The Privileges (9 page)

“Three times, we painted this room,” she was saying, as if she would even know which end of a paintbrush to hold. “And I had a chip from Barry’s house in Stowe for the painter to match. Hello? Is that so hard? But you know how it is up here in these small towns, you just have to make the best of what you’re given, in terms of contractors and such I mean.”

“Sounds rough,” Cynthia said.

“Are you from New York originally?” Victoria said.

Cynthia, who had turned around to make sure the children hadn’t fallen too far behind, or maybe been snatched by silent ninja domestics, said, “What? No. Near Chicago.”

“And what line is your family in?”

Cynthia repeated the question in her head to be sure she had heard it right. “They’re small-town contractors,” she said.

That she had put her foot in her mouth seemed more plausible to Victoria than the idea of being openly mocked; embarrassed, she looked away, and in avoiding Cynthia’s eyes she seemed to remind herself of the presence of the two children, who, though of course they could have cared less about paint shades and window treatments, were awestruck by the house itself, the scale and gadgetry of it. There were environmental-control panels in every room, touch screens that not only calibrated light and temperature and music but also gave you access to security-camera views of the garage, the grounds, the driveway, and even the other rooms inside the house. It had taken Jonas about ten seconds to figure it out. “There’s Dad!” he said. Cynthia kept throwing him doomsday looks over her shoulder, but having solved the puzzle of the touch screens he couldn’t keep his hands off them, and anyway she was half rooting for him to figure out how to make it rain in there. Soon he had left a trail of images of his father and Sanford flickering in every empty room through which they passed.

Victoria hadn’t noticed that, but she picked up on the kids’ general enchantment and felt gratified again. April was walking a few steps ahead of her brother now, embarrassed by his youthful enthusiasm, trying to blend in with the women, mimicking their facial expressions like someone trying to sneak into the second act of a play. She loved it when new people thought she was older than she was. She was leaning toward Victoria like some kind of thirsty plant, but Victoria seemed disinclined to engage her too directly. “God, these are gorgeous children,” she said to Cynthia. “How old did you say they were?”

“Seven and six,” Cynthia said, ignoring a scowl from April, who felt ages should be rounded up.

“They could model. They look like a Ralph Lauren catalogue. They go to school?”

“Why, yes,” Cynthia said. “We thought that would be wise.”

“Where, though?”

“Dalton,” April offered.

“Very nice,” Victoria said. “And you were smart to have them so young. Easier to bounce back.” And she reached out and casually patted Cynthia just below her waistline, approvingly, a touch so condescendingly intimate that Cynthia was speechless. She tried to remind herself that this was the wife of her husband’s boss and so she would just have to suck it up for the weekend, and when that didn’t work she tried to drum up some sympathetic revulsion at the thought of what old Vicky here must have had to deliver sexually in exchange for this life of high-end vision realizing. But that didn’t really work either, because Sanford, even in his late sixties or whatever he was, was a ridiculously handsome guy.

It was apparently his intent to sit there on the porch drinking Bloody Marys for the duration of his guests’ stay. He was talking now about the upcoming Newport-to-Bermuda yacht race. The Bloody Marys were excellent; Adam was starting to recall the pleasures of getting drunk before lunchtime but this seemed like an odd setting for it, like a myth or a fairy tale in which he might drink the proscribed drink and never find his way back to the surface of the earth. Not that he was nervous around the boss—they’d been drunk together many times—or felt he needed to keep up appearances of any sort. On the contrary: the more he was himself, the more the old man seemed to like him.

He looked abruptly at Adam, struck by an idea. “You could crew,” he said. “The crew I had last year was hopeless. Interested? We’d be out anywhere from four to six days.”

“Sadly,” Adam said, “I know fuck all about sailing.” Sanford’s disappointment lasted only an instant. “You could pick it up,” he said. “I know a sailor when I see one. I see great things in you, you know.”

Adam pretended he hadn’t heard, which was his nearest approach to modesty.

“Those others, they’ll do fine,” Sanford went on. “But they’re lieutenants. You give them a job to do and they’ll get it done—any business needs that. But I see bigger things for you. God knows I won’t be around forever.”

