Bright, Precious Days

2

THE BEST MARRIAGES, like the best boats, are the ones that ride out the storms. They take on water; they shudder and list, very nearly capsize, then right themselves and sail onward toward the horizon. The whole premise, after all, was for better or for worse. Their marriage was seaworthy, if not exactly buoyant. Better off, surely, than the republic, bulging at the waist and spiritually enervated, fighting two wars and a midterm election, all of which seemed endless.

Or maybe not.

At least they’d had sex last night, the first time in God knows how long. She wished they didn’t have to go out tonight, but they had a gala benefit: the third this month. How had she let herself get talked into this one? Her friend Casey had insisted, and it had seemed harmlessly distant a month ago, plus she owed Casey for buying a table for the Nourish New York benefit. That was how the system worked. She couldn’t remember what tonight’s worthy cause was. Something to do with South Africa? Russell was leaving from the office, where he kept his tux, because these benefits were almost always uptown, in the traditionally patrician district, despite the fact that money continued to migrate down the island; happily this one was nearby, at the Puck Building in SoHo.

She sat at her vanity, which doubled as her desk, applying eyeliner with a sense of fatalism, knowing full well that at some point in the evening it would end up on her upper lids, which had sagged over the years. Would an eye lift be a total betrayal of her principles? If she could even afford it. It kind of sucked, being nearly fifty, discovering a new laugh line that you’d at first imagined to be a crack in the mirror.

She was getting more than a little sick of black-tie benefits. Even though they usually attended as guests, rather than ticket buyers, she didn’t have the wardrobe to do full formal all that often. The Upper East Siders, like Casey, her girlhood friend and prep school roommate, went to two or three a week and never repeated a dress. The younger society girls borrowed from the designers and the jewelers, but their mothers spent the equivalent of a Range Rover on dresses every month. Associating with the rich was inevitably expensive, even when they were ostensibly paying. You paid one way or another. Corrine was going to have to wear one of the two long dresses in her closet, the Ralph Lauren probably, the one she’d bought for less than half retail at the sample sale, the same thing she’d worn to the Authors Guild benefit, and hope that no one remembered it. But then, why would they? It wasn’t as if the party photographers immortalized her fashion choices. And she didn’t feel like she was getting all that much masculine attention, either. She examined the satin bodice in the mirror. Was it tight? Tighter than a month ago? And what about shoes and a bag? More things she wished she could afford to indulge in. She settled on the silver Miu Miu pumps to sort of go with her grandmother’s silver mesh clutch.

Corrine tottered out of the bedroom, taking care with her heels on the undulant antique oak floor of the loft, with its treacherous gaps. God, she was so over loft living — that was one of the things they fought about, her desire to move; the fact that the kids could get a better education outside Manhattan, since it didn’t look like they could afford private school tuition for both next year, after the kids graduated from PS 234. They’d be positively well-off if they lived almost anywhere outside this wealthy, skinny island. It was always about money, somehow — except when it was about sex. Young idealists, Ivy League sweethearts, they’d followed their best instincts and based their lives on the premise that money couldn’t buy happiness, learning only gradually the many varieties of unhappiness it might have staved off. Russell liked, especially after a few drinks, to divide humanity into two opposing teams: Art and Love versus Power and Money. It was kind of corny, but she was proud that he believed it, and of his loyalty to his team. For better and for worse, it was her team, too.

The kids were on the couch, watching the new Shrek video. Jean, the nanny, meanwhile oblivious, distraught, pacing in the corner, fighting with her girlfriend on the phone. Apparently living with a woman was also difficult.

“Bye-bye, my little honey bunches. Love you tons.”

“Where are you going?” Jeremy asked.

Corrine waited for Storey to comment on her outfit, but she remained absorbed in the video.

“I’m going out to save the world.”

“How does going out save the world?”

“People buy tickets to fancy parties,” Storey explained, “and then the money goes to, like, people with diseases and abused animals and stuff. It’s called a benefit.”

“Exactly.”

“Why don’t you just give the money and stay home?”

“Because adults like parties,” Storey said.

Corrine saw that her motives didn’t really bear scrutiny. She wasn’t actually giving money and she wasn’t even looking forward to this event. She was a fraud, a pretender, a hypocrite. But then, the kids seemed fine. Just a year or two ago they used to get distraught, try to argue her out of going out, weep and gnash their teeth, but now they seemed perfectly content to let her go. She wasn’t sure this development was entirely welcome.

