The Privileges by Jonathan Dee Read Free Book Online Page B

for a few seconds, in the wake of what would normally be considered a serious transgression, it was not apparent which way things would go. Finally she offered him a high five. “Darn right!” she said. “Nobody stares at our family!”
    The woman in the window’s eyebrows seemed to jump, and she moved quickly out of their sight line. There were two windows in the kitchen: Cynthia opened the other one and both kids took up a position there.
    “Go stare at somebody else, you old bat!” Cynthia shouted across the air shaft.
    “Go stare at somebody else, you old bat!” the kids echoed, beside themselves.
    “Mind your own beeswax!”
    “Mind your own beeswax!”
    Then Cynthia stood up on the windowsill and braced her hands against the frame. It wasn’t dangerous, she felt, though there wasn’t much between her and the air shaft now. April, too caught up in her mother’s euphoria to be scared herself, pulled Jonas up on the other sill and they stood there with their arms around each other’s waists.
    “Our family rules!” Cynthia yelled, her breath fogging the glass.
    “Our family rules!”
    Then something flickered in the reflected light on the pane her nose was nearly touching; she turned her head and there, in the kitchen doorway, was Adam. He still had his dripping raincoat on. There was no telling how much he’d heard but his head was cocked warily, like a dog’s. Cynthia hopped down to the floor, a little out of breath. The kids did the same and came and leaned against her on either side, still wearing their bandannas and sunglasses. Her nostrils flared with the effort not to laugh. She put her hands on their shoulders.
    “Hello, dear,” she said in a bright voice. “The children and I have been gambling.”

    After four years at Morgan Stanley, an operation so vast that Adam’s true bosses existed mostly on the level of gossip and rumor, a feeling of toxic stasis had begun to provoke him in the mornings when he arrived at work. It wasn’t all in his head; lately a number of his colleagues had been promoted over and around him, and when he asked about it at his review, the thing that kept coming up was that they may have been dullards and yes-men but they all had their MBAs. Why this should have impressed anybody was beyond him. In theory he could have taken a leave of absence and gone back to business school himself—lots of the firm’s junior employees did it at his age—but those people didn’t have children to support, and anyway Adam lacked the tolerance for the one step back that might or might not set up the proverbial two steps forward. He’d worked hard to get where he was and he couldn’t see giving up that ground voluntarily. The momentum of the business world was one-way only, a principle that should not be rationalized. He and Cynthia had a vivid faith in their own future, not as a variable but as a destination; all the glimpses New York afforded of the lives led by the truly successful, the arcane range of their experiences, aroused in the two of them less envy than impatience.
    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