The Red Book (37 page)

“Unlike some of the Harvard grads I’ve met over the years,” Felicia continues, “whom, if you ask ‘Where did you go to college?,’ will answer, ‘In the Boston area,’ or ‘In Cambridge, Mass.,’ Bill had no use for false modesty. He was so proud of having gone to school here that he hung his Class of ’89 banner in our home office, above his
Veritas
chair and his Adams House mug . . .”

Adams House, thinks Mia—picturing streaks of blue hair and vintage cocktail dresses and boys in fuchsia lipstick blowing smoke rings into patchouli air—was years ahead of its time, offering not only safe harbor to gay students but also a celebration of their sexuality by their peers, of all persuasions, in an era before the abutment of those two words,
gay
and
student
, had become culturally acceptable. It was a kind of utopia, in fact, the only house at Harvard with an annual Halloween drag night in which everyone—straight, gay, bi, it didn’t matter your orientation, you felt like a spoilsport if you didn’t show up in drag—participated. Sure, there was a lot of posing and posturing as well: The clothing was often black; the cigarettes often clove; and the orgies in Greta Suskind’s room in B-entry, though Mia never had the courage to attend one, often legendary. But at its heart, Adams House was a rare escape from the shackles of conformity.

Too bad, she thought, upon hearing that the student lottery to the Harvard houses was randomized in the mid-1990s. In her era, you were allowed to list your top three choices, and then hopefully you got one of the three if you weren’t “quadded”: exiled, a good fifteen-minute walk in good weather, to one of the houses in the old Radcliffe quad.

Sure, it was nerve-racking at the end of freshman year, trying to squeeze one’s entire persona into a cultural stereotype: Were you, say, an Eliot House prep, a Kirkland House jock, a Lowell House egghead, a Dunster House hipster, a Winthrop House high schooler, or an Adams House
artiste
? But there was also something uniquely comforting, at the end of a long day spent learning with and debating other students with radically differing opinions on, say, Nicaragua, abortion, and gay rights, to come home to a place where the Contras were human rights violators; a woman’s right to choose was sacrosanct; and homosexuality was just one other way, among many, of loving.

That first Halloween drag night of their sophomore year, as Mia remembers it, Belinda had showed up in the dining hall dressed in a Brooks Brothers suit she’d borrowed from the house tutor. She’d just cut her hair short, or at least much shorter than usual, and she’d painstakingly glued, with spirit gum to her upper lip, a mustache Mia had nabbed for her in the costume shop at the Loeb. At first Mia didn’t recognize her housemate. Unlike everyone else in the dining hall, who seemed to be cross-dressing more for comedic kicks—the men in particular went totally over the top, wearing dark red lipstick, overstuffed bras, outrageous ball gowns, and feather boas—Belinda just looked, and quite convincingly so, like a man.

“Wow, look at you!” Mia had said to Belinda, when she finally saw the woman under the man, but it was striking how much more confident, more at home in her skin Belinda seemed as a man than she had as a woman. Instead of hunching over, hiding her breasts under crossed arms, she stood up so straight and tall, Mia was shocked by the difference in their height, which hadn’t been apparent to her before.

“I know,” Belinda had said. “I took one look at myself in the mirror and thought, dude, look at you. I’m never wearing a dress again.” From then on, Belinda wore only men’s clothing and searched, in vain, for a woman to love, until—or so she’d beamingly told Mia at the last reunion—she met Felicia at a lesbian bookstore in Northampton.

“After I’d heard Bill’s car had flipped over a nearby embankment, I knew it wasn’t an accident, even before I came home and found the note.” Felicia is winding up, after describing Bill’s addiction to painkillers in the wake of his second reassignment surgery, which ran into grafting complications that became intractable. “It’s a really long note, and it’s really personal, but I know Bill wouldn’t have minded if I read the last section of it here.” She clears her throat and places one piece of paper behind the other. “So here goes. ‘I need you and everyone else to understand that becoming a man did not drive me to kill myself. I wanted, more than anything, to live a regular life, to be your husband, to travel with you and hold your hand and laugh at life’s absurdities together, and had the surgery not gone wrong, I have no doubt I would have lived to a ripe old age by your side. But this life I’ve been left with—endless days and nights of constant pain, where pleasure has been completely eliminated, where I can’t work or socialize or enjoy a spring day—is no life at all. You know that. And I can’t see it changing. And I hope one day you can forgive me.

