The Subprimes (6 page)

“Is he okay? What kind of incident?” I ask.

I am too high to deal with this. Shit.

“Can you or his mother come and pick him up?” Mark Nakamura says. “He's physically intact.”

“What does that mean? Is something wrong?”

“We'll discuss it with you or Ronin's mother when you get here. Sign in at the C Building, please.”

I call Anya, but she doesn't pick up. She never does. She must be at yoga. I have to trot home, still coughing up bits of my pepper-spiced lung as I go, the bad parts, I hope.

Sunset Boulevard from PCH to the 405 has been closed for three years, the outside lanes having finally become more pothole than road and collapsing into actual sinkholes for long stretches. Since the privatization of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works, pothole repair has completely ceased; the
department's resources are now focused entirely on the building of more profitable elevated toll roads connecting Beverly Hills and Malibu to the private aviation terminals at Santa Monica Airport and LAX.

So I sit in traffic in the thick haze of marine smog. The oil rigs offshore—the scandal over their having been drilled one mile closer to the beach than the oil companies had promised had passed in one news cycle—stretch to the horizon like an invading army of black beetles.

At the C Building I sign in, receiving a coupon good for one dollar off on a foot-long sub, and am directed to Vice Principal Nakamura's office, outside of which I see my son sitting with his backpack on his thighs. Ronin has thin brown hair that has grown to shoulder length, a semicircular forehead, thin, surprisingly arched eyebrows, and dark brown eyes. He also has my ex-wife's nose, slender, with large nostrils, her pronounced chin and long neck, and my thick lower lip. He was a cute boy, and still is, though in his current preferred outfit of painter's cap, noise-reduction headphones, black T-shirt, black pegged denims, and high-top skate shoes, he looks more like a member of a struggling boy band working the drive-thru window to pay for his hip-hop dance lessons.

Behind him is a cartoon of Paul Revere riding with a sandwich in each hand above a caption reading: “Two if by land.” (Does this even make sense? I am so stoned I am having trouble following the logic of it. Two if by land, that was the signal from the Old North Church; it had nothing to do with Paul Revere, or did it? I can't remember.)

Ronin's eyes are red. He has been crying.

“What's going on, Rone?”

Before he can answer, Vice Principal Nakamura walks around his desk and out the door to greet me.

“You're Mr. Schwab? I'm going to have Dean of Student Affairs Ramos sit in.”

“Sit in on what?”

“We're going to go over the incident.”

I take a seat facing Vice Principal Nakamura. Behind him is a filing cabinet upon which sits a glass plaque on a black base: “Los Angeles Area 5 Administrator of the Year.” Vice Principal Nakamura gets up and closes the door. I catch a last glimpse of Ronin, his right leg pumping his backpack up and down.

“We'll begin. Ms. Ramos will join shortly.”

My heart rate has climbed and I have a terribly dry mouth. I need a breath mint, or a glass of water. I feel that if called upon to speak, I will be unable to part my tongue from the roof of my mouth.

If I understand Vice Principal Nakamura (and suddenly I am not sure I understand anything), Ronin is being accused of sexual harassment. A teacher, Ms.—

There is a knock at the door and in walks Ms. Ramos, an Asian woman with a rigid perm and a large mole next to her nose.

(It is a very large mole, so large as to be verging on the freakish. It's barely smaller than a dime. Or is that not so big at all? Are many moles actually that big and I'm just focusing on this one because it is the only mole in the room? I have to stop looking at Ms. Ramos's mole.)

Ms. Maddoxx observed Ronin inappropriately touching another student.

(I am going to do it, I am going to open my mouth, I am going to unstick my tongue from my palate. There. I've done it. It sounded like old wallpaper being peeled from stucco.)

“Inappropriately? How?” I ask. “He's thirteen.”

(Did I play the age card too early? I need to focus.)

“The contact was observed by a teacher. It involved, it was, a hand, the . . . uh”—Vice Principal Nakamura looks down at his notes—“the right hand was placed on the buttocks of a female student.”

Ms. Ramos's mole quivers, and then she speaks. “It was a surreptitious fondling of the buttocks. A predatory act—”

“Whoa, whoa,” I say. I need to slow this whole thing down. Is this really happening? “Predatory? Ronin is thirteen.”

