The Latecomer, page 39
I took my sister’s hand, and thought: Yes. But not for much longer.
30
A Bit of a Bastard
In which Harrison Oppenheimer explains what negotiation is for
I want it on record that I declined my brother’s invitation to join him inside the Fox News affiliate on Forty-Eighth Street. I found Harrison’s car and driver parked outside and got into the back to wait for him there, but then, succumbing to temptation (and the luxury of the limo’s waiting television), I tuned in to watch him do his thing.
The topic at hand was a class-action lawsuit alleging discrimination by college admissions officers, specifically at Harvard. The effort, mounted by Asian applicants, had been predictably co-opted by groups far more concerned with keeping Black and brown people out than with letting Asian people (one member of the panel actually used the word “Oriental”) in, and the only other person of color at the table—apart from Harrison’s eternally present friend, Eli Absalom Stone—could do little more than beat back increasingly personal assaults. Harrison himself asked an attorney named Shaunta Owens whether she was aware that the average SAT score of accepted African American applicants in her own UPenn class (1983) had been a full hundred points lower than that of white applicants, and when she answered yes he plowed on unforgivingly. “And are you not deeply chagrined by this fact? How do you expect your own accomplishments to be fairly viewed through the scrim of obvious pandering to political correctness? When somebody looks at you and sees entitlement on the basis of ethnicity—”
“Someone like yourself,” interjected Shaunta Owens, whom Fox was identifying as “Commentator.”
“Someone like any person capable of understanding that when you let a person of statistical inferiority in over a person of statistical superiority you are insulting them, insulting the person who has been declined in their favor, and insulting the integrity of the entire process. I feel insulted on your behalf, and I’m amazed you do not.”
“I’m certainly insulted by your tone,” said Shaunta Owens. She looked, to me, as if she was ready to overturn the table.
“If I may,” said Eli Absalom Stone, who was seated between my brother and this person, Shaunta Owens. “Throughout my life as a scholar and writer, I have considered myself to be far more burdened by the perception of unearned advantages given to me because of my ethnicity than by my ethnicity itself. Before I applied for anything—college admission, or a scholarship, or a job—I went to some lengths to avoid any personal uncertainty about my accomplishments by ensuring that my credentials were not only on par with the statistical averages of their successful applicants, but actually with their upper strata.”
Here, Fox helpfully flashed the pertinent facts below Eli Absalom Stone’s navy-blue bow tie: “Graduate of Harvard University and Rhodes Scholar.”
“If they hadn’t been, I would not have applied. End of story. I was not willing to trade my own integrity for a leg up I in no way deserved. And it gives me a great deal of distress, Ms. Owens, to think that so many of us seem willing to trade their integrity for what I can only see as a form of Jim Crow treatment. However it may present itself.”
“I’m very comfortable with my accomplishments, thank you, Mr. Stone,” said a barely-keeping-it-together Shaunta Owens.
None of this was surprising, by any means. I was about to switch it off when my brother spoke again.
“Justice Thomas has written that these ‘special consideration’ programs brand minorities with a badge of inferiority and may give them cause to feel that they are entitled to preferences in all corners of society. Any institutional preference is also, de facto, institutional discrimination inspired by prejudice, and that is unacceptable in whatever form it appears. I’m sure you can agree with that, Ms. Owens.”
“And besides!” said the Fox News host, a woman of extreme blondness with a Borax smile. “You’d have to be crazy to think there’s anti-Asian discrimination at any of these top-tier places. I took my twins on a college tour last spring break, I’m telling you, every other person we saw was Asian. I mean, everywhere!”
Jesus Christ, I thought.
“I’m sorry, miss?” said the driver, through the intercom.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize I said it aloud.”
I did turn off the television after that.
It had always been like this. Every time I got it into my head to spend time with Harrison, to get to know him a little bit better and be, perhaps, a little bit better known by him, I had run into the very same obstacle: Harrison. More specifically, the noxious, unbearable opinions and associations of Harrison, ostensibly the family star, certainly its most visible member. Harrison, as current president of Wurttemberg Holdings, was also the one responsible for maintaining and extending our individual and collective wealth, and I supposed that was a good thing (I personally had no intention of declining the security and advantages that came with that wealth), but his extracurricular activities as toady to the current president and inhabitant of that vile gray zone between fiscal conservative and Tiki Torchbearer made him less and less palatable every time I resolved to try again.
After returning from Ithaca the week before, and in an ongoing effort to avoid the now-looming task of applying to college, I’d emailed my brother and suggested we talk. In person.
Arranging this turned into an ordeal of its own.
Oppenheimer_H@WurttembergHoldings.com
October 17, 2017. 10:21 a.m.
Yes, lovely to hear from you. Certainly we can meet.
Why not come to office next Tues 11:15 am.
Cc’ing Flora who will confirm.
H. Oppenheimer
P.Oppenheimer@WaldenSchool.com
October 17, 2017. 10:40 a.m.
Harrison, I am a high school student. At 11:15 next Tuesday I will be in Latin class.
Hi Flora.
