After we said goodbye to the kids (Robby was flopped in front of the giant plasma screen watching 1941 and barely acknowledged us, while Sarah sat with Wendy on the other side of the room, going over the CliffsNotes for Lord of the Flies) Jayne and I stepped out onto Elsinore Lane and on the brief walk to the Allens’ she patiently reminded me who everyone was and what they did since I always seemed to forget, which in this circle was considered bad form. Mitchell was, of all things, a member of the investment banking community, while Mark Huntington was a golf course developer and Adam Gardner was yet another semimobster whose supposed career in waste management was clouded with fuzz—just a group of regular dads, living in the soft dreamlight of wealth we had all created, joined by our generically beautiful wives in trying to secure our perfect children’s ascension in the world. A slight wind caused leaves to scratch along the pavement as Jayne and I walked from our house to the Allens’. Jayne held my hand and leaned into me. I moved away slightly so she couldn’t feel the bulge of the cell phone in my pocket.
Mitchell opened the door and hugged Jayne tightly before remembering to shake the hand I was holding out in midair. We were the last couple to arrive, and Mitchell ushered us in quickly since Zoe and Ashton were about to perform the yoga poses they had learned the previous week for the adults. In the living room we nodded at Adam and Mimi Gardner and at Mark and Sheila Huntington, all of us standing in that vast space while Zoe pretended to be a tree for something like five minutes and her brother demonstrated his impressive breathing exercises in a downward dog stretch. (Ashton looked as if he’d been crying—his eyes red, his face flushed and swollen—and he obediently went through his routine as if forced, though at the time I blamed his apparent misery on the ear infection.) They both did the “sideways plank” and then they curled up into a “rock pose.” This was all capped off by Zoe and Ashton’s balancing beanbag pillows on their heads until the adults applauded. “How cute,” I murmured to a delighted Nadine Allen, who I hadn’t realized was standing beside me and whose hand was resting on my lower back. She smiled generously at me (a Klonopin rictus) and then reached out for Ashton, who abruptly turned away and stalked out of the room. Nadine’s face flickered with worry—but only for a second—and then became the smiling mask of a hostess again. It was a significant moment. I was already stricken and exhausted.
The Allens’ house was an almost exact replica of our place—palatial and minimalist and immaculate. There was even the same chandelier in the high-ceilinged foyer and the same curving staircase connecting the two floors, and Mitchell started taking drink orders once the kids had gone to their rooms and Jayne glanced at me when I asked for a vodka on the rocks and I returned the glance jokingly when she demurred and decided on a glass of white wine I knew she really didn’t want, and we settled into cocktail chatter with a Burt Bacharach CD playing in the background—a knowing, kitschy touch presented with an ironic formality, operating not only as a dig at our parents’ tastes, a way of commenting on how bourgeois and middlebrow they were, but also as something comforting; it was supposed to take us back to the safety of our childhoods, and I suppose that for some it worked like a balm, as did a menu that updated the meals our mothers had served: chicken Kiev (but with a Jamaican touch—I could not imagine what that would taste like) and au gratin potatoes (but made with manchego cheese) and that seventies stalwart sangria, which like so many artifacts from that era had made a comeback.
When we sat down to eat I took inventory of the people in the room, and the remnants of my good mood evaporated when I realized how very little I had in common with them—the career dads, the responsible and diligent moms—and I was soon filled with dread and loneliness. I locked in on the smug feeling of superiority that married couples gave off and that permeated the air—the shared assumptions, the sweet and contented apathy, it all lingered everywhere—despite the absence in the room of anyone single at which to aim this. I concluded with an aching finality that the could-happen possibilities were gone, that doing whatever you wanted whenever you wanted was over. The future didn’t exist anymore. Everything was in the past and would stay there. And I assumed—since I was the most recent addition to this group and had not yet let myself be fully initiated into its rituals and habits—that I was the loner, the outsider, the one whose solitude seemed endless. My wonderment at how I had arrived in this world still hadn’t deserted me. Everything was formal and constricted. The polite conversation that carried over from cocktails into dinner was so stifling that it carried a certain ruthlessness, so I honed in on the women, carefully weighing Mimi versus Sheila versus Nadine, all of whom I found attractive (though Jayne outshone them all). Mitchell was leaning into my wife and Nadine kept pouring me sangria that I was positive had no alcohol in it, and everywhere I glimpsed the withholding of a once casual promiscuity and it made me feel old. I briefly imagined all of us involved in an orgy (not a disagreeable fantasy considering how well put together the women were) until I heard that Mimi Gardner owned a Pomeranian named Basket.