The elevator rattled as if in its death throes. She found a cab on Church Street, which also rattled and lurched. What was that band that Storey liked, Death Cab for Cutie?

A cluster of yellow cabs and black Lincoln Town Cars debouched sleek New Yorkers two by two into Lafayette Street at the entrance to the hulking red edifice, where they elbowed and kissed one another, funneling between the gray pillars, beneath the gilded statue of Puck, who disregarded them as he admired himself in a hand mirror. If only, Corrine thought, he might bring a little mischief to what promised to be a thoroughly boring evening.

—

She checked her coat, picked up her table number at reception, followed the throng into the ballroom, where, failing to spot her husband, she scanned the silent-auction items: the handbags and jewelry, the photo sessions with prominent lensmen, the trips — golf in Scotland, salmon fishing in Iceland, wine tasting in Napa, game watching in Kenya, river rafting in Zambia. Looking up, she spotted Casey Reynes at the bar. They’d remained close despite the divergences of their post — Miss Porter’s lives; Casey had married an investment banker and lived in a town house on East 67th; this was Casey’s native environment — the charity ball circuit. She was wearing a sea foam blue empire-waist gown accessorized with tasteful diamonds. Very few women could have pulled it off, but somehow Casey looked as if she’d been born in a ballroom.

“Corrine, oh my God, I was just thinking about you.”

They exchanged kisses on each cheek, Casey dipping in for a third, as was the latest practice in her circle. Sometimes Corrine had to struggle to see her friend underneath the facade of tribal costume and customs.

“I appreciate your coming out for this.”

“What’s the cause?”

Casey smiled enigmatically, her forehead serene and undisturbed, but at either edge of this chemically frozen expanse a series of tiny lines, like stitches, betrayed some sort of emotion, though Corrine couldn’t quite interpret which.

“It’s Luke’s charity.”

“Luke? You mean—”

She leaned forward conspiratorially and hissed into Corrine’s ear: “I mean your Luke.”

As if summoned by the incantation of his name, the man himself appeared out of the crowd a few steps away, his reconnaissance of the room snapping into focus at the sight of Corrine. He seemed to recover his composure more quickly than she felt she did, striding over to greet her, taking her hand in his own and kissing her cheek, only one cheek, in the American fashion, surprising her with the familiarity, the singularity of his scent, which seemed, even more than the sight of him, to elicit a chemical response, a tingling in her scalp, at the back of her neck, even as she tried to adjust to the changes in his appearance, notably the raised pink scar that started just above his chin and trailed down his neck.

“What a lovely surprise,” he said.

“I didn’t expect to…”

“I was wondering if I might see you.”

“I don’t know if you’ve met my friend Casey Reynes. Casey, this is Luke McGavock.” Corrine was all befuddled and couldn’t remember whether they’d met or whether she and Casey had just talked about him, but then she realized they’d traveled in the same circles for years.

“We’re old friends,” Luke said, gallantly overstating the case. He looked in some ways the same and yet older, less robust, not only because of the scar. It had been, what, more than three years since she’d seen him? He seemed to have accumulated more years than that in the interval; his dark hair now several shades closer to silver, two crescents furrowing either side of his face from nose to lips. And yet, still, she felt a visceral thrill in his presence.

“Nice to see you again,” Casey said. “Congratulations on this wonderful organization. The fact that all these jaded New Yorkers have chosen to come out for yet another benefit is undoubtedly a tribute to you.”

“I’m hardly the only one behind this thing, and besides, I’d prefer to think it was a tribute to the cause.” He bobbed his head up and down as he spoke, as if he were agreeing with himself, a nervous tic she remembered fondly.

“It’s a wonderful cause,” Casey said.

What cause? Corrine wanted to scream, but she was loath to admit her ignorance at this stage in the game. “The last I heard, you were in South Africa,” she said.

“About half the year. I invested in a winery and I got more and more involved. I’m back here for a few weeks, for the benefit, taking care of business, visiting Ashley. She’s up at Vassar.”

“Oh my God, she’s in college!”

“Well, it was sort of the logical next step after high school.”

