3

JONAS WOKE UP FIRST—he could tell by listening—with the shutters open facing the sea. No sound but the rain turning to mist on the stones of the patio. It often rained in the first hour of the morning, as if considerately, to get it out of the way early in case the Moreys or the rest of the island’s inhabitants might have had anything planned. Not that there was much to plan, even if you were so inclined. Another walk on the beach, maybe, or another ride across the harbor to Scilly Cay to eat a lobster. That was the genius of the place, as far as Jonas was concerned: wasted time. You needed that in order to properly value, and to gauge the insanity of, your regimented life back home, where sometimes that first minute of brain activity after waking generated so much anxiety that you’d have to get out of bed just to stop thinking. Then again, Anguilla itself was starting to feel a bit like home by now. Twice a year—Christmas break and spring break—for four years. That kind of fidelity was unprecedented. His father must have found something he liked here, since it was the only place they’d ever visited that he had expressed any desire to go back to. Maybe when Jonas was his father’s age, and someone used the word “home” in his hearing, Anguilla would be one place he’d think of. Probably not, though. They rented the same Greek-style villa here every time, even though his parents surely could have afforded to buy it. At least Jonas thought so. It wasn’t always easy to tell what they couldn’t afford anymore.

April was in the bedroom right behind his head, with her friend Robin from school, and the very thought of Robin lent Jonas’s thoughts an instant and somewhat humiliating focus. He put his ear to the wall even though the two girls would not be awake for a couple of hours. They were sleeping in the same king-size bed, because they liked it that way, and this provoked Jonas in ways he almost resented. His mom had urged him to invite a friend on this trip too, but he didn’t really have any friendships that intense; there were the guys in his band, but frankly they were better off taking a little break from one another. Robin was tall and thin and long-haired, like all of April’s nasty school friends really, but she was also on the lacrosse team and knew who Gram Parsons was and turned red when she laughed and was nice to him, and not just when his parents were in the room either. He sublimated a lot of his feelings toward her into a sentimental appreciation of her as a tragic figure, because her own home life was so bad. Her father was a partner at White & Case and they were over-the-top rich—plenty rich enough to take their own family trip to Anguilla for Christmas, or anywhere else in the world, if they could stand being around one another that long—but the mother was bipolar, or so he’d heard his own mother say, and Robin’s father either couldn’t acknowledge that kind of defect or else just chose not to make the requisite sacrifices to deal with it. Robin had been spending a lot of nights with the Moreys back in New York lately, sometimes on short notice. When she was with them and the phone rang, Jonas had been instructed not to answer it until April or their mom had a chance to screen the incoming number. Robin had an older brother who didn’t always come home at night anymore either, though nobody knew where he went instead.

The sadness of it all did nothing to diminish his urge to masturbate, and this was a perfect opportunity, but then Jonas’s eye fell on the Gibson electric guitar he had received two days ago for Christmas, on its stand in the corner of the bedroom. His feelings for it were as passionate as for any object he had ever owned. Indian rosewood neck, humbucker pickups: he’d coveted it for so long that he was in the weird position, Christmas-gift-wise, of knowing exactly how much it had cost. His amp was back in New York but the guitar came with a pair of wireless headphones, so he could jam away without bothering anyone else. He got out of bed, put on a t-shirt, and sat on the couch by the glass doors with the guitar in his lap. The rain was already letting up, and the sky was brightening in great slabs of blue and white. He heard a door open downstairs and footsteps on the patio, but at this hour it could only be Simon laying the table. He decided he’d work on mastering the opening lick from “One Way Out” until his dad appeared on the beach for his morning swim. He clapped the headphones on; an hour later, when he saw Adam winding his way down the whitewashed steps toward the calm ocean below the house, he unplugged and went downstairs to tell Simon what he wanted for breakfast.

Adam walked into the mild surf until the dropoff came, and then he turned and floated, with his toes sticking out of the water, and stared up at the villa. The water on the island’s bay end was impossibly warm. A cargo ship was passing to the north of him, toward the open Atlantic, and he watched it for a while but there was no way to track its progress. Even the plume of smoke trailing behind it was as still as a painting. He swam back and forth for a while, but when he paused the salt water held him up easily and so he closed his eyes. When he opened them again, female figures were moving back and forth on the patio, and he walked out of the surf, grabbed the towel that Simon had hung on the beach chair for him, and headed back up the stairs.

“You might put on a shirt there, nature boy,” Cynthia said to him, rolling her eyes at the girls, and so he stood up again and went to the bedroom to get one. Simon, having dried off the chairs and opened the umbrella that shaded the table, was pouring coffee and taking omelet orders. He was one of the house’s amenities; in the hot off-season, he went to college in Atlanta, and in the winter he saw to the needs of the villa’s guests and went home to his parents’ place at night. Cynthia caught April and Robin nudging each other from time to time when Simon was entering the room, or leaving it, but that was okay. Let them. She prided herself on not talking to her daughter about sex or men in the censorious way most mothers would.

“Robin,” she said, “that skirt is so cute on you.” They’d given it to her for Christmas, and Cynthia was proud of the rightness of it for her. She was fascinated with Robin, who had both everything and nothing. She just loved it that you could have such bitter fuck-ups for parents and still somehow foil them by turning out so sweet and poised and confident at age fifteen.

Robin paused before she sat down and gave a modest little comic twirl. “It’s really beautiful, Cynthia,” she said. “Thank you again. So, what’s on the agenda today?”

“Hmm,” April said. “Tanning by the pool for a few hours and then eating again?”

“That’s what I love about you,” Robin said. “Always willing to think inside the box.”

“Adam,” Cynthia said as he sat down again, “you’re golfing this morning, right? What time?”

“Nine forty-two,” he said.

“So precise,” Cynthia said. “That’s what I admire about golfing.” Turning toward her son, she caught him artlessly checking out Robin’s breasts again; Jesus, it must suck to be a boy, she thought. Completely pathetic and condemned to know it. “When are you going to initiate young Jonas into the golfing mysteries, anyway?”

Jonas dropped his fork and waved his hands in front of him. “Please, God, no,” he said.

“Maybe someday when he’s done something really horrible,” Adam said. They fell silent as their plates arrived. The shadow of the villa receded over them as the sun rode a little farther up the sky. Adam drained his coffee and held his hand over the cup as Simon moved to fill it again; he excused himself and went to the bedroom to change into shorts and a collared shirt and a baseball cap. He threw his clubs in the back seat of their rental car and drove north on the island’s one highway, past the overgrown lots and the discreet high-end resort entrances and the bright pastel exteriors of houses no one was living in anymore. At one point he waited patiently for some goats to develop the urge to get out of the road. He drove past the golf course and all the way to the little business district in Shoal Bay East, at the island’s northern end. There was a bar there that was open even at ten in the morning; he parked in the shade behind it and walked across the street to the Royal National Bank of Anguilla.

It wasn’t really much of a bank; it looked more like a doctor’s office, with a heavy-lidded fat woman in a tight pink dress sitting at a receptionist’s desk and a closed door behind her with a security camera above it. The woman was not someone Adam had seen before.

“Mr. Bryant?” he asked her. Regally she looked him over and then stood and passed through the door behind her without a word. Adam looked up at the camera. In a few seconds she reappeared and beckoned him through, smiling now as she closed the door behind him.

Mr. Bryant rose from behind an old metal desk and shook Adam’s hand; behind him were two low metal filing cabinets, the paneled wall, and, through a narrow window, the blue marina. “Merry Christmas to you, Mr. Adam,” he said. “You have everything you need?” He meant at the villa. He had absolutely nothing to do with the villa or its operation, but he liked to ask. “You are enjoying yourself?”

“As always,” Adam said.

“Your family is well?”

“Very well. And yours?”

Mr. Bryant nodded in answer, or maybe he was just nodding approvingly at the question. They would never meet each other’s families, but the civilities could not be bypassed, as Adam had learned, when you dealt with Mr. Bryant. Now he unfolded his long-fingered hands, opened his desk drawer, and took out a collection of five checks, all for different amounts, all payable to cash, held together by a paper clip. He removed the paper clip and handed the checks to Adam. Adam looked them over, though not carefully; he folded them in half, put them in the pocket of his shorts, and rose to shake hands a second time.

“My friend says to expect him next around Easter,” Adam said.

“At your service. When do you fly home?”

“Tomorrow.”

Mr. Bryant clucked regretfully. “You’ll miss the regatta,” he said. “Oh well. Duty calls, I am sure.” They shook hands yet again, warmly. Adam never understood why it was so important to Mr. Bryant to treat this like a friendship, but would not have dreamt of offending him either.

He drove back along a different route, taking his time, less for clandestinity’s sake than to catch one last view of the hills of Saint Martin across the water before it got too hazy. It was still only about quarter to eleven, though, and a plausible round of golf had to last three hours at least. So he drove back to the course, went into the pro shop, and bought two large buckets of balls for the driving range. He took the checks out of his pocket and zippered them into one of the compartments of the golf bag before he got started. It was so hot by now that he was the only one out on the range, but he didn’t care. The heat rarely got to him, and the scolding a slight sunburn would earn him would only help cement the question of his whereabouts.

Half an hour later, sweat was pouring off him, but he was absolutely striping the ball, better than he’d hit it in months. He had the driver going a good 280 yards. He was so locked in, he wound up sorry there wasn’t enough time to get out on the course after all.

There was a lunchtime board meeting of the Coalition for Public Schools at some restaurant down in Soho, which by any reasonable standard should have been over by three; but it wasn’t, and when Cynthia couldn’t stand it anymore she rose to excuse herself early, telling everyone she had a doctor’s appointment uptown. She couldn’t make it out the door without ten women stopping her to express the bogus hope that it was nothing serious. On days like this she just had to take a deep breath and remind herself that it was all for a good cause, namely the separation of these aimless gossips from some of their millions, so that those millions could start to do some good in the world. It took up a lot of time. You could just stay at home and write checks, of course, and when Adam had started making serious money that’s all she initially thought she would do; but a big check was wasted on these halfwit dowagers with no idea how to do anything more substantial than send out invitations to a benefit, and before you knew it you were involved. Not just the CPS either; she’d become involved to various degrees with the Riverside Park Fund, the Coalition for the Homeless, and Big Brothers Big Sisters. She did have a rule about staying away from disease charities: there was something about them that just struck her as especially haughty, a blithe tossing of money at the ineffable, like Won’t You Please Join Us in the Fight Against Death. She knew on some level she was wrong about this but obeyed the feeling anyway. She preferred causes that dealt with what might actually be improved, not the hard-to-fathom world of genes and viruses but just the generally fucked-up way in which human institutions worked—homelessness, public schools, Habitat for Humanity, things like that. Anything that improved the lot of children got her money in a heartbeat. “You’re sweet,” Cynthia said, smiling and backing away, “but no, it’s nothing major, just something I scheduled months ago, and you know how hard it is to get in to see these guys.” Which probably left them all thinking that she was going in to get her ass lifted or something, but so what. In truth all she had to do was make a phone call, but it was a private one that had to be made before close of business and she had lost faith that they could wrap up this meeting in time. It was a kind of universal truth in the nonprofit world that everything took at least twice as long as it needed to. She used to have to schedule her shrink appointments for five in the afternoon, because her commitments had grown to the point where that was the only window; but if she had an evening event, as she often did, there were days when seeing the shrink meant not seeing the kids at all, and so she’d finally just quit therapy altogether. No room in her day for it anymore, which was probably the best circumstance for terminating, she thought, and probably why doing so had turned out easier than she’d expected.

Despite the accursed narrowness of those Soho streets, her driver was idling right there in front of the restaurant. They inched toward the West Side Highway and she started to open up her phone right then, but she didn’t want to make the call in front of the driver either. He was totally trustworthy but it had nothing to do with that. Half an hour later she was home. They’d been in the new apartment on Columbus for almost two years now, after a restless few years in the place on East End she’d loved so much when they bought it. Almost as soon as the renovations were done she’d started glancing adulterously at the real estate section. But the priceless thing about Adam was that he didn’t really give her much more than one night’s shit about it, because the truth was, he understood. He got why she didn’t mind packing up again, why there was such romance in the new, why it was so hard to stay in a place that had maxed out its own potential. Plus they’d made a fortune each time they sold. This was Manhattan, after all; everyone wanted a foothold, and they weren’t making any more of it.

Still, the place on Columbus was so wonderfully eccentric that Cynthia couldn’t imagine ever growing tired of it: a penthouse duplex that looked directly down onto the planetarium behind the Museum of Natural History. At night the spheres glowed blue through the planetarium’s glass walls, and from the wraparound windows thirty stories up it seemed to Cynthia almost like their home was returning to the planet after a day’s journey into space. The kids had the downstairs floor mostly to themselves; it had a separate entrance, which meant she had less of a sense of their comings and goings than she used to. They were too old to want or need an escort back and forth to school, and they had so much else going on in their lives, socially and otherwise, that it wasn’t always possible to know exactly when she’d see them next. Or Adam, for that matter.

Which could sometimes give rise to a sort of loneliness; but today Cynthia was just as glad to come home and find nobody else there. It was still well before five, so she called their accountant; she knew he would have taken a call from her no matter the time, but she liked to be considerate about it. She asked if he would please handle a wire transfer for her, a small one, just ten thousand, but it was important that it be done right away.

“Charles Sikes,” she said.

She heard him typing; he wore one of those phone headsets, like only receptionists used to wear. “Same account as before?”

“Same bank, different city,” she said, and dug a folded, typed letter out of her pocket and read him the number. He took it down, and then as he always did he asked after her kids, whom he’d never met but knew in his way, and then they said goodbye.

Still no one home. The winter sky outside the living room was just beginning to gray. She opened up a bottle of wine, took one cigarette out of the pack she kept hidden behind the leather-bound volume of wedding photos on the bookshelf, put her coat back on, and stood outside on the balcony that overlooked the planetarium. She spent maybe twenty minutes that way, looking down on the still planets, listening to the symphony of faint sounds that passed for silence. Then, in a spirit of beneficence, she opened up the cell phone again and called her mother.

