This Beautiful Life (5 page)

There was no denying it, not in the moment nor later in guilty hindsight. Liz was a cranky, disheveled, hungover person when she walked back into her kitchen to make coffee. She was a person who wasn't sure if she'd just spent the evening before giving her young daughter a fairy-tale night to remember or if she'd ruinously inflated the kid's expectations for life. She was a person who, if you'd put a gun to her head at that moment, wouldn't have been able to recall the subtitle to her own dissertation. The title was “Modernism in Flight,” that much she knew. She'd struggled mightily over it, worried at the time that she might box herself into one academic category or another, when her interests and passions were numerous. It was an art historian's study of the set and costume designs of the Ballets Russes. Liz had received her PhD in “modern thought.” At the time, her dissertation had distinguished itself because she'd focused on the synthesis of art, design, and dance in a new and radical way. But now she couldn't remember the subtitle. For some reason this very question had popped into her mind during the cab ride home. What was it? She couldn't remember. She couldn't remember the opening line. She was struggling with this, she was struggling to remember the opening line to the dissertation she herself had written so many years before, so many lifetimes ago it felt like whatever it was she had written back then must have come out of someone else's mind, a mind that had been siphoned out of her body, leaving the scaffolding behind. She simply wasn't in mom-mode that morning. She felt done with all that; she'd had enough. Liz's antennae regrettably were not up.

Not up at all.

Jake entered the room just as she put the teapot on the stove to boil. He was still in last night's Coldplay T-shirt and his flannel pajama pants. They were too short. She'd bought them long five weeks before, but his newly hairy ankles were now poking out the bottom. So he'd made it home in one piece. He hadn't needed her. He was fine.

“Did you have a good time last night?” she asked him, as he opened the refrigerator and scanned its insides.

She could see the wings of his shoulder blades through his T-shirt. She could see the bicep of his right arm flex as he held the refrigerator door wide open, letting all the cool air pour out. Jake was a beautiful boy, growing too fast, with hairy ankles, and she loved him. Probably she loved him too much. He'd told her that once when he was small. “Really, Jake?” she had said. “I really love you too much?” He'd noted her pain, he always noted it—she was unfair like that—and he said, “Too much love is better than enough.” Taking pity on her. She loved him too much, but she could not think about him now.

“Yeah, I guess so,” Jake said, as he lifted out the milk gallon and brought it to his lips. “I guess I had a good time, yeah.” There was a little red string with some beads on it wrapped around his wrist. It looked silly, like something Coco might wear, but maybe not.

Liz didn't have the strength to yell at him. Shut the door. Don't waste energy. Use a glass! She didn't have the wherewithal to question his noncommittal answer. She turned off the gas under the kettle, reconsidering whether she would be able to tolerate the whistle. That stupid French press. What she wouldn't give for a Mr. Coffee now.

Jake took a long slug of milk and put the container back inside. He turned to her then, this boy, her boy; he looked straight at her, his green eyes burning with something. Humiliation? Anxiety? Confusion? There was bait there, but she did not rise.

He did not say, “Hey, Mom, can I talk to you about something?” He did not sit down at the table and wait for her to sit down next to him, all motherly concern and skill, to carefully draw whatever it was out of him, as she had done so many times before. None of these things happened.

Instead, Liz said, “All right, then, Mom's got a hangover,” and sidled past him.

“Way to go, Mom,” Jake said, in a voice that was at the same time too soft and still too hearty, like white bread with too many additives in it. But she didn't notice, she didn't notice until she examined and reexamined the whole morning under a microscope in retrospect, and she made her way into her bedroom to sleep off Coco's party. The bed was made, of course. That motherfucker, perfect Richard, had perfectly made it. Liz unmade it, pulled off her pants, unhooked her bra, and slid it out of one of her shirtsleeves like she used to do at sleepovers or that one summer she went to camp. Then she slipped her body between the covers, which were cool and tightly bound to the bed. Richard was probably already at the office—where else would he have gone? He'd probably run a million laps around the reservoir, showered, changed, and headed uptown to his office like he did every single Saturday morning since they'd moved here.

