But as she watched them play she admitted to herself that sometimes this anxiety over whether your kids’ lives were perfectly realized could reach the point where it wasn’t a lot different from Victoria ’s trying to match a paint chip: you had to justify the day, and your existence in it, somehow. It was impressive, in a way, that a woman Victoria’s age not only didn’t want children but didn’t really even pretend to like them. Certainly such a life was possible. Certainly there were other things one might do. According to Adam, she sat on the boards of about ten different national charities, where she no doubt made herself a pain in the ass, but what did that really matter when she had the assets and the social position to actually do some good in the world? What did it matter that the money wasn’t hers, as long as it was hers to give away? Cynthia already lived better than anyone in her family ever had, at least until Ruth remarried; still, there was rich and there was rich. She glanced over at Victoria, who wore a huge straw hat that she clamped down on her head with one palm even though there was no wind onshore at all. Cynthia was sorely tempted to ask her how old she was. It wasn’t impossible that they were actually the same age.

“You have a beautiful home,” she said. Victoria was staring back in the direction of the parking lot and didn’t seem to hear.

Sanford, though, nodded graciously. “Shame you all can’t spend the night,” he said. “Next time.” Adam’s shocked expression was luckily hidden behind his sunglasses; they had their overnight bags in the car. “That’s very kind of you,” Cynthia said; she didn’t know how she would keep the kids from howling, though, so she went down to the dock to give them the news out of their hosts’ earshot. Adam saw her put her finger to her lips and give them the universal five-more-minutes signal as they stomped their feet in the water and complained. She knew how to be gracious. Even after ten years together, his more complex desires for her wound up translating themselves into the simpler language of arousal; and as he watched her walk back up the lawn toward the umbrella table where the adults sat, he experienced an untimely urge to pull her back to the parking lot and do her right there up against some old Brahmin’s car. Victoria went off to use the bathroom, and Sanford went off to take a phone call, and Adam was able to give his wife at last the private eye-roll he had wanted to give her all day.

“I am so sorry to put you through this,” he said.

But she just smiled. “Actually, I’m really glad we came,” she said. “If you want to know the truth, it all makes me kind of jealous.”

He was so surprised by that, he couldn’t think of another word to say until their hosts returned. The kids had such a meltdown when the time came to get them out of the water that Adam and Cynthia wound up deciding to leave for New York straight from the club. Once again the men were cleaved from the women, the old man walking Adam in the direction of his own car, with his arm around him.

“So what do you think of all this?” Sanford said, and it sounded astonishingly heartfelt, even if he was drunk. His life, Adam supposed he meant. The thought of being asked to pass judgment on it, even just as a matter of etiquette, made him almost resentful.

“Green with envy,” he said finally. “You have a beautiful home. I mean, I’m sure you have several. But this is a great part of the world. And frankly,” he said, tapping the hood of the Boxster, “this gets me a little hard too.”

Sanford laughed enchantedly. Then he laid his hand on Adam’s cheek. “Patience, my son,” he said. “One day, all this will be yours.”

While they searched for Route 22 signs, Adam noticed his fingers were white around the wheel. “Pretty quiet back there,” he said. “Did you guys have fun today?”

“It was awesome,” April said. “I thought they would have kids, though.”

“Not everybody does, you know,” Cynthia said.

“Dad?” Jonas said meekly. “Can we have a country house?”

Cynthia laughed. “Yeah, Dad,” she said. “How about it?”

Adam said nothing, and after half a minute Cynthia turned around in her seat. “One day,” she said to the kids. “One day soon. We’ll have all that stuff. It just takes time. You have to remember that Mr. Sanford is almost two hundred years old.”

Actually, Adam thought, there was no reason why they couldn’t buy some sort of weekend home now, although having gotten a load of Sanford ’s place Jonas would no doubt feel let down by anything Adam could afford. But there was something in Adam that stiffened against that idea-more so after today than ever before. Some manor in the country to return to over and over again, in which to sit and drink among the plants and do nothing in particular: was that what he was supposed to want? All day long he had felt like the house, the car, the club, the view, that whole life was being conspicuously shown to him, held out in front of him. Patience, my son. Why didn’t he want it, then? Maybe he just wanted to determine his own rewards, and the pace at which they would come. Or maybe it was the presumption that all this privilege, no matter how touching it was that Sanford wanted him to have it, was Sanford’s to give him in the first place. Patrimony, even the sentimental kind, had nothing to do with it. Something in Adam bristled at the thought of inheriting anything from anybody.

The next night they had an early dinner together so that Adam could make his flight to Milwaukee. Guy-whose last name was Farbar but whose abusive phone manner had earned him monomial status in the Perini office-ran a company that made cryogenic rubber; he wanted financing to take it global. Adam didn’t have a perfect understanding of what cryogenic rubber was or what it was used for, but one of the beauties of his job was that he didn’t really have to. Sanford was high on the numbers, and with good reason, even though as a man of business Guy himself was essentially everything Sanford was not-loud, confrontational, impetuous, undisguised. His staff turnover was incredible, a fact that his seeming compulsion to fuck every single one of his female employees did nothing to diminish. In fact, probably the biggest red flag about getting into business with Guy at all was that there were already two pending lawsuits against him, one of which involved a temp who had been nineteen at the time.

He turned out to be even more of a character in person. He had bushy hair and a retro mustache and had taken this cryogenic rubber company from receivership to eleven million in profit in less than three years. His office had one of those topless gas-station calendars on the wall. “We were up thirty-one percent last year,” he shouted at Adam. “In fucking Wisconsin! What is taking you people so long? Where’s the money already? Fucking tight-ass Ivy League Wall Streeters. None of you have ever run an actual business in your lives-I mean, a business that makes things. Calling me up and asking for this form and that prospectus. Get your heads out of your asses! I talk to that Sanford guy and it’s like talking to one of those animatronic Disney things. The Hall of WASPs. You, on the other hand, seem almost like an actual person. Why can’t I just deal with you? Just write me a fucking check already!”

“It’s not my money,” Adam said, amused.

Guy scowled. “Whatever,” he said. “If it was your money we could shake hands and get rich. But you’re still young and you still have a boss to jerk off, I get it. When do you fly back? Do I have your cell?”

“Tomorrow first thing. Here, let me write it down for you again.”

“Then by Wednesday morning latest I need sixteen million for starters or I go elsewhere.”

“Understood,” Adam said, meaning that he understood that Guy delivered this same ultimatum every time. Secretly he had an intuition that there was no way this maniac would not succeed, no matter what he was selling. Still, it wasn’t Adam’s money.