The Privileges (13 page)

By the weekend, they seemed to have gotten past it; they were a little less clingy, and that uncharacteristic wide-eyed silence in which Adam or Cynthia would sometimes come upon them diminished and then was gone. They went to the Radio City Christmas show and packed for the trip to Costa Rica and ate at 3 Guys and it all seemed behind them.

But Cynthia was unconvinced. Every night she postponed Adam’s sleep demanding to know what more he thought they should do about it. He tried his best to say all the properly sympathetic things; he was pretty sure that the suffering she ascribed to them was really her own, but the great thing about Cynthia was that no matter how stressed she might get, she always returned to her own center, somehow, if you had the patience to just let it happen. But when she told him Wednesday night that she had called Dalton to ask if they could recommend a psychiatrist who specialized in treating children with PTSD—and that not only was there such a person but she had already made an appointment with him—Adam started to wonder whether the whole thing was getting out of hand.

“In a few days,” he said soothingly, “we’ll all be sitting on the beach, and we’ll have a new perspective on everything. Them too.”

They were whispering because though the kids had been put to bed down the hall hours ago, you never knew.

“Not so much,” Cynthia said. “I called the resort tonight and canceled our reservation.”

He struggled up onto his elbows and stared at her.

“The plane tickets weren’t refundable. Sorry about that. But I told the kids and they’re fine with it. We’ll have Christmas at home for once. It won’t kill us. I just don’t feel like being in a strange place right now.”

She started crying.

“But something has to change around here,” she said. “Something has to start getting better. You can’t just do nothing.”

“It will. Things are going great.” It was true, and yet even as he said it he could feel himself starting to panic. “Bonuses are this week, you know. It’s only going to get better for us.”

“I know it. But time doesn’t mean the same thing to you and me anymore, you know? You’re all like, in ten years we’ll have everything we want, and in the meantime I feel like I need binoculars just to be able to see to the end of the fucking day.”

“Look,” he said pleadingly, “I don’t blame you for being upset about what happened, but isn’t there another way of looking at it? I mean, April and Jonas knew what to do. They did exactly the right thing. In a way it should make you worry less. Plus, I don’t want to make light of it or anything, but it’s New York. You can’t protect them from everything.”

“Well, maybe we shouldn’t live here, then,” she said.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Maybe we should live somewhere else. Maybe we should be living a different kind of life. Who says it has to be this way? You think this is the best life we could be living? There’s so little space here. There’s so little room to move. It should feel safe but it just feels exposed. There’s got to be somewhere else for us to go.”

He was nervous about touching her all of a sudden. “I thought you said you wanted to stay here, though,” he said tentatively.

She shook her head, wiping her eyes. “Don’t you get it?” she said. “This is the only thing there is for me to be good at. And I suck at it. In fact I’m terrified I’m getting worse at it instead of better.”

“Cyn, it was one bad hour out of their lives. You seriously think, as good as our lives are, that that’s what they’re going to remember?”

“Don’t be an idiot,” she said. “You think you’re born knowing how to forget shit like that?”

Each December Sanford took them out to lunch one by one and gave them their bonus checks, along with a kind of performance review, known among the staff as the State of the Career Address, that helped explain the amount. The business itself was his whim, and while they all knew that it had been a profitable year, there was no expectation that the relative size of the bonuses reflected anything more precise than Sanford’s own fondness for them.

They were good enough friends to joke about their fear. The whole operation was so mercurial that it wouldn’t have been outside the realm of possibility for one of them to be fired at his or her bonus lunch, or for all of them to be handed a severance check and told that Sanford had decided to shut the place down. Adam, whose lunch was scheduled for the Friday before Christmas, was on a roll. He’d put together the first round of financing for a generic-drug start-up that was poised to get huge in a way few people other than Adam had foreseen; and he’d set up a friendly takeover of Wisconsin Cryogenics, friendly enough to keep the volatile Guy from Milwaukee in teenagers and blow for the rest of his life. The hardest part about putting that together was getting Guy to keep his mouth shut about it, so the stock wouldn’t overreact and screw the deal.

