“Where are you from?” asked Ariel, while lighting Rebecca’s cigarette. Her nails were bitten down to the quick.
“New York.”
“City?”
Rebecca nodded.
“I’m jealous,” she said sweetly. “Stephan’s from Manhattan, too.” She took a big bite of her green apple. “If I lived there? No way I’d leave. You have a good summer?”
“Uh-huh, sure.”
“What’d you do?” asked Stephan, who had evidently been listening.
“Um,” said Rebecca. She was unreasonably nervous. “I went to Greece? My dad took me.” She looked at some leaves in the dirt, looked back up at Stephan. “It was beautiful.”
“I bet,” he said, and she could tell she’d sounded too serious. “I bet it was.” Stephan didn’t look like he was from New York, or at least her New York. He was (as her mother would say) rough around the edges. He was smiling maniacally.
Rebecca reminded herself that he was no real renegade; none of them were, because they, too, were students at this very same prep school, which counted among its alumni not only two U.S. presidents but (more excitingly) not one but two stars of Fatal Attraction. They, too, had written those essays and been interviewed. “How about you?” she asked Stephan. “What did you do?”
“I sold acid in Washington Square Park,” he said.
“Oh.” Rebecca nodded, trying not to look unsettled. “How was that?”
“I’m just kidding,” said Stephan. He was laughing.
“I know,” she said. “I know you are.”
“I was a camp counselor in Mount Kisco.”
“Right,” she said, “okay.” She smiled vaguely. “Thanks for the cigarette.”
“Where are you going?” somebody asked, but she was already gone—shoes shuffling through the dirt, heart in her throat. Relax, she scolded herself, please oh please—for the love of a perfectly nice place to smoke—would you please learn to relax!
She would relax. It would take about a month and a half. She spent at least a small part of each of those days in the Arts Center courtyard. Though “aggressively modern” (as her mother had observed), the building reminded her of the ancient amphitheaters she’d seen with her father in Greece. Their hosts, the Barkopolises (who, according to her father, “owned Athens”), brought Rebecca and her father to their summer home near Delphi for a weekend. Rebecca was the youngest guest by a good thirty years. And yet, as she’d watched her father drink ouzo among the men and women, who must have smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, as she’d watched them all dancing nightly, often with underwear atop their heads, she’d felt much much older than any of them. She’d also spent most of the trip trying to discover if her father was having an affair with someone and so approached every remotely attractive, raspy-voiced woman as a potential enemy. Rebecca not only listened with spylike intensity to every phone call but also scanned every story her father told for innuendos. She finally decided that it really was only her mother who’d done the cheating. Which hadn’t made her feel any better.
This modern–ancient Arts Center was the sole reason she’d agreed to apply to boarding school at all, even though she had little to no interest in theater and only a general interest in visual arts (she took pictures of buildings that she liked, but she often forgot to develop the film—did that count as an interest in the visual arts? How about hanging out on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum?). She’d seen that pale colossal building, its shaded courtyard, and agreed to apply to this one school, where—after learning to relax—she now spent most of her free time not exploring photography or theater but rather sitting in the woods and staring at the trees, the sky, Brian, a soda can.
I don’t know what it is about boarding school, her friend Dan had warned, but I swear it’s, like, relatively preppy arrival, followed by quick descent into patchouli cloud.
I hate the smell of patchouli.
Which is one of the reasons I’m guessing you come right back. You’ll be one of those kids everyone talks about senior year. Gone but Not Forgotten.
Right, she had said. Gone but Not Forgotten. She’d thought of her parents living not only without her but also without each other.
Her mother was (in her own words) not much of a phone person; she preferred to send little gifts, which were usually nothing Rebecca needed or even wanted but were somehow always the very things that elicited compliments: yellow alarm clock, Japanese notepad, fuchsia fingerless gloves. But—at his request—she called her father most nights, from the telephone closet off the small dorm kitchen. Before calling, she rummaged around the freezer for a frozen sesame bagel (kept in a plastic bag on which she’d written CANTOWITZ with a thick black Sharpie); she toasted the bagel until it was soft and warm and brought it into the phone closet, closing the door behind her. She and her father usually talked about her classes, her grades, what the dining hall served; he had a weird fondness for institutional food. They talked about the places he traveled for work. On Memphis: It would be refreshing to live there; I wouldn’t have to socialize with anybody. On the many Mexicans in Arizona: The hair! These guys put my hair to shame! Over the course of the phone conversation, she nibbled on the bagel in the phone booth, making it last until they said goodbye.
And now, after dialing and hearing the first ring, Rebecca could picture how whatever her father was doing—watching the news, reading an article, writing himself yet another Post-it note to leave around the apartment—he would not be able to stop doing it until at least the fourth ring. That she knew her father this well flooded her with sudden warmth, but when she heard his voice—always somewhat annoyed—saying, “Yes?” (one of the few words that displayed his Boston accent), she jumped right in:
“You know,” Rebecca said, “you don’t have to answer the phone.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You sound so put out when you say hello. Do you not want me to call so much?”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Okay, then.”
