The Privileges_ A Novel Part 8

"Okay," Adam said. "You think he's telling the truth? There's nothing else going on there, no trouble he's in, no debts or anything like that?"

"Why?" Devon said. He meant to sound sarcastic but it just came out petulant. "You thinking of having him killed?"

Adam rolled his eyes. "I'm just wondering why you considered it some kind of emergency. It's happened before. I mean, you know this isn't a good idea, our meeting like this. Not that I don't enjoy your company."

As they finished their first circuit Devon looked up and saw a strange bald man in a tuxedo struggling to fix an expensive camera onto a tripod. He was all the way across the garden, where the bridal party was, but the camera looked like it was pointing right at him. He fought down a taste of panic in his throat. "That's kind of my point, that this same thing happened two months ago. It's not like we can take out an ad to replace these guys. Pretty soon it will be down to you and me, and that would not be tenable. We couldn't disguise it well enough."

"Well," Adam said, "you know a lot more guys in the trenches than I do. Can you think of anyone else you might bring in?"

Devon grimaced. "Yes, probably," he said, "but that's not the point. We can't keep piling risk upon risk, right, and expect to stay lucky forever. I don't know. Honestly I'm wondering if it's time to get out. I want to be smart about this. I mean, am I the only one? Don't you think about this stuff? Aren't you f.u.c.king freezing, by the way?"

Of course Adam thought about it, not because he was p.r.o.ne to fear or paranoia but just as a matter of risk management. He saw perfectly clearly that the whole arrangement was held together at this point only by own his ability to lead, to inspire faith in himself even among people he met only briefly, if ever. Any one of these brokers, Devon included, who slipped up and got caught could always save himself by giving up the top of the chain, and the top of the chain was Adam. So he wasn't sure what there was for Devon to get so stressed about. He had to admit that his initial a.s.sessment of the kid, aboard the Intrepid Intrepid all those years ago, had turned out to be wrong in some respects, though not, of course, in the important one. all those years ago, had turned out to be wrong in some respects, though not, of course, in the important one.

"You say you want to be smart about it," he said, looking into Devon's eyes. "But to say that we can't be successful today because we were successful yesterday-that's not smart, that's just superst.i.tious. You start giving in to ideas about luck or fate or karma or whatever and you're f.u.c.ked. There's no fate. Everything that you and I have made happen in these last however many years? It never happened. It's gone. It doesn't exist. The only thing that exists, the only risk to be a.n.a.lyzed, is what's in front of us today."

"I know," Devon said sulkily. He looked down. Adam knew he had him.

"We are hypercareful. We always have been. We don't give every piece of information to everybody in the chain. And I'm sure you figured out a long time ago that some of the information I give you is bogus, so it never looks to anyone like some unbroken winning streak."

"I'm not questioning anything like that. It's just-the whole thing isn't like I thought it would be. The money is almost like a burden because I'm so paranoid about spending it. And how can you not look back? I don't get that. Which is probably why I'll never be a billionaire. I'm just not a stone killer like you are. See, that's another thing I don't get: as little as I know about you, I know that you are one of those guys, those guys who are like missing a part of their brain or something. No conscience. No memory for losses. So you don't need this. You'd be a player anyway. Why are you doing it still? Don't you think about stopping?"

The bridesmaids had run off to the car to get warm and the wedding photographer was packing his gear into a couple of canvas bags. No conscience? Adam thought. It's not as though I can't remember; it's just that there's nothing constructive about remembering. Still, when he did consider the life his family was living now, a life in which literally anything was possible, every desire was in reach, no potential was allowed to wither, and they had all seen so much of the world; when he thought back to the moment he had gone for it, to his own fearlessness when threatened with the unhappiness of those he loved, and how readily, in the face of that, he had cleared the hurdle that most men would never have the fort.i.tude to clear; and how all this was accomplished by his taking all the risk onto himself, so much so that they would never even have a clue that there was any risk involved; the only reasonable conclusion, he felt, was that it was the n.o.blest thing he had ever done in his life. It was humility, really, that made him so uncomfortable reminiscing about it.

But it was also true that that particular hurdle had been cleared a long time ago, and that there were other reasons he was loath to terminate the life of secret risk, the world inside the world. "Devon," he said, "you're going in to work today, right?"

He fingered his suit. "Some of us have to," he said.

"Well when you do, just take a minute and look around you at everyone else in that office, everyone you work for, everyone who works for you. All of them with their fingers crossed, all of them so afraid that if getting some kind of inside information meant never seeing you again they would make that trade in a heartbeat. I think I know what you think of those people. But you are not one of them. You are Superman. You are a f.u.c.king gangster. The day we go back to feeling safe from risk is the day you can no longer look at them and say to yourself that there's any difference between them and you. Are you really ready to go back to that? Are you really ready to go back to reading bulls.h.i.+t quarterly reports and trying to use those to figure out how the world works? It's no kind of life, leaving your future in the hands of forces that have nothing to do with you and calling them fate or luck or whatever. And there is only this life, dude. I don't want to get all mystical on you, but this is the only life we get, and either you leave your mark on it or it's like you were never here."

