Bright, Precious Days

13

THEN IT WAS MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND and the Calloways were packing up the borrowed Land Rover and joining the exodus from Manhattan, funneling out of the Midtown Tunnel into the so-called expressway, joining the hundred-mile-long queue of vehicles creeping toward the outer reaches of Long Island, the traffic eventually congealing like melted butter turning cold at the lower end of the lobster claw of the South Fork late Friday afternoon. Every year they left TriBeCa earlier and every year the drive was longer, or so it felt to Corrine.

The old farmhouse they’d rented for so many years, and the two acres that remained of a once-vast empire of corn and potatoes, within sniffing distance of the ocean, was on the market for $4.9 million. Even in this booming market it seemed unlikely the Polanskis would get that much, and, in fact, it had been listed for nine months when Sara Polanski had called Corrine and offered to rent it one more time if the Calloways agreed to show it, her native thrift triumphing even on the verge of the avalanche of cash that would be hers when the house sold. Already the Polanskis, who’d farmed the land for more than a century, were wealthier than some of the second-home owners from the city, after years of selling off acreage by the sea. Certainly much richer than Russell and Corrine, who’d been instrumental in getting Becca Polanski into Brown, the first alumnus of Bridgehampton High School to matriculate there, and Corrine sent Christmas and birthday cards, while Russell sent books that might appeal to one family member or another — none of which had hurt when it came time to negotiate a deal each spring.

The first weekend in June, they quietly observed their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, as they had less significant ones, at the Old Stove Pub, a steak house on the highway. Neither seemed inclined to make a big fuss about it, sensibly agreeing to save energy and resources for their big Labor Day party; in the end, they included Tom and Casey, whose own silver jubilee was just a few months off.

Russell took the jitney from the city Thursday evenings and went back into the city every Monday morning, while Corrine, on hiatus from her job, stayed out with the kids and adhered rigorously to the South Beach diet. Russell talked to the children every day during the course of the week; toward the end of July, he and Jeremy camped out at the Books of Wonder bookstore in Chelsea, where they communed with live owls and several hundred fans waiting for the midnight release of the final Harry Potter novel. That summer, except for a few John Edwards partisans, everyone was divided into Hillary and Obama camps, and the arguments were heated around the pools and fire pits.

Tom and Casey had lent them their old Land Rover, a stylish, if not terribly reliable, vehicle in regulation hunter green, and thus they were able to spend yet another season beside the ocean, going to movie premieres in East Hampton with the actors and directors, arranging play dates with the children of a media mogul, playing grass-court tennis in Southampton with the spawn of great American robber barons. It was a life they’d been living for years, and therefore unremarkable to them, until some minor dislocation or embarrassment highlighted its absurdities. Storey’s desire to keep a horse at the nearby stable, as some of her friends did, had to be thoroughly discouraged. The proximity to so much wealth could be infectious; only last year Russell had talked about buying into a bankrupt vineyard. Likewise, unless they were included by someone who’d purchased a table, they had to find clever excuses for declining invitations to the charity benefits that had spread east to the Hamptons in recent years, some of which ran to a thousand bucks a head. And yet, many of their friends and their children’s friends were here, and over the years they’d carved out a place for themselves in the Darwinian social fray without violent effort or expenditure. They were well liked, and their parties fashionable — the kind of gatherings that mixed what was left of the literary and artistic communities with some of the Southampton blue bloods and the East Hampton Democratic Party politicos and the Amagansett Saturday Night Live crowd.

Even the hedge funders who’d bought up most of the oceanfront and the dentists and dermatologists whose houses dotted the former potato fields had a soft spot for the founding myth of a seaside arts colony, for the days when Pollock and de Kooning had lurched around the same sand dunes as Capote and Albee. The Calloways somehow managed to inherit this tradition; one of the many glossy giveaway publications that chronicled the summer scene had recently compared them to Gerald and Sara Murphy, the great host and hostess of the Lost Generation, which delighted Russell, who’d published a book about them, though Corrine considered the comparison imperfect on the detail of the Murphys’ inherited wealth.

