The Privileges (10 page)

He turned out to be even more of a character in person. He had bushy hair and a retro mustache and had taken this cryogenic rubber company from receivership to eleven million in profit in less than three years. His office had one of those topless gas-station calendars on the wall. “We were up thirty-one percent last year,” he shouted at Adam. “In fucking Wisconsin! What is taking you people so long? Where’s the money already? Fucking tight-ass Ivy League Wall Streeters. None of you have ever run an actual business in your lives—I mean, a business that
makes
things. Calling me up and asking for this form and that prospectus. Get your heads out of your asses! I talk to that Sanford guy and it’s like talking to one of
those animatronic Disney things. The Hall of WASPs. You, on the other hand, seem almost like an actual person. Why can’t I just deal with you? Just write me a fucking check already!”

“It’s not my money,” Adam said, amused.

Guy scowled. “Whatever,” he said. “If it was your money we could shake hands and get rich. But you’re still young and you still have a boss to jerk off, I get it. When do you fly back? Do I have your cell?”

“Tomorrow first thing. Here, let me write it down for you again.”

“Then by Wednesday morning latest I need sixteen million for starters or I go elsewhere.”

“Understood,” Adam said, meaning that he understood that Guy delivered this same ultimatum every time. Secretly he had an intuition that there was no way this maniac would not succeed, no matter what he was selling. Still, it wasn’t Adam’s money.

“Whatever way it works,” Guy said, and turned around to make a phone call.

And that was it: no lavish dinner to woo him, no junior executives, no strip club. Back at the hotel Adam tried to book a flight home that same night, but there was nothing—some kind of storm was coming in, and flights were being canceled in bunches. A hotel room these days was basically like a mausoleum with a big TV in it: he couldn’t just sit there. But the health club in the basement was closed for renovations; and there was a Journey tribute band playing in the bar. It was like a nightmare. He hadn’t even brought any work with him. Rain battered the windows, and in the lobby the staff ran around putting wastebaskets under new leaks in the ceiling. He went back upstairs to his room and called Cynthia.

“So what have you been up to?” he asked, drumming his fingers on the bedspread.

“Math homework. April’s class started talking about geometry this week. Not exactly my strong suit. She gets a little stressed if she doesn’t pick up something immediately.”

Her voice flattened out in the evenings, once the kids were in
bed—he’d noticed that lately, but never as distinctly as he did now, when her voice was all he had of her.

“There’s acute angles,” he said, “and also some other kind.”

“Okay,” she said. “Home schooling probably not an option, then.”

“Why so early, anyway? Didn’t we start geometry in like ninth grade?”

“I can’t remember,” Cynthia said.

“Well, you have to talk to me about something,” he said. “I’m in some kind of black Midwestern hole here. What have you got?”

She sighed. “Okay,” she said. “Marietta has this shrink she used to see, and I called him up today and made an appointment.”

He said nothing.

“Discuss,” she said.

“An appointment for yourself?”

She laughed. “Yes of course for myself, genius. At least it’s not like he’s some stranger. I mean he’s a stranger to me, but Marietta vetted him for like three years. It’s just something I’ve been thinking about a little bit and I decided to see what it’s all about.”

He could feel that she needed him to say something, but something was preventing him, something that felt, at least, a little like panic.

“Adam, of course I won’t do it if it’s going to freak you out,” she said. “I mean it. I know it’s probably not something you approve of in general.”

“Of course it’s okay with me,” he said. “Of course I approve of it. I mean it’s not for me to approve or disapprove. It’s just I guess I didn’t know you were unhappy.”

“Not unhappy,” she said thoughtfully. “More like stuck. Anyway, Christ, it’s like going to the gym, everyone does it. You know that, right?”

He tried to say the right things, and then he heard April come in with another homework question and he had to let her go. The truth was that he did disapprove, at least a little—not in general, not for other people; but the two of them were different. One of the
things that made the two of them so great together, he’d always felt, was that shared talent for leaving all their baggage behind. Why would you want to go back and pick that up again? Everybody’s got their own; just walk the fuck away from yours and don’t turn around. He saw it borne out every day in the world of finance: the most highly evolved people were the ones for whom even yesterday did not exist.

