Jay McInerney - Bright, Precious Days

He wasn’t even sure why he was arguing the case for staying in the Cape, although certainly the foundation did have something to do with this. It made him feel needed and useful in a way that he hadn’t felt before; he’d single-handedly brought fresh water, a new school and a clinic to the township down the road. On the other hand, he’d never felt the same enthusiasm for this place since the accident. He’d grown weary of his whole African adventure.

He knew he was being reflexively contrarian. If Giselle had been dead set on staying in her homeland, he might well have been arguing the other side. In fact, he was ready to go home, but not with her.

“I don’t want to wait any longer,” she said, turning to face him and putting her arms on his shoulders. “I want a family. I want a baby. I don’t know what you’re waiting for, but I know you haven’t made love to me in almost two weeks.” Her eyes suddenly welled with tears. “I’m not sure if it’s because you don’t find me attractive anymore, or if you’re afraid I’ll get pregnant. But I can’t go on like this.”

He climbed into the bed beside her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I got all caught up in the harvest. And then Ashley was having all that trouble at school.”

“Aren’t you attracted to me anymore?”

“Of course I am. You’re one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen.”

“Are you worried I’ll get pregnant?”

“Maybe a little.”

“Don’t you want a family?”

“I just need to get used to the idea.”

“That was what we always talked about.” She was sobbing now, and he found it impossible to speak honestly with her. If he were truly honest with himself, he would have to say that he didn’t want to be a father again, that he hoped the issue might be equivocated indefinitely, but she was determined to force his hand. Until he had finally resolved his feelings for Corrine, he couldn’t possibly make her pregnant. Nor could he keep denying her forever, and his desire to postpone the reckoning, combined with genuine regret and even love, evolved almost imperceptibly from comforting her into gestures of stimulation, her sobbing transformed to moaning as she thrashed off his belt and trousers, his reservations and scruples melting away as he thrust himself inside her.

He woke shortly after dawn and left his wife sleeping, dressed and took his coffee out to the patio, looking out over the valley, the golden vineyards spilling down to the Onrust River and the rusty mountains rising up to the north. A small troop of baboons ambled up the service road before disappearing into the vines. There was a slight chill in the air, the coffee cup throwing a faint nimbus of steam. At this moment it was hard to credit any of last night’s anxieties.

He went down to the chicken yard and picked up five eggs, two brown, two small white eggs from the bantams and one a faint, ghostly blue. In the kitchen he fried them and cooked sausages, then took a tray into Giselle, who stirred and smiled up at him, seeming to float on the feather bed as if on a cloud of postcoital serenity.

—

She sat up and settled the tray on her lap, delicately selected a sausage and lifted it to her lips, nibbling teasingly.

Having long since emerged from the spell of the bedroom, he felt the need to establish a more quotidian tone. “So what does your day look like?”

“I’m going down to the township to help the vet. We have dogs to dip and spay. And you? Will you come along?”

“Actually, I’ve got to wait here for that oenologist. He’s coming down from Stellenbosch to help us with a stuck fermentation. That last lot of Pinot won’t finish off. Seems our indigenous yeasts have gone on strike. They refuse to reproduce. We may have to play some Marvin Gaye and light some scented candles to get them in the mood.”

“Let’s eat in town tonight. I’m feeling a little cooped up.”

“All right.”

Later, he walked her to the door, kissed her good-bye.

“Will you think about what we talked about?” she said.

“Which part?”

“The part about starting a life away from here.”

“Okay,” he said, even as he wondered if he had the courage to ask her for a divorce. Suddenly it seemed the only honorable thing to do. He tried to dissociate this possible course of action from the thought of a possible future with Corrine. He certainly had no guarantee that she’d ever leave her own marriage, but he couldn’t in good conscience ask her to until he was free of his own. Could he do it? He felt exhilarated by the prospect, the glimpse of freedom on the horizon. But whatever happened, he realized, this chapter of his life was over.

“And about us having…children?”

“I’m sorry,” he said, sighing and looking away from her.

“What do you mean?

“I can’t do it,” he said. “I just can’t.”

OFF-SEASON, THE TRAIN OUT TO MONTAUK was almost empty, the faint residue of sweat and stale beer the only reminder of summer hordes.

They’d changed trains in Jamaica, Queens, and racketed along past the brick apartment buildings and the duplexes, tactfully dodging south of the bedroom communities of Long Island, the golfing and horseback-riding enclaves of the wealthy along the North Shore, rolling through the aluminum-sided postwar suburbs housing homicidal teens, philandering plumbers, dandy mobsters, as well as presumably others who never featured in the New York tabloids, the vegetation taking over as they got farther from the city and the homes of commuters were replaced by summer homes, passing through the leafy utopia of Southampton, with its shingled mansions behind privet hedges, shimmying onward to Bridgehampton and East Hampton and then out along the narrow isthmus of scrubby sand dunes that barely connected Montauk to the Hamptons.

Montauk was the farthest extremity of Long Island, the end of the road. It had once been an island and still felt remote from the gilded summer communities to the west. Each fall as the ocean cooled, the striped bass followed the churning biomass of baitfish pouring down the coast from Maine and Cape Cod across Long Island Sound to Montauk Point. Not long after the summer tourists departed, the town was taken over by campers, recreational vehicles and Jeeps sporting huge toothy tires, with custom rod and cooler racks mounted on their front grilles, piloted by sportsmen from mid-island and upstate and Jersey who stood on the beach throwing vaguely fishlike plastic plugs with fearsome treble hooks into the surf, apex predators in pursuit of Morone saxatilis.

The locals tended to be more enthusiastic about visiting fishermen than about the summer people; especially unwelcome in this Irish community were the hipsters, scruffy chic invaders from the East Village and Williamsburg attracted by the working-class authenticity their presence was diluting. Overlapping with this group, if not quite coextensive, were the surfers, who swarmed the beach at Ditch Plains every year in increasing numbers. Class warfare was palpably simmering in the salty air. As a fly fisherman, Russell would be suspect, an elitist with a wandlike rod throwing dainty feathered hooks. For his part, Jack wanted no part of this hoity-toitiness. Where he came from, dynamite was part of the fisherman’s arsenal, but in this case he would settle for a stout spinning rod.

Russell’s friend Deke was waiting for them at the station, slouching against his rust-pitted 60-series Land Cruiser, a relic of the Reagan administration; inevitably when Russell saw this dilapidated vehicle, he uttered the phrase “It’s morning in America.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Jack asked.

“A vapid slogan from my youth. Come meet Deke.”