Bright, Precious Days

16

WHEN THE PHONE RINGS HOURS AFTER Corrine fell asleep, she assumes it’s Russell, calling from the Frankfurt Book Fair. But the voice on the other end is Jeff’s, raspy and tense, telling her he really needs her help. She reminds him it’s two in the morning.

“I’m in kind of a jam, here, Corrine. I need money like yesterday.”

“How much money?”

“A thousand as fast as you can get here.”

She doesn’t ask him if it can wait till morning, knowing that, at least in his mind, it can’t. It’s a lot of money — a month’s rent. She knows he’s in trouble, or he wouldn’t have called. She focuses on practicalities, reminding him of the two-hundred-dollar limit on ATM withdrawals and discovering, on searching her purse, that she has less cash than that on hand.

“Where are you?” she asks.

He gives her an address on the Lower East Side, a quadrant of Manhattan she’s never set foot in during her three-year tenure in the city.

But she does have her rainy day fund, an emergency stash of twenty-dollar gold pieces her grandfather had given her for her eighteenth birthday. He’d told her not to tell anyone, to save them until the day she really needed them. She gets dressed, descends in the elevator, and nods at the startled doorman; it’s a crisp October night adorned by a gibbous moon. At the Chase Manhattan on Second Avenue, she withdraws her limit. The first cab refuses to take her. “Ain’t going down there this time of night,” the driver says. “That’s the fucking DMZ.”

The second cabbie is skeptical, but he sets off without comment. Eventually he asks, “What’s that address? You going to that club, what’s it called, Kill the Robots?”

She shrugs. “I don’t think so.” They finally find the number they’re looking for on a block of burned-out, boarded-up tenements. At street level the boards and the bricks are festooned with colorful graffiti. The sidewalk is buckled, the street deserted. The address is painted on a piece of plywood covering the windows of a downstairs storefront, which, like the rest of the block, appears desolate and abandoned except for the anomaly of a shiny heavy steel door. The driver shakes his head and looks at her ruefully, as if giving her a chance to change her mind. She almost loses heart; it’s the most frightening corner of the city she’s ever seen and she can’t imagine walking out of here unmolested. The cabbie tells her he’ll wait while she tries the door.

She pushes a buzzer beside the door, sees a shadow cross the peephole from within. The door clicks open and she takes a last glance at the cab before stepping inside.

A wiry, twitchy young Hispanic guy wearing a red bandanna nudges her forward down a darkened hallway and raps on another door. The second door swings open, revealing a murky expanse, shrouded in smoke, illuminated by the glow of a television tuned to a Spanish-language station. Jeff and his friend Tony Duplex are sprawled on a ratty sofa, one of several that look as if they’ve been dragged in from the street. Sitting beside them in an armchair, watching the TV, is a middle-aged Hispanic man in a wife beater with multiple tattoos covering his neck and arms. He seems to be on easy terms with Jeff and Tony. A figure of indeterminate race and gender is passed out on another couch, covered by a quilt. The air is thick with cigarette smoke, infused with some kind of acrid chemical smell.

Jeff nods at her, though he seems reluctant or unable to move.

“So this is your friend?”

Jeff nods again. “Did you bring the money?”

This time, Corrine nods, not trusting her voice. But she realizes she has to explain. “I have a hundred fifty in cash,” she says, seeing the man’s eyes flash, the sense of stoned camaraderie suddenly evaporating. “And I have twelve hundred in gold.”

She hands him the cash and three twenty-dollar Liberty gold coins. “Gold closed today at four hundred and nine dollars an ounce. In case you’re wondering how I know this, I’m a broker at Merrill Lynch. Each of those coins weighs just under point nine six ounces of gold, so you’re looking at almost three ounces, which in bullion is worth about twelve hundred and thirty, although a collector would pay a lot more than that for the coins.”

For a moment the man looks confused, and Corrine fears that she’s blown it, but suddenly he laughs.

“What da fuck, dis one, she da fuckin’ secretary da treasury,” he says, hefting the coins in his palm.

