Jay McInerney - Bright, Precious Days

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll get you back to the city. I just need to make a call.”

She started dreading the two-hour drive, crawling along the expressway with her only son waiting, stricken, on the other end.

“We’re all set,” Luke said, emerging from the library. “I’m going to fly you into the city myself.”

“What? Are you sure you can do this?”

He picked up her bag where he’d dropped it only two hours ago. “Let’s go.”

They spoke hardly at all as he raced over the back roads to the East Hampton Airport, paused only briefly at the flight desk. The plane was a flimsy twin-engine with four seats. Luke buckled her into the copilot’s seat and proceeded to run through the preflight protocol, looking at ease with the panel of toggles and switches and dials. He showed her how to use the headsets, since the plane was too noisy for normal conversation in the cockpit, but she remained silent for most of the flight, consumed by anxiety and guilt, barely noticing the sere landscape between the open ocean and the sound, coming to her senses above the necropolis of eastern Queens, looking out at the Manhattan skyline rising beyond an undulant sea of headstones, surprised anew by its recent disfigurement, altered like a familiar smile marred by missing teeth.

RUSSELL WOKE THE KIDS, moving back and forth between their rooms until they were upright and moving, under protest. Ferdie emerged from under Jeremy’s covers and followed him into the kitchen, snaking along at his heels, waiting eagerly for his bowl of ZuPreem Ferret Diet pellets, supplemented with a chopped sardine, which was supposedly good for his coat and his bones, if not his breath. He strained upward on his hind legs, like a masked bandit, as Russell stirred the fragrant mess.

Storey appeared first, dressed and ready with her backpack and her homework binder. “Can I have French toast?” she asked.

“That’s a weekend treat,” Russell said. “I’ve got yogurt and a banana and Honey Nut Cheerios here. Promise I’ll make you French toast tomorrow.”

“With sausage? I like the English ones you got last weekend. The exploding kind.”

“Bangers.” He’d picked them up at the limey grocery store in the West Village, along with some Aero and Cadbury bars for Corrine, milk chocolate being among the very few foods she craved.

“Why are they called bangers?”

“Because of the way they pop and explode in the pan.”

He hated to admit it, but Corrine was right that Storey was getting compulsive about food and, lately, a little bit chubby. Corrine thought it was somehow a reaction to Hilary’s drunken revelation, a theory that seemed plausible enough. They would have to address this sooner or later, though just now he needed to check on Jeremy’s progress; getting him dressed and organized on time was a continual challenge. Jeremy was, in fact, still in his pajamas, hunched over his desk. “I thought you finished your homework last night.”

“I just forgot some math.”

“Time’s up. Get dressed and get out here now.”

“Hey, Dad?”

“What?” he said, trying to contain his mounting irritation. He’d failed to contain it often enough to be aware of the potential consequences, the kids’ tears and his inevitable apology. Both lately seemed excessively sensitive to any criticism whatsoever.

“Are we ever going to see Aunt Hilary and Dan?”

“I don’t know. Why, do you miss them?”

Where had that come from? he wondered, even as he acknowledged that for kids, there’s no such thing as a non sequitur. Nonlinearity was a given.

“I guess I should miss Hilary,” Jeremy said, “since she’s sort of my mom.”

“Well, yes and no.”

“I feel bad I never liked her that much.”

“Don’t feel bad about your feelings. As long as you try to be understanding and sympathetic to others, that’s all I’d ask. But we can’t always control what we feel.”

“I kind of miss Dan,” he said. “He seemed like a good guy. Until he hit you, I mean.”

“He has his virtues. Now come on and get ready.”

“It was so cool when he showed us his gun.”

“Actually, that was kind of a dick move.”

“A what?”

“I mean it wasn’t cool.”

“I think Storey is freaked-out,” Jeremy said.

“About the Hilary thing?”

“Yeah.”

“Why? Has she said anything to you?”

“Not really. Just a few things.”

Before he could pursue this, Storey herself was right beside him. “We are going to be totally late. Is Jeremy still pretending to be wounded?”

It was true: He’d been milking his appendix scar for all it was worth this last week, and it hadn’t taken Storey long to lose patience.

He got them into the elevator with just a few minutes till the bell and hurried them down the block, scolding Jeremy when he tried to pet a passing fox terrier tethered to a pretty young redhead Russell noticed frequently at this hour. When they arrived at the school yard, it was empty, and Storey was distraught; she was a fastidious and law-abiding citizen who dreaded violating rules or schedules, whereas her brother was essentially an anarchist.

He led both children to their homeroom, the smell of the corridors almost overwhelming him with sense memories, that compound of linoleum, art supplies, ammonia, snacks and childish effluvia unique to elementary schools, so reminiscent of his own, a thousand miles and four decades away in Michigan.

Back outside, a stiff breeze off of the Hudson helped propel him along Chambers to the subway. Going down the steps, he encountered many trolls and one princess, a lovely creature in a white leather jacket whose porcelain face was framed by shiny blue-black tresses. He kept waiting to become inured to beautiful strangers, who seemed even more abundant now than when he’d first arrived in the city, yet his heart always leapt and his imagination wove unlikely narratives of erotic encounters and alternative lives. Somewhere in the metropolis was a Russell Calloway whose life was devoted to seduction. In this case, he courted and bedded the white leather angel, moved into her penthouse on Broome Street, became very rich in some undefined enterprise and retired from publishing to travel the world with her, all in the distance between Chambers and Canal Streets, where she rose from her seat and got off the train, while he continued on to 14th.

Ascending to the sidewalk, he trudged past the Starbucks on Eighth Avenue, past his office and up Ninth Avenue to the Chelsea Market on Fifteenth, entering the redolent brick cave lined with bakeries and restaurants — which had once, long ago, been a Nabisco biscuit factory before it had been abandoned to become a refuge for the homeless and derelict, a shooting gallery where Jeff Pierce went to score heroin — then waiting at the counter with Food Network execs for his latte, a filigreed heart inscribed in the foam. He wouldn’t necessarily want anyone to know that he added three blocks to his morning commute because he thought this was the best coffee in the city, certainly not his wife, who already thought his epicureanism was some kind of sickness.

Walking back to the office, he unlocked the front door and stooped to scoop up three take-out menus and a brochure advertising the latest local manicure parlor. All this paper was destined for the trash, and yet when he thought about it, as he did now, he found it touching that these small businesses were popping up and reaching out to him, a Chinese or Korean immigrant with his life savings on the line, in hock to some murderous criminal who’d smuggled him into the country. And he could empathize because he, too, was a small businessman, with all his paltry capital invested in his company, only two or three flops away from financial peril, if not outright ruin. This morning he was particularly susceptible to intimations of doom because he was short on sleep and slightly hungover and especially because he was about to take the biggest risk of his career.