Jesus, Corrine thought, was there any limit to her insipidity? She hated it when people marveled at the fact that other people’s kids aged instead of magically remaining the same as when the interlocutor had last seen or thought of them. But she was nervous and uncomfortable on several levels.

“How are the twins?” he asked.

“Good. Fine.”

“They’re how old?”

She had to think a moment. “They’re eleven.”

If only Casey were to make a dignified exit, they might be able to get beyond this twaddle. Was there anything worse than small talk between two people who’d once exchanged bodily fluids? Her confusion was compounded by the fact that one of his eyes seemed not to be looking at her. What was that about? He’d always had a somewhat manic aspect, a darting field of attention, but this was different.

“I think I’ll find my husband, and get him to bid on some jewelry,” Casey said. “So nice to see you again, Luke.”

And suddenly, confusingly, they were alone in the midst of the burbling crowd.

“You haven’t changed,” he said. “You look beautiful.”

“Now I’m unlikely to believe anything else you say.”

“You never did accept a compliment lying down.”

“Women get suspicious of compliments when they discover the purpose is to get them to lie down. And then when they get older, they become so unaccustomed to hearing them that they don’t know what to do with them. I just spent twenty minutes in front of a mirror, and no one knows better than I how much I’ve changed since we last met.”

“Now I recall that your lack of vanity was one of the things I loved most about you.”

“I like to think of myself as a realist.”

“I prefer to think of you as a romantic,” Luke said.

“Once, perhaps, when I was young. Have you noticed — romantics are like fat people? You don’t meet many old ones.”

“You’re still young in my eyes,” he said. “After all, you’re quite a bit younger than I, and I insist on seeing myself as youthful.”

Despite the strangeness of his off-center gaze, she was recalling how much she loved their banter, when a blonde in a lavender gown suddenly appeared at Luke’s side.

And even before he said “There you are,” there was something in the ease of her comportment, in the serenity of the smile directed at Luke, and in Luke’s sudden discomfort, that provoked a sinking feeling of nausea in Corrine.

“Giselle, this is Corrine Calloway. A very dear friend.”

Oh, thanks for that, she thought. Dear. Friend.

“Corrine, this is my…wife, Giselle.”

“How nice to meet you,” Corrine managed to say, although it was all she could do to remain standing, feeling suddenly light-headed and faint.

“Likewise,” she said. “It’s lovely to meet so many of Luke’s old friends. I’m afraid we got married in such a terrible hurry, I feel I’ve a great deal of catching up to do.” She was very pale, with white blond hair, although an athletic physique and an air of boisterous vitality undermined the impression of Pre-Raphaelite delicacy. Likewise her accent, which seemed like a muscular, rusticated version of upper-crust English.

Corrine caught sight of Russell and waved frantically.

“Were you two school chums?” Giselle inquired politely.

“We met doing some volunteer work together,” Luke said quickly, as if he were afraid of what she might say.

“After September eleventh.”

“Ah, yes. At the soup kitchen. Luke told me about that. It must have been a terrible time.”

“Best of times, worst of times,” she said, regretting it as soon as it was out of her mouth. “I mean, as terrible as it was, it brought out the best in a lot of people.” God, what an idiot she was being tonight. She realized how clichéd this sounded, which was only slightly better than glib.

To his credit, Luke was looking slightly pained. She was improbably grateful to Russell as he bumped into her and splashed some of his drink on her arm. He had this kind of overflowing physicality, a puppyish lack of coordination, a sort of comical deficit of grace that had earned him the nickname “Crash.”

“Hello, my love. Sorry.”

“Hello, Russell. I don’t know if you remember Luke McGavock. And this is his wife, Gazelle.”

“Giselle, actually.”

Yes, she knew, but she couldn’t help herself, and was that a look of amused complicity on Luke’s face? “My husband, Russell Calloway.”

“The man of the hour,” Russell said, shaking Luke’s hand.

“I’m grateful to you and all the other guests,” said Luke before excusing himself to be towed off by a woman with a clipboard.

“Interesting guy,” Russell said after they’d both been swallowed by the crowd. “Tom was just telling me his story.”

“I know,” she said. “We worked together for six weeks.”

Russell looked blank.

“Ground Zero, soup kitchen.”

“Oh, right.”

Five years later — another era. “You met him once outside Lincoln Center, just before The Nutcracker.”

