Jay McInerney - Bright, Precious Days

She leaned into him, kissed his neck and hugged him close, feeling his resistance fade as he exhaled and wrapped his arms around hers. At some point she realized he was crying, his torso convulsing rhythmically against her shoulder. She held him tighter, until the sobbing subsided.

Afterward, he showed her Jack’s letter.

“I can’t believe he’d do this to you after all you did for him.”

“The news hasn’t broken yet, but it will any day.”

She stroked the hair away from his damp forehead. “I’m so sorry, honey.”

“And then I’m well and truly fucked.”

“Writers change publishers all the time.”

“Jack isn’t just another writer. He’s a game changer. And I’m not just any editor — I’m the guy who published the infamous bogus memoir a few months back.”

“I’ve hated the bastard ever since he killed Ferdie. Face it, Russell, the guy’s a train wreck. You have other books, other writers.”

“Not as many as I used to. And submissions have been way down this spring. I can’t even get agents to send me books.”

“We’ll be all right,” she said. As worried as she was about Russell, and about his business, in a possibly perverse way she was grateful for this crisis, for the opportunity to weather it with him. If she’d been waiting for a sign, this might well be it.

SPRING ARRIVED LATE, fitful and grudging, and then refused to make way for summer, which was fine with Russell. Even if he’d been eager to display himself on the lawns and beaches of the Hamptons that summer, which he wasn’t, their straitened finances pretty much ruled it out, as did the sale of the Sagaponack farmhouse — for six million dollars — in March, a few days before Bear Stearns collapsed.

But with the economy sagging under the weight of the subprime mortgage crisis, the buyer’s financing was delayed, and in mid-June the Polanskis offered the house to the Calloways, without charge, on the condition that they’d vacate on a week’s notice. Corrine, who’d always handled communications with the Polanskis, was delighted by their generosity, and Russell couldn’t think of a reason to decline the offer. So it looked as if he had no choice but to spend his summer among the voyeurs and exhibitionists who were his friends and peers, on the only spit of land in America where his business was remotely a matter of public interest.

Real estate was a hot topic in the Calloway household that summer. When their TriBeCa landlord opened with an offer of $1.5 million for the loft, Russell was forced to admit they couldn’t swing it, not when he was struggling to keep his company afloat. While he fervently searched for financing in a tightening credit market, Corrine, he felt certain, was scouting real estate in the upper reaches of the metropolis.

The Calloways spent the last two rainy weekends in June cocooned beside the steely, too-cold-to-swim-in ocean, juggling playdates and sleepovers for the kids. Finally, in July, the sun returned from wherever it had been hiding, tennis was reinvented and Corrine moved out to the beach full-time with the kids, her summer sabbatical being one of the few perks of the nonprofit sector.

On Thursday nights, Russell rode out to Sagaponack on the jitney, returning to the city early Monday morning. Far from resenting his schedule, he cherished the solitude of these bachelor weekdays, working late and dining with a book at the bar at Soho House or the Fatted Calf, loved walking home through the clamorous, sweaty youth brigades of the Meatpacking District. He was bewitched by the vistas of feminine flesh, the exposed limbs and shoulders and the upper slopes of breasts swelling above halter tops, the flimsy summer dresses clinging at the top and fluttering up above the knees. He wanted them all, these girls of summer, but he didn’t want any of them enough to act on his desire. Sometimes he found himself haunted by the regret that he’d never been a single man in the city, never walked these streets free and open to romantic adventure, to the spontaneous pursuit of erotic impulse, having moved in with Corrine as soon as he returned from Oxford and then marrying her soon after, although those early days had their own burnished halo of romance, when New York seemed to be a frontier teeming with infinite opportunities. Even now, despite their seasonal recurrence over the decades, the blasts of heat from the subway grates, the tarry smell of the melting streets like a bass note beneath the acrid tang of urban compost, the animal, vegetable and human waste decomposing and fermenting in the heat, invariably carried him back to his earliest, happiest years here, before they had enough money or vacation days to escape the summer heat, when the city, having been abandoned by the geezers, belonged to them and their kind. The days before they could afford an air conditioner, sprawling, stunned, on damp sheets, naked and slick with sweat and each other’s secretions.

On these weekday evenings, Russell had dinner with Washington or Carlo Rossi, or caught up with friends he’d been too busy to see during the school year, flagging a cab or wobbling home in the humid fug, buzzed on cheap rosé, catching a last blast of heat from the subway vent in the sidewalk just outside the door, arriving home around midnight to pass out in front of Frasier and Seinfeld reruns. Television was a consolation for being alone, a solitary, guilty pleasure. He inevitably woke up with the TV on, a few hours after he’d fallen asleep, the pressure of his bladder as insistent as the alarm. He hardly ever slept through the night anymore. This was the only time he felt lonely and missed his family, the hour or two before dawn, when he lay awake racked by thoughts of bankruptcy and mortality. Like Fitzgerald at Asheville, trembling in the 3:00 a.m. darkness — except that, unlike Fitzgerald, he had no Great Gatsby to show when he met his Maker, only a thin portfolio of clerical accomplishments in the service of literature. And several gaudy failures — his failed takeover of Corbin, Dern; the Kohout debacle. In fact, after a long struggle with his Catholic upbringing, he no longer believed he would meet anyone on his departure from this existence, and the notion of oblivion filled him with despair. He’d always been an optimist, able to convince himself that the best was still ahead, that every day held the promise of new adventure, but now he seemed increasingly conscious of his failures and anxious about the future. It was impossible to be optimistic at three-forty-five in the morning, at the age of fifty-one, and there were times when he was absolutely terrified at the prospect of his own extinction. Finally, he took half an Ambien or a Xanax and waited for the panic to subside.

In the daylight, despite the dull ache at the back of his skull from the Ambien — the feeling that his skull had been trepanned by dental drills — and the parched prickle in his throat, he felt grateful that he’d survived the terrors of the night.

That month, the contract holder on the Sagaponack house, a thirty-four-year-old banker from Lehman Brothers, was poised to close on the property and came twice to inspect the house before concluding that he would tear it down. When Corrine reported this to Russell, she was indignant. “This goddamn zillionaire philistine in a pink golf shirt with a giant polo-player logo and his wife with her fake tits and her John Barrett Salon blond hair planning their McMansion.”

While it looked as if they could probably stay on through Labor Day, it was now clear this would be their last summer there, and that the house itself, after surviving a hundred and fifty years of hurricanes and nor’easters, would succumb to the wrecking ball, a fact that further eroded Russell’s self-esteem, and added to his sense that the world as he knew it was crumbling around him. How was it that after working so hard and by many measures succeeding and even excelling in his chosen field, he couldn’t afford to save this house that meant so much to his family? Their neighbors seemed to manage, thousands of people no smarter than he was — less so, most of them — except perhaps in their understanding of the mechanics of acquisition. Partly, he knew, it was his lack of the mercenary instinct. Never caring enough about getting and keeping and compounding, he’d felt himself above such considerations and stayed true to the ideals he’d formed in college, at the expense of his future. If he’d been savvy and resourceful, he could have bought this house years ago, or, more important, a place to live in the city, but as things stood, he owned nothing; he’d missed the biggest real estate boom of his lifetime and even now that the bubble was bursting, his own finances were more precarious than ever. It was increasingly difficult to avoid the conclusion that he was, by the conventional measures of familial and professional achievement, a failure.