Andersen, Kurt (28 page)

“Chilling?” Waverly asks.

“What?”

“You’ve been looking out the window a long time,” she says, looking down at her pad. “Are you just chilling?”

“You know, I remember when the very first interstate opened.” She smiles, thinks that I’m joking the way good-natured elderly people do about having known Abe Lincoln personally. “Our family made a special trip just to drive on it the first time.”

“No
way,
” she says, reacting not to my interstate origin tale but to a news story on her iPad. “There are a
thousand
undercover cops in Miami, including federal agents, and like a million new surveillance cameras all over Miami Beach. To monitor
us
!” She’s excited to be entering the Big Brotherscape.

“So I’ve heard.”

Around Hollywood we start stretching, powering down, gathering up. The kids consent to join me in my taxi, but when we get to South Beach, Waverly asks the driver to drop them a block away from their hostel, as if for convenience’s rather than appearances’ sake.

Two hours later—they’ve agreed to let me buy them dinner—we order locally harvested crabs and fried fair-trade bananas. When some older kids they know from New York appear from the restaurant’s back room, each of the young people hug each of the others. This new obligation to hug mere acquaintances reminds me of the new obligation to give standing ovations to mediocre plays—a thought that makes me feel like an old crank.

My granddaughter tells me that even though one of the boys “seems like a total bro, I know” (Dartmouth rugby shirt tucked into khaki shorts, backward “99%” baseball cap surmounted with sunglasses), he has organized something called Occupy Christmas that is awesome. I tell her I once knew a boy like that—Rob Norquist, the nice jock from New Trier, who came to Miami Beach in 1972 as a Yippie protester at both the Democratic and Republican conventions. “And then never left,” I say. I do not say that he made a fortune as a redeveloper of real estate in the Art Deco district.

Hunter is immersed in texting, and in the dark restaurant with his phone illuminating his face and neck and front dreads, he looks like a Georges de La Tour painting.

“I wish we’d had texting when I was your age,” I say. “Talking to a boy on the phone, I always felt so
nervous.
Texting would’ve given me time to figure out the next thing to say.”

“Totally,”
Sophie says. “I
hate
phone conversations. It’s impossible to do anything else. And
ending
a call? I always feel like such a bitch. I can’t do it.”

“If you treat it like theater,” Waverly tells her, “like a speech in a play, and sort of figure out what the point is ahead of time, it’s easier. Beginning, end,
scene.
Goodbye.”

Sophie says her parents have “LoJacked” her—installed software on her phone that lets them know her whereabouts within fifty feet. I say I know people my age who track their elderly parents the same way.

Hunter reenters the conversation, smiling, even as he continues thumbing his keypad. “My dad had this car with big-ass control knobs that he bought because he skis all winter, and it’s easier to operate with ski gloves? This hot hitchhiker he picked up thought it was some special old person’s thing, for arthritis or whatever. So he traded in the car like a month later.” He finishes texting and closes the phone. “Dad says hi.”

Hunter has been texting with his father for the last five minutes? How sweet. How unlike parent-teenager relations in the old days.

“He’s going to be here on a layover on Wednesday,” Hunter says, “and wants to get together.”

“Your dad’s a pilot?”

“Flight attendant.”

“That’s interesting,” I say.

“
Biological
father,” Hunter adds, no doubt realizing what I find
interesting
is how on earth a flight attendant could afford New York private school tuition. “My mom’s husband works on Wall Street. She hates it when I hang out with my dad. She thinks he’s a bad role model.”

“How so?” I ask.

“Because he only makes fifty-one thousand a year. And because he has too many girlfriends.”

A middle-aged heterosexual male flight attendant: another stereotype refuted.

Sophie says she’s “developing a crush” on a boy with whom she’s been having sex for two months. The conversation turns briefly to porn, and its effects on female behavior. When I say there’s probably more cleavage on display today than any time since late-eighteenth-century London, Sophie seems a little self-conscious about her spectacular half-naked bosom, so I add that I think late-eighteenth-century London was a swell time and place.

“The thing is,” Hunter says, “people always think the way things happen to be right now, the styles, everything, are the way they’ve always been and will always be.”

