This Beautiful Life (23 page)

“Fuck you,” Lizzie says. “Go fuck yourself.”

“Why did you have me?”

They both turn. Unbeknownst to them, Jake has entered the room, who knew when? Both Lizzie and Richard turn to look at him now. He had heard them fighting, apparently, and is standing just inside the now-open doorway.

“It's obvious you hate me, Dad. It's obvious I ruined your lives.” His hands are fists hanging down his sides. His face is red and his eyes are wild.

“That's not true, Jake,” says Lizzie. “You made our lives. You've brought us so much joy. Everything has gotten better since you were born. Everything.”

“Cut out the self-pity,” says Richard, to Jake. And then to her: “Stop babying him.”

“Richard, ease up,” says Lizzie sharply. She looks at Jake.

“He's feckless and he's weak,” says Richard. “We've made him weak.”

“He's had a hard day,” says Lizzie. “He's brokenhearted about Chemistry. He thinks he's
failed
you.”

“He's failed himself, that's who he's failed.”

“That's exactly what I'm talking about,” Lizzie says.

She walks over to Jake. She tries to put her hands on his shoulders to comfort him, but he shrugs them off. Tears spill down his face. She stands beside him. She looks at Richard.

“I can take the kids and move them back to Ithaca,” Lizzie says.

“No,” says Richard.

“I
can
work, Richard, and I can move us away. I'd like to get away from here anyway.” She looks at Jake. Jake standing still with his eyes closed, tears streaming.

“I said no,” says Richard. “I don't want you to go. I love you.” He turns to Jake, but Jake's eyes are shut. “I love them. We are a family,” says Richard.

Jake just stands there, trembling, eyes shut, crying. Richard stares at him. He has no idea how to reach him. He has no idea how to be his father. He turns to Lizzie. Now he needs her help.

“I just— Goddamn it, Lizzie, I can do this thing, I know I can,” Richard says. “One last time, I can pull it together, be the glue… We can have stupid money and we can get our son back on track and into a good school and, with a little luck and a lot of expensive therapy, we can heal our little girl, and you can have all the things you want, but you, the boy, all of you—I've ripped out my guts for you. You've got to see what it costs me.”

He sits down on the bed. Richard puts his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.

“Jake, honey, you should leave the room,” Richard hears Lizzie say.

“I want to be a success,” says Richard, into his hands.

“You are a success, Richard,” says Lizzie.

Richard's shoulders began to quiver.

“I need to be a success,” says Richard.

“How much did you drink?” he hears Lizzie say as if she is far away. Down a long tunnel. “Did you eat anything?

Richard shakes his head, again, without looking up. “Chex Mix. I don't know.” His shoulders are shaking, but his voice holds steady.

“Jake, go get your dad two aspirins and a glass of water. If there's a roll left from dinner, bring that, too.”

He does not hear Jake move.

“Jake,” says Lizzie. “Richard.”

“You shouldn't say ‘fuck you' to me, Lizzie,” Richard says, shaking the head he holds in his hands.

I
n the middle of the night, Liz got up to pee. Richard was passed out in the bed beside her and snoring lightly—it had been quite late when their fighting and then their talking, their efforts at reconciliation and renewal, had ceased to be productive and, totally spent, they'd joined together only in calling it quits for the night. She'd ended up giving him a Tylenol PM and a glass of water; he needed to sleep if he was going to make it in to work in the morning. Once she'd used the bathroom she returned to their bedroom to get her laptop. She tiptoed down the hall to the living room, sat down on the couch, and opened the computer on her lap. Feigenbaum had written her back that afternoon. She'd read his email after she and the kids had dinner.

“Dear Ms. Wilshevsky,” he'd written. “Of course I know you by reputation. And I'd be very eager to send you my work and get your expert response.”

Earlier that night, Liz had not known how to reply. She was embarrassed for Feigenbaum and even more so for herself, mortified by her own recklessness. She'd been sitting at her desk thinking about what to do next when Richard had barged in. Richard had looked strange the moment he'd entered the bedroom. She should have realized then that he was in trouble. He'd looked overstuffed. As if someone had put his handsome face on the copier and pressed Enlarge.

Now she reopened her email from Daniel Feigenbaum and clicked on Reply.

“I'm sorry,” Liz's fingers tapped against the keyboard, “I really liked what you wrote and I wanted to help, but I don't know how. I'm not who I pretend to be.” Then she pressed Send and closed her laptop.

She walked back down the hall to check on her children. First Coco. The little girl was fast asleep, curled up at the foot of the bed, her bottom in the air. There were a few cookie crumbs stuck to her cheek, and as Liz brushed them away she realized they'd never bothered to clean up from the tea party. There was half a cookie stuck to the pillow. Liz picked it up and popped it in her mouth. Probably the sheets and comforter were still sticky. She'd strip the bed in the morning after Coco left for school. She kissed her on her forehead.

Next, Liz tiptoed into Jake's room. He, too, was sound asleep. His ankles hung over the side of the mattress. Jake lay entangled in his sheets, the linens somehow a straitjacket about his waist. She wanted to smooth them out and tuck him in, but she'd only wake him if she tried. He was on his own tonight.

