This Beautiful Life (19 page)

Liz stood in the bathroom doorway and watched her husband complete his toilette—nails filed, ears Q-Tipped, eyebrows trimmed.

“Do you think you'll be able to make her recital?” Liz asked.

“I'll try,” said Richard, “but I have a meeting. It may not be possible. It will be mostly mothers anyway.”

“Okay,” said Liz.

“Just act normally, like we have nothing to hide,” said Richard. “Because we have nothing to hide.”

“Aye aye, Capitan.” Liz saluted him. She was in yoga pants, a wife-beater. She planned soon to be at the studio, standing on her head. Perhaps with the blood rushing to her brain, she'd see the wisdom of Richard's ways: the value of the public performance, the importance of admiring one's own children before a keenly competitive audience, of being caught beaming behind the video camera, a single hand waving in the air while the other fiddled with a touch pad. A twenty-first-century Buddhist koan: What is the sound of one hand clapping? The karmic root of birth and death leant clarity by the silent applause produced by a proud parent simultaneously tapping on his smartphone.

“If anyone asks how we are, you say, ‘We're all okay, thank you for asking.' You end it right there.”

“I'm not an idiot, Richard,” said Liz. He was pissing her off.

“I'm good at this,” said Richard.

Then he went to work. He was still officially on family leave, although he now went into the office every day. According to Richard, he fed Strauss info and then Strauss acted as his mouthpiece. Richard liked him, and usually relished the role of mentor, but this felt more like puppeteering. The COO urged patience, but even Liz wasn't sure if her husband wasn't being played.

Liz's class was at 10:30. It was perfectly timed to give structure and purpose to her morning, so it wouldn't get all flabby and soft around the middle. If she left the house now, she could enjoy a latte and a muffin first. Or she could scramble, do errands and pick up some fish and wine for dinner. She could read the paper, call a friend (except she had no friends, not really; Stacey was still asleep; things between her and Marjorie had decidedly cooled); she could pay some bills, straighten up the house. She was a stay-at-home mother. She could be nickel-and-dimed to death day after day by boring tasks, but she still had the luxury of time.

Or she could go back to her computer and log on.

After hours spent studying Daisy's video the way she might have analyzed a slide in grad school, Liz had graduated to the wider world of online porn—the professionals. She'd concocted an email confession to Stacey at around two a.m., when she was worrying about herself. “ ‘Daisy' is a gateway drug!” She never sent it; Liz was now a master at Delete. What she so easily found online via Google both captivated and disgusted her. It was also oddly boring; and yet she found it hard to tear herself away. All she had to do was type in “sex” and she found “passed out, gang fucked and screwed.” She found “choking on grandpa's smelly old sperm.” She found “teen masturbating,” which had nothing on Daisy. Liz couldn't believe Jake had access to this stuff. Free. Legal. Frightening. And the other things, not so free, not so legal, with animals, children; it got so much worse. Of course, Liz had been aware of Internet pornography as a concept, but she'd never bothered to explore it. This is not what people who love each other do together, she wanted to say to Jake—although maybe it was? And what did love have to do with it, except for everything? Wasn't love, or a thirteen-year-old's version of it, what had ignited Daisy? It didn't look like lust.

Liz went into the living room, where, last night, on the sofa with her feet on the coffee table, she'd last curled up, her MacBook warm like a kitten on her lap. The sex Liz had so assiduously prepared Jake for—“safe, with a condom, consensual”—wasn't exactly the sex she'd had as a teenager, and it certainly didn't seem to have much to do with the sex he was confronted with now. Sex in a bed, a parked car, a public park in the dark—sex between two actual people with no spectators, Liz understood. But
this
kind of sex, the kind of sex that had kept her up all night, tireless, violent, addictive, was another beast altogether.

Liz sat down on the couch and slid the laptop onto her thighs. She checked her email. The usual detritus, with a single intimate communiqué from Stacey, who must have woken early to mountain bike up Mt. Tamalpais: “So how's my godson Bob Guccione Jr. holding up? You two cuties are on my mind…” A note Liz found funny, insensitive, and hopelessly impossible to answer.

