Bright, Precious Days

10

SHE MET CASEY AT JUSTINE’S, a private club in the basement of a midtown hotel, a plush red sanctuary that at lunchtime was popular with ladies who spent a good deal of time and money just up the street at Bergdorf, while their mates coveyed up nearby at the Four Seasons and ‘21.’ Casey lived in the East Sixties, and they alternated between uptown and downtown for their lunch dates. For once she was on time, chatting with some women at another table when Corrine arrived. The others all seemed to be wearing Chanel suits. Casey looked very fashion-forward, by contrast, sporting that luxe boho chic look — a below-the-knee burgundy skirt and a long, nubbly olive turtleneck cinched with a big brown belt.

“Sorry, traffic. Love your outfit.”

“It’s Oscar. Very down-home for him — I know. Don’t tell me you took a cab? Usually I have to listen to you tell me about how fast and convenient the subway is, and all I can think of is you’ll get mugged or anthraxed or something.”

“I was on the Upper West Side, so it was the only option.”

“What were you doing there? Are you seeing your shrink again?”

As soon as she mentioned where she’d been, Corrine realized it was a bit of a giveaway.

“Well, yes. Just a one-off. Situation with the kids.”

“Should I pretend I’m not interested?”

“No, I was going to tell you. My beloved sister’s been calling, trying to worm her way back into our lives.”

“Tell me everything.”

“I need to hit the buffet first. I’m starving.”

“The chef will be delighted, if he doesn’t die of shock. The food’s basically decorative. Very few of our members actually eat.”

After they settled back at the table with their plates, Casey said, “It’s always amazed me that you have this white-trash sister.” She poked at the lozenge of chicken paillard on her plate. “As long as I can remember, she was a real problem. I mean, I grew up with you, I know your family, and you’re one of the most elegant people on the planet. Maybe your mom screwed the milkman or the chimney sweep.”

“Don’t say that. Hilary’s the biological mother of my kids.”

“You’d better hope nurture trumps nature.”

“Thanks for sharing that.”

“If you want my advice, keep her out of your life and your kids’, too.”

“Sooner or later they’re going to want to get to know her.”

“I’m not entirely sure about that, but much later would be much better.”

“I can’t stop worrying that eventually they might think of her as their mother.”

“You raised them to have better taste than that.” Casey took a sip of her iced tea and leaned forward in her conspiratorial pose. “Have you seen Washington?”

“Yes, with his wife.” Corrine did not approve of Casey’s affair with Russell’s best friend, which had been going on, intermittently, for years.

Casey waved at a fierce-looking blonde with protuberant cheekbones and sticklike arms a couple of tables away.

“Who’s that?” Corrine asked.

Casey leaned forward. “That’s Carol Ricard. Her husband just divorced her right before the escalator clause on the prenup kicked in.”

“That’s sad,” Corrine said reflexively.

“Not really. Apparently, he’s agreed to marry her again after the divorce.”

When she’d worked at Sotheby’s and lived on Beekman Place, Corrine used to think of downtown as the province for all kinds of bohemian kinkiness, but lately she’d decided that Casey’s coterie of uptown socialites was far more debauched and jaded.

“One time we saw her at ‘21,’ pushing lettuce leaves around her plate, and Tom had a burger sent over to the table. It was hilarious. He made the waiter promise not to say where it came from, but the whole room was buzzing.”

Corrine looked over at the skeletal Mrs. Ricard with a certain fascination, not entirely disapproving. She was not immune to the dream of leaving behind the heavy cloak of flesh. And in fact, Carol Ricard was only marginally thinner than her dining companions — or Casey and Corrine, for that matter.

“She has to shave her arms and chest,” Casey said. “When your body approaches true starvation, it grows fur as a protective reaction to try to keep you warm.”

“That’s gross.” Apparently it was possible to be too thin. Who knew? At least, Corrine thought, she’d never gotten to that point.

