The Red Book (4 page)

Chapter 2
Clover

Clover never met an excuse to dress up she hasn’t embraced: weddings, the opera, Halloween, toga parties, Christmas, black-tie benefits, white-tie benefits, New Year’s Eve, that time she was out in LA for work several years back, and Mia told her to wear all white and join her family for the closing ceremony of Yom Kippur, the one that sounded like a Russian cabdriver pronouncing the Nilla in Nilla Wafers, and they both held hands and teared up watching Mia’s three sons walking down the aisle of the synagogue carrying their flashlight candles—Mia because even though she was a bacon-eating, twice-a-year Jew, she was thinking about the generations of Jews that came before her, and how centuries of hatred had nearly wiped them out, and yet just
look
at her three living, breathing sons in their baseball-themed yarmulkes, carrying the torch into the future with all those other pint-size offshoots of the tribes of Israel, but also because absent from that twinkling parade was the one thing life had denied her: a daughter; Clover because she was getting to that age when the window for having a child of her own was growing narrower, and witnessing such a flagrant show of her contemporaries’ productivity flooded her with a toxic brew of desire and jealousy, which was tempered only and somewhat pathetically, she knew (she
knew
!), by the realization that none of the women in that synagogue looked as physically striking in their white frocks as she. Even now, at forty-two—with her giraffe legs, her gym-toned arms, her still-smooth skin, her salon-straightened hair framing a fine-boned jaw, and the oddity of those cerulean eyes parked in the middle of a dark-skinned face—she was still asked, on occasion, if she modeled.

All this to say that when Clover signed up for the reunion online and saw not only that the Friday night cocktail party in the Kirkland House courtyard had a luau theme but also that Bucky Gardner would be in attendance, she headed straight to Calypso to find the perfect tunic. Something in light blue, she asked the salesperson, to bring out the color in her eyes. Bucky’s wife Arabella, or so she’d heard, had not aged well. Rumor had it that she was an alcoholic (no surprise there) and that the decades of smoking and meal purging had taken their toll on her skin and teeth. Clover, though newly and relievedly married, wanted Bucky to see, really see, if only on the most superficial level possible, the depths of his mistake.

“Clover Love. How the heck are you?” says Bucky, nearly bumping into her after emerging from the Kirkland House bathroom in what seemed like a random encounter but wasn’t. Clover had seen him heading to the men’s room and had planted herself directly in front of the door, pretending to be deeply engaged with her BlackBerry. A ridiculous ruse, as she and her device were no longer the Siamese twins they used to be, back when Lehman was still a bank, and she still had a job.

She suddenly wishes Danny were here with her, instead of traveling for work, if only to show Bucky that she, Clover Love, has been deemed reworthy of her last name. “Bucky! Oh my God. Is that you!” The two embrace in the type of respectful-but-familiar hug practiced by those who were once on a first-name basis with each other’s reproductive organs.

“Yeah, it’s me.” Bucky points to the plastic-covered name tag—
ARCHIBALD BUCKNELL GARDNER IV
, a name that still astonishes Clover with its audacity—hanging around his neck, its cheap, elastic lanyard caught in the lapel of Bucky’s luau-inappropriate blue blazer. Unlike Clover, Bucky has never met an excuse to dress up in anything other than a coat and tie he has embraced. And nearly always begrudgingly at that.

Clover catches herself reflexively reaching out to free Bucky’s lanyard from the V-shaped trap as the two finally stand face-to-face, examining the scuffs and hollows of time and gravity on each other’s surfaces. “Sorry,” she says. “I can’t help myself. If it makes you feel any better, I walk up to random strangers on the subway and fix their shirt collars.”

“Hmm,” says Bucky. “I wonder what Freud would have to say about that?”

“Tons,” she says, thinking, since when has Bucky Gardner ever given a passing thought to the unconscious?

The electronic beat of the Psychedelic Furs’ “The Ghost in You” bounces from wall to wall as Bucky chuckles, politely, and stares for just a beat longer than appropriate at the wreath of plumeria resting in the delicate valley of Clover’s chest. “Nice lei,” he says.

Clover nearly chokes on her half-swallowed sip of wine. “Speaking of Freud.”

