This Beautiful Life (20 page)

“School,” says Jake.

“Finish up what you need to do there and go home,” says Richard.

“Mom's home,” says Jake.

“Mom's with Coco,” says Richard. “Go home. I'll tell your mother. Just go home when you can.”

“Yes, Dad,” Jake squeaks out.

“Don't worry,” says Richard. “I'll take care of it.”

He hangs up the phone. He turns to his computer, Googles the school, and hunts for Carmichael's extension. This should not be done by email, Richard thinks. The poor kid, he has been under so much pressure. Still, they had given him one job, one job, and that was to mind the perimeters of his probation, and he screwed it up. Richard is at war with himself. His son is feckless, a victim, weak, supersensitive. It is as if Lizzie is in the room and he is arguing with her in his head. Still, Jake came to him. That is what they had instructed him to do. “Why didn't you come to me?” Richard had said over and over again after Daisy sent that blasted email. Now Jake has. Richard has to live up to his promise.

He reaches across his desk for the landline to call Carmichael. His plea will be on humanist terms. Jake was a solid chemistry student before this disaster. He's experienced tremendous tension since the whole thing started. Richard will offer to get a doctor's note from Jake's shrink. He and Liz will be grateful if Jake can take a makeup. Richard himself will grill Jake on the material. Richard is forming the conversation into a shape in his head when the phone begins to ring, his fingers hovering airborne above the receiver. Is Carmichael calling him? Are his thoughts so loud that Carmichael can read Richard's mind? Richard picks up the phone.

“Hello,” says Richard.

“Richard,” says the voice.

“Strauss?” says Richard.

“Scott Levine. How are you?”

A Stanford B-School buddy, now an investment banker. They were on the opposite side of everything in the old days, but they always respected one another. Now Scott is a big muckety-muck at Lehman Brothers. He lives in Greenwich and is already on his second wife. The first one Lizzie always referred to as “Mrs. Scott.” They have not met the second, although she and Scott have been married for quite some time. There are kids, Richard thinks, with both women. What is her name again?

“Good, Scott,” says Richard. “Great to hear from you.”

“I've heard a little about what's been going on over there,” says Scott. “Jen still keeps up with all the private school scuttlebutt, and the university's loss might just be my gain, Richard. Any chance you're available after work today for a drink?”

As invitations go, this is clearly a nice one. But truth be told, Richard would say yes to anything from anyone at the moment.

“Where and when?” says Richard.

L
iz race-walked her usual route through the park, hurrying down ribbony cement pathways that girded fields of plush green grass, and then along the dusty bridle path and across the Upper Reservoir, which spat her out and down a ramp in the East Nineties. At the base of the incline, she spied something that stopped her. At first she thought it had to be the pot, but then, shuddering with some weird evanescent epiphany, she recognized that it really
was
a raccoon, of all things, scaling the trunk of the tree up ahead of her. The masked, pointy-nosed animal stopped his climb and locked eyes with hers:
We are a pair of outlaws living in an alien land
, he communicated telepathically, before curling up in a cleft between two flowering branches. Nature exists, Liz thought. It triumphs. Even when we seal off the curve of the earth with a concrete carapace or the unfurled carpet of seeded lawns. But there was no time to pause and contemplate the victory of the actual over the fake, or even the simulative. Liz was now trotting down to the gaping open mouth of Engineer's Gate on Fifth Avenue and Ninetieth Street. She was perspiring profusely and could also smell her perfume—still Chanel No. 5 after all these years—plus the blank “cool powder” olfactory mask of her deodorant and her own stinky sweat. Looking south as she crossed against traffic, Liz noted the squat Carvel swirl of the Guggenheim. And even though she was late, and full of dread, practically running, she wasted a few seconds to take it in. Oh God, she thought, I could have loved living here.

She then hurried north up Fifth and turned east, jogging the last half block. Panting a little and out of breath, her heart racing, she gathered in front of the Lower School's stately limestone edifice with the other stay-at-homes, the nannies and the au pairs, a stray father or two—not Richard, a searching glance told her—because they got props for showing up to events, fathers did, even if they spent the whole time sending and receiving email. At the Winter Concert, from the balcony, the North Dakota of the school's theater, where Liz and Richard had purposefully homesteaded, the darkened auditorium below had looked like the prairie at night—all those BlackBerrys flickering their Morse code like fireflies.

