Bright, Precious Days

48

HER LOVER, ULTIMATELY, dies in a fiery crash, his beloved Austin-Healey wrapped around a tree in East Hampton, just a few miles from the spot where Jackson Pollock, whose grave they once visited together, met his own death in a car crash many years before. And her husband, who asked her to leave their home after he discovered their affair, is about to take her back, after a long separation, in which they both seemed to be in mourning, walking the gloomy canyons of Manhattan separately, against the backdrop of indifferent skyscrapers. On their anniversary, she calls to hear his voice, and when he tells her he misses her, she admits that she’s out on the sidewalk, just outside his art gallery. He is, for all his faults, a good man and she realizes that they are meant to be together. Though easily entranced and distracted by shiny surfaces, by glamour and fleeting pleasures, he loves art and artists; he loves his friends and his wife. When he steps out of the gallery to meet her on the sidewalk, he’s holding a painting of her, done the year before, by her deceased lover — his best friend.

In Corrine’s first five drafts, this penultimate scene was more subtle, becoming increasingly rom-com and clichéd after every meeting with the studio, but now, seeing it on the screen, she feels it has a certain power and it draws tears from her eyes, which, she supposes, is good, though, of course, she is hardly an objective viewer. The final scene undercuts the easy resolution of the sidewalk reunion. Short as it is, it wasn’t easy to write, but she knows from bitter experience that trust, once breached, can never be fully restored. The reunited couple is at a gallery opening, one of those big ratfucks in West Chelsea, the Cure’s “Just Like Heaven” blaring away, the film’s music director having intuitively chosen Jeff’s second-favorite band. She asked Jeff once, “The cure for what?” and he looked at her as if to say, You really need to ask?

The camera pans the room, gradually picking out the wife, who’s chatting up a handsome young artist, and then pans farther to pick up her husband, who’s watching her; his expression not exactly suspicious, but wary, perhaps — cautious, wistful and sad, as if he were yearning for the time when his trust in her was absolute. That’s Corrine’s written stage direction. She has to admit, Jess Colter, the actor, really nailed it, and even though she wrote the scene, she knew it would all come down to whether the actor could translate her intentions, and now it’s all she can do to keep herself from sobbing.

The expression on Colter’s face is not so different from the one that Russell turns on her when the houselights go up.

“Well?” she says hopefully.

“It’s good,” he says, having already seen a rough cut without the final, gallery-opening scene. “The last scene was…powerful.” It can’t have been easy for him to watch this, and she admires his stoicism; more than that, his active support over the years, his encouraging her to persevere on a project that would inevitably revive painful memories, and at this moment she feels a great upwelling of affection for her husband.

The well-wishers approach shyly, obliquely, uncertain of the etiquette of congratulating a couple on the movie adaptation of a novel based on their marriage, written by their dead friend, who possibly — definitely in this version — slept with the wife. The fact that the wife wrote the screenplay makes it an even more complicated equation.

The screening room is womblike, as are the dark, pillowy seats, which seem to soak up the light and swallow the sitter, sucking her down into the imaginary realm, making it hard for her to stand up and regain her sense of place. It’s a chapel of make-believe, an intermediate space between the dream world of the screen and the chaotic quotidian tumult of the world, which serves as an endless source of raw material, to be reshaped and interpreted and improved upon. As long as you’re here, daily life can seem subsidiary to its transubstantiated representation. In the immediate afterglow, the images on the screen are more real than whatever’s waiting for her outside. They linger. For this instant, she’s free, suspended between her own life and the lives that might have been. In her imagination, writing the screenplay and now watching the film, the two men had become one, Luke becoming Jeff, or perhaps Jeff had become Luke, and the years separating them had fallen away and she was forever twenty-two and forever in love.

But the other life, her actual life, is coming at her like a wave, coming to reclaim her and obliterate the imagined one, washing over her and pulling her back to solid but shifting ground — friends, colleagues, a producer and two of the actors, even a sister she’s been trying to discard.

Here’s Casey, her oldest friend, looking a little tight around the eyes from her face-lift, dry-eyed, taut cheeks, coming over, arms open wide to sweep her in. “Oh my God, I was sobbing, it was so beautiful.”

Veronica and Washington are holding back, keeping their distance while pretending not to be noticing Casey, waiting for her to disappear. Already it has been negotiated that Casey, in deference to Veronica’s feelings, will not be going to the after party, which is why she gets primacy here. Among the negotiating points was the promise that her ex wouldn’t be invited to either event. The present is littered with wreckage from their past.

“Well, it’s wonderful you came,” Corrine says, unfurling herself.

