This Beautiful Life (18 page)

Jake sort of hated her then, even later, too, when she smiled at him.

6

A
s much as he hates the public spectacle of standing outside Wildwood at drop-off—“like a stockade in the town square,” Lizzie said when ceding to him the unhappy task—Richard stands his ground. He waits, bare-legged, exposed in his running shorts and his Astor University T-shirt for all to see, until Coco disappears safely inside the building. She'd wriggled free from his grasping hand and run pell-mell down the block when she saw a group of her little friends milling about the red front doors as they opened, barely tossing her father a goodbye. At least she is eager to go to school, Richard thinks. He ought to be grateful for that.

“Hello, Richard,” a woman says. She has reddish hair pulled back in a ponytail and the wrinkly face of a raisin. She wears yoga pants and a tank top. All the mothers dropping off are in some kind of workout gear; it is their uniform. Except for the ones who are obviously going to work. They wear light-colored suits and pumps, slacks and white blouses and flats. Several have already whipped out their cell phones. One is talking into the air like a madwoman, until Richard spots the telltale earpiece with the long cord like an umbilicus attaching her to her Treo. There are a couple of dads in suits. He is the only male in running shorts. The mom who said hello smiles at him, so he smiles back. It is obviously the right thing to do.

“Good morning,” says Richard. He has no clue who she is, but his tone is friendly. Then he leans over to touch his toes. He stands up and lifts his hands over his head and bends backward in a little stretch, as if he is going to execute a rearward-facing dive. He bounces on the balls of his feet, dipping his heels down below the curb one after the other, pedaling them out to stretch his Achilles'. He gives the red-haired mother a little wave and takes off. He always starts slowly at first, springing off of the sidewalk and into the street, warming his muscles with a preliminary jog. He runs next to the stalled traffic—the SUVs, the cabs, the Town Cars with drivers. The sidewalk is too crowded, parents bent over and kissing, parents admonishing, reminding, chasing after kids with a forgotten project, the backpack that they've been toting and are mindlessly about to carry with them to work. Nannies giving big fat bosomy hugs. It is like a scene at a cruise launch, Richard thinks. Ahead, the park beckons with its cool green leaves and fragrant air. He waits until he has crossed Fifth Avenue, threading his way through the cars and buses to the other side, and glances at his watch only when he enters the track. He will do two loops on the dirt. Most mornings these days he does three or four loops. This business with Jake has had only one silver lining: Richard has really improved his time. He returned to work ten days before, but he keeps running. He works from behind the scenes. His deputy is still officially in command, although Richard makes all the decisions. They have meetings today. The thought makes his heart race. He has to get home and shower and change and groom himself. He has to put on a jacket and tie. Two loops and Richard will hit the asphalt and run the sidewalks on the other side all the way back to his apartment. Running will help temper his frustration and anxiety. He wonders if Lizzie has woken up yet. He hopes so, and he hopes not. He hopes so, because if she is awake, if she is awake and doing things, her malaise may have lifted, and he'll have help. But if she is awake, doing things or not, he'll have to deal with her. For the first time ever, Richard is sick of dealing with his wife.

Richard increases his pace. One foot after the other, his arms chugging him forward like pistons, his breath blessedly even, deep, calm. He loves to run. He's always loved to run. These days he's loved it harder, more intensely, even as he's felt more so every day like he is running on a hamster wheel—where is he running to? He's begun to wonder. Still, he loves the release it brings him. Not mindlessness, like Lizzie talks about with yoga—or is it mindfulness?—no, more like a fluidity and ease entering his thoughts. The running, the breathing, takes the weight off his thinking, which is constant these days and transmits across multiple frequencies simultaneously: Should he resign? How can he get back in? Is this the moment to make his move? How has this happened to him? It is a relief, any amount of time when he isn't a prisoner of his own mind.

