This Beautiful Life (12 page)

T
hey sit around the mahogany table in O'Halloran's conference room. “Someone is giving a deposition in his office,” his secretary said when she led the Bergamots apologetically to this wood-paneled book-lined room. For a moment, Richard compares the opulence of this meeting room to the one he presided over Monday; the rooms themselves living, breathing dioramas illustrating the differences between the public and the private sector. And then they wait. They wait and wait for O'Halloran. Richard never makes anyone wait if he can help it. But O'Halloran holds Richard's son's future in his hands. This is a little like waiting for a neurosurgeon, Richard thinks, and then stops the thought, blocks it. The analogy is too terrible and too frightening.

Jake is just a kid. He wiggles in his suit. He looks almost grown, but like a kid still anyway—he looks like he's not one or the other, but a baby somehow, and from certain angles, a man. Richard wasn't even tuned into the fact that his son had suddenly changed and seemed much older. Is he a virgin? At fifteen, almost sixteen, Richard wasn't. It hasn't even occurred to him until this moment that Jake could be having sex, the times are so different. Kids wait these days; they don't all do drugs (Lizzie informed him of this fact after a seminar she took at The Freedom Institute: “They told us sixty percent of kids today don't even experiment with anything,” she said in amazement), and Richard hasn't bothered to turn to that channel yet. Just seconds ago it was Jake whom Richard was swinging up upon his shoulders. It was Jake shouting out joyfully, “It's my dad!” Jake and his friends seem so much younger to Richard than he was at their age—at this age Richard had worked his way away from home to boarding school; he'd wrangled himself a scholarship; he'd had a girlfriend at school with a diaphragm; her mother had taken her to see her own Beacon Hill gynecologist. He always carried a condom in his pocket. It sat next to the money he'd earned himself.

“Sean O'Halloran,” O'Halloran says, entering the room. He is short, balding but red-haired, freckly and blue-eyed, well groomed and wearing a three-piece suit—exactly as he was in the photo Richard Googled. The secretary who escorted them into the room accompanies him. She's a nice-looking woman in her fifties. She wears a short strand of pearls. Perhaps Lizzie should be wearing pearls; Richard bought her some about fifteen years ago, slightly longer, that dipped gracefully just below her clavicle—throughout his childhood his mother had sighed from time to time over some magazine ad or other and said, “Someday I am going to buy myself a string of pearls”—but he'd rarely seen Lizzie wear them. Interviews and funerals. Dinner with the COO when he was being wooed for this job. But mostly the pearls sat in a jewelry box collecting dust on top of her dresser.

O'Halloran shakes Richard's hand and then Jake's—a nice move, Richard notes—and then he shakes Lizzie's. “Your father and I talked on the phone,” O'Halloran says to Jake. “I don't want to waste anybody's time. You are in trouble. As far as I can tell, we have two areas to worry about, and the first is school. If we can get them to back down—”

“They've suspended him indefinitely,” interrupts Lizzie. “And we're entering finals period. That means for every test he misses he gets a zero. He's in his sophomore year; he's an A student—”

“A's and B's, Mom,” says Jake.

“This will destroy his chances of getting into college. Plus, I don't want this going down on his permanent record. Richard, do you think it will?”

Richard doesn't know. He is new to this. Whatever occurred didn't occur during school time or on school property. Still, they should probably be exploring the option of switching schools. But who would take Jake now? He feels a sense of bewilderment. Since when did anyone ever think of Jake as a troubled kid? Jake's whole life, Richard has been so proud of him. He reaches out a hand to pat Jake on the shoulder. Jake looks up gratefully, and Richard gives his shoulder a squeeze before he removes his hand.

O'Halloran continues: “The second potential problem is if the girl's parents choose to press charges.”

“What about ‘disseminating child pornography'?” says Richard. “Is he protected because he's underage?”

“We can discuss all of this later.” O'Halloran nods at Jake. “We're going to need to know what happened. From start to finish, in your own words.”

“Just tell the truth, honey,” says Lizzie. She is talking to Jake but she stares at Richard.

“Leave nothing out,” says Richard. “The girl came on to you, right? She sent the email to you. She never asked you not to forward it…”

Jake nods, looking from one parent to the other.