Ruth seemed almost miffed to hear from her, though no more miffed than she was by anything that rose up unexpectedly in her day without giving her adequate time to prepare. “We are doing as well as can be expected,” she said. “Warren’s health is not good, as you know.”

She didn’t know; or maybe she did—in her mother’s conversations it was hard to separate fact from dire prediction. “Well, tell him I hope he feels better.”

“How are the children?”

“They’re great. So busy I hardly see them anymore. The amount of schoolwork they have is just brutal.” There was a pause, and somehow Cynthia knew what was supposed to go there. “I’m sorry we haven’t been able to get out there to visit.”

“Probably not the best time for a visit anyway,” Ruth said.

“You’re right,” Cynthia said, misunderstanding her. “It’s impossible to get away. Sometimes I wonder why they have to work so hard. But then just last week I was in this public school in East Harlem—”

“Good Lord, why?”

“This charity I work with. We were dedicating a computer lab. Anyway, you wouldn’t believe—”

“Your education was always very important to me,” Ruth said. “That came first.”

Cynthia laughed affrontedly and took another quick drag. “Are you joking?” she said, exhaling. “Dirksen? That place was like a drug bazaar. There was an English teacher there who killed herself over Christmas break. Remember that? It’s a miracle I learned a fucking thing at that place.”

Ruth closed her eyes. She was trying to get some dinner ready, even though Warren probably wouldn’t eat any of it; he was so sick he hadn’t been out of the living room chair all day except to go to the bathroom, and even for that he had to call out to her. She missed part of what Cynthia was saying because when he got a coughing jag it was so heart-wrenching that she couldn’t hear anything else. “I don’t know what you expected me to do about it,” she said. “There certainly wasn’t money for private school. It was hard enough to hold on to the house those years.”

“There are ways,” Cynthia said, tossing her cigarette over the edge of the patio railing, hearing a key turn in the front door inside. “It’s just a matter of where your priorities are.”

“Well, anyway,” Ruth said. “You certainly managed to land on your feet.”

Me: SWM, 27—Big Mets fan, good income, not afraid of adventure. Willing to think long term, or, if you prefer, NSA. You: athletic, 19–24, long hair. Not afraid to act if the moment seems right. Send photo, plz.

He left out, of course, any references to his face, specifically his nose, because while some women were into it, most, he found, were not. But that seemed fair, since he hadn’t mentioned anything about what he liked or didn’t like in a face either—those faint mustaches, for instance, which were a total dealbreaker. He hit Send and switched back to the streaming video of Kasey in her apartment in California. Maybe it was California. The windows were always covered, so she might have been in Bayside for all any of her subscribers really knew. Right now she was in the kitchen making herself some kind of smoothie. There was a laptop on the kitchen counter near the blender, as there was in every room of Kasey’s house, and so she could see, as he saw, the requests typed in by feverish guys: Take off your top. Mmm how’s that taste? It was pretty embarrassing. He’d stopped communicating with Kasey himself months ago, but he still watched her, and the meter still ran on his credit card.

Would like blowjob without paying for it is what his personal ad should have read, that is if there were any such thing as an honest personal ad. People said that there were women out there, maybe not a lot but some, who thought the way guys did, but that had to be a myth. The truth was, he had zero interest in thinking long term—that was just one of those things you had to say if you wanted to get any responses at all. He was just so on edge all the time, but that tension could, if you willed it, channel itself into the sexual and thus could be relieved. It always worked, and it never worked for long. He had a lot of stress in his life to fight off.

And as if to punish him for letting that thought into his head, the cell phone rang in his bedroom. He had three cells, actually—they were lined up on top of his dresser—but he could tell from the ring that it was the disposable.

“Devon, what’s up,” Adam said, but it didn’t sound like a question. “So we have some Bantex, right? Financial services? Start shorting it. We can take our time, though. We have a couple of months. So go slowly. Spread it out.”

That was always his mantra: spread it out. No more than a certain number of shares in one transaction, because anything over that number supposedly tripped SEC radar.

“Huh,” Devon said. “How about that. I was just reading that they were doing really well.”

A silence.

“I know, I know,” Devon said. “The less I know, the better.” Adam sounded like he was in a taxi. “So what shall we talk about, then? How’s the family?”

Adam laughed, not unkindly. “They’re good, thanks. Listen, you know we shouldn’t stay on any longer than we have to. I’m sure a single guy like you has got plans, anyway.”

“Mos def. I have a date.”

“My man,” Adam said. “Enjoy.” He hung up. He was so fucking cool all the time. In one way it would have made Devon feel better to hear, even just once, a little panic in his voice, but in other ways it would have made him feel infinitely worse. It was like high school all over again with that guy. He was one of those alphas, master of every situation, receiver of every gift, one of those guys you made merciless fun of until the day he actually brought you inside the circle and then you turned into a simpering little bitch. They saw each other very rarely—maybe three or four times in the last year—but in the aftermath Devon always felt humiliated by how slavishly he had said yes to everything.

He put the phone down on the dresser and went back to the screen, but Kasey was in the bathroom; there were cameras in there too, of course, but he scowled and went to the kitchen to see if there was anything to eat. Some people were into some perverse shit.

They’d brought in a couple of other people—they’d had to, to keep things sufficiently spread out—friends of his from the old boiler-room days on Long Island who now worked at more legit houses. They’d set up accounts for one another’s aunts, cousins, whatever they could get documentation for, and siphoned the trades through there. To most of these guys Devon himself was the ringleader, the mastermind, though without a tip to act on, of course, they were all nothing but a group of enlisted men with a willingness to get ahead. His stomach felt like shit again. Maybe because he hadn’t eaten anything, but that, he was reminded as he opened and closed the freezer a couple more times, was only because there was fuck all to eat around here. He took the bottle of pear vodka out of the freezer instead, and in the cabinet it turned out there was still half a bag of salt-and-vinegar potato chips. Presto. Dinner.

He poured himself some vodka and sat down in front of the computer. Kasey was sitting at the kitchen table writing something—paying bills, maybe?—but at least she had her pants off now, which was promising. His own apartment had a pretty Spartan look to it, which was to say that it had a couch and a flat-screen TV that were both huge and expensive, and a rug that was huge and not expensive, and that was it. Nothing on the walls. He’d bought some kind of print of the Golden Gate Bridge and hung it on the wall over the couch, but he just felt stupid and pretentious looking at it—like, do I actually give a fuck about the Golden Gate Bridge?—and he took it down. In the bedroom was a bed and a dresser and a closet, and underneath a ceiling panel in the closet was a gym bag with about a hundred and sixty thousand dollars in it. This, Devon felt, was the true source of his stomach problems, though he also wondered if that was just dramatic nonsense, if his stomach would quiet down if he ate the occasional well-balanced meal and generally just took a little better care of himself.

He went back to the kitchen to throw out the chip bag and returned with the pear-vodka bottle. The stuff tasted like Jolly Ranchers after a while. Why did he have to get stuck with all the grunt work? The money was pretty much its own answer, even though the more he made, the harder it got to figure out how to spend it, or even where to put it, without attracting attention. Jesus, just one good blowjob would go such a long way right now, he thought. There was an outcall service just a few blocks away; he had it on speed dial. He called them up and asked if Teresa was available tonight, just so he could clear his mind of the whole thing. Fuck Bantex, until tomorrow anyway. It was all that paranoia about being watched that was making him feel sick all the time. He bet the rest of them felt sick too. But no one is watching, he thought as he logged off of Kasey and put the bottle back in the freezer and picked some laundry up off the floor. He was the one doing all the watching. That’s what you paid for. I see you, but you don’t see me.

Titles were considered unimportant at Perini but a natural hierarchy evolved and was respected. Sanford’s reliance on Adam made him the de facto number two; he spent more of his time out of the office now wooing investors in the fund, drinking with them, charming them, impressing them, seducing them into confidence even after the rare misstep or during the always-brief lean times. Precisely the kind of thing Sanford himself used to do all day long—and still did, though he had less of a taste for it now, and also seemed to recognize that youth itself was part of the package that investors wanted to be sold. Sanford himself didn’t really look any older, just more dissolute, a little puffier and less put together.

No one else there begrudged Adam the boss’s favor; it was a measure of their comfort with it that they made jokes about San-ford’s obvious late-stage conversion to homosexuality at every opportunity. Every job but Adam’s and Bill Brennan’s had turned over at least once since Adam had arrived there; Parker had finally been belittled into quitting almost three years ago, and since he’d stopped coming to basketball, Adam had no idea what had become of him. The office’s basic fraternal atmosphere was unchanged. Most of them were younger than Adam now, but he could still outrun them and outlift them and outdrink them and while they honored his status as their superior, in every important way he fit right in. Still, there was of course something momentous about his very presence in that office that none of them even suspected, and their not knowing sharpened the borderline Adam prized between his own character and theirs.

Friday afternoons at work tended to devolve into a head start on the younger employees’ bachelor weekends, with beer and foosball tournaments and a general disengagement from their adrenalized professional selves; usually the last hour of work was turned over to discussions of why the bar they went to last Friday sucked and which one they should try tonight instead, but on one particular spring afternoon they managed to talk Adam into coming with them to some catered event they knew about that was taking place inside the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. A fund-raiser for something or other. Brennan had tickets and they all wanted Adam’s company so badly that they even offered to pay for him. “I cannot get too hammered,” Adam said. “Tomorrow’s my son’s birthday.” Something else to drink to. They took over one of the round tables on the bare stage and there they met their waitress, whose name was Gretchen. Gretchen was provocatively tattooed and reluctantly conceded that she was an actress and would not tell them her age, which led to a general consensus that she was no more than twenty-two.

“God, I love me some of that hipster pussy,” Brennan said.

“Because they hate you. That’s why.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. Because she hates me. That is precisely why.”

They kept ordering more drinks so that Gretchen would have to return to their table, and each time she stopped there they did a clumsier job of chatting her up. They thought their own artlessness was hilarious. Gretchen knew better than to flirt back, but she was enough of a pro, Adam saw, not to let her contempt for these guys show either. The tips were becoming outrageous.

Somehow a serious betting pool took shape around the question of whether Gretchen’s tongue was pierced. She came back with a round of Maker’s for everyone but Adam. It impressed him that she wasn’t a little frightened of them by now. “Gretchen,” Brennan said earnestly, “I don’t want this to come out wrong, but if you open wide and say Aaah, you will make me a rich man.”

“You gentlemen have a good night,” Gretchen said, smiling. She cleared the last of their glasses and walked away. A few minutes later Adam stood up to go home, prompting a wave of questions about the staunchness of his heterosexuality. Instead of heading out the theater gate, though, he turned and went underneath the grandstand, where the kitchen and bar setups were, and when he found her, she rolled her eyes and smiled.

“Pay no attention to me,” he said. “I’m counting your tattoos.”

“Well, you won’t get an accurate count,” she said.

“I’m a very busy man. I have to get back to the table soon because I’m in charge of the centerpieces. We’re planting them in the Sheep Meadow. So I just need your phone number and I’ll be on my way.”

She turned and looked at him, her head at an inquisitive angle, and he could tell she was amused not by anything he’d said but by something else about him. “How drunk are you?” she said.

“Not at all. I just have to see you again. I don’t want to live in a world where women like you are never seen again.”

She stared at him as the bartender loaded up her tray. “Oh, this,” he said, grabbing his ring finger, “this comes right off.”

She laughed. “Leave it on,” she said. “I like married guys. Keeps things on a basic level. You’re happily married, am I right?”

“Extremely,” he said.

She pulled his hand toward her and wrote a phone number on it. “Wow,” Adam said. “What a world.”

The sun set in front of him as he walked west out of the park, the long shadows behind him gradually merging into nothing. He took his time; it was probably one of the five most beautiful nights of the year. In the rare moments when he stepped back and thought about it at all, it was vital to Adam’s conception of his professional life that he wasn’t stealing from anybody. There was nothing zero-sum about the world of capital investment: you created wealth where there was no wealth before, and if you did it well enough there was no end to it. What Adam did was just an initiative based on that idea, an unusually bold manifestation of it. Why should he be restricted—or, worse, restrict himself—from finding a way to act on what he was enterprising enough to know and to synthesize? It took leadership skills as well, because you couldn’t pull off something like this by yourself even if you wanted to. In order to minimize the risk he had to command the total trust and loyalty of Devon and the handful of his friends he’d brought in on it from brokerages around the city. And that he had done. Devon had turned out to be a young man prone to anxiety but whenever he seemed close to the point of bailing, five minutes together was enough for Adam to reassure him they still had the whole thing safely in hand.

It wasn’t even his chief source of income, at least not anymore. His compensation at Perini had soared, and deservedly so. This was more in the nature of a self-administered bonus. In the course of his work he learned some things about a given company, things not of a public nature; based on this information he gave Devon an instruction on the buying or the selling of that company’s stock, spread out through about thirty small accounts with dummy names managed by Devon and the others; each account transferred its profits to different offshore banks, all of which then sent the money, in slow increments, to the Royal National Bank of Anguilla, where oversight policies were business-friendly. Adam’s share in the last year was less than half a million. It was a nice margin to have, certainly, and every little bit added to the range of possibilities in his family’s lives. But they didn’t depend on it. He could have ended the whole scheme at any time and, in terms of their daily lives, they very likely wouldn’t feel the money’s absence at all.

But it wasn’t just about the money, in any case. More than the money, which had to be spent with some care, it was about exercising that ability to repurpose information those around him were too timid or shortsighted to know what to do with: the night two weeks ago, for instance, when he and Brennan had sat there in the office having a Scotch after working late and had shared a laugh about Brennan’s former frat brother who worked at Bantex, who had just called him up scared shitless because his entire office had just been served with grand jury subpoenas. That was what kept the whole scheme fresh at this point, that was its engine and its reward: the sense of living in two realms at once, one that was visible to others and one that was not. Every day he looked right into Sanford’s face and confirmed with wonder that the old man was so blinded by affection that he didn’t even see him.

