This Beautiful Life (13 page)

But it is ridiculous to fight this battle now, Richard will lose, he sees that he will lose, so it makes no sense to make his case. Better to lie low for a week or two, until Jake is exonerated, or whatever. Until it's out of the papers. But how will he get it offline? There should be a service to suck this kind of stuff out; he'll look into that. Until the school starts behaving like a school. Until the legal questions are resolved—when will that be? Until the girl's family moves away in disgrace, the way teenage girls' families have had to do throughout history. As Lizzie had said the night before half-jokingly, “Don't they know their role?” Richard's got a firm grasp on what it is he needs to do. To save his son. To save himself, he must at least for now give up the job he loves.

“I read you loud and clear, Mike. Thanks for being so up-front. I'll be in touch,” he says and then he hangs up.

I
t's not late enough in the day for a drink, but Richard pours himself one anyway. He keeps a bottle of Laphroaig in his bottom drawer, for late nights, for victory celebrations, for once in a while. He reaches into the drawer and pulls out the bottle and his glass. He pours himself two fingers. It is sort of amazing that it has taken him this long to do what he is finally about to do.

It's not that he is incurious.

Richard goes to the outer office and shuts and locks the department door. He goes back into his office and locks the inner door from the inside. This is not something to be done at home, and he'd avoided doing it before at work, but soon Richard won't have the office to go to, and his assistant is out—lucky her, she's had a long-standing dental appointment. No one will bother him with the door shut anyway. Everyone feels too sorry for him at this point to intrude. These days they're all exceedingly polite and formal, cautiously avoiding him.

Richard takes out his laptop—no way would he download this on his desktop. He'd downloaded the video that very first evening after he'd gotten home, before it was pulled from so many of the sites, before it was listed online and off as child pornography, illegal, a criminal activity simply to click on, but he hasn't had the heart to actually watch the thing. Lizzie watched it. In the head of school's office at Wildwood with Jake by her side—O'Halloran had loved this tidbit, what a lack of judgment on Threadgill's part!—and then again and again on her computer at home at night. She couldn't get over it. She'd told Richard every salacious little detail: the shaved pudenda, the rolls of baby fat—a “muffin top,” she'd called it. He'd felt like he'd already seen the performance. But because of some peculiar, sideways sense of honor, Richard just couldn't bring himself to turn it on. Daisy had made the video for Jake; she had not made the video for him.

Although now that Richard has risked and lost so much, it just seems practical to understand what it has all been for.

He sits at his desk. He sips his scotch. He clicks on the file.

It starts.

The bleached hair, the pierced ears, the kilted mini, the schoolgirl-whore. The taunt. “Still think I'm too young?” He knows what to expect; he's been briefed. Of course she's too young. She's an infant, a zygote. The tiny breast buds, the raised skirt, a slash and two yeasty rises. Perhaps she hadn't shaved or waxed, Richard thinks irrationally, perhaps she is just prepubescent. His mind turns to his own daughter. Little Coco: elemental, irrepressible, thoughtless, wild. She was not natively blessed with sound judgment, Coco. She followed her heart. He can see her coming out of the bath, her velvety caramel color, the beauty of her naked body, there's nothing erotic about it—Coco is a child. But so pretty. When they first brought Coco home from China, Lizzie said, “Look at her belly, those tiny toes. Look at the arch of her foot. Her ears. They're like mother-of-pearl seashells. She's perfect, Richard.
Even her little vagina.
” She'd said the last part in a whisper, because it was such a secret pleasure, a parent's pleasure, marveling at the singular gorgeousness of their child's genitalia.

Richard turns back to the video. To Daisy. What he feels is close to incredulous. Wasn't she someone's daughter? Hadn't her parents shared a private joy, when she was born, in the miracle of her body? The body she has now displayed without reservation to his ungallant son. And for all the video's dismal raunch, its tawdriness, for all its sexual immaturity and unknowingness, there is something about the way this girl has revealed herself, the way that she has offered herself, truly stripped herself bare, that is brave and powerful and potent and ridiculous and self-immolating and completely nuts. It speaks to him. Is he crazy? He feels crazier in this moment than he has ever felt in his life. He feels touched by it. And because the video is all these things and more, because in some way it is truly the literal essence of what it means to be naked, because this Daisy makes herself completely vulnerable and open and 100 percent exposed, it also breaks Richard's heart.

