The Privileges: A Novel by Jonathan Dee

Author:Jonathan Dee
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Rich people, Families, New York (N.Y.), Family Life, Fiction, Literary, Sagas
ISBN: 9781588369208
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2010-01-05T07:24:00.588000+00:00

In his office one May afternoon Adam got a call from his brother saying that he and his wife, Paige, were coming to New York for something called the upfronts; he didn’t want to take Adam up on his offer to stay with them—writers, he said, got few enough perks in this world and he wanted to soak his employers for every room-service amenity he could think of—but they agreed to come over for dinner on their first night in town. Conrad had never been to the apartment on Columbus before. The brothers were less a part of each other’s lives than they would have liked, mostly on account of geography and work schedules but also because of Paige. Twelve years younger than Conrad, she felt intimidated and rudely excluded by any conversation that referenced the years before he met her, when she was just a child; she also had a suspicion that Cynthia did not like her, which was entirely correct.

“What the hell does your brother see in her?” she would ask Adam after every encounter; Adam would shrug supportively, but he knew the answer to the question. Conrad made a tidy living in Los Angeles writing movie scripts even though nothing he’d written had ever risen high enough on the developmental scale to be acted out by performers in front of cameras. One of his screenplays, though, had led to a staff job on an hour-long TV drama called The Lotus Eaters, about a group of high-school students who lived in Hawaii. Conrad traveled there twice a year, along with the entire production staff, for research purposes, and on one of these trips he had become better acquainted with Paige, a production designer who worked just two offices down from him back in LA. There was something about those Hawaiian junkets that accelerated intimacy. Adam knew his little brother well enough to know that the point was not so much that Paige was attractive but that she was attractive in a certain sterile, classic way—blonde, very thin, small-featured, always put together—that Conrad had long ago convinced himself was out of his league. It made perfect sense that the first woman who proved him wrong on this score would be the one he wound up asking to marry him. Now they spent their off-hours at clubs and concerts and bars trying to absorb osmotically, for scriptwriting purposes, the rituals and value systems of privileged eighteen-year-olds. Paige was an enormous help in this regard.

After dinner the kids disappeared downstairs and Adam brought four glasses filled with whiskey out onto the patio, where Conrad was pointing out various New York landmarks, not always correctly, to his wife. The moon hung over the park and the blue-lit planetarium, low enough to be scored every few minutes by the silhouette of a plane. “This is quite something,” Conrad said. “Who knew there was such good money in being a master of the universe?”

Paige sniffed her glass, made a face, and put it down on the table.

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