Hugh nodded, but to Lucy he didn’t seem overly happy to be a prop in Gordon’s little show.
“Hugh has got three kids in private school,” Gordon said. “Turns out, he’s smarter than I am.”
Hugh looked down and shook his head.
“I moved my family to Beekman because I wanted to believe in public education again,” said Gordon. “I wanted to believe in America again, frankly, if that isn’t too patriotic. Well, one thing I know about America is that the public has a voice. And you, all of you, sitting up there on the stage, are here at the pleasure of the people. We pay your salaries and we can hire and fire you. The school board is elected and can be recalled. The administration can be replaced.
“Either the drag queen goes, or you’ll be seeing me in court.”
Gordon Allen didn’t typically take an interest in local affairs. He viewed Beekman as his own personal Brigadoon, completely removed from reality, which for Gordon meant from global finance, George Soros versus the Koch brothers, the nonstop flickering of his Bloomberg terminal, the price of gold, the boneheaded mistakes the Republicans in Congress kept making, the browning of America, the dangers posed by artificial intelligence, and his own creeping mortality. If you’d asked him a month earlier, he would have said he’d be more likely to go to the moon than show up at a local school-board meeting.
But an incident earlier that week had changed everything.
He had been in the kitchen making himself a protein shake when Kelly and Rocco and one of the nannies came home from soccer.
“Hey, champ. How was the game?”
“I didn’t score any goals.”
“You gotta score goals, buddy! That’s the whole point of soccer. Otherwise you’re just a schmuck running up and down a field,” said Gordon. He ruffled his son’s hair and was struck by how silky and perfect his blond curls were, like he had spent the afternoon at the salon. “Did your team win?”
“Everybody won,” said Rocco.
“It was a tie?”
“I don’t know.”
“Were the scores the same?”
“We’re not allowed to keep score.”
Gordon turned to Kelly. “They’re not allowed to keep score?”
“It’s like this everywhere,” said Kelly. “You can’t get away from this stuff, Gordy. You know that.”
Gordon turned to Rocco, who had begun to suck on a yogurt stick like it was a clarinet. “How are your grades?”
“He’s in kindergarten,” said Kelly. “They don’t give them grades.”
“Tell his teacher we want grades,” Gordon said to Kelly. “I want to know where he is in the class, because if he’s not at the top of it in this place, something’s really wrong.”
“They color things and sit on alphabet mats. How can anyone be at the top of that?”
“Trust me, there’s a kid at the top of that class, and the teacher sure as hell knows who it is. I want to hear that it’s Rocco.”
Kelly rolled her eyes.
“My teacher wears dresses to school,” Rocco volunteered.
“Good for her,” said Gordon. “That’s nice. I like it when women wear dresses.”
“Yeah, I guess,” said Rocco. He slurped down the last of his snack, and his yogurt clarinet went limp in his hand. “But he’s a boy.”
“What the fuck!”
Gordon was in the great room, pacing up and down in front of the fireplace, which was blazing even though it was unseasonably warm outside. Gordon kept the temperature in the house low so he could enjoy a fire twelve months out of the year. He loved his fireplace. It was an exact replica of the fireplace in the lobby of the Ahwahnee lodge at Yosemite, and it could burn logs that were twelve feet long. It could, and it did.
“Calm down, Gordon. You’re going to have a heart attack and we’re an hour from a halfway-decent hospital.”
“Goddamn it, Kelly, why didn’t you tell me about this?”
“Because I knew you’d have this reaction,” Kelly said. “And I didn’t want to deal with it. There’s nothing we can do about it and it’s not that big of a deal.”
“It sure as fuck is a big deal! If the goddamn kindergarten teacher is going to chop his dick off? I’d call that a big fucking deal!”
“He’s not gonna do it in the classroom, Gordon. The surgery isn’t until the summer.”
“Oh, well, that makes it better,” Gordon said. He was stalking around like a madman. “He’s gonna have a dick under his dress all year and then chop it off in July. That’ll make for an interesting what-I-did-last-summer essay, don’t you think?”
“Teachers don’t write those essays, Gordon.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me this, Kelly. This is unacceptable. I would have pulled Rocco straight out of that school and you know it.”
“Well, I’m sorry. He’s already been exposed. I think making too big of a deal about it around Rocco would be counterproductive at this point, but what do I know?” Kelly said. “Good night. I’m going to my room.”
*
Lucy would love this, Owen thought as he trudged up the narrow staircase of Izzy’s basement. He was carrying a rusty old air-conditioning unit, the kind he hadn’t owned since college, and it had to weigh seventy pounds. He could already tell that this little task of Izzy’s was going to be more difficult than she had let on. If Lucy saw me doing this, Owen thought as he took another shaky step, she’d never stop cracking up.
Owen had dropped by Izzy’s for a quickie, twenty minutes of what turned out to be exceptionally hot and sweaty sex. He was sitting on the foot of the bed, pulling on his khakis, trying to think of what he needed to pick up at GroceryLand and whether there was enough wine in the house, when he heard Izzy sigh loudly.
“That was amazing,” he said.
“Um-hmm,” said Izzy.
“Look at you,” he said. “You’re dripping with sweat.”
“This isn’t from the sex,” Izzy pointed out. “It’s a million degrees in here. My window unit is shot.”
“Oh yeah?”
“I’ve got a spare one down in the basement,” said Izzy.
Could I ever tell Lucy about this? Owen thought as he braced his lower back against the handrail and tried to catch his breath. Was this the kind of story he could tell his wife: that the woman he was sleeping with had him hauling an old air-conditioning unit up two flights of stairs and installing it in a window?
Owen didn’t even do this sort of thing in his own house. He paid a guy named Larry to do it. Lucy made a list of things that in a perfect world her husband would do, and then Owen called Larry and paid him to do it. And if Owen could have figured out how to get Larry over to Izzy’s, he would have. But unfortunately, in the course of the past few years, Larry had become something of a family friend. He also was not an idiot. The penis is an interesting organ, Owen thought as he shuffled along the landing and then paused for a moment before starting up the second flight of stairs. The penis truly has a mind of its own.
“Lift with your knees, not with your back,” Izzy called from the kitchen. She was standing naked in front of the open refrigerator, drinking white wine from a half-empty bottle.
Helpful, Owen thought. Very helpful.