Bright, Precious Days

6

JACK DIDN’T QUITE KNOW what to expect from a Manhattan dinner party, but so far he felt like a rube — which actually was pretty much what he’d expected. He felt like he was watching a movie, an updated version of one of those Depression-era New York flicks in which all the characters were ridiculously good-looking and witty. He wouldn’t have been totally surprised if one of his publisher’s friends had suddenly started belting out “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” although the stage itself was a little shabby, a little more After Hours than Dinner at Eight.

“We didn’t know it was the eighties at the time,” Washington was saying. “It was just the present. Does anyone ever have a feeling of living in a particular decade? I mean, do you feel right now, right this minute, like you’re living in the aughts? Is that what we call them? Are we somehow acting out the zeitgeist here and now? Are we exhibiting aughtness? I sure as hell don’t remember being aware it was the eighties back then.”

“I’m not sure Russell and Corrine ever knew it was the eighties,” Nancy said. “They were like these elegant throwbacks to the twenties, having these chic little parties. The rest of us were living in hovels, illegal sublets in the East Village and shared railroad flats in Hell’s Kitchen, eating pizza and lo mein out of boxes while they were serving cocktails and canapés on the Upper East Side. Poster children for the good life, the perfect couple — while everybody else was single and searching and scruffy. Russell even had a velvet smoking jacket. It was all very Scott and Zelda, Nick and Nora.”

“Now you’re mixing your periods,” Washington said.

“I’ll have you know,” Russell said, “I published a book by Keith Haring.”

“You are so fucking hip,” Washington said. To the others: “Russell went to the Mudd Club one night in a blue blazer and chinos. I shit you not. Everybody thought he was being ironic.”

“It was authentic,” Russell said. “I yam what I yam.”

“Before anyone romanticizes the eighties any further,” Nancy said, “I have two words: Milli Vanilli.”

“Talk about authentic.”

Jack decided not to ask what the fuck Milli Vanilli was.

—

Eventually, when they were all finally seated at the dinner table, Russell stood up and raised his glass. “I’d like to toast old friends and new, and in particular to welcome Jack Carson to our fair city.” Even as he shrank away from this unexpected beam of attention, this turning of all eyes in the room on him, the rube among the sophisticates, dressed like a bum, with the manners to match, Jack thought, defensively, Nobody says our fair city anymore, do they? He was relieved to hear his famous Manhattan editor sounding so dorky.

“Two years ago,” Russell was saying, “my assistant urged me to look at some unpublished stories posted on Myspace, and I couldn’t have been more skeptical. In fact, I wasn’t even sure what Myspace was.”

Washington said, “He still thinks the Internet is a passing fad.”

“But I eventually read the stories and I was blown away. It was like Raymond Carver and Breece D’J Pancake had had a love child—”

“That is so gross,” Nancy interjected.

“Breece D’ what?” Hilary asked.

“And at the same time, it was unlike anything I’d ever read before. So please raise a glass to our new friend and his masterful book, which I’m more than honored to be publishing.”

Jack didn’t know what the hell he was supposed to do or where to look. He’d never been the object of a toast before. For that matter, he wasn’t sure he’d ever been to an actual dinner party before, unless you counted the odd Thanksgiving or barbecues at his uncle Walt’s. This was all very…civilized, Russell and Corrine like two glamorous parents presiding over some kind of salon. If his stepfather could see him now, he’d say, What, you think you’re fucking special?

After disappearing for a few minutes, Washington returned to the table, clinked his fork against his wineglass repeatedly until he mostly had their attention. “Ladies and germs, it appears Eliot Spitzer is our new governor.”

“Big surprise,” Dan said. “But just remember, New York isn’t America.”

“Thank God for that,” Nancy said. “Isn’t that why we all came here in the first place?”

“Better be careful comin’ to my part of America with that attitude,” Jack said before he could check himself. He hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but in his nervousness he’d already guzzled two vodkas and two glasses of wine.

“Darn tootin’,” Hilary slurred.

“Honey,” Corrine said, “tell us about the wine.” Apparently, this was a play she’d called more than once. And sure enough, old Russell got up and yammered on about the wine, which apparently came from Spain. Washington threw a piece of bread at him. Jack couldn’t help laughing, finally recognizing at least one dinner ritual.

After Russell sat down, Corrine turned to Jack and said, “I don’t know when I’ve seen Russell as excited about a book as he is about yours.”

“Shitfire, ma’am, pardon my French, but I grew up readin’ the books he published,” he said, obligingly pouring on the backwoods accent for her benefit. “Gettin’ published by Russell, it’s like signin’ with the fuckin’ Yankees. Coming from where I come from, the idea that I’d ever publish a book at all was just pie in the sky.”

It was becoming impossible to ignore Hilary, directly across the table, who seemed to have consumed a hell of a lot of Russell’s wine, judging by the volume of her voice. “You fucking liberals are so predictable,” she said, toppling her wineglass with a dismissive wave of her arm, spattering Spanish red all over the table.

“You right wingers are so fucking violent,” Washington said, brushing a few drops from the sleeve of his jacket.

