Bright, Precious Days (5 page)

They got off at Grand Concourse/149th Street, Corrine leading the way up a series of passages and stairways to the corner of two large boulevards, where she indicated their direction with a nod of her head.

“So tell me,” she said, “did you just forget to tell your wife about me, or did you
deliberately
not tell her about me?”

“I think the latter.”

“And will you be telling her about me now?”

“No, I definitely don't think so.”

“Why not?”

He tried to decide why, and then whether, to tell Corrine the truth. “Because if I really told her how I felt about you, it would break her heart.”

She seemed genuinely surprised by this declaration. After digesting it, she said, “Is she enjoying New York?”

“Actually, she left this morning.”

They passed a barbershop with matching lurid-colored hagiographic posters of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., crossed the boulevard and turned into a smaller street lined with low-rise hair salons, bodegas, clothing boutiques, liquor stores and an abandoned brownstone covered in graffiti, including the slogan
ARM THE HOMELESS
.

Corrine pointed to a cluster of brick towers in the distance. “That's our objective. Four thousand residents in the poorest congressional district in America. The nearest supermarket is more than a mile away. And of course no one has a car. A gypsy cab to the supermarket will cost eight, ten bucks each way. Most of them buy their food from the bodegas, which stock no fruit or vegetables aside from a few old plantains.”

As they approached the towers, a long queue of people stretched back along the sidewalk.

“Our clients,” Corrine said. “Looks like a busy day.”

As they walked down the line, a motley, colorful cohort attired not only in the baggy staples of American leisure wear but also in the traditional garb of at least half a dozen nations, she greeted several of them by name.

“How's your gout, Jimmy? Are you staying away from the red meat?”

“Tolerable better, though I did get me a batch of ribs night 'fore last.”

To another man she said, “How'd that job interview work out?”

“Would I be in this fuckin' line if it did?”

Luke wanted to tell the guy to show a little respect, but Corrine pushed on, saying, “Come talk to me inside.”

Luke followed her, hopping over a chain into a parking lot flanked on either side by open tents. Corrine introduced him to several harried colleagues and deposited him with a group of volunteers. “Georgia here will show you the ropes.” Georgia was a petite Goth brunette whose grooming and wardrobe choices seemed to intentionally contradict her sylphlike physique: her hair cropped close to her skull, her ears studded with metal, her pale skin, where it emerged from her black leather jacket, heavily embroidered with tattoos.

“We're cucumbers,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“Our station. We're distributing cucumbers.”

“Okay.”

“You always dress like that to hand out vegetables in the South Bronx?”

“When I got dressed this morning, I didn't know I'd be coming here.”

“What, you thought you were going to shoot an ad for
GQ
?”

“I'll pretend that was intended as a compliment.”

“Whatever gets you off, dude. Nice scar, though.”

She showed him the stacked cartons filled with cucumbers, how to weigh and bag them in three-, four- and six-pound units. “The clients have a coded checklist,
A
's the smallest bag,
C
the biggest. I'm hoping you can guess which one
B
is. When you give them their bag, you check it off their list so they don't try to come back again.”

When the gate opened a few minutes later, they were besieged by a procession of supplicants, their demeanors as various as their sizes and shapes, showing degrees of gratitude from shy to effusive; some resentful and sullen, others embarrassed, a few greedy, trying to snatch up extra bags or pass through the line twice. The majority were women, the men mostly elderly, a few sulking teens among them. After an hour he was told to take a break, at which point he called his driver. When he returned to his station, one of his coworkers informed him that many of the cucumbers in the second pallet were rotten; they ended up throwing half of them out.

Corrine appeared to assess the situation. “I can't believe they pawned this shit off on us,” she said. As it turned out, they were running short on the other vegetables, too, with some forty or fifty people still waiting in line, so she instructed the volunteers to cut the rations in half. With the crisis more or less in hand, she told Luke she had to get back to her office.

Hoping to persuade her otherwise, he followed past the stragglers and out into the street. For some reason, she felt particularly bad about the very last woman in line, a strung out–looking mom with matted hair and two shivering toddlers, one of whom wore mismatched boots. Corrine tried to slip her ten dollars, but instead of quietly pocketing the bill, she snapped, “What the fuck this for?” holding it out in front of her, pinched between her thumb and forefinger, as if it were tainted.

“I just felt bad that we'd run low on provisions.”

“I don't need your fuckin' pity,” the woman shouted.

Corrine looked stunned by her wrath. “I just thought, with your two little ones—”

“Don't you be talking 'bout my kids. Ain't none ayo' fuckin' bidness.”

The next woman in line said, “Hey, sister, you don't want it, I'll be happy to help out.”