Russell shrugged. He didn’t seem to remember one of the pivotal moments of Corrine’s life, had no idea that the complex emotional transaction of that encounter had preserved his marriage. Russell’s obtuseness had been a blessing in the event; he’d never suspected anything, so far as she could tell, never noticed how thoroughly she’d withdrawn from him back then, how close she’d come to leaving.

The lights were pulsing, summoning them to the main event. “We’d better find our table,” he said. She felt the familiar pressure of Russell’s hand on her elbow, guiding her forward into the throng, the radiant, bejeweled women with their taut faces stretched back over their ears, and their sinking cleavage, the men in their bespoke tuxedos with faraway stares, thinking about share prices in Hong Kong and mistresses in condos in the East Sixties.

Seeing Casey, their hostess, standing at the table, Corrine wondered if this had been some kind of setup. How could she not have mentioned, when she invited Corrine, that this was Luke’s charity? But what was the point, exactly? Luke was married, as was she. So maybe it was a coincidence.

“Corrine, you know Kip, of course,” Casey said, indicating Russell’s business partner. “And this is Carl Fontaine, who works with Tom,” she added, directing her attention toward a burly young man with thinning hair and a florid complexion.

“A pleasure,” he said. “I can see I’m very well seated tonight.”

She wished she could say the same, but at least his enthusiasm seemed genuine. She walked around to double-kiss Tom, who was fiddling with his BlackBerry, and Kip’s wife, Vanessa; they agreed unanimously that their children were doing very well, indeed, thank you.

The tables were extravagantly decorated in a safari motif — herds of toy elephants, rhinos and hippos wandering over the zebra-print tablecloths, a tropical jungle sprouting from a sisal bowl in the center. “I’m actually dying to hear all about the charity,” Corrine announced, taking up the glossy magazine-size brochure on her plate that featured a picture of Luke standing amid a sea of African schoolchildren.

“Well,” Kip said, “McGavock was a founding partner in the Riverhead Group, one of the top private equity firms. Big player. He retired a few years back, bought a winery in South Africa and planned to sit and watch the Cabernet Sauvignon ripen, but you know, guys like us, you can’t just sit on your ass no matter how much capital you’ve piled up, and sure enough he finds a project.”

“I don’t know if I’d call her a project,” said the man next to Vanessa. “More like a trophy.”

“Tony, you’re terrible,” said Vanessa, who, Corrine knew, had once been a trophy herself, and seemed genuinely amused by this remark.

“A little young,” Kip said.

“No, it’s actually age-appropriate for the second wife,” Tony said. “The formula’s half your age plus six years.”

Carl Fontaine picked up the Luke narrative: “Of course, vineyards are pretty labor-intensive, and he started getting involved with his workers. Adopted the village. Built a school and a clinic, and now he’s encouraging his old friends to do the same.”

Proud of Luke, Corrine wondered how much it cost to adopt a village. He really was a good man, a generous soul. She’d always known that about him. But how could he have gotten remarried without telling her?

“What’s with the scar?” Tony asked.

“Car crash,” Fontaine said. “Luke spent, like, three months in the hospital.”

Corrine tried to conceal her distress by waving over the waiter. Perhaps the girl had been at his bedside and he’d married her out of gratitude. She held out her wineglass for a refill of Sauvignon blanc, which Kip informed her was from Luke’s winery.

“It’s actually surprisingly good,” Russell said. “And I don’t normally go for New World wines.”

Did South Africa qualify as New World? she wondered. Wasn’t it the birthplace of the species? The home of Lucy and all those other hominid fossils? Didn’t get much older than that. She brooded through the first course, imagining Luke’s suffering, listening to Tom and the older man to his left comparing notes on game camps in Africa, arguing the virtues of Kenya versus South Africa.

“Singita Boulder’s incredible. Amazing chef.”

“We were at Masai Mara last year. Top of the line. Saw the big five.”

“What exactly are the big five?” Corrine asked.

“Five toughest game animals: lion, elephant, Cape buffalo, leopard, rhinoceros.”

Vanessa said, “I thought the big five were cats — lion, tiger, leopard, cheetah and…panther?”

“No, no,” Russell chimed in from the other side of the table. “The tiger doesn’t live in Africa, and the panther’s actually just a melanistic variant of the leopard.” He’d never been to Africa, but he’d read all of Hemingway.