“That was an accident.”

“Yeah, and so was the Tuskegee experiment.”

“Hey,” said Russell, mopping up the spill with his dinner napkin.

“What the hell is that?” demanded Hilary.

“U.S. Public Health Service used six hundred Negroes as guinea pigs to study the effects of untreated syphilis.”

“Oh, right.”

“Google it.”

“I will.”

Corrine, in despair, turned to Jack. “Is this your first Manhattan dinner party?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Sorry, we’re usually slightly better behaved.”

“Back home we don’t consider it a party till blood’s been drawn. Last Thanksgiving my uncle stabbed my aunt with the electric carving knife.”

“Oh my God! Was she okay?”

“She was fine. It wasn’t plugged in at the time. They stitched her up and sent her home that night.”

“Are they still married?”

“Not exactly. She shot him dead a few months later.” This part wasn’t exactly true. She shot him in the arm and he drove himself to the same clinic that had sewed her up at Thanksgiving, but Jack assumed he had a role to play here and didn’t want to disappoint anybody.

“Oh my God,” she said again.

“He had the emphysema bad, so it was only a matter of time,” he drawled. As both a southerner and a fiction writer, he hated for the facts to get in the way of a good story.

“What about your parents?” she asked.

“Well, my dad left before I was born. He was a musician. My mom met him in Nashville; she was only with him for a few months before he hit the road. Then there was the meth dealer and then Cliff, my so-called stepfather, who did a little of everythin’ and a whole lot of nothin’. My mom shoulda shot his goddamn ass but never did. Woulda been a service to humanity. I thought about doin’ it myself. In the end, I knocked him senseless with an ax and went to juvie.”

Corrine looked pained, and Jack almost felt bad. Clearly she hadn’t read the stories yet.

“The French were right about the Iraq War,” Russell was saying. “Back when all these jerkoffs were boycotting French wine and cheese and calling french fries ‘freedom fries,’ I was calling cheeseburgers fromage burgers and boycotting California wines.”

“Big fucking sacrifice,” Washington said. “You haven’t drunk a wine from California in years.”

“Wait,” Nancy said. “I thought Spain was the new France.”

“The point is,” Russell said, “if you’re going to boycott the products of a country based on disagreeing with their foreign policy, then those of us who think the Iraq debacle was the most ill-advised and unjustified shoot-’em-up since Vietnam should be boycotting American products.”

“That’s easy,” Washington said. “America hardly makes anything anymore.”

“What about Harley-Davidsons?” Jack said.

“And Levi’s.”

“Nope, sorry. Made in China.”

“We do make cruise missiles and stealth bombers.”

“Weapons of mass destruction.”

“We’ve met the enemy and he is us.”

“Fiction,” Russell said. “We still do fiction really well. American literature’s alive and well. When I first got into publishing, everyone said the novel was dead, that our generation wasn’t reading. Since then we’ve seen, like, two or three generations of American novelists come of age.”

“Tell it to the Nobel Prize committee,” Washington said.

Hilary was regaling Veronica about the TV pilot she and Dan were trying to pitch, based on his career as a cop in Brooklyn. “This is, like, totally authentic, not like those bullshit cop shows. Dan was on the force for twenty years. He knows where the bodies are buried.” This Hilary is kind of hot, Jack thought, if not exceptionally smart — a not atypical combo — and he was fascinated by Corrine’s barely concealed contempt for her.

“As a cop,” Russell said, “wasn’t he supposed to tell somebody where the bodies were buried before now?”

—

Jack went back to trying to entertain his hostess with tales of crystal meth in the land of moonshine. “The meth business, it’s all in the family,” he said. “You got three generations cookin’ crystal in the kitchen. Course, there ain’t a big age gap between the generations. Momma’s thirty-three and Gran’s forty-five. And they’re all losin’ their teeth thanks to the crystal and the co’cola. Toothless in Fairview. That could be the title of my book.”

“Shit, round here meth’s strictly a gay thing,” Washington said. “Wealthy decorators and film producers trolling the bathhouses wired to the gills.”

“I can’t believe you said decorators,” Corrine said. “That’s such a stereotype.”

“A gay thing?” Jack was appalled. “Meth? Fuck me. Who woulda thought? Seemed to me like us rednecks owned that shit.”

Corrine said, “Didn’t the bathhouses shut down in the eighties?”

Washington shook his head and poured another glass of wine, so Jack held his out for a refill.

“They’re back,” Washington said. “These guys start on a Friday night, do meth and Viagra and go at it all weekend.”

“It’s true,” Russell said.

“And we know this how?” Corrine asked.

“I know a guy, Juan Baptiste. He’s into the scene.”

“The Voice columnist.”

“Does the Voice still exist?”

“It’s a giveaway now.”

Jack was struggling to keep up. He had to stop drinking before he totally lost his grip in front of these people and said or did something stupid. “What voice?” he said.

“The Village Voice,” Corrine said. “It was the hipster alternative weekly when we first came to New York.”

“Norman Mailer started it. We all used to read it to figure out what our politics should be and what music to listen to.”

