The Privileges_ A Novel Part 2

"Our family rules!" Cynthia yelled, her breath fogging the gla.s.s.

"Our family rules!"

Then something flickered in the reflected light on the pane her nose was nearly touching; she turned her head and there, in the kitchen doorway, was Adam. He still had his dripping raincoat on. There was no telling how much he'd heard but his head was c.o.c.ked warily, like a dog's. Cynthia hopped down to the floor, a little out of breath. The kids did the same and came and leaned against her on either side, still wearing their bandannas and sungla.s.ses. Her nostrils flared with the effort not to laugh. She put her hands on their shoulders.

"h.e.l.lo, dear," she said in a bright voice. "The children and I have been gambling."

[image]

After four years at Morgan Stanley, an operation so vast that Adam's true bosses existed mostly on the level of gossip and rumor, a feeling of toxic stasis had begun to provoke him in the mornings when he arrived at work. It wasn't all in his head; lately a number of his colleagues had been promoted over and around him, and when he asked about it at his review, the thing that kept coming up was that they may have been dullards and yes-men but they all had their MBAs. Why this should have impressed anybody was beyond him. In theory he could have taken a leave of absence and gone back to business school himself-lots of the firm's junior employees did it at his age-but those people didn't have children to support, and anyway Adam lacked the tolerance for the one step back that might or might not set up the proverbial two steps forward. He'd worked hard to get where he was and he couldn't see giving up that ground voluntarily. The momentum of the business world was one-way only, a principle that should not be rationalized. He and Cynthia had a vivid faith in their own future, not as a variable but as a destination; all the glimpses New York afforded of the lives led by the truly successful, the arcane range of their experiences, aroused in the two of them less envy than impatience.

So he called a guy named Parker he'd met a few times playing pickup basketball at Chelsea Piers, and took him out to lunch, and two weeks later Parker had brought him on at a private equity firm called Perini Capital, an outfit with a s.h.i.tload of money behind it but so few people working there that Adam knew everyone's name by the end of his first day. The money, pre-bonus at least, was actually a little less than he'd been making at Morgan, but it wasn't about that. It was about potential upside, and also about his vision of what a man's work should be: a tight group of friends pushing themselves to make one another rich. No hierarchies or job descriptions; there was the boss and then there was everyone else, and the boss, Barry Sanford, loved Adam from day one. Sanford was a white-haired libertine who was on his fourth wife and had named the company after his boat. It was obvious to everyone that he saw something of his young self in Adam, and though Adam didn't personally see the resemblance, he was unoffended by it. The job's only drawback was that it required some travel-the occasional overnight to Iowa City or the equivalent, to sound out some handful of guys who thought their business deserved to be bigger than it was. And strippers: for some reason these aspirants always had the idea that strippers were the lingua franca of serious money men. In truth Adam considered few things in life a grimmer bore than an evening at Podunk's finest strip club, but he went along with it, because his job was to make these people admire him, a job at which he excelled.

His Perini colleagues, Parker included, were all still single; he'd go out for a few drinks with them after work but then the evening would start to turn into another kind of evening and he'd excuse himself and go home. Still, the new environment-the informality and irreverence, the clubby decor, the foosball table, the sense that they were bound not by any sort of dull corporate ethos but only by the limits of their own creativity-fit him perfectly; he felt he belonged there. Its best amenity, though he wouldn't have said so to anyone but Cynthia, was that in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the building, which was on Ninth Avenue, there was a swimming pool. Whenever he didn't have a lunch, Adam would take the elevator all the way down, hang his suit in the changing room, and swim laps until he wore himself out. Sometimes there was a group of kids wearing floaties in the shallow end-one of the other, bigger companies in the building had its own day care-but most days he had the water completely to himself, his every stroke echoing off the walls, his heartbeat loud in his ears. It felt like stealing. Then he'd shower, put his suit on, and go back upstairs to his desk. Sometimes he'd have Liz the receptionist order him something to eat, or sometimes he'd just skip it and let the adrenaline carry him through until dinner. He was in the best shape of his life, and it was a boon to his job performance too, because he always thought more clearly when he was a little exhausted.

