Pass It On

by J. Minter

  Arno looked around the restaurant. The whole place was decorated to look like the inside of a Chinese opium den, with lights covered in purple and pink fabric, strings of glass beads everywhere, and lots of heavily carved tables and chairs. At the far end of the room was a group of twenty high school kids lolling on dozens of big embroidered cushions, all of whom Liesel seemed to know. They were air-kissing and laughing and braying and spilling drinks all over each other. Several of the girls were openly staring at Arno.

  “What the fuck am I doing?” Arno asked, suddenly.

  “I don’t know, man.” Mickey tossed back the champagne and set the glass on a table where some businessmen were huddled. They glared at him.

  “Philippa broke up with you?”

  “Yeah.” Mickey snagged another glass of champagne and some food from a silver plate. He stood there for a moment, chewing thoughtfully, and then he turned to Arno and said, “You know, your new girlfriend was pretty rude to me just now.”

  “I know.” Arno turned up the collar of his overcoat, even though it was really warm in the restaurant. “Wait here for a second, will you?”

  Arno moved quickly across the room and got close to Liesel. He tapped her on the shoulder.

  “Just a moment,” she said. But she grabbed his hand at the same time and rubbed it up and down her back, and then over the place where a normal person’s butt would have been.

  “Hey,” Arno said.

  Liesel turned around suddenly. “Could you please wait a moment? We’re deciding whether we should all go uptown or not. I think we will, though. This place is lame.”

  “Well, I’m not going with you.”

  “Why not?”

  “You were rude to my friend.”

  Liesel smiled. She had an icy quality around her eyes. Arno could see that they were dusted with something sparkly, but it was more than that.

  “Well your friend is kind of gross.”

  “Really?”

  “Like, if I were wearing shiny Helmut Lang slippers, he could shine them. Or if I were driving one of those cute new Mercedes two-doors, he could polish it.”

  Arno burst out laughing. And then he realized he was laughing at himself. Why was he putting up with this person? He didn’t even particularly like having a girlfriend, and it wasn’t as if looks were the most important thing to him in the first place. Why would they be? He was definitely the best-looking person he knew. Or at least that’s what he told himself right then.

  “I’m out of here,” he said.

  “You know what you’re doing, don’t you?”

  “Yeah.” Arno took the glass of champagne Liesel was holding, finished it, and handed it back to her. “You’re an incredibly wild person. I’m going to miss hanging out with you.”

  “You’re going to really miss what we were going to do tonight.”

  “I’m not sure that’s true.”

  “Why?”

  “Because at the end of the day, even though you’re really fun, you’re an unbelievably snobby bitch.”

  On the way out, Arno locked eyes with a few girls. One was clearly a model and Arno had long ago stopped bothering with models. But another was probably part of the random high school contingent who had been invited to the opening, and she looked really nice. Arno thought, I’m Arno. I’m hot. I’ll be okay.

  “Let’s go,” Arno grabbed Mickey and they made their way out. “It looks like I’m not going back to having one girlfriend in particular for a while.”

  “You and me both,” Mickey said.

  Then they went outside and got into an argument over whether Mickey should drive the Triumph home, since he’d managed to slam down about five glasses of champagne in the fifteen minutes they’d been inside. Arno grabbed the key out of the ignition, where Mickey had left it.

  “Gimme it,” Mickey said.

  “No.” And then Arno pushed Mickey and his borrowed motorcycle the eleven blocks home.

  my confrontation with old father flood

  “So you haven’t seen him, Jonathan?” Frederick Flood asked. They were standing in the Floods’ kitchen at eight o’clock in the morning on Friday. Frederick and his wife had just come in from Greenwich.

  “Who has?” Fiona asked. She glanced around the kitchen, first at me, then at Flan, who was putting on her coat to go outside. Meanwhile the Floods’ driver was bringing in suitcases from their car.

