Bright, Precious Days (16 page)

WHEN THE PHONE RINGS HOURS AFTER
Corrine fell asleep, she assumes it's Russell, calling from the Frankfurt Book Fair. But the voice on the other end is Jeff's, raspy and tense, telling her he really needs her help. She reminds him it's two in the morning.

“I'm in kind of a jam, here, Corrine. I need money like
yesterday.
”

“How much money?”

“A thousand as fast as you can get here.”

She doesn't ask him if it can wait till morning, knowing that, at least in his mind, it can't. It's a lot of money—a month's rent. She knows he's in trouble, or he wouldn't have called. She focuses on practicalities, reminding him of the two-hundred-dollar limit on ATM withdrawals and discovering, on searching her purse, that she has less cash than that on hand.

“Where are you?” she asks.

He gives her an address on the Lower East Side, a quadrant of Manhattan she's never set foot in during her three-year tenure in the city.

But she does have her rainy day fund, an emergency stash of twenty-dollar gold pieces her grandfather had given her for her eighteenth birthday. He'd told her not to tell anyone, to save them until the day she really needed them. She gets dressed, descends in the elevator, and nods at the startled doorman; it's a crisp October night adorned by a gibbous moon. At the Chase Manhattan on Second Avenue, she withdraws her limit. The first cab refuses to take her. “Ain't going down there this time of night,” the driver says. “That's the fucking DMZ.”

The second cabbie is skeptical, but he sets off without comment. Eventually he asks, “What's that address? You going to that club, what's it called, Kill the Robots?”

She shrugs. “I don't think so.” They finally find the number they're looking for on a block of burned-out, boarded-up tenements. At street level the boards and the bricks are festooned with colorful graffiti. The sidewalk is buckled, the street deserted. The address is painted on a piece of plywood covering the windows of a downstairs storefront, which, like the rest of the block, appears desolate and abandoned except for the anomaly of a shiny heavy steel door. The driver shakes his head and looks at her ruefully, as if giving her a chance to change her mind. She almost loses heart; it's the most frightening corner of the city she's ever seen and she can't imagine walking out of here unmolested. The cabbie tells her he'll wait while she tries the door.

She pushes a buzzer beside the door, sees a shadow cross the peephole from within. The door clicks open and she takes a last glance at the cab before stepping inside.

A wiry, twitchy young Hispanic guy wearing a red bandanna nudges her forward down a darkened hallway and raps on another door. The second door swings open, revealing a murky expanse, shrouded in smoke, illuminated by the glow of a television tuned to a Spanish-language station. Jeff and his friend Tony Duplex are sprawled on a ratty sofa, one of several that look as if they've been dragged in from the street. Sitting beside them in an armchair, watching the TV, is a middle-aged Hispanic man in a wife beater with multiple tattoos covering his neck and arms. He seems to be on easy terms with Jeff and Tony. A figure of indeterminate race and gender is passed out on another couch, covered by a quilt. The air is thick with cigarette smoke, infused with some kind of acrid chemical smell.

Jeff nods at her, though he seems reluctant or unable to move.

“So this is your friend?”

Jeff nods again. “Did you bring the money?”

This time, Corrine nods, not trusting her voice. But she realizes she has to explain. “I have a hundred fifty in cash,” she says, seeing the man's eyes flash, the sense of stoned camaraderie suddenly evaporating. “And I have twelve hundred in gold.”

She hands him the cash and three twenty-dollar Liberty gold coins. “Gold closed today at four hundred and nine dollars an ounce. In case you're wondering how I know this, I'm a broker at Merrill Lynch. Each of those coins weighs just under point nine six ounces of gold, so you're looking at almost three ounces, which in bullion is worth about twelve hundred and thirty, although a collector would pay a lot more than that for the coins.”

For a moment the man looks confused, and Corrine fears that she's blown it, but suddenly he laughs.

“What da fuck, dis one, she da fuckin' secretary da treasury,” he says, hefting the coins in his palm.

Amazed at herself for having produced this speech, she coughs and rubs her eyes, which are burning from the acrid smoke; when she opens them, the tattooed man is fiddling with a triple-beam scale that has materialized on the table in front of him, placing the coins on the tray. She feels light-headed and nauseous and all of a sudden she can't stop coughing, and she isn't sure if any more is said, but the next thing she knows, Jeff's clapping her on the back as he leads her out of the room, and only as she's leaving does she see that the man at the door has a silver pistol in his belt.

The air outside is only slightly less funky and fetid, the street dark and deserted. Jeff takes her hand and walks her west, toward civilization.

“Pyramid,” Tony mumbles.

“I should get her home.”

“Think we all need a fucking drink.” The last thing Tony needs is a drink, she feels certain, watching him stumble up the sidewalk, tacking like a leaky sailboat to port and starboard in his forward progress.

A few minutes later they're standing outside another tenement storefront, the door guarded by a hulk in a pink sequined halter. He does a complicated handshake with Jeff and waves them into the din: a smoky room with a stage at the far end, where a drag queen in a gold lamé jumpsuit is prancing and singing “Let Me Entertain You.” Many in the audience are also cross-dressing men. She wonders how it is that Jeff, who looks so out of place in his Brooks Brothers shirt, seems so at home here, receiving and returning greetings as he tows her toward the bar. She's sort of furious at him for bringing her down here and exposing her to drug dealers and armed thugs, but also sort of mesmerized by these delicate pretty boys carrying lunch boxes and the broad-shouldered divas in poofy blond wigs, by the topless woman dancing virtually unnoticed beside the bar. For a moment she understands that impulse, feels the urge to experience that freedom. But it's fleeting; she could never do such a thing.

