Jonathan Dee - The Privileges

The model friend wound up asking April and Jonas if they wanted to come with her to see The Strokes that night at Hammersmith Palais; she was meeting some people there, and she herself was so freakishly hot that the mere prospect of her friends was enough to overcome Jonas’s disdain for the band. Cynthia and Adam went out to dinner in Kensington and had two bottles of wine. There he told her that a few days ago Sanford had offered to retire and basically bequeath him the whole fund, but that he had turned the offer down. “Jesus,” Cynthia said. “He must have been crushed. What did he say when you told him?”

Instead of answering that question, Adam said, “I was worried you’d be disappointed in me,” and he was surprised to feel a little catch in his throat when he said it.

She took his hand, which was a pretty good indicator that she was drunk. “Listen,” she said. “You’re a fucking genius. Every single move you’ve made has worked out for us. Look where we are. Everything has happened for us just the way you said it would. What kind of an idiot would I have to be to second-guess you?”

He held her fingers to his lips and closed his eyes. Other diners were starting to turn in their direction.

“Go ahead and stare,” Cynthia said softly, without taking her eyes off him. “Fucking old skanks wish they were me.”

By their last night, Adam was saying to Cynthia that they ought to just buy the flat they were staying in so they could come and go as they pleased. “I had a good year,” he said. She looked at him as if he were a little mad, but then she caught something exciting in his eyes and threw up her hands and said, “Why not?” That was it: everything was open to them. What was life’s object if not that? Adam knew on some level that he had to get as much money out of those Anguillian accounts as possible and shut them down, but more than that he wanted to just spend it all on the three of them, as orgiastically as possible, challenge his family to come up with desires they hadn’t even thought of yet and then make those desires real. There was, after all, no life but this life. The days were swallowed up behind you. He’d had a little too much gin. He wanted to be more like Sanford, actually, and just give it all away: he wanted to self-immolate in the name of the love he felt for his wife and children, a love for which no conventional outlet was close to sufficient.

By the time they returned to New York he’d come down a little bit. He went back in to work on Monday morning, and before he had his coat off Sanford called him into his office and fired him. It was not a cordial scene. “You haven’t looked this young in years,” Adam told him. Sanford gave him until 9:15 to clean out his desk. “I don’t know what you’re planning,” Sanford said, trembling, “but I will find out. You will learn the hard way that you cannot fuck with me. I made you.” Which was funny not just in the sense that Adam had been fucking with him for years with great success but also because the elaborate plan Sanford believed was behind this decision — a plan to start his own fund, a plan to force him out of this one, whatever — didn’t exist, not in any form. Adam had no clue what came next.

When he got back home it was still only about eleven o’clock in the morning and no one else was in the apartment. He sat in the media room and watched TV, scrolling through the channels without stopping. He’d been careful for so long that he felt like doing something especially stupid, something that would finish him off once and for all. But he didn’t. He reminded himself that there were other people involved, people he was bound to protect. Sanford was angry enough to do anything, to look anywhere. He went to the bedroom closet and got the disposable cell phone out of its hiding place inside one of his sneakers.

“I thought we said never during business hours,” Devon said.

“It’s over,” Adam said. “We have to shut it down.”

“What?”

“It’s over starting now. Okay? Nothing for you to worry about.”

“Nothing for me to worry about?” he said, in a kind of strangled whisper. “What the fuck are you talking about? Has somebody found out?”

There was something in his voice. It should have been simple, Adam thought — yesterday is done, it never happened, tomorrow you start over — but he could hear the give in Devon’s voice and knew that his thoughts were turning in a bad direction.

“Listen to me,” Adam said. “It’s just time. Nothing has happened. No one knows anything. We will be fine. And I will take care of you. I will not forget what you and I have put on the line for each other. Understand? Now, you will not hear from me for a while, maybe a long while, but that’s just about being cautious. You have my word that I will not leave you hanging. Our future is still together. We could take each other down, but it’s way preferable for neither of us to go down at all. Preferable and honorable. We’ve done something amazing together. I would never, ever give you up for any reason. And I know that I can count on your loyalty too. Right?”

Even in the silence that wasn’t silence — there was too much noise in the background, phones beeping and keyboards clicking and salesmen screaming and purring — Adam could hear him coming around.

“Right,” Devon said, to himself as much as to Adam. “No snitching. If you say we’ll be fine, we’ll be fine.”

“We will be better than fine. The future is brilliant and I promise you you have a place in it. I won’t leave you hanging. In the meantime get rid of the phone, get rid of everything. Just to be safe. Just don’t look back and when the time is right you will hear from me again. Okay? Eyes forward. Trust me.”

So that was taken care of, he thought. Still, though he had always known how to act boldly in the moment, as the day passed in idleness the idea of his own past opened up in front of him as something threatening and, amazingly, ineradicable. You couldn’t undo it, it didn’t belong to you anymore, and yet it was still there. This was a new one on him. It was just as real — more real, in fact, as each day of unaccustomed inaction went by — as the present, but in another sense it was inviolate, behind glass, where even if you wanted to get rid of it you could not.

He had three different job offers in the first week, as word spread of his firing, but he declined all three and the offers stopped coming, no doubt because people assumed, as Sanford did, that Adam had some plan that had yet to be revealed. He didn’t want to go to work for anyone else. Yet the solitude of sitting at home — even in his bright, high-ceilinged home office, the sky over Central Park like a frame around his computer monitor — wasn’t good for him either. Eventually he figured out that there was one thing that did return him at least temporarily to himself, and that was risk. He took flyers in the market on companies that might turn out to be way undervalued and then watched with a gambler’s intensity to see whether his instincts were correct. There was one memorable afternoon when Cyn went off to a Children’s Aid Society board meeting and by the time she returned and said “How was your day?” he had lost two hundred and thirty thousand dollars of their own money. It was all their own money now. He told her he’d been to the gym, and that was answer enough for her. He felt, as he hadn’t in years, what it was to be loved. He had a strong intuition that he would die without her, that just as any slacking off in his workout routine would surely lead to a rapid and shocking physical decline, so would time spent outside the field of her total belief in him eventually unmoor him from his status as a civilized man.

He saw that Barron’s had a strong sell recommendation on a pharmaceutical stock called Amity. He’d long thought Barron’s fatally unimaginative and decided it would be fun to prove them wrong. He bought ten thousand shares, and a week later sold them again at a net loss of four hundred and eight thousand dollars.