The Privileges (26 page)

Nikki had a research fellowship with Agnew that defrayed the cost of her tuition, and the terms of that fellowship, which were basically those of Agnew’s cheerfully expressed but iron whims, were what kept her in Chicago over the summer. Her lease, though, like a lot of student leases, ran only through June. One morning at his place Jonas inexpertly scrambled some eggs and, as he watched her eat them in the summertime light with his bedsheet wrapped around her shoulders, he suggested, a little less blithely than he meant to, that she should move in with him.

He tried to hold on to this feeling of precocious maturity when his mother took the news that he wasn’t coming home that summer rather harder than he’d expected. She even sounded like she might have been crying a little bit. Jonas wound up agreeing to let her send the jet for him so he could at least spend a week at home. It was a little jarring to be reminded how much bigger the townhouse was than the apartment where he and Nikki now chose to live. He said he was tired of going out so he and his mother sat at the dining room table and the cook, whom Jonas hadn’t met before, brought them skate in a kind of clam broth that was probably the best meal he’d had in a year. “Home cooking,” he said, and Cynthia laughed. There was something different about her appearance. At first he thought maybe she’d had some work done, but it wasn’t anything as radical as that. Probably just Botox or whatever was the equivalent du jour. He didn’t know why she thought she needed it, but he didn’t say so. She liked to say that he could talk about anything with her, but it was an expression of his love for her that he would treat a subject like growing older as off-limits. She had a lot of questions for him about Nikki, which Jonas did his best to answer without answering.

His father came in when they were eating dessert. “Look, darling, it’s our son, home from college,” she said, as she’d been saying all week every time Adam walked into a room. “You saw the OneWorld Health people today?”

“I did. For about two minutes. I really prefer it when they don’t try to be charming, actually. They’re like, we’re busy saving lives around here, just leave the money on the table and let us get back to it.”

“Really,” she said, standing up and putting her arms around him. “Personally I’m a sucker for a well-planned charm offensive.”

They kissed. “Nick and Nora up in here,” Jonas said.

April wasn’t home; she was spending the week out at the beach. Not surprising. Her boredom threshold was very low these days. He noticed that his mother would get a call on the cell every evening that wasn’t from April but seemed to be about her. Maybe a driver or one of the other Amagansett staff charged with making sure that his sister wasn’t letting anything get out of hand. He was disappointed to miss her; but it didn’t last long, because the week after he got back to Chicago she called and surprised him with the news that she was coming out there to visit.

He didn’t meet her at the airport—it hadn’t been that long since they’d seen each other, Christmas probably, though it felt like longer than that—but he waited by the window with a cup of coffee for her car to arrive. He’d called the service himself and given the driver his address, so he didn’t have to worry that she wouldn’t be able to find the place; but there was an element of uncertainty that accompanied April whenever other agendas, like airline schedules, intersected with hers. It was not unheard of for her to express her disdain for flying commercial by skipping the flight entirely in favor of another few hours in the first-class lounge. Jonas and their parents actually preferred it when she went to the lounges, though, not because they wanted to encourage her to fly drunk but because at least there were paid employees there who might help ensure that April actually boarded the plane.

When the town car rolled to a stop in front of their building’s awning a few minutes later, he was a little shocked at how she
looked: almost junkie-skinny, though her eyes and her skin were pretty clear and he had warned himself not to exaggerate or overreact. She set down her bag and you could tell right away, from the gimlet eye she passed around the apartment, what she was thinking.

“Be it ever so humble,” he said.

April shrugged. “Whatever you’re into, Gandhi,” she said. “So where’s the wife?”

Jonas scowled at her as Nikki emerged from the kitchen. Nikki was blushing and her voice was pitched unnaturally high; in truth she was a little intimidated by the image of Jonas’s family and though she had professed to look forward to April’s visit, at the last moment she seemed to have lost her nerve. She carried April’s bag into the study that had been temporarily cleaned out to serve as a guest room. When she returned, she apologized for having to leave but she had a departmental conference with Agnew that started in half an hour. Jonas didn’t recall her having mentioned it before. He and April watched the door close behind her.

“I am not at all sure,” April said, “that chick likes me.”

“I think,” said Jonas, on whom this was just dawning, “she’s a little anxious that you not get the wrong idea about her.”

