Jay McInerney - Bright, Precious Days

“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.”