Bright, Precious Days

30

CORRINE WAS ALREADY LATE when she arrived at the Grand Concourse and 149th Street, having just missed her subway after dropping the kids at school, shouting for someone to hold the door and watching as the train pulled away, the man with the stupid hat with earflaps staring at her moronically with his arms pinned to his sides. After waiting fifteen minutes for the next train, she found herself fighting a headwind on 149th Street, and she was half an hour late by the time she turned onto Morris Avenue.

The line of clients — so they called them — stretched from the parking lot back around the corner some fifty deep up the avenue, supplicants in parkas and fleeces, ski caps and babushkas and African head wraps — tropical splashes of color against the drab pregreen cityscape, the scene reminding her of the view outside her mother’s kitchen window on a winter morning, blue jays and cardinals and towhees clustered around the bird feeder. One man wore a bright orange vest and cap, as if he’d just come from an early-morning deer hunt; another was in full army camo, skulking near the back of the line.

The orientation meeting was just breaking up, the volunteers scattering to their stations, Luke McGavock among them, so out of context that for a moment she didn’t even register the surprise. She hadn’t spoken to him for a week, and it had been two months since she’d laid eyes on him. She was taken aback, after these long intervals, by her reaction to his presence, by the quickening of her metabolism, a kind of mental flush that made her feel simultaneously light-headed and keenly focused. She could go for days without thinking of him, and after a time she could imagine that seeing him wouldn’t affect her. He was dressed down in jeans and fleece. Catching sight of her, he stopped in the middle of the parking lot, shrugging his shoulders and flashing a rueful, boyish grin. Sometimes the things we love most in our adored ones can become, like that grin, the things we hold against them. She kissed him as she would a friend — on the cheek. He was freshly shaven, and her resolve to be businesslike was eroded by the scent of his skin.

“I was afraid you might not show up,” he said.

“In other words, you didn’t come here out of the goodness of your heart to help distribute food to the needy.”

“My motives weren’t entirely pure. Mixed would be the charitable way to describe them. But I think motives are usually mixed, don’t you?”

“I’m not sure if you thought this was a good time to catch up, but I have three hours of work ahead of me here.”

“I understand and I’m here to help. I’m on carrots today.”

“An important station. If anyone asks, tell them that beta-carotene is partly metabolized into vitamin A, which can improve vision, though it won’t enable you to see in the dark. That was a rumor started by the RAF during World War I, disinformation to disguise why their pilots were shooting down so many German planes at night. The cover story was that it was due to high carrot consumption among the gunners, when in fact it had to do with the development of radar.”

She realized she was babbling out of nervousness, which must have been painfully obvious.

He was looking at her fondly, as if she were a familiar, harmless lunatic.

“When did you get back?” she asked.

“A few days ago. I thought maybe we could have lunch after we finish up here.”

“It’s possible. Let’s see how the morning goes.”

“Well, you know where to find me,” he said, jogging off to his station.

For once, their supplies held out till the end and the morning passed without incident. Corrine was painfully aware of Luke’s presence, even as she tried to pretend she wasn’t; if anything, she visited the carrot tent less often than the others. Luke seemed to be performing his duties cheerfully and efficiently, getting along well with the women working alongside him, at least one of whom was annoyingly attractive.

“So, I assume you have a car?” she asked him after she’d finished her duties.

He shook his head.

“You took the subway?”

“No, but I let the car go. It seemed sort of, I don’t know, it just didn’t seem quite right having a Town Car standing by for three or four hours while I handed out carrots at a housing project.”

On the one hand, she gave him credit for his decency; on the other, she’d been looking forward to a ride downtown. She was getting a little weary of trying to live within her means. “I guess we’re taking the subway. It’s a kind of underground train.”

“Genius idea.”

They could, of course, have had lunch in Manhattan, but wanting to see how he reacted, she took him instead to a Salvadoran restaurant on 149th that Doreen, one of the clients, had introduced her to last year.

“You come here often?” he asked after she led him to a Formica table for two.

“Occasionally,” she said.

“I’m not sure I buy that,” he said, taking a seat across from her. “What do you order?”

“They do a chicken dish I like,” she said. At least that’s what Doreen ordered, although for the life of her she couldn’t remember what it might be called.

“You’re sure you want to eat here?”

“Absolutely,” she said, despite having second thoughts about the venue and not feeling particularly hungry. Only two other tables were occupied — a Hispanic couple with a toddler and a pretty, solitary young African-American woman in light blue medical scrubs, reading Us magazine.

