by Jonathan Dee
“I think not,” Robin said, giggling. She was already wasted and April felt a flash of resentment. “We’re up on the third floor.”
“There’s a third floor?” April said, looking up.
She got there eventually, picking her way past a group of boys who had found a silver tea tray and were trying to surf down the stairs. Robin, red-eyed, hugged her for a good thirty seconds, which told April that it was X. But the X was now all gone, supposedly. They were all in some kind of den or study or something; this house was a trip, one of those houses that even this crowd couldn’t quite believe somebody they knew lived in. The room itself, as a place to hang out, was tolerable-only about ten of them, the music reaching them as a kind of modulating throb-but the downside was that they were now so far away from the beer that there was no question of convincing anyone to make the trip. Someone passed April a warm bottle of Grey Goose and she did the best she could with it.
Two guys sitting about ten feet apart were texting each other and collapsing in laughter, and someone else was making a big show of checking out all the books on the shelves. Robin was talking with her eyes closed. Not the best sign. April was sitting in a club chair that was so comfortable she could have slept in it, even though it smelled like beer. Who would invite strangers in here, she thought? Who was this chick from St. Paul ’s, and where had her parents gone without her? April didn’t understand some families. Most families, actually. Just then, as if on cue, her cell phone vibrated in her pocket again; it was Cynthia. April tried to think quickly. She was a little fucked up, but if she didn’t answer now her mother would just keep calling, and she wasn’t likely to get any less fucked up as the evening progressed. She walked out to the landing and answered. She was able to keep it short on account of the noise. A minute later she returned and they were all staring at her.
“Your mom, right?” Robin said. Her eyes were like little mail slots.
“And you answered?” one of the guys said.
“Shut up,” Robin said. “Her mom is so cool. April, I think it’s so cool that your mom is so cool.”
“Ah,” the guy said. “The Cool Mom.”
“Also totally smoking hot,” Robin said. “Seriously. Have you ever seen her?”
“I have!” said some random guy. “I saw her in some magazine! A total babe. She looks like, what the fuck is the name of that actress, the one who plays the mom-”
It should have made her feel weird, April thought, that they were all on the borderline of getting crude about her mom, but it didn’t. She wasn’t even sure they were all talking about the same person anyway. Besides, her mom was gorgeous, she’d been onto that long before any of them. “Hey,” she said to the guy who was still struggling to remember the name of the actress, “are you Calvin?”
“No,” he said irritably, as if his chain of thought had been broken. “I’m Tom. Calvin who? Calvin fucking Klein?”
A while later Robin said she wasn’t feeling well, and next thing they knew she was asleep in the chair, with Tom’s jacket over her.
“You think she’s all right?” April asked.
“Sure,” Tom said. “Not like we’ve never seen this before.”
“I just love her so much,” April said, and to demonstrate how much, she tried to look very hard into Tom’s eyes.
“Don’t worry,” Tom said. When you were drunk there was something so impressive about people who held it together better than you. April had the sense that the other people in the room were now gone. “We won’t let anything happen to her. We care about her.”
“Do you think we should find a phone?” she said. What the fuck was she talking about? She didn’t know. There was a phone right there in her ass pocket, for one thing.
“Yes, let’s,” Tom was saying very seriously. “By all means. Let’s go look for a phone.”
He walked behind her up to the darkened fourth floor, and when she turned around on the landing they were kissing. She felt cold and realized he already had her shirt up around her armpits and she at least had the presence of mind to walk backward a few more steps before anybody downstairs saw them. She wasn’t going to be one of those skanks who got wasted and put on a show for everybody. She pulled him along by his jacket. She was trying to communicate without talking because she knew she had been slurring. Off the hallway were two closed doors. Tom tried them but they were locked. No telling what was going on in there. At the end of the hall, impossibly, was another, narrower flight of stairs.
“Jesus Christ,” Tom said, “this place is massive.”
At the top of the final staircase was a room with the door ajar and some light seeping through. Tom pushed the door open and they both stopped short: it was an attic that had been converted into a study or office of some kind, with a long desk and a computer, and there was a man sitting there. He spun slowly in his swivel chair, like the mother’s corpse in Psycho, April thought, only this guy was wearing a cardigan and reading The Wall Street Journal.
“Hello,” he said.
April was too freaked out to speak. “Hi, sir,” Tom said. “Sorry to disturb you. We were looking for the bathroom.”
“There isn’t one on this floor,” the man said amiably. Oh my God, April thought, you live here! She had an urge to go up and poke at him like he was a ghost. “There’s one right underneath us.” He had to be the father of the girl throwing the party. This had to be his own home that they were tearing apart downstairs. He was staring at her and she realized she was laughing.
“Sorry to disturb you,” Tom said a second time, and pulled April outside and shut the door behind them.
Downstairs they found the bathroom; they went in and shut the door and kissed for a while longer, and then April went down on him. It was the quickest way to bring the whole thing to a close-ridiculously quick, in fact-and it was also the best way to keep his hands and mouth from going anywhere she didn’t want them to go. Amazing how passive guys got, and how quickly, once you took over that way. It was all so predictable. She kept going even when she felt the cell vibrating in her pocket again.
