The Privileges_ A Novel Part 7

Jonas shook his head. "No way," he said. "That world is gone for good."

In the winter Robin had started showing up at the Moreys a lot more often. Not always with April either, or even preceded by a phone call; one night she showed up at their front door so drunk you could barely understand her, and Cynthia, after whispering to her for a few seconds, let her right in. There was a while where she was basically living there. April's feelings about this kept turning out to be the wrong ones: when she wondered aloud why Robin continued to get away with murder in a way that April never could, her mother took her out on the balcony and told her that Robin was being physically abused at home, that one night at the Moreys' Robin had taken Cynthia into the bathroom and shut the door and showed her a series of cuts and red marks on her stomach and chest that had been left there by the power cord from a laptop. April acted totally shocked when the shameful truth was that she had heard that rumor before and thought that it was bulls.h.i.+t, that that kind of thing didn't really happen to anyone she knew. In her least generous moments she had even wondered if maybe Robin was amping up all these stories about how bad things were at her home, not just for drama's sake but because life at the Moreys' was like some kind of spa for her: she came and went as she pleased, ate what she wanted, either studied or didn't according to her whim. So April had to deal with her guilt over that. On top of which she felt disappointed and confused that Robin, who was her friend after all, had been moved to confess all this to her mother but not to her.

There was even one night when Robin's father had shown up at their door, unannounced, to take his daughter back home. That was some drama. The doorman called upstairs and said that he was down there in the lobby, demanding to come up. Cynthia said no. Two minutes later the doorman called again. By this time all five of them, the Moreys and Robin, were gathered in the foyer staring at the video from the security camera. Robin's father was just standing there in an overcoat, his hands in his pockets. "He says he isn't going anywhere," the doorman murmured into the phone. He seemed torn between excitement and fear that some sort of incident might imperil his job. "Ask if there's anyone else down there with him," Cynthia said to Adam, and when the answer came back no, Cynthia said to let him up.

They told Robin to go downstairs to April's room but she wouldn't; instead she withdrew into the living room, as far as she could get from the front door with her sight line unimpeded, as if her father's reach were impossibly long. He was a good twenty years older than Adam and Cynthia and that seemed to sharpen his contempt for them. "May I come in?" he said on the threshold, and April's jaw fell when her mother answered no.

When he made out Robin in the room beyond the foyer, standing behind one of the couches, he sighed. "This is ridiculous," he said. "You are fifteen years old. You do not have our permission to be here. Get your things."

Robin didn't reply. "She has our permission to be here," Cynthia said. "You might ask yourself why she feels safer here than she does in her own home."

At first he ignored her, his eyes still on his daughter. Eventually he turned on Cynthia his most withering look. It was interesting to April that her father didn't even try to come between them. Most husbands probably would have, even if they weren't sure why. But her dad obviously felt, as she did, that if anybody needed protecting in this scenario, it was the older man, with his combed-back silver hair and his steel gla.s.ses.

"I recognize you," he said to Cynthia. "All the parents talk about you. You like to play at being one of the girls. You're the youngest mother there and yet the one least able to deal with getting old. I don't know what kind of fantasy this is for you, but it couldn't be of less interest to me."

"You can see how eager your child is to have anything to do with you," Cynthia said. "Kudos. As long as she feels like she's in danger, she is welcome here. Her choice. Period."

Even if you knew that parents sometimes talked to one another that way, it still seemed incredibly transgressive to overhear it. April turned and caught Jonas's eye.

"She is fifteen," Robin's father repeated. "It's a legal matter. If you won't let her go, the police will have to get involved. I've lived in New York a long time and I know a lot of people."

"Oh, you've said the magic word," Cynthia said, smiling. She took a step closer to him. "Police. If you want to go there, we'll go there. I took pictures of what she looked like last time she came over here."

Something changed then, not on his face so much as behind it, but still April could see it. He knew he couldn't intimidate Cynthia so he took one more shot at intimidating his daughter, calling to her over Cynthia's shoulder to say that she had been forgiven for a lot of things, but she would not be forgiven for this. After he was gone the five of them stayed up almost all night, just watching TV in the media room, waiting for whatever would happen next without quite knowing what that would be. But nothing else happened at all.

