Bright, Precious Days (11 page)

“Let me give you the tour,” he said.

The interior was decorated more elaborately than she would have imagined, not as ostentatious and formal as many of the homes she'd seen in Southampton, with their chintzes and their Chippendale, but still more pristine and staged than she would have liked, her taste shaped by her own childhood in rambling houses in Wellfleet and Nantucket, with their jumble of objects and beach salvage collected over time, furniture with worn and faded upholstery, and random knickknacks. This was the Ralph Lauren version of her primal memories of tatty old WASP summer homes, bearing the same relation to the archetype as the McMansions out in the potato fields did to the house itself.

“Sasha decorated,” he said, as if reading her mind. “With a little help from Peter Marino.”

Of course—she should have known. Luke's ex would have had to have everything just so. “It's lovely,” she said.

“
Tasteful,
” he said in an italicized tone that alleviated her previous disappointment. And who was she, after all, to insist that his house resemble her grandmother's? It wasn't Luke's fault that her grandfather had given all his money away, that she was stuck with memories of lost privilege and a sense of aesthetic judgment that bordered on snobbery.

“Are you hungry?” he asked, and for once, she realized, she was. Ravenous, in fact.

“I'll put together some lunch,” he said. “You can explore the place.”

She drifted through the living room to the library, the most masculine corner of the house, examining the artifacts therein, the books and the photographs, his daughter, Ashley, being the most frequent subject—only one picture showed the three of them, Sasha and Luke and Ashley, all in white at some garden party, and Corrine was amazed anew by how beautiful Luke's ex was, or had been—like a young Candice Bergen. No one would ever ask, “What does he see in her?” She found it annoying that he'd married two beauties—it suggested a certain superficiality of character, a value deficit. She could consider herself complimented to be in that company—maybe he thought she was beautiful, too, or maybe he liked her because she was different from his wives. Thankfully, there weren't any pictures of the new one here, but neither was there any evidence of Corrine's existence, or so it seemed until she spotted the copy of
The Heart of the Matter
on a side table next to a big leather club chair. On further inspection, it proved to be the copy she'd given him six years ago, with the inscription, XI XII MMI XXCC. Her initials and kisses beside the date she'd presented it, two months to the day after they'd met.

She wandered out to the kitchen, where he was finishing his lunch preparations. “Almost ready,” he said. This room felt more homey than the others, perhaps because the pine cabinets and the antique Windsor chairs around a circular table reminded her of the kitchen she'd grown up in.

He pulled out a chair, motioned for her to sit, and said, “I prepared a special treat for us,” holding out a tray of sandwiches.

They looked frighteningly retro—white bread cut into triangles. “Oh my God, is that peanut butter and jelly?”

“Sorry, I couldn't help myself. You don't have to eat them. I have a Greek salad in the fridge.”

It took her a moment to catch his reference to their days at the soup kitchen, a kind of private joke; peanut butter and jelly sandwiches had been the first item on the menu.

“I remember eating one of these that first day,” he said, “and having this violent emotional reaction, like I was being transported back to my childhood. I hadn't had one since I was a kid. Haven't had one since, either.”

“I could never actually eat one,” she said. She found it kind of touching, though, that he'd made them. “Maybe I had too many as a kid.”

“Ah, well,” he said, bringing the salad to the table and setting it in front of her. He took a sandwich for himself and bit into it.

“What does it evoke now—childhood, or the soup kitchen?”

“Both,” he said. “I can almost smell that foul smoke.”

“The oven cleaner smell.”

“I remember it more as burned plastic.”

“That's because you have no idea what oven cleaner smells like.” She helped herself to the salad. “As I remember it, you were the one who stared hitting up the restaurants. One time you drove up to Babbo and came back with like fifty veal chops.”

“I think that was Jerry's idea,” Luke said. “I wonder what's happened to him. Did you stay in touch?”

She shook her head. Jerry was a carpenter who'd rushed downtown as soon as the towers collapsed to help dig through the rubble; he'd returned the next day with a coffee urn and a vanful of food, eventually establishing an ad hoc soup kitchen, which soon attracted volunteers, Corrine and Luke among them. “I did for a while. We had a coffee a few months after. Exchanged a few e-mails. But it was hard. I felt like those weeks were the high point of his life, that after that he seemed kind of angry and lost. Plus, honestly, I couldn't. It just reminded me of you.”

“I'm sorry.”

She shrugged. “What could we do? It was for the best in the end.”

“I'm not so sure,” he said. “I had a lot of time to wonder about that when I was in the hospital.”

“No, you were right the first time. I can't just walk away from my life, my marriage and my kids.”

“Yet here you are.”

“Can I ask you why you got Casey to invite me to the benefit?”

“That should be obvious by now.”

“Not really.”

“Ever since my accident, I've been thinking about you.”

“Tell me about the accident, if it's not too…”

“I don't remember all that much. I was in the car alone, coming home from Cape Town at night. I got hit by a van that crossed the line into my lane. The driver drunk, of course. He died, along with his passenger. Not my fault at all, apparently. Giselle hired an investigator and a team of lawyers, but that didn't keep it from getting ugly. White survivor, two dead black men. But I missed a lot of it. I was in hospital for almost three months.”

“You say it the way they do—‘in hospital.' ”

“What do you mean?”

“We'd say ‘in
the
hospital.' ”

“I hadn't thought about it.” He paused, rubbing the shiny patch of skin on his neck. “I loved the idea of Africa,” he said. “And I loved the reality, too. Its primal, cradle-of-life, origin-of-the-species aliveness. The smells, not just the fertile dung smell of the veldt; even the wood smoke, seared meat and raw sewage smell of the townships. It felt like the beginning of the world, where I could really start all over again. Even the fact that I was a minority, the possibility of violence, it made me feel more alive just at a time when I was feeling half-dead. My firm had acquired the winery and I'd been charged with overseeing it, pumping it up and selling it for a big profit, but when I went to visit, I kind of fell for the whole picture, Africa, the agrarian dream, the safari life.”

“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.