Good Kids: A Novel (20 page)

“The truth comes out when you need to be funny.”

“As I just explained fifteen minutes ago, I didn’t mean it as a criticism of your sister. It was bullshit for a reporter.” She clutched her seat belt with both hands, as if to brace for a crash.

“Yeah, I mean, everyone gets that, so, hey. It was just, whoops, awkward, change of tune.”

“WHEN YOU MEET YOUR BOYFRIEND’S FAMILY, YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE SUPERNICE TO THEM. I WAS BEING NICE. And later, it was, What kind of honesty do you think is going to come out of me, after what she said about my dad? She was looking at him like she was going to bite him in the neck.”

“He denied the existence of male privilege. You don’t do that around Rachel.”

“He downplayed its significance in his particular, very difficult life. That’s different.”

“It’s just what every bourgeois libertarian does, discount their own particular privileges as irrelevant to their success.”

“‘Bourgeois libertarian.’ Would that be me, for example?”

“You’re a dark-skinned woman, so I never think of you that way, I just think of you as really good. You’re excused.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m sorry, it’s just been a rough visit. I didn’t eat enough at the premiere. I’m really hungry.”

Some strangeness worse than fighting bubbled up beneath us. We rode the rest of the way home in silence.

We were back before the battle stations when we started to speak again. “You clearly don’t—you don’t see us, my family, very well,” she said. “I don’t get your mother and your sister either.”

“I’ll try to get your parents better,” I said. “I’m just trying to be loyal. My dad picked women he loved over his family. I can’t be like that.”

“Do you like my parents?” she asked.

“Yeah. Yeah.”

“I don’t want to be your Khadijah’s mom,” said Julie. She slammed the door.

I flossed, alone at my battle station.

T
wo and a half days later, Rachel and my mother had left Los Angeles, and a cold peace prevailed in the house. But Julie and I weren’t touching each other.

As dust particles swam in brutal morning sunbeams, I sat at the desk in the study and sent two e-mails to my manager: one checking on a Portuguese hedge fund that wanted to license an instrumental remix of “This Is Just Wrong” for its website, another checking on a Ukrainian cell phone commercial, which was going to play “This Is Just Wrong” as gendered cell phones freak-danced each other. Sending them made me feel that the way I supported myself shared a common ancestor with employment. I so enjoyed this sensation, the warmth of purpose, that I wrote a third business e-mail to Gordon, whom I was going to see that night; he and Cora and Julie and I had a long-standing date to see Joanna Newsom at Disney Concert Hall.

“This is a wild proposition,” I wrote. “But would you ever be interested in having me build you a home studio? In that big-ass garage of yours?” This was entrepreneurial initiative. “I’d give you the bro rate.”

The response was swift, festooned at beginning and end with garlands of exclamation points. “Yes,” wrote Gordon. “How can we make this happen quickly? I have SO MANY SONGS IN MY HEAD AND SOON CORA IS (Cora and I are) GOING TO GENERATE A BABY.”

We resolved to explore specifics at the concert. I hid my laptop
and my cell phone from myself, under the covers of the bed, and took out my acoustic guitar. I was still waiting for notes on the
Spirits of New Orleans
score. It was the time of day Julie had encouraged me to set aside for songwriting. Since our evening with Khadijah a week ago, I had known—how I loathed this knowledge—whom the song must be about. TV could show us wish fulfillment, but pop songs were for longing. Replacing the woman with a song about the woman—surely, this was adulthood.

I slung the guitar strap over my shoulders and whipped around a corner and aimed the guitar like an M16 at the block of machinery in the hall closet, the brain of the smart house, with its red veins flowing to the DVR, the AC, the alarm system, the sprinklers. I charged out of the closet and down the hall in bare feet. A white swath of kitchen spread open before me.

I swung the guitar onto my back, hoisted myself up onto the kitchen island, and sat cross-legged beneath the hanging pans.

“Good evening,” I said, addressing the track lighting. I strummed an open chord and waited for a song to come. I stared at the ceiling and hoped to hear a melody reverberate around the kitchen like a bird.

