The Privileges_ A Novel Part 10

"What do you mean?"

She put her drink down disgustedly but still carefully. "Come on," she said. "Knock it off. You know what I mean."

She was really the only one he could talk about this with, but somehow that only made him more uncomfortable talking about it. "Why is it necessary," he said, "to make a show of it? It's not like I've taken a vow of poverty. I live a lot better than most of my friends here do. Just because I have the means to live in some penthouse, does that mean I should do it?"

"Well, yeah, it does mean that, if the alternative is pretending, even to someone you're supposedly in love with, that you're somebody you're not. What, you don't think she would like it? Don't kid yourself."

"Mom and Dad's money," he said, "is not who I am."

"Except why shouldn't it be? In the sense that you are one of a handful of people to whom certain experiences are open, and not taking advantage of that isn't n.o.ble, it's just a pose. And anyway, who are you being modest for? Who is impressed by you? It's crazy. For instance, you're into art now, I understand. Why don't I see any art hanging on the walls at your place? Can't afford it?"

"Excuse me," he said, "if I'm trying to live a life that's more authentic than just buying whatever catches my eye, hanging out in clubs and getting high and showing up on Page Six."

"Please, let's not exaggerate, I have never been on Page Six. But that's your problem, right there, what you said. Who told you you were inauthentic? Where do you think this authenticity is waiting to be found, exactly?"

He rolled his eyes and said nothing.

"So come out with me tonight. f.u.c.k eight hours of sleep for once in your life. Life has given you the gift of possibility, and the real arrogance is wasting it so that you can condescend to everyone else by calling them authentic. Do you even know where people go out in this so-called city?"

"No," he said, "actually, I don't. I have no idea. Can we talk about something else, please? How do Mom and Dad seem to you?"

She sighed; then she reached across the table and took his unfinished martini. "Mom is all up in my s.h.i.+t, as usual," she said. "To be honest, they seem really happy with the whole Robin Hood gig they have going. Totally uninhibited about it. Let me tell you, there are two people with no guilt. None. I don't know where you got it from, is my point. Maybe Dad is not your real father. Maybe Mom was having an affair with Che Guevara or something." She pushed some food around on her plate. "Who eats dinner this early?" she said.

She was supposed to stay a week, but the next morning she was on the cell with friends in New York trying unsuccessfully to get them to come to Chicago and hang out with her, and that night she called their mother for the jet and flew home. She was very friendly and apologetic about it, and she and Nikki were actually quite sweet with each other by the time it was all over. The next morning, a delivery van buzzed them from downstairs: it turned out that before she left, April had gone to a gallery on Michigan Avenue and bought them a Pica.s.so. It was a simple sketch of a bull's head; when Nikki was out of earshot, Jonas idly asked one of the delivery guys if he had a receipt for it, and the amount on the receipt was sixteen thousand dollars. When they were alone again, Jonas hammered a nail into the wall above their couch and they hung the frame there and gazed at it. Nikki shook her head. "I don't get it," she said. "I really thought she hated me."

The research Nikki was doing for Agnew lost what little structure it had when summer came; by the end of August their scheduled conferences in his office had devolved into meetings for lunch or coffee or even just a standing invitation to show up at his apartment on South Blackstone and have a gla.s.s of wine. It was all well above board, though; Agnew was one of the few cult professors who had no reputation for trying to get over on his grad students, and in any case Nikki never once knocked on his apartment door without finding at least two or three others, usually more-grad students, faculty colleagues, friends of mysterious art-world provenance-already lounging inside. Jonas was curious about these salons but also too self-conscious about his own youth and ignorance to want to go with her. But before long Agnew himself made a point of asking Nikki where her boyfriend-"child bride," actually, was the expression he used-spent these afternoons and evenings while his paramour drank cheap wine and talked about art. Surely not home alone? When the teasing got to be too much for her, Nikki asked Jonas again if he would please reconsider, just for her sake, and he said yes.

The apartment itself was scruffy but large with, as Agnew said, a great view of the lake if you were willing to let someone hang you out the living room window by your ankles. Nikki came bearing a CD full of images Agnew needed to copy for one reason or another and so the two of them went straight into his study. Jonas felt like people were smirking at him a little bit and so rather than try to horn in on a conversation he acted as if he were in a museum, touring the perimeter of each room, on whose walls hung dozens of small-scale artworks in cheap stationery-store frames. He didn't recognize any of it. Many of the drawings and paintings (anyone who'd taken Agnew's Intro to Seeing knew his dismissive views on photography) were unsigned. In the kitchen, an odorous thicket of old wine bottles and impromptu ashtrays, Jonas got to staring at one particular sketch, framed so that the frayed edge from the spiral notebook binding was still visible, of some kind of industrial landscape that kept yielding details that made less and less sense. The sky was filled with numbers, written very carefully as if in a sequence. Just a few feet from the walls of a mysterious factory or plant-which had no doors or windows, only smokestacks-there was a scaled-down forest about the size of a traffic island, with a lake or pond in it in which birds flew underwater.

