The Privileges_ A Novel Part 11

Cynthia put her palm gently underneath her daughter's chin. "Oh, my sweetheart," she said. "Ten days. It's not that long."

April stood up, stomped back into her bedroom, and slammed the door. Adam and Cynthia exchanged a look that made it permissible for them both to laugh, just for a second. "Deja vu, or what?" Adam said.

"All of a sudden I feel ten years younger," Cynthia smiled. But then she lost herself in staring at the closed door, and when she looked back at him she was crying again. "Seriously," she said. "I don't understand it. What did I do wrong?"

His cell phone vibrated again; he stood to leave the room. "You didn't do anything wrong, my love," he said. "She'll figure it out. The way you grow up is you find your thing to struggle against, and, I mean, look around." He kissed her forehead on his way past the couch. "Whatever it is, we've hidden it pretty well."

The image of the presumably autistic young artist rocking on the floor with his fingers in his ears imprinted itself on Jonas, and when, a few days later, he and Nikki met Agnew in his office on campus to deliver their informal report on the fair, that, rather than the art, was the thing he found himself describing. Agnew had a way of leaning backward when he felt something interesting was being said-usually by himself-and so Jonas could tell he had not miscalculated in telling the story.

"So what do you imagine this guy was shutting out?" Agnew said.

"The whole condescending circus. The whole glorified Tupper-ware party they're basically making out of his attempts to communicate. The profiteers. The charlatans."

"Wrong," Agnew said. "He would have had his hands over his ears if it was Mother Teresa talking too loud for him, or Rembrandt, or Clement Greenberg. Or his family. You're the one making the value judgments for him. To him, noise is noise."

Jonas nodded submissively. He felt a little naive for romanticizing it like that.

"And as far as charlatanism goes, you're right: outsider art is overrun by thieves and hacks and opportunists and corrupters. Which makes the difference between it and any other type of art exactly nil. Forget about them. They're not worth getting mad at. The difference here is that the artists themselves can't be corrupted by it. Nor can they be uncorrupted, for that matter. It's not in them. If they're really outsider, that is. There's a tremendous amount of bulls.h.i.t involved."

"How do you tell what's real and what's not?"

"Well, anything can be forged in this world, but the total absence of self-consciousness turns out to be pretty d.a.m.n hard to fake." This for some reason made Agnew bark with laughter. "But often you just need to meet the artist. Simple as that. It's like being one of those psychiatrists for the prosecution. I spend a lot of my time doing that now."

On the walls of Agnew's dark office there was no art, nor any reproductions. Instead there hung framed photographs of artists: Duchamp, Pollock, Warhol, and many others whose faces Jonas didn't recognize. Nikki had told him about this. Apparently Agnew found actual works of art too distracting; he became so lost in staring at them, even in reproduction, that he couldn't get done whatever work he had shut himself in his office to do. So he displayed the artists themselves, because, he liked to say, they were much easier for him to ignore.

"You could make the case," Agnew said, "that the history of modern art is the history of artists trying to unlearn what they know. To them, the world that is made is really the only world that matters. You can work all your life to break all those connections to the known world and re-form them, but it's never the same as not having had those connections in the first place. So in that sense it's not hard to tell when someone's a true artist, whether or not he considers himself one at all."

"You have a budget," Jonas asked, "from the department for the research you're doing for your book? To pay for graduate a.s.sistants?" Nikki, still holding in her lap all the one-sheet artist bios from the fair she had a.s.sembled for Agnew, turned and looked at Jonas in budding surprise.

"Yes and no. The department basically lowers the tuition of the students I have working for me. It's not like I have actual cash to distribute. But, in any case, I've used up my allotment and then some."

"Would you be willing to take on another one? Off the books? I don't mean 'off the books,' sorry, I just mean that no one would have to pay me anything. It's not necessary."

Agnew leaned back. "Well aren't you the young man on the go," he said.

"I could do some of this research for you. Check out some of these artists. Maybe even find new ones. I wouldn't presume to offer you my opinion or anything, like your grad students do, but just legwork. However I could be useful to the project."

