Chapter Three
Griffin
I don’t have time for this.
But my mother’s drama doesn’t happen according to my convenience and schedule. If I ignore her summons, she’ll have an episode and check herself into a hospital for chest pain or some other catastrophe that will drag on for at least a week. Afterward, she’ll not only make sure I hear about it, but start contacting reporters to tell them who her son is and why he is cruelly abandoning her in her time of need.
So here I am in New Orleans when I should be in my office, working on the new research I’m doing with Keith Lenin from Stanford. He reached out after I won the John Bates Clark Medal last year, which is a prestigious award given to American economists under the age of forty.
“This is simply…simply heartbreaking.”
Mom’s words flow out slowly, like ice in a river about to freeze over. Her voice cracks a bit for maximum effect.
And she’s prepped for the scene. She’s wearing a diaphanous white dress, the kind appropriate for a young virgin about to be sacrificed to a dragon. Her makeup is perfect, but doesn’t look too obvious. Just enough to render her skin flawless, her azure eyes impossibly wide and her mouth full and vulnerable. Her glossy golden hair is brushed out and tumbles over her shoulders like a waterfall. If she could, she would’ve set up a fan to blow it gently, but of course she knows you won’t get the desired effect if your spectators can see the equipment.
I swallow an impatient growl that wants to push its way out of my chest, since it would only add fuel to her scene. Now that she’s said the opening line, the tears will come.
With great difficulty, I arrange my face into an appropriate I-care-deeply-about-your-terrible-situation façade and sit back on the white leather sofa in her swanky suite. I count slowly to three, all the while wondering what the hell I did to deserve this punishment.
Exactly on three, she starts sobbing into her hands. Actually, not her hands. Rachel Griffin does not cry into her hands like a common woman. She sobs into a white silk handkerchief with her initials embroidered in pale lavender.
Ethereal elegance and beauty are her signature. That’s what gave her fame and fortune in her youth as a supermodel. Every man wanted to sleep with her and every woman wanted to emulate her.
It’s too bad she slept with Ted Lasker during his Vasectomy Fail and ended up pregnant. With me. He named me after her last name, saying that it was an homage to her beauty, but really so that he wouldn’t forget what to call me. At least I didn’t become Ted Junior—shudder—but that’s a very minor consolation.
If I had a choice, I would’ve picked a normal, everyday American couple from some staid and boring Midwest town for parents. And if I absolutely had to have famous parents, I’d have chosen Adriana Mitchell and her husband Don Kasher. They’re the most wholesome couple in Hollywood, doing charity work and promoting family values for various brands.
But instead, I got a degenerate Hollywood movie producer and overly dramatic former supermodel who’s trying desperately to cling to her youth and influence.
I grunt to show I’m paying attention. But mentally, I’m going over the statistics I’ve been talking about with Keith during the last few weeks. I just got tenured a couple of years ago, and I’m not about to lose it by slowing down on research, especially when I poured all my energy into my career and recognize how fortunate I’ve been. Most newly minted PhDs are hired as lecturers and adjunct professors without any possibility of tenure, much less decent pay and benefits.
Not that money is an issue. My bank account has more than enough zeros to set any self-respecting gold digger’s heart aflutter.
Still, being tenured doesn’t guarantee permanent employment, despite what people think. It can be revoked if the college finds my behavior inappropriate—ha!—or if I fail to publish because I’m too distracted, participating in my mother’s latest drama. But I’ll be damned if I don’t get to keep my sign of recognition and respect. It’s one thing that can’t be bought. And I earned it through hard work.
Mom sheds more tears. The woman can calibrate the rate at which her eyes excrete fluid—it feels wrong to call it tears, as most of the time she isn’t really crying—more precisely than Dad’s pastry chef can add sugar to a vat of buttercream.
Since I’m expected to do more than grunt, I make myself listen for a moment to catch the gist of her current issue.
“…and then he left and went to Europe! And now I don’t have a date for the masquerade party tonight!”
“I’m sure Fabio will see the error of his ways.” I say the words with more hope than truthfulness, while praying I don’t sound as annoyed as I feel.
Mom’s latest boy toy is probably incapable of seeing anything other than his next meal ticket or a movie role that could break him out despite his mediocre talent. Mom doesn’t choose her beaus for their intellect or fascinating conversation. She prefers them young and flashily handsome—in other words, Instagrammable.
For his part, Fabio has been dating Mom because he knows she’s still friendly with my father, the movie mogul Ted Lasker, who hasn’t produced a single flop in his decades-long career. My parents get along fabulously, since they never had any real feelings for each other to begin with. It’s difficult to be bitter about unmet expectations and broken dreams when there were no expectations and you care about the other person about as much as a dog does salad.
Regardless, my calmness will hopefully help lessen her theatrics.
But the scene is simply too perfect, and she’s too opportunistic to let it go to waste. An elegant white suite with white leather sofas. Fresh pale cream orchids and a pitcher of lemon water with two crystal glasses on the coffee table. I can see the bed behind her through the open door. The sheets are pristine white, with subtly threaded gold and silver stripes to add to the air of delicate opulence. The suite smells exactly like the kind of expensive perfume Mom loves, and the heartrending strains of a violin solo come from the music system to accompany her tragedy.
“But what if he doesn’t?” She raises her face and looks straight at me. Tragic tears spike her lashes. They’re so long and thick that people assume they’re fake.
But they’re not. I have them too.
“He will. The man can’t not see how wonderful you are.” I want to be back home. Go over my research notes. Think of some evil ways to torment the lazy and unmotivated students in my class who should’ve never attempted econometrics in the first place. They’re bound to fail—or do badly enough that they won’t be able to major in economics without retaking the course. The issue is that many of them are terrible at math—they can’t do high school algebra, much less the statistical analysis necessary to understand the economic data that is the heart of econometrics.
Teaching students who don’t care is utterly unrewarding and a gross waste of my time. I could be gathering data on interesting fields like sports gambling or semiconductor production or predicting children’s future outcomes based on a multitude of factors. But I don’t say any of that. Mom doesn’t need another reason to throw herself into this tragic heroine role she’s created for herself over the latest breakup.