Martin looked across at me. Even when they’re angry, smart people are impressed if you know stuff they don’t expect you to know.
*
Another reason why I get apprehensive at Happy Lives is that it can be pretty hard to know who’s got special needs and who’s a supervisor or a carer or whatever. Now I know that sounds pretty mean, but it’s true. A lot of the special needs kids can seem pretty normal. They’re friendly and competent with tending the barbecue and stuff like that, and a lot of them look pretty normal too. The supervisors can look pretty musty, but they’re also friendly and competent with the barbecue, so it really is hard to tell who’s who. I like to case it out a bit first, before talking to anyone; at least that way you get an idea of what’s going on. That’s what I suggested to Martin and he agreed, so we made for the food tent and avoided catching anyone’s eye as we crossed the garden.
I was removing the walnuts from my Waldorf salad when a dowdy looking lady started speaking to me:
‘You must be Charlie,’ she said.
This surprised me. I was pretty sure I had never seen the lady before, so I said: ‘Yes ma’am, I am. How did you know?’
‘You look like Charlie,’ she replied, peering intently at me. Her eyes looked very big through her glasses.
‘I do?’
‘Izzy has told us all so much about you.’
‘She has?’ I wasn’t feeling so talkative; like I say, I like to case it out a bit first.
The lady continued: ‘Oh yes. All about how good you are at raising an eyebrow, and how you hate nuts and…’
As it happens I only really dislike walnuts, and especially in salad. But the old lady looked pretty pleased with herself, so I didn’t want to set her right. I just said: ‘Wow ma’am, I guess you know me pretty well.’ I actually meant it to sound friendly, but it came out kind of mocking. I hate it when that happens, and it happens quite a lot. The worst thing is, there’s just nothing you can do about it. I mean, you shouldn’t apologize for something you never did in the first place. In fact, you shouldn’t even talk about it because it confirms the suspicion in their minds. But I guess maybe I’m over-sensitive about this stuff; although it came out sounding kind of mocking to me, the old lady kept chatting away.
‘Have you seen Izzy yet? No? Come, I’ll show you where she is. I’m Ma Petri, by the way. I supervise on weekends.’
She was pretty good, old Ma Petri was. She led us out of the big tent, between the tables in the garden towards another, smaller tent. A couple of times some freaky-looking kid that was following us tried to grab my hand, but Ma Petri said, ‘Not now my love, the young gentlemen are here to see Izzy,’ and just kept on walking, so we did too. I felt a bit impolite doing that, but I figured Ma Petri knew what she was doing. She led us around to the back of the smaller tent where Izzy and three of her friends were making a pile of records for the DJ to play. I’d like to say that Izzy leapt into my arms when she saw me, but that wouldn’t be true. It’s funny – she can be pretty shy when she hasn’t seen me for a while. Like I said, I’m not much of an extrovert either, so I kissed her on the cheek and introduced her to Martin. At that moment Cotton Eyed Joe started to play. Izzy loves that song but I’ve got to say, it really bugs me. It’s just kind of fake. I mean, originally it was a sad old song about a blind slave, then it got rerecorded as a dance track by a Swedish band so that overfed Americans can jiggle around and get off on some sanitized idea of their own folk heritage. But at Happy Lives they get a real kick out of it. Suddenly the chairs in the garden were all empty and the dancing area in front of the tent was crowded with kids having a blast. I mean, technically they were pretty lousy dancers, bouncing up and down and doing these corny moves, and being out of time and all. This one kid was swinging his arms like some crazy windmill, but I had to hand it to them, they really were having fun. And then I realized what I should do: I should take Izzy’s hand and dance with her in the middle of the dance floor, right in the middle of all her friends. I mean, I know she tells her friends about me, and that she’s pretty proud of me in her way. Boy, would she get a kick out of me and her dancing along to Cotton Eyed Joe.