“Mailer’s cool,” Jack said, latching onto a familiar bearing. “Specially Advertisements for Myself.”

“I once played pool with him,” Russell said.

“But then it got pretty gay,” Nancy said.

“What, Mailer?” Jack asked, confused.

“No, the Voice.”

“God, we’re dating ourselves here,” Corrine said. “Let’s turn on CNN and find out about the midterms.”

Russell protested, complaining that they hadn’t served the cheese yet.

“I hate this cheese thing,” Corrine muttered to Jack.

“Cheese?” Jack wondered if that was code for something else.

“Another thing we borrowed from the French. It became fashionable in Manhattan about ten years ago. You finish a giant meal and then gorge on semirancid dairy.”

“Yeah, I don’t actually see the point of that,” Jack said. “Where I come from, we got something called dessert.”

“That comes after the cheese,” she said.

Despite her age, he was surprised to find Russell’s wife sexy — in a refined, untouchable kind of way. To his mind she looked as he imagined the temptress suburban housewives in Updike would look. They would be so cool and collected right up to the minute they grabbed your crotch behind the pool house while their husbands were playing croquet on the lawn a few yards away. He couldn’t help imagining how sexy, because unexpected, the grunts and groans of passion emerging from such an elegant creature would be. He felt totally weird fantasizing about fucking his editor’s wife, so he tried thinking about Nancy, right across the table and also pretty hot for a chick her age.

Eventually, after he reminded himself that these people were from another planet and might have totally different genitals, the group moved away from the table and Corrine switched on the television so they could all check on the elections. It looked as if the Democrats would take the House and the Senate. Russell sat on the back of the couch behind Corrine, running his hand through her hair. Jack found it kind of sweet. He’d never seen a married couple touch like that.

Wolf Blitzer announced that CNN was predicting that Nancy Pelosi would be the first female Speaker of the House in history.

“California knee-jerk liberals,” Hilary shouted. She was pretty wasted. Her lips seemed to be congealing around her words.

“She ought to know,” Corrine said to Russell. “She slept with half of Hollywood.” She’d probably intended the remark for his ears only, but by chance it pierced a brief moment of silence in what up to then had been relentless clamor.

Hilary spun in Corrine’s direction and fixed her with a blurry look of hurt reproach before storming off in the direction of the bathroom.

“Oh shit,” Corrine said. “That was supposed to be sub rosa.”

“Wait, check this out,” Russell said, pointing at the TV screen, which showed a photograph of a middle-aged dude. Blitzer was saying, “We’ve received word that American journalist Phillip Kohout has been found alive in Lahore, Pakistan, after allegedly escaping captivity at the hands of terrorists associated with the Taliban. Kohout disappeared almost three months ago while researching a story about terrorism in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan. He reportedly made his way to the American consulate in Lahore after escaping from a compound in the nearby suburbs. More on this story as it develops.”

“I didn’t know he’d been kidnapped,” Corrine said.

“I heard something about it a couple months ago,” Russell said.

“Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving fellow,” Corrine said.

“That’s a little harsh,” Russell said. He turned to Jack. “An author I published. His first novel was a big success.”

“After which he dumped you,” Corrine added.

“Well, he screwed me out of the option on his second book. But I don’t think that warrants two months wearing a black hood in Waziristan.”

Suddenly, Storey, the daughter, appeared in her nightgown, looking distraught, and ran across the room to Corrine. “Aunt Hilary says you’re not my real mother! She says she’s my mother.”

Hilary followed in Storey’s wake, looking like someone determined to maintain her sense of righteousness even as she was starting to lose her conviction. Jack couldn’t believe this shit — Storey clutching her mother’s waist, Corrine lifting and enfolding her in a desperate hug and Russell advancing on Hilary.

“Did you really do that, you bitch?”

“She’s deserves to know the truth. You can’t hide it forever.”

“You fucking cunt,” Russell said, backing her against the wall.

“You can’t talk to my girlfriend like that,” Dan said, rushing up, grabbing Russell’s shoulder to spin him around and throwing a punch that caught him squarely on the cheek, sending him back against the wall with a thud. Russell staggered to his feet and took a swing at Dan, barely grazing his rib cage.

For a moment Jack couldn’t locate the source of the wail of pain that echoed through the loft, until he saw Jeremy standing in the hallway, staring at his father, who was propped against the wall, stunned, holding a hand to his cheek.

Corrine clutched Storey’s head to her shoulder and marched straight at Dan and Hilary. “Please leave, both of you.” As Jeremy howled again and Storey began sobbing, her fury redoubled. “Get out! Get the hell out! Right now!”

Jack hadn’t noticed Washington since the onset of hostilities, until he scooped up Jeremy in one arm and pointed at Dan with the other. “You heard the lady,” he said. “Get your sorry cracker asses the fuck out of here.”

Jack wasn’t entirely sure what he’d just witnessed, although the general tenor of family rancor and violence was reassuringly familiar. For the first time all night he felt nearly at ease. Apparently, these people weren’t as different as he’d first imagined.