This Beautiful Life Read online

  When they finally arrived at the hotel—a mildly chastened Coco and her thoroughly castigated guardian—it took a moment to spy the three little girls and their mothers in the pink, frondy Palm Garden, hidden behind the harpist. The girls were balancing on their knees on the Louis XIV chairs, using their thumbs to lick whipped cream off their plates, while the ladies picked at the remainders of their tea sandwiches at a neighboring table. Above them, palm trees soared like giraffe parasols, all long necks and sporadic splayed leaves. There were little potted pink azaleas in marble urns throughout the room, lending the inhabitants a youthful, rosy glow, even the smattering of Park Avenue dowagers and a rather large, boisterous group of women of a certain age, all wearing red hats and purple dresses. At the girls’ table, Juliana was sporting an Egyptian collar of Mardi Gras beads and a feather boa; Clementine, the future poet, was staring dreamily at the harpist; and a little blonde Liz assumed was Kathy was sorting through a pile of geegaws and feathers. Coco took one look at the booty and hightailed it over there, left hand already outstretched, reaching for the gold.

  At the grown-up table, directly below a huge, glittery chandelier, Casey was inclining her head toward Sydney, Clementine’s mother, a tall, angular woman with attenuated features and a long, narrow, wedge-shaped head. With her closely cropped dark hair and wide-set ears, she looked like a purebred Siamese cat, sleek in her black cashmere leggings and feather-light sweater. The woman who must have been Liz’s new best friend, Marsha, sat on Casey’s other side, slathering clotted cream and jam on the remainder of a scone. She had shoulder-length center-parted brown hair, and wore mom jeans; she had already begun to let herself go. Why was Liz surprised? Casey had described her as “down-to-earth.” Parenthood made strange bedfellows—there was no other moment in time that these four women would ever have spent an entire evening together. Yet, there was a happy buzz to the group, thank God. Liz could feel its vibrato as she approached. All that sugar, plus what looked like two bottles of champagne still sweating in their ice buckets next to the table, had created a lovely cloud of conviviality.

  “Hey, ladies,” Liz said, stepping in, it seemed, on the heels of what must have been the punch line of something hilarious.

  The mommies looked up from their laughter with just-woken-up surprise. Perhaps they’d forgotten that Liz and Coco were joining them.

  “What did that old bitch have to say?” asked Casey, by dint of greeting. She had the happy, drunken sheen in her eyes, like a coat of clear nail polish smeared across her blue irises, of a hostess at a successful party.

  “She sent us to see Jane Perskey,” Liz said.

  Liz and Coco had spent a half hour waiting on an old blue velvet sofa outside the headmistress’s office and a half hour on the newish burgundy velveteen sofa inside the office staring at the headmistress’s porcelain pig collection. “I’ve never seen so many pig tchotchkes in my life.”

  “Oh my God,” gasped Casey. “We sent Jane a Limoges pig when we were trying to get Jules into the school. As a Christmas bribe. She had it returned to us that very day, with a firm no-thank-you note. It came by car and driver. I was mortified, but they took Jules anyway.” Casey sipped her champagne. “We were lucky. Juliana ERB’d off the charts, and my husband is a legacy. They had to take her.” The ERB: the Educational Records Bureau exam kids took to qualify for kindergarten admissions. Luckily, the university had lent a hand in finding spaces for both Liz’s kids and paying their tuition—it was almost impossible to get into these schools without pull. Marjorie had told Liz this much. That she was lucky. But it was evident.

  “She got called into Perskey?” Sydney said, laughing. “Good for her. She must have transgressed royally to get inside the inner sanctum.”

  Well, yes. This time Coco had displayed such an outstanding array of bad behavior, a virtual peacock’s tail of criminal activity, that Mrs. Livingston had washed her hands of her and sent Coco to the principal’s office. So much for progressive education.

  Or rather, so much for the synthesis of the very best of progressive and traditional pedagogy as manifested by the Wildwood Plan, Liz thought.

