The Privileges (8 page)

Still, the ethereal was where the real money was, and everybody knew it. Parker in particular loved to bitch about how working at Perini was like driving some financial horse and buggy and how he couldn’t wait for the old man to loosen his grip a little bit so they could start making themselves into real players. He was eaten up by envy of guys he’d gone to Wharton with who were worth fifty million in these high-flying VCs they’d started maybe three years ago. At least once a week he tried to draw Adam into some conversation about how the two of them should walk out and start their own fund. It might even have been worth listening to, Adam thought, if it wasn’t for the fact that Parker sucked so bad at his job. He’d played football at Cornell and it was easy to see what Sanford had once liked about him, but lately the old man seemed to have soured
on him completely. The more Parker worried about his own job security, the more contempt he showed privately for the whole operation, and the stupider high-risk shit he proposed in the hopes of proving his indispensability to the place once and for all.

He came over to Adam’s desk one morning holding a manila folder and said, “Dude, can I run something by you?” He’d gone to Los Angeles for the weekend, to some decadent birthday party one of his B-school classmates had thrown for himself, and he’d returned to New York with the notion that Perini should get into the movie business. Commercial credit was tight enough now, apparently, that rather than scuttle existing projects, the smaller studios would take financing from anywhere. “Here’s the thing,” Parker whispered. “It’s kind of an outside-the-box idea, and if I go in there alone with it, he’ll hand my balls to me before he’s even heard what I have to say. But if you go in there with me, he’ll give it a chance. He fucking loves you. So will you just go in there with me? You don’t even have to say anything.”

Adam was pretty sure that even five minutes’ thought would reveal the idea as a terrible one. But he felt both pity and fascination when it came to Parker, who seemed more and more capable of some kind of epic crash and burn; and he knew Sanford would recognize that he was there only as a favor. Plus it was such a lunatic idea that he hated the thought of not being in the room when Sanford heard it. “When?” he said.

Parker beamed. “No time like the present,” he said.

The rear wall of Sanford’s office was floor-to-ceiling glass that looked out over the Hudson. It was all dark wood and leather and had so much nautical crap in it that he might have stood by the window and imagined he was in some sort of high-tech crow’s nest. It was pouring rain out there and much darker than it should have been. Parker nervously laid it out for him, and with a glance at Adam the old man gestured for the manila folder to be handed to him. He pored over Parker’s analysis, not impatiently. At one point he looked up and said, “But who is Joe Levy?”

“Production head,” Parker said.

“Yes, I see that, but who is he? What’s he done? What sort of
track record does he have in terms of, you know, actually making money?”

Parker shifted in his seat. “Well, he’s produced numerous films as an independent,” he said.
“Boathook
was one that did pretty well, in a box-office sense. But really what’s intriguing about him is mostly a matter of pedigree. He’s the son of Charles Levy, who was the head of UA back in the glory days. A legendary guy. Something like five or six Oscars. Joe grew up surrounded by all the great minds in the business.”

Sanford made a snorting noise. “That’s it?” he said, and leaned back in his chair. “His father? What is it, some sort of feudal system out there?”

“Kind of, actually,” Parker said.

But Sanford was getting on a roll. “Were more chilling words ever spoken,” he said, putting the folder down, “from the investor’s point of view, than ‘he’s the son of the founder’? He figures the old man made it look so easy, how hard can it be? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m sure he’s a lovely guy. I’m sure the parties are amazing. But I’m always leery of guys who do that, who step into their fathers’ shoes. You know why? Because usually they’re Pete Rose Junior. I mean, my father was a tailor. Should I have gone into that business? Do you suppose I had some kind of genetic affinity for it? What about you? What does your father do?”

Parker was nodding now, trying to get out in front of the idea that the whole proposal had been a lark to begin with. “He’s a tax attorney,” he said.

“Well then maybe you missed your calling. Maybe you should be a tax attorney too. Adam, how about you? What’s your father’s trade?”

Adam smiled. “Pipe fitter,” he said.

The eyes of the other two men met for a silent moment, and then they burst into laughter. “I can just see it!” Sanford said. “So maybe you’re considering going into business with him?”

