This Beautiful Life (11 page)

Now Lizzie
wants
him to be an asshole.

He will give her what she wants.

T
hey are in the lawyer's offices, one o'clock. Wednesday afternoon, Jake looking almost comical in a too-large blue blazer and one of Richard's ties. The boy's limbs are long and gangly and they hang awkwardly from his torso as he slumps down into the plush leather chair. The cuffs of his white shirt rattle around his forearms like bangles. He's still got that dumb string thing tied around one wrist; Richard makes a mental note to cut it off when they get home.

The conference table is long and burnished. The wood so rich and dark it glistens; it's been deeply oiled and it looks like the surface might ripple to the touch. The boy leans forward and stares at his reflection in the shiny wood. With his neck bent that way—like a crane swooping down for a drink—his head appears bigger, weightier, more orbicular and bobbling than it ever has before. Jake seems to Richard to be too skinny and too tall and too small in that chair, all at the same time. He doesn't fit his own frame, and his frame doesn't fit the seat. He looks almost spindly, as if his arms and legs could be blown around like a weathervane. The knot of his tie is off-center. It's Richard's tie: a dark blue silk with a thin turquoise stripe—a little schmancy maybe, Lizzie said, for the venue, but the most youthful one in Richard's closet. No matter how many times Richard or Lizzie has reached over to straighten it today, it invariably lists left again.

Richard had tied that knot himself, and he'd had a moment when he did so, standing behind his son in front of the bathroom mirror that morning—Jake looking for a second like the Hindu god Vishnu, with all those multiple arms. That's how Richard's own father had taught him; Dad could only tie a tie as if he were performing the ritual upon himself, and so Dad had stood behind Richard, as he had both of Richard's older brothers before him, and it hadn't occurred to Richard to teach Jake any other way. While he was adjusting the knot, Richard had suddenly noticed how truly broad Jake's shoulders had become. Like a wire frame hanger from which the rest of his lean body simply hung.

Richard had teared up a little then, and the boy had taken notice. “I'm sorry, Dad,” said Jake, his eyes muddy swollen green, like a pond all stirred up after a series of summer storms.

“It wasn't a smart thing to do, was it?” Richard said.

“I didn't know, I didn't realize, I had no idea, Dad…” Jake said. “I didn't think.”

“That's the problem,” said Richard. “You have to think. You always have to think.”

“It was a mistake, Richard,” said Lizzie, from the doorway. Neither of them had seen her standing there. She was in her “Richard's interview suit,” a black Armani she'd bought in Ithaca, on eBay, to charm the provost and the COO, with stockings, low heels, and lipstick; her wavy auburn hair slicked back in a French twist. “Jake would never intentionally hurt anyone. He couldn't possibly have known what would happen—”

“You should never send an email you don't want the whole world to see. How many times have I said that?” said Richard.

“She asked for it,” Lizzie cut in. “She made the video, she emailed it—what would Dr. Freud say,” she said, shaking her head. “That poor, wretched, stupid girl. Marjorie says the mother's always away somewhere, that even when she was little she was always picked up by a nanny.” Her eyes met Richard's in the mirror. “He needs to shave, Richard.”

“He can do that himself,” said Richard. “He needs a haircut.”

“My hair?” said Jake. It had taken forever for it to grow this long.

“Short,” said Richard. “So your ears stick out.”

“I still can't believe they made us watch that thing together in Treadwell's office.” Lizzie stole a look at Jake, and then whispered, “Did I tell you, she waxed? Down there…”

Richard felt the skin on his face tighten. Whether it was because Lizzie was being inappropriate in front of Jake or because she'd bungled it so big time at Wildwood, he wasn't sure. He honestly wasn't sure why he felt so angry.

“You shouldn't have agreed to it,” said Richard.

“I was trying to work with the school,” said Lizzie. There was both incredulity and a little heat on her words.

“There is no working with the school,” said Richard.

“I know that now, Richard,” said Lizzie firmly. “I wonder if you, too, would have realized it in the moment had you been there.”

