Bright, Precious Days

by Jay McInerney

  “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.

  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.