  The Flood parents were always packing and unpacking at odd times, going back and forth from Manhattan to Greenwich, and then just as often they were headed to Paris or Bermuda or Antigua, or to the horn of Africa for safari. Their lives were a perpetual vacation.

  “But you’re staying here?” Frederick asked.

  “Um, if it’s okay.” I said.

  “Of course it is. It’d just be nice if we knew where our son was.”

  “I think he said he’d meet us up in the country before Thanksgiving,” Flan said.

  “That’s this coming Thursday.” Her mother sighed and tightened her cashmere scarf around her neck. “Perhaps he’ll check in with us before then?”

  “I can call him.” I pulled out my phone, though I knew how completely doubtful it was that I’d reach Patch.

  “No, I talked to him before,” Flan said. “He’s fine.”

  “Jonathan, help me take this pot into the garden,” Frederick Flood said. I stared at him. He was in lemon-yellow corduroys, a cream-colored cashmere sweater, and Gucci loafers. He wasn’t smiling at me. At his feet was a small clay pot.

  “Okay.” I just sort of stood there, since I couldn’t figure how I was going to help him carry the little pot.

  “Pick it up and follow me.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “Careful,” Flan whispered, as I headed toward the backyard with her father.

  The pot was a lot heavier than I’d thought. The Floods’ garden had been planted with the kinds of plants that look good even when they’re dead for the winter. We stood there, Frederick Flood and I, puffing air at each other.

  “Let me think about where it should go …” So while he thought, I wobbled and hugged the pot to my stomach.

  “As you may know, I’m a subscriber to the philosophy put forth by our mutual friend, Sam Grobart.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “Total honesty, that’s my thing. Total honesty, even to a fault. For instance, the moment Alec Wildenburger said Ricardo Pardo’s work was over, I saw that he was right and put all my Pardo sculptures up for sale even though I’ve been friends with Ricardo for more than ten years.”

  From inside the house we could hear Flan begin to bicker with her mother over whether she had to wear tights to school. Outside, it was alarmingly crisp and the sky was the same stunning blue that it had been all week. It was the warmest November anyone could remember.

  “So Sam—my therapist, my counselor, my friend—has confirmed as truth something that I’d long suspected your father had done.”

  “Um.” I looked around the garden, but the wooden fence was easily ten feet high and the stakes were pointed on top. He’d be able to yank me down before I got free. And then he’d probably empty my pockets to get whatever he could to pay himself back for my father’s crimes, and then he’d kill me. So even though I knew I couldn’t run, I began to back away.

  “Can I put this down?”

  He didn’t look at me.

  I heard the front door slam, which probably meant that Flan had left for school.

  Sure enough, Fiona Flood came out to the garden. So we were all standing outside in the bright morning sun, and finally I just gave up and set the pot at my feet.

  “I want you to tell me the truth,” Frederick said.

  “About what?”

  “How much did he steal from us?”

  “How should I know?” I asked. I took another step backward and knocked up against the fence.

  “It’s not about the money,” Fiona said.

  “Right. My dad said that, too …” But then I decid
ed that probably wasn’t the right thing to say right then.

  “Well, that’s an interesting opinion for him to hold. But yes, it’s the principle of the thing. We have tremendous sympathy for your mother. You should know that.”

  Frederick glared at me. “Talk!” As I scrambled to come up with an answer, we heard the glass door swing open.

  “Why, February,” Fiona said. “We’re busy just now, with Jonathan. Can you—”

  “Leave him alone.” February Flood winked at me. She and I had been friendly since I’d gotten her into a bona fide private A.P.C. sale a month earlier. And since just a few weeks ago, when she said she appreciated how I handled everything that had been weird with Flan.

  “Excuse me?” Frederick Flood turned to his daughter. No two people could have been more different. February looked like Chloë Sevigny after a bad night and Frederick looked like Prince Charles in the middle of a good morning.

  “He’s a junior in high school and he’s going to be late for class and you two are old and mean. If you want what amounts to gossip, you’ll have to find it within your own clique.”

