Bright, Precious Days Page 9

  She’d just finished a SlimFast at her desk when Nancy called.

  “Oh my God, I’m so hungover.”

  “Did you go out?” Corrine asked. Sometimes she felt she lived vicariously through Nancy, who was still pursuing the single-girl life that Corrine had never actually experienced for herself, and that most of her peers had resigned from a decade ago.

  “I went to Bungalow 8 with that handsome young redneck that Russell’s publishing. By the time I was fucked-up enough to think about seducing him, he’d disappeared.”

  “He does have a roguish, rough-hewn charisma.”

  “Then I went to some after-hours place where some fan boy tried to seduce me, but even as drunk as I was, I got a bisexual vibe from him, and I have so stopped doing that. I mean, what is it about me that attracts fags? Why don’t they just stick to their own? I am absolutely not a fag hag. Do I seem like a fag hag to you?”

  “Of course not. So what happened?”

  “I’m not sure how I made it home, but I woke up fully clothed in the living room, so I must’ve been alone. And now I’m literally dying. Excuse me while I go vomit for the third time.”

  “You’re excused.”

  An old hand at vomiting, Nancy frequently stuck a finger down her throat when she thought she’d eaten too much, or if she felt drunk but wanted to keep drinking. Corrine wasn’t entirely unsympathetic, having been there, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it anymore—not often, not in a fairly long time—and tried instead to limit her intake of calories. She was relieved, too, that Nancy was too self-absorbed to bring up the Hilary debacle.

  Waiting outside the school, Corrine surveyed the parents and the nannies, more of the former than the latter, and more fathers than you’d ever see at the uptown schools—Buckley or St. Bernard’s, Chapin or Spence. Here at PS 234, the moms were less uniformly blond than their Upper East Side counterparts, less Chaneled and Ralphed; more messenger bags than Kelly bags. She waved to Karen Cohen and Marge Findlayson, in their puffy parkas and their Uggs, both full-time moms whose involvement in various school committees and projects made her feel inadequate. The din of construction from the giant apartment complex down the street absolved her of the need to say anything to them, and she chose a spot next to hunky Todd, whose last name she’d never picked up, who worked at home as a Web designer while his wife raked it in at J. P. Morgan.

  And suddenly the kids were pouring out, shrieking and howling, hands clutching the straps of their backpacks. And while her children greeted her enthusiastically enough, they grew uncharacteristically subdued on the walk home, and even Rice Krispies Treats from the deli failed to raise their spirits significantly.

  Russell came home early, as promised, with the ingredients for the kids’ favorite meal, which he adamantly refused to call “chicken tenders,” as it was known in certain quarters; he’d actually been known to tell waiters that tender was not a noun, unless it referred to a boat that was used to ferry people and supplies to and from a ship. But it was certainly not a part of any chicken. The kids would use the phrase just to wind him up, to hear Dad launch into his tirade. He was willing to call these fried strips of breast meat “chicken fingers,” as long as they understood that this was a fanciful association. Whatever they were called, Corrine hated it when he made them, because the batter making and the deep frying trashed the kitchen; he was capable of getting batter on virtually every surface, once even on the ceiling, and he could have easily ordered takeout from Bubby’s, just a few blocks away. But the kids were always deeply appreciative, even now that they had moved on to appreciate such grown-up fare as fried calamari and rock shrimp tempura. They still declared loyally that Dad’s were better than the restaurant kind, and perhaps they were. At any rate, tonight it seemed extremely important to enact this family ritual, and she was grateful to Russell for thinking of it.

  “Have you thought about what, exactly, we’re going to say about last night?” he asked, mixing the batter.

  Both children were still in their rooms, allegedly doing homework.

  “I think we’ll just have to come totally clean. Look, we knew this day was going to come. We’ve just been putting it off.”

  The battered chicken hissed and sputtered as he slid it into the oil, protesting as if it were alive. “Too good a fate for your sister,” he said, nodding at the pot. “I guess we no longer boil people in oil. I don’t suppose she called to apologize?”

  Corrine shook her head.

