Jonathan Dee: The Privileges

Irene’s lips were pursed, and her face moved irregularly like a bobblehead.

“I think our interests here actually coincide,” Cynthia said. “I would imagine that you, an older woman with no visible means of support, as they used to say, are thinking that your years of devotion to this fun guy with the rich daughter, if you can hang in there until the end, deserve some recompense.”

“I beg your—”

“And I,” Cynthia went on, “I would like you to go away and let me have this little bit of time alone with him. I would like that very much. I feel like I can see a way for these desires to dovetail nicely. Can you?”

Irene’s face had gone bright red.

“It’s not about you,” Cynthia said. “You seem like a nice enough person.”

“I don’t understand.”

“What don’t you understand?”

“I mean, I don’t want to be rude.”

“If not now, when?” Cynthia said.

“He abandoned you,” Irene said, and then put her hand over her mouth. “I know that he was a terrible, terrible father to you. He knows it too. And he took your money. All those years. He never asked for it, but he could have refused it. He should have.”

“Au contraire. He could have had anything he asked me for.”

“I wasn’t even sure you’d come down here,” Irene said. “I really wasn’t. He said you would, but I thought that was just the way he wanted to see things. And yet you seem so in denial about it all—”

“You had fun with him, didn’t you? I can tell. It’s sad when the fun comes to an end. Somewhere in the world a woman learns that lesson every day.”

Irene closed her eyes. “I’m just trying,” she said, “to honor his wishes. I’m just trying to do what’s right. Money has never even occurred to me.”

“Well, I’m sure that’s true. Let it occur to you now. You honored his wishes. That part is done. I’m asking you to honor my wishes now.”

She began eating. It seemed as if even Irene’s hair had started to come undone as they sat there at the table, as if she were riding in a convertible or sitting uncomfortably on a boat. Into her eyes came the glaze of the rest of her life. Cynthia knew her father well enough to know exactly what he had meant to this poor woman, all the high spirits, all the promise, all the purpose implicit in taking care of someone who expected to be taken care of. But now he was on his deathbed and there were no more high spirits for Irene. Abruptly her mouth fell open, and she emitted a laugh that was more like a bark; she shrugged, with her hands in the air, and shook her head as though denying that she was even the person saying what she was about to say.

“A hundred thousand dollars,” she said.

“Done,” Cynthia said. She reached for a napkin and pulled a pen out of her bag. “I’m going to give you a number to call. Call it tomorrow. There’ll be something for you to sign as well.”

“That won’t be necessary.”

Cynthia was about to insist, as she knew she should have, but something in Irene’s face advocated for mercy. Instead she looked down at the table and spun the syrups meditatively. “God, this is decadent,” she said. “Do people down here really eat like this? Boysenberry syrup? Well, okay, what the hell. When in Podunk.”

“Do you,” Irene said, and then closed her eyes and put her head in her hand. “Do you need a ride back to the hospice?”

“That is very kind of you,” Cynthia said, reaching for her cell phone. “But no.”

When Jonas’s cell phone began ringing more insistently, Novak, who could not figure out how to turn it off, came up with a novel solution: he walked briskly into the bathroom and dropped it into the toilet. Jonas saw it when he went in there. He was allowed, it seemed, to get up from the couch — nothing but fear restrained him — though whenever he did, Novak would stop drawing and stare at him, inscrutably, like a cat, until he was back in his seat again. Jonas was left unsure whether his status was that of a prisoner or hostage of some kind or whether he was simply free to leave. Novak had already demonstrated how far he was willing to go to enforce his own sense of it, though, whatever that was, and Jonas didn’t really feel up to the risk of testing him again. At least not yet.

One of the things that enervated him was the fact that he hadn’t eaten in — well, he didn’t know anymore how long he had been here. Along with the phone he had been relieved of his watch, though for some reason not his wallet or his car keys. The paper had been torn down from the windows but the shades were drawn. Novak had pulled a two-step ladder out of his bedroom, presumably for covering the parts of the wall too high for him to reach, and Jonas thought maybe that would be the time to break for the door, but he hadn’t seen him use it yet. The food from Arby’s had been sitting in the kitchen long enough to contribute to the rank, maddening airlessness, which was almost enough by itself to put you back to sleep.

Novak worked without stopping but he didn’t work particularly fast. Jonas decided, maybe too dramatically, that whatever was going to happen to him would happen once the wall drawing was finished. Of course there were other walls to fill, though filling them would require moving the furniture again. There was no look of rapture or emotion on Novak’s face as he drew; just concentration, that was all. As for what he was drawing, it was just another reconfiguration of the same shit he always drew; it was obsessive and incomprehensible and conveyed nothing, which would once have presented itself as a virtue but was frustrating now that there was something Jonas actually wanted to know. Novak’s mural was no sort of key or portal to anything. And drawing pictures didn’t seem to liberate him from his inner misery at all. If anything he looked grayer and more haggard than he had when Jonas first arrived. It was all one burden, a huge burden, but one for which Jonas had lost all capacity for empathy or even interest. It would not admit him. For the life of him he couldn’t remember why he had been so excited about coming here.

Out of nowhere there were footsteps on the stairs outside Novak’s door, and then a knock, not a friendly one. Jonas’s head lifted up like a dog’s, but Novak did not even react. His fingertips were completely browned by Sharpie ink of all colors. “Joseph?” a woman’s voice called. He went about his business, not responding but not making any effort to be silent either. “Joseph?” More knocking. “Joseph, if you are in there, I have warned you about taking garbage out. I know you don’t like to do it but you have to. I can smell it from all the way down on the sidewalk. Do you hear me?”

Novak may or may not have needed glasses but he worked with his nose almost touching the surface on which he drew. He was working now, in green, on one of the square, blank-screened, rabbit-eared TVs he favored. This particular one sat on the roof of a gas station.

“By tonight,” the woman said. “By tonight or I am calling your brother.” The footsteps receded.

Use your key , Jonas yelled in his head, use your fucking key, you idiot , and then, cursing himself for his cowardice, he jumped up and ran for the door. Just as quickly, Novak dropped his pens on the floor and cut Jonas off, just by standing between him and the exit. Jonas stopped and put his hands up in front of him, his head pounding. Novak’s leg started to shake. Tears came into his eyes. “Just please be still,” he said. “Just be still. Unless you have to pee or something, and then just use the bathroom. This isn’t my fault, you know. You think you’re so smart but you’re stupid. Do you have any idea how much trouble I’m in now?”

What exactly was she hoping might still happen? She was desperate that he not die, that was true, and she knew there was something shameful about that feeling because of its obvious defiance of what he wanted, back when he could want anything. She would never have admitted out loud to anyone how much she needed him to stay alive. But that wasn’t because there was something she had to have from him before he went. It was more that she couldn’t imagine herself in the world without him somewhere in it too. He was the living rebuke to whatever other people may have said or thought about his selfishness, his delinquency, his supposed mistreatment of her, because his adoration of her was no fake, no pose. He knew how to do it, and to make her feel it, from afar. He believed in her self-sufficiency. She adored him too. Everything was good between them, but she needed him alive in order to prove that.