[image]

At school April's first task was to esteem herself. They began with self-portraits, huge-headed, in which the bodies were an afterthought, apportioned roughly the same s.p.a.ce on the page as a nose or an ear. The portraits smiled widely with crooked teeth, not because the children's teeth were crooked but because teeth were hard to draw. They made lists of the reasons they liked themselves, lists of the things they were good at and the things at which they were determined to improve. They named the comforts of their homes-pets, siblings, favorite toys, or favorite places. One girl said her favorite place was Paris, but April took this to mean the imaginary Paris of the Madeline books. Her own favorite place was her parents' bed, with her parents not in it, just her and a few stuffed animals and a juice box and a Disney movie on TV. She dreamed of this situation often, though in practice she usually had to be sick to attain it. Something told her, though, that it would be seen as babyish, and so she said the Central Park Carousel instead.

Less auspicious was the name project. A name, the students were told, had a secret history; it might connect you to the country from which your family had first emigrated, or to the language or the religion of that country, or even just to the family itself and the loved ones who had gone before. It let you know that you were not just some one-time phenomenon but an outcome, a culmination, the top branch of a majestic tree. Told to go home and conduct some research on why she was named April Morey, she saw her parents exchange a quick look before her mother answered.

"Well," Cynthia said, muting the TV, "Dad and I talked about a lot of different names. We would sit on the couch in our old apartment and try them out on each other back when I was pregnant with you, say them out loud to see how they sounded. And there were a few we liked, but we kept coming back to April. April Morey. It just sounded the most beautiful to us."

Her dad smiled, and patted her mom's leg.

"That's it?" April said.

They looked as confused as she was. "Also," her father said, sitting forward on the couch, "it's a pretty unusual name. Not a lot of other Aprils in the world. We wanted a name as special as you are."

They'd given her her name not because somebody else had had it, but because n.o.body had? "Was there ever another April in our family?" she asked. They looked at each other again, and shook their heads. "Why didn't you name me after a loved one?"

"A loved one?" Adam said.

April nodded. "A dead loved one. That's what a lot of people do. Or somebody from the old country." Her mother punched her father in the thigh, and that, it shocked April to realize, was because he had been about to laugh.

"Where do we come from?" she demanded of them. "What country?"

Stunningly, they seemed less than sure. Adam knew his father's family had come from England, but he didn't know where in England specifically, nor how many generations ago that had been; his mother's family was part German and part Dutch. Cynthia knew her father's ancestors were Russian, unless he'd been lying about that too, and as for her maternal grandparents, her mother had always refused to discuss them.

"Was there something special about the month month of April?" April asked. There wasn't. No historic event had taken place then, no anniversary or birthday, though they did offer that if April's birthday had actually fallen in April, they would have named her something else. of April?" April asked. There wasn't. No historic event had taken place then, no anniversary or birthday, though they did offer that if April's birthday had actually fallen in April, they would have named her something else.

"What would you have named me instead?" she persisted. The revelation that she, April, might just as plausibly have been Samantha or Josephine or Emma, that only chance was behind the whole solemn question of her ident.i.ty, made her feel worse than ever. She could see that her parents were now upset, but she was angry at them and didn't care. They kept coming back to beauty, but it was a beauty she couldn't comprehend and that she wasn't at all sure her teacher would consider a satisfactory completion of the a.s.signment.

Ms. Diaz was nice about it, of course, but there was nothing to be done about the jealousy engendered by the other, longer name-essays that went up on the walls above their lockers, stories of honored relatives and cool languages and religious rituals tended through the generations. April felt as if her family came from nowhere, and, more puzzlingly, that this suited her parents just fine.

The next unit was family traditions. The teacher took pains to define this idea as broadly as possible; still, what traditions did April's family have? They hardly ever did the same thing even twice. They had no ancestral home they returned to, no church they attended (her mom had gone to church as a child but April had heard her say that she hated it and was glad she never had to go again), no special place they liked to travel to-indeed, having been someplace on vacation once, like Nantucket or Vail or Disney World, even if they'd had a good time there, was usually cited as a reason not to go there again. Even their Christmas tree wasn't in the same spot every year. April knew her own grandparents so little that she sometimes mixed them up in her head and was shy about talking to them on the phone. She had one uncle and no aunts, just something her mother called a step-aunt, whom she'd only ever seen in a photo in her parents' wedding alb.u.m.

