Bright, Precious Days

12

“ ‘THE LIGER IS A HYBRID CROSS between a male lion (Panthera leo) and a tigress (Panthera tigress).’ ” Jeremy was reading aloud to his mother from Wikipedia, psyching himself up for the day’s adventure, to see an actual liger in the native habitat of one of the Wildlife Society’s most generous benefactors. “ ‘Thus, it has parents with the same genus but of different species. It is the largest of all known extant felines. Ligers enjoy swimming, which is a characteristic of tigers, and are very sociable like lions. Ligers exist only in captivity because the habitats of the parent species do not overlap in the wild….’ ”

Casey had two extra tickets to see the liger and its trainer in the Fifth Avenue town house of Minky Rijstaefal, who was president of the society. This beast had risen from obscurity into a kind of cult fame after being mentioned in Napoleon Dynamite, and the society was capitalizing on that interest. Indeed, the event had quickly sold out, drawing the otherwise jaded children of the 10021 zip code, who’d already seen plenty of lions and tigers and bears, oh my, and more than a few of whom had been on Abercrombie & Kent safaris in Kenya and South Africa. For Corrine’s part, she couldn’t help being reminded of Luke, who was, she knew, spending the week at his game park, couldn’t help conjuring a glimmer of communion in this Upper East Side expedition, or thinking about the e-mail she’d write to him about it later.

Much as Storey had liked Napoleon Dynamite and its supernerd protagonist, she didn’t want to go. It always made her sad to see wild animals in captivity. Corrine didn’t bother to point out that the liger wasn’t technically a wild animal, since she had only the two tickets. She wondered, too, if there wasn’t another point of reference in Storey’s refusal; she’d entered a stage of acute social sensitivity, having recently complained about the “snotty UES rich kids” she’d encountered at a birthday party, and the Wildlife Society event would be largely composed of that species. Jeremy, by contrast, was excited from a zoological standpoint and relatively oblivious to the sociological implications. He was lying in bed with his laptop, his neck propped up on a pillow, reading everything he could find online. “It doesn’t say whether they’re dangerous or not.”

“Well, I assume this one isn’t too dangerous, or they probably wouldn’t be bringing it into somebody’s living room.”

He didn’t seem entirely satisfied with the idea of a harmless liger. “Lions are dangerous, and tigers definitely are.”

“Well, personally I’m going to sit as far away as possible.”

“I might sit close to it,” Jeremy ventured.

“Don’t blame me if you both get eaten,” Storey said.

“No one’s going to get eaten,” Corrine said.

“I’ll just stay home and watch Napoleon Dynamite instead” was Storey’s final comment.

—

Spring had finally made its debut, and while Corrine had planned to take the subway, it seemed a pity to go underground, given this unaccustomed warmth and sunshine, so she grabbed a passing cab, reasoning that she’d already saved two grand on the tickets.

When they arrived at the town house, a Beaux Arts limestone edifice designed by McKim, Mead & White just a door in from Fifth Avenue and the park, Corrine realized that she’d been here once before, years ago — a wild night back in the eighties. Minky, née Hortense, was a famous debutante who’d acquired her nickname shortly after she came out at the age of seventeen and Town & Country announced that she owned twenty-three fur coats. She threw infamous parties and eventually spent the latter part of the eighties in rehab. After one of her stints at Silver Meadows, she publicly renounced her fur habit, selling off her coats at a well-publicized auction at Christie’s and giving the proceeds to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. She’d since settled into harmless modes of eccentricity, collecting and discarding exotic husbands — an Argentinian polo player, a Russian ballet dancer and an Italian/Uruguayan rancher — while devoting herself increasingly to the welfare of animals. In addition to the Wildlife Society, she sat on the boards of the Central Park Zoo and the ASPCA and was the sole benefactor of an elephant sanctuary in Tennessee and a turtle refuge in Palm Springs.