Casey lifted her by-no-means-chubby arm, decorated with several bands of gold and a Bulgari snake watch, and summoned a waiter who was hovering in the corner. “I’d like another iced tea,” she told him, “and my friend will have another cranberry and soda with lime.”

Corrine had been waiting for an opening. “I got a call from Luke today.”

“Is he here?”

She nodded, surprised that Casey didn’t seem to be.

Casey clapped her hand on top of Corrine’s and beamed. “So, will you see him? And more to the point, are you going to sleep with him?”

Corrine looked around, mortified, but no one was conspicuously eavesdropping.

“He invited me out to Sagaponack for the weekend.”

“This is huge,” Casey said, leaning forward. “What about the wife?”

“Ten thousand miles away.”

“Well, what are you waiting for?”

“I’m waiting for my conscience to have a stroke. I mean, why am I even contemplating this?”

“You’re contemplating it because he’s rich and handsome and he loves you.”

“How can you possibly know that? He clearly cares about me and he seems to want to sleep with me, which is, I must say, a big point in his favor. He’s actually been sending me these very romantic e-mails.”

“He’s crazy about you. Do you think it was a coincidence that you were at my table for his benefit? He asked me to invite you.”

“That was a setup?”

“He really wanted to see you,” Casey said, “and I suspect he wanted you to see him in his moment of glory. He must’ve heard that Tom bought a table, so he called me out of the blue and practically begged me to take you.”

“And you’re just telling me now?”

“He swore me to secrecy, Corrine.”

“I’m your best friend.”

“And as my best friend, you should realize I have your best interests at heart.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Only that I approve of you and Luke.”

“There is no me and Luke. We’re both married.”

“I think Luke is over his marriage.”

“That’s ridiculous. You saw that girl.”

“Yes, I did. And she looked a lot like you. What does that tell you?”

“That he has a type.”

“Are you having sex with Russell?”

“I can’t remember. Last fall we had a brief renaissance, and then once in Saint Barth’s.”

“I don’t even want to sleep with Tom anymore; that’s the sad part. I give him a blow job on his birthday and we call it good for another year.”

Corrine would never get used to her friend’s sexual candor, but she was probably the perfect adviser in the present situation; certainly Corrine couldn’t imagine confiding in anyone else. “What should I do? And what the hell would I say to Russell?”

“Tell him you’re going out to Southampton with me for the weekend — a little time away from the family.”

“Why are you saying this?”

“Because I don’t think you’re really over him. And I don’t think he’s over you.”

—

Corrine refused Luke’s offer of a ride — a small and perhaps absurd point of honor, given that she’d agreed to spend two days and nights alone with him — opting instead for the jitney. The principal bus service between New York City and the Hamptons used this obscure term for a public conveyance because the kind of people who could afford to live in both places either didn’t ride buses or, if forced to, would never identify them as such. A neologism was called for. Even those with drivers and multiple German automobiles sometimes found it convenient, and there was little stigma attached to riding the bus by another name. Corrine, considering it more sensible and ecologically sound, would have insisted on this mode of transport even if the purpose of her journey had been beyond reproach. Casey, as it turned out, was going out to the island only for twenty-four hours on Saturday, and they would drive back together Sunday.

She took the kids to school that morning and watched them disappear inside with a rising sense of panic and dread, as if it were possible she might never see them again. She was about to venture beyond the pale — and what if she couldn’t return? What if something terrible happened out there? On the walk back to the apartment, she resolved to call the whole thing off. The night before, after several glasses of Sancerre, she had been certain that seeing Luke was, if not the right thing, at least what she wanted, even craved. She just needed to get this out of her system. Her yearning was palpable, and she’d gone to bed reviewing and savoring the memories of the episodes of lovemaking that had constituted their brief romance. This morning all she could think about was everything she was putting at risk, without any compensatory prospect of reward except that of possessing him and being possessed one or two or three more times, of fulfilling a desire that continued to plague her, although it had almost gone dormant until she saw him again last fall.