"Recognize it?" a voice said; Jonas turned, embarra.s.sed by how close his face was to the drawing itself, and saw Agnew. And though he hadn't recognized anything until that moment, now he did.

"It's the guy from outside the Inst.i.tute," he said.

Agnew clapped him on the shoulder. "Good eye," he said. "Actually, I have to ask you not to mention to any of your art-world friends that you saw this here. I am in serious Dutch with Mr. Strauss's gallery over having this piece."

"I have no art-world friends," Jonas said. "What do you mean, his gallery? He has a gallery?"

Agnew explained to him, while opening another bottle of wine, that Martin Strauss, far from being Agnew's secret, was actually quite a name in outsider-art circles, a phrase that was accompanied by a roll of Agnew's eyes. Strauss was showing in New York and in Miami; though he was somewhere in his thirties, money from the sales of his work, which Agnew guessed might have been as much as thirty or forty thousand dollars a year, went straight to his elderly parents in their capacity as his guardians. Strauss himself had certain needs that had to be met but beyond that he had no use for the money at all. Agnew technically had given him money in exchange for this drawing-"I give him something every time I see him"-but the gallery owner considered this thievery because, he said, the artist had no way of properly valuing his own work. "You can imagine," Agnew said, "how provocative I find that idea. So I torture this guy a little by maintaining the friends.h.i.+p with his client, even though I am, I suppose, legally speaking, in the wrong."

Jonas was conscious that he was actually hunched over a little in order not to look down on his host. So-called outsider art, Agnew went on, was nowadays pretty much the sole focus of his own research, and for that matter of his interest in art, period. "And not 'outsider' as in 'self-taught,' either," he said. "That's one of the many problems with the influx of people like this schmuck with his gallery-in an effort to maximize their own exploitation, they broaden the definition until it becomes meaningless. So no, none of that condescending Grandma Moses folk-art bulls.h.i.+t. I'm interested only in the artistic expression of those whose mental or psychological circ.u.mstances lie outside what society has defined as acceptable."

"The insane?" Jonas asked. Agnew frowned. "I try not to romanticize them," he said, "for good or bad. Whatever they may have done to marginalize themselves is immaterial. As artists, they sit down to engage their art with absolutely no sense of a viewer, of history, of an outside world. Does that make them insane? You look at what they produce and the only proper answer to that question becomes, What's the difference?"

Jonas had many more questions, but just then Nikki walked in and stopped short in surprise. "There you are," she said uncertainly.

"Ah," Agnew said, "the power couple. Listen, Nikki, there's one of those-G.o.d, it makes my mouth hurt just having to say it-'outsider art fair' fiascoes in town next month, and I was going to ask if you'd go. Larry Masters will have a little booth there-Larry, that's the dealer I was telling you about, Jonas, the one who accuses me of devaluing Martin Strauss-and so I can't go, he hates me, he probably has some kind of court order waiting for me, actually. But why don't the two of you go? There should actually be some great stuff there, some Wolfli, I think, some Ramirez, some Dadd. You'll do it?"

They glanced wide-eyed at each other; then Jonas turned back to Agnew and nodded.

"Excellent. About time we got young Mr. Morey here on the payroll. Just an expression, Jonas, don't look like that. Not that you need it, like most of these indigents. In fact, maybe you can put us on the payroll, right?"

Jonas smiled nervously. He was surprised to learn that Agnew knew who he was.

"Seriously," Agnew said, "you'd be doing me a real favor if you'd return this. I love it, but I don't feel like getting sued over it. Tell him who it's from." He took the framed Strauss down from the kitchen wall and handed it to Jonas.

"You can't," Jonas said without thinking. It was too extraordinary; he didn't want to be the one to hand it over. "It's like-I don't know. It's like putting a kid into foster care. There has to be some other way."

