Jay McInerney - Bright, Precious Days

“ ‘Swami Tommy’?”

“Are you going to nitpick my language or listen to my story?”

“Actually, I liked it; I was just curious if that was really his name or your clever coinage.”

“Who knows what his name is? He’s the fucking yoga instructor.”

“Okay, good one. Proceed.”

“Thank you. But that’s basically the story. Blah blah blah, photographic evidence, notice of marital discord, divorce court, activate prenup infidelity clause with only one year to go before the five-year escalator clause kicks in. I’m just saying it’s foolish not to be careful. To watch one’s back, as it were.”

“Do you think there’s even a chance that he’s having you followed?”

“I’m just saying you can’t be too careful.”

“And would you call what you’re proposing careful ?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying. It’s genius.”

“It’s utterly twisted.”

“I thought you liked twisted.” She lowered her head and inserted her tongue into his ear.

“There’s freaky. And then there’s crazy.”

But he had to admit crazy was hot; it was the hottest. But twisted was the perfect signal to stop. To end it for good. Not that he relished telling her that.

—

She called him twice at work that week to try to talk him into changing his mind, but up in his office on the thirty-first floor, under the sickish fluorescent light, the idea did not seem any more sensible than it had wrapped in Frette sheets at the Lowell.

The night of the benefit, he felt incredibly nervous, suddenly uncertain of his composure in the event of an encounter between Veronica and Casey. He was hoping she’d given up on her plan by now; at any rate, he had no intention of participating.

His son, Mingus, in whose face he inevitably saw the lineaments of his mother at her most beautiful, protested their departure: “This is the third night you’ve been out this week.”

His sister said, “Caroline Cartwright says her parents go out every night.” Zora was enamored of this new friend, whose father ran a hedge fund. Next week she was flying to Palm Beach on the Cartwrights’ G5 for a sleepover birthday party.

“I’ll bet Caroline’s mom has a new dress every night,” Veronica said.

“I expect so,” Zora said haughtily, basking in the reflected glory, even her diction elevated by this grand association.

When Veronica had confessed to feeling self-conscious about wearing a dress that she’d already worn earlier this month, Washington put his foot in it by saying that no one would notice, which prompted her to give him a dirty look. All he meant was that it wasn’t as if either one of them appeared all that often in the party pages among the socialites and celebrities. She was especially skittish, he figured, because her firm was being honored with the Corporate Leadership Award tonight, Veronica herself having had a hand in directing some of the corporate tax write-off largesse to Corrine’s charity, and her boss of bosses would be in the room.

“Don’t give Rosalita a hard time,” she told the kids.

“And don’t call to complain if she doesn’t let you play Halo,” he added.

“Wash, I can’t find my phone. Will you call it?”

“You don’t need it; I’ve got mine.”

“You know I hate not having my phone.”

It’s true, he thought as he pressed her number. She had that maternal fear of being unreachable to an excessive degree, at least it seemed excessive to him, though as far as he could tell, nobody — man, woman or child — felt secure going anywhere without a phone these days. As he heard the ring tone on his end, her phone chirped from the couch, where they’d been watching the news.

“We won’t be late,” she said after recovering her precious phone and wedging it into the tiny crystal-studded Judith Leiber clutch that she’d bought at a silent auction at an earlier charity benefit, a bibelot shaped like a butterfly and just big enough for the phone and a lipstick, though not long enough for her reading glasses, which she asked Washington to carry.

Surveying his kingdom, which he was fond of saying looked like heaven as designed by a feminine disciple of Le Corbusier — a vast hardwood plain with rounded outcroppings of beige, black, and white furniture, and two beautiful beige children — he wondered why he didn’t stay home more often. He was feeling particularly vulnerable and nostalgic tonight. The prospect of encountering Casey had him rattled and made him more susceptible to domestic sentimentality. He wanted to be a good guy, really he did. He was committed to future reform. He felt, much as Saint Augustine had in the years of debauchery and lechery before his conversion, theoretically willing but, practically, unready. Lord, save me, but not yet.

—

When they got to the Waldorf, he was in a quiet panic and immediately threw back two martinis, at which point his nerves started to settle. Veronica had just drifted off toward the auction tables to talk to a friend when he spotted Casey bearing down on him.

“Hello, lover.” She was looking pretty delicious in a very formfitting shiny turquoise satin gown. It was automatic, or perhaps autonomic, the stirring in the groin, the surge of warmth that suffused him at the sight of her. Damned if he wasn’t getting a hard-on.

“Good evening,” he said, trying to maintain his cool as he thrust his right hand into his pocket to cover the erection. “I like your dress.”

“Why, thank you,” she said. “Given the way it fits, there wasn’t any room for undergarments, I’m afraid.”

“Yes, I can see that.”

“Enjoying yourself?”

“It’s a wonderful cause,” he said, playing hard to get.

“What is?”

“Feeding the hungry. Isn’t that why we’re here?”

“I’m feeling a certain hunger myself.” She leaned forward, coming in close to his shoulder. “Actually, I’m here to fuck you. Room 308. I’ll be there in three minutes.”

She seemed confident of his complicity, which sort of bugged him, but she looked so fucking good, and she was so utterly, sluttishly shameless, that he realized at that moment he would follow her, even as he vowed that this would be the last time. It felt as if he had no choice in the matter. The die had been cast millions of years ago. Evolution. The instinctive drive to spread genes as widely as possible, no matter that reproduction was not part of his conscious program tonight. As Casey shimmied toward the elevators, he felt biologically programmed to follow. He clocked Veronica moving down the auction table with her friend Becky Fiers, admiring the wares, the donated handbags and jewelry and furs, before following his mistress.

Upstairs, the door was ajar; he tapped on it, and, getting no response, entered cautiously. Casey leapt on him from behind the door, scaring the shit out of him.

“Jesus!”

She shoved her tongue in his mouth before he could say more and groped his crotch, squeezing his cell phone in his pocket before moving on to her intended target. After what might have been seconds or minutes of mutual kneading, he carried her over to the bed and dropped her on it.

“Unzip my dress and put that big cock inside of me,” she demanded, rolling over on her side to facilitate the process and then sliding out of her dress; pushing up his cummerbund and unzipping his trousers, reaching in and finding the item in question, which emerged briefly before disappearing into her mouth.

Rising eventually from her knees, she pushed him down on the bed and jumped on top of him. “Fuck me deep and hard!”

He barely managed to fulfill her command before the whole thing was over, Casey shouting “Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me” as he exploded inside of her, his ardor heightened by fear. Quick as he’d been, he’d been worried even before he finished about the time, and whether his absence would be noticed.