“Highlight of my day. Okay?”
“Okay, right. Highlight of your day.”
“How was the calculus exam?”
She chewed on her bagel, took her time. “A,” she said.
“That’s my girl.”
“I studied.” She shrugged. “How’s the used-car business?”
“Very funny.”
“Well, that’s what it is, isn’t it?”
Her father had been buying up Japanese and European car dealerships all through the South and the Southwest for a couple of years now. His constant travel was one of the reasons cited when he and her mother had brought up boarding school. After Uncle Hy (whom she hadn’t seen since she was eleven but still thought of as Uncle Hy) had betrayed her father and the company had basically kicked him to the curb, he’d sold his shares and decided to focus on what he best understood. His goal was to create an auto group and take it public, which, as he’d explained to Rebecca—over a late lunch at the Harvard Club one winter’s day after shopping and seeing Dreamgirls on Broadway—had never been done before. Shopping bags had surrounded their table, dead animals were mounted all over the walls, and she’d had a tough time concentrating on what he was saying. Rebecca remembered nothing of the conversation, but she remembered very clearly that he had wanted her enthusiasm. Also: The early sunset had cloaked the nearly empty dining room in sadness. At the time, Rebecca attributed this sadness to the plot of Dreamgirls and how the fat girl who could really sing got kicked out of the group, while the gorgeous skinny one who was only so-so at singing became a megastar. How it was, of course, based on a true story.
“So,” her father said now over the phone, crunching on what she was sure were ice cubes from a cobalt glass filled with Diet Coke, “your mother still saying that I’m a used-car salesman?”
“No,” she lied.
“Let me tell you something. When you are a stock analyst, you are always an outsider. Always. And I’m only so interested in
being an outsider.”
“Huh,” Rebecca said.
“What. What’s that huh supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know, Daddy. You always seem to kind of thrive on being an outsider.”
“I’m talking about my profession here, sweetie pie. My profession. Quit analyzing me.”
She waited for him to ask if she missed home, if the kids at school were snobby or messed up. He never asked about her friends or potential friends and she never brought anybody up, because he always zeroed in on their flaws, and even if Rebecca was sure he was wrong, she would, in time, become unable to disregard his comments. Her father would no doubt describe her friends from the woods as a bunch of scuzzy deadbeats. She cared too much what he thought.
“Until you are the owner of companies, you don’t understand the necessity for all kinds of knowledge. All kinds. Not micro but macro. I’m telling you.”
She heard a group of girls laughing in the common room. They’d asked her to join them—they were eating cookie dough—but she had declined in order to call her father; he’d insisted she “keep him posted.” If he was so insistent on these phone calls, she thought, shouldn’t he be answering on, say, the second ring?
That day at the Harvard Club when her father had explained his new venture, Rebecca had thought her sadness was about the dead animals on the walls and the fact that a leopard who was once alive and darting across a savanna had encountered a New York Harvard man who’d wanted to shoot it dead. And how proud that Harvard man must have been. That was what made her really sad: imagining his pride, his twinkling smile, and how all of his friends must have clapped him on the back, saying, Well done! As if his accomplishment was something other than killing living beauty. She had thought her sadness was about Dreamgirls and the sudden clarity with which she’d begun to see that most of her favorite childhood tales followed a similar story and were always letting us know that the pretty girl, no matter how dopey, does just fine, as her father liked to say.
“You know, you looked really pretty when we dropped you off at that school,” her father said now. “I thought to myself, those prep school boys aren’t going to know what hit ’em.”
That day at the Harvard Club, she hadn’t known yet that her parents were finished with each other. In a way she wished she had. Because that’s what the sadness was really about, even though she wasn’t aware of it then. When they finally did tell her, last year, she became fixated on the fact that her parents had known their marriage was over and that they had planned on telling her—for how long? After they’d lied to her about loving each other, she felt she would never believe that anything was entirely true.
But despite all this, and despite her father’s exhausting combination of overbearing interest and total remove and how strange she still felt about living away from home, and despite the fact that her mother already had a boyfriend (David) and probably had for longer than she admitted, Rebecca was oddly okay right then, in the phone closet, with her bagel nearly gone. Though okay wasn’t the right word. She was overcome with a distinct weightlessness, as if she were looking down at this phone closet with the phone numbers and the Rilke and Patti Smith and Fleetwood Mac quotes scrawled on the wall, and not only could anything happen but nothing really mattered all that much; no one scenario was better than the other.
“You there?” her father asked.
“I’m here.”
“You’re pretty quiet.”
“I am?”
“You know what I would have given to have gone to that school?”
“Now are you trying to teach me about rhetorical questions?”
Her father laughed and she could picture his broad smile, the very one that always made her at least marginally happy.
“Daddy, you know I’ve spent some quality time with Grandpa. Of course you would have killed to go away to school.”
There was a friendlier silence between them then, and, after she’d eaten all but the very last crumb of her bagel, her father said, “Rebecca?” And just as she’d known he wouldn’t answer the phone until the fourth ring, she now knew what was coming. “It’ll all work out. Okay? Your head is on good and straight.”