Sanford took Adam to Bouley, where they split two bottles of wine before the boss produced a check in a glassine envelope. “Open it,” he said immodestly, as if there were a ring inside.

Adam opened it and saw it was for three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It was much more than he was expecting, or had received in previous years, and he’d heard enough to know that none of his colleagues had gotten anything close to it.

“This is between you and me,” Sanford said unnecessarily. In his old age he cried more easily. “This is not about the past year. This is about the future. I need to make sure you aren’t going anywhere. I need to be sure you know how you’re valued. I’m getting to the
point where I need to think about the legacy that I leave in this world.”

Like a lot of his peers, Sanford maintained his social profile through lavish entertainments tied to charities; it wasn’t long after bonus season, when presumably they were all feeling flush, that his employees were dunned to buy tickets to that spring’s annual benefit for an organization close to his heart, the Boys and Girls Clubs of New York, to be held on the deck of the
Intrepid
, the decommissioned aircraft carrier that served as a floating naval museum at one of the Hudson River piers. A thousand dollars a head. For those who worked at Perini it was not an invitation there was any question of refusing. Adam bought a ticket for Cynthia as well. Normally he wouldn’t have forced her hand like that, but he needed to see a little of the old Cynthia, radiant at a party, for her sake but also for his own. She was so down these days, and though for the life of him he couldn’t see what there was to be down about, he was so used to being grounded by her that he had a real fear that, wherever she was drifting, he’d end up drifting right out there along with her. He couldn’t figure out what to try other than maybe to reenact an evening when she was happier.

It wasn’t much of a plan, but for that night, at least, it seemed to work. Cynthia was beaming as she shivered in a black dress in the hangarlike space below the deck of the ship, drinking some kind of themed martini, the center of attention among Adam’s colleagues from Perini, none of whom had sprung for the extra grand for a date. They took turns asking her to dance. He could see how smitten they were with her, with the idea of her, proof of life after marriage. Even when they got a little drunk and their gaze became a little more direct, it did not occur to him to feel jealous, because she deserved their attention. They ate rack of lamb. They saw Tiki Barber. Sanford and his wife came magnanimously by their table, everyone happily drunk.

“One of these things is not like the other,” Sanford said, smiling rakishly at Cynthia. “What are you doing at this table full of empty tuxedos?” He held out his hand to her, and when she held out hers, he kissed it. Victoria smiled into the middle distance.

“So nice to see you again, Barry,” Cynthia said.

“Please. The pleasure is all mine. You are the absolute jewel of this sorry gathering. Let me ask you something. Do you dance?”

“Not really.”

“Splendid. Son,” he said to Adam, “you don’t mind if I make off with your wife for a while, do you? Adam may not have told you this but I am a dance instructor par excellence. Among my many talents.” He held out his elbow; Cynthia, with a mock-frightened glance at her husband, put down her martini and glided off on Sanford’s arm toward the dance floor. Victoria saw a friend a few tables away, or pretended to, and she waved and chirped and left the table without a word.

“Unbelievable,” Parker said, not without a little envy in his voice. “Fucking old goat. And with his wife right there too. Amazing what that guy gets away with.”

Parker’s bonus, Adam knew, was so insultingly small that he had skipped right over resentment and moved straight to terror. He emptied another martini, and beckoned to the waitress with the empty glass. “There’s no buzz,” he said to Adam, “like that good-cause buzz.”

“True dat,” Adam said. In fact, though, the drunker he got, the more restless and vaguely surly he began to feel, which was unusual for him. He could feel himself smiling, so he stopped. There was a bar up on deck as well, and he headed outside to visit it, just to get away from the table for a few minutes. On the stairs he turned and was able to pick out his boss and his wife on the crowded dance floor. It was a field of tuxedos but his eyes were drawn right to them. He watched Sanford turn her around and around in that small space; he said something that made her laugh. It made Adam nostalgic. All the energy and heedlessness and faith in herself that he had always adored had lost its outlet and so that faith had backed up, as it were, into the lives of the children. What was worst was that the life of maximized potential they had always believed in for themselves was still right there in front of them, closer than ever really, but she had stopped looking forward to it, she wouldn’t even lift her head to see it. When he told her about the bonus, she had
mustered a polite smile and whistled, like, How nice for you. It was both thrilling and a little sad to see her out there dancing like her old self, drunk and luminous, because it took a crazy setting like this, a fantasy almost, to bring it out of her again. Maybe life needed to better resemble the fantasy. Not that there was some thousand-dollar gala to go to every night. But whatever it was that had to be done, it was his turn to bail her out; she’d bailed him out in more ways than he could count. He couldn’t picture what he might have become without her.

