Bright, Precious Days (24 page)

“Fuck fuck fuck. This is why the English had valets.”

“And why men on Park Avenue have wives,” she said. “Let me help.”

In fact, she was clearly experienced in the procedure, and finally he looked presentable, but when he looked down at his watch, he saw that despite his Quick Draw McGraw impersonation, almost twenty minutes had elapsed since he'd left the ballroom.

“We should definitely leave separately,” he said, adding reluctantly, “Ladies first.”

“I'll be feeling you inside of me during the speeches,” she said, kissing him at the door.

“I like that idea,” he said, almost pushing her out the door. He was grateful that Casey and Tom had their own table, that he wouldn't have to sit with her through dinner. He didn't think he could handle that.

He looked again at his watch, waited thirty seconds, and poked his head out the door. Finding the hallway empty, he bounded out and waited at the elevators, pressing the button repeatedly, reflexively checking his pockets for wallet, cell phone and keys.

Withdrawing his phone from his pocket, he looked at the screen and saw Veronica's name. It took him a moment to register the time code, to see that it was advancing, to realize that the line had been open fourteen minutes and counting.

Horrified, he punched the red button to disconnect and considered the options. There was certainly a chance that in the din of the party she might not have heard her phone, ensconced inside that ridiculous clutch. And even if she had answered, what were the chances she would have heard anything comprehensible, given that his phone was in his pocket, muffled by all that fabric? On the other hand, Casey had been even more vocal than usual.

The elevator finally arrived, though he was no longer quite so eager to get downstairs. He kept running through the possibilities as the car descended, and walked back through the lobby dreading his encounter with Veronica and trying to anticipate her reaction, wondering if he would be able to read her at first sight. She had a pretty good poker face and had lots of experience with being disappointed by her husband's behavior. If she seemed to be ignorant of his transgression, he would find a way to get hold of her phone and erase those fourteen minutes.

The reception gallery was almost empty, the stragglers disappearing into the ballroom as the lights flashed on and off, signaling the start of dinner. Despite feeling that his knees might buckle beneath him, he somehow made his way through the tables, eventually discovering his own in the middle of the room. Veronica was already sitting next to Russell. At least she has a good seat, he thought, dreading the moment of eye contact, and indeed her expression was neither warm nor welcoming when she looked up at him, although it might have merely indicated her impatience with his prolonged absence, as opposed to knowledge of his activities. Then, with a sinking feeling, he saw her phone next to her place setting, though she might have removed it from her purse after he'd broken the connection.

A stranger took the chair beside her then and she was distracted by introductions as Washington moved around the other side of the table to his own seat and threw himself into conversation with Corrine, who seemed almost as skittish as he was. Having pretty much organized the event, she was telling him about all the last-minute glitches and about the competition among the gala committee women for time at the podium.

“They all want to speak,” she was saying. “Personally, I'd rather shoot myself than get up there, but every one of them seems to feel that her husband's fifty grand entitles her to take the stage. And half of them haven't even sent the check yet. Actually, the only exception is Karen Fontana, and her husband donated a million bucks! Only don't say I told you that, because he genuinely wants to remain anonymous. If only the others could act like that.”

When Washington finally looked over at Veronica, she seemed to be engrossed with the stranger on her left, and he began to allow himself to believe he might have escaped, that he might have been given another chance—a chance to get his shit together and appreciate the life they had together, to stop taking her for granted and stop fucking around, to love his kids and come home early at night to the bosom of his family. He promised himself that if he were somehow spared exposure tonight, he would never stray again.

At first her failure to make eye contact was a welcome reprieve, but after the speeches started and she failed to so much as glance his way, it started to seem pointed and deliberate.

Washington's attention was diverted by a short speech from a tiny woman in a purple dashiki and matching headdress, who said she was an immigrant from Ghana, ineligible for food stamps or welfare, and unable to feed her family until she'd learned about Nourish New York, and who concluded her speech with a shout-out to “Miss Corrine,” who had taken a special interest in her case. Mortified, the object of her approbation blushed as heads turned toward their table and the applause mounted.

As the speeches dragged on, he began to think he couldn't bear the suspense any longer, and he texted her—testing the waters.

Hey you.

Across the table, she looked down, picked up her phone and glanced up at him inquisitively.

Boring,
he texted.

She lowered the phone to her lap, typing a response.
Haven't had enough excitement for 1 nite?

He looked up from his phone, but she'd turned away and was watching the podium.

Hopelessly, he texted back:
????