They had stopped walking. The garden was now abandoned. Devon, head down, nodded sullenly, like a child. Adam put his hands on the younger man's shoulders.

"No one else," Adam said gently, "knows the things that you and I know. Now. Speaking of being careful. It's time for new cell numbers, right? Did you memorize yours?"

Devon nodded, and recited it. "Done," Adam said, and began bouncing on the b.a.l.l.s of his feet again. "Now relax a little. Have some fun. Wait to hear from me." He ran up the garden steps, headed south until he could breach the low stone wall again, and twenty minutes later he was home. He showered, put on a suit, grabbed his briefcase, hailed a cab, and met Sanford inside the first-cla.s.s lounge in the Delta terminal at LaGuardia. Sanford was sitting in a too-low club chair in front of a muted TV, holding a gla.s.s of wine and looking miserable.

"I can't tell you how much I hate flying these days," he said. "Commercial especially. It's so degraded. Look at what pa.s.ses for first cla.s.s now." His face was tired and florid, even though the gla.s.s of wine was his first. They were on their way to Minneapolis to close a deal with the state's teachers union, which had agreed to let Perini grow their pension fund.

"I almost wonder why we have to go at all," Sanford said to him as they boarded the plane, a few drinks later. "It's all in the bag. But they just need a little face time, before they hand over the pension money to a couple of sharks from New York City. Maybe they just want to make sure we're not Nigerian princes." Adam had the aisle seat and thus took the brunt of the resentful glances from those who boarded after them and had to stand waiting while others tried to smash their carry-ons into the tiny overhead bins in coach. "You know," Sanford said once they were in the air, "I spent a lot of time talking you up with them, and then one of them asked me an odd question. 'If this guy's such a star,' he asked me, 'how do we know he won't bolt and start his own hedge fund or something?'"

Adam smiled. "And you said, 'Hey, you're right, I'd better go and give that guy a ma.s.sive midyear bonus right away'?"

Sanford slapped him affectionately on the knee. "Good one," he said. "No, I told him that you were still a young man. And that the best thing about you is that with all the ego in this business, you're not one of those guys obsessed with having a high profile. Honestly, if you'd asked me ten years ago, I would have bet I'd have lost you by now. But you're an old-school guy, a throwback in a lot of ways. Put your head down, do your job, respect the traditions, and everybody gets rich enough in the end. Lazard was like that when I worked there, a hundred years ago. Anyway, I can't tell you what a comfort it is to me now."

He looked out the window at the ground far below, the lit veins of the empty streets, the bright ball fields and parking lots. "It's funny how much I've grown to hate this," he said. "I used to take it for granted. Airplanes and airports. But lately I just want to be out on the water. It's almost all I think about."

A few minutes later he was asleep, his cheek sunk against his shoulder, his lower lip drooping. Not a flattering look, Adam thought, and closed his eyes.

There was a template for everything somewhere, an overgrown headwater of the original and unprecedented, and you might hack away in search of it your whole life long and never find it. Or, on the other hand, you might. Jonas hated having his ignorance exposed. On the M79 bus coming home from school some fat guy wearing board shorts even though it was about forty degrees out tried to peek over his shoulder to see what he was listening to on his iPod. Jonas showed him the screen. The guy made a condescending face: "Reheated Joy Division," he said, and Jonas nodded in agreement, like what-can-you-do, but then he couldn't wait to get home and get on the computer and find out who Joy Division was. And a couple of hours later he had to conclude that the fat guy was right. Mostly just by virtue of being older, but still. The more you learned about something you thought was good, the more holes like this you fell into. His own obsessions tended to bear Jonas backward in time, and eventually they led him to the sad but empirical conclusion that the popular music of his own day and age sucked a.s.s.

In tenth grade this was not a mainstream view. If you wanted to be a music sn.o.b, fine, but you were expected to do so by raving obnoxiously about some band no one else had ever heard of because they'd only formed three weeks ago and played one gig. Jonas knew guys like that, older guys who ran the high-school radio station n.o.body listened to and who were flunking English because they spent so much time commenting on one another's blogs, and even though he wanted nothing to do with them he had to cop to their being kindred spirits, because really they were jonesing for the same thing he was: the unspoiled, the uncorrupted, the pure of intent. They were just looking for it in the wrong place. Then of course there were all the kids in the happy mainstream, the kids whose moms drove them out to Na.s.sau Coliseum to see some dancing boy-band lip-synch songs of longing vetted by a focus group of ten-year-old girls. That s.h.i.+t was beyond the pale. It was too hard to believe that there was such a thing as not even caring, not bothering to distinguish in terms of value between the simulated and the real.