“Not likely,” Adam said. “He’s dead.”

He’d meant it as what it was, a fact, but it came out all wrong. He could tell from their faces. One thing he did not like was for people
to feel sorry for him. When the sympathy faded, they would remember the weakness, and then one day they would turn around and shank you.

The rain made for an odd effect forty floors up, because you didn’t get to see it hit anything on the way down, it was just a kind of static in the gray air.

“Jesus Christ,” Sanford said. His voice was very different. He had a sentimental streak in him—everybody knew about it, and some weren’t above playing on it, but Adam really hadn’t been trying to do that. “I didn’t know.”

“Did he die like when you were a kid or something?” Parker said.

Adam thought for a moment. “A little less than a year ago,” he said.

“What?” Sanford said. “You don’t mean when you were working here.”

“Just before.”

“I had no idea. Was he sick?”

“No,” Adam said. “Well, yes and no. He died of a coronary, but it was his third one.”

“How old was he?”

“Sixty-two.”

Sanford turned white. “I had no idea,” he said.

“Well, that’s okay,” Adam said. He waited for the conversation to resume. Sanford was looking right into his face like he wasn’t even there, like he was some portrait of himself. Finally he tapped the folder with his forefinger. “Why don’t I look this over,” he said. Adam and Parker nodded and got up to leave, and they didn’t really speak for the rest of the day, though Parker must have been talking to others there; Adam could tell by the way they stared at him when they thought he wasn’t looking. At the end of the day he felt hyper and irritable and wanted nothing more than to get out for a run, but the rain was so heavy now you almost couldn’t see the river anymore. Then he had a brainstorm: he grabbed his gym bag and went down to the basement, but the pool was already locked, even though it was just a few minutes after six. By the time he got back
up to the fortieth floor the office had cleared out completely. He went and looked out Sanford’s window for a while, and then he went back to his desk and picked up the phone.

“Nice weather we’re having,” Cynthia said. “I thought you might be on your way already.”

“What are you doing right now?” Adam said.

“Doing? What am I doing?”

“Can you call that Barnard girl? Do you think we could get her to come over and babysit right now?”

“I’m sure we could not,” Cynthia said. “Why?”

“Because here’s what I want to do,” he said, watching the lights flicker on the phones in the silent office. “I want to check into a hotel with you for a couple of hours. I want to go to the nicest place we can think of and have a good dinner and some wine and then I want to take you to bed. I want you to think of something you’ve never asked me to do before and then I’ll do it. I want to amaze you. I want complaints from the front desk. I want to get kicked out of there. Seriously, I am as hard as a rock right now just thinking about you.”

She laughed delightedly. “I believe I’m getting the vapors,” she said. “You better hope this phone’s not tapped, pervert. Maybe you need to call that number for when you experience an erection lasting more than four hours.”

“I’m not kidding, though,” Adam said. “I love you. Seriously, the kids are old enough to be by themselves for a couple of hours, right?”

“No,” she said indulgently, “they are not. They do go to bed early, though. So here’s my counterproposal.” He could hear her walking with the phone into another room. “After they’re asleep, you sit down on the couch, and I will bring you a Scotch, and then I will kneel in front of that couch, and whatever happened to you today, I’m betting that between me and the Scotch we will make it all better. Okay? I love you too, by the way. And I do like the way you think. But this way we won’t have any visits from Child Protective Services. Okay?”

“Okay,” he said.

“We will call that Plan B,” Cynthia said. “Now come home.”

He hung up. It was almost dark now, and the rain on the windows made for a beautiful effect on the opposite wall, like a bleeding shadow. He called the car service and fifteen minutes later he was in the back seat of a limo that sat motionless in the rain on 57th Street, in traffic that was so bad he felt like time had stopped.

Isn’t your father dead, Barry? he had wanted to say. Doesn’t everybody’s father die? Isn’t that what happens? But he’d figured the less he said, the sooner they’d move on. For a long time Adam had known his father mostly as a short-fused bastard, but then in his teenage years something had shifted, and he’d felt like both his parents were a little afraid of him. It wasn’t such a bad feeling, actually.

