The Privileges (16 page)

He drove back along a different route, taking his time, less for clandestinity’s sake than to catch one last view of the hills of Saint Martin across the water before it got too hazy. It was still only about quarter to eleven, though, and a plausible round of golf had to last three hours at least. So he drove back to the course, went into the pro shop, and bought two large buckets of balls for the driving range. He took the checks out of his pocket and zippered them into one of the compartments of the golf bag before he got started. It was so hot by now that he was the only one out on the range, but he didn’t care. The heat rarely got to him, and the scolding a slight sunburn would earn him would only help cement the question of his whereabouts.

Half an hour later, sweat was pouring off him, but he was absolutely striping the ball, better than he’d hit it in months. He had the driver going a good 280 yards. He was so locked in, he wound up sorry there wasn’t enough time to get out on the course after all.

There was a lunchtime board meeting of the Coalition for Public Schools at some restaurant down in Soho, which by any reasonable standard should have been over by three; but it wasn’t, and when Cynthia couldn’t stand it anymore she rose to excuse herself early, telling everyone she had a doctor’s appointment uptown. She couldn’t make it out the door without ten women stopping her to
express the bogus hope that it was nothing serious. On days like this she just had to take a deep breath and remind herself that it was all for a good cause, namely the separation of these aimless gossips from some of their millions, so that those millions could start to do some good in the world. It took up a lot of time. You could just stay at home and write checks, of course, and when Adam had started making serious money that’s all she initially thought she would do; but a big check was wasted on these halfwit dowagers with no idea how to do anything more substantial than send out invitations to a benefit, and before you knew it you were involved. Not just the CPS either; she’d become involved to various degrees with the Riverside Park Fund, the Coalition for the Homeless, and Big Brothers Big Sisters. She did have a rule about staying away from disease charities: there was something about them that just struck her as especially haughty, a blithe tossing of money at the ineffable, like Won’t You Please Join Us in the Fight Against Death. She knew on some level she was wrong about this but obeyed the feeling anyway. She preferred causes that dealt with what might actually be improved, not the hard-to-fathom world of genes and viruses but just the generally fucked-up way in which human institutions worked—homelessness, public schools, Habitat for Humanity, things like that. Anything that improved the lot of children got her money in a heartbeat. “You’re sweet,” Cynthia said, smiling and backing away, “but no, it’s nothing major, just something I scheduled months ago, and you know how hard it is to get in to see these guys.” Which probably left them all thinking that she was going in to get her ass lifted or something, but so what. In truth all she had to do was make a phone call, but it was a private one that had to be made before close of business and she had lost faith that they could wrap up this meeting in time. It was a kind of universal truth in the nonprofit world that everything took at least twice as long as it needed to. She used to have to schedule her shrink appointments for five in the afternoon, because her commitments had grown to the point where that was the only window; but if she had an evening event, as she often did, there were days when seeing the shrink meant not seeing the kids at all, and so she’d finally just quit therapy altogether. No room
in her day for it anymore, which was probably the best circumstance for terminating, she thought, and probably why doing so had turned out easier than she’d expected.

Despite the accursed narrowness of those Soho streets, her driver was idling right there in front of the restaurant. They inched toward the West Side Highway and she started to open up her phone right then, but she didn’t want to make the call in front of the driver either. He was totally trustworthy but it had nothing to do with that. Half an hour later she was home. They’d been in the new apartment on Columbus for almost two years now, after a restless few years in the place on East End she’d loved so much when they bought it. Almost as soon as the renovations were done she’d started glancing adulterously at the real estate section. But the priceless thing about Adam was that he didn’t really give her much more than one night’s shit about it, because the truth was, he understood. He got why she didn’t mind packing up again, why there was such romance in the new, why it was so hard to stay in a place that had maxed out its own potential. Plus they’d made a fortune each time they sold. This was Manhattan, after all; everyone wanted a foothold, and they weren’t making any more of it.

