This Beautiful Life (10 page)

Lizzie would not interrupt him unless she had to. And Richard Bergamot, by definition, is the kind of man who takes his wife's “urgent” phone call in the middle of a high-powered meeting—he is a family man. That's what the articles say about him, and it is true. Phi Beta Kappa at Princeton, Stanford MBA and PhD in Econ. He is the kind of guy (even as a kid) who always has a clean shirt, in his briefcase or his locker. It was the clean shirt that got him started—he worked after school and summers in a fast-food restaurant slinging Macho Burritos in San José, and the wardrobe of pristine white polo shirts beneath his uniform impressed the franchise owner, who'd sent his own rather feckless boy back east to boarding school. “The rich rule the world; you better learn how to deal with them early,” Mr. Harrison said, and so he guided Richard through the application process, helping him negotiate a free ride.

St. Paul's paved Richard's pathway to Princeton, where he became interested in finance, all those wealthy prep school friends of his tempting him with the grace and ease of their gracious, easy lives. At Stanford he remembered his roots, inspired by his thesis advisor, vowing to live a life of public service—public service with money. He was a golden boy who grew up to be a golden man, a family man. Richard Bergamot loves his family. All his ambition and striving is in service to that love.

So when he hears the tremulous tone in his wife's voice as she struggles to convey the information that sounds as if it is rapidly whirling inside her head, he tries very hard to brush away his impatience. Lizzie isn't making sense.

“He's physically all right?” Richard asks. “Yes, yes,” Lizzie says. “But honey, they are suspending him. They want us to come up to school and get him right away.”

She anxiously tries to explain something about Jake and an email, a love letter, the school, suspension, the poor, poor mother of that pitiable little girl… Richard jotting down notes on his legal pad as she rambles:
Turn the meeting over to Bert, PowerPoint presentation to Kate, meet L.B. at the garage
, and his father's most cogent axiom:
Don't ever let them see you sweat…
He actually writes this down. Jotting notes gives Richard something to do and confers upon his reluctant audience an aura of significance to the phone call. Richard looks around the boardroom, at the polite but impatient faces—busy, important people, all of them—turning away from him now and toward each other in a Kabuki-like effort to offer him some false modicum of privacy. He does not want to leave this meeting before he's won them over.

Ironically, Richard's garage, MTP (the initials stand for More Than Parking—“What more?” said Lizzie. “Bikini waxes?”), is located in Manhattanville, and is also one of the first businesses slated to be turned over to the university because the university, as of six months ago, under Richard's tutelage, is now MTP's landlord. It was one of Richard's first acquisitions. The garage is a fifteen-minute sprint from the assemblyman's 125th Street offices—five minutes if Richard can catch a cab, which is not always possible on 125th Street. Maybe a car service, or a gypsy, but you can't count on a yellow taxi, not yet, not until the arrival of the Manhattanville campus, that is—which leaves him with very little time to extricate himself from this meeting, if extricating is indeed what he is going to do. Certainly this is what his wife is asking for.

He lets Lizzie go on, because she needs to; it is always wiser to let her perseverate a little, if time allows (she is more logical and reasonable once she's had a chance to “talk it out”), before weighing in. Usually he likes to help her; it makes him feel good. But in the moment,
his
moment, he feels a brief surge of annoyance—why can't she just handle this? Still, there is no time for irritation now; he loves her, he is her husband, it's their boy they are discussing, and he needs to settle her down.

“The secret of Richard's success is a cool head,” Lizzie always says, wryly, out of the corner of her lovely mouth, when one friend or another marvels at Richard's latest accomplishment, or at some dinner thrown in his honor. She compliments him in public with pride, but pride with an edge, like so many married women of her generation, because she isn't totally above a little jealousy. She isn't 100 percent above feeling envious of his stature, she admits, even when she counts upon it, quality-of-life-wise. She hasn't accomplished all she's wanted to accomplish, she confesses repeatedly, after a glass or two of wine, publicly leaking her neurosis, what with her PhD, her two kids, her tug-of-war between the family and the workplace, dipping in and out of academia, the occasional bones Cornell threw her, a class here, a symposium there, before running back to the kids. Who wouldn't like that kind of freedom? Richard sometimes thinks when he stays late at the office, Lizzie calling to remind him of the importance of face time with the family. Men were never allowed the space to mull over whether they wanted to work—they just worked, period. What she admires most about Richard, Lizzie always says when she has officially drunk too much, is the fact that he isn't conflicted—he is a straight and independent arrow tirelessly shooting toward success.