There was something sort of priestly about him when it came to music, and as with most priests, some people respected his outlook and some people just found the whole att.i.tude a bit much. Certainly it put him outside the realm of anything girls might be interested in. And there was another big downside to having such an exacting ear, which was that it tortured Jonas to know how mediocre and ordinary his own band sounded, himself not excepted. They were never going to be good. Still, he practiced and practiced. The others were blissfully optimistic, which was, he thought, a lovely thing to be able to be. They did a decent "Sweet Jane," because really if you couldn't get that down what hope was there for you? They played together once or twice a week in an old boathouse near the FDR Drive, a property that their lead singer's father had bought up but hadn't yet gotten a zoning abeyance to convert. It was hard to find places in the city to rehea.r.s.e-probably easier to find places to perform, which was unfortunately where the fantasies of Jonas's band-mates tended to drift anyway.

Girls did sometimes come to their rehearsals, though. Even senior girls like the completely unattainable Tori Barbosa. It proved once and for all the tremendous magical properties of rock and roll, Jonas thought, that even a band that sucked as bad as they did still attracted girls. He was the youngest among them and had the reputation of being the best musician as well, but that was because he was the only one who bothered to practice outside of rehearsal. One of the most depressing manifestations of their lameness was how much time they spent naming themselves. Haskell, their singer, thought some preemptive irony was in order and wanted them to call themselves The Privileged, or The Privileges. The notion of preemptive irony made Jonas want to kill himself; since he was always trying to interest them in a more rootsy direction anyway, he kept suggesting The Headwaters, like a kind of quest for the source rather than just some bar band-style aping of that month's Top 40. But every time they wrote it down and looked at it, somebody would say, "The Headwaiters?" Every time. Then Alex, the drummer, had a revelation while watching a film in 20th Century U.S. History and so their name, at least until the next time they decided to argue about it, was Run Bobby Run.

With the cars roaring by on the FDR outside the boathouse door, they summoned the attention span for a pa.s.sable version of "People Who Died." Everyone was impressed with Jonas's solo, and a couple of the spectators even came over afterward to tell him so, but at the end of the evening of course all the girls went off with the older guys and Jonas called the car service to come take him home. He needed to study, and he needed to sleep, but surplus adrenaline wouldn't really permit him to do either; instead he turned on the record player and put on his headphones. Lately he was on a serious bluegra.s.s kick. There was no end to that stuff-you were always stumbling on these amazing old 78s or field recordings that, the first time you played them, went off in your head like little bombs. He'd think so-and-so was a discovery of his and then learn later that, to real aficionados of the music, so-and-so was like Shakespeare or Tolstoy. His ignorance, he sometimes felt, was boundless.

He saw a shadow fall across the line of light that came in from the hallway, under his bedroom door. It was his mom, he knew, just checking to make sure he was back home. He didn't even need to take the headphones off; he s.h.i.+fted around in his chair so it squeaked a little, and the foot shadows moved off again. Someone was always awake in that apartment. He opened up his cell and checked the time: 1:52. Then he turned back toward the blue lights of the planetarium outside his window.

I used to think my daddy was a black man With scrip enough to buy the company store Now he goes downtown with empty pockets And his face as white as February snow What the h.e.l.l ever happened to country music, anyway? It used to be so f.u.c.king dark it took your breath away. Just a few more weary days and then I'll fly away. Now it was a museum of itself, a pander-factory full of Vegas-style reactionaries in thousand-dollar hats. What was good about it was never coming back. Jonas slid the volume up and put his feet on the windowsill and listened until he saw the sun starting to brighten the planets below him.

This world is not my home, I'm just a-pa.s.sing through My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue The angels beckon me to heaven's open door And I can't feel at home in this world anymore In the morning he came upstairs to breakfast feeling temporarily okay after a shower and drank the remnants of some kind of smoothie April had left in the fridge the night before. She pa.s.sed him on her way out the door. She was part of that universe at school, the Tori Barbosa universe, and friends of his-total strangers, for that matter, kids from other schools sometimes-would come up to him and ask about her in ways that were pathetic and stalkerish. His sister was sort of a stranger to him but not enough of one that he could see her in the way everybody else apparently saw her.

"You look like s.h.i.+t," she said, and patted him on the head.

Adam came in through the front door drenched in sweat from a run. Jonas liked running too-he hated sports in general but there was something ascetic about running, something monkish-but there was no way he could hang with his father, who kept a chart of his own split times and was talking about entering next year's marathon. Adam sat down across from him and asked him how everything was going, and by the time that conversation was over Jonas had gotten permission to go down to Sam Ash and buy himself a banjo. Cynthia was still asleep and would be until after everyone else was out of the house.

It sounded hypocritical, he knew, to be so hung up on originality and authenticity when he was playing in a cover band; but that choice had been dictated less by aesthetics than by the discovery that songwriting was brutally hard. They all gave it a try at some point and the results were uniformly atrocious, with hurt feelings to contend with on top of that. So they went back to covers, but Jonas kept thinking that they could at least aspire to cover some material their audience didn't already know by heart. That way at least you could argue you were maybe doing the music a service. He came to rehearsal one night with the banjo and a CD he'd burned of Jimmy Martin's "You Don't Know My Mind," which was one of the scariest songs he'd ever heard in his life. He'd even found sheet music for it online, though only he and Alex knew how to read music anyway. He played the CD for them and was pierced by the looks on their faces even though on some level it was exactly the reaction he'd expected.