Agnew's eyebrows were up, though not, it seemed, in a bad way. "Well, I'm glad you like it," he said. "But, like it or not, it is in the world, and has been a.s.signed a value in that world, quite independent of what you or I or the artist think about that. Or can do to stop it, for that matter. Outsider art is very hot right now. I've been happy to hang this piece here but now it's time for it to go, as they say, into the system."

Jonas looked at it again. He was flushed with the awareness of Agnew's interest in him, in what he was going to do; he wasn't courting that interest, but still, he could feel it. Something about the drawing was too compelling to just let go of like that. It wasn't like it spoke to him or anything. It resisted all that-you could admire it, but you had no real hope of interpreting it. It was an artifact of an unimaginable state of mind. There was no dialogue going on there, no puzzle to solve, no meaning to extract. Or, if it had a meaning, it was a meaning he had no hope of understanding.

"How much do you think he wants for it?" Jonas said.

Clubs were over, there weren't any good ones anymore, and anyway a key component of the usual club high-getting in when you weren't supposed to, when it was technically illegal for them to serve you, but they would serve you anyway and for free because of how you looked and because they knew who you were-was gone now that April was of age. Yet at a certain point the night always took a certain turn and the next thing you knew you were sitting in some VIP room with a bunch of people who said they were with you, paying five hundred bucks for a bottle of Ketel One while the ba.s.s throb reached you through the walls. The reason this was a bad development was that the disgust and contempt it engendered in her, directed at those around her but at herself too, left her open to longing for stronger intoxicants. And little men, older men, would pop up in her field of vision at the very moment this desire started making itself felt in her mind-as if she were tripping already, as if the world itself were some sort of Second Life dreamscape programmed to tempt her with her own wants-and once you reached that point, b.i.t.c.h, you were finished.

When the speed kicked in, the music dropped out of the mix for a moment and she heard as clear as a bell the voice of her friend Katie, her best friend Katie whose last name April couldn't remember but whom she'd known and hung out with when they were in middle school. Katie went to Spence. The two girls made eye contact and screamed. "You went to Spence!" April shouted over the music, which was loud again, as if Katie might have forgotten. "Yes!" Katie said. "Yes! Six years ago!" Her math seemed wrong, but her eyes were like pinp.r.i.c.ks and she was so happy to see April that she was crying. Where had she come from? The world got so small when you were out at night. In the shadows over Katie's shoulder, as they hugged again, April could make out two very sketchy-looking guys sitting on the arms of Katie's vacated chair, older guys, though they were hard to reckon in the way of shaven-headed men. The world was full of these guys, who were waiting, always waiting. Waiting for what? Well, she wasn't an idiot, they were waiting to f.u.c.k Katie, Katie and her; they were pathetic and old and degenerate but April liked having them around for a couple of reasons, one being that the nauseating prospect of one of them being there to catch you when you fell was the only thing that kept you vigilant, and the other was that their gaze reminded you where you were, which was basically at the exact center of the f.u.c.king universe, young, hot women of privilege at the very peak of everything that was desirable, the very apex of all in life that was worth coveting. And who the h.e.l.l wanted to sleep through that?

"Katie," she said to Katie, who was talking at the same time, "that guy over there, his head looks like a f.u.c.king turtle. Who is that guy?"

"I don't know," Katie said. "He's not American, though. He wants to f.u.c.k me."

"Well we cannot let that happen!"

"I know." Katie turned and looked right at him. "He has the best drugs, though. He likes my tattoos. He has his uses."

The guy's stare was reptilian. He would sit there for thirty years if he had to. "Look," April said. "Look look look. He is a goblin. I was sent here to earth to save you from him, you f.u.c.king stoned b.i.t.c.h." They hugged again. "How are we going to throw these guys off the trail?"

The answer was to pile into April's car and have the driver take them to Scores. She called ahead for a room and set them up with lap dance after lap dance. While this one completely amazing Amazon was rubbing her t.i.ts on the turtle's head, April and Katie motioned that they were going to the bathroom, and once they were out of there they ran stumbling out the door and piled back into April's limo and told the driver to hit it.

They laughed and got up on their knees in the back seat to look out the rear window but then it was just the two of them in the car, and they realized they didn't know each other particularly well and the speed was wearing off. The driver hadn't even asked them where they were going, because he was waiting for them to figure it out. Waiting while driving. April couldn't remember his name, but he was the best. Katie said she knew where she could get some Adder-all; probably from her own bathroom cabinet, April thought, and anyway, Adderall seemed a little low-stakes right now. "I know a guy we can call," she said. "And he owes me a favor." If you made a lot of friends when you went out then there was always somebody who owed you a favor. The guy's name was Dmitri and when he called back he was, where else, in a club, so she told the nice driver to take Ca.n.a.l almost all the way over to the highway, and he nodded without turning around.

