Modern Lovers (9 page)

E
lizabeth didn't like to think of herself as anal, but she did like things to be a certain way. She could have been an architect, if she'd cared more about math. It was why she was good at her job—there were so many offer sheets, comp sheets, pages and pages of contracts—and Elizabeth's were always in spotless order. It just felt good, to have everything in its rightful place. She wasn't sure about godliness in general, but if she were, then cleanliness would definitely have been next to it. She was organizing the guest room when she noticed that her storage boxes were in the wrong order. Everything was chronological—her childhood things, Andrew's childhood things, Kitty's Mustache memorabilia, files of old letters, Harry's childhood things. The Kitty's Mustache box was all the way to the right-hand side of the shelf, three spaces over from where it should have been, and the top had been put on backward. Elizabeth slid the box out and set it down on the floor.

She knew every piece of paper in the box: every press clipping, every photo. At first she saved things just because it seemed like a special time in her youth, but after Lydia died, it seemed more important than that. No one else had pictures of Kitty's Mustache's first practice, or of Lydia with her drumsticks sitting on a dorm-room floor. No one else had pictures of Lydia smiling, wearing a sweatshirt,
with a ponytail. These were cultural artifacts. Like dinosaur bones, they were proof of previous life, and as precious to Elizabeth as her wedding pictures.

There were a few pictures missing—two band photos, including Elizabeth's selfish favorite, the one where she thought she looked like a high priestess, with the dark lipstick and the long black skirt. She'd bought the dress for seven dollars at the Elyria Salvation Army, and it was so long that it dragged on the ground behind her, which meant that the polyester began to unravel and wear after a few months of constant contact with the sidewalk.

“Andrew?” Elizabeth called.

“Yeah?” It sounded like he was in the kitchen.

“Can you come up here?” She leafed through—there were three things missing total, she was pretty sure.

“Hey,” Andrew said, eating an apple. “What's up?”

“Did you go through my pictures, take anything?” Elizabeth held up one of the band portraits. “Remember your flannel phase?”

Andrew shook his head. “God, I haven't looked at those in forever.” He stepped into the room and plucked the picture out of Elizabeth's hand. “Man, we look fucking cool. Right? Or do we not? You look incredible.”

“I think we do. Or did. I think we did. You still look like that.” She kissed him on the cheek. Andrew handed the photo back and took another bite of his apple, sending a juicy mist into the air.

“Don't spray my memories,” Elizabeth said, wiping off the photo on her shirt. “It's so weird, but I'm pretty sure there are some things missing. You don't think Harry would have taken them, do you?” She lowered her voice. “Is he in his room?”

Andrew nodded. Elizabeth tucked the picture back in the box and stood up, dusting off her fingers. She squeezed past Andrew and knocked on Harry's bedroom door. Once she heard his muffled reply, Elizabeth turned the knob and opened the door.

Harry was sitting cross-legged on his bed, an SAT study guide splayed open in front of him. He had his giant headphones around his neck, which made his head look shrunken, as if he'd gotten into a fight with a voodoo shaman.

“Hey, Mom,” Harry said. There were dark circles under his eyes. Elizabeth had never seen him look that way before, like he hadn't been sleeping enough. She wanted to scoop him up in her arms and rock him back and forth, even though he probably weighed as much as she did.

“Hi, honey,” Elizabeth said. She didn't know why she was asking him—Harry had never taken anything that wasn't his, not a pack of gum from the supermarket, not an extra piece of Halloween candy out of a neighbor's bowl. He didn't fib. Harry was their little golden ticket. Whenever she got together with other mothers of kids in his class, she would listen to them complain and rail against the demons living in their houses, and Elizabeth would just smile and nod politely. “This is probably silly, but did you happen to be in my storage boxes?” She pointed to the wall. “You know, in the guest room?”

Harry would have made any poker player very, very happy. His face melted instantly, and his lower lip began to wobble. “Um,” he said.

Elizabeth took another step into the room, her hands on the edges of the door. “Honey, what is it?”

