Bright, Precious Days Page 4

  “Singita Boulder’s incredible. Amazing chef.”

  “We were at Masai Mara last year. Top of the line. Saw the big five.”

  “What exactly are the big five?” Corrine asked.

  “Five toughest game animals: lion, elephant, Cape buffalo, leopard, rhinoceros.”

  Vanessa said, “I thought the big five were cats—lion, tiger, leopard, cheetah and…panther?”

  “No, no,” Russell chimed in from the other side of the table. “The tiger doesn’t live in Africa, and the panther’s actually just a melanistic variant of the leopard.” He’d never been to Africa, but he’d read all of Hemingway.

  Setting aside her notion of Giselle as nurse, Corrine imagined her as a predator, stalking Luke. He’d been alone in a strange land; she was a native, on familiar terrain, hunting him down. As smart and successful as he was, he was, like most men, emotionally naïve. His ex-wife, Sasha, had played him for years.

  Someone onstage was talking about what a terrific guy he was, although the din from the tables made it hard to hear. At their table, Carl Fontaine was giving his own little speech about Luke: “Let’s hope he sticks with it. These private equity guys have a pretty short attention span, they’re used to the two-year turnaround—buy, slash, fix, sell. I wonder if we’ll even be here in three years.”

  Corrine was indignant that no one was listening or paying attention. Did these people think paying $25,000 for a table absolved them of any semblance of courtesy?

  The introduction was punctuated by scattered applause as Luke took the stage; she was relieved to notice that the chatter subsided. Standing silently on the podium, he waited until the room was almost quiet. “Ladies and gentlemen, friends, and former colleagues, and philanthropists. I was lucky enough to discover South Africa almost by accident. It’s a country of extraordinary diversity and beauty. I went there to manage a winery but ended up discovering a people….”

  She tried to listen but instead found herself thinking about the first night they’d been together, at the little studio he kept in a dilapidated town house on 71st, his body stippled with stripes of streetlight filtering through the venetian blinds, the musky scent of him tinged with the residue of the acrid smoke from Ground Zero….

  Fully clothed on the podium, Luke was saying, “For thirty-five thousand, less than the base price of a Lexus, you can build a double-room schoolhouse with a capacity for up to a hundred children. For the same price you can build accommodations for the teachers. Kitchens are very important, so the school can get government food grants and apply to the World Food Program. Ecofriendly, hygienic bathrooms cost about seven thousand. And water-catchment systems, gutters that trap and store rainwater in so-called JoJo tanks, these are a few thousand dollars. Less than some of us spend on a suit—I’m looking at you, Ron Tashman. Is that an Anderson & Sheppard tuxedo?”

  This provoked a few ripples of laughter.

  “Finally we have three clinics ready to build, each providing health care for an entire village or a township, for between a hundred and two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. You can find the details in your program. Put your name on one of those. On the screen to my right you are going to see some phone numbers next to particular projects. Text us your pledge and your name will appear on the screen on my left, along with your project. Unless, of course, you want to remain anonymous, in which case just put Ron’s name down, since he’s always happy to take credit. Let’s start out with the water-catchment systems, at a mere three grand. Come on, Chuck Coffey, that’s less than your weekly cigar budget….”

  Corrine opened her grandmother’s purse, pulled out her Razr and tapped in the number. She’d never encountered this bidding technology before and she didn’t entirely believe it would work, or so she told herself as she typed in the code and then the message Happy H2O. She glanced over at Russell, who was deep in conversation with Kip Taylor’s wife. Would including his name make it better or worse? Should she just stop now? She typed Corrine and Russell Calloway and pressed SEND.

  “We have our first pledge,” Luke said from the stage. He seemed to miss a beat, pause just a moment before announcing, “Corrine and Russell Calloway have just bought clean drinking water for a school in the Transvaal. Thank you, Corrine and Russell.”