A lugubrious young Asian man in a black Nehru suit answered the door and beckoned them inside. The town house of her memory had been largely obliterated by a recent renovation, the gilt and ormolu stripped down and plastered over. In place of the former baroque splendor was a Zen temple with an ornamental pool fed by a trickling bamboo spout on one side of the entry hall, flanked on the other by a Ginkaku-ji-style rock garden, a stark rectangle blanketed with polished black stones the size of flattened quail eggs. A Greek kouros stood in an alcove, a torso mounted on a steel rod, sans arms and legs and head, the lack of appendages in keeping with the minimalism of the decor, although the penis had somehow survived the millennia. Directly across from the statue was a Picasso from the painter’s classicist period, a rendering of a surreally distorted white sculptural figure against a milky blue background. Otherwise, the space was unembellished, a vast expanse of white wall and black marble floor, whose owner seemed to be boasting that empty space was the ultimate extravagance in this costly precinct of this expensive city. In the eighties the entire neighborhood had been decorated like Versailles, but now, it seemed to Corrine, the au courant aesthetic model was the downtown loft, as if someone up here had noticed or at least suspected that the zeitgeist had moved south. The sole architectural feature of the entire floor was a massive rough-hewn staircase forged out of bronze, which seemed to dare the intrepid visitor to explore the upper reaches of the house. The man in black pointed out that there was also the option of an elevator at the far end of the hall.

Corrine didn’t choose her route fast enough to avoid Sasha McGavock, Luke’s ex, who came in right behind her, heels clicking on the marble floor, towing by the hand her six-year-old stepson, who, like a recalcitrant bulldog on a leash, was strenuously resisting forward motion. When she’d started her dalliance with Luke, Corrine had been inordinately curious about Sasha. She was fairly certain Sasha didn’t know she existed, but she’d followed her rival’s social progress in the years since their divorce, via the press and intermittent briefings from Casey, and it wasn’t unlike Sasha’s current march through the entry hall, a triumph of will over not-inconsiderable resistance. Her affair with the billionaire Bernie Melman, an open secret toward the end of her marriage, had ended in humiliating fashion. She’d confided to all of her friends that she fully expected him to initiate divorce proceedings against his wife once her own divorce from Luke was final. In the meantime, Melman’s wife decided to go public, slapping Sasha’s face in the dining room of Le Cirque at lunch while advising her to “stay the fuck away from my husband.” This confrontation brought joy not only to the wives of the community but also to hard-hearted gossip columnists, and the subsequent publicity seemed to mark a turning point in Bernie Melman’s attitude toward his wife and his mistress. In the days after the slapfest, photographs of the Melmans engaged in public displays of affection appeared in Women’s Wear Daily and the New York Post. Sasha compounded her disgrace by tearfully confronting Melman at the benefit for the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum — whose theme that year happened to be “Dangerous Liaisons”—and demanding to know why he hadn’t returned her calls, all this under the turned-up noses of Anna Wintour and Charlize Theron. Just when it seemed she had no choice but to get out of town, she appeared at the Robin Hood Gala on the arm of Nate Bronstein, who’d clashed with Melman on several corporate takeovers. Some were surprised that Bronstein would be interested in his enemy’s discarded mistress, but others, particularly some of his colleagues in finance, felt that in scooping up Sasha he’d shown a savvy sense of market timing, acquiring a blue-chip asset at a steep discount. And last year Sasha had closed the deal with Bronstein, though it was widely noted that she continued to use the name McGavock, which suggested to more than one commentator a reluctance to bear a Semitic surname.

Thankfully, she didn’t recognize Corrine — they’d met only once, in passing — and was fully engaged in the struggle to drag her stepson toward the stairs.

“I don’t want to see the tiger.”

“It’s not a tiger,” Sasha hissed. “It’s a liger. Like in that stupid movie.”

Jeremy observed the younger boy with an air of sympathetic condescension. “It’s okay,” he said. “There’s actually nothing to be scared about.”

Not true, thought Corrine. That little boy had plenty of reasons to be scared.

Upstairs, a flock of mothers and their young chattered en masse in the drawing room. As an interloper from downtown, Corrine was ill-equipped to decode the room and plumb the levels of intrigue in this gathering, although she did identify among them the much-photographed first and second wives of a hedge fund manager whose divorce had been chronicled in the columns — the new young wife the center of an enthusiastic audience, chattering like grackles, the old one huddled resentfully with a single companion at the outer edge of the scrum.

The room itself was less austere than the entry hall, the decorator seeming to have grudgingly acknowledged the need for some furniture — a pair of bargelike beige sofas faced each other across a prodigious expanse of white-lacquered coffee table. An orange-and-chartreuse Rothko hung over the stark black marble fireplace.

Casey waved her over to the corner that she shared with the woman they’d seen at Justine’s a few weeks before, who resembled a bejeweled Giacometti in a canary yellow dress. She stood beside an actual Brancusi — a shiny marble Bird in Space. Even as Casey introduced them, the scarecrow glanced over the top of Corrine’s head in search of more familiar faces.

