The pedestrians were giving them a wide berth, glancing briefly at the shouting, gesticulating man in the blue blazer before veering away.
“Oh my God. Corrine’s having an affair?”
“You didn’t know?”
“I had no idea.”
“So I don’t really care if you tell her about my little peccadillo or not.”
“Please. I’m just asking for a little help to see me through.”
Russell reached for his wallet and removed two one-hundred-dollar bills, leaving only a twenty and some ones. “Here, that’s it. That’s most of my remaining net worth. Now piss off. I’ve had enough of the Makepeace girls to last a lifetime.”
She seemed genuinely hurt, and as she turned away, he felt a twinge of guilt. Even now, as he watched her walk away, he was astonished, and mortified, that he still found her alluring. He’d always been attracted to her, but the fact that he could feel anything resembling lust in the wake of his crushing humiliation was practically miraculous, if not perverse.
—
Russell took the subway to 51st Street, just a short walk from the venerable Brook Club, on 54th between Park and Lex. He’d been there only a few times—very blue-blood, old New York. George Plimpton had taken him there for lunch a few years ago, when they’d been working on an anthology of travel writing together that was unlikely to break even, much less cover the $35,000 advance. But it was an affordable gamble that he felt brought honor to his imprint as well as an opportunity to collaborate with one of the last American men of letters. When Plimpton failed to wake up one morning not long afterward, Russell was almost envious of the grace with which he’d departed, out with friends to a couple of cocktail parties, followed by dinner at Elaine’s, slipping away in his sleep like a guest ducking out of the party without bothering anyone. A gentleman to the end, not wanting to make a fuss, or put anyone out, though several thousand souls took time out of their workday to attend his memorial at Saint John the Divine. And how many would come for me? Russell wondered. What Raymond Carver said in that poem of his—to be beloved. “And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.”
Russell did not feel beloved on the earth.
Inside the lobby of the Brook, he presented himself to the liveried gent at the front desk, who told him that Mr. Reynes would meet him on the third floor. He took the circular staircase, noting an air of geriatric decorum—or was it gloom?—among the members on the second floor. On the third floor, making his way to the front parlor, he detected a distinct undercurrent of melancholy in the murmuring convocation, several groups of two and three scattered around the room, sunken deeply into the sofas and club chairs, a faint honking akin to a flock of geese in the distance across a cornfield, the unmistakable whine of privileged white men with the blues. Russell suspected that most of them had lost a lot of money today, and that few of them were going to vote for Obama in November. Tom waved to him from a small table in the corner.
“Thanks for coming,” he said. “Hell of a day. I’m going right back to the office after this, but I figured I needed a break. The fallout from this Lehman situation is brutal. Dow’s down five hundred plus. Would you like a drink?” He looked tired, though by no means dispirited; indeed, he seemed cheery, as if invigorated by crisis.
He waved to the ancient server framed in the doorway.
“Hell of a weekend all round. All the big swinging dicks of banking huddled down at the Fed all weekend, trying to save Lehman and themselves. I lived through the crash of ’87 and the dot-com bust, but I’ve never seen anything like this. Gonna get much much worse before it gets better.”
The waiter hovered. Tom ordered a Bloody Mary and Russell decided it was probably a mistake to order a Negroni here. “I’ll have a bullshot,” he said—a manly, Waspy club drink to steel the nerves in the face of this onrushing bear market.
“I’m sorry about your, uh, situation,” Tom said. “I ran into Corrine when I was picking up Amber. It seems she’s staying with Casey.”
“I asked her to leave,” Russell said.
Tom leaned forward, nodding, uncharacteristically sympathetic and engaged. Or perhaps he was just curious to know what had happened.
“She’s been having an affair. I just found out about it.”
“God, I’m sorry.”
Russell felt a sudden welling of emotion, a tightening of his facial muscles.
“What are you going to do?” Tom asked.
Russell shook his head. “Don’t know yet. So what about you? Are you still getting divorced?”