Instead I saw, reflected in the side of a hanging pot, the distorted bust of a twenty-eight-year-old man: the expanding forehead, the thickening neck. The person on the side of the pot could not with credibility write any song I would want to write, so I stood on the island and gingerly removed the pots, the insidious, face-fattening wok. I dismounted the island, found a photo in a bedroom drawer, the one our Australian label had taken of me three years earlier, and placed it in the island’s sink. Looking at it as I played, I searched for a loop of four high minor chords, the song the boy in the picture would write about a sad-eyed girl he loved.

I shut my eyes and was in a department store covered with dust. It was a picture that came to me from the photo spreads of downtown Manhattan after the towers fell, but that didn’t matter. Dust coated the shoulders of shirts on their spinal racks.
Khadijah sat on a desk beside a cash register, in a wool sweater and a wool skirt, dustless, kicking her feet to a muffled floor tom counting four—that rhythm was the first component, perhaps.

In the department store, I saw everyone I knew in high school break in, through the emergency exit, and run laughing through the room. They were still teenagers, and they ran like Vikings in a church, unopposed, rustling the rows of sleeves. Dust carpeted their faces, so that you couldn’t see their eyes, and so that their hair stuck limp to their necks. They converged upon us at great speed. They were memories who wanted to be made corporeal, from my song, but Khadijah slid off the cashier’s desk and said, “It’s me you’ll bring back.” Sounds started to form discrete chords as she touched her fingers to my hand.

This was when the front door of the house opened, and there entered not a high school’s worth of spectral adolescents but Julie’s father, Samson.

“I was just reading about your father’s country house in the paper,” he called to me from the foyer, a Crate & Barrel bag full of wineglasses supported by one forearm as he locked the door behind him. Julie had warned me this morning he might be coming over to bring what he felt were necessary additions to our kitchen. “The one he converted, from a little cabin in the Berkshires.”

The
Times
’ Sunday Real Estate section had a piece in which my father was featured: “The Death Grip of the Summer Home.” Of course Sam had read it.

My father’s recent additions to the cabin had been a dramatic, autodidactic experiment in residential architecture. The Monopoly house of my childhood, the dacha, had grown three stories tall, retaining its original small, square footprint. Each floor was an undivided room strewn with beds and desks. It was an outpost where troops might be marshaled, where conquests and retributions might be planned. The roof was trimmed with a green stripe, and the stripe was full of white Celtic knots.

“Oh, that, yeah,” I said.

“No, no, it’s a courageous thing to design your own house,” said Sam. “A brave risk.” He stopped to glance at my head shot,
lying in the island’s sink, in which I was twenty-five, long-haired, smoking a cigarette and wearing a tincture of eyeliner. This gave me enough time to seize the Crate & Barrel bag and march with it toward the guest bedroom, leading him away, I hoped, from the head shot.

“It’s good of you to carry something,” he said. “In the
Times,
he says the contractors have been stringing him on, making him spend money left and right,” Sam followed me through the kitchen. “It’s terrible what these people do.”

“His biggest mistake was granting this woman at the
Times
an interview,” I said. “She’s the new girlfriend of this guy he knows from college, Beanie Camden, and my father will do virtually anything for any person named Beanie Camden.” I shrugged to convey insignificance. I realized that, out of great insecurity, I was bragging about my family—implying a picturesque insanity, a glorious downward mobility,
fin de race
.

Sam looked at me sadly. “Ah,” he said, “old guys have their dreams, you know.”

Somewhere in Massachusetts, my father, buffered by Mueller-affiliated income, was lavishing cash on improvements to the cabin, instead of writing the essays he’d moved to New York to write. I began to reinterpret his story. Perhaps the problem wasn’t that he’d cheated on my mother; perhaps the problem was that he’d never gotten what he’d pursued. I could write songs about the ghost of a teenage girl and age into such a man. Or I could stop dreaming about Khadijah and get her. She’d be back in L.A. to visit Todd. Giving her the stone might not have been such an infantile performance after all. And Khadijah, whoever she might be now, would not mock a member of my family on television for liberalism.