The last time Lizzie slept in, day after day, waking with a slack face, bleary, features softened into a haze of pain, was before Coco. Her periods coming month after month, and each time Lizzie, with her intense raised hopes, experiencing this normal bodily function like a miscarriage, a loss. With Jake, it had all been so easy—“Richard, you want to go bareback?” Lizzie had whispered into his ear one night when they were still living in Palo Alto, and even now the memory of it, the memory of the sexiness of it, hit him in the gut. He'd been the one who'd wanted a child right away, which in hindsight seems funny now; she is the one possessed. She wasn't sure, she said; they were so young, she had a career to think of, blah blah blah; later, maybe; they were so happy; didn't they have the right to indulge in that happiness? Lizzie and her equivocating, her dreaming, her torture. But Richard had wanted his own family, he craved the stability, and if they had a child together, he could admit this to himself now, Lizzie would be cemented to him. He'd been afraid of losing her. All the range of feeling, the color, she brought into his life, her moral compass, her clamorous need for him, even her neuroses were at that point still attractive, watching her be alive made him feel alive. He'd envied her her emotional scale. Fixing things for her made him feel strong. And when she was pregnant, when he saw Lizzie naked, belly soaring and round, coming out of the shower, he couldn't help feeling powerful—I put that inside of you, he'd thought, getting high off of it. He couldn't believe his luck. They'd been happy with Jake. Richard moved to the World Bank and then to Cornell, things for him had gone swimmingly, and then, all of a sudden, Lizzie wanted another one. Babies were a little like drugs, he remembered thinking at the time. Jake felt so good, she'd wanted more. Now he wondered, was it just that Jake had been getting older? As Jake grew more independent, was it simply that Lizzie no longer knew what to do with herself ?

Richard veers off the path and up onto the reservoir. He doesn't often go this way, his daily run is usually longer, but he suddenly craves the steely blue shine on the water and the openness of the footpath. He looks reflexively at his watch, but he's forgotten his starting time, which is unlike him. Too many thoughts. Too many thoughts. He quickens his pace anyway; he wants to sweat, he wants to breathe hard and long. He'd felt so badly for Lizzie the last time. She was clearly depressed then; she is clearly depressed now, but at this point he doesn't have time for her depression, and he realizes with a start that he does not feel that bad for her. Oddly he feels bad for himself. They are both parents up against it. He is the one who has had to compromise himself. What has Lizzie lost? His compassion has run out.

“We meet again, Richard,” a woman calls out to him, sort of flirty. She is race-walking, coming from the other direction. Raisin face. There is no privacy here. They might as well live in a fishbowl. Richard gives her a hearty salute as he flies past.

He has too much to do. He has to settle things with the university, one way or another. Fish or cut bait. He has to get back to productive work. He has to support their family. He has to keep Jake on track. He has to provide Coco with a sense of normalcy. Pay the bills, buy the food, do some of the things that are usually on Lizzie's list, until she snaps out of it. He needs to save them from this miasma. Again.

The COO has not said yes and he has not said no to Richard's coming back as spokesman. The COO has been cooling his heels, “consulting with folks,” he said. Consulting with “folks”? Richard wanted to laugh out loud. The COO was born and bred in Boston. The Back Bay. Harvard educated.
Folks
? The story will die down, but is Richard the public face they wanted on the project, when the story could so easily flare up again? “Nothing goes away now, Richard,” the COO said. “Forgetting is over.”

There are seagulls sitting on the surface of the reservoir. They perch one after the other in a straight diagonal line. There must be a sandbar that they are sitting on, Richard thinks. It is not natural for seagulls to sit in a line like that. How did seagulls get there anyway? They are so far away from the sea. Could there be fish living in the reservoir? Nothing makes sense to him. His shirt is soaked with sweat and is stuck to his skin. He pulls it away with his hand but it slaps back and sticks there.

He exits the track on the West Side. He runs on the surface road uptown, in the jogging lane. He'd given Lizzie shots in the butt every day when they were trying to have another baby. He'd helped her take her temperature, had sex when he was too tired, run home from work because she was ovulating. He'd stood on his head next to her, to make her giggle, when she had to invert. He'd held her night after night when she was crying. He'd done the research, brought the articles home for her about all those baby girls in China. He would have done anything for Lizzie then. He wanted to keep them how they were.

He slows down to a jog. He does what he never does. He slows down. There is no hurry to get home, Richard thinks. I have a meeting later, I have to shower, but there's time. There is time now to walk.

When he leaves the park, he stops at a Chino-Latino place on Amsterdam to get a coffee. Decaf, milk, no sugar. Café Nada, they call it. He drinks it as he walks, and little by little the sweat on his shirt dries off.

S
o many parties. And bad form, Richard said, not to attend them all.

“We have to make sure that we always behave correctly,” he told Liz. “There is no margin for error at this point.”

It was just past 9:30. Richard had apparently deposited Coco at school and run his ten miles; undoubtedly he'd also already performed his sit-ups on a mat laid down on the living room rug. He'd showered and finished shaving, when Liz, coffee mug in hand, finally stumbled down the hall to negotiate the strategies of the day. Richard was currently applying lotion to the tender skin where his beard had been. Liz leaned against the doorjamb and sipped; the coffee tasted sour, as if she'd just brushed her teeth, although she hadn't yet. For the new apartment, the COO had promised two full baths, but where did that new apartment exist, on whose list of priorities, now that the university had “concerns”?

