The Privileges (14 page)

No way. Bluto turned away from the bar again to head back into the crowd, holding three beers by their necks in one hand. “Have a good night, G,” he said to Adam.

“You too. Hey, do you have the time?”

Bluto shook his thick wrist out of his sleeve and held it up in front of his face. It was bare. “Holy fuck,” he said.

Adam left him there pushing everyone backward while he searched the deck for his expensive watch. He got about halfway back to his own table before he stopped. It took a second in that sea of tuxes but he could pick out his colleagues sitting at the Perini table with their heads close together, probably in some timid bitch-fest about something. They didn’t see him. Cynthia must still have been dancing. Adam turned around and walked back into the darkness punctuated by the hulks of old Mustangs and helicopters and fighter jets. He found his man lighting a cigarette, way up by the bow, looking across the water to New Jersey, as if the boat were on its way there.

He looked a little nervous at Adam’s approach. “Cheese it, the cops,” he said.

“Why did you show me the watch?” Adam asked him. “How did you know I wasn’t some friend of that guy’s?”

He shrugged. “He was laughing,” he said. “Whereas you looked pissed just to be here.”

“Where did you learn to do that? What are you, like some child of the streets or something? Did you even pay to get in here?”

Once he realized Adam wasn’t there to bust him, the kid relaxed a bit. “Somebody gave me his ticket,” he said. “His boss paid for it because he believes in Giving Back. I’d love to tell you some Oliver Twist bullshit but the truth is a whole lot geekier. I used to do magic. Right through high school. I can get wallets too. Want to see?”

“Where do you work?” Say I’m a broker, Adam thought.

“I’m a broker at Merrill Lynch. What about you?”

Adam didn’t answer. You could never, ever go back to this moment in time, he was thinking, to this one permutation of the random. It wasn’t about fate—fate was bullshit. It was about a moment’s potential and what you did with it. Unrealized potential was a tragic thing.

“Do you know how perfect this is?” he said out loud. “There’s no connection between us at all. We don’t know each other, we don’t work together, we didn’t go to the same school. I don’t even know your name. Your name isn’t even on the guest list here.”

“Wait,” the kid said. “Don’t tell me.
Strangers on a Train.”

“You’re not going to give that asshole back his watch, are you?” Adam said.

A little smirk that Adam hadn’t even realized was there suddenly faded from the kid’s face. The inchoate patter of the bandleader beneath them and the tidal rush of the Hudson below them were like one sound. He looked at Adam and swallowed. “No,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because fuck him. That’s why not.”

The adrenaline was pounding through him now. He hadn’t felt like this since he proposed. Without turning he gestured over his shoulder toward the party, which they could hear but not see.

“They’re all like him,” Adam said. “They wear a uniform to make it easier to tell. They give us gifts, like tickets to benefits, to make us forget that life is short. We can’t just wait around. We don’t have that kind of time.”

“We who?” the kid said.

“We happy few,” he said. “You and me. It’s time to bum-rush the show. It’s time to change the terms. It’s going to require some bravery on your part.”

What was scary was how immediately all this came to him, when he hadn’t even really known it was there: an urge for vengeance, sure, but vengeance against what? He used to be a leader. He’d never done what others his age were doing, he was always in too much of a hurry, and yet somehow that hurry, instead of bringing him the life he wanted, had marginalized him. Now all of a sudden
the margin seemed like the only place to be. As for the kid, Adam could tell from the look of terror on his face that he was not wrong about him.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the kid said, which was the right thing to say.

“Yes you do,” Adam said. “I’m going to tell you something now. You don’t need to do anything but hear it. Wisconsin Cryogenics. Can you remember that without writing it down?”

He nodded.

“Now, you can do with that what you will. If you like, it can just be my little gift to you. And that can be the end. But it doesn’t have to be the end.”

They froze and watched a man and a woman, both holding martini glasses, stoop to walk under the stilled blades of a helicopter. Drunkenly they climbed inside. Music started up again within the ship.