“Can’t thank you enough,” Corrine told her friend. “Jeremy’s so excited.” Her son nodded solemnly in confirmation, visibly flustered by the arrival of Casey’s daughter, Amber, a budding beauty three years his senior. A quadruple threat: blond, tall and elegantly thin, she had in the past year sprouted perfect pear-shaped breasts. It hardly seemed fair, with all her other advantages, that she should look so good, or that she could maintain an A average at Spence. She was destined, Corrine felt certain, to make some nice boy from Harvard or Princeton very miserable.

“You remember Jeremy,” Casey said.

“Yeah, hi. Look, Mom, can we go to Jessica’s house after this? Her dad has an advance copy of Knocked Up and we’re going to watch it in their screening room.”

“This is what, a new movie?”

Amber rolled her eyes. “It’s the new Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl, and it’s not even in theaters yet.”

“It’s supposed to be really cool,” Jeremy said, gazing up at Amber with fear and longing.

“I suppose that’s fine. But not until after the presentation. And I want you to ask questions.”

“Whatever.”

“You know I hate that word.”

“Okay, fine, I will ask incisive questions that make my mother look good and thereby increase her chances of getting asked to be on the board of the Wildlife Society, which is the only reason we’re here. I don’t even know why you want to be on the stupid board anyway. You don’t even like animals.”

“We’re all animals, Amber. Let’s go upstairs and get a seat, shall we?”

Rows of folding chairs had been set up in the library on the third floor. Jeremy insisted on taking a seat in the first row. Corrine sat, reluctantly, beside him, with Casey on her right. At the end of their row, a cameraman and a soundman were setting up under the supervision of Trina Cox, one of cable TV’s Money Honeys, not to mention Russell’s former partner in the failed attempt to takeover Corbin, Dern, the publishing company where he’d been working at the time. Russell had somehow conceived the idea of a leveraged buyout of his employer after learning that he was on the verge of getting fired, and Trina had been the investment banker who advised him and, quite possibly, slept with him. They might have succeeded in the takeover if the stock market crash hadn’t derailed them. It was the eighties. Stranger things had happened.

Now Trina was one of several babes employed by the cable stations in the past decade to deliver business and economic news, the collective bet being that the audience for such, as with sports, was largely hetero male. Corrine had to admit she looked good. Though she hadn’t been a raving beauty back in the days when she was seducing Russell — call her crazy, but Corrine certainly didn’t think so — she was one of those women who’d actually grown more attractive in her thirties and forties, her face losing baby fat and gaining definition. Still, this seemed like quite a comedown from delivering the monthly jobs report on CNN. She was alternately standing in front of the camera, mike in hand, and checking the playback.

“Jesus Christ, I look like Kathy Bates in Misery. Can we do something with the fucking lights, please?”

“Excuse me….”

One of the moms raced over and tapped Trina on the shoulder. “Excuse me, this is an event for children, as you can plainly see, and we would all appreciate it if you’d refrain from inappropriate language.”

“Sorry,” Trina said, turning back to the cameraman. “I meant to say ‘Could we please do something with these fornicating lights?’ ”

The buzz of conversation subsided when Minky wafted into the room, her gold caftan flapping like a sail. Even as a debutante she’d been more zaftig than her peers, and the years had only added to her volume. Surrounded by stick figures, she seemed to be serenely comfortable in her flesh, untroubled by the neuroses and eating disorders of the lesser rich. Her blond bob was kept in check by a black velvet headband and she was bedizened with enormous jewels.

“My friends,” she began, “thank you so much for coming. And thank you for supporting the Wildlife Society.” A few of the children tittered, seemingly amused by her fluty patrician voice. “I’m particularly pleased for the opportunity to introduce these young people to our group. It’s crucial that we preserve our wildlife so that you will inherit an earth where humans and animals live in harmony. Imagine a planet with no lions or tigers or elephants. If not for our society, there might have been no American bison left. Do you children all know what the bison is?”

“It’s a buffalo.”

“We have bison burgers when we go to Jackson Hole. Mom says they’re superhealthy.”

“That’s gross.”

Minky frowned. “What you children may not know is that by the end of the last century the bison had been hunted almost to extinction. In 1907, our founder, William Temple Hornaday, sent fifteen bison from the Bronx Zoo to a reserve in Wichita, Kansas, where the buffalo had once roamed in the millions, and gradually the species recovered in some of its natural habitats. Today we’re working to save other endangered species. Who here has visited the Central Park Zoo?”