He knew his boss well enough to have no doubt that seducing Cynthia was the one and only thing on his mind right now. It didn’t bother him. Not just because he knew it would never happen: it was right, somehow, that that was what Sanford should try to do, regardless of the fact that his wife was standing right there, or his love for Adam, or the presence of hundreds of onlookers. That was the point of a life like Sanford’s. You pursued what you wanted.

Up on the deck there was some kind of disturbance in the line for drinks: a frat-boy type in front of Adam was complaining to his friends that the kid at the front of the line, who looked about nineteen years old, was chatting up the bartender. “Mack on your own time, Junior,” he said. “Some of us are thirsty here.”

The kid turned around. He had a huge nose, one of those noses that starts practically on the forehead, but on him it looked sort of Roman and oddly handsome. “Take it easy there, Bluto,” he said, and Adam’s eyes widened gleefully at the audacity of it. “She’s my sister.”

“What?” Bluto said.

“I’m not shitting you,” the kid said. “I think we’re twins.” Though he had his drink in hand, he turned back and started murmuring to the bartender again.

Another Wall Street tyke, Adam thought, another kid blowing his bonus money on a party where he thinks he’ll network with people who don’t even know he’s alive. The whole bonus thing got to him, actually, in a way it hadn’t before. He’d been given a big bonus this year. What did that even mean? Maybe he should buy himself a sailboat, or find more expensive hotels to stay in during the few
weeks a year he was allowed to travel where he wanted instead of Charlotte or Omaha, or see if he could find an even more overpriced school to send his kids to? He felt like a sap. Everybody acted like the amount mattered, when what mattered was the notion of getting a bonus at all, of being outside that small circle wherein it was decided how much a man’s work was worth, how close you had come to some goal somebody else had set for you. Sanford could have given him two million and the principle would still be the same. Meanwhile time was going by, and the life around you started to calcify while the Barry Sanfords of the world paid you to wait to be told what would happen next.

His relationship to drinking had grown complicated. The more he felt he wanted one, the more he tried not to have it: it was a self-control exercise, of course, but also he was working out more and more lately, and drinking and especially hangovers were incommensurate with the plan to get into perfect shape. He weighed less and could lift more now than ten years ago. One day off from his routine, though, and he could feel the backslide beginning. Even now, standing in the bar line in a tuxedo, he had a restless urge to descend through the loud metal innards of this impotent ship and, once out on the thin path that ran between the Hudson and the West Side Highway, go for a run.

When Bluto got to the front of the line, he pushed the kid aside—just a nudge, really, but the kid was so much smaller that he stumbled and lost about half his drink on the floor. He put the glass down on the bar and for a moment Adam thought the kid was drunk enough to do something seriously stupid. Instead, though, he stuck out his hand. “No hard feelings, bro,” he said to Bluto, and when Bluto scowled and shook his hand, the kid reached up with his other hand and clapped Bluto on the shoulder. Then he wandered off, not toward the tables but in the direction of the moribund planes, some of them spotlit, welded onto the deck as exhibits. Adam continued to stare after him, not so much intently as distractedly, and then suddenly the kid turned around and caught him at it. A few strange seconds passed, strange in that it seemed less awkward than it probably should have. The kid raised his eyebrows,
and then—Adam was absolutely sure of it—as he started to walk away again he held up his right hand, opened it up by raising his fingers as one might open up a book of matches, and there, facing out from his palm, looped around a couple of his fingers, was a wristwatch.