“Actually, I haven’t entirely made up with her,” Corrine said. “I just sort of humored her and made a vague threat about getting together.”
“None of us is perfect. Although sometimes we thought you were. Don’t forget it wasn’t so easy for her, following you, with your straight A’s, and Miss Porter’s and captain of the lacrosse team. Ivy League, summa cum laude, and then marrying Russell right out of college. I think the only role left for Hilary was the bad girl.”
Corrine was sort of amazed at this idealized portrait of herself. “Well, she must feel better now that I’ve failed to live up to my early promise.”
“Your life looks pretty great from where I sit, kiddo. A good husband, two great kids. Not that I’ve seen them recently.”
“They’ll be here tomorrow, Mom.”
“One big happy family,” Jessie said. “Enjoy it, because you never know when your husband will run off with your best friend.”
“I don’t think Russell’s rich enough to tempt Casey.”
Sooner or later, Jessie inevitably steered the conversation back to her own sense of loss and betrayal, the husband who’d indeed run off thirty years ago with her best friend, although usually this came later in the evening. It had become the defining event of Jessie’s existence, the original sin. Corrine was determined to steer clear of this miasma as long as possible and excused herself, saying she wanted to unpack.
—
Visitors never failed to be surprised at the gloomy ambience of Corrine’s room, which Russell characterized as “preppy Goth”; aside from a few athletic trophies and a lacrosse stick, the predominant decorative element consisted of grave rubbings from nearby Colonial graveyards. Like many adolescents, Corrine had exhibited a strong morbid streak, along with an interest in local history. She’d spent hours wandering the cemeteries in search of tragic stories, taping newsprint to the stones and rubbing charcoal over it, the ghostly letters as they appeared seeming like nothing so much as spirit writing, like terse communiqués from the dead. A few were selected for the crude beauty of the stonework, skulls with angel wings being her favorite motif. But most she chose for the poignance of their inscriptions. Here was little Hattie Speare, who died in 1717: An Aged Soule Who had seene but 7 Wynters in this World. As a teenager, Corrine was haunted by this one and spent many hours imagining the life that might have inspired it. These grim haiku helped her to survive adolescence. She found them comforting, much as others took solace in songs of heartbreak.
She opened the door to the closet and dug back into the depths, parting the phalanx of musty dresses and blouses, stepping over the rows of embarrassing shoes and boots, pushing aside the boxes behind them until she uncovered a big flat package wrapped in cardboard and sealed with duct tape. She wrestled it out into the room and cut the tape with a box cutter, pulling away the layers of cardboard to reveal an oil painting she hadn’t looked at in over twenty years, a canvas by Tony Duplex.
She propped it up against the bed and stood back for a closer look. It was a single canvas divided into three panels. The center panel was a map of Manhattan pasted on the canvas; he had painted the bust of a man on one side and on the other a woman. The painter had managed to imply a relationship between the two, though they were not looking at each other; the images were less stylized, more realistic and lyrical than most of Duplex’s figures. Painted neatly across the bottom of the map were the words OH SHIT, I GUESS I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN IT WOULD BE LIKE THIS.
She had always thought the two figures in the painting were, in Jeff’s mind, himself and Corrine. She needed to decide what to do with the painting, whether to sell it now or to hang on to it in the hope that its value might appreciate. For the moment it seemed safe enough here, along with the other artifacts of her past that she couldn’t yet bear to part with, including the very few surviving mementos from Jeff. He’d been careful in what he committed to writing; she was sad now that, out of a sense of discretion, he’d never sent her an actual letter. Instead, he’d sent her books with underlined passages, pointed and poignant texts. She took a small box from the closet and pulled out one that Jeff had sent her after Russell had returned from Oxford; they’d been married a few months later. She’d been working as a broker downtown and Jeff had mailed this slim volume, The Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, to her office, and, as a kind of quiet rebuke and lament, included a bookmark marking the poem “They Flee from Me.”