“Give me a number,” Adam said. “Not a work number, or a home number. Maybe like a girlfriend’s cell. I’m going to contact you in about three weeks, okay? Three weeks. Then we’ll either talk about the future or you can just hang up on me. My name is Adam.”

The kid was right with him. He whispered a number, and Adam recited it back. Once he had a number in his head he didn’t forget it. “One more thing,” Adam said. “Give me the watch.”

The kid was confused but handed it over. Adam had a quick look at it: a gold Patek Philippe. He wasn’t much into watches himself but he appreciated value. He pursed his lips respectfully, and then he threw it over the side.

Back at the table he found Cynthia sitting with Parker and Brennan and one or two of the others, all of whom were too drunk and needed to go home. Cynthia, still glowing from all the dancing, glared teasingly at him. “Leave a lady hanging, why don’t you,” she said. “Where’ve you been, anyway?”

He told her he’d run into some old friends from Morgan. It was the easiest lie he’d ever told. Parker staggered around the table to say goodbye to her; he bent over with drunken gravitas and kissed
her hand, and she laughed, and Adam thought how right she was: you couldn’t just do nothing. It wasn’t enough to trust in your future, you had to seize your future, pull it up out of the stream of time, and in doing so you separated yourself from the legions of pathetic, sullen yes-men who had faith in the world as a patrimony. That kind of meek belief in the ultimate justice of things was not in Adam’s makeup. He’d give their children everything too, risk anything for them. He knew what he was risking. But it was all a test of your fitness anyway. The noblest risks were the secret ones.
Fortuna favet fortibus
.

Sanford talked a good game but he wasn’t about to give up what was his except maybe in his will, just like all the other bloated old satyrs capering around on this big docked ship. As for Adam, when he was lying speechless in some hospital bed after his third coronary, everybody would think he was thinking about one thing, but he would be thinking about something else.

They finally found a new apartment, on East End, a long way from Dalton but bigger and better in so many other respects—not only would April and Jonas finally have their own rooms, there was a guest room also, and a patio and access to a pool—that even the kids gave in to the idea of uprooting pretty quickly. But the renovations Cynthia wanted took months longer than expected, and in the end they had to knock fifty thousand off the selling price of their own place in return for the buyer’s agreement to delay the closing. It was a strange period, with about half their stuff packed away, calling the contractors for updates every afternoon, living like sub-letters in their own home. The kids lost their enthusiasm and started to complain remorsefully about having to move at all. They’d act out, Cynthia would get frustrated with them, and after one particularly trying weekend in this short-tempered limbo, Adam proposed to his wife that they go away somewhere for a few days, just the two of them. Couples they knew did that all the time, but when they stopped to think about it, they hadn’t really done it themselves since April was born. He even offered to take Cynthia to Paris; he knew
he probably wouldn’t enjoy it that much himself, two flights across the Atlantic in three days, but he made the offer just to show her he was serious. Sitting on a beach someplace in the Caribbean was more their style, but in the end it didn’t matter because there was no one to leave the kids with for that long. Cynthia couldn’t think of anyone she knew or trusted well enough for that. Who, that little Barnard girl they hired, from Minnesota? It was a wonder she could survive a weekend in the city herself. It was true that the two of them didn’t have parents who lived nearby, or whom you’d necessarily trust your kids with even if they were nearby. When Adam was a kid, his parents thought nothing of stashing him and Conrad at some neighbor’s place if they had plans, sometimes on the shortest of notice. But when Cyn asked him if he had any bright ideas for April and Jonas, he had to admit that he did not. As a family they were a little more of an island, for better or for worse, than he’d realized.

