The Privileges

by Jonathan Dee

  They all got high in the car again and two hours later they were in Amagansett. April hit the security code and they were in. The streets were empty and when the sky darkened they didn’t see lights coming on in any of the neighboring houses.

  There was a lot of alcohol in the house, which helped them avoid peaking too drastically. Their only foray outside was down to the beach at night, just to listen to the receding water and watch the stars. April felt very happy. Like being a kid: finding a hiding place in your own home. They all got briefly excited when they saw, way way down the beach, a bonfire burning in the sand; but it was freezing and they weren’t really dressed right so they didn’t go check it out. At one point April and one of the Russians-they were Russian, she’d decided-were alone in the pool house, and they decided to try to have sex, but it was pretty much a nonstarter.

  When they left to drive back to the city, the last few bottles in hand, April turned to look at the place one last time and consoled herself that not a lot had gotten damaged or broken, though the whole first floor just looked vaguely grimy. Even the walls. Someone would come and clean it, though. Dmitri drove while the others tried not to fall asleep; they were still on Route 15 when Dmitri, who was trying to text someone with one hand while passing another car, hit a van traveling in the other direction. The van managed to turn a little so they didn’t hit head-on; it skidded over to the shoulder and then fell lazily and loudly onto its side.

  None of them was wearing a seat belt, but Dmitri was the one who was truly fucked up. Somehow the rest of them were standing outside the ruined car now-the two chicks were wailing-and looking curiously through the driver’s-side window at Dmitri, whose head rested on the steering wheel and was turned so that you couldn’t see his face, which was probably just as well. No sirens yet. Where were they? April started to get scared. She had lots of shameful thoughts in succession: Thank God it wasn’t her car. Thank God she wasn’t driving. Still, this was not going to be good. It was all going to fall on her, because they’d all been at her place, and because who were these people, really? Hers was the only name that was going to give anybody anything to latch on to. She looked again at the door to the van, which had not moved. It said Sagaponack Nursery on it. Nursery like trees, she told herself. Not like nursery school. Suddenly she wanted so badly to be ten years old again. No more pretending now. Her own phone had been dead for days. “Who has a phone?” she asked the others, but they were like statues, like garden gnomes. “A phone!” Finally, desperate and shaking, she took two steps forward and, holding her breath, reached through the shattered window, pulled the cell phone out of Dmitri’s clenched hand, wiped it on her jacket, and called her mother.

  The fair was held in the McCormick Place convention center just off Lake Shore Drive; Jonas and Nikki had to pay thirty-five bucks each just to get in. A number of galleries from all over the Midwest, and four or five from New York, had paid for and staked out square footage inside. Little pamphlets on draped card tables held one-page biographies of the artists, like trading cards for mental illness; Jonas picked up as many of them as he could find. The rule of thumb seemed to be that the farther a particular artist’s own mind had pushed him toward society’s border, the more you could charge for his work. It was somehow revolting and thrilling at the same time. A few dead outsiders had become stars, like Henry Darger or Martin Ramirez. Maybe this was no different, Jonas thought, from the way the art establishment had processed, say, Van Gogh. But everyone moving through the building’s vast warren of temporary drywall seemed so loathsome to him that it was hard to judge. He was surprised how old they were, ten or twenty years older than him at least, if you discounted the occasional baby in a stroller-smug bohemian speculators, praising everything noisily in overcompensation for the fact that they were no match for the magnificent strangeness of what hung right in front of their eyes.

