The Privileges (20 page)

She couldn’t compete with that. She still went to the gym three or
four times a week, but she had long since come to consider it a chore and, in an effort to at least make it diverting, had gone through fickle infatuations with every bit of technology in there, every new fad and philosophy. The two of them belonged to different gyms—she would never have dreamed of working out with him, he was far too humorless about it. Still, like him, she was interested in hanging onto her physical prime for as long as possible—indefinitely, really. Together they did quite a good job of it. And there was one respect in which Cynthia—though she’d never discussed it with him—was prepared to go further in this effort than he was. They had three friends who’d had work done already; she told Adam about the first two, and then when Marietta had her eyelids and neck done Cynthia had said nothing and waited to see if he’d notice, which he never did. It wasn’t like Marietta’s tits had gotten bigger or something; she was only confirming Adam’s sense of what she was supposed to look like anyway. Aging would have been more conspicuous. Cynthia still looked fantastic—everyone said so, and she knew they were serious—but it was so hard to look at yourself with fresh eyes. That was the insidious thing about time and its effects: how incremental they were. So far, so good, was her thought, but whenever the moment came, there was no resource she wouldn’t call upon.

In the cold morning overcast, wearing shorts and a t-shirt and a lightweight ski hat and a pair of fingerless gloves, Adam put his palms flat against the façade of his building and pushed, until the tightness left his calves. He shifted his hips forward and slowly lowered one heel to the sidewalk, then the other, and when his Achilles tendons felt loose as well, he was good to go. He bounced on his toes a couple of times, exhaled once forcefully through his mouth as if preparing for an entrance onstage, put one finger to his watch, and started running.

Though he kept to the south side of 81st Street, where the sidewalks were wider on the perimeter of the museum grounds, it was still stop and go; he had to work his way around or through the knots of tourists and the pairs of strollers advancing in unison as
their nannies chatted behind them. There was nothing to be done until he crossed the transverse exit at Central Park West and passed through the low stone gate into the park, and then he found his rhythm. He glided around the softball fields, passing everyone else on the path—the fat guys with headbands and hair leaking up from the collars of their shirts, the women in Lycra tights with sweatshirts tied self-consciously around their waists, the serious rope-muscled runners with the perfect strides and fixed stares—feeling the familiar warmth and pulse of his blood radiating from his core until there was no part of his body uninvolved in it. He’d never been to the Conservatory Garden before, but he knew roughly where it was—not far from their old apartment, the one where April and Jonas had shared a room. He could have shortened his time by cutting across the North Meadow but it was blocked by that temporary soft orange fencing that signaled a reseeding; so he passed all the way out of the park again on the east side and turned north along Fifth Avenue until he saw the theatrical flight of stone steps that led down into the garden. It was laid out in the dimensions of a cross, with trellised roses and reflecting pools on the right and left of him; at the far end, at the foot of a flagstone path, another flight of steps led up to a long, curved, and colonnaded stone arch, and there, sitting on the top step with his arms around his knees, wearing a khaki suit, was Devon.

He stood up slowly and bemusedly as Adam sprinted up the steps, touched his watch again, and stood gazing around the garden with his hands clasped on top of his head, waiting for his heart rate to slow. “Multitasking,” Devon said, a little bitterly. “Nice. No reason meeting me should interfere with your regimen. Won’t you have to go home and change now, though, before work, or is it Casual Tuesday or something?”

Adam shook his head. “Not going in this morning,” he said. “The boss and I are flying to Minneapolis in a few hours.”

They stood beneath the arch, facing back toward Fifth Avenue across the top of the sunken gardens. In the unseasonable cold the paths were almost empty, but not quite; the incongruous country-squire layout made it a popular spot for wedding photos, and so
there was a full bridal party standing by one of the reflecting pools, blowing on their hands to keep warm, while a couple of boys in suits who couldn’t have been older than six chased each other around the still water. In fact, Adam was the only one in the whole garden not dressed formally. Still, Devon felt like the conspicuous one.

“So?” Adam said. “Shall we go talk amongst the roses?”