(Shit, I just said that again.)

Vice Principal Nakamura nods. “We are aware of our students' ages and the parameters of age-appropriate behavior.”

“And this,” says Ms. Ramos, “is not appropriate at any age.”

“Is the girl that upset?” I ask. “Who was it?”

“We can't tell you the student's name. Her response is not germane. Her parents have been informed. At this point, she is completely removed from this incident and will no longer be apprised of any action taken against Ronin.”

“Action? What action?” I ask.

“Sexual harassment will not be tolerated in our school. The Subway Fresh Take Paul Revere Middle School code of student conduct makes that very clear.”

(I am about to say it again: He's thirteen. But I stop myself.)

“Look, did he know the girl? I mean, kids do this stuff. They grab ass. We all did it.”

Vice Principal Nakamura and Ms. Ramos glance at each other in such a way that I can tell they never played grab-ass.

“We've suspended Ronin for two days,” Vice Principal Nakamura says. “He will spend lunches in Concentration. And he is required to attend a Youth Sexual Conduct and Guidance seminar once a week. It meets in the library after school on Tuesdays. We have also told him that until further notice he is not to have any out-of-class one-on-one contact
with any female student. At least until the conclusion of the seminar. This was my recommendation, and Ms. Ramos agrees with me.”

“What's Concentration?” I ask.

“It's a room that is staffed during lunch where a student may think about his actions.”

“You actually call it ‘Concentration'? Is it surrounded by an electrified barbed-wire fence?”

They don't appreciate my comment.

“No contact?” I ask. “What does that mean. He can't talk to a girl?”

“Oh, he can talk to a female, just not out of class or in a one-on-one situation.”

I purse my lips. “But it seems as if . . . as if what is needed here is a good talking-to. An explanation: You can't, you know, grab ass.”

“Mr. Schwab. I don't think ‘grab
a-word
is a useful teaching expression.”

“But a ban? On talking to girls? This just seems like an awful lot of punishment.”

“This is serious, Mr. Schwab. We have a legal responsibility here, as do you.”

Ah
, I think,
that's what this is about. Nobody wants a lawsuit
.

“Please, talk to your son, have a serious talk about this, about sexuality, perhaps, based on his curiosity in the opposite sex. Perhaps it is time to have the talk about contraception.”

“If he's not allowed to even talk to a girl, I don't think Ronin is going to be getting to first base, forget about scoring.”

There is a long silence.

Of course they don't consider the baseball scoring system to be an appropriate method for describing teen sexual behavior.

IN THE CAR ON THE
way home, as we drive down San Vincente, past the artificial palm trees that now line the median island, I ask Ronin for his version of events.

He is seated in the passenger seat, his backpack at his feet. “I don't want to talk about it. Dad, it's embarrassing.” His voice is on the precipice of changing, it slips occasionally, dropping an octave or two, before scrambling back up to his boyish tenor.

“I've heard the school's version of events, and I need to hear yours.”

“What did they say?”

“That you . . . that you grabbed another student.”

“‘Grabbed'?”

“I don't think they used that word. They said ‘inappropriate touching.'”

“Whatever,” he says, his voice dropping, then rising. “That is so retarded.”

“Was there any touching?”

“I pinched Ashley McDaniels's butt. Like, once. Hard. She liked it.”

“How do you know she liked it?”

“She smiled. She smiled when I did it yesterday, and then we walked together to English.”

“Did you ask her if she liked it?”

“No, that would be embarrassing.”

“But it's not embarrassing to pinch her butt?”

“No, because she smiled at me afterward. But you can't go, like, ‘Do you like when I pinch your butt?' That would be weird.”

He made sense. In these matters, between a man and a woman, or a boy and a girl, certain things are best left unsaid.

“Okay, but you understand why Vice Principal Nakamura is sending you to Concentration and to that special after-school thing.”

“He said I have to go to Freaks?”

“No, it's this after-school program where you are going to talk about, you know, growing up and stuff.”

“That's Freaks. And I'm NOT GOING TO FREAKS.”