"It's interesting," Haskell said, "but I don't think we can pull off that whole blues thing. You least of all, actually."

"It's not blues," Jonas said. He felt exposed now, in the way one does when one confesses to a crush, and he didn't want to make things worse by getting into an argument. Still, he couldn't help it. "At least know what you're talking about before you dismiss it. This guy was a poor drunk from the Tennessee mountains. He wasn't trying to get on MTV or get his s.h.i.+t in a Verizon commercial. He had nothing but what came out of him. And you guys get all excited about The Strokes or whatever when it's all just prepackaged bulls.h.i.+t."

They looked at each other in a way that reminded him horribly of how young he was. "Look," Haskell said gently, "you want to talk authentic, how authentic would it look for me to be singing about being a Tennessee dirt farmer or whatever? That's not who I am."

"Who are you?" Jonas said.

There must have been some expression on his face he wasn't aware of, because Alex said, "Who needs a beer?" But it was past that point already. "I can tell you who I'm not," Haskell said. "I'm not some self-hating son of a zillionaire. I'm not some condescending hypocrite poser. So you and your banjo f.u.c.k off. Grab your f.u.c.king Gibson and back me up on some songs about getting drunk and laid because when we are through here I am going to get both of those things. Authentic enough for you?"

Tori Barbosa was right there listening to the whole thing. It seemed too humiliating to walk out. Red-faced, he strapped on his guitar and looked at Alex, who tapped his fist to his heart a couple of times and then counted off "Sweet Emotion."

For Christmas, as usual, Jonas's parents asked him what he wanted; he said he wanted all twelve volumes of the Alan Lomax Library of Congress recordings, on vinyl, and since they didn't have the first idea how to acquire such a thing, he bought it himself online and put it on their credit card. Over the winter he got the flu and had to miss a few rehearsals, and when he found out they'd had some kid from Collegiate sitting in for him, he texted Haskell and said he was out of the band. He spent evenings in his room with the headphones on, reading liner notes about Lomax and how he literally tromped through fields with a microphone in his hand and a huge reel-to-reel slung over his shoulder, recording things no one had ever recorded before. The guitars and the banjo sat on their stands in the corner. The forties, the thirties, the twenties: that, he kept thinking, was the time to be alive.

In May, just a week before the end of the school year, Ruth's husband Warren died. He'd had a lung removed two weeks earlier but never made it home from the hospital. Even though his cancer had been diagnosed two years ago, Cynthia was almost as surprised as if the news had come out of nowhere; her mother's peerless flair for pessimism had her convinced, right up until the final hysterical phone call, that Ruth was probably making too big a deal out of it.

The four of them flew to Pittsburgh the next morning. Adam asked Cynthia if she planned to stay on for a few days after the funeral to "help out" and Cynthia said she didn't know, it hadn't occurred to her. Indeed there was a whole barrage of quotidian death-consequences that somehow had never occurred to her. Ruth came to the door to greet them in what for her might have pa.s.sed as high spirits; she exclaimed, as well she might have, over the changes in her tall and comely grandchildren, who had not seen her in years and who were not entirely sure how to act but instinctively determined to err on the side of restraint. "It'll be so nice for you to see your cousins," Ruth said to them, and at the word "cousins" Cynthia saw them indiscreetly catch each other's startled eyes.

The funeral was still three days away. Ruth kept stressing how much she would require Cynthia's help with various decisions but then it would turn out that she had already made those decisions anyway, some of them so far in advance as to border on the ghoulish. Cynthia had little advice to offer in any case. She had no experience with funerals but beyond that she could bring only a generic approach to the question of how Warren's life ought to be celebrated. He was a sort of machine of dependability. He was also a former managing partner at Reed Smith and a surprising amount of ceremony was dictated by that, which was helpful if also a little perverse, as if the law firm were a branch of the armed services with attendant arcane, unquestioned rituals. Ruth wanted a closed casket because toward the end he'd looked too little like himself. They could put a lot of makeup on him but they couldn't put the weight back on. She went instead for a large framed photo to be placed on top of the casket itself, a formal portrait commissioned when he'd been made managing partner: round-faced, smiling appropriately, projecting, with his gla.s.ses and his silver hair, a kind of well-fed competence.

The house was too small for all of them to sleep in; they spent the day there, battling their own restlessness as an a.s.sortment of Tupperware-bearing geriatric strangers consoled them on their loss, and then at night they escaped to the Hilton downtown, where they splurged on every silly, expensive amenity as a way of getting the hours of toxic solemnity out of their systems. The tips Adam doled out had the bell staff literally fighting for his attention. He'd never really liked Ruth: he didn't do well with negative people. This time was different, obviously, and he was more than willing to make allowances; still, he wasn't sure how to take it whenever she acted as if she and Adam were as close as mother and son, not just when others were around but even in the rare minutes when the two of them were alone together. She didn't seem to be performing, either, as she often did. When he smiled and stood aside in her kitchen doorway just to let her pa.s.s, she put her forehead on his shoulder and closed her eyes, and Adam felt as he might have if a woman in a strange city had mistaken him for someone else.

