Bright, Precious Days

4

RUSSELL HAD SPENT THE AFTERNOON hunting and gathering in search of the perfect ingredients: the heritage ducks from upstate at the Union Square farmers’ market, the star anise from Fujian in Chinatown. He belonged to the new breed of male epicureans who viewed cooking as a competitive sport, and pursued it with the same avidity that others had for fly-fishing or golf, with the attendant fetishization of the associated gadgetry and equipment. He and Washington, his best friend, had serious arguments about Japanese versus German cutlery. Russell had been raised on frozen vegetables and casseroles made with Campbell’s soup, and Corrine saw this as another means of distancing himself from his midwestern roots, which was just fine with her, since she’d rather have gone to the gynecologist than cook a meal from scratch. This macho cooking thing worked to her advantage.

“Where’s my damn immersion blender?” Russell huffed, standing at the counter in his Real Men Don’t Wear Aprons apron.

“I don’t even know what the hell that is,” Corrine said.

“I need it for my brown sauce.”

“Has anyone ever told you you’re such a poofter.”

“What’s a poofter?” Their daughter, Storey, had suddenly appeared as if out of thin air, as was her practice. A slender blond ghost.

“It’s just…well, it’s just a word I use when Dad’s being kind of ridiculous and pretentious.”

“So you must use it a lot. I’m surprised I never heard it before.”

Corrine was taken aback. Eleven years old? One minute she’s talking about Hannah Montana and the next minute she sounds like Janeane Garofalo. Russell, searching for his inversion blender, or whatever the hell it was, hadn’t seemed to notice.

“Jeremy’s playing a video game,” Storey said, reverting to a younger persona. “It’s a weekday and he’s not supposed to.”

With mixed feelings, Corrine went back to his bedroom to investigate. It was true that Jeremy wasn’t supposed to play video games on weeknights; and also true that Storey had a not entirely admirable tendency to tattle on her brother. They’d shared a bedroom until last year, when Russell finally agreed to partition off another hundred-something square feet of the apartment so they could each have their own. It was an old railroad-style loft, twenty-two by eighty. Before they arrived in ’95, someone had slapped together a master bedroom in the back with two-by-fours and Sheetrock, and when the twins were born, they’d walled in twelve by fourteen feet, and then this second, almost identical room had shrunk their open space considerably. They’d grown accustomed, especially for publication parties, to fitting sixty or eighty people cheek by jowl, but now their guests really had to rub up against one another. This project had involved posting a bond with their landlord, who reserved the right to have them remove the walls on termination of the lease. She didn’t know anyone else in their circle who still rented, but their rent was lower than mortgage and maintenance payments would be if they were to buy a comparable space, not that she was sure there were many comparable spaces left — an old-school loft with exposed pipes and wiring, warped hardwood floors with gaps large enough to swallow golf balls; palimpsest pressed-tin ceiling, the fleur-de-lis squares cut and patched and painted over countless times; an ancient freight elevator that worked according to its own moods. The decor had remained unchanged for a decade: one solid wall of books, the other a collage of framed photographs and paintings and posters, including one for the Disney movie Those Calloways, “A Family You’ll Never Forget!” Only the Russell Chatham landscape, a small Agnes Martin etching and the Berenice Abbott portrait of James Joyce were worth more than their frames.

Corrine was desperate to move, desperate to have a second bathroom, but Russell clung to an outdated vision of himself as a downtown bohemian. Their apartment could have been a diorama at the Museum of Natural History: Last of the Early TriBeCans, an example of the traditional dwelling of the original loft dwellers. The neighborhood was being gentrified and renovated out from under them. Construction everywhere now, new buildings and wholesale renos, scaffolding and cranes and Dumpsters on every block, steel-on-steel banging, blasting and generators chuffing all day long; it was like living in a war zone. It had fallen silent for a few months after September 11, though in retrospect it seemed as if the construction and the speculation had started up again just at about the same moment the smoke had stopped coming off the mountain of rubble farther south. New towers with doormen and spas rose from the landfill along the river, while the old industrial buildings were gutted and gilded and stocked with shiny new residents thrilled to have ceilings high enough to accommodate gigantic canvases by artists who’d lived and worked here in the seventies and eighties. Now you saw movie stars in the Garden Deli, investment bankers at the Odeon. There hadn’t even been a deli when they’d first arrived. The Mudd Club was certainly long gone and so were the Talking Heads, though Russell was currently blasting “Life During Wartime” to inspire his cooking, an anthem of their early days in the city.

