This Beautiful Life Page 4

“What time is it?” asked Liz rhetorically, for she was peering at her wristwatch. “Maybe it’s sunrise time. Coco Louise Mei Ping Bergamot, have you ever seen the sun rise?”

  Coco shook her head no, she never had.

  “Come, we have to tiptoe, shh, shh, quietly,” said Liz and she hoisted herself up on one elbow and then swung her legs over the side of the bed. When she stood, the floor made a rocking motion, in accompaniment to her head, a little like a bongo board before it steadied.

  “Shh, Coco, come,” said Liz.

  “I didn’t say anything,” said Coco, running to her mother and taking her hand.

  “Don’t breathe, baby,” Liz said.

  They tiptoed down the carpeted, dark hall. They made their way into the living room. Streetlights lit up the park below. Liz sat herself in the window seat, and Coco climbed up into her lap.

  Below, the park was dark green velvet with jeweled stitching, streetlights strung along the roads. As they watched, a wave of gray light—dawn, it must be the gray light of dawn, Liz thought—passed over Fifth Avenue and began to spread across the park. Soon half the park was lit, the smoky dark luminescence of morning, and the other half was still inversely radiant with the green-black nothingness of night. Liz had never seen anything like it.

  “It’s half morning,” said Coco.

  “Yes, sweetie pie,” said Liz.

  The light made its steady progression from east to west, and soon the whole park was illuminated by the ashy-dusky light, and then the sky turned pink; it turned pink in increments, a great pink wave rolling across the park, and on its back rode a large white hawk.

  “It’s a hawk,” said Liz excitedly. “Coco, look! Maybe it’s Pale Male.”

  Perhaps it was. Perhaps it was the famous red-tailed hawk who had made his nest on the outside of a fancy building on Fifth Avenue. Liz loved that hawk. He defied the urban forest of buildings and the cement skin that choked and encased the earth, building his little family a home where he damn well pleased. He’d even defied the wealthy, powerful residents of the building—Manhattanites!—with their co-op board battles and their warring lawyers and their positive and negative media exposure, and their spin; all those big guns called to arms over one lone hawk and his mate, some demanding he be turned out, then ripping down his nest, then delighting those who’d championed him by rebuilding it after all that bad press.

  The brave, defiant hawk flew in great swoops over the park.

  “Or maybe it’s a pigeon, Momma,” said Coco. “It’s awfully small.”

  Yes, maybe it was. Liz kissed Coco on the back of her neck, directly on top of the tiny cigarette burn inscribed in her creamy skin like a little signature of ownership. Not every Chinese infant in their group of adoptive American parents was thusly scarred. The interpreter who had accompanied them to the orphanage had said at the time that scars like Coco’s were there to be read like personalized tattoos, not designed to help the Chinese birth mothers identify their offspring in the future, as Liz and the other adoptive parents had first worriedly surmised, but rather as missives to whoever might find the little ones, that no matter what terrible set of circumstances had forced this woman to relinquish this baby, she still claimed her, marking her forever as her child.

  By the time Liz got Coco home that morning—screw Saturday ballet and West African dance class; they were a schlep-and-a-half every weekend anyway—the kid was practically in a coma. She fell asleep during the cab ride home and Liz had to hold her under her arms with one hand, while jostling their overnight bags with the other, and walk her like Frankenstein’s monster into their building. Coco never fully woke up. “Now you’re asleep,” Liz muttered under her breath. When they got into the apartment, Liz dragged Coco into her room and slung her across the bed. Her own mouth felt raw, as if she’d smoked a thousand cigarettes. Her body stank; alcohol was leaking out of her pores, although she’d bathed in that beautiful marble hotel shower ninety minutes before. The water had been so hot, and the soap had smelled so expensive and so good. She’d felt so clean!

  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 i
t. 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

  There 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 thin
k 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.