He wasn't sure what to tell the kids to do in that house of mourning, so he settled for telling them what not to do: no texting from inside Grandma's house, no earphones in their ears for any reason. Save it all for the hotel. He and Cynthia took them to the church where they were married and the four of them even had dinner in the Athletic Club dining room, which was the site of their reception; Jonas and April were indulgent about it at best. Nor were they especially diverted by the introduction of their "cousins," a term that turned out to refer to the twin sons of Cynthia's stepsister, Deborah. The two women hadn't had occasion to speak to each other in years; April heard her mother cooing about some recent Christmas-card photo of the twins but it was not any Christmas card that she and Jonas had ever seen. The boys were five years old and, April couldn't stop herself from thinking, really unfortunate-looking. Virtually the only way to get them to stop talking was to feed them something. Somehow they'd gotten to know their grandpa Warren much better than she and Jonas ever had, and they turned cutely somber when discussing the loss of him.

Deborah was much altered. She was fat, for starters, with no vestiges of the goth edge, faint to begin with, she had cultivated as a grad student, to say nothing of her one night at Bellevue; she taught twentieth-century art history at Boston University, as did her husband, who was a good deal older than her and had been, Cynthia was amused to learn, the chair of the search committee that hired her. When Deborah cried at the funeral, not at all showily, Cynthia found herself struggling not to stare at her, without quite knowing why. She had written a eulogy for her father but had arranged for her husband to read it for her, as she doubted her ability to get through it. And when the last mourner had gone through the receiving line in the room at the back of the church after the service, Cynthia and Deborah hugged.

But that feeling of kins.h.i.+p was short-lived. After the last guest left Ruth's house that evening, Cynthia heard two more voices out on the deck, and when she went out to investigate she found Deborah and Jonas leaning against the railing, deep in conversation. She tried to conceal her surprise, but could not, and when they both noticed her standing there in the doorway, they laughed. "We're arguing about Andy Warhol," Deborah said. "Pittsburgh's own. I feel like I'm defending my thesis again." Unless Andy Warhol played the f.u.c.king banjo, Cynthia thought, she would not have guessed that Jonas knew or cared who he was; but before she could say anything else, Jonas said, "Mom, what time is our flight tomorrow?"

"I'm actually not leaving tomorrow after all," Cynthia said. "Your flight is at something like three-thirty."

Jonas pumped his fist, and Deborah said, "Well, would you mind then if I took Jonas out to the Warhol Museum? One of the curators there is an old cla.s.smate of mine. It's a pretty great museum, actually. Maybe you want to come too."

She did not miss the look that crossed her son's face when Deborah made that last suggestion. "No," she said, "I'm sure it's a real life-changer and all that, but there's things to take care of around here. You go. Knock yourselves out. Just be back at the hotel by, I don't know, one." Smiling as tightly as her mother might have, she stepped back inside the house and slid the door shut. Back in the kitchen there were a thousand dishes to wash, and she briefly entertained the pros and cons of just throwing them all in the garbage. It's not like there'd ever be a crowd this size here again. Andy Warhol, she thought suddenly. It's one thing to fall for that bulls.h.i.+t as a high-school student, but imagine devoting your whole life to it.

Adam and the kids flew home the next day, and so, as it turned out, did Deborah's family; but Deborah stuck around. Cynthia supposed she should be happy that the burden of the next few days-all those hours maintaining one's patience on the phone with the insurance company or the idiots at Social Security-wasn't all going to fall on her, only child or not. Still, it was a little confounding to see how close Deborah and Ruth seemed to have become over the past few years, outside of Cynthia's awareness. At some point, she thought, Deborah must have really bought into that whole extended-family thing, because she certainly hadn't been buying into it when they first met each other, more than fifteen years ago now.

As for Ruth, having both girls in the house helped her maintain the bizarre equanimity that had characterized her all week. She'd wept a little during the service but otherwise there had been no great outpouring of grief. Cynthia believed this was some kind of denial. Or maybe it was relief. Or maybe it was just that she was old and alone and so there was no longer any need for her customary exaggeration of how hopeless things were. She puttered and took naps and answered condolence cards and fought good-naturedly with them when they tried to cook for her. She was sixty-seven and there was nothing to suggest that she couldn't go on like this for another twenty or thirty years.

She was easily exhausted, though, and went to bed early, and a few minutes later Cynthia was sitting numbly in the kitchen staring at a light-switch cover shaped like a rooster when Deborah walked in happily waving a bottle of k.n.o.b Creek bourbon she'd found in the liquor cabinet. Hallelujah, Cynthia thought.

"So when are you heading back?" Deborah said, after the first one.