Their Friday-before-Labor-Day party had become a fixture on the Hamptons calendar, and Corrine was always amazed to find herself being courted during the summer by those who hoped to get invited. They tried to hold the guest list to a hundred, but last year at least twice that many had showed up. Certainly no one came for the food, although Russell seemed proud of the chili and cornbread and salad he made with the help of a local chef, the bulk of the budget going to booze, wine and beer. They hired three bartenders and three servers and hoped it wouldn’t rain, since the crowd inevitably overflowed the house, and a tent was beyond their means. It was exhausting, but it would kill Russell to give it up.

“It’s bigger than we are,” he once told Corrine when she complained about the effort and the expense. She wondered if it was the kind of institution that could survive uprooting; this year’s gathering would have a valedictory feeling, almost certainly their last in the old farmhouse.

—

That week, Cody Erhardt, the director, was staying with them. Once upon a time he’d been a notorious badass, a hard-drinking, skirt-chasing American ninja — also the title of his best-known movie — but at this point in deep middle age he was fairly unprepossessing, doughy and overfed, with thinning hair and a mottled pink complexion. Although he’d played a version of himself in a Godard film, no casting agent would have, at this date, tried to sell him as a macho hip director. It was strange to see him — so clearly an indoor creature, a native of editing studios and screening rooms — out here at the beach. Cody was, if not exactly an old friend, at least an old acquaintance, an avatar of the brief, lamented renaissance of American film that flared up around 1969 in the wake of Easy Rider. Russell had published a collection of three of his screenplays and he’d later, briefly, been attached to Corrine’s adaptation of The Heart of the Matter after it had been bought by New Line. Though that film got made by someone else and ultimately played in only a few theaters, it was still a hot project when she managed, with Russell’s help, to get herself assigned to do the script for Youth and Beauty. Tug Barkley, or someone who worked for him, had discovered Jeff’s novel. After going silent for two years, his production company had recently renewed the option, and Corrine was working on yet another draft with Cody. The development process had been, from her point of view, painfully protracted and convoluted, though no more so, Cody assured her, than the average movie; he’d been trying to make Kerouac’s Dharma Bums for seventeen years.

Although she liked to give the impression that she’d adapted The Heart of the Matter on a whim, that she’d never expected anything to come of it, she had worked on it tirelessly and was thrilled when her screenplay was optioned, pleased to have forged an identity in the Hobbesian cultural landscape of Manhattan after a stint as a stay-at-home mom, resentful of any insinuation that Russell’s connections had played a part, and secretly crushed when the film disappeared without a trace. She’d thrown herself into the job at Nourish New York on the rebound. She loved the work, but when she was given another chance on Youth and Beauty, it felt like a new lease on life. Corrine desperately wanted to see it made, and succeed, though she would be hard-pressed to say whether it was herself or Jeff she was hoping to redeem.

She and Cody had been working during the day and then the three of them would make the rounds in the evening. As August progressed, the social pace had become ever more frenzied; it would have been impossible to honor even half of their cocktail and dinner party invitations, even if the traffic hadn’t been so clotted as to make it necessary to plot out one’s course in advance, calculating likely time of transit and distance between points, weighing the relative desirability of events that were unrealistically far apart. Russell actually enjoyed this crazy whirl, at least up to a point, and Corrine was grateful that Cody was here to accompany him, allowing her to spend a few nights with the kids.

For their latest powwow, she had forced Cody to accompany her to the beach, which she hadn’t seen in three days, and he’d covered himself up like a mummy, swathed in gray sweats, with a towel on his head.

The ending of Jeff’s novel had always posed a problem. In the book, the Jeff surrogate — a successful neo-Expressionist painter — dies of a heroin overdose, presumably accidental, although the possibility of suicide isn’t far-fetched; he is, after all, hopelessly in love with his best friend’s wife. Just to complicate matters further, his best friend is his gallerist. Corrine had originally adhered closely to the novel, but the studio execs had balked once they read the first draft, and in the next draft a car accident took the place of the heroin overdose. Lately, a consensus had been building that the protagonist shouldn’t die at all.

“Back in the day, the studios would have let us get away with that,” Cody said one morning, “the hero dying of an overdose; they would have let us show it, for God’s sake — the syringe in the arm, the trickle of blood — then pulled back on the dude gradually turning blue. After Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Mean Streets and Death by a Thousand Cuts, they realized they didn’t have a clue, and for a little while they let the kids have the keys to the candy store. But eventually the marketing department took over, and now they call the shots. No way they’re going to let us kill off our fucking protagonist.”