  He and Nikki caught a break when they stopped at Larry Masters’s booth and found that Masters himself had gone to lunch; they left the framed Strauss sketch with an indifferent gallery assistant and hurried away. Nikki had a list on an index card of particular artists Agnew wanted her to look for; he wanted to know what their work was selling for and also, more problematically, camera-phone shots of the work itself, but there were security guards here and there and Nikki, who was afraid of cops even of the rental variety, could sneak a shot only occasionally. She took copious notes, though, and collected all the pamphlets and price lists. It wasn’t really a two-person job, so Jonas just walked around following whatever caught his eye. He squeezed through a pack of reverent yuppies for a look at those great iconic deer in the work of Martin Ramirez, who had lived on the streets of LA apparently incapable of so much as a conversation and whose asylum warders at first tried to stop him from drawing on the grounds that it was unhealthy. That stuff was going for tens of thousands now. There were diagrams of nonexistent machines, maps of nonexistent places, ferociously detailed charts filled with dates and numbers in an order that you were never, ever going to divine. There was a grown man named Morton Bartlett who had spent decades photographing his own doll collection. Jonas was just about to start looking for Nikki again when he saw a group of charcoal portraits, if you could call them portraits, of people screaming. Were they screaming, though? Their mouths were open. Maybe they were just trying to speak. Their eyes were always neutral, and their necks were thin and cylindrical, like plant stalks almost. Sometimes there was a background, slight variations on what Jonas ultimately decided was a gas station, or at least looked like one; there were also some simply drawn dogs, and boxlike forms that may have been televisions, though, if so, they were never turned on. But it was the faces, the upturned open mouths, that were most ambiguous and obsessive.

  The number written on a sticker beside the portraits was 12; Jonas checked the gallery pamphlet and saw prices listed but no biography of the artist, who was named Joseph Novak. When he asked the stout, short-haired woman at the card table if she could tell him anything more, she sized him up and smiled with a touch too much patience, probably, he realized, because his youth and appearance didn’t suggest that he was in a position to buy anything.

  “Joseph is new to us,” said the woman; she didn’t introduce herself, but she seemed to Jonas like the gallery owner, in which case her name was Margo. “He-well, I don’t want to get into specifics, but he was in an institution for several years, in the wake of a crime he admitted to committing as a minor; like a lot of artists he really only began drawing when his freedom was taken away, but he has kept up the pace since his release.”

  “So he’s still working on this series?” Jonas asked.

  Margo considered how to answer. “Presumably,” she said. “I mean, ‘series’ is a word you could use. I’ve only met Joseph one time myself. These drawings came to me via a brother of his in Kenosha who had a suspicion they might be worth something. Joseph himself is-well, communication is difficult, let’s say that.”

  Jonas stared at the drawings for a while longer. They had a broken, smudged line, like if you extracted the lead from a pencil and just tried to hold it in your hand. They were figurative and thus a little less grotesquely original than some of the other stuff there; still, the longer he stared at the faces, the more excitement he felt, like what he was seeing was something that had never even been looked at before. He tried to forget what little Margo had just told him about the artist himself, but that was difficult to do. A while later Nikki was walking past and spotted him. He asked her right away if the name Joseph Novak was on Agnew’s list and felt a small thrill when the answer was no. “How about you?” he said. “See anything interesting?”

  “Kind of,” Nikki said. She beckoned him around the corner with one finger, to the exhibition stall right behind Margo’s. There was a good crowd there. On the wall hung an array of large, photorealistic oil portraits of an iconic-looking family, most often standing in front of what was probably their own house, staring right back at the viewer, happy and st
iff-in fact, it was almost as if the paintings were portraits not of the people themselves but of photographs of them. It was easy to spot the dealer, who wore a tweed jacket and a name tag and kept touching everyone who spoke to him on the shoulder. And after a moment Jonas realized that the proud-looking family standing with their backs to the artwork, accepting the occasional congratulations-a father, a mother, and a boy who looked like he was maybe in eighth grade, wearing a DePaul University sweatshirt-was the same family represented in the paintings.

  “No,” Nikki said, taking his hand. “Over there.” Jonas looked to the right of the exhibition stall, where there was a little recessed area beneath a fire-door sign, and saw a man who looked just about his age, wearing a crewneck sweater with a name tag on it and jeans and unlaced snow boots, sitting lotus-style on the floor; beside him was a worn stack of khaki-colored loose-leaf notebooks that said DePaul University on them. He had his head down and his eyes closed, and his index fingers stuck inside his ears, and his lips pressed together, as he rocked very slightly but rhythmically forward and back. “Who is that?” Jonas asked, though he saw the family resemblance right away.