She typed in “feigenbaum/blogspot.com.” The past two weeks seemed only to heighten her interest in her old TA. She had to have something to do when she was online and it seemed now that she was online most of the time. Last night's entry had shown up at around four a.m. Recently, Daniel Feigenbaum had found the courage to post some of his novel, several pages a pop. He posted as he wrote, so eager it seemed for confirmation. His current contribution completed the novel's first section, sans prologue: “I am putting my work out there in the hopes of building my readership. I am also interested in any ideas about how I can get published.”

Some of the earlier postings had garnered wan, obligatory responses. A coworker named Greta had written, “You are so talented. What are you doing wasting your time writing bullshit ad copy here with us?”

His sister wrote, “I like it, Danny. But isn't this sort of the same book you were working on in grad school?”

Now that the section was complete, there were no responses, but of course he'd only posted a few hours before, in the middle of the night. The work showed some promise, Liz thought, but sister Feigenbaum was right. It seemed an awful lot like the stuff Liz had read of his twenty-some-odd years before, when he was her TA; it showed shopworn and familiar promise. The circumstances were so recognizable—a coming-of-age story about a talented young writer living in Philly—she actually scanned it for references to the mean story he'd written about her in the graduate literary magazine so long ago, as the streetwise but unrefined, small-titted “Eliza” with the Bronx accent, who “wore her urbanity like a badge.” She still remembered that line—still remembered trying to suss out whether or not this was a character deficit or not, and right now she wondered if there was any “urbanity” left in her. Whatever, Feigenbaum's gifts remained. He was smart, funny, but still immature. He hadn't seemed to have developed distance from his own dilemmas or learned how to structure a narrative. At what point did potential, budding and nascent, turn into stagnancy? At what point did stagnancy equal tragedy? Is that what made midlife unendurable for so many? Is that what made each and every day feel so damaging? For one strange and burning moment, Liz wanted to save Daniel Feigenbaum even more than she wanted to save herself. The whole thing would read better, she supposed, if the chapter had some kind of hook.

Liz typed, “My name is Sandra Wilshevsky and I am a literary agent. A friend forwarded your work on to me because it shows flair and facility. Do you have representation? Would you be interested in my notes?” Then she pressed Send.

As soon as she had done so, she couldn't believe herself. She was not manipulative, she didn't think, nor deceitful. Or was she? Pathetically, could it be she felt closer to Daniel Feigenbaum at this particularly dreadful moment than she did to almost anyone else on earth?

Liz looked at her watch. Oh my God, she thought, it's late. Time had wrinkled. She'd missed both yoga and lunch. It was as if she'd fallen into a lunatic fever dream. Soon she needed to begin walking across the park to pick up Coco. Yet there was still so much to accomplish. She had to shower and dress. None of the bills had been paid. She could not be late. She felt a bit panicky. With Coco, Mom's presence was still nonnegotiable.

On the screen, her words turned up magically and inerasably on Daniel Feigenbaum's blog, the clandestine email address she used to log on to all that porn appearing next to the post. Her hands were shaking. What was happening to her?

She knew she shouldn't, but she needed fortification. Post-Feigenbaum and pre-pickup. In order to forget Feigenbaum and to be able to face the gauntlet at the kids' concert, even though she was in a hurry, she got high, blowing the smoke out the bathroom window, just like she'd done as a teenager and, truth be told, during some of the grayer stretches of her marriage, all those long nights when Richard worked late, at the World Bank, at Cornell, especially here in New York, all those long days when work seemed to consume most of his thoughts, when she'd had to be funny or cry or fall apart just to capture his attention—and now every day for the past three weeks. It would make the afternoon somewhat possible.

Before this mess with Jake—after, she'd remained apartment bound—the walk from west to east across the park to transport Coco had been the highlight of Liz's afternoons; her mornings, too. All of it. No matter what the weather, the park was a respite, and this time of year the flowering trees—first cherry, then apple blossoms; now it was the dogwood—made her feel like she'd been starving and was suddenly being fed. She especially loved the skyline that ringed the park across the reservoir; it was as if the buildings themselves were the forest and the park was the town. She still couldn't believe sometimes she actually was a resident of this city. The place was rariefied, striking, closed off, and encapsulated. A village under glass.