"The day after tomorrow, I think. I've got a board meeting, and then we have this place down in Anguilla we go to sometimes, so we'll go there when school's out, which is in ... What is today? Anyway, it's next week."

Deborah nodded but was unable to suppress an ambivalent laugh. "You guys have really been successful," was what she said.

Cynthia wasn't sure how to reply to that one. "It's all Adam," she said finally. "Some people just have a talent for investing."

"Well, you two always did seem to have that kind of penumbra around you. And now your kids have got it too."

"Your boys are adorable," Cynthia said, reaching for the bottle.

"Thank you. And the weird thing is, I have two more. Sort of. Sebastian has two daughters from his first marriage. Both in college now. So after all these years, I'm the stepmother."

"Ironic would be the word there, I guess," Cynthia said.

"Say this for my dad," Deborah said, holding up the bottle. "He knew that life was too short to settle for cheap liquor."

"So I'm curious," Cynthia said. She could see already that Deborah was something of a lightweight, and who knew but that this might be the last time they ever talked. "What's happened to you? I mean the one thing I always thought we had in common was thinking that the whole blended-family thing or whatever people call it was bulls.h.i.+t. You always seemed to hate it worse than I did. And now you're all Aunty Deborah with Jonas, and you're treating Ruth like she's your own mom. Is your own mom even still alive? That seems like something I should know, I guess, but I have no idea."

Deborah looked at her slyly. "She lives with us," she said. "Back in Boston."

"Get the f.u.c.k out of here."

She nodded, amused by herself. "I don't know when it happened exactly, but somehow the older I got the more exposed I felt, and the whole family idea got real meaningful to me. I developed this need for it. I had a theory that it had to do with being an only child, like the fear of being alone that comes with that, but I guess not. It didn't happen to you."

"So is this it for you, in terms of coming out here to visit or to help Ruth or whatever? I've always kind of wondered about the step-thing. Does it end when you're an adult? Does it end when the marriage that made it happen ends?"

Deborah considered it. She put her chin down on the kitchen table and stared at the bottle. "Time will kick your a.s.s," she said. "I used to be so angry about how fake the whole thing was. I was p.i.s.sed about having to be in your wedding, even. But you wait around long enough and these bogus connections harden into something real, whether you like it or not. I really think of Ruth as one of my parents now. I don't think Dad's death can undo that."

"What will happen to her?" Cynthia said suddenly. "You know there's going to be a huge crash once we're gone. It must f.u.c.king suck to be old. It must suck to have your husband die. But I mean what can we do about it? The only way to hold it off is to stay here forever. And there's no way she's coming to live with us, I mean, hats off to you and all that, but I could never do it."

"She'd never come live with you anyway, even if you asked her. Or with me. No way Ruth could ever open herself up enough to depend on one of us like that. I think she'll actually do okay living alone. Better than most people. The thing to worry about, if you want to worry about something, is what if her health goes south, like Dad's did. Then you're looking at some hard choices."

Did she mean "you" as in "one," or "you" as in "Cynthia"? But there was no way to ask for a clarification because she felt craven and selfish just for wondering. Anyway, those decisions were still a long way off. "She's never been sick a day in her life," Cynthia said.

There was some kind of noise from the direction of the living room, and they both c.o.c.ked their heads in case Ruth was up, but only silence followed. The muted TV still flickered on the walls beyond the kitchen door.

"You know," Deborah said, "my dad was really a great guy. He had his limits in terms of expressiveness, but he was really loving. And he always had a soft spot for you. I think because you were certain things I wasn't. It hurt him that you didn't think of him as a parent. You never really gave him a chance."

Her eyes were drunk. Either she hadn't done this in a long time or she did it a lot. Cynthia suddenly lost interest in the answer. You started taking on other people's grievances and there was no end to it. She was n.o.body's sister, and neither was Deborah. It was one thing to conspire about the future but there was no way she was going back into the past.

"I already have a father," she said.

Juniors and seniors from Dalton still came and went at the Moreys' apartment like it was some kind of after-school program; but months after April's friend Robin had stopped living there, gone back to rea.s.sume her place inside her own much more opaque home, April still missed having her around. Which was ironic, she thought, because toward the end of Robin's time there, the girl's behavior had actually started to offend her a little, less on her own behalf than on her mother's. Robin brought drugs into the house, she used her key to sneak out at night and flirted with the doorman so he wouldn't bust her, she even brought guys into the downstairs half of the apartment in secret, and even though April had done just about all of these things herself at one time or another, her thought this time was: My mother takes you in and gives you every freedom and this is how you pay her back?

When it got around Dalton that she was essentially a runaway, and that her mom had beaten her (April herself may have been the one who let that slip), Robin's school persona had undergone a sea change. She went from a carefully cultivated normality to a kind of exalted strangeness. She started playing up to her new persona by mouthing off to teachers (who, like Cynthia, basically let her get away with anything), to other kids, to the people who worked at the Starbucks near school where they hung out during free periods. Friday afternoons sometimes she'd be so drunk she'd fall asleep in cla.s.s. To others it might have looked like acting out but April saw it as pure performance. Only she knew how good the chances were that this supposedly damaged bada.s.s would end the day lying in her pajamas on April's couch with her head in April's mother's lap while the three of them watched movies and shared a bag of red licorice. But now that was over and Robin and she, though still friends, didn't share anything like that at all.

