Bright, Precious Days

27

THE CITY GREW TALLER TO THE NORTH, the lowlands of SoHo and Greenwich Village giving way to the towers of midtown. In the foreground: Chessie Steyl, the actress, in a shiny purple dress with a plunging neckline, whom Russell was complimenting on her performance, hating himself a little for the inevitable clichés, the obsequiousness of the fan, even as he felt warmed by her proximity, and her acknowledgment of his existence. Their acquaintance, casual though it might be, was based on a few encounters at gatherings like this, a party following the screening of her latest film in the penthouse of the Soho Grand Hotel. Close up, he felt she had as much iconic presence as the Empire State or the Chrysler buildings glittering behind her. Russell occasionally sent her books he thought she would like, and she would inevitably send him a thank-you note, an actual handwritten missive on a monogrammed Crane notecard — she was a product of Greenwich, Connecticut, after all — and sometimes mention these titles in her interviews. Knowing Russell gave her a little shot of lit cred, helped her feel she was smarter than she looked, which, in fact, she was. For his part, he’d been thinking for a while that she might be perfect for the lead in the film adaptation of Jeff’s novel. She looked to him quite a bit like the younger Corrine Calloway. It would be an elegant sublimation of his desire for this sexy young actress to see her play the fictional version of his wife.

“I just got the galleys for Toni Morrison’s new novel,” she said, offering him a cigarette from her pack of American Spirits, which he accepted, although he hadn’t smoked in years. She produced a Zippo from her purse.

“May I?” he said, taking the lighter. He cupped his hand around the flame as she leaned over, offering a thrilling view of her breasts.

“What else should I be reading?”

It was flattering that she seemed to be devoting all of her attention to him, putting her hand on his arm and drawing him into a conspiracy that excluded all of the noisy and populous party in her honor. “Have I sent you Jack Carson’s short stories? No? Really amazing. He’s like a latter-day Raymond Carver, a smart hillbilly Hemingway. Incredibly powerful stuff. And I’m just publishing this memoir by Phillip Kohout — you know, the guy who got captured by the Taliban? He was going to come with me tonight, but he has a stomach thing. I don’t know if you got the invitation, but we’re having a launch party next week.”

“I can’t wait,” she said, letting go of his arm to attend to the publicist who was whispering in her ear, the spell broken as she nodded and turned back to Russell, flicking her cigarette away and kissing his cheek in parting.

Russell watched her waft away, her serene self-containment unpunctured by the spiky anxiety of her handler, and Russell found himself alone on the terrace, which seemed terribly cold now, high above the icy, sparkling city. The metropolis was uncharacteristically silent against the din of the gathering inside the penthouse, a ridiculous circus from this vantage: the babble, the postures and gestures, the ambition and striving and yearning coiled therein…the way the energy in the room shifted and realigned as the actress entered from the terrace. For a moment, he recognized how artificial it all was, but he, too, was part of it.

Back inside, he was heading for the bar when he was accosted by Steve Sanders, a cultural reporter for the Times. Decent guy, bit of a nerd, he somehow managed to get everything just slightly wrong when he wrote about publishing. Not malicious, just slightly clueless and humorless. Russell hadn’t seen him since the Labor Day party, when he’d brought that fat-ass hit man Toby Barnes along.

“I called your office earlier,” he said, “but you’d already left.”

“And here I am in the flesh.”

“I also tried Phillip Kohout several times.”

“Actually, he was supposed to be here tonight,” Russell said, “but he canceled on me.”

“Maybe we should, uh…” He motioned to an unoccupied corner, to which Russell followed him. His manner seemed ominous.

“What’s up?”

“I wanted you to have a chance to answer these accusations before I—”

“What accusations?”

“Basically, my sources are saying that during the time Kohout was supposedly in captivity in the North-West Frontier Province, he was hiding out in an opium den in Lahore.”

Russell laughed. “You’re talking about the stuff on that Islamist Web site last week? I mean, come on, we saw that. It’s a forum for crazy jihadist ranting. What evidence is there?”

“Dated photographs. Video. E-mails. All from the time Kohout claimed to be a captive in Waziristan. In fact, it seems he was briefly held, and roughed up, by some drug dealers he owed money to.”

