The Privileges (5 page)

“Jesus!” Conrad says.

“Close the door,” she says.

“How did you get in here?”

“You’re not like the rest of them,” Deborah says. She’s still in her bridesmaid’s dress but she’s not wearing any shoes. She’s very drunk. “I can see you, you know,” she says. “You should give up trying to be one of them because you’re not.”

He’s starting to get an inkling of what this is all about. She’s not what he usually considers attractive, but on the other hand sometimes life puts something in your path that may never show up there again.

“You deserve something special,” she says. Something in him chafes at this self-satisfied Mrs. Robinson routine. But he’s in no position to call her bluff; she does know at least that much about me, he thinks. She lifts up her bridesmaid’s dress; if she was wearing something underneath it earlier, she’s not anymore. She has a piercing that actually makes him wince. He is still young enough to immediately amend a mental checklist of sexual phenomena he has or has not seen.

“Close the door,” she says. “Come on. Quickly.”

“Aren’t we related now?” he asks.

“Get on your knees,” she says.

“Jesus Christ!” he says, and he gets on his knees.

In the ballroom an actual fight breaks out. One of the dishwashers has come out of the kitchen and told Sam to leave the young waitress alone; she’s reached the end of her shift but is now so afraid to leave the hotel, because she knows he’ll follow her outside, that she’s in tears. Sam throws the first ridiculous punch, but the real damage is done when he’s backing away in self-defense and falls
right across the bar, smashing glasses and bottles alike. The women have long since removed their shoes, and so as a safety measure they climb up on the tables and continue dancing there. The band hasn’t had this kind of contact high in years. They play until the moment they stop getting paid, and then they play three more songs, and then the night manager comes in and threatens to pull the plug. It would be really punk to tell him to go fuck himself, but they have another job here next month.

So the music stops, and the bar is closed, and the lights are all turned on because the night manager has had all the complaints from upstairs he can take; but there are still twenty or thirty people in and around the ballroom, drunk, tired, euphoric, young, beautiful, sweaty, dressed up and on someone else’s nickel, and determined—as who wouldn’t be?—to remain all those things forever. When the ballroom is locked they take over the lobby, and when they’re chased out of the lobby they take it upstairs to their rooms. Dawn seeps around the drapes. They pass out on one another’s floors, across one another’s beds, refusing to part, sealing their legend.

At the bed and breakfast eight blocks away Cynthia, in a t-shirt and shorts, is propped up by pillows on the huge four-poster bed, some librarian’s idea of a honeymoon bower; she strokes her husband’s hair as he sleeps with his head in her lap. He didn’t even make it out of his clothes. She’s not disappointed. Sex is no novelty; being exhausted together, being each other’s safe place—that’s what tells you you’ve found what everybody’s always whining about searching for. The air conditioner hums. Tomorrow they will fly to Mexico, and when they fly back to New York Cynthia will be pregnant. When she figures that out, she will wonder again what she is wondering right now: whether it’s true what the priest said—that God gives each of us only what He knows we can handle—because, all her life, things have come at her very fast.

T
IME ADVANCED IN TWO WAYS
at once: while the passage of years was profligate and mysterious, flattening their own youth from behind as insensibly as some great flaming wheel, still somehow those years were composed of days that could seem endless in themselves, that dripped capriciously like some torment of the damned. There were two full weeks, for instance, between the end of the children’s summer camp and the beginning of school. Cynthia started out full of ideas, but after the zoo, the aquarium, the Children’s Museum, the Circle Line, and the other zoo, there was still a week to go. And then came the rain.

Two days since they’d set foot outside the building and April and Jonas, who were six and five, could not find anything to do, separately or together, that didn’t devolve into a death match within ten minutes. Cynthia sat at the kitchen table with a magazine and listened to them yelling in their bedroom. An only child herself, she had no experience with this kind of fighting; she took it too much to heart, which was why she was trying her best to stay clear of it now.
She had a tendency to lose her own patience and end things by punishing them both indiscriminately in the name of fairness. In spite of which they were now raising their voices on purpose to try to get her to intervene. Then there was some kind of a snapping sound, and Jonas started howling, and Cynthia was out of her chair like a shot and by the time she’d come out of their bedroom again she had told them there’d be no more TV that day, a stupid, spontaneous decision she knew would hurt them but that would really wind up hurting her because it was not even two in the afternoon and they were not going outside and the day would now pass about three times as slowly for all of them.

