Bright, Precious Days

by Jay McInerney

  “We’re just a little early,” Washington said. “Apparently my man here couldn’t get us a prime-time reservation.”

  “I could have gotten a later reservation for two,” Russell said. “Maybe I should have.”

  “You boys sit across from each other so you can rhapsodize about the food,” Corrine said. “Just don’t start arguing about Clinton and Obama again, please.”

  “Yeah, let’s definitely give that subject a rest,” Veronica said. Their household, too, was divided on this issue, Veronica being a staunch backer of Hillary, Washington equally ardent for Obama.

  The waiter, who didn’t appear to be of legal drinking age, informed them that the house cocktail was called the Rudyard Kipling and combined umeshu, Japanese plum brandy, with a fifteen-year-old Kentucky small-batch bourbon and house-made blood-orange bitters.

  “What the fuck’s the difference between house-made and homemade?” Washington asked. “Everywhere I go lately, it’s house-made fettuccini and every other goddamn thing.”

  “Homemade, technically, could refer to something made elsewhere, in some kind of artisanal environment,” Russell explained. “House-made tells you it was made here, in-house.”

  “Hallelujah!” Veronica said. “My vocabulary is growing by the minute. But really, Russell, artisanal environment?”

  He shrugged and ordered the house cocktail for all, declining to ask, given the existing level of skepticism around the table, why the miscegenated blend of Asian and American ingredients was named for the poet who wrote that “East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” The bartender, he’d been told, was one of the new breed of scholar/mixologists who’d made a name for himself at a celebrated Lower East Side absinthe bar.

  “Russell,” Corrine said, “you know I hate it when you order for everybody. Maybe some of us don’t want the damn Kipling.”

  “Forgive me, my love, but Carlo said it’s not to be missed. And as for the food, there’s no choice anyway. It’s a tasting menu.”

  “Oh God, the dread tasting menu. Another night of endless plates. Death by a thousand bites.”

  “Seriously,” Veronica said, “Washington took me to AKA last week and I thought I was going to puke, there was so much food.”

  “That wasn’t the food; it was the four bottles of wine we drank while waiting for the food to come.”

  “God, I know, Russell took me there last month,” Corrine said. “Thirteen courses spread over four hours. He definitely didn’t get lucky that night.”

  “Tasting menu,” Veronica said. “Two of the scariest words in the English language.”

  “For you girls, maybe,” Washington said. “For us, the two scariest words are breast reduction.”

  “Hilarious,” Veronica said.

  He couldn’t get away with that joke, Russell thought, if Veronica wasn’t a C cup. “The portions here are very small,” he noted.

  “You’ve never even been here,” Corrine said.

  “I’ve read about it,” Russell said.

  “I thought you said it was totally under the radar.”

  “There’ve been a few blog posts.”

  “I feel like nobody has any primary aesthetic encounters anymore,” Corrine said. “Every time we pick up a book or sit down to a movie, we’ve already read the commentary.”

  “I’m surprised to hear you admit that dining could be an aesthetic experience.”

  “Some of you certainly think so.”

  “Look at the waiter,” Washington said. “That motherfucker’s positively anorexic.”

  “That’s a good sign, at least,” said Veronica.

  The cocktails arrived, along with tiny plates of minuscule crabs. Corrine and Veronica studiously ignored the tiny crabs and resumed their conversation.

  “Not bad,” Russell said, crunching on a crab pinched between his thumb and forefinger.

  “Boring,” Washington countered.

  “The cocktail’s good.” Since Russell had gotten the reservation, he assumed a proprietary degree of responsibility.

  The waiter arrived with the first course: “Chef would like you to begin with O-dori ebi,” he said, placing in front of each of them a plate with a squirming deshelled prawn.

  “It’s alive,” Corrine said with horror.

  “This is known in English as dancing shrimp. After shell is removed, chef place a small piece of wasabi on spine of shrimp, which stimulate him to dance.”

  “That’s so disgusting. And barbaric.”

  “Enjoy.”

  “I’ll take yours,” Russell said once the waiter had retreated.

  “Take mine,” Veronica said to Washington.

  Russell downed his shrimp and then Corrine’s.

  “Tasty,” Washington said. “Simple, but strong presentation.”