  “Are you joking?” Frederick asked. “We’re just having a friendly conversation.”

  “No you aren’t.”

  I stared at February and her dad. They circled each other, like alley cats about to rumble. I wished I could climb a tree and scuttle out of there. Then, suddenly, Frederick Flood harumphed and followed his wife back into the house.

  “Wow. Thanks February.” I smiled at her.

  “Don’t thank me—I just get off on screwing up whatever my dad’s up to. There’s one thing I need from you, though.”

  “What?”

  “Guess.”

  “Find your brother and make sure he’s okay?”

  “Exactly. I’m not my brother’s keeper—you are. And if you don’t find him, I’ll unleash the wrath of my parents on you.”

  “And I can’t afford that.”

  “Right again.” February smiled at me, and it was impossible for me to tell if there was a gleam in her eye, or if she was still high from the night before, or brilliant, or what.

  “And for what it’s worth,” she said, “I heard about your Caribbean sailing vacation and I think you should bring Patch. If you can find him, I mean.”

  “What if I lose him there?”

  “It’d be hard to lose him on a yacht.”

  Then I said, “With Patch, you never know.” And we both nodded at each other.

  i spend friday in heaven

  “Tea,” Ruth said. We were in her bedroom, which I’d recently decided was my favorite place in the world.

  I called her once I’d gotten away from the Floods, and we decided to ditch school. I’d talked with her late the night before and we’d been going on about ourselves. She told me about the car accident she was in with her big sister and her mom a few summers ago, and the year she spent in London when she was in eighth grade and the proper little English boy she made out with there, and the months she spent sailing with her parents in the West Indies, which actually got me pretty excited about this trip with my swindler of a dad. She was so incredibly cool.

  “And look, aren’t those scones? And jam? This is great,” I said. And then I laughed. I was nuzzling her neck and she smelled of the black currant tea and this kind of warm hippie-ish smell that I was getting to really, really like. Even though up to now I’d always said I hated hippies.

  “I’m so glad we ditched school,” Ruth said. “Especially because we’re going away tonight. I would’ve really missed you.”

  “You’re going away? Where?”

  “The Harvard-Yale game. My dad makes us go every year. It’s at Harvard.”

  “Shit! You’re going to Cambridge?”

  “My sister’s a freshman there. We usually have fun when we’re together.”

  “So, you know other Harvard kids?”

  “Yeah—Alan Ebershoff’s sister is best friends with my sister. Actually I heard that Froggy’s been fooling around with your friend’s ex-girlfriend—Amanda something? Do I have that right? Describe her.”

  “Extremely insecure and kind of short—lives in Tribeca?”

  “That’s her. Froggy will probably be there with his friends, too. They’re going to fly up tomorrow morning and they’re a lot of fun.”

  “But I think maybe David wants to marry Amanda. That’s why I’ve got to take him to the Caribbean, to get a cheap diamond.” That wasn’t the point though. I looked at Ruth. I sighed. “I can’t believe she moved on so quickly.”

  “Some girls are like that.”

  “Not you, I hope.”

  “Nope, not me.”

  I didn’t say anything, and for a moment a sharp needle of paranoia and jealousy poked me, even though it was three o’clock on Friday afternoon and we were in Ruth’s bed, buried deep under her comforter that smelled like jasmine and hemp. We began to kiss and the Death Cab for Cutie CD on the stereo was like a quiet reassuring whisper, calm down calm down she likes you she likes you. And so I did calm down. And then time passed and we must have been sleeping. And when I woke up, I admit, it took me a second to shake off the feeling that sometimes when I was with Ruth, I was kind of pretending to be as laid back and relaxed as her, since no matter how much I wanted to be, I knew inside that I’m not really that way.

  “I’m going to the bathroom,” I said. “Where is it?”

  “Oh, go down to the first floor and use the one there.”

  “Why?”