He was trying not to cry. “It was just a couple of things. I didn't know you'd miss them. If I'd known, we wouldn't have done it.”

“Who's ‘we'?” Elizabeth asked. Harry's friends were the sort with glasses and dirty sneakers, the sort of boys who'd worn sweatpants to school long after they should have. Arpad, Max, Joshua—those boys weren't thieves. Together, they were a motley crew, like the geeks she remembered from her own high-school days, with squared-off glasses and overbites.

“Me and Ruby,” Harry said. “She thought they were worth a lot
of money.” He temporarily brightened, thinking this information might scuttle him out of trouble. “And she was right! We're already way past the reserves, look!” He opened his laptop and clicked some keys, then spun the computer screen toward his mother. Sure enough, there were her photographs on eBay, each going for over two hundred dollars already.

“Harr,” Elizabeth said. It was unlike him in so many ways—too entrepreneurial, too sneaky, too thoughtless.

Andrew poked his head in. “Did you find them?”

“Oh, we found them all right. Ruby Kahn-Bennett put them on eBay.” She grabbed the computer from Harry's bed and showed Andrew the screen.

“Are you kidding? What are you going to do next, sell the television set for drug money?” Andrew frowned, his forehead creases deepening into hard lines, as even as ruled paper.

“I'm sorry,” Harry said. He shrugged. “I mean, I guess I knew I shouldn't, but Ruby thought that it wasn't a big deal, and that we'd make all this money. . . .”

“Which you were going to do what with? Buy your mother flowers?” Andrew's voice was veering close to a shout, which made Elizabeth's ears ring. He never yelled at his son—maybe three times in the last sixteen years. Elizabeth knew how important it was to him to keep his temper in check. It had been a problem in their youth, Andrew always flying off into the stratosphere with rage over something totally inconsequential, but since the birth of their son, it had vanished almost completely.

“I don't know,” Harry said. “I hadn't thought that far ahead.” His cheeks were bright red.

“Andrew, relax,” Elizabeth said. She was upset that Harry had taken the pictures, but it was so clear—so perfectly obvious—that it wasn't his fault. He was under Ruby's spell. “It was Ruby's idea.”

“And that makes it better? I'm going to call Zoe. Right now.” He
slid his phone out of his back pocket and dialed Zoe's cell. In the band, there had been two distinct teams: Elizabeth and Zoe, and Lydia and Andrew. It wasn't that Andrew and Zoe weren't friends, officially, it was just that they weren't friends, actually. Sometimes Elizabeth wondered what her life would have been like if she'd hit it off with Lydia instead of Zoe, what dominoes that would have sent knocking together.

“Oh, my God,” Harry said. He dropped his face into his hands.

“It's not your fault,” Elizabeth said. He'd been taken hostage, simple as that. In the hall, Andrew's voice got louder and louder, and Elizabeth walked over to the bed and put her arms around her son.

A
fter screaming at Zoe (and then Jane) about their delinquent daughter's theft, Andrew took a walk around the block, walking away from the Kahn-Bennetts', just in case the three of them were staring out the window and ready for a rematch. He could feel his blood pumping in his ears. Andrew exhaled loudly through his mouth, once, and then again. Harry's offense wasn't so horrible, he knew that, but it was sneaky and wrong, and it was because Zoe was as shitty a mother as she was a person. She'd always been totally self-centered, and Elizabeth couldn't see it, the way Zoe treated her like a dog. Worse than a dog! Zoe loved her dog, but Andrew wasn't sure she felt the same way about his wife.

Andrew was at EVOLVEment before he realized that that's where he was headed. He took the stoop steps two at a time. The door was open, and there was a meditation group in session. A girl with two braids pinned to the top of her head motioned him in, pointing to a blanket toward the front of the room, where Dave was sitting. Andrew climbed over everyone as quietly as possible and sank to his seat. He closed his eyes and felt better already. He sat in silence for an indeterminate amount of time—it could have been fifteen minutes, it could have been an hour. Dave rang a singing Tibetan bowl to
reawaken the room, and they all started to move their bodies, sliding their hands over their knees and faces. When Andrew opened his eyes, Dave was looking right at him, smiling.