That was where they started in on the meth. Then it was some time later and they were on the sidewalk in the hostile sunlight and "they" no longer included Katie, whom April hadn't seen in a while. Dmitri was there, and three other sketchy guys with accents, and two women whose job, it seemed, was to make out with each other once an hour or so to keep the others from losing interest in everything. That may not have been a joke; it wouldn't be unlike Dmitri to have actually paid them to do it. They found a diner and ate without tasting anything, while the sketchy guys glared menacingly, to zero effect, at the disgusted cas.h.i.+er. April felt ashamed to be with these people she didn't know, but they were like vampires, she was one of them now, she couldn't just go back to the living. She looked out the window and there at the curb, unbelievably, was her driver, leaning against the side of his car, looking exhausted. She had to let him go. She wanted to tip him a few hundred bucks, but when she looked in her bag she saw that she had like thirty dollars in there, which was f.u.c.ked up but true. So she called him on her cell, watching his angry face through the window, and sent him home.

Her cell had a bunch of voice mails on it but she didn't bother with them. Some were from her mother, but she was out of town herself, so there was no stress there. Everyone was arguing over the check like a bunch of losers, not because they particularly cared but just as a symptom of their panic over coming down. "Where can we go, my love?" Dmitri said to her. One of the chicks was trying to reapply her makeup.

"Your place?" April said. "I mean, you must live somewhere, right?"

He shook his head. "Not with these pigs," he said. "If we go there, it is just you and me. Is that what you want?"

No, it was not. "I want the festivities to go on," she said.

"Brava. Well, in that case we need someplace big. Big and empty. Private."

And then April had what she knew right away was a terrible idea.

"Hey," she said loudly to the group. They were like rats, red-eyed and squabbling. "Does one of you lowlifes have a car?"

One of the lowlifes did indeed have a car; it was in Queens, though, so he and Dmitri went to get it. The others went somewhere to steal cigarettes and take a shower. April waited more than an hour for them in a Starbucks on Varick Street. Dmitri texted her every few minutes. She didn't know what time it was, or what day it was, but the Starbucks was packed. And the strange thing, even though she wasn't high anymore, was that the people in this fake s.p.a.ce exhibited the most terrible intimacies-yelling into their cell phones, popping zits, putting on makeup, talking to themselves like maniacs-six inches from your face. Their conviction that you could not see or hear them was so strong that, in fact, you usually did not see or hear them. Sitting across the tiny table from April, picking at some kind of m.u.f.fin, was a woman about April's mother's age who had unmistakably, some time in the last day or two, been punched in the eye.

They all got high in the car again and two hours later they were in Amagansett. April hit the security code and they were in. The streets were empty and when the sky darkened they didn't see lights coming on in any of the neighboring houses.

There was a lot of alcohol in the house, which helped them avoid peaking too drastically. Their only foray outside was down to the beach at night, just to listen to the receding water and watch the stars. April felt very happy. Like being a kid: finding a hiding place in your own home. They all got briefly excited when they saw, way way down the beach, a bonfire burning in the sand; but it was freezing and they weren't really dressed right so they didn't go check it out. At one point April and one of the Russians-they were Russian, she'd decided-were alone in the pool house, and they decided to try to have s.e.x, but it was pretty much a nonstarter.

When they left to drive back to the city, the last few bottles in hand, April turned to look at the place one last time and consoled herself that not a lot had gotten damaged or broken, though the whole first floor just looked vaguely grimy. Even the walls. Someone would come and clean it, though. Dmitri drove while the others tried not to fall asleep; they were still on Route 15 when Dmitri, who was trying to text someone with one hand while pa.s.sing another car, hit a van traveling in the other direction. The van managed to turn a little so they didn't hit head-on; it skidded over to the shoulder and then fell lazily and loudly onto its side.