Liz nervously combed her hair with her fingers. It had air-dried and tangled in the breeze. She'd forgotten to pack her brush.

“I hate this shit.” Sydney sidled up behind her with her signature feline grace. She was in white today, cropped linen pants suspended off the frame of her hip bones and a skimmy tank dangling from her collarbone as if it were slung loosely on a clothesline. Her skin glowed bronze on her toned arms and shoulders. She was chewing gum. She offered Liz a piece. Liz took it.

“Nobody loves their kids more than me,” said Sydney, “but even Clemmie thinks all these events are overkill. She'd rather be at home sucking her thumb and staring out the window.”

“She's my kind of kid,” Liz said.

Sydney placed a light hand on Liz's shoulder. “How's Jake doing?”

Liz knew she shouldn't—Richard would kill her—but she was stoned and lonely and grateful for the interest.

“Not so well,” she said. She twisted her hot hair off her damp neck. And then, as if the truth itself were dawning on her: “Actually I think the word for what he is, is shattered. We've gotten him into therapy, but still… I'm honestly ready to shoot myself.”

Kevin, the security guard, stepped out in his gray blazer and mushroom-colored slacks, his wide face pink as a rose. “All kindergarten parents and nannies, please join us in the auditorium.”

Sydney sent Liz a melty look of sympathy just as the red doors opened. The throngs advanced.

There was a sudden sea change and Liz sailed forward in the crush, like she was in a mosh pit, her feet grazing the ground, carried by the crowd. She swiveled her head to search for Sydney, but Sydney was to the front of Liz now, her short brown bob gleaming sleekly in the sun.

“There you are,” said Casey. She had her hair caught back in two pigtails, which somehow made her look older than she was. More pruney, Liz thought. Prunier? She was wearing a Paul Frank top and a tiered crinkly cotton skirt, almost as if she were dressing up as her own daughter for Halloween.

“I have been dying to talk to you,” said Casey.

“Oh,” said Liz.

“How are you all doing? I saw Richard running this morning.”

“We're all okay,” said Liz. “Thanks for asking.”

Good thing Richard prepped me on that one, Liz thought. She felt a little claustrophobic in the crowd. Maybe that's why she was aware of her heart beating inside her chest. Or maybe it was being high. That sometimes happened. Paranoia. Cold sweats. An anxiety attack. She dug her fingernails into her palms to calm herself.

“My heart goes out to you, Liz, it really does,” said Casey.

As they entered the foyer of the school and pressed down the corridor to the theater, Casey grabbed Liz's hand by the wrist. Liz was momentarily grateful for the pressure of her grasp. It grounded her, just when she thought she might astral-project out of her own body and sail off into some form of tempestuous sea.

“Sit with me,” Casey said. “I've known the Cavanaughs for years; we're old friends—Peter did Bill's photorefractive keratectomy…” She stared hard at Liz. Could she tell that Liz was stoned? Or was Casey just taking note of Liz's confused expression? “His astigmatism.”

“Oh,” said Liz. She breathed in deep.

They took seats together to the left of the center aisle, mid-auditorium. In the thick of it. Richard would have approved, Liz thought. Now everyone could see that she had nothing to hide, that she held her head high. This was Liz's first real foray out in public, she realized, since the whole sordid affair broke. She couldn't just arrive late, duck her head, grab Coco, and jump into a taxi.

“Sherrie supposedly got pregnant by accident,” Casey confided. “Peter has three children from his first marriage. Sherrie was supposed to be the younger, sexy wife—you know, the fun one, the one who's never too tired, that sort of thing. She'd give him blow jobs on the ride up to the country. But then they hit a bumpy stretch after Daisy was born; she gained some weight and I think maybe when Daisy was in the Lower School, Sherrie was hospitalized for depression? Anyhow, Peter let Bill know he had one foot out the door but then she pulled it together and
voilà
.