“What idea is that?”

“About why she’s dating me.”

“Ah. Well,” April said, leaping onto the couch, “it’s true that she’s a little young to be doing the cougar thing. Also a little hot for you. Nerd-hot, I mean. No offense.”

“You’ve never really understood that expression,” Jonas said.

“But hey, one look around this garret is enough to quell any suspicions that she’s a gold digger. Or else she’s into the long con. I’ll sit her down and ask her what her intentions are when she comes back.”

She needed a nap, she said, and then she wanted to go exploring, which he knew meant shopping; they made a plan whereby he would meet her at Roberto Cavalli at six and then take her to Frontera Grill for dinner. It was the trendiest place he could think of and he imagined Nikki might even be pleased about that but instead she texted him to say that she was feeling sick and would skip it.

“Maybe she’s afraid I’ll carry her over to the Dark Side,” April said.

“The dark side of what?”

She shrugged. “The dark side where people have fun and act their age. I’ve never in my life seen a chick as ready to get married as that one is.”

“You’re wrong,” Jonas said, blushing. “You really think she’d be dating a junior in college if she was looking for a husband?”

“Well, not your average junior. But a forty-year-old junior like yourself? Perfect. She’s in on the ground floor.” She saw the look of grim defensiveness on his face and laughed. “Dude, you remain an enigma to me. For instance that apartment. What is up with that?”

“What do you mean?”

She put her drink down disgustedly but still carefully. “Come on,” she said. “Knock it off. You know what I mean.”

She was really the only one he could talk about this with, but somehow that only made him more uncomfortable talking about it. “Why is it necessary,” he said, “to make a show of it? It’s not like I’ve taken a vow of poverty. I live a lot better than most of my friends here do. Just because I have the means to live in some penthouse, does that mean I should do it?”

“Well, yeah, it does mean that, if the alternative is pretending, even to someone you’re supposedly in love with, that you’re somebody you’re not. What, you don’t think she would like it? Don’t kid yourself.”

“Mom and Dad’s money,” he said, “is not who I am.”

“Except why shouldn’t it be? In the sense that you are one of a handful of people to whom certain experiences are open, and not taking advantage of that isn’t noble, it’s just a pose. And anyway, who are you being modest for? Who is impressed by you? It’s crazy. For instance, you’re into art now, I understand. Why don’t I see any art hanging on the walls at your place? Can’t afford it?”

“Excuse me,” he said, “if I’m trying to live a life that’s more authentic than just buying whatever catches my eye, hanging out in clubs and getting high and showing up on Page Six.”

“Please, let’s not exaggerate, I have never been on Page Six. But
that’s your problem, right there, what you said. Who told you you were inauthentic? Where do you think this authenticity is waiting to be found, exactly?”

He rolled his eyes and said nothing.

“So come out with me tonight. Fuck eight hours of sleep for once in your life. Life has given you the gift of possibility, and the real arrogance is wasting it so that you can condescend to everyone else by calling them authentic. Do you even know where people go out in this so-called city?”

“No,” he said, “actually, I don’t. I have no idea. Can we talk about something else, please? How do Mom and Dad seem to you?”

She sighed; then she reached across the table and took his unfinished martini. “Mom is all up in my shit, as usual,” she said. “To be honest, they seem really happy with the whole Robin Hood gig they have going. Totally uninhibited about it. Let me tell you, there are two people with no guilt. None. I don’t know where you got it from, is my point. Maybe Dad is not your real father. Maybe Mom was having an affair with Che Guevara or something.” She pushed some food around on her plate. “Who eats dinner this early?” she said.

She was supposed to stay a week, but the next morning she was on the cell with friends in New York trying unsuccessfully to get them to come to Chicago and hang out with her, and that night she called their mother for the jet and flew home. She was very friendly and apologetic about it, and she and Nikki were actually quite sweet with each other by the time it was all over. The next morning, a delivery van buzzed them from downstairs: it turned out that before she left, April had gone to a gallery on Michigan Avenue and bought them a Picasso. It was a simple sketch of a bull’s head; when Nikki was out of earshot, Jonas idly asked one of the delivery guys if he had a receipt for it, and the amount on the receipt was sixteen thousand dollars. When they were alone again, Jonas hammered a nail into the wall above their couch and they hung the frame there and gazed at it. Nikki shook her head. “I don’t get it,” she said. “I really thought she hated me.”

