Jay McInerney - Bright, Precious Days

“After which he dumped you,” Corrine added.

“Well, he screwed me out of the option on his second book. But I don’t think that warrants two months wearing a black hood in Waziristan.”

Suddenly, Storey, the daughter, appeared in her nightgown, looking distraught, and ran across the room to Corrine. “Aunt Hilary says you’re not my real mother! She says she’s my mother.”

Hilary followed in Storey’s wake, looking like someone determined to maintain her sense of righteousness even as she was starting to lose her conviction. Jack couldn’t believe this shit — Storey clutching her mother’s waist, Corrine lifting and enfolding her in a desperate hug and Russell advancing on Hilary.

“Did you really do that, you bitch?”

“She’s deserves to know the truth. You can’t hide it forever.”

“You fucking cunt,” Russell said, backing her against the wall.

“You can’t talk to my girlfriend like that,” Dan said, rushing up, grabbing Russell’s shoulder to spin him around and throwing a punch that caught him squarely on the cheek, sending him back against the wall with a thud. Russell staggered to his feet and took a swing at Dan, barely grazing his rib cage.

For a moment Jack couldn’t locate the source of the wail of pain that echoed through the loft, until he saw Jeremy standing in the hallway, staring at his father, who was propped against the wall, stunned, holding a hand to his cheek.

Corrine clutched Storey’s head to her shoulder and marched straight at Dan and Hilary. “Please leave, both of you.” As Jeremy howled again and Storey began sobbing, her fury redoubled. “Get out! Get the hell out! Right now!”

Jack hadn’t noticed Washington since the onset of hostilities, until he scooped up Jeremy in one arm and pointed at Dan with the other. “You heard the lady,” he said. “Get your sorry cracker asses the fuck out of here.”

Jack wasn’t entirely sure what he’d just witnessed, although the general tenor of family rancor and violence was reassuringly familiar. For the first time all night he felt nearly at ease. Apparently, these people weren’t as different as he’d first imagined.

CORRINE WOKE FEELING CLOUDY AND ANXIOUS, experiencing a sinking dread as she reviewed the evening’s absurd and mortifying climax. As many outrages as her sister had committed over the years, this was truly the most unforgivable.

She found Russell out in the kitchen, finishing off the dishes, a fresh blue-and-yellow bruise on his left cheek.

“Ouch,” she said. “Does it hurt?”

“Only when I breathe.” He poured her a cup of coffee from the French press.

“I still can’t believe it. When I woke up just now, I thought, There’s no way that actually happened.”

“On a happier note, the Democrats took control of both houses.”

She heard a thump from one of the kids’ rooms. “Oh shit,” she said. “We’re going to have to have a serious talk. But first we’ve got to figure out what to say.”

“Fucking Hilary.”

“Really. Hilary the C-U-N-T. You were so great, Russell. I never thought I’d approve of anyone using that word. Ever. But I couldn’t think of a more appropriate deployment.”

“Well, I’ve always believed there is a precise word or phrase for every need, and that was the exact word for the occasion. And by the way, she’s banned from our threshold henceforth.”

“You won’t hear an argument from me.”

“Persona non grata.”

“I think we need to talk to the kids right away.”

“Yeah, you’re right. But not this morning. Too much to process. I’ll come home early tonight and we’ll have a family dinner.”

Sometimes, just when she needed him most, Russell came through for her, and she suddenly experienced a little shudder of guilt about her recent preoccupation with Luke.

The kids were unusually quiet, and even manageable, as if fearful of what might happen next. Russell took them off to school, promising to get home early. Corrine poured a second cup of coffee and tried to plan her day. She had to go to the office and organize Saturday’s food giveaway in Harlem, but she also knew that she wouldn’t really be able to concentrate — the combination of a little too much wine at dinner and being completely distracted by the situation that Hilary had created.

How many times had she asked herself why she’d chosen her as an egg donor, her irresponsible, coked-out, slutty little sister, and yet, to question that decision was to question the children’s very identity; they were, for better and for worse, hatched from Hilary’s eggs, and she couldn’t repent the choice without in some fundamental respect renouncing the result. She couldn’t imagine loving her children more completely, and at this point days and even weeks went by when she never once thought of the circumstances of their conception, because she could not possibly have felt more like their mother. For most of human history, being a mother meant bearing young from your womb. She’d always imagined that they were out there in the void, waiting for her, these little souls, and that after years of struggle and miscarriage and failed in vitro fertilizations she’d discovered a way to reel them in. She believed they were hers; she would never allow herself to be swayed by mere biology.

But now she was scared, riddled with doubts, most specifically that they would love her less when they found out the facts, that they’d blame her for not being who they had so implicitly believed her to be, or, worst of all, that they would gravitate toward Hilary, their real mother, their flesh and blood. She’d once had a nightmare in which her sister and Russell had run away together with the children. She sometimes masochistically imagined the day in the not too distant future when one or both would ask if they could live with Aunt Hilary. She was haunted, too, by something Hilary had said that summer they’d all shared the house in Sagaponack while they were coordinating their menstrual cycles and Russell was shooting Hilary up with progesterone, sticking a giant needle in her ass filled with a substance distilled from the urine of menopausal women: “It’s not natural, what we’re doing.” Hilary was drunk and probably coked-up after having stayed out half the night, rebelling against the strict regimen of temperance and injections they’d been observing the entire month, but Corrine sometimes worried that it was true, that they had tampered with the natural order of things.

All of these worries had preyed on her, but she’d always projected them into the future, hadn’t ever suspected they’d have to try to explain exactly what had happened before the kids were old enough to understand the basics of reproduction. How to explain to them that Russell had drawn the line at adoption and hadn’t wanted to raise kids that weren’t genetically his own, in whom he was afraid he would not see himself. So when it became clear that her eggs weren’t good, she’d devised this plan, almost unheard of at the time, to plant Hilary’s in her own womb. The fertility doctor had said, when she’d proposed it, “Well, theoretically it’s possible.” But, as hard as she’d tried, apparently she hadn’t considered all of the practicalities.

Checking her e-mails, she accepted an invitation to a screening next week, deleted spam for discount pharmaceuticals and breast enlargement. Breast enlargement. As if. Eye lift maybe.

The phone chirped, displaying the name and number of Jean, their part-time housekeeper and nanny. She was calling to say she had a doctor’s appointment and couldn’t get the kids after school. She sounded weepy, and Corrine was afraid that if she asked what was wrong, she would hear another tale of the cruelty and heartlessness of Jean’s girlfriend, Carlotta, who’d been making her miserable for nearly a dozen years now, and Corrine just didn’t have time for it this morning. Plus, she thought it was a good idea, today of all days, to pick the kids up herself. So she said, “Don’t worry, Jean. Take the afternoon off and we’ll see you tomorrow.”