But I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t do it. I usually have to be pretty smashed before I can dance anyway, and even then I don’t know if I could dance to Cotton Eyed Joe. Maybe it would’ve been easier if Martin hadn’t been there. But I felt too embarrassed. And the worst thing was, I didn’t even know what I was embarrassed of. Of being a lousy dancer? Not really – I’m fine with that. Of not having as much fun as everyone else? Well, maybe a little bit. But the more I thought about it, the more embarrassed I got. In fact, I felt embarrassed about being embarrassed. Sometimes it’s not good to think about stuff too much.
I told Izzy to go and dance and that we would watch her. She bounced onto the dance floor holding hands with two of the girls who had been helping her arrange the records. The third girl went to stand next to the tent, to the side of the dancing area. She was wearing a New England Patriots shirt which was pretty big for her, and a strange choice too. She wasn’t dancing but I saw that Izzy and the other two girls on the dance floor kept looking across at her and waving and the girl in the football shirt smiled and waved back and seemed to be having fun in her way.
All the tables in the garden were empty now, so Martin and I sat down at one of them. To tell you the truth, I was starting to feel pretty down. What’s the point of being educated and normal and all if you can’t just have fun when a dumb song comes on and all the time you know you could have made someone really happy? From where I was sitting I could see Izzy on the dance floor, bouncing up and down opposite the crazy windmill guy and occasionally looking across to see if I was still watching. She really was having a blast.
At Belmont I had a Philosophy teacher called Mr. Rowland-Smith. He was very old and kind of bent – I mean physically – but he was a pretty funny guy all the same. He never got pissed or raised his croaky old voice, but man, did he know how to cut you down to size. You didn’t want to mess with old Rowland-Smith or he’d make you the butt of some pretty sharp jibes. Except it wasn’t so much the jibes themselves that hurt, it was more that he’d get the whole class laughing at you, even your buddies. The other thing about Rowland-Smith, he used to repeat a couple of phrases the whole time. His favourite was: ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’ Boy, did he love that phrase. I guess sometimes it was applicable, like if you were asking about why you should bother with Ancient Greek and Philosophy and stuff, but he used to use it all the time. Anyway, I wished old Rowland-Smith could’ve seen Izzy having a blast with that crazy windmill guy. She looked so happy, she really did. But as for me, sitting on the white plastic chairs with Martin, examining it all, I really felt that my whole way of looking at stuff was wrong and that maybe my life was not worth living. I know that sounds kind of dramatic, but I couldn’t help thinking how simple it should be to go and dance with her and yet I couldn’t do it. Like I said, it made me feel pretty sad, so I asked Martin if we could go and he said that was fine with him. I think he was kind of down himself.
That was the last time I saw Izzy. Martin and I drove back to New York that night and two weeks later the trustees signed my mother’s estate over to me, on the condition that I pledged to look after Izzy as her legal guardian. I mean, the trustees had set up a separate fund for her and all that, but someone still had to go check on her sometimes. Boy, did I sign a load of papers last summer. Then, a month later, I was accepted by the Hollywood School of Dramatic Arts in Los Angeles, so I found a realtor to sell the apartment in New York and I moved to LA. That summer barbecue party had taken place almost a year before, but as I sat in the diner fifty miles south of Vegas I thought how I wanted to see Izzy more than anything else in the world. That’s why I’d left LA a couple of days before, and it’s why I was headed east. That’s also why it was convenient for me to meet Special Agent Kramer in the diner off of Interstate 15.
III
THE ESTATE GOT signed over to me on my eighteenth birthday. I guess I always knew I was going to be very rich but still it was weird the way it happened, just like that. And it’s also pretty weird to have so much money and not know what to do with it. I guess most kids would have gone crazy and thrown a few parties and stuff, but to tell the truth I wouldn’t have known who to invite. I’d kind of lost touch with everyone I knew from Belmont. I’d even lost touch with Mikey – he’d been my best friend at Belmont. After that, I guess I became a bit of a loner. I mean, if you live with your own tutor and housekeeper and cook you don’t really feel like inviting anyone back to your apartment. I guess I just didn’t want to stick out any more than I already did. And that’s another thing – I wasn’t into the same kind of stuff as the other guys I knew. For example, they used to dress up in business suits that were too big for them, in the hope of maybe getting let into a nightclub. I never did that. So even if I had wanted to throw a party when the estate got signed over, there wasn’t really anyone I wanted to invite. I guess I could have thrown it just for myself and Martin, before he left. That would have been fun.