Still, she was unhappy; she was unhappy, and that had to be his responsibility. He opened up the minibar, sat on the edge of the vast bed with his feet on the windowsill, his back to the empty room behind him, and watched the lightning over black Lake Michigan. A few mini-bottles later he felt less agitated; but he hated doing nothing, and these were hours he was never going to get back.

The first thing Jonas ever collected was Duplo animals. He was too young at the time to remember it now, but his mother liked to tell him stories about himself. The different Duplo sets had different animal-shaped blocks, and he would take them out of their sets and line them up on the coffee table in the living room, or on the rim of the bathtub, or on the floor under his parents’ bed, always in the same mysterious order determined somehow, as best she could tell, by their color. Cynthia would find them arrayed like that, in different places around the apartment, two or three times a week.

Next it was pennies: he would arrange them by year, once he’d learned his numbers, and then he’d arrange them by color, really by gradations of dirtiness, from the bright polish of the new ones to the murky greenish-bronze that made the man on the penny look like he was sitting and thinking about something on a bench inside a cave. Then his mother was talking to another mother in the playground and after that she showed him how to bring the shine out of all the pennies by soaking them in lemon juice. That was a lot of fun—like leading the penny man outside where it was light—though it was also the sort of fun that could only be had once and then it was done. This was often the case when grownups got involved.

There was one morning when Jonas walked into the living room
to ask his mother for Oreos before dinner even though he knew he wasn’t going to get them; he saw her sitting on the window seat, holding onto her knees, looking out the window, like she was sad about something she couldn’t find. Think, she often said to him. Where did you have it last?

He loved it when she played with him, but when it came to the collecting she had a way of getting too involved. Like when Grandma Ruth sent him one of those state-quarter sets. His mother would go through her own quarters before he’d even seen them; she knew the ones he was still missing and she’d just walk into his room and hand them to him. Or later when he started reading the Nate the Great books. She saw he liked the first three and so she went out and bought the entire rest of the series, numbers four through sixteen. When it was almost more fun not to have them yet—to know they existed out there somewhere and waited patiently to be found. He didn’t know how to tell her this.

Of course she didn’t only bring him things he’d asked for. Once in a while she’d buy a few CDs and they’d sit on the living room floor and listen, and if there were one or two he didn’t show any interest in, they probably wouldn’t play those again. There was one called
Flight of the Bumblebee—
as soon as that one was over he asked if he could hear it again, and his mother’s face softened, like that was what she’d been waiting for. Pretty soon she told him that he didn’t need to ask permission every time. He knew how to operate the stereo himself though he wasn’t supposed to fiddle with the volume knob.

April said one day that if she heard
Flight of the Bumblebee
one more time she’d go postal. He didn’t know what that meant but it made him self-conscious so he didn’t play it again for the rest of that day.

“He’s got an unusual attention span,” he heard his mother telling someone else in Zabar’s one day. “For a kid his age, a boy especially, he can focus on one thing for a long time.”

He finally found a way to pursue his interests without having to worry about others spoiling it with their own enthusiasm or else getting their feelings hurt: he started a secret collection, which, given his
limited freedom of movement in the outside world, pretty much restricted him to collecting things from inside the apartment. Also, in order to maintain the collection’s integrity as a secret, it had to consist of items people had forgotten about or would eventually be willing to forget about. He knew that this was pretty close to what people called stealing but he chose not to dwell on that. So far he had one of his mother’s lipsticks, a combination lock from his father’s gym bag, April’s hairband with the sunflowers on it, four different wine corks, his father’s empty money clip (this he had found serendipitously under a couch cushion), an electricity bill, one photo from his parents’ wedding album, April’s preschool report card that said she had a “quick temper,” two mismatched earrings from the bottom of his mother’s purse, a tiny wooden carving of a cat from Dad’s boss’s house in Connecticut, and a book light that clipped onto the top of the book you were reading in bed. That last one almost undid the whole project, because his mother had searched for it with unusual thoroughness before giving up.

