The Red Book (5 page)

And there it was. Her first lie at Harvard. Set loose into the world via a spasm of insecurity released, in that brief moment of confusion, because Clover had also spent freshman week soaking up more than she would ever learn, either before or since, about her country’s caste system. Not that she was naïve enough to have believed, prior to matriculating at Harvard, that all men were created equal—growing up as a nappy-headed girl in the late sixties and seventies, even in as liberal and tolerant a setting as northern California, had shattered that myth long before—but she’d had no idea how many strata and substrata the social soil of her country contained until she met Addison. Where she came from, people either had enough money to have sufficient reserves of canned food and dry goods to meet their basic needs, or they were struggling, like her parents, to survive.

But Addison could take one look at any entry in the freshman facebook—that hardbound crimson volume containing the tiny black-and-white faces, names, home addresses, and schools of each one of their 1,600 classmates—and make shockingly accurate snap judgments about that person’s net worth, politics, footwear, breadth of travel, recreational drug use, and proficiency with Latin verb conjugation.

“Okay, what about him?” Clover would say, pointing to a random photo, a candid shot taken outside, against a large oak, of a kid named Jedediah Brooks Pearson III.

“Easy,” Addison replied. “721 Park. Hard building to get into. Father’s a Republican, has a Town Car pick him up every morning for work, the mother used to be a kindergarten teacher at Spence or Nightingale before she left her career to shop, but I’m betting she secretly votes Democrat. Milton Academy: That means he probably went to an all-boys school that ends in eighth grade on the Upper East Side, I’ll say Buckley, where he wore a coat and tie every day, like a miniature version of Dad, but now he wears one of those navy blue sweaters from L.L.Bean with the diagonal white dots, Norwegians I’m pretty sure they’re called, although he definitely has a coat and tie in his closet, freshly pressed and ready for punch season next fall at one of the Final Clubs like the Fly or Porcellian, but definitely not the Owl, which his mother will have suggested, firmly, is NOKD.”

“NOKD?”

“ ‘Not our kind, dear.’ Or sometimes we’ll say NOCD, ‘Not our class, dear.’ ” Addison must have caught the look of horror on her face. “I mean,
I
wouldn’t say that, of course, but you know, it gets said. By others. Moving on: He smokes pot, maybe snorts some coke now and then if someone at the party has some, but he does not buy. Buying is the domain of the Eurotrash and Choate kids. There was that one dude, oh my God, I forget his name, a year older than us who went down to Venezuela to make a buy and tried to smuggle $300,000 worth of pure coke into JFK only to be caught—duh!—at customs. Turns out like half the class had given him $5,000 each. Out of their own pocket money. And none of their parents even noticed. Anyway, back to our pal Jedediah, who most likely is not called Jedediah but goes by his middle name, Brooks, because, well, just because. You give your kid the odd or stuffy or necessary-to-please-the-family first name, and then give him a silly nickname like Boots or Bops or better yet call him by his second name, which is always some historical family name that has significance only to the people who care about such things. In Jedediah’s case, the family didn’t even have to think, since he’s a III. I guess he could go by Jed or Trip or Tre—you know, like ‘the third’—but Jed’s a bit pedestrian and Trip’s overdone and Tre’s more of a southern thing, so I’d put good money on Brooks. And what do we know about our new friend Brooks? Well, he speaks fluent French,
Maman
made sure of that, and his Latin is proficient enough that he could figure out all the Latinate roots on the words he didn’t understand on the SATs, just like his tutor taught him to do when he got stuck. He’s been listed in the
Social Register
since he turned thirteen, which was the same year he started taking formal dance lessons at that place on East Sixty-fifth, where the girls, at least when I had to go to classes there, are still required to wear white gloves. He’s been to Europe. Many times. Probably lost his virginity to some girl from the
seizième
he picked up at the Bains Douches that spring break in Paris when he turned sixteen, or to an Italian chick he met in Crete the following summer, after checking out her tits on the beach. The Italian girls always go topless, so he would have known exactly what he was getting. He spends his winter breaks in the Caribbean, his spring breaks skiing, either in Aspen or the Alps, and his summers either in the Hamptons, Nantucket, the south of France, or Tuscany, and I can’t be more specific than that, because sometimes his family does one place one year and another place the next year, you never know. They might have even done a big educational trip to Nairobi or China or Nepal or Thailand, if the parents were feeling like the kids needed some culture or good material for a college essay, but it really depends on the family. Some of them won’t go to places where there isn’t a Four Seasons. Okay, so, he ate dinner with his nanny until he turned, oh, let’s say ten. Then he had three years of family meals in the formal dining room, prepared by the cook and served by the housekeeper—until he was shipped off to boarding school at fourteen.”

