Jay McInerney - Bright, Precious Days

“Thanks, man. Look, I’m sorry for snappin’ at you like that. I was just gettin’ frustrated.”

“That’s okay,” Russell said, although a certain formality set in between them, Jack at several points soliciting his advice, Russell congratulating him on each fish he brought to the boat. At the end of the day, at the dock, they both asked Deke to join them for dinner at their hotel, a former crash pad for commercial fishermen and hookers that had been renovated, and redecorated with a surfing theme. Russell convinced the chef to cook Jack’s bass, and Deke held forth on rock-and-roll excess, all the compliant beauties and tequila sunrises on Mustique and mountains of glistening blue-flake Colombian cocaine. He became rhapsodic on this last subject. “It was the color of topaz, as iridescent as a fresh-caught false albacore,” he said. “It was the color of the eyes of the first girl I ever slept with, a Swedish exchange student who appeared like an angel in my high school and, for some reason I will never understand, chose to bestow her gloriousness upon me. It was the color of munificence.”

This rhapsody reminded Russell of a passage from Sheilah Graham’s book about Scott Fitzgerald, in which everything about the author, from his eyes to his lips, was described as being blue.

“Don’t you miss it?” Jack asked, sipping his fifth vodka and soda.

“Miss what?”

“You know. The drugs. The life.”

“Only every fucking day,” he said, looking mournfully at his Diet Coke, his own blue eyes glazed and shiny like ponds in the desert landscape of his ruddy face. “You never lose the desire, the compulsion, the yearning. Instead, I go to a meeting every day.”

As if to compensate for Deke’s sobriety, Russell and Jack drank far too much, and passed out almost simultaneously in the room with twin beds, beneath vintage black-and-white photos of surfers in Maui.

The next morning, at breakfast, they eventually found a subject of conversation in their guide.

“Fuckin’ guy’s like the bard of cocaine,” Jack said. “If the Medellín cartel ever needs an ad campaign, I got the man for the job.”

“I’m still trying to decide what made him harder, the coke or the Swedish girl.”

“Oh, I can tell you that. It was for sure the coke.”

On the train back to Manhattan, Jack broke a long silence to tell Russell that he’d signed on with Martin Briskin. Up until this point, Jack hadn’t felt the need for an agent, letting Russell handle rights on the first book. While it was inevitable that Jack would sign up with someone, Russell couldn’t help feeling a little put out, not least because Jack had picked the great white shark of literary agents, the man who treated publishers as mortal enemies.

“Briskin’s one of the top guys, for sure,” he said.

“I just got a lot comin’ at me,” Jack said.

“I understand.” Perfectly reasonable — but still it felt like the end of something. For almost two years, Russell had been Jack’s advocate, his liaison to publishing and New York and the wider world beyond.

“He got The New Yorker to take a story. It’s coming out next month.”

“What story?”

“A new one. You haven’t seen it.”

Russell sat back, absorbing this information. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks.”

“Next month?”

“Yup.”

“Do you want me to take a look at it?”

“I’ll for sure send you an advance copy.”

Up to this point, Russell had placed most of Jack’s stories in literary magazines; The New Yorker had rejected two of them. And, more significantly, he’d edited all of them before they were submitted.

“Great fishin’,” Jack said, as they parted on the platform at Penn Station.

“It’s something special,” Russell said.

“So I hope you’re okay with the Briskin thing.”

“I can’t say he’s my favorite agent. But I’m happy for you about The New Yorker. I just would have loved to have seen the story before he sent it out.”

“I needed to do it myself,” Jack said. “I needed it to be mine.”

“Well, of course. All the stories have been yours.”

“But I needed it to be really mine, to sound like me. Sometimes I feel like you’re manicurin’ my prose. Makin’ it yours.”

“I want it to sound like you. You’ve got a voice — not that many people do. The last thing I want to do is stifle it. I’m just trying to make sure the voice comes through. Clear away the clutter.”

“If you ever saw the trailer I grew up in, you’d know that clutter’s part of my deal. I’m just sayin’ when you cut three sentences out of a paragraph—”

“It’s just a suggestion. You can always ignore it.”

“It’s not that easy. You’re this big-deal New York fuckin’ editor. I’m a hick from the sticks. And I have fuckin’ issues with authority figures, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“I’m sorry. I guess I didn’t know you felt that way.”

“Don’t get me wrong, Russell. I’m grateful as hell for everything you’ve done.”

“That sounds like the prelude to a kiss-off.”

“No. I just need you to let me be myself.”

“I thought I had.”

“You’ve been great, man. You believed in me when nobody else did.”

“I still do.”

They hugged awkwardly.

“Okay,” Jack said. “We good?”

Russell nodded. He felt mournful; it was the end of something. But there was nothing to be done. He had often imagined that someday his children would make him feel this way — that all his efforts to launch them into the world would be appreciated but, in the end, unwanted.

“Share a cab downtown?” Jack asked.

“Sure,” Russell said, realizing that for perhaps the first time in their association he had no idea where Jack was staying or with whom.

—

The next day he got a call from Steve Israel, a rare book dealer who’d been a class ahead of him at Brown. Steve had turned his English lit degree into a lucrative business. It amazed and occasionally irritated Russell that selling first editions of Hemingway and Joyce had enabled Steve to buy a brownstone on the Upper West Side.

“Yesterday I got a call I thought would interest you,” he said. “Bookseller in Nashville says he has the original manuscript of Jack Carson’s short story collection, heavily annotated with your notes.”

“Where the hell did he get it?” Russell asked.

“I was a little suspicious, but he claims he bought it directly from your boy. Apparently, he needed some quick cash.”

“Oh Jesus. What do you think the guy paid?”

“I can tell you what he wants — five thousand.”

“That sounds a little high.”

“Not if Jack wins the National Book Award, which I hear is possible. Plus, the extent of your annotation makes it a historically interesting document.”

“Well, I don’t need the fucking thing.”

“I just thought I’d tell you it was out there. And I wanted to offer you first crack. Let me just say, as a friend, that he faxed me some pages and I found them fascinating. You have a reputation as a real blue pencil guy, but some people might find the extent of your work…well, almost a form of coauthorship.”

“What are you saying, Steve?”

“I’m just wondering if you want this floating around out there. Or if he does. Carson is on his way to becoming an important American author and skeptics might say this calls his achievement somewhat into question.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“Just trying to give you a heads-up here, Russell.”

“If I hadn’t known you all these years, I’d say it sounds like you’re trying to blackmail me.”

“I can’t even believe you’d use that word, Russell. I could sell this thing for a handsome profit with just one phone call. I called you first because I thought we were friends. And because I’m telling you I think you should consider getting this off the market.”