The Privileges (15 page)

She tried what she could think of. She had him pull out his toy cash register. “How many days until your birthday?” she said.

“Fifty-six,” Jonas said, who knew this because he asked about it every day.

“And is that a little or a lot?”

“A
lot
!”

She thought a moment, then punched some figures into the beeping cash register. “This is how many days until you’re Grandma Morey’s age,” she said. “And even Grandma isn’t dying anytime soon.” Her own mother was older than Adam’s, but she didn’t use Grandma Ruth as an example because Jonas hadn’t seen her in so long Cynthia thought she might not seem sufficiently real. She turned the numbers toward him.

“Wow!” he said. But she should have known that wouldn’t work: at that age, any number over one hundred was the same in his mind, and anyway to tell a child that he shouldn’t be afraid of something
yet
was no kind of advice at all.

“It’s all a part of nature,” she said another time. “Every living thing is born, and grows, and dies. Every single animal and plant and bird and flower and tree. It’s what’s called,” she said, hating herself, “the circle of life.”

“So you’ll die? And Daddy? And April? When?”

“No,” she said, panicking. “Mommy and Daddy are not going to die. You don’t even need to worry about that. Just put that thought right out of your head.” She pantomimed plucking a bad thought out of her own head and sniffing it and throwing it away, which made him laugh, and then she let him watch TV.

“He’ll move on,” Adam had said. “He’s three. Something else interesting will come along and bump it right out of his head. I remember going through a phase like that when I was around his age.”

“You did? What did your mother tell you?”

He thought. “I have absolutely no memory of it.”

“So you recall asking the question. It’s just that your mother said nothing worth remembering.”

He nodded.

“Well, there you have it,” Cynthia said.

Then one day the preschool called; they had her come pick Jonas up early because after snack time he had just started crying. He wouldn’t discuss what was bothering him. Probably just tired, the teacher said with that slightly lunatic patience you wanted in a
preschool teacher, but all the same maybe she ought to come and get him.

She took him home in a cab, stroking his hair and kissing the top of his head, not asking any questions. She was trying to soothe herself as much as him. Who is this boy? she said to herself. Why is there no one to help me? How am I supposed to know what to do?

When they walked in the front door, she said, “We have to go get April in about an hour. You want a snack and I’ll read to you?”

“Mommy?” he said. “I don’t want to die because when you’re dead you can’t talk or get up and I’ll miss you.”

And here she learned a lesson about desperation and the ways in which a parent could sometimes rely on it. “Come here,” she said. He sat on her lap. She told him that he was a big boy and it was time for the truth. The truth was that no one knows what happens after we die, because we can’t talk to dead people and dead people can’t talk to us. But some people have some ideas about what might happen. Some people believe in an idea called reincarnation, where when one life ends there’s a little rest time and then you get to come back and live again; not the same exact life, though, and maybe not even the same kind of life—maybe you came back as an eagle, or a dog. In fact, maybe this life, right now, wasn’t even his first one: maybe he’d been a dinosaur, so long ago that he’d forgotten. (She could feel his little arms relaxing.) Another idea, which a whole lot of people believed in, was called heaven. Heaven was a place that depended on your wishes: the place in life when you’d felt safest and happiest and most comfortable, heaven was that place for you all the time, forever.

“A nice warm house,” Jonas said, “with you and Daddy.”

He left his sister out of it, Cynthia noticed, but she had let that go. It was a little rite of passage for her, a confidence builder, a lesson in love’s resources even when there was nothing in particular you yourself believed in.