Inside an empty playground Adam found a water fountain and washed the ink off his hands. He made no effort to memorize the phone number first; he hadn’t even glanced at it. It wasn’t the first time he’d done something like this. He’d never cheated on Cynthia and never would, because that would be weak and stupid, and the risk so much greater than the reward. But sometimes there was a thrill in walking right up to that line, and in charming the other person into stepping over it. He figured it was probably all downhill after that moment anyway.

He turned left at 77th and from that angle he could see the windows of their home high above him as he approached; the only ones lit were downstairs on the kids’ floor. He took the elevator all the way up and walked into the moonlit living room. There was no note for him anywhere but he was pretty sure Cyn had told him where she had to be tonight and he’d just forgotten. The curtains blew toward him where the patio door had been left open. There was always TV but right now Adam just felt like talking to somebody; if he’d known he was returning to an empty home, he might have stayed out. He dropped his jacket on the couch and took the interior staircase, which was behind the kitchen, down to the second floor. All the doors were closed, as always, but there was some kind of noise escaping from Jonas’s room. He knocked; no answer came, but the noise didn’t stop either, so he knocked again and walked in. There were boxes and packing material all over the floor, and on top of Jonas’s dresser, incredibly, was a turntable with a vinyl record spinning on it. Adam couldn’t remember the last time he’d even seen one. Jonas, who had his headphones on, swung his feet down from his desk and smiled.

Adam pointed at the record player and then held his palms up to mime confusion. Jonas took the headphones off. “Mom and I decided to celebrate my birthday early,” he said. “Isn’t it beautiful? Thanks, by the way.”

Adam, laughing, shook his head. There were two chairs in his son’s room and they were both filled with LPs in their covers, probably forty or fifty of them, none of which had been there the day before.

“The sound just doesn’t compare,” Jonas said. “It’s so warm. I can never go back to digital after this.”

Adam walked over to the still-spinning turntable and saw what was playing: the Buzzcocks. “April home?” he said. “I saw her lights on.”

“Her lights are always on. She’s out somewhere. She’s the Queen of the Night.”

Adam flipped through the record pile. There was a fair amount of music he recognized, which was itself a little perplexing. The greatness of The Clash was indisputable, he supposed, but were kids Jonas’s age really still listening to it? Wasn’t that the whole point of music—that you had your own? For Adam, music was tied to time: most ineffably it served as the soundtrack to high school and college. Beyond that he had never given it a lot of thought. The names in the pile began to get even older and more obscure: Television, Fairport Convention, Phil Ochs, the Stanley Brothers.

“And how about you?” he said. “It being a Friday night. Any plans? A date, maybe?”

Jonas rolled his eyes. “Yeah, we’ve all got big dates,” he said. “And then there’s the church social, and then we’re all going to the soda fountain for a cherry phosphate.”

Cynthia worried lately that Adam and Jonas weren’t as close as they used to be, and while Adam didn’t know about that—was it even healthy for a teenage son to be all that close to his father?—it was true that they were growing conspicuously unlike each other. At the same time, there was a kind of Spartan streak in his son that Adam recognized and respected. He’d gone vegan, for instance, which, even though it was not something Adam would have done in a million years, was certainly a form of discipline in the interests of the body. Still, having spent his own high school years as a virtual president of the mainstream, he couldn’t help but find Jonas’s taste for exile a little hard to understand.

He moved one pile of records from a chair to the floor and sat down. “So, punk,” he said. “That was before my time, even. I didn’t know you were interested in that.” His son nodded, like some sort of scholar, less a nod of agreement than a nod to indicate that it was a worthy question. “That was probably the last really genuine thing to happen in pop music,” Jonas said. “It was exciting while it lasted, though, which was about five minutes.”

“But people your age still listen to it?”

“People my age,” Jonas said, “are mostly morons.”

“Wait a minute, though. Aren’t you in a band? The band is still together, right? I assume you’re not playing old Sex Pistols songs?”

“That is kind of a sore subject right now,” Jonas said.

Adam held up his hand to indicate that they would speak of it no more. He picked up an album by Flatt & Scruggs; he didn’t know the first thing about them but for some reason, gazing at their suits and crew cuts and formal smiles, he was struck by a kind of pity for them, because they were so dead. “There wasn’t a lot of music in our house growing up,” he said. “The stereo was like a battlefield. Your uncle Conrad and I kept breaking the rules—mostly about volume; I think the rule was no higher than four—and then the ban would come, no more music in the house for a day, a week, two weeks. We couldn’t help it. We’d hear something on the radio, and when it got to the point where you couldn’t stand waiting a few hours for it to come on again, we’d go out and buy it at Walgreens or someplace, and if it was any good obviously we’d turn it up. Then we’d forget to turn it back down, and a day later Dad would flip on the radio to hear Paul Harvey, and it would come on at ear-splitting volume.”

Jonas nodded as if this story served to confirm something he’d known all along. “Music sucks now,” he said. “It all comes out of a factory. It’s not about anything except wanting to be famous. How people can even listen to it is beyond me.”

Adolescence was all about overstatement; still, it made Adam sad to hear his son talking this way. “Well, cheer up,” he said. “Maybe punk is poised for a comeback.”

Jonas shook his head. “No way,” he said. “That world is gone for good.”

In the winter Robin had started showing up at the Moreys a lot more often. Not always with April either, or even preceded by a phone call; one night she showed up at their front door so drunk you could barely understand her, and Cynthia, after whispering to her for a few seconds, let her right in. There was a while where she was basically living there. April’s feelings about this kept turning out to be the wrong ones: when she wondered aloud why Robin continued to get away with murder in a way that April never could, her mother took her out on the balcony and told her that Robin was being physically abused at home, that one night at the Moreys’ Robin had taken Cynthia into the bathroom and shut the door and showed her a series of cuts and red marks on her stomach and chest that had been left there by the power cord from a laptop. April acted totally shocked when the shameful truth was that she had heard that rumor before and thought that it was bullshit, that that kind of thing didn’t really happen to anyone she knew. In her least generous moments she had even wondered if maybe Robin was amping up all these stories about how bad things were at her home, not just for drama’s sake but because life at the Moreys’ was like some kind of spa for her: she came and went as she pleased, ate what she wanted, either studied or didn’t according to her whim. So April had to deal with her guilt over that. On top of which she felt disappointed and confused that Robin, who was her friend after all, had been moved to confess all this to her mother but not to her.

There was even one night when Robin’s father had shown up at their door, unannounced, to take his daughter back home. That was some drama. The doorman called upstairs and said that he was down there in the lobby, demanding to come up. Cynthia said no. Two minutes later the doorman called again. By this time all five of them, the Moreys and Robin, were gathered in the foyer staring at the video from the security camera. Robin’s father was just standing there in an overcoat, his hands in his pockets. “He says he isn’t going anywhere,” the doorman murmured into the phone. He seemed torn between excitement and fear that some sort of incident might imperil his job. “Ask if there’s anyone else down there with him,” Cynthia said to Adam, and when the answer came back no, Cynthia said to let him up.

They told Robin to go downstairs to April’s room but she wouldn’t; instead she withdrew into the living room, as far as she could get from the front door with her sight line unimpeded, as if her father’s reach were impossibly long. He was a good twenty years older than Adam and Cynthia and that seemed to sharpen his contempt for them. “May I come in?” he said on the threshold, and April’s jaw fell when her mother answered no.

When he made out Robin in the room beyond the foyer, standing behind one of the couches, he sighed. “This is ridiculous,” he said. “You are fifteen years old. You do not have our permission to be here. Get your things.”

Robin didn’t reply. “She has our permission to be here,” Cynthia said. “You might ask yourself why she feels safer here than she does in her own home.”

At first he ignored her, his eyes still on his daughter. Eventually he turned on Cynthia his most withering look. It was interesting to April that her father didn’t even try to come between them. Most husbands probably would have, even if they weren’t sure why. But her dad obviously felt, as she did, that if anybody needed protecting in this scenario, it was the older man, with his combed-back silver hair and his steel glasses.

“I recognize you,” he said to Cynthia. “All the parents talk about you. You like to play at being one of the girls. You’re the youngest mother there and yet the one least able to deal with getting old. I don’t know what kind of fantasy this is for you, but it couldn’t be of less interest to me.”

“You can see how eager your child is to have anything to do with you,” Cynthia said. “Kudos. As long as she feels like she’s in danger, she is welcome here. Her choice. Period.”

Even if you knew that parents sometimes talked to one another that way, it still seemed incredibly transgressive to overhear it. April turned and caught Jonas’s eye.

“She is fifteen,” Robin’s father repeated. “It’s a legal matter. If you won’t let her go, the police will have to get involved. I’ve lived in New York a long time and I know a lot of people.”

“Oh, you’ve said the magic word,” Cynthia said, smiling. She took a step closer to him. “Police. If you want to go there, we’ll go there. I took pictures of what she looked like last time she came over here.”

Something changed then, not on his face so much as behind it, but still April could see it. He knew he couldn’t intimidate Cynthia so he took one more shot at intimidating his daughter, calling to her over Cynthia’s shoulder to say that she had been forgiven for a lot of things, but she would not be forgiven for this. After he was gone the five of them stayed up almost all night, just watching TV in the media room, waiting for whatever would happen next without quite knowing what that would be. But nothing else happened at all.

The story was all over Dalton the next day. Robin and Jonas weren’t talking about it, but April had probably mentioned it to a few people. It bolstered the already considerable perception that April’s parents were the coolest parents on earth. And Robin’s misfortune, as misfortune will do, lent her an aura of respect, even a sort of celebrity.

But eventually Robin did go back home. Either the situation cooled down there or she agreed to pretend it had. That was the thing about families: once they decided to close ranks, for whatever reason, you really had no way of knowing anymore. In school she was just like always, laughing and way into sports and usually surrounded by guys—a little needy for April’s taste, maybe, but nothing that seemed like a red flag. If it was an act, she was fooling herself with it at least as effectively as she was fooling anybody else. The only one who really had trouble getting over the whole thing, April recognized, was her mother. Robin had all but stopped returning Cynthia’s texts, and when she did her tone was disappointingly chirpy and distant. It wasn’t just that Cynthia didn’t believe everything was now all right; she didn’t seem to want to believe it. More than once April came home from school and found her mother sitting at the dining room table with a cup of coffee, crying.

April was proud that her home had such a rep as a stable place that it would actually occur to her friends to go there if they were in trouble. There was always somebody staying over at the apartment, not necessarily because they needed a place but just for the hell of it. Other kids’ mothers would try to gain their trust by acting young, like they understood everything, and it was just pathetic. But April could tell that her friends really did consider her mother to be one of them—older, but just enough for her superior knowledge to seem attractive, like an RA in college. They confessed to her, they asked her advice, they shopped with her (though part of that was surely mercenary, since any time Cynthia thought something looked cute on them she would buy it). They would even talk about guys with her, which should have seemed creepy and out of bounds and yet somehow it did not. The fact that all the other Dalton mothers hated and mocked her only bolstered Cynthia’s cred.

April’s own circle had contracted a bit after eighth grade when a dozen or so kids went off to boarding school. Just like that they were gone from your social life, though occasionally in between classes some kid would immodestly flash a text or a camera-phone photo from a departed peer. The move didn’t always work out for them; there was always some story circulating about someone who had gotten himself expelled from one of these places and been forced to return home, not to Dalton but to the kind of second-tier private school that still had openings mid year. Still, an air of sophistication attached itself even to those of them who failed. April had no desire to go live in a regimented compound in some picturesque New England village where there was nothing to do at night and you weren’t allowed out anyway, but she felt a touch of envy all the same. They were her age but, just by virtue of leaving, they seemed older.

Of course they did come back in relative triumph for a few days at Thanksgiving and then for longer at Christmas. Their homecoming for any vacation was pretext enough for a series of parties. On one of the first really warm nights of the spring, April went to one at a townhouse in the East Fifties, thrown by some girl they didn’t even know—she’d been at Spence and was now home from St. Paul’s—but dotted with enough Dalton kids to make her presence there plausible. She even ran into Robin on the street outside. The townhouse itself was phenomenal, a real old-money museum, and its trashing had a terrible inevitability. It was like the reign of Pol Pot, when legions of ten-year-olds were handed carbines and put in charge of national security. On the first floor was the kitchen and living room, speakers hidden somewhere in the walls blasting Jay-Z, every surface already sticky to the touch. April saw a Matisse on the wall, one of those paintings where figures danced in a circle, and she almost asked someone if it was real but then realized what a stupid question that was. It was hot inside, even with all the windows thrown wide open, and bodies were everywhere. A girl named Julie from April’s Spanish class was lying on her back on top of the piano. She opened her mouth, and a guy in a hockey jersey poured streams of lime juice and vodka from two bottles he held up about a foot above her head. He put the bottles down, placed his hands on either side of Julie’s head, and shook it. When he was done, Julie sat up and opened her mouth to show she’d swallowed it all. She bowed in triumph, but no one was looking.

April thought she’d just stick to beer for now. Robin was scanning the crowd for some guy named Calvin who was probably home from Andover and whom she’d hooked up with one night over Thanksgiving break. She staked out a spot halfway up the front-hall steps and said she’d promise to wait there if April would bring her a beer. April asked some strange girl where the keg was (you never asked a strange guy a question like that unless you were hitting on him, because that’s how he’d interpret it anyway) and found it in the bathtub off the maid’s room, behind the kitchen. She saw that some people had opened up the drawers in there and were trying on some clothes that belonged to the maid or the cook or whoever had been given the night off. Unreal. But low-rent shit like that went on at every party, though usually not this early. People continued to throw parties even though they always went bad in this way, every single time. Strangers showed up, fights broke out, cops came, shit got ruined. They were allowed to do whatever they wanted.