“Jesus, you can tell all that from a name and an address?” said Clover.

“No. I need to see the photo and the name of the school as well. If I don’t know the name of the school, the photo itself helps me nail it down. Public school kids always have those stiff formal school portraits, and the girls wear makeup. Day and prep school kids go bare faced and lean up against trees.”

“What’s the
Social Register
?”

“Come on. You’ve never heard of it?” Addison seemed genuinely shocked.

“No, never.”

“It’s just this . . . book. This kind of, you know, stupid book that no one cares about anymore, with the names of people from the same circles. Just a bunch of WASPs, really. Who all either know each other or know about one another or summered together or served on boards with one another or organized benefits together or . . . whatever, it’s so pointless and boring.” She paused, still seemingly flummoxed at having to explain a concept she’d grown up knowing about since as far back as she could remember, like the fact that rain comes from clouds or doormen open doors. “The only people who really care about being in it are the ones who marry into it. Those of us who are in it by default don’t give a shit.”

“I’m guessing there aren’t any people who look like me in it?” said Clover.

“No. No blacks yet. But there aren’t any Jews either. Or there could be a few, but if there are, they’ve changed their last names, so you can’t tell, or, like I said, they married in. And there aren’t any Catholics either, so it’s not really, you know, about race or anything. It’s about, well, I was going to say ancestry, but it’s more about like . . .”

“Exclusion?”

“Something like that.”

Clover had to pause while she processed this information and the cavalier, matter-of-fact way in which Addison presented it. “Does anyone ever get taken off the list?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether or not they do something ‘unbecoming,’ like having an adulterous affair that makes it into print or committing a crime. Or if they take up a career in the arts, like the theater or the circus or really anything that might be considered showy or where they might reveal too much of themselves. I mean, I’m planning on becoming a painter, which I’m pretty sure is okay so long as I don’t go all Mapplethorpe on them or anything.”

Clover was still trying to get her head around the idea that a book—an actual printed
book
—existed listing the names of people belonging to some secret society to which she could never aspire to belong, even if she wanted to. “So, wait. Taking a job as a circus clown and stealing cars are considered equally bad?”

“Something like that.”

“Huh.” Clover opened the facebook and flipped through the pages until she reached the
L
s. “What about my entry? What does it say about me?”

“Your entry’s harder to read,” Addison admitted. “I mean, I love the fact that you took the photo in a drugstore photo booth—it’s like a real fuck-you to the whole process—but I’ve never heard of your school, and your name is confusing. Like, okay, you have what would be a typical WASP last name for a middle name, but your first name and skin color throw the whole thing off, and your last name, Love, I mean, I just have no idea where that comes from. But Novato, your hometown, I’ve heard of that. Isn’t that like where a lot of East Coast kids fled in the late sixties? The Dead used to hole up there when they weren’t on tour, right?”

“You’re good,” said Clover, without revealing anything further. For how could she explain the particularities of her origins—the commune; the homeschooling; the orgies the adults did little to hide; the traveling musicians, yes, like the Dead and Jefferson Airplane and many others, who came and went and played music and soaked up nature and cavorted, openly, with the residents; the copious amounts of LSD, pot, mushrooms, mescaline; the freeloaders who once got so high they set the Barbie Dream House she’d bought at a tag sale, with her own lemonade-stand money, on fire (“You’ll thank us for that later,” they said); the total lack of clothing, decorum, and boundaries; the breakup of the commune in the late 1970s, when the roof caved in, and there was no money for repairs, and too many of them had overdosed or slept with each other’s lovers or
lost children
, for Christ’s sake, to neglect and an unprotected swimming pool—how to explain all of
that
to these people who’d had normal lives? (Back when Clover still believed there was such thing as a normal life.)