She was just heading back to investigate Jeremy’s activities when the buzzer sounded.

“Jesus,” Russell said, “it’s not even seven-forty.”

She turned back to the front door. “Didn’t we say eight?”

“We always say eight. Which means eight-twenty. Everybody knows that.”

She worked the intercom. “Hello?”

Static, a frequent guest.

“Hello?”

“Um, I’m here for the…for the, uh, dinner.”

“Who’s this?”

“It’s Jack Carson?”

He sounded uncertain and so, for a moment, was she. “Oh, right.” Russell’s new literary prodigy. “Press the door when you hear the buzzer. We’re on the fourth floor.”

“It’s Jack Carson,” she told Russell.

“I guess they don’t do fashionably late in Tennessee,” he said.

“Given what you’ve told me about his appetite for controlled substances, we should be grateful he got here at all.”

“Actually, I think he’s been clean for a couple months now.”

Corrine waited by the elevator door, curious to see this genius, this redneck bard about whom Russell was so excited, whose book he was publishing next year. She was a little disappointed when he turned out to be a gangly kid with dark hair pointing in several directions, a mottled complexion and piercing, almost black eyes, wearing tattered jeans and a black leather jacket over a black T-shirt with a big five-pointed star and the caption Big Star.

“Welcome, I’m Corrine. Russell’s told me so much about you.”

“You wrote the screenplay for The Heart of the Matter.”

“Well, yes, that would be me.”

“I thought it was great,” he said. She was pleased but flustered as he scrutinized her with those black eyes.

“How did you even come across it?”

“Russell gave it to me. He knows I’m a big Graham Greene fan. I thought it was cool the way you managed to humanize Scobie in a way that Greene didn’t.”

She found herself surprised at the erudition implicit in this statement — not just the fact that anyone remembered her little film — even as she realized there was nothing inherently contradictory about the accent and the sentiment; she knew she shouldn’t equate southern with ignorant. Luke came from Tennessee, and they didn’t get much smarter, though his accent was barely noticeable compared to Jack’s. He’d called a few days ago to say good-bye; she supposed she should be happy that he was halfway around the world again, though she’d felt strangely bereft at the thought of his departure.

Russell bounded over and wrapped his new discovery in a bear hug. “How’s the city treating you? So, you met Corrine. And you found us all right?”

“Well, yeah, after I spent about half my advance on the goddamn cab.”

“It’s a bitch, I know. Don’t worry, I’ll call you a car service for the ride home. Come on in, let me get you something. Storey, can you come over and say hello to Jack?”

Corrine slipped away to check on Jeremy.

“What are you doing, sweetie?” He was sprawled on his bed on his Pokémon duvet, with Ferdie the ferret sprawled on the pillow beside him.

“Super Mario Sunshine.”

“What day is today?”

“I dunno.”

“Isn’t it a Tuesday?”

“Maybe.”

“Which would be…a weekday?”

“I guess,” he said, not looking away from the screen, where the little red man traversed a tropical island.

“And are we supposed to play video games on weekdays?”

“I thought it was like a holiday.”

“It’s Election Day, which is not a holiday. Holidays are when you don’t have school. Now turn that off before I take the controller away.”

“Let me just save it.”

“What’s to save? That’s what you always say when you want to keep playing for another five minutes.” She still wasn’t sure if this “saving” gambit was legitimate or not.

When he appeared to keep playing, she walked over to the bed and took hold of the control unit in his hand. Ferdie, snakelike, opened his eyes and regarded her languidly.

“Okay, okay.”

“I don’t want to come back and find this going again. What’s the homework situation?”

“I’m done with everything except math.”

“Well, let’s do math, then.”

She left before he’d actually turned the game off, weary of the struggle. At the same time, enacting these little family rituals was reassuring; she’d felt thoroughly unsettled these last few days, after seeing Luke, and eager to convince herself that she was over him, that he had no bearing on her actual life.

Storey was sitting on the couch with Jack, pointing out a passage in her book. “Are you a Democrat?” she asked. “My dad says friends don’t let friends vote Republican. That’s a joke; it comes from that ad that says friends don’t let friends drive drunk. Everybody we know is a Democrat.” The buzzer rang before Corrine could hear the answer.

“It’s Hilary and Dan.” Two Republicans, in fact. Just barely audible on the crackling intercom. Corrine’s younger sister and her fiancé, the ex-cop, who’d finally gotten divorced from his devoutly Catholic, supremely bitter wife a few months ago. Arguing that Hilary had been with Dan for five years now, Corrine had finally gotten Russell to stop referring to her as “your slutty little sister.”