"Why?"

Jonas cursed his own blush, just at the moment he was trying to seem a little older than he was. He was trying not to look at Nikki, whose mouth was hanging open. "Why? I just... All my requirements are done, or just about, and I haven't found anything that interests me as much as this. It's like something I've been looking for, if that makes any sense. To be honest, I'm already thinking ahead to what I want to do after next year. I think I could get a jump on a thesis this way, not that it would intersect with your work at all, I'd keep that totally separate. But it is a huge field."

Agnew rocked in his desk chair and drummed his fingertips together in the air for what seemed to Jonas like a minute. "Can I ask you a personal question?" Agnew said.

Jonas nodded.

"I read in the paper, a few months ago, about a guy named Morey, one of those hedge-fund guys, who threw a birthday party for his wife. Rented out the New York Public Library for it. Wyclef Jean played. Those are your parents, aren't they?"

Jonas nodded again, fidgeting a little.

"Did you go?"

"Sure. It was their anniversary, actually, not her birthday."

"Some big one, right? Like their twenty-fifth or something?"

"Twenty-third," Jonas said, and laughed grudgingly. "He does kind of jump the gun sometimes."

"I have to admit," Agnew said, "I read about how guys like that make their money, what they do all day, and I don't grasp it at all. Alternative a.s.sets or whatever they're called, it just bounces right off my brain. And I'm presumably not a dumb guy. But hey-people think what I do for a living is arcane."

Jonas didn't smile. "I know what people think about throwing a party like that," he said, "but the thing is, all the display wasn't for anybody else's benefit. It was for her. That's the way my dad thinks. They are just really in love with each other, in this kind of epic way. So I just try to focus on that. That's the real context of everything they do-each other. The other stuff is just kind of outside the walls. Every family is bizarre from the outside in some way, right?"

But Agnew shook his head. He looked at Nikki and pointed back at Jonas with his thumb. "That's some end-times s.h.i.t, your boyfriend's family," he said. "That's okay, though. It's not possible to hold it against him, and anyway I wouldn't, because it just makes it more interesting that he's in here. Because this is some end-times s.h.i.t too, what we're doing. I mean, what we're studying here, what comes after it? That desire to feed on every new expression of what it is to suffer and be human, that need to seek out what's unfamiliar and make it familiar, it's like a G.o.dd.a.m.n fox hunt, and over the centuries it has narrowed down to this. Should we call off the hunt? Probably, but the question is moot anyway, because the world is incapable of leaving art alone. And apres nous, what? I don't know what comes after, what kind of art, what kind of artist. I really don't. But after all these years, you and I will be there at the end. It's kind of thrilling, isn't it?"

Cynthia had learned the hard way to be vigilant about giving out her cell number, but she wound up having to change it every six or eight months anyway. No matter how careful you were, inevitably you were going to start getting calls from total strangers-charities legit and otherwise, journalists, angry socialist crackpots-all of them wanting something, because when you were giving money away, people were terrifically inventive about finding you. At which point it was time to change phones again. Sometimes she'd find herself in the embarra.s.sing position of not knowing her own contact information, but Dawn was always on top of it.

Dawn was in charge of the home phone as well. Though they'd unlisted it, that number had stayed the same for years; Cynthia just never answered it anymore. At the end of the day Dawn gave her a typed list of whatever messages had been left. They were about 95 percent junk, but Cynthia couldn't bring herself to just change the number or disconnect it; it was too much like telling people who used to know you that they didn't know you anymore. Adam wouldn't have minded. The cache of things capable of troubling Adam seemed to clear itself every week or so. She was shocked, sometimes, by the things she had to remind him of, the people they'd met and places they'd visited and times they'd had together that produced a blank, apologetic look on his face when she brought them up.