She was slightly ashamed and baffled by this. She’d always had a healthy appreciation of sex, and never quite stopped enjoying it with Russell, but she’d never felt this kind of compulsive desire, unless perhaps back when they’d first started dating at Brown. Part of her had rationalized it retroactively; she and Luke had come together in the days after September 11, and such cataclysmic events were aphrodisiac, conducive to compulsive and reckless behavior. But the truth was, she was still drawn to him.

Stopping at the corner of Broadway and Reade, she hit number three on her autodial. “I can’t do it,” she said when Casey picked up.

“You owe it to yourself to follow through. You need resolution. Otherwise, you’re always going to wonder.”

“What kind of resolution can I possibly find? Even if we make mad, passionate love, he will have scratched that itch and then will probably remember he’s got a younger, sexier blonde back home.”

“Never discount the value of mad passion. I’d give my left breast for a good night of it.”

“I know, that’s the terrible thing. I really do want him.”

—

Thankfully, there were no familiar faces on the jitney when she boarded at 40th Street, the last stop before the tunnel to Long Island. In July or August, it would be jammed after running down the East Side, but today only five passengers were scattered down the aisle: an elderly couple, a weary middle-aged Hispanic woman, and a pretty young mother in a Barbour jacket and jodhpurs with her preschool daughter. Corrine had borrowed a galley of The Savage Detectives from Russell’s pile in the bedroom, and now she opened it again, determined to distract herself.

When the bus turned off the expressway ninety minutes later, she gave up reading and looked out over the scrub pines alongside the road, crossing the Shinnecock Canal into Southampton, finally disembarking across the street from the post office in Bridgehampton. They’d agreed it would be risky for Luke to pick her up, so he’d commissioned his caretaker, Luis, who was waiting in a pickup. He apologized for the state of the truck, which was, in fact, perfectly tidy, and answered her questions by saying he was from Oaxaca and had been working for Mr. Luke for thirteen years.

It was a short, familiar drive down Sag Main. Russell liked to call it “Writers’ Row,” annotating the landmarks for newcomers as he drove them from the jitney stop: the house where James Jones had spent the last years of his life, the now-boarded-up farm stand where they bought their corn and tomatoes, the old one-room schoolhouse, the general store, the house John Irving used to live in, and, across the street, the shambling old place that had been George Plimpton’s for many years, then the one Kurt Vonnegut still lived in, from which he occasionally shuffled to the general store to buy a pack of Pall Malls — at a party he’d once told Corrine that smoking was the classy way to commit suicide — and down the road was Peter Matthiessen’s. Russell loved being in the proximity of all this literary talent, which he felt almost compensated for the invasion of what he called the hedge funders behind the hedgerows, though by now the writers had mostly died or moved on. It’s not so different, Corrine thought, from what’s happening in TriBeCa.

The late-March fields were brown, the trees gray and naked. Intermittent gusts of wind stirred eddies of crisp leaves in the road. And here she was, pulling up to the white picket fence in front of Luke’s house, a century-old three-story cottage with light blue shutters in the indigenous Shingle Style, one of the originals that had inspired hundreds of imitations in the surrounding fields. By the time she’d realized it was his, he’d been in the middle of his divorce from Sasha, who had apparently claimed exclusive use of it in the ensuing years.

He was waiting in the driveway, looking impatient and vaguely nautical in his white Irish fisherman’s turtleneck. She’d almost forgotten the disconcerting, wandering eye. But she was happy, even excited, to see him. Luis, carrying Corrine’s bag, asked which room she’d be staying in.

“I’ll take that,” Luke told him.

He opened the door for her. Inside the entry hall, he dropped the bag and gripped her shoulder, firmly turning her, dipping down and kissing her. His kiss was both familiar and thrilling.

“Sorry,” he said, releasing her. “I just kind of needed to do that.”

She suddenly felt inordinately shy and awkward, glad that she’d come, though uncertain that she could follow through on the implicit promise of the weekend.