She wants to talk to Jeff, to demand an explanation, an account of the earlier proceedings, get an apology, perhaps, but the music's too loud to talk over, so instead she quickly drains the vodka tonic he places in her hand and asks for another. He introduces her to people with unlikely names and improbable hairstyles and they watch two more acts take the stage, the second culminating in several minutes of shrieking that's billed as an homage to Yoko Ono.

Finally, she walks out in a huff.

Jeff catches up with her on the sidewalk.

“Can you find me a cab?”

“Can we talk first?” He lights a cigarette, hands it to her, then lights one of his own.

She searches for a cab, but for a moment the street is empty.

“You've got to start taking care of yourself,” she says.

“I like it when you take care of me,” he says.

“I don't ever want to get a phone call like that again.”

“Noted.”

“Can you please get me a cab?”

“Come home with me.”

“You know I can't. I'm married to your best friend.”

“That hasn't stopped us before.”

“I wasn't married then.”

“It's not too late.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“ ‘Come live with me and be my love/and we will all the pleasures prove.' ”

“I can't believe you'd say that.”

“I was just quoting Christopher Marlowe.”

“Jeff, I love Russell.”

“I think you love me.”

“I do, but that doesn't mean I need to be with you. It certainly doesn't mean I want to be married to you.”

At that moment a dirty Checker cab rolls up to the entrance of the club, and several gaudily attired passengers clamber out.

“Don't go,” Jeff says.

She kisses him before climbing into the taxi, waving to him as he stands there smoking on the curb.

The next afternoon, a Tony Duplex painting is delivered to her apartment with a note:
This painting reminds me of us. Tony says thanks. Love Jeff.

She'd never spoken of the incident to Jeff or anyone else and had sent the painting off to her mother's house, asking her to stash it in the closet, where it had remained these many years. At least she hoped it was still there. It had occurred to her even at the time that the painting was worth far more than the coins she'd parted with, but she'd never considered selling it then, and later, Tony had more or less disappeared, along with the buyers once clamoring for his art.

She'd never told Russell about that night, feeling that it was part of her secret history with Jeff.

Every marriage, she convinced herself, can bear a few secrets.

RUSSELL HAD FINALLY MANAGED TO BOOK
a reservation at Gaijin, the underground restaurant, after getting referred by his friend Carlo, having first heard about it from Washington, who had so far been unable to get them in. There was no listed number, no reviews and so far only a few cryptic references online.

When he called, Russell was asked, by a woman with a heavy Japanese accent, how he'd gotten the number. “From Carlo Russi, the chef.”

“And what is his phone number?”

Russell gave her Carlo's cell number.

He'd almost concluded that he'd been disconnected when the woman came back on the line and asked him how large his party was, then told him they would be expected at seven o'clock on the following Thursday.

“Please to not be giving this number to anyone.” Apparently if you were Carlo, you could refer someone, but not if you were Russell Calloway.

She gave him the address and told him the restaurant was behind an unmarked door beside a clothing boutique. He should ring the buzzer three times.

After hanging up, he'd immediately called Washington to gloat, and to invite him and Veronica to dinner. Washington pretended to be only mildly interested.

“How can it be a secret restaurant?” Corrine asked when they were en route in a cab. “What does that even mean?”

“Well, basically that they don't have a listed phone number or address or a sign or even a name on the door and in order to get in you need to be referred by somebody who's already been there.”

“Do we know anything about it?” Corrine asked. “Such as what kind of food they serve?”

“I think it's kind of Japanese avant-garde.”

“How can food be avant-garde?”

“If it's really,
really
fresh? Anyway, Carlo said it was brilliant.”

“It all sounds deeply pretentious. And Carlo weighs three hundred pounds, for God's sake. He'd eat his own children if you dunked them in Bolognese sauce.” Corrine could happily subsist on green salad and canned salmon and had limited patience for culinary adventurism.

“Actually, he's lost a ton of weight,” Russell told her.

“Ah, the cocaine diet.”

“No, he stopped that after his heart attack.”

At the corner of Lafayette and Bond, they found the Lees, who'd been searching for the place. Russell had been less precise with his directions than the woman on the phone, but after locating the clothing boutique, he tried the buzzer one door to the west. Just as they were about to try the door on the other side, they were admitted by a slim young man in a tight red suit. After a brief interrogation, they were led through a long hallway into a small room furnished with a heterogeneous mix of tables and chairs—from a store on Fourth Avenue dedicated to fifties design—all of which were for sale here. The walls were adorned with framed book covers—Japanese manga featuring pop-eyed schoolgirls and ninjas, as well as the equally lurid and stylized covers of Avon paperbacks from the forties and fifties—
The Chastity of Gloria Boyd, I Married a Dead Man, Six Deadly Dames.

It was blessedly free of the standard tchotchkes of the typical sushi joint. Only two very young couples were already seated, leaving four tables vacant.

“I hate it when I feel like I should whisper,” Corrine whispered.

“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 interrupted 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.”