This Beautiful Life (9 page)

The Upper School librarian had caught sight of the video over some girl's shoulder on one of the school's PCs and that was that. Jake was pulled out of third-period history, and Henry and McHenry and Davis and Django were pulled out of AP Chemistry and Advanced Math. By noon, Jake's mom was on her way to school, and he had already been suspended. His dad was in a very important meeting at work and could not be disturbed.

He learned all this in the head of school's office. Mr. Threadgill. Mr. Threadgill appeared to be enjoying himself as he told Jake how much trouble he was in before Jake's mom arrived, but Threadgill waited until his mom got there to view the video. Then it was Jake, his mom, and Threadgill, sitting together in Threadgill's office. The guy was balding but with a beard, a Van Dyke, as if he could make up for the lack of hair on his head with hair on his chin. It reminded Jake of pubic hair, of pubic hair on his face, under Threadgill's nose, which was small and quivering with repressed rage, and surrounding his lips, which were too red, like a monkey's anus. He was wearing a shirt and tie, but no jacket, as if it was too steamy in his office and he'd had to sling his tweed jacket over the back of his chair. Jake's mom was wearing a skirt and sweater set; he couldn't recall ever seeing her in that outfit before. Pink top, cream-colored bottom. She was dressed like a pretty suburban mom on TV.

“Jake!” she'd said when she arrived, like she'd just come upon him in a hospital emergency room, like he was on a stretcher, hooked up to some machine that beeped, although Jake was just sitting on a wooden bench outside Threadgill's office, waiting for her. Threadgill moved him into a conference room to wait by himself, while Threadgill filled her in, or threatened her, or threatened Jake—whatever Threadgill wanted. Jake waited on that bench forever. Through the window in the wooden conference room door, Jake saw Henry and his mom walk by.

And then, finally, Jake was called in by Threadgill's secretary, and when he walked back into the head of school's office, he saw that his mom had been crying. Her eyes were red and her nose was pink. She had a balled-up tissue in her fist and she kept dabbing at her nose, which was running. She did not look Jake in the eye when he walked in.

“Take a seat,” said Threadgill, gesturing toward the empty chair leaning against the wall, across from his mother. Jake noticed that his left leg was jiggling.

Jake pulled the chair away from the wall and set it in line with his mom's.

“Jacob, I wanted your mother to see this with you in the room,” said Threadgill. He said this with certainty, like he was certain he was doing the right thing. Then he swiveled his PC monitor around so that all three of them could see the screen and he scooted his own chair back. The computer looked a little like E.T., Jake thought, with its long black accordion neck and wide white monitor. (His dad had ordered
E.T.
on Netflix; Coco loved it, but Jake had found it too sad to watch and wandered away into his bedroom.) Then Threadgill, smug and plump and trying hard to look blank beneath his beard, hit the Play button.

And there it was: Daisy. The zits on her cheek. The earrings on her ear, that awful dyed hair.
I love to love you, baby.
Beyoncé. Jake knew what was coming next. Daisy and her sex dance. Jake's mom, Threadgill, in the room. Daisy lifting up her skirt. Daisy's vagina.

He could not look at the screen. And he could not look at his mom. He thought he would die if he saw his mom's face. So he focused on Threadgill's knee, bouncing up and down, nervously. The knee, more than the video, made Jake want to throw up. The knee, even more than the video, felt perverted.

It was horrible. The worst day of his life, until the next one. Worse than anything he'd been able to imagine. But the most awful part had already happened. It was between first and second period, even before the hideousness in Threadgill's office, and Jake had been heading out of the building and toward the gym, still believing the whole thing might blow over, still pretending to himself like it had never happened, blurring the edges of what he knew and what he hoped, when he saw Daisy Cavanaugh for the first time ever in school. He saw her down the hall.

She was autographing baseball bats. Some of the kids on the team had brought them to her as a goof. They were taking pictures of her with their cell phones and she was posing. Until she saw him. Daisy Cavanaugh in her too-tight jeans and her UGG boots, one hip jutted out, a hand on that hip, smiling broadly for the camera. Daisy Cavanaugh with too much eye makeup.

