by Jonathan Dee
Her eyes were drunk. Either she hadn’t done this in a long time or she did it a lot. Cynthia suddenly lost interest in the answer. You started taking on other people’s grievances and there was no end to it. She was nobody’s sister, and neither was Deborah. It was one thing to conspire about the future but there was no way she was going back into the past.
“I already have a father,” she said.
Juniors and seniors from Dalton still came and went at the Moreys’ apartment like it was some kind of after-school program; but months after April’s friend Robin had stopped living there, gone back to reassume her place inside her own much more opaque home, April still missed having her around. Which was ironic, she thought, because toward the end of Robin’s time there, the girl’s behavior had actually started to offend her a little, less on her own behalf than on her mother’s. Robin brought drugs into the house, she used her key to sneak out at night and flirted with the doorman so he wouldn’t bust her, she even brought guys into the downstairs half of the apartment in secret, and even though April had done just about all of these things herself at one time or another, her thought this time was: My mother takes you in and gives you every freedom and this is how you pay her back?
When it got around Dalton that she was essentially a runaway, and that her mom had beaten her (April herself may have been the one who let that slip), Robin’s school persona had undergone a sea change. She went from a carefully cultivated normality to a kind of exalted strangeness. She started playing up to her new persona by mouthing off to teachers (who, like Cynthia, basically let her get away with anything), to other kids, to the people who worked at the Starbucks near school where they hung out during free periods. Friday afternoons sometimes she’d be so drunk she’d fall asleep in class. To others it might have looked like acting out but April saw it as pure performance. Only she knew how good the chances were that this supposedly damaged badass would end the day lying in her pajamas on April’s couch with her head in April’s mother’s lap while the three of them watched movies and shared a bag of red licorice. But now that was over and Robin and she, though still friends, didn’t share anything like that at all.
Once in a while, when Robin was still living there, when the two of them were up late and couldn’t get to sleep, they used to lie side by side on April’s bed with their laptops and go into these chat rooms that were obviously full of older guys. It was hilarious, because you could say absolutely anything to them with no repercussions because they could have been anywhere in the world, and so, for that matter, could the girls themselves. The guys were just glad you weren’t cops, probably. They would masturbate pathetically while April and Robin, lying on their backs with their laptops on their stomachs, typed the most ridiculous porn and then tilted their screens toward each other to read, trying to outdo themselves until they both laughed so hard they hurt. It would always end with the loser asking to meet you. He didn’t care where you were; he’d travel anywhere to meet Bobbi or Sammi or whatever name they’d given each other that night. They were safe because they lied about everything. Though it wasn’t the same, April still did it sometimes by herself when she was bored.
Now on most weekends it was just the four of them. One Friday April’s mother announced that they were all going to the Hamptons the next morning to look at houses. This was a bit of a surprise; though they visited people out there all the time, her dad in particular had resisted joining the general migration for years, saying that it never changed and there had to be some more interesting place in the world to see. They would spend the next several weekends on the East End looking if they needed to, Cynthia said, but the kids exchanged an eye-roll at that one because once their mother had made up her mind to purchase something, she usually got what she wanted in the first hour. Their dad drove them out to Amagansett in the morning and, sure enough, maybe the third place they saw had their mom hooked. It was really nice, April had to admit-about a hundred feet from the beach-and just being out here at all would bring her closer to a lot of her friends on the weekends. Another home to fill up with stuff. Her mom would be in heaven for the next few months.
Back in the city a few nights later she was in her room alone writing to one of the deviants in the chat room and, when he asked her her name, she thoughtlessly typed April. She had a moment of total panic until she remembered that there were a million Aprils in the world. But after that night, whenever she would log on, amid all the lying and the fake porn-star affect there would be this one voice on the screen that would sometimes pop up and say, April? Is that you? His name, or so he said, was Neil, and he lived in Connecticut. Far from the city? she wrote, and he said, Not far at all. Why? He asked for a picture, and she said no way. He sent her one of himself. A little old, maybe, but not a complete gimp, that is if it was really a picture of him at all. There was no way to know, or rather there was only one way to know. That’s all the Internet was, lies gone wild, and it only made you dizzy if you tried to sort it out.
He was really clever about it. He didn’t say, Do you want to meet? Do you want to meet? He said, I will be at the Starbucks on 41st and Seventh at 2:00 PM on Wednesday June 18th. I really hope you’ll be brave enough to be there too. You’ll recognize me from the photo.
She didn’t breathe a word to Robin about it, nor to anyone else. On the other hand, even though it was a secret, there was no question she was doing it for an audience, even if that audience was, in a strange way, made up. People would be in awe of her if they knew: even if they said they thought it was an incredibly stupid thing to do, they would be in awe of her fearlessness, whether it turned out there was something to fear there or not. She would be the badass, the damaged one. If, in a given activity, there was a next step to be taken-a taller cliff to dive from, purer drugs to try, something bigger and more difficult to steal-someone, at some point, was going to take that step, it was like a law of nature, and so let the record reflect that that someone was her.
