Bright, Precious Days

37

SPRING ARRIVED LATE, fitful and grudging, and then refused to make way for summer, which was fine with Russell. Even if he’d been eager to display himself on the lawns and beaches of the Hamptons that summer, which he wasn’t, their straitened finances pretty much ruled it out, as did the sale of the Sagaponack farmhouse — for six million dollars — in March, a few days before Bear Stearns collapsed.

But with the economy sagging under the weight of the subprime mortgage crisis, the buyer’s financing was delayed, and in mid-June the Polanskis offered the house to the Calloways, without charge, on the condition that they’d vacate on a week’s notice. Corrine, who’d always handled communications with the Polanskis, was delighted by their generosity, and Russell couldn’t think of a reason to decline the offer. So it looked as if he had no choice but to spend his summer among the voyeurs and exhibitionists who were his friends and peers, on the only spit of land in America where his business was remotely a matter of public interest.

Real estate was a hot topic in the Calloway household that summer. When their TriBeCa landlord opened with an offer of $1.5 million for the loft, Russell was forced to admit they couldn’t swing it, not when he was struggling to keep his company afloat. While he fervently searched for financing in a tightening credit market, Corrine, he felt certain, was scouting real estate in the upper reaches of the metropolis.

The Calloways spent the last two rainy weekends in June cocooned beside the steely, too-cold-to-swim-in ocean, juggling playdates and sleepovers for the kids. Finally, in July, the sun returned from wherever it had been hiding, tennis was reinvented and Corrine moved out to the beach full-time with the kids, her summer sabbatical being one of the few perks of the nonprofit sector.

On Thursday nights, Russell rode out to Sagaponack on the jitney, returning to the city early Monday morning. Far from resenting his schedule, he cherished the solitude of these bachelor weekdays, working late and dining with a book at the bar at Soho House or the Fatted Calf, loved walking home through the clamorous, sweaty youth brigades of the Meatpacking District. He was bewitched by the vistas of feminine flesh, the exposed limbs and shoulders and the upper slopes of breasts swelling above halter tops, the flimsy summer dresses clinging at the top and fluttering up above the knees. He wanted them all, these girls of summer, but he didn’t want any of them enough to act on his desire. Sometimes he found himself haunted by the regret that he’d never been a single man in the city, never walked these streets free and open to romantic adventure, to the spontaneous pursuit of erotic impulse, having moved in with Corrine as soon as he returned from Oxford and then marrying her soon after, although those early days had their own burnished halo of romance, when New York seemed to be a frontier teeming with infinite opportunities. Even now, despite their seasonal recurrence over the decades, the blasts of heat from the subway grates, the tarry smell of the melting streets like a bass note beneath the acrid tang of urban compost, the animal, vegetable and human waste decomposing and fermenting in the heat, invariably carried him back to his earliest, happiest years here, before they had enough money or vacation days to escape the summer heat, when the city, having been abandoned by the geezers, belonged to them and their kind. The days before they could afford an air conditioner, sprawling, stunned, on damp sheets, naked and slick with sweat and each other’s secretions.

On these weekday evenings, Russell had dinner with Washington or Carlo Rossi, or caught up with friends he’d been too busy to see during the school year, flagging a cab or wobbling home in the humid fug, buzzed on cheap rosé, catching a last blast of heat from the subway vent in the sidewalk just outside the door, arriving home around midnight to pass out in front of Frasier and Seinfeld reruns. Television was a consolation for being alone, a solitary, guilty pleasure. He inevitably woke up with the TV on, a few hours after he’d fallen asleep, the pressure of his bladder as insistent as the alarm. He hardly ever slept through the night anymore. This was the only time he felt lonely and missed his family, the hour or two before dawn, when he lay awake racked by thoughts of bankruptcy and mortality. Like Fitzgerald at Asheville, trembling in the 3:00 a.m. darkness — except that, unlike Fitzgerald, he had no Great Gatsby to show when he met his Maker, only a thin portfolio of clerical accomplishments in the service of literature. And several gaudy failures — his failed takeover of Corbin, Dern; the Kohout debacle. In fact, after a long struggle with his Catholic upbringing, he no longer believed he would meet anyone on his departure from this existence, and the notion of oblivion filled him with despair. He’d always been an optimist, able to convince himself that the best was still ahead, that every day held the promise of new adventure, but now he seemed increasingly conscious of his failures and anxious about the future. It was impossible to be optimistic at three-forty-five in the morning, at the age of fifty-one, and there were times when he was absolutely terrified at the prospect of his own extinction. Finally, he took half an Ambien or a Xanax and waited for the panic to subside.

In the daylight, despite the dull ache at the back of his skull from the Ambien — the feeling that his skull had been trepanned by dental drills — and the parched prickle in his throat, he felt grateful that he’d survived the terrors of the night.

