Bright, Precious Days

7

CORRINE WOKE FEELING CLOUDY AND ANXIOUS, experiencing a sinking dread as she reviewed the evening’s absurd and mortifying climax. As many outrages as her sister had committed over the years, this was truly the most unforgivable.

She found Russell out in the kitchen, finishing off the dishes, a fresh blue-and-yellow bruise on his left cheek.

“Ouch,” she said. “Does it hurt?”

“Only when I breathe.” He poured her a cup of coffee from the French press.

“I still can’t believe it. When I woke up just now, I thought, There’s no way that actually happened.”

“On a happier note, the Democrats took control of both houses.”

She heard a thump from one of the kids’ rooms. “Oh shit,” she said. “We’re going to have to have a serious talk. But first we’ve got to figure out what to say.”

“Fucking Hilary.”

“Really. Hilary the C-U-N-T. You were so great, Russell. I never thought I’d approve of anyone using that word. Ever. But I couldn’t think of a more appropriate deployment.”

“Well, I’ve always believed there is a precise word or phrase for every need, and that was the exact word for the occasion. And by the way, she’s banned from our threshold henceforth.”

“You won’t hear an argument from me.”

“Persona non grata.”

“I think we need to talk to the kids right away.”

“Yeah, you’re right. But not this morning. Too much to process. I’ll come home early tonight and we’ll have a family dinner.”

Sometimes, just when she needed him most, Russell came through for her, and she suddenly experienced a little shudder of guilt about her recent preoccupation with Luke.

The kids were unusually quiet, and even manageable, as if fearful of what might happen next. Russell took them off to school, promising to get home early. Corrine poured a second cup of coffee and tried to plan her day. She had to go to the office and organize Saturday’s food giveaway in Harlem, but she also knew that she wouldn’t really be able to concentrate — the combination of a little too much wine at dinner and being completely distracted by the situation that Hilary had created.

How many times had she asked herself why she’d chosen her as an egg donor, her irresponsible, coked-out, slutty little sister, and yet, to question that decision was to question the children’s very identity; they were, for better and for worse, hatched from Hilary’s eggs, and she couldn’t repent the choice without in some fundamental respect renouncing the result. She couldn’t imagine loving her children more completely, and at this point days and even weeks went by when she never once thought of the circumstances of their conception, because she could not possibly have felt more like their mother. For most of human history, being a mother meant bearing young from your womb. She’d always imagined that they were out there in the void, waiting for her, these little souls, and that after years of struggle and miscarriage and failed in vitro fertilizations she’d discovered a way to reel them in. She believed they were hers; she would never allow herself to be swayed by mere biology.

But now she was scared, riddled with doubts, most specifically that they would love her less when they found out the facts, that they’d blame her for not being who they had so implicitly believed her to be, or, worst of all, that they would gravitate toward Hilary, their real mother, their flesh and blood. She’d once had a nightmare in which her sister and Russell had run away together with the children. She sometimes masochistically imagined the day in the not too distant future when one or both would ask if they could live with Aunt Hilary. She was haunted, too, by something Hilary had said that summer they’d all shared the house in Sagaponack while they were coordinating their menstrual cycles and Russell was shooting Hilary up with progesterone, sticking a giant needle in her ass filled with a substance distilled from the urine of menopausal women: “It’s not natural, what we’re doing.” Hilary was drunk and probably coked-up after having stayed out half the night, rebelling against the strict regimen of temperance and injections they’d been observing the entire month, but Corrine sometimes worried that it was true, that they had tampered with the natural order of things.

All of these worries had preyed on her, but she’d always projected them into the future, hadn’t ever suspected they’d have to try to explain exactly what had happened before the kids were old enough to understand the basics of reproduction. How to explain to them that Russell had drawn the line at adoption and hadn’t wanted to raise kids that weren’t genetically his own, in whom he was afraid he would not see himself. So when it became clear that her eggs weren’t good, she’d devised this plan, almost unheard of at the time, to plant Hilary’s in her own womb. The fertility doctor had said, when she’d proposed it, “Well, theoretically it’s possible.” But, as hard as she’d tried, apparently she hadn’t considered all of the practicalities.

