Jonathan Dee - The Privileges

“No,” he said irritably, as if his chain of thought had been broken. “I’m Tom. Calvin who? Calvin fucking 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 fuck was she talking about? She didn’t know. There was a phone right there in her ass 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 shirt 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 skanks 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 massive.”

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 , April thought, only this guy was wearing a cardigan and reading The Wall Street Journal .

“Hello,” 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 God, 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 passive 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 hell 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 , 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, classic 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.