The Privileges (27 page)

“The insane?” Jonas asked. Agnew frowned. “I try not to romanticize them,” he said, “for good or bad. Whatever they may have done to marginalize themselves is immaterial. As artists, they sit down to engage their art with absolutely no sense of a viewer, of history, of an outside world. Does that make them insane? You look at what they produce and the only proper answer to that question becomes, What’s the difference?”

Jonas had many more questions, but just then Nikki walked in and stopped short in surprise. “There you are,” she said uncertainly.

“Ah,” Agnew said, “the power couple. Listen, Nikki, there’s one of those—God, it makes my mouth hurt just having to say it—‘outsider art fair’ fiascoes in town next month, and I was going to ask if you’d go. Larry Masters will have a little booth there—Larry, that’s the dealer I was telling you about, Jonas, the one who accuses me of devaluing Martin Strauss—and so I can’t go, he hates me, he probably has some kind of court order waiting for me, actually. But why don’t the two of you go? There should actually be some great stuff there, some Wölfli, I think, some Ramirez, some Dadd. You’ll do it?”

They glanced wide-eyed at each other; then Jonas turned back to Agnew and nodded.

“Excellent. About time we got young Mr. Morey here on the payroll. Just an expression, Jonas, don’t look like that. Not that you need it, like most of these indigents. In fact, maybe you can put us on the payroll, right?”

Jonas smiled nervously. He was surprised to learn that Agnew knew who he was.

“Seriously,” Agnew said, “you’d be doing me a real favor if you’d return this. I love it, but I don’t feel like getting sued over it. Tell him who it’s from.” He took the framed Strauss down from the kitchen wall and handed it to Jonas.

“You can’t,” Jonas said without thinking. It was too extraordinary; he didn’t want to be the one to hand it over. “It’s like—I don’t know. It’s like putting a kid into foster care. There has to be some other way.”

Agnew’s eyebrows were up, though not, it seemed, in a bad way. “Well, I’m glad you like it,” he said. “But, like it or not, it is in the world, and has been assigned a value in that world, quite independent of what you or I or the artist think about that. Or can do to stop it, for that matter. Outsider art is very hot right now. I’ve been happy to hang this piece here but now it’s time for it to go, as they say, into the system.”

Jonas looked at it again. He was flushed with the awareness of Agnew’s interest in him, in what he was going to do; he wasn’t courting that interest, but still, he could feel it. Something about the drawing was too compelling to just let go of like that. It wasn’t like it spoke to him or anything. It resisted all that—you could admire it, but you had no real hope of interpreting it. It was an artifact of an unimaginable state of mind. There was no dialogue going on there, no puzzle to solve, no meaning to extract. Or, if it had a meaning, it was a meaning he had no hope of understanding.

“How much do you think he wants for it?” Jonas said.

Clubs were over, there weren’t any good ones anymore, and anyway a key component of the usual club high—getting in when you weren’t supposed to, when it was technically illegal for them to serve you, but they would serve you anyway and for free because of how you looked and because they knew who you were—was gone now that April was of age. Yet at a certain point the night always took a certain turn and the next thing you knew you were sitting in some VIP room with a bunch of people who said they were with you, paying five hundred bucks for a bottle of Ketel One while the bass throb reached you through the walls. The reason this was a bad development was that the disgust and contempt it engendered in her, directed at those around her but at herself too, left her open to longing for stronger intoxicants. And little men, older men,
would pop up in her field of vision at the very moment this desire started making itself felt in her mind—as if she were tripping already, as if the world itself were some sort of Second Life dreamscape programmed to tempt her with her own wants—and once you reached that point, bitch, you were finished.