Without looking over at him, she eventually picked up the phone and took it in her lap, biting her lip as she laboriously tapped out the answer on the keypad. He was almost afraid to check when his phone finally buzzed.

Wonder if she's feeling you inside her during the speeches?

He glanced up, meeting her gaze, a look he was all too familiar with but had hoped never to see again in this life. And for the first time in a long career of attending benefits, he wished the speeches would never end.

REPORTERS ON CNN WERE DISCUSSING
the upcoming Wisconsin primary and predicting a win for Obama when they left the kids with Jean and walked down the block to Odeon. As soon as they were seated, he spotted Washington at a nearby table with a young woman in a sleek black dress who looked more Condé Nast than Corbin, Dern—an unwelcome sight insofar as he felt it might provoke Corrine. As Washington's best friend, and a male of the species, he was afraid he'd somehow be implicated; in fact, he felt guilty already, as if Corrine, seeing this, might intuit his own sins of thought, if not of deed.

“Oh God, there's Wash,” Corrine said as she unfurled her napkin.

“You'd think he'd at least have the decency to take it out of the neighborhood,” Russell said. Veronica had thrown him out of their apartment the night of Corrine's benefit some two weeks before.

“Well, it's not like he hasn't begged her to take him back. Actually, it might be good for them both if she saw him here with a bimbo.”

“I guess you're right,” he said, careful not to cast his lot too openly with the straying husband.

“It could just be a business thing,” she suggested.

“Yeah, I suppose.”

“I'm not saying Washington's a saint.”

“That would indeed stretch credulity.”

“But it takes two to derail a marriage.”

“I'm not sure I believe that,” Russell said. “I wouldn't say I blame Charles Bovary for his wife's behavior.”

“I don't see why not. He was kind of a pathetic doofus.”

All at once he wondered if it was possible
she
was having an affair. Was she building a case for herself, a defense brief? But he couldn't conjure any suspicious memories, and the hypothesis didn't stand up to scrutiny—just a flash of paranoia.

“I'm just saying I think she changed the rules on him. For years she turned a blind eye, then suddenly she drops the boom.”

Actually, this wasn't uncharacteristic of Corrine, this tendency to take the man's side, to see the male point of view. It was one of the things he loved about her, although it put them on opposite sides in the Democratic primaries. She'd become an early supporter of Obama, whereas Russell believed fervently in Hillary, feeling that the freshman senator from Illinois had come out of nowhere, and that he was the beneficiary of a kind of psychological affirmative action; backing him made white Democrats proud of their liberal open-mindedness. Maybe Hillary wasn't all that lovable, but she had the experience and the battle scars and the policies. Yet even here in New York, where racism was as unfashionable as herpes, casual sexism was like smoking: unfashionable in theory, but not without a certain retro appeal—a thesis that seemed to Russell to be confirmed by the buzz around
Mad Men,
which everyone had been watching. Even downtown, where Republicans were scarcer than unicorns, nostalgia for the age when a woman's place was in the home or the typing pool still bubbled under the surface.

The waitress came by. “Negroni and a glass of champagne?”

“Absolutely,” Russell said.

“You love it that she knows what we drink,” Corrine said.

“Why wouldn't I?”

When the waitress returned with their drinks, they ordered their food. Washington, having spotted them, waved from his table.

“I hate frisée,” Russell said. “It's barely food; it has the texture of excelsior—those weird wood shavings they used to use for stuffing taxidermied animal corpses and packing fragile goods before the advent of Styrofoam peanuts.” He was stalling, trying to postpone the agenda. The landlord was officially converting their building to condos, so now they had to come up with a plan. They'd barely be able to afford the place, but he was determined to try.

“Yes, your views on frisée are well known, Russell. It's a good thing we didn't move to France, where it's a staple, back in '04.”

They'd told their friends back then that they were moving to France if Bush won the election—or rather, Russell had.

“Although maybe we should have,” she added.

“How so?”

“I just thought somehow we'd be
somewhere
else by now. I can't believe we're still sharing one bathroom among four people. I want to live like grown-ups, Russell.”

“Living in the city involves certain sacrifices. We could probably have four bathrooms in White Plains, but would we want to?”

“Do we still want to live here? Look around you. When we moved here, it was funky and cheap; now it's a suburb of Wall Street. The artists have been replaced by bankers and trust fund brats. When I take the kids to school, I'm practically stampeded by guys in suits with briefcases.”

“Lou Reed and James Rosenquist still live here.”

