The Privileges (7 page)

But now they were older, the school day was longer, and she determined that she could pick up where she left off and start working again. She took this idea more literally than she would have if she’d thought about it more. Her first and only job in New York, from the summer after college until after Jonas was born, had been as an editorial assistant at a glossy, ad-heavy magazine called
Beauty
, and in the absence of any other sort of work she particularly burned to do, she thought she might go back there. It was a painful miscalculation. Her best memories of
Beauty
were mostly memories of the kind of euphoric bitching that took place over drinks after work
with her fellow assistants; most of those smart young women and gay men were now, like Cynthia, long gone, but a couple had stuck it out and managed to rise up the masthead. That was the only way to get anything decent out of a career in magazines—become a lifer. The current features editor was someone she used to eat cheap lunches with back when they were happy to get through the day without getting screamed at by someone important. Her name was Danielle. Cynthia left a message with Danielle’s assistant, got a call back from a different assistant asking her to come in the following Monday at eleven-thirty, and arrived to find Danielle standing up behind her desk with a look of awkward condescension on her narrow face that said everything there was to say.

Still, they had to go through with it. Cynthia, angry and humiliated and eager to leave before Danielle had even sat down again, produced pictures of April and Jonas. Danielle told the story of her own broken engagement. They recalled some of the people they had worked with back in the day. Cynthia had no idea what had happened to any of them; Danielle knew what had happened to all of them. It was possible to connect the overbearing power chick she was now to the emotionally manipulable peon she had been back then, but just barely. Finally they came with mutual reluctance to the subject at hand.

“Come on,” Cynthia found herself saying. “I’m smart and I work hard and I can tell a good idea from a shitty one. If that was true three years ago it can’t be untrue now. Children don’t actually make you stupid—you do know that, right? Or maybe that would make a good investigative piece for you.”

What kept her there past the point of good sense was her imagination of the dismayed, relieved, pitying expression into which Danielle’s face would resolve the moment her office door closed between them. She postponed that moment as long as she could, even when doing so came off as begging. “You don’t want what I can offer you,” Danielle kept saying, and she was right, Cynthia didn’t want it, but even less did she want to be spoken to like a child by someone who used to be her peer and now presumed to tell her what she did or did not want. In the end, in a thoroughly bridge-burning
mood, she wrote “eat me” across the top of the résumé she’d brought, slid it across Danielle’s desk, and walked out.

On the street she had a sudden memory, useless now, of a night out after work six or seven years ago when Danielle had gotten so drunk—Cynthia, pregnant by then, was stone sober—that she’d started hitting on the troll of a bartender and Cynthia was deputed to take her home in a cab. The bed in her York Avenue studio, which Cynthia had never visited before, was covered with stuffed dogs. But it wasn’t surprising that Danielle should have changed. There was a fast-moving mainstream in life, and once you’d dropped out of it, as Cynthia had, you weren’t going to be hailed by everybody when you tried to step into it again.

That was what had happened to her: she had fallen into the underworld of women with nothing special to do. Like those moms she despised, the ones you made small talk with while you waited for your kid to find his shoes after a playdate at their Versailles-like apartments, who had live-in help and no real responsibilities and yet all they did was complain about how they never had a moment to themselves. But what filled Cynthia’s days? She was at the gym five mornings a week now; Adam kept telling her she looked hotter than she ever had in her life, which was probably true, but maybe the whole routine there wasn’t even about that, maybe it was about something else entirely. She had volunteered, again, to head the silent-auction committee for April’s grade and for Jonas’s too, even though she took no pleasure in it because of the proximity it forced her into with women whom she imagined were nothing like her. She had a rule about not drinking before five. She never broke it, but why was it there at all?

She and Adam joked all the time about the social purgatory to which they’d condemned themselves by having kids so young: some of their old friends were still hooking up in bars and setting up Hamptons shares, while the people who actually lived the same sort of domesticated life the Moreys lived tended to be a dozen years older, boring as hell, and too covetous of their youth to befriend them in any case. They’d go to some school function and after a
couple of drinks all the middle-aged Wall Street husbands would be macking on her; she thought it was hilarious, and Adam did too, and then the next day their fat-ass wives would make a point of not talking to her, as if that was supposed to be some sort of punishment. Still, her own charisma had become latent in her; who were her friends now?