The kitchen faced back into the building’s air shaft, a column of rain. Through the blur she could see the other kitchens in the building, most with their lights off. Cynthia and Adam had hired three nannies in the two years after Jonas was born but they had no luck there at all; one took eighteen sick days in the first two months, and one was so out of it the doors of a city bus once closed with her on the outside and the children on board, though the other passengers had started yelling before the driver could pull away. And when the third one, whom they all loved, quit without notice to return to the Philippines, April was so upset that she’d come into their bed every night for two weeks. So Cynthia, who was down to part-time at work anyway, decided to try it herself for a while, because she just couldn’t put them through that anymore. Childhood was not supposed to be about loss. That was three years ago now.

April came out of the kids’ bedroom after a while and leaned against her mother’s upper arm.

“Still raining?” she said in a weary, grown-up voice. Cynthia nodded and laid her cheek on top of April’s head.

“No playground today, sweet potato,” she said. “What shall we do instead?”

April sighed thoughtfully. Her face was thinning, where her brother’s was still round as a ball, and she had her father’s small mouth and sharp eyes. She could read pretty well for her age and so Cynthia closed the
Vogue
she was looking at and laid it face down on the table.

“Want to play Go Fish?” April said.

Jonas got wind of it; April tried to discourage him from joining them by making up complex new rules, which wasn’t fair, and Cynthia said “of course he can play” just to forestall that awful whining note in their voices, the note that got in under her defenses and made her own voice turn scary. She could see it in their faces whenever this happened—they were like a mirror at her weakest moments—and then she would end up miserable after they had gone to bed, Adam rubbing her back with a pointlessness that only made things seem worse.

Jonas’s hands were small and at one point he dropped his cards on the table. “That’s a nine!” April said.

“No it’s not,” Jonas said as he gathered them up again.

“I asked you if you had any nines and you said go fish!” she said hotly. “Mom!”

“You did not,” Jonas said, “and anyway that’s a six. And it’s cheating to peek at other people’s cards, that’s what Mom said. Cheater.”

“You dropped them right in front of me! And that
is
a nine, you’re looking at it upside down, here give it to me—”

“No!”

“Jesus, you’re an idiot!”

That was two words she would get punished for, and Jonas looked eagerly at his mother, but a strange thing had happened: his mother was crying. The children withdrew into themselves, frightened, and Cynthia tried hard to stop frightening them, but it was not so easy.

“Sorry,” she said to them.

“It’s okay,” April said reflexively.

“Yeah,” Jonas said—and then, fishing up from his kindergarten experience a sentence he’d been taught for the purpose of conflict resolution, but had never actually used, he said, “What game would
you
like to play?”

When they were sweet like that you had to go with it right away, you had to do or say something, or else they’d really see you cry. So Cynthia said, “I want to play poker.”

“Poker?” April said, wrinkling her nose for comic effect. She’d seen some mischief in her mother’s face, something that promised a return to form, and she tried to draw it out. “How do you play?”

“Well, there’s a bunch of different ways, but I’ll teach you an easy one. Go get that big bowl of change off Daddy’s dresser.” She began shuffling and bridging, which the kids loved. Counting out equal stacks of pennies, dimes, nickels, and quarters killed a good amount of time, long enough for Cynthia to feel herself out of danger.

She taught them to play five-card draw, and when they had the hang of it—one pair, two pair, three of a kind—she introduced the betting. She dealt out a hand, and Jonas, fanning out his cards, put his fist in the air and yelled “Yes!”

“Fold,” Cynthia said automatically, and then, more gently, “Now we’re going to learn what’s called the poker face. You want to have the exact same face all the time, like a statue. That way you’re keeping the secret of what cards you have, until the end when it’s time to show.”

