Bright, Precious Days

23

THE SHADOWS GREW LONGER in the windy canyons of TriBeCa, and soon it was time to throw away the shrunken, collapsed pumpkins and bring the winter coats out of storage. Although they’d been eager to go trick-or-treating again this year, Jeremy and Storey announced over Thanksgiving dinner that they were too old now for The Nutcracker—a family tradition since they were toddlers.

December was the swiftest month, the days growing shorter as the invitations and the obligations mounted, hats and coats and gloves laboriously donned and doffed, Christmas cards signed and addressed, presents chosen and purchased. And the parties, which by the middle of the month came to seem like work, waking to the alarm parched and headachy and chilly in the dark, too soon after the last cocktail, the last farewell; frost veining the windows, chilled air leaking through the gaps in the warped, paint-layered frames, burrowing deeper in the covers and moving closer to the hot lump of your husband.

All the new restaurants that year seemed to be hangar-size Asian fusion spots decorated with giant Buddhas and aquariums stocked with predatory fish, but tonight the boys had chosen a faux-rustic place in the Village, the interior of which resembled a Provençal farmhouse. Cylinders of brown paper bound in twine turned out to be their menus, which faithfully listed the source of all the ingredients, most of them organic. Corrine’s duck hailed from Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

“Are you done with Christmas shopping?” Veronica asked her as their husbands dissected the bill of fare.

“Almost. Storey, naturally, picked her own, a princess bed from Pottery Barn that’s supposed to be delivered tomorrow, and assorted slutty accessories from Juicy Couture. Jeremy’s getting a cell phone — I forget what kind; Russell did that — plus some horrible video games. On the other hand, I haven’t finished the Christmas cards.”

“I can’t believe you still do cards.”

“Russell insists. You know how he is about Christmas.”

“We do it all online — shopping, e-cards.”

“I wish we could visit my mother online and dispense with the actual trip to Stockbridge.”

“That’s still on?”

“Afraid so. I go up a day or two early to spend a little extra time fighting with Mom, then Russell and the kids come Christmas Eve and we leave as early as possible on the twenty-sixth for five days skiing at Killington — a package we bought at the school auction.” The Lee clan, she knew, was going to Saint Barth’s, their own destination last year.

After dinner, the four of them retrieved their coats and wraps from the coat check and bundled themselves against the cold, their misty exhalations like empty speech balloons as they walked past the Greek Revival town houses on Downing Street and waited for a cab on Varick. The chilly air revived her and reminded her of other wintry city nights — the sidewalk debates about the next stop, the farewells to friends, the last cigarettes, and, suddenly very specifically, of a cold night long ago not far from here when, leaving a long-since-shuttered bistro, they’d passed a young boy huddled, shivering, in a shadowed doorway and she’d stopped to ask him if he was okay, Russell palpably irritated by what he called her “missionary impulse,” suspicious of all sidewalk mendicants, the boy so young, barely a teenager, saying, finally, “I’m cold,” and she’d unfurled her scarf and stooped to wrap it around his neck, turning to look at Russell, and to his credit he’d understood, taking several bills from his wallet and handing them to the boy, the memory warming her even as it made her unbearably sad for the lost boy and for the years that had disappeared between that moment and this.

“What’s the matter?” he said now, pulling her close. “Are you crying?”

“It’s just the cold,” she said.

—

“I’m glad you’ve patched things up with your sister,” Jessie said, pouring her first vodka of the day, four fingers in the same heavy juice glass she’d been using since Corrine was a kid. It was four in the afternoon, the commencement of cocktail hour, apparently. Once upon a time, it had kicked off at 6:00 p.m., but at least there was still some boundary. Before pouring her first drink, Jessie had watched the clock over the kitchen stove while the minute hand clicked toward its apex, although there was no numeral to mark the twelve o’clock spot — the numbers were piled in a jumble at the bottom of the clock face, which bore the legend Who Cares? I’m Retired. It was one of the few furnishings that had changed since Corrine was in high school. And in fact, Jessie wasn’t quite retired, still putting in a day or two at the antiques store she ran in Stockbridge, or so she claimed, though more and more she left the management of it to the lesbian couple who’d worked there since graduating from Bennington a decade before.

“Actually, I haven’t entirely made up with her,” Corrine said. “I just sort of humored her and made a vague threat about getting together.”

“None of us is perfect. Although sometimes we thought you were. Don’t forget it wasn’t so easy for her, following you, with your straight A’s, and Miss Porter’s and captain of the lacrosse team. Ivy League, summa cum laude, and then marrying Russell right out of college. I think the only role left for Hilary was the bad girl.”

Corrine was sort of amazed at this idealized portrait of herself. “Well, she must feel better now that I’ve failed to live up to my early promise.”

“Your life looks pretty great from where I sit, kiddo. A good husband, two great kids. Not that I’ve seen them recently.”

“They’ll be here tomorrow, Mom.”

“One big happy family,” Jessie said. “Enjoy it, because you never know when your husband will run off with your best friend.”

