Jay McInerney - Bright, Precious Days

“Genius idea.”

They could, of course, have had lunch in Manhattan, but wanting to see how he reacted, she took him instead to a Salvadoran restaurant on 149th that Doreen, one of the clients, had introduced her to last year.

“You come here often?” he asked after she led him to a Formica table for two.

“Occasionally,” she said.

“I’m not sure I buy that,” he said, taking a seat across from her. “What do you order?”

“They do a chicken dish I like,” she said. At least that’s what Doreen ordered, although for the life of her she couldn’t remember what it might be called.

“You’re sure you want to eat here?”

“Absolutely,” she said, despite having second thoughts about the venue and not feeling particularly hungry. Only two other tables were occupied — a Hispanic couple with a toddler and a pretty, solitary young African-American woman in light blue medical scrubs, reading Us magazine.

An obese waitress waddled over and tossed two plastic-coated menus between them, sending Luke’s empty water glass spinning like a top toward the edge of the table, but he grabbed it and prevented it from sailing to the floor. The waitress’s lack of concern, before she turned and swayed back toward the counter, seemed to indicate this sequence of events was strictly routine.

“Kind of ironic, those poor girls I was working with today from the Bear Stearns back office team — they’ll be needing handouts themselves.”

“How so?”

“Bear Stearns went under last month. The shorts were in a feeding frenzy and the New York Fed reneged on a line of credit. They were out of business in days.”

She’d read something about it; for a moment she thought of Veronica, but, no, she was at Lehman Brothers. “Should the rest of us be worried?” she asked.

“I am. The subprime mortgage market’s melting down,” he said. “I’m basically bearish.”

“Have you told your friend Obama about this?”

“He’s got more immediate problems right now — this Reverend Wright thing is dogging him.”

Before Corrine could respond to this, the waitress heaved back up and leaned over to fill the water glasses, overfilling Corrine’s, water flowing over the Formica and soaking her napkin. “You ready to order?” she asked.

“What do you recommend?” Luke asked.

She shrugged. “For your skinny ass, maybe chicharrón de pollo con tostones. ”

“Sounds delicious. Shall we get two of those?”

“Just a café con leche for me,” Corrine said.

The waitress rolled her eyes.

“One café con leche and one chicharrón de pollo. ”

After she walked off, Luke said, “If you have doubts about the food, please warn me now.”

“No, it’s not that. I’m just not hungry.”

“I find it a little odd that someone with — how to put this delicately? — an ambivalent attitude toward food would become involved in feeding the masses.”

“You’re not the first person to say that. But you should know better than anyone that it all started when we were working at the soup kitchen. The cops and the rescue workers weren’t starving, but it was still gratifying to feed them, and I started thinking about how many people in the city actually had trouble feeding themselves and their families. And I also saw how badly those people were eating, the kind of crap that they were putting in their bodies. And the more I looked into it, the more I learned about how difficult it is for lower-income people to get basic nutritional information, not to mention access to fresh, healthy food.”

“I didn’t mean to sound critical, Corrine.”

“And besides, I resent that remark about food issues. I have issues with gluttony and gourmandism. It’s like chefs have become gods and restaurants have become the new nightclubs. Our friends talk about truffles the way they used to talk about cocaine. My daughter watches the Food Network, for Christ’s sake. That there is a Food Network is a little hard for me to fathom. When did that happen? Foodie culture has become the newest cult of conspicuous consumption, and I find it annoying as hell. The pursuit of bottarga is just as superficial as the pursuit of the latest Kelly bag. Neither one fills a basic need.”

She paused, realizing she needed to get hold of herself. “Sorry, I’m ranting.”

“Maybe you’re just avoiding the other subject.”

“What other subject?”

“Us.”

“Are we a subject?”

“Imagine if instead of just handing out vegetables you could be handing out millions of dollars.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We could have our own foundation. You could really make a difference in the world.”

“Are you proposing to me?”

“I just want you to think about what life could be like.”

“You already have a foundation.” It seemed like a peculiar objection, but she was flummoxed.

“We’d subsume it under the umbrella of the Corrine and Luke McGavock Foundation.”

“Wow,” she said, stunned. “I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a statement that so thoroughly intermixed noble and selfish intentions.”

“They’re always intermixed, Corrine.”

“I don’t believe that. What about the hopes we have for our kids?”

“An interesting example, that. You could say that in caring for our kids we’re promoting our own genes. But if you really care about the welfare of your children — and I know you do — maybe you should consider what I could provide for them. The opportunities they don’t have now.”

“That’s so not fair,” she said, although she’d sometimes allowed herself to wonder what it would be like — not to run a foundation or to indulge fantasies of wild consumption, but to be freed from the hard choices of allocating scarce resources. Even if money couldn’t buy happiness, it could redeem a great many sources of unhappiness. She saw now that for a long time she’d underestimated the importance of financial security and that in doing so she had circumscribed her prospects and those of her children. And yet she still subscribed to the values on which she’d based her life, still believed that the acquisitive instinct was one of the lower impulses on the scale of human values. Was it just some residual cultural snobbery that made her feel that Mammon worship was boorish? And would her children thank her when she explained that she’d left Russell in order to improve their material well-being?

All at once she spotted a flaw in his argument. “I thought the big reason you split up with Giselle was that you didn’t want children.”

“I didn’t want to start a new family with her. ”

“But I don’t understand why you want to take on a broken family with me. What the hell’s wrong with you?”

“You’re right,” he said, just before his lunch was slapped in front of him, chicken parts drowning in an orange swamp beside a mesa of yellow rice. “It doesn’t make sense. It must be love, I guess.”

JACK LANDED AT LA GUARDIA a few minutes early and called the dealer from the cab on the way into the city. By the time he arrived at the Chelsea, a little after 6:00 p.m., Kyle was waiting in the lobby. “I was having breakfast down the street,” he explained. He was wearing the full Williamsburg: Peterbilt trucker’s cap, red flannel shirt over a Pabst Blue Ribbon T-shirt.

They went up to the room, where Kyle unloaded his backpack and laid out his wares — coke, smack, Xanax and several grades of weed. “How’s the H?” Jack asked.

“Better than last time. Really clean. Try it.”

Jack pulled a framed hunting scene from the wall and laid it on the coffee table, ripped open a bindle and laid out a third of it in a thin line, then rolled up a twenty and hoovered the smack. It burned a little before it began to warm him from the inside out. Very soon he felt as if the world around him were slowing to a manageable speed. Everything was going to be all right.