“My mom,” Sophie says, “stopped shaving her legs and armpits in the seventies? She thought it would be that way forever, but like five years later, she started shaving again.”

I pray that we are not headed into a discussion of the modern history of female pubic depilatory custom, about which I was clued in by Stewart in 1997 when he pronounced me “old-school.”

“That’s a great point,” I say. “Did you all know that when I started school, ‘under God’ wasn’t in the Pledge of Allegiance at all?”

“What’s the Pledge of Allegiance?” Sophie asks.

“Right, right,” Hunter continues, on a tear, ignoring Sophie, “one day Social Security and Medicare are socialist plots, and the next day they’re these sacred American rights, now they’re socialism again. Everything can change,
kaboom
—not just fashion crap but mindsets, everything, like
overnight.
The media and the corporations
want
you to think everything is
locked in.
That we aren’t allowed to make real choices. “

“Some things need to be locked in,” I say.

“But it’s like what you talk about in ‘The Trouble with the Constitution,’” Hunter says, then recites my words from
The Atlantic:
“‘Rethinking precedent and moving beyond the status quo is impossible until, suddenly, it isn’t anymore.’ Like when
you
were young.”

“That’s why Occupy was so cool at first,” Waverly says, “because it was actually
different
from what’d been done before. But protests now mostly seem like cover versions of old songs. Like we’re all in a sixties tribute band.”

“We live in the Matrix,” Sophie says.

“You think it might happen again now, Grams? Everything melting, all at once? Like in the sixties?”

“Maybe.”
But I doubt it.
“Although don’t forget, when everything’s up for grabs and everything’s in flux, people get nuts. And the nuts can wreak havoc.”

“What happened back then,” Sophie asks, “in the sixties, to make everyone like, ‘Whoa, what’s going on is totally fucked up’?”

“I don’t know. The good guys won World War II and America was unstoppable, and then came this suddenly gigantic mob of teenagers shouting that the emperors had no clothes, and their parents didn’t have any good answers?”

“But why doesn’t that happen now?” Waverly wonders, her hope and disappointment in perfect equipoise.

Because we no longer feel unstoppable? Because as long as they have enough nachos and sex, people prefer order and comfort to liberty and excitement? Because of prescription psychopharmaceuticals and a million TV channels? Because when I was seventeen, we were under the impression that we’d
discovered
intoxication and fucking and backbeat and injustice and refusal, whereas you, for better and for worse, are wiser? I don’t know.

“I really don’t know.”

“The world’s twice as rich as it was when you were our age,” Waverly says. “I mean, I know it’s naive to think everybody will agree to share everything equally. But as a way to think about what’s fair? If the average income of every person in the world is nine thousand dollars, I mean, that’s thirty-six thousand a year for each family on earth. That’s enough for anybody anywhere to live okay.”

It’s less than your annual school tuition. It wouldn’t cover even my mortgage, and I live alone. It’s what I earned in one week as a partner in a Manhattan law firm.
“Well,” I say, “that is half again more than the U.S. poverty level.”

“Exactly,”
says Hunter.

The waiter presents the check, equal to several months’ income of a Congolese or Malawian, and I hand him my Amex card. At least it’s a green one.

The kids walk south to their hostel, and I walk north to the Raleigh Hotel and meet my friend Sarah for a nightcap in the bar. She’s here to attend the G-20 summit.

“We really love love
love
the painting,” she tells me. My twenty-fifth-anniversary gift was a little Maira Kalman watercolor. “It actually looks like Victor and me! Really, Karen: you were
such
a good egg to come all the way out. Just for that.”

“Well, it wasn’t
just
for you.” I tell her I visited Buzzy Freeman. And got together with Stewart Jones.

“Is he still cute?”

I nod. “We spent the night together.”

“What?”
she screams, and slaps the red leather banquette. “You are fucking incorrigible, Karen Hollander!”

I smile and shrug and tell her I didn’t intend for it to happen, that I was talking to him and to Buzzy for book research.

“Oh, right,
‘research,’
” she says. “But seriously, you need to interview every old boyfriend you ever had? This is some crazy-detailed memoir.”

