Bright, Precious Days

25

REPORTERS ON CNN WERE DISCUSSING the upcoming Wisconsin primary and predicting a win for Obama when they left the kids with Jean and walked down the block to Odeon. As soon as they were seated, he spotted Washington at a nearby table with a young woman in a sleek black dress who looked more Condé Nast than Corbin, Dern — an unwelcome sight insofar as he felt it might provoke Corrine. As Washington’s best friend, and a male of the species, he was afraid he’d somehow be implicated; in fact, he felt guilty already, as if Corrine, seeing this, might intuit his own sins of thought, if not of deed.

“Oh God, there’s Wash,” Corrine said as she unfurled her napkin.

“You’d think he’d at least have the decency to take it out of the neighborhood,” Russell said. Veronica had thrown him out of their apartment the night of Corrine’s benefit some two weeks before.

“Well, it’s not like he hasn’t begged her to take him back. Actually, it might be good for them both if she saw him here with a bimbo.”

“I guess you’re right,” he said, careful not to cast his lot too openly with the straying husband.

“It could just be a business thing,” she suggested.

“Yeah, I suppose.”

“I’m not saying Washington’s a saint.”

“That would indeed stretch credulity.”

“But it takes two to derail a marriage.”

“I’m not sure I believe that,” Russell said. “I wouldn’t say I blame Charles Bovary for his wife’s behavior.”

“I don’t see why not. He was kind of a pathetic doofus.”

All at once he wondered if it was possible she was having an affair. Was she building a case for herself, a defense brief? But he couldn’t conjure any suspicious memories, and the hypothesis didn’t stand up to scrutiny — just a flash of paranoia.

“I’m just saying I think she changed the rules on him. For years she turned a blind eye, then suddenly she drops the boom.”

Actually, this wasn’t uncharacteristic of Corrine, this tendency to take the man’s side, to see the male point of view. It was one of the things he loved about her, although it put them on opposite sides in the Democratic primaries. She’d become an early supporter of Obama, whereas Russell believed fervently in Hillary, feeling that the freshman senator from Illinois had come out of nowhere, and that he was the beneficiary of a kind of psychological affirmative action; backing him made white Democrats proud of their liberal open-mindedness. Maybe Hillary wasn’t all that lovable, but she had the experience and the battle scars and the policies. Yet even here in New York, where racism was as unfashionable as herpes, casual sexism was like smoking: unfashionable in theory, but not without a certain retro appeal — a thesis that seemed to Russell to be confirmed by the buzz around Mad Men, which everyone had been watching. Even downtown, where Republicans were scarcer than unicorns, nostalgia for the age when a woman’s place was in the home or the typing pool still bubbled under the surface.

The waitress came by. “Negroni and a glass of champagne?”

“Absolutely,” Russell said.

“You love it that she knows what we drink,” Corrine said.

“Why wouldn’t I?”

When the waitress returned with their drinks, they ordered their food. Washington, having spotted them, waved from his table.

“I hate frisée,” Russell said. “It’s barely food; it has the texture of excelsior — those weird wood shavings they used to use for stuffing taxidermied animal corpses and packing fragile goods before the advent of Styrofoam peanuts.” He was stalling, trying to postpone the agenda. The landlord was officially converting their building to condos, so now they had to come up with a plan. They’d barely be able to afford the place, but he was determined to try.

“Yes, your views on frisée are well known, Russell. It’s a good thing we didn’t move to France, where it’s a staple, back in ’04.”

They’d told their friends back then that they were moving to France if Bush won the election — or rather, Russell had.

“Although maybe we should have,” she added.

“How so?”

“I just thought somehow we’d be somewhere else by now. I can’t believe we’re still sharing one bathroom among four people. I want to live like grown-ups, Russell.”

“Living in the city involves certain sacrifices. We could probably have four bathrooms in White Plains, but would we want to?”

“Do we still want to live here? Look around you. When we moved here, it was funky and cheap; now it’s a suburb of Wall Street. The artists have been replaced by bankers and trust fund brats. When I take the kids to school, I’m practically stampeded by guys in suits with briefcases.”

“Lou Reed and James Rosenquist still live here.”

“And they’re both rich as hell. Look, if the kids get into Hunter, we really need to think about moving uptown, and if they don’t, we need to go somewhere where they can get a great public education. We agreed Hudson River Middle was just an interim move. I won’t sacrifice their prospects for some romantic notion of a bohemia that’s extinct. It’s gone, Russell. It moved to Williamsburg, or Red Hook, or maybe it just died. There aren’t any starving poets left around here. Instead of trying to buy our apartment, I think we need to move to a less expensive part of the world, with better schools.”

