Bright, Precious Days

9

“IS THERE ANYTHING BETTER THAN BONEFISHING?” Kip asked as they sprawled on lawn chairs on the deck outside camp, looking out over the flats, silvery pink in the reflected sunset. Owl-eyed from a day on the water, white sunglass-shaped ovals on his sunburned face, he was wearing a multipocketed turquoise shirt and a Lehman Brothers cap.

After a nearly perfect day on the water, Russell felt there was indeed much to be said in favor of fly-fishing in the Bahamas with Kip Taylor, his chief investor, who was picking up the tab.

“It’s damn good, but I don’t know that I’d put it right at the very top of the list,” Russell said. His hands were still fragrant from the nine bonefish he’d caught and released, one of them a probable ten-pounder, his personal best.

“Russell, don’t be so predictable, for Christ’s sake. Are you actually going to try to tell me, at our age, that the most important thing in life is sex?”

Russell couldn’t quite decide if Kip was being refreshingly honest or simply trying to be original. “Not necessarily the most important, but certainly the most pleasurable.”

“So why are you here instead of at home poking your wife? I think that’s just what you think you’re supposed to say.”

“If I could only have one or the other, I don’t think I’d pick fishing.”

“After twenty-five years of marriage you still find it exciting?”

For purposes of this discussion, Russell had been thinking about sex in general, or in some earlier incarnation of his marriage, not necessarily conjugal relations in the present tense, though they’d enjoyed a bit of a revival in that department recently. “It comes and goes,” he said.

“How often?” Kip demanded. “Honestly.”

Russell sometimes felt that Kip believed his wealth entitled him to the truth, as if it were a commodity like any other. His questions often took this form, an interrogative followed by the imperative honestly. “Maybe once a week,” he said. This was, in fact, a wildly optimistic estimate. Twice a month, maybe.

“I’m on my third marriage and I’ve come to the conclusion that on average sexual infatuation lasts about five years.”

“Good thing you have fishing, then.”

“Honestly, I get a bigger hard-on closing a serious deal than fucking my wife. And you’d probably rather find the next Hemingway than fuck yours. Hell, I’d rather read the next Hemingway, if the truth be told. Or reread A River Runs Through It. You ever hear the one about the three stages of marriage? When you first get married, you’re having chandelier sex, swinging from the light fixtures. Next you have bedroom sex, once a week, in the bed. Then finally you have hallway sex. Know what that is?”

“What’s that?”

“You pass each other in the hallway and say ‘Fuck you.’ ”

Russell issued a perfunctory snort.

“So, good-looking woman is in a department store,” Kip said, now on a roll. “She’s with her two kids, and she’s yelling at them, ‘Stop touching this, stop fooling around,’ basically cussing them out, and eventually she’s at the cash register, still yelling at them, when the guy behind her says, ‘Those are fine-looking young boys. Are they twins?’ And she looks at him and says, ‘No, they’re not twins, they’re nine and eleven, you idiot. What are you, stupid? Anybody can see they aren’t twins.’ And the guy says to her, ‘It’s just that I can’t imagine anybody fucking you twice.’ ”

After a self-appreciative pause, Kip said, “Ah, yes, kids. That youthful sex drive is nature’s reproductive imperative. But once the kids come along, they destroy it. It’s amazing anyone has more than one; the little buggers seem to be programmed to behave in such a way as to discourage parents from ever doing it again.”

Russell nodded, suddenly feeling guilty that he hadn’t thought about his own children all day.

“But you need distractions, of course; you need your visceral pleasures. God knows I do, being semiretired. Fly-fishing and single-malt scotch,” he said, hoisting his glass and sniffing it appreciatively. “It’s either that or you start screwing your masseuse.”

“I turned down a proposition,” Russell said, “from a hot college girl a few months back.”

Kip looked intrigued. “On what grounds?”

“I’m still trying to decide,” he said.

“There’re only three,” Kip said. “Fidelity. Fear of getting caught. Or lack of interest.” Kip was fond of categorical pronouncements.

“One and two, I guess,” Russell said, although he had to admit that while Astrid Kladstrup had certainly stirred his loins — and in a perfect world he would have liked nothing better than to have exercised them — at this point in his life he just didn’t think it was worth the trouble.

“But I’m not sure you can parse out the reasons that neatly,” he added. “Guilt and fear of getting caught can erode your interest — your carnal enthusiasm. It wasn’t lack of interest so much as lack of the kind of overwhelming drive required to surmount the guilt and the fear of getting caught.”

“That’s what I was saying earlier,” Kip said. “Sex no longer rules your life. There was a time you would’ve been all over that. God knows I was. Secretaries and waitresses were my big hobbies then. Why do you think I got divorced twice?”