“Well, his death does resolve the whole love triangle thing pretty nicely.”

“Hey, maybe we have all three of them move in together, remake Jules and Jim, which I’m pretty sure none of the marketing morons ever heard of — except it probably won’t pass muster with the PG-13 police, either. So, tell me, really, did you actually fuck the guy, or was that wishful thinking on his part?”

“I’m just going to leave it up to your overheated, lecherous imagination, Cody.”

“Am I the only one who thinks it’s weird that Russell edited the novel?”

“It was remarked on somewhat.”

“I mean, doesn’t that make you cringe a little bit?”

“It was a long time ago,” she said.

—

The day of the party dawned brilliantly clear, and the weather held, the heat of the day moderated by the ocean — audible just over the dunes all day — fading to perfect shirtsleeve temperature by six.

“We’re sorry to be so unfashionably early,” said Judy Levine, who, with her husband, Art, was the first to arrive. “But we can only stay a minute. We’ve got to go to the Aldas’ and then on to the Michaelses’ for dinner.” Corrine could imagine that Judy must have thought herself very clever to apologize in a manner that allowed her to drop these names, which could only suggest to the hostess that it was she and her husband who were not quite fashionable enough to merit a later arrival, that the Levines were only stopping by on their way to grander events.

“At least now we’ll get a chance to talk before all the fashionable people show up,” Russell said, parrying the thrust. Corrine tried not to smile. He was a good host, but he was nobody’s patsy. Art was kind of interesting, a writer and director from the golden age of television, though of that generation of men for whom women were anything but equals, and Judy was just a silly, social-climbing twit who couldn’t possibly have improved his opinion of their gender over the course of a thirty-year marriage.

The guests came mostly in pairs, some early birds with a child in tow, others with houseguests — a new divorcée or a single friend from the city. Some of the couples came with a gay friend, and some of the gay couples had a straight friend in tow. They all observed certain sumptuary laws of the time and place; an observer of the cars lining the street might have guessed there was a prohibition on American automobiles, and the people climbing out were dressed in a style best described as expensive casual: polo shirts, jeans, driving shoes. Socks were universally shunned by the men, as were ties — although late in the evening an interloper from Southampton, obviously lost, appeared on the lawn wearing a seersucker suit and a pink tie with a sailboat motif, clutching a bottle of Macallan by the neck.

The women wore sundresses and sandals, and the early arrivals were hidden behind big sunglasses — Tom Ford was the frame of the moment — which they pushed to the tops of their heads after the sun went down in a way that they hoped was reminiscent of Jackie O. Corrine was wearing a stretchy turquoise paisley Pucci that she’d bought when Russell took her to Capri for a literary conference, and she was wondering if it wasn’t just a little too tight.

She was always surprised that she knew almost every single person, except for the houseguests, who were inevitably profuse in thanking her for allowing them to come. She wasn’t aware that Tug Barkley had been invited until she saw him amble up the drive wearing nothing but cargo shorts and a wifebeater, flanked by two glamazons in tiny white dresses. Tug’s interest had revived the long-dormant production of Youth and Beauty, though she’d never actually met him. He seemed to sense she was the hostess, smiling broadly and thrusting out his hand. “Hey, I’m Tug. Thanks for having me.”

“I’m Corrine,” she said. “It’s a real pleasure to meet you.” While she considered herself immune to the charms of vapid celebrities, that wasn’t how she felt at this moment. Perhaps it was the fact that this was the man who would play Jeff on-screen. Except, of course, it was more than that. “Actually, I’m working on the Youth and Beauty screenplay with Cody Erhardt.”

“That’s cool,” he said. “Love Cody.”

Somewhat taken aback, expecting some kind of follow-up or acknowledgment, she explained that there were bars inside and out, and told them to make themselves at home. She was only slightly surprised to see Russell bound off the porch and greet Tug like an old friend. Russell was nothing if not gregarious, and if she sometimes thought he was indiscriminate in collecting people, she also couldn’t help sometimes admiring the breadth of his acquaintance and his enthusiasm for new people, as well as his conviction that there were still friends to be made at an age when most men were consolidating their portfolios of names and faces. After all these years he still had a boyish love of parties, and a provincial’s wonderment at the social spectacle of New York, with all its bright stars and unlikely juxtapositions — and this was undoubtedly New York, with a sprinkle of Hollywood, spread out on the browning lawn beside the old shingled farmhouse.