“Why not,” Devon said. “I’m sure everybody thinks we’re fags anyway.”

They descended the steps and turned left on the flagstones toward the unoccupied reflecting pool. “Miguel is out,” Devon said.

“No names, please.”

“Whatever. One of my associates has told me he’s out. The one who works at Schwab. He’s getting married. He says he’s made enough and doesn’t want this hanging over his head anymore.”

“Okay,” Adam said. “You think he’s telling the truth? There’s nothing else going on there, no trouble he’s in, no debts or anything like that?”

“Why?” Devon said. He meant to sound sarcastic but it just came out petulant. “You thinking of having him killed?”

Adam rolled his eyes. “I’m just wondering why you considered it some kind of emergency. It’s happened before. I mean, you know this isn’t a good idea, our meeting like this. Not that I don’t enjoy your company.”

As they finished their first circuit Devon looked up and saw a strange bald man in a tuxedo struggling to fix an expensive camera onto a tripod. He was all the way across the garden, where the bridal party was, but the camera looked like it was pointing right at him. He fought down a taste of panic in his throat. “That’s kind of my point, that this same thing happened two months ago. It’s not like we can take out an ad to replace these guys. Pretty soon it will be down to you and me, and that would not be tenable. We couldn’t disguise it well enough.”

“Well,” Adam said, “you know a lot more guys in the trenches than I do. Can you think of anyone else you might bring in?”

Devon grimaced. “Yes, probably,” he said, “but that’s not the
point. We can’t keep piling risk upon risk, right, and expect to stay lucky forever. I don’t know. Honestly I’m wondering if it’s time to get out. I want to be smart about this. I mean, am I the only one? Don’t you think about this stuff? Aren’t you fucking freezing, by the way?”

Of course Adam thought about it, not because he was prone to fear or paranoia but just as a matter of risk management. He saw perfectly clearly that the whole arrangement was held together at this point only by own his ability to lead, to inspire faith in himself even among people he met only briefly, if ever. Any one of these brokers, Devon included, who slipped up and got caught could always save himself by giving up the top of the chain, and the top of the chain was Adam. So he wasn’t sure what there was for Devon to get so stressed about. He had to admit that his initial assessment of the kid, aboard the
Intrepid
all those years ago, had turned out to be wrong in some respects, though not, of course, in the important one.

“You say you want to be smart about it,” he said, looking into Devon’s eyes. “But to say that we can’t be successful today because we were successful yesterday—that’s not smart, that’s just superstitious. You start giving in to ideas about luck or fate or karma or whatever and you’re fucked. There’s no fate. Everything that you and I have made happen in these last however many years? It never happened. It’s gone. It doesn’t exist. The only thing that exists, the only risk to be analyzed, is what’s in front of us today.”

“I know,” Devon said sulkily. He looked down. Adam knew he had him.

“We are hypercareful. We always have been. We don’t give every piece of information to everybody in the chain. And I’m sure you figured out a long time ago that some of the information I give you is bogus, so it never looks to anyone like some unbroken winning streak.”

“I’m not questioning anything like that. It’s just—the whole thing isn’t like I thought it would be. The money is almost like a burden because I’m so paranoid about spending it. And how can you not look back? I don’t get that. Which is probably why I’ll
never be a billionaire. I’m just not a stone killer like you are. See, that’s another thing I don’t get: as little as I know about you, I know that you are one of those guys, those guys who are like missing a part of their brain or something. No conscience. No memory for losses. So you don’t need this. You’d be a player anyway. Why are you doing it still? Don’t you think about stopping?”

The bridesmaids had run off to the car to get warm and the wedding photographer was packing his gear into a couple of canvas bags. No conscience? Adam thought. It’s not as though I can’t remember; it’s just that there’s nothing constructive about remembering. Still, when he did consider the life his family was living now, a life in which literally anything was possible, every desire was in reach, no potential was allowed to wither, and they had all seen so much of the world; when he thought back to the moment he had gone for it, to his own fearlessness when threatened with the unhappiness of those he loved, and how readily, in the face of that, he had cleared the hurdle that most men would never have the fortitude to clear; and how all this was accomplished by his taking all the risk onto himself, so much so that they would never even have a clue that there was any risk involved; the only reasonable conclusion, he felt, was that it was the noblest thing he had ever done in his life. It was humility, really, that made him so uncomfortable reminiscing about it.