Her mother Lena, a descendant—Lena would remind everyone—of southern slaves, called herself a civil rights feminist activist poet but had never published a poem, at least in any traditional way. Frank, her father, was one of the visiting musicians who wound up staying. Nine months after they met, blue-eyed, mulatto-skinned Clover was born, further proof, Lena would often remind her daughter—or anyone who commented on the unusual hue of her dark-skinned daughter’s wolf eyes—of the rape of black slaves by their white owners.

“Lena, please don’t say the word
rape
every time someone says something nice about my eyes,” Clover would say to her mother, starting when she was eight.

“I don’t have to bring it up,” Lena would respond. “It’s there in your eyes, for everyone to see. The violence not only in your history but in the history of mankind. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, muffin. It just is.”

But Clover didn’t want her eyes to serve as metaphoric proof of mankind’s imperfections, or of his banishment from Eden, or for any other horrid truth for which her mother claimed their synecdoche-like powers. And she certainly didn’t want anyone peering that intimately into her background. Not then, and not that first week at Harvard, a place she’d applied to without informing her parents, because she’d assumed (correctly) they would not have approved, even if they’d had the money to pay for it. So she lied to Bucky Gardner, and he immediately called her on it. “You’re distant cousins of the Paces?” he said. “I’d always heard Arne Glimcher named the gallery after his father’s first name. Pace Glimcher. Unless I’m wrong?”

Clover, hot with embarrassment, suddenly realized it was going to be a challenge, to say the least, to spend four years pretending to be someone she was not. She didn’t have the proper tools yet. Or the anthropological understanding of the tribal customs and bylaws. You couldn’t just stare longingly into the window of the Tip Top TV Shop as a teenager, watching
Dallas
and
Dynasty
without sound, and get it. She would have to start from the ground up, observing this species in its natural habitat, so that one day, if her offspring were lucky enough to be admitted to a school like Harvard—for she understood, even then, that luck, timing, and a good overcoming-of-extraordinary-odds story were of equal if not greater consequence than skill in the game of college admissions—they could arrive in Cambridge armed with the vocabulary and touchstones and background she lacked, such that when they opened up the facebook to the page containing Archibald Bucknell Gardner IV, aka Bucky Gardner, who hailed from 940 Fifth Avenue and Phillips Andover Academy, they would know, instinctively, what that meant. And they would not be overly impressed or unnerved by it, like their mother had been that night she and Bucky first met. Clover stood up, swiped two beers from the minifridge, and handed one to Bucky. If she was going to set the record straight about who she was, where she came from, and how she got from there to here, she might as well get started. With a little help from her new pal—she examined the beer’s label—Miller Genuine Draft.

“Okay,” she’d said, suddenly emboldened. “Let’s start again.” And she began, haltingly at first, then with genuine draft gusto, to tell Bucky the story of her life.

“Oh,
I
get it, like the Italian word for peace,” said Bucky, when she got to the part about her middle name, chosen by her father as a sly complement to the last name, Love, adopted by every member of their commune. “And Clover? Where does Clover come from?” Bucky, far from recoiling from Clover’s story, she noticed to her relief and surprise, had taken his feet off the coffee table and was sitting, literally, on the edge of his seat.

Clover felt her face grow hot. “Um, well, apparently I was ‘created’ in a field of clover.”

Now Bucky blushed, revealing, as his jaw dropped and his lips parted into a half smile, the most perfectly aligned set of teeth Clover had ever seen. “Dude. No way,” he said. “No way!”

“Way,” said Clover, and she downed the rest of her beer in one gulp.

“Good thing they didn’t do it on a pool table.”

“Don’t laugh!” said Clover. “I had a friend named Back of Truck.”

“You’re shitting me.”