So they compromised: he got her to agree to spend one night in a hotel with him right there in Manhattan. Gina, the Barnard girl, who despite being in college never seemed to have weekend plans, consented to sleep over at their apartment. They told the kids they were going to Atlantic City, where it was very boring and there was gambling and children were not allowed. Then on Friday afternoon they checked into the Parker Meridien and called room service for oysters and a bottle of Absolut Citron and some ice. Adam had her out of her clothes almost before the waiter had left the room. She couldn’t believe how much energy he brought to it. You might have thought he hadn’t gotten laid in months, but God knew that wasn’t true. For a couple with two young kids, they were at it pretty often. But she could see, if not quite understand, how badly he needed this particular encounter to be great. When he wasn’t bending her legs back over her head, he was pulling her to the side of the bed so that her palms were on the floor. It was like some sexual epic, like it was important that they outfuck everyone else in the hotel. Two hours later she was very sure that they had. She didn’t have to fake it with him, mercifully, but seeing the way he was acting—how much he wanted to please her—she would have faked it for him if she had to.

He took a break and pulled a ten-dollar bottle of water out of the minibar. He drank it in front of the dark window, his chest still heaving; my God, Cynthia thought, he is so fucking gorgeous. She rolled over onto her stomach on the oversize bed. It was a long way from their wedding night, passed out from fatigue in that kitschy little B and B in Pittsburgh; she surprised herself by even remembering it. But when you did remember it you had a hard time not feeling optimistic. Things had been getting better the last few months. Adam was doing really well. He’d started trading on the side, he said, and suddenly there was money for everything. They were going to Vail in February, and to the Caribbean in the spring. The new apartment was going to be amazing. Sanford’s wife had asked her to join the Coalition for Public Schools. That had to be Adam’s doing too, of course. And what he kept telling her all these months was absolutely right: you just needed to get out into the world a little more. She felt his fingers on her calf and turned around to see him smiling sweetly at her. “Okay, shorty,” he said. “Break time’s over.”

He kept telling her how much he loved her, and she would turn her face away when he said it for fear she would start crying. He came again and went directly to the bathroom: “Just checking for a defibrillator,” he said. The door closed. Cynthia lay staring at the ceiling; after a minute she rolled to the edge of the bed and walked somewhat stiffly to the chair by the window where she’d dropped her bag. The room was huge, with a stunning view from the foot of Central Park. Cynthia thought she might even be able to see their apartment from there, but they weren’t quite high up enough. No voice mail on her phone, but in her bag she found three tightly folded pieces of lined paper—notes to her that Jonas must have slipped in there just before they left the apartment. The first two said “Love U” and “Miss U,” and the third one said, “R U winning?”

She was still looking at them when Adam came up behind her. She was worried he’d be angry at her, but of course he wasn’t. He was perfect. “Maybe,” he said, and kissed her neck, “we should just head home.”

They called Gina from the sidewalk outside the hotel so she
wouldn’t panic when she heard their key in the door. Adam took her downstairs to put her in a cab; Cynthia slipped off her shoes and went into the kids’ bedroom. Jonas was sleeping on his stomach as he always did, the covers kicked off, one palm flat against the mattress as if it were a pane of glass. She sat on the floor, against the wall across from his bed. In the dark the room was a comforting weave of long shadows, from the dresser, from the window frame, from the rolling backpack full of April’s schoolbooks that sat beside the door. She held her breath for a moment until she made out their own.

It made sense, she supposed, that the kids were a little nervous about moving into a new place, and a little nostalgic too. Everything that had ever happened to them had happened here. But she was flat faking it when she pretended to share their feelings about saying goodbye to this apartment. She never thought this was going to be their last home. To tell the truth she didn’t think the next one would be their last either. It was a vaguely shameful thing to admit. But there was always that moment when you fell out of love with a place, when you looked it over and asked yourself if it was so unimprovable that you wouldn’t mind if you died there. Once that thought lodged itself in your head, forget it, it was over.

Not the kind of reasoning you could share with kids that age, obviously. Jonas had already gone through a brief obsession with death, when he was just three. Cynthia was never sure what triggered it—probably some story she’d read to him, though she couldn’t think which one—but one day he was just aware of death, and he had trouble grasping some of its basic tenets. To him it amounted to being paralyzed, eyes open, inside a coffin, forever. The absence of consciousness was literally unimaginable. He believed the dead could still see, for instance—it was just too dark for them to see anything. Distinctions like that were not anything Cynthia wanted to get into with him.