O'Halloran looks at the bookshelf. Richard notices that there is something funny about his eyes. There is a way in which they seem shut off; they emit no light. He almost looks like he's blind.

“When I was a kid,” O'Halloran says, “I went to summer camp in the Catskills. Two of the kids took pictures of themselves naked—a girl and a boy. I guess we must have been younger than Jacob here, eleven or twelve, and the pictures, they were Polaroids back then, they got passed around the bunk and fell into the counselor's hands. The girl got sent home—she'd been caught doing something else earlier in the month, smoking or eating candy or something—it was so long ago, I honestly can't remember. I'd forgotten the whole episode until you called… The boy was put on probation. That was it. The rest was left up to their families' discretion.”

“This
should
be a family matter,” says Lizzie. “I still don't see why we can't work this all out privately.”

O'Halloran turns toward Jake, his eyes still focused somehow on the distance. “I was that boy.”

Jake smiles weakly.

“My father, he beat the shit out of me—excuse me.” Here O'Halloran turns his head, not his gaze, to Lizzie; perhaps the problem is with his pupils. Maybe they've just been dilated? “He kicked my ass when I got home. But when my mother was out of the room he whispered in my ear, ‘Chip off the old block.' ”

Lizzie does not know how to react to this. Richard watches her fluctuate from grateful to amused to appalled. Her face is so expressive; it's always been as if he could read her mind. Richard's face is just the opposite. Once, not too long ago, Lizzie had queried, sort of as a joke, “What if all the time I think you are wrapped up in great thoughts, you're actually thinking about what you watched last night on television?” As if, if he said yes, the truth would prove that she had wasted her life. She often said, especially when they were younger, that she wished he would open up a little more, that he would put more trust in her, and he's certainly tried. But Richard is who he is, and over the years he's realized that Lizzie seems to value his “containment,” for lack of a better word. It works for her. She, like Richard himself, sees his steadiness as something to rely upon.

“Kids are kids,” says O'Halloran, with a shrug. “They do stupid stuff.” He stares ahead. “The thing you guys don't understand is that with this email business, there is no such thing as confidentiality anymore.”

Is he addressing Jake or is he addressing Lizzie? This gaze thing is driving Richard nuts. It's like visual fingernails on a chalkboard; it makes it impossible to connect with him. Richard did better with O'Halloran on the phone. He feels the urge to break something, a lamp or one of the decorative china bowls that sit in a line down the center of the table.

Jake nods, but he looks dumbfounded, like he doesn't get what O'Halloran is talking about at all. Richard doubts his son has ever thought about confidentiality as a concept.

T
he whole cab ride home, Lizzie talks to Richard. Jake has a window seat, and he has the window open, his face to the wind, like a dog would, like a golden retriever, his lips parted, mouth slightly open, tongue plush and pink.

“So what did you think?” says Lizzie. “Did you like him? I liked him, I think I liked him.” She does not look sure.

“He's supposed to be good,” says Richard. “The best.”

“I know, but those eyes—they creeped me out. What's wrong with them? It's like he's blind or something.”

Richard can't figure it out himself.

Lizzie brings a hand to her hair; curly wisps are flying out of her French twist. She tries to tuck them back.

“Why do you think he told us that story?” says Lizzie. “Was he trying to minimize the shame factor? Or maximize it? Is there still an operative shame factor, Richard? Or has the Internet killed all that? I mean, if everything that's private goes public, is it still humiliating?”

“It depends if the action itself is inherently shameful, Lizzie.”

“Like ‘furries'?” She is both listening and not listening to him. She gets like this sometimes. He pictures her mind like an old barn, her thoughts like swallows: all day long they swoop in and out.

“Furries?” Richard says.

“You know, those people who dress up like stuffed animals
to have sex
”—she mouths the last three words, but Jake's still staring out the window. “That article in
Vanity Fair
? The global network has set them free, Richard. Now they can find each other. Chat rooms. They have conventions and stuff. So is what they do shameful? Or just weird? If there's a lot of them, maybe it's not so weird at all?”

“Like pedophiles?” says Richard. “The purpose of shame is to curtail dangerous behavior.”

She's sitting on the hump in the middle of the cab, knee pressed to knee but with her feet straddling the thing, and she leans over Jake and rolls the window up a bit. “Sorry, sweetie, but the wind is too blowy for me.”

