Bright, Precious Days (12 page)

RUSSELL WOKE THE KIDS,
moving back and forth between their rooms until they were upright and moving, under protest. Ferdie emerged from under Jeremy's covers and followed him into the kitchen, snaking along at his heels, waiting eagerly for his bowl of ZuPreem Ferret Diet pellets, supplemented with a chopped sardine, which was supposedly good for his coat and his bones, if not his breath. He strained upward on his hind legs, like a masked bandit, as Russell stirred the fragrant mess.

Storey appeared first, dressed and ready with her backpack and her homework binder. “Can I have French toast?” she asked.

“That's a weekend treat,” Russell said. “I've got yogurt and a banana and Honey Nut Cheerios here. Promise I'll make you French toast tomorrow.”

“With sausage? I like the English ones you got last weekend. The exploding kind.”

“Bangers.” He'd picked them up at the limey grocery store in the West Village, along with some Aero and Cadbury bars for Corrine, milk chocolate being among the very few foods she craved.

“Why are they called bangers?”

“Because of the way they pop and explode in the pan.”

He hated to admit it, but Corrine was right that Storey was getting compulsive about food and, lately, a little bit chubby. Corrine thought it was somehow a reaction to Hilary's drunken revelation, a theory that seemed plausible enough. They would have to address this sooner or later, though just now he needed to check on Jeremy's progress; getting him dressed and organized on time was a continual challenge. Jeremy was, in fact, still in his pajamas, hunched over his desk. “I thought you finished your homework last night.”

“I just forgot some math.”

“Time's up. Get dressed and get out here now.”

“Hey, Dad?”

“What?” he said, trying to contain his mounting irritation. He'd failed to contain it often enough to be aware of the potential consequences, the kids' tears and his inevitable apology. Both lately seemed excessively sensitive to any criticism whatsoever.

“Are we ever going to see Aunt Hilary and Dan?”

“I don't know. Why, do you miss them?”

Where had that come from? he wondered, even as he acknowledged that for kids, there's no such thing as a non sequitur. Nonlinearity was a given.

“I guess I should miss Hilary,” Jeremy said, “since she's sort of my mom.”

“Well, yes and no.”

“I feel bad I never liked her that much.”

“Don't feel bad about your feelings. As long as you try to be understanding and sympathetic to others, that's all I'd ask. But we can't always control what we feel.”

“I kind of miss Dan,” he said. “He seemed like a good guy. Until he hit you, I mean.”

“He has his virtues. Now come on and get ready.”

“It was so cool when he showed us his gun.”

“Actually, that was kind of a dick move.”

“A what?”

“I mean it wasn't cool.”

“I think Storey is freaked-out,” Jeremy said.

“About the Hilary thing?”

“Yeah.”

“Why? Has she said anything to you?”

“Not really. Just a few things.”

Before he could pursue this, Storey herself was right beside him. “We are going to be totally late. Is Jeremy still pretending to be wounded?”

It was true: He'd been milking his appendix scar for all it was worth this last week, and it hadn't taken Storey long to lose patience.

He got them into the elevator with just a few minutes till the bell and hurried them down the block, scolding Jeremy when he tried to pet a passing fox terrier tethered to a pretty young redhead Russell noticed frequently at this hour. When they arrived at the school yard, it was empty, and Storey was distraught; she was a fastidious and law-abiding citizen who dreaded violating rules or schedules, whereas her brother was essentially an anarchist.

He led both children to their homeroom, the smell of the corridors almost overwhelming him with sense memories, that compound of linoleum, art supplies, ammonia, snacks and childish effluvia unique to elementary schools, so reminiscent of his own, a thousand miles and four decades away in Michigan.

Back outside, a stiff breeze off of the Hudson helped propel him along Chambers to the subway. Going down the steps, he encountered many trolls and one princess, a lovely creature in a white leather jacket whose porcelain face was framed by shiny blue-black tresses. He kept waiting to become inured to beautiful strangers, who seemed even more abundant now than when he'd first arrived in the city, yet his heart always leapt and his imagination wove unlikely narratives of erotic encounters and alternative lives. Somewhere in the metropolis was a Russell Calloway whose life was devoted to seduction. In this case, he courted and bedded the white leather angel, moved into her penthouse on Broome Street, became very rich in some undefined enterprise and retired from publishing to travel the world with her, all in the distance between Chambers and Canal Streets, where she rose from her seat and got off the train, while he continued on to 14th.