Checking her e-mails, she accepted an invitation to a screening next week, deleted spam for discount pharmaceuticals and breast enlargement. Breast enlargement. As if. Eye lift maybe.

The phone chirped, displaying the name and number of Jean, their part-time housekeeper and nanny. She was calling to say she had a doctor’s appointment and couldn’t get the kids after school. She sounded weepy, and Corrine was afraid that if she asked what was wrong, she would hear another tale of the cruelty and heartlessness of Jean’s girlfriend, Carlotta, who’d been making her miserable for nearly a dozen years now, and Corrine just didn’t have time for it this morning. Plus, she thought it was a good idea, today of all days, to pick the kids up herself. So she said, “Don’t worry, Jean. Take the afternoon off and we’ll see you tomorrow.”

—

Corrine took the subway to her office and spent the morning talking to various food banks in the greater metropolitan area, trying to secure vegetables that stood half a chance of not being rotten. Not quite the workday she might have imagined for herself twenty years ago. After her stint at Sotheby’s, she’d embarked on a successful but ultimately uninspiring stretch as a stockbroker before indulging her artistic yearnings by taking film courses at NYU, and wrote an adaptation of Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, which had, against all odds, and after many years, made the arduous journey to production, and, just barely, to a few screens. In the heady months leading up to its release, Russell had managed to get her hired to write the screenplay for Youth and Beauty, the option on which had been renewed by Tug Barkley’s production company, but the project had gone dormant after two drafts. Later she’d struggled to write about what had happened to her in the months after September 11, but instead of inspiring a book or movie, her experience at the soup kitchen had led her to the job at Nourish New York.

She’d just finished a SlimFast at her desk when Nancy called.

“Oh my God, I’m so hungover.”

“Did you go out?” Corrine asked. Sometimes she felt she lived vicariously through Nancy, who was still pursuing the single-girl life that Corrine had never actually experienced for herself, and that most of her peers had resigned from a decade ago.

“I went to Bungalow 8 with that handsome young redneck that Russell’s publishing. By the time I was fucked-up enough to think about seducing him, he’d disappeared.”

“He does have a roguish, rough-hewn charisma.”

“Then I went to some after-hours place where some fan boy tried to seduce me, but even as drunk as I was, I got a bisexual vibe from him, and I have so stopped doing that. I mean, what is it about me that attracts fags? Why don’t they just stick to their own? I am absolutely not a fag hag. Do I seem like a fag hag to you?”

“Of course not. So what happened?”

“I’m not sure how I made it home, but I woke up fully clothed in the living room, so I must’ve been alone. And now I’m literally dying. Excuse me while I go vomit for the third time.”

“You’re excused.”

An old hand at vomiting, Nancy frequently stuck a finger down her throat when she thought she’d eaten too much, or if she felt drunk but wanted to keep drinking. Corrine wasn’t entirely unsympathetic, having been there, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it anymore — not often, not in a fairly long time — and tried instead to limit her intake of calories. She was relieved, too, that Nancy was too self-absorbed to bring up the Hilary debacle.

Waiting outside the school, Corrine surveyed the parents and the nannies, more of the former than the latter, and more fathers than you’d ever see at the uptown schools — Buckley or St. Bernard’s, Chapin or Spence. Here at PS 234, the moms were less uniformly blond than their Upper East Side counterparts, less Chaneled and Ralphed; more messenger bags than Kelly bags. She waved to Karen Cohen and Marge Findlayson, in their puffy parkas and their Uggs, both full-time moms whose involvement in various school committees and projects made her feel inadequate. The din of construction from the giant apartment complex down the street absolved her of the need to say anything to them, and she chose a spot next to hunky Todd, whose last name she’d never picked up, who worked at home as a Web designer while his wife raked it in at J. P. Morgan.

And suddenly the kids were pouring out, shrieking and howling, hands clutching the straps of their backpacks. And while her children greeted her enthusiastically enough, they grew uncharacteristically subdued on the walk home, and even Rice Krispies Treats from the deli failed to raise their spirits significantly.