J
ONAS WOKE UP FIRST
—he could tell by listening—with the shutters open facing the sea. No sound but the rain turning to mist on the stones of the patio. It often rained in the first hour of the morning, as if considerately, to get it out of the way early in case the Moreys or the rest of the island’s inhabitants might have had anything planned. Not that there was much to plan, even if you were so inclined. Another walk on the beach, maybe, or another ride across the harbor to Scilly Cay to eat a lobster. That was the genius of the place, as far as Jonas was concerned: wasted time. You needed that in order to properly value, and to gauge the insanity of, your regimented life back home, where sometimes that first minute of brain activity after waking generated so much anxiety that you’d have to get out of bed just to stop thinking. Then again, Anguilla itself was starting to feel a bit like home by now. Twice a year—Christmas break and spring break—for four years. That kind of fidelity was unprecedented. His father must have found something he liked here, since it was the only place they’d ever visited that he had expressed
any desire to go back to. Maybe when Jonas was his father’s age, and someone used the word “home” in his hearing, Anguilla would be one place he’d think of. Probably not, though. They rented the same Greek-style villa here every time, even though his parents surely could have afforded to buy it. At least Jonas thought so. It wasn’t always easy to tell what they couldn’t afford anymore.

April was in the bedroom right behind his head, with her friend Robin from school, and the very thought of Robin lent Jonas’s thoughts an instant and somewhat humiliating focus. He put his ear to the wall even though the two girls would not be awake for a couple of hours. They were sleeping in the same king-size bed, because they liked it that way, and this provoked Jonas in ways he almost resented. His mom had urged him to invite a friend on this trip too, but he didn’t really have any friendships that intense; there were the guys in his band, but frankly they were better off taking a little break from one another. Robin was tall and thin and long-haired, like all of April’s nasty school friends really, but she was also on the lacrosse team and knew who Gram Parsons was and turned red when she laughed and was nice to him, and not just when his parents were in the room either. He sublimated a lot of his feelings toward her into a sentimental appreciation of her as a tragic figure, because her own home life was so bad. Her father was a partner at White & Case and they were over-the-top rich—plenty rich enough to take their own family trip to Anguilla for Christmas, or anywhere else in the world, if they could stand being around one another that long—but the mother was bipolar, or so he’d heard his own mother say, and Robin’s father either couldn’t acknowledge that kind of defect or else just chose not to make the requisite sacrifices to deal with it. Robin had been spending a lot of nights with the Moreys back in New York lately, sometimes on short notice. When she was with them and the phone rang, Jonas had been instructed not to answer it until April or their mom had a chance to screen the incoming number. Robin had an older brother who didn’t always come home at night anymore either, though nobody knew where he went instead.

The sadness of it all did nothing to diminish his urge to masturbate,
and this was a perfect opportunity, but then Jonas’s eye fell on the Gibson electric guitar he had received two days ago for Christmas, on its stand in the corner of the bedroom. His feelings for it were as passionate as for any object he had ever owned. Indian rosewood neck, humbucker pickups: he’d coveted it for so long that he was in the weird position, Christmas-gift-wise, of knowing exactly how much it had cost. His amp was back in New York but the guitar came with a pair of wireless headphones, so he could jam away without bothering anyone else. He got out of bed, put on a t-shirt, and sat on the couch by the glass doors with the guitar in his lap. The rain was already letting up, and the sky was brightening in great slabs of blue and white. He heard a door open downstairs and footsteps on the patio, but at this hour it could only be Simon laying the table. He decided he’d work on mastering the opening lick from “One Way Out” until his dad appeared on the beach for his morning swim. He clapped the headphones on; an hour later, when he saw Adam winding his way down the whitewashed steps toward the calm ocean below the house, he unplugged and went downstairs to tell Simon what he wanted for breakfast.

Adam walked into the mild surf until the dropoff came, and then he turned and floated, with his toes sticking out of the water, and stared up at the villa. The water on the island’s bay end was impossibly warm. A cargo ship was passing to the north of him, toward the open Atlantic, and he watched it for a while but there was no way to track its progress. Even the plume of smoke trailing behind it was as still as a painting. He swam back and forth for a while, but when he paused the salt water held him up easily and so he closed his eyes. When he opened them again, female figures were moving back and forth on the patio, and he walked out of the surf, grabbed the towel that Simon had hung on the beach chair for him, and headed back up the stairs.