Rather than allow Sanford to stray any farther down this path, Adam said, “So I’m meeting your pal Guy in Milwaukee on Monday morning. I have to fly out there tomorrow night.” “Your pal” was said with some levity; Sanford scowled at the mention of Guy’s name.

“The man is an animal,” he said. “I think there’s money to be made there, but I’m not sure I can spend another hour in the same room with him. Last time we met he threw a pen at my head. I’m sorry to sacrifice you to this lunatic. Maybe you can get it done, though. People like you. You know that? That’s a gift. You can’t teach it. I’m hungry,” he said suddenly.

“Can I ask you something? Is there a pool here?”

“Good Lord,” Sanford said, “you and the swimming.”

“No,” Adam said, “I was thinking of the kids. They brought their suits. Throw them in the water and they’re good all day. It might give them something to do while we’re sitting here getting loaded.”

Sanford folded his hands on his chest. He had sunk quite low in his chair. “Helicopter,” he said. “That’s the term, right? These days? Helicopter parents, helicopter parenting.”

“Sorry?”

“You’re close to them, aren’t you? I think that’s great.”

“You have children yourself, sir?”

The old man loved to be called sir. “Oh God yes,” he said. “Of course. Anyway, no, there’s no swimming pool here, but we do belong to this little club in town where they can swim all they like. Maybe we can even get some goddamn lunch there, since no lunch appears to be forthcoming here.”

They followed the Sanfords in their car, in a silence generated by the fear that anything they wanted to say might later be innocently repeated in front of their hosts by one of the kids. It also required all of Adam’s concentration not to lose sight of Sanford’s Boxster, which he drove through the narrow roads at aristocratic speed. Adam thought the word “club” betokened a simple swimming pool, and had told the kids so; the family made a collective gasping sound when they came instead upon a clean, still lake hidden improbably
high up in the Berkshire foothills. A wooden sign at the gate told them the place was called Cream Hill Pond. The quiet was overwhelming: “No power boats,” Sanford pointed out. “Sunfish city.” White sails dotted the water. There were two tennis courts, but no one was on them. The kids were vibrating with impatience to get into the lake; Cynthia asked Sanford’s wife where the changing rooms were, but Victoria, who looked unhappy and even somewhat baffled to be there at what seemed like the children’s behest, didn’t know and had to ask someone else.

The dark pines, the sun on the water, the shimmer of the triangular sails, it was all so postcard-beautiful that you felt a little stupid giving in to it; but April’s and Jonas’s uncomplicated pleasure was infectious. Cynthia watched them organizing some game in the water with a group of kids they’d met five minutes ago. Rarely did you see the two of them get along so well for so long a stretch and you had to think that the relationship between that and the sheer sense of space out here wasn’t coincidental. She lifted her head to admire the green bowl of the hills. Wide open yet secure. Maybe she’d been looking at this place, this life, through the wrong eyes. All you wanted was for your children to become their best selves, but how were you supposed to know if this was not happening? Victoria was right: they were beautiful, so beautiful you almost felt like you should apologize for it, like something fundamental had been rigged in their favor. Maybe you were denying them something they needed without even knowing it, just because you weren’t thinking big enough, or far enough outside the box of what your own childhood was like.

But as she watched them play she admitted to herself that sometimes this anxiety over whether your kids’ lives were perfectly realized could reach the point where it wasn’t a lot different from Victoria’s trying to match a paint chip: you had to justify the day, and your existence in it, somehow. It was impressive, in a way, that a woman Victoria’s age not only didn’t want children but didn’t really even pretend to like them. Certainly such a life was possible. Certainly there were other things one might do. According to Adam, she sat on the boards of about ten different national charities,
where she no doubt made herself a pain in the ass, but what did that really matter when she had the assets and the social position to actually do some good in the world? What did it matter that the money wasn’t hers, as long as it was hers to give away? Cynthia already lived better than anyone in her family ever had, at least until Ruth remarried; still, there was rich and there was rich. She glanced over at Victoria, who wore a huge straw hat that she clamped down on her head with one palm even though there was no wind onshore at all. Cynthia was sorely tempted to ask her how old she was. It wasn’t impossible that they were actually the same age.

“You have a beautiful home,” she said. Victoria was staring back in the direction of the parking lot and didn’t seem to hear.

