The Privileges

by Jonathan Dee

  With scrip enough to buy the company store

  Now he goes downtown with empty pockets

  And his face as white as February snow

  What the hell ever happened to country music, anyway? It used to be so fucking dark it took your breath away. Just a few more weary days and then I’ll fly away. Now it was a museum of itself, a pander-factory full of Vegas-style reactionaries in thousand-dollar hats. What was good about it was never coming back. Jonas slid the volume up and put his feet on the windowsill and listened until he saw the sun starting to brighten the planets below him.

  This world is not my home, I’m just a-passing through

  My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue

  The angels beckon me to heaven’s open door

  And I can’t feel at home in this world anymore

  In the morning he came upstairs to breakfast feeling temporarily okay after a shower and drank the remnants of some kind of smoothie April had left in the fridge the night before. She passed him on her way out the door. She was part of that universe at school, the Tori Barbosa universe, and friends of his-total strangers, for that matter, kids from other schools sometimes-would come up to him and ask about her in ways that were pathetic and stalkerish. His sister was sort of a stranger to him but not enough of one that he could see her in the way everybody else apparently saw her.

  “You look like shit,” she said, and patted him on the head.

  Adam came in through the front door drenched in sweat from a run. Jonas liked running too-he hated sports in general but there was something ascetic about running, something monkish-but there was no way he could hang with his father, who kept a chart of his own split times and was talking about entering next year’s marathon. Adam sat down across from him and asked him how everything was going, and by the time that conversation was over Jonas had gotten permission to go down to Sam Ash and buy himself a banjo. Cynthia was still asleep and would be until after everyone else was out of the house.

  It sounded hypocritical, he knew, to be so hung up on originality and authenticity when he was playing in a cover band; but that choice had been dictated less by aesthetics than by the discovery that songwriting was brutally hard. They all gave it a try at some point and the results were uniformly atrocious, with hurt feelings to contend with on top of that. So they went back to covers, but Jonas kept thinking that they could at least aspire to cover some material their audience didn’t already know by heart. That way at least you could argue you were maybe doing the music a service. He came to rehearsal one night with the banjo and a CD he’d burned of Jimmy Martin’s “You Don’t Know My Mind,” which was one of the scariest songs he’d ever heard in his life. He’d even found sheet music for it online, though only he and Alex knew how to read music anyway. He played the CD for them and was pierced by the looks on their faces even though on some level it was exactly the reaction he’d expected.

  “It’s interesting,” Haskell said, “but I don’t think we can pull off that whole blues thing. You least of all, actually.”

  “It’s not blues,” Jonas said. He felt exposed now, in the way one does when one confesses to a crush, and he didn’t want to make things worse by getting into an argument. Still, he couldn’t help it. “At least know what you’re talking about before you dismiss it. This guy was a poor drunk from the Tennessee mountains. He wasn’t trying to get on MTV or get his shit in a Verizon commercial. He had nothing but what came out of him. And you guys get all excited about The Strokes or whatever when it’s all just prepackaged bullshit.”

  They looked at each other in a way that reminded him horribly of how young he was. “Look,” Haskell said gently, “you want to talk authentic, how authentic would it look for me to be singing about being a Tennessee dirt farmer or whatever? That’s not who I am.”

  “Who are you?” Jonas said.

  There must have been some expression on his face he wasn’t aware of, because Alex said, “Who needs a beer?” But it was past that point already. “I can tell you who I’m not,” Haskell said. “I’m not some self-hating son of a zillionaire. I’m not some condescending hypocrite poser. So you and your banjo fuck off. Grab your fucking Gibson and back me up on some songs about getting drunk and laid because when we are through here I am going to get both of those things. Authentic enough for you?”

  Tori Barbosa was right there listening to the whole thing. It seemed too humiliating to walk out. Red-faced, he strapped on his guitar and looked at Alex, who tapped his fist to his heart a couple of times and then counted off “Sweet Emotion.”

