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Posh

St. Martin's Press

KATHRYN HOFFMAN

It falls to Kathryn "Lazy" Hoffman, headmistress of the Griffin School (grades K-12), to notify the ninety-nine other students in Morgans class about the funeral. (Lazy, a childhood nickname bestowed upon her by her parents when, as a three-year-old, she refused to walk and demanded to be carried everywhere, has stuck to her all these years, like a barnacle to a rock.) She sends out a mass e-mail from her office, wherein she makes clear that attendance at the service is mandatory:

Attendance is not mandatory, but it is my hope that each and every one of you will show your support of Morgan and the entire Goldfine family during this sad time. Remember that we at the Griffin School are a caring, responsible community — a family, if you will. Tomorrow morning, three buses will be waiting outside the school at 9:45 sharp to take us to the funeral chapel. Please make every effort to join us. — KH

P.S. Any test or quiz scheduled during these hours will, of course, be postponed.

She clicks SEND and lights up a cigarette, though of course there is no smoking allowed anywhere in the school, not even in her beautiful office with its Persian rugs and burnished mahogany furniture, its stained-glass windows and built-in floor-to-ceiling bookcases. She's the headmistress, for God's sake; if she wants to smoke one or two (well, make that three) lousy Newports in her own private office at six P.M., who's going to stop her? The truth is, most of the time she loves this job, loves being high man on the totem pole, loves the (relatively) generous salary they pay her for keeping the students and faculty in line and for stroking the swollen egos of all those superstar parents — Academy Award winners; publishing and real estate moguls; Emmy and Tony Award winners; painters whose work goes for a million dollars a pop and is part of the permanent collections of the Whitney and the Modern; Pulitzer Prize winners; authors whose books are perched at the top of the New York Times bestseller lists. And then there are the housewives richer than Croesus who arrive in their chauffeur-driven cars with nothing better to do than torment her with their own torment: If Erin doesn't get into Yale, Harvard, or Princeton, I'll shoot myself, Lazy! In the head! I'll blow my brains out and that's no idle threat! Just last night I dreamed that Erin was rejected everywhere except Cornell, and I woke up drenched in sweat! How many times had she heard this neurotic refrain sung by a designer-dressed mother with impeccably styled hair and makeup, and tears in her eyes? And how many times had Lazy reminded a parent that her very own son was a graduate of, believe it or not, the University of Michigan. And that after only three years at Michigan, he went on to Harvard Law School, where he's now a first-year student.

University of Michigan? Are you joking?

"Lunatics," Lazy murmurs, and exhales a perfectly formed smoke ring. And then two more. If these parents don't drive her to her grave, nothing will. Maybe she should quit this job she sometimes fiercely despises; take an early retirement and move to some tranquil little town in Dutchess County or Connecticut where she would grow her own vegetables and herbs and reread all of Henry James and ... whom is she kidding? This is a dream job, at one of the very best private (or "independent," as they say in the biz) schools in all of America, filled with exceptionally bright, impassioned students; it's a privilege to be surrounded by them day after day as she walks the quiet, carpeted hallways and pops her head into a classroom or two to listen to her faculty with their Ivy League doctorates brilliantly dissecting King Lear or To the Lighthouse or Anna Karenina. And in one of those very classrooms, she can get a good look at Doug McNamee, WASP prince in his Cole Haan loafers and tweed jacket, his pale blue eyes alert and watchful, his graying blond hair a pleasure to her fingers as he pins her to the burgundy leather couch in her office. He's got a wife and she's got a husband, but these things, unfortunately, sometimes happen so let he or she who is without sin cast the first ... not that she's proud of herself. Far from it. The guilt, in fact, has caused a chronic case of nocturnal teeth-grinding, for which her dentist has already prescribed a plastic mouth guard to be used at bedtime. (Fat chance she'll ever wear that to bed.) But if Bloomingdale's sold sackcloth and little bags of ashes, she'd be there with credit card in hand. And if she were a Catholic, she'd be first in line for confession, absolution, and penance — an act of self-abasement or mortification might very well do the trick for her, Lazy thinks.

Turning forty-three last week was, like all her birthdays after thirty-nine, no picnic, and without Doug to look forward to, she might have been too depressed to get out of bed. But he arrived at school early that morning with a large chocolate-dipped strawberry and a bottle of sparkling wine in hand, and they made love at seven A.M. in the private bathroom attached to her office, Lazy pressed against the pedestal sink, the skirt of her suit yanked above her hips, her heart thumping as she neared orgasm, heart knocking harder and harder at the thought of being caught by a member of the housekeeping staff, though of course the office door and the bathroom door were both locked and she and Doug were safe as could be. Happy birthday, my darling Jewish princess, Doug had murmured, as if she hadn't asked him more than once not to refer to her that way. It's so undignified, she told him. Not to mention the teensiest bit anti-Semitic.

