Jay McInerney - Bright, Precious Days

When the bus turned off the expressway ninety minutes later, she gave up reading and looked out over the scrub pines alongside the road, crossing the Shinnecock Canal into Southampton, finally disembarking across the street from the post office in Bridgehampton. They’d agreed it would be risky for Luke to pick her up, so he’d commissioned his caretaker, Luis, who was waiting in a pickup. He apologized for the state of the truck, which was, in fact, perfectly tidy, and answered her questions by saying he was from Oaxaca and had been working for Mr. Luke for thirteen years.

It was a short, familiar drive down Sag Main. Russell liked to call it “Writers’ Row,” annotating the landmarks for newcomers as he drove them from the jitney stop: the house where James Jones had spent the last years of his life, the now-boarded-up farm stand where they bought their corn and tomatoes, the old one-room schoolhouse, the general store, the house John Irving used to live in, and, across the street, the shambling old place that had been George Plimpton’s for many years, then the one Kurt Vonnegut still lived in, from which he occasionally shuffled to the general store to buy a pack of Pall Malls — at a party he’d once told Corrine that smoking was the classy way to commit suicide — and down the road was Peter Matthiessen’s. Russell loved being in the proximity of all this literary talent, which he felt almost compensated for the invasion of what he called the hedge funders behind the hedgerows, though by now the writers had mostly died or moved on. It’s not so different, Corrine thought, from what’s happening in TriBeCa.

The late-March fields were brown, the trees gray and naked. Intermittent gusts of wind stirred eddies of crisp leaves in the road. And here she was, pulling up to the white picket fence in front of Luke’s house, a century-old three-story cottage with light blue shutters in the indigenous Shingle Style, one of the originals that had inspired hundreds of imitations in the surrounding fields. By the time she’d realized it was his, he’d been in the middle of his divorce from Sasha, who had apparently claimed exclusive use of it in the ensuing years.

He was waiting in the driveway, looking impatient and vaguely nautical in his white Irish fisherman’s turtleneck. She’d almost forgotten the disconcerting, wandering eye. But she was happy, even excited, to see him. Luis, carrying Corrine’s bag, asked which room she’d be staying in.

“I’ll take that,” Luke told him.

He opened the door for her. Inside the entry hall, he dropped the bag and gripped her shoulder, firmly turning her, dipping down and kissing her. His kiss was both familiar and thrilling.

“Sorry,” he said, releasing her. “I just kind of needed to do that.”

She suddenly felt inordinately shy and awkward, glad that she’d come, though uncertain that she could follow through on the implicit promise of the weekend.

“Let me give you the tour,” he said.

The interior was decorated more elaborately than she would have imagined, not as ostentatious and formal as many of the homes she’d seen in Southampton, with their chintzes and their Chippendale, but still more pristine and staged than she would have liked, her taste shaped by her own childhood in rambling houses in Wellfleet and Nantucket, with their jumble of objects and beach salvage collected over time, furniture with worn and faded upholstery, and random knickknacks. This was the Ralph Lauren version of her primal memories of tatty old WASP summer homes, bearing the same relation to the archetype as the McMansions out in the potato fields did to the house itself.

“Sasha decorated,” he said, as if reading her mind. “With a little help from Peter Marino.”

Of course — she should have known. Luke’s ex would have had to have everything just so. “It’s lovely,” she said.

“ Tasteful, ” he said in an italicized tone that alleviated her previous disappointment. And who was she, after all, to insist that his house resemble her grandmother’s? It wasn’t Luke’s fault that her grandfather had given all his money away, that she was stuck with memories of lost privilege and a sense of aesthetic judgment that bordered on snobbery.

“Are you hungry?” he asked, and for once, she realized, she was. Ravenous, in fact.

“I’ll put together some lunch,” he said. “You can explore the place.”

—

She drifted through the living room to the library, the most masculine corner of the house, examining the artifacts therein, the books and the photographs, his daughter, Ashley, being the most frequent subject — only one picture showed the three of them, Sasha and Luke and Ashley, all in white at some garden party, and Corrine was amazed anew by how beautiful Luke’s ex was, or had been — like a young Candice Bergen. No one would ever ask, “What does he see in her?” She found it annoying that he’d married two beauties — it suggested a certain superficiality of character, a value deficit. She could consider herself complimented to be in that company — maybe he thought she was beautiful, too, or maybe he liked her because she was different from his wives. Thankfully, there weren’t any pictures of the new one here, but neither was there any evidence of Corrine’s existence, or so it seemed until she spotted the copy of The Heart of the Matter on a side table next to a big leather club chair. On further inspection, it proved to be the copy she’d given him six years ago, with the inscription, XI XII MMI XXCC. Her initials and kisses beside the date she’d presented it, two months to the day after they’d met.

She wandered out to the kitchen, where he was finishing his lunch preparations. “Almost ready,” he said. This room felt more homey than the others, perhaps because the pine cabinets and the antique Windsor chairs around a circular table reminded her of the kitchen she’d grown up in.

He pulled out a chair, motioned for her to sit, and said, “I prepared a special treat for us,” holding out a tray of sandwiches.

They looked frighteningly retro — white bread cut into triangles. “Oh my God, is that peanut butter and jelly?”

“Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. You don’t have to eat them. I have a Greek salad in the fridge.”

It took her a moment to catch his reference to their days at the soup kitchen, a kind of private joke; peanut butter and jelly sandwiches had been the first item on the menu.

“I remember eating one of these that first day,” he said, “and having this violent emotional reaction, like I was being transported back to my childhood. I hadn’t had one since I was a kid. Haven’t had one since, either.”

“I could never actually eat one,” she said. She found it kind of touching, though, that he’d made them. “Maybe I had too many as a kid.”

“Ah, well,” he said, bringing the salad to the table and setting it in front of her. He took a sandwich for himself and bit into it.

“What does it evoke now — childhood, or the soup kitchen?”

“Both,” he said. “I can almost smell that foul smoke.”

“The oven cleaner smell.”

“I remember it more as burned plastic.”

“That’s because you have no idea what oven cleaner smells like.” She helped herself to the salad. “As I remember it, you were the one who stared hitting up the restaurants. One time you drove up to Babbo and came back with like fifty veal chops.”

“I think that was Jerry’s idea,” Luke said. “I wonder what’s happened to him. Did you stay in touch?”

She shook her head. Jerry was a carpenter who’d rushed downtown as soon as the towers collapsed to help dig through the rubble; he’d returned the next day with a coffee urn and a vanful of food, eventually establishing an ad hoc soup kitchen, which soon attracted volunteers, Corrine and Luke among them. “I did for a while. We had a coffee a few months after. Exchanged a few e-mails. But it was hard. I felt like those weeks were the high point of his life, that after that he seemed kind of angry and lost. Plus, honestly, I couldn’t. It just reminded me of you.”