  Russell looked more puzzled than angry as he accepted congratulations from his tablemates before directing a quizzical gaze at Corrine. She shrugged, put on her most winsome smile. There would, of course, be an interrogation, reminders about bills and tuition, admonitions about charity beginning at home. It was going to wreck their budget for the next few months, probably. They gave, when they could, five hundred to Brown, their alma mater, five hundred to Oxfam and Meals on Wheels and the Henry Street Settlement, two fifty to PEN and the ASPCA. And they gave every day, in a sense, to Nourish New York, since as an executive director of that organization, Corrine was paid about half of what she would have been paid in a private-sector job; plus, they wrote a check every year for the gala. But they’d never given this much to any single charity. She hardly knew why she’d done it—on an impulse, as a kind of ontological squeal, a cry of “I’m here” directed at her former lover? But on reflection she was glad, and she thought she could justify it, smooth it over at home.

  She had a strong suspicion that Russell was going to get lucky tonight. For him that was the good news; the bad was that she was afraid she’d be thinking of someone else.

  3

  STILL ON THE AFRICAN CLOCK, Luke woke up a few hours after he’d fallen asleep, thinking about Corrine. He checked the markets in Europe, cleared his e-mail and talked to his vineyard manager. Baboons harassing the pruning team—normally only a problem near the harvest, in March, when the grapes were ripe. Something they didn’t have to deal with in Napa or Bordeaux. The workers threw rocks at them and the apes started throwing them back. His manager had put in an early order for lion dung from a local game park, which was effective as a deterrent.

  He’d known that he would see Corrine the night before last, but he hadn’t really known how he would react. Three years ago, after yet another post-breakup rendezvous, he’d taken himself to the other side of the world in no small part to get away from her.

  He met Giselle at a garden party in Franschhoek, a pretty girl in a white dress crouching in the courtyard, talking to a giant tortoise with a ring dangling from a hole in its shell, feeding it an orange wedge from the drink in her hand. “We’re old friends,” she said when she looked up and caught him watching her. And indeed, her little gold nose ring hinted at a certain affinity. He was immediately attracted to her; only later did he become conscious of her resemblance to Corrine.

  Twenty-nine years old, she’d recently broken off a long engagement with a man she’d known since childhood. That first afternoon she told him quite frankly that she was tired of all the young men in her insular social circle and that she was thinking of moving to London or the States. She’d done some modeling in Paris as a teenager, traveled in her early twenties, and ended up back home in Cape Town, where she fell in with an old family friend, who’d eventually proposed.

  Luke told her about his recent divorce from Sasha, about his daughter, who’d be joining him for her summer vacation, but he never mentioned Corrine. Before proposing to Giselle, he’d gone back to New York and spent a month at the Carlyle, somehow imagining that he’d run into Corrine somewhere. He felt that if he did, it would be a sign. A few days after he returned to South Africa, he ran into Giselle at a cocktail party.

  At seven-thirty the breakfast cart was delivered and he woke Giselle, who was flying back to Cape Town that morning. “All packed?” he asked as she lingered over tea in her fluffy white bathrobe.

  “I think so,” she said. “I’m sorry to leave you here alone.”

  “I’ll be busy,” he told her, “and you can’t very well miss your cousin’s wedding.”

  After the bellman finally came for the luggage, he walked her down to the car. “I’ll miss you,”
she said.

  “I’ll miss you, too,” he agreed, though in fact for the first time he could recall he was impatient for her to leave.

  After the car disappeared into traffic, he scrolled to Corrine’s number on his BlackBerry and typed: Thanks for the contribution. It was great to see you the other night.

  It occurred to him that their affair had preceded texting—or at least their own use of it. Maybe she didn’t text.

  A few minutes later the instrument buzzed, dancing on the onyx coffee table.

  Great not quite the word I’d use. Had no idea would see you. Husband not real happy about sudden excursion into philanthropy.

  Don’t worry, I’ll cover you on that.