Naturally by the time April made it back to the front hall, struggling not to let the two beers she was carrying get dumped all over her, Robin was gone. There was no way April was going back through that mob again, so she kept going, out to the stoop, where some guys were smoking and where it was at least not so sweltering—a little chilly, in fact. She didn’t recognize any of them, but one was wearing an Andover sweatshirt. She asked him if he knew a guy named Calvin. He nodded, and smiled broadly, apparently at the very thought of Calvin. He was either stoned or else just one of those guys who always appeared stoned.

“Haven’t seen him, though,” he said. “Want to get high?”

She did want to get high, being at this stupid party where she didn’t really know anybody made it seem imperative to get high, but she didn’t like the looks of the guy: his interest in her, for all his glazed affect, was too obvious. Her cell phone started buzzing in the back pocket of her jeans. She saw the caller ID and scowled and smiled at the same time. “Where the fuck are you?” she said.

“I’m at this party,” Robin said. “Where the fuck are you?”

“Outside on the stoop,” April said, taking a couple of steps away from the stoner, who shrugged. “I looked everywhere for you.”

“I think not,” Robin said, giggling. She was already wasted and April felt a flash of resentment. “We’re up on the third floor.”

“There’s a third floor?” April said, looking up.

She got there eventually, picking her way past a group of boys who had found a silver tea tray and were trying to surf down the stairs. Robin, red-eyed, hugged her for a good thirty seconds, which told April that it was X. But the X was now all gone, supposedly. They were all in some kind of den or study or something; this house was a trip, one of those houses that even this crowd couldn’t quite believe somebody they knew lived in. The room itself, as a place to hang out, was tolerable—only about ten of them, the music reaching them as a kind of modulating throb—but the downside was that they were now so far away from the beer that there was no question of convincing anyone to make the trip. Someone passed April a warm bottle of Grey Goose and she did the best she could with it.

Two guys sitting about ten feet apart were texting each other and collapsing in laughter, and someone else was making a big show of checking out all the books on the shelves. Robin was talking with her eyes closed. Not the best sign. April was sitting in a club chair that was so comfortable she could have slept in it, even though it smelled like beer. Who would invite strangers in here, she thought? Who was this chick from St. Paul’s, and where had her parents gone without her? April didn’t understand some families. Most families, actually. Just then, as if on cue, her cell phone vibrated in her pocket again; it was Cynthia. April tried to think quickly. She was a little fucked up, but if she didn’t answer now her mother would just keep calling, and she wasn’t likely to get any less fucked up as the evening progressed. She walked out to the landing and answered. She was able to keep it short on account of the noise. A minute later she returned and they were all staring at her.

“Your mom, right?” Robin said. Her eyes were like little mail slots.

“And you answered?” one of the guys said.

“Shut up,” Robin said. “Her mom is so cool. April, I think it’s so cool that your mom is so cool.”

“Ah,” the guy said. “The Cool Mom.”

“Also totally smoking hot,” Robin said. “Seriously. Have you ever seen her?”

“I have!” said some random guy. “I saw her in some magazine! A total babe. She looks like, what the fuck is the name of that actress, the one who plays the mom—”

It should have made her feel weird, April thought, that they were all on the borderline of getting crude about her mom, but it didn’t. She wasn’t even sure they were all talking about the same person anyway. Besides, her mom was gorgeous, she’d been onto that long before any of them. “Hey,” she said to the guy who was still struggling to remember the name of the actress, “are you Calvin?”

“No,” he said irritably, as if his chain of thought had been broken. “I’m Tom. Calvin who? Calvin fucking Klein?”

A while later Robin said she wasn’t feeling well, and next thing they knew she was asleep in the chair, with Tom’s jacket over her.

“You think she’s all right?” April asked.

“Sure,” Tom said. “Not like we’ve never seen this before.”

“I just love her so much,” April said, and to demonstrate how much, she tried to look very hard into Tom’s eyes.

“Don’t worry,” Tom said. When you were drunk there was something so impressive about people who held it together better than you. April had the sense that the other people in the room were now gone. “We won’t let anything happen to her. We care about her.”

“Do you think we should find a phone?” she said. What the fuck was she talking about? She didn’t know. There was a phone right there in her ass pocket, for one thing.

“Yes, let’s,” Tom was saying very seriously. “By all means. Let’s go look for a phone.”

He walked behind her up to the darkened fourth floor, and when she turned around on the landing they were kissing. She felt cold and realized he already had her shirt up around her armpits and she at least had the presence of mind to walk backward a few more steps before anybody downstairs saw them. She wasn’t going to be one of those skanks who got wasted and put on a show for everybody. She pulled him along by his jacket. She was trying to communicate without talking because she knew she had been slurring. Off the hallway were two closed doors. Tom tried them but they were locked. No telling what was going on in there. At the end of the hall, impossibly, was another, narrower flight of stairs.

“Jesus Christ,” Tom said, “this place is massive.”

At the top of the final staircase was a room with the door ajar and some light seeping through. Tom pushed the door open and they both stopped short: it was an attic that had been converted into a study or office of some kind, with a long desk and a computer, and there was a man sitting there. He spun slowly in his swivel chair, like the mother’s corpse in Psycho, April thought, only this guy was wearing a cardigan and reading The Wall Street Journal.

“Hello,” he said.

April was too freaked out to speak. “Hi, sir,” Tom said. “Sorry to disturb you. We were looking for the bathroom.”

“There isn’t one on this floor,” the man said amiably. Oh my God, April thought, you live here! She had an urge to go up and poke at him like he was a ghost. “There’s one right underneath us.” He had to be the father of the girl throwing the party. This had to be his own home that they were tearing apart downstairs. He was staring at her and she realized she was laughing.

“Sorry to disturb you,” Tom said a second time, and pulled April outside and shut the door behind them.

Downstairs they found the bathroom; they went in and shut the door and kissed for a while longer, and then April went down on him. It was the quickest way to bring the whole thing to a close—ridiculously quick, in fact—and it was also the best way to keep his hands and mouth from going anywhere she didn’t want them to go. Amazing how passive guys got, and how quickly, once you took over that way. It was all so predictable. She kept going even when she felt the cell vibrating in her pocket again.

On her way downstairs she peeked into the study but Robin, as April pretty much knew she would be, was gone. April had the cab let her off at 72nd and walked the rest of the way home to straighten out a little, and on the way she checked the phone and found a text from her mom: Where R U? She bought a pack of Juicy Fruit at a newsstand to clean up her breath. She came in through the downstairs door but went up to the kitchen for a bottle of water and saw the lights, like lights from a swimming pool, flickering on the walls of the darkened media room. Her mom was curled up against the arm of the couch. She smiled. “Everything okay?” she whispered.

April nodded.

“How was the party? Who’d you hang out with?”

“Robin was there, actually,” April said.

“Oh yeah? How’d she seem?”

“Pretty good. She maybe had a little too much to drink.”

“She got home okay?”

April nodded. “I put her in a cab myself.” She blew her mother a kiss and started back toward the kitchen, but then she stopped.

“What’s on?” she said.

“A River Runs Through It. Ever seen it?”

She had, but it didn’t really matter; she went down to her room, put on some pajamas, and came back to lie down on the couch with her head in her mother’s lap. Cynthia stroked her hair for a minute and then took her hand away. On the screen were these still, mountainous landscapes and endless skies, so dreamy that the hot guys in their fetishy western garb just seemed like figures in a painting, and after a few minutes of that she couldn’t keep her eyes from closing, but whenever they did, what she kept seeing was the man in the attic. April reached up, grabbed Cynthia’s hand and placed it on her head again, just like she’d done when she was little—just like she’d never stopped doing, really. Some people were in such a hurry to pretend they didn’t need their mothers anymore, like they couldn’t wait to leave behind the things that were great about being a kid in the first place, the things they still liked but for some reason thought it was important to feel ashamed of liking. She didn’t understand those people at all.

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. “Maybe it’s not too late for you,” she said, in a kind of musical voice intended to suggest she was teasing. “Maybe you could still get into the family business.”

“I would,” Conrad said, “if I could even figure out what the hell it is he does.”

“Not a problem,” Adam said. “Always room for you, Fredo.”

They all laughed, Paige a little less heartily, because she didn’t know who Fredo was. In an effort to keep the conversation from escaping her completely, she said, “You know who would totally lose it over this apartment, Con? Tracy.”

Conrad nodded vigorously as if he’d been thinking the same thing. “Who’s Tracy?” Cynthia asked. “Tracy Cepeda is our show’s chief location scout,” Conrad said. “She would collapse if she saw this place. She’d offer you a mint to shoot in here. Even though we’d probably need to CGI some sand and palm trees out these windows.”

Adam felt his cell phone vibrate; he ignored it. It was hard for your eye not to be drawn to Paige because she was, in a way that was compelling without being at all sexual, so flawless. When she opened her mouth she became Paige but when she was silent, and still, there were no idiosyncracies in her face at all. Adam knew from Conrad that she had started out as an actress but did not like to talk about how badly that had gone.

“You better be careful he doesn’t write you all into the show,” Paige said, elbowing him. Conrad winced. “Please,” he said. “But it’s true that this place looks like a set. And so do the people in it. I mean, no joke, we spend weeks in casting trying to find kids who look exactly like April and Jonas. Adam, this is bourbon? What kind is it?”

“It’s rye, actually.”

“Wow,” Conrad said. He held up his empty glass and stared into it.

“Oh, Connie, you’ll have beautiful children too,” Cynthia said. “Provided Paige can find a way to reproduce without you, that is. What is that called again? Reproduction without sex? Paige, what’s the word I’m looking for?” Adam shot her a look intended to signal that she was close to the borderline.

“If you’re ever hard up for money, just fly the family to LA, and both kids will have agents before you’re out of baggage claim,” Conrad said. “Parthenogenesis, by the way, is what it’s called. Seriously, though, I can’t quite believe I’m related to them.” He stared at Adam. “You either,” he said, swiping at his older brother’s stomach. “Seriously, what kind of Faustian shit is going on around here? You literally do not look a day older than you did in college. It’s annoying as hell. What is the secret?”

Adam smiled. “Commitment, mon frère,” he said. “Commitment to the body. You should try it.”

“Commitment my ass. You’re a fucking vampire.”

The cell phone buzzed in Adam’s pocket. The incoming number was Devon’s, which was not something that was supposed to happen. “Excuse me a second?” he said, and went inside.

The three of them stood silently in front of the moon for a while, arms crossed on the patio railing. Conrad started. “Jesus, I just almost dropped my glass over the side,” he said. “Parthenogenesis. There, I can still say it. Cyn, where’s the bathroom?”

“There’s one off the kitchen,” she said, “and one just to the right of the front door as you came in.”

When he was gone, Paige and Cynthia exchanged a quick and awkward smile, and then went back to gazing over the railing, into the pocket of darkness that was Central Park.

“I’m sorry I said that about having children,” Cynthia said. “I mean, it’s really none of my business. I was just giving him shit. We’ve known each other forever.”

Paige tipped her head to indicate it was nothing. “You have a beautiful family,” she said. It was just one of those polite expressions people used when they couldn’t, or didn’t want to, come up with anything else to say; but for some reason it got to Cynthia this time. She felt a little sting at the corners of her eyes.

“Yeah, well,” she said, trying to stop herself but failing, “that’s what people start saying to you when you get a little older yourself. You have a beautiful family. It’s like, yeah, we can tell you were hot once. You notice I don’t get any of those remarks about how I don’t look any different than I did twenty years ago.”

Paige, for once, looked quite thoughtful.

“Time is different for us,” she said.

Adam walked back onto the patio, stuffing his cell phone in his pocket. He looked back and forth between the two women. “What?” he said.

It was an old story, how time favored men over women, but in Adam’s case, Cynthia thought, it was just as Conrad had said: he wasn’t growing more distinguished as he aged—it was more like he wasn’t aging at all. His waist size hadn’t changed since they got married, which was freaky but at least explicable, considering what a fanatic he was about it. But he wouldn’t even have known how to do anything to his face except wash it and shave it and yet that looked the same as it always had too. It wasn’t the first time someone else had confirmed it for her. True, he didn’t have too many vices, unless working out too hard counted as a vice, which she thought it probably did. He spent too much time in the office, he didn’t sleep enough, but whatever toll all this might have been exacting, none of it showed in his face. And if you pointed this out to him, he didn’t even understand what you were talking about.

She couldn’t compete with that. She still went to the gym three or four times a week, but she had long since come to consider it a chore and, in an effort to at least make it diverting, had gone through fickle infatuations with every bit of technology in there, every new fad and philosophy. The two of them belonged to different gyms—she would never have dreamed of working out with him, he was far too humorless about it. Still, like him, she was interested in hanging onto her physical prime for as long as possible—indefinitely, really. Together they did quite a good job of it. And there was one respect in which Cynthia—though she’d never discussed it with him—was prepared to go further in this effort than he was. They had three friends who’d had work done already; she told Adam about the first two, and then when Marietta had her eyelids and neck done Cynthia had said nothing and waited to see if he’d notice, which he never did. It wasn’t like Marietta’s tits had gotten bigger or something; she was only confirming Adam’s sense of what she was supposed to look like anyway. Aging would have been more conspicuous. Cynthia still looked fantastic—everyone said so, and she knew they were serious—but it was so hard to look at yourself with fresh eyes. That was the insidious thing about time and its effects: how incremental they were. So far, so good, was her thought, but whenever the moment came, there was no resource she wouldn’t call upon.

In the cold morning overcast, wearing shorts and a t-shirt and a lightweight ski hat and a pair of fingerless gloves, Adam put his palms flat against the façade of his building and pushed, until the tightness left his calves. He shifted his hips forward and slowly lowered one heel to the sidewalk, then the other, and when his Achilles tendons felt loose as well, he was good to go. He bounced on his toes a couple of times, exhaled once forcefully through his mouth as if preparing for an entrance onstage, put one finger to his watch, and started running.