In the years to come, for some reason this moment in recollection took on a totemic importance for Liz. There were many decisions to rethink, obviously, to restring in the whole painful sequence of this debacle, but it was this particular for-instance where she most felt she could have saved them, where she could have saved him, this boy, child of her heart, whom she loved too much. She should have woken him up that night, she thought years later when he flunked out of Princeton as a freshman, or when he drank more than he could handle and their fights grew bloody, especially that one time when she had to confiscate his car keys, throwing them out the window as he lunged; or that horrible rainy afternoon when she dragged him out of the Marines' storefront in Ann Arbor when he threatened to enlist. They had a pretty little house with a garden there during the academic year, she and Coco, near to the ballet school that Coco loved, walking distance to the university where Liz was teaching, and Jake would show up for weeks at a time to sleep in the daybed in the guest bedroom–study, which Richard used for work when he visited on weekends. He'd given her room, Richard, but he never let them go, and Liz was grateful for that. Although it was hard, separated but not. They were on two different tracks now. She'd given him room, too, in her own way, letting him pursue his career on his terms in New York. But when Jake came to visit, she'd experienced none of the wholeness she'd felt when Richard was there lying next to her, or reading to Coco or on the phone in the other room. At night in Ann Arbor, she'd watch Jake sleep then, too, wondering what would become of him, and how to assist him, and about why, on that night now so long ago, she hadn't woken him up, she hadn't sat him up groggily at the end of the bed and said, “I'm sorry honey, I haven't handled this correctly, but there is still time,” and told him that it was his job to make some of this right, that she would help him, but he had to own up, own up to what he'd done and to what had been done to him, and once he'd humbled himself before his own faults and misdoings, that he had to learn to forgive himself. Both he and she had to practice the art of self-forgiveness—she should have said this—because although their hearts were good, they were both the type to screw up.

But instead, that night, Liz just stood in her pajamas looking silently down at Jake's cheek, wondering if it was still soft beneath the stubble. He had been the antidote to existential loneliness for her, when he was small. Now she stood by his bedside, on the cusp of finding her wings, helplessly watching him grow.

After grad school, when Richard was working at the World Bank and they were still a young couple, a young couple with a child, they would lie at night in the foldout bed in the living room of their little place in Adams Morgan, above that Senegalese restaurant—what was its name again?—and refer to their home, privately, in whispers, so as not to jinx themselves, as “happy house.” The aroma of Yassa au Roulet de la Casamance, the restaurant's signature offering, barbecued chicken in a rich onion-and-lemon sauce, wafted nightly throughout their living room. Jake lay safely ensconced in his crib in the tiny bedroom down the hall. In the summer, that scent was as delicious and as lightly encompassing as the cool sheets that skimmed their bodies. Night after night, she and Richard made love.

Standing at Jake's bedside now, Liz could smell the dish if she concentrated hard enough. When had she last tasted it?

It was so good.

7

S
he was exiting through the glass doors of the lobby as he was entering—he held the door open for her and the heat that blasted off Broad Street almost was enough to send her back into the building and up to her desk, where she could order in, but she forged ahead. He was tall and good-looking in a geeky way, and he kind of did a double take as she scooted out the door and murmured, “Thanks,” and headed down the sidewalk. He looked like he thought he knew her, but she was in a hurry and couldn't be bothered. So, even though he was sort of cute, she was a tiny bit annoyed when he called out her name.

“Daisy?”

She stopped and turned, reluctantly.

Her dad had arranged her summer internship, which came with a lot of scut work—answering phones and printing out documents, sorting through crap and walking visitors down the hall—plus her own email address ([email protected]—GS, she told her friends, like “golden sunshine,” although everyone knew it was Goldman Sachs, and that she was lucky), a wardrobe of new shoes,
and
only thirty minutes for lunch, as a result of which she was rushing now, high on top of her stilettos, because there was a new lobster roll place in the neighborhood. One of the summer associates told her it was on Stone Street, and since this was her very first summer not at the beach (she was only flying up on weekends), she craved one.

So she stopped reluctantly when this kid in khakis and a blazer called out after her.

“Daisy,” he said it again, and for the first time in a long time she was reminded, out of nowhere, it seemed, that her name was also the name of a flower. Like Hyacinth, or Rose, or Iris.

“Davis,” he said. He was sort of preppy, with short hair. “Davis Palmer,” he repeated, reminding her. “I was a couple of years ahead of you at Wildwood.”

“Yeah, oh, hi,” she said. It took her a moment to recognize his name, to place him at all: he was one of the nicer ones. But when she did, her stomach kind of fell.

“So, how's it going?” he said. His eyes searched her face, not unkindly. He looked her up and down, and she wondered for a moment if her skirt was too short. Her hand reached to the hem and tugged it.

“Fine,” Daisy said. “But I have only twenty-four and a half more minutes for lunch.”

“Are you okay?” Davis asked, staring at her. “I mean, I always wondered…”

For a second Daisy worried that she looked faint or red-faced, or that she had ink smeared across her forehead, before she realized what he was referring to.