In any case, most of the money was pretty tied up in stocks and the rights from mom’s early vocal recordings, before she made it big in the movies. But the best thing about the estate getting signed over was that the trustees couldn’t tell me what to do anymore. They were meant to keep on advising me, but their advice was pretty predictable and anyway I didn’t have to take it. Right after the estate got signed over I agreed to go to lunch with Mr Hartfelder, the senior trustee. Big mistake.
Mr Hartfelder came to pick me up in this shiny green sports car, some old time British race car. It was pretty slick on the inside, all polished wood and leather. It really was a nice car, I’m not pretending it wasn’t. The problem was, Mr Hartfelder was just too proud of the damn thing. First thing he said to me was:
‘Hiya Charlie. Good to see ya. I bet you’re wondering where I got these wheels.’
‘Yes sir, I am,’ I replied, though I couldn’t have cared less.
‘Sure you are, Charlie. Sure you are. Bought it at the Christie’s auction. Just got it shipped over from old Blighty.’
Man, the guy was a terrible fake. He might have spent a semester at Oxford – I think that’s what he told me – but he thought he was the goddamn Prince of Wales.
‘Just imagine what a good-looking kid like yourself could do with a car like this. Chicks wouldn’t leave you alone, eh?’ Old Hartfelder looked across at me and made a kind of clucking noise with his cheek. I hate it when old people talk about sex. At least, I guess it’s ok if they talk about themselves and sex – though I’m not too crazy about that either – but I hate it when they talk about you and sex.
‘But then, I guess you’re getting more than enough already, ha, ha.’ If this was old Hartfelder’s way of breaking the ice, well, he really screwed up.
‘Of course, I daresay, if you really wanted a car like this you could go out and buy one tomorrow. What are you worth now? Your mother was a smart one, that’s for sure. Had ‘em all by the balls, ha, ha!’ Man, old Hartfelder made me want to puke.
*
We drove to this really stuffy French restaurant for lunch. I saw Hartfelder trail his fingers along the car’s paintwork before carefully handing the keys to the valet. We walked inside where the maitre d’ was some slimy French dude with slick black hair.
‘Ah Monsieur Hartfelder, it is both an honor and a pleasure to see you again.’ The guy laid it on thick, with an accent and all, and you could see Hartfelder was really getting off on it. He was puffing up like one of those bullfrogs that blow air into the membranous cavities beneath the jaw. I watched a film about them once. They’re pretty interesting. The membrane has the greatest elasticity ratio of any animal tissue.
I couldn’t deal with these two phonies jacking each other off any longer, so I started wandering towards the dining room.
‘Monsieur, Monsieur!’ I heard feet scampering behind me. ‘I am sorry Monsieur, etiquette requires all gentleman to wear jackets in the restaurant. I think you will find this one an excellent fit.’ The slimeball handed me a sports jacket and a tie. Boy was it a bad idea to have lunch with Hartfelder.
The old bullfrog insisted on ordering for both of us. He ordered scallops followed by lobster, after which I was getting some pretty bad stomach cramps. He was watching me closely and when I put down my knife and fork in defeat he speared a piece of lobster from my plate and said, ‘One must never be selfish with shellfish.’ He didn’t eat the bit of lobster though; I guess he’d been planning to say that for a while. Then he asked, ‘So what’s it to be: Harvard, Yale, or do you intend to broaden your horizons with a sojourn over the pond?’
‘Well sir…’ I wasn’t feeling so good; my stomach was really playing up. Also I was distracted by a bit of lobster on Hartfelder’s lip. He must have seen me staring at it because he dabbed it away with his napkin. I remember wishing at the time that I could get rid of Hartfelder as easily as he had got rid of that bit of lobster. Looking back now I don’t feel the same way at all. In fact, I wish he were still around, and still himself. He was annoying, and he was an old fake, but really he wasn’t a bad guy.
