This Beautiful Life by Helen Schulman

interferon again?” Lizzie teased the first time they slept together.
    It has taken a great deal of calibrated effort to get all parties to agree to this sit-down—the West Harlem Development Corporation, the community activists, the whining college students, the coiffed wives of philanthropists, the local Parents’ Association, Richard’s own team of experts—and an endless amount of cajoling and arm-twisting to persuade Bertram Anderson, the senior assemblyman, to donate his Harlem offices for the purpose of this meeting (which is key, the location of this meeting is key); and yet it has all been done. These seemingly Herculean tasks have been completed.
    The various warring factions are now present and assembled peaceably in Bert’s conference room, around his long, chipped wooden table, with the rather worn black leather chairs that swivel (good thing), the wilting flowers, sweaty water glasses, and bound copies of all of Richard’s charts and agendas and projections, the PowerPoint presentation, the computer that goes wherever Richard goes, like a lapdog or an ancillary lobe of his brain. There is a low-level scent of activity in the air, the musky respiration of skin mixed with the aroma of various perfumes and deodorants; it is the olfactory background hum of meetings when they get going, and Richard noted its presence about an hour in, as a positive barometrical measurement of the assembly’s charge. No one was sweating profusely, no one was hot under the collar, there was no angry human stink.
    Richard had been halfway through the presentation when he received the call, and now, as he is listening to his distraught wife, it is quickly becoming clear that he has been thrust into battle on not one but two fronts: (a) work, which he is prepared for, naturally; and (b) this thing with his kid, which he decidedly is not.
    He is senior executive vice chancellor of the Astor University of the City of New York, and at the onset of the meeting he’d welcomed everyone individually and by name (prepping himself with Google Images the night before), thanking the skeptical, smug assemblyman for allowing them to gather in his offices, blowing a little sunshine up Bert’s ass as he went. From the get-go, Richard did his best to set the group at ease. He poured the water himself, passing glasses around the table. He’d taken off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, keeping it casual and friendly, biting into a donut off a plate of baked goods proffered by his deputy, George Strauss, before he’d even begun. In private, he is too vigilant to indulge in sweets—his father died of a coronary at forty-nine—but nothing puts off other people more than public displays of discipline. A little confectioners’ sugar had sprinkled onto Richard’s lap as he ate, and so he’d started to speak to the group with cast-down eyes—those lashes again—casually brushing the powder off with his hand.
    â€œWelcome, everyone,” he’d said. “Here’s a concept to embrace: no sugar donuts when wearing black jeans.” He looked up. “Here’s a better one: let’s take a rare, underutilized industrial area in the greatest city in the world and turn it into a state-of-the-art cohort campus to a first-tier university while creating jobs, schools, and affordable housing for the surrounding community.” He’d put the half-eaten donut aside on his napkin for emphasis.
    â€œAnyone who can accomplish the latter deserves the rest of that donut, Richard,” Bert said. A portly man in his sixties with a dusting of silver gray in his well-trimmed beard, Bert, to Richard, always looks like he has just come in out of the snow. Born and bred in Harlem, Bert has run the district for the last twenty-five years. He is as smart as and/or smarter than Richard, perhaps wilier, by virtue of Richard’s own rigorously honest assessment. “Lying to