Once in a while, when Robin was still living there, when the two of them were up late and couldn't get to sleep, they used to lie side by side on April's bed with their laptops and go into these chat rooms that were obviously full of older guys. It was hilarious, because you could say absolutely anything to them with no repercussions because they could have been anywhere in the world, and so, for that matter, could the girls themselves. The guys were just glad you weren't cops, probably. They would m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e pathetically while April and Robin, lying on their backs with their laptops on their stomachs, typed the most ridiculous p.o.r.n and then tilted their screens toward each other to read, trying to outdo themselves until they both laughed so hard they hurt. It would always end with the loser asking to meet you. He didn't care where you were; he'd travel anywhere to meet Bobbi or Sammi or whatever name they'd given each other that night. They were safe because they lied about everything. Though it wasn't the same, April still did it sometimes by herself when she was bored.

Now on most weekends it was just the four of them. One Friday April's mother announced that they were all going to the Hamptons the next morning to look at houses. This was a bit of a surprise; though they visited people out there all the time, her dad in particular had resisted joining the general migration for years, saying that it never changed and there had to be some more interesting place in the world to see. They would spend the next several weekends on the East End looking if they needed to, Cynthia said, but the kids exchanged an eye-roll at that one because once their mother had made up her mind to purchase something, she usually got what she wanted in the first hour. Their dad drove them out to Amagansett in the morning and, sure enough, maybe the third place they saw had their mom hooked. It was really nice, April had to admit-about a hundred feet from the beach-and just being out here at all would bring her closer to a lot of her friends on the weekends. Another home to fill up with stuff. Her mom would be in heaven for the next few months.

Back in the city a few nights later she was in her room alone writing to one of the deviants in the chat room and, when he asked her her name, she thoughtlessly typed April. She had a moment of total panic until she remembered that there were a million Aprils in the world. But after that night, whenever she would log on, amid all the lying and the fake p.o.r.n-star affect there would be this one voice on the screen that would sometimes pop up and say, April? Is that you? His name, or so he said, was Neil, and he lived in Connecticut. Far from the city? she wrote, and he said, Not far at all. Why? He asked for a picture, and she said no way. He sent her one of himself. A little old, maybe, but not a complete gimp, that is if it was really a picture of him at all. There was no way to know, or rather there was only one way to know. That's all the Internet was, lies gone wild, and it only made you dizzy if you tried to sort it out.

He was really clever about it. He didn't say, Do you want to meet? Do you want to meet? He said, I will be at the Starbucks on 41st and Seventh at 2:00 PM PM on Wednesday June 18th. I really hope you'll be brave enough to be there too. You'll recognize me from the photo. on Wednesday June 18th. I really hope you'll be brave enough to be there too. You'll recognize me from the photo.

She didn't breathe a word to Robin about it, nor to anyone else. On the other hand, even though it was a secret, there was no question she was doing it for an audience, even if that audience was, in a strange way, made up. People would be in awe of her if they knew: even if they said they thought it was an incredibly stupid thing to do, they would be in awe of her fearlessness, whether it turned out there was something to fear there or not. She would be the bada.s.s, the damaged one. If, in a given activity, there was a next step to be taken-a taller cliff to dive from, purer drugs to try, something bigger and more difficult to steal-someone, at some point, was going to take that step, it was like a law of nature, and so let the record reflect that that someone was her.

She saw him right away, and he smiled at her, but she made a big show of getting a Venti Americano first before joining him. "I cannot believe," he said first thing, "how beautiful you are," and she realized then how the very same thing that might sound desperate and pathetic when you saw it in type on your laptop screen might be, in other, more direct circ.u.mstances, a very powerful thing to hear. She didn't give away any details, not her last name or the name of her school or her address, or what her parents did; he seemed to understand, though, what was difficult about all this for her, even to antic.i.p.ate it sometimes, and so he helped her relax by talking a lot about himself. He was, he said, a private investor ("So's my dad," she wanted to say but didn't) who worked at home but had managed to make a lot of money-"not as much money as you have, though, I bet," he said. She wondered how he could tell that about her, how it showed. He'd grown up in Greenwich and had inherited his own house after his parents died. Living in your hometown was cool, but it was hard to meet new people. She really wanted to ask him how old he was-she couldn't tell the difference between thirty and fifty, it all looked the same to her at her age-but she was afraid of appearing too interested in him. She hardly moved except to lift the coffee to her mouth.

"So I won't ask you where you live, April," he said, smiling, like it was some kind of coyness that kept her silent, "but how did you get down here today? Subway?"

She'd taken a cab, but she nodded yes. Any lie, even a pointless one, seemed like a good idea. Then, clearing her throat first, she said, "You? Do you take the train in or what?"