“ ‘I love you, Fizzy. I really do.’ ” Felicia pauses, catches her breath. “That’s what he called me, Fizzy. ‘And I’m so sorry to leave you . . .’ ”

Clover reaches into her purse to grab a tissue for Addison, who seems particularly shaken by Bill’s story. The screen of her silenced BlackBerry comes alive, as if it had been waiting for her to peek inside. “
LOOK 2 UR RIGHT,”
says the text. It’s from Bucky.

•  •  •

Jonathan carefully frames
the young couple in the viewfinder of their crap camera so that both the new house and the moving van are visible in the background. He wishes he had his Nikon D80. This will be one of those keepers, he knows, a shot for the couple to hang on the wall or to revisit after an argument or to nostalgically gaze upon toward the end of their lives: a simple, vivid, visual reminder of the day the buds were first blooming, the fruit ripe, the horizon so far off in the distance it was as yet undetected. An awesome responsibility, getting a shot like that just right.

“You’re kidding,” says the woman, rubbing her swollen belly. “
You’re
the director of
Movers and Quakers
?”

“I am indeed,” says Jonathan, going for a different angle to block out the reflection of the sun in the dormer window.

“How crazy!” says the man. “That was our first date.”

“Then this must be kismet. From
Movers and Quakers
to movers and . . .” He tries to come up with a word that rhymes with
shakers
and means pregnant or married or new homeowners or some such thing. He quickly zooms through the whole alphabet in his head. Nothing. “. . . a new home.”

The husband squinches his eyebrows, wondering if such an analogy requires his laughter. Jonathan holds his hand up as if to say,
Don’t bother. My bad. Couldn’t come up with the right pun.
He wonders, in fact, whether he isn’t suddenly losing his knack for the comeback: troubling, in his line of work, to say the least.

Movers and Quakers,
a tale of star-crossed love between a poor Quaker minister and the Orthodox heiress to an Israeli moving company, was the first of Jonathan’s romcoms not to recoup its initial investment at the box office. In fact, as far as Sony was concerned, it bombed, both domestically, where it was pilloried and boycotted by both liberal and conservative Jewish groups alike, for its endorsement of the “Second Silent Holocaust” of intermarriage, as well as abroad, where the whole friction between a Quaker man and a Jewish woman didn’t translate well, if at all. He’d made a terrible mistake with that contract, forgoing a large director’s fee for back-end points that never materialized.

Mia, expecting a large windfall from the film—everyone did, it wasn’t just her—had already hired the team that would knock down the far wall of their house to build a new extension, a place apart for the boys where they could play their music and entertain their friends in peace. But both she and the architect had gotten carried away, creating a soundproof music studio, where the kids could not only play but record their music; a home gym; a twenty-seat movie theater with digital surround sound; and a games/entertainment room, with enough space for a Ping-Pong table, an air hockey table, and a full wall of vintage games from the 1970s, like Pac-Man and Asteroids, and a couple of pinball machines. Mia had always wanted a room filled with such things when she was a teenager, and now her boys, who would have been just as happy playing Xbox, had one.

The renovation had cost them close to two million dollars, part of which they ended up financing with a home equity loan. A few months after the construction was completed, the market tanked, and they lost what little remained of their savings. Not that Mia is aware of any of this. Yet.

Today, Jonathan thinks. Today on the plane home, I will tell her we’re in deep shit. That we have to sell the house in Antibes, at the very least. Probably some art as well, and most likely . . . oh God, he can’t even think about it. He will remind her that these are rich people’s problems, completely solvable via asset liquidation.

Not that this makes him any less stressed-out about their situation. In fact, these days, money—or rather his sudden lack thereof—is all he can think about. The shame of debt feels bottomless, an indictment.