Liz yawned. She'd been up late surfing the web and had slept in. She'd missed breakfast with the kids and sending them both off to school. These days, she couldn't seem to shake herself into consciousness; for weeks now, ever since the mess with Jake—or, honestly, could it even have been before that?—she'd felt like she could not force her eyelids open, could not swing her legs over the side of the bed and face the world. This inability to achieve wakefulness seemed somewhat akin to rousing from anesthetics, a subject Liz knew something about: she'd endured five surgical procedures following the secondary infertility that preceded Coco's adoption. Then, like this very morning, she had been an imprisoned sculpture trying to find structure and shape, struggling to escape from a block of marble, captive to her own lethargy. Why get up, she'd thought, before they'd redeployed and gone to China—just to wade into a sea of hopeless hope?

A towel was wrapped around Richard's waist. There were still little droplets of water clinging to the silvering hair on his belly and chest. Once upon a time, and not that long ago, Richard in a towel had been sexy. Kids at school, the apartment to themselves, that sort of thing. But Liz was no longer even sure what “sexy” was, or if it applied to her. “Daisy Up at Bat” had seemingly put an end to all that. Sex as a wild and wooly continent, there to be navigated and explored, had been usurped by her son's contemporaries, just as she supposed she and her cohort had once done to their parents—although perhaps a
tad
less dramatically, Liz thought. Generation after generation of teenagers invading this mysterious and previously “adults only” floating island, laying down the flag of ownership, and declaring the previous inhabitants obsolete. Now it was the kids' turf.

“Thanks for letting me sleep in,” Liz said. “I can't remember the last time I did that.”

Richard raised his eyebrows but said nothing. He opened the medicine chest and reached for his deodorant.

“Everyone get off okay?” she said. “Jakey?”

Richard nodded.

Liz yawned again. He didn't ask her what she'd been up to all night hunched over her computer, and she didn't volunteer.

She put her mug down on the rim of the sink and did a little forward bend, swaying her hips to get out the kinks. In the past, even such a simple pre-yoga stretch might have been enough to draw Richard in, his arms instantly around her waist, his groin pressing against her butt. But Richard hadn't batted one obscenely lush eyelash in her direction since this whole mess with Jake started. Clearly he didn't need to. He whacked off twice daily, it seemed, running through the park.

Oh, who cared? Who cared, but Liz? There were bigger fish to fry, bigger problems to pinball back and forth between and become exhausted by. Like, the 100 percent new and completely foreign hollowness in Jake's eyes. And Richard's bloody, consuming battles at work. Plus there was their altogether shaky standing in the Wildwood community—now, every afternoon at Coco's pickup, Liz felt like a modern-day Hester Prynne. Increasingly, inescapably, she was filled with a desire to flee.

But most urgent of all, according to Richard, were all these end-of-the-school-year parties to attend—so, so many of them. Mostly Coco's. The child Liz had gone all the way to China to seize and neglect. Coco was so little still. So innocent. So spirited—that was a nice word for it—and sweet. Just thinking about her suddenly made Liz's eyes fill. They had been neglecting her. Liz and Richard had tried their best to shield her these last few weeks—although regrettably that had meant more screen time than anything. It had seemed the easiest way to get her out of the room. This weekend, Liz would take her to a museum. They'd bake cookies. She'd ask Coco what she wanted to do. Liz couldn't flee until she lived up to her responsibilities to her daughter, unless the trajectory of her flight was out the window. And Coco had her end-of-the-year music recital this afternoon, dance class performances (Chinese and African and ballet) this Saturday. There was the class science fair tomorrow. The kindergarten end-of-the-year party on Thursday. Also on Thursday was the kindergarten art show (which seemed somewhat anticlimactic coming after the end-of-the-year party, but this was on account of scheduling, the Lower School email had read). The all-school picnic followed “moving-up ceremonies” Friday a.m.—which, thank God, parents weren't allowed to attend—then one of the class mothers was opening her town house for Sunday brunch. Apparently all the town houses on the block shared a giant, lush, rear garden and paid for a communal gardener, and it was lovely this time of year, said the mom—not bragging but stating—especially with the peonies, which Liz imagined to be in full frontal bloom. The call for Liz's correct behavior thus extended through the weekend, even though her whole life she'd always had about a three-hour time limit on being good.