I was able to bludgeon these thoughts into submission by the time Julie came home from work to spin into a concert-going outfit. I gave her a breezy kiss, as if affection were flowing freely between us. Samson’s voice rose and expanded with joy through the guest room as he greeted his only child. I knew from the creak of bedsprings that Julie had sat on the bed to embrace him,
and for a moment they became quiet and affectionate. I could just barely overhear them.

“Sleep here tonight, Dad,” Julie said, “if you don’t feel like dealing with the traffic on the way back to Glendale. It doesn’t bother us.”

“What is this music you are going to see, Jules, instead of staying here to hang out with your decrepit father?”

“It’s indie-rock music, Dad; it’s this horrible thing. Her name is Joanna Newsom. She’s this singer with a tiny voice who plays the harp. Everybody loves her, for reasons no one can explain.”

• • •

Gordon met us in the lobby of Disney Concert Hall, in a tweed suit and tie. He wore a vest, a watch chain, and a longer beard than the one he’d had three weeks ago. Cora hadn’t followed him into the Edwardian; she wore a wool skirt and a pigeon gray cowl-neck that made her pregnancy more visible than usual. I’d known she was due in three months, but it wasn’t until I saw the mound that I recognized the threat it posed to my career. It might give Gordon a deadline by which to record his songs, but with a house full of puling, Cora might not permit the garage to become a second source of bedlam on the property.

“What do you think of the new album?” Cora asked me. “As a musician?”

“I mean, she’s fucking amazing,” I said, “but I kind of miss the home-studio sound of the first record.” I realized at this point that my need to make money had taken whole possession of my tongue, but there was nothing I could do to stop it. “On that album, you could feel that it was just her, in a space where she felt
at home,
and it was so
warm
for that reason. I actually think that’s how a huge proportion of great albums are made. People put their studios in their guesthouses, or whatever structure is at hand.”

Julie squeezed my hand and flashed me a look: Calm down. She toed Cora’s leather sandals with her black flats.

“You know how to dress for the occasion,” said Julie. “You look like a beautiful elf. Not Santa’s workshop, Middle Earth.
You’re like the best version of all these other girls here. This is Elf Night.”

She had a point. Last week, Joanna Newsom had publicly renounced her medieval outfits, but this audience gave off an unmistakable vapor of Tolkien. A slender young woman quested among Gehry’s escarpments in pointed boots, her hair parted down the middle, her collar up and ready for the alpine frost. Two teenage girls stood apart from their dates as one adjusted the other’s tunic.

“This album has finished music for me,” one of their dates explained to them, loudly. “It’s complete. I’m done.”

“Julie, you are so right,” said Cora. She pointed her chin to something behind me. “That girl over there is a perfect little Sephardic elf-princess.”

Before I turned around, I knew who it was. Of course she and Todd were here. Why hadn’t I seen it? Going to Joanna Newsom Accompanied by the L.A. Philharmonic at Disney Concert Hall was like going to the opera in
Dangerous Liaisons
. It was where you looked at everybody you knew, and they looked at you.

Todd and Khadijah stared at me goggle-eyed for a moment, and we might have kept the conversation brief by unspoken consensus had not the third of their party, whom I recognized from an early mumblecore film, approached Gordon and Julie. He reminded them, in triumphant tones, that they’d hung out with him in Williamstown, three summers ago.

“Gordon, Cora,” I said. “This is Khadijah. We went to high school together.”

“I love that,” said Cora. “I was just talking about how pretty you are.”

Khadijah’s thrift-store dress was hideous, and would have been merely hideous placed on any other woman in the hall. But on Khadijah it was wickedly hideous. Two strips of a thick, bright red plaid material began at a point on the small of her back and crossed in the middle of her stomach. These components were so crudely stitched together as to seem to have been sewn, as a healing activity, by the inmates of a group home. It
was only because of the absurd size of Khadijah’s eyes and nose in proportion to her body that the dress took on its evil prettiness. You are
so liberal,
I thought, full of longing. You believe so strongly in the contingency of your own success on factors beyond your control, you’re game to dress yourself like a crafts project gone wrong. No libertarian would wear such a dress. I could feel, as an almost tactile presence, the warmth of the northeastern hearth.

This was not an easy circumstance for Julie. Because I knew her face, I could see the weight it carried. But she kept her composure. I was smashed by a wave of guilt.