“Who’s that?” Russell asked, approaching from the kitchen.

“Hilary and Dan.”

“Ah, your formerly slutty little sister and her police escort.”

“Jesus, Russell.” She nodded toward the couch.

Chagrined, Russell glanced over to see the blond crown of Storey’s head just visible above the couch cushions. “Sorry.”

They listened to the elevator rattling upward and finally shuddering to a stop, the doors groaning open.

Kisses and handshakes…

“Happy birthday, sis,” Hilary said. “Oh shit, I forgot we’re not allowed to mention your birthday.” She held a finger to her lips. “Top secret.”

“Not so secret now, thanks,” Corrine said. She’d insisted that this was not a birthday party, having no desire to commemorate the fact that she was turning fifty, unlike Russell, who’d had a big bash a few months ago to celebrate his own semicentennial.

“Where are my little chickadees?” Hilary chirped.

Corrine glanced over at her husband, who was studying her ruefully. He knew how much it pissed Corrine off when her sister used the possessive adjective with reference to the kids, as if determined to reiterate her maternal claim and give them hints about their complicated origins, whether they were ready for this knowledge or not.

Storey rose from the couch and marched over to greet the newcomers.

“There she is!” Hilary lifted Storey in her arms without losing her grip on the Pinot Grigio. “How’s my favorite girl?”

“Good.” It warmed Corrine’s heart to see how Storey stiffened and struggled in her grasp. Hilary was one of those people who just couldn’t connect with children, who seemed unable to speak their language, having spent all her adult energy learning the idiom and gestures of seduction. She’d been a professional girlfriend for years, a concubine without portfolio, a groupie.

Dan rescued Storey from Hilary’s awkward embrace, hugged her and set her down again. “How’s my storybook princess? And where’s your stinky brother?”

“I’m good. He’s playing video games even though it’s a weekday.”

“We’d better go make a citizen’s arrest,” Dan said.

The buzzer interrupted this interdiction, followed by the crackling baritone of Washington Lee on the intercom. The elevator soon debouched Washington and his wife, Veronica, Russell’s best friend natty in a black suit and crisp white shirt; his wife, who worked for Lehman Brothers, wearing a businessy charcoal suit. Russell dragged Jack into the group, introducing him to all as the author of the most brilliant collection of short stories he had ever had the privilege to publish.

What about Jeff? Corrine thought. What about our dead friend?

“Jack’s from Fairview, Tennessee,” Russell said, relishing, she knew, the idea of gritty Americana. Much as Russell liked his adoptive home, this slender, crowded island at the eastern edge of the continent, he believed in his heart that America was elsewhere, off in the South or the West, the big sprawling vistas beyond the tired ramparts of the Appalachians; that the country’s literature was about the strong, silent men and women of the hollows and the heartland — although to judge from Jack’s stories, which showcased babbling, toothless speed freaks, they were no longer necessarily silent.

“So did you vote for the cracker or the brother?” Washington asked him.

“Are we to assume you’re inquiring about the Senate race in Tennessee?” Russell asked.

“Indeed, Corker versus Ford,” Washington said.

“I think they both suck,” Jack said, catching everyone by surprise.

“Well, sure, but there are degrees of suckiness,” Washington said. “Last time I checked, Ford wasn’t running ads that implied Corker fucked black girls.” Typical Washington, Corrine noted, making assumptions about racism based on accent. Come to think of it, the kid could be a racist, for all she knew. But if he acted like one, Washington would eat him alive. He’d always relished playing the race card, using his blackness when it suited him; the only thing he enjoyed more than twisting liberal white people into pretzels of self-consciousness was messing with unreconstructed racists.

“Wash, please,” Corrine said.

“Hey, I got no secrets,” Jack said. “I wrote in Kid Rock.”

Corrine laughed, relieved at how neatly he’d defused the situation. It was a pretty funny joke — even funnier if it was true.

Jeremy had emerged from his room, as if intuiting the arrival of Dan, with whom he had an easy rapport, and asked to see his gun, as he inevitably did.

“I thought you told me you were a Democrat,” Dan said.

“So what?” Jeremy said.

“Well,” Dan said, directing an impish look at Corrine, “if the Democrats win, nobody will be allowed to carry guns except criminals.”

Jack said something that sounded like “Wut chu packin?”