“Who asked you to put your fuckin' nose in it?” After the recipient of the bill crumpled it in her fist and pocketed it, word of the cash handout spread down the line, provoking queries from those who'd received only coupons.

A skeletal man stood with his hand outstretched before her, wrapped in one of those quilted blue blankets used by moving companies to cushion furniture in transit.

Corrine was clearly mortified, all the more so when Georgia came over and said, “What's going on?”

“What's goin' on is—some people gettin' special treatment.”

Corrine drew her colleague away and tried to explain the situation. “I know, I know,” she said in response to the reprimand that Georgia had yet to deliver. “Totally unprofessional.”

“Well, you're the boss,” Georgia said in a tone of voice that transparently betrayed her actual belief—that Corrine was a slumming dilettante.

“Well, that was incredibly embarrassing,” Corrine said when they were alone. “I'm sorry you had to see that.”

“Don't be. I love it that you have such a big heart. So, might you consider accepting a ride downtown?” he asked, spotting his car idling across the street.

She seemed deflated by the recent fracas, less trusting of her instincts. “Just give me a ride to the subway.”

“Let me buy you lunch,” he said when the driver asked for their destination.

“I need to get back to the office.”

“Just a quick bite at the Four Seasons—it's on the way,” he said after she'd given the address. “I've hardly spoken to you the last three hours.”

“I'm sorry, Luke—I've got a meeting.”

“How about dinner?”

“I can't—”

“A drink, then, after work. I'll show you pictures of the village your water-catchment system will benefit.”

“All right, we'll see.”

“I'll pick you up at your office.”

He dropped her off at the subway stop and rode back down to the Four Seasons, not entirely discouraged by his progress, but she called at five to cancel.

“I'm sorry, but I'm going to be in a meeting till six-thirty and I've got to relieve the nanny by seven.”

“When will I see you?”

“Luke, honestly, I don't know what you want from me.”

“Just to catch up, spend a little time together.”

He was lying through his teeth. He didn't know if sleeping with her one more time would sate his desire or fuel it, but he found himself consumed with the need to find out.

RUSSELL HAD SPENT THE AFTERNOON
hunting and gathering in search of the perfect ingredients: the heritage ducks from upstate at the Union Square farmers' market, the star anise from Fujian in Chinatown. He belonged to the new breed of male epicureans who viewed cooking as a competitive sport, and pursued it with the same avidity that others had for fly-fishing or golf, with the attendant fetishization of the associated gadgetry and equipment. He and Washington, his best friend, had serious arguments about Japanese versus German cutlery. Russell had been raised on frozen vegetables and casseroles made with Campbell's soup, and Corrine saw this as another means of distancing himself from his midwestern roots, which was just fine with her, since she'd rather have gone to the gynecologist than cook a meal from scratch. This macho cooking thing worked to her advantage.

“Where's my damn immersion blender?” Russell huffed, standing at the counter in his Real Men Don't Wear Aprons apron.

“I don't even know what the hell that is,” Corrine said.

“I need it for my brown sauce.”

“Has anyone ever told you you're
such
a poofter.”

“What's a poofter?” Their daughter, Storey, had suddenly appeared as if out of thin air, as was her practice. A slender blond ghost.

“It's just…well, it's just a word I use when Dad's being kind of ridiculous and pretentious.”

“So you must use it a lot. I'm surprised I never heard it before.”

Corrine was taken aback. Eleven years old? One minute she's talking about Hannah Montana and the next minute she sounds like Janeane Garofalo. Russell, searching for his inversion blender, or whatever the hell it was, hadn't seemed to notice.

“Jeremy's playing a video game,” Storey said, reverting to a younger persona. “It's a weekday and he's not supposed to.”

With mixed feelings, Corrine went back to his bedroom to investigate. It was true that Jeremy wasn't supposed to play video games on weeknights; and also true that Storey had a not entirely admirable tendency to tattle on her brother. They'd shared a bedroom until last year, when Russell finally agreed to partition off another hundred-something square feet of the apartment so they could each have their own. It was an old railroad-style loft, twenty-two by eighty. Before they arrived in '95, someone had slapped together a master bedroom in the back with two-by-fours and Sheetrock, and when the twins were born, they'd walled in twelve by fourteen feet, and then this second, almost identical room had shrunk their open space considerably. They'd grown accustomed, especially for publication parties, to fitting sixty or eighty people cheek by jowl, but now their guests really had to rub up against one another. This project had involved posting a bond with their landlord, who reserved the right to have them remove the walls on termination of the lease. She didn't know anyone else in their circle who still rented, but their rent was lower than mortgage and maintenance payments would be if they were to buy a comparable space, not that she was sure there were many comparable spaces left—an old-school loft with exposed pipes and wiring, warped hardwood floors with gaps large enough to swallow golf balls; palimpsest pressed-tin ceiling, the fleur-de-lis squares cut and patched and painted over countless times; an ancient freight elevator that worked according to its own moods. The decor had remained unchanged for a decade: one solid wall of books, the other a collage of framed photographs and paintings and posters, including one for the Disney movie
Those Calloways,
“A Family You'll Never Forget!” Only the Russell Chatham landscape, a small Agnes Martin etching and the Berenice Abbott portrait of James Joyce were worth more than their frames.