When she saw him her eyes gaped open like endless holes, ragged and raw, like two wounds that would never heal. Jake felt vertigo just looking at them, like if he got too close he, too, could fall down that well of pain into hopeless misery. He was the creator of her torment and he knew it. At that moment, inside him the twin ruling deities of the rest of his life, a giddy recognition of his own powers and a crushing sense of shame, were born. Both paled before the desire to save himself.

Daisy looked at him and stuck out her tongue.

“Thanks a lot,” she said. Her voice was trembling.

Then whatever had opened up inside her closed over, and she went back to signing bats. Giving the people what they wanted.

She was famous now.
He'd
made her famous. She was autographing the bats and smiling a big, broad, winning smile.

4

O
nce, he was a golden boy.

Now he is a golden man. Handsome, smart, silver-haired Richard, Richard at forty-five, still with the tight abs and runner's legs, Richard in the hound's-tooth sport coat and black jeans, the clean white shirt, self-made Richard with his preternaturally cool, casual, youthful elegance. He is on the phone. He is on the phone with his distraught wife, Lizzie, in the middle of one of the most important meetings of his career, and he remains calm. For most of his life, Richard Bergamot has been allergic to failure. He isn't about to allow for a reversal of fortune now.

He sits with one hand curling around his BlackBerry, the left one, with the simple gold wedding band, those long “piano” fingers, his father's old Timex encircling his wrist for luck, his leather chair swiveling just enough to face away from the eclectic group of enemies and advocates it has taken him so many months of careful diplomacy to assemble, but not enough to relinquish his authority and control.

How can I possibly walk out now? Richard thinks, as he peers sideways at the gathering through long, dark lashes—they grow so ridiculously thick at times they actually obscure his vision; they “flutter” when he blinks. This is a phenomenon Richard has grown used to, although as a kid he'd trimmed them back with a nail scissors, sick of hearing the ladies at his church stage-whisper, “Wasted on a boy.”

“Been dipping into the interferon again?” Lizzie teased the first time they slept together.

It has taken a great deal of calibrated effort to get all parties to agree to this sit-down—the West Harlem Development Corporation, the community activists, the whining college students, the coiffed wives of philanthropists, the local Parents' Association, Richard's own team of experts—and an endless amount of cajoling and arm-twisting to persuade Bertram Anderson, the senior assemblyman, to donate his Harlem offices for the purpose of this meeting (which is key, the location of this meeting is key); and yet it has all been done. These seemingly Herculean tasks have been completed.

The various warring factions are now present and assembled peaceably in Bert's conference room, around his long, chipped wooden table, with the rather worn black leather chairs that swivel (good thing), the wilting flowers, sweaty water glasses, and bound copies of all of Richard's charts and agendas and projections, the PowerPoint presentation, the computer that goes wherever Richard goes, like a lapdog or an ancillary lobe of his brain. There is a low-level scent of activity in the air, the musky respiration of skin mixed with the aroma of various perfumes and deodorants; it is the olfactory background hum of meetings when they get going, and Richard noted its presence about an hour in, as a positive barometrical measurement of the assembly's charge. No one was sweating profusely, no one was hot under the collar, there was no angry human stink.

Richard had been halfway through the presentation when he received the call, and now, as he is listening to his distraught wife, it is quickly becoming clear that he has been thrust into battle on not one but two fronts: (a) work, which he is prepared for, naturally; and (b) this thing with his kid, which he decidedly is not.

He is senior executive vice chancellor of the Astor University of the City of New York, and at the onset of the meeting he'd welcomed everyone individually and by name (prepping himself with Google Images the night before), thanking the skeptical, smug assemblyman for allowing them to gather in his offices, blowing a little sunshine up Bert's ass as he went. From the get-go, Richard did his best to set the group at ease. He poured the water himself, passing glasses around the table. He'd taken off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, keeping it casual and friendly, biting into a donut off a plate of baked goods proffered by his deputy, George Strauss, before he'd even begun. In private, he is too vigilant to indulge in sweets—his father died of a coronary at forty-nine—but nothing puts off other people more than public displays of discipline. A little confectioners' sugar had sprinkled onto Richard's lap as he ate, and so he'd started to speak to the group with cast-down eyes—those lashes again—casually brushing the powder off with his hand.

