Jay McInerney - Bright, Precious Days

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Harlem. It was a heady concept. Russell had a completely irrational dislike of the Upper West Side, but Harlem, upper as it was, might just appeal to his sense of urban romance. She hadn’t even told him she was looking yet. She wanted to find something and present him with the whole package. A town house in Harlem was an evocative phrase, charged with tension, contradiction, vibrating between poles of domesticity and urban menace. Corrine had a tenuous ancestral tie to the neighborhood, her grandfather having fallen under its spell after being taken to a jazz club by his friend Carl Van Vechten, and he’d told her many stories about those visits.

The idea had grown on Corrine after she took a tour with Carol two months ago. They’d focused their search south of 125th, as close as possible to the kids’ new school on East 94th, looking at duplexes and town houses, whole and divided, including a few that were boarded up and derelict, fetid, the walls covered in graffiti, crack vials underfoot, some of them mere shells and others with century-old decorative flourishes intact: elaborate moldings and fireplaces, magnificent staircases and monumental arches.

She’d been completely and utterly smitten by the last house of the day, an Italianate brownstone on West 121st Street that had been partially renovated by the owner, who’d bought it in 2006 and quickly run out of money. This was the house that Carol wanted to talk about now. The parlor floor was composed of two theatrical rooms with fourteen-foot ceilings and egg and dart molding, joined by a soaring arch. The front room had been restored to its former glory, with Carrara marble fireplaces flanked by Ionic columns. “This kitchen wasn’t even here; it used to be downstairs. Look at this,” Carol said, on the day of the tour, beckoning her to the back room, a huge kitchen and dining area. “Sub-Zero, Miele dishwasher, granite countertops, the works.” Corrine could see Russell getting excited about this. “Plus the boiler and the roof are new,” Carol had added. “After that, well, it gets a little rough.” The rooms on the upper floors were in various states of disrepair, but by no means unrecoverable. Many of the windows were boarded up or bricked over, and the top floor was a junkyard, but Corrine was absolutely giddy, given the space, the sheer number of rooms, and the fenced-in backyard. “If she’d finished the job, this place could easily go for one five, one seven, but that’s the beauty of it. You can finish it yourself, and you’ve got a motivated seller.”

“It’s still a stretch,” Corrine had said wistfully.

“It would be easy to seal the lower stairs and rent out the basement apartment for income to defray the mortgage.”

She pictured herself here, in a house, with her family: Russell reading in front of the fireplace, the children playing with their friends in the backyard. It seemed almost attainable, and yet she knew that it was more than their present circumstances would allow. And then — she couldn’t help it — just for a moment, she wondered what Luke would think of the place.

“I’m pretty sure we can get it for one point one,” Carol said to Corrine now, after the last cabbage had been distributed.

She’d never been one to yearn beyond her means, but she desperately wanted this house and told herself if she could only find a way to get her family there, she would be happy with her lot, and with the man she’d married, and never wish for more.

ARRIVING HOME SHORTLY BEFORE SEVEN, Russell collected the mail, finding among the bills and cards from realtors a slim envelope addressed to him in Jack’s loopy, backward-leaning hand. This aroused his curiosity, an actual physical letter from one of his authors, as if they were Perkins and Hemingway in 1927. Why the hell would Jack be writing him a letter?

Jean was standing at the elevator door to present her grievances. “The kids is hungry, and Miss Corrine, she stay late at the office, and I got my choir practice tonight I’m gonna be late for.”

Jeremy looked up from his laptop. “What’s for dinner?”

“Good question.”

“Don’t forget it’s meatless Monday,” Storey called from the couch. She’d recently become a vegetarian, out of ethical concerns, and while she couldn’t convert the family entirely, they’d agreed to forgo animal products once a week. Even Mario Batali was doing it, she pointed out. Although Corrine worried about Storey getting the right kind of nutrients, she was thrilled that she’d lost ten pounds in the past six months, even as she’d grown two inches. Now, like her mother, she worried about calories and assiduously studied the ingredients labels of all packaged foods.

