Read Online The Privileges by Jonathan Dee - Free Book Online Page A

who were her friends now?
    Her erstwhile maid of honor, Marietta, was one of those with whom Cynthia had lost touch, all the more disgracefully since she lived right there in Tribeca—more than a hundred blocks away, but still. She was married now, to some Viacom executive she had met through some online personal ad—you had to hand it to her, she embraced all that stuff, the newer it was the more unintimidated she felt—but married or not it was hard to stay in contact with her because she worked ten or twelve hours a day as vice president of a media-relations company, one of those places that orchestrated the public rehabilitation of the disgraced: drunk starlets, politicians who turned up in sex videos, clients like that. “It’s a lot like being a lawyer,” was how Marietta had explained it to her. “Or a lot like advertising. It’s a lot like most things, actually.” As if to prove their bond, just when Cynthia was missing her most Marietta called one night out of nowhere and begged Cynthia to meet her for a drink the next afternoon: there was something she needed to ask her. Cynthia said that, since she had to pick up the kids from school at three-thirty, maybe coffee was better. “Fuck that,” Marietta said. “We’ll have drinks at two, then. It’s not like it’s unprecedented. Remember that time at Head of the Charles when we made martinis at nine in the morning?”
    “Less than distinctly,” Cynthia said, smiling.
    She actually wondered whether Marietta was going to offer her a job, weird as that would be, but instead it turned out that she was trying to get pregnant. She and Mr. Viacom had only been at it for six months but Marietta, who at thirty was a less patient person than she used to be, was getting ready to start on clomiphene. “How did it happen with you?” she asked Cynthia. “When it happened, I mean like the moment it happened, did you just know?”
    “Don’t you remember?” Cynthia said. “It was a total fucking shock. I was on my honeymoon. I’m still not sure how it happened.”
    “What about with Jonas?” she said, biting a cuticle. “Were you trying there?”
    “Nope.”
    She scowled. “Fertile bitch. Well, you’re still the only friend I can talk to about any of this who wouldn’t try to talk me out of it. If they got wind of it at work, forget about it.”
    They sat at an outdoor table at a café across from the entrance to the Met, drinking lemon-drop martinis. There was no one else in the place at that hour but their waiter, and even he was barely in evidence.
    “Here’s the big discovery,” Marietta said. “Here’s the one aspect of this subject about which I know more than you. Sex where you’re
trying
to get pregnant is the absolute worst sex known to man. Another six weeks of this and I swear to God if I’m not knocked up we’re going to get divorced.”
    “Come off it,” said Cynthia. Her new martini was too full to lift without spilling, so she was hunched over in her chair trying to sip from it.
    “They always tell you that this is the true calling of sex, right? The higher purpose. It should be beautiful. Two people in love trying to create a new life. And let me tell you, it is easily the most joyless humping I’ve ever been a part of in my entire life. Remember Tom Billings?”
    Cynthia thought for a moment. “From freshman orientation?” she said.
    Marietta nodded ominously.
“That
was better than this,” she said. “I just want him to come already and get out of the room so I can lie there like an idiot holding my knees up in the air like I’m supposed to. You’d think it’s a guy’s dream, right? Just blow your load and get out. But no: he wants to act like he’s in some kind of weird Christian porno, going really slowly, stroking my hair, telling me that he loves me. Jesus!” She looked at Cynthia for a frozen moment, her mouth open in amazement, and then she started to laugh.“And he knows what I’m thinking, and I do feel