On Friday afternoon, with Adam and April still in the air on their way to Shanghai, Dawn handed Cynthia the day's list of home-phone calls and then, unusually, lingered in the door to her office while she read it. Dawn had come to work for her with the announced goal of saving up money to apply to business school; Cynthia had grown to depend on her to such a degree that she now paid her not just enough for business school but so much that business school itself would seem like too big a sacrifice. She was twenty-four, just a couple of years older than April, and scary-competent, and if she'd wanted to she could have found myriad ways to manipulate Cynthia's obvious affection for her, but she wasn't that type of person. Boundaries were never an issue. They talked about everything. The poor girl's taste in men was even worse than a twenty-four-year-old's should be, and with Dawn's mother living with a new boyfriend in Queens and functionally out of the picture, Cynthia suffered through Dawn's nonworking hours imagining all the mistakes a beautiful young girl like that might make.

"What?" Cynthia said quietly, looking over the list.

Dawn shook her head. "Nothing. Just wanted to see if you recognized that last name. I wasn't sure if it was on the level. But I guess not. Sorry not to catch it."

Cynthia's gaze hadn't actually made it all the way to the bottom of the page. She looked down again and saw the name Irene Ball.

"Nope," she said. "A name like that I'd remember. Why?"

Dawn shrugged. "She said she was calling on behalf of your father. She wouldn't say why, though. I kind of had a feeling it was bogus. She actually called three times."

Cynthia looked down at the name again.

"I mean, this is totally something I should know, but didn't you tell me that your father had pa.s.sed away?"

"That was my stepfather."

Dawn blanched. "I'm sorry. Oh my G.o.d. Teach me to ask personal questions."

Cynthia glanced up at her, then reached out and squeezed her hand. "Please," she said. "It's me."

Sat.u.r.day morning Cynthia sat in the dining room drinking a protein shake the weekend cook had made, languishing over the paper, and staring out the window at the boat traffic on the churning East River. It was a novelty to have the house all to herself. Not that she was completely alone; there was a housekeeper moving around audibly in the master bedroom above her head, and the cook was on until four, doing prep work for a c.o.c.ktail reception Cynthia was hosting the next night. It would be strange to host anything without Adam there too, but that kind of thing was happening more and more, as they had to split up to accommodate the foundation's reach. She was about to go downstairs and read through a few grant proposals on the StairMaster when the home phone rang on the sideboard behind her. She turned to look at the caller ID, which read only, PRIVATE NAME, PRIVATE NUMBER. PRIVATE NAME, PRIVATE NUMBER. She pursed her lips. No one else was going to pick it up. Just before the fourth ring, which would send it to voice mail, she answered. She pursed her lips. No one else was going to pick it up. Just before the fourth ring, which would send it to voice mail, she answered.

Irene Ball was a real person, all right. She had been keeping company-that was the expression she used-with Cynthia's father for the last four years. Her thin, formal voice suggested she'd be about his age, at least, even if her name sounded like that of a stripper.

"Irene Ball," Cynthia said. "And my father gave you this number?"

There was a pause. "Yes, of course," Irene Ball said. "I wouldn't just call out of the blue. I understand this is an awkward conversation for us to be having."

She had stayed with him even through his illness- "Illness?" Cynthia said. There was another pause, either shocked or decorous, but either way Cynthia, who was becoming flushed, didn't have the patience for it. "Look, Irene," she said, "just please go on the a.s.sumption that I don't know what you're talking about, all right?"

Cynthia had last seen him more than a year ago, when, unusually, he'd turned up in New York. She knew he'd been living in Florida; once or twice a year she'd transfer some money to a bank account in Naples, and at some point he would thank her politely with a note. It was hard to know how much to send him. She could have made him a millionaire if she felt like it, but since he never asked her for anything, she didn't really know what he needed, nor what he might take offense at. When he called to say he was in the city she invited him to stay with them for a few days at least but he said he couldn't, he said he had business to attend to. So they wound up having him over for dinner. The kids sat at the table mute and amazed. He told them stories about her childhood, and hugged them all warmly, and left, and shortly afterward, Irene now said-or maybe, it occurred to Cynthia, shortly before-he was diagnosed with liver cancer. The chemo weakened his immune system, he got pneumonia, he had a heart attack while in the hospital, the cancer turned up in his pancreas as well ... long story short (there's an expression, Cynthia thought), he had not been out of the hospital for the last month and felt quite sure he was never going to get out again at all, and in light of this, he had made a decision.