But it was also true that that particular hurdle had been cleared a long time ago, and that there were other reasons he was loath to terminate the life of secret risk, the world inside the world. “Devon,” he said, “you’re going in to work today, right?”

He fingered his suit. “Some of us have to,” he said.

“Well when you do, just take a minute and look around you at everyone else in that office, everyone you work for, everyone who works for you. All of them with their fingers crossed, all of them so afraid that if getting some kind of inside information meant never seeing you again they would make that trade in a heartbeat. I think I know what you think of those people. But you are not one of them. You are Superman. You are a fucking gangster. The day we go back to feeling safe from risk is the day you can no longer look at
them and say to yourself that there’s any difference between them and you. Are you really ready to go back to that? Are you really ready to go back to reading bullshit quarterly reports and trying to use those to figure out how the world works? It’s no kind of life, leaving your future in the hands of forces that have nothing to do with you and calling them fate or luck or whatever. And there is only this life, dude. I don’t want to get all mystical on you, but this is the only life we get, and either you leave your mark on it or it’s like you were never here.”

They had stopped walking. The garden was now abandoned. Devon, head down, nodded sullenly, like a child. Adam put his hands on the younger man’s shoulders.

“No one else,” Adam said gently, “knows the things that you and I know. Now. Speaking of being careful. It’s time for new cell numbers, right? Did you memorize yours?”

Devon nodded, and recited it. “Done,” Adam said, and began bouncing on the balls of his feet again. “Now relax a little. Have some fun. Wait to hear from me.” He ran up the garden steps, headed south until he could breach the low stone wall again, and twenty minutes later he was home. He showered, put on a suit, grabbed his briefcase, hailed a cab, and met Sanford inside the first-class lounge in the Delta terminal at LaGuardia. Sanford was sitting in a too-low club chair in front of a muted TV, holding a glass of wine and looking miserable.

“I can’t tell you how much I hate flying these days,” he said. “Commercial especially. It’s so degraded. Look at what passes for first class now.” His face was tired and florid, even though the glass of wine was his first. They were on their way to Minneapolis to close a deal with the state’s teachers union, which had agreed to let Perini grow their pension fund.

“I almost wonder why we have to go at all,” Sanford said to him as they boarded the plane, a few drinks later. “It’s all in the bag. But they just need a little face time, before they hand over the pension money to a couple of sharks from New York City. Maybe they just want to make sure we’re not Nigerian princes.” Adam had the aisle seat and thus took the brunt of the resentful glances from those who
boarded after them and had to stand waiting while others tried to smash their carry-ons into the tiny overhead bins in coach. “You know,” Sanford said once they were in the air, “I spent a lot of time talking you up with them, and then one of them asked me an odd question. ‘If this guy’s such a star,’ he asked me, ‘how do we know he won’t bolt and start his own hedge fund or something?’”

Adam smiled. “And you said, ‘Hey, you’re right, I’d better go and give that guy a massive midyear bonus right away’?”

Sanford slapped him affectionately on the knee. “Good one,” he said. “No, I told him that you were still a young man. And that the best thing about you is that with all the ego in this business, you’re not one of those guys obsessed with having a high profile. Honestly, if you’d asked me ten years ago, I would have bet I’d have lost you by now. But you’re an old-school guy, a throwback in a lot of ways. Put your head down, do your job, respect the traditions, and everybody gets rich enough in the end. Lazard was like that when I worked there, a hundred years ago. Anyway, I can’t tell you what a comfort it is to me now.”

He looked out the window at the ground far below, the lit veins of the empty streets, the bright ball fields and parking lots. “It’s funny how much I’ve grown to hate this,” he said. “I used to take it for granted. Airplanes and airports. But lately I just want to be out on the water. It’s almost all I think about.”