Bright, Precious Days

by Jay McInerney

  “The girl.”

  “That was later. Anyway, as I was negotiating the terms of my retirement, I sold the winery to myself.”

  “I’ve never quite understood your former business.”

  “Private equity. Didn’t you tell me that years ago your husband tried to buy the publisher he worked for in a leveraged buyout?”

  “Yes, though in the end, of course, he failed.”

  “Well, it’s the same basic idea multiplied many times over, spread over different industries. Private equity is just a rebranding of the leveraged buyout concept. We’re essentially high-class used-car salesmen. We raise funds from private investors, pension funds, whatever. Then we target an underperforming company, ideally one with bad management and good cash flow. We use some of our own funds, but leverage is the key. Let’s say we commit a billion of our own and our investors’ money and we borrow maybe six billion from the bank. We buy it, install new management, fix it up, sell off the spare parts, pay the interest on the loan out of cash flow and then try to sell it in a couple of years for maybe ten billion. A profit of three billion. After you pay off the bank, you’ve tripled your original investment. That’s the beauty of leverage—playing with someone else’s money.”

  “What if you can’t sell the company at a profit?”

  “Well, that’s what separates the good players from the others. But ultimately leverage still works for you. If the whole thing goes south, it’s the lenders who take the biggest hit.”

  “It sounds kind of, I don’t know…like you say, selling used cars.”

  “The theory is that we keep the economy healthy by fixing broken companies.”

  “So every couple of years you’re in a whole new business?”

  “Every couple years we’re in ten new businesses. Or I was. I’d had enough, so I cashed out. The winery was just something we’d picked up when acquiring a larger South African conglomerate, one of the pieces the firm was selling off. I picked it up along with a game farm in the Transvaal. It’s quite wonderful. You should come visit.”

  “How would that work? You and me and Russell and Gazelle riding around in a Land Rover, looking for the big five?”

  “I was thinking more of you and me in a Cessna, flying low over the savanna. Did I tell you I’ve learned to fly? It comes in handy, going between the game farm and the winery.”

  “I’m not sure I’d feel safe with you in the pilot’s seat.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It’s just that your attention kind of jumps around from one thing to another. Maybe that’s why you were so good at private equity.”

  “I’ll have you know I’m an excellent pilot.”

  “Well, maybe someday I’ll find out. In the meantime, let’s take a walk on the beach.”

  —

  He gave her a flannel-lined Adirondack coat, presumably Sasha’s, but she decided not to question the provenance.

  She smelled the ocean as soon as they stepped out the door, and heard the waves as they approached the parking lot of the town beach. Just a few months ago she’d walked this very beach with Russell and the kids. She stopped in her tracks, not certain she wanted to do this.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” she said, willing herself forward. It was just a walk on the beach, after all. Then, feeling the cold and smelling the brine, she remembered another walk on a winter beach in Nantucket five years ago, with Luke—that and the smell of wood smoke afterward and Gram Parsons in the borrowed house on a winter weekend. Love hurts. No shit.

  The long ribbon of white sand was deserted for as far as they could see, and she finally allowed herself to take his hand. Even allowing for high tide, the beach seemed narrower than she remembered it; she’d heard something about a nor’easter. A heavy surf pounded the sand, misting them with salt.

  “You can see why all those painters came out here,” Luke said. “The sky has a clarity. And it’s even clearer in the winter.” It was true: The sky was a limpid periwinkle blue, more vivid than any she could recall from the past summer, with majestic flotillas of altocumulus drifting eastward out over the ocean, nudged by a stiff western breeze. She imagined the two of them, she and Luke, from the vantage of a ship at sea, tiny figures in a vast Turneresque setting, a perspective that seemed to both ennoble them and minimize the moral consequences of their actions.

  When they got back to the house, she had almost come to terms with her desire; chilly as she was, she thought of them taking a bath together, gradually reacquainting themselves with each other’s bodies, although she wasn’t yet emboldened enough to suggest it.