The story was all over Dalton the next day. Robin and Jonas weren't talking about it, but April had probably mentioned it to a few people. It bolstered the already considerable perception that April's parents were the coolest parents on earth. And Robin's misfortune, as misfortune will do, lent her an aura of respect, even a sort of celebrity.

But eventually Robin did go back home. Either the situation cooled down there or she agreed to pretend it had. That was the thing about families: once they decided to close ranks, for whatever reason, you really had no way of knowing anymore. In school she was just like always, laughing and way into sports and usually surrounded by guys-a little needy for April's taste, maybe, but nothing that seemed like a red flag. If it was an act, she was fooling herself with it at least as effectively as she was fooling anybody else. The only one who really had trouble getting over the whole thing, April recognized, was her mother. Robin had all but stopped returning Cynthia's texts, and when she did her tone was disappointingly chirpy and distant. It wasn't just that Cynthia didn't believe everything was now all right; she didn't seem to want want to believe it. More than once April came home from school and found her mother sitting at the dining room table with a cup of coffee, crying. to believe it. More than once April came home from school and found her mother sitting at the dining room table with a cup of coffee, crying.

April was proud that her home had such a rep as a stable place that it would actually occur to her friends to go there if they were in trouble. There was always somebody staying over at the apartment, not necessarily because they needed a place but just for the h.e.l.l of it. Other kids' mothers would try to gain their trust by acting young, like they understood everything, and it was just pathetic. But April could tell that her friends really did consider her mother to be one of them-older, but just enough for her superior knowledge to seem attractive, like an RA in college. They confessed to her, they asked her advice, they shopped with her (though part of that was surely mercenary, since any time Cynthia thought something looked cute on them she would buy it). They would even talk about guys with her, which should have seemed creepy and out of bounds and yet somehow it did not. The fact that all the other Dalton mothers hated and mocked her only bolstered Cynthia's cred.

April's own circle had contracted a bit after eighth grade when a dozen or so kids went off to boarding school. Just like that they were gone from your social life, though occasionally in between cla.s.ses some kid would immodestly flash a text or a camera-phone photo from a departed peer. The move didn't always work out for them; there was always some story circulating about someone who had gotten himself expelled from one of these places and been forced to return home, not to Dalton but to the kind of second-tier private school that still had openings mid year. Still, an air of sophistication attached itself even to those of them who failed. April had no desire to go live in a regimented compound in some picturesque New England village where there was nothing to do at night and you weren't allowed out anyway, but she felt a touch of envy all the same. They were her age but, just by virtue of leaving, they seemed older.

Of course they did come back in relative triumph for a few days at Thanksgiving and then for longer at Christmas. Their homecoming for any vacation was pretext enough for a series of parties. On one of the first really warm nights of the spring, April went to one at a townhouse in the East Fifties, thrown by some girl they didn't even know-she'd been at Spence and was now home from St. Paul's-but dotted with enough Dalton kids to make her presence there plausible. She even ran into Robin on the street outside. The townhouse itself was phenomenal, a real old-money museum, and its tras.h.i.+ng had a terrible inevitability. It was like the reign of Pol Pot, when legions of ten-year-olds were handed carbines and put in charge of national security. On the first floor was the kitchen and living room, speakers hidden somewhere in the walls blasting Jay-Z, every surface already sticky to the touch. April saw a Matisse on the wall, one of those paintings where figures danced in a circle, and she almost asked someone if it was real but then realized what a stupid question that was. It was hot inside, even with all the windows thrown wide open, and bodies were everywhere. A girl named Julie from April's Spanish cla.s.s was lying on her back on top of the piano. She opened her mouth, and a guy in a hockey jersey poured streams of lime juice and vodka from two bottles he held up about a foot above her head. He put the bottles down, placed his hands on either side of Julie's head, and shook it. When he was done, Julie sat up and opened her mouth to show she'd swallowed it all. She bowed in triumph, but no one was looking.