Though he kept to the south side of 81st Street, where the sidewalks were wider on the perimeter of the museum grounds, it was still stop and go; he had to work his way around or through the knots of tourists and the pairs of strollers advancing in unison as their nannies chatted behind them. There was nothing to be done until he crossed the transverse exit at Central Park West and passed through the low stone gate into the park, and then he found his rhythm. He glided around the softball fields, passing everyone else on the path—the fat guys with headbands and hair leaking up from the collars of their shirts, the women in Lycra tights with sweatshirts tied self-consciously around their waists, the serious rope-muscled runners with the perfect strides and fixed stares—feeling the familiar warmth and pulse of his blood radiating from his core until there was no part of his body uninvolved in it. He’d never been to the Conservatory Garden before, but he knew roughly where it was—not far from their old apartment, the one where April and Jonas had shared a room. He could have shortened his time by cutting across the North Meadow but it was blocked by that temporary soft orange fencing that signaled a reseeding; so he passed all the way out of the park again on the east side and turned north along Fifth Avenue until he saw the theatrical flight of stone steps that led down into the garden. It was laid out in the dimensions of a cross, with trellised roses and reflecting pools on the right and left of him; at the far end, at the foot of a flagstone path, another flight of steps led up to a long, curved, and colonnaded stone arch, and there, sitting on the top step with his arms around his knees, wearing a khaki suit, was Devon.

He stood up slowly and bemusedly as Adam sprinted up the steps, touched his watch again, and stood gazing around the garden with his hands clasped on top of his head, waiting for his heart rate to slow. “Multitasking,” Devon said, a little bitterly. “Nice. No reason meeting me should interfere with your regimen. Won’t you have to go home and change now, though, before work, or is it Casual Tuesday or something?”

Adam shook his head. “Not going in this morning,” he said. “The boss and I are flying to Minneapolis in a few hours.”

They stood beneath the arch, facing back toward Fifth Avenue across the top of the sunken gardens. In the unseasonable cold the paths were almost empty, but not quite; the incongruous country-squire layout made it a popular spot for wedding photos, and so there was a full bridal party standing by one of the reflecting pools, blowing on their hands to keep warm, while a couple of boys in suits who couldn’t have been older than six chased each other around the still water. In fact, Adam was the only one in the whole garden not dressed formally. Still, Devon felt like the conspicuous one.

“So?” Adam said. “Shall we go talk amongst the roses?”

“Why not,” Devon said. “I’m sure everybody thinks we’re fags anyway.”

They descended the steps and turned left on the flagstones toward the unoccupied reflecting pool. “Miguel is out,” Devon said.

“No names, please.”

“Whatever. One of my associates has told me he’s out. The one who works at Schwab. He’s getting married. He says he’s made enough and doesn’t want this hanging over his head anymore.”

“Okay,” Adam said. “You think he’s telling the truth? There’s nothing else going on there, no trouble he’s in, no debts or anything like that?”

“Why?” Devon said. He meant to sound sarcastic but it just came out petulant. “You thinking of having him killed?”

Adam rolled his eyes. “I’m just wondering why you considered it some kind of emergency. It’s happened before. I mean, you know this isn’t a good idea, our meeting like this. Not that I don’t enjoy your company.”

As they finished their first circuit Devon looked up and saw a strange bald man in a tuxedo struggling to fix an expensive camera onto a tripod. He was all the way across the garden, where the bridal party was, but the camera looked like it was pointing right at him. He fought down a taste of panic in his throat. “That’s kind of my point, that this same thing happened two months ago. It’s not like we can take out an ad to replace these guys. Pretty soon it will be down to you and me, and that would not be tenable. We couldn’t disguise it well enough.”

“Well,” Adam said, “you know a lot more guys in the trenches than I do. Can you think of anyone else you might bring in?”

Devon grimaced. “Yes, probably,” he said, “but that’s not the point. We can’t keep piling risk upon risk, right, and expect to stay lucky forever. I don’t know. Honestly I’m wondering if it’s time to get out. I want to be smart about this. I mean, am I the only one? Don’t you think about this stuff? Aren’t you fucking freezing, by the way?”

Of course Adam thought about it, not because he was prone to fear or paranoia but just as a matter of risk management. He saw perfectly clearly that the whole arrangement was held together at this point only by own his ability to lead, to inspire faith in himself even among people he met only briefly, if ever. Any one of these brokers, Devon included, who slipped up and got caught could always save himself by giving up the top of the chain, and the top of the chain was Adam. So he wasn’t sure what there was for Devon to get so stressed about. He had to admit that his initial assessment of the kid, aboard the Intrepid all those years ago, had turned out to be wrong in some respects, though not, of course, in the important one.

“You say you want to be smart about it,” he said, looking into Devon’s eyes. “But to say that we can’t be successful today because we were successful yesterday—that’s not smart, that’s just superstitious. You start giving in to ideas about luck or fate or karma or whatever and you’re fucked. There’s no fate. Everything that you and I have made happen in these last however many years? It never happened. It’s gone. It doesn’t exist. The only thing that exists, the only risk to be analyzed, is what’s in front of us today.”

“I know,” Devon said sulkily. He looked down. Adam knew he had him.

“We are hypercareful. We always have been. We don’t give every piece of information to everybody in the chain. And I’m sure you figured out a long time ago that some of the information I give you is bogus, so it never looks to anyone like some unbroken winning streak.”

“I’m not questioning anything like that. It’s just—the whole thing isn’t like I thought it would be. The money is almost like a burden because I’m so paranoid about spending it. And how can you not look back? I don’t get that. Which is probably why I’ll never be a billionaire. I’m just not a stone killer like you are. See, that’s another thing I don’t get: as little as I know about you, I know that you are one of those guys, those guys who are like missing a part of their brain or something. No conscience. No memory for losses. So you don’t need this. You’d be a player anyway. Why are you doing it still? Don’t you think about stopping?”

The bridesmaids had run off to the car to get warm and the wedding photographer was packing his gear into a couple of canvas bags. No conscience? Adam thought. It’s not as though I can’t remember; it’s just that there’s nothing constructive about remembering. Still, when he did consider the life his family was living now, a life in which literally anything was possible, every desire was in reach, no potential was allowed to wither, and they had all seen so much of the world; when he thought back to the moment he had gone for it, to his own fearlessness when threatened with the unhappiness of those he loved, and how readily, in the face of that, he had cleared the hurdle that most men would never have the fortitude to clear; and how all this was accomplished by his taking all the risk onto himself, so much so that they would never even have a clue that there was any risk involved; the only reasonable conclusion, he felt, was that it was the noblest thing he had ever done in his life. It was humility, really, that made him so uncomfortable reminiscing about it.

But it was also true that that particular hurdle had been cleared a long time ago, and that there were other reasons he was loath to terminate the life of secret risk, the world inside the world. “Devon,” he said, “you’re going in to work today, right?”

He fingered his suit. “Some of us have to,” he said.

“Well when you do, just take a minute and look around you at everyone else in that office, everyone you work for, everyone who works for you. All of them with their fingers crossed, all of them so afraid that if getting some kind of inside information meant never seeing you again they would make that trade in a heartbeat. I think I know what you think of those people. But you are not one of them. You are Superman. You are a fucking gangster. The day we go back to feeling safe from risk is the day you can no longer look at them and say to yourself that there’s any difference between them and you. Are you really ready to go back to that? Are you really ready to go back to reading bullshit quarterly reports and trying to use those to figure out how the world works? It’s no kind of life, leaving your future in the hands of forces that have nothing to do with you and calling them fate or luck or whatever. And there is only this life, dude. I don’t want to get all mystical on you, but this is the only life we get, and either you leave your mark on it or it’s like you were never here.”

They had stopped walking. The garden was now abandoned. Devon, head down, nodded sullenly, like a child. Adam put his hands on the younger man’s shoulders.

“No one else,” Adam said gently, “knows the things that you and I know. Now. Speaking of being careful. It’s time for new cell numbers, right? Did you memorize yours?”

Devon nodded, and recited it. “Done,” Adam said, and began bouncing on the balls of his feet again. “Now relax a little. Have some fun. Wait to hear from me.” He ran up the garden steps, headed south until he could breach the low stone wall again, and twenty minutes later he was home. He showered, put on a suit, grabbed his briefcase, hailed a cab, and met Sanford inside the first-class lounge in the Delta terminal at LaGuardia. Sanford was sitting in a too-low club chair in front of a muted TV, holding a glass of wine and looking miserable.

“I can’t tell you how much I hate flying these days,” he said. “Commercial especially. It’s so degraded. Look at what passes for first class now.” His face was tired and florid, even though the glass of wine was his first. They were on their way to Minneapolis to close a deal with the state’s teachers union, which had agreed to let Perini grow their pension fund.

“I almost wonder why we have to go at all,” Sanford said to him as they boarded the plane, a few drinks later. “It’s all in the bag. But they just need a little face time, before they hand over the pension money to a couple of sharks from New York City. Maybe they just want to make sure we’re not Nigerian princes.” Adam had the aisle seat and thus took the brunt of the resentful glances from those who boarded after them and had to stand waiting while others tried to smash their carry-ons into the tiny overhead bins in coach. “You know,” Sanford said once they were in the air, “I spent a lot of time talking you up with them, and then one of them asked me an odd question. ‘If this guy’s such a star,’ he asked me, ‘how do we know he won’t bolt and start his own hedge fund or something?’”

Adam smiled. “And you said, ‘Hey, you’re right, I’d better go and give that guy a massive midyear bonus right away’?”

Sanford slapped him affectionately on the knee. “Good one,” he said. “No, I told him that you were still a young man. And that the best thing about you is that with all the ego in this business, you’re not one of those guys obsessed with having a high profile. Honestly, if you’d asked me ten years ago, I would have bet I’d have lost you by now. But you’re an old-school guy, a throwback in a lot of ways. Put your head down, do your job, respect the traditions, and everybody gets rich enough in the end. Lazard was like that when I worked there, a hundred years ago. Anyway, I can’t tell you what a comfort it is to me now.”

He looked out the window at the ground far below, the lit veins of the empty streets, the bright ball fields and parking lots. “It’s funny how much I’ve grown to hate this,” he said. “I used to take it for granted. Airplanes and airports. But lately I just want to be out on the water. It’s almost all I think about.”

A few minutes later he was asleep, his cheek sunk against his shoulder, his lower lip drooping. Not a flattering look, Adam thought, and closed his eyes.

There was a template for everything somewhere, an overgrown headwater of the original and unprecedented, and you might hack away in search of it your whole life long and never find it. Or, on the other hand, you might. Jonas hated having his ignorance exposed. On the M79 bus coming home from school some fat guy wearing board shorts even though it was about forty degrees out tried to peek over his shoulder to see what he was listening to on his iPod. Jonas showed him the screen. The guy made a condescending face: “Reheated Joy Division,” he said, and Jonas nodded in agreement, like what-can-you-do, but then he couldn’t wait to get home and get on the computer and find out who Joy Division was. And a couple of hours later he had to conclude that the fat guy was right. Mostly just by virtue of being older, but still. The more you learned about something you thought was good, the more holes like this you fell into. His own obsessions tended to bear Jonas backward in time, and eventually they led him to the sad but empirical conclusion that the popular music of his own day and age sucked ass.

In tenth grade this was not a mainstream view. If you wanted to be a music snob, fine, but you were expected to do so by raving obnoxiously about some band no one else had ever heard of because they’d only formed three weeks ago and played one gig. Jonas knew guys like that, older guys who ran the high-school radio station nobody listened to and who were flunking English because they spent so much time commenting on one another’s blogs, and even though he wanted nothing to do with them he had to cop to their being kindred spirits, because really they were jonesing for the same thing he was: the unspoiled, the uncorrupted, the pure of intent. They were just looking for it in the wrong place. Then of course there were all the kids in the happy mainstream, the kids whose moms drove them out to Nassau Coliseum to see some dancing boy-band lip-synch songs of longing vetted by a focus group of ten-year-old girls. That shit was beyond the pale. It was too hard to believe that there was such a thing as not even caring, not bothering to distinguish in terms of value between the simulated and the real.

There was something sort of priestly about him when it came to music, and as with most priests, some people respected his outlook and some people just found the whole attitude a bit much. Certainly it put him outside the realm of anything girls might be interested in. And there was another big downside to having such an exacting ear, which was that it tortured Jonas to know how mediocre and ordinary his own band sounded, himself not excepted. They were never going to be good. Still, he practiced and practiced. The others were blissfully optimistic, which was, he thought, a lovely thing to be able to be. They did a decent “Sweet Jane,” because really if you couldn’t get that down what hope was there for you? They played together once or twice a week in an old boathouse near the FDR Drive, a property that their lead singer’s father had bought up but hadn’t yet gotten a zoning abeyance to convert. It was hard to find places in the city to rehearse—probably easier to find places to perform, which was unfortunately where the fantasies of Jonas’s band-mates tended to drift anyway.

Girls did sometimes come to their rehearsals, though. Even senior girls like the completely unattainable Tori Barbosa. It proved once and for all the tremendous magical properties of rock and roll, Jonas thought, that even a band that sucked as bad as they did still attracted girls. He was the youngest among them and had the reputation of being the best musician as well, but that was because he was the only one who bothered to practice outside of rehearsal. One of the most depressing manifestations of their lameness was how much time they spent naming themselves. Haskell, their singer, thought some preemptive irony was in order and wanted them to call themselves The Privileged, or The Privileges. The notion of preemptive irony made Jonas want to kill himself; since he was always trying to interest them in a more rootsy direction anyway, he kept suggesting The Headwaters, like a kind of quest for the source rather than just some bar band-style aping of that month’s Top 40. But every time they wrote it down and looked at it, somebody would say, “The Headwaiters?” Every time. Then Alex, the drummer, had a revelation while watching a film in 20th Century U.S. History and so their name, at least until the next time they decided to argue about it, was Run Bobby Run.