She saw him right away, and he smiled at her, but she made a big show of getting a Venti Americano first before joining him. “I cannot believe,” he said first thing, “how beautiful you are,” and she realized then how the very same thing that might sound desperate and pathetic when you saw it in type on your laptop screen might be, in other, more direct circumstances, a very powerful thing to hear. She didn’t give away any details, not her last name or the name of her school or her address, or what her parents did; he seemed to understand, though, what was difficult about all this for her, even to anticipate it sometimes, and so he helped her relax by talking a lot about himself. He was, he said, a private investor (“So’s my dad,” she wanted to say but didn’t) who worked at home but had managed to make a lot of money-“not as much money as you have, though, I bet,” he said. She wondered how he could tell that about her, how it showed. He’d grown up in Greenwich and had inherited his own house after his parents died. Living in your hometown was cool, but it was hard to meet new people. She really wanted to ask him how old he was-she couldn’t tell the difference between thirty and fifty, it all looked the same to her at her age-but she was afraid of appearing too interested in him. She hardly moved except to lift the coffee to her mouth.
“So I won’t ask you where you live, April,” he said, smiling, like it was some kind of coyness that kept her silent, “but how did you get down here today? Subway?”
She’d taken a cab, but she nodded yes. Any lie, even a pointless one, seemed like a good idea. Then, clearing her throat first, she said, “You? Do you take the train in or what?”
His smile broadened. “I drove,” he said. “It’s really a short drive. You’d love my car. It’s a convertible. But then if you get stuck in traffic or the rain or whatever, you put up the top and I’ve got a killer sound system in there-you just plug your iPod in and blast it. You’ve got an iPod, right? Everyone does these days. I’d even let you drive it if you wanted. Or maybe you’re not old enough for a permit yet?”
She stared at him. She wo
ndered why they weren’t drawing more attention from everyone else in there, an older guy and a high-school girl in a Starbucks in the middle of the day. But maybe it didn’t seem that unusual to people.
“Well,” Neil said, “even if you aren’t old enough to drive, that could be our little secret.”
She realized then that, whatever outcome she had been pointing this toward-one-upping Robin, getting her mother’s attention again, whatever subconscious wish some shrink would probably say she was acting on right now-it was all contingent on the idea that someone would see her, that she would get caught. The idea that she would not get caught had never really hit her before now.
“Do you want to go outside and see it?” Neil said.
In the end she got as far as the car itself but she didn’t get inside it. He wasn’t angry with her at all. He knew how to be patient. He wrote down his cell number for her, said he looked forward to seeing her again, and he gave her a long hug.
Nine days later, the phone rang at the Moreys; it was Robin, and she asked, for some reason, for Cynthia. Cynthia held the phone to her ear and didn’t say anything for half a minute; her expression was perfectly flat. Then she hung up and stood and walked straight into her bedroom and shut the door, but when she brushed past April in the hallway she was already crying. Robin’s mother had cut her wrists in the bathtub the night before last and was dead. Adam was out of the country on business, and Cynthia, disappointingly, wasn’t even able to pull herself together and at least make a show of strength for Robin’s sake; so April wound up being the one Morey to go to the funeral. The whole class went. They sat together in the back pews from which they could easily see Robin and her father up front, but what difference did that make, April realized-Robin was a million miles away. They might as well have been watching her on TV. The gulf between them was so terrible that they were all too scared to say or do anything to try to traverse it.
Robin wasn’t back at Dalton in the fall, but the dean of the upper school said he was still hopeful she’d be back in January. April threw out Neil’s cell number, and never went back into those chat rooms again, though it was not exactly reassuring to know that he was very likely still out there somewhere himself, calling out her real name.
Dalton had a fathers’ basketball league that Adam still played in a couple of times a month. It wasn’t your standard pickup game. You could tell which ones were the lawyers from the way they stopped the game for two minutes to argue every time somebody called a foul. And some of them, the financial guys especially, were competitive to the point where you’d be breaking up fights once in a while-not often, but often enough that years ago they’d voted not to let faculty members play, because the idea of losing your temper and throwing an elbow at your kid’s history teacher was a little too fraught. The level of competition was obviously spotty, but there were some decent athletes in there. And as his own kids grew older and the fathers of new kindergartners joined the league, Adam even found himself on occasion guarded by guys who were actually his age. One night he went up for a rebound and got knocked off balance by someone’s shoulder against his hip, and as he landed on one foot he could feel his knee come apart. He remembered standing up again, his arms over the shoulders of two of his teammates, and watching the lower half of his right leg swing from side to side like a pendulum. After three days in the hospital and a week working while bedridden at home, he made his return to Perini on crutches, locked into a kind of massive splint that ran from his ankle almost to his hip and kept his right leg as straight as a pencil at all times.