•   •   •

H
e hadn't seen the upstairs, and was excited when Dave offered the full tour. Like the first floor, the stairs and the upstairs hall had all been painted white, and the only rugs and curtains were white as well, which made the space seem much more open than it really was. Most of the houses in Ditmas were Victorian, which was code for small, dark rooms with lots of wood, but this house had been ripped apart by enough owners that none of the original millwork remained. Young people walked around barefoot, the soles of their feet making gentle sucking sounds. It wasn't like one of the yoga studios in the Slope, where everyone was wearing ninety-dollar yoga pants, all the logos on their asses lining up perfectly when they were in downward-facing dog. These kids were wearing whatever they wanted, shorts and T-shirts and filmy little dresses. One kid standing near the kitchen was wearing a headband with flowers on it and an open robe, a millennial Hugh Hefner. Andrew ran his hand up the banister. He and Elizabeth had always been on the minimal side of things, but being in EVOLVEment made him want to get rid of everything unnecessary—he wanted blank walls, open windows.

“This is one of the body-treatment rooms,” Dave said. “Reiki, massage. We have so many talented body workers in our community.” He kept walking, with Andrew a half step behind. “This is another treatment room.” A young woman was lying on her back while another dripped something onto her forehead. “Ayurveda.”

“So who lives here?” Andrew asked.

“Right now there are six of us—me, Jessie, who I think you've met”—Dave pointed toward the girl with the braids—“three
artists-in-residence, plus Salome, who leads the cosmic trances on Friday nights. She's amazing, you should come. The vibes in this house are incredible. I swear, for three days after, the whole place is still vibrating.”

“I will,” Andrew said.

There were more rooms—bedrooms filled with potted ficus trees and rubber plants, rooms with futons and candles and musical equipment. Every so often, a young woman or man would squeeze by them slowly, touching Dave on the arm and then smiling. Andrew never wanted to leave.

“Do you need help building things around here?” he asked. “I've been getting into woodworking. I'd love to help.”

Dave clapped Andrew on the back. He smelled like sage and sandalwood. “That would be great, man. We'd love that. And if you ever need to crash here, go right ahead. There is always room in a bed.”

“Thanks,” Andrew said. It wasn't clear if the beds Dave was offering already had people in them or not, but it seemed like it. Jessie, the girl with the braids, walked quickly toward them, her feet in ballerina turnout. She held a small cup in each hand.

“You guys have to try this juice I just made,” she said. They each took one and raised it to their lips.

The juice was green and pulpy, leaving stringy pieces in between Andrew's teeth. Dave seemed to have no trouble sucking it down. “What's in it?” Andrew asked, after he swallowed. There was a funny taste, medicinal, lingering in the back of his throat.

“Kale, chili peppers, anise, apple, orange, St.-John's-wort, a few other things. It's good, right?”

“Delicious,” Dave said. He pulled on his beard. “Mmmm.”

“That's right,” Jessie said. She took a few tiny steps forward and kissed Dave on the mouth. Then she pirouetted around and walked back the way she'd come.

There was nothing about youth that was fair: the young hadn't done anything to deserve it, and the old hadn't done anything to drive
it away. Andrew thought about Harry and the stolen photos and Ruby and her purple hair, and even though part of him wanted to call Zoe and Jane back and yell at them even more, mostly he wanted to know how it was that he wasn't the child anymore, how his baby boy had become a teenager, and how it was possible that he—Andrew Marx!—would soon be fifty. It didn't matter what any listicle said, about how fifty was the new thirty. Harry was going to start having sex, and Andrew was going to be a grandfather, and then Andrew was going to be dead. It was a chain of events that he couldn't stop, even if he had all of his parents' money. They had tried—the sports cars in the garage at the country house in Connecticut, the “skin treatments” his mother had every three months in an attempt to erase the lines and spots from her face—but it was all a pathetic Hail Mary. Andrew just wanted to pause time for a little while, to pretend that he was still young enough to do something that mattered. He wanted to drink juice and sit in a quiet room and wait for all the young bodies around him to dance.