"He's asked his doctors to stop treating him," Irene said, "and they've agreed to honor that request. He's still lucid enough to know what he's doing, except when the pain medication kind of overwhelms him." She was weeping now, which was moving but also confusing and inappropriate, like weeping from a TV newscaster. "I don't think he should do it. I want him to keep fighting. He's a wonderful man. He talks about you all the time. When he sees your name in the paper he always cuts it out and shows it to me."

What was there to say to that? Instead of calling his child for help, he clipped her name out of the newspaper and showed it to people. "So he's in the hospital right now, or out of it, or what?"

"There's a hospice down here that has an opening. It's such a nice place. It's-"

"Where?"

"Sorry?"

"Where," Cynthia said, her face heating up, "is here? Where is my father? I mean, like on a map?"

"Oh. Oh, I'm sorry. I just a.s.sumed ... My apologies. We're in Fort Myers, Florida. I have a-"

"Is he there with you right now?"

"No," Irene said. "He's still in the hospital. They can't move him until they have somewhere to move him to. I'm in our home."

Our home! She tried to keep her emotions moored in the practical. "What's the name of the hospital?" she asked.

"They probably won't let you talk to him, I'm afraid. Not on the phone. He's just awake too little of the time."

"Why is he still there, if he doesn't want to be there anymore?"

Irene cleared her throat. "This is a part," she said, "a very small part, of why I'm calling. This place, it's called Silverberg Hospice of South Florida, it's ... it's an expensive facility."

"Aha," Cynthia said. She halted in her pacing and stared out the window past the Triborough, over the level expanse of Queens. When it was clear, you could stand at that window and count a dozen airplanes stratified in the sky. "Well, Irene Ball, you've come to the right place. It's called Silverberg?" The cook came in the door; Cynthia made a furious scribbling motion in the air and then snapped her fingers at her, which surprised the woman visibly. "And it's in Fort Myers. Well then. You've been a great help. Many thanks. Best of luck to you."

"I'm sorry?"

"I can take over from here," Cynthia said, leaning her forehead against the gla.s.s. "Thank you, Irene. I'm very grateful to you. I mean it."

More dead air. "I thought," Irene began. "I mean, maybe I didn't explain it right. You are coming down to see him, right?"

"Of course. It's just-well, look, I have no desire to hurt anybody's feelings here, but since my father has never mentioned you to me, I just didn't want to take anything for granted. I don't want you to think that I expect there's any obligation on your part. I'm happy to take care of whatever needs to be taken care of. That's all I meant."

The cook appeared with a pad and pen. Cynthia sat back down at the table and wrote the word "Silverberg," and closed her eyes.

"Your father and I," Irene said, sounding quite confused, "are in love with each other."

These long silences; was this how other people, people who didn't live in New York maybe, conducted themselves on the phone? It was harder to be polite now that there were all these arrangements to be made, so Cynthia said, "Well, I imagine we'll see each other soon, then. Goodbye," and hung up. Irene Ball, she thought. What a name. She was shaking so hard she had to light up a cigarette in the house. At least no one was around to scold her for it. She called Lee Memorial in Fort Myers and asked to speak to the head of the cardiac-care unit there, and while she was waiting for a call back she spoke to the director of the Silverberg Hospice, who told her that she was very sorry but there were no beds currently available. She ended the call politely but without ever quite accepting that answer, and then she ran into the living room, grabbed her laptop, found Silverberg's annual report online, and scrolled all the way to the end of it. It was run, as she'd guessed, as a charity, and though it was a local one, the board included a couple of names she knew. She called one of them-even though it was still early, even though it was Sat.u.r.day-and said as plainly as she could that she needed a favor. There was always, when it came to getting things done, a level above your level. There was always that next level to acknowledge, and to aspire to.

