by Jonathan Dee
So he called a guy named Parker he’d met a few times playing pickup basketball at Chelsea Piers, and took him out to lunch, and two weeks later Parker had brought him on at a private equity firm called Perini Capital, an outfit with a shitload of money behind it but so few people working there that Adam knew everyone’s name by the end of his first day. The money, pre-bonus at least, was actually a little less than he’d been making at Morgan, but it wasn’t about that. It was about potential upside, and also about his vision of what a man’s work should be: a tight group of friends pushing themselves to make one another rich. No hierarchies or job descriptions; there was the boss and then there was everyone else, and the boss, Barry Sanford, loved Adam from day one. Sanford was a white-haired libertine who was on his fourth wife and had named the company after his boat. It was obvious to everyone that he saw something of his young self in Adam, and though Adam didn’t personally see the resemblance, he was unoffended by it. The job’s only drawback was that it required some travel-the occasional overnight to Iowa City or the equivalent, to sound out some handful of guys who thought their business deserved to be bigger than it was. And strippers: for some reason these aspirants always had the idea that strippers were the lingua franca of serious money men. In truth Adam considered few things in life a grimmer bore than an evening at Podunk’s finest strip club, but he went along with it, because his job was to make these people admire him, a job at which he excelled.
His Perini colleagues, Parker included, were all still single; he’d go out for a few drinks with them after work but then the evening would start to turn into another kind of evening and he’d excuse himself and go home. Still, the new environment-the informality and irreverence, the clubby decor, the foosball table, the sense that they were bound not by any sort of dull corporate ethos but only by the limits of their own creativity-fit him perfectly; he felt he belonged there. Its best amenity, though he wouldn’t have said so to anyone but Cynthia, was that in the basement of the building, which was on Ninth Avenue, there was a swimming pool. Whenever he didn’t have a lunch, Adam would take the elevator all the way down, hang his suit in the changing room, and swim laps until he wore himself out. Sometimes there was a group of kids wearing floaties in the shallow end-one of the other, bigger companies in the building had its own day care-but most days he had the water completely to himself, his every stroke echoing off the walls, his heartbeat loud in his ears. It felt like stealing. Then he’d shower, put his suit on, and go back upstairs to his desk. Sometimes he’d have Liz the receptionist order him something to eat, or sometimes he’d just skip it and let the adrenaline carry him through until dinner. He was in the best shape of his life, and it was a boon to his job performance too, because he always thought more clearly when he was a little exhausted.
***
At school April’s first task was to esteem herself. They began with self-portraits, huge-headed, in which the bodies were an afterthought, apportioned roughly the same space on the page as a nose or an ear. The portraits smiled widely with crooked teeth, not because the children’s teeth were crooked but because teeth were hard to draw. They made lists of the reasons they liked themselves, lists of the things they were good at and the things at which they were determined to improve. They named the comforts of their homes-pets, siblings, favorite toys, or favorite places. One girl said her favorite place was Paris, but April took this to mean the imaginary Paris of the Madeline books. Her own favorite place was her parents’ bed, with her parents not in it, just her and a few stuffed animals and a juice box and a Disney movie on TV. She dreamed of this situation often, though in practice she usually had to be sick to attain it. Something told her, though, that it would be seen as babyish, and so she said the Central Park Carousel instead.
Less auspicious was the name project. A name, the students were told, had a secret history; it might connect you to the country from which your family had first emigrated, or to the language or the religion of that country, or even just to the family itself and the loved ones who had gone before. It let you know that you were not just some one-time phenomenon but an outcome, a culmination, the top branch of a majestic tree. Told to go home and conduct some research on why she was named April Morey, she saw her parents exchange a quick look before her mother answered.
“Well,” Cynthia said, muting the TV, “Dad and I talked about a lot of different names. We would sit on the couch in our old apartment and try them out on each other back when I was pregnant with you, say them out loud to see how they sounded. And there were a few we liked, but we kept coming back to April. April Morey. It just sounded the most beautiful to us.”
Her dad smiled, and patted her mom’s leg.
“That’s it?” April said.
They looked as confused as she was. “Also,” her father said, sitting forward on the couch, “it’s a pretty unusual name. Not a lot of other Aprils in the world. We wanted a name as special as you are.”
They’d given her her name not because somebody else had had it, but because nobody had? “Was there ever another April in our family?” she asked. They looked at each other again, and shook their heads. “Why didn’t you name me after a loved one?”
“A loved one?” Adam said.
April nodded. “A dead loved one. That’s what a lot of people do. Or somebody from the old country.” Her mother punched her father in the thigh, and that, it shocked April to realize, was because he had been about to laugh.
“Where do we come from?” she demanded of them. “What country?”
Stunningly, they seemed less than sure. Adam knew his father’s family had come from England, but he didn’t know where in England specifically, nor how many generations ago that had been; his mother’s family was part German and part Dutch. Cynthia knew her father’s ancestors were Russian, unless he’d been lying about that too, and as for her maternal grandparents, her mother had always refused to discuss them.
