This Beautiful Life by Helen Schulman Page B

“Let’s sit on the porch; it’s such a beautiful night,” looking through the open window next to their bed. Outside, they’d talked, it seemed, for hours; he’d felt the need to make it clear to her that this job was about doing good—Lizzie liked that—that the challenge turned him on for sure, but that there was a vision here he’d like to fulfill. There was something about that night, the conversation, the excitement of this new venture, her willingness to give him what he wanted, that made him feel like he had when he’d first met her, unbeatable and unstoppable. Here was this smart, pretty girl eager to be his audience, witty but vulnerable; it was that vulnerability that always got to him. It amazed him that she was still ready to go with him where he wanted to go. It was his mission to make it worth her while. And so he says this often: “The university will expand correctly.” It is as if, if he says it enough, it will become true.
    To back this up, he is prepared to spend $150 million of the university’s money (Lizzie loves to verbally insert the italics) over the next sixteen years to ensure not only the preservation but also the growth of the surrounding community as they build a campus that will catapult the university into the new century. He is in possession of a big fat economic gift, a gift he can give to Harlem; Richard firmly believes this. He never would have accepted the position if he did not. Richard is a dyed-in-the-wool Populist. His father was a postal worker. His mother, a homemaker. The youngest of three sons, he was the first in his family to graduate from high school. What had once only been simply fact, the architecture of Richard’s life, even in his own mind, has been elevated to myth.
    It is Richard’s mission to persuade the members of his audience to see what he sees, that Manhattanville is ripe for development, that developing Manhattanville will not only increase the academic, artistic, and economic reach of the university but, in doing so, will also cast significant academic, artistic, and economic light on the surrounding neighborhood, enhancing it without gentrifying it (gentrifying it too much , he qualifies internally; a little gentrification is good, he reasons: banks, drugstores, supermarkets, jobs) or destroying it. This is called “city planning.”
    So Richard began this morning the way he always begins, by stating his objectives simply and directly. (With Jake he’d say, “Today you are going to clean up your room,” and then list a vast array of directives: “You will make the bed and change the linens. You will cull through and straighten out your dresser drawers. You will attack that mess on your desk and make sense of it. You will alphabetize your underwear, my underwear, and the dog’s underwear,” the last delivered with a grin and a noogie—there was no dog—and then the two of them would end up wrestling on the floor.) He’d then proceed to get as wonkish and as detailed as possible, dazzling his audience with data, bringing them to their intellectual knees. As he outlined the various stages in the development of Manhattanville, Richard did what he did best: he delegated, he delegated, and then jumped in (that is, he interrupted politely, self-effacingly, bursting with enthusiasm, as if he could barely contain his excitement) with a flurry of addendums, proving himself as expert as the army of experts he has scattered around the table. He has seated his team strategically among the community activists, the philanthropists, the local apparatchik, the assemblyman and his aides.
    â€œNo ‘us versus them,’ ” Richard had warned prior to the meeting. “We are one, guys. A single human organism.”
    This morning, he’d called upon his colleagues on a first-name basis, no matter how accomplished or renowned (“Here’s where you come in,