  “You two are appalling,” Corrine said. “I’m going to call PETA.”

  “Let’s just hope the vertebrates don’t dance,” Washington said. “So what’s happening with the Kohout book?”

  “He sent me some pages. They’re good. We’re publishing in the spring.”

  “You do know that Briskin called me to shop your offer?”

  This revelation caught Russell entirely by surprise. “Well, thanks for not playing the game.”

  “I don’t know how glad you should be. I always thought he was a slippery bastard. I heard Harcourt passed, too.”

  “That worked out for me, then,” Russell said, trying to sound nonchalant.

  “Yeah, but the question you should be asking yourself is, Why?”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Corrine said.

  “I’ll see you all at the National Book Awards,” Russell said. He suddenly felt slightly queasy, and it wasn’t the dancing shrimp. It hadn’t occurred to him that others had decided against the book; he thought he’d preempted it.

  As the plates were cleared, he changed the subject, asking Washington for his prognostications on Manhattan real estate. His friend had always been much savvier about financial matters, and since he’d ascended to the executive suite of the publishing house where Russell had once toiled, his income had taken a big jump, though he certainly made less than his wife, who worked for Lehman Brothers as in-house counsel. He and Veronica owned a three-bedroom loft in a former factory a few blocks from the Calloways, although, with its doorman, gym and spa, it seemed light-years away in space and time.

  A rumor had reached Russell that his landlord was thinking of forming a condominium for the purpose of selling off the five apartments in the building, and while it was possible the Calloways could continue to rent, Russell wanted, not unreasonably, he felt, to become a home owner for the first time in his life.

  “I’m fifty years old and I’ve never owned any real estate,” Russell said. “How pathetic is that?”

  “Up to this point you’ve had a pretty good deal,” Washington said. “Rent control—now, those are two of the happiest words in the language.”

  “Unless you’re a landlord,” Veronica interjected.

  “True, but I feel like it would be nice for once to own the roof over my head.”

  “Actually, in a condo, the association owns the roof.”

  “Stop being a wiseass, Wash. You know what I’m saying.”

  “You wish to be a man of property. A chatelain.”

  “What I want,” Corrine said, “is to have more than one bathroom before my hair turns gray.”

  “We can do that if we own it,” Russell said.

  “Oh God, can’t we just find a grown-up apartment? We have two children.”

  “We’ve got to get in the game first, and if there’s a conversion, we’d get an insider price here. Plus, I want equity in an asset that’s bound to appreciate. I feel like I’ve missed out on this incredible real estate boom, and if we wait much longer, we’ll never be able to buy in.”

  “The whole point of booms,” Corrine said, “is that they go bust.”

  The conversation was interru
pted by the preparation of the next course, which consisted of big matsutake mushrooms grilled at the table over a small charcoal brazier and spritzed with fresh lime juice. These, the waiter explained, were a great delicacy in Japan, “like Japanese truffle.” Even Corrine thought they were delicious, although she was highly skeptical of the following course, a deconstructed teriyaki chicken—teriyaki ice cream, over which the waiter ladled chicken demi-glace—and she completely rebelled against the fifth. “Chef calls this transgressive fusion,” he announced, placing the square plates in front of them.

  “Jesus, what the fuck,” Washington said. “Is that like Chuck Palahniuk making sweetbread sushi?”

  “This is lily paste dumpling wrap around foie gras. And this twenty-four-karat gold leaf,” the waiter continued, dusting each of the dumplings as Russell watched his wife’s expression grow incredulous. “And this,” he said, sprinkling what looked like bacon bits over Corrine’s plate, “crushed quail skull.” She refused to try it even after the other three declared it delicious. Russell was the only defender of the next course, the uni soufflé, and the situation threatened to turn ugly with the arrival of a plate laden with what looked like creamy comma-shaped extrusions of semifreddo.

  “This shirako,” the waiter said proudly.

  —

  “I can’t believe we were supposed to eat fish sperm,” Corrine said in the cab. “Jesus, Russell.”

  “Not my favorite, I have to admit.”

  “But you ate it.”

  “Well, I tasted it. I certainly didn’t finish it. But I think I owed it to myself and the establishment to at least try it.”

  “That’s so disgusting. I don’t even want to sit next to you.”