On her way downstairs she peeked into the study but Robin, as April pretty much knew she would be, was gone. April had the cab let her off at 72nd and walked the rest of the way home to straighten out a little, and on the way she checked the phone and found a text from her mom: Where R U? She bought a pack of Juicy Fruit at a newsstand to clean up her breath. She came in through the downstairs door but went up to the kitchen for a bottle of water and saw the lights, like lights from a swimming pool, flickering on the walls of the darkened media room. Her mom was curled up against the arm of the couch. She smiled. “Everything okay?” she whispered.
April nodded.
“How was the party? Who’d you hang out with?”
“Robin was there, actually,” April said.
“Oh yeah? How’d she seem?”
“Pretty good. She maybe had a little too much to drink.”
“She got home okay?”
April nodded. “I put her in a cab myself.” She blew her mother a kiss and started back toward the kitchen, but then she stopped.
“What’s on?” she said.
“A River Runs Through It. Ever seen it?”
She had, but it didn’t really matter; she went down to her room, put on some pajamas, and came back to lie down on the couch with her head in her mother’s lap. Cynthia stroked her hair for a minute and then took her hand away. On the screen were these still, mountainous landscapes and endless skies, so dreamy that the hot guys in their fetishy western garb just seemed like figures in a painting, and after a few minutes of that she couldn’t keep her eyes from closing, but whenever they did, what she kept seeing was the man in the attic. April reached up, grabbed Cynthia’s hand and placed it on her head again, just like she’d done when she was little-just like she’d never stopped doing, really. Some people were in such a hurry to pretend they didn’t need their mothers anymore, like they couldn’t wait to leave behind the things tha
t were great about being a kid in the first place, the things they still liked but for some reason thought it was important to feel ashamed of liking. She didn’t understand those people at all.
In his office one May afternoon Adam got a call from his brother saying that he and his wife, Paige, were coming to New York for something called the upfronts; he didn’t want to take Adam up on his offer to stay with them-writers, he said, got few enough perks in this world and he wanted to soak his employers for every room-service amenity he could think of-but they agreed to come over for dinner on their first night in town. Conrad had never been to the apartment on Columbus before. The brothers were less a part of each other’s lives than they would have liked, mostly on account of geography and work schedules but also because of Paige. Twelve years younger than Conrad, she felt intimidated and rudely excluded by any conversation that referenced the years before he met her, when she was just a child; she also had a suspicion that Cynthia did not like her, which was entirely correct.
“What the hell does your brother see in her?” she would ask Adam after every encounter; Adam would shrug supportively, but he knew the answer to the question. Conrad made a tidy living in Los Angeles writing movie scripts even though nothing he’d written had ever risen high enough on the developmental scale to be acted out by performers in front of cameras. One of his screenplays, though, had led to a staff job on an hour-long TV drama called The Lotus Eaters, about a group of high-school students who lived in Hawaii. Conrad traveled there twice a year, along with the entire production staff, for research purposes, and on one of these trips he had become better acquainted with Paige, a production designer who worked just two offices down from him back in LA. There was something about those Hawaiian junkets that accelerated intimacy. Adam knew his little brother well enough to know that the point was not so much that Paige was attractive but that she was attractive in a certain sterile, classic way-blonde, very thin, small-featured, always put together-that Conrad had long ago convinced himself was out of his league. It made perfect sense that the first woman who proved him wrong on this score would be the one he wound up asking to marry him. Now they spent their off-hours at clubs and concerts and bars trying to absorb osmotically, for scriptwriting purposes, the rituals and value systems of privileged eighteen-year-olds. Paige was an enormous help in this regard.
After dinner the kids disappeared downstairs and Adam brought four glasses filled with whiskey out onto the patio, where Conrad was pointing out various New York landmarks, not always correctly, to his wife. The moon hung over the park and the blue-lit planetarium, low enough to be scored every few minutes by the silhouette of a plane. “This is quite something,” Conrad said. “Who knew there was such good money in being a master of the universe?”
Paige sniffed her glass, made a face, and put it down on the table. “Maybe it’s not too late for you,” she said, in a kind of musical voice intended to suggest she was teasing. “Maybe you could still get into the family business.”
“I would,” Conrad said, “if I could even figure out what the hell it is he does.”
“Not a problem,” Adam said. “Always room for you, Fredo.”
They all laughed, Paige a little less heartily, because she didn’t know who Fredo was. In an effort to keep the conversation from escaping her completely, she said, “You know who would totally lose it over this apartment, Con? Tracy.”
Conrad nodded vigorously as if he’d been thinking the same thing. “Who’s Tracy?” Cynthia asked. “Tracy Cepeda is our show’s chief location scout,” Conrad said. “She would collapse if she saw this place. She’d offer you a mint to shoot in here. Even though we’d probably need to CGI some sand and palm trees out these windows.”
Adam felt his cell phone vibrate; he ignored it. It was hard for your eye not to be drawn to Paige because she was, in a way that was compelling without being at all sexual, so flawless. When she opened her mouth she became Paige but when she was silent, and still, there were no idiosyncracies in her face at all. Adam knew from Conrad that she had started out as an actress but did not like to talk about how badly that had gone.