Has he himself ever been that undefended with someone he loved? With anyone?

The answer is simply no. Richard has never had the courage. He hasn't known how.

For an instant, Richard feels a loss and a yearning so potent that he actually quietly cries out. What he hungers for in the shadow of Daisy's foolish bravery is to break the seal of privacy that surrounds his very core. He wants more than anything else to possess the nerve to make himself known.

He takes another sip of scotch.

Daisy wanted Jake to
know
her. She wanted this desperately, Richard thinks. Was it wrong to crave this kind of union—an erasure of boundaries, a blending of souls—so much so that she was willing to risk all?

Richard does not even genuinely know himself.

This little girl, this
flower
, she was wasting herself, wasting herself on his son. A boy so remarkably dunderheaded that he didn't realize that this gift she made for him, that she gave to him, was too precious and vital to her very survival for him to pass it along like some worthless piece of chain mail.

Who gave Jake the power to seize private property, to expropriate it without the owner's consent? What was wrong with him?

Richard picks up the phone and dials his parents' number. No one answers. He knows no one will answer. No one has answered that number in years. Dad died when Richard was seventeen, too young, too young for Dad, too young for Richard. His mother had passed just before they went to China to bring Coco home—at least Mom had seen Coco's picture, at least she'd met and loved Lizzie, at least she'd had the privilege of watching Jake grow. But right now, all in the world Richard wants is to hear his father's voice. He always had such good advice. His father wasn't educated, and the life they'd lived together, Dad and his mother, all three boys, had been simple and predictable and hard, nothing like the complexity and difficulty Richard faces every day, to be sure, but also without the sophistication and the perks, the travel, the art, the fascinating friends, the powerful circles, the restaurants and vacations and good shoes and artisanal cheese and organic fruit and fine wine, the grace notes that he enjoys at this point as if they were his birthright.

Richard was a golden boy, he is a golden man, but he lacks Dad's wisdom. He knows this to be true. He needs his father's help. There is a part of him that no one, including himself, can access. Could his father help him if he were alive? Is it that missing part of Richard, the thing that Daisy has and he hasn't, that allowed Jake to grow up this blinded? Or was Richard being way too hard on Jake? The way Lizzie said. Were his expectations of Jake and of himself ridiculous? Richard is a grown man with children, but he sure as hell wishes he could talk to his own father. Ask his advice. Where did they go wrong with Jake? What should he do now to help him? How can he rise to this occasion and be the kind of parent that would have made his own father proud? He hangs up the phone. It is no longer a working number. For some odd reason, it has never been reassigned.

The BlackBerry buzzes. O'Halloran.

“I got nowhere with Wildwood's head of legal,” the lawyer says, bypassing an introduction. “So we're going to make a preemptive strike. We're going to make the preliminary motions of filing a suit. Wildwood has arbitrarily and capriciously suspended Jacob for an incident that he did not provoke or ask for, that occurred off school property and on the weekend, when school was not in session, and that is a private matter that the school has irresponsibly made public, causing Jacob irreparable harm. I am going to demand that Wildwood expunge any reference to the scandal from his record and reinstate him in good standing immediately, offering him the proper preceptorial assistance to help make up for the work he's missed, so that he can take his exams on time.”

“Okay,” says Richard, slowly. “Sounds good.”

“And then, if the girl's people file suit, we are going to countersue for slander and entrapment. I've done some research, Richard, and her old man is fucking loaded. He's made a fortune in labels. Calvin Klein. I certainly don't want to slap them with a suit, but I'll tell you what, Jacob could come out of this with a significant college fund.”

“Wow, Sean, I don't know,” says Richard.

“The boy's been wronged, Richard.”

“Yes, but…” says Richard.

“You're the boy's father. You'll do whatever it takes to protect your kid. I'm telling you it's better to be proactive than to be stuck on second playing catch-up.”