  “I’m not saying I’d do it a second time.”

  “Has it ever occurred to you that your obsessive gourmandism may have something to do with Storey’s eating issues?”

  “Whoa, hold on here. That’s a reach.”

  In recent months, Storey had developed a passionate interest in food and had gained some ten or fifteen pounds. Russell wanted to point out that it didn’t resemble his own passion—the word obsession was slander—in that it was fairly indiscriminate. They’d both been concerned, though reluctant to discuss it with her for fear of making it more of an issue. Corrine said it would be a huge mistake to make her feel self-conscious, even though she was horrified by corpulence and considered it a sign of moral weakness. It was one of her few prejudices.

  “You have an unhealthy interest in food,” she said to him, “and now she seems to be developing one, too. At breakfast she wants to know what’s for lunch, and at lunch she asks about dinner. And she’s started watching that damn Food Network.”

  “Look,” Russell said, ready with his defense, “this all started right after Hilary decided to tell the kids she was their real mother. That has to have rocked her world, whether or not she’s talked about it openly. The fact that she hasn’t seems pretty strange to me. If there’s been a sea change in her behavior, that might be a good place to start looking for an explanation.”

  “Maybe, but you don’t have to make them both think food’s so damn important.”

  “Do you have a problem with my weight?”

  “No, you’re looking pretty good, considering, but that’s only because you’re blessed with a high metabolism. And if you really want to know, you could lose a little around the middle.”

  “Is that why you don’t want to make love anymore?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. And anyway, we’re talking about our daughter.”

  “I’m not being ridiculous. Things were good last fall—I felt like we were sexually attuned again for the first time in years—and then it went to shit again.”

  “That’s a little extreme.”

  “Think about it. When was the last time?”

  “I don’t know, a couple weeks?”

  “Seven weeks. I practically had to beg for it.”

  “I didn’t know you were keeping track.”

  “I am.”

  “There are cycles in a marriage; you know that.”

  “Yes, I do. But it’s not like the fucking weather. It’s not out of anyone’s control. It’s volitional.”

  “Complaint registered.” She sighed theatrically and threw herself back against the seat. “Now can we finish talking about Storey?”

  “We can. I think that her sudden bingeing might just as likely be a reaction to your food and weight phobias as to my issues. But honestly, I think it’s just a phase. Like your lack of interest in sex.”

  He considered this a rather neat rhetorical maneuver, although it became clear, as the silence in the cab stretched several blocks and followed them into the elevator, that it was at best a Pyrrhic victory. They each greeted Jean, and separately said good night to the kids, who’d just turned out their lights. Ferdie was curled up with Jeremy, who asked, “How was the secret restaurant?”

  “It was pretty fun.”

  “Mom didn’t like it.”

  “No, she didn’t.”

  “What was the secret?”

  “The secret was that they have shrimp that dance.”

  “That’s weird. Night, Dad.”

  “Good night, son.”

  —

  After returning from the bathroom, she undressed behind the closet door and emerged in full pajamas, a red cotton top and bottom that had never once been removed in the heat of passion, and settled into her side of the bed with her book, Joan Didion’s memoir about her husband’s death—not necessarily a good sign. He could see from the tight set of her mouth that she was not likely to say anything, the silence settling around them like setting concrete. He picked up a manuscript, an addiction memoir he wouldn’t even have glanced at if the agent, whom he respected, hadn’t assured him of its literary quality. He just didn’t think the world needed another one of these, except that they seemed to continue to sell, even after the scandal of A Million Little Pieces, as if there were a bottomless appetite for true-life tales of degradation and redemption. It was by this time formulaic, a genre as unvarying in its stations of the cross as an episode of Law & Order, although there were variables—coke instead of heroin or, in this particular case, meth.

  “I might just read a little more,” he said when she clicked off her light.

  “That’s fine,” she said.

  Fifteen minutes later he knew that she was still awake, could sense her consciousness from across the king-size bed. The tension was palpable; his continued reading was giving her an additional grievance to store up against him. He put down the manuscript and turned out his light, but while he was trying to come up with a conciliatory remark, he heard the rhythmic breathing of Corrine’s sleep.

