Free The Privileges by Jonathan Dee

late for what, exactly? It might have made a difference if there were some type of work she felt passionate about, or some particular skill she might cultivate into excellence, something a little more marketable than just above-average intelligence and fear of idleness. Marietta loved to make fun of her dissolute clients, but if you got her drunk enough she would start talking in dead earnest about her job in terms of second chances and the desire to repent. Well, if you got Cynthia drunk enough, Cynthia thought, she would cop to wanting to do some good in the world, or at least to feel like her presence in it was value-added.How, though? Without some framework, some resources, even your secret aspirations just curdled into sentimental bullshit.
    A lot of time seemed to have gone by very suddenly. The injustice of it, the knowledge that one could never go back to where one had started, to the old advantages, didn’t subside that day or the next. She knew that, every day, some woman somewhere did exactly what now seemed so impossible to her. Nevertheless she persisted in feeling that some sort of privilege had been stolen from her, not by the children, of course, but by someone.
    Private equity was considered old-school in some ways, because it still had one foot in the real: IPOs, profits on actual goods sold, even the occasional start-up, compared to which the ethereal instruments hedge funds dealt in were like some branch of astrophysics that generated money. It even called upon some old-fashioned people skills, which Adam turned out to possess in precocious abundance. You had to sit down with a guy, to listen to his pitch or to listen to whatever it was he talked about when he thought the pitch was over, in order to gauge whether he himself was the key to his own company’s prospects or whether, at some point down the line, extracting a worthwhile profit was going to require taking the whole thing out of his hands.
    Still, the ethereal was where the real money was, and everybody knew it. Parker in particular loved to bitch about how working at Perini was like driving some financial horse and buggy and how he couldn’t wait for the old man to loosen his grip a little bit so they could start making themselves into real players. He was eaten up by envy of guys he’d gone to Wharton with who were worth fifty million in these high-flying VCs they’d started maybe three years ago. At least once a week he tried to draw Adam into some conversation about how the two of them should walk out and start their own fund. It might even have been worth listening to, Adam thought, if it wasn’t for the fact that Parker sucked so bad at his job. He’d played football at Cornell and it was easy to see what Sanford had once liked about him, but lately the old man seemed to have souredon him completely. The more Parker worried about his own job security, the more contempt he showed privately for the whole operation, and the stupider high-risk shit he proposed in the hopes of proving his indispensability to the place once and for all.
    He came over to Adam’s desk one morning holding a manila folder and said, “Dude, can I run something by you?” He’d gone to Los Angeles for the weekend, to some decadent birthday party one of his B-school classmates had thrown for himself, and he’d returned to New York with the notion that Perini should get into the movie business. Commercial credit was tight enough now, apparently, that rather than scuttle existing projects, the smaller studios would take financing from anywhere. “Here’s the thing,” Parker whispered. “It’s kind of an outside-the-box idea, and if I go in there alone with it, he’ll hand my balls to me before he’s even heard what I have to say. But if you go in there with me, he’ll give it a chance. He fucking loves you. So will you just go in there with me? You don’t even have to say anything.”
    Adam was pretty sure that even five minutes’ thought would reveal