Ascending to the sidewalk, he trudged past the Starbucks on Eighth Avenue, past his office and up Ninth Avenue to the Chelsea Market on Fifteenth, entering the redolent brick cave lined with bakeries and restaurants—which had once, long ago, been a Nabisco biscuit factory before it had been abandoned to become a refuge for the homeless and derelict, a shooting gallery where Jeff Pierce went to score heroin—then waiting at the counter with Food Network execs for his latte, a filigreed heart inscribed in the foam. He wouldn't necessarily want anyone to know that he added three blocks to his morning commute because he thought this was the best coffee in the city, certainly not his wife, who already thought his epicureanism was some kind of sickness.

Walking back to the office, he unlocked the front door and stooped to scoop up three take-out menus and a brochure advertising the latest local manicure parlor. All this paper was destined for the trash, and yet when he thought about it, as he did now, he found it touching that these small businesses were popping up and reaching out to him, a Chinese or Korean immigrant with his life savings on the line, in hock to some murderous criminal who'd smuggled him into the country. And he could empathize because he, too, was a small businessman, with all his paltry capital invested in his company, only two or three flops away from financial peril, if not outright ruin. This morning he was particularly susceptible to intimations of doom because he was short on sleep and slightly hungover and especially because he was about to take the biggest risk of his career.

At his desk he wrote three rejection letters. Russell took great pride in these, and was known for them; while most editors tried to stay vague and upbeat—“not quite right for our list at this time”—he was specific about his reservations and offered constructive criticism, even as he admitted that his judgment was fallible, or at least that in the end he was a prisoner of his own taste (not that he really believed this). Usually this scrupulous attention was appreciated, although the agent Martin Briskin once told him, “Just give me the fucking verdict and spare me the sensitive lecture.” And it was Briskin with whom he had to deal today.

At nine-thirty he called Kip Taylor, whose money he'd be putting on the line, to get the final clearance.

“Russell, you sound terrible. You're croaking like a frog. Pull yourself together, man.”

“I'm fine, Kip. Ready to go.”

“So, you think you can get it for seven fifty?”

“I'll try like hell.”

“You know he'll want a million. It's the number—the basic unit.”

Russell assumed he was being polite about the Lilliputian dynamics of publishing, because he distinctly remembered Kip saying that in the financial world, 100 million was the basic unit.

“Then I guess we have to be willing to walk away,” Russell said tentatively.

“Is that what you want to do?” Kip asked.

“I think it's worth a million with foreign rights.”

“All right, do it if you can.”

This was one of the things he admired about Kip, his decisiveness. He'd started his career as a trader at Salomon Brothers, staking millions on split-second judgments.

“Russell, I have to trust your instincts. That's why I hired you. If your gut tells you to go for it, then go for it. Honestly, it's your call.”

Actually, Kip hadn't hired him; rather, Russell had solicited his capital to help buy a struggling business in which they both saw hidden value, but he was willing to let this pass. Having gotten the answer he wanted, he couldn't understand why, after hanging up, he felt such trepidation and anxiety. His esophagus was burning with indigestion, his stomach suddenly queasy.

He went out to the deli and bought a toasted corn muffin fresh off the greasy grill—a plebeian delicacy that pleased him no less than last night's short ribs—gobbling down half of it as he hurried back to the office, chucking the rest, intercepting Gita, his assistant, and Tom Bradley, his subrights director, coming in together. Were they a couple? They certainly seemed a little flustered to encounter him here on the steps. Both followed him up to the second floor after Russell told Tom he wanted to review Kohout's foreign prospects before making the big call.

At ten-thirty he punched in the number. He could've had Gita make the call and ask Briskin's assistant to hold for him, but that wasn't Russell's style. Briskin made him wait several minutes before picking up.

“Speak to me.”

“I want to preempt the Kohout.”

“I hope you have a large figure in mind.”

“It seems plenty big to me.”

“You probably believe it when your wife says that about your dick. But let's hear it anyway.”

“Seven fifty.”

