The Privileges

by Jonathan Dee

  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 assumed… 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 glass. “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 Saturday-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 cocktail 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 pa
rents’ 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 hell 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 passed 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 damn 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 pass bleary-eyed in front of their windshield, trying to button down his collar with one hand while holding a Diet Coke.

  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 class; 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.

  She hadn’t brought anything to read, and there was too much cloud cover even for a look out the window. She supposed that this was a time when one might naturally think about the past. Up to now she’d been able to keep herself moving and thus hover above whatever it was that she should be feeling. But going over her father’s failings, their little moments of disconnected joy-this seemed too much like eulogizing him, hurrying him into the grave, and she resisted it. Instead she found herself wondering what was the last really great advance, in terms of speed, in human transportation. The jet engine? What was that, a hundred years ago? Why did it take just as long to get from New York to Florida now as it had before she was born? What kind of sense did that make? But if she was thinking of it now, chances were excellent others had already been thinking about it for a while: work was being done somewhere, somebody needed an angel.

  Dawn had found her a decent hotel in Fort Myers, and Cynthia went there first to drop her bags and take a quick shower. She tried not to hurry, because hurrying seemed like bad luck somehow, or an absence of faith; her cell sat on the dresser as she changed, and she avoided staring at it just as she might have if someone were watching her. She called the concierge up to her room to tell him that she would need a car and driver on call at all times during her stay, which would be indefinite; but it turned out Dawn had cal
led ahead and arranged for all that too. Cynthia’s driver was a man as old as her father, a Cuban named Herman with a crewcut and a neck whose folds were unevenly browned. Herman was unfailingly polite but he had a real meanness in his eye. She thought he was probably ex-military. He never spoke first. He wore a suit jacket over a short-sleeved shirt, and she imagined that when he got home after work every day, the first thing he did was throw that jacket on the floor, and his wife would pick it up and hang it for him.

  Florida. It really was a blight. Maybe that’s why old people assembled here-having to leave it behind wouldn’t seem like such a bad deal. She stared out the back of the limo at the six-lane roads and the shopping plazas, the endless construction, the high walls and dimly visible golf courses, as if life on a golf course were so desirable that too direct a look at it would sear your eyes somehow. They were still in the middle of the whole car-infested hellscape-somehow she’d imagined they wouldn’t be-when she felt Herman slow down, and they turned left past a gas station with a Krispy Kreme inside it, and another two hundred yards past that was the Silverberg Hospice of South Florida.

  She’d never had any reason to see the inside of a hospice before and had only a dim idea what went on in there. Partly in fear, partly out of a superstition that it was important to continue acting as if she had all the time in the world, she walked in a sort of dream languor down the long corridor to the nurses’ desk, her heart banging, and from what she could observe it was basically a hospital that didn’t smell like a hospital. Also it was quiet, and less crowded, and only one story high. Also it was staffed by people who were clearly angels of some sort, drably luminous avatars of selflessness. She was ambivalent about this. She could not be expected to integrate with these people. She was hoping that at least one of them would feel as scared and selfish and inadequate as she did, that maybe there was someone who was only working here as a condition of his community-service sentence and would form a bond with her and maybe give her a slug from the bottle he kept in his locker just to get through the day without freaking out completely. But no. Some stout woman in a nurse’s outfit that could almost have been worn as a Hawaiian shirt actually came out from behind the desk to greet her before she’d even reached the end of the hallway. Somehow the woman’s very informality was scary too, as if civility were one of the pretentious earthly comforts Cynthia was apparently supposed to have checked at the door.