by Jonathan Dee
Inside an empty playground Adam found a water fountain and washed the ink off his hands. He made no effort to memorize the phone number first; he hadn’t even glanced at it. It wasn’t the first time he’d done something like this. He’d never cheated on Cynthia and never would, because that would be weak and stupid, and the risk so much greater than the reward. But sometimes there was a thrill in walking right up to that line, and in charming the other person into stepping over it. He figured it was probably all downhill after that moment anyway.
He turned left at 77th and from that angle he could see the windows of their home high above him as he approached; the only ones lit were downstairs on the kids’ floor. He took the elevator all the way up and walked into the moonlit living room. There was no note for him anywhere but he was pretty sure Cyn had told him where she had to be tonight and he’d just forgotten. The curtains blew toward him where the patio door had been left open. There was always TV but right now Adam just felt like talking to somebody; if he’d known he was returning to an empty home, he might have stayed out. He dropped his jacket on the couch and took the interior staircase, which was behind the kitchen, down to the second floor. All the doors were closed, as always, but there was some kind of noise escaping from Jonas’s room. He knocked; no answer came, but the noise didn’t stop either, so he knocked again and walked in. There were boxes and packing material all over the floor, and on top of Jonas’s dresser, incredibly, was a turntable with a vinyl record spinning on it. Adam couldn’t remember the last time he’d even seen one. Jonas, who had his headphones on, swung his feet down from his desk and smiled.
Adam pointed at the record player and then held his palms up to mime confusion. Jonas took the headphones off. “Mom and I decided to celebrate my birthday early,” he said. “Isn’t it beautiful? Thanks, by the way.”
Adam, laughing, shook his head. There were two chairs in his son’s room and they were both filled with LPs in their covers, probably forty or fifty of them, none of which had been there the day before.
“The sound just doesn’t compare,” Jonas said. “It’s so warm. I can never go back to digital after this.”
Adam walked over to the still-spinning turntable and saw what was playing: the Buzzcocks. “April home?” he said. “I saw her lights on.”
“Her lights are always on. She’s out somewhere. She’s the Queen of the Night.”
Adam flipped through the record pile. There was a fair amount of music he recognized, which was itself a little perplexing. The greatness of The Clash was indisputable, he supposed, but were kids Jonas’s age really still listening to it? Wasn’t that the whole point of music-that you had your own? For Adam, music was tied to time: most ineffably it served as the soundtrack to high school and college. Beyond that he had never given it a lot of thought. The names in the pile began to get even older and more obscure: Television, Fairport Convention, Phil Ochs, the Stanley Brothers.
“And how about you?” he said. “It being a Friday night. Any plans? A date, maybe?”
Jonas rolled his eyes. “Yeah, we’ve all got big dates,” he said. “And then there’s the church social, and then we’re all going to the soda fountain for a cherry phosphate.”
Cynthia worried lately that Adam and Jonas weren’t as close as they used to be, and while Adam didn’t know about that-was it even healthy for a teenage son to be all that close to his father?-it was true that they were growing conspicuously unlike each other. At the same time, there was a kind of Spartan streak in his son that Adam recognized and respected. He’d gone vegan, for instance, which, even though it was not something Adam would have done in a million years, was certainly a form of discipline in the interests of the body. Still, having spent his own high school years as a virtual president of the mainstream, he couldn’t help but find Jonas’s taste for exile a little hard to understand.
He moved one pile of records from a chair to the floor and sat down. “So, punk,” he said. “That was before my time, even. I didn’t know you were interested in that.” His son nodded, like some sort of scholar, less a nod of agreement than a nod to indicate that it was a worthy question. “That was probably the last really genuine thing to happen in pop music,” Jonas said. “It was exciting while it lasted, though, which was about five minutes.”
“But people your age still listen to it?”
“People my age,” Jonas said, “are mostly morons.”
“Wait a minute, though. Aren’t you in a band? The band is still together, right? I assume you’re not playing old Sex Pistols songs?”
“That is kind of a sore subject right now,” Jonas said.
Adam held up his hand to indicate that they would speak of it no more. He picked up an album by Flatt & Scruggs; he didn’t know the first thing about them but for some reason, gazing at their suits and crew cuts and formal smiles, he was struck by a kind of pity for them, because they were so dead. “There wasn’t a lot of music in our house growing up,” he said. “The stereo was like a battlefield. Your uncle Conrad and I kept breaking the rules-mostly about volume; I think the rule was no higher than four-and then the ban would come, no more music in the house for a day, a week, two weeks. We couldn’t help it. We’d hear something on the radio, and when it got to the point where you couldn’t stand waiting a few hours for it to come on again, we’d go out and buy it at Walgreens or someplace, and if it was any good obviously we’d turn it up. Then we’d forget to turn it back down, and a day later Dad would flip on the radio to hear Paul Harvey, and it would come on at ear-splitting volume.”
Jonas nodded as if this story served to confirm something he’d known all along. “Music sucks now,” he said. “It all comes out of a factory. It’s not about anything except wanting to be famous. How people can even listen to it is beyond me.”