  At that moment her phone rang in her purse and she knew, even before fishing it out to look, that it was Russell, knowing with the certainty of guilt that her adulterous fantasy had called forth a rebuke. Luke watched as she stirred the contents of her purse and finally came up with the phone, just as it stopped ringing. He knew, too. He seemed to be holding his breath. She flipped it open to check the caller.

  “It was Russell,” she said.

  He nodded mournfully.

  “I’d better call back,” she said.

  Outside, on the deck, the wind had picked up, and she considered going back in for the coat but then decided that she deserved to suffer. Dialing her husband, she imagined, beyond the possibility of her own secret having been discovered, everything that might have gone wrong with the children in her absence: illness, injury, disappearance. So she wasn’t all that surprised when Russell said, “It’s Jeremy.”

  —

  Luke seemed to have anticipated bad news; he held her gently as she explained…chest pains, emergency room, appendicitis.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll get you back to the city. I just need to make a call.”

  She started dreading the two-hour drive, crawling along the expressway with her only son waiting, stricken, on the other end.

  “We’re all set,” Luke said, emerging from the library. “I’m going to fly you into the city myself.”

  “What? Are you sure you can do this?”

  He picked up her bag where he’d dropped it only two hours ago. “Let’s go.”

  They spoke hardly at all as he raced over the back roads to the East Hampton Airport, paused only briefly at the flight desk. The plane was a flimsy twin-engine with four seats. Luke buckled her into the copilot’s seat and proceeded to run through the preflight protocol, looking at ease with the panel of toggles and switches and dials. He showed her how to use the headsets, since the plane was too noisy for normal conversation in the cockpit, but she remained silent for most of the flight, consumed by anxiety and guilt, barely noticing the sere landscape between the open ocean and the sound, coming to her senses above the necropolis of eastern Queens, looking out at the Manhattan skyline rising beyond an undulant sea of headstones, surprised anew by its recent disfigurement, altered like a familiar smile marred by missing teeth.

  11

  RUSSELL WOKE THE KIDS, moving back and forth between their rooms until they were upright and moving, under protest. Ferdie emerged from under Jeremy’s covers and followed him into the kitchen, snaking along at his heels, waiting eagerly for his bowl of ZuPreem Ferret Diet pellets, supplemented with a chopped sardine, which was supposedly good for his coat and his bones, if not his breath. He strained upward on his hind legs, like a masked bandit, as Russell stirred the fragrant mess.

  Storey appeared first, dressed and ready with her backpack and her homework binder. “Can I have French toast?” she asked.

  “That’s a weekend treat,” Russell said. “I’ve got yogurt and a banana and Honey Nut Cheerios here. Promise I’ll make you French toast tomorrow.”

  “With sausage? I like the English ones you got last weekend. The exploding kind.”

  “Bangers.” He’d picked them up at the limey grocery store in the West Village, along with some Aero and Cadbury bars for Corrine, milk chocolate being among the very few foods she craved.


  “Why are they called bangers?”

  “Because of the way they pop and explode in the pan.”

  He hated to admit it, but Corrine was right that Storey was getting compulsive about food and, lately, a little bit chubby. Corrine thought it was somehow a reaction to Hilary’s drunken revelation, a theory that seemed plausible enough. They would have to address this sooner or later, though just now he needed to check on Jeremy’s progress; getting him dressed and organized on time was a continual challenge. Jeremy was, in fact, still in his pajamas, hunched over his desk. “I thought you finished your homework last night.”

  “I just forgot some math.”

  “Time’s up. Get dressed and get out here now.”

  “Hey, Dad?”

  “What?” he said, trying to contain his mounting irritation. He’d failed to contain it often enough to be aware of the potential consequences, the kids’ tears and his inevitable apology. Both lately seemed excessively sensitive to any criticism whatsoever.

