This Beautiful Life by Helen Schulman Page A

yourself gets you nowhere,” Richard’s father always said, so Richard does his best to adhere to that axiom. Bert wears his experience and his legislative weight the way he wears his signature well-tailored gold-buttoned vest. Snugly. With gravitas.
    The senior assemblyman is today’s linchpin. If Richard can get Bert’s support, the rest will follow suit, eventually. The few real estate holdouts they can always buy out at a premium. Richard has a slush fund set aside just for this purpose.
    â€œI tell you what, Bert, when we’re done here today, I’ll split it with you,” Richard had said, earlier, before the call, nodding playfully at the donut.
    Manhattanville, east of Broadway and commercial Harlem, consists of mostly warehouses and parking garages, windswept river views, rubble-strewn lots, some auto body shops and gas stations—there is presently so little foot traffic that often in good weather some of the handful of proprietors and residents sit outside in the middle of the empty sidewalks on folding chairs, playing dominos on portable card tables. The neighborhood, if one can call it that, is home to La Floridad, the Cuban restaurant where Lizzie gets her café con leche en route to picking up the car (theirs is the cheapest garage in the city, and an expression of some residual shared frugality—they are both products of working-class families); Fairway Uptown, where she shops on Saturday mornings; and some of the most beautiful, antique iron latticework, huge trestles that—miraculously, considering their copious rot, those rusted stanchions—still manage to support the elevated subway line. The best landmark of all is a mysterious aerial road to nowhere that abruptly ends near the river where it meets up against the sky. On Richard’s maps, it is an abandoned arm of the West Side Highway, but in his mind that graceful, cast-off celestial boulevard is the “Stairway to Heaven” that he slow-danced to so many times as a kid. (He hears Jimmy Page’s electric guitar riffing in his head every time he walks beneath it.)
    Gazing up at the clouds through that intricate, corroded metalwork feels like peering through a veil of muddied silver lace, and the poetry of it all appeals to Richard, although once the university breaks ground the thing will have to go—unless he can turn it into a park, a green oasis, like the one a variety of developers plan for the High Line, the elevated railway that runs like a spine through the rough-and-tumble neighborhood of gas stations and art galleries in Chelsea, downtown. The possibilities here are endless! The pitfalls, myriad. Ergo, the complex, exhilarating joy of his job.
    Best, for all its raw, physical gifts, this most western reach of Harlem is virtually uninhabited—for New York, that is. Not that many people actually live there.
    In the nine months Richard has spearheaded the university’s plans to expand by building a new campus in Manhattanville, he has aimed to please, sensitive as he is to the university’s missteps almost four decades prior, when their efforts to build new dorms and an indoor stadium ended in race riots. It is important that they do this right. Richard has said this over and over again. First to Lizzie, when he was being wooed away from Cornell and was contemplating taking the job, late one night, after sex, when they did their best talking, when she wasn’t anxious and he was loose, when the breeze off the gorge was damp and sultry and the kids were asleep and the intense pleasure of living hovered over a waterfall that way—the music of it—was almost enough to make him spring naked to his feet, his dick still hard and wet, and pick up the phone and wake up the university’s chief operating officer in New York and say, no, no, I am too fucking happy here to risk changing my life. Lizzie had slipped on her skirt and T-shirt from off of the floor, and said,