Her erstwhile maid of honor, Marietta, was one of those with whom Cynthia had lost touch, all the more disgracefully since she lived right there in Tribeca—more than a hundred blocks away, but still. She was married now, to some Viacom executive she had met through some online personal ad—you had to hand it to her, she embraced all that stuff, the newer it was the more unintimidated she felt—but married or not it was hard to stay in contact with her because she worked ten or twelve hours a day as vice president of a media-relations company, one of those places that orchestrated the public rehabilitation of the disgraced: drunk starlets, politicians who turned up in sex videos, clients like that. “It’s a lot like being a lawyer,” was how Marietta had explained it to her. “Or a lot like advertising. It’s a lot like most things, actually.” As if to prove their bond, just when Cynthia was missing her most Marietta called one night out of nowhere and begged Cynthia to meet her for a drink the next afternoon: there was something she needed to ask her. Cynthia said that, since she had to pick up the kids from school at three-thirty, maybe coffee was better. “Fuck that,” Marietta said. “We’ll have drinks at two, then. It’s not like it’s unprecedented. Remember that time at Head of the Charles when we made martinis at nine in the morning?”

“Less than distinctly,” Cynthia said, smiling.

She actually wondered whether Marietta was going to offer her a job, weird as that would be, but instead it turned out that she was trying to get pregnant. She and Mr. Viacom had only been at it for six months but Marietta, who at thirty was a less patient person than she used to be, was getting ready to start on clomiphene. “How did it happen with you?” she asked Cynthia. “When it happened, I mean like the moment it happened, did you just know?”

“Don’t you remember?” Cynthia said. “It was a total fucking shock. I was on my honeymoon. I’m still not sure how it happened.”

“What about with Jonas?” she said, biting a cuticle. “Were you trying there?”

“Nope.”

She scowled. “Fertile bitch. Well, you’re still the only friend I can talk to about any of this who wouldn’t try to talk me out of it. If they got wind of it at work, forget about it.”

They sat at an outdoor table at a café across from the entrance to the Met, drinking lemon-drop martinis. There was no one else in the place at that hour but their waiter, and even he was barely in evidence.

“Here’s the big discovery,” Marietta said. “Here’s the one aspect of this subject about which I know more than you. Sex where you’re
trying
to get pregnant is the absolute worst sex known to man. Another six weeks of this and I swear to God if I’m not knocked up we’re going to get divorced.”

“Come off it,” said Cynthia. Her new martini was too full to lift without spilling, so she was hunched over in her chair trying to sip from it.

“They always tell you that this is the true calling of sex, right? The higher purpose. It should be beautiful. Two people in love trying to create a new life. And let me tell you, it is easily the most joyless humping I’ve ever been a part of in my entire life. Remember Tom Billings?”

Cynthia thought for a moment. “From freshman orientation?” she said.

Marietta nodded ominously.
“That
was better than this,” she said. “I just want him to come already and get out of the room so I can lie there like an idiot holding my knees up in the air like I’m supposed to. You’d think it’s a guy’s dream, right? Just blow your load and get out. But no: he wants to act like he’s in some kind of weird Christian porno, going really slowly, stroking my hair, telling me that he loves me. Jesus!” She looked at Cynthia for a frozen moment, her mouth open in amazement, and then she started to laugh.
“And he knows what I’m thinking, and I do feel sorry for him, but at the same time if this is all too hard on his fucking
ego
, well boo hoo. The last time we did it we didn’t even say a word to each other until the next day. Speaking of which,” she said, pulling her phone out of her purse, “I should give him a call. Today is supposed to be one of our prime fertility days. He has to come straight home from work and inseminate me, and if he’s forgotten, I’ll kill him. Excuse me a minute. Two more?” she said to the waiter.