Corrine was desperate to move, desperate to have a second bathroom, but Russell clung to an outdated vision of himself as a downtown bohemian. Their apartment could have been a diorama at the Museum of Natural History:
Last of the Early TriBeCans,
an example of the traditional dwelling of the original loft dwellers. The neighborhood was being gentrified and renovated out from under them. Construction everywhere now, new buildings and wholesale renos, scaffolding and cranes and Dumpsters on every block, steel-on-steel banging, blasting and generators chuffing all day long; it was like living in a war zone. It had fallen silent for a few months after September 11, though in retrospect it seemed as if the construction and the speculation had started up again just at about the same moment the smoke had stopped coming off the mountain of rubble farther south. New towers with doormen and spas rose from the landfill along the river, while the old industrial buildings were gutted and gilded and stocked with shiny new residents thrilled to have ceilings high enough to accommodate gigantic canvases by artists who'd lived and worked here in the seventies and eighties. Now you saw movie stars in the Garden Deli, investment bankers at the Odeon. There hadn't even
been
a deli when they'd first arrived. The Mudd Club was certainly long gone and so were the Talking Heads, though Russell was currently blasting “Life During Wartime” to inspire his cooking, an anthem of their early days in the city.

She was just heading back to investigate Jeremy's activities when the buzzer sounded.

“Jesus,” Russell said, “it's not even seven-forty.”

She turned back to the front door. “Didn't we say eight?”

“We always say eight. Which means eight-twenty. Everybody knows that.”

She worked the intercom. “Hello?”

Static, a frequent guest.

“Hello?”

“Um, I'm here for the…for the, uh, dinner.”

“Who's this?”

“It's Jack Carson?”

He sounded uncertain and so, for a moment, was she. “Oh, right.” Russell's new literary prodigy. “Press the door when you hear the buzzer. We're on the fourth floor.”

“It's Jack Carson,” she told Russell.

“I guess they don't do fashionably late in Tennessee,” he said.

“Given what you've told me about his appetite for controlled substances, we should be grateful he got here at all.”

“Actually, I think he's been clean for a couple months now.”

Corrine waited by the elevator door, curious to see this genius, this redneck bard about whom Russell was so excited, whose book he was publishing next year. She was a little disappointed when he turned out to be a gangly kid with dark hair pointing in several directions, a mottled complexion and piercing, almost black eyes, wearing tattered jeans and a black leather jacket over a black T-shirt with a big five-pointed star and the caption
Big Star.

“Welcome, I'm Corrine. Russell's told me so much about you.”

“You wrote the screenplay for
The Heart of the Matter.
”

“Well, yes, that would be me.”

“I thought it was great,” he said. She was pleased but flustered as he scrutinized her with those black eyes.

“How did you even come across it?”

“Russell gave it to me. He knows I'm a big Graham Greene fan. I thought it was cool the way you managed to humanize Scobie in a way that Greene didn't.”

She found herself surprised at the erudition implicit in this statement—not just the fact that anyone remembered her little film—even as she realized there was nothing inherently contradictory about the accent and the sentiment; she knew she shouldn't equate southern with ignorant. Luke came from Tennessee, and they didn't get much smarter, though his accent was barely noticeable compared to Jack's. He'd called a few days ago to say good-bye; she supposed she should be happy that he was halfway around the world again, though she'd felt strangely bereft at the thought of his departure.

Russell bounded over and wrapped his new discovery in a bear hug. “How's the city treating you? So, you met Corrine. And you found us all right?”

“Well, yeah, after I spent about half my advance on the goddamn cab.”

“It's a bitch, I know. Don't worry, I'll call you a car service for the ride home. Come on in, let me get you something. Storey, can you come over and say hello to Jack?”

Corrine slipped away to check on Jeremy.

“What are you doing, sweetie?” He was sprawled on his bed on his Pokémon duvet, with Ferdie the ferret sprawled on the pillow beside him.

“Super Mario Sunshine.”

“What day is today?”

“I dunno.”