Even when he wiped the windows with the back of his hand he couldn’t see outside. It didn’t feel like they were moving at all. He thought about laying into the driver for taking 57th in the first place, but that wouldn’t make him feel any better. He just needed for a new day to start.

Sanford owned several secondary homes, but the one of which his current wife was most enamored was in Cornwall, Connecticut, two hours and then some outside the city. The following Thursday at lunch he decided aloud that Adam should visit them there that very weekend, and should bring his wife and kids; initially Adam wasn’t sure how seriously to take him, especially since this was a lunch at Gramercy Tavern that featured lots of wine, but when San-ford’s secretary faxed him driving directions the next day, he phoned Cynthia and gave her the news. She was a sport about it. She asked if the kids should pack their bathing suits, and he answered that he didn’t have the slightest idea.

“I owe you one,” he said. He was actually thinking about San-ford’s wife, whom he had met but Cynthia had not. He didn’t see that going particularly well.

He spent Friday laughing off the mostly good-natured stink eye from everyone else at Perini, none of whom had ever been graced with such an invitation before, though they’d all been employed
there longer than he had. The drive upstate the next morning opened gradually into the kind of calendar-art New England hillscape Adam had grown up in—stone walls, church spires, village greens—but Sanford’s house, down at the end of a dirt road they passed twice before finding, was a white Regency-style mansion so gigantic and out of place it looked like a theme park. It sprawled across an expensively produced clearing as if it had been dropped there from the air. Adam turned off the car and the four of them got out and stared. In its inappropriateness the house was so self-absorbed that it could have sprung fully formed from the head of Sanford’s awful wife; still, the sheer ballsiness of it, the arrogance required to raze whatever must have been here before in order to erect this monstrosity precisely where it didn’t belong, was kind of impressive. He knew Sanford had a lot of money but sometimes even someone in Adam’s job had to be reminded what the phrase “a lot of money” really meant.

“This,” Jonas said, “is the coolest house I have ever seen.”

No one came outside to greet them; he wasn’t sure how to let their hosts know they had arrived. Honking felt wrong on multiple levels. “So what time is the next tour?” Cynthia said, but just then Mrs. Sanford #4—she introduced herself to Cyn as Victoria, thank God, because Adam had blanked on her name—came gaily through some side door that they hadn’t even noticed was there.

Sanford himself was waiting in the foyer to shake hands with Cynthia and the children, in whom he took no pains to seem interested, and then he and his wife did something that struck Adam as truly old-school: they segregated their guests immediately by gender, with Victoria taking Cynthia and the kids upstairs and Sanford leading Adam down some steps, through a media room, and onto what turned out to be a screened back porch that faced directly, with only a few feet of mowed grass intervening, into the dense woods. The porch was crowded with dozens of large potted and hanging plants, creating for a moment the effect that the spanking-new house was actually a sort of ruin the birches and pines were intent on reclaiming; but in there among the fauna were two large and very softly upholstered rattan chairs, and in between them was a
table that held a pitcher of Bloody Marys. The porch was cool and dark, despite which Sanford wore a pair of sunglasses on a cord around his neck. His own glass was already three-quarters empty—he must have been sitting out here before the Moreys arrived—and he filled Adam’s with a stately flourish. “You have a beautiful family,” he said as he sank back into his chair.

“Thank you,” Adam said. “Where have they been taken?”

“Not much to do out here,” was Sanford’s answer. “You’re at least a hundred miles from the ocean, is what I don’t like about it. Still, it is quiet.” He took the celery stalk out of his drink and stuck it in his mouth.

Victoria had launched without prelude into a house tour, recounting the difficulties she’d had getting the various painters and decorators and contractors to adhere to her clearly expressed vision, a separate haughty narrative for every room in the mansion. By the fourth or fifth room Cynthia had a powerful urge to burn the whole place to the ground with this Botoxed stick figure inside it. There was no way they could have been more than ten years apart in age—unless she was a mummy, Cynthia reflected while watching the jaw move in her eerily smooth face, or possibly a vampire, preserved for centuries by the blood of her social inferiors—and yet she spoke as if from some great experiential height, as if, at the end of her remarks, there might be time for a few questions.