“Are you fucking kidding me? You call that a preempt?”

“This will be our top title of the year. And I'll be there with Phillip every step of the way. He's worked with me, and I think he'd like to again. He knows I'm a good editor and somebody he can trust.”

“Russell, be serious. I can't go to my client with this.”

“The worst he can say is no.”

“He could say a lot worse, and so can I. If you were on fire, I wouldn't cross the street to piss on you for seven fifty,” he said before hanging up.

Russell plodded along through the morning, unable to focus as he tried to decide whether to call back and sweeten the offer or wait Briskin out. Maybe, he thought, I should just sit tight. Maybe he'd just dodged a bullet. He had a somewhat distracted lunch at Soho House with David Cohen, the young editor he'd taken with him from Corbin, Dern. David was a keen advocate of the Kohout book and urged Russell to up his offer. The rooftop restaurant had just reopened for the season, and it seemed almost miraculous to dine outside, with the sun on your face, looking out over the Hudson, the slightest fetid whiff of which reached him on the breeze.

He'd just settled back at his desk when Gita told him Briskin was on the line.

“Give me a million,” Briskin said.

“Nine hundred, and we keep world rights.”

“Try again. A million and I'll give you the UK. That's the best I can do.”

That Briskin was calling at all, Russell interpreted as a sign of weakness.

“A million and world rights,” he said. “Final offer.”

“Come on, Russell, world rights might not be that big a factor on this book.”

“Then you shouldn't mind giving them to us.”

“Fuck you,” he said before hanging up again.

Russell's pulse was racing, his face flushed. As the adrenaline subsided, he found himself disappointed and second-guessing his tactics, but later, when his publicity director, Jonathan, and David came in for an update, he felt relieved.

“Well, it wasn't really our kind of book anyway,” Jonathan said. “I wouldn't know how to play this to the reviewers.”

“Maybe, but we can't just suffocate in our comfortable little niche,” David said. “We need to grow.”

“We do?”

“Of course,” David said.

“We don't do that blockbuster thing,” Jonathan countered.

How easy it is, Russell thought, to be a purist in your twenties.

Gita buzzed and said that Briskin was on the line. All at once the silence in the office was palpable. Russell picked up the receiver.

“All right,” Briskin said, “we have a deal. I have to tell you I advised my client against it.”

“If I didn't think we could do right by this book I wouldn't have pushed so hard. I'm going to do everything in my power—”

“Spare me the fucking speech and send over the contract.”

“Okay,” he said, feeling giddy and light-headed as he hung up the phone.

“We got world rights?” Jonathan asked.

Russell nodded. “I'll tell Tom to get busy on it.”

“You all right?”

“I think so,” Russell said, standing up and walking unsteadily to the bathroom, where he threw up what was left of his lunch.

“ ‘
THE LIGER IS A HYBRID CROSS
between a male lion (
Panthera leo
) and a tigress (
Panthera tigress
).' ” Jeremy was reading aloud to his mother from Wikipedia, psyching himself up for the day's adventure, to see an actual liger in the native habitat of one of the Wildlife Society's most generous benefactors. “ ‘Thus, it has parents with the same genus but of different species. It is the largest of all known extant felines. Ligers enjoy swimming, which is a characteristic of tigers, and are very sociable like lions. Ligers exist only in captivity because the habitats of the parent species do not overlap in the wild….' ”

Casey had two extra tickets to see the liger and its trainer in the Fifth Avenue town house of Minky Rijstaefal, who was president of the society. This beast had risen from obscurity into a kind of cult fame after being mentioned in
Napoleon Dynamite,
and the society was capitalizing on that interest. Indeed, the event had quickly sold out, drawing the otherwise jaded children of the 10021 zip code, who'd already seen plenty of lions and tigers and bears, oh my, and more than a few of whom had been on Abercrombie & Kent safaris in Kenya and South Africa. For Corrine's part, she couldn't help being reminded of Luke, who was, she knew, spending the week at his game park, couldn't help conjuring a glimmer of communion in this Upper East Side expedition, or thinking about the e-mail she'd write to him about it later.