“Like where?”

“I don’t know. Brooklyn? New Jersey?”

“I can’t believe you said New Jersey.” Russell suddenly felt like a losing contestant on that terrible show his kids watched, about to be kicked off the island. His island.

“There are beautiful places in New Jersey. Steve Colbert lives in New Jersey. So does Richard Gere.”

“Fuck Richard Gere. I lost two hours of my life watching Bee Season, and I’ll never get them back.”

“Even the Upper East Side is cheaper than this neighborhood. And it’s where, fingers crossed, they’ll soon be attending school.”

“The Upper East Side? Do I look like a—”

“Like a middle-aged preppy? Yes, as a matter of fact, you do. Do you realize we live in the most expensive zip code in the city? Even if we had two million, I wouldn’t want to spend it on our shitty old loft. We lived happily uptown for years, and you used to say you hated lofts.”

“It’s our home. And it won’t cost anything like two million.”

“I bet it does. We could get a house in, say, Park Slope for much less.”

“I hate Park Slope. The People’s Republic of. Strollers and food co-ops and self-righteous Manhattan bashers.”

“For a liberal, you can be incredibly bigoted and narrow-minded. Anyway, there are lots of other neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Most of your staff live in Brooklyn, and so do a lot of writers.”

“One less since we lost Mailer,” Russell said wistfully. She was right that the city was changing, even shrinking, but he wasn’t about to abandon ship. “Good old Norman. You remember his place in Brooklyn Heights?”

“Brooklyn Heights is crazy expensive,” Corrine said. “It’s virtually Manhattan.”

“If we bought the loft, we could renovate it, add another bathroom.”

“Where would we put it? On the fucking fire escape?”

Russell was getting agitated, desperate to score another drink.

“Russell, I want you to be honest with yourself and with me. We’re living like grad students and our kids are getting a crappy education. Here’s something else I don’t understand. Why is it necessary to eat at restaurants two or three times a week? That’s what, a few thousand dollars a month? We can’t afford to live here anymore.”

“We can’t afford not to live here,” Russell said peevishly.

“That’s just childish and nonsensical. I don’t even know what that means.”

“It means I’m one of those people, as Updike put it, who believes that anyone who lives anywhere other than New York must, in some sense, be kidding.”

“Do you realize we could get a town house in Harlem for what we’d end up paying for a stupid loft we outgrew ten years ago? Seriously, more and more people like us are moving up there, but it’s still affordable. And it’s on the way up.”

Harlem? Jesus Christ — though Bill Clinton had his office there, didn’t he? Honorary black man, though lately he’d lost some of that cred campaigning against Obama. “At least it’s Manhattan,” Russell conceded. “Barely.”

“What does Manhattan even signify anymore?” she said. “Certainly not what it did twenty-five years ago. Now it’s an island of wealthy people shopping in the same stores you can find in San Francisco and London and Dubai. Look around you, Russell. Look at the shiny condos going up all around us, crowding out the middle class and your old bohemians, blocking out the sunlight. I want you to grow up and get serious about this. We need to start looking for another place to live, and if you can’t face up to that, I’ll start looking on my own.”

What he wanted to say was that being a resident not only of Manhattan but of downtown was an irreducible core of his identity. He was as much — if not more — a New Yorker as those who found themselves here through the accident of birth, through no inclination or effort of their own, he and his tribe of restless striving immigrants from the provinces and the farthest corners of the earth, who’d been inexorably drawn here and had made the city their own, who’d shaped it and been shaped by it. And for Russell, New York was downtown Manhattan: Greenwich Village, SoHo, TriBeCa. He could even imagine a case being made for Chelsea or the Flatiron District. He refused to believe that the city no longer had room for people like themselves, refused to concede New York to the Power and Money team. It needed the Art and Love team, goddamn it: actors who were not yet famous; used bookstores and the people who worked in them, and professional waiters and dog walkers and piano tuners. It needed bassoon players and chorus line dancers as well as the corps de ballet, watchmakers and furniture restorers and cobblers and dealers in rare coins and stamps. It needed underpaid blue bloods with degrees from Brown who fed the undernourished, and midwestern refugees who published literary fiction. It needed them. This was the city he’d chosen of all the places in the world; to live anywhere else would feel like exile.