Last night, both of Elizabeth Bergamot's children had had parties to go to. Bad mother Liz! She'd chaperoned the wrong one. She was going to mommy prison. Literally, she was.

3

T
here was a girl he
liked
liked. Her name was Audrey.

Audrey was in his grade, but as with almost everyone else at school, she was older. She had short, sleek, dark hair, thick and lustrous, black as an oil slick. It dripped perfectly down around her perfect head, like a shiny onyx globe. Audrey's hair was cut so that it hung straight and glossy and curled under just at the tips of her earlobes, like two commas, strangely sexual, tiny clefts; it was that little swing that made it girl's hair, not boy's hair, and it was the swing—more of a sway, really, an undulation,
a quaver
—that drove Jake crazy.

Jake thought Audrey's haircut made her look French, although he had no idea really what that meant—he'd been to Italy a bunch of times, but not to France; he had an aunt who lived there, in Rome. When he went to Italy he liked to pretend he was Italian; he liked to eat a lot, and the food was
so
good. His aunt Michelle would let him drink wine and ride around on her Vespa, which drove his mother nuts. Audrey was Chinese, like his sister. Which was why she was old for their grade; most of the foreign-born adopted kids ended up old for their grade, while Jake was young to begin with, young at least for the city. He overheard his best friend Henry's mom say to his own mother one night: “In New York, we keep boys in preschool until they're shaving.” The two women had been gabbing together over a glass of wine at Jake's house. They were a little looped. Mom-looped. Henry had been there, too; his mom had stopped by ostensibly to drag him home, and he'd been rolling his eyes at Jake over both their moms' heads all evening, because it was his mom, not Henry, who kept on staying. Henry's mom, Marjorie, had poured herself another round and gone on to imitate her kids' preschool ex–missions director through pursed lips: “ ‘Truth be told, boys this age are a bit Neanderthal. To get them into a first-tier kindergarten, we must wait until their neurological systems have had a chance to mature.' ” This cracked Jake's mom up. The whole scene made Jake's mom laugh, except when it made her shake her head. But then she seemed lonely these days and had been drinking wine, so almost anything could elicit either response, and Henry's mom
was
funny. (In his mind's eye, when Jake heard the term “ex–missions director,” he had imagined a little redbrick schoolhouse emitting a chain of small children in a series of puffs—like smoke rings—up into the sky through the chimney while some old lady stood outside cracking a whip.)

When Jake confided to Henry the French part, the part about Audrey looking French,
not the liking-her part
, when he said in a quiet voice as they passed her in the hallway one day after lunch that there was something about Audrey Rosenberg that seemed a little bit French, Henry whistled low and then whispered in Jake's ear with hot Dorito breath,
“Chinois
.
”

Jake Googled the word later, after school, when he was home alone, in his room with the door shut. It meant some kind of cookware, but it was also the French term for “Chinese,” and it was the name of a restaurant in Las Vegas. Jake couldn't decide if the use of this word—whispered in the hall at school in a cloud of toxic orange cheesy dust—was hard-core evidence of Henry's ingrained sophistication or absolutely the complete opposite.
Chinois.
That was the problem and the intrigue of Henry as a best friend—the dialectical imbalance of sophistication and its opposite,
dialectical
also being a word of Henry's. But Jake liked words, which was part of why he liked Henry so much. They
used
words together when they talked, and words almost became their secret language, because they didn't sound like all the others. But
Chinois
. The feel of the lexeme unspoken in his mouth suited Audrey. (
Lexeme
was Jake's word; he'd looked it up, when he was sick of the word
word
for all the glittery multifaceted, polished gems that he and Henry excavated from the broken surface of the concrete world, now on an almost daily basis, in a kind of tournament of kindred spirits and my-dick-is-bigger-than-thou's.)
Chinois.
Exotic, diaphanous,
erotic
—another of Henry's favorites, as in “that babe is
e-ro-tic
,” as he chose to refer to any girl in a too-short skirt. There was nothing sluttish about the word
Chinois
. It seemed sort of upper-class. Sensual. Concupiscent. Whatever it was, it was the right word for Audrey.