  “Are we ever going to see Aunt Hilary and Dan?”

  “I don’t know. Why, do you miss them?”

  Where had that come from? he wondered, even as he acknowledged that for kids, there’s no such thing as a non sequitur. Nonlinearity was a given.

  “I guess I should miss Hilary,” Jeremy said, “since she’s sort of my mom.”

  “Well, yes and no.”

  “I feel bad I never liked her that much.”

  “Don’t feel bad about your feelings. As long as you try to be understanding and sympathetic to others, that’s all I’d ask. But we can’t always control what we feel.”

  “I kind of miss Dan,” he said. “He seemed like a good guy. Until he hit you, I mean.”

  “He has his virtues. Now come on and get ready.”

  “It was so cool when he showed us his gun.”

  “Actually, that was kind of a dick move.”

  “A what?”

  “I mean it wasn’t cool.”

  “I think Storey is freaked-out,” Jeremy said.

  “About the Hilary thing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why? Has she said anything to you?”

  “Not really. Just a few things.”

  Before he could pursue this, Storey herself was right beside him. “We are going to be totally late. Is Jeremy still pretending to be wounded?”

  It was true: He’d been milking his appendix scar for all it was worth this last week, and it hadn’t taken Storey long to lose patience.

  He got them into the elevator with just a few minutes till the bell and hurried them down the block, scolding Jeremy when he tried to pet a passing fox terrier tethered to a pretty young redhead Russell noticed frequently at this hour. When they arrived at the school yard, it was empty, and Storey was distraught; she was a fastidious and law-abiding citizen who dreaded violating rules or schedules, whereas her brother was essentially an anarchist.

  He led both children to their homeroom, the smell of the corridors almost overwhelming him with sense memories, that compound of linoleum, art supplies, ammonia, snacks and childish effluvia unique to elementary schools, so reminiscent of his own, a thousand miles and four decades away in Michigan.

  Back outside, a stiff breeze off of the Hudson helped propel him along Chambers to the subway. Going down the steps, he encountered many trolls and one princess, a lovely creature in a white leather jacket whose porcelain face was framed by shiny blue-black tresses. He kept waiting to become inured to beautiful strangers, who seemed even more abundant now than when he’d first arrived in the city, yet his heart always leapt and his imagination wove unlikely narratives of erotic encounters and alternative lives. Somewhere in the metropolis was a Russell Calloway whose life was devoted to seduction. In this case, he courted and bedded the white leather angel, moved into her penthouse on Broome Street, became very rich in some undefined enterprise and retired from publishing to travel the world with her, all in the distance between Chambers and Canal Streets, where she rose from her seat and got off the train, while he continued on to 14th.

  Ascending to the sidewalk, he trudged past the Starbucks on Eighth Avenue, past his office and up Ninth Avenue to the Chelsea Market on Fifteenth, entering the redolent brick cave lined with bakeries and restaurants—which had once, long ago, been a Nabisco biscuit factory before it had been abandoned to become a refuge for the homeless and derelict, a shooting gallery where Jeff Pierce went to score heroin—then waiting at the counter with Food Network execs for his latte, a filigreed heart inscribed in the foam. He wouldn’t necessarily want anyone to know that he added three blocks to his morning commute because he thought this was the best coffee in the city, certainly not his wife, who already thought his epicureanism was some kind of sickness.

  Walking back to the office, he unlocked the front door and stooped to scoop up three take-out menus and a brochure advertising the latest local manicure parlor. All this paper was destined for the trash, and yet when he thought about it, as he did now, he found it touching that these small businesses were popping up and reaching out to him, a Chinese or Korean immigrant with his life savings on the line, in hock to some murderous criminal who’d smuggled him into the country. And he could empathize because he, too, was a small businessman, with all his paltry capital invested in his company, only two or three flops away from financial peril, if not outright ruin. This morning he was particularly susceptible to intimations of doom because he was short on sleep and slightly hungover and especially because he was about to take the biggest risk of his career.