When the speed kicked in, the music dropped out of the mix for a moment and she heard as clear as a bell the voice of her friend Katie, her best friend Katie whose last name April couldn’t remember but whom she’d known and hung out with when they were in middle school. Katie went to Spence. The two girls made eye contact and screamed. “You went to Spence!” April shouted over the music, which was loud again, as if Katie might have forgotten. “Yes!” Katie said. “Yes! Six years ago!” Her math seemed wrong, but her eyes were like pinpricks and she was so happy to see April that she was crying. Where had she come from? The world got so small when you were out at night. In the shadows over Katie’s shoulder, as they hugged again, April could make out two very sketchy-looking guys sitting on the arms of Katie’s vacated chair, older guys, though they were hard to reckon in the way of shaven-headed men. The world was full of these guys, who were waiting, always waiting. Waiting for what? Well, she wasn’t an idiot, they were waiting to fuck Katie, Katie and her; they were pathetic and old and degenerate but April liked having them around for a couple of reasons, one being that the nauseating prospect of one of them being there to catch you when you fell was the only thing that kept you vigilant, and the other was that their gaze reminded you where you were, which was basically at the exact center of the fucking universe, young, hot women of privilege at the very peak of everything that was desirable, the very apex of all in life that was worth coveting. And who the hell wanted to sleep through that?

“Katie,” she said to Katie, who was talking at the same time, “that guy over there, his head looks like a fucking turtle. Who is that guy?”

“I don’t know,” Katie said. “He’s not American, though. He wants to fuck me.”

“Well we cannot let that happen!”

“I know.” Katie turned and looked right at him. “He has the best drugs, though. He likes my tattoos. He has his uses.”

The guy’s stare was reptilian. He would sit there for thirty years if he had to. “Look,” April said. “Look look look. He is a goblin. I was sent here to earth to save you from him, you fucking stoned bitch.” They hugged again. “How are we going to throw these guys off the trail?”

The answer was to pile into April’s car and have the driver take them to Scores. She called ahead for a room and set them up with lap dance after lap dance. While this one completely amazing Amazon was rubbing her tits on the turtle’s head, April and Katie motioned that they were going to the bathroom, and once they were out of there they ran stumbling out the door and piled back into April’s limo and told the driver to hit it.

They laughed and got up on their knees in the back seat to look out the rear window but then it was just the two of them in the car, and they realized they didn’t know each other particularly well and the speed was wearing off. The driver hadn’t even asked them where they were going, because he was waiting for them to figure it out. Waiting while driving. April couldn’t remember his name, but he was the best. Katie said she knew where she could get some Adder-all; probably from her own bathroom cabinet, April thought, and anyway, Adderall seemed a little low-stakes right now. “I know a guy we can call,” she said. “And he owes me a favor.” If you made a lot of friends when you went out then there was always somebody who owed you a favor. The guy’s name was Dmitri and when he called back he was, where else, in a club, so she told the nice driver to take Canal almost all the way over to the highway, and he nodded without turning around.

That was where they started in on the meth. Then it was some time later and they were on the sidewalk in the hostile sunlight and “they” no longer included Katie, whom April hadn’t seen in a while. Dmitri was there, and three other sketchy guys with accents, and two women whose job, it seemed, was to make out with each other once an hour or so to keep the others from losing interest in everything. That may not have been a joke; it wouldn’t be unlike Dmitri
to have actually paid them to do it. They found a diner and ate without tasting anything, while the sketchy guys glared menacingly, to zero effect, at the disgusted cashier. April felt ashamed to be with these people she didn’t know, but they were like vampires, she was one of them now, she couldn’t just go back to the living. She looked out the window and there at the curb, unbelievably, was her driver, leaning against the side of his car, looking exhausted. She had to let him go. She wanted to tip him a few hundred bucks, but when she looked in her bag she saw that she had like thirty dollars in there, which was fucked up but true. So she called him on her cell, watching his angry face through the window, and sent him home.

Her cell had a bunch of voice mails on it but she didn’t bother with them. Some were from her mother, but she was out of town herself, so there was no stress there. Everyone was arguing over the check like a bunch of losers, not because they particularly cared but just as a symptom of their panic over coming down. “Where can we go, my love?” Dmitri said to her. One of the chicks was trying to reapply her makeup.

“Your place?” April said. “I mean, you must live somewhere, right?”

He shook his head. “Not with these pigs,” he said. “If we go there, it is just you and me. Is that what you want?”

No, it was not. “I want the festivities to go on,” she said.

“Brava. Well, in that case we need someplace big. Big and empty. Private.”

And then April had what she knew right away was a terrible idea.

“Hey,” she said loudly to the group. They were like rats, red-eyed and squabbling. “Does one of you lowlifes have a car?”

