Bright, Precious Days

35

ONCE UPON A TIME, Washington’s kids had been thrilled to go to the Museum of Natural History — the dinosaurs, the dioramas of cavemen and American Indians and African wildlife, the giant blue whale floating like a zeppelin over the great hall, the planetarium — but they’d complained bitterly when he’d proposed it this Saturday morning, and he’d been forced to improvise, ending up at the Calloways’. While it would be an exaggeration to say that Jeremy and Mingus were close friends, they were brothers in arms when playing Halo 3, trading roles between the Master Chief and the Arbiter, nuances of personality disappearing in the pursuit of their roles within this alternate universe. The situation with the girls was more complicated; Zora was a year older than Storey and several rungs above her in the intricate social hierarchy of junior high, a fact somehow understood and acknowledged by both, despite the fact that they attended different schools. Although it was a warm, sunny spring day, the air cleansed and refreshed by yesterday’s downpour, outdoor activities weren’t up for consideration — they’d reached the age where their habits began to resemble those of the vampires who were becoming so popular in television shows and young adult fiction. Both girls were deliriously excited about the first Twilight movie, hitting theaters in the fall, and had instructed their parents, who were sometimes invited to screenings and premieres, to be on the lookout. In the meantime, they were willing to settle for Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

Russell, who seemed deeply out of sorts, begged off, citing a pile of unread manuscripts, so Washington took the girls up to the multiplex at Union Square.

In the popcorn-redolent theater he sat next to Zora, who poked him awake twice during the movie, hissing that he was snoring. As he was dozing off again, he was roused by his text message signal. Furtively checking his phone, he saw it was from Casey Reynes: Suite at Lowell. Under name of Lily Bart. Come ASAP.

He met Russell and Corrine for an early dinner with the kids at Bubby’s — ignoring several texts from Casey — before returning his own kids to his former home. The loft looked particularly appealing, so vast and opulent in comparison to his sublet studio in West Chelsea and yet so homey and familiar — the old family seat. There was his favorite reading perch, the Arne Jacobsen egg chair with its soft cinnamon leather in the corner by the southeast windows, and his vintage McIntosh sound system with its luminescent blue-green dials nestled in its zebrawood console with all his old vinyl, the Miles and the Coltrane, the Dizzy and Bird LPs. Somewhere among them was a copy of Charles Mingus’s Pithecanthropus Erectus, the only possession of his father’s that had passed down to Washington, left behind when he abandoned him and his mother in Trinidad. For years he’d thought if he could decode the title, he would discover his father, or at least his essence, titillated by what the priapic Erectus suggested.

Veronica appeared, greeting the children, falsely cheerful and haggard of mien, listening as they narrated the day’s adventures, while Washington waited just inside the door.

“How are you?” she asked after the children had melted away to their rooms.

He shrugged. “You?”

“Things have been pretty scary at work. Rumors flying and the stock’s taken a beating. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but our college fund is half what it was last month.”

“It’ll come back,” he said, though he had no information about the situation at Lehman Brothers; he was just trying to reassure her.

“Let’s hope.”

—

Watching for a cab on Greenwich Street, he got another text: Where the hell r u? About to call concierge for Rent-a-Hunk. He told himself that if he didn’t see a cab in the next three minutes, he’d text back that he’d been unavoidably detained, but just then one of those new cabs that looked like a tiny school bus pulled over.

He wondered if he was up for this — still under the spell of nostalgia for a lost domesticity brought on by his visit to the loft, feeling the old protective instinct in response to Veronica’s distress — even as the driver hurtled uptown, braking and accelerating, leaving Washington vaguely nauseous by journey’s end. Debating whether to stop at the desk or stride boldly to the elevator, he could already detect that extra level of scrutiny from the little pink-faced twerp behind the counter and the bellman poised by the elevator, both of them white. He still found it hard to believe that people were giving the brother better than even odds of winning the election. He didn’t see that happening.

“I’m here to see Lily Bart,” he said, wondering if the man behind the desk was a Wharton fan. “I believe she’s expecting me.”

“Ah, yes, Miss Bart mentioned she might have a visitor and asked me to tell you that she’s just gone across the street to — oh, I believe that’s Miss Bart now.”

He turned around to see Casey coming through the door, looking very slinky in a black leather jacket over a silver shirt.