Cody, meanwhile, was chatting up one of the gorgeous young things who’d showed up with Tug. “I’m just saying every novel’s unique, a reinvention of the form. A screenplay has conventions that need to be observed — action, dialogue, three-act structure.”

“What’s three-act structure?”

“Boy meets girl, boy and girl get into pickle, boy gets pickle into girl.”

She giggled, raising her hand to her face to cover a crooked tooth.

“I haven’t heard that one,” Tug said, returning with three drinks in hand, one of which he handed off to her. “So I see you’ve met the great Cody Erhardt.”

“Cody who?”

Cody looked miffed, of course.

“Shit, that just shows what’s happened to this business,” Tug said. “Cody here’s the man. He did all these amazing movies in the seventies. Part of that Scorsese-Schrader clique. American Ninja, Death by a Thousand Cuts.”

The great man himself, who had tried at one time to get his pickle into Corrine, bowed in acknowledgment of the compliment.

“Oh right,” the girl said. “I loved American Ninja.”

—

Burly, bearded Rob Klemp, the painter, in paint-stained cargo shorts, was talking to reedy Jillian Simms, the fashion designer, angelic in white jeans and white T-shirt, her blond hair flat against her skull, pulled back in a ponytail. What were they talking about? Sometimes Corrine wondered how these people knew one another, and how the hell they knew them. As she got closer, she heard them arguing.

“Come on, Obama has no résumé,” Jillian said. “I mean, he’s been a senator for, what? Three minutes?”

“Long enough to be right about the war in Iraq.”

“Hillary’s got substance. Face it, Obama’s a lightweight.”

Russell had loaded up a special iPod for the occasion, which seemed to Corrine to consist of Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer,” the Go-Go’s “Vacation,” the Motels’ “Suddenly Last Summer,” “Summertime Blues” by various artists, “Margaritaville,” plus pretty much all of the Beach Boys catalog. Thankfully, he’d skipped “Big Girls Don’t Cry” and “Umbrella,” the ubiquitous anthems of the summer.

“Oh my God,” Corrine said, spotting a newcomer. “That’s Tony Duplex.”

“Yeah,” Rob said. “He came with Gary Arkadian. Tony’s got a new show going up this fall at Arkadian’s gallery.”

“I haven’t seen him in years,” Corrine said. Tony looked very much out of place in a tight black suit over a shirt as white as his complexion.

“He disappeared up a crack pipe for most of the nineties, but apparently he’s back.”

“I remember,” she said. He’d been great friends with Jeff, in fact.

Not surprisingly, he looked frail for his years. They were almost surely the same age, but he looked much older, his face pitted and canyoned. He showed no sign of recognition when Russell came over and introduced him to Corrine. One of those downtown bad boys who failed to leave the party while the getting was good, he’d managed to sustain his drug habit well into the nineties, by which time his critical reputation had crashed and his drug of choice had gone out of fashion. As she recalled, there’d been some kind of fight with a collector who held dozens of his paintings, and the guy dumped them on the market all at once, right before Robert Hughes wrote a withering review of his latest show. She hadn’t heard his name for years; then, recently, she’d seen a picture of him at a party in New York magazine, and she seemed to recall a mention of his resurrection in the Post’s Page Six.

“Thanks for having me,” he said, shaking her hand limply. Obviously he had no memory of the night she’d met him on the Lower East Side, ransoming him and Jeff from a shortchanged drug dealer with a handful of gold coins.

Kip Taylor emerged from the throng, with one hand raised in greeting, the other perched on his wife’s shoulder, accompanied by Luke and Giselle McGavock. Corrine tried to mute her shock as the group approached, to compose her features as Kip and Vanessa hugged her in turn, at which point the question of how to greet Luke presented itself. He answered it quickly by kissing her cheek, as did Giselle.