They were both laughing so hard by now that they had to steal napkins from the empty tables around them to wipe away tears, drawing stares from the pedestrians who passed in the sunlight just beyond the awning. Half an hour later they had hugged goodbye three times and vowed to see each other more often and Cynthia, drunk and paranoid, was on her way to Dalton to pick up the kids. She’d have to avoid conversation with the other mothers, but since they didn’t like her anyway, there wasn’t much trick to that. As for the kids, they weren’t old enough, she reassured herself, to be able to tell; besides, this being Tuesday, April had dance and Jonas had tee ball so it was just a matter of rushing them into a cab and racing around the East Side anyway. No worries about making conversation. The kids hated it when they were late for things.

She remembered walking up this same stretch of Fifth Avenue years ago, when Jonas was still an infant, and as she waited for the light to change, one of those overly sunny old ladies who felt free to accost you whenever you were pushing a stroller had started pointing and cooing at him. When she was done she gazed up at Cynthia and said, “Enjoy this time. It goes by so fast,” and Cynthia said, Well then either my watch has stopped or one of us is nuts. Or maybe she hadn’t actually said that out loud. She couldn’t remember anymore.

That had been a tough time, with both kids still in diapers. Still, even now, probably her dirtiest secret was that impatience for these years to be over: for them to be teenagers, at least, where they started to fend for themselves a little bit and where she wouldn’t have to spend so much time wondering whether she would prove equal to whatever bad thing might befall them. Most days were fine,
but then once in a while she would feel herself caught in an afternoon that just seemed to refuse to pass. On the bright side, they were way ahead of most children their age, and part of that had to be that she made more than just a cameo appearance in their daytime lives, that unlike so many of their friends they weren’t being raised by nannies who ferried them dispassionately from place to place like they were especially valuable packages. She didn’t care whether or not they appreciated that now but some part of her was counting on their appreciating it later. And she hated it when people handed you that Norman Rockwell shit about kids growing up too fast; on the contrary, she looked forward to being able to talk to them almost as peers, maybe ask their advice once in a while instead of feeling like she had to have all the answers all the time. Anyway, when you considered the whole bazaar of damage that childhood exposed you to, was there even any such thing as growing up too fast?

She checked her watch again; she’d checked it just a few seconds ago, but somehow five minutes had gone by, and she quickened her pace. She didn’t want to get there after the bell. Walking in the bright sunlight gave her a piercing headache, sort of like being drunk and hung over at the same time. As she searched her bag again for the sunglasses she already knew she’d left on the hall table at home, she heard a voice through the uncomfortable buzz inside her head, a voice that whispered
too late. Too late
.

Which was ridiculous. She was barely thirty. At Adam’s old job there was a broker who used to be a professional dog walker, who graduated from business school at age thirty-five. Too late for what, exactly? It might have made a difference if there were some type of work she felt passionate about, or some particular skill she might cultivate into excellence, something a little more marketable than just above-average intelligence and fear of idleness. Marietta loved to make fun of her dissolute clients, but if you got her drunk enough she would start talking in dead earnest about her job in terms of second chances and the desire to repent. Well, if you got Cynthia drunk enough, Cynthia thought, she would cop to wanting to do some good in the world, or at least to feel like her presence in it was value-added.
How, though? Without some framework, some resources, even your secret aspirations just curdled into sentimental bullshit.

A lot of time seemed to have gone by very suddenly. The injustice of it, the knowledge that one could never go back to where one had started, to the old advantages, didn’t subside that day or the next. She knew that, every day, some woman somewhere did exactly what now seemed so impossible to her. Nevertheless she persisted in feeling that some sort of privilege had been stolen from her, not by the children, of course, but by someone.

Private equity was considered old-school in some ways, because it still had one foot in the real: IPOs, profits on actual goods sold, even the occasional start-up, compared to which the ethereal instruments hedge funds dealt in were like some branch of astrophysics that generated money. It even called upon some old-fashioned people skills, which Adam turned out to possess in precocious abundance. You had to sit down with a guy, to listen to his pitch or to listen to whatever it was he talked about when he thought the pitch was over, in order to gauge whether he himself was the key to his own company’s prospects or whether, at some point down the line, extracting a worthwhile profit was going to require taking the whole thing out of his hands.