Bright, Precious Days

3

STILL ON THE AFRICAN CLOCK, Luke woke up a few hours after he’d fallen asleep, thinking about Corrine. He checked the markets in Europe, cleared his e-mail and talked to his vineyard manager. Baboons harassing the pruning team — normally only a problem near the harvest, in March, when the grapes were ripe. Something they didn’t have to deal with in Napa or Bordeaux. The workers threw rocks at them and the apes started throwing them back. His manager had put in an early order for lion dung from a local game park, which was effective as a deterrent.

He’d known that he would see Corrine the night before last, but he hadn’t really known how he would react. Three years ago, after yet another post-breakup rendezvous, he’d taken himself to the other side of the world in no small part to get away from her.

He met Giselle at a garden party in Franschhoek, a pretty girl in a white dress crouching in the courtyard, talking to a giant tortoise with a ring dangling from a hole in its shell, feeding it an orange wedge from the drink in her hand. “We’re old friends,” she said when she looked up and caught him watching her. And indeed, her little gold nose ring hinted at a certain affinity. He was immediately attracted to her; only later did he become conscious of her resemblance to Corrine.

Twenty-nine years old, she’d recently broken off a long engagement with a man she’d known since childhood. That first afternoon she told him quite frankly that she was tired of all the young men in her insular social circle and that she was thinking of moving to London or the States. She’d done some modeling in Paris as a teenager, traveled in her early twenties, and ended up back home in Cape Town, where she fell in with an old family friend, who’d eventually proposed.

Luke told her about his recent divorce from Sasha, about his daughter, who’d be joining him for her summer vacation, but he never mentioned Corrine. Before proposing to Giselle, he’d gone back to New York and spent a month at the Carlyle, somehow imagining that he’d run into Corrine somewhere. He felt that if he did, it would be a sign. A few days after he returned to South Africa, he ran into Giselle at a cocktail party.

At seven-thirty the breakfast cart was delivered and he woke Giselle, who was flying back to Cape Town that morning. “All packed?” he asked as she lingered over tea in her fluffy white bathrobe.

“I think so,” she said. “I’m sorry to leave you here alone.”

“I’ll be busy,” he told her, “and you can’t very well miss your cousin’s wedding.”

After the bellman finally came for the luggage, he walked her down to the car. “I’ll miss you,” she said.

“I’ll miss you, too,” he agreed, though in fact for the first time he could recall he was impatient for her to leave.

After the car disappeared into traffic, he scrolled to Corrine’s number on his BlackBerry and typed: Thanks for the contribution. It was great to see you the other night.

It occurred to him that their affair had preceded texting — or at least their own use of it. Maybe she didn’t text.

A few minutes later the instrument buzzed, dancing on the onyx coffee table.

Great not quite the word I’d use. Had no idea would see you. Husband not real happy about sudden excursion into philanthropy.

Don’t worry, I’ll cover you on that.

Too late. Already settled up on the way out.

Can I see you?

Why?

Tell you when I see you.

He stood at the big window, looking downtown, as if he might be able to spot her out there down near the tip of the island, past the MetLife, the Chrysler and the Empire State Buildings, checking the screen of his BlackBerry as the minutes ticked by. The device finally vibrated again.

Working today in Bronx.

Time to meet before?

9 AM Caffe Roma.

He wondered if he was supposed to know where it was, if she was testing him. He Googled it: a pastry place in Little Italy. They’d stopped there once, he remembered now, coming off the night shift at the soup kitchen. Cannolis and cappuccino. Holding hands under the table, the interior redolent of fresh-baked bread and coffee after a night in the acrid smoke, the airborne residue of the ruined towers, of which they both reeked. Still dark outside, the only other customers a table of revelers who’d closed some nearby bar or nightclub, soaking up the alcohol with sweets.

If Corrine was trying to be discreet, she’d picked well. Little Italy, what was left of it that hadn’t been swallowed by Chinatown, was an unlikely destination for anyone they might know. A few tables away, a young French-speaking couple pored over a map. The only other customers were four strident Italians, throwing back espressos and talking with their hands — the whole place picturesque, quaint in a manner that to fashionable New Yorkers would seem kitsch: the white marble tables with their cartoonish bent-wire café chairs, the dark green pressed-tin ceiling sagging with innumerable layers of paint, the display case teeming with pale confections. He checked his e-mails, and tested his French by eavesdropping on the couple two tables away, who were deconstructing Scorsese movies.

Through the window he spotted Corrine, hurrying up the sidewalk in a peacoat and jeans, and for just a minute he could see her as a type, a New York woman rushing somewhere important, harried but not frantic, confident that she would be waited for.