  Too late. Already settled up on the way out.

  Can I see you?

  Why?

  Tell you when I see you.

  He stood at the big window, looking downtown, as if he might be able to spot her out there down near the tip of the island, past the MetLife, the Chrysler and the Empire State Buildings, checking the screen of his BlackBerry as the minutes ticked by. The device finally vibrated again.

  Working today in Bronx.

  Time to meet before?

  9 AM Caffe Roma.

  He wondered if he was supposed to know where it was, if she was testing him. He Googled it: a pastry place in Little Italy. They’d stopped there once, he remembered now, coming off the night shift at the soup kitchen. Cannolis and cappuccino. Holding hands under the table, the interior redolent of fresh-baked bread and coffee after a night in the acrid smoke, the airborne residue of the ruined towers, of which they both reeked. Still dark outside, the only other customers a table of revelers who’d closed some nearby bar or nightclub, soaking up the alcohol with sweets.

  If Corrine was trying to be discreet, she’d picked well. Little Italy, what was left of it that hadn’t been swallowed by Chinatown, was an unlikely destination for anyone they might know. A few tables away, a young French-speaking couple pored over a map. The only other customers were four strident Italians, throwing back espressos and talking with their hands—the whole place picturesque, quaint in a manner that to fashionable New Yorkers would seem kitsch: the white marble tables with their cartoonish bent-wire café chairs, the dark green pressed-tin ceiling sagging with innumerable layers of paint, the display case teeming with pale confections. He checked his e-mails, and tested his French by eavesdropping on the couple two tables away, who were deconstructing Scorsese movies.

  Through the window he spotted Corrine, hurrying up the sidewalk in a peacoat and jeans, and for just a minute he could see her as a type, a New York woman rushing somewhere important, harried but not frantic, confident that she would be waited for.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, sitting down across from him. “I was thinking of making you wait, of being deliberately late, until I realized how childish that would be, but then I got caught on the phone with our director about a lost truckload of cabbages.”

  Not a type at all, he realized happily, recognizing what he took to be the singular staccato rhythms of her thought, though he was baffled by the reference to cabbages. “I’m just glad you came at all.”

  “Well, I didn’t want your last impression of me to be flustered and tongue-tied. As I suspect I was the other night.”

  “I thought you were very composed.”

  “Please. I was…flummoxed. I had no idea what the event was, or that you were the focus of it. Kind of a shock, really. You could have warned me you were coming to town.”

  “If I had, you might’ve raced off in the opposite direction.”

  “I can’t believe I was totally oblivious to the fact that it was your charity.”

  “Do you know what I was thinking about when I was up on the podium?”

  “Your wife’s dimples?”

  “I was thinking about making love to you on that musty old couch in Nantucket with Gram Parsons singing ‘Love Hurts.’ ”

  “Gram Parsons was correct,” she said. “It does hurt. It would behoove us both to remember that.”

  He started to sing softly: “Love hurts, love scars, love wounds and mars—”

  “Luke, for God’s sake.” She was blushing, embarrassed by the attention he was attracting, not to mention the quality of his singing. “That was terrible. You shouldn’t be allowed to sing outside the shower.”

  “I bought the album after that weekend. I’d never even heard of Gram Parsons.”

  “Shouldn’t you be singing to your wife? How the hell old is she, by the way?”

  “Young enough to be my daughter, but older than my actual daughter.”

  “Well, close enough, no doubt, that they can become BFFs.”

  “She’ll be thirty-two next month.”

  “And you are, let’s see, fifty-seven?”

  He nodded.

  “What’s the rule of thumb I heard the other night, the remarriage formula? Half your age plus six years, that’s the ideal equation for a second wife in this town. I guess by that measure she’s just a little young.”

  She was smiling, but he definitely detected the edge. “I admit, when you put it that way, I’m feeling like a cliché.”

  “Does she know about me?”

  He shook his head.

