Jay McInerney - Bright, Precious Days

The bumpy touchdown came as a blessed relief.

“Welcome to Vermont,” Luke said, emerging from the cockpit.

“I thought we were going to die.”

“What, that little patch of turbulence?”

“Were you always this—”

“ Unflappable? ”

“I was going to say reckless. Or maybe heedless. I was going to say ‘Were you always such a reckless asshole?’ ” Even as she said this, she remembered that he’d run toward the towers that day while others were running away.

“If I were risk-averse, I’m sure my life would be very different,” he said with evident relish.

—

An SUV was waiting for them just beyond the ramp. Luke signed for it, shook hands with the pilot and tipped the man who loaded their bags into the back.

“Are you ever going to tell me exactly where the hell we’re going?” she said as they drove out through the gate.

“Wouldn’t you rather be surprised?”

“I guess I’m not really an adventurer at heart. I like to know what’s coming around the corner.”

“Well, I’m grateful that you were adventurous enough to come along with me.”

“It’s totally out of character, I assure you.”

“Good.”

“Can you at least tell me what that big obelisk was that I saw while I was praying for my life to be spared? Or was that a hallucination?”

“That was a monument built to commemorate the Battle of Bennington during the Revolutionary War.”

“I got into Bennington,” she said, “but I decided it was a little too far-out for me.”

“I dated a Bennington girl once,” Luke said. “She was a real wildcat.”

“I want to hear about all the other girls in your life.”

“It’s not like this huge list.”

“Then it’ll be easy for you to tell me.”

“I don’t pretend to be an expert, but in my experience when women say they want to hear about their romantic predecessors, they don’t really mean it.”

“I’m not like those other bitches,” she said.

“Indeed you’re not.”

—

After driving south through the valley for ten minutes, they got off the highway and followed a road up into the hills, turning into a long driveway that culminated in a rambling white farmhouse with green shutters that crowned a snowy hilltop. A decrepit red gambrel-roofed barn came into view behind the house as they shimmied up the driveway, the tires spinning and spitting snow.

“I can only assume you have a golden retriever waiting to complete the picture.”

“I don’t even know if you’re a dog person.”

“I’m a ferret person, actually. Though I grew up with terriers.”

“I didn’t know there were ferret people.”

“We like to root around, uncovering things and bringing them to light.”

He pulled up in front of the house and said, “Shall I carry you over the threshold?”

“That might be premature. Where are we, anyway?”

“Pownal, Vermont. A friend’s house.”

“It looks as if we’ll have plenty of privacy.”

The interior had a shambolic, layered quality that suggested decades of slow accretion, faded and frayed carpets, surfaces covered with books and magazines and journals, shelves sagging with the weight of more books, treasures and oddities, split logs and newspapers stacked beside the brick fireplace. Off the living room was a small overstuffed library. The master bedroom had a fireplace, wallpaper in a trellis and vine pattern, a telescope and a four-poster bed that almost touched the low, sagging ceiling.

“I love this place,” Corrine said.

“It belongs to my favorite history professor. I’ve been visiting for years. He’s in an assisted-living facility in Williamstown now, about ten miles down the road.”

“I forgot you went to Williams.”

“But I remember your telling me about a weekend you spent there your sophomore year.”

“God, yes. Tod Baker, homecoming weekend, 1977. Did I really tell you about that?”

“You did.”

“And you thought it would be romantic for me to revisit the scene of my humiliation?”

He suddenly looked worried. “As I recall, it sounded idyllic.”

“Well, yes, except for the part where I puked in his lap.”

“You neglected to mention that detail.”

“But otherwise, yes, idyllic.”

—

Luke had packed two coolers of food, and that night, while she sneaked off to the library to call home, he laid out a spread of caviar and foie gras and cheese, along with an array of premade salads. “I don’t actually cook,” he said when she came into the kitchen and found this feast laid out on the table.

“Thank God for that,” she said, kissing him.

Sex with Luke had been thrilling from the beginning, but she’d never felt so adventurous or voracious as she did over the next forty-eight hours. Her ardor was informed by a sense of transience, an awareness not only of the hours ticking away on the hilltop but of the gradually unwinding spring of her own vitality. She would probably never feel this kind of desire again; with Russell she had far too much history to ever again experience the thrill of discovery. She had a fervent desire to do everything with Luke, to have a store of memories to draw on in the cold nights to come.

That night, she lay back on the bed as he started to play with her, and gently guided his hand. She was amazed how quickly she came under the gentle thrum of his finger. As the tremors subsided, she released her grip on his forearm and moved her hand down his body. Finding him thoroughly hard, she was seized with a sudden inspiration. “I want you to put it in my ass.”

This was not a sentence she’d ever uttered before, and she was only slightly less surprised than he was, although he didn’t object or try to debate the point. She reached over to the bedside table for the bottle of Kiehl’s body lotion.

She tried to imagine it from his point of view as he slowly advanced, the deferral of gratification as he paused and gently pressed again, pausing at her sudden intakes of breath.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes,” she said.

It must have been difficult for him to go so slowly when his instinct was to thrust ahead. There was a last spasm of painful resistance and then suddenly she yielded and he was inside of her and the pain metamorphosed into something that increasingly resembled pleasure. She hadn’t even been sure that she would enjoy this, her initial desire more symbolic than physical. It had been years, a few times long ago when she and Russell were new, but she wanted to do this with him, to have this intimacy, and now she felt more connected to him than ever and wanted to always remember this feeling.

“I want to remember what you smell like,” she said, lying on his chest afterward.

“I’m right here,” he said. “No remembering required.”

But perversely, she felt the night and the weekend slipping away. She couldn’t help it — she was already thinking ahead to missing him later.

That morning, she woke to the smell of bacon frying, the bed beside her empty. Please God — not another man who wants to feed me breakfast, she thought, although on second thought she realized she was actually hungry. She put on the silk robe she’d packed, peed, brushed her teeth and hair, dabbed on some lip gloss. Seeing his Dopp kit open on the sink, she couldn’t resist glancing at its contents, particularly the prescription bottles: Lipitor, Ambien, Cialis and Adderall. She couldn’t help being slightly disappointed about the Cialis, preferring to imagine that his sexual stamina was a tribute to her, but the Adderall was more surprising. Half the kids in Manhattan were taking it for attention deficit disorder, real or alleged, the other half for weight loss or the sheer speedy buzz of it. Was he taking it to treat himself or to fuel himself? Did it matter? ADD would certainly explain some of his tics, his sometimes manic demeanor.