  “Well, I’m as ready as I’ll ever be,” Russell said a few minutes later as he carried a salad and the platter of chicken whatevers to the table and Corrine went to fetch the kids, finding both hunched over their desks.

  “Dad made your favorite—chicken tentacles,” Corrine said, urging them toward the table.

  “Why’s he home so early?” Storey asked.

  “So he can have a nice dinner with his family.”

  Once they were seated, Russell inquired about their school day and received a perfunctory answer from Storey.

  He cleared his throat. “Now, let’s talk about last night. It must have upset you, what Aunt Hilary said.”

  Storey asked, “Is she really our mother?”

  “No, she’s not,” Russell said. “Your mother’s your mother.”

  “Are you okay, Jeremy?” Corrine said, laying an arm around his shoulders.

  He nodded, his eyes suddenly welling with tears, then surrendered to his mother’s embrace and sobbed.

  “It’s okay, honey; nothing’s changed.”

  “Can we still live here?” Storey asked.

  “Of course, silly.” Russell was being solid and sensibly Dad-like, which was good, since Corrine was on the verge of absolute fucking hysteria.

  “She can’t take us away?”

  “No one can take you away.”

  “Here’s the thing,” Corrine said, trying to keep her voice steady. “More than anything in the world we wanted to have you two, but I was having trouble with my eggs—they weren’t strong enough—so I had to borrow some eggs.”

  “Does that mean Dad had sex with Aunt Hilary?” Storey asked.

  “Absolutely not,” Corrine said.

  “You guys know about…reproduction?”

  “We’re eleven, Dad,” Storey informed him.

  “Well, basically, my, uh, sperm was mixed with Hilary’s eggs.”

  “You mean in vitro fertilization,” Storey said.

  Russell and Corrine exchanged a look. “Well, yes, exactly. And then the fertilized eggs were planted in Mom’s…in Mom.”

  “So does that make Hilary our mother?”

  It was all Corrine could do to maintain her composure.

  “Aunt Hilary helped, but Mom is your only mother,” Russell said. “She’ll always be your mother.”

  “She can’t take us away?”

  “No one can take you away from us,” Russell said. “You’ll live with us until you’re so sick of us that you can’t wait to go off to college and pretend you never had any parents at all.”

  —

  So impressed was she with Russell’s performance that night, and the night before, that she felt an upwelling of the love and desire she sometimes feared had gone extinct, and that had lately been eclipsed by Luke’s reappearance. But tonight she felt a rekindling of the belief that this was her soul mate, the one person on the planet made especially for her, her Platonic twin. She hadn’t felt so close to him in years; when they were finally settled in bed, she kissed his neck and worked her way down his chest, eager to express her gratitude. Russell seemed surprised at first, moaning and arching his back, quickly becoming hard, and she realized it had been months since she’d done this, and when she felt him on the verge, she slid up his chest and slipped him inside and didn’t mind that he came almost immediately—took it as compliment, basically—and she fell asleep feeling as happy and fulfilled as she could remember being in a very long time.

  8

  ONCE AGAIN IT WAS TH
E HOLIDAY SEASON, that ceaseless cocktail party between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, when the city dressed itself in Christmas colors and flaunted its commercial soul, when the compulsive acquisitiveness of the citizenry, directed outward into ritual gift giving, was transmuted into a virtue and moderation into a vice. Mendicant sidewalk Santas rang bells beside buckets dangling from chains on tripods. Doormen were suddenly eager to perform their jobs, opening taxi doors and carrying shopping bags, which were abundant, and maîtres d’hôtel greeted their regulars with extra obsequiousness. As the end of the tax year approached, the philanthropic impulse became more acute. The directors of great museums and charitable foundations awaited the mail as eagerly as did the bankers and analysts and brokers of Wall Street, whose bonuses would soon flood the streets with gold. Fantastical landscapes materialized in the windows of Saks and Bergdorf and Lord & Taylor, and legions of actors and dancers answered the call to service, signing up with the catering companies that orchestrated and provisioned the great corporate and private holiday fetes. The children became manic, fueled by sugary treats and the anticipation of gifts; the lions on guard outside the New York Public Library donned spiky wreaths. Redolent of mothballs, furs and tweeds were liberated from storage. Furtive blondes draped in sable and mink emerged from the backseats of black Mercedes and Escalades, darting across the open tundra of the sidewalk into the refuge of Madison Avenue boutiques. The once-verdant island called Mannahatta was reforested, coniferous thickets springing up on sidewalks and in vacant lots—dense stands of Scotch pine, blue spruce and balsam fir tended by upstaters wrapped in layers of down and fleece.