Most of the kids in Jake's grade traveled in groups. Like they had in Ithaca. Like they probably did everywhere, throughout history, throughout time. His mother said it was just that way when she was a kid, too. Like on TV or in the movies. Jocks with jocks, stoners with stoners, kids in bands, robotics geeks, chess nerds, some intermingling of the various categories—because these kids also prided themselves on their grades, their after-school stuff, teams and instruments and theater and politics and volunteering; they all volunteered or invented stuff scientifically; they spoke Chinese, but Jake didn't and his sister was. Jake's mother made her study Mandarin, but no one else in the family spoke a word of it, not even enough to order in a restaurant. The kids at school who didn't speak Chinese spoke Japanese or Hebrew, or they studied Latin and ancient Greek. Jake took Spanish. His dad was from California, and all his cousins on his dad's side were in Spanish-immersion programs; he took it so they could talk to each other at Christmas, behind their parents' backs.

There were very few couples at his school. Kids hooked up all the time, at parties, between classes, in cars or on the campus grounds, in the woods. They weren't in couples, though, mostly; they did not “go out.” But Audrey was part of a couple; her boyfriend's name was Luke, and sometimes they would walk through the Humanities Building at school holding hands, or Luke would steer her by her elbow through the swarms of students like she was under arrest or something, or he'd grab her by her wrist and pull her along like a kite—she was so light she looked like she might lift off the ground. It was almost as if Audrey had to take little leaps just to keep up with him—maybe that's why she wore those shoes every day in the spring, those little gold ballet slippers, so she could skim the ground, two quick elastic steps, a double dash to Luke's single stride. In the winter she wore pink UGGs ironically, as if they were a joke, and every so often she wore big black, clunky Doc Martens. Sometimes Luke swung her up into the air and behind him, like they were jitterbugging or they were in
West Side Story
, so that her legs in those Doc Martens wrapped around his waist and Luke gave her piggyback rides. Luke was tall and blond, really big. He was good-looking like a guy on TV might be. He had that kind of jaw, the good-looking-guy jaw. He seemed older; maybe he
was
older. Henry said he'd gone to some fancy school for dyslexic kids up in Westchester before he transferred to Wildwood and they held him back a year. Since he was probably older to begin with—everyone at Wildwood was older, the boys were all older, kids at private school were intrinsically older—this made Luke
really
old, which probably accounted for the fact that he had strawberry blond stubble on his face most of the time, and once in a while he must have had to shave.

Luke wore T-shirts like everyone else at school, and flannel shirts in winter, but you could kind of imagine him in a suit someday, with short hair—his hair was long now, just past his ears, longer than Audrey's. You could kind of imagine him as a suit guy being an asshole. Audrey was slender, and not too tall. Jake didn't like to think about them being together much; Luke was so big, almost anything Jake could imagine them doing, even a hug or a friendly wrestle, involved Luke crushing her.

At night, the Manhattanites from the hill schools hung out in Manhattan on Park Avenue. All the kids from all the other schools—the city schools, East Side and West, the private school kids, the public school kids, the Hunter kids—they'd walk up and down Park Avenue, forming and reforming into groups, smoking and laughing too loud, looking for something to do. They were too young for the good stuff, still. Soon. Soon there would be clubs and music and bars, and even now there could be movies, but instead, they hung out on Park Avenue. Jake had just started hanging out at night, with his cell phone on vibrate in his front pocket; it was the only way his mom would let him go out. Riverdale was a whole new story; she hadn't wanted him on the subways alone or on the West Side Highway with some driver she hadn't met; she had to
know
the mom, she said—until last week, on his half birthday. Then she was forced by her own sense of fairness (Jake's mom was fair, he'd give her that) to let him be truly free. When he was in Manhattan, he'd take the bus across the park with Henry and Henry's twin, James, guys who lived in his hood—his mom liked him to travel in groups—and the three of them would meet up with McHenry, Davis, and Django. They were a crew. Henry had brought Jake in. The first week of school, Henry gave Jake the once-over and said, “You look cool,” which saved him so much social misery; it was such an awesome thing for Henry to do, to size him up like that and bring him in, Jake figured he owed Henry his left nut or sympathetic karma for life. Maybe even money.