That month, the contract holder on the Sagaponack house, a thirty-four-year-old banker from Lehman Brothers, was poised to close on the property and came twice to inspect the house before concluding that he would tear it down. When Corrine reported this to Russell, she was indignant. “This goddamn zillionaire philistine in a pink golf shirt with a giant polo-player logo and his wife with her fake tits and her John Barrett Salon blond hair planning their McMansion.”

While it looked as if they could probably stay on through Labor Day, it was now clear this would be their last summer there, and that the house itself, after surviving a hundred and fifty years of hurricanes and nor’easters, would succumb to the wrecking ball, a fact that further eroded Russell’s self-esteem, and added to his sense that the world as he knew it was crumbling around him. How was it that after working so hard and by many measures succeeding and even excelling in his chosen field, he couldn’t afford to save this house that meant so much to his family? Their neighbors seemed to manage, thousands of people no smarter than he was — less so, most of them — except perhaps in their understanding of the mechanics of acquisition. Partly, he knew, it was his lack of the mercenary instinct. Never caring enough about getting and keeping and compounding, he’d felt himself above such considerations and stayed true to the ideals he’d formed in college, at the expense of his future. If he’d been savvy and resourceful, he could have bought this house years ago, or, more important, a place to live in the city, but as things stood, he owned nothing; he’d missed the biggest real estate boom of his lifetime and even now that the bubble was bursting, his own finances were more precarious than ever. It was increasingly difficult to avoid the conclusion that he was, by the conventional measures of familial and professional achievement, a failure.

—

Russell stayed at the beach throughout August, working mornings at the rickety wicker desk in the den overlooking the potato fields. For the first time in many years, he declined an invitation to play in the artists’ and writers’ softball game — an event that had its origins in a pickup game back in the fifties with the likes of de Kooning and Pollock and Franz Kline nursing their hangovers on a scrubby lawn in the unfashionable town of Springs; the game had later been infiltrated by art critics and other writers, eventually becoming an annual spectacle in which movie stars and politicians vied for spots in the lineup, the painters claiming the actors as fellow artists; the politicians usually played with the writers — an acknowledgment, as one novelist suggested, of their accomplishments in the field of fiction. By virtue of his occasional essays and book reviews, Russell had qualified as a writer and had played for years, and while the mode of the event was more comic than epic, he’d prided himself on his accomplishments on the field, dependable and, occasionally, distinguished. This year, he just didn’t have it in him.

After moving out to the beach, he found time for simpler pleasures — cooking for the family, seeking out the best tomatoes and corn and fresh fish; fishing, playing tennis and bodysurfing with Jeremy. He watched John Edwards admitting his extramarital affair on ABC; he watched hours of the summer Olympics with the kids. He liked to think he was comporting himself as a model father and husband, largely avoiding the big social events, the benefits under the big white tents, the clambakes on the beach and the movie premieres in Southampton and East Hampton. He told Corrine he was sick of all that, that he wanted to cherish, with her and the kids, these final days in this house where they’d spent their summers for twenty years. Corrine was too smart to buy it but too loving to call him on it, except once. They were curled up together in bed on a night when they’d skipped a party he’d enjoyed for years. “It’s been so nice,” she said, “these past few weeks, I could happily skip the next hundred cocktail parties, but I know it’s like a punishment for you. I’ve waited for years for you to get a little weary of the endless social treadmill, but I hate to see you crawl away and hide like a criminal.”

“I have gotten a little weary of it,” he said. “Suddenly the whole thing seems empty and exhausting. August in the Hamptons — it’s not relaxing; it’s work. It’s like climbing Everest.”

“It’s been like that for a long time, but you never complained before.”

“We all have our tipping point.”

“Have you given any more thought to whether we’re going to have the party?”

Russell had previously had the excuse that they might be thrown out of the house on a week’s notice, but now their residency was secured through Labor Day. “It’s a lot of work,” he muttered.

“Come on, Russell, it’s only three weeks till Labor Day. I can’t believe I’m having to talk you into this party, but people have been calling to ask me about it. You’ve created a tradition.”

“Corrine’s right, actually,” Washington said the next night as they stood amid the throng at the bar of the American Hotel in Sag Harbor. They’d just finished two sets of tennis at the public courts down the road and Washington had insisted on buying the loser a gin and tonic. “You’ve kept your head down for a while now, but it’s time to get back out there. Not having the party’s like some admission of guilt. I mean, how many books have you published in your career? Two hundred? Three? You made a bad call, and it’s too bad, Crash, but you’ve got to get back on the goddamn horse. You’ve done your time in the wilderness and we’re all ready to forgive, forget and party on.”