They flee from me that sometime did me seek
With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themself in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range,
Busily seeking with a continual change.
Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; but once in special,
In thin array after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small;
Therewithall sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, “Dear heart, how like you this?”
It was no dream: I lay broad waking.
But all is turned thorough my gentleness
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodness,
And she also, to use newfangleness.
But since that I so kindly am served
I would fain know what she hath deserved.
The second book was a battered old hardcover without dust jacket, a 1959 edition of a medieval text, The Art of Courtly Love, by Andreas Capellanus, wherein a letter addressed “To the illustrious and wise woman M, Countess of Champagne” was underlined. She didn’t need to reread the letter, having done so many times. Two nobles, a man and woman, supposedly wrote it in order to pose a question: whether true love can exist between husband and wife, and whether lovers have any right to be jealous of spouses. To which the countess answered, at some length, that love by definition cannot obtain between man and wife, who are duty-bound to each other, but only between lovers, who choose each other freely, and whose jealousy is a concomitant of their love. Jeff had thought this very clever, and apposite, at the time, a few months after Corrine married Russell. It seemed almost ridiculous, given the situation, the friendship between the two men, and their mutual desire for Corrine, that Jeff’s major was Elizabethan literature, his senior thesis about the conventions of courtly love. As events unfolded later, it seemed incredibly touching that he’d chosen to write about the antique notion of a love both illicit and spiritually elevating, a love that existed outside the legal sphere of marriage. Did he see himself even then as her vassal, her knight?
Back in her school days, she would not have believed it was possible to love two people, but she had learned that it was. And the sadder truth was that possession blunted desire, while the unattainable lover shimmered at the edge of the mind like a brilliant star, festered in the heart like a shard of crystal.
24
IT HAD ALMOST BEEN PERFECT, Washington thought, this thing with Casey. They were both happily married—or at least he was, and certainly she was conveniently married, with no desire to alter her domestic arrangements, or to abandon her rarefied social and economic spheres.
He had experienced less convenient situations—the single girls who started out seeming carefree but gradually started whining about spending Valentine’s Day on their own and eventually threatening to call his wife. The tears in restaurants, the tantrums on street corners, the unannounced appearances at the office. The eventual phone calls to his apartment, his home, where he lived with his family. Yes, Washington could honestly say he’d paid for his sins. He liked to believe he had pretty good radar for crazy, but the equipment sometimes malfunctioned due to libidinal interference. Generally speaking, the crazier the babe, the better the sex. Crazy was freaky. Crazy was hot. And it was hard to
walk away from that, or to rule it out in advance.
Casey, though eminently sensible and conventional in many regards, was a fucking demon in the sack, a lioness of desire. Any prejudicial stereotypes he might have entertained about the frigidity of rich WASP women went right out the window the first time Casey hauled him into a bathroom stall at the Surf Club back in the eighties. He was drunk and high, but she was voracious, and wasn’t about to admit that failure was an option, and after a few minutes he had the illusion that he was going to be swallowed whole, which wouldn’t have been a bad way to go, really, crotch-first into eternity. They’d been on and off ever since, sometimes going years between intimate encounters, but the sexual chemistry remained so potent that they kept coming back, and over the last few months, after five years of abstinence, they were making up for lost time, fucking like teenagers; the illicit nature of their affair, the enforced separations, and the need for secrecy stoking their desire. There was nothing like strange, after all. He’d heard some men express a preference for home cooking, but Washington loved dining out.