Tom nodded. “Trying like hell to. It was a long time coming. But in the end, it just happened. Boom! Walk out a door straight into your future. You know as well as anyone that I wasn’t so well behaved. But the really weird thing, the thing I wasn’t expecting, I actually fell in love. It didn’t even occur to me it was possible. And I can’t tell you how great it feels. It was a huge relief, really, to find out Casey had been cheating on me. I mean, we have a lot of history together, and kids, and she’s not a bad person, really, but I don’t think anyone would accuse her of being deeply sentimental. That was part of the problem. I felt like our marriage was a business arrangement. Our parents grew up going to the same schools and belonging to the same clubs; we didn’t have to bother to get to know each other, because we already did. I’m not sure I ever felt for Casey what I feel for Laura. In fact, I’m pretty sure I was never in love. Who knew you could discover love in your forties? Well, fifty-two, whatever.”
Russell raised his glass, which the waiter had just placed in front of him. “Cheers, then. I’m happy for you.”
“Thanks. She’s an amazing woman. You should meet her sometime.”
“Is it possible we already met? Or rather, that I saw her across a room?”
“It’s possible,” he said. “Though if you had, I trust I could count on your discretion not to say anything.”
“Absolutely.”
So Tom had fallen in love with a hooker.
“The thing is, this divorce could get messy, since we don’t have a prenup. Can you believe it? Very old-fashioned. Or dumb. But Casey has money of her own and I’m hoping I can get her to be reasonable, though I have a feeling she’s not going to make it easy. Anyway, long story short, my assets are pretty much frozen for the foreseeable future, not to mention the fact the economy has just turned to shit. Lehman’s just the start of it. Money is going to get incredibly tight after this long binge of credit. The hangover is going to be heinous. I guess you see where I’m going with this. Sorry to say I can’t make any kind of personal investments at this point. Anyway, I wish you every success and I wish I could be along for the ride.”
Up until the last couple of sentences, his monologue had been surprisingly heartfelt and revealing. Only at the end, as the subject turned from love to money, had it become cliché-ridden and stilted. Along for the ride? Until a few moments ago, the collapse of a major investment bank had seemed somewhat remote, but now he felt a sinking, sickening feeling in his gut as he understood that he was collateral damage. He’d often told himself that he inhabited a world apart, that the machinations and fluctuations of the financial markets had nothing to do with him, and he was shocked to realize that he was deeply entangled in the current crisis. He’d always been a little scornful of that other world, the world of suits and money, but it turned out that devoting your career to letters didn’t give you immunity.
“I always liked Corrine,” Tom said before draining his drink and setting the glass down on the table. “I used to wonder how she put up with Casey.”
“Now she’s got no choice,” Russell said bitterly.
As he was walking back to the subway Corrine called, her name on the screen of the cell phone surprising him, as if it were unfamiliar. He debated whether to answer.
“Yeah,” he barked.
“It’s me.”
“I know. No surprises anymore.” Did he have to explain mobile phone t
echnology to her?
After a long pause, she said, “I just wanted to arrange to see the kids.”
“When?”
“Maybe I could get them from school tomorrow, take them out for a bite.”
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll tell Jean.”
He thought about hanging up then, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to do so.
“Russell?” she said, finally.
“Yeah?”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Me too,” he said, before closing his phone.
—
“I don’t understand why Mom’s staying with Casey,” Jeremy said, brandishing a nubbly golden chicken finger. Russell had cooked his favorite childhood meal in the vague hope of normalizing a painfully abnormal domestic situation.
“They’re having issues,” Storey said.
“What issues?”
“We just decided that we needed to spend some time apart while we worked on some aspects of our relationship.” God, that was stilted, he realized.
“Are you guys getting divorced?”
“No, we’re not. We’re just taking a breather.”
Jeremy chewed moodily. “How come Storey seems to know what’s going on?”
“I’m a girl. I notice things. I observe the people around me. You’re a guy. You don’t.”
“Do we get to see Mom, at least?”
“Tomorrow afternoon,” Russell said, “she’s picking you up from school and taking you out.”
“Out where?”
“I’m not sure; that’s up to her.”
“Why is everything happening at once?”
“What do you mean?”
“A bunch of kids’ dads lost their jobs and everyone seems freaked-out about everything.”