JULIANNE COOPERSMITH

It was the old tall-dark-and-handsome thing that first captured her attention. That, and the exceptionally smart, articulate comments he offered up in the A.P. English class they were both taking in this, their senior year. One day during the first week of school, he'd spoken at length about Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs, and not once, Julianne noted, had he used the word "like"; as in, "I think this book, like, totally rocks" — just the sort of moronic declaration you might hear in the classroom any day of the week. Now the two of them, Julianne Coopersmith and Michael Avery, are joined at the hip. Before Michael, she had never been in love, had never been attached to any guy at all for more than a few awkward kisses. She is a tiny, sweet-faced blonde, barely five feet tall, barely ninety-five pounds, and people who don't know her well might make the mistake of thinking she is shy. Which, in class, she often is, rarely saying much of anything, even about her favorite books from among the ones they are reading — Portrait of a Lady and The House of Mirth. But she has a good many friends of both sexes, and goes out Friday and Saturday nights to hear music downtown at the Knitting Factory and at the Bowery Ballroom, and then travels uptown to the Jackson Hole on Second Avenue where she sits for a couple of hours picking at a cheeseburger and talking endlessly — with her best friend, Morgan, and whoever else happens to be around — about everything in the world. She never drinks, as some of her friends do, though she smokes weed occasionally, a hit or two, just to be sociable. She and her friends are among Griffins best students, and most of them hope to attend colleges like Yale and Harvard and Stanford when they graduate. Smaller schools like Haverford, Williams, and Amherst are more her speed, Julianne thinks, or maybe even an arty place like Sarah Lawrence. No matter what, she'll need lots of financial aid wherever she goes. Griffin has given her plenty of help to cover its $23,000 annual tuition, but who knows if the colleges will be so generous. Julianne will just have to wait until April to see how it all shakes out.

She and her mother, Dee, formerly a novelist and currently a freelance editor and part-time cab driver, live together in a rent-controlled high-rise in Chelsea. It's just the two of them — her father has relocated to Houston, Texas, with his girlfriend, who is only in her thirties and has suffered one miscarriage after another these past few years. Julianne feels sorry for her, but her mother does not. This is only one of the many things Julianne and Dee disagree on. Every night her mother kisses Julianne's forehead or cheek and tells her that she loves her more than anything on this planet, which Julianne doesn't doubt for a minute. But not a day goes by that they don't argue strenuously over something — the "disastrous" state of Julianne's room, her habit of lingering on the Internet until two-thirty or three A.M. on school nights, her refusal to drink anything except coffee and Diet Coke, her insistence on taking her cell phone everywhere, even into the bathroom. Sometimes her mother slams Julianne's bedroom door so forcefully that the framed posters of Superchunk and Modest Mouse and Ani di Franco on her wall actually tremble. If only you would listen to me even a little, if only you would clean up that pigsty of a room, if only you would get off that damn AOL and into bed at a decent hour ... Sometimes Dee loses it completely and cries, but Julianne has hardened her heart against the sound of her mother's weeping. She's a good kid and knows it — so what if she talks on her cell phone while she sits on the toilet, or uses the floor of her room as a closet, or leaves tiny orange flecks of cheddar popcorn on her pillowcase? So what? She has pointed out to her mother that, in fact, things could be infinitely worse. Think of the possibilities, she instructs Dee: she could be a druggie, high on Ecstasy or coke fifty-two weekends a year; she could be a slut, sleeping with every boy in her grade; she could be a victim of obsessive-compulsive disorder or bulimia, like some people she knows at Griffin. "Well, I'm grateful that you're not," Dee tells her, "because I just wouldn't be able to deal with it. I'm a single mother and I can deal with only so much."

DEE COOPERSMITH

Boiling over in her daughter's double bed where she happened to fall asleep tonight after watching a two-and-a-half-hour video, Dee resists the temptation to stroke Julianne's soft blond hair; out cold, she looks especially serene, and Dee stares and stares, entirely free to do so and still amazed, after all these years, that this beautiful child is hers. What will she do next year when Julianne goes off to college — cry herself to sleep night after night like some pathetic loser? (Loser: that's her daughter's word, employed to denote anyone she finds useless.) Dee ought to get back to her own bed, a perfectly good convertible couch parked in the living room of their one-bedroom apartment, but she'd rather just stay where she is. Mostly out of laziness, but also because it's sweet and cozy with her daughter beside her. The next time Dee goes to her shrink for a tune-up, she may finally raise the subject of how desperately she wishes Julianne would choose a college right here in the city and continue to live at home. She could, in fact, use a general, all-purpose adjustment from Dr. Kaye, whom she likes to think of as the chiropractor of her soul. He is also, in Dee's estimation, a full-fledged mensch, as evidenced by his willingness to look the other way when it comes to the thousands of dollars of unpaid bills with Dee's name on them. From time to time, Dee pays off a portion of what she owes, but it's clear to both her and Dr. Kaye that she is never going to catch up, not unless she writes a book that happens to hit the bestseller lists or is bought by a major studio for serious money Neither of these possibilities seems at all likely. Not by a long shot. Dee, who is the author of a half-dozen critically praised (but otherwise ignored) novels, hasn't had a book out in eight years. And she has no plans to finish the new one she is only halfway through, because, she keeps reminding herself, she is no longer a writer. Been there, done that. Had her heart broken all too many times out there in the marketplace of public opinion, where, apparently, those with $23.95 to spend would rather spend it on anything but her books.