“I hope you don’t mind us crashing your party,” Luke said. “We’re staying with Kip and Vanessa this weekend.”

“You’re more than welcome,” Corrine said, hoping she sounded less flustered than she felt.

“I told them it was the party of the season,” Kip said.

“Hardly that,” Corrine said.

Luke grazed her with a rueful, apologetic glance.

Ten minutes later he found her alone in the kitchen, where she’d quickly retreated.

“I didn’t mean to sneak up on you,” he said. “Kip only mentioned that we were coming here an hour ago.”

“Why should I mind?” she said, realizing immediately that her tone was peevish. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just — I just wasn’t expecting to see you.”

“I thought about calling. I didn’t know if I should. But I’d love to see you.”

“Here I am.”

“I mean alone.”

“We head back to the city on Monday,” she said.

“I’ll be there next week.”

“And your wife?” She wasn’t sure which designation she liked least, her name or her title.

“She flies back on Wednesday. On Saturday, Ashley’s coming down from Poughkeepsie to join me in the city.”

“Call me,” Corrine said, not at all certain whether she wished to encourage or dismiss him, their conference punctuated by the arrival of a waiter looking for more ice.

As they stepped outside, she spotted her husband engaged in what looked like a heated discussion with a pale, chubby stranger, who seemed to be cowering.

She hurried over as the guests, increasingly, turned to observe the scene.

“It’s my job to express an opinion,” the man was saying.

“It’s your job to attract attention to yourself by doing hatchet jobs on your betters, you fucking troll.”

“Who’s being ad hominem now?”

“Damn right I am. You just turn around on your Birkenstocks and get your fat ass off my lawn.”

Steve Sanders, who looked like a young Trotsky and wrote for the Times, had been hovering at the edge of the battle. “Russell,” he said, “let’s be reasonable.”

“Fuck you, Steve,” he said. “There’s nothing reasonable about his bitchy little tirades. I can’t stop him from writing them, but I sure as hell don’t have to put up with his company at my own party.” The man in question was retreating with tattered dignity under the gaze of half the partygoers.

“I didn’t know he’d attacked one of your authors, or I never would’ve brought him.”

“I’m sure you wouldn’t have,” Russell said, his rage dissipating as its object retreated.

“What was all that about, my love?” she asked a few minutes later, drawing him away from the party, toward the potato barn.

“That was Toby Barnes.”

“Who?”

“The little twat who wrote that nasty review of Youth and Beauty in Details.”

“For God’s sake, Russell, that had to be fifteen years ago. It was another lifetime.”

“I remember it like it was yesterday. The headline was ‘Uncouth and Snooty.’ ”

She thought it was kind of magnificent that Russell was still defending Jeff after all these years, if not very politic. “Is it wise to humiliate him like that? Now you’ve made a real enemy.”

“Fuck him, he was already my enemy.”

“Well, don’t forget that you publish a lot of authors who might not want to be on Barnes’s shit list.”

“They’d be glad to know that I’d fight for them just like I fought for Jeff.”

“Well, let’s see if we can salvage this party, slugger. Smile and laugh and show them that all’s well,” she said, taking his arm and leading him back into the crowd.

—

Russell’s outburst, far from dampening spirits, seemed to give the party a new source of energy. He was congratulated by half a dozen of the guests, most of them artists or writers, all of them at one time or another the recipients of nasty reviews. The drama provided grist for dozens of conversations about art and criticism and hospitality, and was reported the following Tuesday in a gossip item on Page Six.

The party continued on for several hours, until finally the guests melted away and Corrine found herself sitting alone on the front porch, smelling the primal brine of the invisible ocean, listening to the waves rolling in beyond the dunes and the brittle song of the crickets, who seemed to be eulogizing the summer, the chill in the air a melancholy premonition of fall. Far away, from somewhere inside the house, she could intermittently hear Russell’s muffled baritone as he regaled some straggler. Farther away, Luke was doing who knew what. Maybe she’d had too much to drink, but she suddenly felt terribly sad. Instead of being reassured by the familiarity of these sensations, she was depressed by them. The first time she’d felt the autumn approach across the dunes from this very spot, she’d been a young woman. Summer was over and she was fifty years old, her life going by so fast that the fog drifting in over the grass seemed like an omen.