Much as Storey had liked
Napoleon Dynamite
and its supernerd protagonist, she didn't want to go. It always made her sad to see wild animals in captivity. Corrine didn't bother to point out that the liger wasn't technically a
wild
animal, since she had only the two tickets. She wondered, too, if there wasn't another point of reference in Storey's refusal; she'd entered a stage of acute social sensitivity, having recently complained about the “snotty UES rich kids” she'd encountered at a birthday party, and the Wildlife Society event would be largely composed of that species. Jeremy, by contrast, was excited from a zoological standpoint and relatively oblivious to the sociological implications. He was lying in bed with his laptop, his neck propped up on a pillow, reading everything he could find online. “It doesn't say whether they're dangerous or not.”

“Well, I assume this one isn't too dangerous, or they probably wouldn't be bringing it into somebody's living room.”

He didn't seem entirely satisfied with the idea of a harmless liger. “Lions are dangerous, and tigers definitely are.”

“Well, personally I'm going to sit as far away as possible.”

“I might sit close to it,” Jeremy ventured.

“Don't blame me if you both get eaten,” Storey said.

“No one's going to get eaten,” Corrine said.

“I'll just stay home and watch
Napoleon Dynamite
instead” was Storey's final comment.

Spring had finally made its debut, and while Corrine had planned to take the subway, it seemed a pity to go underground, given this unaccustomed warmth and sunshine, so she grabbed a passing cab, reasoning that she'd already saved two grand on the tickets.

When they arrived at the town house, a Beaux Arts limestone edifice designed by McKim, Mead & White just a door in from Fifth Avenue and the park, Corrine realized that she'd been here once before, years ago—a wild night back in the eighties. Minky, née Hortense, was a famous debutante who'd acquired her nickname shortly after she came out at the age of seventeen and
Town & Country
announced that she owned twenty-three fur coats. She threw infamous parties and eventually spent the latter part of the eighties in rehab. After one of her stints at Silver Meadows, she publicly renounced her fur habit, selling off her coats at a well-publicized auction at Christie's and giving the proceeds to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. She'd since settled into harmless modes of eccentricity, collecting and discarding exotic husbands—an Argentinian polo player, a Russian ballet dancer and an Italian/Uruguayan rancher—while devoting herself increasingly to the welfare of animals. In addition to the Wildlife Society, she sat on the boards of the Central Park Zoo and the ASPCA and was the sole benefactor of an elephant sanctuary in Tennessee and a turtle refuge in Palm Springs.

A lugubrious young Asian man in a black Nehru suit answered the door and beckoned them inside. The town house of her memory had been largely obliterated by a recent renovation, the gilt and ormolu stripped down and plastered over. In place of the former baroque splendor was a Zen temple with an ornamental pool fed by a trickling bamboo spout on one side of the entry hall, flanked on the other by a Ginkaku-ji-style rock garden, a stark rectangle blanketed with polished black stones the size of flattened quail eggs. A Greek kouros stood in an alcove, a torso mounted on a steel rod, sans arms and legs and head, the lack of appendages in keeping with the minimalism of the decor, although the penis had somehow survived the millennia. Directly across from the statue was a Picasso from the painter's classicist period, a rendering of a surreally distorted white sculptural figure against a milky blue background. Otherwise, the space was unembellished, a vast expanse of white wall and black marble floor, whose owner seemed to be boasting that empty space was the ultimate extravagance in this costly precinct of this expensive city. In the eighties the entire neighborhood had been decorated like Versailles, but now, it seemed to Corrine, the au courant aesthetic model was the downtown loft, as if someone up here had noticed or at least suspected that the zeitgeist had moved south. The sole architectural feature of the entire floor was a massive rough-hewn staircase forged out of bronze, which seemed to dare the intrepid visitor to explore the upper reaches of the house. The man in black pointed out that there was also the option of an elevator at the far end of the hall.