Sanford, though, nodded graciously. “Shame you all can’t spend the night,” he said. “Next time.” Adam’s shocked expression was luckily hidden behind his sunglasses; they had their overnight bags in the car. “That’s very kind of you,” Cynthia said; she didn’t know how she would keep the kids from howling, though, so she went down to the dock to give them the news out of their hosts’ earshot. Adam saw her put her finger to her lips and give them the universal five-more-minutes signal as they stomped their feet in the water and complained. She knew how to be gracious. Even after ten years together, his more complex desires for her wound up translating themselves into the simpler language of arousal; and as he watched her walk back up the lawn toward the umbrella table where the adults sat, he experienced an untimely urge to pull her back to the parking lot and do her right there up against some old Brahmin’s car. Victoria went off to use the bathroom, and Sanford went off to take a phone call, and Adam was able to give his wife at last the private eye-roll he had wanted to give her all day.

“I am so sorry to put you through this,” he said.

But she just smiled. “Actually, I’m really glad we came,” she said. “If you want to know the truth, it all makes me kind of jealous.”

He was so surprised by that, he couldn’t think of another word to say until their hosts returned. The kids had such a meltdown when the time came to get them out of the water that Adam and Cynthia wound up deciding to leave for New York straight from the
club. Once again the men were cleaved from the women, the old man walking Adam in the direction of his own car, with his arm around him.

“So what do you think of all this?” Sanford said, and it sounded astonishingly heartfelt, even if he was drunk. His life, Adam supposed he meant. The thought of being asked to pass judgment on it, even just as a matter of etiquette, made him almost resentful.

“Green with envy,” he said finally. “You have a beautiful home. I mean, I’m sure you have several. But this is a great part of the world. And frankly,” he said, tapping the hood of the Boxster, “this gets me a little hard too.”

Sanford laughed enchantedly. Then he laid his hand on Adam’s cheek. “Patience, my son,” he said. “One day, all this will be yours.”

While they searched for Route 22 signs, Adam noticed his fingers were white around the wheel. “Pretty quiet back there,” he said. “Did you guys have fun today?”

“It was awesome,” April said. “I thought they would have kids, though.”

“Not everybody does, you know,” Cynthia said.

“Dad?” Jonas said meekly. “Can we have a country house?”

Cynthia laughed. “Yeah, Dad,” she said. “How about it?”

Adam said nothing, and after half a minute Cynthia turned around in her seat. “One day,” she said to the kids. “One day soon. We’ll have all that stuff. It just takes time. You have to remember that Mr. Sanford is almost two hundred years old.”

Actually, Adam thought, there was no reason why they couldn’t buy some sort of weekend home now, although having gotten a load of Sanford’s place Jonas would no doubt feel let down by anything Adam could afford. But there was something in Adam that stiffened against that idea—more so after today than ever before. Some manor in the country to return to over and over again, in which to sit and drink among the plants and do nothing in particular: was that what he was supposed to want? All day long he had felt like the house, the car, the club, the view, that whole life was being conspicuously
shown to him, held out in front of him.
Patience, my son
. Why didn’t he want it, then? Maybe he just wanted to determine his own rewards, and the pace at which they would come. Or maybe it was the presumption that all this privilege, no matter how touching it was that Sanford wanted him to have it, was Sanford’s to give him in the first place. Patrimony, even the sentimental kind, had nothing to do with it. Something in Adam bristled at the thought of inheriting anything from anybody.

The next night they had an early dinner together so that Adam could make his flight to Milwaukee. Guy—whose last name was Farbar but whose abusive phone manner had earned him monomial status in the Perini office—ran a company that made cryogenic rubber; he wanted financing to take it global. Adam didn’t have a perfect understanding of what cryogenic rubber was or what it was used for, but one of the beauties of his job was that he didn’t really have to. Sanford was high on the numbers, and with good reason, even though as a man of business Guy himself was essentially everything Sanford was not—loud, confrontational, impetuous, undisguised. His staff turnover was incredible, a fact that his seeming compulsion to fuck every single one of his female employees did nothing to diminish. In fact, probably the biggest red flag about getting into business with Guy at all was that there were already two pending lawsuits against him, one of which involved a temp who had been nineteen at the time.