Jonathan Dee - The Privileges

“Kind of,” Nikki said. She beckoned him around the corner with one finger, to the exhibition stall right behind Margo’s. There was a good crowd there. On the wall hung an array of large, photorealistic oil portraits of an iconic-looking family, most often standing in front of what was probably their own house, staring right back at the viewer, happy and stiff — in fact, it was almost as if the paintings were portraits not of the people themselves but of photographs of them. It was easy to spot the dealer, who wore a tweed jacket and a name tag and kept touching everyone who spoke to him on the shoulder. And after a moment Jonas realized that the proud-looking family standing with their backs to the artwork, accepting the occasional congratulations — a father, a mother, and a boy who looked like he was maybe in eighth grade, wearing a DePaul University sweatshirt — was the same family represented in the paintings.

“No,” Nikki said, taking his hand. “Over there.” Jonas looked to the right of the exhibition stall, where there was a little recessed area beneath a fire-door sign, and saw a man who looked just about his age, wearing a crewneck sweater with a name tag on it and jeans and unlaced snow boots, sitting lotus-style on the floor; beside him was a worn stack of khaki-colored loose-leaf notebooks that said DePaul University on them. He had his head down and his eyes closed, and his index fingers stuck inside his ears, and his lips pressed together, as he rocked very slightly but rhythmically forward and back. “Who is that?” Jonas asked, though he saw the family resemblance right away.

April was still sound asleep when Cynthia left the house to meet with their lawyers at Debevoise. From Debevoise she went straight downtown to Marietta’s office; Adam couldn’t get away to meet her there but they had him on speaker. It was chastening how long these meetings took — how much more there was to take into account than she’d even realized. She’d never seen Marietta so businesslike. By the time Cynthia got back home it was nearly three, and Dawn, her assistant, met her at the front door to let her know that April was still not up. God bless Dawn: even though she and April had barely met, she’d done what Edina, the housekeeper, was too scared to do and opened up April’s bedroom door every twenty minutes or so just to make sure she was still breathing, because she knew that was going to be Cynthia’s first question whether Cynthia actually asked it or not.

Her eyes adapted to the dark inside her daughter’s room and she saw April’s legs twitch in her sleep. There were snoring noises, sick-sounding but still reassuring. She closed the door again and went back to sit in the solarium. Her daughter had been sleeping for about fifteen straight hours but in a way it played into Cynthia’s desire to be able to put off talking to her until Adam was home from work. Not that she wanted April to think it was some kind of intervention or something. Hard to get up on any kind of moral high horse when she’d spent the last thirty-six hours involuntarily remembering all the times she herself had been high and in a car, as a passenger or, God help her, behind the wheel, back when she was April’s age. She wasn’t about to deliver a lecture on the subject when the fact that she was here at all was nothing more than evidence of a charmed life.

Two hours with the lawyers this morning, two hours to go over the ways in which April’s name could be kept out of any court papers and then, as a separate issue, out of the press as well. They didn’t pretend it wasn’t a crisis atmosphere; there were faces around that conference table she’d never even seen before. That was okay. That was why you kept them on retainer: for emergencies. She felt worse about all the lying she’d asked poor Dawn to do in the course of canceling all the appointments originally scheduled for today; probably some of those people hadn’t bought it and were offended now. But family trumped all other considerations. All she dared to want from this day was for her daughter to end it in better shape than she’d started it. It was beyond Cynthia, and probably beyond Adam too, to express or even to feel privately any real disappointment in either of their children. But the hard fact to get used to — the thing that Marietta kept harping on — was that the Morey family existed now on a public plane as well as a private one, and in that light something had to happen to make sure this kind of incident never took place again.

“It’s nice,” Marietta had said to her, “to have done so many favors for people in influential positions, so that they will then do this favor for you. But I’m telling you, you can go back to that well only so many times before people start to feel taken advantage of. And then the dam bursts in terms of curiosity about the Morey family, in terms of the desire to see the high brought low; and then the foundation’s work is hurt, and your name starts to get associated with things other than the good work you and Adam have started to do. People want that bubble popped, believe me. People would love nothing better than for you to turn out to be hypocrites and scumbags instead of the generous, caring family that you are. Far be it from me, as a friend or as someone technically on your payroll, to give you parenting advice. But just as a professional matter, this is something you and Adam need to get out in front of.”

Then a frightened-looking Edina was in the doorway mouthing the words “She’s up,” and a few moments later April walked heavily into the living room, in a t-shirt and Adam’s pajama bottoms, her hair everywhere, her face bloated, her eyes nearly closed. You had to see her looking her worst, Cynthia thought, in order to understand how irreducibly gorgeous she was. Cynthia didn’t stand up. “My head is pounding,” April said hoarsely. “Will you tell whats-herface to get me some Advil?” Cynthia leaned over and typed something onto the laptop on the coffee table in front of her; communication like that was all done wirelessly now. April made her way over to the couch and curled up against the arm farthest from her mother.

“Do you want anything to drink?” Cynthia said politely. “Or eat?”

“Oh my God no,” April mumbled.

Maybe it was selfish of her, but what Cynthia most wanted to hear right now was the same note of pleading, childish belief in her that she’d heard in that first phone call from the shoulder of Route 15, just to reassure her that it hadn’t all been an act, that it wasn’t just a matter of April’s knowing how to play her in order to get what she wanted: Mommy-I’m-scared, Mommy-I-need-your-help. “Dad will be home in a little while,” Cynthia said. “I spent this morning with our lawyers and basically, as it concerns you at least, in legal terms, the whole thing never happened.”

April’s face was hidden behind her hair. “Of course it didn’t,” she said weakly. “Um, is there any word on Dmitri?” Before Cynthia could ask who the hell Dmitri was, April added, “And the guy driving the van?”

Cynthia sighed. “They’re not dead,” she said, which sounded harsh but was all she really knew. “Nobody’s dead.”

“Okay,” April said.

She’d always been precocious, she’d always set herself apart. Sometime in the last couple of years she seemed to have run up against some kind of interior wall and now she spent her days and nights running into that same wall over and over again. Cynthia believed that there had to be a kind of key to the adult April somewhere, and that it was her fault for not having found it. If you were the mother it was always your fault. But it’s not too late, Cynthia told herself. There’s still time. She tried to be calm and unprovocative, but she couldn’t help herself.