A unanimous chorus of cheers and huzzahs.

“And the Bronx Zoo?”

Only a trickle of affirmations followed this query.

“Well, today we have a very special visitor from the Bronx. Please welcome Lionel the Liger and his trainer, Dr. Michael Jost.”

All eyes turned toward the hallway, which was empty. A disembodied voice was exhorting the star attraction: “Lionel…Lionel?”

Necks were craned; feet were scuffed. The tension was broken, briefly, by a pigtailed preschooler in a tartan jumper: “Come on, Lionel, don’t be afraid.”

Trainer and beast finally appeared at the top of the stairway, eliciting a collective gasp and assorted squeals, the liger resisting the pressure on his leash, batting at the silvery chain links and shaking his head back and forth. It was a very big animal, much bigger than Corrine had expected. The man holding the leash, though fairly solid, wouldn’t stand a chance against a cat that must’ve outweighed him by a factor of three or four.

The squeals rose in volume as he succeeded in leading it into the library. After some coaxing and pushing, he managed to get the big cat to sit on its hind legs.

“Good afternoon, everyone. I’m Dr. Jost, from the Bronx Zoo, and this is Lionel, who’s visiting us from his home at an animal refuge in South Carolina.”

“Isn’t he from Africa?”

“No, he’s not, but I’m glad you asked that. Lions and tigers don’t live near each other in the wild. The Bengal tiger lives in Asia and the lion is native to Africa.”

“So how did the lion have sex with the tiger?” shouted one of the older boys.

Dr. Jost waited patiently for the uproar to subside.

“Well, in the case of Lionel’s mom and dad, they were living together at the game refuge. His father was a lion and his mother was a tiger. And, in fact, the liger shares traits with both of his genetic parents. Like tigers, they like to swim, and like lions, they’re very sociable. But they’re significantly bigger than either lions or tigers. They can grow almost twice as big.”

Whatever his parentage, Corrine didn’t like the way this animal was looking at Jeremy. At first she thought it was just her imagination, but when she studied her son, his eyes were locked on those of the cat, who was staring back at him disconcertingly.

A late-arriving mother and son were standing in the doorway, and Corrine decided to use this opportunity to get Jeremy out of the liger’s direct line of sight by moving over to occupy empty seats near the end of the row. But the cat’s gaze was still fixed on Jeremy when they settled into their new chairs, a fact that the trainer seemed to register.

“Stop tracking,” he said, whacking it on the side of its neck.

After shaking its huge head and yawning, Lionel returned his gaze to Jeremy. It was terrifying, and Jeremy seemed a little freaked-out himself.

“Mom, why’s the liger staring at me?”

“I’m not sure, honey.”

Dr. Jost continued his spiel: “What we do know is that ligers are missing the growth-inhibiting gene that keeps them at a normal size. They can weigh up to nine hundred pounds and the skulls are forty percent larger than a Bengal tiger’s. Lionel, stop tracking.”

He whacked the cat again, and that was enough for Corrine. She grabbed Jeremy’s hand and started to lead him out. As they crossed in front of the liger, it crouched and seemed to take aim for a lunge, at which point Dr. Jost tugged hard on its leash. “Behave yourself, Lionel.”

Corrine shoved Jeremy ahead as she watched over her shoulder, the liger stationary but shaking its head against the straining collar. In the hallway, she took his hand and together they ran down the stairs.

“That was pretty scary,” Jeremy said.

Corrine nodded. She didn’t want to overdramatize, but she’d been terrified.

“Was it just me, or did that liger look like it wanted to eat me?”

“Well, let’s just say I didn’t like the way it was looking at you.”

Standing outside on the sidewalk on a warm spring afternoon, she wondered if she’d let her imagination run wild. Just across from the town house was a large trailer towed by a pickup truck with a Bronx Zoo logo. They crossed Fifth Avenue and walked down the park side, under the porous canopy of just-leafing tree branches. She could predict the call from Casey, who would accuse her of being a crazy, overprotective mother, but she really didn’t care.

In fact, when Casey finally did call, it seemed that the Calloways’ premature exit was overshadowed by subsequent events. The story that gradually emerged was that Lionel, while being led to his trailer from the door of the town house, had pounced on a passing jogger, who was now in stable condition at Lenox Hill Hospital.