Nancy Tanner squirms through the scrum — easily done, since she is skinnier than ever — and materializes in front of Corrine. “For an amateur,” she says, “you’re not a bad screenwriter. Gotta say, you really captured those entitled, overeducated New Yorkers.”

“I’ll take that as a tribute to my vast imaginative powers. But seriously, Jeff and Cody deserve most of the credit.”

And indeed, Cody Erhardt is mobbed over in the other corner, the director accepting tribute from some of the more fashionable members of the audience.

“But seriously, can you please introduce me to Tug Barkley? He was amazing playing Jeff. Is he coming to the party? He’s so hot. Did you get to know him at all?”

“I can’t say that we’re close — I wasn’t on the set.”

“You absolutely must introduce me.”

“I’ll try to at the party.”

The fluid comportment of her sister, wobbling in place, artfully tilting her head as she rests an arm on Corrine’s shoulder, suggests that she didn’t stint on the cheap wine served before the screening.

“So proud of you, sis.”

“Thank you, Hilary.”

“I mean it. S’wonderful.”

“I’m paralyzed with happiness.”

“I know you don’t think I’m smart.”

“I don’t think any such thing.”

“Yes, you do. But I was smart enough to know what to say to make Russell forgive you.”

“You mean Russell, my husband, who’s standing right there, within earshot?”

Fortunately, he’s absorbed in conversation with Carlo Russi, the chef, who is hosting the after-party at his new restaurant.

“I know I shouldn’t say anything.”

“You’re quite right about that, so don’t. Have you met Michael, our exec producer? Michael, this is my sister, Hilary.”

Michael, a dark, chiseled prince with a fiercely intelligent gaze, tall and handsome enough that he might have made a career in front of the camera, succeeds in distracting Hilary from whatever revelation was quivering on her lips, taking her hand and ducking his head gallantly. “A pleasure to meet you.”

“Likewise. Are you going to the party? Maybe we could share a cab? I work at HBO, but I have a script I’d love to tell you about.”

Michael’s visibly stricken by this revelation. But he’s a big boy who will have to take care of himself, and Corrine is grateful to be rid of her sister, who is towing him toward the exit.

“Corrine, this is Astrid Kladstrup,” Russell is saying, presenting this voluptuous Betty Boop babe with a bobbed do, cartoon lips and a vintage dress. “Astrid’s at least partly responsible for the whole Jeff Pierce revival — she curates that Web site.”

“It’s so amazing to meet you,” the girl says as Corrine looks her over, then glances back at Russell, suddenly wondering if it’s possible, and indeed he seems a little flustered. “I thought the movie was great,” she continues, “although I was sorry it wasn’t faithful to the drug overdose. But I suppose there was no way that was going to fly.”

The publicist has slipped behind them and is urging them forward toward the exit.

“You still weepy?” Russell asks, putting his arm around her.

“I’m fine,” she says, her voice catching in her throat.

“Well, let’s join Wash and Veronica, who’ve been waiting patiently to pay homage.”

She remembers then that they’re a couple; that she is, in addition to being a lover and a mother, half of this unit: Russell & Corrine.

She exchanges kisses with the Lees, and together they walk out into the anteroom, redolent of popcorn, which is glowing yellow in the glass case of the bright red machine.

They collect their coats, share the elevator down to the lobby and walk out into the cold.

“If we still lived here, we’d be home now,” Russell says, looking down West Broadway. They live a hundred and forty blocks north now, in Harlem.

“What was that expression of yours?” Corrine says. “ ‘If wishes were Porsches, beggars would drive’?”

“A clever refashioning of the old adage, I think.”

“I think we’ll all be a whole lot cleverer after a cocktail or two,” Washington says, flagging a cab.

“It’s only a few blocks,” Corrine tells him. “You guys go ahead. We’re going to walk.” Russell gives her a quizzical look before nodding — one of those tiny empathetic exchanges of which a marriage of long duration is compounded. Corrine was ready to jump in the cab, but she realizes now that she wants more than anything to walk, and she takes Russell’s hand. It’s an important night and she intends to savor it.

Such moments are too often lost, the private interludes between the tribal gatherings, the transit between destinations, when the city becomes an intimate landscape, a secret shared by two. This was once their neighborhood and she wants to reclaim it for a little while, to walk past the apartment where they spent so much of their lives, even if it makes her sad thinking of all that transpired there, and all that’s lost. It makes her melancholy to imagine that she might never be here again, that these blocks, their former haunts, and their old building will outlast them; that the city is supremely indifferent to their transit through its arteries, and to their ultimate destination. For now, she wants just to be in between. She knows that later it won’t be the party she will remember so much as this, the walk with her husband in the crisp autumn air, bathed in the yellow metropolitan light spilling from thousands of windows, this suspended moment of anticipation before arrival.