  For Christmas, as usual, Jonas’s parents asked him what he wanted; he said he wanted all twelve volumes of the Alan Lomax Library of Congress recordings, on vinyl, and since they didn’t have the first idea how to acquire such a thing, he bought it himself online and put it on their credit card. Over the winter he got the flu and had to miss a few rehearsals, and when he found out they’d had some kid from Collegiate sitting in for him, he texted Haskell and said he was out of the band. He spent evenings in his room with the headphones on, reading liner notes about Lomax and how he literally tromped through fields with a microphone in his hand and a huge reel-to-reel slung over his shoulder, recording things no one had ever recorded before. The guitars and the banjo sat on their stands in the corner. The forties, the thirties, the twenties: that, he kept thinking, was the time to be alive.

  In May, just a week before the end of the school year, Ruth’s husband Warren died. He’d had a lung removed two weeks earlier but never made it home from the hospital. Even though his cancer had been diagnosed two years ago, Cynthia was almost as surprised as if the news had come out of nowhere; her mother’s peerless flair for pessimism had her convinced, right up until the final hysterical phone call, that Ruth was probably making too big a deal out of it.

  The four of them flew to Pittsburgh the next morning. Adam asked Cynthia if she planned to stay on for a few days after the funeral to “help out” and Cynthia said she didn’t know, it hadn’t occurred to her. Indeed there was a whole barrage of quotidian death-consequences that somehow had never occurred to her. Ruth came to the door to greet them in what for her might have passed as high spirits; she exclaimed, as well she might have, over the changes in her tall and comely grandchildren, who had not seen her in years and who were not entirely sure how to act but instinctively determined to err on the side of restraint. “It’ll be so nice for you to see your cousins,” Ruth said to them, and at the word “cousins” Cynthia saw them indiscreetly catch each other’s startled eyes.

  The funeral was still three days away. Ruth kept stressing how much she would require Cynthia’s help with various decisions but then it would turn out that she had already made those decisions anyway, some of them so far in advance as to border on the ghoulish. Cynthia had little advice to offer in any case. She had no experience with funerals but beyond that she could bring only a generic approach to the question of how Warren ’s life ought to be celebrated. He was a sort of machine of dependability. He was also a former managing partner at Reed Smith and a surprising amount of ceremony was dictated by that, which was helpful if also a little perverse, as if the law firm were a branch of the armed services with attendant arcane, unquestioned rituals. Ruth wanted a closed casket because toward the end he’d looked too little like himself. They could put a lot of makeup on him but they couldn’t put the weight back on. She went instead for a large framed photo to be placed on top of the casket itself, a formal portrait commissioned when he’d been made managing partner: round-faced, smiling appropriately, projecting, with his glasses and his silver hair, a kind of well-fed competence.

  The house was too small for all of them to sleep in; they spent the day there, battling their own restlessness as an assortment of Tupperware-bearing geriatric strangers consoled them on their loss, and then at night they escaped to the Hilton downtown, where they splurged on every silly, expensive amenity as a way of getting the hours of toxic solemnity out of their
systems. The tips Adam doled out had the bell staff literally fighting for his attention. He’d never really liked Ruth: he didn’t do well with negative people. This time was different, obviously, and he was more than willing to make allowances; still, he wasn’t sure how to take it whenever she acted as if she and Adam were as close as mother and son, not just when others were around but even in the rare minutes when the two of them were alone together. She didn’t seem to be performing, either, as she often did. When he smiled and stood aside in her kitchen doorway just to let her pass, she put her forehead on his shoulder and closed her eyes, and Adam felt as he might have if a woman in a strange city had mistaken him for someone else.