“You better be careful he doesn’t write you all into the show,” Paige said, elbowing him. Conrad winced. “Please,” he said. “But it’s true that this place looks like a set. And so do the people in it. I mean, no joke, we spend weeks in casting trying to find kids who look exactly like April and Jonas. Adam, this is bourbon? What kind is it?”
“It’s rye, actually.”
“Wow,” Conrad said. He held up his empty glass and stared into it.
“Oh, Connie, you’ll have beautiful children too,” Cynthia said. “Provided Paige can find a way to reproduce without you, that is. What is that called again? Reproduction without sex? Paige, what’s the word I’m looking for?” Adam shot her a look intended to signal that she was close to the borderline.
“If you’re ever hard up for money, just fly the family to LA, and both kids will have agents before you’re out of baggage claim,” Conrad said. “Parthenogenesis, by the way, is what it’s called. Seriously, though, I can’t quite believe I’m related to them.” He stared at Adam. “You either,” he said, swiping at his older brother’s stomach. “Seriously, what kind of Faustian shit is going on around here? You literally do not look a day older than you did in college. It’s annoying as hell. What is the secret?”
Adam smiled. “Commitment, mon frère,” he said. “Commitment to the body. You should try it.”
“Commitment my ass. You’re a fucking vampire.”
The cell phone buzzed in Adam’s pocket. The incoming number was Devon ’s, which was not something that was supposed to happen. “Excuse me a second?” he said, and went inside.
The three of them stood silently in front of the moon for a while, arms crossed on the patio railing. Conrad started. “Jesus, I just almost dropped my glass over the side,” he said. “Parthenogenesis. There, I can still say it. Cyn, where’s the bathroom?”
“There’s one off the kitchen,” she said, “and one just to the right of the front door as you came in.”
When he was gone, Paige and Cynthia exchanged a quick and awkward smile, and then went back to gazing over the railing, into the pocket of darkness that was Central Park.
“I’m sorry I said that about having children,” Cynthia said. “I mean, it’s really none of my business. I was just giving him shit. We’ve known each other forever.”
Paige tipped her head to indicate it was nothing. “You have a beautiful family,” she said. It was just one of those polite expressions people used when they couldn’t, or didn’t want to, come up with anything else to say; but for some reason it got to Cynthia this time. She felt a little sting at the corners of her eyes.
“Yeah, well,” she said, trying to stop herself but failing, “that’s what people start saying to you when you get a little older yourself. You have a beautiful family. It’s like, yeah, we can tell you were hot once. You notice I don’t get any of those remarks about how I don’t look any different than I did twenty years ago.”
Paige, for once, looked quite thoughtful.
“Time is different for us,” she said.
Adam walked back onto the patio, stuffing his cell phone in his pocket. He looked back and forth between the two women. “What?” he said.
It was an old story, how time favored men over women, but in Adam’s case, Cynthia thought, it was just as Conrad had said: he wasn’t growing more distinguished as he aged-it was more like he wasn’t aging at all. His waist size hadn’t changed since they got married, which was freaky but at least explicable, considering what a fanatic he was about it. But he wouldn’t even have known how to do anything to his face except wash it and shave it and yet that looked the same as it always had too. It wasn’t the first time someone else had confirmed it for her. True, he didn’t have too many vices, unless working out too hard counted as a vice, which she thought it probably did. He spent too much time in the office, he didn’t s
leep enough, but whatever toll all this might have been exacting, none of it showed in his face. And if you pointed this out to him, he didn’t even understand what you were talking about.
She couldn’t compete with that. She still went to the gym three or four times a week, but she had long since come to consider it a chore and, in an effort to at least make it diverting, had gone through fickle infatuations with every bit of technology in there, every new fad and philosophy. The two of them belonged to different gyms-she would never have dreamed of working out with him, he was far too humorless about it. Still, like him, she was interested in hanging onto her physical prime for as long as possible-indefinitely, really. Together they did quite a good job of it. And there was one respect in which Cynthia-though she’d never discussed it with him-was prepared to go further in this effort than he was. They had three friends who’d had work done already; she told Adam about the first two, and then when Marietta had her eyelids and neck done Cynthia had said nothing and waited to see if he’d notice, which he never did. It wasn’t like Marietta ’s tits had gotten bigger or something; she was only confirming Adam’s sense of what she was supposed to look like anyway. Aging would have been more conspicuous. Cynthia still looked fantastic-everyone said so, and she knew they were serious-but it was so hard to look at yourself with fresh eyes. That was the insidious thing about time and its effects: how incremental they were. So far, so good, was her thought, but whenever the moment came, there was no resource she wouldn’t call upon.
In the cold morning overcast, wearing shorts and a t-shirt and a lightweight ski hat and a pair of fingerless gloves, Adam put his palms flat against the façade of his building and pushed, until the tightness left his calves. He shifted his hips forward and slowly lowered one heel to the sidewalk, then the other, and when his Achilles tendons felt loose as well, he was good to go. He bounced on his toes a couple of times, exhaled once forcefully through his mouth as if preparing for an entrance onstage, put one finger to his watch, and started running.
