Jay McInerney - Bright, Precious Days

Jack felt something rubbing against his ankle just before Madison screamed.

“Fuck — a rat!” She pushed her chair back from the table and jumped to her feet. Jack stomped the furry creature with the heel of his boot.

“That’s Ferdie,” Russell said, leaping to his feet and circling to their side of the table.

“That was Ferdie,” Nancy said.

“What the fuck’s a ferdie?” Madison said.

Whatever it had been, it was now a bloody mess on the floor.

“Jesus, Jack. Fuck! That was our fucking pet ferret,” Russell said, crouching down to examine the carnage. The creature gave one last quiver.

“I’m sorry, man, I thought it was a rat.”

“Rats don’t have furry tails,” Russell said, gingerly touching the thing with his finger. “Poor little Ferdie. Oh Jesus.” He sounded as if he were about to cry.

Corrine reappeared. Taking in the scene, she turned pale and asked, “What happened?”

“It’s Ferdie,” Russell said, still kneeling there.

Approaching closer, she put her hand to her mouth when she saw the squashed pet. “Oh my God, is he—”

“He’s dead,” Russell said, standing up and heading her off, throwing his arms around her shoulders.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Damn, I’m really sorry, you guys,” Jack said. “It was an accident.”

Storey, who had crept over to see, started howling.

“Oh my God,” Corrine said, looking at him with horror.

“I think you should go,” Russell said.

“Oh my…Jesus,” Corrine said, her voice breaking, barely audible over Storey’s wails. “You killed him? You killed Ferdie? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“He thought it was a rat,” Madison explained.

“You’re right, I’ll go,” Jack said, retreating to the elevator door and standing to wait as the car rattled upward from the first floor, listening to Corrine sobbing on Russell’s shoulder while the other guests sat helplessly at the table.

Madison glanced back and forth between the Calloways and Jack before joining him just as the elevator arrived.

“That party’s definitely over,” she said as the doors finally closed.

“I can’t believe I killed their ferret.”

“I can’t believe they had a ferret.”

“This is bad.”

“Well, you probably won’t get invited back for the Memorial Day party.”

“Jesus.”

“He’ll have to forgive you. You’re too good a writer.”

“You don’t understand. I was going to fire him.”

“What?”

“I was gonna tell him this week.”

“Why are you firing him?”

“Because he treats me like a baby. Because he thinks he knows how to write my stuff better than I do. Because he thinks he made me. You heard him tonight, talking about how he changed the ending of ‘Shine.’ ”

“So what’re you going to do?”

“The thing is, I like the guy. And I sure can’t fire him now.”

The elevator stopped at the ground floor.

“Where to?” she said.

“I don’t care. Anywhere — just so long as we can do more drugs. I don’t know if there are enough goddamn drugs in the world to make me forget that fucking dinner party, but I’m sure as shit gonna try.”

THE FIRST FRIDAY OF EVERY MONTH was the food giveaway at the Grant Housing Project in Harlem. Carol, the realtor, was among those who showed up for the volunteer orientation.

“I was going to call you,” she said, her unruly salt-and-pepper hair pulled back in a ponytail with a scrunchie. “I don’t know if you’re still looking, but there’s been a price reduction at that town house on West 121st. The bank’s threatening foreclosure and the owner’s desperate. It looks like they’re going to do a short sale.”

Much as this announcement piqued Corrine’s interest, she couldn’t help feeling this wasn’t the time or place for that conversation, though she had loved the house Carol had showed her two months earlier. Most of the families in the crumbling housing project were on some sort of public assistance, and the median income for a family of four, of which there were very few, was around twenty thousand.

“Let’s talk afterward,” Corrine said before setting up the separate stations for turnips, carrots and acorn squash.

They’d met here after Carol first volunteered a year ago, and within minutes Corrine had heard the whole story: “We were the perfect couple, Upper West Side liberal Jewish intelligentsia version. He taught political science at Columbia. Culturally we were Jewish — we did the bar mitzvah and the bat mitzvah — but basically we were nonobservant. We were secular humanists, and proud of it. We thought that religion was divisive; superstition, the opiate of the masses. Fast forward to 9/11: Howard’s brother worked for Cantor Fitzgerald; he’s on the one hundred and fifth floor when the first plane hits. They were close, so Howard’s on the phone with him when the tower collapses. And he goes into a funk. We all go into a funk, right? But Howard doesn’t come out of his, and he turns to religion. He starts going to synagogue and then he joins this Orthodox shul, and I try it a few times, but my heart’s not in it. I tell him, ‘Hey, honey, it’s your thing.’ He becomes ultra-Zionist and insists we keep kosher, and he wants to send the kids to Hebrew school, and eventually he quits his job and moves out of the house and joins this Hasidic sect in Brooklyn. Suddenly I’ve got no husband and no income. So that’s how I got into real estate.”

When she heard that Corrine was thinking about moving, Carol had talked up the virtues of the far Upper West Side, the high eighties and nineties, where they looked at several three-bedroom apartments in a nice prewar building. But Corrine’s price range kept driving them north, till Carol said, “For about the same money you could get a town house in Harlem. The housing stock is incredible — block after block of late-nineteenth-century town houses. As recently as five years ago, I wouldn’t have advised someone like you to consider it. I mean, I wouldn’t want that on my conscience. Now, I’d say jump before it’s too late. Sure, it’s still rough around the edges, but you’re already seeing features in New York magazine. You don’t want to be the last white people through the door.”

“I’d hate to think we were displacing the…local residents.”

“It’s not you; it’s the economy. Market forces. The neighborhood has already been ravaged. It was heroin in the sixties and seventies; then the crack wars in the eighties and nineties wiped out what was left of the middle class. A lot of these properties — the best values, really — are abandoned foreclosures. Boarded-up town houses used as drug dens for the last couple of decades. And the others are already renovated. Those are getting pricey. I’m not sure you could swing that. It’s funny, though, the kind of white people who consider moving to Harlem — I don’t count the speculators, of course — are precisely the kind most prone to liberal guilt.”

“What about, you know, crime?”

“Oh God, SoHa, it’s totally safe.”

“SoHa?”

“South Harlem. Get it? It’s SoHo for the aughts. I’m not saying it’s the Upper East Side, but it’s safer than the Upper West Side was when I was growing up. We lived on Riverside, and my mother wouldn’t let me walk to Central Park because Amsterdam and Broadway and Columbus were so dangerous. You’ve heard of Needle Park, right? They made that film with Al Pacino. That was Broadway and 72nd. You had these well-to-do Jewish upper-middle-class families on the river and on the park, but everything in between was the freakin’ Wild West. Junkies, muggers, perverts in raincoats. Broadway was lined with SROs full of released mental patients. The good old days. Hah! Compared to that, Harlem, today, it’s gotten to the point where it’s hard to score drugs, so they tell me. The trade’s mostly moved uptown to Inwood.”