Still, the place on Columbus was so wonderfully eccentric that Cynthia couldn’t imagine ever growing tired of it: a penthouse duplex that looked directly down onto the planetarium behind the Museum of Natural History. At night the spheres glowed blue through the planetarium’s glass walls, and from the wraparound windows thirty stories up it seemed to Cynthia almost like their home was returning to the planet after a day’s journey into space. The kids had the downstairs floor mostly to themselves; it had a separate entrance, which meant she had less of a sense of their comings and goings than she used to. They were too old to want or need an escort back and forth to school, and they had so much else going on in their lives, socially and otherwise, that it wasn’t always possible to know exactly when she’d see them next. Or Adam, for that matter.

Which could sometimes give rise to a sort of loneliness; but today Cynthia was just as glad to come home and find nobody else there. It was still well before five, so she called their accountant; she knew
he would have taken a call from her no matter the time, but she liked to be considerate about it. She asked if he would please handle a wire transfer for her, a small one, just ten thousand, but it was important that it be done right away.

“Charles Sikes,” she said.

She heard him typing; he wore one of those phone headsets, like only receptionists used to wear. “Same account as before?”

“Same bank, different city,” she said, and dug a folded, typed letter out of her pocket and read him the number. He took it down, and then as he always did he asked after her kids, whom he’d never met but knew in his way, and then they said goodbye.

Still no one home. The winter sky outside the living room was just beginning to gray. She opened up a bottle of wine, took one cigarette out of the pack she kept hidden behind the leather-bound volume of wedding photos on the bookshelf, put her coat back on, and stood outside on the balcony that overlooked the planetarium. She spent maybe twenty minutes that way, looking down on the still planets, listening to the symphony of faint sounds that passed for silence. Then, in a spirit of beneficence, she opened up the cell phone again and called her mother.

Ruth seemed almost miffed to hear from her, though no more miffed than she was by anything that rose up unexpectedly in her day without giving her adequate time to prepare. “We are doing as well as can be expected,” she said. “Warren’s health is not good, as you know.”

She didn’t know; or maybe she did—in her mother’s conversations it was hard to separate fact from dire prediction. “Well, tell him I hope he feels better.”

“How are the children?”

“They’re great. So busy I hardly see them anymore. The amount of schoolwork they have is just brutal.” There was a pause, and somehow Cynthia knew what was supposed to go there. “I’m sorry we haven’t been able to get out there to visit.”

“Probably not the best time for a visit anyway,” Ruth said.

“You’re right,” Cynthia said, misunderstanding her. “It’s impossible to get away. Sometimes I wonder why they have to work so
hard. But then just last week I was in this public school in East Harlem—”

“Good Lord, why?”

“This charity I work with. We were dedicating a computer lab. Anyway, you wouldn’t believe—”

“Your education was always very important to me,” Ruth said. “That came first.”

Cynthia laughed affrontedly and took another quick drag. “Are you joking?” she said, exhaling. “Dirksen? That place was like a drug bazaar. There was an English teacher there who killed herself over Christmas break. Remember that? It’s a miracle I learned a fucking thing at that place.”

Ruth closed her eyes. She was trying to get some dinner ready, even though Warren probably wouldn’t eat any of it; he was so sick he hadn’t been out of the living room chair all day except to go to the bathroom, and even for that he had to call out to her. She missed part of what Cynthia was saying because when he got a coughing jag it was so heart-wrenching that she couldn’t hear anything else. “I don’t know what you expected me to do about it,” she said. “There certainly wasn’t money for private school. It was hard enough to hold on to the house those years.”

“There are ways,” Cynthia said, tossing her cigarette over the edge of the patio railing, hearing a key turn in the front door inside. “It’s just a matter of where your priorities are.”

“Well, anyway,” Ruth said. “You certainly managed to land on your feet.”

Me: SWM, 27—Big Mets fan, good income, not afraid of adventure. Willing to think long term, or, if you prefer, NSA. You: athletic, 19–24, long hair. Not afraid to act if the moment seems right. Send photo, plz.

He left out, of course, any references to his face, specifically his nose, because while some women were into it, most, he found, were not. But that seemed fair, since he hadn’t mentioned anything about what he liked or didn’t like in a face either—those faint mustaches, for
instance, which were a total dealbreaker. He hit Send and switched back to the streaming video of Kasey in her apartment in California. Maybe it was California. The windows were always covered, so she might have been in Bayside for all any of her subscribers really knew. Right now she was in the kitchen making herself some kind of smoothie. There was a laptop on the kitchen counter near the blender, as there was in every room of Kasey’s house, and so she could see, as he saw, the requests typed in by feverish guys: Take off your top. Mmm how’s that taste? It was pretty embarrassing. He’d stopped communicating with Kasey himself months ago, but he still watched her, and the meter still ran on his credit card.