  At one-thirty he went to the bathroom and took an Ambien. He heated a mug of milk in the microwave and stirred in some Ovaltine. Taking it to the couch, he surveyed his kingdom, such as it was—the bookshelves with their signed first editions, the Berenice Abbott portrait of Joyce, the almost abstract Russell Chatham landscape they’d bought from the artist himself on a trip to Montana, the Wiener Werkstätte side table they’d bought at a flea market in Pennsylvania for seventy-five bucks; these were among the few items of worldly value, and they didn’t add up to all that much—certainly not enough to cover the down payment on the loft—but everything here had been gathered by the two of them together over the years and he felt a keen sense of conjugal proprietorship in the family portraits and bric-a-brac, the cracked leather club chair from his father’s den, the Those Calloways poster, the kids’ artwork framed on the walls or attached to the refrigerator with magnets—the backdrop they’d created over many years for the ongoing story of their lives.

  He couldn’t believe that after all this time, as hard as he’d worked, he wasn’t sure he could even afford to buy this decrepit loft with its subcode wiring and peeling paint, wavy floors and a single bathroom. Was this too much to ask? He’d known when he chose his profession that it wasn’t terr
ibly lucrative, but he hadn’t anticipated then that someday he’d be fifty, with two school-age children. Nor had he realized that Corrine would abandon her job at Merrill Lynch early on, that she’d be working in the nonprofit sector. He was proud of her, but her paycheck left something to be desired.

  He retreated to the bedroom, with the clock ticking on his Ambien; he needed to be lying down with all the lights out when it kicked in, or else he’d lose the moment and be awake all night.

  He lay down at a little after two o’clock and woke up exactly five hours later with the jangly headache that inevitably resulted from taking Ambien after a night of drinking…first the house cocktail, then two bottles of Pol Roger, then who knows how many of those sneaky little carafes of sake. Had he actually eaten that disgusting sack of fucking fish sperm? He must’ve been drunk.

  Something else was bothering him, lodged at the back of his mind like a tiny fishhook. It was like that dream song of Berryman’s where Henry wakes up afraid he’s killed someone, but “nobody is ever missing.” What the hell was it? After he’d awakened the kids and turned on the news, the nagging question finally came to him: Why had Washington passed on Kohout’s book?

  18

  SPRING WAS COMING TO the Hemel-en-Aarde valley even as the autumn deepened in New York. Just back from the Transvaal, Luke was restless; the vines and the grass were bright green once again, while the fossilized bones of ancient hominids and the animals they’d killed and the stone tools they’d carved continued their ancient slumber. Sometimes a fragment of a jawbone or a knife point would appear in the vineyard, exposed by plowing or erosion. Along with a handful of Civil War bullets and belt buckles from his childhood home in Tennessee—relics of the Battle of Franklin—three Acheulean hand axes graced Luke’s desk: faceted stone lozenges with a pleasing heft in the palm, the oldest and longest-used implements made by human hands, unearthed in the vineyard.

  He loved the valley, but he was also tired of it, and at this moment he missed New York, where nothing was ancient and a new crop of stores and bars and restaurants pushed up between the cracks of the sidewalks to flourish for a season or two, before they, in turn, were crowded out by newer ones. Though he’d spent three decades in the city, in recent years he associated it mostly with Corrine; he was nostalgic for interludes they’d never shared, constrained as they had been by the need to hide their affair—picnics in Central Park, shopping sprees on Madison Avenue, leisurely dinners at Italian restaurants recommended by the Times. In fact, he’d hardly ever had the leisure for these urban idylls he imagined now, working sixteen-hour days, shuttling by Town Car from apartment to office, office to airport, bound for Columbus or Little Rock, pausing occasionally to refuel at the Four Seasons or celebrate a deal at ‘21’ or accompany his wife to one of the charity balls that seemed to be her chief recreation, where he diddled his BlackBerry under the table as she flirted with his friends and the husbands of her friends. He cherished certain memories of urban rituals with his daughter, but in his heart he knew he’d been a part-time father at best. His real life had been lived on LCD screens, Manhattan as the backdrop for due-diligence drudgery and occasional heroic digital feats of high finance. Which is why he’d retired from the private equity firm he’d cofounded. Within days, the planes had crashed into the towers, and all his plans had gone sideways.