Jonathan Dee - The Privileges

He was almost there — going too slowly, bent over the steering wheel to stare up at the street signs as he passed them — when his cell phone rang. “Who is this,” the voice on the other end said, “why do you keep calling me and hanging up?” and Jonas felt a chill go through him. “Your brother gave me your number,” he said. “I’m sorry to have called you so many times, I was just trying to get a hold of you. My name is—”

“Why don’t you just leave a damn message?”

A perfectly sensible question, and it both relaxed Jonas and disappointed him a little to think that he was dealing with someone a little more reasonable than he’d imagined. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry. Anyway, I called because”—he saw the sign for Novak’s street out the window, but decided to circle the block a few times and keep talking—“I called because I’m, I’m someone who’s interested in art, and I’ve seen some of your drawings and I think they’re really great. And I just happen to be in town today — I live in Chicago — and I was hoping I could meet you and maybe see some more of your, of your work.”

There was a very long pause.

“Joseph?” Jonas said finally. “Are you there?”

Nothing. No way the call could have been dropped — he was only circling the block. Jonas saw the number 236 on a tattered-looking row house and realized he was right outside Novak’s door. He was starting to think he’d made a terrible mistake — not in seeking out Novak in the first place, but in the impetuous way he’d handled it. Strange to feel yourself the object of someone else’s paranoia. And here he was, staring at the artist’s windows.

“I’m hungry,” Novak said.

“What? You’re hungry? I’m kind of hungry too. Do you want to go out and eat something?”

Silence.

“Or do you want me to bring some food,” Jonas said, “when I come over?”

“Arby’s?” Novak said — a little softly, but sounding more interested now.

“Sure,” Jonas said. “I’ll get some stuff from Arby’s and come over. Is there an Arby’s near where you live?”

Novak hung up. Jonas rolled his window down, looking for someone on the street he could ask where the Arby’s was. But the streets were pretty empty this time of day, unless maybe they were like this all day. He could sort of see it from Novak’s point of view: if the voice knows where I live, then why wouldn’t it know where the Arby’s is?

Dawn chartered a plane from Teterboro and rode along in the limo; poor thing, she was constantly tearing up — mostly out of a kind of terrified remorse that she had almost screened out a call that came from her boss’s father’s deathbed, but also because she had lost her own father to cancer when she was in high school. In the limo she asked, in a tone that was businesslike yet tinged with hope, whether Cynthia needed her to come to Florida. Cynthia put her hand on Dawn’s discomposed face and told her that her only job, for the next day or two or however long it would be, was to apologize convincingly on her boss’s behalf to the dozens of people whose appointments to see her would now have to be postponed indefinitely — an easy enough job if Dawn had been free to explain what it was that had called her away, but Cynthia, for privacy’s sake, had asked her to please come up with a different story.

The plane was still being fueled when they got there, so the limo sat on the tarmac for a while. The horizon was just starting to lighten. Dawn fell asleep against her shoulder. Cynthia saw the pilot pass bleary-eyed in front of their windshield, trying to button down his collar with one hand while holding a Diet Coke.

It would have been nice to have her family around her now, but their pursuits were spread all over the world, and so she sat in the main cabin alone, save for an attendant who mostly tried to stay out of her sightline behind the bulkhead. Jonas wasn’t answering his cell. Maybe he was in class; anyway, she could certainly send the plane up to Chicago for him if there was any need. She’d spoken to Adam while she was packing — too emotional to calculate the time difference — and just as she’d expected he offered to fly back right away, but there was no point. The work he was doing was too important. And it sounded like her father might be dead anyway by the time Adam could get to Fort Myers from Shanghai; but she knew that if she said that out loud she would burst into tears that would cause him to fly back immediately anyway, so she settled for telling him that she loved him and would keep him posted.

She hadn’t brought anything to read, and there was too much cloud cover even for a look out the window. She supposed that this was a time when one might naturally think about the past. Up to now she’d been able to keep herself moving and thus hover above whatever it was that she should be feeling. But going over her father’s failings, their little moments of disconnected joy — this seemed too much like eulogizing him, hurrying him into the grave, and she resisted it. Instead she found herself wondering what was the last really great advance, in terms of speed, in human transportation. The jet engine? What was that, a hundred years ago? Why did it take just as long to get from New York to Florida now as it had before she was born? What kind of sense did that make? But if she was thinking of it now, chances were excellent others had already been thinking about it for a while: work was being done somewhere, somebody needed an angel.

Dawn had found her a decent hotel in Fort Myers, and Cynthia went there first to drop her bags and take a quick shower. She tried not to hurry, because hurrying seemed like bad luck somehow, or an absence of faith; her cell sat on the dresser as she changed, and she avoided staring at it just as she might have if someone were watching her. She called the concierge up to her room to tell him that she would need a car and driver on call at all times during her stay, which would be indefinite; but it turned out Dawn had called ahead and arranged for all that too. Cynthia’s driver was a man as old as her father, a Cuban named Herman with a crewcut and a neck whose folds were unevenly browned. Herman was unfailingly polite but he had a real meanness in his eye. She thought he was probably ex-military. He never spoke first. He wore a suit jacket over a short-sleeved shirt, and she imagined that when he got home after work every day, the first thing he did was throw that jacket on the floor, and his wife would pick it up and hang it for him.

Florida. It really was a blight. Maybe that’s why old people assembled here — having to leave it behind wouldn’t seem like such a bad deal. She stared out the back of the limo at the six-lane roads and the shopping plazas, the endless construction, the high walls and dimly visible golf courses, as if life on a golf course were so desirable that too direct a look at it would sear your eyes somehow. They were still in the middle of the whole car-infested hellscape — somehow she’d imagined they wouldn’t be — when she felt Herman slow down, and they turned left past a gas station with a Krispy Kreme inside it, and another two hundred yards past that was the Silverberg Hospice of South Florida.

She’d never had any reason to see the inside of a hospice before and had only a dim idea what went on in there. Partly in fear, partly out of a superstition that it was important to continue acting as if she had all the time in the world, she walked in a sort of dream languor down the long corridor to the nurses’ desk, her heart banging, and from what she could observe it was basically a hospital that didn’t smell like a hospital. Also it was quiet, and less crowded, and only one story high. Also it was staffed by people who were clearly angels of some sort, drably luminous avatars of selflessness. She was ambivalent about this. She could not be expected to integrate with these people. She was hoping that at least one of them would feel as scared and selfish and inadequate as she did, that maybe there was someone who was only working here as a condition of his community-service sentence and would form a bond with her and maybe give her a slug from the bottle he kept in his locker just to get through the day without freaking out completely. But no. Some stout woman in a nurse’s outfit that could almost have been worn as a Hawaiian shirt actually came out from behind the desk to greet her before she’d even reached the end of the hallway. Somehow the woman’s very informality was scary too, as if civility were one of the pretentious earthly comforts Cynthia was apparently supposed to have checked at the door.