Bright, Precious Days (27 page)

Touched by the extravagant gesture of the private tour and the fact that he'd remembered her story about the Manet, she tried to explain to him the insecurity she'd felt at the time, the tension and psychic violence, the shouting matches and ruined holidays. She was in the middle of a story about a Thanksgiving shoving match when he opened his menu and began to peruse it.

“Are you reading the
menu
?”

He lowered it and looked up, startled by her tone.

“I was just—”

“I was in the middle of telling you about the traumatic events of my childhood and you start reading the goddamn
menu
?”

“I'm sorry.”

“Was it that boring?”

“No, I promise, I really was listening.”

“Go ahead. Focus on the menu. I wouldn't want to distract you from planning your meal.”

“I'm sorry. Sometimes I just have difficulty focusing.”

“Is that why you take Adderall?”

“Well, yes, actually.”

“I just happened to see it in your Dopp kit.”

“It must be nice to have X-ray vision.”

“All right, I'm sorry, I looked.”

“No, you're right. It's a problem. I'm easily distracted. Sometimes, I have the attention span of a gnat. I'm surprised it took you this long to complain.” He reached over and put his hand on hers. “I didn't
mean
to hurt your feelings.”

Snow was falling again as they drove back up the valley to the house.

Their desire and their attempts to sate it reached a kind of crescendo pitch that night; they woke in the middle of the night to try it again, and then once more just before dawn. They rose afterward to watch the sky turn silver and pink across the meadow, which had a fresh layer of snow. After breakfast they strapped on cross-country skis and explored the countryside for an hour, briefly staving off the regret of imminent departure, though Corrine became increasingly melancholy as the sun rose higher in the sky, wondering if this might be the last time she would be alone with Luke like this, realizing that her real life lay elsewhere.

“I hate Sundays,” Luke said as he helped her unbuckle her bindings, as if reading her thoughts.

“Me, too,” she said, brushing the snow from her jeans as he unlaced his boots.

“Why don't we stay an extra day?”

“I can't,” she said.

“Why don't we just stay, period?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean let's be together,” he said, stepping out of his jeans and dumping them in the foyer.

“That's crazy.”

“Why? What's crazy is that I let you get away once, and I don't want to make the same mistake again.”

“I love that you feel that way, but trust me, it will pass.”

“It's been six years and the feeling hasn't passed yet.”

“That's because you didn't have me. If you had, you would have gotten sick of me years ago.” And yet, even though she believed this, she found herself marveling that he actually wanted her still.

“You know, I'm used to getting what I want,” he said.

“Does that arrogant rich-guy line work on other girls?”

“I'm sorry,” he said. “Sometimes I forget you're not like anyone else.”

“
That
might work,” she said, stepping out of her jeans.

They landed smoothly at Teterboro, Luke emerging from the cockpit after the plane braked to a stop. As they walked across the tarmac to the terminal, she took his hand and held it. Inside, she was trying to steel herself for their parting, when they were accosted by Kip Taylor, sitting in the waiting area, who rose to greet them. “Corrine, Luke, what a…”

He seemed unable to finish the sentence, his surprise spawning confusion.

“Kip, I've been meaning to call you,” Luke said. “Got a company you might be interested in.”

Kip nodded skeptically. Corrine, too, was at a loss for words.

Luke said, “Headed someplace glamorous, I hope?”

“A little bonefishing down in the islands,” Kip said.

“Russell still talks about that trip with you last winter,” Corrine said, her voice sounding off-key, even slightly hysterical.

Before she could cobble together some plausible explanation, Kip said, “Give him my best,” then turned away and walked over to the counter, leaving her to wonder if it was only her own guilt that made this sound so much like a reproach.

“Oh my God,” she said as they walked to the front door. “What must he be thinking?”

“He's going to think what he's going to think,” Luke said tautologically. “But he has no reason to
say
anything.”

Even if this were true, she felt the weekend had been tarnished, if not ruined, with this abrupt reminder of her obligations and her place in an intricate web of social and familial and even commercial relations. Whatever had made her think she could just run away?

