Free The Privileges by Jonathan Dee Page B

idea. Was he sick?”
    “No,” Adam said. “Well, yes and no. He died of a coronary, but it was his third one.”
    “How old was he?”
    “Sixty-two.”
    Sanford turned white. “I had no idea,” he said.
    “Well, that’s okay,” Adam said. He waited for the conversation to resume. Sanford was looking right into his face like he wasn’t even there, like he was some portrait of himself. Finally he tapped the folder with his forefinger. “Why don’t I look this over,” he said. Adam and Parker nodded and got up to leave, and they didn’t really speak for the rest of the day, though Parker must have been talking to others there; Adam could tell by the way they stared at him when they thought he wasn’t looking. At the end of the day he felt hyper and irritable and wanted nothing more than to get out for a run, but the rain was so heavy now you almost couldn’t see the river anymore. Then he had a brainstorm: he grabbed his gym bag and went down to the basement, but the pool was already locked, even though it was just a few minutes after six. By the time he got backup to the fortieth floor the office had cleared out completely. He went and looked out Sanford’s window for a while, and then he went back to his desk and picked up the phone.
    “Nice weather we’re having,” Cynthia said. “I thought you might be on your way already.”
    “What are you doing right now?” Adam said.
    “Doing? What am I doing?”
    “Can you call that Barnard girl? Do you think we could get her to come over and babysit right now?”
    “I’m sure we could not,” Cynthia said. “Why?”
    “Because here’s what I want to do,” he said, watching the lights flicker on the phones in the silent office. “I want to check into a hotel with you for a couple of hours. I want to go to the nicest place we can think of and have a good dinner and some wine and then I want to take you to bed. I want you to think of something you’ve never asked me to do before and then I’ll do it. I want to amaze you. I want complaints from the front desk. I want to get kicked out of there. Seriously, I am as hard as a rock right now just thinking about you.”
    She laughed delightedly. “I believe I’m getting the vapors,” she said. “You better hope this phone’s not tapped, pervert. Maybe you need to call that number for when you experience an erection lasting more than four hours.”
    “I’m not kidding, though,” Adam said. “I love you. Seriously, the kids are old enough to be by themselves for a couple of hours, right?”
    “No,” she said indulgently, “they are not. They do go to bed early, though. So here’s my counterproposal.” He could hear her walking with the phone into another room. “After they’re asleep, you sit down on the couch, and I will bring you a Scotch, and then I will kneel in front of that couch, and whatever happened to you today, I’m betting that between me and the Scotch we will make it all better. Okay? I love you too, by the way. And I do like the way you think. But this way we won’t have any visits from Child Protective Services. Okay?”
    “Okay,” he said.
    “We will call that Plan B,” Cynthia said. “Now come home.”
    He hung up. It was almost dark now, and the rain on the windows made for a beautiful effect on the opposite wall, like a bleeding shadow. He called the car service and fifteen minutes later he was in the back seat of a limo that sat motionless in the rain on 57th Street, in traffic that was so bad he felt like time had stopped.
    Isn’t your father dead, Barry? he had wanted to say. Doesn’t everybody’s father die? Isn’t that what happens? But he’d figured the less he said, the sooner they’d move on. For a long time Adam had known his father mostly as a short-fused bastard, but then in his teenage years something had shifted, and he’d felt like both his parents were a little afraid of him. It wasn’t such a bad feeling, actually.
    Even when he wiped the windows