Everything Happens Today (8 page)

Wes held up
War and Peace
and waved it wearily even as he lowered his eyes to his own computer screen, which had gone dark for lack of activity. Wes punched a button on the keyboard and the screen lit up again. His father strode across the room and took the book from his hand. He was barefoot, in a white T-shirt and plaid Bermuda shorts that may or may not have been underwear. His hair was freshly washed and plastered against his head, and he smelled strongly of Monsieur Balmain.

“
War and Peace
? I was just about your age, maybe a year or two younger, when I first read this. Very powerful. A big influence on me in my formative years.” He began to leaf through it, as if to revive fond memories.

“Wanna do my paper for me?”

“You have to learn to think for yourself, son.” He dropped the book on the bed and opened his laptop without sitting down. Wes noticed for the first time that his father had hair growing in his ears, squiggly little grey-brown hairs like pubes, and he looked down at his own toes, which had lately begun to sprout little tufts of light brown hair of their own.

“What do you need, dad? I'm very busy.”

His father turned the laptop downwards to show Wes the screen, which was opened on a Facebook page.

“What do you know about Facebook?”

“I know it's not for old guys.”

“Wrong, pal. There's more of my kind on here than your kind.”

“What do you want to know?”

“See, I signed on a couple of months ago, kind of by accident. And I never used it, but then people started friending me. It started slowly, but suddenly it's snowballing, dozens and dozens of people coming out of the woodwork, people I haven't spoken to in decades.”

“And?”

“I guess I want to know what sort of things I can do with it.”

“How do you sign on ‘by accident?'”

“I don't know. Nora wanted me to look at something and her computer was broken or she couldn't find the charger. I don't remember. But see, like here, somebody tagged this picture of me from college.”

The photograph showed Wes's father, aged maybe nineteen, sitting at the end of a row of students on a low wall at the edge of some sort of quad or terrace, supremely pretentious, in the pre-grunge fashion of the early eighties, in a thrift-store herringbone overcoat several sizes too big, his shoulders hunched Bob Dylan-style against a non-existent chill, as evidenced by the trees in full leaf directly behind him. Apart from the full head of thick brown curls and the blue-tinted granny glasses, he looked much as he did now. The look he had apparently been stretching for was that of a down-at-the-heels artist, a writer or a musician, in the days before he had become a household name, someone indifferent to the hunger and cold that come with the territory of being a young, unsung genius. Like many of the similarly affected students at Dalton, his father might have pulled it off had he not been studying at an elite educational institution that cost more a semester than most people earned in a year. Wes did not recognize any of the other people in the photo, all men or boys, and it was not in fact clear whether his father was part of the group or simply clinging to its periphery. Wes ran the cursor over each one; some had been tagged, some not.

“They spelled your name wrong. See the question mark? Whoever tagged you didn't know you very well.”

“Yeah, I noticed that. Can I change that?”

“Just go down here to ‘Tag this photo,' put the cursor on your face and click. You can put in anything you want.”

“But will people know it was me who made the correction?”

“I'm not sure. I think so.”

“Forget it, then. What else can I do?”

“Like what?”

“You know, post my own pictures, find friends, join groups, that sort of thing.”

“Dad, I really don't have time for this. Can't you figure it out for yourself? Everybody else does.”

“Sure, I just thought . . . Maybe it was something we could do together.”

“Nostalgia. Wasted youth. Bitter regret. I'll pass.”

“Can I friend you?”

“Parents and children cannot be friends. That would be a travesty. Now please?” The iPhone rang, and Wes made a big show of pushing his father to the side, picking it up off the floor, and raising it like a talisman between them, as if it were a silver cross and his father a vampire. The call was from Lucy. Wes had no desire to talk to her, but anything was better than helping his father make a total dick of himself on Facebook. He gave his father a dismissive glare, pointed at the door and answered the call. His father shrugged his shoulders and padded from the room.

“Wes?”

“Oh Lucy.”

“Where are you?”

“At home, doing homework.”

“I was worried about you, when you disappeared like that. I've been trying to reach you all morning.”

“I know, I'm sorry. I've got this paper due Monday and I haven't even started it.”

“Can I see you later?”

“Like I said, I've got to get to work . . . ”

“I know, but it'll be, like, just for a few minutes. I really need to see you.”

“Lucy, any other time.”