Mercifully wasted, Liz showered and dressed as carefully as she could in a sleeveless shift and ballet flats. She Visined and applied her makeup. Hair still wet, she left the apartment, although once over the threshold, she stuck one foot behind her to catch the door with her heel before it shut completely. She hustled back inside and quickly checked the Feigenbaum blog and her email (no response, thank God) and then painfully ripped herself away from the computer's powerful epoxy, an anxious glance at her wristwatch forcing her out of the apartment and into the world.

R
ichard looks at his watch. He told his wife he would try to make their daughter's recital, but both of them knew that this was highly unlikely. He's stuck in a meeting. Actually, he is stuck outside of a meeting, a meeting with some select members of the board of directors of the Manhattanville Campus Project. Strauss is inside. Richard is in his own office waiting to hear Strauss's report on how the proposals are going over. There is his study on potential architects for the project. There is more research on the school—it is Richard's hope that they will turn it into a School of the Humanities. No one knows how to write anymore, and if you can't write, you can't think. Richard believes this to be true. It will start as a middle school and grow into a high school a grade every year. It will be a school to rival the top-tier schools already in the public school system, but he'll make it available only to neighborhood children, including, of course, the offspring of faculty and members of the administration who will soon be residing in the neighborhood. The school community will then be diverse and guaranteed a middle-class faction. This formula will prove—this was Richard's hypothesis, and he had the studies to back it up—that given proper instruction and small class size and a willing parent population, almost any child can succeed. The meeting has been going on for quite some time, an hour and thirty minutes. For an hour and thirty minutes, Richard has been waiting for his phone to ring. It was a lunch meeting, taking place in a nearby restaurant. Richard has not yet eaten lunch himself. Twice he's gone down to the basement of his building to raid the vending machines, with his office phone placed on Call Forward to his BlackBerry. Twice he's come back upstairs, once with chips and the other, a Kit Kat bar. He is a little nauseated in his hunger. A little dizzy. His desk phone rings. He picks it up. Please let it be Strauss, he thinks, like a kid hoping for a present.

“Richard Bergamot,” says Richard.

“Dad,” says Jake.

“What's up, Jake?” says Richard. He tries to hide the disappointment in his voice. His mind is on the meeting, on the other call. “Everything all right?”

“I fucked up,” says Jake. “Again, Dad.” And then he begins to cry.

The crying breaks Richard's heart. The “again” inflames him.

“What's going on?”

But all he hears is empty air.

“Get a hold of yourself, Jake,” says Richard. Although the empty air frightens him. What now? What more could go wrong with this kid? “Take a deep breath.” And then when he still hears no response: “I'm your father. I'm always on your side.”

Jake's voice comes out thin and wobbly. “It's the Chem final, Dad. I got a fifty-five.”

A fifty-five. A failure. Low enough to blow the terms of his probation. Already. The probation blown already. In just a few weeks' time.

“Shit,” says Richard, without thinking.

“I'm sorry, Dad, I really tried. I thought I did better, I really did. When I got the grade back I didn't know what to do. I couldn't call Mom. She'll die, Dad.”

The two of them, in cahoots now. Protecting Lizzie. Richard feels another flare of anger. He tries to tamp it down. He is reaching out to you, Richard, he says to himself, in
his
father's voice. Don't let him down.

“Chemistry is Carmichael, right?”

“Yes, sir,” says Jake. “Mr. Carmichael.”

“He's the one who likes you, right?” says Richard. The one. The only.

“Yeah, Dad, I think so. Yes,” says Jake.

“I'll give him a call,” says Richard.

“I've been really stressed, Dad,” says Jake.

“I'll give him a call,” says Richard.

Jake starts to cry again. “I'm a mess, Dad. I'm all screwed up.”

“Pull yourself together, Jake,” says Richard. “Where are you?”