And yet, lately, he’d found himself wondering if he wasn’t getting too old for this shit. The last time he found himself undressing in her presence, he’d actually felt a brief twinge of conscience, a kind of yearning to do the right thing, although Casey had quickly obliterated these thoughts with action. Her latest plan was positively freaky. When she found out that they were both attending the Nourish New York benefit at the Waldorf, she’d decided to take a room there. “We arrange a time, during cocktails. You excuse yourself, I excuse myself, we meet upstairs, fuck our brains out and return to our respective spouses,” she said a week before the benefit, when they were lying in a midday postcoital tangle of sheets at the Lowell, a small, expensive hotel they’d been using like a private club for a while now. He’d felt like a trespasser, a criminal, the first time he stopped at the front desk and said he was meeting Casey Reynes. He thought it was crazy for her to book under her own name, but she said Tom never looked at the Visa bill. He’d been lying in bed, wondering idly how much the room cost, when she launched her proposal to spice up Corrine’s benefit.
“Damn, you’re sick,” Washington said.
“And you love it,” she said, slapping his thigh beneath the sheets.
He knew her well enough to know that the idea of the spouses downstairs was part of the thrill. It was completely perverse if you thought about it, but he was not immune to the buzz; betrayal was an aphrodisiac unto itself and, as with all rushes, the dose of the drug had to be raised, continually, in order to maintain the high. The near presence of her husband and his wife, downstairs in the ballroom, oblivious, was the Spanish fly in this particular scenario.
“It is outrageous,” she said, “but at the same time it’s foolproof. I sometimes worry about private detectives—I mean, I don’t really have any reason to think Tom suspects anything, but practically everybody uses them sooner or later. The beauty of this is, there’s no chance of his having me followed when I’m actually with him.”
“Hold on a fucking minute,” Washington said. “Rewind. You suspect you’re being followed by detectives? And you’re just telling me now?” In the midst of his panic, he was hearing Elvis Costello’s “Watching the Detectives,” part of the sound track of his early days in Manhattan.
“It’s not that I suspect it so much as I want to be totally careful. Amanda Giles was carrying on with her yoga instructor—”
“ ‘Carrying on’? What kind of euphemism is that?” It amazed him that a girl who had been screaming “Fuck my hungry pussy” ten minutes before could suddenly resort to such a genteel locution.
“All right, she was fucking her yoga instructor. And the next thing she knows, her husband’s showing her pictures of herself and Swami Tommy in some supertantric positions that the authors of the Kama Sutra hadn’t even thought of.”
“ ‘Swami Tommy’?”
“Are you going to nitpick my language or listen to my story?”
“Actually, I liked it; I was just curious if that was really his name or your clever coinage.”
“Who knows what his name is? He’s the fucking yoga instructor.”
“Okay, good one. Proceed.”
“Thank you. But that’s basically the story. Blah blah blah, photographic evidence, notice of marital discord, divorce court, activate prenup infidelity clause with only one year to go before the five-year escalator clause kicks in. I’m just saying it’s foolish not to be careful. To watch one’s back, as it were.”
“Do you think there’s even a chance that he’s having you followed?”
“I’m just saying you can’t be too careful.”
“And would you call what you’re proposing careful?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. It’s genius.”
“It’s utterly twisted.”
“I thought you liked twisted.” She lowered her head and inserted her tongue into his ear.
“There’s freaky. And then there’s crazy.”
But he had to admit crazy was hot; it was the hottest. But twisted was the perfect signal to stop. To end it for good. Not that he relished telling her that.
—
She called him twice at work that week to try to talk him into changing his mind, but up in his office on the thirty-first floor, under the sickish fluorescent light, the idea did not seem any more sensible than it had wrapped in Frette sheets at the Lowell.
The night of the benefit, he felt incredibly nervous, suddenly uncertain of his composure in the event of an encounter between Veronica and Casey. He was hoping she’d given up on her plan by now; at any rate, he had no intention of participating.
His son, Mingus, in whose face he inevitably saw the lineaments of his mother at her most beautiful, protested their departure: “This is the third night you’ve been out this week.”
His sister said, “Caroline Cartwright says her parents go out every night.” Zora was enamored of this new friend, whose father ran a hedge fund. Next week she was flying to Palm Beach on the Cartwrights’ G5 for a sleepover birthday party.