I explain that Stewart is helping me find certain government files that I need to finish the book.

“What, you can’t mail your own Freedom of Information requests?”

I’m tempted to tell all. I resist. “It’s more than that,” I say, almost whispering. “It goes lots deeper than that. It’s—if I’m going to tell the truth, I need his help. That’s all. I can’t tell you anything more. Trust me.”

She looks at me for a long time. “Is this why you got so weird at the end of freshman year? And then also what was going on that time in 1970-whatever, when I thought you’d decided you made a mistake by marrying Jack?”

What?
I’m alarmed. I have no memory of the seventies conversation. “What did I say?”

“You called really late one night from Chicago, crying, but whispering so Jack and the baby wouldn’t wake up, and said you didn’t trust Buzzy, but then you wouldn’t tell me what that meant, but you made me promise to take care of Greta if anything ever happened to you. You said, ‘Sarah, she’ll need a mom.’ I think maybe you were a little drunk.”

“Uh-huh. That’s it.” I take a deep breath and another. “You’ve never told anyone about this, have you?”

She frowns theatrically. “Have you forgotten I’m Sicilian? Omertà: no joke, sweetheart.”

I laugh and wipe the wetness from my eyes. “I love you, Sarah Caputo.”

“Likewise, and I cannot
wait
to read this fucking book.”

Having lived in Los Angeles for seven years, I am (almost) accustomed to the sound of helicopters hovering a few hundred feet overhead for minutes or hours at a time. But that peculiarly modern noise, always serious, usually sinister, has been vibrating my hotel room windows since late this morning, and now that the choppers’ fat grime beats have been joined by an unending wail of emergency-vehicle sirens, I can’t stay in bed reading and picking at the remains of my room-service lunch. So I go out on my little balcony and tiptoe at the edge to look west and south toward the Convention Center and the anti-protester barricades. I see two black smoke plumes.

Oh,
Christ.
During the last decade, I’ve grown unaccustomed to worrying about teenagers under my care.

I turn on the TV to watch the live coverage. It’s on three national and four local channels. Bank windows have been smashed, U.S. mailboxes filled with gasoline and set on fire, tear gas fired, microwave stun weapons deployed, two hundred protesters arrested, more than two dozen injured—one breaking both legs when the fifteen-foot-tall Uncle Sam puppet he was operating collapsed on him, another when a driver, under the influence, pulled a pistol and fired a shot at a group of protesters in white makeup and ripped-up American flags splattered with fake blood, pretending to be zombies, who had surrounded his Mercedes.

I mute the TV. The orchestra of helicopters and sirens is as loud as ever. I call Waverly’s cellphone again. She doesn’t answer. I text her. Still no reply.

Should I go outside and try to find her among the ten thousand kids playing revolution all over Miami Beach? In order to, what, make myself feel better because I would be pointlessly acting instead of pointlessly fretting? And if by some impossible chance I do spot her, then what—cross the police line and threaten to spank her if she doesn’t come with me right this second?

“Guests of the Raleigh,” a man’s nervous voice suddenly says over the hotel’s public address system, “we are in a temporary lockdown situation. For the duration of the disturbances, no one will be allowed to enter the hotel. If you leave the grounds, reentry is not guaranteed. We apologize. These are circumstances beyond our control.”

I smell tear gas.

Jesus.
I feel responsible. I enabled this.

The zombie girl shot by the drunken Mercedes driver is in critical condition.

Three and a half hours pass, and I have no word from Waverly. I pray she’s all right.

“She’s here in my room, in bed.” Using my laptop and enjoying the free Wi-Fi and the four-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets, spending the night at the most luxurious anarchist safe house in history. “She’s sort of conked out.” Although not asleep: she’s mouthing
Thank you.

“Yes, she threw up,” I say into the phone, “and she’s got a bit of a rash or something on her neck, and her eyes are watering, but she’s perfectly fine … Tell Jungo there’s no ‘permanent record’ to worry about, since she wasn’t arrested.” She’s so fine that she’s shaking her head and rolling her bloodshot eyes.