One of the lowlifes did indeed have a car; it was in Queens, though, so he and Dmitri went to get it. The others went somewhere to steal cigarettes and take a shower. April waited more than an hour for them in a Starbucks on Varick Street. Dmitri texted her every few minutes. She didn’t know what time it was, or what day it was, but the Starbucks was packed. And the strange thing, even though she wasn’t high anymore, was that the people in this fake
space exhibited the most terrible intimacies—yelling into their cell phones, popping zits, putting on makeup, talking to themselves like maniacs—six inches from your face. Their conviction that you could not see or hear them was so strong that, in fact, you usually did not see or hear them. Sitting across the tiny table from April, picking at some kind of muffin, was a woman about April’s mother’s age who had unmistakably, some time in the last day or two, been punched in the eye.

They all got high in the car again and two hours later they were in Amagansett. April hit the security code and they were in. The streets were empty and when the sky darkened they didn’t see lights coming on in any of the neighboring houses.

There was a lot of alcohol in the house, which helped them avoid peaking too drastically. Their only foray outside was down to the beach at night, just to listen to the receding water and watch the stars. April felt very happy. Like being a kid: finding a hiding place in your own home. They all got briefly excited when they saw, way way down the beach, a bonfire burning in the sand; but it was freezing and they weren’t really dressed right so they didn’t go check it out. At one point April and one of the Russians—they were Russian, she’d decided—were alone in the pool house, and they decided to try to have sex, but it was pretty much a nonstarter.

When they left to drive back to the city, the last few bottles in hand, April turned to look at the place one last time and consoled herself that not a lot had gotten damaged or broken, though the whole first floor just looked vaguely grimy. Even the walls. Someone would come and clean it, though. Dmitri drove while the others tried not to fall asleep; they were still on Route 15 when Dmitri, who was trying to text someone with one hand while passing another car, hit a van traveling in the other direction. The van managed to turn a little so they didn’t hit head-on; it skidded over to the shoulder and then fell lazily and loudly onto its side.

None of them was wearing a seat belt, but Dmitri was the one who was truly fucked up. Somehow the rest of them were standing outside the ruined car now—the two chicks were wailing—and looking curiously through the driver’s-side window at Dmitri,
whose head rested on the steering wheel and was turned so that you couldn’t see his face, which was probably just as well. No sirens yet. Where were they? April started to get scared. She had lots of shameful thoughts in succession: Thank God it wasn’t her car. Thank God she wasn’t driving. Still, this was not going to be good. It was all going to fall on her, because they’d all been at her place, and because who were these people, really? Hers was the only name that was going to give anybody anything to latch on to. She looked again at the door to the van, which had not moved. It said Sagaponack Nursery on it. Nursery like trees, she told herself. Not like nursery school. Suddenly she wanted so badly to be ten years old again. No more pretending now. Her own phone had been dead for days. “Who has a phone?” she asked the others, but they were like statues, like garden gnomes. “A
phone!”
Finally, desperate and shaking, she took two steps forward and, holding her breath, reached through the shattered window, pulled the cell phone out of Dmitri’s clenched hand, wiped it on her jacket, and called her mother.

The fair was held in the McCormick Place convention center just off Lake Shore Drive; Jonas and Nikki had to pay thirty-five bucks each just to get in. A number of galleries from all over the Midwest, and four or five from New York, had paid for and staked out square footage inside. Little pamphlets on draped card tables held one-page biographies of the artists, like trading cards for mental illness; Jonas picked up as many of them as he could find. The rule of thumb seemed to be that the farther a particular artist’s own mind had pushed him toward society’s border, the more you could charge for his work. It was somehow revolting and thrilling at the same time. A few dead outsiders had become stars, like Henry Darger or Martin Ramirez. Maybe this was no different, Jonas thought, from the way the art establishment had processed, say, Van Gogh. But everyone moving through the building’s vast warren of temporary drywall seemed so loathsome to him that it was hard to judge. He was surprised how old they were, ten or twenty years older than him at least, if you discounted the occasional baby in a stroller—smug bohemian
speculators, praising everything noisily in overcompensation for the fact that they were no match for the magnificent strangeness of what hung right in front of their eyes.