  Here was today’s list of transgressions: (1) Coco had pushed another girl by accident (maybe) down the stairs on her hell-bent journey to gym, resulting in blood (both elbows); (2) she’d started a water fight in the boys’ bathroom; but, worst of all, (3) at the end of the day, during free time, she’d hopped up onto Mrs. Livingston’s desk in the front of the classroom and said, “Nobody play with Juliana.” That’s right, the birthday girl, and their hostess for the evening, the one whose mother—thanks to the health insurance plans of several third-world dictators—was footing the hotel bill. Why would Coco B. do such a thing?

  Liz asked her this (sans the initial) in front of the somewhat bemused, seen-it-all headmistress, Jane (that the teacher was addressed as Mrs. and the headmistress by her first name was just another example of Wildwood’s nuanced eclecticism). Apparently Juliana had cheated in musical chairs. According to Coco—Coco with her heightened sense of social justice—cheating was for cheaters, especially when Coco didn’t win.

  “But she’s the birthday girl,” Liz said. “Coco, you don’t ostracize a kid on her birthday.”

  It was decided that Coco would write Juliana a letter of apology that she could mail through the school’s post office—a unit that effectively combined mathematics, art, and the social sciences, and was a perfect method of keeping track of who was popular and who wasn’t by charting the number of letters sent and received, so it was also a unit on statistics. The fact that Coco knew only half her letters, and the ones she could accurately identify were often formed facing the wrong direction or sleeping on their tummies, didn’t matter. She could use kindergarten spelling, said Jane. Even with this caveat, the whole endeavor would take hours of their weekend time at home. Coco hated to sit. She hated to write. She loathed apologizing. All this clucking and coaxing, back and forth between Liz and seen-it-all Jane—they sounded like a dovecote of cooing birds, a scripted dovecote—plus Liz’s feeble attempts at being smart and funny and supportive in front of a discerning audience, and trying to appear publicly and sufficiently horrified by her daughter’s errant behavior when she secretly found it sort of humorous, was finally enervating. By the time they left Casa Jane (that’s what the enamel hand-painted sign outside of Jane’s office read; when pressed, she admitted to winning it in a dance contest at Club Med Turks and Caicos after her divorce), Liz needed a martini.

  How lucky she was that she was now regaling a bunch of drunken mothers with her tales out of school at the Palm Court of the Plaza Hotel, where it was easy enough to procure a drink. Grey Goose, heavy on the olives. Which Liz would ask for, as soon as she could grab the waiter’s attention. After glancing furtively at the kids’ table—Juliana and Coco were performing a charming tango together to the angel-winged rustlings of the harp—she sank back in her chair in relief, for it didn’t seem that Juliana held any of Coco’s misbehaviors against her. She was a good kid, Juliana.

  Sydney called the waiter over. “Enrique, could you get our friend Liz here a drink?” And then quietly to Liz, “Honey, you look like you could use one.”

  Liz mouthed a silent thank-you.

  “My pleasure, madam,” said Enrique, an elderly man in uniform, who possessed a studied European elegance.

  “He loves us,” Casey whispered loudly. “We had two tins of caviar before you got here.” And then, “Do you like caviar? I can order another.”

  “I could eat ten more of these scones,” said Marsha. “But I shouldn’t.”

  “No, no, but thank you,” said Liz. “I just need alcohol, preferably intravenously.”

  “We can always have more sent up to the room,” said Casey. “Caviar. Champagne. My husband called from Dubai this morning and told me to go crazy. He said, ‘What the hell, enjoy yourselves; we’re not throwing a bat mitzvah.’ ” She laughed.

  “Oh my God,” said Sydney. “I have four
kids in Hebrew school. I’m planning on robbing a bank. I’ve even joined the celebrations committee . . . so we all don’t book conflicting dates. With my oldest daughter, we had to register her party in the fourth grade; that’s three years in advance.” She drained her glass. She lifted it and said, “Champagne me,” and Casey, laughing, emptied the last inch or two from both bottles into Sydney’s flute.

  Liz reclined on the pink Louis XIV chair across from the harpist in her flowing gown, next to a gilt-edged marble column beneath the tall palm trees and potted pink azaleas, and began to feel like a human being. Here in the pretty hotel lobby, her daughter pleasantly occupied, her husband and son out of sight and out of mind, it was almost as if she were on vacation—away, away, in a resort somewhere. Where, who knew? Palm Beach? There was something old-ladyish about this place, in an appealing way. It was the job-well-done, now-you-can-relax-in-a-hammock-of-sea-breezes-and-social-graces ambience. The idyllic pink flamingo’d Florida of her soul.