  Russell loved this time of year more than any other, loved the city most when it was imbued with the familiar rituals of his youth, amplified or distorted as they might be, loved sharing it all with the children. For six weeks every year he nearly suspended judgment, choosing not to be offended by the blatant commercialism and the clichés, by the mercenary undercurrent of the bonhomie. He perused the Times food section for the latest wisdom on preparing the traditional Thanksgiving bird, varying from Pierre Franey and Craig Claiborne’s roast young turkey with giblet gravy to R. W. Apple’s brine-cured roast turkey and Mark Bittman’s improbable, and not entirely successful, forty-five-minute turkey. The question of whether or not to stuff the bird was a perennial stickler. This year he decided to brine and slow-cook the turkey, a heritage breed ordered two months in advance from a farm near Woodstock, and to cook his mother’s traditional pecan stuffing on the side. The cast in their loft included, in addition to the Lee and Reynes families, both Washington’s mother and Veronica’s. Much to everyone’s relief, Corrine’s mother had chosen to invite Hilary and Dan to her house in Stockbridge for Thanksgiving after her arguments for a reconciliation fell on deaf ears, thus sparing the Calloways the inevitable vodka-fueled domestic drama.

  Then, with increasing frequency, a series of outings: The Nutcracker at Lincoln Center; family lunch at ‘21’ with the Salvation Army singing carols; Russell’s and Corrine’s respective office parties; the Reyneses’ Christmas cocktail party at Doubles. And then the selection of the tree—a ritual that engaged all of Russell’s aestheticism and sense of ceremony, even as it delighted the kids. He’d inherited this fixation from his own father, who had sometimes visited three or four purveyors in suburban Detroit before finding the ideal evergreen. They walked the three blocks over to the tree sellers on the corner of Chambers and Duane. The notion of a portable forest inspired Russell to tell the children an abbreviated version of Macbeth, and about how the thane’s demise was ordained when the prophecy of Birnam Wood moving to Dunsinane was confirmed.

  “But how did the witches know?” Jeremy asked.

  “That’s their job,” Russell said.

  “There must have been an awful lot of soldiers to chop down a whole forest and move it.”

  “Well, I’m not sure they actually moved the whole forest. They probably just chopped off some branches to camouflage themselves.”

  “That sounds kind of improbable,” Storey said.

  “Hey, who’s the editor in this family, anyway?” Russell said. “Let’s have a little suspension of disbelief here. And let’s pick a great tree.” He surveyed the offerings with a critical eye. A stickler for symmetry, he rejected Jeremy’s first choice, a sort of droopy Scotch pine, as being obviously lopsided. Storey’s first choice was crooked and lamentably sparse on one side. Eventually they started picking obvious rejects just to torment him, bursting into laughter even before he had a chance to unleash scornful commentary. Despite these provocations, he eventually found the perfect tree, a seven-foot blue spruce, which he lugged, bound in twine, back to the loft. He spent the rest of the day washing off the fragrant sap.

  The evening was devoted to decoration, Russell first stringing the lights and then setting the kids loose with tinsel and finally hanging glass balls and assorted handmade ornaments, including some monstrosities they’d crafted at school over the years.

  On Christmas Eve, the Calloways rented a car and drove north to Stockbridge and Corrine’s mother’s, the residue of dread from previous visits alleviated by the sudden appearance of snowflakes dancing in the headlights on the Taconic Parkway. And that night, after the kids had opened one present each, he read from “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” as they sprawled on either side of Corrine, alternately comatose and twitchy.

