Jay McInerney - Bright, Precious Days

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Corrine took the subway to her office and spent the morning talking to various food banks in the greater metropolitan area, trying to secure vegetables that stood half a chance of not being rotten. Not quite the workday she might have imagined for herself twenty years ago. After her stint at Sotheby’s, she’d embarked on a successful but ultimately uninspiring stretch as a stockbroker before indulging her artistic yearnings by taking film courses at NYU, and wrote an adaptation of Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, which had, against all odds, and after many years, made the arduous journey to production, and, just barely, to a few screens. In the heady months leading up to its release, Russell had managed to get her hired to write the screenplay for Youth and Beauty, the option on which had been renewed by Tug Barkley’s production company, but the project had gone dormant after two drafts. Later she’d struggled to write about what had happened to her in the months after September 11, but instead of inspiring a book or movie, her experience at the soup kitchen had led her to the job at Nourish New York.

She’d just finished a SlimFast at her desk when Nancy called.

“Oh my God, I’m so hungover.”

“Did you go out?” Corrine asked. Sometimes she felt she lived vicariously through Nancy, who was still pursuing the single-girl life that Corrine had never actually experienced for herself, and that most of her peers had resigned from a decade ago.

“I went to Bungalow 8 with that handsome young redneck that Russell’s publishing. By the time I was fucked-up enough to think about seducing him, he’d disappeared.”

“He does have a roguish, rough-hewn charisma.”

“Then I went to some after-hours place where some fan boy tried to seduce me, but even as drunk as I was, I got a bisexual vibe from him, and I have so stopped doing that. I mean, what is it about me that attracts fags? Why don’t they just stick to their own? I am absolutely not a fag hag. Do I seem like a fag hag to you?”

“Of course not. So what happened?”

“I’m not sure how I made it home, but I woke up fully clothed in the living room, so I must’ve been alone. And now I’m literally dying. Excuse me while I go vomit for the third time.”

“You’re excused.”

An old hand at vomiting, Nancy frequently stuck a finger down her throat when she thought she’d eaten too much, or if she felt drunk but wanted to keep drinking. Corrine wasn’t entirely unsympathetic, having been there, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it anymore — not often, not in a fairly long time — and tried instead to limit her intake of calories. She was relieved, too, that Nancy was too self-absorbed to bring up the Hilary debacle.

Waiting outside the school, Corrine surveyed the parents and the nannies, more of the former than the latter, and more fathers than you’d ever see at the uptown schools — Buckley or St. Bernard’s, Chapin or Spence. Here at PS 234, the moms were less uniformly blond than their Upper East Side counterparts, less Chaneled and Ralphed; more messenger bags than Kelly bags. She waved to Karen Cohen and Marge Findlayson, in their puffy parkas and their Uggs, both full-time moms whose involvement in various school committees and projects made her feel inadequate. The din of construction from the giant apartment complex down the street absolved her of the need to say anything to them, and she chose a spot next to hunky Todd, whose last name she’d never picked up, who worked at home as a Web designer while his wife raked it in at J. P. Morgan.

And suddenly the kids were pouring out, shrieking and howling, hands clutching the straps of their backpacks. And while her children greeted her enthusiastically enough, they grew uncharacteristically subdued on the walk home, and even Rice Krispies Treats from the deli failed to raise their spirits significantly.

Russell came home early, as promised, with the ingredients for the kids’ favorite meal, which he adamantly refused to call “chicken tenders,” as it was known in certain quarters; he’d actually been known to tell waiters that tender was not a noun, unless it referred to a boat that was used to ferry people and supplies to and from a ship. But it was certainly not a part of any chicken. The kids would use the phrase just to wind him up, to hear Dad launch into his tirade. He was willing to call these fried strips of breast meat “chicken fingers,” as long as they understood that this was a fanciful association. Whatever they were called, Corrine hated it when he made them, because the batter making and the deep frying trashed the kitchen; he was capable of getting batter on virtually every surface, once even on the ceiling, and he could have easily ordered takeout from Bubby’s, just a few blocks away. But the kids were always deeply appreciative, even now that they had moved on to appreciate such grown-up fare as fried calamari and rock shrimp tempura. They still declared loyally that Dad’s were better than the restaurant kind, and perhaps they were. At any rate, tonight it seemed extremely important to enact this family ritual, and she was grateful to Russell for thinking of it.

“Have you thought about what, exactly, we’re going to say about last night?” he asked, mixing the batter.

Both children were still in their rooms, allegedly doing homework.

“I think we’ll just have to come totally clean. Look, we knew this day was going to come. We’ve just been putting it off.”

The battered chicken hissed and sputtered as he slid it into the oil, protesting as if it were alive. “Too good a fate for your sister,” he said, nodding at the pot. “I guess we no longer boil people in oil. I don’t suppose she called to apologize?”

Corrine shook her head.

“Well, I’m as ready as I’ll ever be,” Russell said a few minutes later as he carried a salad and the platter of chicken whatevers to the table and Corrine went to fetch the kids, finding both hunched over their desks.

“Dad made your favorite — chicken tentacles,” Corrine said, urging them toward the table.

“Why’s he home so early?” Storey asked.

“So he can have a nice dinner with his family.”

Once they were seated, Russell inquired about their school day and received a perfunctory answer from Storey.

He cleared his throat. “Now, let’s talk about last night. It must have upset you, what Aunt Hilary said.”

Storey asked, “Is she really our mother?”

“No, she’s not,” Russell said. “Your mother’s your mother.”

“Are you okay, Jeremy?” Corrine said, laying an arm around his shoulders.

He nodded, his eyes suddenly welling with tears, then surrendered to his mother’s embrace and sobbed.

“It’s okay, honey; nothing’s changed.”

“Can we still live here?” Storey asked.

“Of course, silly.” Russell was being solid and sensibly Dad-like, which was good, since Corrine was on the verge of absolute fucking hysteria.

“She can’t take us away?”

“No one can take you away.”

“Here’s the thing,” Corrine said, trying to keep her voice steady. “More than anything in the world we wanted to have you two, but I was having trouble with my eggs — they weren’t strong enough — so I had to borrow some eggs.”

“Does that mean Dad had sex with Aunt Hilary?” Storey asked.

“Absolutely not,” Corrine said.

“You guys know about…reproduction?”

“We’re eleven, Dad,” Storey informed him.

“Well, basically, my, uh, sperm was mixed with Hilary’s eggs.”

“You mean in vitro fertilization,” Storey said.

Russell and Corrine exchanged a look. “Well, yes, exactly. And then the fertilized eggs were planted in Mom’s…in Mom.”