“Welcome, everyone,” he'd said. “Here's a concept to embrace: no sugar donuts when wearing black jeans.” He looked up. “Here's a better one: let's take a rare, underutilized industrial area in the greatest city in the world and turn it into a state-of-the-art cohort campus to a first-tier university while creating jobs, schools, and affordable housing for the surrounding community.” He'd put the half-eaten donut aside on his napkin for emphasis.

“Anyone who can accomplish the latter deserves the rest of that donut, Richard,” Bert said. A portly man in his sixties with a dusting of silver gray in his well-trimmed beard, Bert, to Richard, always looks like he has just come in out of the snow. Born and bred in Harlem, Bert has run the district for the last twenty-five years. He is as smart as and/or smarter than Richard, perhaps wilier, by virtue of Richard's own rigorously honest assessment. “Lying to yourself gets you nowhere,” Richard's father always said, so Richard does his best to adhere to that axiom. Bert wears his experience and his legislative weight the way he wears his signature well-tailored gold-buttoned vest. Snugly. With gravitas.

The senior assemblyman is today's linchpin. If Richard can get Bert's support, the rest will follow suit, eventually. The few real estate holdouts they can always buy out at a premium. Richard has a slush fund set aside just for this purpose.

“I tell you what, Bert, when we're done here today, I'll split it with you,” Richard had said, earlier, before the call, nodding playfully at the donut.

Manhattanville, east of Broadway and commercial Harlem, consists of mostly warehouses and parking garages, windswept river views, rubble-strewn lots, some auto body shops and gas stations—there is presently so little foot traffic that often in good weather some of the handful of proprietors and residents sit outside in the middle of the empty sidewalks on folding chairs, playing dominos on portable card tables. The neighborhood, if one can call it that, is home to La Floridad, the Cuban restaurant where Lizzie gets her café con leche en route to picking up the car (theirs is the cheapest garage in the city, and an expression of some residual shared frugality—they are both products of working-class families); Fairway Uptown, where she shops on Saturday mornings; and some of the most beautiful, antique iron latticework, huge trestles that—miraculously, considering their copious rot, those rusted stanchions—still manage to support the elevated subway line. The best landmark of all is a mysterious aerial road to nowhere that abruptly ends near the river where it meets up against the sky. On Richard's maps, it is an abandoned arm of the West Side Highway, but in his mind that graceful, cast-off celestial boulevard is the “Stairway to Heaven” that he slow-danced to so many times as a kid. (He hears Jimmy Page's electric guitar riffing in his head every time he walks beneath it.)

Gazing up at the clouds through that intricate, corroded metalwork feels like peering through a veil of muddied silver lace, and the poetry of it all appeals to Richard, although once the university breaks ground the thing will have to go—unless he can turn it into a park, a green oasis, like the one a variety of developers plan for the High Line, the elevated railway that runs like a spine through the rough-and-tumble neighborhood of gas stations and art galleries in Chelsea, downtown. The possibilities here are endless! The pitfalls, myriad. Ergo, the complex, exhilarating joy of his job.

Best, for all its raw, physical gifts, this most western reach of Harlem is virtually uninhabited—for New York, that is. Not that many people actually live there.

In the nine months Richard has spearheaded the university's plans to expand by building a new campus in Manhattanville, he has aimed to please, sensitive as he is to the university's missteps almost four decades prior, when their efforts to build new dorms and an indoor stadium ended in race riots. It is important that they do this right. Richard has said this over and over again. First to Lizzie, when he was being wooed away from Cornell and was contemplating taking the job, late one night, after sex, when they did their best talking, when she wasn't anxious and he was loose, when the breeze off the gorge was damp and sultry and the kids were asleep and the intense pleasure of living hovered over a waterfall that way—the music of it—was almost enough to make him spring naked to his feet, his dick still hard and wet, and pick up the phone and wake up the university's chief operating officer in New York and say, no, no, I am too fucking happy here to risk changing my life. Lizzie had slipped on her skirt and T-shirt from off of the floor, and said, “Let's sit on the porch; it's such a beautiful night,” looking through the open window next to their bed. Outside, they'd talked, it seemed, for hours; he'd felt the need to make it clear to her that this job was about doing good—Lizzie liked that—that the challenge turned him on for sure, but that there was a vision here he'd like to fulfill. There was something about that night, the conversation, the excitement of this new venture, her willingness to give him what he wanted, that made him feel like he had when he'd first met her, unbeatable and unstoppable. Here was this smart, pretty girl eager to be his audience, witty but vulnerable; it was that vulnerability that always got to him. It amazed him that she was still ready to go with him where he wanted to go. It was his mission to make it worth her while. And so he says this often: “The university will expand correctly.” It is as if, if he says it enough, it will become true.