No one ever looked in the old Lego box that was inside a drawstring bag that was at the bottom of the toy chest that he sat on to read or to draw. He didn’t need to look inside the box to remind himself what was in there—he could tick off its contents in his head at any moment of the day, or while lying in bed at night—but once in a while he liked to open it up anyway. It made each item seem even more valuable to know that everyone else had given up on it, because he was the only one in the family who knew the secret, which was that things might disappear but, thanks to him, rarely was anything ever really lost. He held each object between his fingers for a while, recommitting it to memory; then he packed them all away and opened the door of his room and walked past his mother at the kitchen table and into the living room to hear
Flight of the Bumblebee
again.

For Christmas break they were going to a resort in Costa Rica; some guy from Morgan Stanley Adam still played basketball with had said the beaches there were the most beautiful beaches on earth.
To the kids, one resort was the same as another, which was to say a kind of paradise where all strangers were nice to you and your parents never said no to anything or asked how much it cost and all you had to do to get anything you wanted was to pick up the phone. April was also mindful, though she knew she shouldn’t be, of the jealousy these trips engendered in some of her school friends, who maybe got to go skiing for a couple of days or spent the break in Florida in the hot, featureless homes of their grandparents.

Just a week or so before they were due to leave, the most recent hire at Perini—a guy named Bill Brennan, just barely out of college, whose junior status was unfortunately cemented by the fact that he was only about five feet six—strode around the office tossing postcard-style invitations on everyone’s desk. “Some buddies of mine are opening a bar,” he said. “Grand opening tonight. Actually, I have a piece of it too. You have to come. All of you are comped. They have to get some buzz going. Every hot woman I know will be there. Adam, dude, it’s on 89th and Second, right in your backyard. You have to come. I know it’s not your thing anymore.”

“Fuck you it’s not my thing anymore,” Adam said, laughing. He called Cynthia and told her to get the sitter they used, or some other sitter, it didn’t matter. They hadn’t been to a real meat-market bar like that in a long time, long enough that everything about it seemed hysterical now. The men—if you could even use that word, since despite their suits and loosened ties they all looked about twenty years old—nodded meaningfully to the pounding music and generally stood around hoping for disinhibited women to fall on them like some humanitarian airdrop. Parker and the rest of them were in heaven. Brennan comped all their drinks, but it was so crowded that it took Adam almost fifteen minutes to complete the round trip to the bar from the spot they’d staked out against the wall. By the time he made it back from his third go-round with a Scotch for himself and a vodka and soda for Cynthia, she was holding a different, brand-new drink someone else had bought for her; she was visibly smashed, and encircled by strange, hyena-like guys.

“This, losers, is my husband,” she shouted when she saw him, because you had to shout in there to say anything at all. Even so,
they smiled and nodded and were likely only pretending to have caught, or cared, what she was saying. A beautiful drunk woman standing alone, even for five minutes, drew these guys like touts at a racetrack; they were too young and callow even to check for a wedding ring. “He is more of a man than any of you will ever be. Especially you, fatso,” she yelled, gesturing to one guy, who just smiled.

“Hey now,” Adam said.

“You have lost a step, though,” Cynthia said in his ear. “I mean, these bottom-feeders bought me three drinks while I was waiting for you to come back with this one.” She took one glass out of his hand, took a sip from it, and then with drinks in both hands put her arms around his neck and started making out with him. He felt a little vodka splash on the back of his neck. He wasn’t sure whether or not this was hilarious. The circle of guys may not have been able to hear anything she’d been saying to them, but this kind of display they understood, and with no hard feelings they turned away to see what else was available.

Cyn stopped kissing him for a moment and screamed after them, “His dick is bigger than yours too!” That they heard. In fact, a number of people seemed to hear it. “Okay,” Adam said, putting his hand gently on the small of her back, “I’m thinking it’s time to call it a night.”