  He wasn’t sure what to tell the kids to do in that house of mourning, so he settled for telling them what not to do: no texting from inside Grandma’s house, no earphones in their ears for any reason. Save it all for the hotel. He and Cynthia took them to the church where they were married and the four of them even had dinner in the Athletic Club dining room, which was the site of their reception; Jonas and April were indulgent about it at best. Nor were they especially diverted by the introduction of their “cousins,” a term that turned out to refer to the twin sons of Cynthia’s stepsister, Deborah. The two women hadn’t had occasion to speak to each other in years; April heard her mother cooing about some recent Christmas-card photo of the twins but it was not any Christmas card that she and Jonas had ever seen. The boys were five years old and, April couldn’t stop herself from thinking, really unfortunate-looking. Virtually the only way to get them to stop talking was to feed them something. Somehow they’d gotten to know their grandpa Warren much better than she and Jonas ever had, and they turned cutely somber when discussing the loss of him.

  Deborah was much altered. She was fat, for starters, with no vestiges of the goth edge, faint to begin with, she had cultivated as a grad student, to say nothing of her one night at Bellevue; she taught twentieth-century art history at Boston University, as did her husband, who was a good deal older than her and had been, Cynthia was amused to learn, the chair of the search committee that hired her. When Deborah cried at the funeral, not at all showily, Cynthia found herself struggling not to stare at her, without quite knowing why. She had written a eulogy for her father but had arranged for her husband to read it for her, as she doubted her ability to get through it. And when the last mourner had gone through the receiving line in the room at the back of the church after the service, Cynthia and Deborah hugged.

  But that feeling of kinship was short-lived. After the last guest left Ruth’s house that evening, Cynthia heard two more voices out on the deck, and when she went out to investigate she found Deborah and Jonas leaning against the railing, deep in conversation. She tried to conceal her surprise, but could not, and when they both noticed her standing there in the doorway, they laughed. “We’re arguing about Andy Warhol,” Deborah said. “ Pittsburgh ’s own. I feel like I’m defending my thesis again.” Unless Andy Warhol played the fucking banjo, Cynthia thought, she would not have guessed that Jonas knew or cared who he was; but before she could say anything else, Jonas said, “Mom, what time is our flight tomorrow?”

  “I’m actually not leaving tomorrow after all,” Cynthia said. “Your flight is at something like three-thirty.”

  Jonas pumped his fist, and Deborah said, “Well, would you mind then if I took Jonas out to the Warhol Museum? One of the curators there is an old classmate of mine. It’s a pretty great museum, actually. Maybe you want to come too.”

  She did not miss the look that crossed her son’s face when Deborah made that last suggestion. “No,” she said, “I’m sure it’s a real life-changer and all that, but there’s things to take care of around here. You go. Knock yourselves out. Just be back at the hotel by, I don’t know, one.” Smiling as tightly as her mother might have, she stepped back inside the house and slid the door shut. Back in the kitchen there were a thousand dishes to wash, and she briefly entertained the pros and cons of just throwing them all in the garbage. It’s not like there’d ever be a crowd this size here again. Andy Warhol, she thought suddenly. It’s one thing to fall for that bullshit as a high-school student, but imagine devoting your whole life to it.

  Adam and the kids flew home the next day, and so, as it turned out, did Deborah’s family; but Deborah stuck around. Cynthia supposed she should be happy that the burden of the next few days-all those hours maintaining one’s patience on the phone with the insurance company or the idiots at Social Security-wasn’t all going to fall on her, only child or not. Still, it was a little confounding to see how close Deborah and Ruth seemed to have become over the past few years, outside of Cynthia’s awareness. At some point, she thought, Deborah must have really bought into that whole extended-family thing, because she certainly hadn’t been buying into it when they first met each other, more than fifteen years ago now.

  As for Ruth, having both girls in the house helped her maintain the bizarre equanimity that had characterized her all week. She’d wept a little during the service but otherwise there had been no great outpouring of grief. Cynthia believed this was some kind of denial. Or maybe it was relief. Or maybe it was just that she was old and alone and so there was no longer any need for her customary exaggeration of how hopeless things were. She puttered and took naps and answered condolence cards and fought good-naturedly with them when they tried to cook for her. She was sixty-seven and there was nothing to suggest that she couldn’t go on like this for another twenty or thirty years.