“No, I meant”—he reddens—“the flowers. You know,
l
-
e
-
i
, not
l
-
a
- . . .” He quickly scrambles to dig himself out. “Look at you. You haven’t aged a day.”

“Thanks. And—” Clover nearly returns the compliment but knows Bucky would immediately sense her disingenuousness. Bucky Gardner has not only aged more than a day, he’s aged more decades than the four he’s weathered. His once lean midsection has grown a small paunch, noticeable in the pull of the bottom buttons of his blue oxford. His skin has a grayish, sallow hue, as if he’d spent the past twenty years in an underground bunker. The dense forest of strawberry blond hair that used to flop just beneath his left eye, such that the whipping of his head back to clear his vision could become tic-like if he went too long between haircuts, looks as if it has been razed by a fire and replaced with the scorched nubs of gray twigs. “You look good, too,” she says. This, at least, is not
un
true. He does look good. Really good. For a sixty-year-old man.

“And you’re a phenomenal liar,
Pace
.” He emphasizes the last word and presses his lips between his teeth to try to keep a smile at bay.

“Man oh man, Gardner, you’re never going to let me live that one down, are you?” She crosses her arms and shakes her head before shoving him, playfully.

“Nope. Never . . .” Bucky finally frees his mouth to smile, and rays of his buoyant young self push through the slate brume. “Pace.”

*  *  *

Pace became Bucky’s de facto pet name for Clover after he mispronounced it the night they met, rhyming it with
race
, as it appeared on the page, instead of pronouncing it double syllabically, Italian-style—
pah’-chay
—as her peacenik parents intended. “So, Pace . . . ,” Bucky had said, pointing to the middle name printed under her photo in the freshman facebook after having planted himself on the lumpy couch in her Canaday dorm room to wait for Addison. Jane was out at a comp meeting at the
Crimson
, Mia was off at an audition for
The Cherry Orchard
, so Clover was left, once again—not that she minded—entertaining yet another spoke in the endless circle of Addison’s East Coast prep school friends and acquaintances, all of whom kept dropping by the room to see if she was in, which, due to the intense intermingling of said circle during those first heady weeks of school, she hardly ever was. Bucky’s sockless, blucher-shod feet were propped up on a tapestry-covered board atop two LP-filled milk crates, which Addison had fashioned into a coffee table, when he asked the question that would forever define for Clover both the future of their relationship and everything about Harvard that made her feel like a visitor from Planet Kumbaya. “. . . Any relation to the Pace Gallery?”

This was at the end of the first week of freshman year, which Clover had spent like the rest of her classmates: overdrinking; undersleeping; surveying classes; making midnight runs to Herrell’s for coffee ice cream sundaes or to Tommy’s Lunch for lime rickeys and fries; participating in a Rocky Horroresque screening of
Love Story
in the Science Center, where those in the know lobbed the most oft-quoted lines of dialogue back at the screen; taking a French aptitude test and writing a primitive program in BASIC to get out of various intro-level language and computer science requirements; passing a swimming test; setting up the living room of the three-bedroom suite she shared with Addison, Mia, and Jane according to Addison’s exacting prep school standard that, because they adhered to the same 1967-California-opium-den aesthetic favored by Clover’s parents, felt both nostalgically familiar and flagrantly inappropriate for 1985 Ivy League New England.

“Of course we get the one freshman dorm in all of Harvard that looks like a jail,” Addison had lamented when they’d first arrived, looking around at the freshly painted cinder block walls that, to Clover, felt more civilized, safe, and bright than any walls that had previously housed her. “Well, I guess we’ll just need to buy more tapestries.”

The Pace Gallery? “I’m sorry?” Clover had said, pretending she didn’t hear Bucky’s question, not wanting to admit she had no idea what he was talking about. What Pace Gallery? A secret chalice of proper nouns seemed to exist from which everyone except her—or at least everyone who hailed from states between Pennsylvania and Maine—had imbibed before arriving on campus: Dorrian’s;
¹
Spee;
²
Brearley;
³
Limelight;
⁴
Shady Hill;
⁵
Andover;
⁶
Fly;
⁷
Siasconset;
⁸
Buckingham Browne & Nichols;
⁹
Knickerbocker;
¹⁰
Colony;
¹¹
St. Albans;
¹²
St. Barths;
¹³
Farmington;
¹⁴
Cotillion;
¹⁵
Sidwell;
¹⁶
Narthex;
¹⁷
Signet;
¹⁸
Deerfield;
¹⁹
Area;
²⁰
Locke-Ober;
²¹
Porcellian.
²²
And those were just a few of the ones she’d overheard that first week.