“Where’s this coming from?”

“Obviously, I can’t divulge my sources, but this is coming from people who saw him in Lahore.”

“The fact that he spent some party time in Lahore doesn’t mean he wasn’t in captivity in Waziristan. He writes about it in the book.” Russell’s mind was racing, his sense of indignation undercut by a creeping sense of dread. The Internet was awash in conspiracy theories and unfounded innuendo, as Kohout had reminded him when the first post questioning his claim to have been captured was brought to his attention. But, like stopped clocks, cranks and lunatics sometimes told the truth.

“The evidence we’ve gathered suggests he was in Lahore the entire time. And according to our Washington desk, the State Department had doubts from the beginning. They’re working the story on that end, and we’d clearly like to talk to Kohout and get his response. But in the meantime, I’m curious to get your reaction. Were you aware that Kohout was perpetrating a hoax?”

“Of course not. I’m still not aware of any such thing.”

“I’d be interested to know what kind of vetting and fact-checking you’ve done to verify his story.”

Russell felt dizzy and slightly nauseous. In fact, he’d done very little — the story of Kohout’s abduction had been reported all over the world, including the pages of The New York Times, and the book itself was vivid, rich in detail and texture.

Suddenly, he saw a glimmer of light, a chance of reprieve. “If you want to talk about vetting,” Russell said, “The New Yorker’s running their excerpt next week, and they’ve got the toughest fact-checking department in the world.”

“What I hear — they’ve dropped the excerpt they were publishing precisely because of concerns about veracity. You didn’t know about this?”

Could that possibly be true? If so, it was a very bad sign. Of course, he’d had his moments of doubt about Kohout’s story, certain details in his narrative that didn’t quite jibe with others, but Kohout’s explanations had seemed convincing enough, though in retrospect Russell had been perhaps too willing to accept them, too facile in suppressing his concerns. And Kohout’s last-minute cancellation tonight, just before the screening, suddenly seemed suspicious, and telling. Thinking back on it, he realized Phillip had seemed a little flustered and out of sorts this past week, hadn’t he?

Suddenly, Sanders was holding a small digital recorder in front of his nose. “Would you care to comment on the allegations?”

“No, I fucking wouldn’t.” He couldn’t print that in the Times. He glanced at his watch: ten-forty, too late for tomorrow’s paper. Assuming Sanders felt he had enough to go with, Russell had less than twenty-four hours to get this figured out. In the meantime, he shouldn’t be pissing the guy off. “Obviously, I’ve got to look into this,” he said. “I’ll call you first thing in the morning.”

“This isn’t going to go away, Russell,” Sanders said, looking uncharacteristically fierce behind his round steel glasses, seeming less clueless and nerdy than at any time in their acquaintance.

Sanders followed Russell as he pushed through the crowd toward the elevator. In his haste to escape, Russell almost collided with Chessie Steyl, who was being interviewed by a video crew.

“Oh here’s my friend Russell Calloway,” she blurted. “He’s a brilliant editor. We were just talking about books. He’s, like, my literary mentor. Mostly he publishes fiction, but he was just telling me about this memoir by that guy who was captured by the Taliban. I’m so bad with names — what was it, Russell?”

“Um, Phillip Kohout.”

“I can’t wait to read it,” she said.

The interviewer seemed not to know what to make of this exchange; Sanders, though, appeared to find it fascinating, hunched over his notebook, scribbling away, his head bobbing up and down like a hungry crow pecking at carrion.

—

The mailbox of the subscriber you are trying to reach is full and cannot accept new messages at this time.

Russell wasn’t the only person looking for Phillip, apparently — that lying bastard. He decided to try cornering him in his apartment, only a few blocks away at Spring and Sullivan — a breach of Manhattan etiquette necessitated by the urgency of the search. He had to tread carefully, the frozen SoHo sidewalk slick as a water slide against the leather soles of his new cordovan loafers.

There was no answer to his repeated ringing of Phillip’s buzzer. He would have called Briskin, Phillip’s agent, who would at least, presumably, know if The New Yorker had backed out of the deal, but he didn’t have his home or cell number.