An obese waitress waddled over and tossed two plastic-coated menus between them, sending Luke’s empty water glass spinning like a top toward the edge of the table, but he grabbed it and prevented it from sailing to the floor. The waitress’s lack of concern, before she turned and swayed back toward the counter, seemed to indicate this sequence of events was strictly routine.

“Kind of ironic, those poor girls I was working with today from the Bear Stearns back office team — they’ll be needing handouts themselves.”

“How so?”

“Bear Stearns went under last month. The shorts were in a feeding frenzy and the New York Fed reneged on a line of credit. They were out of business in days.”

She’d read something about it; for a moment she thought of Veronica, but, no, she was at Lehman Brothers. “Should the rest of us be worried?” she asked.

“I am. The subprime mortgage market’s melting down,” he said. “I’m basically bearish.”

“Have you told your friend Obama about this?”

“He’s got more immediate problems right now — this Reverend Wright thing is dogging him.”

Before Corrine could respond to this, the waitress heaved back up and leaned over to fill the water glasses, overfilling Corrine’s, water flowing over the Formica and soaking her napkin. “You ready to order?” she asked.

“What do you recommend?” Luke asked.

She shrugged. “For your skinny ass, maybe chicharrón de pollo con tostones.”

“Sounds delicious. Shall we get two of those?”

“Just a café con leche for me,” Corrine said.

The waitress rolled her eyes.

“One café con leche and one chicharrón de pollo.”

After she walked off, Luke said, “If you have doubts about the food, please warn me now.”

“No, it’s not that. I’m just not hungry.”

“I find it a little odd that someone with — how to put this delicately? — an ambivalent attitude toward food would become involved in feeding the masses.”

“You’re not the first person to say that. But you should know better than anyone that it all started when we were working at the soup kitchen. The cops and the rescue workers weren’t starving, but it was still gratifying to feed them, and I started thinking about how many people in the city actually had trouble feeding themselves and their families. And I also saw how badly those people were eating, the kind of crap that they were putting in their bodies. And the more I looked into it, the more I learned about how difficult it is for lower-income people to get basic nutritional information, not to mention access to fresh, healthy food.”

“I didn’t mean to sound critical, Corrine.”

“And besides, I resent that remark about food issues. I have issues with gluttony and gourmandism. It’s like chefs have become gods and restaurants have become the new nightclubs. Our friends talk about truffles the way they used to talk about cocaine. My daughter watches the Food Network, for Christ’s sake. That there is a Food Network is a little hard for me to fathom. When did that happen? Foodie culture has become the newest cult of conspicuous consumption, and I find it annoying as hell. The pursuit of bottarga is just as superficial as the pursuit of the latest Kelly bag. Neither one fills a basic need.”

She paused, realizing she needed to get hold of herself. “Sorry, I’m ranting.”

“Maybe you’re just avoiding the other subject.”

“What other subject?”

“Us.”

“Are we a subject?”

“Imagine if instead of just handing out vegetables you could be handing out millions of dollars.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We could have our own foundation. You could really make a difference in the world.”

“Are you proposing to me?”

“I just want you to think about what life could be like.”

“You already have a foundation.” It seemed like a peculiar objection, but she was flummoxed.

“We’d subsume it under the umbrella of the Corrine and Luke McGavock Foundation.”

“Wow,” she said, stunned. “I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a statement that so thoroughly intermixed noble and selfish intentions.”

“They’re always intermixed, Corrine.”

“I don’t believe that. What about the hopes we have for our kids?”

“An interesting example, that. You could say that in caring for our kids we’re promoting our own genes. But if you really care about the welfare of your children — and I know you do — maybe you should consider what I could provide for them. The opportunities they don’t have now.”

“That’s so not fair,” she said, although she’d sometimes allowed herself to wonder what it would be like — not to run a foundation or to indulge fantasies of wild consumption, but to be freed from the hard choices of allocating scarce resources. Even if money couldn’t buy happiness, it could redeem a great many sources of unhappiness. She saw now that for a long time she’d underestimated the importance of financial security and that in doing so she had circumscribed her prospects and those of her children. And yet she still subscribed to the values on which she’d based her life, still believed that the acquisitive instinct was one of the lower impulses on the scale of human values. Was it just some residual cultural snobbery that made her feel that Mammon worship was boorish? And would her children thank her when she explained that she’d left Russell in order to improve their material well-being?

All at once she spotted a flaw in his argument. “I thought the big reason you split up with Giselle was that you didn’t want children.”

“I didn’t want to start a new family with her.”

“But I don’t understand why you want to take on a broken family with me. What the hell’s wrong with you?”

“You’re right,” he said, just before his lunch was slapped in front of him, chicken parts drowning in an orange swamp beside a mesa of yellow rice. “It doesn’t make sense. It must be love, I guess.”