She is forty-nine, precariously, perilously, close to fifty, and the manuscript of her latest novel currently rests on the dust-coated surface of the Nok Hockey board she's been storing under Julianne's bed for the past five or six years. Every so often she's spotted some of her earlier efforts in a used book shop, priced to move at a humiliating $1.95. Affectionately, she strokes their covers, leafing through them tenderly, as if they were her poor, doomed, infinitely vulnerable offspring, fatally afflicted by some awful genetic disease for which there is no cure. She finds herself taking comfort in the words of countless professional critics who'd judged her "gifted," "prodigiously gifted," "abundantly gifted" throughout her career. "I may not be Dostoyevsky," Dee had been fond of saying to her husband (when they were still married and even after they weren't), "but I have to believe I'm pretty decent at what I do, right? I mean, if I'm not convinced of even that, I might as well give it all up and get a job, I don't know, driving a cab?" Not surprisingly, she'd annoyed the hell out of her ex with that kind of talk.

In addition to the money she earns as a hack, Dee gets by on child support and alimony and the freelance editing jobs frequently tossed her way. But it's always a struggle. And of the sort that Julianne's friends and their families are unacquainted with — accustomed as they are to their uniformed housekeepers and laundresses and cooks and chauffeurs, their winter vacations swimming in the Caribbean or skiing at Telluride or in the Swiss Alps, their summers in the Hamptons or on Nantucket, their seemingly charmed lives burnished by the endless flow of money-moneymoneymoneymoney ... and oh how hard it is not to regard them with envy and maybe a smidgen of loathing, even when they're hardworking and smart and generous. Just like Dee herself.

LAZY

The funeral chapel is packed, standing room only, a tribute, Lazy knows, to all the money the Goldfines have given away over the years — to the Democratic Party, to Planned Parenthood, to Mount Sinai Hospital (where there is a pavilion named after them), Harvard Law School (from which Morgan's father graduated at the top of his class thirty years ago), to the Make-a-Wish Foundation, Lincoln Center, the Museum of Natural History, and to Griffin, naturally, where a science center has been named in their honor. And soon enough, Lazy bets, Griffin will be the lucky beneficiary of an extravagantly large gift dedicated to the memory of Elizabeth Goldfine. The lower school is currently in cramped quarters several blocks from the twelve-story building that houses the rest of Griffin — a new building for K through 5 might not be too much to hope for! The body's not even in the ground yet and here she is interviewing architects in her head. ... It's more than a little unseemly, but an important part of her job is fund-raising, and surely there's nothing wrong with thinking ahead, is there?

"These shoes hurt more than life itself, but how cute are they?" she hears someone seated behind her say, and turns to see Daisy Camarano-Rosenthal, a transfer student from Our Lady of Holy Agony, showing off her new Jimmy Choos to Julianne Coopersmith.

"Shush!" Lazy orders, and glares at them both. "Does the word 'inappropriate' mean anything to you girls? This is a funeral, for God's sake. Show a little respect!"

"Sorry," Daisy says, and Julianne's face reddens.

"I certainly hope so," says Lazy, just as the rabbi positioned up front at a small podium begins to speak in Hebrew. He quickly switches to English, quoting Sophocles' description of man as "but breath and shadow, nothing more." The rabbi pauses, dramatically, and a single wrenching sob fills the silence.

"That's Morgan!" someone says in a stage whisper, and then Richard, Lazy's husband, who teaches neurobiology to med students all the way up at Columbia, slides into her velvet-upholstered pew.

"Well, this is a surprise," Lazy says.

"I thought you wanted me here."

Not really. "Shouldn't you be at school?"

"Actually, my first class isn't until noon today," Richard whispers in her ear. "Didn't I tell you that last night?"

"Oh."

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Excerpted from Posh by Lucy Jackson. Copyright © 2007 Lazybones Ink, LLC. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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