None of them was wearing a seat belt, but Dmitri was the one who was truly f.u.c.ked up. Somehow the rest of them were standing outside the ruined car now-the two chicks were wailing-and looking curiously through the driver's-side window at Dmitri, whose head rested on the steering wheel and was turned so that you couldn't see his face, which was probably just as well. No sirens yet. Where were they? April started to get scared. She had lots of shameful thoughts in succession: Thank G.o.d it wasn't her car. Thank G.o.d she wasn't driving. Still, this was not going to be good. It was all going to fall on her, because they'd all been at her place, and because who were these people, really? Hers was the only name that was going to give anybody anything to latch on to. She looked again at the door to the van, which had not moved. It said Sagaponack Nursery on it. Nursery like trees, she told herself. Not like nursery school. Suddenly she wanted so badly to be ten years old again. No more pretending now. Her own phone had been dead for days. "Who has a phone?" she asked the others, but they were like statues, like garden gnomes. "A phone!" phone!" Finally, desperate and shaking, she took two steps forward and, holding her breath, reached through the shattered window, pulled the cell phone out of Dmitri's clenched hand, wiped it on her jacket, and called her mother. Finally, desperate and shaking, she took two steps forward and, holding her breath, reached through the shattered window, pulled the cell phone out of Dmitri's clenched hand, wiped it on her jacket, and called her mother.

The fair was held in the McCormick Place convention center just off Lake Sh.o.r.e Drive; Jonas and Nikki had to pay thirty-five bucks each just to get in. A number of galleries from all over the Midwest, and four or five from New York, had paid for and staked out square footage inside. Little pamphlets on draped card tables held one-page biographies of the artists, like trading cards for mental illness; Jonas picked up as many of them as he could find. The rule of thumb seemed to be that the farther a particular artist's own mind had pushed him toward society's border, the more you could charge for his work. It was somehow revolting and thrilling at the same time. A few dead outsiders had become stars, like Henry Darger or Martin Ramirez. Maybe this was no different, Jonas thought, from the way the art establishment had processed, say, Van Gogh. But everyone moving through the building's vast warren of temporary drywall seemed so loathsome to him that it was hard to judge. He was surprised how old they were, ten or twenty years older than him at least, if you discounted the occasional baby in a stroller-smug bohemian speculators, praising everything noisily in overcompensation for the fact that they were no match for the magnificent strangeness of what hung right in front of their eyes.

He and Nikki caught a break when they stopped at Larry Masters's booth and found that Masters himself had gone to lunch; they left the framed Strauss sketch with an indifferent gallery a.s.sistant and hurried away. Nikki had a list on an index card of particular artists Agnew wanted her to look for; he wanted to know what their work was selling for and also, more problematically, camera-phone shots of the work itself, but there were security guards here and there and Nikki, who was afraid of cops even of the rental variety, could sneak a shot only occasionally. She took copious notes, though, and collected all the pamphlets and price lists. It wasn't really a two-person job, so Jonas just walked around following whatever caught his eye. He squeezed through a pack of reverent yuppies for a look at those great iconic deer in the work of Martin Ramirez, who had lived on the streets of LA apparently incapable of so much as a conversation and whose asylum warders at first tried to stop him from drawing on the grounds that it was unhealthy. That stuff was going for tens of thousands now. There were diagrams of nonexistent machines, maps of nonexistent places, ferociously detailed charts filled with dates and numbers in an order that you were never, ever going to divine. There was a grown man named Morton Bartlett who had spent decades photographing his own doll collection. Jonas was just about to start looking for Nikki again when he saw a group of charcoal portraits, if you could call them portraits, of people screaming. Were they screaming, though? Their mouths were open. Maybe they were just trying to speak. Their eyes were always neutral, and their necks were thin and cylindrical, like plant stalks almost. Sometimes there was a background, slight variations on what Jonas ultimately decided was a gas station, or at least looked like one; there were also some simply drawn dogs, and boxlike forms that may have been televisions, though, if so, they were never turned on. But it was the faces, the upturned open mouths, that were most ambiguous and obsessive.

The number written on a sticker beside the portraits was 12; Jonas checked the gallery pamphlet and saw prices listed but no biography of the artist, who was named Joseph Novak. When he asked the stout, short-haired woman at the card table if she could tell him anything more, she sized him up and smiled with a touch too much patience, probably, he realized, because his youth and appearance didn't suggest that he was in a position to buy anything.

"Joseph is new to us," said the woman; she didn't introduce herself, but she seemed to Jonas like the gallery owner, in which case her name was Margo. "He-well, I don't want to get into specifics, but he was in an inst.i.tution for several years, in the wake of a crime he admitted to committing as a minor; like a lot of artists he really only began drawing when his freedom was taken away, but he has kept up the pace since his release."

"So he's still working on this series?" Jonas asked.

Margo considered how to answer. "Presumably," she said. "I mean, 'series' is a word you could use. I've only met Joseph one time myself. These drawings came to me via a brother of his in Kenosha who had a suspicion they might be worth something. Joseph himself is-well, communication is difficult, let's say that."