Phoebe
Oppenheimer_H@WurttembergHoldings.com
October 17, 2017, 12:10 p.m.
Delighted to hear that Walden is finally offering Latin.
Begged and pleaded, to no avail.
Tuesday at 4 pm office.
Cc’ing Flora who will confirm.
H. Oppenheimer
P.Oppenheimer@WaldenSchool.com
October 17, 2017, 12:31 p.m.
Sorry, track practice. Can I just come visit on the weekend?
Phoebe
Oppenheimer_H@WurttembergHoldings.com
October 18, 2017, 9:33 a.m.
Will be at board retreat in Virginia. Suggest 10/28 6:30 Harvard Club.
Cc’ing Flora who will confirm.
H.
And on like this for another half dozen go-rounds, with his proposed dates stretching into November. At last he suggested I meet him at Fox News the following Saturday, then come back to his apartment. Whether or not he’d finally sensed there was something of possible consequence I wanted to talk about I wasn’t sure, but naturally I accepted. Not the Fox News part, though. Waiting for him in a limo in front of the studio was about as close as I could bear to get to Fox News.
After Ithaca I’d taken a few days to think through Sally’s various revelations; they were intense, intermittently distressing, and, in complete contrast, somehow also a great relief, as the previously invisible pegs of my own secret history began to drop into their appointed holes. I’d also decided to stop wondering why this was apparently my job, this reweaving of the shredded fabric of our family, the figuring out what was owed to whom by whom and how we were all supposed to become unstuck with one another. Maybe I just wanted it more than any of the others did, or was better able to understand that I wanted it, or to say that I wanted it, or all of that at once. But the bald fact was that there wasn’t anybody else volunteering to make it happen. Our father was dead. Our mother was basically estranged from Lewyn—despite his physical proximity—and Sally, and not terribly interested in me (except, at the moment, in where I was going to college and how far behind I was on my applications). Sally and her brothers did not speak, Harrison and Lewyn were locked in mutual disdain. I had a real sense that if things didn’t improve by the time I graduated Walden and (presumably) left home, the center—whatever center remained in our family—would not hold, not for one moment longer.
If not me, in other words, who?
If not now, in other words, when?
“I hear you’re going to see Harrison appear on Fox News tomorrow,” our mother announced on Friday afternoon, as I made my post-practice tea.
“Well, yes and no. Yes to Harrison, no to Fox News. I cannot deal. How do you stand it?”
“He’s entitled to his opinions. You can’t say he isn’t well-informed.”
I could if I wanted to, I thought. Instead, I hedged. “I doubt they’re very proud of him at Walden these days. He’s like a one-man repudiation of everything they hold dear.”
“I sent my children to Walden to be educated. Not indoctrinated.”
“Fair point.”
“And one thing I have always admired about Harrison is his self-awareness, and his drive.”
That’s two things, I thought, but I didn’t interrupt.
“He knew from an early age what he wanted, and he worked very hard for it. I wish Sally and Lewyn had had a bit more of that.”
I got a spoon from the drawer and lifted my tea bag out of the mug, depositing it in the trash. There was no point in noting that Sally, too, had chosen an occupation at a relatively early age, or that she ran a hale little business which more than supported her and more than fulfilled her. Or that Lewyn, after some undeniable wandering, had found work commensurate with his talents and interests.
“Drive is fine. But not everyone knows what they want as early as Harrison did. I don’t know what I want, for example.”
I don’t even know where to apply to college, I almost said. I didn’t. It didn’t matter.
“Have you decided where you’re applying to college?” she said, meeting my expectations.
“I’m narrowing it down,” I said. An utter fiction.
I waited in the limo for another half an hour after switching off Harrison’s panel, time I passed in monitoring its lively Twitter response. This debate ranged in substance from deeply unpleasant comments about Shaunta Owens’s “Black accent” to the usual praise for Eli Absalom Stone and his great, self-reliant rise. Regarding Harrison himself, the predominant words were: “blowhard” and “dickwad,” with an opposing cluster of “sensible” and “hypocritical libtards!” but none of this struck me as at all remarkable. I put my phone away when he finally turned up.
“Hello there,” my brother said, climbing in beside me. He gave me a perfunctory kiss on the cheek, then another on the other cheek. (It was one of the habits—some might call them affectations—he had picked up during his Rhodes years.) “Eli’s here. We’re dropping him at his apartment.”
Eli had been waylaid on the sidewalk. He was signing a book for a man and his teenaged son.
“Okay,” I said.
I had met Eli before, of course. It was hard not to meet Eli when seeing Harrison. Eli lived a few blocks from my brother, in another elegant Sutton Place building, and though his primary affiliation was with a policy and education think tank based in DC, the two of them were mainly engaged in the common pursuit of writing books and “instigating change” together. Not the kind of change my own classmates were always going on about, either.
“Hello, Eli,” I said when he joined us.
“Little Phoebe! My word. How old are you now?”
I told him. Seventeen. “And please don’t ask me where I’m going to college. It’s all anyone wants to know.”
“It’s a glorious time! Don’t suffer. Delight in your choices and opportunities.”