Amazed at herself for having produced this speech, she coughs and rubs her eyes, which are burning from the acrid smoke; when she opens them, the tattooed man is fiddling with a triple-beam scale that has materialized on the table in front of him, placing the coins on the tray. She feels light-headed and nauseous and all of a sudden she can’t stop coughing, and she isn’t sure if any more is said, but the next thing she knows, Jeff’s clapping her on the back as he leads her out of the room, and only as she’s leaving does she see that the man at the door has a silver pistol in his belt.

The air outside is only slightly less funky and fetid, the street dark and deserted. Jeff takes her hand and walks her west, toward civilization.

“Pyramid,” Tony mumbles.

“I should get her home.”

“Think we all need a fucking drink.” The last thing Tony needs is a drink, she feels certain, watching him stumble up the sidewalk, tacking like a leaky sailboat to port and starboard in his forward progress.

A few minutes later they’re standing outside another tenement storefront, the door guarded by a hulk in a pink sequined halter. He does a complicated handshake with Jeff and waves them into the din: a smoky room with a stage at the far end, where a drag queen in a gold lamé jumpsuit is prancing and singing “Let Me Entertain You.” Many in the audience are also cross-dressing men. She wonders how it is that Jeff, who looks so out of place in his Brooks Brothers shirt, seems so at home here, receiving and returning greetings as he tows her toward the bar. She’s sort of furious at him for bringing her down here and exposing her to drug dealers and armed thugs, but also sort of mesmerized by these delicate pretty boys carrying lunch boxes and the broad-shouldered divas in poofy blond wigs, by the topless woman dancing virtually unnoticed beside the bar. For a moment she understands that impulse, feels the urge to experience that freedom. But it’s fleeting; she could never do such a thing.

She wants to talk to Jeff, to demand an explanation, an account of the earlier proceedings, get an apology, perhaps, but the music’s too loud to talk over, so instead she quickly drains the vodka tonic he places in her hand and asks for another. He introduces her to people with unlikely names and improbable hairstyles and they watch two more acts take the stage, the second culminating in several minutes of shrieking that’s billed as an homage to Yoko Ono.

Finally, she walks out in a huff.

Jeff catches up with her on the sidewalk.

“Can you find me a cab?”

“Can we talk first?” He lights a cigarette, hands it to her, then lights one of his own.

She searches for a cab, but for a moment the street is empty.

“You’ve got to start taking care of yourself,” she says.

“I like it when you take care of me,” he says.

“I don’t ever want to get a phone call like that again.”

“Noted.”

“Can you please get me a cab?”

“Come home with me.”

“You know I can’t. I’m married to your best friend.”

“That hasn’t stopped us before.”

“I wasn’t married then.”

“It’s not too late.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“ ‘Come live with me and be my love/and we will all the pleasures prove.’ ”

“I can’t believe you’d say that.”

“I was just quoting Christopher Marlowe.”

“Jeff, I love Russell.”

“I think you love me.”

“I do, but that doesn’t mean I need to be with you. It certainly doesn’t mean I want to be married to you.”

At that moment a dirty Checker cab rolls up to the entrance of the club, and several gaudily attired passengers clamber out.

“Don’t go,” Jeff says.

She kisses him before climbing into the taxi, waving to him as he stands there smoking on the curb.

The next afternoon, a Tony Duplex painting is delivered to her apartment with a note: This painting reminds me of us. Tony says thanks. Love Jeff.

—

She’d never spoken of the incident to Jeff or anyone else and had sent the painting off to her mother’s house, asking her to stash it in the closet, where it had remained these many years. At least she hoped it was still there. It had occurred to her even at the time that the painting was worth far more than the coins she’d parted with, but she’d never considered selling it then, and later, Tony had more or less disappeared, along with the buyers once clamoring for his art.

She’d never told Russell about that night, feeling that it was part of her secret history with Jeff.

Every marriage, she convinced herself, can bear a few secrets.