Jake sits back, the window now half closed. He stares out at the passing streets.

“Do you think O'Halloran was trying to be funny?” Lizzie says, the flight of her thoughts turning and banking. “Do you think he was trying to relate to Jake?” She pats Jake's shoulder for emphasis. “Do you think he was saying ‘boys will be boys'? Do you think he was being sexist?”

Even with the window only partly open, the back draft blows some more of her hair out of place. A wisp falls into her mouth. She pushes it aside impatiently with a little articulated arpeggio of her fingers.

“Do you think he'll make things right for us?” she asks. She collapses back against the seat. She closes her eyes.

Jake doesn't look like he's listening at all, his eyes are shut too, and his mouth is open. He looks stoned.

With her eyes still closed, Lizzie says, “I wonder what this all will cost us, Richard?”

“L
ook,” Richard says to the COO of the university, on the phone, “you can't stop progress. If we don't develop Manhattanville, it will be developed anyway. By the real estate guys. There's, like, nothing left on the island, and here's this great big uninhabited space. By business. What an opportunity! The residents are going to be forced out one way or another. Some of them will be; might as well have the area developed responsibly, by a world-class university, in the interest of science and scholarship, the pursuit of knowledge. Compassionately, Mike. With an eye on preserving and enhancing the existing community. We own most of this stuff already, and it's blighted—I've made sure it's blighted. We haven't renewed any leases. We shut down half the garage space—we're preserving it for Astor employees, by the way—we've evicted tenants, the illegal ones, you know, from the loft spaces near the river. Foot traffic is now less than zero. So we'll turn a blighted urban area into a university town. That's the skinny and that's the way to spin it. We're off to the side there, in Manhattanville. We're not in the heart of Harlem—too much historical significance, too hot. It's cooler where we are. With us, on the side there, bringing in new businesses, creating jobs, increasing safety, services—you know the drill, Mike—they are a lot better off with us than if rampant speculators develop willy-nilly. That's the gist of the talking points; you can gussy them up as you see fit. I am happy to feed you guys more by phone, until I am back in my office.”

He feels like a used-car salesman, which is puzzling, because he believes in what he is saying. Richard knows he believes in what he is saying.

The COO has asked him to “take a short break.” “Family leave,” the COO says, over the phone. “Brief, Richard. A week, maybe two, max. A month, tops. Whatever's necessary.”

He has no choice but to accept. There will be no reduction in salary. It'll still be his show, Manhattanville. “You can run things from behind the scenes, but don't quote me, Richard,” the COO assures him.

The thing is, they don't want to cast any shadows on this venture. It's too important for the university's future. And a “sex scandal” with his kid when he is supposed to be looking out for the neighborhood children is not the image the university wants to project to a nervous community. Already, that bozo Steven Schwartz has started blogging about it. The COO says, “The Schwartz piece, that's the crux of it.” Then he quotes Schwartz: “ ‘Do you want this man in charge of your kids' school when he can't control his own fifteen-year-old?' That's toxic stuff, Richard. Exactly what we don't need. Plus, the tabloids are having a field day. Thank God, so far you and your family have not yet been named. Still, Page Six! The tuition! The tabloids love the private schools' tuition. But will Bert Anderson? Spelled out in public that way? Anderson's youngest boy is still at St. David's, and his three girls all graduated from Spence. He's not going to want any of that dug up at this late date. He doesn't want to appear like a fat cat, no way.”

There's logic in this, Richard sees it. Although a sex scandal seems a ridiculous thing to call it—the girl made the video. He wants to scream this into the phone. Jake just forwarded the fucking thing. It's not his fault. Not really. And it's not bad parenting. Maybe it wasn't the kind of behavior
his
father would have expected from
him
—“You always treat girls honorably,” Dad said. “With respect.” Hadn't he and Lizzie taught Jake the same thing, albeit in a different language? Hadn't they said, “Safe sex, and better with someone you love”? His son wasn't bad; he was stupid in the moment. So he sent the video to his best friend for help. What does tuition have to do with it? It didn't happen because the kids have money. It happened because they had access to a computer. And how in God's name, in two thousand and fucking three, are you going to stop access to
that
?