“Please? Five minutes? I'll come downtown.”

Wes was not very experienced at casual cruelty, and in fact had impressed himself by holding out as long as he already had. Now he had exhausted his entire repertory.

“What time?”

“Whenever's good for you. Some time this afternoon?”

“What time is it now?”

“I don't know. Hang on. Eleven twenty.”

“Say around three? You know where I am?”

“You're in the school directory. I'll find it. I had a really fun time last night.”

“So I'll see you three-ish.”

“Bye?”

“See you later.”

Wes didn't get it at all. Why was she calling him? Why did she want to see him? Twenty-four hours earlier she would barely have been able to identify him in a line-up, and now she . . . what? Involuntarily, Wes reviewed a mental slide show of memorable moments from the previous night—memorable for him, certainly, but he could hardly persuade himself that he had so distinguished himself among Lucy's many lovers that he had ruined her for every other man. Had he somehow, quite unknowingly, touched her in a way she had never been touched before—emotionally? The truth was, he knew her mostly by reputation, had rarely spoken to her until the day before, and was hardly in a position to pretend to know or to predict what she might be thinking on any particular subject, much less about him. Wes hoped that he was the kind of person who was able to judge people on their own merits and to rise above idle gossip and speculation, but in fact he had never had any reason to question or doubt the extent to which she had earned her reputation, simply because he had never given it a moment's consideration. Lucy was the hot sophomore with pouty lips who left herds of middle-school dweebs dry-mouthed and stricken in her wake as she floated down the halls. From everything he knew or thought he knew about the kind of guys she liked—rich, well-groomed, confident, clever but not unduly intelligent—he was well out of the running for what was said to be the best fuck in the upper school, and since his interests and desires had long lain in a very different direction, he had never considered himself to be in the running in the first place. Delia was the girl he wanted, the girl he had always wanted. And he knew in his heart of hearts that when Delia was finally his, the long, humbling wait would prove to have been more than worth it, because it would have demonstrated the primacy of love and faith and patience, and gotten him laid. The Lucies of this world were for guys who set the bar a little lower.

Wes recalled the fateful moment on Friday morning, just minutes after emerging from his meeting with Mrs. Fielding, that he had received Lucy's tweet. The school had been still largely deserted, although a few early arrivals like himself were beginning to disturb the serenity of the empty halls. Because his daily commute to school involved a long walk across town and a crowded subway ride on the local line, Wes tended to arrive at the last moment, when the lobby was most frenzied and he himself had no time to loiter. But with fifteen minutes before the bell, on Friday morning he had lingered in the lobby. He had never before noticed all the campaign posters that plastered the lobby walls, and he took a moment to appreciate them. Incongruously, someone, probably in administration, with a view to some misguided concept of political correctness or to forestall controversy, had thought to balance or neutralize them by posting almost as many for McCain as for Obama, although many of the McCain posters were defaced with mustaches and horns or, in the case of Sarah Palin, erect phalluses, usually aimed towards her mouth. Almost everybody Wes knew was for Obama and felt deeply energized by and connected to the electoral process, even though most of them were too young to vote; the few eligible seniors had been strutting around school for months now and making their newly fungible opinions known to anyone who would listen. For almost everyone, Bush had been president as long as they had memories of politics, so the imminent upheaval felt extremely personal in a way that very few issues could to a group of overprivileged teenagers, and even the tweenies in middle school acted as though they were individually responsible for electing the country's first black president. But Wes's guilty secret was that he could not play along, at least not in his heart. He despised Bush as much as anyone, he supposed, but he worried that, like the housing market, the hysteria surrounding Obama was a big bubble bound to burst. If you're in the opposition your whole life, and you've come to identify yourself with the frustrated, stifled and outmaneuvered moral minority, how do you take to victory? Republicans knew this; they were masters at playing the victim even when in power, they didn't own it even when they broke it, but Democrats and these kids didn't get it and they were going to get their fingers burned. America holding its head high once more among the comity of nations, the dawn of a new day, everything changed and renewed from one day to the next—Wes just couldn't buy into it, as much as he'd have wanted to. He wished he could just be free to enjoy the moment, but he didn't seem to have it in him to pop a woody for new beginnings.

