Jay McInerney - Bright, Precious Days

She shrugged, hoping to convey indifference to his opinion, although, in fact, she did want him to know she wasn’t as straight and as predictable as he imagined. She could be bad — she was bad, and sometimes she felt like such a fucking impostor. She didn’t want to be the perennial good girl, the doting mother and faithful wife. Washington would understand. She almost wanted to tell him about Luke, that she wasn’t just some prude in a plaid skirt and penny loafers. She, too, had her secret desires and sins. Who better to confide a crime to than a serial criminal? But of course she couldn’t.

“Where’s Veronica?” she asked, seeing her husband slaloming awkwardly toward them through the crowd.

“At the office, I expect. And here’s your husband. The phrase ‘bull in a china shop’ yet again comes to mind,” Washington said as they watched Russell apologize to an art lover in a fedora whom he’d elbowed sideways.

“I prefer to think of him as puppyish,” she said.

“It’s getting a little late in the day for that fucking analogy,” Washington said before gripping Russell’s hand. “Don’t see you at many art openings, Crash.”

“A lot of Tony’s art has captions,” Corrine said. “Russell prefers his art with text.” Actually, she knew, it was Duplex’s connection with Jeff that had sparked Russell’s interest. When he died, they were supposedly working on a project together.

Washington led them all into the second, slightly less crowded room of the gallery, where the older paintings — the ones that they’d seen and taken for granted in their youth — were hanging. The earliest had been rescued, or stolen, from the street — from lampposts and windows and the boarded walls of construction sites. Colorful figurative cartoons complete with captions.

“I used to see these fucking things plastered all over the subway stations,” Russell said wistfully.

Corrine didn’t herself remember any such thing, but she recognized some of the images, including the iconic EAT THE RICH painting, which featured a skeleton attacking a top-hatted pig in a tuxedo with a giant knife and fork. And three versions of the ENJOY COKE series, showing a young man with a Colt.45 jammed in his nostril. Duplex’s iconography and his technique had become more subtle and refined as the eighties progressed and his work moved indoors to the walls of galleries and collectors’ lofts without necessarily losing its exuberance. The captions became more enigmatic, at least for a while, the brushwork more nuanced, the palette more complex. And suddenly she came across a canvas depicting a man and a woman separated by the words YOU WERE RIGHT. SORRY. It was similar to the canvas Jeff had given her long ago, which was presumably still in the closet at her mother’s house, and which, it seemed, might actually be worth something.

Standing in front of the painting, she registered a disturbance in the buzz of voices in the next gallery, a spike in volume and intensity, and turned to look just as a man with a bandanna covering his face like an outlaw in an old Western movie charged into the room and looked around before running toward them, holding some kind of cylinder in front of him, taking aim at the first ENJOY COKE painting, which suddenly exploded with a new color scheme — and seemed to bleed as he sprayed an unreadable cursive symbol on the painting. She realized that the cylinder was a can of spray paint and that the man was marking the canvas, appropriating it for himself, that the lightninglike mark was his signature, his tag, if not his name.

He dodged around Corrine when a beefy blazered man lunged for him, using Russell as a human shield, shoving him at the security guard and breaking for the exit. A second guard suddenly appeared in his path and wrestled him down below her sight line.

“Well, that seals it,” Washington said. “Tony Duplex is back, baby.”

“Was that part of the show?” asked a young woman behind them.

“It is now,” Wash said as the two security guards hustled the spray painter into the main room.

“You don’t think it was planned?” Corrine said.

“Well, far be it from me to be cynical, but whether it was or whether it wasn’t, I’d guess that Arkadian’s not at all unhappy about it.”

“How much are Tony’s paintings going for, anyway?”

“After this, probably twice what they were going for yesterday.”

—

It soon became apparent that they’d shared front-row seats at the event of the season. Somehow Russell ended up getting interviewed by Entertainment Tonight. Facts and rumors were being traded like especially tasty canapés. The party had acquired a new energy, at once both festive and valedictory, but except for the artist himself, who appeared genuinely upset about the defacement of his painting, the former note seemed dominant, the crowd reacting in a manner that might have reminded an outside observer of hometown fans who’d just witnessed a great sporting victory, although a different observer might have guessed that the giddiness of those in the gallery resembled the relief of witnesses who had been passed over by a catastrophe, a tornado, say, that had wiped out several buildings without casualties, and the party certainly would have lasted well into the night if the Pinot Grigio and Prosecco hadn’t run out after an hour. Eventually it flickered out, only to flare up again at Bottino, the art-world cantina on Tenth Avenue, and later just a few blocks away at Bungalow 8. Russell and Corrine returned home to the kids, but he got a call from Washington a few hours later, summoning him to the after-party, which he pretended to be reluctant to attend, before eventually deciding that his friend probably needed the company, then returning finally at two-thirty, smelling of booze and cigarettes, just like in the good old days.

WHEN THE PHONE RINGS HOURS AFTER Corrine fell asleep, she assumes it’s Russell, calling from the Frankfurt Book Fair. But the voice on the other end is Jeff’s, raspy and tense, telling her he really needs her help. She reminds him it’s two in the morning.

“I’m in kind of a jam, here, Corrine. I need money like yesterday. ”

“How much money?”

“A thousand as fast as you can get here.”

She doesn’t ask him if it can wait till morning, knowing that, at least in his mind, it can’t. It’s a lot of money — a month’s rent. She knows he’s in trouble, or he wouldn’t have called. She focuses on practicalities, reminding him of the two-hundred-dollar limit on ATM withdrawals and discovering, on searching her purse, that she has less cash than that on hand.

“Where are you?” she asks.

He gives her an address on the Lower East Side, a quadrant of Manhattan she’s never set foot in during her three-year tenure in the city.

But she does have her rainy day fund, an emergency stash of twenty-dollar gold pieces her grandfather had given her for her eighteenth birthday. He’d told her not to tell anyone, to save them until the day she really needed them. She gets dressed, descends in the elevator, and nods at the startled doorman; it’s a crisp October night adorned by a gibbous moon. At the Chase Manhattan on Second Avenue, she withdraws her limit. The first cab refuses to take her. “Ain’t going down there this time of night,” the driver says. “That’s the fucking DMZ.”

The second cabbie is skeptical, but he sets off without comment. Eventually he asks, “What’s that address? You going to that club, what’s it called, Kill the Robots?”

She shrugs. “I don’t think so.” They finally find the number they’re looking for on a block of burned-out, boarded-up tenements. At street level the boards and the bricks are festooned with colorful graffiti. The sidewalk is buckled, the street deserted. The address is painted on a piece of plywood covering the windows of a downstairs storefront, which, like the rest of the block, appears desolate and abandoned except for the anomaly of a shiny heavy steel door. The driver shakes his head and looks at her ruefully, as if giving her a chance to change her mind. She almost loses heart; it’s the most frightening corner of the city she’s ever seen and she can’t imagine walking out of here unmolested. The cabbie tells her he’ll wait while she tries the door.