So let me accomplish something here, today, Richard thinks. Lizzie, honey, don't make me fuck this up.

Jake and the girl are teenagers. Teenagers flirt and embarrass themselves. They are biologically programmed to do so. Wasn't he young once, too? How big a deal could this be? When he was a teenager he thought about sex all day long. Even while he was getting some, he was thinking about when he could get some next.

Richard looks up and catches the eye of the smug, self-satisfied young community organizer, Steven Schwartz, a graduate of the university, recently a teenager himself. Is
he
getting any? Schwartz has a slightly schlubby young Bolshevik edge, via Williamsburg. A goatee and a shaved head. Ten extra pounds. Richard is a quarter century older than this kid, but he carries about a third of his body fat. Schwartz brought up the term “eminent domain” at the start of the meeting: a preemptive strike. His shoulders shaking with postadolescent rage and barely contained excitement—jumping the gun, tone-deaf to the rhythms and parries of a well-timed and executed assault. Even Bert had glared at the kid; Richard assumed the assemblyman had wanted to launch that particular salvo himself at the proper moment in the charged, fast-paced allegro of the post-presentation Q&A. Richard gives that fucker Schwartz a cool smile and a nod. Richard raises his right forefinger. One minute, he'll be off the phone in one minute. He hates being forced off his game.

“Sweetheart, this sounds like typical teen stuff,” he says into the phone when Lizzie asks if he can meet her at the car.

“You mean you're not going to come?” she says, hope deflating out of her voice like a loss of pride.

There is silence.

She is his wife. She knows him. As much as anyone knows anyone.

Lizzie says, “Fine. I'll pick him up, and I'll have Jakey apologize to the girl and her parents—” and now it is his turn to interrupt her. Richard does not want his son apologizing for anything, not yet.

“No,” he says, authoritatively. “We'll sort this all out together at home.” He whispers, “Just get him the hell out of there.” Then he says the next part clearly enough for his audience to hear him signing off. “See you later, honey.”

“Okay,” says Lizzie, sounding a little less desperate. Either Richard has successfully talked her down or she is wisely giving up and beginning to orchestrate her own next move.

That is her problem. He has his.

Richard needs to take his meeting back. He puts the phone down and instinctively reaches for a live grenade.

“Steven brought up the words
eminent domain
at the start of our meeting,” Richard says, with a nod toward the fat kid in the corner, “for which I'm grateful. So let's talk frankly now about the elephant in the room.”

A
fter the meeting is over Richard feels amazingly light. The spring breeze is cool against his neck, his collar blessedly open. As these things go, the whole day has gone swimmingly. He has layered down a foundation of promise and goodwill, building the groundwork for consensus, a strong basis for moving forward. He remembers how he outmaneuvered Steven Schwartz so that even the boy, sputtering with free-floating, inarticulate rage, understood he was behaving like a clown. “White privilege,” said Schwartz. “Culturally insensitive…”

“Take a closer look at the proposals, Steven,” Richard said patiently, passing him piles of paper. “The education will be top-notch and inclusive—it's a new and exciting option for the neighborhood kids as well as Astor U. families—which are as diverse a group as any you can find in New York.” Here he shook his head a little. “It's a bit antiquated to assume our faculty is homogeneous…”

Now Richard feels like he is floating in his skeleton, taller, stronger, and more alive, lambent; this is the way he always feels after a significant achievement. It is the sensation itself, he sometimes thinks, that he is addicted to. He tries to preserve it as he walks back to his apartment, perhaps not as quickly as the situation with Jake warrants (the situation suggests a cab, a car service, a subway; a phone call stating, “I'm on my way home, honey”). But the moment consists of a rare fusion of solitude and satisfaction, and he isn't quite ready to surrender it just yet.

