The Privileges

by Jonathan Dee

  “First of all,” he said, “Mom and I want you to know that this isn’t about the drugs. We are not going to be hypocrites about that.”

  “Is it the drugs, though?” Cynthia said. “I mean, I think it has to be asked. Are you an addict, do you think?”

  “Jesus,” April said. “If you had ever in your life seen an actual addict, you would know better than to ask that. I love how you guys always want to establish your street cred.”

  “Okay,” Cynthia said. “It just had to be asked.”

  No one said anything. Adam’s phone vibrated; after a second’s deliberation, he looked at the screen and saw that it was a call from Devon. Six months ago he’d put Devon in charge of the fund’s nascent commercial-realty speculation arm; it was the only aspect of the fund that might be said to be underperforming right now, but that would turn around. The more immediate problem was that in terms of decision-making Devon wasn’t quite the self-starter Adam had hoped and so he was getting these phone calls seven times a day. He let this one bounce to voice mail. Somewhere upstairs they heard a door open and close.

  “It’s true that I would like to do less drugs than I currently do,” April said. “But that’s not the same thing.”

  “I think even you have to admit,” Cynthia said, “that this was a close one. You get that, right? I mean, you have to admit that yesterday could easily have ended in some way very much worse than you sitting on the couch in your own living room getting lectured by your parents. It’s not exactly a big stretch to imagine it ending with you dead or in jail.”

  “Or dead and in jail,” April said.

  “Please don’t be smart,” Adam said. “There is a point to this conversation. We spent a lot of time today talking to Marietta, and what she kept stressing is that we all have to get used to a new way of thinking around here. Like it or not, this family has a name now, a profile. We have been fortunate enough to make a lot of money, which is fascinating to people, and we are in a position to use some of that money to try to do some good. Which, oddly enough, makes us all a target. There are a lot of people who do not want people like us to succeed, even when our success benefits them. Like the scorpion and the frog. They would rather see us brought down. But we are not going to be brought down. We’ve done what we can to keep the media in particular off the scent of what happened yesterday, but information like this is like water, if you’re not ultracareful it’s going to find a way out, and in order to protect both you and the good work that this family wants to continue to do, we have to take some steps. We have to be proactive.”

  April started to look worried. “If you say the word ‘rehab,’” she said, “I swear to God I am going to fucking lose it.”

  “Nope,” Adam said. “Better. This was Marietta ’s idea, actually. I have to go to China for ten days or so, for business and also for a little foundation work, and we have moved up that trip so that it starts the day after tomorrow. You’re coming with me. That’ll be enough time for your buddies who trashed our country place to go through the system and for us to settle with the van driver on their behalf.”

  “What?” April said. “ China? Wait. If you want to just stash me somewhere, can’t I at least pick where?”

  “Sorry, no. No St. Barts, no Chateau Marmont, none of your usual haunts. None of your usual friends. The whole point is to be somewhere where nobody has any idea who you are.”

  “I can’t believe this,” April said. She was struggling not to cry. “You’re trying to disappear me.”

  “Au contraire,” Adam said. “You will never be out of my sight. It’ll be a little father-daughter time.” His phone vibrated again. “And I’m pretty sure you will see some things you’ve never seen before. Travel broadens the mind. Anyway, it is not negotiable. Cyn, could you maybe have Dawn help with calling the consulate and all that?”

  “Already taken care of,” Cynthia said.

  “Mommy?” April said.

  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. “Déjà 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 naïve 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 bullshit 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 damn 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 assistants?” Nikki, still holding in her lap all the one-sheet artist bios from the fair she had assembled 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 assets 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 shit, 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 shit 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 goddamn 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 après 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 embarrassing 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 passed away?”

  “That was my stepfather.”

  Dawn blanched. “I’m sorry. Oh my God. Teach me to ask personal questions.”

  Cynthia glanced up at her, then reached out and squeezed her hand. “Please,” she said. “It’s me.”

  Saturday 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 cocktail 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. 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 assumption that I don’t know what you’re talking about, all right?”