  Enrique returned with the fixings for Liz’s drink on a tray and it looked so good—little pearls of condensation dripping down the sides of the elegant silver shaker, proof positive of the icy cold elixir inside—that she almost wept. The martini was expertly shaken and poured, and it perfectly met the edge of the glass. Liz had to hover like a hummingbird over it to take that first welcome sip. From that angle she noticed that the carpet was fraying. As she raised her eyes to sea level she saw that Enrique’s uniform was faded. Even the harpist’s skin looked worn under her pancake makeup. Sydney’s pink satin seat cushion sported a few shiny stains. Looking up, she saw that the leaves of the sun-deprived palm trees were dotted with urban blight.

  They were shutting down the hotel. It had been neglected and had gone to seed. The pleasures it had once provided were being chipped away by the ticking clock. For a few giddy moments, she had forgotten why they were there. Something was ending.

  “This is delicious, Enrique, thank you,” she said. “How much longer will the hotel be open?

  “We close soon,” he said. “Nobody knows for sure.”

  “That’s so sad,” said Marsha.

  “I’ve worked here thirty-five years,” said Enrique, his dark eyes liquid and wide. “They say they will bring the Palm Court back, but once it is gone . . .”

  The ladies looked at him. No one knew exactly what to say.

  “Oh, sure they can!” said nice Marsha. “Perhaps it’ll be even better. New and improved, you know?”

  “Two years is a long time to wait for work,” said Enrique. “They want me to take early retirement. But I’m not sure . . .” With the look of a man who had violated his own sense of dignity, he shrugged. “What can you do?”

  Another beat of silence.

  “Drink,” said Casey, in nervous hostess mode, clearly anxious to dispel the gloom. “Enrique, please bring us another bottle.” Then, with a flirty smile: “This time with an extra glass for you.”

  “In that case, I bring two,” said Enrique.

  And the ladies laughed.

  It was five a.m. and Liz couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t sleep because Coco couldn’t sleep. She was too wired from all the room service—chicken tenders and brownie sundaes, all that fat and sugar and artificial everything making her tawny skin glow orange and her diminutive aura buzz—and Liz, poisoned as well, grown-up poisoned, was hungover and crashing, so dehydrated her tongue felt like parchment paper she had to peel off the roof of her mouth. She hadn’t drunk this much, she thought, since high school.

  Mother and daughter had been sprawled out side by side on the king-size bed watching videos for hours. This newest period of respite came after an initial phase of screen time, from eleven p.m. to three a.m., when Coco was mostly jumping on the bed and Liz was curled up in a fetal position on the carpet. Progress has been made, Liz thought. It was a thought that comforted her. She had now crawled her way up off the floor and onto the bed; she was presently sitting up, sort of, her head and neck leaning against the headboard at a bizarre, but not nauseating, angle. It was five o’clock in the morning. It said so on the digital clock’s glowing green dial, and the numbers echoed with a sick-making pulse on her inner lids when she shut her eyes, so she knew that this was true.