They mocked him about it relentlessly at the office, hiding his crutches, making pirate noises when he stumped by, emailing him videos of famous sports knee blowouts. It was a survival-of-the-fittest kind of humor, where they laughed at his weakness more or less in lieu of killing and eating him, but he didn’t mind it, he would have expected no less. His great fear in the months that followed was getting fat. He set his recovery back a couple of weeks, or so his doctor told him, by trying to double up on the exercises his physical therapist had given him.
The analysts in the office were almost all guys in their twenties, and though they loved hanging out with Adam and were in awe of his excellence at what he did-he saw a company’s future almost instantly, an instinct that his lack of a business school degree elevated to the level of the mystical and heroic-they couldn’t figure out what he was still doing there. Over and over they would sidle up to him, usually in some bar, and let him know that when the time came for him to bolt Perini and start his own fund, he could count on their total loyalty. To a man they felt that Sanford was too risk-averse and that if it weren’t for Adam’s presence there, his clients’ money wouldn’t be doing much better than it would in a savings account.
“Someday it will be the right time,” was Adam’s usual line. “I won’t forget we talked.”
The truth was that leaving and starting his own shop would bring into play questions of proprietary information, and other forms of unwelcome attention. Part of what insulated him from suspicion is that he himself never appeared, to anyone outside Perini at least, to be the one making the decisions. No one looking at the books would have any way of knowing that Barry, at this point, did literally everything that Adam advised him to. Adam didn’t want anyone looking too hard at some of the deals he’d been involved in over the last eight or ten years, because while they might not have known exactly what they were looking for, there was always a chance they would find it anyway. From his point of view the most promising scenario was for things to stay just as they were.
Perini was still at the same address, the same layout as ever. Sanford came in less and less but talked to Adam four or five times a day wherever he was. Adam had his own office but the rest of them worked in a kind of open-floor plan and he spent most of his time out there anyway. He hadn’t been beaten on the office foosball table in four years.
Usually if Sanford wanted to make a big personal display about something, he took you out to lunch. But one morning in February, just about the time Adam was walking normally again, a few weeks after the removal of the accursed splint, the boss came in at ten-early, by his standards-called Adam into his office behind him, and told him that he had decided to retire, effective in two weeks, and to turn his executive partnership position in Perini Capital, minus only some deferred compensation, over to Adam.
“It’s largely a tax thing,” the old man said. “I had to redraw my will and there are certain things they advised me to make clear.” But his eyes were watering when he said it.
Adam was profoundly unprepared. He never saw it coming; for all the old man’s sentimentality, Adam never imagined he’d let go voluntarily of anything truly estimable without dying first.
“Barry,” he said. “You don’t need to do this now.”
“What should I wait for?” Sanford said. “You have to look forward. This is a beautiful institution and I want it to continue.”
“Don’t you-I mean, I know you have children of your own?”
“They’ll be provided for,” he said, “according to their merits. This is a separate thing.”
Adam fought down an alien panic. “This place could never exist without you,” he said. “It’s a monument to you.”
“Well, that does remind me, there is one condition to all this, and that is that the fund keeps its name. Even after I’m gone. One does want to leave a legacy, you know. One does want to be remembered. Why that should make a damn bit of difference I’m not really sure, but it does. Anyway, that will be a provision of the ten thousand things we will both have to sign.”
Adam wound up saying that it was something he would need to talk over with his wife. Sanford took that to mean that he was too moved to say yes on the spot and decorously granted his request. Adam went home that night and in the margins of a newspaper added up all the money he had offshore. It was rare for him to write anything down; he kept accounts in his head. There was enough for them to live on for th
e rest of their lives; but what did that even mean? It was unsettling to think of money in terms other than those of growth, of how it might be used to make more money. Something about it smelled of death to him but he didn’t know why.
He went in the next day and told Sanford that he was going to decline the offer. He felt it was premature, he said, because Sanford was still a titan in the world of private equity and would be for years to come; anyway, Perini Capital was literally unthinkable without its founder at the helm and he was sure everyone else in the office would say the same thing. Then he said he was going to use a week of vacation time. It didn’t take even an hour for Sanford ’s hurt and astonishment to turn into anger. It was a strangely joyous sort of anger, though, as if he’d found out that his doctors had made some terrible diagnostic error and in fact he was going to live forever. He stormed out without a word to anyone at about three o’clock and when the others turned to Adam to ask what the fuck was going on between the two of them, he said, in a tone that terrified them, that it was nothing for them to worry about.
He probably should have gone to Anguilla right away, but instead, that night at dinner, he told Jonas and April that he was taking them out of school for a week so they could all go to London. They looked at him like he was nuts, as did Cynthia, but they had always been raised to respect spontaneity and it was much too good an offer to turn down. On short notice, in the high season, everything was outrageously expensive, but even though they kept referring to that, it didn’t really mean anything to them. They found a place in Mayfair and when April found out a former school friend of hers was on a modeling job in Surrey, Adam took them all to Battersea and chartered a helicopter to take them out there for a visit.