But it ran against their nature. They scowled and groaned when the draw didn’t give them what they were hoping for, and they wiggled and widened their eyes when they found themselves with something good. Cynthia had so taken to heart the children’s generosity in suggesting that today they should all play what Mommy wanted to play that she couldn’t bring herself to just throw them the game. She wanted to even things out between them, not lose on purpose to keep them happy, or allow herself to win a few just to teach them another lame lesson about being a good sport. It wasn’t as though she was really taking their money. They were excited, and as long as the spell was unbroken the hours would keep marching smartly by and maybe tonight for once she wouldn’t already be staring at the front door when it opened and her husband came home.

So she sent April back to Adam’s dresser, to the top drawer this time, and April came back holding two red bandannas. Cynthia knew they were there because she’d used them to tie Adam’s wrists to the headboard, though that seemed like an awfully long time ago now. She called the kids in front of her chair and tied the bandannas around their faces so that everything below their eyes was draped
like a bank robber. Then she sent them back to her bedroom to look at themselves in the full-length mirror, whence she soon heard screams of delight. Jonas ran back into the kitchen, pretending to shoot her.

“Stick ’em up!” he said.

“Back in your seat, there, pardner,” Cynthia told him. “If you want my money you’ll have to win it off me fair and square. Now, the name of the game,” she said, dealing, “is Jacks or Better.”

She ordered out for an early dinner—turkey sandwiches, chips, a bag of Milanos, even one small glass each of regular Coke, which they weren’t normally allowed to have. Anything to keep them at the table. The bandannas weren’t enough, because the kids’ expressive eyes still gave their hands away, so she went into the bedroom herself and came back with two pairs of sunglasses, her own and Adam’s, and balanced them on the children’s ears. They looked like little Unabombers, but at least now the playing field was somewhat level. They would never, ever fold, even after the principle had been explained to them more than once; but even so, at one point in the afternoon Cynthia was thrilled to discover that she was down three bucks to her children.

Then their attention began to waver. Jonas said he was bored, the word itself billowing out his red bandanna. April’s desire to keep her mother happy was much stronger, but she had started putting her head down on the table between hands.

“Can we go to the playground?” Jonas asked.

Cynthia glanced quickly at the air-shaft windows to confirm that it was still raining; then something made her look again, and she saw one of their neighbors—some old woman, she didn’t know who—standing at her own kitchen window, staring brazenly in at Cynthia and her incognito children, and scowling. What was worse, Cynthia saw, was that she was on the phone.

“Hey!” Cynthia said. She stood right up from the table and pulled open the kitchen window as far as it would go, which wasn’t very far owing to the child-safety guards. She bent from the waist and shouted sideways out the window. “Hey! What are you looking at?”

Emboldened by his mother’s high spirits, eager to jump to her defense
whether he knew the source of the attack or not, Jonas ran up beside her, lifted the corner of his bandanna, and yelled out the window, “Yeah! What are you looking at?”

Cynthia turned; they stared at each other, and for a few seconds, in the wake of what would normally be considered a serious transgression, it was not apparent which way things would go. Finally she offered him a high five. “Darn right!” she said. “Nobody stares at our family!”

The woman in the window’s eyebrows seemed to jump, and she moved quickly out of their sight line. There were two windows in the kitchen: Cynthia opened the other one and both kids took up a position there.

“Go stare at somebody else, you old bat!” Cynthia shouted across the air shaft.

“Go stare at somebody else, you old bat!” the kids echoed, beside themselves.

“Mind your own beeswax!”

“Mind your own beeswax!”

Then Cynthia stood up on the windowsill and braced her hands against the frame. It wasn’t dangerous, she felt, though there wasn’t much between her and the air shaft now. April, too caught up in her mother’s euphoria to be scared herself, pulled Jonas up on the other sill and they stood there with their arms around each other’s waists.

“Our family rules!” Cynthia yelled, her breath fogging the glass.