Jay McInerney - Bright, Precious Days

“Russell,” he said, bending down to retrieve his stash. “This is so amazing, man. How long has it been?”

“How are you, Phillip?”

“Let me tell you, I’ve been a whole lot worse.”

“So I heard.”

“I mean, Waziristan was pretty bad, but the debriefing in D.C. — now that was a fucking nightmare.”

“Looks like you’re making up for lost time.” Russell hadn’t meant to sound pissy, but realized he did.

“Well, carpe diem, you know? That’s one thing I learned wearing a hood for two months.”

“No, yeah, definitely,” Russell said, unintentionally covering all the bases.

“We should hook up back in the city,” Phillip said.

“That would be great.”

“Yeah, definitely.”

Phillip took a step toward the door, then turned to wrap Russell in a bear hug. “Look, I’m really sorry about that business with the second book. It was a crazy time.”

“Long forgotten,” Russell said.

“We’ll catch up for sure in Madhattan.”

—

And all too soon they were back in the city, returning tanned, dulled and sated, awakened from the dream by a brisk slap of cold air on the jet bridge at JFK.

Then, a snowstorm on Valentine’s Day: It had been coming down heavily since they woke; school had been canceled, much to the chagrin of Storey, who was apparently expecting some pledge of troth from her classmate Rafe Horowitz. That night they left the kids with Jean and trudged, heavily bundled, to Bouley, their traditional Valentine’s destination, a temple of haute cuisine that was, conveniently, a short walk from the loft. Corrine held Russell’s arm with one hand and an umbrella with the other as they negotiated the heavy snow on the sidewalk, admixed with hail, which had a granular texture, like wet beach sand. Corrine had made it clear she would have been happy to stay in tonight, but Russell had insisted that the holiday be observed with a romantic meal.

He discussed the wine list with the sommelier while Corrine visited the kitchen to pay her respects to the chef, who was on the board of her organization. He had just settled the debate over the merits of Chablis versus Chasselas when she returned. He stood up as she approached; his father had drilled him in the forms of chivalry.

A few minutes later when he looked up from his menu, he saw that Corrine was crying.

He reached over and put his hand on hers. “Sweetheart, what’s the matter?”

“Oh, Russell, is this it? Roses once a year and maybe an obligatory drunken fuck? We’re fifty years old. Where’s the romance? Whatever happened to the romance?”

Russell had no idea where this was coming from — having thought things were relatively good between them — but this kind of outburst was by no means unprecedented. And while he believed, after all these years, that he knew her better than he knew anyone on earth, he sometimes suspected there were parts of her psyche that were inaccessible to him, vast regions beyond the beacon of his understanding.

“IS THERE ANYTHING BETTER THAN BONEFISHING?” Kip asked as they sprawled on lawn chairs on the deck outside camp, looking out over the flats, silvery pink in the reflected sunset. Owl-eyed from a day on the water, white sunglass-shaped ovals on his sunburned face, he was wearing a multipocketed turquoise shirt and a Lehman Brothers cap.

After a nearly perfect day on the water, Russell felt there was indeed much to be said in favor of fly-fishing in the Bahamas with Kip Taylor, his chief investor, who was picking up the tab.

“It’s damn good, but I don’t know that I’d put it right at the very top of the list,” Russell said. His hands were still fragrant from the nine bonefish he’d caught and released, one of them a probable ten-pounder, his personal best.

“Russell, don’t be so predictable, for Christ’s sake. Are you actually going to try to tell me, at our age, that the most important thing in life is sex?”

Russell couldn’t quite decide if Kip was being refreshingly honest or simply trying to be original. “Not necessarily the most important, but certainly the most pleasurable.”

“So why are you here instead of at home poking your wife? I think that’s just what you think you’re supposed to say.”

“If I could only have one or the other, I don’t think I’d pick fishing.”

“After twenty-five years of marriage you still find it exciting?”

For purposes of this discussion, Russell had been thinking about sex in general, or in some earlier incarnation of his marriage, not necessarily conjugal relations in the present tense, though they’d enjoyed a bit of a revival in that department recently. “It comes and goes,” he said.

“How often?” Kip demanded. “ Honestly. ”

Russell sometimes felt that Kip believed his wealth entitled him to the truth, as if it were a commodity like any other. His questions often took this form, an interrogative followed by the imperative honestly. “Maybe once a week,” he said. This was, in fact, a wildly optimistic estimate. Twice a month, maybe.

“I’m on my third marriage and I’ve come to the conclusion that on average sexual infatuation lasts about five years.”

“Good thing you have fishing, then.”

“Honestly, I get a bigger hard-on closing a serious deal than fucking my wife. And you’d probably rather find the next Hemingway than fuck yours. Hell, I’d rather read the next Hemingway, if the truth be told. Or reread A River Runs Through It. You ever hear the one about the three stages of marriage? When you first get married, you’re having chandelier sex, swinging from the light fixtures. Next you have bedroom sex, once a week, in the bed. Then finally you have hallway sex. Know what that is?”

“What’s that?”

“You pass each other in the hallway and say ‘Fuck you.’ ”

Russell issued a perfunctory snort.

“So, good-looking woman is in a department store,” Kip said, now on a roll. “She’s with her two kids, and she’s yelling at them, ‘Stop touching this, stop fooling around,’ basically cussing them out, and eventually she’s at the cash register, still yelling at them, when the guy behind her says, ‘Those are fine-looking young boys. Are they twins?’ And she looks at him and says, ‘No, they’re not twins, they’re nine and eleven, you idiot. What are you, stupid? Anybody can see they aren’t twins.’ And the guy says to her, ‘It’s just that I can’t imagine anybody fucking you twice.’ ”

After a self-appreciative pause, Kip said, “Ah, yes, kids. That youthful sex drive is nature’s reproductive imperative. But once the kids come along, they destroy it. It’s amazing anyone has more than one; the little buggers seem to be programmed to behave in such a way as to discourage parents from ever doing it again.”

Russell nodded, suddenly feeling guilty that he hadn’t thought about his own children all day.

“But you need distractions, of course; you need your visceral pleasures. God knows I do, being semiretired. Fly-fishing and single-malt scotch,” he said, hoisting his glass and sniffing it appreciatively. “It’s either that or you start screwing your masseuse.”

“I turned down a proposition,” Russell said, “from a hot college girl a few months back.”

Kip looked intrigued. “On what grounds?”

“I’m still trying to decide,” he said.

“There’re only three,” Kip said. “Fidelity. Fear of getting caught. Or lack of interest.” Kip was fond of categorical pronouncements.

“One and two, I guess,” Russell said, although he had to admit that while Astrid Kladstrup had certainly stirred his loins — and in a perfect world he would have liked nothing better than to have exercised them — at this point in his life he just didn’t think it was worth the trouble.