By the end of the afternoon her father had been transferred to the hospice by ambulance. Since Adam and April had taken the jet, she left Dawn a voice mail asking her to book a charter to Florida Monday night; there was a foundation board meeting first thing Monday at which she had to present, and anyway, she figured, why not give him a chance to settle in a little bit, get comfortable, maybe give Irene and her long silences a chance to say a private goodbye.

He was an exceptionally proud man. He'd never asked her for anything and he wasn't about to start now that he was at his weakest. She was proud of him for that and frustrated at the same time. Why would he risk having some need of his go unmet rather than ask her to meet it? Surely there was no question in his mind that she might say no. Maybe he felt guilty. Or maybe he thought it was more considerate to spare her the facts of his weakness.

She put off trying to reach Adam because she was worried that he would want to turn right around and fly home. Too grueling, and also pointless, since the cardiac-care doc she'd spoken to estimated that her father still had several weeks to go. Jonas was in Chicago and there didn't seem much point in pulling him away from his studies to sit at the deathbed of a man he hardly knew.

The next night was the c.o.c.ktail reception, for a children's charity the foundation had just gotten involved with called Little Red Wagon. A small affair for a few influential donors, maybe twenty people altogether. She spent a lot of time apologizing for Adam's absence. It was depressing, working the room alone, even though this wasn't the first time she'd done it, even though the room in question was in her own home. She felt liberated and sad at the same time. Always the same faces at these events.

Toward the end of the evening, one of the cooks came all the way into the doorway of the solarium and discreetly caught Cynthia's eye. There was a phone call for her, which had for some reason been transferred to the kitchen; she took it in there, while all the servers turned their backs and acted soundlessly busy. Remarkably, it was Irene calling again; but before Cynthia could politely defer her, she interrupted to say that her father's health, now that he was comfortably installed in the hospice, had taken a precipitous turn, such that rather than wait until later in the week as planned, Cynthia had better fly down there as soon as she possibly could.

There was no way, not even after Jonas shamelessly dragged his parents' name into it, that Margo the gallery owner was going to give up any contact information for Joseph Novak. She kept telling Jonas that she had been in the business for thirty years, as if that explained anything. But then Jonas had a brainstorm: he recalled Margo's mention, at the art fair, of the brother in Kenosha. There were a lot of Novaks in Kenosha, as it turned out, but he finally dialed the one he was looking for, and after that it was a simple negotiation. Arthur Novak didn't care who the money came from. You could tell from the merriness in his voice that he just couldn't have been more tickled to have stumbled into this world of rich idiots who forever needed new things to waste their money on.

When Jonas asked for his brother's address, though, Arthur hesitated a moment. "You do know what he was locked up for, right?" he said.

The sudden caution in Arthur's voice spooked Jonas into fearing that he might change his mind about the whole thing. "Sure," Jonas said, "I know all about that."

"Well then," Arthur said, and he gave Jonas the address. Jonas didn't mention the jail business to Nikki-she was freaked out enough as it was by his "infatuation" with Agnew and this whole notion of making him a gift, in effect, of an artist so far out on the margins that even Agnew had never heard of him.

"I'm thinking ahead," Jonas said. "I mean I'm genuinely interested in the subject, and I'm sort of in Agnew's favor right now for whatever reason and I want to capitalize on that. I can get a jump on a master's thesis this way."

"What the h.e.l.l difference does it make," she said, "how fast you do it?"

He shrugged. Maybe it was a way of closing the gap between him and her. But in the end the impulse was so strong that it didn't really matter to him what the reason was. Two days later he rented a car and drove into Wisconsin. Nothing but brown fields and broken stalks surrounded the highway, until some strange concern would rear up out of nowhere-a liquor wholesaler, a John Deere dealership, a Church of Latter-day Saints-and then disappear in his mirror. When it got to be a reasonable hour he started dialing Novak's phone number, but Arthur Novak had told him not to expect his brother to answer necessarily, and he didn't. Jonas never let it go past five or six rings for fear of antagonizing him. He held the printed directions against the steering wheel with his thumb as he drove.