“Let me give you the tour,” he said.

The interior was decorated more elaborately than she would have imagined, not as ostentatious and formal as many of the homes she’d seen in Southampton, with their chintzes and their Chippendale, but still more pristine and staged than she would have liked, her taste shaped by her own childhood in rambling houses in Wellfleet and Nantucket, with their jumble of objects and beach salvage collected over time, furniture with worn and faded upholstery, and random knickknacks. This was the Ralph Lauren version of her primal memories of tatty old WASP summer homes, bearing the same relation to the archetype as the McMansions out in the potato fields did to the house itself.

“Sasha decorated,” he said, as if reading her mind. “With a little help from Peter Marino.”

Of course — she should have known. Luke’s ex would have had to have everything just so. “It’s lovely,” she said.

“Tasteful,” he said in an italicized tone that alleviated her previous disappointment. And who was she, after all, to insist that his house resemble her grandmother’s? It wasn’t Luke’s fault that her grandfather had given all his money away, that she was stuck with memories of lost privilege and a sense of aesthetic judgment that bordered on snobbery.

“Are you hungry?” he asked, and for once, she realized, she was. Ravenous, in fact.

“I’ll put together some lunch,” he said. “You can explore the place.”

—

She drifted through the living room to the library, the most masculine corner of the house, examining the artifacts therein, the books and the photographs, his daughter, Ashley, being the most frequent subject — only one picture showed the three of them, Sasha and Luke and Ashley, all in white at some garden party, and Corrine was amazed anew by how beautiful Luke’s ex was, or had been — like a young Candice Bergen. No one would ever ask, “What does he see in her?” She found it annoying that he’d married two beauties — it suggested a certain superficiality of character, a value deficit. She could consider herself complimented to be in that company — maybe he thought she was beautiful, too, or maybe he liked her because she was different from his wives. Thankfully, there weren’t any pictures of the new one here, but neither was there any evidence of Corrine’s existence, or so it seemed until she spotted the copy of The Heart of the Matter on a side table next to a big leather club chair. On further inspection, it proved to be the copy she’d given him six years ago, with the inscription, XI XII MMI XXCC. Her initials and kisses beside the date she’d presented it, two months to the day after they’d met.

She wandered out to the kitchen, where he was finishing his lunch preparations. “Almost ready,” he said. This room felt more homey than the others, perhaps because the pine cabinets and the antique Windsor chairs around a circular table reminded her of the kitchen she’d grown up in.

He pulled out a chair, motioned for her to sit, and said, “I prepared a special treat for us,” holding out a tray of sandwiches.

They looked frighteningly retro — white bread cut into triangles. “Oh my God, is that peanut butter and jelly?”

“Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. You don’t have to eat them. I have a Greek salad in the fridge.”

It took her a moment to catch his reference to their days at the soup kitchen, a kind of private joke; peanut butter and jelly sandwiches had been the first item on the menu.

“I remember eating one of these that first day,” he said, “and having this violent emotional reaction, like I was being transported back to my childhood. I hadn’t had one since I was a kid. Haven’t had one since, either.”

“I could never actually eat one,” she said. She found it kind of touching, though, that he’d made them. “Maybe I had too many as a kid.”

“Ah, well,” he said, bringing the salad to the table and setting it in front of her. He took a sandwich for himself and bit into it.

“What does it evoke now — childhood, or the soup kitchen?”

“Both,” he said. “I can almost smell that foul smoke.”

“The oven cleaner smell.”

“I remember it more as burned plastic.”

“That’s because you have no idea what oven cleaner smells like.” She helped herself to the salad. “As I remember it, you were the one who stared hitting up the restaurants. One time you drove up to Babbo and came back with like fifty veal chops.”

“I think that was Jerry’s idea,” Luke said. “I wonder what’s happened to him. Did you stay in touch?”