At home, in the kitchen, both his wife and son will be in need of shoring up. There will be phone calls to make, parents to placate, school administrators to stroke or to intimidate, he isn't sure which tactic to take yet. During the meeting, Richard had been the executive vice chancellor of the Astor University of the City of New York; at home he will be “the dad,” the husband. The responsibilities of these roles are enormous. Right now, in the intermission between acts, he has no part to play. He belongs to no one. He feels good. He wants to preserve that feeling for a while longer.

Richard decides to crisscross through the projects, making his way toward Broadway, soaking up the cool sunshine, deftly sidestepping little logs of dog shit and slaloming through the garbage that tumbles out of the overflowing bins and wafts through the spring breeze as if it has wings. There are teenagers gathered in the small prison run of a playground, listening to loud music. Making out. Two fat old ladies sit on a park bench, the flesh around their knees overhanging their support hose. Laundry dangles from lines off the little rusting terraces. The air smells like fried food. It is a smell that once made him salivate and now makes him gag. There are so many people outdoors in the middle of the day you'd think this was the weekend. Doesn't anyone around here have a job? School? They need Richard and his programs and his progress.

He nods at a man with a gold front tooth. The guy's arm muscles, which look carved out of ebony, are resplendent beneath his sawed-off sweatshirt. There is more skin than shirt here, and Richard thinks if he had that physique himself he'd want to flaunt it, too. He really should be lifting heavier weights.

The meeting went well, extraordinarily so. The local school board representatives were particularly impressed. Schwartz be damned—Who doesn't want better schools for their children? Richard thinks, and for a moment, in an uncharacteristic excess of self-esteem and ambition, he allows himself the indulgence of contemplating what he could accomplish if he were someday to take over the New York City School System perhaps, or the university itself… Once the Manhattanville operation is in full swing the sky will be the limit in terms of his future employment. Public or private sector. This might be the time to make real money.

Just twenty minutes ago Bert himself put a hand on Richard's shoulder and said, “If you can pull half of this off, we're all in better shape up here, just as long as no one is forced from their homes, son.” He'd called Richard “son.” Bert is one sharp cookie, instinctively zeroing in on his Achilles' heel, Richard's lingering hunger for his own dead father. It was a vote of confidence and a warning, and Richard vows to heed it, at least as long as it is possible and prudent to do so.

He suddenly feels a light, pulsating pressure on his shoulder, right where Bert had touched him more firmly; it is like the massaging fingers of a Japanese hostess, featherlike, goose-bump-giving, reverberating through his bones with a dangerous chill racing through his synapses and up to his teeth. He whirls around—it had been imprudent for him, a well-dressed white guy carrying a computer, to wander through the projects. What an imbecile! Is it the dude with the muscles? Richard is instantly in fight-or-flight mode, adrenaline pumping. It takes only a second to realize his situation and laugh out loud. This will be the last time he hears his own laughter in weeks.

The tremor he feels is his BlackBerry, once again set on vibrate. He'd shoved it into his interior sport jacket pocket after Lizzie's earlier call, and that pocket is now resting on his shoulder.

He reaches in and pulls out the phone. Clicks On without bothering to verify the caller and says, “I'm on my way. I'll be home in ten minutes, honey.”

There is silence on the line.

“I want you to be an asshole,” Lizzie says.

In all the years he has known her, Richard has never heard Lizzie sound like this before. Harsh, strategic, uncompromising. Like she is declaring war. Like she is declaring war on anyone and everyone who has threatened their child. Like he, Richard, is the general who has to fight it.

I want you to be an asshole.

Richard thinks back, back to all the years when Lizzie wanted him
not
to be an asshole, when she questioned his humanity, worried that life and work were changing him, making him hard, turning him cold. Where was the caring, compassionate visionary she'd married? she'd ask him wryly from time to time. Then she'd gently nudge him back on track. It was one of the reasons he'd picked her: she made him a better person. Who will Richard be if Lizzie, of all people, gives him permission to be an animal? Without her reining him in, how far will Richard go?