But in the restaurant he was pretty focussed on my education. ‘Oxford’s dreaming spires, Cambridge perhaps?’ he suggested.
‘No sir, I don’t think I’ll be continuing my education.’
Like I said, it’s not that I don’t like learning stuff, but I really think that when stuff is interesting you just pick it up anyway. And I don’t like people who lecture you, because they’re not really talking to you, they’re talking to themselves. But I knew old Hartfelder wouldn’t understand, so I didn’t even try him.
‘But you can’t just gallivant around New York. Your mother would be very disappointed. The trust she set up was very clear in expressing the wish that you should have the best education that money can buy.’
‘Yes sir, that’s why I would like to go to drama school.’
Old Hartfelder pinched the skin over the bridge of his nose together. People usually do that for show. With guys like Hartfelder, everything’s for show. But if everything’s for show, I mean, really everything, then it can’t be for show because there’s no room for the bit that’s doing the showing, if you see what I mean.
‘I want to learn about acting. I really do,’ I said.
Hartfelder paused and looked at me. He’d want me to describe it as a ‘dramatic’ pause. Then he said: ‘Well my boy, I don’t suppose your mother could have objected to that.’
When we left the restaurant the sun was shining. Hartfelder put down the roof of the car and we crawled slowly up Park Avenue. The old fake spent the whole damn ride checking out the sidewalks to see if people were checking him out. The guy was nearly seventy and all he wanted was for people to check him out in his flashy green car. It was pretty sad.
*
After that meeting with Hartfelder I sent off for the forms for the Hollywood School of Dramatic Arts, but in the end I never finished filling them out. I had to telephone the school to explain that my next of kin was Izzy but that she wouldn’t be much help in an emergency. They seemed pretty suspicious at first, but when I told them that I would be paying the fees upfront, and when they found out who my mother was, well, they put me through to one of the directors of the school and he pretty much offered me a place over the phone.
However, the director still wanted to know who to contact in case of an emergency. I said I really didn’t know. I mean, I guess I could have given him Hartfelder’s name, but then I thought that if I were laid up in hospital with appendicitis or something, well, the last person I would want to see would be Hartfelder. That turned out to be just as well because Hartfelder had a stroke at the end of the summer. His office contacted me to tell me and to give me the number of the nursing home where he was recuperating. I called the number and when I eventually spoke to him he was friendly and all, but I kind of got the
feeling he didn’t know who I was. At the time I was almost grateful, like his amnesia severed the last tie between me and the trustees. I guess I sort of blamed them for the fact that I’d been pretty unhappy in New York, but that’s unfair. I feel pretty differently about them now too; in fact, I wish those ties hadn’t been quite so easy to break.
Anyway, I didn’t think it was so bad to lose your memory like Hartfelder did; maybe you’d have the pleasure of rediscovering all your favorite things, as if you were seeing them for the first time. But I guess once you’ve had one stroke you’re more likely to have another. When I phoned the nursing home at Thanksgiving they told me Hartfelder had had his third stroke and had lost the power of speech. I felt pretty bad then. Anyways, when the Hollywood School asked me for an emergency contact I gave them Mikey Katzounnis’ mom’s address, because although the family had stopped talking to me, they were still the closest I had to parents of my own.
*
Mikey was my best friend for a time. His parents were Greek – his pa was into shipping – and my mom was Italian, like I said, so we got lumped together during my first semester at Belmont. I guess Mikey and I even looked pretty similar, at least compared to all the freckly, patrician kids from New England. I used to be pretty quiet back then, but I sure used to read a lot. The best thing about Belmont was the old library right at the top of the main school building. The whole building was really gothic looking, and the old library was in the attic and stretched from the far end of the west wing to the far end of the east wing. It was called the ‘old’ library because there was also a new library in the new part of the school and that’s where you had to go for textbooks and science books and so on. Most kids never even bothered going up to the old attic library; the books there had all been part of C. Arthur Allen’s own private collection. C. Arthur Allen was one of the original founders of the school way back and he had donated his library as part of an endowment.
Who is Charlie Conti? Page 2