O'Halloran continues: “And if someone close to you wants to leak our side of this to the
Observer
or the
Post
, behind your back, without your permission, you know, viewing the video with the boy and his mother in the room, that sort of stuff—horrendous judgment, embarrassingly shameful—well, worse things can happen. Do you understand what I'm saying?”

Richard understands. A shot across Threadgill's bow.

“You love your kid, Richard,” says O'Halloran. “You'll do anything for him.”

This is all true.

Richard's father loved him, too. Dad was a family man. He didn't live so far from the ground. Dad didn't focus on him, he didn't coddle him, he didn't help him with his homework or take his emotional temperature three times a day or do any of the things Richard and Lizzie do now, along with eating and breathing, as a way of life. Dad loved his boys within reason. Dad's was a reasonable, conditional love, the condition being that Richard kept his nose clean, that he always did his best, that he conducted himself with honor.

Richard and Lizzie and the girl's parents, all the other parents at that school—they are both too close to their children and too far away from the ground. They are too accomplished. They have accumulated too much. They expect too much. They demand too much. They even love their kids too much. This love is crippling in its way.

One of his suitemates from Princeton is now the managing editor at a major newsweekly. He'll know exactly where and to whom to leak this story, to an intern or a kid reporter. Someone ruthless and eager and hunting for blood.

It is New York. Everyone instantly goes for the big guns. So Richard goes for the big guns, too.

“Whatever you say, Sean,” says Richard. “I'll do it.”

And so he does.

T
hey meet the next afternoon at the Princeton Club. It has been a while since Richard was inside the building, and he wonders when things got so bad economically that they opened their doors to house the Columbia Club as well. There is a whiff of tackiness about the arrangement. The Harvard Club is what an Ivy League club should be like, Richard thinks, nursing an old sting—he had chosen Princeton over Yale, but he had not made Harvard. Still, this is where his old roommate suggests they meet for drinks. “It will be quiet,” said Paul on the phone.
“Discreet.”
Paul has a lunch at 44 at the Royalton, so this stop will be on his way back to the office. They meet at three p.m. A discreet hour if Richard ever saw one.

The barroom has few customers; he'd forgotten how beautiful it is, with its large, rectangular black marble bar, backlit wine case, and Art Deco tile floors. Throughout the room there are both literal and pictorial references to the school and to the crew team. A wooden scull hangs upside down across the ceiling over the bar. Two guys Richard's age in suits and an older woman in flesh-colored panty hose are drinking highballs on high-back chairs. An elderly man snoozes in a leather seat at a table near the windows, as if in an old
New Yorker
cartoon. Richard walks to the end of the dining area and slides onto the room-width-long black leather banquet that lines the back wall, behind a small wooden table in the corner. A uniformed barkeep comes over with a bowl of snack mix. Richard orders a scotch on the rocks. He nervously ferrets out the honey nuts from the bowl and pops them in his mouth.

Paul is twenty minutes late, so for twenty minutes Richard inspects the large, handsomely framed color photos of the Princeton canal that hang between the windows. He used to run along that canal when he needed a break from studying. In truth, in the four years he spent at the university, he was most at peace alone on that canal, his arms and legs going, his heart pounding in his chest, his breathing deep and steady. Paul has always had a tendency to be late, even back at school, and now he is a very busy man, so Richard is not surprised that he has to wait. He has a drink and a half cooling his heels. The Laphroaig blunts his edges, and he almost forgets for a while why he is there.

So he is momentarily taken aback when Paul finally enters the room. For a second, seeing Paul, in the afternoon this way, seems like a coincidence, a bit of serendipity, a fluke.

Paul stands in the doorway in a dark double-breasted suit, with a light shimmery tie, a cool blue, almost silvery in color; it exudes a phosphorescent glimmer across the barroom like a neon fish underwater. Paul is tall and lean, handsome. He is the first African American ME of his magazine. A media star. He and Richard have always enjoyed a healthyish rivalry (the “ish” is absent Lizzie's input). Back in college, late at night, in the living room of their suite, they would argue over beers “who had it harder,” Paul, the Princeton legacy, with his dark skin and congressman father, or working-class bootstraps Richard.