The research Nikki was doing for Agnew lost what little structure it had when summer came; by the end of August their scheduled conferences in his office had devolved into meetings for lunch or coffee or even just a standing invitation to show up at his apartment on South Blackstone and have a glass of wine. It was all well above board, though; Agnew was one of the few cult professors who had no reputation for trying to get over on his grad students, and in any case Nikki never once knocked on his apartment door without finding at least two or three others, usually more—grad students, faculty colleagues, friends of mysterious art-world provenance—already lounging inside. Jonas was curious about these salons but also too self-conscious about his own youth and ignorance to want to go with her. But before long Agnew himself made a point of asking Nikki where her boyfriend—“child bride,” actually, was the expression he used—spent these afternoons and evenings while his paramour drank cheap wine and talked about art. Surely not home alone? When the teasing got to be too much for her, Nikki asked Jonas again if he would please reconsider, just for her sake, and he said yes.

The apartment itself was scruffy but large with, as Agnew said, a great view of the lake if you were willing to let someone hang you out the living room window by your ankles. Nikki came bearing a CD full of images Agnew needed to copy for one reason or another and so the two of them went straight into his study. Jonas felt like people were smirking at him a little bit and so rather than try to horn in on a conversation he acted as if he were in a museum, touring the perimeter of each room, on whose walls hung dozens of small-scale artworks in cheap stationery-store frames. He didn’t recognize any of it. Many of the drawings and paintings (anyone who’d taken Agnew’s Intro to Seeing knew his dismissive views on photography) were unsigned. In the kitchen, an odorous thicket of old wine bottles and impromptu ashtrays, Jonas got to staring at one particular sketch, framed so that the frayed edge from the spiral notebook binding was still visible, of some kind of industrial landscape that kept yielding details that made less and less sense. The sky was filled with numbers, written very carefully as if in a sequence. Just a few feet from the walls of a mysterious factory or
plant—which had no doors or windows, only smokestacks—there was a scaled-down forest about the size of a traffic island, with a lake or pond in it in which birds flew underwater.

“Recognize it?” a voice said; Jonas turned, embarrassed by how close his face was to the drawing itself, and saw Agnew. And though he hadn’t recognized anything until that moment, now he did.

“It’s the guy from outside the Institute,” he said.

Agnew clapped him on the shoulder. “Good eye,” he said. “Actually, I have to ask you not to mention to any of your art-world friends that you saw this here. I am in serious Dutch with Mr. Strauss’s gallery over having this piece.”

“I have no art-world friends,” Jonas said. “What do you mean, his gallery? He has a gallery?”

Agnew explained to him, while opening another bottle of wine, that Martin Strauss, far from being Agnew’s secret, was actually quite a name in outsider-art circles, a phrase that was accompanied by a roll of Agnew’s eyes. Strauss was showing in New York and in Miami; though he was somewhere in his thirties, money from the sales of his work, which Agnew guessed might have been as much as thirty or forty thousand dollars a year, went straight to his elderly parents in their capacity as his guardians. Strauss himself had certain needs that had to be met but beyond that he had no use for the money at all. Agnew technically had given him money in exchange for this drawing—“I give him something every time I see him”—but the gallery owner considered this thievery because, he said, the artist had no way of properly valuing his own work. “You can imagine,” Agnew said, “how provocative I find that idea. So I torture this guy a little by maintaining the friendship with his client, even though I am, I suppose, legally speaking, in the wrong.”

Jonas was conscious that he was actually hunched over a little in order not to look down on his host. So-called outsider art, Agnew went on, was nowadays pretty much the sole focus of his own research, and for that matter of his interest in art, period. “And not ‘outsider’ as in ‘self-taught,’ either,” he said. “That’s one of the many problems with the influx of people like this schmuck with his gallery—in an effort to maximize their own exploitation, they
broaden the definition until it becomes meaningless. So no, none of that condescending Grandma Moses folk-art bullshit. I’m interested only in the artistic expression of those whose mental or psychological circumstances lie outside what society has defined as acceptable.”