“She's not very maternal, Sherrie,” Casey went on. “I don't think she really wanted a child. Maybe she was just staking her claim on Peter? She's a party girl and likes to collect art.”

The lights dimmed, thank God. Liz wasn't sure how to respond to Casey. She didn't know how to feel about all this intense and indiscreet camaraderie. Her face felt red and hot, as if she were embarrassed or blushing or angry or just warm. She wasn't sure. She didn't know if she was supposed to be grateful that Daisy's mother hadn't wanted her and was, thus, conveniently the source of all her daughter's troubles, or if she should feel worse that her own son had played a part in this poor child's endless misery. It occurred to her just then that she had never heard Daisy's mother's name spoken aloud before. Peter Cavanaugh, she'd heard. The father. The family broker. The Wallet. But the neglectful mother, depressed, hospitalized—no wonder Daisy had been overseen by nannies—overweight, inept, formerly fun, no. What a sad and devastating portrait. Not at all how she had imagined the Cavanaughs and their life of splendor. Poor Daisy. Poor Sherrie. Liz knew what depression felt like. Sherrie Cavanaugh must love her daughter, Liz thought. Even if she didn't want her. She must love her to the point of unendurable pain at this very moment. She must also hate herself.

In the dark, Liz's heart went out to Sherrie Cavanaugh. Like Liz, Sherrie Cavanaugh was an art lover who didn't have a job, and was bungling being a mother.

After Liz's father died, when she was a teenager, her mother would often arrive at home in the evenings from her job downtown in a dentist's office too weary to eat; she would undress in the entranceway to their apartment, peeling her stockings down, unraveling as she closed their front door. Mom would then lie down on the couch in her bra and half-slip and chain-smoke the cigarettes that eventually killed her from an agate ashtray that lay like an anchor on her chest. Liz could not forget her mother's hectoring: “You girls have to work hard in school. You've got to have your own careers. Never be dependent on a man for money.” Now, with all those fancy advanced degrees behind her—BA, MA, PhD, in the lucrative field of art history no less—“dependent on a man for money” would be the ID in Liz's contributor's notes were she ever to email updates to her various alumni magazines. Trapped and useless, Sherrie Cavanaugh and Liz Bergamot had more in common, perhaps, than their children's mutually assured destruction.

The stage lit up. Jane Perskey, crisp in a light blue pantsuit, walked out of the wings and up to the miked podium. The auditorium rang with polite applause.

“Welcome to the Wildwood Class of 2016 end-of-the-year musicale,” she said. “I am sure you will be delighted by what you are about to see and hear this afternoon. But before we begin, I'd like to take the time to ask you to turn off your cell phones and other electronic devices and to let you know that several members of our audience suffer from seizure disorders. In our efforts to cut back on all the flash photography, we will be videotaping the performance and will send you each a copy over the summer to remind you of the splendid year we've had, along with materials on the 2003-to-2004 annual fund.”

Jane smiled and winked.

There was diffuse laughter. Like the scattering of leaf piles in the wind.

“We have had a wonderful year with all your wonderful children. Thank you all so much for lending them to us.”

Everyone clapped, Liz included. From the wings came the opening strains of Bob Marley's “One Love.” One by one, led by Mrs. Livingston, the kindergarteners marched out onto the stage singing,
One love, one heart, let's get together and feel all right
. Coco was number eleven in the lineup and she marched with a shit-eating grin on her face. When she spotted Liz in the audience she started to wave and blow her kisses. “Momma,” she shouted. “It's me, Coco B.! It's me!” Liz's heart swelled.

“That's so adorable,” said Casey.

“Thanks,” said Liz.

Mrs. Livingston gently refocused Coco and helped the children arrange themselves in line. Mrs. Aguado's kindergarten class and Ms. Evans's followed them. Soon the entire stage was three-deep in a multi-culti panoply.

“They look like a Gap ad,” Casey said, approvingly.

Indeed they did, except for the fact that they were bedecked in gray pants and skirts and white polos.

The music teacher, Ms. Walton, entered from stage left and took a bow. She raised her baton, and the children all inhaled sharply. She brought it down and they lifted their sweet young voices in song, their throats long, their faces upturned, mouths open like baby birds. Like little gray sparrows.