  And then the unaccustomed benediction of a week at Tom and Casey’s house in Saint Barth’s, sunbathing among plutocrats and pop stars, drinking Provençal rosé the color of onion skin, eating insanely expensive lunches of lentil salad and grilled langoustines that lasted until dusk. At one of these endless feasts at a beachside restaurant, Russell was startled to see Phillip Kohout holding court at the head table, the center of a large and boisterous group that included a Hollywood actor and a Paris-based fashion designer. Later, retreating to the men’s room, he collided with the writer, who was coming out of a stall, bumping him hard enough to dislodge something he was holding in his hand, which clattered to the floor—a small glass vial filled with white powder.

  “Russell,” he said, bending down to retrieve his stash. “This is so amazing, man. How long has it been?”

  “How are you, Phillip?”

  “Let me tell you, I’ve been a whole lot worse.”

  “So I heard.”

  “I mean, Waziristan was pretty bad, but the debriefing in D.C.—now that was a fucking nightmare.”

  “Looks like you’re making up for lost time.” Russell hadn’t meant to sound pissy, but realized he did.

  “Well, carpe diem, you know? That’s one thing I learned wearing a hood for two months.”

  “No, yeah, definitely,” Russell said, unintentionally covering all the bases.

  “We should hook up back in the city,” Phillip said.

  “That would be great.”

  “Yeah, definitely.”

  Phillip took a step toward the door, then turned to wrap Russell in a bear hug. “Look, I’m really sorry about that business with the second book. It was a crazy time.”

  “Long forgotten,” Russell said.

  “We’ll catch up for sure in Madhattan.”

  —

  And all too soon they were back in the city, returning tanned, dulled and sated, awakened from the dream by a brisk slap of cold air on the jet bridge at JFK.

  Then, a snowstorm on Valentine’s Day: It had been coming down heavily since they woke; school had been canceled, much to the chagrin of Storey, who was apparently expecting some pledge of troth from her classmate Rafe Horowitz. That night they left the kids with Jean and trudged, heavily bundled, to Bouley, their traditional Valentine’s destination, a temple of haute cuisine that was, conveniently, a short walk from the loft. Corrine held Russell’s arm with one hand and an umbrella with the other as they negotiated the heavy snow on the sidewalk, admixed with hail, which had a granular texture, like wet beach sand. Corrine had made it clear she would have been happy to
stay in tonight, but Russell had insisted that the holiday be observed with a romantic meal.

  He discussed the wine list with the sommelier while Corrine visited the kitchen to pay her respects to the chef, who was on the board of her organization. He had just settled the debate over the merits of Chablis versus Chasselas when she returned. He stood up as she approached; his father had drilled him in the forms of chivalry.

  A few minutes later when he looked up from his menu, he saw that Corrine was crying.

  He reached over and put his hand on hers. “Sweetheart, what’s the matter?”

  “Oh, Russell, is this it? Roses once a year and maybe an obligatory drunken fuck? We’re fifty years old. Where’s the romance? Whatever happened to the romance?”

  Russell had no idea where this was coming from—having thought things were relatively good between them—but this kind of outburst was by no means unprecedented. And while he believed, after all these years, that he knew her better than he knew anyone on earth, he sometimes suspected there were parts of her psyche that were inaccessible to him, vast regions beyond the beacon of his understanding.

  9

  “IS THERE ANYTHING BETTER THAN BONEFISHING?” Kip asked as they sprawled on lawn chairs on the deck outside camp, looking out over the flats, silvery pink in the reflected sunset. Owl-eyed from a day on the water, white sunglass-shaped ovals on his sunburned face, he was wearing a multipocketed turquoise shirt and a Lehman Brothers cap.

  After a nearly perfect day on the water, Russell felt there was indeed much to be said in favor of fly-fishing in the Bahamas with Kip Taylor, his chief investor, who was picking up the tab.

  “It’s damn good, but I don’t know that I’d put it right at the very top of the list,” Russell said. His hands were still fragrant from the nine bonefish he’d caught and released, one of them a probable ten-pounder, his personal best.

  “Russell, don’t be so predictable, for Christ’s sake. Are you actually going to try to tell me, at our age, that the most important thing in life is sex?”