“Was there something special about the month of April?” April asked. There wasn’t. No historic event had taken place then, no anniversary or birthday, though they did offer that if April’s birthday had actually fallen in April, they would have named her something else.
“What would you have named me instead?” she persisted. The revelation that she, April, might just as plausibly have been Samantha or Josephine or Emma, that only chance was behind the whole solemn question of her identity, made her feel worse than ever. She could see that her parents were now upset, but she was angry at them and didn’t care. They kept coming back to beauty, but it was a beauty she couldn’t comprehend and that she wasn’t at all sure her teacher would consider a satisfactory completion of the assignment.
Ms. Diaz was nice about it, of course, but there was nothing to be done about the jealousy engendered by the other, longer name-essays that went up on the walls above their lockers, stories of honored relatives and cool languages and religious rituals tended through the generations. April felt as if her family came from nowhere, and, more puzzlingly, that this suited her parents just fine.
The next unit was family traditions. The teacher took pains to define this idea as broadly as possible; still, what traditions did April’s family have? They hardly ever did the same thing even twice. They had no ancestral home they returned to, no church they attended (her mom had gone to church as a child but April had heard her say that she hated it and was glad she never had to go again), no special place they liked to travel to-indeed, having been someplace on vacation once, like Nantucket or Vail or Disney World, even if they’d had a good time there, was usually cited as a reason not to go there again. Even their Christmas tree wasn’t in the same spot every year. April knew her own grandparents so little that she sometimes mixed them up in her head and was shy about talking to them on the phone. She had one uncle and no aunts, just something her mother called a step-aunt, whom she’d only ever seen in a photo in her parents’ wedding album.
Soon the whole temper of the assignment had changed, in April�
�s mind, from an exercise in self-discovery to an indiscriminate hunt for what Ms. Diaz, for whom she would have died in any case, wanted to admire in her. It seemed perfectly defensible to start making things up. She wrote down that her family went to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral every Sunday, and that they were considering a trip to Jerusalem for Christmas. Her grandmother on her mother’s side, who was named May, had lost her parents as a girl but had gamely made her way from Holland to America by boat. Every summer April and her cousins gathered for a reunion at the family estate on a mountain in New Hampshire. It was so big that some of her distant pioneer relatives were buried in a small graveyard right there on the place.
Adam and Cynthia read these notions on the wall beneath their daughter’s self-portrait on Parents’ Night, mute with amazement. April’s teacher couldn’t really believe this stuff, could she? Yet she had posted it right there with all the other handwritten, dubiously spelled histories of perseverance and hardship. They already felt conspicuous, as they always did at these school functions, as the youngest couple in the classroom; at twenty-nine they were still strikingly young, by Manhattan standards at least, to be parents at all. Jonas’s best friend in kindergarten had once slept over for a whole weekend while his father took his mother to London for her fiftieth birthday. Every Parents’ Night Adam and Cynthia were a kind of generation unto themselves, and it didn’t take much, in that context, to awaken a vestigial unease about being in some sort of trouble they didn’t even understand. When Ms. Diaz, deep in conversation with some kid’s father who was surely old enough to be their father too, smiled at them from across the room as if to say that she would be with them in just a moment, they smiled back warmly until she turned away and then Cynthia squeezed his arm and they got the hell out of there.
When she’d first stopped working outside the home, as the expression went, the kids were toddlers with unsynchronized nap schedules and so Cynthia’s brain was pretty much indentured to them; even apart from the physical exhaustion, it was a struggle just to find a little interior space for herself, a little space in which to be herself, when they were so present and so vulnerable and so demanding every minute of the day. The only time that truly felt like her own was late at night when everyone else was asleep, when she would stay up and watch movies and savor the day’s one cigarette, blowing the smoke out the window; but even that came at a price, since the sleep she lost made the next day’s selflessness harder to maintain.
But now they were older, the school day was longer, and she determined that she could pick up where she left off and start working again. She took this idea more literally than she would have if she’d thought about it more. Her first and only job in New York, from the summer after college until after Jonas was born, had been as an editorial assistant at a glossy, ad-heavy magazine called Beauty, and in the absence of any other sort of work she particularly burned to do, she thought she might go back there. It was a painful miscalculation. Her best memories of Beauty were mostly memories of the kind of euphoric bitching that took place over drinks after work with her fellow assistants; most of those smart young women and gay men were now, like Cynthia, long gone, but a couple had stuck it out and managed to rise up the masthead. That was the only way to get anything decent out of a career in magazines-become a lifer. The current features editor was someone she used to eat cheap lunches with back when they were happy to get through the day without getting screamed at by someone important. Her name was Danielle. Cynthia left a message with Danielle’s assistant, got a call back from a different assistant asking her to come in the following Monday at eleven-thirty, and arrived to find Danielle standing up behind her desk with a look of awkward condescension on her narrow face that said everything there was to say.
Still, they had to go through with it. Cynthia, angry and humiliated and eager to leave before Danielle had even sat down again, produced pictures of April and Jonas. Danielle told the story of her own broken engagement. They recalled some of the people they had worked with back in the day. Cynthia had no idea what had happened to any of them; Danielle knew what had happened to all of them. It was possible to connect the overbearing power chick she was now to the emotionally manipulable peon she had been back then, but just barely. Finally they came with mutual reluctance to the subject at hand.