“It’s a pretty scary time, son.”
“Could you lose your job?”
“Well, publishing doesn’t have that much to do with what happens on Wall Street,” Russell said, wishing that this were actually the case. If the credit markets froze up, as seemed likely, his chances of survival were negligible. He had a strong premonition that everyone was going to get soaked and battered in the coming storm.
After saying good night to the kids, he lay down on the bed to watch the Giants play the Cowboys and fell asleep almost immediately, waking in the middle of the eleven o’clock news—just as a photo of a young Tony Duplex with his arm around Andy Warhol flashed on the screen, and then, to his astonishment, a shot of Jack Carson, looking uncomfortable in a tuxedo, standing next to Russell, that had been taken at the PEN/Faulkner Awards in D.C. the year before; this was soon replaced by scenes of anxious Lehman Brothers employees entering and exiting their midtown office building.
—
He slept intermittently that night, and woke up exhausted, enervated at the prospect of the day ahead and all the days beyond. The children, picking up on his mood, were frightened and solicitous.
He called Washington from the office and asked if he could meet for lunch. He arrived at the Fatted Calf half an hour early and ordered a Bloody Mary. He was halfway through his second when his friend arrived.
“You look like shit,” Washington said, taking a seat across from Russell.
“That’s good, because I feel like shit,” Russell said.
“I guess you’re entitled.”
“How’s Veronica?”
“Shell-shocked. Clearing out her office as we speak. Any word from Corrine?”
He shook his head. “We talked briefly about child-care logistics. She told me she was sorry.” He shook his head derisively.
“She probably doesn’t know what to say.”
“It’s hopeless,” Russell said. “I don’t even want to talk about it. Actually, I wanted to talk to you about something else.”
“Whatever you want, coach.”
“I want Corbin, Dern to buy McCane, Slade. I think it would be a win-win situation for both sides.”
“It might make sense,” Washington said after a long pause. “We’d have to look at the books. I promise to take it under advisement if you promise never to use the phrase win-win again.”
—
As he was walking back to the office, he took a call from Hilary.
“I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am.”
“Thanks. I’m sorry I was…unkind when I saw you yesterday.”
“No, I understand. Look, I just wanted to say, if you ever need me to babysit, or anything, just call, okay?”
“Okay, thanks. I will.”
“You promise?”
“Promise.”
“All right, then.”
“Thanks for calling.”
43
Silver Meadows, New Canaan, CT.
10/27/08
Dear Russell:
I wanted to say how sorry I was about Jack, but really, that’s the least of it. I’m not sure how to apologize for what I did to you, but I have to if I’m going to move on. Step 9. I’m up here at Silver Meadows, once again. Clearly I didn’t learn much the last time. I thought if I tried to explain what happened, you might understand, though I don’t expect you to forgive me. But I want at least to try to make amends. Where to begin? With the failure of my third novel? Returning from my sad little six-city book tour, I still had a kind of residual celebrity, which kept my social life interesting, and I turned to journalism. Because even if there’d been a demand for my fiction, I was utterly without inspiration.
And then the planes hit the towers. Ian McEwan summed it up the next day in The Guardian: “American reality always outstrips the imagination.” Hard as it had been earlier, it was even harder now to imagine the role of fiction in this changed world. I wanted to be involved in the response to the most shocking event of my lifetime. But my various employers had their specialists: real journalists, foreign correspondents, policy experts. I tried to land an assignment in Afghanistan and then, later, Iraq. Even though I thought that war, the WMD war, was utterly fraudulent, I wanted to cover it, to swim the currents of history.
And suddenly, out of the blue, I got invited to a wedding in Lahore. The groom was from a wealthy Pakistani family, attended NYU and then became a fixture of the downtown party scene in the nineties, which is how I knew him. Always throwing parties, entertaining squads of models, sharing his drugs. He went home after 9/11 and settled down with a girl from his social class, though when I called him about the invitation, he said that the wedding festivities would resemble the New York bacchanals of his youth. “Lahore’s insane, man. It’s a party town. Come for the week. You won’t regret it.” This sounded attractive, and it occurred to me that I could turn the occasion to advantage. This could be my side-door entry into the great struggle.