“I’m sorry,” she said, sitting down across from him. “I was thinking of making you wait, of being deliberately late, until I realized how childish that would be, but then I got caught on the phone with our director about a lost truckload of cabbages.”

Not a type at all, he realized happily, recognizing what he took to be the singular staccato rhythms of her thought, though he was baffled by the reference to cabbages. “I’m just glad you came at all.”

“Well, I didn’t want your last impression of me to be flustered and tongue-tied. As I suspect I was the other night.”

“I thought you were very composed.”

“Please. I was…flummoxed. I had no idea what the event was, or that you were the focus of it. Kind of a shock, really. You could have warned me you were coming to town.”

“If I had, you might’ve raced off in the opposite direction.”

“I can’t believe I was totally oblivious to the fact that it was your charity.”

“Do you know what I was thinking about when I was up on the podium?”

“Your wife’s dimples?”

“I was thinking about making love to you on that musty old couch in Nantucket with Gram Parsons singing ‘Love Hurts.’ ”

“Gram Parsons was correct,” she said. “It does hurt. It would behoove us both to remember that.”

He started to sing softly: “Love hurts, love scars, love wounds and mars—”

“Luke, for God’s sake.” She was blushing, embarrassed by the attention he was attracting, not to mention the quality of his singing. “That was terrible. You shouldn’t be allowed to sing outside the shower.”

“I bought the album after that weekend. I’d never even heard of Gram Parsons.”

“Shouldn’t you be singing to your wife? How the hell old is she, by the way?”

“Young enough to be my daughter, but older than my actual daughter.”

“Well, close enough, no doubt, that they can become BFFs.”

“She’ll be thirty-two next month.”

“And you are, let’s see, fifty-seven?”

He nodded.

“What’s the rule of thumb I heard the other night, the remarriage formula? Half your age plus six years, that’s the ideal equation for a second wife in this town. I guess by that measure she’s just a little young.”

She was smiling, but he definitely detected the edge. “I admit, when you put it that way, I’m feeling like a cliché.”

“Does she know about me?”

He shook his head.

“I’m glad of that at least.” She seemed to ponder this. “Cappuccino,” she said. “I’d like a cappuccino to go. I have to leave in five minutes.”

When he returned with the coffees, he could tell her mood had turned darker. “You know, I almost broke up my family for you,” she said. “And then I don’t hear from you for three years. I’d have thought, at least, we were friends.”

He was taken aback at the iciness of her tone. “We were far more than friends, Corrine. What was I supposed to do, write you e-mails about the weather? It was painful. I wanted you and it didn’t seem possible and I had to pull away. Hell, I went halfway around the globe to forget about you.”

He hadn’t necessarily realized this back then, but in retrospect it seemed obvious.

“What did you feel after that night at the Carlyle a few years back? When you ran back to Tennessee, when you stopped calling and returning my e-mails?”

“I was afraid we were just falling back into an untenable situation. Our circumstances hadn’t changed. You were still married. I was sad and the situation seemed hopeless. I’m pretty certain now that I may have gotten married again in an attempt to get over you.”

“So it wasn’t just that you’d forgotten me?”

“I had an accident about a year ago, and it was touch-and-go for a couple of days whether I’d make it.” He fingered his scar, still numb, to illustrate. “Strangely enough, when I came to in the hospital, my wife was asleep in the chair beside me, lying with her face turned away from me. All I could see was her hair — and I was convinced it was you. I even called your name.” He wasn’t actually sure if he’d said her name out loud, but he’d indeed imagined, briefly, that the woman in the chair was Corrine, and he wanted to tell her so.

She was staring at him intently, apparently weighing the truth of this assertion. “Was your left eye injured?”

He nodded.

“Can you see out of it?”

“Not really. Sorry, I know it’s disconcerting.”

“Please. I’m the one who should be sorry.” She lifted her cup and looked down into the foam. “Do you know where the name comes from? Cappuccino?”

He shook his head.

“From the color of the coffee-milk mixture, which reminded someone of the color of a Capuchin friar’s habit.”

“That’s one of the things I miss about you.”

“My pedantry?”

He shrugged. “That sounds negative. Your eccentric erudition, let’s say.”

“You didn’t have all that much time to get used to it, did you?”

“It’s hard to believe it was only two, three months.”

“Ninety days, as it happens.”

“Was that it?”

“From the day I first saw you walking up West Broadway, covered in ash, till the day after The Nutcracker, when we said good-bye in Battery Park. You see, I really am a pedant.”

“That sounds more romantic than pedantic.”

“Well, whatever. I’m off to work.”

