Jay McInerney - Bright, Precious Days

“Wash, please, ” Corrine said.

“Hey, I got no secrets,” Jack said. “I wrote in Kid Rock.”

Corrine laughed, relieved at how neatly he’d defused the situation. It was a pretty funny joke — even funnier if it was true.

Jeremy had emerged from his room, as if intuiting the arrival of Dan, with whom he had an easy rapport, and asked to see his gun, as he inevitably did.

“I thought you told me you were a Democrat,” Dan said.

“So what?” Jeremy said.

“Well,” Dan said, directing an impish look at Corrine, “if the Democrats win, nobody will be allowed to carry guns except criminals.”

Jack said something that sounded like “Wut chu packin?”

“A Sig P226.”

“That’s a great gun,” Jack said. “I was shooting one a few days ago with my buddy. Let me check it out.”

Corrine refrained from protest as Jeremy, Jack and Dan lovingly examined the lethal black-and-silver pistol, though she hovered at the edge of the group, ready to pounce if anyone let Jeremy touch it.

—

Nancy Tanner showed up just as Chef Russell was complaining about her tardiness. Nancy was back in the city after a stint in Los Angeles, working as a producer on a Showtime adaptation of her last book. She looked better than ever, thin and sculpted, and Corrine couldn’t help wondering if she’d had any work done out there.

“How are my favorite preppy bohemians?” Nancy said, kissing Corrine on both cheeks, and then, to Washington and Veronica: “And how’s life in Cheever country?” They’d fled to New Canaan in the wake of September 11, then moved back to the city this summer in time for the school year, buying a loft a few blocks away in a converted tool and die factory, although this news hadn’t yet reached Nancy.

“I think we found out why Cheever drank so much,” said Washington.

“It was horrible,” Veronica said. “We thought we were doing it for the kids, but if anything, they hated it even more than we did.”

“And everyone thought I was the help,” Washington said.

“Now you’re exaggerating, Wash.”

“Fucking dudes in madras shorts trying to hire me to cut the lawn.”

“Stop it.”

“ ‘Hey, boy, can you carry my golf clubs?’ ”

“He’s only slightly exaggerating. Even the dog hated it.”

“And Mingus got Lyme disease.”

“Who knew the yard was lousy with ticks.”

“The dog got Lyme disease.”

“Everybody up there has it. It’s like this fucking epidemic.”

“Give me roaches any day. Way better than ticks.”

“I was so happy when we moved back to the city and I spotted a roach in the sink.”

“I could’ve told you it was a mistake to move to the suburbs,” Nancy said. “I grew up there.”

“Didn’t everybody?” Hilary said.

“We were city kids,” Washington said, “Veronica and I. We both grew up in fucking Queens, man. The dream was to trade the tenement for a house with a yard. And it’s like we had to live out our parents’ immigrant dream of escape to the suburbs. It was encoded in us, ever since Veronica’s mother fled Budapest after the revolution and my mom stowed away on a boat from Port of Spain: Go to America, work hard, eat shit, scrub floors, and someday your children will live in Westchester. And Veronica’s mom — ever since she was a little girl she wanted her daughter to live in New Canaan. Anyway, it’s over, our little American dream turned nightmare. We’re back, baby. Solid concrete and asphalt underfoot. Skyscrapers and everything. Just like I pictured it. Yellow limos at my beck and call. Doorman standing at attention, building superintendent at the other end of the intercom whenever you blow a fuse or a fucking lightbulb. City life’s the life for me.”

“I don’t know,” Russell said after a slug of champagne, “nobody loves New York more than I do, but I feel like the city’s getting suburbanized itself. Less diverse, less edgy. It’s more like New Canaan than like the city we moved to.”

Corrine said, “Let’s not get nostalgic for the era of muggings and graffiti and crack vials in the hallway.” She’d almost said AIDS but stopped herself in time. She didn’t want to scratch that scar right now, in the opening hour of a dinner party with strangers in the house. She wasn’t about to talk about Jeff. But it was too late — he was here in the room with her, with his tobacco-inflected scent — back then almost everything smelled like tobacco, Jeff only a little more so, layered over a leathery smell that she’d never encountered since. Everyone has an olfactory signature, if only we’re attuned to it, and she’d been attuned to his. What they called chemistry, she suspected, had mostly to do with smell. She’d felt it again, the other night, with Luke. When we form a snap judgment, and don’t know why. We’re animals first. And she’d loved Jeff’s scent, even though he was Russell’s best friend. It had only happened on a couple of occasions. But the eventual revelation had almost wrecked their marriage. Eighteen years now — he’d died in ’88, in the great epidemic.

To break the spell, she said, “Remember those sidewalk paintings that looked like crime-scene silhouettes — how you couldn’t tell if it was graffiti or a homicide? Who was that artist?”

“What about stepping on crack vials?” Washington added. “On the Upper West Side it was like acorns in a goddamn forest.”

“New York in the eighties,” Jack said. “That must’ve been rad.” And at that moment something in his manner, his youth, his slouching posture reminded her of Jeff.

“We didn’t know it was the eighties at the time,” Washington said. “No one told us until about 1987, and by then it was almost over.”

THE SUMMER AFTER GRADUATION, Jeff is subletting a loft in SoHo. The word itself seems as raffish and bohemian as the neighborhood, half-deserted, inhabited mainly by painters and sculptors in search of cheap studio space. The district is zoned for light industry and it’s illegal to actually live here, which only adds to its mystique. Jeff is cat-sitting for a girl he knows who’s touring with her band for three months, and who, in turn, sublets the place illegally from a painter living in Berlin. It’s just the kind of convoluted and jerry-rigged yet serendipitous situation in which Jeff inevitably seems to find himself, or, more accurately, in which he manages to place himself.

Having recently graduated from Brown, Corrine lives on the Upper East Side and works at Sotheby’s. To her, SoHo is terra incognita, a mysterious southern region of the island allegedly inhabited by artists and who knows who. No one who’s gone to Miss Porter’s, certainly. It seems a little eerie to her, almost deserted, as she emerges from the subway at Prince Street and walks west, her shadow inching out across the buckling sidewalk, the ornate, soot-stained facades of the buildings that had once been sweatshops and factories. She passes a heavily bearded man in overalls sitting on a stoop, smoking; she would guess he’s homeless except for the paint caked on his fingers and his OshKosh overalls. For all she knows, he could be James Rosenquist or Frank Stella.

She can’t help feeling very adventurous coming down here on her own, almost tingling with anticipation as she approaches Greene Street. Jeff offered to come uptown, but she insisted on seeing his place. Later she will cross-examine herself about her motives.

Russell’s at Oxford on his fellowship, studying Romantic poetry. He writes her long letters about his reading and the quirkiness of the Brits and the horrors of Marmite, letters that inevitably culminate in declarations of love. They can’t afford to talk long-distance more than once or twice a month. In his mind they’re already engaged, but she’s been very specific in telling him to see how he feels after eight months apart. It’s been six weeks, and already he’s worried that she’ll meet someone else. She hasn’t met anyone, and visiting Russell’s best friend feels like a way of being closer to him.