Bright, Precious Days

11

RUSSELL WOKE THE KIDS, moving back and forth between their rooms until they were upright and moving, under protest. Ferdie emerged from under Jeremy’s covers and followed him into the kitchen, snaking along at his heels, waiting eagerly for his bowl of ZuPreem Ferret Diet pellets, supplemented with a chopped sardine, which was supposedly good for his coat and his bones, if not his breath. He strained upward on his hind legs, like a masked bandit, as Russell stirred the fragrant mess.

Storey appeared first, dressed and ready with her backpack and her homework binder. “Can I have French toast?” she asked.

“That’s a weekend treat,” Russell said. “I’ve got yogurt and a banana and Honey Nut Cheerios here. Promise I’ll make you French toast tomorrow.”

“With sausage? I like the English ones you got last weekend. The exploding kind.”

“Bangers.” He’d picked them up at the limey grocery store in the West Village, along with some Aero and Cadbury bars for Corrine, milk chocolate being among the very few foods she craved.

“Why are they called bangers?”

“Because of the way they pop and explode in the pan.”

He hated to admit it, but Corrine was right that Storey was getting compulsive about food and, lately, a little bit chubby. Corrine thought it was somehow a reaction to Hilary’s drunken revelation, a theory that seemed plausible enough. They would have to address this sooner or later, though just now he needed to check on Jeremy’s progress; getting him dressed and organized on time was a continual challenge. Jeremy was, in fact, still in his pajamas, hunched over his desk. “I thought you finished your homework last night.”

“I just forgot some math.”

“Time’s up. Get dressed and get out here now.”

“Hey, Dad?”

“What?” he said, trying to contain his mounting irritation. He’d failed to contain it often enough to be aware of the potential consequences, the kids’ tears and his inevitable apology. Both lately seemed excessively sensitive to any criticism whatsoever.

“Are we ever going to see Aunt Hilary and Dan?”

“I don’t know. Why, do you miss them?”

Where had that come from? he wondered, even as he acknowledged that for kids, there’s no such thing as a non sequitur. Nonlinearity was a given.

“I guess I should miss Hilary,” Jeremy said, “since she’s sort of my mom.”

“Well, yes and no.”

“I feel bad I never liked her that much.”

“Don’t feel bad about your feelings. As long as you try to be understanding and sympathetic to others, that’s all I’d ask. But we can’t always control what we feel.”

“I kind of miss Dan,” he said. “He seemed like a good guy. Until he hit you, I mean.”

“He has his virtues. Now come on and get ready.”

“It was so cool when he showed us his gun.”

“Actually, that was kind of a dick move.”

“A what?”

“I mean it wasn’t cool.”

“I think Storey is freaked-out,” Jeremy said.

“About the Hilary thing?”

“Yeah.”

“Why? Has she said anything to you?”

“Not really. Just a few things.”

Before he could pursue this, Storey herself was right beside him. “We are going to be totally late. Is Jeremy still pretending to be wounded?”

It was true: He’d been milking his appendix scar for all it was worth this last week, and it hadn’t taken Storey long to lose patience.

He got them into the elevator with just a few minutes till the bell and hurried them down the block, scolding Jeremy when he tried to pet a passing fox terrier tethered to a pretty young redhead Russell noticed frequently at this hour. When they arrived at the school yard, it was empty, and Storey was distraught; she was a fastidious and law-abiding citizen who dreaded violating rules or schedules, whereas her brother was essentially an anarchist.

He led both children to their homeroom, the smell of the corridors almost overwhelming him with sense memories, that compound of linoleum, art supplies, ammonia, snacks and childish effluvia unique to elementary schools, so reminiscent of his own, a thousand miles and four decades away in Michigan.

Back outside, a stiff breeze off of the Hudson helped propel him along Chambers to the subway. Going down the steps, he encountered many trolls and one princess, a lovely creature in a white leather jacket whose porcelain face was framed by shiny blue-black tresses. He kept waiting to become inured to beautiful strangers, who seemed even more abundant now than when he’d first arrived in the city, yet his heart always leapt and his imagination wove unlikely narratives of erotic encounters and alternative lives. Somewhere in the metropolis was a Russell Calloway whose life was devoted to seduction. In this case, he courted and bedded the white leather angel, moved into her penthouse on Broome Street, became very rich in some undefined enterprise and retired from publishing to travel the world with her, all in the distance between Chambers and Canal Streets, where she rose from her seat and got off the train, while he continued on to 14th.

Ascending to the sidewalk, he trudged past the Starbucks on Eighth Avenue, past his office and up Ninth Avenue to the Chelsea Market on Fifteenth, entering the redolent brick cave lined with bakeries and restaurants — which had once, long ago, been a Nabisco biscuit factory before it had been abandoned to become a refuge for the homeless and derelict, a shooting gallery where Jeff Pierce went to score heroin — then waiting at the counter with Food Network execs for his latte, a filigreed heart inscribed in the foam. He wouldn’t necessarily want anyone to know that he added three blocks to his morning commute because he thought this was the best coffee in the city, certainly not his wife, who already thought his epicureanism was some kind of sickness.

Walking back to the office, he unlocked the front door and stooped to scoop up three take-out menus and a brochure advertising the latest local manicure parlor. All this paper was destined for the trash, and yet when he thought about it, as he did now, he found it touching that these small businesses were popping up and reaching out to him, a Chinese or Korean immigrant with his life savings on the line, in hock to some murderous criminal who’d smuggled him into the country. And he could empathize because he, too, was a small businessman, with all his paltry capital invested in his company, only two or three flops away from financial peril, if not outright ruin. This morning he was particularly susceptible to intimations of doom because he was short on sleep and slightly hungover and especially because he was about to take the biggest risk of his career.