Jonas stared at the drawings for a while longer. They had a broken, smudged line, like if you extracted the lead from a pencil and just tried to hold it in your hand. They were figurative and thus a little less grotesquely original than some of the other stuff there; still, the longer he stared at the faces, the more excitement he felt, like what he was seeing was something that had never even been looked at before. He tried to forget what little Margo had just told him about the artist himself, but that was difficult to do. A while later Nikki was walking past and spotted him. He asked her right away if the name Joseph Novak was on Agnew's list and felt a small thrill when the answer was no. "How about you?" he said. "See anything interesting?"

"Kind of," Nikki said. She beckoned him around the corner with one finger, to the exhibition stall right behind Margo's. There was a good crowd there. On the wall hung an array of large, photorealistic oil portraits of an iconic-looking family, most often standing in front of what was probably their own house, staring right back at the viewer, happy and stiff-in fact, it was almost as if the paintings were portraits not of the people themselves but of photographs of them. It was easy to spot the dealer, who wore a tweed jacket and a name tag and kept touching everyone who spoke to him on the shoulder. And after a moment Jonas realized that the proud-looking family standing with their backs to the artwork, accepting the occasional congratulations-a father, a mother, and a boy who looked like he was maybe in eighth grade, wearing a DePaul University sweats.h.i.+rt-was the same family represented in the paintings.

"No," Nikki said, taking his hand. "Over there." Jonas looked to the right of the exhibition stall, where there was a little recessed area beneath a fire-door sign, and saw a man who looked just about his age, wearing a crewneck sweater with a name tag on it and jeans and unlaced snow boots, sitting lotus-style on the floor; beside him was a worn stack of khaki-colored loose-leaf notebooks that said DePaul University on them. He had his head down and his eyes closed, and his index fingers stuck inside his ears, and his lips pressed together, as he rocked very slightly but rhythmically forward and back. "Who is that?" Jonas asked, though he saw the family resemblance right away.

April was still sound asleep when Cynthia left the house to meet with their lawyers at Debevoise. From Debevoise she went straight downtown to Marietta's office; Adam couldn't get away to meet her there but they had him on speaker. It was chastening how long these meetings took-how much more there was to take into account than she'd even realized. She'd never seen Marietta so businesslike. By the time Cynthia got back home it was nearly three, and Dawn, her a.s.sistant, met her at the front door to let her know that April was still not up. G.o.d bless Dawn: even though she and April had barely met, she'd done what Edina, the housekeeper, was too scared to do and opened up April's bedroom door every twenty minutes or so just to make sure she was still breathing, because she knew that was going to be Cynthia's first question whether Cynthia actually asked it or not.

Her eyes adapted to the dark inside her daughter's room and she saw April's legs twitch in her sleep. There were snoring noises, sick-sounding but still rea.s.suring. She closed the door again and went back to sit in the solarium. Her daughter had been sleeping for about fifteen straight hours but in a way it played into Cynthia's desire to be able to put off talking to her until Adam was home from work. Not that she wanted April to think it was some kind of intervention or something. Hard to get up on any kind of moral high horse when she'd spent the last thirty-six hours involuntarily remembering all the times she herself had been high and in a car, as a pa.s.senger or, G.o.d help her, behind the wheel, back when she was April's age. She wasn't about to deliver a lecture on the subject when the fact that she was here at all was nothing more than evidence of a charmed life.

Two hours with the lawyers this morning, two hours to go over the ways in which April's name could be kept out of any court papers and then, as a separate issue, out of the press as well. They didn't pretend it wasn't a crisis atmosphere; there were faces around that conference table she'd never even seen before. That was okay. That was why you kept them on retainer: for emergencies. She felt worse about all the lying she'd asked poor Dawn to do in the course of canceling all the appointments originally scheduled for today; probably some of those people hadn't bought it and were offended now. But family trumped all other considerations. All she dared to want from this day was for her daughter to end it in better shape than she'd started it. It was beyond Cynthia, and probably beyond Adam too, to express or even to feel privately any real disappointment in either of their children. But the hard fact to get used to-the thing that Marietta kept harping on-was that the Morey family existed now on a public plane as well as a private one, and in that light something had to happen to make sure this kind of incident never took place again.