April thought she'd just stick to beer for now. Robin was scanning the crowd for some guy named Calvin who was probably home from Andover and whom she'd hooked up with one night over Thanksgiving break. She staked out a spot halfway up the front-hall steps and said she'd promise to wait there if April would bring her a beer. April asked some strange girl where the keg was (you never asked a strange guy a question like that unless you were hitting on him, because that's how he'd interpret it anyway) and found it in the bathtub off the maid's room, behind the kitchen. She saw that some people had opened up the drawers in there and were trying on some clothes that belonged to the maid or the cook or whoever had been given the night off. Unreal. But low-rent s.h.i.+t like that went on at every party, though usually not this early. People continued to throw parties even though they always went bad in this way, every single time. Strangers showed up, fights broke out, cops came, s.h.i.+t got ruined. They were allowed to do whatever they wanted.

Naturally by the time April made it back to the front hall, struggling not to let the two beers she was carrying get dumped all over her, Robin was gone. There was no way April was going back through that mob again, so she kept going, out to the stoop, where some guys were smoking and where it was at least not so sweltering-a little chilly, in fact. She didn't recognize any of them, but one was wearing an Andover sweats.h.i.+rt. She asked him if he knew a guy named Calvin. He nodded, and smiled broadly, apparently at the very thought of Calvin. He was either stoned or else just one of those guys who always appeared stoned.

"Haven't seen him, though," he said. "Want to get high?"

She did want to get high, being at this stupid party where she didn't really know anybody made it seem imperative to get high, but she didn't like the looks of the guy: his interest in her, for all his glazed affect, was too obvious. Her cell phone started buzzing in the back pocket of her jeans. She saw the caller ID and scowled and smiled at the same time. "Where the f.u.c.k are you?" she said.

"I'm at this party," Robin said. "Where the f.u.c.k are you?" you?"

"Outside on the stoop," April said, taking a couple of steps away from the stoner, who shrugged. "I looked everywhere for you."

"I think not," Robin said, giggling. She was already wasted and April felt a flash of resentment. "We're up on the third floor."

"There's a third floor?" April said, looking up.

She got there eventually, picking her way past a group of boys who had found a silver tea tray and were trying to surf down the stairs. Robin, red-eyed, hugged her for a good thirty seconds, which told April that it was X. But the X was now all gone, supposedly. They were all in some kind of den or study or something; this house was a trip, one of those houses that even this crowd couldn't quite believe somebody they knew lived in. The room itself, as a place to hang out, was tolerable-only about ten of them, the music reaching them as a kind of modulating throb-but the downside was that they were now so far away from the beer that there was no question of convincing anyone to make the trip. Someone pa.s.sed April a warm bottle of Grey Goose and she did the best she could with it.

Two guys sitting about ten feet apart were texting each other and collapsing in laughter, and someone else was making a big show of checking out all the books on the shelves. Robin was talking with her eyes closed. Not the best sign. April was sitting in a club chair that was so comfortable she could have slept in it, even though it smelled like beer. Who would invite strangers in here, she thought? Who was this chick from St. Paul's, and where had her parents gone without her? April didn't understand some families. Most families, actually. Just then, as if on cue, her cell phone vibrated in her pocket again; it was Cynthia. April tried to think quickly. She was a little f.u.c.ked up, but if she didn't answer now her mother would just keep calling, and she wasn't likely to get any less f.u.c.ked up as the evening progressed. She walked out to the landing and answered. She was able to keep it short on account of the noise. A minute later she returned and they were all staring at her.

"Your mom, right?" Robin said. Her eyes were like little mail slots.

"And you answered?" one of the guys said.

"Shut up," Robin said. "Her mom is so cool. April, I think it's so cool that your mom is so cool."

"Ah," the guy said. "The Cool Mom."

"Also totally smoking hot," Robin said. "Seriously. Have you ever seen her?"

"I have!" said some random guy. "I saw her in some magazine! A total babe. She looks like, what the f.u.c.k is the name of that actress, the one who plays the mom-"

It should have made her feel weird, April thought, that they were all on the borderline of getting crude about her mom, but it didn't. She wasn't even sure they were all talking about the same person anyway. Besides, her mom was gorgeous, she'd been onto that long before any of them. "Hey," she said to the guy who was still struggling to remember the name of the actress, "are you Calvin?"