Setting aside her notion of Giselle as nurse, Corrine imagined her as a predator, stalking Luke. He’d been alone in a strange land; she was a native, on familiar terrain, hunting him down. As smart and successful as he was, he was, like most men, emotionally naïve. His ex-wife, Sasha, had played him for years.

Someone onstage was talking about what a terrific guy he was, although the din from the tables made it hard to hear. At their table, Carl Fontaine was giving his own little speech about Luke: “Let’s hope he sticks with it. These private equity guys have a pretty short attention span, they’re used to the two-year turnaround — buy, slash, fix, sell. I wonder if we’ll even be here in three years.”

Corrine was indignant that no one was listening or paying attention. Did these people think paying $25,000 for a table absolved them of any semblance of courtesy?

The introduction was punctuated by scattered applause as Luke took the stage; she was relieved to notice that the chatter subsided. Standing silently on the podium, he waited until the room was almost quiet. “Ladies and gentlemen, friends, and former colleagues, and philanthropists. I was lucky enough to discover South Africa almost by accident. It’s a country of extraordinary diversity and beauty. I went there to manage a winery but ended up discovering a people….”

She tried to listen but instead found herself thinking about the first night they’d been together, at the little studio he kept in a dilapidated town house on 71st, his body stippled with stripes of streetlight filtering through the venetian blinds, the musky scent of him tinged with the residue of the acrid smoke from Ground Zero….

Fully clothed on the podium, Luke was saying, “For thirty-five thousand, less than the base price of a Lexus, you can build a double-room schoolhouse with a capacity for up to a hundred children. For the same price you can build accommodations for the teachers. Kitchens are very important, so the school can get government food grants and apply to the World Food Program. Ecofriendly, hygienic bathrooms cost about seven thousand. And water-catchment systems, gutters that trap and store rainwater in so-called JoJo tanks, these are a few thousand dollars. Less than some of us spend on a suit — I’m looking at you, Ron Tashman. Is that an Anderson & Sheppard tuxedo?”

This provoked a few ripples of laughter.

“Finally we have three clinics ready to build, each providing health care for an entire village or a township, for between a hundred and two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. You can find the details in your program. Put your name on one of those. On the screen to my right you are going to see some phone numbers next to particular projects. Text us your pledge and your name will appear on the screen on my left, along with your project. Unless, of course, you want to remain anonymous, in which case just put Ron’s name down, since he’s always happy to take credit. Let’s start out with the water-catchment systems, at a mere three grand. Come on, Chuck Coffey, that’s less than your weekly cigar budget….”

Corrine opened her grandmother’s purse, pulled out her Razr and tapped in the number. She’d never encountered this bidding technology before and she didn’t entirely believe it would work, or so she told herself as she typed in the code and then the message Happy H2O. She glanced over at Russell, who was deep in conversation with Kip Taylor’s wife. Would including his name make it better or worse? Should she just stop now? She typed Corrine and Russell Calloway and pressed SEND.

“We have our first pledge,” Luke said from the stage. He seemed to miss a beat, pause just a moment before announcing, “Corrine and Russell Calloway have just bought clean drinking water for a school in the Transvaal. Thank you, Corrine and Russell.”

Russell looked more puzzled than angry as he accepted congratulations from his tablemates before directing a quizzical gaze at Corrine. She shrugged, put on her most winsome smile. There would, of course, be an interrogation, reminders about bills and tuition, admonitions about charity beginning at home. It was going to wreck their budget for the next few months, probably. They gave, when they could, five hundred to Brown, their alma mater, five hundred to Oxfam and Meals on Wheels and the Henry Street Settlement, two fifty to PEN and the ASPCA. And they gave every day, in a sense, to Nourish New York, since as an executive director of that organization, Corrine was paid about half of what she would have been paid in a private-sector job; plus, they wrote a check every year for the gala. But they’d never given this much to any single charity. She hardly knew why she’d done it — on an impulse, as a kind of ontological squeal, a cry of “I’m here” directed at her former lover? But on reflection she was glad, and she thought she could justify it, smooth it over at home.

She had a strong suspicion that Russell was going to get lucky tonight. For him that was the good news; the bad was that she was afraid she’d be thinking of someone else.