“You guys work fast,” Jonathan says to the couple, gesturing to the woman’s belly with his eyes. “That film only came out, gosh, what was it? A year and a half ago, right?” Was it really only a year and a half ago? Jesus, he thinks. How quickly the whole thing can tailspin. One minute you’re flying high, full speed ahead, the next a pocket of air catches your wing just as a lightning storm hits. He feels his chest tightening at the mere thought of it. If the U.S. housing market weren’t so deep in the toilet . . . but no, that’s ridiculous. Part of the reason he’s in the pickle he’s in is because the U.S. housing market tanked, taking everything and everyone down with it. How could all those lenders, bankers, quants, and brokers have been so blind? How does an entire country enter into a common state of denial?

He wonders how much the young couple paid for their charming center-hall Colonial. Probably got it for a steal. Lucky them. Timing’s everything.

“Our first date was in January of ’08,” says the man. “So yeah, very recently.”

“We moved in together a month later,” says the woman, squeezing her husband’s hand.

“We just knew, right away,” says the husband. He turns to face his glowing, fecund bride, and she turns to face him, and Jonathan, jolted by the bright spark of that electrical current, has instincts well honed enough to capture it. He crouches down.
Click!
He snaps the perfectly composed shot that will sit in a silver frame on their new mantel for the next eight years, until the husband can no longer stand the sight of his wife’s sagging breasts, nor her nightly refusals of ardor, nor being apart from his colleague, Vivian, and so another moving truck will come to haul away his vinyl record collection and his first edition Updikes and the liquor cabinet and flat-screen TV into which he’ll so often escape, while his wife stands at the threshold, comforting their three children, who will shout at the van backing out of the only home they’ve ever known, “Daddy! Don’t go! Daddy, please don’t go!” while behind them, unseen from the van, the photograph that Jonathan so painstakingly composed will be smashed to bits on the slate hearth.

“Blindsided,” the wife will lie to her friends. “I was completely blindsided.”

“Well, here you go,” says Jonathan, handing the camera back to his subjects, pleased that he was able to play a minor role in their recorded history. Nice couple, he thinks. Visibly in love.

And with the notes of Chopin reinserted back into his ears, off he runs to Fresh Pond, heart pounding.

•  •  •

A few of
the former members of the college chamber orchestra with whom Sharon Warren, née Sharon Spivak, used to perform have begun tuning their instruments as Clover searches over her left shoulder, in vain, for Bucky. Violin bows stroke an assortment of A, D, G, and E strings, all of them searching for that perfect nexus between sharp and flat; the cellist repositions his chair; and the flutist runs a bunch of lightning quick scales as a new text appears on the screen of Clover’s BlackBerry. “no, ur other right, knucklehead. : )” Of course. Bucky wrote “look 2 ur right,” not her left. Right and left: two concepts children are usually taught in school early enough for it to sink in, but Clover had been deprived of this and other equally useful pieces of information her parents had deemed unnecessary to her education—names of trees, capitals of the U.S. states, rules of English grammar and punctuation—until it was too late for them to be subsumed, second nature, into her being. Even now, though her facility with numbers (innate, she’s convinced) is legendary in certain circles, she confuses maples with oaks, Dallas with Austin, verbs with gerunds, commas with semicolons, and left with right, although recently her husband, who was getting fed up with her always turning right when the GPS lady said left, taught her that the thumb and forefinger on the left hand make the correct-facing L, so she’s getting better on that front.

Danny. Jesus Christ, why isn’t he here with her? Flutterings of love at the conjuring of his lesson give way to suppressed anger, which slowly radiates out from her chest into her extremities, surprising her. She told him about this weekend a
year
ago. She kept reminding him, every month or so, that it was coming up. “This is important to me,” she’d recently told him, when she found out he still hadn’t booked his plane ticket. “I have to give Sharon’s eulogy. I’d like you to be there for moral support.” He’d promised to try. Which technically, she pointed out, wasn’t a promise. What will happen when it’s a parent-teacher conference? A birthday party? Will he promise to try to get to those, too, or will he promise to actually go? He’d promised to try to get over his squeamishness with regard to leaving a sperm sample in a cup at the fertility clinic, and look how well that turned out. A promise to try, at heart, is meaningless; it’s just a well-crafted cop-out.

Danny, his colleagues always tell her, is a brilliant lawyer. Never shows his cards. Always wins.