Jay McInerney - Bright, Precious Days

That just might have been the drugs talking.

JACK DIDN’T QUITE KNOW what to expect from a Manhattan dinner party, but so far he felt like a rube — which actually was pretty much what he’d expected. He felt like he was watching a movie, an updated version of one of those Depression-era New York flicks in which all the characters were ridiculously good-looking and witty. He wouldn’t have been totally surprised if one of his publisher’s friends had suddenly started belting out “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” although the stage itself was a little shabby, a little more After Hours than Dinner at Eight.

“We didn’t know it was the eighties at the time,” Washington was saying. “It was just the present. Does anyone ever have a feeling of living in a particular decade? I mean, do you feel right now, right this minute, like you’re living in the aughts? Is that what we call them? Are we somehow acting out the zeitgeist here and now? Are we exhibiting aughtness? I sure as hell don’t remember being aware it was the eighties back then.”

“I’m not sure Russell and Corrine ever knew it was the eighties,” Nancy said. “They were like these elegant throwbacks to the twenties, having these chic little parties. The rest of us were living in hovels, illegal sublets in the East Village and shared railroad flats in Hell’s Kitchen, eating pizza and lo mein out of boxes while they were serving cocktails and canapés on the Upper East Side. Poster children for the good life, the perfect couple — while everybody else was single and searching and scruffy. Russell even had a velvet smoking jacket. It was all very Scott and Zelda, Nick and Nora.”

“Now you’re mixing your periods,” Washington said.

“I’ll have you know,” Russell said, “I published a book by Keith Haring.”

“You are so fucking hip,” Washington said. To the others: “Russell went to the Mudd Club one night in a blue blazer and chinos. I shit you not. Everybody thought he was being ironic.”

“It was authentic,” Russell said. “I yam what I yam.”

“Before anyone romanticizes the eighties any further,” Nancy said, “I have two words: Milli Vanilli.”

“Talk about authentic.”

Jack decided not to ask what the fuck Milli Vanilli was.

—

Eventually, when they were all finally seated at the dinner table, Russell stood up and raised his glass. “I’d like to toast old friends and new, and in particular to welcome Jack Carson to our fair city.” Even as he shrank away from this unexpected beam of attention, this turning of all eyes in the room on him, the rube among the sophisticates, dressed like a bum, with the manners to match, Jack thought, defensively, Nobody says our fair city anymore, do they? He was relieved to hear his famous Manhattan editor sounding so dorky.

“Two years ago,” Russell was saying, “my assistant urged me to look at some unpublished stories posted on Myspace, and I couldn’t have been more skeptical. In fact, I wasn’t even sure what Myspace was.”

Washington said, “He still thinks the Internet is a passing fad.”

“But I eventually read the stories and I was blown away. It was like Raymond Carver and Breece D’J Pancake had had a love child—”

“That is so gross,” Nancy interjected.

“Breece D’ what?” Hilary asked.

“And at the same time, it was unlike anything I’d ever read before. So please raise a glass to our new friend and his masterful book, which I’m more than honored to be publishing.”

Jack didn’t know what the hell he was supposed to do or where to look. He’d never been the object of a toast before. For that matter, he wasn’t sure he’d ever been to an actual dinner party before, unless you counted the odd Thanksgiving or barbecues at his uncle Walt’s. This was all very… civilized, Russell and Corrine like two glamorous parents presiding over some kind of salon. If his stepfather could see him now, he’d say, What, you think you’re fucking special ?

After disappearing for a few minutes, Washington returned to the table, clinked his fork against his wineglass repeatedly until he mostly had their attention. “Ladies and germs, it appears Eliot Spitzer is our new governor.”

“Big surprise,” Dan said. “But just remember, New York isn’t America.”

“Thank God for that,” Nancy said. “Isn’t that why we all came here in the first place?”

“Better be careful comin’ to my part of America with that attitude,” Jack said before he could check himself. He hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but in his nervousness he’d already guzzled two vodkas and two glasses of wine.

“Darn tootin’,” Hilary slurred.

“Honey,” Corrine said, “tell us about the wine.” Apparently, this was a play she’d called more than once. And sure enough, old Russell got up and yammered on about the wine, which apparently came from Spain. Washington threw a piece of bread at him. Jack couldn’t help laughing, finally recognizing at least one dinner ritual.

After Russell sat down, Corrine turned to Jack and said, “I don’t know when I’ve seen Russell as excited about a book as he is about yours.”

“Shitfire, ma’am, pardon my French, but I grew up readin’ the books he published,” he said, obligingly pouring on the backwoods accent for her benefit. “Gettin’ published by Russell, it’s like signin’ with the fuckin’ Yankees. Coming from where I come from, the idea that I’d ever publish a book at all was just pie in the sky.”

It was becoming impossible to ignore Hilary, directly across the table, who seemed to have consumed a hell of a lot of Russell’s wine, judging by the volume of her voice. “You fucking liberals are so predictable,” she said, toppling her wineglass with a dismissive wave of her arm, spattering Spanish red all over the table.

“You right wingers are so fucking violent, ” Washington said, brushing a few drops from the sleeve of his jacket.

“That was an accident.”

“Yeah, and so was the Tuskegee experiment.”

“Hey,” said Russell, mopping up the spill with his dinner napkin.

“What the hell is that?” demanded Hilary.

“U.S. Public Health Service used six hundred Negroes as guinea pigs to study the effects of untreated syphilis.”

“Oh, right. ”

“Google it.”

“I will.”

Corrine, in despair, turned to Jack. “Is this your first Manhattan dinner party?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Sorry, we’re usually slightly better behaved.”

“Back home we don’t consider it a party till blood’s been drawn. Last Thanksgiving my uncle stabbed my aunt with the electric carving knife.”

“Oh my God! Was she okay?”

“She was fine. It wasn’t plugged in at the time. They stitched her up and sent her home that night.”

“Are they still married?”

“Not exactly. She shot him dead a few months later.” This part wasn’t exactly true. She shot him in the arm and he drove himself to the same clinic that had sewed her up at Thanksgiving, but Jack assumed he had a role to play here and didn’t want to disappoint anybody.

“Oh my God,” she said again.

“He had the emphysema bad, so it was only a matter of time,” he drawled. As both a southerner and a fiction writer, he hated for the facts to get in the way of a good story.

“What about your parents?” she asked.

“Well, my dad left before I was born. He was a musician. My mom met him in Nashville; she was only with him for a few months before he hit the road. Then there was the meth dealer and then Cliff, my so-called stepfather, who did a little of everythin’ and a whole lot of nothin’. My mom shoulda shot his goddamn ass but never did. Woulda been a service to humanity. I thought about doin’ it myself. In the end, I knocked him senseless with an ax and went to juvie.”