"No," he said irritably, as if his chain of thought had been broken. "I'm Tom. Calvin who? Calvin f.u.c.king Klein?"

A while later Robin said she wasn't feeling well, and next thing they knew she was asleep in the chair, with Tom's jacket over her.

"You think she's all right?" April asked.

"Sure," Tom said. "Not like we've never seen this before."

"I just love her so much," April said, and to demonstrate how much, she tried to look very hard into Tom's eyes.

"Don't worry," Tom said. When you were drunk there was something so impressive about people who held it together better than you. April had the sense that the other people in the room were now gone. "We won't let anything happen to her. We care about her."

"Do you think we should find a phone?" she said. What the f.u.c.k was she talking about? She didn't know. There was a phone right there in her a.s.s pocket, for one thing.

"Yes, let's," Tom was saying very seriously. "By all means. Let's go look for a phone."

He walked behind her up to the darkened fourth floor, and when she turned around on the landing they were kissing. She felt cold and realized he already had her s.h.i.+rt up around her armpits and she at least had the presence of mind to walk backward a few more steps before anybody downstairs saw them. She wasn't going to be one of those s.k.a.n.ks who got wasted and put on a show for everybody. She pulled him along by his jacket. She was trying to communicate without talking because she knew she had been slurring. Off the hallway were two closed doors. Tom tried them but they were locked. No telling what was going on in there. At the end of the hall, impossibly, was another, narrower flight of stairs.

"Jesus Christ," Tom said, "this place is ma.s.sive."

At the top of the final staircase was a room with the door ajar and some light seeping through. Tom pushed the door open and they both stopped short: it was an attic that had been converted into a study or office of some kind, with a long desk and a computer, and there was a man sitting there. He spun slowly in his swivel chair, like the mother's corpse in Psycho Psycho, April thought, only this guy was wearing a cardigan and reading The Wall Street Journal The Wall Street Journal.

"h.e.l.lo," he said.

April was too freaked out to speak. "Hi, sir," Tom said. "Sorry to disturb you. We were looking for the bathroom."

"There isn't one on this floor," the man said amiably. Oh my G.o.d, April thought, you live here! She had an urge to go up and poke at him like he was a ghost. "There's one right underneath us." He had to be the father of the girl throwing the party. This had to be his own home that they were tearing apart downstairs. He was staring at her and she realized she was laughing.

"Sorry to disturb you," Tom said a second time, and pulled April outside and shut the door behind them.

Downstairs they found the bathroom; they went in and shut the door and kissed for a while longer, and then April went down on him. It was the quickest way to bring the whole thing to a close-ridiculously quick, in fact-and it was also the best way to keep his hands and mouth from going anywhere she didn't want them to go. Amazing how pa.s.sive guys got, and how quickly, once you took over that way. It was all so predictable. She kept going even when she felt the cell vibrating in her pocket again.

On her way downstairs she peeked into the study but Robin, as April pretty much knew she would be, was gone. April had the cab let her off at 72nd and walked the rest of the way home to straighten out a little, and on the way she checked the phone and found a text from her mom: Where R U? She bought a pack of Juicy Fruit at a newsstand to clean up her breath. She came in through the downstairs door but went up to the kitchen for a bottle of water and saw the lights, like lights from a swimming pool, flickering on the walls of the darkened media room. Her mom was curled up against the arm of the couch. She smiled. "Everything okay?" she whispered.

April nodded.

"How was the party? Who'd you hang out with?"

"Robin was there, actually," April said.

"Oh yeah? How'd she seem?"

"Pretty good. She maybe had a little too much to drink."

"She got home okay?"

April nodded. "I put her in a cab myself." She blew her mother a kiss and started back toward the kitchen, but then she stopped.

"What's on?" she said.

"A River Runs Through It. Ever seen it?"