With the cars roaring by on the FDR outside the boathouse door, they summoned the attention span for a passable version of “People Who Died.” Everyone was impressed with Jonas’s solo, and a couple of the spectators even came over afterward to tell him so, but at the end of the evening of course all the girls went off with the older guys and Jonas called the car service to come take him home. He needed to study, and he needed to sleep, but surplus adrenaline wouldn’t really permit him to do either; instead he turned on the record player and put on his headphones. Lately he was on a serious bluegrass kick. There was no end to that stuff—you were always stumbling on these amazing old 78s or field recordings that, the first time you played them, went off in your head like little bombs. He’d think so-and-so was a discovery of his and then learn later that, to real aficionados of the music, so-and-so was like Shakespeare or Tolstoy. His ignorance, he sometimes felt, was boundless.

He saw a shadow fall across the line of light that came in from the hallway, under his bedroom door. It was his mom, he knew, just checking to make sure he was back home. He didn’t even need to take the headphones off; he shifted around in his chair so it squeaked a little, and the foot shadows moved off again. Someone was always awake in that apartment. He opened up his cell and checked the time: 1:52. Then he turned back toward the blue lights of the planetarium outside his window.

I used to think my daddy was a black man
With scrip enough to buy the company store
Now he goes downtown with empty pockets
And his face as white as February snow

What the hell ever happened to country music, anyway? It used to be so fucking dark it took your breath away. Just a few more weary days and then I’ll fly away. Now it was a museum of itself, a pander-factory full of Vegas-style reactionaries in thousand-dollar hats. What was good about it was never coming back. Jonas slid the volume up and put his feet on the windowsill and listened until he saw the sun starting to brighten the planets below him.

This world is not my home, I’m just a-passing through
My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue
The angels beckon me to heaven’s open door
And I can’t feel at home in this world anymore

In the morning he came upstairs to breakfast feeling temporarily okay after a shower and drank the remnants of some kind of smoothie April had left in the fridge the night before. She passed him on her way out the door. She was part of that universe at school, the Tori Barbosa universe, and friends of his—total strangers, for that matter, kids from other schools sometimes—would come up to him and ask about her in ways that were pathetic and stalkerish. His sister was sort of a stranger to him but not enough of one that he could see her in the way everybody else apparently saw her.

“You look like shit,” she said, and patted him on the head.

Adam came in through the front door drenched in sweat from a run. Jonas liked running too—he hated sports in general but there was something ascetic about running, something monkish—but there was no way he could hang with his father, who kept a chart of his own split times and was talking about entering next year’s marathon. Adam sat down across from him and asked him how everything was going, and by the time that conversation was over Jonas had gotten permission to go down to Sam Ash and buy himself a banjo. Cynthia was still asleep and would be until after everyone else was out of the house.

It sounded hypocritical, he knew, to be so hung up on originality and authenticity when he was playing in a cover band; but that choice had been dictated less by aesthetics than by the discovery that songwriting was brutally hard. They all gave it a try at some point and the results were uniformly atrocious, with hurt feelings to contend with on top of that. So they went back to covers, but Jonas kept thinking that they could at least aspire to cover some material their audience didn’t already know by heart. That way at least you could argue you were maybe doing the music a service. He came to rehearsal one night with the banjo and a CD he’d burned of Jimmy Martin’s “You Don’t Know My Mind,” which was one of the scariest songs he’d ever heard in his life. He’d even found sheet music for it online, though only he and Alex knew how to read music anyway. He played the CD for them and was pierced by the looks on their faces even though on some level it was exactly the reaction he’d expected.

“It’s interesting,” Haskell said, “but I don’t think we can pull off that whole blues thing. You least of all, actually.”

“It’s not blues,” Jonas said. He felt exposed now, in the way one does when one confesses to a crush, and he didn’t want to make things worse by getting into an argument. Still, he couldn’t help it. “At least know what you’re talking about before you dismiss it. This guy was a poor drunk from the Tennessee mountains. He wasn’t trying to get on MTV or get his shit in a Verizon commercial. He had nothing but what came out of him. And you guys get all excited about The Strokes or whatever when it’s all just prepackaged bullshit.”

They looked at each other in a way that reminded him horribly of how young he was. “Look,” Haskell said gently, “you want to talk authentic, how authentic would it look for me to be singing about being a Tennessee dirt farmer or whatever? That’s not who I am.”

“Who are you?” Jonas said.

There must have been some expression on his face he wasn’t aware of, because Alex said, “Who needs a beer?” But it was past that point already. “I can tell you who I’m not,” Haskell said. “I’m not some self-hating son of a zillionaire. I’m not some condescending hypocrite poser. So you and your banjo fuck off. Grab your fucking Gibson and back me up on some songs about getting drunk and laid because when we are through here I am going to get both of those things. Authentic enough for you?”

Tori Barbosa was right there listening to the whole thing. It seemed too humiliating to walk out. Red-faced, he strapped on his guitar and looked at Alex, who tapped his fist to his heart a couple of times and then counted off “Sweet Emotion.”

For Christmas, as usual, Jonas’s parents asked him what he wanted; he said he wanted all twelve volumes of the Alan Lomax Library of Congress recordings, on vinyl, and since they didn’t have the first idea how to acquire such a thing, he bought it himself online and put it on their credit card. Over the winter he got the flu and had to miss a few rehearsals, and when he found out they’d had some kid from Collegiate sitting in for him, he texted Haskell and said he was out of the band. He spent evenings in his room with the headphones on, reading liner notes about Lomax and how he literally tromped through fields with a microphone in his hand and a huge reel-to-reel slung over his shoulder, recording things no one had ever recorded before. The guitars and the banjo sat on their stands in the corner. The forties, the thirties, the twenties: that, he kept thinking, was the time to be alive.

In May, just a week before the end of the school year, Ruth’s husband Warren died. He’d had a lung removed two weeks earlier but never made it home from the hospital. Even though his cancer had been diagnosed two years ago, Cynthia was almost as surprised as if the news had come out of nowhere; her mother’s peerless flair for pessimism had her convinced, right up until the final hysterical phone call, that Ruth was probably making too big a deal out of it.

The four of them flew to Pittsburgh the next morning. Adam asked Cynthia if she planned to stay on for a few days after the funeral to “help out” and Cynthia said she didn’t know, it hadn’t occurred to her. Indeed there was a whole barrage of quotidian death-consequences that somehow had never occurred to her. Ruth came to the door to greet them in what for her might have passed as high spirits; she exclaimed, as well she might have, over the changes in her tall and comely grandchildren, who had not seen her in years and who were not entirely sure how to act but instinctively determined to err on the side of restraint. “It’ll be so nice for you to see your cousins,” Ruth said to them, and at the word “cousins” Cynthia saw them indiscreetly catch each other’s startled eyes.

The funeral was still three days away. Ruth kept stressing how much she would require Cynthia’s help with various decisions but then it would turn out that she had already made those decisions anyway, some of them so far in advance as to border on the ghoulish. Cynthia had little advice to offer in any case. She had no experience with funerals but beyond that she could bring only a generic approach to the question of how Warren’s life ought to be celebrated. He was a sort of machine of dependability. He was also a former managing partner at Reed Smith and a surprising amount of ceremony was dictated by that, which was helpful if also a little perverse, as if the law firm were a branch of the armed services with attendant arcane, unquestioned rituals. Ruth wanted a closed casket because toward the end he’d looked too little like himself. They could put a lot of makeup on him but they couldn’t put the weight back on. She went instead for a large framed photo to be placed on top of the casket itself, a formal portrait commissioned when he’d been made managing partner: round-faced, smiling appropriately, projecting, with his glasses and his silver hair, a kind of well-fed competence.

The house was too small for all of them to sleep in; they spent the day there, battling their own restlessness as an assortment of Tupperware-bearing geriatric strangers consoled them on their loss, and then at night they escaped to the Hilton downtown, where they splurged on every silly, expensive amenity as a way of getting the hours of toxic solemnity out of their systems. The tips Adam doled out had the bell staff literally fighting for his attention. He’d never really liked Ruth: he didn’t do well with negative people. This time was different, obviously, and he was more than willing to make allowances; still, he wasn’t sure how to take it whenever she acted as if she and Adam were as close as mother and son, not just when others were around but even in the rare minutes when the two of them were alone together. She didn’t seem to be performing, either, as she often did. When he smiled and stood aside in her kitchen doorway just to let her pass, she put her forehead on his shoulder and closed her eyes, and Adam felt as he might have if a woman in a strange city had mistaken him for someone else.

He wasn’t sure what to tell the kids to do in that house of mourning, so he settled for telling them what not to do: no texting from inside Grandma’s house, no earphones in their ears for any reason. Save it all for the hotel. He and Cynthia took them to the church where they were married and the four of them even had dinner in the Athletic Club dining room, which was the site of their reception; Jonas and April were indulgent about it at best. Nor were they especially diverted by the introduction of their “cousins,” a term that turned out to refer to the twin sons of Cynthia’s stepsister, Deborah. The two women hadn’t had occasion to speak to each other in years; April heard her mother cooing about some recent Christmas-card photo of the twins but it was not any Christmas card that she and Jonas had ever seen. The boys were five years old and, April couldn’t stop herself from thinking, really unfortunate-looking. Virtually the only way to get them to stop talking was to feed them something. Somehow they’d gotten to know their grandpa Warren much better than she and Jonas ever had, and they turned cutely somber when discussing the loss of him.

Deborah was much altered. She was fat, for starters, with no vestiges of the goth edge, faint to begin with, she had cultivated as a grad student, to say nothing of her one night at Bellevue; she taught twentieth-century art history at Boston University, as did her husband, who was a good deal older than her and had been, Cynthia was amused to learn, the chair of the search committee that hired her. When Deborah cried at the funeral, not at all showily, Cynthia found herself struggling not to stare at her, without quite knowing why. She had written a eulogy for her father but had arranged for her husband to read it for her, as she doubted her ability to get through it. And when the last mourner had gone through the receiving line in the room at the back of the church after the service, Cynthia and Deborah hugged.

But that feeling of kinship was short-lived. After the last guest left Ruth’s house that evening, Cynthia heard two more voices out on the deck, and when she went out to investigate she found Deborah and Jonas leaning against the railing, deep in conversation. She tried to conceal her surprise, but could not, and when they both noticed her standing there in the doorway, they laughed. “We’re arguing about Andy Warhol,” Deborah said. “Pittsburgh’s own. I feel like I’m defending my thesis again.” Unless Andy Warhol played the fucking banjo, Cynthia thought, she would not have guessed that Jonas knew or cared who he was; but before she could say anything else, Jonas said, “Mom, what time is our flight tomorrow?”

“I’m actually not leaving tomorrow after all,” Cynthia said. “Your flight is at something like three-thirty.”

Jonas pumped his fist, and Deborah said, “Well, would you mind then if I took Jonas out to the Warhol Museum? One of the curators there is an old classmate of mine. It’s a pretty great museum, actually. Maybe you want to come too.”

She did not miss the look that crossed her son’s face when Deborah made that last suggestion. “No,” she said, “I’m sure it’s a real life-changer and all that, but there’s things to take care of around here. You go. Knock yourselves out. Just be back at the hotel by, I don’t know, one.” Smiling as tightly as her mother might have, she stepped back inside the house and slid the door shut. Back in the kitchen there were a thousand dishes to wash, and she briefly entertained the pros and cons of just throwing them all in the garbage. It’s not like there’d ever be a crowd this size here again. Andy Warhol, she thought suddenly. It’s one thing to fall for that bullshit as a high-school student, but imagine devoting your whole life to it.

Adam and the kids flew home the next day, and so, as it turned out, did Deborah’s family; but Deborah stuck around. Cynthia supposed she should be happy that the burden of the next few days—all those hours maintaining one’s patience on the phone with the insurance company or the idiots at Social Security—wasn’t all going to fall on her, only child or not. Still, it was a little confounding to see how close Deborah and Ruth seemed to have become over the past few years, outside of Cynthia’s awareness. At some point, she thought, Deborah must have really bought into that whole extended-family thing, because she certainly hadn’t been buying into it when they first met each other, more than fifteen years ago now.

As for Ruth, having both girls in the house helped her maintain the bizarre equanimity that had characterized her all week. She’d wept a little during the service but otherwise there had been no great outpouring of grief. Cynthia believed this was some kind of denial. Or maybe it was relief. Or maybe it was just that she was old and alone and so there was no longer any need for her customary exaggeration of how hopeless things were. She puttered and took naps and answered condolence cards and fought good-naturedly with them when they tried to cook for her. She was sixty-seven and there was nothing to suggest that she couldn’t go on like this for another twenty or thirty years.

She was easily exhausted, though, and went to bed early, and a few minutes later Cynthia was sitting numbly in the kitchen staring at a light-switch cover shaped like a rooster when Deborah walked in happily waving a bottle of Knob Creek bourbon she’d found in the liquor cabinet. Hallelujah, Cynthia thought.

“So when are you heading back?” Deborah said, after the first one.

“The day after tomorrow, I think. I’ve got a board meeting, and then we have this place down in Anguilla we go to sometimes, so we’ll go there when school’s out, which is in … What is today? Anyway, it’s next week.”

Deborah nodded but was unable to suppress an ambivalent laugh. “You guys have really been successful,” was what she said.

Cynthia wasn’t sure how to reply to that one. “It’s all Adam,” she said finally. “Some people just have a talent for investing.”

“Well, you two always did seem to have that kind of penumbra around you. And now your kids have got it too.”

“Your boys are adorable,” Cynthia said, reaching for the bottle.

“Thank you. And the weird thing is, I have two more. Sort of. Sebastian has two daughters from his first marriage. Both in college now. So after all these years, I’m the stepmother.”