H
arry had been weighing the decision for weeks—three weeks, every day since Ruby's graduation. He was going to kiss her, with tongue. If that's what she wanted. If she let him! It was unclear how exactly to make a kiss happen. They had to be alone, obviously, and they had to be sitting close enough together that Harry didn't have to lunge across the room like a zombie, eyes closed and mouth open. Other than that, though, he really wasn't sure.

He and Ruby hadn't spoken since the Grand Theft of 2014. Harry's parents had gone crazy, as if Ruby had taken nuclear-bomb codes from the president's briefcase. It really didn't seem like that big a deal, or at least it hadn't before they'd been discovered. Harry hated being in trouble, but he also hated that Ruby was now going to think he ratted her out. He'd been trying to figure some casual way to tell her that he hadn't narced on them, but so far all he had was a text that said
HEY
with the emoji for a bomb and the ghost sticking out its tongue. It wasn't quite there yet.

It was Friday morning. He'd done nothing all week. On Wednesday, he went to see a crappy movie with Yuri, one of his few friends from Whitman who wasn't off doing something glamorous all summer long. Most kids were at their summer houses, or backpacking across New Zealand or Israel or France. Yuri lived in Windsor
Terrace and was working at a Starbucks and made Harry free iced coffees when he visited. On Friday, Harry and his parents went to the Tibetan restaurant by the train. The entire time, all week long, Harry had been thinking about walking into his SAT class and worrying about whether Ruby would still sit next to him.

There were three houses for sale in their neighborhood, and his mom was working them all—one down by Newkirk, one at the end of their block, and one over on Stratford. Sometimes she dragged Harry along when she was setting up for things. He liked to fill the giant glass bowls with the Granny Smith apples, that kind of thing. It all seemed so goofy, but his mother swore that it worked, as if someone would say,
I freaking
love
apples. I need to buy this house.
Mostly, though, it meant that his mother was AWOL most of the time and so was his dad.

Because the bidding wasn't over yet, Elizabeth was able to take down the listing on eBay. Zoe and Ruby had brought the pictures back, and Zoe stood there in the doorway while Ruby apologized to Elizabeth. Harry sat on the stairs, cringing. It was his fault, too, and he was technically in trouble, but everyone involved knew that he never would have done it without Ruby. Her voice was flat and even, just this side of insolence. Elizabeth nodded and offered her terse thanks, and then Zoe and Ruby were gone. Harry thought he saw Ruby wink at him quickly on her way out the door, but he was probably seeing things. He held his phone in his hand all night long, waiting for a message, but none came.

Harry slid out of bed and pulled on his jeans, still sitting in a crumpled pile on the floor, as if he'd just evaporated out of them. He swabbed some deodorant under his arms and shuffled into the hallway.

“Dad?” There was no answer. Harry poked his head up the stairs, toward his parents' bedroom. “Dad?” Still no answer. His father was almost always home. When Harry was small, he actually believed
that his father didn't sleep but instead just sat in a corner of a room, waiting to be played with, like the biggest toy in the house.

Harry walked slowly up the stairs. His parents' room was empty, except for Iggy Pop, who was still curled up in a ball at the foot of the bed. Harry wondered if Ruby had gotten grounded, or if she'd ever been grounded. Being grounded was such an ancient concept, like feudalism, or jazz being cool. It had no place in modern society. Parents couldn't even take away phones or computers, not really, because then how could you call for help if you were run over by a bus on the way to school, and how could you turn in your reading logs and science worksheets? It would be like giving your kid an abacus and sending him off to his calculus final exam.

His mother's laptop was sitting open on her small desk, which was against the far wall, away from the windows. Harry sat down and clicked the mouse. Her computer woke up, a photo of Harry and Iggy asleep on the couch together a few years ago as the background. Without thinking about it, Harry clicked the mail icon on the bottom of the screen, and Elizabeth's e-mail in-box leaped up, alert and dinging.