I pulled together a list of contacts in Pakistan, journalists and government officials. My roommate from Amherst was an undersecretary of state, and after advising me not to go, he gave me phone numbers and briefings and deep background. I hoped to talk my way into some serious journalism about the Taliban and Pakistani politics; in the meantime, I had a single assignment for a travel piece about the city. So I embarked for Lahore, where the wedding was everything the groom had promised and more. Drugs were abundant and the festivities moved around town, from gated compounds to sprawling lofts. It’s a majestic city with a patina of elegant decay, though I quickly gravitated toward its squalor. I met an English girl, a cousin of the groom’s, and a week after the wedding the two of us were holed up in an apartment in the Gulberg neighborhood, where I discovered opium. Two weeks turned into four.
Marty Briskin eventually reported me missing. And the next thing I knew, the story was in the Herald Tribune: “American novelist missing, believed kidnapped, in Pakistan.” When I’d failed to show up for an interview with a Pakistani intelligence operative, he’d called my friend at the State Department, and when Marty called the consulate, the search was on. Meanwhile, I got a text from the groom, asking if I was okay, telling me about the Herald Trib. A day later, there wa
s a message on a jihadist Web site from a group that claimed it was holding me.
At first, it just seemed embarrassing. But then I sensed an opportunity. I’d already done my homework on the various jihadist factions, and in several Internet cafés I researched the stories of recent hostages. I thought, at the very least, it was good for an article, so I decided to hide out for a while and see where it went. Then, oddly enough, three weeks later I actually did get kidnapped, held against my will in a squalid room in Heera Mandi, the red-light district, after trying to buy drugs. I got robbed and pistol-whipped by two thugs and locked in a room, which I escaped from through a window after twenty-four hours.
Nine weeks after arriving for the wedding, I turned up at the consulate in Lahore, disheveled, skinny and seemingly disoriented, with cuts and bruises from the beating in Heera Mandi that validated the kidnapping narrative, so I stuck to it. The debriefing at the consulate was relatively easy, the one in Washington much tougher.
It was strange, undergoing a real-life interrogation by my countrymen in a windowless conference room in Washington, D.C., about imaginary interrogations in a windowless mud-and-wattle hut in Waziristan. I was scared of these government boys, but I stuck to my story, and when this tough little CIA geek in an oversized suit really had me up against the ropes, I said, “Weren’t you the guys who claimed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?” Finally it became clear that whatever the truth, I didn’t have any actionable intelligence, so they cut me loose. I got the feeling that in their eyes, the propaganda value of a story about an American journalist faking his own kidnapping was strictly negative. And in the context of the official post-9/11 narrative—the war on terror—the lie was more useful than the truth, to them as well as to me.
Back in New York, Marty carefully managed and rationed press access, the idea being not to overdo it, to give me just enough exposure to drive up the price of the memoir without letting the public and the press get tired of me. He played the Today show against Good Morning America, Larry King against Anderson Cooper. I couldn’t help wondering if Briskin had suspicions about my story, but like a good defense lawyer, he never asked me any questions, although he eventually told me that Random House had some concerns that seemed to derive from sources in the State Department, and I think that’s why he decided to go with you for less money than he might have gotten from the big boys. As for me, you have to believe I somehow imagined that I was doing you a favor, making up for my shitty behavior the last time around. It’s hard to explain, but by that time I almost believed my own story, with the help of a steady diet of drugs and alcohol. I was genuinely indignant when the reporter from the Times started dogging me after that ridiculous jihadist Web site questioned my account. As the evidence mounted, I became angry, and bitter, feelings that culminated in my disastrous appearance on Charlie Rose. That was the peak of my delusion—and, as many suggested, I was indeed drunk and high. The next morning, I knew it was all over and I felt strangely relieved. This is something you hear about over and over in AA and NA meetings, actually. Exposure of a great secret, of a pattern of lying, can be curiously liberating. But I realized, eventually, that my catharsis was your crisis, and I’m terribly, terribly sorry for the position I put you in. And I hope to find ways to make amends to you in the future.
Bright, Precious Days Page 38