He was almost there-going too slowly, bent over the steering wheel to stare up at the street signs as he pa.s.sed them-when his cell phone rang. "Who is this," the voice on the other end said, "why do you keep calling me and hanging up?" and Jonas felt a chill go through him. "Your brother gave me your number," he said. "I'm sorry to have called you so many times, I was just trying to get a hold of you. My name is-"

"Why don't you just leave a d.a.m.n message?"

A perfectly sensible question, and it both relaxed Jonas and disappointed him a little to think that he was dealing with someone a little more reasonable than he'd imagined. "You're right," he said. "I'm sorry. Anyway, I called because"-he saw the sign for Novak's street out the window, but decided to circle the block a few times and keep talking-"I called because I'm, I'm someone who's interested in art, and I've seen some of your drawings and I think they're really great. And I just happen to be in town today-I live in Chicago-and I was hoping I could meet you and maybe see some more of your, of your work."

There was a very long pause.

"Joseph?" Jonas said finally. "Are you there?"

Nothing. No way the call could have been dropped-he was only circling the block. Jonas saw the number 236 on a tattered-looking row house and realized he was right outside Novak's door. He was starting to think he'd made a terrible mistake-not in seeking out Novak in the first place, but in the impetuous way he'd handled it. Strange to feel yourself the object of someone else's paranoia. And here he was, staring at the artist's windows.

"I'm hungry," Novak said.

"What? You're hungry? I'm kind of hungry too. Do you want to go out and eat something?"

Silence.

"Or do you want me to bring some food," Jonas said, "when I come over?"

"Arby's?" Novak said-a little softly, but sounding more interested now.

"Sure," Jonas said. "I'll get some stuff from Arby's and come over. Is there an Arby's near where you live?"

Novak hung up. Jonas rolled his window down, looking for someone on the street he could ask where the Arby's was. But the streets were pretty empty this time of day, unless maybe they were like this all day. He could sort of see it from Novak's point of view: if the voice knows where I live, then why wouldn't it know where the Arby's is?

Dawn chartered a plane from Teterboro and rode along in the limo; poor thing, she was constantly tearing up-mostly out of a kind of terrified remorse that she had almost screened out a call that came from her boss's father's deathbed, but also because she had lost her own father to cancer when she was in high school. In the limo she asked, in a tone that was businesslike yet tinged with hope, whether Cynthia needed her to come to Florida. Cynthia put her hand on Dawn's discomposed face and told her that her only job, for the next day or two or however long it would be, was to apologize convincingly on her boss's behalf to the dozens of people whose appointments to see her would now have to be postponed indefinitely-an easy enough job if Dawn had been free to explain what it was that had called her away, but Cynthia, for privacy's sake, had asked her to please come up with a different story.

The plane was still being fueled when they got there, so the limo sat on the tarmac for a while. The horizon was just starting to lighten. Dawn fell asleep against her shoulder. Cynthia saw the pilot pa.s.s bleary-eyed in front of their windshield, trying to b.u.t.ton down his collar with one hand while holding a Diet c.o.ke.

It would have been nice to have her family around her now, but their pursuits were spread all over the world, and so she sat in the main cabin alone, save for an attendant who mostly tried to stay out of her sightline behind the bulkhead. Jonas wasn't answering his cell. Maybe he was in cla.s.s; anyway, she could certainly send the plane up to Chicago for him if there was any need. She'd spoken to Adam while she was packing-too emotional to calculate the time difference-and just as she'd expected he offered to fly back right away, but there was no point. The work he was doing was too important. And it sounded like her father might be dead anyway by the time Adam could get to Fort Myers from Shanghai; but she knew that if she said that out loud she would burst into tears that would cause him to fly back immediately anyway, so she settled for telling him that she loved him and would keep him posted.