“I’d almost given up on you,” she said, taking his arm and leading him to the elevator. “I went to Bilboquet for a cocktail.”

“I had the kids,” he said.

“Can’t you just hardly wait to ship them off to boarding school?”

“First I’d have to convince their mother,” he said, though in fact he had no intention, or desire, to send his kids away to school. As a weekend dad, he missed them already.

She attacked him even before the elevator doors swooshed closed, grabbing his collar, smashing her lips against his and thrusting her tongue in his mouth, her breath hot with alcohol, tinged faintly with juniper.

“I’ve been so waiting for you,” she said, panting and pushing her hair back from her face as the doors slid open.

She took his hand and led him down the corridor, their progress abruptly checked by someone emerging from a room in front of them, a man in a Barbour jacket and red wide-wale cords, who looked as if he was en route to his hobby farm in Millbrook.

“Oh my God,” she said.

“Casey?”

The man — Casey’s husband, Washington was by now pretty certain — seemed puzzled, whereas she was clearly dumbfounded.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.

“I just had a meeting,” he said, although the real answer to the question became apparent as the door from which he’d emerged opened, revealing a peppermint ice-cream cone of a girl in a white terry-cloth bathrobe: long pink legs and red locks.

“That’s your fucking meeting?”

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact. And what, might I ask, are you doing here?”

Casey emitted several short exhalations before finally finding speech. “Who is this bitch? Your new secretary?”

“Actually,” Tom said, “she’s my girlfriend. Laura, this is Casey, my wife. Casey, Laura.”

Washington had to hand it to Tom, who seemed very much in control of the situation, the least flustered person in the corridor. The girl was flabbergasted, her face, already pink, flushing even deeper as the seconds ticked past.

“As long as we’re on the subject, perhaps you’d introduce me to your friend.”

“You know Washington.”

“Apparently not nearly as well as you do.”

“We were just…” Casey couldn’t seem to conjure a suitable predicate to complete the sentence.

Looking at Washington, Tom said, “Better you than me.”

Washington shrugged; mortified, of course, but also impressed by his ostensible rival’s command of the situation.

“If you could get it up,” Casey hissed, “maybe I wouldn’t be here with him.”

“I’ve never known Tom to have any difficulty in that area,” Laura said.

“Don’t you dare speak to me, you slut.”

“You don’t need to hear this,” Tom said to the girl, nudging her back in the room with a little pat on the ass. “I’ll call you later,” he said, easing the door shut. “Now if you’ll excuse me,” he said to his wife.

“I certainly will not excuse you. You can’t just walk away.”

“I really don’t see the point in staying. You’re clearly occupied.”

“You bastard. I’ll ruin you.”

“Oh, please.”

“You won’t be welcome anywhere in this town after I tell people how you treated me. You think your little tramp friend’s going to be welcome at the Deepdaleses’ or the von Muefflings’?”

Washington was pretty certain that the Deepdales and the von Muefflings, whoever the fuck they were, would be happy enough to welcome the new Mrs. Reynes to their fetes in due course, after the divorce went through. So far as he could tell, second wives were the backbone and gatekeepers of haute New York society. All those secretaries, shopgirls, yoga teachers, models and escorts who were waiting with open arms and legs for the tired, muddled moguls of Manhattan, whose first wives didn’t understand them, didn’t fuck and suck them the way they wanted to be fucked or sucked, or who just bored them silly — these were the women who usually inherited the earth, or at least the Upper East Side, Southampton, Palm Beach, and other select private-jet destinations. The other wives would be sympathetic to Casey, and indignant at Tom, but in the long run Tom and Laura would be fine, and in time Laura could, if she were socially ambitious enough and Tom’s fortune robust enough, become one of those wives who guarded the kingdom against interlopers like her younger self. Casey’s future was harder to predict, although he’d once heard her express her horror at the fates of former friends who, after divorce, found themselves obliged to sell real estate or art to their former peers.

He was grateful this wasn’t his world. And all at once, he knew where his place was, where his heart tended.

Casey watched as Tom disappeared into the elevator, and then turned to Washington, her features still puffed with rage. “I guess you think this is all pretty amusing.”

“Yes and no.”

“So what should we do?”

“I know what I’m going to do.”

Twenty minutes later, he was standing outside the door of the loft in TriBeCa, practicing his speech as he waited for Veronica to open the door.