“By which you mean,” I said, “my privilege?”
“There is nothing wrong with privilege. The suffering of others is no reason not to make the most of your own life. Should you stay home and rend your garments because somebody in Calcutta can’t take the SAT?”
I glanced at Harrison. He was smiling, looking out at Sixth Avenue as it passed.
“Go to college, become educated, and create opportunities for people in Calcutta. This is called progress.”
“Oh,” I said with what I hoped was evident sarcasm.
“Your generation has become so marinated in self-loathing. They talk about the phones and the internet as great afflictions. These are not afflictions. The utterly pointless whining about collective guilt—this is the affliction. Let me ask you something. Have you ever enslaved another human being?”
I sighed. “Directly? No, of course not.”
“Bashed a little puppy’s head in?”
“Not that I can recall.”
“Called someone …” He made quote marks with his fingers. “The N-word?”
I looked, involuntarily, at the driver, who was Black.
“No. Please.”
“I’m happy to hear it. Great job! Now as a person”—again with the quote marks—“of color, I wave my magic wand and absolve you of all crimes real and imaginary. You may go, secure in the knowledge that the best thing that can be done for so-called minorities is to stop trying to help them because they are minorities. People can rise on their own. If it isn’t on their own it doesn’t last and it doesn’t count.”
“Like you,” I said. “On your own.”
“Entirely. Albeit with the great assistance of Plato, Sophocles, Mark Twain, Homer, Shakespeare, Donne.”
I could almost hear the happy chorale that seemed to accompany Eli Absalom Stone wherever he referenced his story, though these days he did so less and less, mainly because he needed to less and less. The advent of Eli Absalom Stone, orphaned Black boy from the Appalachian mountain shack, bound for Harvard, Oxford, and the kind of cultural influence usually attached to people of entirely different antecedents, had saturated the populace.
We let him off at his apartment building and he leaned back in to say something to Harrison about dinner that night, with Roger, at Per Se, and it was arranged that they would meet for a cab at seven. Then I was given another double kiss, in which I felt the sharp edge of Eli’s bow tie against first one cheek and then the other, and he exited the limo. I felt better when he was no longer there. I always felt better when he was no longer there.
“You haven’t seen Eli since when?” said Harrison, holding the door for me a moment later.
“I don’t know. Couple of years?”
“Before he spoke at the Republican Convention.”
Yes, I thought. Very much so. “He’s looking well.”
“He should. He’s had dinner at the White House twice this month.”
This struck me as a dubious claim to health.
“And you, Harrison?”
“Once. In early August, before he left for vacation.”
“Steak and apple pie, with an extra scoop of vanilla ice cream for the commander in chief?”
“You needn’t be snide, Phoebe. Not everyone can win a presidential election.”
I said nothing. It would be such a waste to lose my cool now.
Harrison’s apartment actually comprised two apartments, purchased simultaneously and knocked together. It had also been “gut” renovated, then decorated with remorseless modern furniture. While this was not the tragedy it might have been to our sister Sally, it struck me as regrettable. The place did have a truly impressive view of the East River. Then again, I had never felt the East River to be all that attractive.
“What can I get you?” said Harrison. “I’m having a juice my doctor sends over. It’s repulsive, but supposedly good for me. I’d offer you one, but I need them all, apparently. It’s very strict.”
I asked for tea. He didn’t have real tea, just chamomile.
“Can you see our house from here?” I asked him. I was standing at one of the windows when he brought me the mug.
“I never looked. Maybe. You could fall out trying, though. It doesn’t seem worth it.”
“I study in your room, you know. I sleep in Sally’s, but I study in yours. I love looking out on the harbor.”
“Mm-hm,” he nodded. He had brought himself a glass bottle of bright green juice, and had set his phone on the coffee table. It was abuzz with social media mentions, from his Fox panel. Harrison was trying not to look at it. “Well, why not? You have the whole house to yourself. Almost the whole house.”
“If you’re referring to Lewyn, he never comes upstairs. He’s pretty much only in his apartment.”
“By which you mean: in the basement.”
“Yes, in the basement.”
“Classic,” Harrison said, drinking his juice. He had taken off his jacket in the kitchen and loosened his crimson tie (worn, I supposed, in support of his alma mater, currently under assault by all those rejected “complainants”).
“You know, Harrison, it’s a completely separate apartment. He could live anywhere. He chose to live there.”
“If he could live anywhere, why would he choose to live there? He’s afraid to leave home, obviously. It is truly pathetic.”
“Actually, I’ve always assumed that he didn’t want to leave me.”
I heard myself say this, and it came as something of a surprise: another thing I hadn’t quite put together. Like so many things these days.
“Don’t be silly. You don’t need looking after. You have a mother. You have an excellent mother.”
I shook my head. “I have a once-excellent mother who is not all that interested in being a mother right now. Which is completely understandable given that she has been raising children for thirty-four years. I’m not sure how into it I’d be, on the second go-round.”
“She is devoted to all of us. Equally.”
“Oh, Harrison,” I laughed. “Don’t even.”