She had, but it didn't really matter; she went down to her room, put on some pajamas, and came back to lie down on the couch with her head in her mother's lap. Cynthia stroked her hair for a minute and then took her hand away. On the screen were these still, mountainous landscapes and endless skies, so dreamy that the hot guys in their fetishy western garb just seemed like figures in a painting, and after a few minutes of that she couldn't keep her eyes from closing, but whenever they did, what she kept seeing was the man in the attic. April reached up, grabbed Cynthia's hand and placed it on her head again, just like she'd done when she was little-just like she'd never stopped doing, really. Some people were in such a hurry to pretend they didn't need their mothers anymore, like they couldn't wait to leave behind the things that were great about being a kid in the first place, the things they still liked but for some reason thought it was important to feel ashamed of liking. She didn't understand those people at all.

In his office one May afternoon Adam got a call from his brother saying that he and his wife, Paige, were coming to New York for something called the upfronts; he didn't want to take Adam up on his offer to stay with them-writers, he said, got few enough perks in this world and he wanted to soak his employers for every room-service amenity he could think of-but they agreed to come over for dinner on their first night in town. Conrad had never been to the apartment on Columbus before. The brothers were less a part of each other's lives than they would have liked, mostly on account of geography and work schedules but also because of Paige. Twelve years younger than Conrad, she felt intimidated and rudely excluded by any conversation that referenced the years before he met her, when she was just a child; she also had a suspicion that Cynthia did not like her, which was entirely correct.

"What the h.e.l.l does your brother see in her?" she would ask Adam after every encounter; Adam would shrug supportively, but he knew the answer to the question. Conrad made a tidy living in Los Angeles writing movie scripts even though nothing he'd written had ever risen high enough on the developmental scale to be acted out by performers in front of cameras. One of his screenplays, though, had led to a staff job on an hour-long TV drama called The Lotus Eaters The Lotus Eaters, about a group of high-school students who lived in Hawaii. Conrad traveled there twice a year, along with the entire production staff, for research purposes, and on one of these trips he had become better acquainted with Paige, a production designer who worked just two offices down from him back in LA. There was something about those Hawaiian junkets that accelerated intimacy. Adam knew his little brother well enough to know that the point was not so much that Paige was attractive but that she was attractive in a certain sterile, cla.s.sic way-blonde, very thin, small-featured, always put together-that Conrad had long ago convinced himself was out of his league. It made perfect sense that the first woman who proved him wrong on this score would be the one he wound up asking to marry him. Now they spent their off-hours at clubs and concerts and bars trying to absorb osmotically, for scriptwriting purposes, the rituals and value systems of privileged eighteen-year-olds. Paige was an enormous help in this regard.

After dinner the kids disappeared downstairs and Adam brought four gla.s.ses filled with whiskey out onto the patio, where Conrad was pointing out various New York landmarks, not always correctly, to his wife. The moon hung over the park and the blue-lit planetarium, low enough to be scored every few minutes by the silhouette of a plane. "This is quite something," Conrad said. "Who knew there was such good money in being a master of the universe?"

Paige sniffed her gla.s.s, made a face, and put it down on the table. "Maybe it's not too late for you," she said, in a kind of musical voice intended to suggest she was teasing. "Maybe you could still get into the family business."

"I would," Conrad said, "if I could even figure out what the h.e.l.l it is he does."

"Not a problem," Adam said. "Always room for you, Fredo."

They all laughed, Paige a little less heartily, because she didn't know who Fredo was. In an effort to keep the conversation from escaping her completely, she said, "You know who would totally lose it over this apartment, Con? Tracy."

Conrad nodded vigorously as if he'd been thinking the same thing. "Who's Tracy?" Cynthia asked. "Tracy Cepeda is our show's chief location scout," Conrad said. "She would collapse if she saw this place. She'd offer you a mint to shoot in here. Even though we'd probably need to CGI some sand and palm trees out these windows."

Adam felt his cell phone vibrate; he ignored it. It was hard for your eye not to be drawn to Paige because she was, in a way that was compelling without being at all s.e.xual, so flawless. When she opened her mouth she became Paige but when she was silent, and still, there were no idiosyncracies in her face at all. Adam knew from Conrad that she had started out as an actress but did not like to talk about how badly that had gone.

