Life and Other Inconveniences(52)
Every night, he and his mother sat down for a joyless dinner during which he was criticized. “Honestly, Clark, must you scrape your knife that way? Must you?” He mastered the art of tormenting her—manipulating a bit of food on his upper lip and leaving it there, pretending not to notice until she snapped at him to use his napkin. Or he’d slosh his milk just a tiny bit so that she couldn’t see, and the milk would drip down the glass and through the tablecloth, staining the antique cherry table. If he could manage it, he’d fart when he walked past her, not flush the toilet in the downstairs bathrooms, pick his scabs just because it bothered her. Sheppard would never have done that. Of course not. Sheppard was perfect.
He stopped pretending to listen to her or make her like him when he was about ten. By then, Donelle lived with them. She was so much nicer than his mother. Donelle let him watch TV in her little den when Genevieve traveled, which always caused Helga to go to her room in a huff. Donelle played video games with him and asked him about his friends. She knit him a blue scarf in the softest cashmere and said it brought out his beautiful eyes. She’d never met Sheppard, so she didn’t know Sheppard’s eyes were the beautiful color, that startling blue that leapt out from photographs even now.
As for his friends, well, they weren’t real friends. They were just boys he hung around with. The truth was, Clark didn’t know how to be with people very well. Still, his money, his family history, his mother’s instant fame in the fashion world couldn’t be ignored by the other kids, who weren’t as wealthy, whose houses weren’t as beautiful as Sheerwater, who didn’t have a three-bedroom apartment in the city waiting for them. His family had donated libraries and hospital wings. A driver picked Clark up from school every day. So even if the other kids didn’t like him that much, they knew better than to say it to his face. Unlike his mother.
“You have to stop being so weak, Clark,” she said to him. “You’re thirteen. It’s time to start being a man. Show some interest in life, for God’s sake.”
But what was there to be interested in? Lacrosse was okay, he supposed. He liked action movies. He could sail, but it had been way more fun with his father. He liked shooting at the Rod and Gun Club. He liked Playboy magazine and jerking off. He read comic books, waiting for the day when, like lucky Batman, his mother would die, and he would inherit a fortune and start being heroic.
When he finished eighth grade at Stoningham Country Day School, he went off to Choate, where you could buy really good weed, get by on a fifth-grade knowledge of math, skip half of your reading assignments and still get into an Ivy League school, which Clark proved by getting into Dartmouth. The fact that there was a building there with his grandfather’s name on it didn’t hurt.
He floated through six years of undergraduate studies in New Hampshire, changing majors three times, popular by way of his name, wealth and, of course, his mother’s business.
The college finally expelled him after a drunken episode when he set a fire in the Rauner Special Collections Library. It was funny; they had no sense of humor, those snotty academic assholes. Who really read Shakespeare, anyway? It was the final straw, the dean said. Clark didn’t care. He was bored anyway.
He returned to Sheerwater for three weeks before Genevieve informed him he had a job and an apartment in Manhattan, where he’d be moving the coming weekend.
That was fine. He was supposed to be a titan of some kind, and why not? Born to an impressive family, the finest education, blah blah blah. This was what happened to kids like him—they knew people, or their parents did, or they joined certain clubs at certain Ivy League schools, and bam! A seat in the House or Senate, or a job with an impressive title, a huge salary and a corner office, regardless of ability to do the work. Sorry, everyone not born with a pedigree. That’s how real life works. You can be a self-made man, like . . . like Spider-Man or something, or you could do it Clark’s way.
Career-wise, all Clark had to do was show up. His job was with FHK, the advertising agency that handled his mother’s empire. Vice president of customer relations, whatever that meant. Starting salary, $400K a year. Six weeks’ paid vacation, an office overlooking St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a smokin’-hot secretary fifteen years older than he was who knew more about the accounts than he ever would and made a tenth what he did.
His apartment was fantastic. His mother had furnished it (of course); an Upper East Side flat on the thirty-second floor, two bedrooms, giant living room, kitchen, three baths, terrace. Leather couches and soft towels, a maid service twice a week, a fully stocked bar, probably expensive artwork on the walls.
He deserved it, because he was a London, an almost-graduate of Dartmouth College, and he knew his way around sailboats. That was his job, apparently. Taking clients out on the company sailboat. Buying them cocktails at the Standard. Golfing in Westchester County. Treating them for dinner at Peter Luger’s or whatever restaurant had a Michelin star, then out to a high-class strip club, depending on the client’s taste. Clark would sit in a conference room while a minion threw around terms like ROI and attribution and media buys, and he would fantasize about screwing his assistant. That was his birthright. Sorry, suckers.
He knew he was hated at FHK—by those above him, who’d naively thought he’d bring a little more to the table, being Genevieve’s son, and now found themselves with an employee they couldn’t fire; and by those beneath him, who had to do all the grunt work and know things and have talent. Clark knew it wasn’t fair—he had nothing to offer other than a few choice stories about his mother, or some of his more colorful shenanigans at Dartmouth. He knew he was a shell. That he’d be nothing without his name. He knew his mother wished he’d been kidnapped and/or murdered instead of St. Sheppard. Try living with that legacy. “And this is Clark, the son we wish we’d lost.” The disappointing second. The never-as-good-as-Sheppard son.