Jonathan Dee - The Privileges

Parker’s bonus, Adam knew, was so insultingly small that he had skipped right over resentment and moved straight to terror. He emptied another martini, and beckoned to the waitress with the empty glass. “There’s no buzz,” he said to Adam, “like that good-cause buzz.”

“True dat,” Adam said. In fact, though, the drunker he got, the more restless and vaguely surly he began to feel, which was unusual for him. He could feel himself smiling, so he stopped. There was a bar up on deck as well, and he headed outside to visit it, just to get away from the table for a few minutes. On the stairs he turned and was able to pick out his boss and his wife on the crowded dance floor. It was a field of tuxedos but his eyes were drawn right to them. He watched Sanford turn her around and around in that small space; he said something that made her laugh. It made Adam nostalgic. All the energy and heedlessness and faith in herself that he had always adored had lost its outlet and so that faith had backed up, as it were, into the lives of the children. What was worst was that the life of maximized potential they had always believed in for themselves was still right there in front of them, closer than ever really, but she had stopped looking forward to it, she wouldn’t even lift her head to see it. When he told her about the bonus, she had mustered a polite smile and whistled, like, How nice for you. It was both thrilling and a little sad to see her out there dancing like her old self, drunk and luminous, because it took a crazy setting like this, a fantasy almost, to bring it out of her again. Maybe life needed to better resemble the fantasy. Not that there was some thousand-dollar gala to go to every night. But whatever it was that had to be done, it was his turn to bail her out; she’d bailed him out in more ways than he could count. He couldn’t picture what he might have become without her.

He knew his boss well enough to have no doubt that seducing Cynthia was the one and only thing on his mind right now. It didn’t bother him. Not just because he knew it would never happen: it was right, somehow, that that was what Sanford should try to do, regardless of the fact that his wife was standing right there, or his love for Adam, or the presence of hundreds of onlookers. That was the point of a life like Sanford’s. You pursued what you wanted.

Up on the deck there was some kind of disturbance in the line for drinks: a frat-boy type in front of Adam was complaining to his friends that the kid at the front of the line, who looked about nineteen years old, was chatting up the bartender. “Mack on your own time, Junior,” he said. “Some of us are thirsty here.”

The kid turned around. He had a huge nose, one of those noses that starts practically on the forehead, but on him it looked sort of Roman and oddly handsome. “Take it easy there, Bluto,” he said, and Adam’s eyes widened gleefully at the audacity of it. “She’s my sister.”

“What?” Bluto said.

“I’m not shitting you,” the kid said. “I think we’re twins.” Though he had his drink in hand, he turned back and started murmuring to the bartender again.

Another Wall Street tyke, Adam thought, another kid blowing his bonus money on a party where he thinks he’ll network with people who don’t even know he’s alive. The whole bonus thing got to him, actually, in a way it hadn’t before. He’d been given a big bonus this year. What did that even mean? Maybe he should buy himself a sailboat, or find more expensive hotels to stay in during the few weeks a year he was allowed to travel where he wanted instead of Charlotte or Omaha, or see if he could find an even more overpriced school to send his kids to? He felt like a sap. Everybody acted like the amount mattered, when what mattered was the notion of getting a bonus at all, of being outside that small circle wherein it was decided how much a man’s work was worth, how close you had come to some goal somebody else had set for you. Sanford could have given him two million and the principle would still be the same. Meanwhile time was going by, and the life around you started to calcify while the Barry Sanfords of the world paid you to wait to be told what would happen next.

His relationship to drinking had grown complicated. The more he felt he wanted one, the more he tried not to have it: it was a self-control exercise, of course, but also he was working out more and more lately, and drinking and especially hangovers were incommensurate with the plan to get into perfect shape. He weighed less and could lift more now than ten years ago. One day off from his routine, though, and he could feel the backslide beginning. Even now, standing in the bar line in a tuxedo, he had a restless urge to descend through the loud metal innards of this impotent ship and, once out on the thin path that ran between the Hudson and the West Side Highway, go for a run.

When Bluto got to the front of the line, he pushed the kid aside — just a nudge, really, but the kid was so much smaller that he stumbled and lost about half his drink on the floor. He put the glass down on the bar and for a moment Adam thought the kid was drunk enough to do something seriously stupid. Instead, though, he stuck out his hand. “No hard feelings, bro,” he said to Bluto, and when Bluto scowled and shook his hand, the kid reached up with his other hand and clapped Bluto on the shoulder. Then he wandered off, not toward the tables but in the direction of the moribund planes, some of them spotlit, welded onto the deck as exhibits. Adam continued to stare after him, not so much intently as distractedly, and then suddenly the kid turned around and caught him at it. A few strange seconds passed, strange in that it seemed less awkward than it probably should have. The kid raised his eyebrows, and then — Adam was absolutely sure of it — as he started to walk away again he held up his right hand, opened it up by raising his fingers as one might open up a book of matches, and there, facing out from his palm, looped around a couple of his fingers, was a wristwatch.

No way. Bluto turned away from the bar again to head back into the crowd, holding three beers by their necks in one hand. “Have a good night, G,” he said to Adam.

“You too. Hey, do you have the time?”

Bluto shook his thick wrist out of his sleeve and held it up in front of his face. It was bare. “Holy fuck,” he said.

Adam left him there pushing everyone backward while he searched the deck for his expensive watch. He got about halfway back to his own table before he stopped. It took a second in that sea of tuxes but he could pick out his colleagues sitting at the Perini table with their heads close together, probably in some timid bitch-fest about something. They didn’t see him. Cynthia must still have been dancing. Adam turned around and walked back into the darkness punctuated by the hulks of old Mustangs and helicopters and fighter jets. He found his man lighting a cigarette, way up by the bow, looking across the water to New Jersey, as if the boat were on its way there.

He looked a little nervous at Adam’s approach. “Cheese it, the cops,” he said.

“Why did you show me the watch?” Adam asked him. “How did you know I wasn’t some friend of that guy’s?”

He shrugged. “He was laughing,” he said. “Whereas you looked pissed just to be here.”

“Where did you learn to do that? What are you, like some child of the streets or something? Did you even pay to get in here?”

Once he realized Adam wasn’t there to bust him, the kid relaxed a bit. “Somebody gave me his ticket,” he said. “His boss paid for it because he believes in Giving Back. I’d love to tell you some Oliver Twist bullshit but the truth is a whole lot geekier. I used to do magic. Right through high school. I can get wallets too. Want to see?”