Sometimes Henry and James and Jake walked across the park at night, smoking cigarettes, and then they'd meet McHenry there, in the middle. He had this thing about this one particular park bench at the Big Circle. There was a plaque on it for his dead grandfather, the one who had made “all the money the rest of us live off of ” in banking or something, and McHenry liked to sit on that bench and blow a joint. Every single time he fired one up and sucked the smoke in, he'd say in a strangled breath, “This one's for you, Pops,” before passing the joint to James. Jake and Henry didn't smoke pot. They liked to play ball. Basketball. Henry liked to board. Ultimate Frisbee. That kind of stuff. They smoked cigarettes, once in a while. They weren't addicted or anything. They just sort of enjoyed it. It was cool in the park at night. At night the park felt a little bit menacing in a way that made Jake feel powerful just for being there. Like the sight of the four of them hanging out together was scary to someone else.

On Park Avenue, they'd stand around on the sidewalks in groups. Sometimes they'd head to a party. Other times, if no one was home at someone's apartment, all the kids would go there and they'd drink and listen to music and play video games and some of the kids would hook up. He was always in strangers' apartments, Jake. He was a new kid, so most of them were strange to him anyway, but a lot of the kids invited a lot of kids to these parties.

That's how you ended up making friends outside your school. People said, “Eli's folks are in Nantucket. Wanna come?” People said, “There's this Trinity dude whose parents said we could hang out on their terrace,” and then a whole bunch of them would head over to the address someone shouted out and whatever doorman would let them up. Some of the apartments where these ad hoc parties were held were awesome—most were, really, because they were hanging on Park Avenue on the East Side—but some were small, too, like when there'd been a divorce, or a single mother and the kid was adopted or sperm-banked or whatever. Lesbians. Even on the East Side, lesbian parents tended to have smaller apartments.

All this easy come and go between kids who didn't know each other made the city feel small, and Jake liked that; he came from a small town and it made him feel comfortable. It also probably helped with hookups, because it was always easier to hook up with someone you didn't have to see the next day at school or the day after that and whom you could cross Park Avenue to avoid if you had to—Park Avenue had two lanes with convenient little islands in the middle, these natural barriers if you needed a bulwark of protection.

When they didn't go up to someone's apartment, they used the steps of the museum to smoke pot or drink beers. If they didn't smoke pot or drink, they stayed on Park Avenue. Mostly they walked around, calling out to one another, “S'up. S'up.” It was rhetorical, not ever a question. Nothing was up, usually, unless something was. They were kids; they were terminally looking for something to do.

Audrey was never on Park Avenue. She lived in Riverdale, near school. So did Luke. Jake could only imagine what they did together in the woods by Luke's house or in his basement. He didn't like to think about it.

The kids who lived in Riverdale or nearby, in Cedar Knolls or Bronxville, if they had cars, if they had learner's permits, or if they had cool parents, they hung out at each other's houses, or in the woods near school. Some of them rode bikes, like he used to do at home. Audrey didn't look like the kind of girl who rode bikes. She wore those little gold ballet slippers to school and black jeans so narrow and straight they looked like tights. She was so hip, Audrey. She had such small ankles. She wore black eyeliner that matched her black eyes and that short swing of black hair, that slash that curled under her ear. How did she get so stylish? She was adopted. Was she found wrapped in a newspaper, like his sister was, in the doorway to some orphanage? Did she just have hip genes in her DNA? Was there some
something
that made her cool here in Riverdale and that would have made her cool, too, back in China? Or only here? How did she know to wear those straight, narrow black jeans and those gold ballet slippers? The little golden band of her skin, those ankles! Like bracelets between pants and shoes. The Doc Martens in winter? With those skinny long legs, the Doc Martens made her look like she wore space boots.

Audrey's wrists looked like a sparrow's rib cage; that's what always flashed through Jake's mind when he saw Luke grab her in the hall, encircling her little wrist with his great big paw of a hand. Ouch, you'll break the little bird's little rib cage. That's what he thought, as Luke grabbed and pulled her along through the halls. They were one of their grade's only couples, so the waters parted. They were kind of special. Like a king and a high priestess. Soaring above the rest because they alone had found love.