"You better be careful he doesn't write you all into the show," Paige said, elbowing him. Conrad winced. "Please," he said. "But it's true that this place looks like a set. And so do the people in it. I mean, no joke, we spend weeks in casting trying to find kids who look exactly like April and Jonas. Adam, this is bourbon? What kind is it?"

"It's rye, actually."

"Wow," Conrad said. He held up his empty gla.s.s and stared into it.

"Oh, Connie, you'll have beautiful children too," Cynthia said. "Provided Paige can find a way to reproduce without you, that is. What is that called again? Reproduction without s.e.x? Paige, what's the word I'm looking for?" Adam shot her a look intended to signal that she was close to the borderline.

"If you're ever hard up for money, just fly the family to LA, and both kids will have agents before you're out of baggage claim," Conrad said. "Parthenogenesis, by the way, is what it's called. Seriously, though, I can't quite believe I'm related to them." He stared at Adam. "You either," he said, swiping at his older brother's stomach. "Seriously, what kind of Faustian s.h.i.+t is going on around here? You literally do not look a day older than you did in college. It's annoying as h.e.l.l. What is the secret?"

Adam smiled. "Commitment, mon frere," mon frere," he said. "Commitment to the body. You should try it." he said. "Commitment to the body. You should try it."

"Commitment my a.s.s. You're a f.u.c.king vampire."

The cell phone buzzed in Adam's pocket. The incoming number was Devon's, which was not something that was supposed to happen. "Excuse me a second?" he said, and went inside.

The three of them stood silently in front of the moon for a while, arms crossed on the patio railing. Conrad started. "Jesus, I just almost dropped my gla.s.s over the side," he said. "Parthenogenesis. There, I can still say it. Cyn, where's the bathroom?"

"There's one off the kitchen," she said, "and one just to the right of the front door as you came in."

When he was gone, Paige and Cynthia exchanged a quick and awkward smile, and then went back to gazing over the railing, into the pocket of darkness that was Central Park.

"I'm sorry I said that about having children," Cynthia said. "I mean, it's really none of my business. I was just giving him s.h.i.+t. We've known each other forever."

Paige tipped her head to indicate it was nothing. "You have a beautiful family," she said. It was just one of those polite expressions people used when they couldn't, or didn't want to, come up with anything else to say; but for some reason it got to Cynthia this time. She felt a little sting at the corners of her eyes.

"Yeah, well," she said, trying to stop herself but failing, "that's what people start saying to you when you get a little older yourself. You have a beautiful family. It's like, yeah, we can tell you were hot once. You notice I don't get any of those remarks about how I don't look any different than I did twenty years ago."

Paige, for once, looked quite thoughtful.

"Time is different for us," she said.

Adam walked back onto the patio, stuffing his cell phone in his pocket. He looked back and forth between the two women. "What?" he said.

It was an old story, how time favored men over women, but in Adam's case, Cynthia thought, it was just as Conrad had said: he wasn't growing more distinguished as he aged-it was more like he wasn't aging at all. His waist size hadn't changed since they got married, which was freaky but at least explicable, considering what a fanatic he was about it. But he wouldn't even have known how to do anything to his face except wash it and shave it and yet that looked the same as it always had too. It wasn't the first time someone else had confirmed it for her. True, he didn't have too many vices, unless working out too hard counted as a vice, which she thought it probably did. He spent too much time in the office, he didn't sleep enough, but whatever toll all this might have been exacting, none of it showed in his face. And if you pointed this out to him, he didn't even understand what you were talking about.