“I’ll bet Caroline’s mom has a new dress every night,” Veronica said.
“I expect so,” Zora said haughtily, basking in the reflected glory, even her diction elevated by this grand association.
When Veronica had confessed to feeling self-conscious about wearing a dress that she’d already worn earlier this month, Washington put his foot in it by saying that no one would notice, which prompted her to give him a dirty look. All he meant was that it wasn’t as if either one of them appeared all that often in the party pages among the socialites and celebrities. She was especially skittish, he figured, because her firm was being honored with the Corporate Leadership Award tonight, Veronica herself having had a hand in directing some of the corporate tax write-off largesse to Corrine’s charity, and her boss of bosses would be in the room.
“Don’t give Rosalita a hard time,” she told the kids.
“And don’t call to complain if she doesn’t let you play Halo,” he added.
“Wash, I can’t find my phone. Will you call it?”
“You don’t need it; I’ve got mine.”
“You know I hate not having my phone.”
It’s true, he thought as he pressed her number. She had that maternal fear of being unreachable to an excessive degree, at least it seemed excessive to him, though as far as he could tell, nobody—man, woman or child—felt secure going anywhere without a phone these days. As he heard the ring tone on his end, her phone chirped from the couch, where they’d been watching the news.
“We won’t be late,” she said after recovering her precious phone and wedging it into the tiny crystal-studded Judith Leiber clutch that she’d bought at a silent auction at an earlier charity benefit, a bibelot shaped like a butterfly and just big enough for the phone and a lipstick, though not long enough for her reading glasses, which she asked Washington to carry.
Surveying his
kingdom, which he was fond of saying looked like heaven as designed by a feminine disciple of Le Corbusier—a vast hardwood plain with rounded outcroppings of beige, black, and white furniture, and two beautiful beige children—he wondered why he didn’t stay home more often. He was feeling particularly vulnerable and nostalgic tonight. The prospect of encountering Casey had him rattled and made him more susceptible to domestic sentimentality. He wanted to be a good guy, really he did. He was committed to future reform. He felt, much as Saint Augustine had in the years of debauchery and lechery before his conversion, theoretically willing but, practically, unready. Lord, save me, but not yet.
—
When they got to the Waldorf, he was in a quiet panic and immediately threw back two martinis, at which point his nerves started to settle. Veronica had just drifted off toward the auction tables to talk to a friend when he spotted Casey bearing down on him.
“Hello, lover.” She was looking pretty delicious in a very formfitting shiny turquoise satin gown. It was automatic, or perhaps autonomic, the stirring in the groin, the surge of warmth that suffused him at the sight of her. Damned if he wasn’t getting a hard-on.
“Good evening,” he said, trying to maintain his cool as he thrust his right hand into his pocket to cover the erection. “I like your dress.”
“Why, thank you,” she said. “Given the way it fits, there wasn’t any room for undergarments, I’m afraid.”
“Yes, I can see that.”
“Enjoying yourself?”
“It’s a wonderful cause,” he said, playing hard to get.
“What is?”
“Feeding the hungry. Isn’t that why we’re here?”
“I’m feeling a certain hunger myself.” She leaned forward, coming in close to his shoulder. “Actually, I’m here to fuck you. Room 308. I’ll be there in three minutes.”
She seemed confident of his complicity, which sort of bugged him, but she looked so fucking good, and she was so utterly, sluttishly shameless, that he realized at that moment he would follow her, even as he vowed that this would be the last time. It felt as if he had no choice in the matter. The die had been cast millions of years ago. Evolution. The instinctive drive to spread genes as widely as possible, no matter that reproduction was not part of his conscious program tonight. As Casey shimmied toward the elevators, he felt biologically programmed to follow. He clocked Veronica moving down the auction table with her friend Becky Fiers, admiring the wares, the donated handbags and jewelry and furs, before following his mistress.
Bright, Precious Days Page 24