Adolescence was all about overstatement; still, it made Adam sad to hear his son talking this way. “Well, cheer up,” he said. “Maybe punk is poised for a comeback.”
Jonas shook his head. “No way,” he said. “That world is gone for good.”
In the winter Robin had started showing up at the Moreys a lot more often. Not always with April either, or even preceded by a phone call; one night she showed up at their front door so drunk you could barely understand her, and Cynthia, after whispering to her for a few seconds, let her right in. There was a while where she was basically living there. April’s feelings about this kept turning out to be the wrong ones: when she wondered aloud why Robin continued to get away with murder in a way that April never could, her mother took her out on the balcony and told her that Robin was being physically abused at home, that one night at the Moreys’ Robin had taken Cynthia into the bathroom and shut the door and showed her a series of cuts and red marks on her stomach and chest that had been left there by the power cord from a laptop. April acted totally shocked when the shameful truth was that she had heard that rumor before and thought that it was bullshit, that that kind of thing didn’t really happen to anyone she knew. In her least generous moments she had even wondered if maybe Robin was amping up all these stories about how bad things were at her home, not just for drama’s sake but because life at the Moreys’ was like some kind of spa for her: she came and went as she pleased, ate what she wanted, either studied or didn’t according to her whim. So April had to deal with her guilt over that. On top of which she felt disappointed and confused that Robin, who was her friend after all, had been moved to confess all this to her mother but not to her.
There was even one night when Robin’s father had shown up at their door, unannounced, to take his daughter back home. That was some drama. The doorman called upstairs and said that he was down there in the lobby, demanding to come up. Cynthia said no. Two minutes later the doorman called again. By this time all five of them, the Moreys and Robin, were gathered in the foyer staring at the video from the security camera. Robin’s father was just standing there in an overcoat, his hands in his pockets. “He says he isn’t going anywhere,” the doorman
murmured into the phone. He seemed torn between excitement and fear that some sort of incident might imperil his job. “Ask if there’s anyone else down there with him,” Cynthia said to Adam, and when the answer came back no, Cynthia said to let him up.
They told Robin to go downstairs to April’s room but she wouldn’t; instead she withdrew into the living room, as far as she could get from the front door with her sight line unimpeded, as if her father’s reach were impossibly long. He was a good twenty years older than Adam and Cynthia and that seemed to sharpen his contempt for them. “May I come in?” he said on the threshold, and April’s jaw fell when her mother answered no.
When he made out Robin in the room beyond the foyer, standing behind one of the couches, he sighed. “This is ridiculous,” he said. “You are fifteen years old. You do not have our permission to be here. Get your things.”
Robin didn’t reply. “She has our permission to be here,” Cynthia said. “You might ask yourself why she feels safer here than she does in her own home.”
At first he ignored her, his eyes still on his daughter. Eventually he turned on Cynthia his most withering look. It was interesting to April that her father didn’t even try to come between them. Most husbands probably would have, even if they weren’t sure why. But her dad obviously felt, as she did, that if anybody needed protecting in this scenario, it was the older man, with his combed-back silver hair and his steel glasses.
“I recognize you,” he said to Cynthia. “All the parents talk about you. You like to play at being one of the girls. You’re the youngest mother there and yet the one least able to deal with getting old. I don’t know what kind of fantasy this is for you, but it couldn’t be of less interest to me.”
“You can see how eager your child is to have anything to do with you,” Cynthia said. “Kudos. As long as she feels like she’s in danger, she is welcome here. Her choice. Period.”
Even if you knew that parents sometimes talked to one another that way, it still seemed incredibly transgressive to overhear it. April turned and caught Jonas’s eye.
“She is fifteen,” Robin’s father repeated. “It’s a legal matter. If you won’t let her go, the police will have to get involved. I’ve lived in New York a long time and I know a lot of people.”
“Oh, you’ve said the magic word,” Cynthia said, smiling. She took a step closer to him. “Police. If you want to go there, we’ll go there. I took pictures of what she looked like last time she came over here.”
Something changed then, not on his face so much as behind it, but still April could see it. He knew he couldn’t intimidate Cynthia so he took one more shot at intimidating his daughter, calling to her over Cynthia’s shoulder to say that she had been forgiven for a lot of things, but she would not be forgiven for this. After he was gone the five of them stayed up almost all night, just watching TV in the media room, waiting for whatever would happen next without quite knowing what that would be. But nothing else happened at all.
The story was all over Dalton the next day. Robin and Jonas weren’t talking about it, but April had probably mentioned it to a few people. It bolstered the already considerable perception that April’s parents were the coolest parents on earth. And Robin’s misfortune, as misfortune will do, lent her an aura of respect, even a sort of celebrity.