“Ironic would be the word there, I guess,” Cynthia said.

“Say this for my dad,” Deborah said, holding up the bottle. “He knew that life was too short to settle for cheap liquor.”

“So I’m curious,” Cynthia said. She could see already that Deborah was something of a lightweight, and who knew but that this might be the last time they ever talked. “What’s happened to you? I mean the one thing I always thought we had in common was thinking that the whole blended-family thing or whatever people call it was bullshit. You always seemed to hate it worse than I did. And now you’re all Aunty Deborah with Jonas, and you’re treating Ruth like she’s your own mom. Is your own mom even still alive? That seems like something I should know, I guess, but I have no idea.”

Deborah looked at her slyly. “She lives with us,” she said. “Back in Boston.”

“Get the fuck out of here.”

She nodded, amused by herself. “I don’t know when it happened exactly, but somehow the older I got the more exposed I felt, and the whole family idea got real meaningful to me. I developed this need for it. I had a theory that it had to do with being an only child, like the fear of being alone that comes with that, but I guess not. It didn’t happen to you.”

“So is this it for you, in terms of coming out here to visit or to help Ruth or whatever? I’ve always kind of wondered about the step-thing. Does it end when you’re an adult? Does it end when the marriage that made it happen ends?”

Deborah considered it. She put her chin down on the kitchen table and stared at the bottle. “Time will kick your ass,” she said. “I used to be so angry about how fake the whole thing was. I was pissed about having to be in your wedding, even. But you wait around long enough and these bogus connections harden into something real, whether you like it or not. I really think of Ruth as one of my parents now. I don’t think Dad’s death can undo that.”

“What will happen to her?” Cynthia said suddenly. “You know there’s going to be a huge crash once we’re gone. It must fucking suck to be old. It must suck to have your husband die. But I mean what can we do about it? The only way to hold it off is to stay here forever. And there’s no way she’s coming to live with us, I mean, hats off to you and all that, but I could never do it.”

“She’d never come live with you anyway, even if you asked her. Or with me. No way Ruth could ever open herself up enough to depend on one of us like that. I think she’ll actually do okay living alone. Better than most people. The thing to worry about, if you want to worry about something, is what if her health goes south, like Dad’s did. Then you’re looking at some hard choices.”

Did she mean “you” as in “one,” or “you” as in “Cynthia”? But there was no way to ask for a clarification because she felt craven and selfish just for wondering. Anyway, those decisions were still a long way off. “She’s never been sick a day in her life,” Cynthia said.

There was some kind of noise from the direction of the living room, and they both cocked their heads in case Ruth was up, but only silence followed. The muted TV still flickered on the walls beyond the kitchen door.

“You know,” Deborah said, “my dad was really a great guy. He had his limits in terms of expressiveness, but he was really loving. And he always had a soft spot for you. I think because you were certain things I wasn’t. It hurt him that you didn’t think of him as a parent. You never really gave him a chance.”

Her eyes were drunk. Either she hadn’t done this in a long time or she did it a lot. Cynthia suddenly lost interest in the answer. You started taking on other people’s grievances and there was no end to it. She was nobody’s sister, and neither was Deborah. It was one thing to conspire about the future but there was no way she was going back into the past.

“I already have a father,” she said.

Juniors and seniors from Dalton still came and went at the Moreys’ apartment like it was some kind of after-school program; but months after April’s friend Robin had stopped living there, gone back to reassume her place inside her own much more opaque home, April still missed having her around. Which was ironic, she thought, because toward the end of Robin’s time there, the girl’s behavior had actually started to offend her a little, less on her own behalf than on her mother’s. Robin brought drugs into the house, she used her key to sneak out at night and flirted with the doorman so he wouldn’t bust her, she even brought guys into the downstairs half of the apartment in secret, and even though April had done just about all of these things herself at one time or another, her thought this time was: My mother takes you in and gives you every freedom and this is how you pay her back?

When it got around Dalton that she was essentially a runaway, and that her mom had beaten her (April herself may have been the one who let that slip), Robin’s school persona had undergone a sea change. She went from a carefully cultivated normality to a kind of exalted strangeness. She started playing up to her new persona by mouthing off to teachers (who, like Cynthia, basically let her get away with anything), to other kids, to the people who worked at the Starbucks near school where they hung out during free periods. Friday afternoons sometimes she’d be so drunk she’d fall asleep in class. To others it might have looked like acting out but April saw it as pure performance. Only she knew how good the chances were that this supposedly damaged badass would end the day lying in her pajamas on April’s couch with her head in April’s mother’s lap while the three of them watched movies and shared a bag of red licorice. But now that was over and Robin and she, though still friends, didn’t share anything like that at all.

Once in a while, when Robin was still living there, when the two of them were up late and couldn’t get to sleep, they used to lie side by side on April’s bed with their laptops and go into these chat rooms that were obviously full of older guys. It was hilarious, because you could say absolutely anything to them with no repercussions because they could have been anywhere in the world, and so, for that matter, could the girls themselves. The guys were just glad you weren’t cops, probably. They would masturbate pathetically while April and Robin, lying on their backs with their laptops on their stomachs, typed the most ridiculous porn and then tilted their screens toward each other to read, trying to outdo themselves until they both laughed so hard they hurt. It would always end with the loser asking to meet you. He didn’t care where you were; he’d travel anywhere to meet Bobbi or Sammi or whatever name they’d given each other that night. They were safe because they lied about everything. Though it wasn’t the same, April still did it sometimes by herself when she was bored.

Now on most weekends it was just the four of them. One Friday April’s mother announced that they were all going to the Hamptons the next morning to look at houses. This was a bit of a surprise; though they visited people out there all the time, her dad in particular had resisted joining the general migration for years, saying that it never changed and there had to be some more interesting place in the world to see. They would spend the next several weekends on the East End looking if they needed to, Cynthia said, but the kids exchanged an eye-roll at that one because once their mother had made up her mind to purchase something, she usually got what she wanted in the first hour. Their dad drove them out to Amagansett in the morning and, sure enough, maybe the third place they saw had their mom hooked. It was really nice, April had to admit—about a hundred feet from the beach—and just being out here at all would bring her closer to a lot of her friends on the weekends. Another home to fill up with stuff. Her mom would be in heaven for the next few months.

Back in the city a few nights later she was in her room alone writing to one of the deviants in the chat room and, when he asked her her name, she thoughtlessly typed April. She had a moment of total panic until she remembered that there were a million Aprils in the world. But after that night, whenever she would log on, amid all the lying and the fake porn-star affect there would be this one voice on the screen that would sometimes pop up and say, April? Is that you? His name, or so he said, was Neil, and he lived in Connecticut. Far from the city? she wrote, and he said, Not far at all. Why? He asked for a picture, and she said no way. He sent her one of himself. A little old, maybe, but not a complete gimp, that is if it was really a picture of him at all. There was no way to know, or rather there was only one way to know. That’s all the Internet was, lies gone wild, and it only made you dizzy if you tried to sort it out.

He was really clever about it. He didn’t say, Do you want to meet? Do you want to meet? He said, I will be at the Starbucks on 41st and Seventh at 2:00 PM on Wednesday June 18th. I really hope you’ll be brave enough to be there too. You’ll recognize me from the photo.

She didn’t breathe a word to Robin about it, nor to anyone else. On the other hand, even though it was a secret, there was no question she was doing it for an audience, even if that audience was, in a strange way, made up. People would be in awe of her if they knew: even if they said they thought it was an incredibly stupid thing to do, they would be in awe of her fearlessness, whether it turned out there was something to fear there or not. She would be the badass, the damaged one. If, in a given activity, there was a next step to be taken—a taller cliff to dive from, purer drugs to try, something bigger and more difficult to steal—someone, at some point, was going to take that step, it was like a law of nature, and so let the record reflect that that someone was her.

She saw him right away, and he smiled at her, but she made a big show of getting a Venti Americano first before joining him. “I cannot believe,” he said first thing, “how beautiful you are,” and she realized then how the very same thing that might sound desperate and pathetic when you saw it in type on your laptop screen might be, in other, more direct circumstances, a very powerful thing to hear. She didn’t give away any details, not her last name or the name of her school or her address, or what her parents did; he seemed to understand, though, what was difficult about all this for her, even to anticipate it sometimes, and so he helped her relax by talking a lot about himself. He was, he said, a private investor (“So’s my dad,” she wanted to say but didn’t) who worked at home but had managed to make a lot of money—“not as much money as you have, though, I bet,” he said. She wondered how he could tell that about her, how it showed. He’d grown up in Greenwich and had inherited his own house after his parents died. Living in your hometown was cool, but it was hard to meet new people. She really wanted to ask him how old he was—she couldn’t tell the difference between thirty and fifty, it all looked the same to her at her age—but she was afraid of appearing too interested in him. She hardly moved except to lift the coffee to her mouth.

“So I won’t ask you where you live, April,” he said, smiling, like it was some kind of coyness that kept her silent, “but how did you get down here today? Subway?”

She’d taken a cab, but she nodded yes. Any lie, even a pointless one, seemed like a good idea. Then, clearing her throat first, she said, “You? Do you take the train in or what?”

His smile broadened. “I drove,” he said. “It’s really a short drive. You’d love my car. It’s a convertible. But then if you get stuck in traffic or the rain or whatever, you put up the top and I’ve got a killer sound system in there—you just plug your iPod in and blast it. You’ve got an iPod, right? Everyone does these days. I’d even let you drive it if you wanted. Or maybe you’re not old enough for a permit yet?”

She stared at him. She wondered why they weren’t drawing more attention from everyone else in there, an older guy and a high-school girl in a Starbucks in the middle of the day. But maybe it didn’t seem that unusual to people.

“Well,” Neil said, “even if you aren’t old enough to drive, that could be our little secret.”

She realized then that, whatever outcome she had been pointing this toward—one-upping Robin, getting her mother’s attention again, whatever subconscious wish some shrink would probably say she was acting on right now—it was all contingent on the idea that someone would see her, that she would get caught. The idea that she would not get caught had never really hit her before now.

“Do you want to go outside and see it?” Neil said.

In the end she got as far as the car itself but she didn’t get inside it. He wasn’t angry with her at all. He knew how to be patient. He wrote down his cell number for her, said he looked forward to seeing her again, and he gave her a long hug.

Nine days later, the phone rang at the Moreys; it was Robin, and she asked, for some reason, for Cynthia. Cynthia held the phone to her ear and didn’t say anything for half a minute; her expression was perfectly flat. Then she hung up and stood and walked straight into her bedroom and shut the door, but when she brushed past April in the hallway she was already crying. Robin’s mother had cut her wrists in the bathtub the night before last and was dead. Adam was out of the country on business, and Cynthia, disappointingly, wasn’t even able to pull herself together and at least make a show of strength for Robin’s sake; so April wound up being the one Morey to go to the funeral. The whole class went. They sat together in the back pews from which they could easily see Robin and her father up front, but what difference did that make, April realized—Robin was a million miles away. They might as well have been watching her on TV. The gulf between them was so terrible that they were all too scared to say or do anything to try to traverse it.

Robin wasn’t back at Dalton in the fall, but the dean of the upper school said he was still hopeful she’d be back in January. April threw out Neil’s cell number, and never went back into those chat rooms again, though it was not exactly reassuring to know that he was very likely still out there somewhere himself, calling out her real name.

Dalton had a fathers’ basketball league that Adam still played in a couple of times a month. It wasn’t your standard pickup game. You could tell which ones were the lawyers from the way they stopped the game for two minutes to argue every time somebody called a foul. And some of them, the financial guys especially, were competitive to the point where you’d be breaking up fights once in a while—not often, but often enough that years ago they’d voted not to let faculty members play, because the idea of losing your temper and throwing an elbow at your kid’s history teacher was a little too fraught. The level of competition was obviously spotty, but there were some decent athletes in there. And as his own kids grew older and the fathers of new kindergartners joined the league, Adam even found himself on occasion guarded by guys who were actually his age. One night he went up for a rebound and got knocked off balance by someone’s shoulder against his hip, and as he landed on one foot he could feel his knee come apart. He remembered standing up again, his arms over the shoulders of two of his teammates, and watching the lower half of his right leg swing from side to side like a pendulum. After three days in the hospital and a week working while bedridden at home, he made his return to Perini on crutches, locked into a kind of massive splint that ran from his ankle almost to his hip and kept his right leg as straight as a pencil at all times.

They mocked him about it relentlessly at the office, hiding his crutches, making pirate noises when he stumped by, emailing him videos of famous sports knee blowouts. It was a survival-of-the-fittest kind of humor, where they laughed at his weakness more or less in lieu of killing and eating him, but he didn’t mind it, he would have expected no less. His great fear in the months that followed was getting fat. He set his recovery back a couple of weeks, or so his doctor told him, by trying to double up on the exercises his physical therapist had given him.

The analysts in the office were almost all guys in their twenties, and though they loved hanging out with Adam and were in awe of his excellence at what he did—he saw a company’s future almost instantly, an instinct that his lack of a business school degree elevated to the level of the mystical and heroic—they couldn’t figure out what he was still doing there. Over and over they would sidle up to him, usually in some bar, and let him know that when the time came for him to bolt Perini and start his own fund, he could count on their total loyalty. To a man they felt that Sanford was too risk-averse and that if it weren’t for Adam’s presence there, his clients’ money wouldn’t be doing much better than it would in a savings account.

“Someday it will be the right time,” was Adam’s usual line. “I won’t forget we talked.”

The truth was that leaving and starting his own shop would bring into play questions of proprietary information, and other forms of unwelcome attention. Part of what insulated him from suspicion is that he himself never appeared, to anyone outside Perini at least, to be the one making the decisions. No one looking at the books would have any way of knowing that Barry, at this point, did literally everything that Adam advised him to. Adam didn’t want anyone looking too hard at some of the deals he’d been involved in over the last eight or ten years, because while they might not have known exactly what they were looking for, there was always a chance they would find it anyway. From his point of view the most promising scenario was for things to stay just as they were.