“Isn't it a Tuesday?”

“Maybe.”

“Which would be…a weekday?”

“I guess,” he said, not looking away from the screen, where the little red man traversed a tropical island.

“And are we supposed to play video games on weekdays?”

“I thought it was like a holiday.”

“It's Election Day, which is not a holiday. Holidays are when you don't have school. Now turn that off before I take the controller away.”

“Let me just save it.”

“What's to save? That's what you always say when you want to keep playing for another five minutes.” She still wasn't sure if this “saving” gambit was legitimate or not.

When he appeared to keep playing, she walked over to the bed and took hold of the control unit in his hand. Ferdie, snakelike, opened his eyes and regarded her languidly.

“Okay, okay.”

“I don't want to come back and find this going again. What's the homework situation?”

“I'm done with everything except math.”

“Well, let's do math, then.”

She left before he'd actually turned the game off, weary of the struggle. At the same time, enacting these little family rituals was reassuring; she'd felt thoroughly unsettled these last few days, after seeing Luke, and eager to convince herself that she was over him, that he had no bearing on her actual life.

Storey was sitting on the couch with Jack, pointing out a passage in her book. “Are you a Democrat?” she asked. “My dad says friends don't let friends vote Republican. That's a joke; it comes from that ad that says friends don't let friends drive drunk. Everybody we know is a Democrat.” The buzzer rang before Corrine could hear the answer.

“It's Hilary and Dan.” Two Republicans, in fact. Just barely audible on the crackling intercom. Corrine's younger sister and her fiancé, the ex-cop, who'd finally gotten divorced from his devoutly Catholic, supremely bitter wife a few months ago. Arguing that Hilary had been with Dan for five years now, Corrine had finally gotten Russell to stop referring to her as “your slutty little sister.”

“Who's that?” Russell asked, approaching from the kitchen.

“Hilary and Dan.”

“Ah, your formerly slutty little sister and her police escort.”

“Jesus, Russell.” She nodded toward the couch.

Chagrined, Russell glanced over to see the blond crown of Storey's head just visible above the couch cushions. “Sorry.”

They listened to the elevator rattling upward and finally shuddering to a stop, the doors groaning open.

Kisses and handshakes…

“Happy birthday, sis,” Hilary said. “Oh shit, I forgot we're not allowed to mention your birthday.” She held a finger to her lips. “Top secret.”

“Not so secret now, thanks,” Corrine said. She'd insisted that this was not a birthday party, having no desire to commemorate the fact that she was turning fifty, unlike Russell, who'd had a big bash a few months ago to celebrate his own semicentennial.

“Where are my little chickadees?” Hilary chirped.

Corrine glanced over at her husband, who was studying her ruefully. He knew how much it pissed Corrine off when her sister used the possessive adjective with reference to the kids, as if determined to reiterate her maternal claim and give them hints about their complicated origins, whether they were ready for this knowledge or not.

Storey rose from the couch and marched over to greet the newcomers.

“There she is!” Hilary lifted Storey in her arms without losing her grip on the Pinot Grigio. “How's my favorite girl?”

“Good.” It warmed Corrine's heart to see how Storey stiffened and struggled in her grasp. Hilary was one of those people who just couldn't connect with children, who seemed unable to speak their language, having spent all her adult energy learning the idiom and gestures of seduction. She'd been a professional girlfriend for years, a concubine without portfolio, a groupie.

Dan rescued Storey from Hilary's awkward embrace, hugged her and set her down again. “How's my storybook princess? And where's your stinky brother?”

“I'm good. He's playing video games even though it's a weekday.”

“We'd better go make a citizen's arrest,” Dan said.

The buzzer interrupted this interdiction, followed by the crackling baritone of Washington Lee on the intercom. The elevator soon debouched Washington and his wife, Veronica, Russell's best friend natty in a black suit and crisp white shirt; his wife, who worked for Lehman Brothers, wearing a businessy charcoal suit. Russell dragged Jack into the group, introducing him to all as the author of the most brilliant collection of short stories he had ever had the privilege to publish.

What about Jeff? Corrine thought. What about our dead friend?

“Jack's from Fairview, Tennessee,” Russell said, relishing, she knew, the idea of gritty Americana. Much as Russell liked his adoptive home, this slender, crowded island at the eastern edge of the continent, he believed in his heart that America was elsewhere, off in the South or the West, the big sprawling vistas beyond the tired ramparts of the Appalachians; that the country's literature was about the strong, silent men and women of the hollows and the heartland—although to judge from Jack's stories, which showcased babbling, toothless speed freaks, they were no longer necessarily silent.

“So did you vote for the cracker or the brother?” Washington asked him.