Reading the back label on the jar of Rao’s marinara sauce, which Russell was heating while waiting for the pasta water to boil, she announced, “It’s gluten-free and cholesterol-free. But the pasta has tons of gluten. I mean, pasta is like pure gluten. We should think about getting brown rice pasta.”

“I can assure you,” Russell said, “it will be a cold day in hell before you see brown rice pasta in this kitchen. Besides, it’s meatless Monday, not gluten-free Monday.”

“Dad, you said hell. ” At one time, Jeremy had said things like this with a genuine sense of reproach, but it was now ironic, a kind of joke between them, based on their mutual recognition of Jeremy’s new twelve-year-old sophistication, with him poking fun at his younger self.

“Call me when dinner’s ready,” he said. “I’m going to finish my geometry.”

“Aunt Hilary phoned me,” Storey said after he’d drifted off to his room.

“What? She called you? Why?”

“She does sometimes.”

“What do you talk about?”

“Not much. Girl stuff. I think she’s kind of lonely.”

“Have you told your mother?”

Storey shook her head. “No way. I don’t think Mom would approve.”

“You’re probably right.”

“Don’t tell her, promise?”

“I promise.”

“You don’t like her very much, do you?”

“Hilary? I don’t know. Let’s just say I’m grateful to her when I see how beautiful you’ve become.”

He turned up the volume on All Things Considered: “A defiant Hillary Clinton heralded her campaign victories and boasted of her millions of supporters last night — conceding nothing to Barack Obama even as her rival crossed the critical delegate-number threshold to secure the Democratic nomination….”

—

He couldn’t help noticing that Storey ignored her mother when she got home a few minutes later, in contrast to her brother, who bounced around her like a puppy while describing his day.

“And what about you?” Corrine asked Storey, who was sitting on the couch with a schoolbook. “How was your day?”

“Same old.”

Corrine was taking a week off from drinking, so over dinner Russell finished a bottle of Gigondas by himself, pouring the last glass at the table while Corrine helped Jeremy with his math. He was about to reach for a manuscript, when he remembered Jack’s letter, which he retrieved from the kitchen counter.

Russell,

Damn, man, this is about the hardest letter Ive ever had to write and Ive got halfway into a bottle of vodka to work up the balls to do it. I hoped we could work this out so I wouldnt have to, but its got to the point where I got to say what Ive got to say. Nobody knows better than me how much I owe you and I will always be grateful for that. (Or maybe Im supposed to say “No one knows better than I, ” you could tell me, I know, so just ignore the fucking grammar for once OK.) You discovered me and put me on the map. You put your reputation on the line for me. And I won’t forget it. But at the risk of sounding like some fucking new age twat I have to be myself and I feel like you want me to be some idea of me that you want to put out there, you want me to be the redneck version of you. I’m not saying my sentences are always perfect or even always grammatical but sometimes when you get finished with them I dont even hear myself in them anymore. I have my sound and I like to think some kind of music in the prose but when you start rebuilding my sentances I feel like the tune and the rhythm gets lost. Maybe its just a tin whistle but its my tin whistle. I think you look at a story and think its a machine that can be improved but I think a story is more like an animal. Its like your performing taxadermy on a living thing. You might make it look better by your lights but youve done kilt it in the meantime. And why is shorter always better? Its like sure you can save five words but whose fucking counting. It’s not like I’m charging you by the word but sometimes that’s what it feels like. I tried to tell you all this maybe I didnt try hard enough but its hard for a high school dropout cracker like me to stand up to his hotshot New York Ivy League editor you know. Youre Russell fucking Calloway. Which is good and bad. I let you push me to much and if I don’t push back really hard than it will be true. Its just time for me to move on you know. Its like life or death for me. I know youll think its about me signing with Briskin but its not. Ive been thinking about this for a good long while and its what I need to do for myself. And Im way fucking greatful for everything. I love you, man. And I value your friendship. And I hope we can still be friends but I know youll hate me after this and I wouldn’t half blame you.