Perini was still at the same address, the same layout as ever. Sanford came in less and less but talked to Adam four or five times a day wherever he was. Adam had his own office but the rest of them worked in a kind of open-floor plan and he spent most of his time out there anyway. He hadn’t been beaten on the office foosball table in four years.

Usually if Sanford wanted to make a big personal display about something, he took you out to lunch. But one morning in February, just about the time Adam was walking normally again, a few weeks after the removal of the accursed splint, the boss came in at ten—early, by his standards—called Adam into his office behind him, and told him that he had decided to retire, effective in two weeks, and to turn his executive partnership position in Perini Capital, minus only some deferred compensation, over to Adam.

“It’s largely a tax thing,” the old man said. “I had to redraw my will and there are certain things they advised me to make clear.” But his eyes were watering when he said it.

Adam was profoundly unprepared. He never saw it coming; for all the old man’s sentimentality, Adam never imagined he’d let go voluntarily of anything truly estimable without dying first.

“Barry,” he said. “You don’t need to do this now.”

“What should I wait for?” Sanford said. “You have to look forward. This is a beautiful institution and I want it to continue.”

“Don’t you—I mean, I know you have children of your own?”

“They’ll be provided for,” he said, “according to their merits. This is a separate thing.”

Adam fought down an alien panic. “This place could never exist without you,” he said. “It’s a monument to you.”

“Well, that does remind me, there is one condition to all this, and that is that the fund keeps its name. Even after I’m gone. One does want to leave a legacy, you know. One does want to be remembered. Why that should make a damn bit of difference I’m not really sure, but it does. Anyway, that will be a provision of the ten thousand things we will both have to sign.”

Adam wound up saying that it was something he would need to talk over with his wife. Sanford took that to mean that he was too moved to say yes on the spot and decorously granted his request. Adam went home that night and in the margins of a newspaper added up all the money he had offshore. It was rare for him to write anything down; he kept accounts in his head. There was enough for them to live on for the rest of their lives; but what did that even mean? It was unsettling to think of money in terms other than those of growth, of how it might be used to make more money. Something about it smelled of death to him but he didn’t know why.

He went in the next day and told Sanford that he was going to decline the offer. He felt it was premature, he said, because Sanford was still a titan in the world of private equity and would be for years to come; anyway, Perini Capital was literally unthinkable without its founder at the helm and he was sure everyone else in the office would say the same thing. Then he said he was going to use a week of vacation time. It didn’t take even an hour for Sanford’s hurt and astonishment to turn into anger. It was a strangely joyous sort of anger, though, as if he’d found out that his doctors had made some terrible diagnostic error and in fact he was going to live forever. He stormed out without a word to anyone at about three o’clock and when the others turned to Adam to ask what the fuck was going on between the two of them, he said, in a tone that terrified them, that it was nothing for them to worry about.

He probably should have gone to Anguilla right away, but instead, that night at dinner, he told Jonas and April that he was taking them out of school for a week so they could all go to London. They looked at him like he was nuts, as did Cynthia, but they had always been raised to respect spontaneity and it was much too good an offer to turn down. On short notice, in the high season, everything was outrageously expensive, but even though they kept referring to that, it didn’t really mean anything to them. They found a place in Mayfair and when April found out a former school friend of hers was on a modeling job in Surrey, Adam took them all to Battersea and chartered a helicopter to take them out there for a visit.

The model friend wound up asking April and Jonas if they wanted to come with her to see The Strokes that night at Hammersmith Palais; she was meeting some people there, and she herself was so freakishly hot that the mere prospect of her friends was enough to overcome Jonas’s disdain for the band. Cynthia and Adam went out to dinner in Kensington and had two bottles of wine. There he told her that a few days ago Sanford had offered to retire and basically bequeath him the whole fund, but that he had turned the offer down. “Jesus,” Cynthia said. “He must have been crushed. What did he say when you told him?”

Instead of answering that question, Adam said, “I was worried you’d be disappointed in me,” and he was surprised to feel a little catch in his throat when he said it.

She took his hand, which was a pretty good indicator that she was drunk. “Listen,” she said. “You’re a fucking genius. Every single move you’ve made has worked out for us. Look where we are. Everything has happened for us just the way you said it would. What kind of an idiot would I have to be to second-guess you?”

He held her fingers to his lips and closed his eyes. Other diners were starting to turn in their direction.

“Go ahead and stare,” Cynthia said softly, without taking her eyes off him. “Fucking old skanks wish they were me.”

By their last night, Adam was saying to Cynthia that they ought to just buy the flat they were staying in so they could come and go as they pleased. “I had a good year,” he said. She looked at him as if he were a little mad, but then she caught something exciting in his eyes and threw up her hands and said, “Why not?” That was it: everything was open to them. What was life’s object if not that? Adam knew on some level that he had to get as much money out of those Anguillian accounts as possible and shut them down, but more than that he wanted to just spend it all on the three of them, as orgiastically as possible, challenge his family to come up with desires they hadn’t even thought of yet and then make those desires real. There was, after all, no life but this life. The days were swallowed up behind you. He’d had a little too much gin. He wanted to be more like Sanford, actually, and just give it all away: he wanted to self-immolate in the name of the love he felt for his wife and children, a love for which no conventional outlet was close to sufficient.

By the time they returned to New York he’d come down a little bit. He went back in to work on Monday morning, and before he had his coat off Sanford called him into his office and fired him. It was not a cordial scene. “You haven’t looked this young in years,” Adam told him. Sanford gave him until 9:15 to clean out his desk. “I don’t know what you’re planning,” Sanford said, trembling, “but I will find out. You will learn the hard way that you cannot fuck with me. I made you.” Which was funny not just in the sense that Adam had been fucking with him for years with great success but also because the elaborate plan Sanford believed was behind this decision—a plan to start his own fund, a plan to force him out of this one, whatever—didn’t exist, not in any form. Adam had no clue what came next.

When he got back home it was still only about eleven o’clock in the morning and no one else was in the apartment. He sat in the media room and watched TV, scrolling through the channels without stopping. He’d been careful for so long that he felt like doing something especially stupid, something that would finish him off once and for all. But he didn’t. He reminded himself that there were other people involved, people he was bound to protect. Sanford was angry enough to do anything, to look anywhere. He went to the bedroom closet and got the disposable cell phone out of its hiding place inside one of his sneakers.

“I thought we said never during business hours,” Devon said.

“It’s over,” Adam said. “We have to shut it down.”

“What?”

“It’s over starting now. Okay? Nothing for you to worry about.”

“Nothing for me to worry about?” he said, in a kind of strangled whisper. “What the fuck are you talking about? Has somebody found out?”

There was something in his voice. It should have been simple, Adam thought—yesterday is done, it never happened, tomorrow you start over—but he could hear the give in Devon’s voice and knew that his thoughts were turning in a bad direction.

“Listen to me,” Adam said. “It’s just time. Nothing has happened. No one knows anything. We will be fine. And I will take care of you. I will not forget what you and I have put on the line for each other. Understand? Now, you will not hear from me for a while, maybe a long while, but that’s just about being cautious. You have my word that I will not leave you hanging. Our future is still together. We could take each other down, but it’s way preferable for neither of us to go down at all. Preferable and honorable. We’ve done something amazing together. I would never, ever give you up for any reason. And I know that I can count on your loyalty too. Right?”

Even in the silence that wasn’t silence—there was too much noise in the background, phones beeping and keyboards clicking and salesmen screaming and purring—Adam could hear him coming around.

“Right,” Devon said, to himself as much as to Adam. “No snitching. If you say we’ll be fine, we’ll be fine.”

“We will be better than fine. The future is brilliant and I promise you you have a place in it. I won’t leave you hanging. In the meantime get rid of the phone, get rid of everything. Just to be safe. Just don’t look back and when the time is right you will hear from me again. Okay? Eyes forward. Trust me.”

So that was taken care of, he thought. Still, though he had always known how to act boldly in the moment, as the day passed in idleness the idea of his own past opened up in front of him as something threatening and, amazingly, ineradicable. You couldn’t undo it, it didn’t belong to you anymore, and yet it was still there. This was a new one on him. It was just as real—more real, in fact, as each day of unaccustomed inaction went by—as the present, but in another sense it was inviolate, behind glass, where even if you wanted to get rid of it you could not.

He had three different job offers in the first week, as word spread of his firing, but he declined all three and the offers stopped coming, no doubt because people assumed, as Sanford did, that Adam had some plan that had yet to be revealed. He didn’t want to go to work for anyone else. Yet the solitude of sitting at home—even in his bright, high-ceilinged home office, the sky over Central Park like a frame around his computer monitor—wasn’t good for him either. Eventually he figured out that there was one thing that did return him at least temporarily to himself, and that was risk. He took flyers in the market on companies that might turn out to be way undervalued and then watched with a gambler’s intensity to see whether his instincts were correct. There was one memorable afternoon when Cyn went off to a Children’s Aid Society board meeting and by the time she returned and said “How was your day?” he had lost two hundred and thirty thousand dollars of their own money. It was all their own money now. He told her he’d been to the gym, and that was answer enough for her. He felt, as he hadn’t in years, what it was to be loved. He had a strong intuition that he would die without her, that just as any slacking off in his workout routine would surely lead to a rapid and shocking physical decline, so would time spent outside the field of her total belief in him eventually unmoor him from his status as a civilized man.

He saw that Barron’s had a strong sell recommendation on a pharmaceutical stock called Amity. He’d long thought Barron’s fatally unimaginative and decided it would be fun to prove them wrong. He bought ten thousand shares, and a week later sold them again at a net loss of four hundred and eight thousand dollars.

Cynthia had no idea about any of this, and if she had, her concern would have been disproportionate because she had no idea how much money Adam had managed to put away in accounts she knew nothing about. He couldn’t think of a way to justify a solo trip to Anguilla when spring break was less than a month away and so he just had to bite the bullet and wait. He did float the idea that maybe this would be their last trip. He said he was bored with it and had heard about other places he wanted to try, maybe the South Pacific. She believed him. The whole scheme, he reminded himself, had been for her benefit, and in fact it had worked out just the way he hoped it would: he had seen her stuck and unhappy and the thought of it had been too much for him; he had an image of the life he was going to make for all of them and it wasn’t coming fast enough and so he had done what he’d had to do to speed things up, to get them all intact to that place of limitlessness that she so deserved and that he had always had faith they would occupy. It wasn’t about being rich per se. It was about living a big life, a life that was larger than life. Money was just the instrument. He thought about calling someone at Perini just to ask what was new, like say a visit from the SEC, but he decided that was a bad idea.

It was hard, some days, to keep himself stimulated. He shorted Wisconsin Cryogenics International, his old stomping ground, thinking that maybe irony would protect him now. Guy Farbar was long gone: the deal Adam had put together for him had made him a millionaire many times over but then he was fired by his own board for impregnating his secretary. The stock started soaring as soon as Adam picked it up, almost as if it had been waiting for him. He told himself that taking the loss was a smart move in this case because if anyone was looking into his past then this kind of miscalculation was bound to throw them off the trail.

Cynthia said she had something important to talk to him about. After the kids were home and fed and had disappeared downstairs for the evening, she came into his office and sat across the desk from him. Incredibly, what she wanted to discuss was his fortieth birthday—something that was completely off his radar, not because he was in any sort of denial about it but because he had turned forty ten months ago.

“We didn’t do enough to celebrate,” she said, “but that’s okay, it’s not too late, it’s technically still the Jubilee Year. I want us to go somewhere. Somewhere amazing, somewhere we’ve never been. I thought about surprising you, but I decided that what I really want is for you to surprise me. Where would you go if you could just go anywhere?”

She was so excited. She looked older than she used to, that was true, and the unfairness of that made him a little sad. He opened his mouth to speak but he felt the catch in his throat and had to close it again. He smiled apologetically. He hoped she’d figure he was too choked up by her thoughtfulness to speak. He hoped she’d figure he was taking a moment to think about it, about where he would go if he could go anywhere. Or that he was sitting there thinking about how much he loved her.

But he watched her get up and shut his office door. “What’s going on?” she said.

He told her everything. Even as he was talking he couldn’t make himself stop trying to think of some way out of saying it, some way to keep her in the dark. Her eyes got very big. When he’d said everything he could think of to say, she started to cry.

“Are they going to find out?” she said. “Are they going to arrest you or something?”

He said that a lot of people liked him on Wall Street and so if someone were looking into him, someone from the SEC or the U.S. Attorney’s office or even just some investigator hired by Sanford, he had to believe he would have heard something about it by now. But it was a possibility, and maybe it would always be. And she should know that if he was ever even charged with anything, their powers were very broad. They might arrest him or they might just seize the money, which in some ways was worse, because they could seize everything they figured the money might have been spent on, including the apartment in which all four of them were sitting right now. She shook her head.

“I don’t give a shit about the money,” she said.

“You don’t?”

“I don’t. I want to ask you something else. It might seem off topic. Have you ever been unfaithful to me?”

And the amazing part was that he understood right away how she had gotten there, how it was part of what they were discussing. He stood up from his chair but kept the desk between them. “No,” he said as gravely as he could. His heart was beating dangerously hard; he put his hand on it. “I never have, and I never would. If I lose you, it’s all over for me. I don’t care if they take everything else away. I honestly don’t.”

She walked around his desk and fit herself against him with her arms around his neck. He was shaking.

“Thank you for not telling me,” she said. “All this time, I mean. What a burden that must have been for you. I know why you did it. I know you did it for us. I’m fucking proud of you, if you want to know the truth. You are a man, Adam. You are a man among men. Let them come after us. They can’t touch us.”

They stood like that until they were in the dark. He felt invincible, like a martyr, like a holy warrior. Why hadn’t he understood it before now? No wrong for him but whatever was wrong in her eyes.