And then talk turned to Buckley, which was really the only reason the four couples were sitting at the round table below the dimmed lights in the austere and barren dining room in the Allen home—all of our kids attended the school. We were reminded that it was parent/teacher night tomorrow, and would we be there? Oh yes, Jayne and I assured the table, we would. (I shuddered at what the consequences would have been if I had said, “Under no circumstances are we attending the Buckley parent/teacher thing.”) The conversation leaned toward the shallow endowment, the deep denial, the value distinctions, the grand connections, that large donation, the right circumstances—big and personal topics that demanded specifics and examples but there was just enough anonymity hovering over them to make everyone feel comfortable. I had never been to a dinner party where all talk revolved around children and since I was basically the new dad I couldn’t grasp the emotional undertow and anxiety pulsing below the casual chatter—and there was something off about the obsession with their children that bordered on the fanatical. It wasn’t that they weren’t concerned about their kids, but they wanted something back, they wanted a return on their investment—this need was almost religious. It was exhausting to listen to and it was all so corrupt because it wasn’t making for happier children. What happened to just wanting your kids to be content and cool? What happened to telling them the world sucks? What happened to getting slapped around a little? These parents were scientists and were no longer raising their kids instinctually—everyone had read a book or watched a video or skimmed the Net to figure out what to do. I actually heard the word “portal” used as a metaphor for “nursery school” (courtesy of Sheila Huntington) and there were five-year-olds with bodyguards (Adam Gardner’s daughter). There were kids experiencing dizzy spells due to the pressure of elementary school and who were in alternative therapies, and there were ten-year-old boys with eating disorders caused by unrealistic body images. There were waiting lists filled with the names of nine-year-olds for acupuncture sessions with Dr. Wolper. I found out that one of the children in Robby’s class had drunk a small bottle of Clorox. And then it was: cutting the pasta from the school lunch program, and the nutritionist who catered the bar mitzvah, and the Pilates class for two-year-olds, the sixth-grader who needed the sports bra, the little boy who tugged at his mother in the upscale supermarket and asked, “Does this have carbs in it?” A conversation began about the connection between wheezing and dairy products. After that: a bogus debate about echinacea. The concussions, the snakebite, the neck brace, the need for bulletproof classroom windows—it all kept coming, things that to me seemed futuristic and pointless and hollow. But Jayne was nodding in agreement and listening thoughtfully and making helpful comments and I suddenly realized that the more famous Jayne became—and the more people expected from her—the more she seemed like a politician. When Nadine gripped my arm and asked me what my feelings were about a topic I hadn’t been following I offered vague generalities about the de
spair in book publishing. When this didn’t get any kind of reaction from the table, I understood then that what I wanted was to be accepted. So why wasn’t I volunteering at computer classes? Why wasn’t I coaching the tennis team? Nadine saved me by mentioning the hopeful rumor that one of the missing boys had been spotted on Cape Cod, before excusing herself from the table to check on Ashton again—which she did, by my count, seven times during that dinner. I started reaching for the sangria with a frequency that caused Jayne to move the pitcher away from me after I had filled my glass to its rim. “But what will happen when my drink needs replenishing?” I asked in a robot’s voice and everyone laughed, though I wasn’t aware I had made a joke. I kept glancing over at Mitchell, who was staring at Jayne with his dull carnal gaze while she uselessly explained something to him, his only response a constant panting. It took three hours for dinner to complete itself.