Almost more than anything else, he dreaded telling Corrine. She’d been against his acquisition of the Kohout book from the start, and while she hadn’t exactly questioned its authenticity, she’d certainly questioned the author’s character, which was really the ultimate point at issue. She didn’t trust him, and now he felt it in his gut: She was right, and he was screwed. He’d printed 75,000 copies of the book, more than half of which were already in transit to bookstores at this moment; advanced copies had been in the hands of reviewers and journalists for weeks. Just two days ago he’d written Kohout a check for $250,000; Briskin had asked for an early payment of the amount due on publication — a request that now looked highly suspicious. The book was, for all intents and purposes, already published.

Standing on the sidewalk outside Phillip’s building after fruitlessly ringing his buzzer, he realized that one of the few people he knew at The New Yorker lived only a few blocks away, and on an impulse he set off for Thompson Street, even as he wondered whether she might still be living there after all these years. As he approached the doorway, he felt a tingling of recognition that seemed to suffuse his bloodstream, heating the surface of his skin; for years he’d visited this apartment for late-night assignations with a woman with whom he’d never shared a meal or accompanied to a social gathering, arriving in the middle of the night after a drunken business dinner or a book party. He hadn’t hit that buzzer in many years—9/11 had served to break the spell — and he’d seen her only once in the aftermath, though he still called upon the store of memories of their past encounters when he was in need of erotic stimulus, and now, involuntarily, he felt a stirring in his groin as he found himself standing in front of the familiar door. Checking the names on the row of buzzers, he found hers and pressed it, jumping when the intercom crackled with her voice.

“Who is it?”

He could hardly bring himself to answer, ashamed as he was of his neglect of her for the past six years. But then, he’d always felt a measure of shame standing in front of this door. “It’s Russell,” he finally managed to croak.

The intercom went silent, and after what seemed like an eternity he was about to turn away, when he was startled by the harsh metallic jangle. He reached for the door handle and pulled it open.

“I don’t believe it,” she said after letting him in. She was wearing a faded black T-shirt and white panties. There was a blue bruise with yellow highlights on her left thigh and her legs had a faint dusting of black stubble. It was the smell that was most familiar at first, a potent alloy of pot, dry rot, decaying food, dirty laundry and Japanese incense, which failed to mask the other smells. Behind her, on the floor next to the bed, was a pile of unwashed clothing; in the little kitchen, a half-eaten egg roll sat on plate beside a tangle of sesame noodles.

He stood in the doorway while she slouched against the door frame of the kitchen, just a few feet away.

“After all these years you just barge in here like nothing’s changed.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Are you at least going to come in?”

He stepped just inside the apartment and closed the door behind him.

“Why did you want to see me?”

“Because I’m in trouble and I need your help.”

“I think you wanted to see me because you wanted me to suck your cock. Isn’t that why you wanted to see me?”

“Don’t say that.”

“Why shouldn’t I say it? It’s not true?”

“That’s not why I came.” He suddenly realized that telling her the real purpose of his visit — that he hadn’t come for her at all, but merely for information that she might, by virtue of her employment, possess — seemed worse than saying he’d come for sex.

“Are you sure? Because that used to be why you came. You couldn’t stay away, could you? Do you remember how you’d come here in the middle of the night and ring my buzzer because you just knew that no matter what time it was I’d suck your cock for you?”

“Yes, I remember,” he said, his voice quavering.

“Would you like me to suck your cock now?”

She moved toward him, approaching within inches, the top of her head coming just up to his chin, and cupped her hand on his crotch. “I bet you’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“That’s not why I came. I need to know if The New Yorker has canceled the Phillip Kohout piece.”

She grabbed at his crotch. Pushing her away, he almost knocked her over.

He turned, wrenched the door open and ran down the stairs. Halfway up the block, he heard footsteps, turned to see her loping after him, her panties showing beneath a quilted parka.

Before he could quite decide what to do, he found himself running; it was absurd, running from a hundred-pound girl. It was a reflex, an instinctive response; he’d just started running; he wanted to be rid of her, to put this entire sordid portion of his life out of mind forever, and she seemed determined not to let him escape. But he was risking his life in these new loafers and it soon became clear she could keep up with him.

He stopped at the corner of Spring and Thompson and turned to confront her.

“This is ridiculous,” he said, trying to read her expression as she stood a few feet away, panting. “What do you want?”

