Jay McInerney - Bright, Precious Days

She finds the building, with its elaborately ornamented cast-iron facade — grimy columns framing tall, arched windows, the rust showing in patches through the layers of once-white paint and city grit. Corrine, an art history major, can’t help noticing that Corinthian, with its fluted columns and complicated acanthus leaves and scrolls, was the classical order favored by the nineteenth-century architects who created the neighborhood. On the sidewalk in front of the building is a splattered black human silhouette that looks like it might be a crime-scene outline of a body.

At the door, a cluster of mismatched buzzers is mounted on a sheet of plywood, one of them labeled with a scrap of yellow legal paper on which the initials J.P. are scrawled. She presses the button and waits, eventually looking up when a window above rattles open and Jeff’s head emerges.

“You sure you want to come up?”

“Absolutely,” she says. “I’ve never seen an artist’s loft.”

“It ain’t pretty.” He dangles something from his fingers. “Catch.”

A key attached to a piece of dirty balsa wood clatters to the sidewalk.

“Fifth floor,” he calls. “Can’t miss it.”

Inside, she’s confronted with a vast creaking stairway composed of ancient oak planks that recedes as it ascends ahead of her, each floor taking her farther back into the building, until finally she finds herself on the top floor, where the door stands ajar. “Not exactly a stairway to heaven,” Jeff says, bowing deeply and ushering her in, hunching slightly to make his height less daunting. He’s wearing his standard outfit, an untucked Brooks Brothers button-down shirt over a pair of ripped jeans.

“Please don’t say ‘Welcome to my humble abode.’ ”

“I was going to say my cleaning lady died, but I don’t actually have one.”

“It’s very…lived-in.”

“I was also going to say this is where the magic doesn’t happen.”

It’s a mess — clothes and books and overflowing ashtrays everywhere, but the space itself is grand, with a soaring pressed-tin ceiling supported by more columns, and huge arched windows on either end. One wall is dominated by a long graffiti mural, all swirls and distorted letters and fanciful animals, by an artist friend of his, he explains when she asks about it, who painted it recently after partying all night in the loft.

“That’s such a stupid verb, partying, ” she says. “I mean, really, don’t you think? It’s so coy. What does it mean — does it mean drinking? Doing drugs? Having sex? All of the above?” This sounds prissy and pedantic even to her and she realizes she is nervous, though she isn’t sure why, exactly.

At one end of the room, a mattress floats on the wide floorboards like a dilapidated barge, the bedding in disarray. At the other end, a door rests on two filing cabinets — a makeshift desk with a big beige IBM Selectric perched between stacks of books. Russell has been jealous of Jeff’s typewriter for years — the ultimate writing machine. In between, an island of decrepit furniture suggests a living area: a brown legless couchlike object, a beanbag chair, and in the role of coffee table, a surfboard supported on either end by cinder blocks.

“Originally, Seventy-seven Greene Street was one of New York’s most notorious cathouses,” Jeff tells her. “When that building burned down, this came next and housed a corset factory for many years.”

“Unfettered wantonness yielding to the creation of feminine fetters.”

“Relentless,” Jeff says, “the march of civilization.”

For all its shabbiness, the sheer expanse and the architectural details give it the aura of a place where great deeds should be performed, great paintings painted, or even a great novel written — and that, she knows, is his sole ambition, though he carries himself with a self-deprecating cynicism and has so far published only a single short story in The Paris Review. But it’s his whole identity: Jeff Pierce, the writer, the poète maudit. When he read The Sun Also Rises at the age of thirteen, his destiny was revealed. Robert Lowell is some kind of distant uncle. At Brown he walked around with a copy of Ulysses under his arm and studied with John Hawkes, the avant-garde novelist, who vouched for his genius. He was one of the few non — New Yorkers at Brown who visited Manhattan frequently, eschewing the traditional landmarks of his classmates — Trader Vic’s and ‘21’ and Dorrian’s Red Hand — in favor of poetry readings and punk-rock clubs downtown. Somewhere along the line, he became acquainted with William Burroughs, who, he says, now lives in a former YMCA gym on the Bowery.

A black-and-white cat appears and rubs itself fervently against Jeff’s leg. She remembers this about him — animals always like him. “That’s Kurt Weill,” Jeff says as the cat slides away.

“I might have known,” she says.

He offers her a Marlboro, and lights it, and then his own, with a Zippo. It gives them something to do together, and something to do with their hands. They all smoke, all the time, everywhere — at home and in bars and restaurants, in movie theaters and on airplanes.

“Why do you always have the collars of your button-downs unbuttoned?” she asks. “Have you ever thought of getting the regular kind of collars, without buttons? It seems like it would be easier. I mean, if you’re not going to button them anyway.”

“Not really. I like having the option.”

She’s just making conversation, knowing this is one of his signatures, like his grandfather’s old gold Longines, which he wears with the face on the inside of his wrist. Not that he would ever tell you himself; he does his best to distance himself from his heritage, but Jeff comes from one of those old New England families that view the Pilgrims as arrivistes. They wear threadbare blazers with Wellingtons and drive shit brown Oldsmobiles. Some have lots of money, others only the memory of it. Even those who’ve escaped the gravity of Boston tend in the summers to cluster in rambling shingled houses on the rocky Protestant coast of Maine, occasionally traversing the pebbly beaches to dunk themselves in the frigid waters of the Atlantic, more often sailing the surface in wooden boats. But Jeff has come to downtown Manhattan to reinvent himself from scratch, or so he likes to believe, though he’s likewise determined to remain true, in some sense, to his roots, to be at once authentic and unique. His grandfather’s watch might seem to complicate the self-invention narrative; on the other hand, it distinguishes the wearer from the aspiring bohemian herd. Just as William Burroughs, the famous junkie and wife killer, dresses in three-piece suits.

“So,” she says, inhaling a lungful of smoke. “What does one do downtown?”

“Drugs,” he says.

“Very funny.”

“You asked.”

His demeanor is a blend of boyish and smug, and she sees that he is actually serious. Serious, but also amused at his own cleverness, his knowingness. He wants to shock her, even as he wants to invite her into the circle of forbidden knowledge. She’s smoked pot with him before, so she knows it isn’t that.

“What, cocaine?”

He beams. “Ever tried it?”

She shakes her head.

“Want to?”

Of course she doesn’t want to seem like a — what, a wimp, a prude, uncool? But still… cocaine ? She knew some kids at Brown did it, city kids who went back to Manhattan on weekends and hung at Studio 54 and Xenon, then bragged about it back in Providence. But Corrine isn’t that kind of girl, is she?

“No pressure,” he says.

“What are you saying?” she says. “That we would, like, do it…now?” She seems unable even to name the drug, and knows that she is stalling for time, trying to decide what she feels about this totally unexpected proposition.