Her brown eyes met his green ones in the mirror—no surprise Jake's were the color of algae. She did not have the right to chastise him, especially in front of their son. Richard had been at work; he'd been supporting the family. And then it was as if their argument played out in the short form telepathically: they volleyed back and forth from eyes to eyes locked in the mirror, marital shorthand from years of experience, one upping the ante, testing to see who would concede this time, and indeed it seemed that in this instance Richard had won. Because Lizzie got a little softer then. She thought he was right, maybe; or she was timing her battles; maybe she was just gearing up for the big one, a more important confrontation that would inevitably come; maybe she wanted to protect Jake; maybe she just knew Richard enough to recognize a good moment to back down. Whatever it was, their dispute played out rapid-fire and died out.

This was marriage, Richard thought, pragmatically compressed into emotional haiku.

“They could have turned it all into a teaching moment,” Lizzie said. “A school is supposed to help children and their families, by definition a school—”

“If he were eighteen he could be charged with disseminating child pornography,” said Richard, and instantly regretted it. He sounded like a robot and he knew it. He didn't want to fight now, either. But someone had to assess the situation, assess it properly, keep cool. And once again, it seemed that responsibility was his. He'd been on the phone, the Internet. He'd begun his due diligence. He'd already talked to lawyers. The video had found its way to a music-sharing website—that is, one of the kids had sent it, thank God not Jake; Richard grilled him every way to Sunday, and Jake swore he had not posted it, because that could lead to further legal woes—and it had reached thousands, if not hundreds of thousands. Possibly it had already reached a million viewers. A million. The staggering consequence of a flick of his son's index finger, the amazing irrevocable reach of his unleashed power—it was sort of stunning, really, what his son could actually do.

Kids have fucked up before, Richard thought, again and again. Kids have fucked up since time immemorial. It is their biological mandate to fuck up, Richard repeated to himself inside his own head. But not like this. Up until now, there was an element of containment to their fuck-ups. You could keep it to yourself pretty much and pay to have the rest swept away.

“McHenry is seventeen,” said Jake, looking like he might be sick. “Luke is eighteen,” he said slowly.

Lizzie looked at Jake with an inspector's gaze.

“I'll shave him,” said Lizzie.

“I'll do it myself, Mom,” said Jake. His eyes were brimming, but he held those broad shoulders square.

Which now accounts for the two red scratches on his peachy face. The marinelike haircut. His ears twitching on both sides of his head like a fawn's. Richard had marched Jake into a Latino barbershop on Amsterdam after he'd called into the office. “Not a buzz, but almost as short.” Richard stayed to watch as the long chestnut locks hit the linoleum in graceful spirals, like streamers the day after the party. He had nothing better to do this morning. Yesterday he'd gone into work. Yesterday Richard had “tried to set the gears in motion to make good on the goodwill of the meeting,” but it had been a lost cause. Yesterday he'd still had some stupid, ridiculous hope that this thing might actually die down.

All morning Richard's BlackBerry and his landline had rung like crazy. His email, his IM were going nuts. Yesterday, Lizzie dropped Coco off at school in the a.m. as per usual, but he had had to pick her up in the afternoon, because Lizzie called him midday semi-hysterically and said she didn't want to leave Jake alone at home, the poor kid was torturing himself, and she just couldn't face the scene, again, that day, at pickup. Everyone was buzzing, she said. Everyone wanted to have coffee. Everyone wanted to talk. “No one ever wanted to have coffee before,” said Lizzie. “They want the dirt,” she said. “They want to trash-talk
that girl
.”

She gave him a list of instructions: arrive at 2:45, and the kindergarten class will be assembled on the sidewalk and half of them will already have left and he won't have to kibitz with anyone. Also: “Bring a snack for Coco, she'll need protein first, not sugar, so a nut bar or a squeezy yogurt; you can pick up a mini-ham-and-cheese at the foodie place on the corner with the big windows, unless you are trying to avoid people…” And then: “Poor Jake; the kid is curled up on the couch like a worm. I hate that girl.”

It wasn't Richard's style to hide. He'd arrived on time and sauntered across the sidewalk, nodding a bright hello at almost anyone who looked vaguely familiar, and swung Coco up up up into the air and then onto the royal perch of his shoulders. “It's my dad,” shouted Coco, in utter amazement. She bellowed this into the crowd. “It's my dad,” as if he'd materialized out of thin air. When he heard her squeal of delight, Richard realized he'd never picked his daughter up from school in the city before. In Ithaca, Coco would come back with him up the hill to his office on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when Lizzie taught that grad seminar on Goncharova, Picasso, and Braque. Sometimes he'd let Coco run loose on the Arts Quad, glancing out his window from time to time to make sure she wasn't annoying any of the lounging undergrads and keeping them from their seductions or their studies. But in New York, pickup had been her mother's purview.