“Come on,” Cynthia found herself saying. “I’m smart and I work hard and I can tell a good idea from a shitty one. If that was true three years ago it can’t be untrue now. Children don’t actually make you stupid-you do know that, right? Or maybe that would make a good investigative piece for you.”
What kept her there past the point of good sense was her imagination of the dismayed, relieved, pitying expression into which Danielle’s face would resolve the moment her office door closed between them. She postponed that moment as long as she could, even when doing so came off as begging. “You don’t want what I can offer you,” Danielle kept saying, and she was right, Cynthia didn’t want it, but even less did she want to be spoken to like a child by someone who used to be her peer and now presumed to tell her what she did or did not want. In the end, in a thoroughly bridge-burning mood, she wrote “eat me” across the top of the résumé she’d brought, slid it across Danielle’s desk, and walked out.
On the street she had a sudden memory, useless now, of a night out after work six or seven years ago when Danielle had gotten so drunk-Cynthia, pregnant by then, was stone sober-that she’d started hitting on the troll of a bartender and Cynthia was deputed to take her home in a cab. The bed in her York Avenue studio, which Cynthia had never visited before, was covered with stuffed dogs. But it wasn’t surprising that Danielle should have changed. There was a fast-moving mainstream in life, and once you’d dropped out of it, as Cynthia had, you weren’t going to be hailed by everybody when you tried to step into it again.
That was what had happened to her: she had fallen into the underworld of women with nothing special to do. Like those moms she despised, the ones you made small talk with while you waited for your kid to find his shoes after a playdate at their Versailles-like apartments, who had live-in help and no real responsibilities and yet all they did was complain about how they never had a moment to themselves. But what filled Cynthia’s days? She was at the gym five mornings a week now; Adam kept telling her she looked hotter than she ever had in her life, which was probably true, but maybe the whole routine there wasn’t even about that, maybe it was about something else entirely. She had volunteered, again, to head the silent-auction committee for April’s grade and for Jonas’s too, even though she took no pleasure in it because of the proximity it forced her into with women whom she imagined were nothing like her. She had a rule about not drinking before five. She never broke it, but why was it there at all?
She and Adam joked all the time about the social purgatory to which they’d condemned themselves by having kids so young: some of their old friends were still hooking up in bars and setting up Hamptons shares, while the people who actually lived the same sort of domesticated life the Moreys lived tended to be a dozen years older, boring as hell, and too covetous of their youth to befriend them in any case. They’d go to some school function and after a couple of drinks all the middle-aged Wall Street husbands would be macking on her; she thought it was hilarious, and Adam did too, and then the next day their fat-ass wives would make a point of not talking to her, as if that was supposed to be some sort of punishment. Still, her own charisma had become latent in her; who were her friends now?
Her erstwhile maid of honor, Marietta, was one of those with whom Cynthia had lost touch, all the more disgracefully since she lived right there in Tribeca-more than a hundred blocks away, but still. She was married now, to some Viacom executive she had met through some online personal ad-you had to hand it to her, she embraced all that stuff, the newer it was the more unintimidated she felt-but married or not it was hard to stay in contact with her because she worked ten or twelve hours a day as vice president of a media-relations company, one
of those places that orchestrated the public rehabilitation of the disgraced: drunk starlets, politicians who turned up in sex videos, clients like that. “It’s a lot like being a lawyer,” was how Marietta had explained it to her. “Or a lot like advertising. It’s a lot like most things, actually.” As if to prove their bond, just when Cynthia was missing her most Marietta called one night out of nowhere and begged Cynthia to meet her for a drink the next afternoon: there was something she needed to ask her. Cynthia said that, since she had to pick up the kids from school at three-thirty, maybe coffee was better. “Fuck that,” Marietta said. “We’ll have drinks at two, then. It’s not like it’s unprecedented. Remember that time at Head of the Charles when we made martinis at nine in the morning?”
“Less than distinctly,” Cynthia said, smiling.
She actually wondered whether Marietta was going to offer her a job, weird as that would be, but instead it turned out that she was trying to get pregnant. She and Mr. Viacom had only been at it for six months but Marietta, who at thirty was a less patient person than she used to be, was getting ready to start on clomiphene. “How did it happen with you?” she asked Cynthia. “When it happened, I mean like the moment it happened, did you just know?”
“Don’t you remember?” Cynthia said. “It was a total fucking shock. I was on my honeymoon. I’m still not sure how it happened.”
“What about with Jonas?” she said, biting a cuticle. “Were you trying there?”
“Nope.”
She scowled. “Fertile bitch. Well, you’re still the only friend I can talk to about any of this who wouldn’t try to talk me out of it. If they got wind of it at work, forget about it.”
They sat at an outdoor table at a café across from the entrance to the Met, drinking lemon-drop martinis. There was no one else in the place at that hour but their waiter, and even he was barely in evidence.