Russell had, in fact, been unfaithful to Corrine in the past, not often, but more than once. He wasn’t proud of it now, and he just didn’t want to feel that way again. He wasn’t certain whether this meant he was getting wiser, or merely older.

“So who was this?” Kip asked. “Some girl at the office?”

“No, although I’ve made that mistake before.”

Kip looked surprised, and Russell realized that this was the first time he’d ever admitted to any kind of extramarital activity in front of his business partner. Their friendship was relatively new. They’d been acquainted at Brown but had fallen out of touch in the years after both moved to New York. They started socializing five years ago, after a chance encounter at an uptown dinner party, where they discovered that Kip’s son was the same age as Russell’s twins.

They’d both been English majors, but after a year in Paris, failing to write a novel, Kip had joined the training program at First Boston, and later started a hedge fund while maintaining his subscriptions to The New York Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement. He kept up with contemporary fiction, and Russell was flattered to learn he’d followed his career. Kip confessed he’d always wondered what it would be like if he’d pursued a literary career, and had always watched the alumni review for notes on Russell’s progress. “You know, the road not taken.” Kip’s son hit it off with Jeremy, and Russell shared Kip’s passion for fly-fishing, though he’d never been able to practice it much farther from home than upstate New York before Kip started taking him along on his trips. It had been on the North Platte River in Wyoming that their business partnership had been conceived, though it took them several months to find the appropriate vehicle.

Russell was chafing in his old job, working for a philistine at a once-illustrious publishing house that had been purchased by a French conglomerate. He’d been increasingly unhappy since the change in ownership, and after the events of September 11, he felt the need to make his mark in the world while there was still time, and to do more than other publishers were for the writers he believed in. He’d seen too many talented authors sent naked into the world as the big houses lavished all their hopes and energy on a few flashy titles for which they’d overpaid after ruinous bidding wars. He’d recently attended the funeral of a friend who’d published four serious, well-reviewed novels, whose fifth Russell had been unable to convince his employers to take on, given the disappointing sales of its predecessors. Though it turned out the writer had been treated for depression, Russell never forgave his boss, or himself, when the man committed suicide a year later. And of course there was Jeff….When McCane, Slade went up for sale after old man Slade suffered a stroke, they’d pounced. It had a venerable name and a solid backlist that threw off over a million a year. Kip assembled a small group of investors, putting up half of the money himself, giving Russell 20 percent of the company, with additional equity contingent on performance. And, in 2004, after just two years, they’d turned a small profit. Score one for the Art and Love team.

—

They were summoned to dinner by Matthew Soames, an Englishman in his mid-thirties whose fifth-great-grandfather had been given title to this Bahamian island by King George III. Various agricultural schemes had been tried and abandoned over the generations, until Matthew, after getting kicked out of Oxford, had finally hit on the idea of building a fishing camp on the otherwise-uninhabited island. After his first two visits, and his very first tarpon on a fly rod, Kip had invested in the camp. The accommodations were more spartan than Kip was accustomed to, but the fishing more than compensated, and Matthew’s girlfriend was an excellent cook.

Tonight, Cora started them with stone crab claws. The main course was a very tasty Nassau grouper in a green curry sauce. They talked about fishing and, with an earnestness unique to fishermen and seafarers, about the weather, until Kip sent Matthew to fetch a second bottle of wine.

“So what’s your thinking on this Kohout book?” Kip said.

“An important title, no doubt about it.”

“Well, getting captured by the Taliban or whoever the fuck they are doesn’t seem like such a brilliant achievement in and of itself.”

“No, but Phillip managed to escape, which wasn’t all that easy, and in the meantime he seems to have picked up some interesting intelligence. He claims that bin Laden is in Pakistan.”

“That’s hardly a novel theory.”

“But beyond that it’s a story of triumphing over adversity. What’ll make this different is that he’s a very good writer, and a real writer can make a trip to Food Emporium fascinating.” Russell decided not to mention the recent encounter in Saint Barth’s; if he begrudged his authors’ drug habits and narcissistic behavior, he wouldn’t have much of a list. “I’ve worked with Kohout before — I basically discovered him, so I think that gives me an edge. Plus, a book like this puts us right in the middle of the cultural dialogue.”

“It seems to me our business model is still sound. We cultivate new talent, mostly fiction, buy low, sell foreign rights, leave expensive wannabe blockbusters to the big houses.”

Easy for Kip to say — he had a five-bedroom apartment on Park Avenue. Russell could have said he wanted to be able to send his kids to private school, or buy an apartment, or take the occasional trip to Europe, but instead he said, “Well, yes, but sometimes we might need to be flexible, be willing to assume some risk for a worthwhile project with a big upside.” He realized that he sounded a little stilted trying to speak Kip’s language. “Obviously, if the book goes for three or four million, we’re out, end of story, but maybe we could make a preemptive offer, let’s say seven fifty, and see if we can’t make a deal. I think it’s an important book that could put us in a different league.”