  At his desk he wrote three rejection letters. Russell took great pride in these, and was known for them; while most editors tried to stay vague and upbeat—“not quite right for our list at this time”—he was specific about his reservations and offered constructive criticism, even as he admitted that his judgment was fallible, or at least that in the end he was a prisoner of his own taste (not that he really believed this). Usually this scrupulous attention was appreciated, although the agent Martin Briskin once told him, “Just give me the fucking verdict and spare me the sensitive lecture.” And it was Briskin with whom he had to deal today.

  At nine-thirty he called Kip Taylor, whose money he’d be putting on the line, to get the final clearance.

  “Russell, you sound terrible. You’re croaking like a frog. Pull yourself together, man.”

  “I’m fine, Kip. Ready to go.”

  “So, you think you can get it for seven fifty?”

  “I’ll try like hell.”

  “You know he’ll want a million. It’s the number—the basic unit.”

  Russell assumed he was being polite about the Lilliputian dynamics of publishing, because he distinctly remembered Kip saying that in the financial world, 100 million was the basic unit.

  “Then I guess we have to be willing to walk away,” Russell said tentatively.

  “Is that what you want to do?” Kip asked.

  “I think it’s worth a million with foreign rights.”

  “All right, do it if you can.”

  This was one of the things he admired about Kip, his decisiveness. He’d started his career as a trader at Salomon Brothers, staking millions on split-second judgments.

  “Russell, I have to trust your instincts. That’s why I hired you. If your gut tells you to go for it, then go for it. Honestly, it’s your call.”

  Actually, Kip hadn’t hired him; rather, Russell had solicited his capital to help buy a struggling business in which they both saw hidden value, but he was willing to let this pass. Having gotten the answer he wanted, he couldn’t understand why, after hanging up, he felt such trepidation and anxiety. His esophagus was burning with indigestion, his stomach suddenly queasy.

  He went out to the deli and bought a toasted corn muffin fresh off the greasy grill—a plebeian delicacy that pleased him no less than last night’s short ribs—gobbling down half of it as he hurried back to the office, chucking the rest, intercepting Gita, his assistant, and
Tom Bradley, his subrights director, coming in together. Were they a couple? They certainly seemed a little flustered to encounter him here on the steps. Both followed him up to the second floor after Russell told Tom he wanted to review Kohout’s foreign prospects before making the big call.

  At ten-thirty he punched in the number. He could’ve had Gita make the call and ask Briskin’s assistant to hold for him, but that wasn’t Russell’s style. Briskin made him wait several minutes before picking up.

  “Speak to me.”

  “I want to preempt the Kohout.”

  “I hope you have a large figure in mind.”

  “It seems plenty big to me.”

  “You probably believe it when your wife says that about your dick. But let’s hear it anyway.”

  “Seven fifty.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me? You call that a preempt?”

  “This will be our top title of the year. And I’ll be there with Phillip every step of the way. He’s worked with me, and I think he’d like to again. He knows I’m a good editor and somebody he can trust.”

  “Russell, be serious. I can’t go to my client with this.”

  “The worst he can say is no.”

  “He could say a lot worse, and so can I. If you were on fire, I wouldn’t cross the street to piss on you for seven fifty,” he said before hanging up.

  Russell plodded along through the morning, unable to focus as he tried to decide whether to call back and sweeten the offer or wait Briskin out. Maybe, he thought, I should just sit tight. Maybe he’d just dodged a bullet. He had a somewhat distracted lunch at Soho House with David Cohen, the young editor he’d taken with him from Corbin, Dern. David was a keen advocate of the Kohout book and urged Russell to up his offer. The rooftop restaurant had just reopened for the season, and it seemed almost miraculous to dine outside, with the sun on your face, looking out over the Hudson, the slightest fetid whiff of which reached him on the breeze.