"It's nice," Marietta had said to her, "to have done so many favors for people in influential positions, so that they will then do this favor for you. But I'm telling you, you can go back to that well only so many times before people start to feel taken advantage of. And then the dam bursts in terms of curiosity about the Morey family, in terms of the desire to see the high brought low; and then the foundation's work is hurt, and your name starts to get a.s.sociated with things other than the good work you and Adam have started to do. People want that bubble popped, believe me. People would love nothing better than for you to turn out to be hypocrites and sc.u.mbags instead of the generous, caring family that you are. Far be it from me, as a friend or as someone technically on your payroll, to give you parenting advice. But just as a professional matter, this is something you and Adam need to get out in front of."

Then a frightened-looking Edina was in the doorway mouthing the words "She's up," and a few moments later April walked heavily into the living room, in a t-s.h.i.+rt and Adam's pajama bottoms, her hair everywhere, her face bloated, her eyes nearly closed. You had to see her looking her worst, Cynthia thought, in order to understand how irreducibly gorgeous she was. Cynthia didn't stand up. "My head is pounding," April said hoa.r.s.ely. "Will you tell whats-herface to get me some Advil?" Cynthia leaned over and typed something onto the laptop on the coffee table in front of her; communication like that was all done wirelessly now. April made her way over to the couch and curled up against the arm farthest from her mother.

"Do you want anything to drink?" Cynthia said politely. "Or eat?"

"Oh my G.o.d no," April mumbled.

Maybe it was selfish of her, but what Cynthia most wanted to hear right now was the same note of pleading, childish belief in her that she'd heard in that first phone call from the shoulder of Route 15, just to rea.s.sure her that it hadn't all been an act, that it wasn't just a matter of April's knowing how to play her in order to get what she wanted: Mommy-I'm-scared, Mommy-I-need-your-help. "Dad will be home in a little while," Cynthia said. "I spent this morning with our lawyers and basically, as it concerns you at least, in legal terms, the whole thing never happened."

April's face was hidden behind her hair. "Of course it didn't," she said weakly. "Um, is there any word on Dmitri?" Before Cynthia could ask who the h.e.l.l Dmitri was, April added, "And the guy driving the van?"

Cynthia sighed. "They're not dead," she said, which sounded harsh but was all she really knew. "n.o.body's dead."

"Okay," April said.

She'd always been precocious, she'd always set herself apart. Sometime in the last couple of years she seemed to have run up against some kind of interior wall and now she spent her days and nights running into that same wall over and over again. Cynthia believed that there had to be a kind of key to the adult April somewhere, and that it was her fault for not having found it. If you were the mother it was always your fault. But it's not too late, Cynthia told herself. There's still time. She tried to be calm and unprovocative, but she couldn't help herself.

"How did we get here?" she said. "I mean, I try to sort of look back and find out where I made the mistake, but I can't." And then, frustratingly, she started to cry-like she was the daughter, like she was the one who had been through something and needed to be comforted. "I feel like I'm losing you. How can I keep that from happening?"

"Mom, you are not going to lose me," April said, not particularly kindly. "Please. Like there's not enough drama here already."

"I'm sorry, but you cannot just scare the s.h.i.+t out of me like that and expect me to be cool about it. I do not want that to happen again."

"I don't want it to happen again either," April said.

Edina came in with the Advil and a gla.s.s of water on a tray; she placed it on the far edge of the gla.s.s-topped table and withdrew.

"That's what gets me, actually," April said, in a voice that wasn't quite as sharp. "I'm pretty sure it will. Happen again. Even though I don't want it to. I can feel myself forgetting what it feels like to feel this way." She snorted. "Another few days and I'll be hanging out with the same people doing the same stupid s.h.i.+t even though I don't really want to. Why is that? I mean, what am I supposed to do with all my time?"

Cynthia reached out and tried to stroke April's tangled hair, but April pulled her head away. Her kids' moods had always had a way of swamping hers and so after ten minutes of sitting at the opposite end of the couch staring at nothing, she found herself feeling just as mad and hopeless as April did, just as stonewalled and estranged, even though in truth, outside the confines of this moment, she had never in her life felt closer to the heart of things than she did right now. She was chair of one of the top ten fastest growing charitable foundations in New York. The foundation, at Adam's insistence, had her name on it. People brought her antipoverty initiatives of all kinds and her interest made them real, not just at home but overseas, in countries she had never seen. No more intermediaries between her desire for a better world and the world itself; all she had to do was imagine it. But even these triumphs receded like moons into a distant orbit of the fact of her child's unhappiness. She laid her cheek on the arm of the couch and waited.