“You mean ‘that'?” she said, raising her eyebrows. Beneath her skin, her cheeks were hot. And that terrible feeling that she used to feel in her stomach all the time, like she was going to throw up or something, returned to her. “It's so long ago, I think of it as kind of humorous.”

“Cool,” said Davis. And then: “What are you doing down here?”

“I work here,” said Daisy. “I mean I work in there.” She pointed toward the Goldman Sachs building. “What are
you
doing down here?” She blushed harder. Why did she have to run into him?

“I'm a paralegal,” he said, “applying to law school in the fall. I'm meeting a buddy of mine for lunch. A Wildwood guy. Do you remember Zack Bledsoe?”

A fat kid. Now previously fat. Daisy had once thought she'd seen him in the elevator bank; it was kind of hard to tell, because he was half the original's original size—gastric bypass, she remembered thinking as she scooted into the next car to avoid him.

“Speaking of lunch, I've got only nineteen and a half minutes left,” Daisy said, looking at her watch. “Bye.”

And she ran away from Jake's friend on her high heels toward the Urban Lobster Shack.

She thought she heard him call after her, but she couldn't be sure and she couldn't be bothered.

Daisy was in a hurry and she didn't like to think about all of that anyway. She didn't like to think about those two stupid years she spent away from Wildwood, at that stupid girls' school up in Dobbs Ferry. Things got better when she got back; no one cared that much anymore and Jake was gone, his whole class was gone anyway, and by the time she'd returned, some kids had done much worse: one had jumped in front of a subway and another had taken part in a robbery where a cop died. Plus, there was that scandal with the senator who had twins in the middle school. But as Daisy waited at the takeout window for her lobster roll and chips and slaw and her Honest Tea iced tea, she thought about that first summer after. They had traveled a lot that year, she and her parents. The only constant was that wherever they were, in whichever of their houses, Daisy's windows looked out upon water.

At home, she saw the metallic blue of the Hudson; on the Vineyard, the whitecaps on the icy silver of the Atlantic; in France, it was pure azure all the way, sky and water all the same color; ditto the horizon where they met.

She remembered now her mom had said, “That is how the beach here got its name, Côte d'Azur,” which was a big “duh,” if you asked Daisy, but nobody asked her.

Instead, she'd spent a long time not reading books, listening to her iPod, flipping through magazines, and not spending time on her computer—she wasn't allowed on her computer then, unless there was an adult in the room, and even her parents got tired of importing and renting adults. Daisy was way too old for a babysitter; everyone knew that and they all got sick of that game pretty quick. Most of the time she'd just lie on her bed or sit in a chair by the window and look out at whatever body of water stretched out endlessly in front of her, and think of him.

Sometimes, in these fantasies, she yelled and screamed at him. Sometimes she kicked him in the balls, or even knifed him in the gut, blood and gore oozing out. The memories of her reveries were beyond embarrassing now. What a little idiot I was, Daisy thought. She remembered an elaborate fantasy, where she threw shit at him, great big gobs of cow pie or horse manure (she had a horse on Martha's Vineyard and sometimes, after a riding lesson, she thought about mailing some of that horseshit to him in Tupperware, but she worried that they might be able to trace it back to her), and she shuddered now at the thought. Sometimes, with great dignity, she told him off; in her imagination she had these awesome rhetorical skills, while in real life back then (and now), it seemed as if she could barely string two words together. She was trapped and inarticulate; it was even hard to tell herself what she thought, but in her daydreams she made him feel like dirt. She made him feel the same way
she
felt. Other times, she had the regal bearing and grace of a princess, and she sat silently in a tall chair as he kneeled on the ground and begged for her forgiveness.

But whatever the tenor of their encounter, the setting of the denouement was always the same: one of her bedrooms, she in a chair, her hands folded in her lap, Jake on the floor at her feet.

He'd say, “It was my fault, Daisy.”

He'd say, “I didn't know. I didn't understand. But now I do.”

Sometimes he'd say, “I will spend the rest of my life making this up to you.”

Sometimes he'd say, “I wish I could just take it all back. I wish I could make it unhappen. We were just beginning to get to know each other. I could have been your boyfriend. We could have been a couple and gone out.”

Always he'd say, “I am sorry, Daisy. I am really, truly sorry.”

In all her dreams, Jake apologized. It totally wasn't enough, but it was better than what she'd had.

Then he'd reach out and curl his fingers around hers, and his palm was warm and dry and he'd squeeze tight.

They wouldn't kiss or anything.

He'd just feel bad and hold her hand.

“Lady,” said the Urban Lobster Shack guy, waking her up.

Daisy's order was ready, and so she paid up at the takeout counter and took her lunch bag. She looked at her watch.

“Oh my God,” she said out loud. It was late, and it was time to get back to work.

She started to trot down Stone Street as fast as she could on those high heels, skittering along on the cobblestones, heading back to the office, her lunch bag flapping against her thigh.

I was a funny kid, she thought, as she ran.

I am still funny.