“What are you writing?”

“I’m not writing, actually. I decided there were plenty of unemployed screenwriters in the world already.”

“But The Heart of the Matter was produced. I read a great review in the Financial Times.”

“I must’ve missed that one.” She shrugged. “Let’s just say it was less than a blockbuster.”

“I thought it was great.”

“You actually saw it?” She seemed skeptical.

“I own the DVD. Watched it three times.”

“Twice more than I did.”

“You were always self-deprecating, almost to a fault. It’s a very rare quality.”

“In this city, perhaps.”

“So now you’re…”

“I work for an organization called Nourish New York. We solicit excess food from local restaurants, food banks, farmers, grocery stores, and try to get it to the people who need it.”

“Sounds somewhat familiar.”

She blushed and looked away. He was touched that her new vocation connected her to their shared past in the soup kitchen.

“Did you ever write that book about samurai movies?”

It took him a minute to figure out what she was talking about; he’d forgotten that this was one of many projects he’d conceived after retiring from the firm, samurai films having been a passion for many years. “I discovered I don’t have the patience or concentration to sit down and write a book.”

“It’s probably true,” she said. “I’d forgotten how hyper you are. Like the way you tap your foot when you talk.” She paused. “Anyway, gotta go.”

“Where?”

“A housing project in the Bronx. We have a bimonthly distribution program for fresh fruit and vegetables. Today it’s carrots, apples, cucumbers and onions.”

“Can I come along?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Don’t you have volunteers?”

“Well, yes.”

“So that’s what I’ll be, then. I have experience, remember? You might recall I was the one who got you involved with the soup kitchen down at Bowling Green.”

“Surely you fulfilled your monthly good deeds quota the other night.”

“Perhaps, but I didn’t get to spend any time with you.”

She regarded him skeptically.

“I want to see what your days are like.”

“Well, you asked for it. Let’s go.”

“I have a car,” he said, holding the door open for her.

She shook her head. “If you actually want to see what my days are like, you’ll need to take the subway.”

She seemed determined on this point. He knew that look, so many of her gestures and expressions coming back to him so clearly.

After he dismissed the driver, they walked over to Canal Street and descended into the IRT, squeezing themselves into the crowded number 2 train among the rush-hour commuters. She was pressed against his shoulder and thigh, her legs enveloping his, and even in the stale, funky train car he could smell her hair. He’d almost forgotten that smell. Absurdly, he found himself getting hard. They rode most of the way in silence, leaning together, their physical contact obviating the need for speech. Whatever they needed to tell each other was too intimate to be said here.

They got off at Grand Concourse/149th Street, Corrine leading the way up a series of passages and stairways to the corner of two large boulevards, where she indicated their direction with a nod of her head.

“So tell me,” she said, “did you just forget to tell your wife about me, or did you deliberately not tell her about me?”

“I think the latter.”

“And will you be telling her about me now?”

“No, I definitely don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

He tried to decide why, and then whether, to tell Corrine the truth. “Because if I really told her how I felt about you, it would break her heart.”

She seemed genuinely surprised by this declaration. After digesting it, she said, “Is she enjoying New York?”

“Actually, she left this morning.”

They passed a barbershop with matching lurid-colored hagiographic posters of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., crossed the boulevard and turned into a smaller street lined with low-rise hair salons, bodegas, clothing boutiques, liquor stores and an abandoned brownstone covered in graffiti, including the slogan ARM THE HOMELESS.

Corrine pointed to a cluster of brick towers in the distance. “That’s our objective. Four thousand residents in the poorest congressional district in America. The nearest supermarket is more than a mile away. And of course no one has a car. A gypsy cab to the supermarket will cost eight, ten bucks each way. Most of them buy their food from the bodegas, which stock no fruit or vegetables aside from a few old plantains.”

As they approached the towers, a long queue of people stretched back along the sidewalk.

“Our clients,” Corrine said. “Looks like a busy day.”

As they walked down the line, a motley, colorful cohort attired not only in the baggy staples of American leisure wear but also in the traditional garb of at least half a dozen nations, she greeted several of them by name.

“How’s your gout, Jimmy? Are you staying away from the red meat?”

“Tolerable better, though I did get me a batch of ribs night ’fore last.”

To another man she said, “How’d that job interview work out?”

“Would I be in this fuckin’ line if it did?”

Luke wanted to tell the guy to show a little respect, but Corrine pushed on, saying, “Come talk to me inside.”

