Jonathan Dee - The Privileges

“This,” Jonas said, “is the coolest house I have ever seen.”

No one came outside to greet them; he wasn’t sure how to let their hosts know they had arrived. Honking felt wrong on multiple levels. “So what time is the next tour?” Cynthia said, but just then Mrs. Sanford #4—she introduced herself to Cyn as Victoria, thank God, because Adam had blanked on her name — came gaily through some side door that they hadn’t even noticed was there.

Sanford himself was waiting in the foyer to shake hands with Cynthia and the children, in whom he took no pains to seem interested, and then he and his wife did something that struck Adam as truly old-school: they segregated their guests immediately by gender, with Victoria taking Cynthia and the kids upstairs and Sanford leading Adam down some steps, through a media room, and onto what turned out to be a screened back porch that faced directly, with only a few feet of mowed grass intervening, into the dense woods. The porch was crowded with dozens of large potted and hanging plants, creating for a moment the effect that the spanking-new house was actually a sort of ruin the birches and pines were intent on reclaiming; but in there among the fauna were two large and very softly upholstered rattan chairs, and in between them was a table that held a pitcher of Bloody Marys. The porch was cool and dark, despite which Sanford wore a pair of sunglasses on a cord around his neck. His own glass was already three-quarters empty — he must have been sitting out here before the Moreys arrived — and he filled Adam’s with a stately flourish. “You have a beautiful family,” he said as he sank back into his chair.

“Thank you,” Adam said. “Where have they been taken?”

“Not much to do out here,” was Sanford’s answer. “You’re at least a hundred miles from the ocean, is what I don’t like about it. Still, it is quiet.” He took the celery stalk out of his drink and stuck it in his mouth.

Victoria had launched without prelude into a house tour, recounting the difficulties she’d had getting the various painters and decorators and contractors to adhere to her clearly expressed vision, a separate haughty narrative for every room in the mansion. By the fourth or fifth room Cynthia had a powerful urge to burn the whole place to the ground with this Botoxed stick figure inside it. There was no way they could have been more than ten years apart in age — unless she was a mummy, Cynthia reflected while watching the jaw move in her eerily smooth face, or possibly a vampire, preserved for centuries by the blood of her social inferiors — and yet she spoke as if from some great experiential height, as if, at the end of her remarks, there might be time for a few questions.

“Three times, we painted this room,” she was saying, as if she would even know which end of a paintbrush to hold. “And I had a chip from Barry’s house in Stowe for the painter to match. Hello? Is that so hard? But you know how it is up here in these small towns, you just have to make the best of what you’re given, in terms of contractors and such I mean.”

“Sounds rough,” Cynthia said.

“Are you from New York originally?” Victoria said.

Cynthia, who had turned around to make sure the children hadn’t fallen too far behind, or maybe been snatched by silent ninja domestics, said, “What? No. Near Chicago.”

“And what line is your family in?”

Cynthia repeated the question in her head to be sure she had heard it right. “They’re small-town contractors,” she said.

That she had put her foot in her mouth seemed more plausible to Victoria than the idea of being openly mocked; embarrassed, she looked away, and in avoiding Cynthia’s eyes she seemed to remind herself of the presence of the two children, who, though of course they could have cared less about paint shades and window treatments, were awestruck by the house itself, the scale and gadgetry of it. There were environmental-control panels in every room, touch screens that not only calibrated light and temperature and music but also gave you access to security-camera views of the garage, the grounds, the driveway, and even the other rooms inside the house. It had taken Jonas about ten seconds to figure it out. “There’s Dad!” he said. Cynthia kept throwing him doomsday looks over her shoulder, but having solved the puzzle of the touch screens he couldn’t keep his hands off them, and anyway she was half rooting for him to figure out how to make it rain in there. Soon he had left a trail of images of his father and Sanford flickering in every empty room through which they passed.

Victoria hadn’t noticed that, but she picked up on the kids’ general enchantment and felt gratified again. April was walking a few steps ahead of her brother now, embarrassed by his youthful enthusiasm, trying to blend in with the women, mimicking their facial expressions like someone trying to sneak into the second act of a play. She loved it when new people thought she was older than she was. She was leaning toward Victoria like some kind of thirsty plant, but Victoria seemed disinclined to engage her too directly. “God, these are gorgeous children,” she said to Cynthia. “How old did you say they were?”

“Seven and six,” Cynthia said, ignoring a scowl from April, who felt ages should be rounded up.

“They could model. They look like a Ralph Lauren catalogue. They go to school?”

“Why, yes,” Cynthia said. “We thought that would be wise.”

“Where, though?”

“Dalton,” April offered.

“Very nice,” Victoria said. “And you were smart to have them so young. Easier to bounce back.” And she reached out and casually patted Cynthia just below her waistline, approvingly, a touch so condescendingly intimate that Cynthia was speechless. She tried to remind herself that this was the wife of her husband’s boss and so she would just have to suck it up for the weekend, and when that didn’t work she tried to drum up some sympathetic revulsion at the thought of what old Vicky here must have had to deliver sexually in exchange for this life of high-end vision realizing. But that didn’t really work either, because Sanford, even in his late sixties or whatever he was, was a ridiculously handsome guy.

It was apparently his intent to sit there on the porch drinking Bloody Marys for the duration of his guests’ stay. He was talking now about the upcoming Newport-to-Bermuda yacht race. The Bloody Marys were excellent; Adam was starting to recall the pleasures of getting drunk before lunchtime but this seemed like an odd setting for it, like a myth or a fairy tale in which he might drink the proscribed drink and never find his way back to the surface of the earth. Not that he was nervous around the boss — they’d been drunk together many times — or felt he needed to keep up appearances of any sort. On the contrary: the more he was himself, the more the old man seemed to like him.

He looked abruptly at Adam, struck by an idea. “You could crew,” he said. “The crew I had last year was hopeless. Interested? We’d be out anywhere from four to six days.”

“Sadly,” Adam said, “I know fuck all about sailing.” Sanford’s disappointment lasted only an instant. “You could pick it up,” he said. “I know a sailor when I see one. I see great things in you, you know.”

Adam pretended he hadn’t heard, which was his nearest approach to modesty.

“Those others, they’ll do fine,” Sanford went on. “But they’re lieutenants. You give them a job to do and they’ll get it done — any business needs that. But I see bigger things for you. God knows I won’t be around forever.”

Rather than allow Sanford to stray any farther down this path, Adam said, “So I’m meeting your pal Guy in Milwaukee on Monday morning. I have to fly out there tomorrow night.” “Your pal” was said with some levity; Sanford scowled at the mention of Guy’s name.