Russell came home early, as promised, with the ingredients for the kids’ favorite meal, which he adamantly refused to call “chicken tenders,” as it was known in certain quarters; he’d actually been known to tell waiters that tender was not a noun, unless it referred to a boat that was used to ferry people and supplies to and from a ship. But it was certainly not a part of any chicken. The kids would use the phrase just to wind him up, to hear Dad launch into his tirade. He was willing to call these fried strips of breast meat “chicken fingers,” as long as they understood that this was a fanciful association. Whatever they were called, Corrine hated it when he made them, because the batter making and the deep frying trashed the kitchen; he was capable of getting batter on virtually every surface, once even on the ceiling, and he could have easily ordered takeout from Bubby’s, just a few blocks away. But the kids were always deeply appreciative, even now that they had moved on to appreciate such grown-up fare as fried calamari and rock shrimp tempura. They still declared loyally that Dad’s were better than the restaurant kind, and perhaps they were. At any rate, tonight it seemed extremely important to enact this family ritual, and she was grateful to Russell for thinking of it.

“Have you thought about what, exactly, we’re going to say about last night?” he asked, mixing the batter.

Both children were still in their rooms, allegedly doing homework.

“I think we’ll just have to come totally clean. Look, we knew this day was going to come. We’ve just been putting it off.”

The battered chicken hissed and sputtered as he slid it into the oil, protesting as if it were alive. “Too good a fate for your sister,” he said, nodding at the pot. “I guess we no longer boil people in oil. I don’t suppose she called to apologize?”

Corrine shook her head.

“Well, I’m as ready as I’ll ever be,” Russell said a few minutes later as he carried a salad and the platter of chicken whatevers to the table and Corrine went to fetch the kids, finding both hunched over their desks.

“Dad made your favorite — chicken tentacles,” Corrine said, urging them toward the table.

“Why’s he home so early?” Storey asked.

“So he can have a nice dinner with his family.”

Once they were seated, Russell inquired about their school day and received a perfunctory answer from Storey.

He cleared his throat. “Now, let’s talk about last night. It must have upset you, what Aunt Hilary said.”

Storey asked, “Is she really our mother?”

“No, she’s not,” Russell said. “Your mother’s your mother.”

“Are you okay, Jeremy?” Corrine said, laying an arm around his shoulders.

He nodded, his eyes suddenly welling with tears, then surrendered to his mother’s embrace and sobbed.

“It’s okay, honey; nothing’s changed.”

“Can we still live here?” Storey asked.

“Of course, silly.” Russell was being solid and sensibly Dad-like, which was good, since Corrine was on the verge of absolute fucking hysteria.

“She can’t take us away?”

“No one can take you away.”

“Here’s the thing,” Corrine said, trying to keep her voice steady. “More than anything in the world we wanted to have you two, but I was having trouble with my eggs — they weren’t strong enough — so I had to borrow some eggs.”

“Does that mean Dad had sex with Aunt Hilary?” Storey asked.

“Absolutely not,” Corrine said.

“You guys know about…reproduction?”

“We’re eleven, Dad,” Storey informed him.

“Well, basically, my, uh, sperm was mixed with Hilary’s eggs.”

“You mean in vitro fertilization,” Storey said.

Russell and Corrine exchanged a look. “Well, yes, exactly. And then the fertilized eggs were planted in Mom’s…in Mom.”

“So does that make Hilary our mother?”

It was all Corrine could do to maintain her composure.

“Aunt Hilary helped, but Mom is your only mother,” Russell said. “She’ll always be your mother.”

“She can’t take us away?”

“No one can take you away from us,” Russell said. “You’ll live with us until you’re so sick of us that you can’t wait to go off to college and pretend you never had any parents at all.”

—

So impressed was she with Russell’s performance that night, and the night before, that she felt an upwelling of the love and desire she sometimes feared had gone extinct, and that had lately been eclipsed by Luke’s reappearance. But tonight she felt a rekindling of the belief that this was her soul mate, the one person on the planet made especially for her, her Platonic twin. She hadn’t felt so close to him in years; when they were finally settled in bed, she kissed his neck and worked her way down his chest, eager to express her gratitude. Russell seemed surprised at first, moaning and arching his back, quickly becoming hard, and she realized it had been months since she’d done this, and when she felt him on the verge, she slid up his chest and slipped him inside and didn’t mind that he came almost immediately — took it as compliment, basically — and she fell asleep feeling as happy and fulfilled as she could remember being in a very long time.