THE CITY GREW TALLER TO THE NORTH,
the lowlands of SoHo and Greenwich Village giving way to the towers of midtown. In the foreground: Chessie Steyl, the actress, in a shiny purple dress with a plunging neckline, whom Russell was complimenting on her performance, hating himself a little for the inevitable clichés, the obsequiousness of the fan, even as he felt warmed by her proximity, and her acknowledgment of his existence. Their acquaintance, casual though it might be, was based on a few encounters at gatherings like this, a party following the screening of her latest film in the penthouse of the Soho Grand Hotel. Close up, he felt she had as much iconic presence as the Empire State or the Chrysler buildings glittering behind her. Russell occasionally sent her books he thought she would like, and she would inevitably send him a thank-you note, an actual handwritten missive on a monogrammed Crane notecard—she was a product of Greenwich, Connecticut, after all—and sometimes mention these titles in her interviews. Knowing Russell gave her a little shot of lit cred, helped her feel she was smarter than she looked, which, in fact, she was. For his part, he'd been thinking for a while that she might be perfect for the lead in the film adaptation of Jeff's novel. She looked to him quite a bit like the younger Corrine Calloway. It would be an elegant sublimation of his desire for this sexy young actress to see her play the fictional version of his wife.

“I just got the galleys for Toni Morrison's new novel,” she said, offering him a cigarette from her pack of American Spirits, which he accepted, although he hadn't smoked in years. She produced a Zippo from her purse.

“May I?” he said, taking the lighter. He cupped his hand around the flame as she leaned over, offering a thrilling view of her breasts.

“What else should I be reading?”

It was flattering that she seemed to be devoting all of her attention to him, putting her hand on his arm and drawing him into a conspiracy that excluded all of the noisy and populous party in her honor. “Have I sent you Jack Carson's short stories? No? Really amazing. He's like a latter-day Raymond Carver, a smart hillbilly Hemingway. Incredibly powerful stuff. And I'm just publishing this memoir by Phillip Kohout—you know, the guy who got captured by the Taliban? He was going to come with me tonight, but he has a stomach thing. I don't know if you got the invitation, but we're having a launch party next week.”

“I can't wait,” she said, letting go of his arm to attend to the publicist who was whispering in her ear, the spell broken as she nodded and turned back to Russell, flicking her cigarette away and kissing his cheek in parting.

Russell watched her waft away, her serene self-containment unpunctured by the spiky anxiety of her handler, and Russell found himself alone on the terrace, which seemed terribly cold now, high above the icy, sparkling city. The metropolis was uncharacteristically silent against the din of the gathering inside the penthouse, a ridiculous circus from this vantage: the babble, the postures and gestures, the ambition and striving and yearning coiled therein…the way the energy in the room shifted and realigned as the actress entered from the terrace. For a moment, he recognized how artificial it all was, but he, too, was part of it.

Back inside, he was heading for the bar when he was accosted by Steve Sanders, a cultural reporter for the
Times.
Decent guy, bit of a nerd, he somehow managed to get everything just slightly wrong when he wrote about publishing. Not malicious, just slightly clueless and humorless. Russell hadn't seen him since the Labor Day party, when he'd brought that fat-ass hit man Toby Barnes along.

“I called your office earlier,” he said, “but you'd already left.”

“And here I am in the flesh.”

“I also tried Phillip Kohout several times.”

“Actually, he was supposed to be here tonight,” Russell said, “but he canceled on me.”

“Maybe we should, uh…” He motioned to an unoccupied corner, to which Russell followed him. His manner seemed ominous.

“What's up?”

“I wanted you to have a chance to answer these accusations before I—”

“What accusations?”

“Basically, my sources are saying that during the time Kohout was supposedly in captivity in the North-West Frontier Province, he was hiding out in an opium den in Lahore.”

Russell laughed. “You're talking about the stuff on that Islamist Web site last week? I mean, come on, we saw that. It's a forum for crazy jihadist ranting. What evidence is there?”