“A Sig P226.”

“That’s a great gun,” Jack said. “I was shooting one a few days ago with my buddy. Let me check it out.”

Corrine refrained from protest as Jeremy, Jack and Dan lovingly examined the lethal black-and-silver pistol, though she hovered at the edge of the group, ready to pounce if anyone let Jeremy touch it.

—

Nancy Tanner showed up just as Chef Russell was complaining about her tardiness. Nancy was back in the city after a stint in Los Angeles, working as a producer on a Showtime adaptation of her last book. She looked better than ever, thin and sculpted, and Corrine couldn’t help wondering if she’d had any work done out there.

“How are my favorite preppy bohemians?” Nancy said, kissing Corrine on both cheeks, and then, to Washington and Veronica: “And how’s life in Cheever country?” They’d fled to New Canaan in the wake of September 11, then moved back to the city this summer in time for the school year, buying a loft a few blocks away in a converted tool and die factory, although this news hadn’t yet reached Nancy.

“I think we found out why Cheever drank so much,” said Washington.

“It was horrible,” Veronica said. “We thought we were doing it for the kids, but if anything, they hated it even more than we did.”

“And everyone thought I was the help,” Washington said.

“Now you’re exaggerating, Wash.”

“Fucking dudes in madras shorts trying to hire me to cut the lawn.”

“Stop it.”

“ ‘Hey, boy, can you carry my golf clubs?’ ”

“He’s only slightly exaggerating. Even the dog hated it.”

“And Mingus got Lyme disease.”

“Who knew the yard was lousy with ticks.”

“The dog got Lyme disease.”

“Everybody up there has it. It’s like this fucking epidemic.”

“Give me roaches any day. Way better than ticks.”

“I was so happy when we moved back to the city and I spotted a roach in the sink.”

“I could’ve told you it was a mistake to move to the suburbs,” Nancy said. “I grew up there.”

“Didn’t everybody?” Hilary said.

“We were city kids,” Washington said, “Veronica and I. We both grew up in fucking Queens, man. The dream was to trade the tenement for a house with a yard. And it’s like we had to live out our parents’ immigrant dream of escape to the suburbs. It was encoded in us, ever since Veronica’s mother fled Budapest after the revolution and my mom stowed away on a boat from Port of Spain: Go to America, work hard, eat shit, scrub floors, and someday your children will live in Westchester. And Veronica’s mom — ever since she was a little girl she wanted her daughter to live in New Canaan. Anyway, it’s over, our little American dream turned nightmare. We’re back, baby. Solid concrete and asphalt underfoot. Skyscrapers and everything. Just like I pictured it. Yellow limos at my beck and call. Doorman standing at attention, building superintendent at the other end of the intercom whenever you blow a fuse or a fucking lightbulb. City life’s the life for me.”

“I don’t know,” Russell said after a slug of champagne, “nobody loves New York more than I do, but I feel like the city’s getting suburbanized itself. Less diverse, less edgy. It’s more like New Canaan than like the city we moved to.”

Corrine said, “Let’s not get nostalgic for the era of muggings and graffiti and crack vials in the hallway.” She’d almost said AIDS but stopped herself in time. She didn’t want to scratch that scar right now, in the opening hour of a dinner party with strangers in the house. She wasn’t about to talk about Jeff. But it was too late — he was here in the room with her, with his tobacco-inflected scent — back then almost everything smelled like tobacco, Jeff only a little more so, layered over a leathery smell that she’d never encountered since. Everyone has an olfactory signature, if only we’re attuned to it, and she’d been attuned to his. What they called chemistry, she suspected, had mostly to do with smell. She’d felt it again, the other night, with Luke. When we form a snap judgment, and don’t know why. We’re animals first. And she’d loved Jeff’s scent, even though he was Russell’s best friend. It had only happened on a couple of occasions. But the eventual revelation had almost wrecked their marriage. Eighteen years now — he’d died in ’88, in the great epidemic.

To break the spell, she said, “Remember those sidewalk paintings that looked like crime-scene silhouettes — how you couldn’t tell if it was graffiti or a homicide? Who was that artist?”

“What about stepping on crack vials?” Washington added. “On the Upper West Side it was like acorns in a goddamn forest.”

“New York in the eighties,” Jack said. “That must’ve been rad.” And at that moment something in his manner, his youth, his slouching posture reminded her of Jeff.

“We didn’t know it was the eighties at the time,” Washington said. “No one told us until about 1987, and by then it was almost over.”