1.
Dorrian’s Red Hand, the bar on the Upper East Side of Manhattan where underage private school students would congregate to drink, later made infamous by Robert Chambers’s premurderous partying there in 1986.

2.
The Spee Club, an exclusive all-male club (aka Final Club) at Harvard where John F. Kennedy was once a member.

3.
The Brearley School, a selective, academically rigorous, private girls’ school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

4.
A nightclub located in an abandoned church in Manhattan’s Chelsea district.

5.
Shady Hill School, a top-notch private day school in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

6.
Phillips Andover Academy, aka Phillips Academy, aka Andover, one of the oldest boarding schools in the United States.

7.
The Fly Club, an exclusive all-male club (aka Final Club) at Harvard where Franklin Delano Roosevelt was once a member.

8.
A village in eastern Nantucket, an island off the coast of Cape Cod, pronounced
skon’-sit
.

9.
Buckingham Browne & Nichols school, aka BB&N, a private day school on the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

10.
The Knickerbocker Club, aka “The Knick,” an old, exclusive, all-male social club in Manhattan.

11.
The Colony Club, an exclusive women’s club in Manhattan modeled on all-male New York clubs like the Knickerbocker, the Metropolitan Club, and the Union Club.

12.
St. Albans School, aka STA, a selective, all-boys college preparatory school in Washington, DC, whose Latin motto translates as “For Church and Country.”

13.
The Caribbean island of Saint Barthélemy, an overseas collectivity of France and a popular vacation spot for the barefooted well-heeled.

14.
The in-the-know name for Miss Porter’s School, an exclusive all-girl’s preparatory school in Farmington, Connecticut.

15.
The International Debutante Ball, held every December in New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, to formally present young, impeccably bred women to society.

16.
The Sidwell Friends School, a selective private school in Washington, DC, described as the “Harvard of Washington’s private schools.”

17.
A position of distinction ( just under President and Ibis) on the masthead of the
Harvard Lampoon
, a humor magazine that has been the training ground for scores of television writers and comics. Narthex also refers to the entrance area of the Lampoon castle ( just as Ibis refers to the sculptural bird that sits atop it, stolen by
Crimson
writers and sent as a gift to the government of the Soviet Union).

18.
The Signet Society, a literary society at Harvard whose new members have to be invited by current members to join. T. S. Eliot, John Updike, James Agee, and Norman Mailer were all members.

19.
Deerfield Academy, formerly an all-boys (when Clover was in college) but now a coeducational, selective preparatory school in Deerfield, Massachusetts.

20.
A nightclub in Manhattan from 1983 to 1987, known for its bathroom stalls, where the glitterati would snort cocaine and fuck.

21.
An old Boston Brahmin restaurant, where wealthy parents of Harvard students would dine with their progeny during school visits.

22.
The Porcellian Club, aka the Porc, aka the P.C., the most exclusive and storied all-male Final Club at Harvard. Its interior rooms, unlike those of other Final Clubs, are off-limits to both non-members and women.

Then there were the verbs. “To punch,” from what she could gather, when used in connection with one of the nine exclusive men’s social clubs on campus, called Final Clubs, was the Harvard equivalent of rushing a fraternity. “To comp” meant “to compete,” as in to compete for a place on the student newspaper, the
Crimson
, or on the humor magazine, the
Lampoon
. Archrivals, those two, again from what Clover could gather.

“You know, the Pace Gallery? In New York?” Bucky smiled mischievously. “Actually, I was just—”

But she interrupted him too soon before the second half of his sentence, “yanking your chain,” to detect his undercurrent of jest. “Oh, of course, the Pace,” she said. “I think we’re distant cousins.”