MY EX-WIFE IS ANGRIER WITH
the school than with me. She lives a few miles away in a rented house overlooking a canyon where she is waiting when I drop Ronin off and explain the reasons for his suspension. She wants to hire a lawyer, she wants to sue the school, she believes our son is being defamed and the school is overreacting. All of which may be true, but I'm not sure we can make much of a case.

“He pinched a girl's butt?” she says. “So what? He's a boy. Boys and girls are supposed to play with each other in this way. It's normal.”

“They disagree. This is the new normal.”

She studies me. “Have you had a puff?”

I shake my head. “I was pepper-sprayed.”

She is about to go down this conversational path but then stops herself, staying on subject. “They can't do this.”

My ex-wife has short black hair with fishhook-shaped, skull-hugging curls that hang over her ears, a narrow forehead, the long, slender nose. She has a pleasingly ovoid face, perfectly symmetrical; babies smile when they look at her. Her skin is surprisingly clear and largely unwrinkled, the first infinitesimally small canyons in the flesh now radiating from her narrow, almost Asian-shaped blue eyes.

Anya is still in her yoga togs: tight leggings, sports bra. When we met we were the same height, but while I have spent the last fifteen years slouching, she has been stretching, for yoga, for Pilates, for bar method, for capoeira, for parkour, for yoga-Pilates,
for bar-yoga, for parkoeira. The women in her family are all long and slender, and Anya accentuates that with her predisposition to a bland, tasteless diet of high-fiber cereals and breads and high-antioxidant fruits and vegetables. Whenever a new food is found to have wondrous antiaging or anticancer benefits, it will turn out that Anya has been eating it by the bushel her whole life.

I like to eat steak.

If when we met it was plausible that a woman like her might entertain a man like me—she was better-looking, a model actually, but in my prime I had a certain rogueish, Keanu Reeves charm. Now we would be walking proof that men and women don't always marry commensurately attractive partners.

“Did you pinch a girl's butt?” Anya asks Ronin. “Without her asking?”

“Who asks ‘Will you pinch my butt?'? God, this is so embarrassing.”

“Who is she? Let's talk to her parents,” Anya suggests.

Ronin runs to his room. “NO!”

“We can't talk to her parents. We're not even supposed to know who it is. He has to do some special classes, some after-school thing where they talk about sexuality.”

“Because of this?”

I nod.

Anya says, “Ronin shouldn't be singled out because of this incident. That's wrong.”

There is so much going wrong I'm not sure this is where we should be taking a stand.

As I'm driving back down to my house, Rajiv calls me from Bloomberg.

“It's awfully late to still be at your terminal,” I say.

“Arthur Mack,” he says.

Are we playing this game again?

“Evan Spiegel,” I say.

“No, I mean can you do Arthur Mack? He's already indicted. Richie, not even you can get sued by a guilty man. Here, wait.”

A moment of silence as he attends to something.

“I just sent you Ms. Mack's mother's address. That's where she's staying. In Santa Monica, near you.”

Back home, I light up a Strawberry Cough spliff and Google photos of Gemma Mack. Gemma and Arthur at a museum fundraiser, Gemma and Arthur at a party in the Hamptons, Gemma and Arthur at a hospital benefit. She never smiles; instead, she stares blankly at the camera as if she just wants the shot to be over. Arthur grins widely, as though he has just been told a hilarious joke; he is never looking at the camera. There is something hyena-like about his expression, as if he is gloating through the computer screen about his exploits in capitalism and cuckoldry.

There is something familiar about Gemma, and not because she's been in the news lately. That stern expression, the pretty freckled features, the blond highlights—she's the coyote woman!

I still feel her sting.

I send a note to Gemma Mack, reintroducing myself, explaining who I am and what I am working on. Can we meet, I ask, this time unarmed?

IT WAS HARD NOW TO
ascertain what the developer's vision might have been. Sargam doubted he had any aesthetic vision at all, but what he did have was an appetite. There had been at least six hundred houses with fifty-foot frontages on each, in three styles—the largest five bedrooms and 3,600 square feet, the smallest three bedrooms and 2,800 square feet—with corresponding price points. Yet with this sprawling ambition, he,
or she, had not bothered to imagine the need for a store, a park, a library, a bench, a gas station, a school, or a tree. Who would live here?