At his desk he wrote three rejection letters. Russell took great pride in these, and was known for them; while most editors tried to stay vague and upbeat—“not quite right for our list at this time”—he was specific about his reservations and offered constructive criticism, even as he admitted that his judgment was fallible, or at least that in the end he was a prisoner of his own taste (not that he really believed this). Usually this scrupulous attention was appreciated, although the agent Martin Briskin once told him, “Just give me the fucking verdict and spare me the sensitive lecture.” And it was Briskin with whom he had to deal today.

At nine-thirty he called Kip Taylor, whose money he’d be putting on the line, to get the final clearance.

“Russell, you sound terrible. You’re croaking like a frog. Pull yourself together, man.”

“I’m fine, Kip. Ready to go.”

“So, you think you can get it for seven fifty?”

“I’ll try like hell.”

“You know he’ll want a million. It’s the number — the basic unit.”

Russell assumed he was being polite about the Lilliputian dynamics of publishing, because he distinctly remembered Kip saying that in the financial world, 100 million was the basic unit.

“Then I guess we have to be willing to walk away,” Russell said tentatively.

“Is that what you want to do?” Kip asked.

“I think it’s worth a million with foreign rights.”

“All right, do it if you can.”

This was one of the things he admired about Kip, his decisiveness. He’d started his career as a trader at Salomon Brothers, staking millions on split-second judgments.

“Russell, I have to trust your instincts. That’s why I hired you. If your gut tells you to go for it, then go for it. Honestly, it’s your call.”

Actually, Kip hadn’t hired him; rather, Russell had solicited his capital to help buy a struggling business in which they both saw hidden value, but he was willing to let this pass. Having gotten the answer he wanted, he couldn’t understand why, after hanging up, he felt such trepidation and anxiety. His esophagus was burning with indigestion, his stomach suddenly queasy.

He went out to the deli and bought a toasted corn muffin fresh off the greasy grill — a plebeian delicacy that pleased him no less than last night’s short ribs — gobbling down half of it as he hurried back to the office, chucking the rest, intercepting Gita, his assistant, and Tom Bradley, his subrights director, coming in together. Were they a couple? They certainly seemed a little flustered to encounter him here on the steps. Both followed him up to the second floor after Russell told Tom he wanted to review Kohout’s foreign prospects before making the big call.

At ten-thirty he punched in the number. He could’ve had Gita make the call and ask Briskin’s assistant to hold for him, but that wasn’t Russell’s style. Briskin made him wait several minutes before picking up.

“Speak to me.”

“I want to preempt the Kohout.”

“I hope you have a large figure in mind.”

“It seems plenty big to me.”

“You probably believe it when your wife says that about your dick. But let’s hear it anyway.”

“Seven fifty.”

“Are you fucking kidding me? You call that a preempt?”

“This will be our top title of the year. And I’ll be there with Phillip every step of the way. He’s worked with me, and I think he’d like to again. He knows I’m a good editor and somebody he can trust.”

“Russell, be serious. I can’t go to my client with this.”

“The worst he can say is no.”

“He could say a lot worse, and so can I. If you were on fire, I wouldn’t cross the street to piss on you for seven fifty,” he said before hanging up.

Russell plodded along through the morning, unable to focus as he tried to decide whether to call back and sweeten the offer or wait Briskin out. Maybe, he thought, I should just sit tight. Maybe he’d just dodged a bullet. He had a somewhat distracted lunch at Soho House with David Cohen, the young editor he’d taken with him from Corbin, Dern. David was a keen advocate of the Kohout book and urged Russell to up his offer. The rooftop restaurant had just reopened for the season, and it seemed almost miraculous to dine outside, with the sun on your face, looking out over the Hudson, the slightest fetid whiff of which reached him on the breeze.

—

He’d just settled back at his desk when Gita told him Briskin was on the line.

“Give me a million,” Briskin said.

“Nine hundred, and we keep world rights.”

“Try again. A million and I’ll give you the UK. That’s the best I can do.”

That Briskin was calling at all, Russell interpreted as a sign of weakness.

“A million and world rights,” he said. “Final offer.”

“Come on, Russell, world rights might not be that big a factor on this book.”

“Then you shouldn’t mind giving them to us.”

“Fuck you,” he said before hanging up again.

Russell’s pulse was racing, his face flushed. As the adrenaline subsided, he found himself disappointed and second-guessing his tactics, but later, when his publicity director, Jonathan, and David came in for an update, he felt relieved.

“Well, it wasn’t really our kind of book anyway,” Jonathan said. “I wouldn’t know how to play this to the reviewers.”

“Maybe, but we can’t just suffocate in our comfortable little niche,” David said. “We need to grow.”

“We do?”

“Of course,” David said.

“We don’t do that blockbuster thing,” Jonathan countered.

How easy it is, Russell thought, to be a purist in your twenties.

Gita buzzed and said that Briskin was on the line. All at once the silence in the office was palpable. Russell picked up the receiver.

“All right,” Briskin said, “we have a deal. I have to tell you I advised my client against it.”

“If I didn’t think we could do right by this book I wouldn’t have pushed so hard. I’m going to do everything in my power—”

“Spare me the fucking speech and send over the contract.”

“Okay,” he said, feeling giddy and light-headed as he hung up the phone.

“We got world rights?” Jonathan asked.

Russell nodded. “I’ll tell Tom to get busy on it.”

“You all right?”

“I think so,” Russell said, standing up and walking unsteadily to the bathroom, where he threw up what was left of his lunch.