She couldn't compete with that. She still went to the gym three or four times a week, but she had long since come to consider it a ch.o.r.e and, in an effort to at least make it diverting, had gone through fickle infatuations with every bit of technology in there, every new fad and philosophy. The two of them belonged to different gyms-she would never have dreamed of working out with him, he was far too humorless about it. Still, like him, she was interested in hanging onto her physical prime for as long as possible-indefinitely, really. Together they did quite a good job of it. And there was one respect in which Cynthia-though she'd never discussed it with him-was prepared to go further in this effort than he was. They had three friends who'd had work done already; she told Adam about the first two, and then when Marietta had her eyelids and neck done Cynthia had said nothing and waited to see if he'd notice, which he never did. It wasn't like Marietta's t.i.ts had gotten bigger or something; she was only confirming Adam's sense of what she was supposed to look like anyway. Aging would have been more conspicuous. Cynthia still looked fantastic-everyone said so, and she knew they were serious-but it was so hard to look at yourself with fresh eyes. That was the insidious thing about time and its effects: how incremental they were. So far, so good, was her thought, but whenever the moment came, there was no resource she wouldn't call upon.

In the cold morning overcast, wearing shorts and a t-s.h.i.+rt and a lightweight ski hat and a pair of fingerless gloves, Adam put his palms flat against the facade of his building and pushed, until the tightness left his calves. He s.h.i.+fted his hips forward and slowly lowered one heel to the sidewalk, then the other, and when his Achilles tendons felt loose as well, he was good to go. He bounced on his toes a couple of times, exhaled once forcefully through his mouth as if preparing for an entrance onstage, put one finger to his watch, and started running.

Though he kept to the south side of 81st Street, where the sidewalks were wider on the perimeter of the museum grounds, it was still stop and go; he had to work his way around or through the knots of tourists and the pairs of strollers advancing in unison as their nannies chatted behind them. There was nothing to be done until he crossed the transverse exit at Central Park West and pa.s.sed through the low stone gate into the park, and then he found his rhythm. He glided around the softball fields, pa.s.sing everyone else on the path-the fat guys with headbands and hair leaking up from the collars of their s.h.i.+rts, the women in Lycra tights with sweats.h.i.+rts tied self-consciously around their waists, the serious rope-muscled runners with the perfect strides and fixed stares-feeling the familiar warmth and pulse of his blood radiating from his core until there was no part of his body uninvolved in it. He'd never been to the Conservatory Garden before, but he knew roughly where it was-not far from their old apartment, the one where April and Jonas had shared a room. He could have shortened his time by cutting across the North Meadow but it was blocked by that temporary soft orange fencing that signaled a reseeding; so he pa.s.sed all the way out of the park again on the east side and turned north along Fifth Avenue until he saw the theatrical flight of stone steps that led down into the garden. It was laid out in the dimensions of a cross, with trellised roses and reflecting pools on the right and left of him; at the far end, at the foot of a flagstone path, another flight of steps led up to a long, curved, and colonnaded stone arch, and there, sitting on the top step with his arms around his knees, wearing a khaki suit, was Devon.

He stood up slowly and bemusedly as Adam sprinted up the steps, touched his watch again, and stood gazing around the garden with his hands clasped on top of his head, waiting for his heart rate to slow. "Mult.i.tasking," Devon said, a little bitterly. "Nice. No reason meeting me should interfere with your regimen. Won't you have to go home and change now, though, before work, or is it Casual Tuesday or something?"

Adam shook his head. "Not going in this morning," he said. "The boss and I are flying to Minneapolis in a few hours."

They stood beneath the arch, facing back toward Fifth Avenue across the top of the sunken gardens. In the unseasonable cold the paths were almost empty, but not quite; the incongruous country-squire layout made it a popular spot for wedding photos, and so there was a full bridal party standing by one of the reflecting pools, blowing on their hands to keep warm, while a couple of boys in suits who couldn't have been older than six chased each other around the still water. In fact, Adam was the only one in the whole garden not dressed formally. Still, Devon felt like the conspicuous one.

"So?" Adam said. "Shall we go talk amongst the roses?"

"Why not," Devon said. "I'm sure everybody thinks we're f.a.gs anyway."

They descended the steps and turned left on the flagstones toward the unoccupied reflecting pool. "Miguel is out," Devon said.

"No names, please."

"Whatever. One of my a.s.sociates has told me he's out. The one who works at Schwab. He's getting married. He says he's made enough and doesn't want this hanging over his head anymore."