And—as more than one friend from home had started to point out toward the end of last year—she really was straight. Even square. Each friend who’d remarked upon this had done so with a perplexed tone, and Rebecca attributed their confusion to the fact that she was the first of her friends to take up smoking, way back in eighth grade. She knew that, even though she hadn’t done it to impress anybody, she’d commanded an early authority that had been conflated with rebellious behavior. And she knew, too, that her new friends from the woods must have been seeing her in that same rebellious light, as each time she ventured into those woods and lit up, she was, in fact, breaking a major rule. There was—as stated in the school’s “Student Contract,” which she perversely enjoyed reading over and over—NO SMOKING ALLOWED ANYWHERE.
But she wasn’t rebellious. She was a virgin. She had never been drunk. She had never smoked pot. She’d declined all invitations from her old friends, who had—over the course of the previous year—started going to Au Bar and Nell’s to flirt with married cokehead bankers. She wasn’t rebellious; she simply liked smoking—preferably by herself. She’d logged hours on the roof of her building, in Dan’s mother’s garden, by the boathouse in Central Park, and in diners while she was studying. Solange had moved back to Haiti at the start of her freshman year of high school, and Rebecca missed her even more than she thought she would. She missed eating Jell-O with Solange and watching Dallas together; she missed her beautiful singing voice and how she made up all kinds of lyrics to songs she didn’t know (the Eurythmics: Sweet dreams are made of cheese; Men at Work: You better run, you better take the bus) and how she could laugh about Rebecca’s mother and father without ever seeming as if she didn’t like them. The only upside of Solange being gone was having the apartment to herself and wandering through the rooms—windows all open no matter what the weather—like the star of her own hollow art film. To remove the tobacco smell, she ate peppermint patties, rubbed her fingers with orange oil. Her father, she knew, might literally have a heart attack if he knew she smoked. His cholesterol was high, which was not exactly shocking. He wasn’t fat, but he wasn’t exactly what he called his “fighting weight,” either; he alternated between trying to diet and absolute overindulgence. He had taken her to Paris last spring and she’d watched him devour foie gras and steak frites and all kinds of brains and cream and butter and duck fat—usually during one meal—washed down with red wine. He was hardly a shining example of healthy habits, and yet whenever he saw anyone smoking (which was, of course, a ubiquitous sight on the streets of Paris), he offered his standard remark to whoever was in earshot: What kind of idiot would smoke these days?
She liked smoking because it gave her companionship, because it relaxed her, because it—ironically, she knew—helped her remember to breathe. And it wasn’t only on campus where she wasn’t allowed to indulge in or—face facts—maintain her nicotine addiction. If a teacher saw her smoking off campus in the town’s crappy diner—if they caught her as far away from here as Central Park—that teacher could turn her in, and she would be suspended. And she had zero interest in being suspended. She wanted to go to Columbia University. Being in Manhattan for college was one of the reasons that two years at boarding school didn’t seem so terrible.
But here she was, breaking rules, hiking toward the Tree, which had evidently been struck by lightning years ago and left to rot on its side, in an abandoned field. In the past—before the two schools merged and went coed—this field had belonged to the girls’ campus. In the future—it was rumored—the Tree would be gone and the field would become faculty housing. But for now it was a perfect playground: Two people could comfortably fit inside the sideways hollow, and it sustained a crowd on its trunk and surviving branches. Since it was a chilly October weekday right before dinner and the Tree was a wee
kend place (it was a hike to walk there and back from the main campus), it wasn’t unrealistic that Rebecca expected to have it all to herself. But when she approached, there was Vivi Shipley: laid out flat with her eyes closed, as if she were on a cruise.
Rebecca climbed up to the highest branch. Just us chickens, her father would say. But Rebecca didn’t say anything. She looked out at the weedy field, at the pine forest where the path to campus began. Midway through her cigarette, she wondered if Vivi was sleeping.
“There’s something wholesome about all these spots,” Rebecca mused.
“Wholesome?” Vivi said, still not moving. Definitely not asleep. “You know—the fresh air, the grass. Sometimes I find pine needles in my pockets.”
“You ought to campaign,” said Vivi. Her voice, Rebecca noticed, had a certain full quality to it—not quite accented, but almost—and Rebecca tried to put her finger on what it reminded her of.
“For what exactly?” Rebecca asked. “Smoking outside?”
Vivi laughed, still on her back. Then she sat up, looking drained. Rebecca realized she was stoned. “I don’t know. Maybe you can make a million dollars hawking soap on TV. Maybe you can raise money for my father’s clinics. That would be good. My father runs health clinics. I’m just saying.” Vivi focused suddenly on Rebecca. “You have a face you can trust.”
“Really?”
“Maybe not,” she said. “But I trust you.”
Old movies, thought Rebecca. That’s what Vivi’s voice reminded her of. The way Americans spoke when life was reflected back in black and white. But she didn’t seem to be putting it on—if anything, she seemed to be somehow at odds with her natural elegance.
A Dual Inheritance Page 28