His smile broadened. "I drove," he said. "It's really a short drive. You'd love my car. It's a convertible. But then if you get stuck in traffic or the rain or whatever, you put up the top and I've got a killer sound system in there-you just plug your iPod in and blast it. You've got an iPod, right? Everyone does these days. I'd even let you drive it if you wanted. Or maybe you're not old enough for a permit yet?"

She stared at him. She wondered why they weren't drawing more attention from everyone else in there, an older guy and a high-school girl in a Starbucks in the middle of the day. But maybe it didn't seem that unusual to people.

"Well," Neil said, "even if you aren't old enough to drive, that could be our little secret."

She realized then that, whatever outcome she had been pointing this toward-one-upping Robin, getting her mother's attention again, whatever subconscious wish some shrink would probably say she was acting on right now-it was all contingent on the idea that someone would see her, that she would get caught. The idea that she would not get caught had never really hit her before now.

"Do you want to go outside and see it?" Neil said.

In the end she got as far as the car itself but she didn't get inside it. He wasn't angry with her at all. He knew how to be patient. He wrote down his cell number for her, said he looked forward to seeing her again, and he gave her a long hug.

Nine days later, the phone rang at the Moreys; it was Robin, and she asked, for some reason, for Cynthia. Cynthia held the phone to her ear and didn't say anything for half a minute; her expression was perfectly flat. Then she hung up and stood and walked straight into her bedroom and shut the door, but when she brushed past April in the hallway she was already crying. Robin's mother had cut her wrists in the bathtub the night before last and was dead. Adam was out of the country on business, and Cynthia, disappointingly, wasn't even able to pull herself together and at least make a show of strength for Robin's sake; so April wound up being the one Morey to go to the funeral. The whole cla.s.s went. They sat together in the back pews from which they could easily see Robin and her father up front, but what difference did that make, April realized-Robin was a million miles away. They might as well have been watching her on TV. The gulf between them was so terrible that they were all too scared to say or do anything to try to traverse it.

Robin wasn't back at Dalton in the fall, but the dean of the upper school said he was still hopeful she'd be back in January. April threw out Neil's cell number, and never went back into those chat rooms again, though it was not exactly rea.s.suring to know that he was very likely still out there somewhere himself, calling out her real name.

Dalton had a fathers' basketball league that Adam still played in a couple of times a month. It wasn't your standard pickup game. You could tell which ones were the lawyers from the way they stopped the game for two minutes to argue every time somebody called a foul. And some of them, the financial guys especially, were compet.i.tive to the point where you'd be breaking up fights once in a while-not often, but often enough that years ago they'd voted not to let faculty members play, because the idea of losing your temper and throwing an elbow at your kid's history teacher was a little too fraught. The level of compet.i.tion was obviously spotty, but there were some decent athletes in there. And as his own kids grew older and the fathers of new kindergartners joined the league, Adam even found himself on occasion guarded by guys who were actually his age. One night he went up for a rebound and got knocked off balance by someone's shoulder against his hip, and as he landed on one foot he could feel his knee come apart. He remembered standing up again, his arms over the shoulders of two of his teammates, and watching the lower half of his right leg swing from side to side like a pendulum. After three days in the hospital and a week working while bedridden at home, he made his return to Perini on crutches, locked into a kind of ma.s.sive splint that ran from his ankle almost to his hip and kept his right leg as straight as a pencil at all times.

They mocked him about it relentlessly at the office, hiding his crutches, making pirate noises when he stumped by, emailing him videos of famous sports knee blowouts. It was a survival-of-the-fittest kind of humor, where they laughed at his weakness more or less in lieu of killing and eating him, but he didn't mind it, he would have expected no less. His great fear in the months that followed was getting fat. He set his recovery back a couple of weeks, or so his doctor told him, by trying to double up on the exercises his physical therapist had given him.

The a.n.a.lysts in the office were almost all guys in their twenties, and though they loved hanging out with Adam and were in awe of his excellence at what he did-he saw a company's future almost instantly, an instinct that his lack of a business school degree elevated to the level of the mystical and heroic-they couldn't figure out what he was still doing there. Over and over they would sidle up to him, usually in some bar, and let him know that when the time came for him to bolt Perini and start his own fund, he could count on their total loyalty. To a man they felt that Sanford was too risk-averse and that if it weren't for Adam's presence there, his clients' money wouldn't be doing much better than it would in a savings account.

"Someday it will be the right time," was Adam's usual line. "I won't forget we talked."

The truth was that leaving and starting his own shop would bring into play questions of proprietary information, and other forms of unwelcome attention. Part of what insulated him from suspicion is that he himself never appeared, to anyone outside Perini at least, to be the one making the decisions. No one looking at the books would have any way of knowing that Barry, at this point, did literally everything that Adam advised him to. Adam didn't want anyone looking too hard at some of the deals he'd been involved in over the last eight or ten years, because while they might not have known exactly what they were looking for, there was always a chance they would find it anyway. From his point of view the most promising scenario was for things to stay just as they were.