Soon the whole temper of the a.s.signment had changed, in April's mind, from an exercise in self-discovery to an indiscriminate hunt for what Ms. Diaz, for whom she would have died in any case, wanted to admire in her. It seemed perfectly defensible to start making things up. She wrote down that her family went to Saint Patrick's Cathedral every Sunday, and that they were considering a trip to Jerusalem for Christmas. Her grandmother on her mother's side, who was named May, had lost her parents as a girl but had gamely made her way from Holland to America by boat. Every summer April and her cousins gathered for a reunion at the family estate on a mountain in New Hampshire. It was so big that some of her distant pioneer relatives were buried in a small graveyard right there on the place.

Adam and Cynthia read these notions on the wall beneath their daughter's self-portrait on Parents' Night, mute with amazement. April's teacher couldn't really believe this stuff, could she? Yet she had posted it right there with all the other handwritten, dubiously spelled histories of perseverance and hardship. They already felt conspicuous, as they always did at these school functions, as the youngest couple in the cla.s.sroom; at twenty-nine they were still strikingly young, by Manhattan standards at least, to be parents at all. Jonas's best friend in kindergarten had once slept over for a whole weekend while his father took his mother to London for her fiftieth birthday. Every Parents' Night Adam and Cynthia were a kind of generation unto themselves, and it didn't take much, in that context, to awaken a vestigial unease about being in some sort of trouble they didn't even understand. When Ms. Diaz, deep in conversation with some kid's father who was surely old enough to be their father too, smiled at them from across the room as if to say that she would be with them in just a moment, they smiled back warmly until she turned away and then Cynthia squeezed his arm and they got the h.e.l.l out of there.

When she'd first stopped working outside the home, as the expression went, the kids were toddlers with unsynchronized nap schedules and so Cynthia's brain was pretty much indentured to them; even apart from the physical exhaustion, it was a struggle just to find a little interior s.p.a.ce for herself, a little s.p.a.ce in which to be be herself, when they were so present and so vulnerable and so demanding every minute of the day. The only time that truly felt like her own was late at night when everyone else was asleep, when she would stay up and watch movies and savor the day's one cigarette, blowing the smoke out the window; but even that came at a price, since the sleep she lost made the next day's selflessness harder to maintain. herself, when they were so present and so vulnerable and so demanding every minute of the day. The only time that truly felt like her own was late at night when everyone else was asleep, when she would stay up and watch movies and savor the day's one cigarette, blowing the smoke out the window; but even that came at a price, since the sleep she lost made the next day's selflessness harder to maintain.

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 a.s.sistant at a glossy, ad-heavy magazine called Beauty 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 Beauty were mostly memories of the kind of euphoric b.i.t.c.hing that took place over drinks after work with her fellow a.s.sistants; 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 a.s.sistant, got a call back from a different a.s.sistant 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. were mostly memories of the kind of euphoric b.i.t.c.hing that took place over drinks after work with her fellow a.s.sistants; 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 a.s.sistant, got a call back from a different a.s.sistant 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 s.h.i.tty 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 resume 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 h.e.l.l, 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-a.s.s 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 s.e.x 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. "f.u.c.k 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 f.u.c.king 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 b.i.t.c.h. 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 cafe 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. s.e.x where you're trying trying to get pregnant is the absolute worst s.e.x known to man. Another six weeks of this and I swear to G.o.d if I'm not knocked up we're going to get divorced." to get pregnant is the absolute worst s.e.x known to man. Another six weeks of this and I swear to G.o.d 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 s.e.x, 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 "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 p.o.r.no, 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 f.u.c.king 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 p.o.r.no, 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 f.u.c.king ego 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 pa.s.sed 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 rea.s.sured 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 pa.s.s. 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 dispa.s.sionately 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 s.h.i.t 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 sungla.s.ses 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 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 pa.s.sionate 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 bulls.h.i.t.

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.

Still, the ethereal was where the real money was, and everybody knew it. Parker in particular loved to b.i.t.c.h 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 s.h.i.t 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 cla.s.smates 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 b.a.l.l.s 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 f.u.c.king 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 gla.s.s that looked out over the Hudson. It was all dark wood and leather and had so much nautical c.r.a.p 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 a.n.a.lysis, 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 "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." 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 bas.e.m.e.nt, 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d, 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 pa.s.sed 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 b.a.l.l.siness 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.