But eventually Robin did go back home. Either the situation cooled down there or she agreed to pretend it had. That was the thing about families: once they decided to close ranks, for whatever reason, you really had no way of knowing anymore. In school she was just like always, laughing and way into sports and usually surrounded by guys-a little needy for April’s taste, maybe, but nothing that seemed like a red flag. If it was an act, she was fooling herself with it at least as effectively as she was fooling anybody else. The only one who really had trouble getting over the whole thing, April recognized, was her mother. Robin had all but stopped returning Cynthia’s texts, and when she did her tone was disappointingly chirpy and distant. It wasn’t just that Cynthia didn’t believe everything was now all right; she didn’t seem to want to believe it. More than once April came home from school and found her mother sitting at the dining room table with a cup of coffee, crying.
April was proud that her home had such a rep as a stable place that it would actually occur to her friends to go there if they were in trouble. There was always somebody staying over at the apartment, not necessarily because they needed a place but just for the hell of it. Other kids’ mothers would try to gain their trust by acting young, like they understood everything, and it was just pathetic. But April could tell that her friends really did consider her mother to be one of them-older, but just enough for her superior knowledge to seem attractive, like an RA in college. They confessed to her, they asked her advice, they shopped with her (though part of that was surely mercenary, since any time Cynthia thought something looked cute on them she would buy it). They would even talk about guys with her, which should have seemed creepy and out of bounds and yet somehow it did not. The fact that all the other Dalton mothers hated and mocked her only bolstered Cynthia’s cred.
April’s own circle had contracted a bit after eighth grade when a dozen or so kids went off to boarding school. Just like that they were gone from your social life, though occasionally in between classes some kid would immodestly flash a text or a camera-phone photo from a departed peer. The move didn’t always work out for them; there was always some story circulating about someone who had gotten himself expelled from one of these places and been forced to return home, not to Dalton but to the kind of second-tier private school that still had openings mid year. Still, an air of sophistication attached itself even to those of them who failed. April had no desire to go live in a regimented compound in some picturesque New England village where there was nothing to do at night and you weren’t allowed out anyway, but she felt a touch of envy all the same. They were her age but, just by virtue of leaving, they seemed older.
Of course they did come back in relative triumph for a few days at Thanksgiving and then for longer at Christmas. Their homecoming for any vacation was pretext enough for a series of parties. On one of the first really warm nights of the spring, April went to one at a townhouse in the East Fifties, thrown by some girl they didn’t even know-she’d been at Spence and was now home from St. Paul’s-but dotted with enough Dalton kids to make her presence there plausible. She even ran into Robin on the street outside. The townhouse itself was phenomenal, a real old-money museum, and its trashing had a terrible inevitability. It was like the reign of Pol Pot, when legions of ten-year-olds were handed carbines and put in charge of national security. On the first floor was the kitchen and living room, speakers hidden somewhere in the walls blasting Jay-Z, every surface already sticky to the touch. April saw a Matisse on the wall, one of those paintings where figures danced in a circle, and she almost asked someone if it was real but then realized what a stupid question that was. It was hot inside, even with all the windows thrown wide open, and bodies were everywhere. A girl named Julie from April’s Spanish class was lying on her back on top of the piano. She opened her mouth, and a guy in a hockey jersey poured streams of lime juice and vodka from two bottles he held up about a foot above her head. He put the bottles down, placed his hands on either side of Julie’s head, and shook it. When he was done, Julie sat up and opened her mouth to show she’d swallowed it all. She bowed in triumph, but no one was looking.
April thought she’d just stick to beer for now. Robin was scanning the crowd for some guy named Calvin who was probably home from Andover and whom she’d hooked up with one night over Thanksgiving break. She staked out a spot halfway up the front-hall steps and said she’d promise to wait there if April would bring her a beer. April asked some strange girl where the keg was (you never asked a strange guy a question like that unless you were hitting on him, because that’s how he’d interpret it anyway) and found it in the bathtub off the maid’s room, behind the kitchen. She saw that some people had ope
ned up the drawers in there and were trying on some clothes that belonged to the maid or the cook or whoever had been given the night off. Unreal. But low-rent shit like that went on at every party, though usually not this early. People continued to throw parties even though they always went bad in this way, every single time. Strangers showed up, fights broke out, cops came, shit got ruined. They were allowed to do whatever they wanted.
Naturally by the time April made it back to the front hall, struggling not to let the two beers she was carrying get dumped all over her, Robin was gone. There was no way April was going back through that mob again, so she kept going, out to the stoop, where some guys were smoking and where it was at least not so sweltering-a little chilly, in fact. She didn’t recognize any of them, but one was wearing an Andover sweatshirt. She asked him if he knew a guy named Calvin. He nodded, and smiled broadly, apparently at the very thought of Calvin. He was either stoned or else just one of those guys who always appeared stoned.
“Haven’t seen him, though,” he said. “Want to get high?”
She did want to get high, being at this stupid party where she didn’t really know anybody made it seem imperative to get high, but she didn’t like the looks of the guy: his interest in her, for all his glazed affect, was too obvious. Her cell phone started buzzing in the back pocket of her jeans. She saw the caller ID and scowled and smiled at the same time. “Where the fuck are you?” she said.
“I’m at this party,” Robin said. “Where the fuck are you?”
“Outside on the stoop,” April said, taking a couple of steps away from the stoner, who shrugged. “I looked everywhere for you.”