  Luckily, each mother-daughter team had been assigned its own bedroom in the “Tony Soprano Suite,” which Casey had rented, she’d said, for a song. It wasn’t actually called the Tony Soprano Suite, of course, but that is how Sydney referred to it when they first swung open the doors, and since then, that’s how Liz thought of it. Because they each had their own rooms, Liz was able to keep the door shut and the volume down at the Bergamot end of the hall, enough to allow the other ladies and their daughters a little shut-eye. Marsha and Kathy were one door down; Clementine and Sydney, the next bedroom over. All three rooms overlooked Fifth Avenue and the little plaza with the fountain in it at the entrance to the hotel—the Plaza’s plaza. Then, at the corner of Fifty-ninth Street, the suite and the hotel both hung a left and the hall opened up into a massive L-shaped living room, half of which overlooked Central Park. A long, ornate dining room glided along Fifty-ninth Street heading toward Sixth Avenue, followed by the master bedroom and bath, all with large windows with picture-perfect park views, like grand landscapes hanging in a gallery. This central part of the suite looked exactly like the one Tony Soprano had once rented in a dream sequence, Sydney swore to it (Liz had never seen the show; motherhood had robbed her of her taste for violence), and Liz believed her. It was thickly overdone. All gilt and gold, the chandeliers simply ridiculous, and the furniture overstuffed. The bathroom in the main bedroom—Juliana and Casey’s—was a two-unit affair: double sink, toilet, shower, and bidet in a room the size of a studio apartment; and in the other, an enormous tub was raised up on a marble stage like a giant cake stand. It faced a floor-to-ceiling glass window that, of course, overlooked the park. The ceiling of this bathtub room was domed and adorned by a rococo extravaganza of fat little painted cherubim. At one point in the evening, all the real little cherubim had ended up in this Jacuzzi together, first with their clothes on and then naked, dressed only in soap bubbles—all at Coco’s behest.

  But first came the pedicures.

  “We don’t pay those Korean women enough,” Sydney had said with a little wink at Liz, rising to her feet and passing the petal pink polish to Marsha. It had been a rollicking evening. The mothers swapped sex stories while the little girls gave each other makeovers, heavy on the eye makeup, until they looked like miniature Russian whores. It was at some point after that that Coco had managed to get them all, even the reticent Clementine, into the giant tub, into which she had poured all the in-house bubble bath. All this decadent beauty reminded Liz of the sprites at the Allée d’Eau, at Versailles, the wet, shiny, prepubescent girls flipping and flopping among the bubbles like baby seals, their mothers ringed around the bathroom sipping their champagne and wondering when exactly their own youth had abandoned them.

  Then there’d been the pay-per-view movies—kid stuff for the kids—and more mommy talk. It turned out that Sydney had been a campaign consultant in her former incarnation. “Nobody who ever won,” she said, dryly. “Gary Hart, talk about the winner’s touch.” But still, thought Liz, that must have been exciting. “That must have been exciting,” she said, and Sydney’s eyes misted for a moment. “It was really fun,” she said, “the camaraderie, the sense of purpose. It was sort of great to have a mission . . . but I got married, I had kids,” and here she leaned over—her shy little girl was sitting on the floor with the rest of the kids watching Herbie Fully Loaded—and lovingly gathered Clementine’s hair into a shiny ponytail, wrapping it around and around her fist. “Now the four of them are my mission,” Sydney said, giving Clementine’s head a little kiss before releasing the long silky locks in an uncoiling twist, and Liz noted, not for the first time, that someday little Clementine would be a great beauty.

  The women talked and talked. They talked about the schools, the cam
ps, the real estate, until Liz thought her head would shoot off her neck, and then, one by one, the girls faded. Like tulips on fragile stalks, they began to bend and nod on the couches in the living area until their grateful mothers carried them off to bed. It was so hard to be with other people, it was hard on everyone, be they social creatures or not; it was such a relief to retire into seclusion, the bacchanal officially over. That is, all except for Coco, who seemed to grow more wound up and animated the more exhausted she became.

  Now it was five o’clock in the morning, and Coco still did not sleep.

  “When I was a child, there was no twenty-four-hour Cartoon Network,” said Liz, but Coco couldn’t have cared less. There was one now.

  “Let’s turn it off for a while,” Liz said, with a little moan. She flipped over too fast and her brain sloshed from side to side within her skull, like water in a sinking rowboat in the middle of a rough, turbulent sea.

  “What will we do now, Momma?” asked Coco.

  Sleep, thought Liz. We could sleep. “Coco, we could sleep, baby,” she said.

  “I’m not tired,” said Coco. She didn’t look like she was. Her black eyes were shining. Her skin was the delicious caramelized brown of a butterscotch cookie. She was a great-looking kid. Her birth mother must have been gorgeous. Liz wished she could send her a postcard, right here, right now, with Coco’s picture on it. Liz hoped it would give her comfort. The desperate woman, who had left newborn Coco in the orphanage doorway in a threadbare nightie, umbilicus still attached, wrapped in newspapers to keep her warm.