Jay McInerney - Bright, Precious Days

They flee from me that sometime did me seek

With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.

I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,

That now are wild and do not remember

That sometime they put themself in danger

To take bread at my hand; and now they range,

Busily seeking with a continual change.

Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise

Twenty times better; but once in special,

In thin array after a pleasant guise,

When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,

And she me caught in her arms long and small;

Therewithall sweetly did me kiss

And softly said, “Dear heart, how like you this?”

It was no dream: I lay broad waking.

But all is turned thorough my gentleness

Into a strange fashion of forsaking;

And I have leave to go of her goodness,

And she also, to use newfangleness.

But since that I so kindly am served

I would fain know what she hath deserved.

The second book was a battered old hardcover without dust jacket, a 1959 edition of a medieval text, The Art of Courtly Love, by Andreas Capellanus, wherein a letter addressed “To the illustrious and wise woman M, Countess of Champagne” was underlined. She didn’t need to reread the letter, having done so many times. Two nobles, a man and woman, supposedly wrote it in order to pose a question: whether true love can exist between husband and wife, and whether lovers have any right to be jealous of spouses. To which the countess answered, at some length, that love by definition cannot obtain between man and wife, who are duty-bound to each other, but only between lovers, who choose each other freely, and whose jealousy is a concomitant of their love. Jeff had thought this very clever, and apposite, at the time, a few months after Corrine married Russell. It seemed almost ridiculous, given the situation, the friendship between the two men, and their mutual desire for Corrine, that Jeff’s major was Elizabethan literature, his senior thesis about the conventions of courtly love. As events unfolded later, it seemed incredibly touching that he’d chosen to write about the antique notion of a love both illicit and spiritually elevating, a love that existed outside the legal sphere of marriage. Did he see himself even then as her vassal, her knight?

Back in her school days, she would not have believed it was possible to love two people, but she had learned that it was. And the sadder truth was that possession blunted desire, while the unattainable lover shimmered at the edge of the mind like a brilliant star, festered in the heart like a shard of crystal.

IT HAD ALMOST BEEN PERFECT, Washington thought, this thing with Casey. They were both happily married — or at least he was, and certainly she was conveniently married, with no desire to alter her domestic arrangements, or to abandon her rarefied social and economic spheres.

He had experienced less convenient situations — the single girls who started out seeming carefree but gradually started whining about spending Valentine’s Day on their own and eventually threatening to call his wife. The tears in restaurants, the tantrums on street corners, the unannounced appearances at the office. The eventual phone calls to his apartment, his home, where he lived with his family. Yes, Washington could honestly say he’d paid for his sins. He liked to believe he had pretty good radar for crazy, but the equipment sometimes malfunctioned due to libidinal interference. Generally speaking, the crazier the babe, the better the sex. Crazy was freaky. Crazy was hot. And it was hard to walk away from that, or to rule it out in advance.

Casey, though eminently sensible and conventional in many regards, was a fucking demon in the sack, a lioness of desire. Any prejudicial stereotypes he might have entertained about the frigidity of rich WASP women went right out the window the first time Casey hauled him into a bathroom stall at the Surf Club back in the eighties. He was drunk and high, but she was voracious, and wasn’t about to admit that failure was an option, and after a few minutes he had the illusion that he was going to be swallowed whole, which wouldn’t have been a bad way to go, really, crotch-first into eternity. They’d been on and off ever since, sometimes going years between intimate encounters, but the sexual chemistry remained so potent that they kept coming back, and over the last few months, after five years of abstinence, they were making up for lost time, fucking like teenagers; the illicit nature of their affair, the enforced separations, and the need for secrecy stoking their desire. There was nothing like strange, after all. He’d heard some men express a preference for home cooking, but Washington loved dining out.

And yet, lately, he’d found himself wondering if he wasn’t getting too old for this shit. The last time he found himself undressing in her presence, he’d actually felt a brief twinge of conscience, a kind of yearning to do the right thing, although Casey had quickly obliterated these thoughts with action. Her latest plan was positively freaky. When she found out that they were both attending the Nourish New York benefit at the Waldorf, she’d decided to take a room there. “We arrange a time, during cocktails. You excuse yourself, I excuse myself, we meet upstairs, fuck our brains out and return to our respective spouses,” she said a week before the benefit, when they were lying in a midday postcoital tangle of sheets at the Lowell, a small, expensive hotel they’d been using like a private club for a while now. He’d felt like a trespasser, a criminal, the first time he stopped at the front desk and said he was meeting Casey Reynes. He thought it was crazy for her to book under her own name, but she said Tom never looked at the Visa bill. He’d been lying in bed, wondering idly how much the room cost, when she launched her proposal to spice up Corrine’s benefit.

“Damn, you’re sick,” Washington said.

“And you love it,” she said, slapping his thigh beneath the sheets.

He knew her well enough to know that the idea of the spouses downstairs was part of the thrill. It was completely perverse if you thought about it, but he was not immune to the buzz; betrayal was an aphrodisiac unto itself and, as with all rushes, the dose of the drug had to be raised, continually, in order to maintain the high. The near presence of her husband and his wife, downstairs in the ballroom, oblivious, was the Spanish fly in this particular scenario.

“It is outrageous,” she said, “but at the same time it’s foolproof. I sometimes worry about private detectives — I mean, I don’t really have any reason to think Tom suspects anything, but practically everybody uses them sooner or later. The beauty of this is, there’s no chance of his having me followed when I’m actually with him.”

“Hold on a fucking minute,” Washington said. “Rewind. You suspect you’re being followed by detectives? And you’re just telling me now?” In the midst of his panic, he was hearing Elvis Costello’s “Watching the Detectives,” part of the sound track of his early days in Manhattan.

“It’s not that I suspect it so much as I want to be totally careful. Amanda Giles was carrying on with her yoga instructor—”

“ ‘Carrying on’? What kind of euphemism is that?” It amazed him that a girl who had been screaming “Fuck my hungry pussy” ten minutes before could suddenly resort to such a genteel locution.

“All right, she was fucking her yoga instructor. And the next thing she knows, her husband’s showing her pictures of herself and Swami Tommy in some supertantric positions that the authors of the Kama Sutra hadn’t even thought of.”