrible moment only a few days earlier. They ended up on her bed.

“It's so good to be together again.” David felt the tiny cuteness of Amanda and realized what he'd said was true. And Amanda, who had been so mean to David so many times, just squeezed him around the neck like she really didn't want to lose him again. And that felt really good, to both of them.

“What happened to your forehead?” my mom asked.

Obviously I didn't want to explain that the bruise on my forehead had come from when I'd inadvertently knocked myself unconscious on a bronze penis, so I said: “I was staying at Mickey's and the bed they built me went crazy and smashed me into the ceiling.” I shrugged. The bed story was almost true.

“I see. Billy was just telling me he had some very nice talks with you.” She nodded to Billy, who was wearing a pair of my favorite Rogan jeans and one of my Polo shirts.

We were standing in a corner of the kitchen, next to a wall where Billy had painted a bunch of bears wearing party hats, who were cavorting around a fountain. My mom seemed to like the bears. And she clearly liked Billy. I shook my head. Life was not becoming less bizarre.

“Sure,” I said. Part of me had been wanting to say that I hadn't much enjoyed how Billy had screwed up my clothes and our apartment, but I figured my mom would just see all that, now that she was back. Nope. Wrong.

“We're not selling the apartment, are we?'

“No way,” my mother said. “We could never sell this place with it painted the way it is. This sort of thing frightens people! We're going to stay right here.”

She raised an eyebrow at me and I finally got it. The insane painting had been part of a bigger plan—no matter how much trouble my dad got into, my mom was tough and wacky and didn't care if people talked about her ex-husband being a thief or the weird bears that were painted on her walls. And all this meant that we definitely weren't going to be moving to Brooklyn and I could keep my room and my friends, and with the exception of a few restaurants that were owned by my dad's former clients, I wouldn't have to hide my face at all and could still go to all the cool places I always had.

“What are we going to do for dinner?” I asked. It was, after all, Thanksgiving. And I had to give my mom that, she'd made it back in time.

“I thought we'd take Billy and go to Aquavit. I know it's not traditional, but they're holding a table for us, and I love the gravlax.”

I smiled, because the deal was not that my mom make a traditional Thanksgiving, just that she actually be around for it. It was kind of like with my friends. We all didn't have to be perfect, but we had to be there for each other anyway.

My mom went to the living room and got on the phone to call my brother, who was having Thanksgiving with his girlfriend's family in L.A. I stood there in the kitchen with Billy and I just had to ask. “Are you having an affair with Lucy Pardo?”

Billy turned to me. He had that same warm smile I associated with Patch, but lurking behind his smile were a few more years of life, so he was not so easy to read.

“Not really.”

“What kind of answer is that?”

“Do you really want to know the truth?”

“Um.”

“Jonathan, get on the phone.” My mother strode into the room and smiled at me and Billy. And that's when I knew that she was well aware of Billy and Lucy Pardo.

“Are you on with Ted?” I asked.

“No. It's your father.” My mother shoved the phone at me. So I took it.

“Hi.” I knew my voice sounded awfully soft and weak. It was difficult for me to know what I should and shouldn't say. Then my dad said, “I hope my bad moves in life haven't affected your life too much.”

Which was the opening I was looking for.

“Well, they have!”

“How?”

Right then I remembered how beyond all else, my dad was able to listen. He was way better than David's dad at doing that, who was supposed to listen professionally.

“Because I've been really embarrassed!”

“Your friends were rough on you?

“Actually—” Then I had to stop. Because they hadn't been so rough on me. But still. Right? And I could hear my dad, so far away on the phone. And he was quiet and he was listening.

“Dad? I'd really like to bring them all on this sailing trip. I can't choose just one, and really, we're all like ten times better together than we are apart.”

“Okay.”

“Just like that, okay?”

“Just like that.”

We kept talking for a while, because he was my father, and honestly, how could I not? He was a good guy. I mean, he'd screwed up, but I got the feeling he was trying to make it right, and what else could I really ask of him? I didn't ask about what happened with Arno's dad, though. I just figured that whatever deal they'd made with each other wasn't my problem.

Later, when I was off the phone, I wandered into the living room. My mom was there, talking with Billy and admiring some vines of roses he'd painted between the windows, where a Richard Avedon photograph of my mother that was taken in the seventies used to be.

I came up to them and tried to let them know I was there. I was now totally against ever being caught again in a position where I could hear something someone was saying when they didn't want me to hear it.

“I think you're doing a terrific job. Really first rate. But let's be honest. You're not done.”

“Right,” Billy smiled.

“So I'd like you to keep living here, in
Jonathan's brother's room. Keep painting. I like a busy house.”

“Don't I—” but then I quieted down. I'd be away in the Caribbean in just a few weeks anyway, and even though Billy had ruined a bunch of my coolest clothes, I had to admit that I liked that guy.

“What do you think, Jonathan?” Billy asked.

“It's fine with me, but the new official house rule is you keep your hands off my clothes and … well I guess that's it.”