“You might put on a shirt there, nature boy,” Cynthia said to him, rolling her eyes at the girls, and so he stood up again and went to the bedroom to get one. Simon, having dried off the chairs and opened the umbrella that shaded the table, was pouring coffee and taking omelet orders. He was one of the house’s amenities; in the
hot off-season, he went to college in Atlanta, and in the winter he saw to the needs of the villa’s guests and went home to his parents’ place at night. Cynthia caught April and Robin nudging each other from time to time when Simon was entering the room, or leaving it, but that was okay. Let them. She prided herself on not talking to her daughter about sex or men in the censorious way most mothers would.

“Robin,” she said, “that skirt is so cute on you.” They’d given it to her for Christmas, and Cynthia was proud of the rightness of it for her. She was fascinated with Robin, who had both everything and nothing. She just loved it that you could have such bitter fuck-ups for parents and still somehow foil them by turning out so sweet and poised and confident at age fifteen.

Robin paused before she sat down and gave a modest little comic twirl. “It’s really beautiful, Cynthia,” she said. “Thank you again. So, what’s on the agenda today?”

“Hmm,” April said. “Tanning by the pool for a few hours and then eating again?”

“That’s what I love about you,” Robin said. “Always willing to think inside the box.”

“Adam,” Cynthia said as he sat down again, “you’re golfing this morning, right? What time?”

“Nine forty-two,” he said.

“So precise,” Cynthia said. “That’s what I admire about golfing.” Turning toward her son, she caught him artlessly checking out Robin’s breasts again; Jesus, it must suck to be a boy, she thought. Completely pathetic and condemned to know it. “When are you going to initiate young Jonas into the golfing mysteries, anyway?”

Jonas dropped his fork and waved his hands in front of him. “Please, God, no,” he said.

“Maybe someday when he’s done something really horrible,” Adam said. They fell silent as their plates arrived. The shadow of the villa receded over them as the sun rode a little farther up the sky. Adam drained his coffee and held his hand over the cup as Simon moved to fill it again; he excused himself and went to the bedroom to change into shorts and a collared shirt and a baseball cap. He
threw his clubs in the back seat of their rental car and drove north on the island’s one highway, past the overgrown lots and the discreet high-end resort entrances and the bright pastel exteriors of houses no one was living in anymore. At one point he waited patiently for some goats to develop the urge to get out of the road. He drove past the golf course and all the way to the little business district in Shoal Bay East, at the island’s northern end. There was a bar there that was open even at ten in the morning; he parked in the shade behind it and walked across the street to the Royal National Bank of Anguilla.

It wasn’t really much of a bank; it looked more like a doctor’s office, with a heavy-lidded fat woman in a tight pink dress sitting at a receptionist’s desk and a closed door behind her with a security camera above it. The woman was not someone Adam had seen before.

“Mr. Bryant?” he asked her. Regally she looked him over and then stood and passed through the door behind her without a word. Adam looked up at the camera. In a few seconds she reappeared and beckoned him through, smiling now as she closed the door behind him.

Mr. Bryant rose from behind an old metal desk and shook Adam’s hand; behind him were two low metal filing cabinets, the paneled wall, and, through a narrow window, the blue marina. “Merry Christmas to you, Mr. Adam,” he said. “You have everything you need?” He meant at the villa. He had absolutely nothing to do with the villa or its operation, but he liked to ask. “You are enjoying yourself?”

“As always,” Adam said.

“Your family is well?”

“Very well. And yours?”

Mr. Bryant nodded in answer, or maybe he was just nodding approvingly at the question. They would never meet each other’s families, but the civilities could not be bypassed, as Adam had learned, when you dealt with Mr. Bryant. Now he unfolded his long-fingered hands, opened his desk drawer, and took out a collection of five checks, all for different amounts, all payable to cash, held together
by a paper clip. He removed the paper clip and handed the checks to Adam. Adam looked them over, though not carefully; he folded them in half, put them in the pocket of his shorts, and rose to shake hands a second time.

“My friend says to expect him next around Easter,” Adam said.

“At your service. When do you fly home?”

“Tomorrow.”

Mr. Bryant clucked regretfully. “You’ll miss the regatta,” he said. “Oh well. Duty calls, I am sure.” They shook hands yet again, warmly. Adam never understood why it was so important to Mr. Bryant to treat this like a friendship, but would not have dreamt of offending him either.