  “I’m glad of that at least.” She seemed to ponder this. “Cappuccino,” she said. “I’d like a cappuccino to go. I have to leave in five minutes.”

  When he returned with the coffees, he could tell her mood had turned darker. “You know, I almost broke up my family for you,” she said. “And then I don’t hear from you for three years. I’d have thought, at least, we were friends.”

  He was taken aback at the iciness of her tone. “We were far more than friends, Corrine. What was I supposed to do, write you e-mails about the weather? It was painful. I wanted you and it didn’t seem possible and I had to pull away. Hell, I went halfway around the globe to forget about you.”

  He hadn’t necessarily realized this back then, but in retrospect it seemed obvious.

  “What did you feel after that night at the Carlyle a few years back? When you ran back to Tennessee, when you stopped calling and returning my e-mails?”

  “I was afraid we were just falling back into an untenable situation. Our circumstances hadn’t changed. You were still married. I was sad and the situation seemed hopeless. I’m pretty certain now that I may have gotten married again in an attempt to get over you.”

  “So it wasn’t just that you’d forgotten me?”

  “I had an accident about a year ago, and it was touch-and-go for a couple of days whether I’d make it.” He fingered his scar, still numb, to illustrate. “Strangely enough, when I came to in the hospital, my wife was asleep in the chair beside me, lying with her face turned away from me. All I could see was her hair—and I was convinced it was you. I even called your name.” He wasn’t actually sure if he’d said her name out loud, but he’d indeed imagined, briefly, that the woman in the chair was Corrine, and he wanted to tell her so.

  She was staring at him intently, apparently weighing the truth of this assertion. “Was your left eye injured?”

  He nodded.

  “Can you see out of it?”

  “Not really. Sorry, I know it’s disconcerting.”

  “Please. I’m the one who should be sorry.” She lifted her cup and looked down into the foam. “Do you know where the name comes from? Cappuccino?”

  He shook his head.

  “From the color of the coffee-milk mixture, which reminded someone of the color of a Capuchin friar’s habit.”

  “That’s one of the things I miss about you.”

  “My pedantry?”

  He shrugged. “That sounds negative. Your eccentric erudition, let’s say.”

  “You didn’t have all that much time to get used to it, did you?”

  “It’s hard to believe it was only two, three months.”

  “Ninety days, as it happens.”

  “Was that it?”
<
br />   “From the day I first saw you walking up West Broadway, covered in ash, till the day after The Nutcracker, when we said good-bye in Battery Park. You see, I really am a pedant.”

  “That sounds more romantic than pedantic.”

  “Well, whatever. I’m off to work.”

  “What are you writing?”

  “I’m not writing, actually. I decided there were plenty of unemployed screenwriters in the world already.”

  “But The Heart of the Matter was produced. I read a great review in the Financial Times.”

  “I must’ve missed that one.” She shrugged. “Let’s just say it was less than a blockbuster.”

  “I thought it was great.”

  “You actually saw it?” She seemed skeptical.

  “I own the DVD. Watched it three times.”

  “Twice more than I did.”

  “You were always self-deprecating, almost to a fault. It’s a very rare quality.”

  “In this city, perhaps.”

  “So now you’re…”

  “I work for an organization called Nourish New York. We solicit excess food from local restaurants, food banks, farmers, grocery stores, and try to get it to the people who need it.”

  “Sounds somewhat familiar.”

  She blushed and looked away. He was touched that her new vocation connected her to their shared past in the soup kitchen.

  “Did you ever write that book about samurai movies?”

  It took him a minute to figure out what she was talking about; he’d forgotten that this was one of many projects he’d conceived after retiring from the firm, samurai films having been a passion for many years. “I discovered I don’t have the patience or concentration to sit down and write a book.”

  “It’s probably true,” she said. “I’d forgotten how hyper you are. Like the way you tap your foot when you talk.” She paused. “Anyway, gotta go.”