  April was still sound asleep when Cynthia left the house to meet with their lawyers at Debevoise. From Debevoise she went straight downtown to Marietta ’s office; Adam couldn’t get away to meet her there but they had him on speaker. It was chastening how long these meetings took-how much more there was to take into account than she’d even realized. She’d never seen Marietta so businesslike. By the time Cynthia got back home it was nearly three, and Dawn, her assistant, met her at the front door to let her know that April was still not up. God bless Dawn: even though she and April had barely met, she’d done what Edina, the housekeeper, was too scared to do and opened up April’s bedroom door every twenty minutes or so just to make sure she was still breathing, because she knew that was going to be Cynthia’s first question whether Cynthia actually asked it or not.

  Her eyes adapted to the dark inside her daughter’s room and she saw April’s legs twitch in her sleep. There were snoring noises, sick-sounding but still reassuring. She closed the door again and went back to sit in the solarium. Her daughter had been sleeping for about fifteen straight hours but in a way it played into Cynthia’s desire to be able to put off talking to her until Adam was home from work. Not that she wanted April to think it was some kind of intervention or something. Hard to get up on any kind of moral high horse when she’d spent the last thirty-six hours involuntarily remembering all the times she herself had been high and in a car, as a passenger or, God help her, behind the wheel, back when she was April’s age. She wasn’t about to deliver a lecture on the subject when the fact that she was here at all was nothing more than evidence of a charmed life.

  Two hours with the lawyers this morning, two hours to go over the ways in which April’s name could be kept out of any court papers and then, as a separate issue, out of the press as well. They didn’t pretend it wasn’t a crisis atmosphere; there were faces around that conference table she’d never even seen before. That was okay. That was why you kept them on retainer: for emergencies. She felt worse about all the lying she’d asked poor Dawn to do in the course of canceling all the appointments originally scheduled for today; probably some of those people hadn’t bought it and were offended now. But family trumped all other considerations. All she dared to want from this day was for her daughter to end it in better shape than she’d started it. It was beyond Cynthia, and probably beyond Adam too, to express or even to feel privately any real disappointment in either of their children. But the hard fact to get used to-the thing that Marietta kept harping on-was that the Morey family existed now on a public plane as well as a private one, and in that light something had to happen to make sure this kind of incident never took place again.

  “It’s nice,” Marietta had said to her, “to have done so many favors for people in influential positions, so that they will then do this favor for you. But I’m telling you, you can go back to that well only so many times before people start to feel taken advantage of. And then the dam bursts in terms of curiosity about the Morey family, in terms of the desire to see the high brought low; and then the foundation’s work is hurt, and your name starts to get associated with things other than the good work you and Adam have started to do. People want that bubble popped, believe me. People would love nothing better than for you to turn out to be hypocrites and scumbags instead of the generous, caring family that you are. Far be it from me, as a friend or as someone technically on your payroll, to give you parenting advice. But just as a professional matter, this is something you and Adam need to get out in front of.”

  Then a frightened-looking Edina was in the doorway mouthing the words “She’s up,” and a few moments later April walked heavily into the living room, in a t-shirt and Adam’s pajama bottoms, her hair everywhere, her face bloated, her eyes nearly closed. You had to see her looking her worst, Cynthia thought, in order to understand how irreducibly gorgeous she was. Cynthia didn’t stand up. “My head is pounding,” April said hoarsely. “Will you tell whats-herface to get me some Advil?” Cynthia leaned over and typed something onto the laptop on the coffee table in front of her; communication like that was all done wirelessly now. April made her way over to the couch and curled up against the arm farthest from her mother.

  “Do you want anything to drink?” Cynthia said politely. “Or eat?”

  “Oh my God no,” April mumbled.

  Maybe it was selfish of her, but what Cynthia most wanted to hear right now was the same note of pleading, childish belief in her that she’d heard in that first phone call from the shoulder of Route 15, just to reassure her that it hadn’t all been an act, that it wasn’t just a matter of April’s knowing how to play her in order to get what she wanted: Mommy-I’m-scared, Mommy-I-need-your-help. “Dad will be home in a little while,” Cynthia said. “I spent this morning with our lawyers and basically, as it concerns you at least, in legal terms, the whole thing never happened.”