“And they're both rich as hell. Look, if the kids get into Hunter, we really need to think about moving uptown, and if they don't, we need to go somewhere where they can get a great public education. We agreed Hudson River Middle was just an interim move. I won't sacrifice their prospects for some romantic notion of a bohemia that's extinct. It's gone, Russell. It moved to Williamsburg, or Red Hook, or maybe it just died. There aren't any starving poets left around here. Instead of trying to buy our apartment, I think we need to move to a less expensive part of the world, with better schools.”

“Like where?”

“I don't know. Brooklyn? New Jersey?”

“I can't believe you said New Jersey.” Russell suddenly felt like a losing contestant on that terrible show his kids watched, about to be kicked off the island.
His
island.

“There are beautiful places in New Jersey. Steve Colbert lives in New Jersey. So does Richard Gere.”

“Fuck Richard Gere. I lost two hours of my life watching
Bee Season,
and I'll never get them back.”

“Even the Upper East Side is cheaper than this neighborhood. And it's where, fingers crossed, they'll soon be attending school.”

“The Upper East Side? Do I look like a—”

“Like a middle-aged preppy? Yes, as a matter of fact, you do. Do you realize we live in the most expensive zip code in the city? Even if we had two million, I wouldn't want to spend it on our shitty old loft. We lived happily uptown for years, and you used to say you hated lofts.”

“It's our home. And it won't cost anything like two million.”

“I bet it does. We could get a house in, say, Park Slope for much less.”

“I hate Park Slope. The People's Republic of. Strollers and food co-ops and self-righteous Manhattan bashers.”

“For a liberal, you can be incredibly bigoted and narrow-minded. Anyway, there are lots of other neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Most of your staff live in Brooklyn, and so do a lot of writers.”

“One less since we lost Mailer,” Russell said wistfully. She was right that the city was changing, even shrinking, but he wasn't about to abandon ship. “Good old Norman. You remember his place in Brooklyn Heights?”

“Brooklyn Heights is crazy expensive,” Corrine said. “It's virtually Manhattan.”

“If we bought the loft, we could renovate it, add another bathroom.”

“Where would we put it? On the fucking fire escape?”

Russell was getting agitated, desperate to score another drink.

“Russell, I want you to be honest with yourself and with me. We're living like grad students and our kids are getting a crappy education. Here's something else I don't understand. Why is it necessary to eat at restaurants two or three times a week? That's what, a few thousand dollars a month? We can't afford to live here anymore.”

“We can't afford
not
to live here,” Russell said peevishly.

“That's just childish and nonsensical. I don't even know what that means.”

“It means I'm one of those people, as Updike put it, who believes that anyone who lives anywhere other than New York must, in some sense, be kidding.”

“Do you realize we could get a town house in Harlem for what we'd end up paying for a stupid loft we outgrew ten years ago? Seriously, more and more people like us are moving up there, but it's still affordable. And it's on the way up.”

Harlem? Jesus Christ—though Bill Clinton had his office there, didn't he? Honorary black man, though lately he'd lost some of that cred campaigning against Obama. “At least it's Manhattan,” Russell conceded. “Barely.”

“What does Manhattan even signify anymore?” she said. “Certainly not what it did twenty-five years ago. Now it's an island of wealthy people shopping in the same stores you can find in San Francisco and London and Dubai. Look around you, Russell. Look at the shiny condos going up all around us, crowding out the middle class and your old bohemians, blocking out the sunlight. I want you to grow up and get serious about this. We need to start looking for another place to live, and if you can't face up to that, I'll start looking on my own.”

What he wanted to say was that being a resident not only of Manhattan but of
downtown
was an irreducible core of his identity. He was as much—if not more—a New Yorker as those who found themselves here through the accident of birth, through no inclination or effort of their own, he and his tribe of restless striving immigrants from the provinces and the farthest corners of the earth, who'd been inexorably drawn here and had made the city their own, who'd shaped it and been shaped by it. And for Russell, New York was downtown Manhattan: Greenwich Village, SoHo, TriBeCa. He could even imagine a case being made for Chelsea or the Flatiron District. He refused to believe that the city no longer had room for people like themselves, refused to concede New York to the Power and Money team. It needed the Art and Love team, goddamn it: actors who were not yet famous; used bookstores and the people who worked in them, and professional waiters and dog walkers and piano tuners. It needed bassoon players and chorus line dancers as well as the corps de ballet, watchmakers and furniture restorers and cobblers and dealers in rare coins and stamps. It needed underpaid blue bloods with degrees from Brown who fed the undernourished, and midwestern refugees who published literary fiction. It needed
them.
This was the city he'd chosen of all the places in the world; to live anywhere else would feel like exile.