Jay McInerney - Bright, Precious Days

“Well, yeah.”

She trusts Jeff and doesn’t think he’d lure her into anything really dangerous. On the other hand, that’s the whole thing about Jeff; he is more reckless than the rest of their crowd at Brown, the guy who wrapped an Austin-Healey around a telephone pole outside of Providence and walked away unscathed. That’s one of the reasons they’re all attracted to him.

“You have some?”

“I wouldn’t offer you any if I didn’t have it.”

“Will I like it?”

“I personally guarantee it.”

She shrugs. “Okay.” This is definitely one way to cut through the awkwardness of the moment. “I don’t even know how you do it,” she says.

She follows him over to the makeshift desk; he clears books and papers away and picks up a framed picture, an almost-familiar sepia-toned image of a beautiful boy with flyaway hair and sleepy eyes, in disheveled Edwardian garb. Suddenly, it comes to her. “Rimbaud?”

He nods and lays the frame flat, unfolding a rectangle of shiny paper on the glass, as if creating some sort of origami.

After tipping the contents of the unfurled packet onto the glass, he chops it up with a one-edged razor blade and lays out eight identical lines of white powder.

She can’t help giggling when he hands her a short plastic straw. “Are we really going to do this? I’m not sure I know how. Why don’t I watch you do it first?”

He takes the straw and leans over the glass, neatly inhaling one of the white lines and then, moving the straw to his left nostril, another.

“Wow, you’re good at that.”

“It’s like anything else. Like how you get to Carnegie Hall.”

“What?”

“Practice.”

“Oh, right, sorry.” Why is she suddenly feeling so slow-witted?

“Your turn.”

She takes the straw and bends down over the desk. As she leans forward, Jeff gathers the hair around her neck and holds it, which seems very sexy to her and also makes the thing she is about to do seem less dangerous.

She can only manage to inhale half of a line the first time. It’s a very weird sensation, a not entirely unpleasant burning in her nasal passages, and then, a few minutes later, a bittersweet drip at the back of her throat. After several tries, she consumes two of the lines and feels very pleased with herself. Having been a little afraid and uncertain, she now congratulates herself on being brave and going for it. Nothing scary here. She feels almost normal, except better than normal.

“I think I’m feeling it, but I’m not sure,” she says. “I feel good but not, like, stoned. You know, I’ve never really liked pot, to tell you the truth, that feeling of not being myself, of being kind of slowed down and dumbed down. That dopey feeling. No wonder they call it dope, right? But now I feel like myself. But sort of, I don’t know, a really upbeat version of myself. Is that the cocaine? Because actually I feel pretty great. I feel like, I don’t know, like doing something.”

Jeff smiles and nods.

“Say something.”

“ Something. ”

“You’re teasing me. Am I talking too much? I’m talking too much, aren’t I? Is that the cocaine? Is that what it does?”

“It comes with the territory.”

“But why aren’t you talking as much as I am?”

“Be careful what you wish for.”

Jeff leans down and snorts another line, then kneels down to riffle through a stack of LPs on the floor beside the stereo, selecting a record and placing it on the turntable.

“I like that,” Corrine says of the wailing guitars and whining, world-weary vocals.

“It’s Television,” Jeff says.

She looks back down at the stereo, wondering if that was a joke. She often feels this way in Jeff’s company, as though she is missing out on some inside reference. Maybe the drug is messing with her perception, although, in fact, she feels incredibly clearheaded and sharp at the moment.

“It’s a stereo,” she says.

“Television’s the name of the band. Unfortunately, no longer with us. I saw them in ’78 at CBGB.”

“Oh, right,” she says. The singer’s voice is very nasal and adenoidal — maybe he did cocaine? What is he singing? She listens for the next chorus. “I fell right into the arms of Venus de Milo.” It takes her a minute. And then, she says, “Very clever. I get it. Better late than never, I guess. You must think I’m very uncool, basically.”

“I’ve never thought that. I think you’re amazing.”

“I don’t know the new music, or even the new art. I mean, I’m good up to Jasper Johns and Rauschenberg, the Stones and Led Zeppelin, but after that…” She shrugs. “I feel like rock and roll kind of petered out a few years ago, but that’s probably just me. Is Led Zeppelin still cool? How do you find these things out? I mean, is there some committee that decides? A bunch of cool kids in leather jackets, smoking bidis, who sit around and pronounce on these issues? Whoever they are, they don’t have my telephone number. And my taste in literature is pretty conventional. I tried, but I couldn’t get past the first twenty pages of Naked Lunch. And that book you gave me last month, Finnegan’s Stew ?”

“ Mulligan Stew, by Gilbert Sorrentino. Finnegan was Joyce. Finnegans Wake. Although curiously enough a character from Finnegans Wake turns up in Mulligan Stew. ”

“That’s what I mean — a novel within a novel within a novel, all that postmodern self-consciousness. A writer writing a book about a writer writing a book. Jesus, I’m sorry, I just get lost. I like Edith Wharton and Anthony Powell and Graham Greene. I’m just not hip enough. I live on East 71st Street and I belong to the Colony Club and the Daughters of the American Revolution. You grew up in the same world I did, but you’ve sort of rejected all that.”

“That doesn’t define you. You’re so much more than that. I don’t believe in types, I believe in individuals. I believe in you. You’re like no one else. I don’t know anyone else at all like you. You don’t judge. You’re the least judgmental, least prejudiced person I know. You take everyone at his own worth. You look at a picture and see things nobody else does. You’re smart. You’re funny. You don’t accept conventional wisdom. You’re beautiful.”

“You really believe all that?” Corrine is amazed. She always imagined that Jeff was judging her and finding her wanting. She thought that each of what she considered to be her secret flaws were glaringly obvious to Russell’s smart, cynical, good-looking best friend. More than she’s ever been willing to admit, she craves his approval, even his admiration. Actually, she wants him to love her, she realizes. That doesn’t necessarily mean that she loves him, but she wants him to want her, and she certainly wants him, never more so than right this minute. He seems to divine this sentiment, stepping toward her and touching her cheek, cradling her face in his hand and guiding her toward his lips, kissing her avidly, almost violently, pressing his lips against hers and probing between them with his tongue, Corrine returning the ardor as she puts her arms around his shoulders and pulls him closer.

It feels as if there’s no time to spare, that after so long a wait they need to seize the moment immediately. He lifts her in his arms and carries her to the bed without taking his lips from hers. They struggle out of their clothes as if they are on fire, she tugging his belt open as he scrabbles at the hook of her bra. She finds herself undoing her belt, unzipping her jeans and stepping out of them. His jeans are still wrapped around his ankles when, twisted on top of her, he pushes himself inside of her. Some sort of animal sound escapes her and then she thrusts her hips upward, finding a rhythm as she races toward her goal. She’s never felt so driven, so desperate, and even the inevitable thought of Russell fails to quell — seems even to fan — her desire. She has never before come so quickly, just a little ahead of him, and it occurs to her as she returns to her body and her senses to wonder about the drug’s influence, although she has imagined this experience more than once — she’s been wildly infatuated with Jeff since they met — and she finds it hard to believe that she will ever regret it. Later, however, she will question the postcoital conviction that she was somehow bringing herself closer to Russell by fucking his best friend.