  She was easily exhausted, though, and went to bed early, and a few minutes later Cynthia was sitting numbly in the kitchen staring at a light-switch cover shaped like a rooster when Deborah walked in happily waving a bottle of Knob Creek bourbon she’d found in the liquor cabinet. Hallelujah, Cynthia thought.

  “So when are you heading back?” Deborah said, after the first one.

  “The day after tomorrow, I think. I’ve got a board meeting, and then we have this place down in Anguilla we go to sometimes, so we’ll go there when school’s out, which is in… What is today? Anyway, it’s next week.”

  Deborah nodded but was unable to suppress an ambivalent laugh. “You guys have really been successful,” was what she said.

  Cynthia wasn’t sure how to reply to that one. “It’s all Adam,” she said finally. “Some people just have a talent for investing.”

  “Well, you two always did seem to have that kind of penumbra around you. And now your kids have got it too.”

  “Your boys are adorable,” Cynthia said, reaching for the bottle.

  “Thank you. And the weird thing is, I have two more. Sort of. Sebastian has two daughters from his first marriage. Both in college now. So after all these years, I’m the stepmother.”

  “Ironic would be the word there, I guess,” Cynthia said.

  “Say this for my dad,” Deborah said, holding up the bottle. “He knew that life was too short to settle for cheap liquor.”

  “So I’m curious,” Cynthia said. She could see already that Deborah was something of a lightweight, and who knew but that this might be the last time they ever talked. “What’s happened to you? I mean the one thing I always thought we had in common was thinking that the whole blended-family thing or whatever people call it was bullshit. You always seemed to hate it worse than I did. And now you’re all Aunty Deborah with Jonas, and you’re treating Ruth like she’s your own mom. Is your own mom even still alive? That seems like something I should know, I guess, but I have no idea.”

  Deborah looked at her slyly. “She lives with us,” she said. “Back in Boston.”

  “Get the fuck out of here.”

  She nodded, amused by herself. “I don’t know when it happened exactly, but somehow the older I got the more exposed I felt, and the whole family idea got real meaningful to me. I developed this need for it. I had a theory that it had to do with being an only child, like the fear of being alone that comes with that, but I guess not. It didn’t happen to you.”


  “So is this it for you, in terms of coming out here to visit or to help Ruth or whatever? I’ve always kind of wondered about the step-thing. Does it end when you’re an adult? Does it end when the marriage that made it happen ends?”

  Deborah considered it. She put her chin down on the kitchen table and stared at the bottle. “Time will kick your ass,” she said. “I used to be so angry about how fake the whole thing was. I was pissed about having to be in your wedding, even. But you wait around long enough and these bogus connections harden into something real, whether you like it or not. I really think of Ruth as one of my parents now. I don’t think Dad’s death can undo that.”

  “What will happen to her?” Cynthia said suddenly. “You know there’s going to be a huge crash once we’re gone. It must fucking suck to be old. It must suck to have your husband die. But I mean what can we do about it? The only way to hold it off is to stay here forever. And there’s no way she’s coming to live with us, I mean, hats off to you and all that, but I could never do it.”

  “She’d never come live with you anyway, even if you asked her. Or with me. No way Ruth could ever open herself up enough to depend on one of us like that. I think she’ll actually do okay living alone. Better than most people. The thing to worry about, if you want to worry about something, is what if her health goes south, like Dad’s did. Then you’re looking at some hard choices.”

  Did she mean “you” as in “one,” or “you” as in “Cynthia”? But there was no way to ask for a clarification because she felt craven and selfish just for wondering. Anyway, those decisions were still a long way off. “She’s never been sick a day in her life,” Cynthia said.

  There was some kind of noise from the direction of the living room, and they both cocked their heads in case Ruth was up, but only silence followed. The muted TV still flickered on the walls beyond the kitchen door.

  “You know,” Deborah said, “my dad was really a great guy. He had his limits in terms of expressiveness, but he was really loving. And he always had a soft spot for you. I think because you were certain things I wasn’t. It hurt him that you didn’t think of him as a parent. You never really gave him a chance.”