The Privileges by Jonathan Dee

for yourself?”
    She laughed. “Yes of course for myself, genius. At least it’s not like he’s some stranger. I mean he’s a stranger to me, but Marietta vetted him for like three years. It’s just something I’ve been thinking about a little bit and I decided to see what it’s all about.”
    He could feel that she needed him to say something, but something was preventing him, something that felt, at least, a little like panic.
    “Adam, of course I won’t do it if it’s going to freak you out,” she said. “I mean it. I know it’s probably not something you approve of in general.”
    “Of course it’s okay with me,” he said. “Of course I approve of it. I mean it’s not for me to approve or disapprove. It’s just I guess I didn’t know you were unhappy.”
    “Not unhappy,” she said thoughtfully. “More like stuck. Anyway, Christ, it’s like going to the gym, everyone does it. You know that, right?”
    He tried to say the right things, and then he heard April come in with another homework question and he had to let her go. The truth was that he did disapprove, at least a little—not in general, not for other people; but the two of them were different. One of thethings that made the two of them so great together, he’d always felt, was that shared talent for leaving all their baggage behind. Why would you want to go back and pick that up again? Everybody’s got their own; just walk the fuck away from yours and don’t turn around. He saw it borne out every day in the world of finance: the most highly evolved people were the ones for whom even yesterday did not exist.
    Still, she was unhappy; she was unhappy, and that had to be his responsibility. He opened up the minibar, sat on the edge of the vast bed with his feet on the windowsill, his back to the empty room behind him, and watched the lightning over black Lake Michigan. A few mini-bottles later he felt less agitated; but he hated doing nothing, and these were hours he was never going to get back.
    The first thing Jonas ever collected was Duplo animals. He was too young at the time to remember it now, but his mother liked to tell him stories about himself. The different Duplo sets had different animal-shaped blocks, and he would take them out of their sets and line them up on the coffee table in the living room, or on the rim of the bathtub, or on the floor under his parents’ bed, always in the same mysterious order determined somehow, as best she could tell, by their color. Cynthia would find them arrayed like that, in different places around the apartment, two or three times a week.
    Next it was pennies: he would arrange them by year, once he’d learned his numbers, and then he’d arrange them by color, really by gradations of dirtiness, from the bright polish of the new ones to the murky greenish-bronze that made the man on the penny look like he was sitting and thinking about something on a bench inside a cave. Then his mother was talking to another mother in the playground and after that she showed him how to bring the shine out of all the pennies by soaking them in lemon juice. That was a lot of fun—like leading the penny man outside where it was light—though it was also the sort of fun that could only be had once and then it was done. This was often the case when grownups got involved.
    There was one morning when Jonas walked into the living roomto ask his mother for Oreos before dinner even though he knew he wasn’t going to get them; he saw her sitting on the window seat, holding onto her knees, looking out the window, like she was sad about something she couldn’t find. Think, she often said to him. Where did you have it last?
    He loved it when she played with him, but when it came to the collecting she had a way of getting too involved. Like when Grandma Ruth sent him one of those state-quarter sets. His mother would go through her own quarters before he’d even seen them; she knew the ones he was still missing and she’d