She shook her head. Jerry was a carpenter who’d rushed downtown as soon as the towers collapsed to help dig through the rubble; he’d returned the next day with a coffee urn and a vanful of food, eventually establishing an ad hoc soup kitchen, which soon attracted volunteers, Corrine and Luke among them. “I did for a while. We had a coffee a few months after. Exchanged a few e-mails. But it was hard. I felt like those weeks were the high point of his life, that after that he seemed kind of angry and lost. Plus, honestly, I couldn’t. It just reminded me of you.”

“I’m sorry.”

She shrugged. “What could we do? It was for the best in the end.”

“I’m not so sure,” he said. “I had a lot of time to wonder about that when I was in the hospital.”

“No, you were right the first time. I can’t just walk away from my life, my marriage and my kids.”

“Yet here you are.”

“Can I ask you why you got Casey to invite me to the benefit?”

“That should be obvious by now.”

“Not really.”

“Ever since my accident, I’ve been thinking about you.”

“Tell me about the accident, if it’s not too…”

“I don’t remember all that much. I was in the car alone, coming home from Cape Town at night. I got hit by a van that crossed the line into my lane. The driver drunk, of course. He died, along with his passenger. Not my fault at all, apparently. Giselle hired an investigator and a team of lawyers, but that didn’t keep it from getting ugly. White survivor, two dead black men. But I missed a lot of it. I was in hospital for almost three months.”

“You say it the way they do—‘in hospital.’ ”

“What do you mean?”

“We’d say ‘in the hospital.’ ”

“I hadn’t thought about it.” He paused, rubbing the shiny patch of skin on his neck. “I loved the idea of Africa,” he said. “And I loved the reality, too. Its primal, cradle-of-life, origin-of-the-species aliveness. The smells, not just the fertile dung smell of the veldt; even the wood smoke, seared meat and raw sewage smell of the townships. It felt like the beginning of the world, where I could really start all over again. Even the fact that I was a minority, the possibility of violence, it made me feel more alive just at a time when I was feeling half-dead. My firm had acquired the winery and I’d been charged with overseeing it, pumping it up and selling it for a big profit, but when I went to visit, I kind of fell for the whole picture, Africa, the agrarian dream, the safari life.”

“The girl.”

“That was later. Anyway, as I was negotiating the terms of my retirement, I sold the winery to myself.”

“I’ve never quite understood your former business.”

“Private equity. Didn’t you tell me that years ago your husband tried to buy the publisher he worked for in a leveraged buyout?”

“Yes, though in the end, of course, he failed.”

“Well, it’s the same basic idea multiplied many times over, spread over different industries. Private equity is just a rebranding of the leveraged buyout concept. We’re essentially high-class used-car salesmen. We raise funds from private investors, pension funds, whatever. Then we target an underperforming company, ideally one with bad management and good cash flow. We use some of our own funds, but leverage is the key. Let’s say we commit a billion of our own and our investors’ money and we borrow maybe six billion from the bank. We buy it, install new management, fix it up, sell off the spare parts, pay the interest on the loan out of cash flow and then try to sell it in a couple of years for maybe ten billion. A profit of three billion. After you pay off the bank, you’ve tripled your original investment. That’s the beauty of leverage — playing with someone else’s money.”

“What if you can’t sell the company at a profit?”

“Well, that’s what separates the good players from the others. But ultimately leverage still works for you. If the whole thing goes south, it’s the lenders who take the biggest hit.”

“It sounds kind of, I don’t know…like you say, selling used cars.”

“The theory is that we keep the economy healthy by fixing broken companies.”

“So every couple of years you’re in a whole new business?”

“Every couple years we’re in ten new businesses. Or I was. I’d had enough, so I cashed out. The winery was just something we’d picked up when acquiring a larger South African conglomerate, one of the pieces the firm was selling off. I picked it up along with a game farm in the Transvaal. It’s quite wonderful. You should come visit.”

“How would that work? You and me and Russell and Gazelle riding around in a Land Rover, looking for the big five?”