  “The ones on this floor are these newfangled kind—my parents discovered them on a trip to Dubai, so they had them installed. But they’re weird and guys don’t like them. Let’s just say they get your private parts extremely clean.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Go downstairs. I’ll be waiting for you.”

  “Mmm. I’m really going to miss you this weekend.”

  She smiled at me. She was half asleep and I watched her. Her eyelashes were strawberry-blond.

  When I got back from downstairs, I found some cream-colored paper on her desk and a bit of charcoal and I began to draw her. I didn’t do a perfect job or anything, but I managed to get across that her eyelashes were really thick and she had freckles across the bridge of her nose. While I was drawing, she woke up and watched me.

  “Is that for me?”

  “Of course.”

  “I made you something, too.”

  She got up then, and she was wearing this long robe made of all sorts of pieces of silk, a crazy quilt of silk. She looked in a wicker basket by her desk.

  “Here it is.” She handed me a thick brown wool hat with a white pom-pom on top. It was a little lumpy in places, and the pom-pom flopped to one side like a dandelion by the side of the highway and had some odd straggly bits that made it look misshapen.

  “It’s for you to wear.”

  “Really?” I took it from her.

  “I knit it over the last couple of days.”

  I pulled it down on my head and it was immediately warm and I’m sure it made me look ridiculous, but she’d made it for me. So it was beautiful. Not something I would ever normally wear, and it would totally not match my new Y-3 neck warmer, but still.

  “I won’t take it off,” I said.

  By the time it got dark, we’d decided that I should probably go and she should get some rest before flying to Boston. There was a big dinner that night and she’d probably have to sit next to the president of Harvard. She didn’t want to be sleepy for that, since she might want to go there in two years and it’d be worthwhile to try to impress him, even though she’d been told he definitely liked her already.

  So I bopped out of her house and onto the streets of Nolita with my new hat on. As I walked toward Fifth Avenue and my apartment, I could feel the pom-pom struggling to sit still on my head.

  When I got to my apartment building, there were several people in the lobby, talking. One of them was a short woman in a br
own fur coat with a lot of gold jewelry. She was holding a purple folder in her hands and talking to a couple; a man and a woman who had a “just-married” look about them—they were all fresh-faced and scrubbed clean, and they both had pleats in their slacks and black loafers on. I recognized the woman’s folder: Corcoran Real Estate.

  “It’s a classic eight,” the fur coat woman was saying. “Rare, very clean, and not even on the market.”

  There was a shuffling then, as the three of them got closer to each other. And I shuffled too.

  “Here’s the inside scoop. The family’s gone bad—I have that on good confidence from someone in my group therapy—so if we come in and make a hefty offer now, well, let’s just say it’s a done deal.”

  “I think we’re interested,” the man said. He had that gross heavy-breathing sound that I always associate with new money. But I realized as I slid across the lobby and back out the front door, it was a whole lot better than my own breathing, which just sounded really, really nervous. So a young couple was about to buy the only home I’d ever known because my mom was probably so ashamed of my dad that we’d have to move to Brooklyn after all, just like I’d predicted. Great. I headed toward Patch’s and tried to forget what I’d just seen.

  everyone is at patch’s but patch

  “We don’t know where he is either, but we’re going to Greenwich in the morning, and we think all you boys should come,” Fiona Flood said to Arno. Unlike Mickey’s mom, who was young and wild and possibly having an affair with Jonathan’s painter, or Jonathan’s mom, who treated them all like little adults, Fiona Flood was just rich and remote.

  Arno stood in her kitchen with David and Mickey. They shifted around, waiting for her to set them free.

  Fiona went on. “We heard from a neighbor that Patch is up there, and we’re not exactly pleased about that, since this is a school week, but you know, we’re used to it.”

  Arno nodded uncertainly. Used to what? That even though Patch was sixteen, he pretty much moved about as he pleased? Or was it that they were used to not being pleased about things. He looked at her thin mouth, at the way her arms were folded over her nonexistent chest. Must be that last one, he figured.