“There’s also a question of funds. Kohout wasn’t just a PR disaster. I lost more than half a million bucks.”

“How much do you need? For the party, I mean.”

“I can’t take your money.”

“Call it a loan, then. I need this fucking party.”

—

That same night, Steve Goldberg, the coach of the writers’ softball team, called to appeal to him to play the next day. An old friend or at least acquaintance of Russell’s, Steve was a sportswriter for the Times. “We need you out there, Russell. The fucking artists have a couple of ringers this year; they’ve got this guy Junior Gonzales who played in the minors for the Yankee organization. Apparently, he made a ceramic frog in sixth grade and that qualifies him as an artist.”

“I’d love to, but I’ve got a lunch,” Russell said.

“What fucking lunch? This is the game, Russell. Lunch happens every day. The writers need your help.” It was supposed to be a fun, even frivolous, event, a fund-raiser for local charities, but Steve took it very seriously.

In the end, Russell allowed himself to be bullied into it. Applying Washington’s rationale for the party, he told himself this was as good a way as any of showing that he wasn’t down-and-out; the game was virtually the only public event of the season out here, most functions taking place behind tall hedges, at the end of gated driveways manned by security guards with guest lists on clipboards.

“I’m glad you’re playing,” Corrine said. “I’ll be over after I drop the kids off at the Toomeys’.”

By the time the first ball was thrown out by an Iraq vet with prosthetic legs, some five hundred spectators had gathered along the first and third baselines. Color commentary was provided by Tim Watkins, the NBC correspondent, who introduced Russell as “editor extraordinaire and Most Valuable Player in 2004.”

He started as catcher and hit a hard grounder for a single in the second inning. Corrine arrived as he was donning his mask for the third inning. Three plays later, with the bases loaded, Tom Jarrow, the artist, whacked a high fly into center field. Russell ripped off his mask and took a wide stance over home plate. The runners held their bases until the center fielder made the catch and threw the ball to the second baseman, who spun and threw it to Russell as the runner on third charged in. It wasn’t a great throw and Russell had to reach high for it as he kept his foot on the plate. Though he was confident the ball was within reach, it somehow tipped the top edge of his glove and bounced off, hitting the backstop as the runner scored home. Russell couldn’t believe he’d blown the catch, and the shock of it paralyzed him even as he registered the runner from second base approaching at full speed; he felt as if he were swimming through mud as he launched himself toward the backstop and finally snatched the ball just as the second guy sailed over home plate for another run.

The hubbub from the artists’ side of the field underscored the terrible silence on his own side. No one said a word as Russell threw the ball back to the pitcher.

The writers were stoic as the next batter drove in the last man on base, giving the artists a two-run lead. When the inning finally ended with the next batter popping up, Russell had no choice but to remove his catcher’s mask and join his teammates on the third baseline, standing among them like an invisible man, a pariah, as they encouraged one another with formulaic exhortations. But after four innings of steady hits, his side went down in quick succession — three batters and three outs — as if his error had disheartened and deflated them.

“I’m putting Riley in as catcher,” Steve told him as the writers took the field. Benched for the rest of the game and thus denied an opportunity for redemption, Russell felt himself excluded from the camaraderie of the dugout, the backslaps and the high fives. He found himself wishing the artists would widen their lead beyond two runs, the margin of his error, but in the end that’s what the writers lost by, and while no one expressed the sentiment, he knew they all thought he’d lost the game.

“You have to let the artists win once in a while,” Corrine said, taking his arm as they retreated to the parking lot. “I mean, haven’t you guys won the last three years?”

“Please don’t try to cheer me up,” Russell snapped. “That was possibly the most mortifying moment of my adult life,” he added.

“Oh, come on, it’s just a game.”

“No, it’s not. It’s never just a game.”

—

Two weeks later, their friends came out in force, including Steve Goldberg, who made no reference to the game. What he could not have predicted was the number of strangers who showed up, some in the company of invitees and some simply drawn by the buzz, like fish responding to chum in the water. A rock star with a home down the street arrived with a brand-new girlfriend on his arm — a debut that dominated the coverage of the party in the gossip press, which identified the mystery woman as a celebrity spinning instructor who’d previously been involved with the former wife of a hedge fund manager.

More significant to Russell were the graying literary lions who paid their respects. As the night progressed, the new arrivals became younger and less familiar, a fistfight broke out between romantic rivals, and the booze ran out just as the cops arrived in response to complaints from the neighbors.

The success of the party briefly revived Russell’s spirits, although the hangover the next morning and the eventual bill for damage and cleanup quickly dampened them, as did, later, after they’d returned to the city, the description of him in New York magazine’s paragraph on the party as “the editor behind the recent faux hostage scandal.”