“I don’t think Russell’s rich enough to tempt Casey.”

Sooner or later, Jessie inevitably steered the conversation back to her own sense of loss and betrayal, the husband who’d indeed run off thirty years ago with her best friend, although usually this came later in the evening. It had become the defining event of Jessie’s existence, the original sin. Corrine was determined to steer clear of this miasma as long as possible and excused herself, saying she wanted to unpack.

—

Visitors never failed to be surprised at the gloomy ambience of Corrine’s room, which Russell characterized as “preppy Goth”; aside from a few athletic trophies and a lacrosse stick, the predominant decorative element consisted of grave rubbings from nearby Colonial graveyards. Like many adolescents, Corrine had exhibited a strong morbid streak, along with an interest in local history. She’d spent hours wandering the cemeteries in search of tragic stories, taping newsprint to the stones and rubbing charcoal over it, the ghostly letters as they appeared seeming like nothing so much as spirit writing, like terse communiqués from the dead. A few were selected for the crude beauty of the stonework, skulls with angel wings being her favorite motif. But most she chose for the poignance of their inscriptions. Here was little Hattie Speare, who died in 1717: An Aged Soule Who had seene but 7 Wynters in this World. As a teenager, Corrine was haunted by this one and spent many hours imagining the life that might have inspired it. These grim haiku helped her to survive adolescence. She found them comforting, much as others took solace in songs of heartbreak.

She opened the door to the closet and dug back into the depths, parting the phalanx of musty dresses and blouses, stepping over the rows of embarrassing shoes and boots, pushing aside the boxes behind them until she uncovered a big flat package wrapped in cardboard and sealed with duct tape. She wrestled it out into the room and cut the tape with a box cutter, pulling away the layers of cardboard to reveal an oil painting she hadn’t looked at in over twenty years, a canvas by Tony Duplex.

She propped it up against the bed and stood back for a closer look. It was a single canvas divided into three panels. The center panel was a map of Manhattan pasted on the canvas; he had painted the bust of a man on one side and on the other a woman. The painter had managed to imply a relationship between the two, though they were not looking at each other; the images were less stylized, more realistic and lyrical than most of Duplex’s figures. Painted neatly across the bottom of the map were the words OH SHIT, I GUESS I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN IT WOULD BE LIKE THIS.

She had always thought the two figures in the painting were, in Jeff’s mind, himself and Corrine. She needed to decide what to do with the painting, whether to sell it now or to hang on to it in the hope that its value might appreciate. For the moment it seemed safe enough here, along with the other artifacts of her past that she couldn’t yet bear to part with, including the very few surviving mementos from Jeff. He’d been careful in what he committed to writing; she was sad now that, out of a sense of discretion, he’d never sent her an actual letter. Instead, he’d sent her books with underlined passages, pointed and poignant texts. She took a small box from the closet and pulled out one that Jeff had sent her after Russell had returned from Oxford; they’d been married a few months later. She’d been working as a broker downtown and Jeff had mailed this slim volume, The Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, to her office, and, as a kind of quiet rebuke and lament, included a bookmark marking the poem “They Flee from Me.”

They flee from me that sometime did me seek

With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.

I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,

That now are wild and do not remember

That sometime they put themself in danger

To take bread at my hand; and now they range,

Busily seeking with a continual change.

Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise

Twenty times better; but once in special,

In thin array after a pleasant guise,

When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,

And she me caught in her arms long and small;

Therewithall sweetly did me kiss

And softly said, “Dear heart, how like you this?”

It was no dream: I lay broad waking.

But all is turned thorough my gentleness

Into a strange fashion of forsaking;

And I have leave to go of her goodness,

And she also, to use newfangleness.

But since that I so kindly am served

I would fain know what she hath deserved.

The second book was a battered old hardcover without dust jacket, a 1959 edition of a medieval text, The Art of Courtly Love, by Andreas Capellanus, wherein a letter addressed “To the illustrious and wise woman M, Countess of Champagne” was underlined. She didn’t need to reread the letter, having done so many times. Two nobles, a man and woman, supposedly wrote it in order to pose a question: whether true love can exist between husband and wife, and whether lovers have any right to be jealous of spouses. To which the countess answered, at some length, that love by definition cannot obtain between man and wife, who are duty-bound to each other, but only between lovers, who choose each other freely, and whose jealousy is a concomitant of their love. Jeff had thought this very clever, and apposite, at the time, a few months after Corrine married Russell. It seemed almost ridiculous, given the situation, the friendship between the two men, and their mutual desire for Corrine, that Jeff’s major was Elizabethan literature, his senior thesis about the conventions of courtly love. As events unfolded later, it seemed incredibly touching that he’d chosen to write about the antique notion of a love both illicit and spiritually elevating, a love that existed outside the legal sphere of marriage. Did he see himself even then as her vassal, her knight?

Back in her school days, she would not have believed it was possible to love two people, but she had learned that it was. And the sadder truth was that possession blunted desire, while the unattainable lover shimmered at the edge of the mind like a brilliant star, festered in the heart like a shard of crystal.