Adam found the two of them still in that position, like listing bookends, when he came home half an hour later; their expressions made it appear as if they'd fought more than they actually had. He sat down across from them and took a silent minute to try to focus. It was much harder than it should have been to stop thinking about work. The problem was that everything seemed rooted in work these days. Day and night. Everywhere he went, people begged him to take them on as investors in his hedge fund, which over the four years of its existence had put up numbers that pushed him into shamanistic territory, where people earnestly believed that he was performing a kind of magic. Old friends, total strangers-they treated even finding themselves in the same room with him as the portent of a lifetime, and some of them were the type who prided themselves on not taking no for an answer. They would lose their manners completely. Some of Adam's junior partners tried to tell him he was insane for not traveling with security just to keep the wannabes at a respectful distance from him, but he really did not want to go that route, especially not at what were nominally social occasions. Now the fund was filing for its own IPO and that meant the news was about to break that one of its nonvoting stakeholders was the Chinese government. There was nothing wrong or underhanded about it; still, when it came to money, there was a certain threshold of size past which outsiders just reacted irrationally. But that particular freakout was still a few weeks away. He and Cyn had spoken at least ten times that day already, so there was nothing on which he needed to be brought up to date. They had a plan and now just needed to draw from each other the resolve to go through with it. He waited for April to meet his eyes.

"First of all," he said, "Mom and I want you to know that this isn't about the drugs. We are not going to be hypocrites about that."

"Is it the drugs, though?" Cynthia said. "I mean, I think it has to be asked. Are you an addict, do you think?"

"Jesus," April said. "If you had ever in your life seen an actual addict, you would know better than to ask that. I love how you guys always want to establish your street cred."

"Okay," Cynthia said. "It just had to be asked."

No one said anything. Adam's phone vibrated; after a second's deliberation, he looked at the screen and saw that it was a call from Devon. Six months ago he'd put Devon in charge of the fund's nascent commercial-realty speculation arm; it was the only aspect of the fund that might be said to be underperforming right now, but that would turn around. The more immediate problem was that in terms of decision-making Devon wasn't quite the self-starter Adam had hoped and so he was getting these phone calls seven times a day. He let this one bounce to voice mail. Somewhere upstairs they heard a door open and close.

"It's true that I would like to do less drugs than I currently do," April said. "But that's not the same thing."

"I think even you have to admit," Cynthia said, "that this was a close one. You get that, right? I mean, you have to admit that yesterday could easily have ended in some way very much worse than you sitting on the couch in your own living room getting lectured by your parents. It's not exactly a big stretch to imagine it ending with you dead or in jail."

"Or dead and in jail," April said.

"Please don't be smart," Adam said. "There is a point to this conversation. We spent a lot of time today talking to Marietta, and what she kept stressing is that we all have to get used to a new way of thinking around here. Like it or not, this family has a name now, a profile. We have been fortunate enough to make a lot of money, which is fascinating to people, and we are in a position to use some of that money to try to do some good. Which, oddly enough, makes us all a target. There are a lot of people who do not want people like us to succeed, even when our success benefits them. Like the scorpion and the frog. They would rather see us brought down. But we are not going to be brought down. We've done what we can to keep the media in particular off the scent of what happened yesterday, but information like this is like water, if you're not ultracareful it's going to find a way out, and in order to protect both you and the good work that this family wants to continue to do, we have to take some steps. We have to be proactive."

April started to look worried. "If you say the word 'rehab,'" she said, "I swear to G.o.d I am going to f.u.c.king lose it."

"Nope," Adam said. "Better. This was Marietta's idea, actually. I have to go to China for ten days or so, for business and also for a little foundation work, and we have moved up that trip so that it starts the day after tomorrow. You're coming with me. That'll be enough time for your buddies who trashed our country place to go through the system and for us to settle with the van driver on their behalf."

"What?" April said. "China? Wait. If you want to just stash me somewhere, can't I at least pick where?"

"Sorry, no. No St. Barts, no Chateau Marmont, none of your usual haunts. None of your usual friends. The whole point is to be somewhere where n.o.body has any idea who you are."

"I can't believe this," April said. She was struggling not to cry. "You're trying to disappear me."

"Au contraire," Adam said. "You will never be out of my sight. It'll be a little father-daughter time." His phone vibrated again. "And I'm pretty sure you will see some things you've never seen before. Travel broadens the mind. Anyway, it is not negotiable. Cyn, could you maybe have Dawn help with calling the consulate and all that?"

"Already taken care of," Cynthia said.

"Mommy?" April said.