Jay McInerney - Bright, Precious Days

“My dad’s looking forward to reading your new book,” Jeremy said.

“How old are you now?” Nancy asked. She enunciated as if she were speaking to an idiot or a deaf person, obviously not too used to kids.

“Twelve and a half,” Jeremy said.

“Wow, that’s amazing,” Nancy said.

“Well, it’s not like an accomplishment or anything,” Storey said.

“Dinner is served,” Russell announced from the kitchen. Corrine instructed them to find their place cards at the table and bring their plates over to the counter, where the food was laid out. At some point, Russell had changed into a burgundy velvet smoking jacket, which looked a little ridiculous by Jack’s lights, though he couldn’t help being impressed yet again with the scene; he’d never encountered this kind of sophisticated domesticity until his first dinner party at the Calloways’ on his first trip to New York. His mother had never entertained, and holiday dinners with his relatives had been dutiful and depressing, generally concluding with tears and fisticuffs. He couldn’t then have imagined a world where children with military posture politely retired to their rooms while artists and writers got elegantly shit-faced on fine wine, talking politics instead of sports, talking shit about other artists and writers.

Jack found himself seated next to Madison, who smelled really good and liked to emphasize her points by squeezing his knee.

She was now explaining how much she liked his story about the moonshining brothers. “What was that one called?” Every time she leaned forward, he was treated to a glimpse of her nipples.

“It’s called ‘Shine,’ ” Jack said.

“Oh God, of course. Duh!”

Russell overheard this and said, “That’s one of the greatest stories of the last quarter century. Although I did have to persuade Jack not to spell out what happens to the older brother in the end.”

“Yeah, I don’t know what I was thinking,” Jack said. “I’d be nothing without my editor. Everything I am today, I owe it all to Russell.”

“That was very tacky of you, Russell,” Corrine said.

“I didn’t mean to take credit for anything major,” Russell said, taken aback by the reaction to his remark. “I mean, I knew it was a great story the first time I read it.”

“Then that’s what you should’ve said the first time,” Corrine said.

“You’re lucky, Jack,” Nancy said. “My editor’s barely literate. Last week she told me my protagonist wasn’t likable enough and not to use so many big words.”

The conversation subdivided again. Madison told Jack about the first time she’d gotten drunk on shine when she was twelve, and then Nancy joined in from the other side, telling a story about her first drunk, when she’d vomited in her purse during a high school football game. Russell orbited the table, filling wineglasses, slapping Jack on the back as he passed.

“Hey, sorry, buddy. Didn’t mean to be a douche bag.”

“No big thing,” Jack said.

At the other end of the table, they were talking about September 11.

“It’s like it never happened,” Washington was saying. “We were all going to change our lives, and in the end we’re the same shallow, grasping hedonists we used to be.”

“Some people changed,” Corrine said, all of a sudden seeming very sad.

“Like the poor bastards who got sent to Iraq,” Russell said.

“I, like, barely remember it,” said the child actor.

“That’s because you were eight when it happened,” said the painter.

“Nuh-uh. I was…twelve.”

Corrine said, “I think for anyone who was here, it’s a wound that’s just barely scabbed over. When you hear a low-flying plane, you tense up in a way you never did before. And let’s not forget we lost a friend, Jim Crespi.”

“Poor fucking Jim,” Washington said.

“If you weren’t here, you have no idea,” the artist said. “But I don’t think anyone who was here then will ever get over it.”

“Give me a fucking break,” Washington said. “New Yorkers aren’t capable of dwelling on the past. When was the last time we talked about Jim? I can’t even remember what I did last night.”

Russell said, “Not everyone drinks as much as you do, Wash.”

“God, I just remembered the weirdest thing,” Nancy said. “I think I slept with two firemen that week. They’d been working at Ground Zero for like three days and they came up to Evelyn’s, all sooty and exhausted, and everyone was buying them drinks, and I ended up taking them home.”

“You slept with both of them at the same time?” Corrine asked.

“It was a weird time,” Nancy said. “We were all fucked-up.”

Jack didn’t have much to contribute to this, having been at home in Fairview. He’d been cranking the night before in a friend’s hunting cabin, then slept through the next day and hadn’t even heard about it till late that night. Since everybody at the table was still yammering about September 11, he decided to take the opportunity to go the bathroom and do some more drugs.

He wiped the top of the toilet tank to make sure it was dry and laid out a bag of the H, cutting and snorting two rails. He was planning to do the coke afterward, but he found his legs getting a little rubbery, so he sat down on the toilet seat, and when the door opened, he was afraid he’d been in there a long time.

Madison was in the doorway, and instead of retreating, she came in and closed the door behind her. “Got anything for me?” she said.

“I got some blow,” he said, not wanting to mention the other. “Just give me a minute to get my shit together here.”

If he could just focus a little and remember how to use his limbs, he’d be fine, but he needed the coke in order to get volitional. It was a vicious circle. Before he could make any progress, Madison got down on her knees and unzipped his jeans and took his cock in her mouth, which made focusing even more difficult. He closed his eyes and tried to enjoy it even as he worried about whether he could get hard or not, but it turned out he could.

When he heard what sounded like someone rattling the door handle, he opened his eyes again. Young Jeremy was standing there staring in wonder at the sight of Madison’s mane bouncing up and down in Jack’s crotch. It might have been five or fifteen seconds before he closed the door.

Jack knew he was in deep shit, but he felt the reckoning could wait; right now he just really wanted to finish what Madison had started.

He realized once he stepped into the hall that the bathroom door was visible from the dining table, where his own seat and Madison’s were conspicuously vacant. After cleaning himself off and giving her some of the coke, he’d suggested she wait for a few minutes after he returned to the table, though at this point he wasn’t sure why he’d bothered.

No one seemed to take any notice as he sat down, until Nancy looked at him and said, “Did you two have fun in there?”

Jack shrugged and filled his mouth with some of whatever it was Russell had cooked, some kind of fucking meat in a sauce. From her side of the table, Corrine looked resigned.

A few minutes later, after Madison had returned to her seat, twitching like a madwoman and chewing on her lower lip, Storey appeared and tugged on Corrine’s shoulder. “Jeremy saw two people having oral sex in the bathroom,” she announced.

Glaring at Jack, Corrine stood up and walked with her daughter back to the bedrooms, presumably to check up on her emotionally scarred son.

“Well,” Nancy said, “I guess now we know what you guys were doing.”

Russell didn’t seem to know how to react. He shook his head and poured half a bottle of red wine into his glass. Jack flashed what he hoped was a rueful grin, insofar as he was able to control the muscles of his own face.