Jay McInerney - Bright, Precious Days

Much as Storey had liked Napoleon Dynamite and its supernerd protagonist, she didn’t want to go. It always made her sad to see wild animals in captivity. Corrine didn’t bother to point out that the liger wasn’t technically a wild animal, since she had only the two tickets. She wondered, too, if there wasn’t another point of reference in Storey’s refusal; she’d entered a stage of acute social sensitivity, having recently complained about the “snotty UES rich kids” she’d encountered at a birthday party, and the Wildlife Society event would be largely composed of that species. Jeremy, by contrast, was excited from a zoological standpoint and relatively oblivious to the sociological implications. He was lying in bed with his laptop, his neck propped up on a pillow, reading everything he could find online. “It doesn’t say whether they’re dangerous or not.”

“Well, I assume this one isn’t too dangerous, or they probably wouldn’t be bringing it into somebody’s living room.”

He didn’t seem entirely satisfied with the idea of a harmless liger. “Lions are dangerous, and tigers definitely are.”

“Well, personally I’m going to sit as far away as possible.”

“I might sit close to it,” Jeremy ventured.

“Don’t blame me if you both get eaten,” Storey said.

“No one’s going to get eaten,” Corrine said.

“I’ll just stay home and watch Napoleon Dynamite instead” was Storey’s final comment.

—

Spring had finally made its debut, and while Corrine had planned to take the subway, it seemed a pity to go underground, given this unaccustomed warmth and sunshine, so she grabbed a passing cab, reasoning that she’d already saved two grand on the tickets.

When they arrived at the town house, a Beaux Arts limestone edifice designed by McKim, Mead & White just a door in from Fifth Avenue and the park, Corrine realized that she’d been here once before, years ago — a wild night back in the eighties. Minky, née Hortense, was a famous debutante who’d acquired her nickname shortly after she came out at the age of seventeen and Town & Country announced that she owned twenty-three fur coats. She threw infamous parties and eventually spent the latter part of the eighties in rehab. After one of her stints at Silver Meadows, she publicly renounced her fur habit, selling off her coats at a well-publicized auction at Christie’s and giving the proceeds to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. She’d since settled into harmless modes of eccentricity, collecting and discarding exotic husbands — an Argentinian polo player, a Russian ballet dancer and an Italian/Uruguayan rancher — while devoting herself increasingly to the welfare of animals. In addition to the Wildlife Society, she sat on the boards of the Central Park Zoo and the ASPCA and was the sole benefactor of an elephant sanctuary in Tennessee and a turtle refuge in Palm Springs.

A lugubrious young Asian man in a black Nehru suit answered the door and beckoned them inside. The town house of her memory had been largely obliterated by a recent renovation, the gilt and ormolu stripped down and plastered over. In place of the former baroque splendor was a Zen temple with an ornamental pool fed by a trickling bamboo spout on one side of the entry hall, flanked on the other by a Ginkaku-ji-style rock garden, a stark rectangle blanketed with polished black stones the size of flattened quail eggs. A Greek kouros stood in an alcove, a torso mounted on a steel rod, sans arms and legs and head, the lack of appendages in keeping with the minimalism of the decor, although the penis had somehow survived the millennia. Directly across from the statue was a Picasso from the painter’s classicist period, a rendering of a surreally distorted white sculptural figure against a milky blue background. Otherwise, the space was unembellished, a vast expanse of white wall and black marble floor, whose owner seemed to be boasting that empty space was the ultimate extravagance in this costly precinct of this expensive city. In the eighties the entire neighborhood had been decorated like Versailles, but now, it seemed to Corrine, the au courant aesthetic model was the downtown loft, as if someone up here had noticed or at least suspected that the zeitgeist had moved south. The sole architectural feature of the entire floor was a massive rough-hewn staircase forged out of bronze, which seemed to dare the intrepid visitor to explore the upper reaches of the house. The man in black pointed out that there was also the option of an elevator at the far end of the hall.

Corrine didn’t choose her route fast enough to avoid Sasha McGavock, Luke’s ex, who came in right behind her, heels clicking on the marble floor, towing by the hand her six-year-old stepson, who, like a recalcitrant bulldog on a leash, was strenuously resisting forward motion. When she’d started her dalliance with Luke, Corrine had been inordinately curious about Sasha. She was fairly certain Sasha didn’t know she existed, but she’d followed her rival’s social progress in the years since their divorce, via the press and intermittent briefings from Casey, and it wasn’t unlike Sasha’s current march through the entry hall, a triumph of will over not-inconsiderable resistance. Her affair with the billionaire Bernie Melman, an open secret toward the end of her marriage, had ended in humiliating fashion. She’d confided to all of her friends that she fully expected him to initiate divorce proceedings against his wife once her own divorce from Luke was final. In the meantime, Melman’s wife decided to go public, slapping Sasha’s face in the dining room of Le Cirque at lunch while advising her to “stay the fuck away from my husband.” This confrontation brought joy not only to the wives of the community but also to hard-hearted gossip columnists, and the subsequent publicity seemed to mark a turning point in Bernie Melman’s attitude toward his wife and his mistress. In the days after the slapfest, photographs of the Melmans engaged in public displays of affection appeared in Women’s Wear Daily and the New York Post. Sasha compounded her disgrace by tearfully confronting Melman at the benefit for the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum — whose theme that year happened to be “Dangerous Liaisons”—and demanding to know why he hadn’t returned her calls, all this under the turned-up noses of Anna Wintour and Charlize Theron. Just when it seemed she had no choice but to get out of town, she appeared at the Robin Hood Gala on the arm of Nate Bronstein, who’d clashed with Melman on several corporate takeovers. Some were surprised that Bronstein would be interested in his enemy’s discarded mistress, but others, particularly some of his colleagues in finance, felt that in scooping up Sasha he’d shown a savvy sense of market timing, acquiring a blue-chip asset at a steep discount. And last year Sasha had closed the deal with Bronstein, though it was widely noted that she continued to use the name McGavock, which suggested to more than one commentator a reluctance to bear a Semitic surname.

Thankfully, she didn’t recognize Corrine — they’d met only once, in passing — and was fully engaged in the struggle to drag her stepson toward the stairs.

“I don’t want to see the tiger.”

“It’s not a tiger,” Sasha hissed. “It’s a liger. Like in that stupid movie.”

Jeremy observed the younger boy with an air of sympathetic condescension. “It’s okay,” he said. “There’s actually nothing to be scared about.”

Not true, thought Corrine. That little boy had plenty of reasons to be scared.

Upstairs, a flock of mothers and their young chattered en masse in the drawing room. As an interloper from downtown, Corrine was ill-equipped to decode the room and plumb the levels of intrigue in this gathering, although she did identify among them the much-photographed first and second wives of a hedge fund manager whose divorce had been chronicled in the columns — the new young wife the center of an enthusiastic audience, chattering like grackles, the old one huddled resentfully with a single companion at the outer edge of the scrum.