Mickey stood up from the table. His family was having Thanksgiving dinner with the Fradys in a private room at Soho House. Month to month, the Pardos and the Frady family could barely keep track of whether they were getting along, much less whether Mickey and Philippa Frady were still together. But Thanksgiving together remained a staple of each year, as consistent as Jackson Frady's death-ray glare for Mickey.

“
Let's go have a drink at the bar downstairs
,” Mickey whispered to Philippa, who was working hard to avoid dealing with the fact that she was sitting next to him. “
Please?
”

“Fine,” she said. She was dressed in a brown cocktail dress with lots of pleats and a pair of pink shoes. Her hair was down and she looked both extremely beautiful and unbelievably bored.

They walked together down the main staircase. When they got to the bar, which was outfitted with white leather seats and a zinc bartop, they sat down at
one end, and the bartenders paid no attention because the newly crowned editor of
Vogue
was at the other end of the bar with her family, and they were drinking mulled wine and waiting to go up to their own Thanksgiving table.

“I love you,” Mickey said. “We just went through some real craziness with Jonathan, where he was trying to hide what was going on with him, but we figured it out and what that made me realize was that—”

“You love me?”

“Yes.”

They smiled at each other. Mickey slipped off his barstool and stood in front of Philippa. He came forward. She opened her arms. They embraced.

“I don't really see how this is connected to Jonathan—except I heard he tried to drown himself in a toilet.”

“That's not true. Anyway, I don't get it either,” Mickey smiled. “But whatever happened with him, it made me realize that you're like, my destiny.”

“It's scary when you use words like that.”

She leaned against the bar and stared into Mickey's eyes. He wasn't high or anything. He'd left the Triumph at home and wasn't trying to get into any trouble just now. Though of course he would later, when everyone met up either at Man Ray or Lucky Strike.

“We're too young for the intensity of this feeling. I've told you. I don't want to be Romeo and Juliet.”

“Don't tell me we can't go out.” Mickey fell forward slightly, so she'd hold him up. The warmth between their bodies seemed to expand, to surround them.

Then the bartender came by, but he saw he didn't need to ask them for their drink order, not right now. And there was music too, the new Yo La Tengo, which sounded like a rainstorm.

“How about we make a pact?”

“Sure.” Mickey nodded. “And then let's leave. We'll go up there and both say we feel very tired and they'll let us go home.”

“They won't.”

“If we yawn a lot they will.”

Philippa nodded. Her brown eyes glittered. “If we both end up at Brown, we can be really in love and like, live off campus in our apartment together and throw dinner parties.”

“But not till then.”

“Not till then.”

Mickey shook his head. Of course they'd find themselves at Brown together, but this seemed so outrageous, this …
waiting
.

“We can see other people till then,” Philippa said.

“No.”

“Or no pact at all.”

“Our love is going to make me waste away and die,” Mickey said. But he said yes. They would have this pact. He'd done far stranger things and he loved her so much. Philippa went upstairs to tell their parents they were leaving together, even though they weren't going out.

Mickey stood outside and waited for Philippa. He said hello to the doorman, who was called Paul. Then an English guy drove up on a black BMW motorcycle and parked on the sidewalk. He tossed the keys to the doorman and swept through the front door without saying a word.

“Asshole, huh?” Mickey nodded at the English guy's back. The doorman looked, too.

“Yeah. He expects me to go park his bike and he doesn't even tip me.”

“I'll give you a hundred bucks if you let me go park it.”

“Done.”

“Cool.” Mickey slipped him the bill and hopped on the big bike. Then Philippa came out.

“No way,” she said.

“If we're going to have a pact, then I'm going to have fun—and the fun starts with, um,
parking
this bike. Now, hop on.”

Philippa shook her head, but then she did get on and they roared off into the darkness.

“Hey, the parking lot is the other way,” the doorman said to the wind, and smiled to himself.

Arno sat in his living room with his parents. They were picking at a plate of aged smelly cheese. The house was warm and there was a Bach cantata playing low, and because the speakers were hidden in places where nobody could see them and, subsequently, nobody could remember where they were, the house felt haunted with the music.

“The truth is it's been this way for a long time,” Allie said to her son. They sat together on a low couch. Alec, Arno's dad, paced in front of them. As usual, he was dressed in an impossibly well-cut blue suit. He was frowning and he had a glass of champagne that he sipped from occasionally. Arno and Allie had glasses too, but they weren't drinking.

“I think I already knew,” Arno said. “But it was really weird having to hear it from Jonathan at a party at three o'clock in the morning.”

“Sorry about that,” Alec said. “We have had what was called, in very different times than these, a marriage
of convenience, and clearly it's wildly outdated. We've tried everything—as you saw just a few weeks ago in Miami. Nothing works, so now we will extract ourselves from each other, but neither of us will come apart from you, if you see what I mean.”

“I guess.” Arno sighed and cut himself a piece of the blue-streaked Royal Stilton. To Arno, it just sounded like they were going to go on as before.

“But we're going to officially divorce.”

That got Arno's attention. He looked up at his father.

“If you're going to make me go to therapy because of this, one thing you ought to know is that I absolutely refuse to go to David's dad. That guy is bonkers.”