“What do you want? You were the one who came to my door.”

“Look, I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. It was a bad idea. Can we just say I made a stupid mistake and I’m sorry?”

“You think you can just make me disappear? That’s what you always thought, wasn’t it? That I just ceased to exist when you weren’t using me.”

“If I made you feel that way, then I’m truly sorry.”

A festive couple reeled toward them, their laughter chiming in the empty canyon of Spring Street, then dying as they approached Russell and Trish. Russell looked at the girl, with her messy straw curls, wrapped in a flowing black and white kaffiyeh, rolling his eyes in the hope of communicating the fact that he had no connection to this wild waif on the street, that he had nothing to do with the bruise on her thigh, trying to communicate his status as a hostage to the seminaked woman in Uggs and a parka, but the young woman showed no flicker of sympathy, turning up her pierced nose, mildly suspicious, disdainful of the tableau and its players, leaning into her boyfriend’s argyle sweater to mutter “Freak show” as they rolled past, laughing as they receded to the west.

“What do you want?” Russell demanded.

“What do you want?”

“I just want to go home, okay?”

“Home to your perfect wife, Corrine.”

“Just home.”

“How do you think Corrine would react if she knew you’d come round to see me tonight?”

“Come on, Trish.”

“Oh, what, I’m just supposed to melt when you say my name?”

“I’m going now — okay?”

He turned and stepped down from the curb, crossing Spring, heading downtown. When he looked back over his shoulder, he saw that she was following some ten paces behind. He turned and faced her again.

“What are you going to do, follow me home?”

“That sounds like an interesting plan.”

He turned again and broke into a run, but he was hampered by the slickness of his soles, which gave him minimal traction and kept him perpetually struggling for balance. When he turned to look back, she was in pursuit, half a block behind him.

He spotted a cab heading west on Broome Street and waved it down, nearly slamming into it as he slid on the street, jumping in and slamming the door just as Trish reached the curb.

“Just get me out of here,” he said to the cabbie, a Sikh. “And lock the doors.”

She was yanking on the handle of his door, but he held it shut until the man had activated the locks.

“Go, please.”

While the cabbie seemed to be assessing the situation, Trish walked to the front of the cab and threw herself across the windshield. The driver leaned on his horn, with no effect. She remained sprawled on the windshield, her white panties pressed against the glass in front of the driver’s face, looking in at Russell with an expression that was uncanny and serene, which seemed to say, You see what I’m capable of?

“Hey, I do not need this shit. Go. Get out of my cab.”

“She’s crazy,” Russell said.

“Get out!”

“Come on, man.”

“I call the cops.”

“Okay, call the cops.”

He disappeared below the seat back and reappeared brandishing a large curved knife — a kirpan. The name popped into his head, something he’d read; all baptized Sikhs were required to carry one.

“Okay, okay.”

He threw open the door and launched himself toward the Hudson, getting a good lead on her this time, dodging south on Sixth Avenue. He couldn’t believe he was fleeing this wisp of a girl, and yet he couldn’t see any alternative, as he was afraid she would follow him all the way to his loft. A girl who would throw herself on the windshield of a cab wasn’t going to stand on ceremony. He considered the subway station as he approached Canal Street but thought better of it.

She was still close behind him when he got to Canal Street, dodging through the late-night tunnel traffic.

Once he took off his shoes, he was able to put some distance between them, but he realized that he had to stop leading her to his home. Did she know his address? He veered east on Lispenard and ran all the way to Broadway before turning back downtown; looking back from the corner of Walker Street, he didn’t see her behind him, and he thought he might finally have ditched her, though he continued to move obliquely, down Church and east again on Walker, only gradually slowing his pace and registering the numbness of his feet.

He approached his building from downtown, via Chambers Street, scanning the street, which was, thankfully, deserted.

The apartment was dark. He pulled off the shredded remains of his socks and deposited them in the kitchen trash bin, then tended to the soles of his numbed feet with damp paper towels.

In the bedroom, he moved stealthily as he undressed.

“How was it?” Corrine asked when he’d settled in beside her.

“Oh, baby, I’m in so much trouble,” he said, rolling over and burrowing into the warm, fragrant refuge between her arm and breast, his heart still pounding with panic.