The women cleared the table and went into the kitchen to prepare dessert while the men sauntered outside to the pool area to smoke cigars, but Mark Huntington had brought four prerolled joints, and before I realized what was happening we started lighting up. I wasn’t a pot fan but I was surprised at and grateful for its arrival: it was going to take forever to get through the rest of the evening—the sorbet with fresh fruit and the lingering goodbyes and the dreary promises of another dinner—and without getting stoned, falling into bed seemed impossibly distant. After the first toke I collapsed onto one of the chaise longues that were set in some particular and artful arrangement around the large yard, which unlike ours sat off to the side of the house instead of the back, and the night was dark and warm and the light from the pool shadowed the men’s features in a ghostly phosphorous blue. From where I was slumped on the chaise I was facing the side of our house, and while taking deep drags off the joint I squinted my eyes and studied it. I could see through the French doors into the media room, where Robby was still lying on the floor in front of the TV and Sarah was still sitting on Wendy’s lap as the babysitter read her the story about those stranded boys on that lost island, and above them was the darkened master bedroom. And surrounding everything was the great peeling wall. Yesterday morning, up close, the patches on the wall hadn’t seemed as large as they looked from this angle. The entire wall was now almost entirely covered with pink stucco, with only small patches of the original lily white paint remaining. A new wall had been uncovered—it had taken over—and this was alarming enough to spread a chill through me (because it was a warning of some kind, right?) and after I was handed another joint and took a heavy toke, I hazily thought, How . . . strange . . . and then my thoughts drifted away to Aimee Light and I felt a faint pang of lust followed by disappointment, the usual combo. The silhouettes of the women could be seen in the kitchen and their voices, distant and muffled, were a gentle backdrop to the men’s conversation. The men were trim with flat stomachs, their hair expensively colored, their faces smooth and unlined, so none of us looked our age, which I supposed, while yawning on the chaise, was a good thing. We were all a little detached and had a tendency to snicker, and I really didn’t know any of them—everyone was still a brief first impression. I was looking at a weather vane on the Allens’ roof when Mitchell asked me with an actual aura of concern and not the overlay of malice I had braced myself for, “So what brought you out to this part of the world, Bret?” I was drowsy and scanning the dark field behind our neighbors’ house.
I aimed for the right note of detachment, and snickered. “Well, she read too many magazine articles about how children raised in fatherless homes are more likely to become adolescent delinquents. And voilà. Here I am.” I sighed and had another toke. An enormous cloud was billowing across the moon. There were no stars.
A chorus of grim chuckles were followed by even more snickering. And then it was back to the children.
“So he’s taking methylphenidate”—Adam pronounced it effortlessly—“even though it really hasn’t been approved for kids under six,” and then he went on about Hanson’s and Kane’s attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, which naturally led the conversation to the 7.5 milligrams of Ritalin administered three times a day, and the pediatrician who discouraged having a television set in the kid’s bedroom, and Monsters, Inc.—so old school—and Mark Huntington had hired an essay writer for his son, who’d pleaded with him that he didn’t need one. And then the talk turned to the missing boys, a lunatic, a recent bombing in New Orleans, another pile of corpses, a group of tourists machine-gunned outside the Bellagio in Vegas. The marijuana—which was pretty strong—had turned our speech into thick parodies of drug talk.
“Have you ever tried the deaf-daddy routine?”
I wasn’t asked this, but I sat up, intrigued, and said, “No, what is it?”
“When he starts whining just pretend you don’t understand what he’s saying.” This was Mitchell.
“What happens?”
“He gets so annoyed he simply gives up.”
“How many hours did you spend on Google to get that info, Mitch?”
“It sounds excruciating,” Adam sighed. “Why not just give him what he wants?”
“I’ve tried that. It does not work, my friend.”
“Why not?” someone asked, even though we all knew the answer.
“Because they always want more” was Mark Huntington’s response.
“Hell,” Mitchell said with a shrug, inhaling, “they’re my kids.”
“We play hide-and-get-lost,” Adam Gardner said after a long silence. He was also sprawled on a chaise, his arms crossed, staring up at the starless sky.
“How do you play that?”
“Kane is ‘it’ and has to count to a hundred and seventy.”
“And then?”
“I drive over to the Loew’s Multiplex and catch a matinee.”
“Does he care?” Adam was asked. “I mean—that he can’t find you?”
Gardner shrugged. “Probably not. Just goes and sits in front of the computer. Stares into that damn thing all day long.” Gardner pondered something. “Eventually he finds me.”
“It’s a whole different world,” Huntington murmured. “They’ve developed an entirely new set of skills that sets us way apart.”
“They know how to handle visual information.” Gardner shrugged. “Big fucking deal. I, for one, am not impressed.”