“Dated photographs. Video. E-mails. All from the time Kohout claimed to be a captive in Waziristan. In fact, it seems he was briefly held, and roughed up, by some drug dealers he owed money to.”

“Where's this coming from?”

“Obviously, I can't divulge my sources, but this is coming from people who saw him in Lahore.”

“The fact that he spent some party time in Lahore doesn't mean he wasn't in captivity in Waziristan. He writes about it in the book.” Russell's mind was racing, his sense of indignation undercut by a creeping sense of dread. The Internet was awash in conspiracy theories and unfounded innuendo, as Kohout had reminded him when the first post questioning his claim to have been captured was brought to his attention. But, like stopped clocks, cranks and lunatics sometimes told the truth.

“The evidence we've gathered suggests he was in Lahore the entire time. And according to our Washington desk, the State Department had doubts from the beginning. They're working the story on that end, and we'd clearly like to talk to Kohout and get his response. But in the meantime, I'm curious to get your reaction. Were you aware that Kohout was perpetrating a hoax?”

“Of course not. I'm still not aware of any such thing.”

“I'd be interested to know what kind of vetting and fact-checking you've done to verify his story.”

Russell felt dizzy and slightly nauseous. In fact, he'd done very little—the story of Kohout's abduction had been reported all over the world, including the pages of
The New York Times,
and the book itself was vivid, rich in detail and texture.

Suddenly, he saw a glimmer of light, a chance of reprieve. “If you want to talk about vetting,” Russell said, “
The New Yorker
's running their excerpt next week, and they've got the toughest fact-checking department in the world.”

“What I hear—they've dropped the excerpt they were publishing precisely because of concerns about veracity. You didn't know about this?”

Could that possibly be true? If so, it was a very bad sign. Of course, he'd had his moments of doubt about Kohout's story, certain details in his narrative that didn't quite jibe with others, but Kohout's explanations had seemed convincing enough, though in retrospect Russell had been perhaps
too
willing to accept them, too facile in suppressing his concerns. And Kohout's last-minute cancellation tonight, just before the screening, suddenly seemed suspicious, and telling. Thinking back on it, he realized Phillip had seemed a little flustered and out of sorts this past week, hadn't he?

Suddenly, Sanders was holding a small digital recorder in front of his nose. “Would you care to comment on the allegations?”

“No, I fucking wouldn't.” He couldn't print that in the
Times.
He glanced at his watch: ten-forty, too late for tomorrow's paper. Assuming Sanders felt he had enough to go with, Russell had less than twenty-four hours to get this figured out. In the meantime, he shouldn't be pissing the guy off. “Obviously, I've got to look into this,” he said. “I'll call you first thing in the morning.”

“This isn't going to go away, Russell,” Sanders said, looking uncharacteristically fierce behind his round steel glasses, seeming less clueless and nerdy than at any time in their acquaintance.

Sanders followed Russell as he pushed through the crowd toward the elevator. In his haste to escape, Russell almost collided with Chessie Steyl, who was being interviewed by a video crew.

“Oh here's my friend Russell Calloway,” she blurted. “He's a brilliant editor. We were just talking about books. He's, like, my literary mentor. Mostly he publishes fiction, but he was just telling me about this memoir by that guy who was captured by the Taliban. I'm so bad with names—what was it, Russell?”

“Um, Phillip Kohout.”

“I can't wait to read it,” she said.

The interviewer seemed not to know what to make of this exchange; Sanders, though, appeared to find it fascinating, hunched over his notebook, scribbling away, his head bobbing up and down like a hungry crow pecking at carrion.

The mailbox of the subscriber you are trying to reach is full and cannot accept new messages at this time.

Russell wasn't the only person looking for Phillip, apparently—that lying bastard. He decided to try cornering him in his apartment, only a few blocks away at Spring and Sullivan—a breach of Manhattan etiquette necessitated by the urgency of the search. He had to tread carefully, the frozen SoHo sidewalk slick as a water slide against the leather soles of his new cordovan loafers.

