Jay McInerney - Bright, Precious Days

“ We didn’t, maybe. But I did.” She paused. “Twenty-plus years ago, when you were in Frankfurt, Tony Duplex gave me a painting….”

“Why would Tony Duplex give you a painting?”

“Because I did him a big favor.”

“What favor — you fucked him?”

“If that’s what you want to think,” she said before hanging up on him.

—

He was looking over the sales figures for Youth and Beauty the next morning at work when Gita brought in an envelope messengered over from Corrine’s office. Inside were two handwritten sheets on Corrine’s crisp stationery, and several sheets of yellowing, brittle onionskin:

February 14, 2009

Dear Russell:

When I was at my mother’s house for Thanksgiving, I found this letter pressed inside my old copy of House of Mirth. Reading it all these years later made me cry. (Your letter, not House of Mirth. ) It made me incredibly sad to think of all the years that have passed, and all that we’ve shared since you wrote this, and sad most of all to think that our story might be over, and that I would spend the rest of my life with the guilt of knowing that I was to blame. Perhaps you can’t forgive me, or ever be able to entirely trust me again. But isn’t it possible that even in this diminished form, our marriage is still worth preserving, that however damaged, it’s better than most other marriages at their best, that ours is still one of the great love stories, especially if we can survive this crisis? I’ve never forgotten that quote from your thesis, was it from Julius Caesar ? “…when the sea was calm, all boats alike/show’d mastership in floating…” Which I take to mean that nobody should get undue credit for doing well during the good times. It’s the storms that truly test us.

I’m sorry that I sailed us into a storm. You didn’t deserve it. And I don’t deserve to be forgiven, but I hope you will anyway.

I love you.

I’m sorry.

Corrine.

PS. You would have written this letter a few years before I got the painting. Jeff and Tony were in a jam with a drug dealer and I sacrificed a few of my grandfather’s twenty-dollar gold pieces to bail them out. I should have told you at the time. I’m sorry. On the other hand, it turned out to be a pretty good investment.

He carefully unfolded the brittle onionskin, recognizing his own loopy youthful cursive script.

Cloisters Attic

Oxford

March 2, 1979

Dear Corrine,

Feeling very restless tonight. It’s already spring here, one of those days when you can smell the earth thawing, the ferment of the soil, when you can almost hear the dormant vegetable life awakening, stirring and thrusting upward, and unlike some of the uniquely Limey odors of recent experience, like that of the fish and chip shop on the High Street, this is the universal scent of renewal and change and migration — and it inspires the desire to get out and do something, to go go go, like Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty. I am so restless, but unlike the south-wintering birds, whose instincts are urging them northward to their summer breeding grounds, I don’t know what it is I want to do. I certainly don’t want to be sitting here reading Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, no offense to that august gentleman, but I can’t concentrate tonight. “Books! ’tis a dull and endless strife,” as his friend and bookish colleague Wordsworth said. Not usually, but that’s how I feel right this moment. In fact, I do know where I want to go. Hearing of you and Jeff and Caitlin and everyone in New York, I feel that you’re all moving ahead without me, while I’m back in school, in a backwater eddy, stuck in the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, Jeff writes to tell me that he met Norman Mailer at the Lion’s Head and they thumb-wrestled while arguing about Hemingway. I feel my life is passing me by. I miss you. I want to come home tonight and crawl into your bed. I want to be inside of you. Enough. Enough of this allegedly fond-making absence. What are we waiting for? I want my life to start now. I knew the first time I saw you at the top of that staircase at the party at Phi Psi that my life would be lived for you. You were like a goddess looking down from Olympus, not unbenevolently, but with a certain amused detachment at the roiling mob of beer-soaked mortals, of which I was a part. The Aphrodite of Phi Psi. I vowed at that moment that I would find out who you were and I would spend the rest of my days at Brown pursuing you. It wasn’t easy, but then, I wouldn’t have wanted it to be. Nothing truly worthwhile is easy, and nothing in my life has ever been so worthwhile as loving you. I would have waited for you for as long as it took to win your affections, and yet tonight I’m so restless, and even fearful, worrying suddenly that perhaps this is the night that your heart finally begins, out of weariness, to drift away or that you lose faith in our intertwined destinies or that you’ll meet someone in New York who has the unfair advantage of physical proximity, and I can’t stand it, it makes me crazy. Yes I’ve had a few drams of Bushmills tonight, but I’ve never been so certain of anything as I am of my devotion to you. Tell me you’ll wait, and I will be able to last this term out, though I want to fly to you now. I’m going to stick this out for the year, but I don’t have it in me to come back for a second year. I hope you won’t think less of me, but I’ve thought long and hard about this, and among other things I realize that I don’t want to teach; I don’t want to spend five or six more years in grad school in Cambridge or Palo Alto (if I’m lucky) in the hope of getting an assistant professorship in Duluth or Des Moines, only to hope at the end of another five or six years that I might get tenure and the privilege of spending the rest of my life there — and hope that’s something you might be willing to do. I don’t want to spend a decade writing yet another scholarly study of some minor aspect of Keats that nobody but my thesis advisers will read. I want to go to New York and start my life with you and I want to be a part of the history and literature of my time. By that I mean not only that I want to be to my era what Max Perkins was to his but I want to be part of the greatest love story of our time, of all time. Corrine and Russell. Russell and Corrine. Forget Troilus and Cressida or Romeo and Juliet, or Pyramus and Thisbe with their tragic fates. Ours will have a happy ending. We’ll create a love story for the ages. So please wait for me. A few short months and then we will have the rest of our lives.

“Grow old along with me. The best is yet to be.”

All my love,

Russell

When he finished reading, he realized there were tears in his eyes. He didn’t know if he had ever felt so bereft in his life — perhaps when his mother died of cancer, almost thirty years before, slipping away when Russell was only twenty-three. He was so sad, now, to think that she’d never gotten to meet her grandchildren. He was sad for the innocence he’d lost since he wrote that letter, for the ways he’d been careless with his life and of his romance with Corrine, and for all the damage it had sustained. Remembering the boy who’d written that callow and idealistic letter, he felt acutely that he’d let him down somehow, just as he’d failed to live up to all the sweet sentiments expressed in it. He was sad that the girl to whom that letter was addressed had betrayed him, and that he’d never feel quite the same way about her again. But the storm had passed. Maybe, or, in fact, definitely, it was time to try to patch the leaks in the ship and sail onward.

For a long time Russell stared out the back window at the naked trees in the courtyard and then he turned back to his desk, found a piece of stationery in the top drawer and started to write.