Luke followed her, hopping over a chain into a parking lot flanked on either side by open tents. Corrine introduced him to several harried colleagues and deposited him with a group of volunteers. “Georgia here will show you the ropes.” Georgia was a petite Goth brunette whose grooming and wardrobe choices seemed to intentionally contradict her sylphlike physique: her hair cropped close to her skull, her ears studded with metal, her pale skin, where it emerged from her black leather jacket, heavily embroidered with tattoos.

“We’re cucumbers,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“Our station. We’re distributing cucumbers.”

“Okay.”

“You always dress like that to hand out vegetables in the South Bronx?”

“When I got dressed this morning, I didn’t know I’d be coming here.”

“What, you thought you were going to shoot an ad for GQ?”

“I’ll pretend that was intended as a compliment.”

“Whatever gets you off, dude. Nice scar, though.”

She showed him the stacked cartons filled with cucumbers, how to weigh and bag them in three-, four- and six-pound units. “The clients have a coded checklist, A’s the smallest bag, C the biggest. I’m hoping you can guess which one B is. When you give them their bag, you check it off their list so they don’t try to come back again.”

When the gate opened a few minutes later, they were besieged by a procession of supplicants, their demeanors as various as their sizes and shapes, showing degrees of gratitude from shy to effusive; some resentful and sullen, others embarrassed, a few greedy, trying to snatch up extra bags or pass through the line twice. The majority were women, the men mostly elderly, a few sulking teens among them. After an hour he was told to take a break, at which point he called his driver. When he returned to his station, one of his coworkers informed him that many of the cucumbers in the second pallet were rotten; they ended up throwing half of them out.

Corrine appeared to assess the situation. “I can’t believe they pawned this shit off on us,” she said. As it turned out, they were running short on the other vegetables, too, with some forty or fifty people still waiting in line, so she instructed the volunteers to cut the rations in half. With the crisis more or less in hand, she told Luke she had to get back to her office.

Hoping to persuade her otherwise, he followed past the stragglers and out into the street. For some reason, she felt particularly bad about the very last woman in line, a strung out — looking mom with matted hair and two shivering toddlers, one of whom wore mismatched boots. Corrine tried to slip her ten dollars, but instead of quietly pocketing the bill, she snapped, “What the fuck this for?” holding it out in front of her, pinched between her thumb and forefinger, as if it were tainted.

“I just felt bad that we’d run low on provisions.”

“I don’t need your fuckin’ pity,” the woman shouted.

Corrine looked stunned by her wrath. “I just thought, with your two little ones—”

“Don’t you be talking ’bout my kids. Ain’t none ayo’ fuckin’ bidness.”

The next woman in line said, “Hey, sister, you don’t want it, I’ll be happy to help out.”

“Who asked you to put your fuckin’ nose in it?” After the recipient of the bill crumpled it in her fist and pocketed it, word of the cash handout spread down the line, provoking queries from those who’d received only coupons.

A skeletal man stood with his hand outstretched before her, wrapped in one of those quilted blue blankets used by moving companies to cushion furniture in transit.

Corrine was clearly mortified, all the more so when Georgia came over and said, “What’s going on?”

“What’s goin’ on is — some people gettin’ special treatment.”

Corrine drew her colleague away and tried to explain the situation. “I know, I know,” she said in response to the reprimand that Georgia had yet to deliver. “Totally unprofessional.”

“Well, you’re the boss,” Georgia said in a tone of voice that transparently betrayed her actual belief — that Corrine was a slumming dilettante.

“Well, that was incredibly embarrassing,” Corrine said when they were alone. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”

“Don’t be. I love it that you have such a big heart. So, might you consider accepting a ride downtown?” he asked, spotting his car idling across the street.

She seemed deflated by the recent fracas, less trusting of her instincts. “Just give me a ride to the subway.”

“Let me buy you lunch,” he said when the driver asked for their destination.

“I need to get back to the office.”

“Just a quick bite at the Four Seasons — it’s on the way,” he said after she’d given the address. “I’ve hardly spoken to you the last three hours.”

“I’m sorry, Luke — I’ve got a meeting.”

“How about dinner?”

“I can’t—”

“A drink, then, after work. I’ll show you pictures of the village your water-catchment system will benefit.”

“All right, we’ll see.”

“I’ll pick you up at your office.”

He dropped her off at the subway stop and rode back down to the Four Seasons, not entirely discouraged by his progress, but she called at five to cancel.

“I’m sorry, but I’m going to be in a meeting till six-thirty and I’ve got to relieve the nanny by seven.”

“When will I see you?”

“Luke, honestly, I don’t know what you want from me.”

“Just to catch up, spend a little time together.”

He was lying through his teeth. He didn’t know if sleeping with her one more time would sate his desire or fuel it, but he found himself consumed with the need to find out.