To back this up, he is prepared to spend $150 million of the
university's
money (Lizzie loves to verbally insert the italics) over the next sixteen years to ensure not only the preservation but also the growth of the surrounding community as they build a campus that will catapult the university into the new century. He is in possession of a big fat economic gift, a gift he can give to Harlem; Richard firmly believes this. He never would have accepted the position if he did not. Richard is a dyed-in-the-wool Populist. His father was a postal worker. His mother, a homemaker. The youngest of three sons, he was the first in his family to graduate from high school. What had once only been simply fact, the architecture of Richard's life, even in his own mind, has been elevated to myth.

It is Richard's mission to persuade the members of his audience to see what he sees, that Manhattanville is ripe for development, that developing Manhattanville will not only increase the academic, artistic, and economic reach of the university but, in doing so, will also cast significant academic, artistic, and economic light on the surrounding neighborhood, enhancing it without gentrifying it (gentrifying it
too much
, he qualifies internally; a little gentrification is good, he reasons: banks, drugstores, supermarkets, jobs) or destroying it. This is called “city planning.”

So Richard began this morning the way he always begins, by stating his objectives simply and directly. (With Jake he'd say, “Today you are going to clean up your room,” and then list a vast array of directives: “You will make the bed and change the linens. You will cull through and straighten out your dresser drawers. You will attack that mess on your desk and make sense of it. You will alphabetize your underwear, my underwear, and the dog's underwear,” the last delivered with a grin and a noogie—there was no dog—and then the two of them would end up wrestling on the floor.) He'd then proceed to get as wonkish and as detailed as possible, dazzling his audience with data, bringing them to their intellectual knees. As he outlined the various stages in the development of Manhattanville, Richard did what he did best: he delegated, he delegated, and then jumped in (that is, he interrupted politely, self-effacingly, bursting with enthusiasm, as if he could barely contain his excitement) with a flurry of addendums, proving himself as expert as the army of experts he has scattered around the table. He has seated his team strategically among the community activists, the philanthropists, the local apparatchik, the assemblyman and his aides.

“No ‘us versus them,' ” Richard had warned prior to the meeting. “We are one, guys. A single human organism.”

This morning, he'd called upon his colleagues on a first-name basis, no matter how accomplished or renowned (“Here's where you come in, Marcus,” and “Maria, take it away”), as he proceeded point by PowerPoint throughout his talk—employing the architects and their computer-enhanced drawings, representatives from the School of Education to discuss the new Public Intermediate School that was a keystone of their proposal; the head of Relocation Services was there, too, Luz Esquilar, with her background in finance and social work (Yale Law), to talk about moving the few actual residents of “inarguably underutilized and industrial” Manhattanville into comparable or better housing for the same dollar or less. (How they really were going to accomplish that move in this real estate market was one of the sticky issues that Richard chewed over and over again. He had his eye on several buildings in Hamilton and Washington Heights, East Harlem—not Harlem, exactly, but close. Was it close enough? he wondered.) Richard had his whole team at the ready to run through their spiels, their words of comfort and renewal, their battle cry for change and opportunity and a new order, when he'd noticed his phone whirring on the conference table.

Lizzie had had the wherewithal to text him first. Richard was laughing along with the rest of them at one of his own jokes (“Is it time to eat the donut, Bert?”) and glanced down and saw the word
URGENT
on the screen of his phone. When they'd first arrived, all the members of the meeting had rested their phones on the table like a bunch of gunslingers sitting at a bar. “Surrender your weapons,” Richard had said jovially when he'd joined them. He'd not hesitated one millisecond in taking Lizzie's call when the phone vibrated again. He was calm, but tabloid headlines did a ticker-tape crawl along the bottom substrata of his thoughts. Often, when asked about his ability to multitask, the image that reaches Richard first is the post-9/11 screen on CNN. He is capable of entertaining several fractured narratives at once.