Jonathan Dee - The Privileges

“The man is an animal,” he said. “I think there’s money to be made there, but I’m not sure I can spend another hour in the same room with him. Last time we met he threw a pen at my head. I’m sorry to sacrifice you to this lunatic. Maybe you can get it done, though. People like you. You know that? That’s a gift. You can’t teach it. I’m hungry,” he said suddenly.

“Can I ask you something? Is there a pool here?”

“Good Lord,” Sanford said, “you and the swimming.”

“No,” Adam said, “I was thinking of the kids. They brought their suits. Throw them in the water and they’re good all day. It might give them something to do while we’re sitting here getting loaded.”

Sanford folded his hands on his chest. He had sunk quite low in his chair. “Helicopter,” he said. “That’s the term, right? These days? Helicopter parents, helicopter parenting.”

“Sorry?”

“You’re close to them, aren’t you? I think that’s great.”

“You have children yourself, sir?”

The old man loved to be called sir. “Oh God yes,” he said. “Of course. Anyway, no, there’s no swimming pool here, but we do belong to this little club in town where they can swim all they like. Maybe we can even get some goddamn lunch there, since no lunch appears to be forthcoming here.”

They followed the Sanfords in their car, in a silence generated by the fear that anything they wanted to say might later be innocently repeated in front of their hosts by one of the kids. It also required all of Adam’s concentration not to lose sight of Sanford’s Boxster, which he drove through the narrow roads at aristocratic speed. Adam thought the word “club” betokened a simple swimming pool, and had told the kids so; the family made a collective gasping sound when they came instead upon a clean, still lake hidden improbably high up in the Berkshire foothills. A wooden sign at the gate told them the place was called Cream Hill Pond. The quiet was overwhelming: “No power boats,” Sanford pointed out. “Sunfish city.” White sails dotted the water. There were two tennis courts, but no one was on them. The kids were vibrating with impatience to get into the lake; Cynthia asked Sanford’s wife where the changing rooms were, but Victoria, who looked unhappy and even somewhat baffled to be there at what seemed like the children’s behest, didn’t know and had to ask someone else.

The dark pines, the sun on the water, the shimmer of the triangular sails, it was all so postcard-beautiful that you felt a little stupid giving in to it; but April’s and Jonas’s uncomplicated pleasure was infectious. Cynthia watched them organizing some game in the water with a group of kids they’d met five minutes ago. Rarely did you see the two of them get along so well for so long a stretch and you had to think that the relationship between that and the sheer sense of space out here wasn’t coincidental. She lifted her head to admire the green bowl of the hills. Wide open yet secure. Maybe she’d been looking at this place, this life, through the wrong eyes. All you wanted was for your children to become their best selves, but how were you supposed to know if this was not happening? Victoria was right: they were beautiful, so beautiful you almost felt like you should apologize for it, like something fundamental had been rigged in their favor. Maybe you were denying them something they needed without even knowing it, just because you weren’t thinking big enough, or far enough outside the box of what your own childhood was like.

But as she watched them play she admitted to herself that sometimes this anxiety over whether your kids’ lives were perfectly realized could reach the point where it wasn’t a lot different from Victoria’s trying to match a paint chip: you had to justify the day, and your existence in it, somehow. It was impressive, in a way, that a woman Victoria’s age not only didn’t want children but didn’t really even pretend to like them. Certainly such a life was possible. Certainly there were other things one might do. According to Adam, she sat on the boards of about ten different national charities, where she no doubt made herself a pain in the ass, but what did that really matter when she had the assets and the social position to actually do some good in the world? What did it matter that the money wasn’t hers, as long as it was hers to give away? Cynthia already lived better than anyone in her family ever had, at least until Ruth remarried; still, there was rich and there was rich. She glanced over at Victoria, who wore a huge straw hat that she clamped down on her head with one palm even though there was no wind onshore at all. Cynthia was sorely tempted to ask her how old she was. It wasn’t impossible that they were actually the same age.

“You have a beautiful home,” she said. Victoria was staring back in the direction of the parking lot and didn’t seem to hear.

Sanford, though, nodded graciously. “Shame you all can’t spend the night,” he said. “Next time.” Adam’s shocked expression was luckily hidden behind his sunglasses; they had their overnight bags in the car. “That’s very kind of you,” Cynthia said; she didn’t know how she would keep the kids from howling, though, so she went down to the dock to give them the news out of their hosts’ earshot. Adam saw her put her finger to her lips and give them the universal five-more-minutes signal as they stomped their feet in the water and complained. She knew how to be gracious. Even after ten years together, his more complex desires for her wound up translating themselves into the simpler language of arousal; and as he watched her walk back up the lawn toward the umbrella table where the adults sat, he experienced an untimely urge to pull her back to the parking lot and do her right there up against some old Brahmin’s car. Victoria went off to use the bathroom, and Sanford went off to take a phone call, and Adam was able to give his wife at last the private eye-roll he had wanted to give her all day.

“I am so sorry to put you through this,” he said.

But she just smiled. “Actually, I’m really glad we came,” she said. “If you want to know the truth, it all makes me kind of jealous.”

He was so surprised by that, he couldn’t think of another word to say until their hosts returned. The kids had such a meltdown when the time came to get them out of the water that Adam and Cynthia wound up deciding to leave for New York straight from the club. Once again the men were cleaved from the women, the old man walking Adam in the direction of his own car, with his arm around him.

“So what do you think of all this?” Sanford said, and it sounded astonishingly heartfelt, even if he was drunk. His life, Adam supposed he meant. The thought of being asked to pass judgment on it, even just as a matter of etiquette, made him almost resentful.

“Green with envy,” he said finally. “You have a beautiful home. I mean, I’m sure you have several. But this is a great part of the world. And frankly,” he said, tapping the hood of the Boxster, “this gets me a little hard too.”

Sanford laughed enchantedly. Then he laid his hand on Adam’s cheek. “Patience, my son,” he said. “One day, all this will be yours.”

While they searched for Route 22 signs, Adam noticed his fingers were white around the wheel. “Pretty quiet back there,” he said. “Did you guys have fun today?”

“It was awesome,” April said. “I thought they would have kids, though.”

“Not everybody does, you know,” Cynthia said.

“Dad?” Jonas said meekly. “Can we have a country house?”

Cynthia laughed. “Yeah, Dad,” she said. “How about it?”

Adam said nothing, and after half a minute Cynthia turned around in her seat. “One day,” she said to the kids. “One day soon. We’ll have all that stuff. It just takes time. You have to remember that Mr. Sanford is almost two hundred years old.”