He wasn't a snoop—his mother's e-mails were boring. Of the fifty or so e-mails in her in-box, half of them were from work, and the rest seemed to be junky things that she should unsubscribe from. Harry tried to tell her how to do it, how easy it was to click a few buttons and not get a hundred e-mails a day from the Container Store or whatever, but she didn't listen. Ruby was right—his mother was obsessive, but not about everything. Her e-mail in-box looked like it belonged to a hoarder with an online-shopping addiction. He scrolled through for a minute, checking to see if Ruby's moms had written, if they'd said anything about him. It wasn't like him to read someone else's private correspondence, but Harry felt bad—felt bad that Ruby had probably gotten into trouble and all he'd gotten into was a hug. His parents were so sure that he'd never do anything wrong, that he wasn't capable of it, and all that love and trust made Harry want to
rob a bank. And so he started reading. It was a low-level crime, but it was a crime, and that's what counted.

There was one from Zoe, but the whole e-mail thread was just about apartments. He copied down some of the links so he could show them to Ruby, but there wasn't anything juicy. It was sad, the idea of one of her mothers moving out—which one would go? Would Ruby get to stay? Or would they both move? Even so, Harry pictured Ruby rolling her eyes at the notion of real estate as juicy information. A truly cutting-edge wooing tactic for a teenage boy. He kept scrolling.

About halfway through her in-box, there were a few flagged e-mails from someone named Naomi Vandenhoovel. The first one had the subject “MY TATTOO MISSES YOU,” which made it look like it was written by some weird bot, but she'd written again and again—subjects “MISTRESS OF MYSELF FILM VIP VIP VIP,” “HI AGAIN, CONTRACT DEADLINE FOR KITTY'S MUSTACHE,” “HI HI HI HI HI IT'S ME NAOMI.” The last one seemed to be dictated via Siri.

Harry read them all, one after the other.

This is what he put together: A crazy woman named Naomi was trying to get his mother and father to agree to sell the rights to “Mistress of Myself” for a movie about Lydia. A biopic. Like
Ray
, or
Walk the Line
. The kind of movie that would win someone an Oscar, especially if they really sang. And it wasn't even like they'd have to actually be a good singer, to sing like Lydia. Harry had never liked the way Lydia sounded. His mom was a much better singer, technically. Anyone who had ever watched
American Idol
or
The Voice
knew when someone was singing out of tune, and that was Lydia's specialty, sliding in and out of tune and screeching like she'd just dropped a toaster into her bathtub. So far, Elizabeth had been putting her off, but crazy Naomi (he couldn't lie, the tattoo picture was kind of hot) was persistent as hell. No wonder his mom had been going through the Kitty's Mustache stuff.

Most of the time, Harry didn't think much about how his parents
had been cool. It mattered to his daily life significantly less than English muffins, slightly more than the existence of remote-control helicopters. He was glad that they were interesting and interested, that they read books and went to the movies, which wasn't true for all of his friends' parents. His friend Arpad's father was a surgeon, and no one ever saw him. It was like he was a ghost who left expensive things lying around the house in an attempt to get you to solve his murder. Harry's parents were present; they were nice to him. It was boring, in a good way. And so Harry wasted very little time thinking about how, when they were his age, they had actually been cool. It sucked to feel as if your parents—your embarrassing, dorky parents—had been invited to parties that you would never get invited to, had done drugs no one had ever offered you, had stayed up all night talking to other cool people just because they wanted to. Harry wanted to stay up all night. He wanted to out-Dust Dust. He wanted to take Ruby's hand and lead her somewhere she'd never been, and to do it with such confidence that she never once questioned that he knew where he was going. The past was the past. Harry was ready to be someone new. What was the masculine form of “mistress”? The “mister.” He was going to be the mister of himself, starting now. He wrote his parents a text that he was going to spend Saturday night at Arpad's, that he was going there right after his SAT class. His mother texted back some smiley faces and some kisses. He had a day to change the entire trajectory of his life. Simple as that.