This was not a jaw-dropping number to a man like Kip. For him, McCane, Slade — the repository of Russell’s life’s ambitions — was more or less a hobby, not that he wanted to lose money on it, any more than Russell did. Still, if Russell ever hoped to own a house or leave money to his kids, this was his shot, and that was no small part of what attracted him to the Kohout deal. For most of his life he’d worked for large corporations, in whose profitability he’d had only an indirect share. He’d acquired a few best-sellers over the years, without ever participating in the profits they generated. This had, he realized now, allowed him the luxury of choosing books according to his own tastes and interests, confident that in the long run they’d make money in the aggregate and keep him employed. His books often won prizes and garnered positive reviews, and his employers understood that these bolstered the value of their brands. But now his compensation was tied directly to his performance. After years of collecting a paycheck, he found himself an entrepreneur.

“Well, if you think we can get it for seven fifty. What kind of rights are we talking about?”

“Well, we’d try for foreign and first serial.”

“Let me look at the proposal one more time.”

When Matthew returned with a second bottle of white Burgundy, Russell told him, “Kip thinks sex is overrated as a human motivation. What do you think?”

“I’m English,” he replied. “Of course I have to agree.”

“You misrepresent me,” Kip said. “I proposed that at a certain age it ceases to be the predominant, overarching drive.”

Matthew bobbed his head, his weathered face glowing red in the candlelight. “Can’t possibly argue with that.”

“So what’s your secret?” Kip asked.

“My secret?”

“To happiness.”

“Who says I’m happy?” Matthew said.

“You seem to have it all figured out.”

“In terms of men and women, if that’s what you mean, my secret is not to get married. We’ve been together eleven years, Cora and I, and I’m convinced that if we tied the knot, it would spoil things between us.”

“How does she feel about that?”

“She’s still here. And she still has the figure she had when she was twenty.”

—

Matthew elaborated on this theme the next day when he took Russell out on the flats. “Security and excitement are opposites, what? You can’t have both.”

They’d chosen the inside of the island, working the maze of creeks and swamps inshore, while Kip and his guide worked the outside. It was a primeval landscape, more liquid than solid, the border between the two blurred by the red mangroves, their dark green leaves hiding the sand, and their roots reaching out into the murk, a universe of prey and predators concealed within these underwater forests. Just an hour past low tide the backcountry was ripe with the tidal-pool stench of decay and regeneration, the effluvia of billions of microorganisms having sex and dying.

The surface of the water was still and glassy as Matthew poled across the flat toward two feeding bonefish, their silvery tails breaking the surface and waggling as they worked, grazing the shallows for crabs and mollusks, sharing the flat with two white egrets that walked with a deliberate and fastidious gait, raising their feet out of the water between steps, periodically piercing the surface with their long beaks. They paused to watch the skiff as it glided closer, spreading their wings in unison and lifting off, spooking the two bonefish, which shot across a half-submerged sandbar and settled on the other side.

By the time Matthew poled over to the sandbar, the fish were working some fifty yards away, and he made a walking motion with his fingers. Russell slid off the bow into the water and waded slowly, carefully extracting each foot from the muck with as little noise and motion as possible as he stalked within casting distance, watching for the tails, which periodically cut the surface, finally unleashing his cast, throwing two false casts to get his line out, waiting for the slight resistance of his back cast before launching his rod forward and dropping his fly six feet in front of the cruising fish. It seemed to him that his line had landed hard but miraculously; they didn’t spook, continuing to move toward the fly, two gray shadows against the gray-brown mud. When they were within a few feet of the fly, Russell twitched it once and then began to retrieve, pulling in line with his left hand and holding the rod close to the surface with his right, until one of the fish broke from its course in pursuit.

In his excitement he snatched the fly away just as the fish was grabbing for it, but he stopped his retrieve and then slowly resumed as it made a second run, and this time when he set the hook he felt a solid tug. It took the creature a moment to react, and time seemed to stand still, Russell hoping he’d set the hook, and then the fish was off, stripping fifty yards of line, Russell getting his hands free of the unspooling fly line just in time to prevent the leader from snapping, holding his rod tip up in the air as the drag of the reel screamed.

“Nice shot,” Matthew shouted from the skiff.

Ten minutes later, with the frantic silvery fish finally brought in and released, Russell said, “Could be Kip’s right. Maybe this is better than sex.”

“Another reason to shun marriage — I don’t ever want to think like that.”

“You know you love it,” Russell said.

“What, the fishing? Yeah, but it’s my job. Doesn’t always do to turn your passion into your work. It’s a bit like marrying your mistress, innit?”