  April’s face was hidden behind her hair. “Of course it didn’t,” she said weakly. “Um, is there any word on Dmitri?” Before Cynthia could ask who the hell Dmitri was, April added, “And the guy driving the van?”

  Cynthia sighed. “They’re not dead,” she said, which sounded harsh but was all she really knew. “Nobody’s dead.”

  “Okay,” April said.

  She’d always been precocious, she’d always set herself apart. Sometime in the last couple of years she seemed to have run up against some kind of interior wall and now she spent her days and nights running into that same wall over and over again. Cynthia believed that there had to be a kind of key to the adult April somewhere, and that it was her fault for not having found it. If you were the mother it was always your fault. But it’s not too late, Cynthia told herself. There’s still time. She tried to be calm and unprovocative, but she couldn’t help herself.

  “How did we get here?” she said. “I mean, I try to sort of look back and find out where I made the mistake, but I can’t.” And then, frustratingly, she started to cry-like she was the daughter, like she was the one who had been through something and needed to be comforted. “I feel like I’m losing you. How can I keep that from happening?”

  “Mom, you are not going to lose me,” April said, not particularly kindly. “Please. Like there’s not enough drama here already.”

  “I’m sorry, but you cannot just scare the shit out of me like that and expect me to be cool about it. I do not want that to happen again.”

  “I don’t want it to happen again either,” April said.

  Edina came in with the Advil and a glass of water on a tray; she placed it on the far edge of the glass-topped table and withdrew.

  “That’s what gets me, actually,” April said, in a voice that wasn’t quite as sharp. “I’m pretty sure it will. Happen again. Even though I don’t want it to. I can feel myself forgetting what it feels like to feel this way.” She snorted. “Another few
days and I’ll be hanging out with the same people doing the same stupid shit even though I don’t really want to. Why is that? I mean, what am I supposed to do with all my time?”

  Cynthia reached out and tried to stroke April’s tangled hair, but April pulled her head away. Her kids’ moods had always had a way of swamping hers and so after ten minutes of sitting at the opposite end of the couch staring at nothing, she found herself feeling just as mad and hopeless as April did, just as stonewalled and estranged, even though in truth, outside the confines of this moment, she had never in her life felt closer to the heart of things than she did right now. She was chair of one of the top ten fastest growing charitable foundations in New York. The foundation, at Adam’s insistence, had her name on it. People brought her antipoverty initiatives of all kinds and her interest made them real, not just at home but overseas, in countries she had never seen. No more intermediaries between her desire for a better world and the world itself; all she had to do was imagine it. But even these triumphs receded like moons into a distant orbit of the fact of her child’s unhappiness. She laid her cheek on the arm of the couch and waited.

  Adam found the two of them still in that position, like listing bookends, when he came home half an hour later; their expressions made it appear as if they’d fought more than they actually had. He sat down across from them and took a silent minute to try to focus. It was much harder than it should have been to stop thinking about work. The problem was that everything seemed rooted in work these days. Day and night. Everywhere he went, people begged him to take them on as investors in his hedge fund, which over the four years of its existence had put up numbers that pushed him into shamanistic territory, where people earnestly believed that he was performing a kind of magic. Old friends, total strangers-they treated even finding themselves in the same room with him as the portent of a lifetime, and some of them were the type who prided themselves on not taking no for an answer. They would lose their manners completely. Some of Adam’s junior partners tried to tell him he was insane for not traveling with security just to keep the wannabes at a respectful distance from him, but he really did not want to go that route, especially not at what were nominally social occasions. Now the fund was filing for its own IPO and that meant the news was about to break that one of its nonvoting stakeholders was the Chinese government. There was nothing wrong or underhanded about it; still, when it came to money, there was a certain threshold of size past which outsiders just reacted irrationally. But that particular freakout was still a few weeks away. He and Cyn had spoken at least ten times that day already, so there was nothing on which he needed to be brought up to date. They had a plan and now just needed to draw from each other the resolve to go through with it. He waited for April to meet his eyes.