Would like blowjob without paying for it is what his personal ad should have read, that is if there were any such thing as an honest personal ad. People said that there were women out there, maybe not a lot but some, who thought the way guys did, but that had to be a myth. The truth was, he had zero interest in thinking long term—that was just one of those things you had to say if you wanted to get any responses at all. He was just so on edge all the time, but that tension could, if you willed it, channel itself into the sexual and thus could be relieved. It always worked, and it never worked for long. He had a lot of stress in his life to fight off.

And as if to punish him for letting that thought into his head, the cell phone rang in his bedroom. He had three cells, actually—they were lined up on top of his dresser—but he could tell from the ring that it was the disposable.

“Devon, what’s up,” Adam said, but it didn’t sound like a question. “So we have some Bantex, right? Financial services? Start shorting it. We can take our time, though. We have a couple of months. So go slowly. Spread it out.”

That was always his mantra: spread it out. No more than a certain number of shares in one transaction, because anything over that number supposedly tripped SEC radar.

“Huh,” Devon said. “How about that. I was just reading that they were doing really well.”

A silence.

“I know, I know,” Devon said. “The less I know, the better.”
Adam sounded like he was in a taxi. “So what shall we talk about, then? How’s the family?”

Adam laughed, not unkindly. “They’re good, thanks. Listen, you know we shouldn’t stay on any longer than we have to. I’m sure a single guy like you has got plans, anyway.”

“Mos def. I have a date.”

“My man,” Adam said. “Enjoy.” He hung up. He was so fucking cool all the time. In one way it would have made Devon feel better to hear, even just once, a little panic in his voice, but in other ways it would have made him feel infinitely worse. It was like high school all over again with that guy. He was one of those alphas, master of every situation, receiver of every gift, one of those guys you made merciless fun of until the day he actually brought you inside the circle and then you turned into a simpering little bitch. They saw each other very rarely—maybe three or four times in the last year—but in the aftermath Devon always felt humiliated by how slavishly he had said yes to everything.

He put the phone down on the dresser and went back to the screen, but Kasey was in the bathroom; there were cameras in there too, of course, but he scowled and went to the kitchen to see if there was anything to eat. Some people were into some perverse shit.

They’d brought in a couple of other people—they’d had to, to keep things sufficiently spread out—friends of his from the old boiler-room days on Long Island who now worked at more legit houses. They’d set up accounts for one another’s aunts, cousins, whatever they could get documentation for, and siphoned the trades through there. To most of these guys Devon himself was the ringleader, the mastermind, though without a tip to act on, of course, they were all nothing but a group of enlisted men with a willingness to get ahead. His stomach felt like shit again. Maybe because he hadn’t eaten anything, but that, he was reminded as he opened and closed the freezer a couple more times, was only because there was fuck all to eat around here. He took the bottle of pear vodka out of the freezer instead, and in the cabinet it turned out there was still half a bag of salt-and-vinegar potato chips. Presto. Dinner.

He poured himself some vodka and sat down in front of the computer.
Kasey was sitting at the kitchen table writing something—paying bills, maybe?—but at least she had her pants off now, which was promising. His own apartment had a pretty Spartan look to it, which was to say that it had a couch and a flat-screen TV that were both huge and expensive, and a rug that was huge and not expensive, and that was it. Nothing on the walls. He’d bought some kind of print of the Golden Gate Bridge and hung it on the wall over the couch, but he just felt stupid and pretentious looking at it—like, do I actually give a fuck about the Golden Gate Bridge?—and he took it down. In the bedroom was a bed and a dresser and a closet, and underneath a ceiling panel in the closet was a gym bag with about a hundred and sixty thousand dollars in it. This, Devon felt, was the true source of his stomach problems, though he also wondered if that was just dramatic nonsense, if his stomach would quiet down if he ate the occasional well-balanced meal and generally just took a little better care of himself.