There was no answer to his repeated ringing of Phillip's buzzer. He would have called Briskin, Phillip's agent, who would at least, presumably, know if
The New Yorker
had backed out of the deal, but he didn't have his home or cell number.

Almost more than anything else, he dreaded telling Corrine. She'd been against his acquisition of the Kohout book from the start, and while she hadn't exactly questioned its authenticity, she'd certainly questioned the author's character, which was really the ultimate point at issue. She didn't trust him, and now he felt it in his gut: She was right, and he was screwed. He'd printed 75,000 copies of the book, more than half of which were already in transit to bookstores at this moment; advanced copies had been in the hands of reviewers and journalists for weeks. Just two days ago he'd written Kohout a check for $250,000; Briskin had asked for an early payment of the amount due on publication—a request that now looked highly suspicious. The book was, for all intents and purposes, already published.

Standing on the sidewalk outside Phillip's building after fruitlessly ringing his buzzer, he realized that one of the few people he knew at
The New Yorker
lived only a few blocks away, and on an impulse he set off for Thompson Street, even as he wondered whether she might still be living there after all these years. As he approached the doorway, he felt a tingling of recognition that seemed to suffuse his bloodstream, heating the surface of his skin; for years he'd visited this apartment for late-night assignations with a woman with whom he'd never shared a meal or accompanied to a social gathering, arriving in the middle of the night after a drunken business dinner or a book party. He hadn't hit that buzzer in many years—9/11 had served to break the spell—and he'd seen her only once in the aftermath, though he still called upon the store of memories of their past encounters when he was in need of erotic stimulus, and now, involuntarily, he felt a stirring in his groin as he found himself standing in front of the familiar door. Checking the names on the row of buzzers, he found hers and pressed it, jumping when the intercom crackled with her voice.

“Who is it?”

He could hardly bring himself to answer, ashamed as he was of his neglect of her for the past six years. But then, he'd always felt a measure of shame standing in front of this door. “It's Russell,” he finally managed to croak.

The intercom went silent, and after what seemed like an eternity he was about to turn away, when he was startled by the harsh metallic jangle. He reached for the door handle and pulled it open.

“I don't believe it,” she said after letting him in. She was wearing a faded black T-shirt and white panties. There was a blue bruise with yellow highlights on her left thigh and her legs had a faint dusting of black stubble. It was the smell that was most familiar at first, a potent alloy of pot, dry rot, decaying food, dirty laundry and Japanese incense, which failed to mask the other smells. Behind her, on the floor next to the bed, was a pile of unwashed clothing; in the little kitchen, a half-eaten egg roll sat on plate beside a tangle of sesame noodles.

He stood in the doorway while she slouched against the door frame of the kitchen, just a few feet away.

“After all these years you just barge in here like nothing's changed.”

“I know. I'm sorry.”

“Are you at least going to come in?”

He stepped just inside the apartment and closed the door behind him.

“Why did you want to see me?”

“Because I'm in trouble and I need your help.”

“I think you wanted to see me because you wanted me to suck your cock. Isn't that why you wanted to see me?”

“Don't say that.”

“Why shouldn't I say it? It's not true?”

“That's not why I came.” He suddenly realized that telling her the real purpose of his visit—that he hadn't come for her at all, but merely for information that she might, by virtue of her employment, possess—seemed worse than saying he'd come for sex.

“Are you sure? Because that used to be why you came. You couldn't stay away, could you? Do you remember how you'd come here in the middle of the night and ring my buzzer because you just knew that no matter what time it was I'd suck your cock for you?”

“Yes, I remember,” he said, his voice quavering.

“Would you like me to suck your cock now?”

She moved toward him, approaching within inches, the top of her head coming just up to his chin, and cupped her hand on his crotch. “I bet you'd like that, wouldn't you?”

“That's not why I came. I need to know if
The New Yorker
has canceled the Phillip Kohout piece.”

She grabbed at his crotch. Pushing her away, he almost knocked her over.