Richard dropped Coco off at Wildwood Lower, also a somewhat rare occurrence, that very morning, and Lizzie arranged for a playdate for after school. Sydney, “Clementine's mother,” had called the day before. Lizzie had actually picked up as Sydney was leaving a message. Usually she screened, and if it was someone she wanted to talk to, Lizzie called back later. Who was Sydney? Who was Clementine? Did it matter? With Coco safely tucked away at some banker's duplex on Park Avenue, neither parent would have to face the perp walk at pickup, and as an added bonus, they wouldn't have to worry about the time while in their newfound attorney's offices, except in terms of billable hours.

“That was so nice,” Lizzie had said, after she'd hung up the phone. “Sydney said Jake is an innocent. She said they are all innocents, the girl, too. She said the parents were richer than God and out to lunch and that poor kid had been left to raise herself. Rich, but deprived, you know?”

“So she blamed the girl's parents?” Richard said.

“Yes, no, I don't know,” said Lizzie. “What I liked was that she didn't blame us.” She paused, thinking. “And that she reached out. She's the only one who has so far, Richard. In a real way.”

So Coco was taken care of for the afternoon. They'd borrowed the blazer from Marjorie for Jake to wear to the attorney's office, and Lizzie had ventured out long enough to pick it up from Marjorie's doorman. The two mothers had been on the phone all afternoon and all night and then again all morning. Henry was in trouble, but seemingly less trouble than Jake. Lizzie seemed to think there was safety in numbers. According to Marjorie, the girl's parents had pulled her out of school for the remaining weeks of the semester and had arranged for her to take her final exams off campus. They were contemplating (a) a move to their home in Saint-Paul de Vence, or a move to their home on Martha's Vineyard; (b) relocating temporarily to their apartment in Cyprus; (c) sticking Daisy in one of the all-girls academies for next year, or maybe boarding school; (d) suing the boys and Wildwood and anyone else they could think of; or (e) all of the above.

Richard had spent the whole afternoon and evening the day before pulling in favors, tracking down legal representation. He was amazed at the recommendations he'd gotten: Thomas P. Puccio, lawyer for Alex Kelly, a rapist punk from Connecticut who'd attacked a girl from his high school on the way home from a party, jumped bail, and fled to Europe to ski for seven years before returning to face the music; Jack T. Litman, the scumbag who had represented Robert Chambers, the “Preppie Killer,” a heroin addict who'd strangled a classmate while having “rough sex” in Central Park. How could anyone think Jake fell into this category?

Through one of the university's legal team, Richard found someone circumspect, from a blue-chip firm: Sean O'Halloran.

“I've got a sixteen-year-old boy myself,” said O'Halloran, over the phone. “Sends shivers down my spine.”

Richard had called into the office first thing this morning—a family matter, he'd said to his secretary, although the story had already broken on the Internet, and Marjorie's spies said there were TV news helicopters and reporters this morning up at Wildwood. Richard had contacted the COO the day before, prior to beginning his legal research. It was imperative that his boss hear the news from Richard himself. Theirs had been a terse, businesslike conversation. The COO said, “Do what you can to defuse this thing.” This morning Richard sent a follow-up email. He would call later in the day, he typed with his thumbs on his BlackBerry, to apprise the university fully of the situation. Best to get a legal handle first before making his pitch to the COO.

Richard hoped to keep his name out of the papers—his son is a minor after all, although he doubted the older boys would be given the same courtesy—but that, too, now seems like a lost cause. It is already up on the Internet. The question is: Did the powers that be at the university read the gossip sites Richard himself had not visited until today? And now that the COO knew, what could possibly keep him away? It was human nature, it seemed, to Google. Ridiculously tempting, highly addictive, a weakness of the flesh. Marjorie had called Lizzie with the news: “The kids made Gawker,” and Lizzie passed that nugget on, hand over phone receiver, in stunned amazement, almost as if it were an accomplishment.