“I was thinking more of you and me in a Cessna, flying low over the savanna. Did I tell you I’ve learned to fly? It comes in handy, going between the game farm and the winery.”

“I’m not sure I’d feel safe with you in the pilot’s seat.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It’s just that your attention kind of jumps around from one thing to another. Maybe that’s why you were so good at private equity.”

“I’ll have you know I’m an excellent pilot.”

“Well, maybe someday I’ll find out. In the meantime, let’s take a walk on the beach.”

—

He gave her a flannel-lined Adirondack coat, presumably Sasha’s, but she decided not to question the provenance.

She smelled the ocean as soon as they stepped out the door, and heard the waves as they approached the parking lot of the town beach. Just a few months ago she’d walked this very beach with Russell and the kids. She stopped in her tracks, not certain she wanted to do this.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said, willing herself forward. It was just a walk on the beach, after all. Then, feeling the cold and smelling the brine, she remembered another walk on a winter beach in Nantucket five years ago, with Luke — that and the smell of wood smoke afterward and Gram Parsons in the borrowed house on a winter weekend. Love hurts. No shit.

The long ribbon of white sand was deserted for as far as they could see, and she finally allowed herself to take his hand. Even allowing for high tide, the beach seemed narrower than she remembered it; she’d heard something about a nor’easter. A heavy surf pounded the sand, misting them with salt.

“You can see why all those painters came out here,” Luke said. “The sky has a clarity. And it’s even clearer in the winter.” It was true: The sky was a limpid periwinkle blue, more vivid than any she could recall from the past summer, with majestic flotillas of altocumulus drifting eastward out over the ocean, nudged by a stiff western breeze. She imagined the two of them, she and Luke, from the vantage of a ship at sea, tiny figures in a vast Turneresque setting, a perspective that seemed to both ennoble them and minimize the moral consequences of their actions.

When they got back to the house, she had almost come to terms with her desire; chilly as she was, she thought of them taking a bath together, gradually reacquainting themselves with each other’s bodies, although she wasn’t yet emboldened enough to suggest it.

At that moment her phone rang in her purse and she knew, even before fishing it out to look, that it was Russell, knowing with the certainty of guilt that her adulterous fantasy had called forth a rebuke. Luke watched as she stirred the contents of her purse and finally came up with the phone, just as it stopped ringing. He knew, too. He seemed to be holding his breath. She flipped it open to check the caller.

“It was Russell,” she said.

He nodded mournfully.

“I’d better call back,” she said.

Outside, on the deck, the wind had picked up, and she considered going back in for the coat but then decided that she deserved to suffer. Dialing her husband, she imagined, beyond the possibility of her own secret having been discovered, everything that might have gone wrong with the children in her absence: illness, injury, disappearance. So she wasn’t all that surprised when Russell said, “It’s Jeremy.”

—

Luke seemed to have anticipated bad news; he held her gently as she explained…chest pains, emergency room, appendicitis.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll get you back to the city. I just need to make a call.”

She started dreading the two-hour drive, crawling along the expressway with her only son waiting, stricken, on the other end.

“We’re all set,” Luke said, emerging from the library. “I’m going to fly you into the city myself.”

“What? Are you sure you can do this?”

He picked up her bag where he’d dropped it only two hours ago. “Let’s go.”

They spoke hardly at all as he raced over the back roads to the East Hampton Airport, paused only briefly at the flight desk. The plane was a flimsy twin-engine with four seats. Luke buckled her into the copilot’s seat and proceeded to run through the preflight protocol, looking at ease with the panel of toggles and switches and dials. He showed her how to use the headsets, since the plane was too noisy for normal conversation in the cockpit, but she remained silent for most of the flight, consumed by anxiety and guilt, barely noticing the sere landscape between the open ocean and the sound, coming to her senses above the necropolis of eastern Queens, looking out at the Manhattan skyline rising beyond an undulant sea of headstones, surprised anew by its recent disfigurement, altered like a familiar smile marred by missing teeth.