He supposed it must have rubbed off from his dad. A vision of his father's face, livid and distorted with anger, superimposed itself upon Barack Obama's calm, forceful features in murky red, white and blue as he gazed with visionary intensity into a dawning future of hope. Wes's father hated Bush with an almost erotic passion, railing savagely against the President's every utterance and decree. He was completely addicted to this hatred, but Wes had no idea what his father actually believed in. The closest his father ever seemed to come to expressing conviction in anything other than the fact that someone, somewhere, had led his life astray was when he recalled the glorious utopia that was the Lower East Side in the early 1980s. How repulsively he reveled in his memories of a city filled with crime, crackheads, ageing Beatniks, $250-a-month walk-up studio apartments in Alphabet City and freewheeling artists thronging the sidewalks of Avenue A at three in the morning, making the world safe for something. How cruel and untrue it had been to tell someone like his father that when you ain't got nothing you ain't got nothing to lose. He had had nothing and had lost everything, and had spent the rest of his life making sure that everyone around him understood that they were accomplices in the theft. Especially his own wife, who'd bankrolled him through two decades of bitter disillusion, which doesn't come cheap. Wes's father, for all his so-called liberalism, was the anti-Obama, and Wes could not help wondering, as he gazed at the Senator's beautiful face, what further price he himself would have to pay for his lifelong exposure to that virulent strain of psychogenesis.

Lost in thought, he felt a strong hand on his left shoulder, and turned to his right to find James, smelling organically of coffee, smiling maniacally through his blonde bangs and thrusting his Blackberry into Wes's face.

“Seen this tweet?”

“What is it?”

“Check your phone.”

Wes had dutifully shucked his backpack, rummaged through the side pockets, removed his phone, turned it on and opened Twitterific. There was a new tweet from PrincessLucy. It said: “When the cats away . . . ! Party @ my place 9 on. C U 2nite mice!”

“Who is this?”

“It's Lucy, man. You know, hot Lucy in tenth.” James snickered oddly.

“So why'd it come to me? I don't subscribe to her tweet.”

“You do now, my friend. I signed you up.
At her request
.”

James seemed to be perfectly serious, yet it made no sense at all to Wes.

“How, at her request? I hardly know her. It's gotta be a mistake.”

“No mistake, Wes.
She likes you
. You've been summoned. You've received the call. Resistance is futile, you lucky fuck.”

And now, lying on the bed with
War and Peace
resting mutely between his raised knees, Wes felt the full force of shame wash over him. His ears began to ring, his vision blurred and his skin felt hot as coals. The shame was inside him too, snaking through the corridors of his body like that archaic video game with the worm that keeps getting longer, hollowing him out to the core. Love had not won out, of course, and yet he still couldn't quite see how it had happened. For the better part of a year, ever since the moment he had allowed himself to understand that he was in love with Delia, he had prepared himself for just such a contingency. Over and over again, he had rehearsed scenes in his head in which he found himself compelled to rebuff, gently but firmly, the advances of women who approached him in the street, at the library, at the fish counter in Citarella, on the subway, on a banquette admiring the Fragonards at the Frick, on line for bagels at Russ and Daughters, in a plush Park Avenue parlor, in a darkened screen­ing room watching “Breathless” at the Film Forum, and offered themselves to him unconditionally for an hour, an afternoon, a weekend of unbridled and possibly kinky passion. Because he was attracted to older women, a category to which Delia nominally belonged, and because he felt that his own puppyish enthusiasm and lack of experience would be irresistible to jaded housewife types, the women in these fantasies tended to resemble the young mothers who crowded the sidewalks outside Dalton every afternoon, waiting for their young ones in tight jeans and high ponytails. No celebrities, except perhaps for the actress Blake Lively or the author Marisha Pessl, whose jacket photo he had spent many hours condoling with over her hopeless infatuation for him, Wes. To those women he would say: “I'm sorry. I'm flattered. You're very attrac­tive, really. Under different circumstances I would be happy to oblige. But you see I'm in love, and mindless, anonymous sex with beautiful strangers holds no allure for me. Haven't you ever been in love? Then you'd know how I feel. No, not even a blowjob in the back of the taxi. I'm sorry.” It was true that such advances had not come his way, but Wes felt that, lit up from within as he was by the light of pure love, the way pregnant women were said to have a special glow about them, it was only a matter of time. And when it happened, he would be ready, and he would be a rock.