Corrine didn't choose her route fast enough to avoid Sasha McGavock, Luke's ex, who came in right behind her, heels clicking on the marble floor, towing by the hand her six-year-old stepson, who, like a recalcitrant bulldog on a leash, was strenuously resisting forward motion. When she'd started her dalliance with Luke, Corrine had been inordinately curious about Sasha. She was fairly certain Sasha didn't know she existed, but she'd followed her rival's social progress in the years since their divorce, via the press and intermittent briefings from Casey, and it wasn't unlike Sasha's current march through the entry hall, a triumph of will over not-inconsiderable resistance. Her affair with the billionaire Bernie Melman, an open secret toward the end of her marriage, had ended in humiliating fashion. She'd confided to all of her friends that she fully expected him to initiate divorce proceedings against his wife once her own divorce from Luke was final. In the meantime, Melman's wife decided to go public, slapping Sasha's face in the dining room of Le Cirque at lunch while advising her to “stay the fuck away from my husband.” This confrontation brought joy not only to the wives of the community but also to hard-hearted gossip columnists, and the subsequent publicity seemed to mark a turning point in Bernie Melman's attitude toward his wife and his mistress. In the days after the slapfest, photographs of the Melmans engaged in public displays of affection appeared in
Women's Wear Daily
and the
New York Post.
Sasha compounded her disgrace by tearfully confronting Melman at the benefit for the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum—whose theme that year happened to be “Dangerous Liaisons”—and demanding to know why he hadn't returned her calls, all this under the turned-up noses of Anna Wintour and Charlize Theron. Just when it seemed she had no choice but to get out of town, she appeared at the Robin Hood Gala on the arm of Nate Bronstein, who'd clashed with Melman on several corporate takeovers. Some were surprised that Bronstein would be interested in his enemy's discarded mistress, but others, particularly some of his colleagues in finance, felt that in scooping up Sasha he'd shown a savvy sense of market timing, acquiring a blue-chip asset at a steep discount. And last year Sasha had closed the deal with Bronstein, though it was widely noted that she continued to use the name McGavock, which suggested to more than one commentator a reluctance to bear a Semitic surname.

Thankfully, she didn't recognize Corrine—they'd met only once, in passing—and was fully engaged in the struggle to drag her stepson toward the stairs.

“I don't want to see the tiger.”

“It's not a tiger,” Sasha hissed. “It's a liger. Like in that stupid movie.”

Jeremy observed the younger boy with an air of sympathetic condescension. “It's okay,” he said. “There's actually nothing to be scared about.”

Not true, thought Corrine. That little boy had plenty of reasons to be scared.

Upstairs, a flock of mothers and their young chattered en masse in the drawing room. As an interloper from downtown, Corrine was ill-equipped to decode the room and plumb the levels of intrigue in this gathering, although she did identify among them the much-photographed first and second wives of a hedge fund manager whose divorce had been chronicled in the columns—the new young wife the center of an enthusiastic audience, chattering like grackles, the old one huddled resentfully with a single companion at the outer edge of the scrum.

The room itself was less austere than the entry hall, the decorator seeming to have grudgingly acknowledged the need for some furniture—a pair of bargelike beige sofas faced each other across a prodigious expanse of white-lacquered coffee table. An orange-and-chartreuse Rothko hung over the stark black marble fireplace.

Casey waved her over to the corner that she shared with the woman they'd seen at Justine's a few weeks before, who resembled a bejeweled Giacometti in a canary yellow dress. She stood beside an actual Brancusi—a shiny marble
Bird in Space.
Even as Casey introduced them, the scarecrow glanced over the top of Corrine's head in search of more familiar faces.

“Can't thank you enough,” Corrine told her friend. “Jeremy's so excited.” Her son nodded solemnly in confirmation, visibly flustered by the arrival of Casey's daughter, Amber, a budding beauty three years his senior. A quadruple threat: blond, tall and elegantly thin, she had in the past year sprouted perfect pear-shaped breasts. It hardly seemed fair, with all her other advantages, that she should look so good, or that she could maintain an A average at Spence. She was destined, Corrine felt certain, to make some nice boy from Harvard or Princeton very miserable.

“You remember Jeremy,” Casey said.

“Yeah, hi. Look, Mom, can we go to Jessica's house after this? Her dad has an advance copy of
Knocked Up
and we're going to watch it in their screening room.”

“This is what, a new movie?”

Amber rolled her eyes. “It's the new Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl, and it's not even in theaters yet.”

“It's supposed to be really cool,” Jeremy said, gazing up at Amber with fear and longing.

“I suppose that's fine. But not until after the presentation. And I want you to ask questions.”

“Whatever.”

“You know I hate that word.”

“Okay, fine, I will ask incisive questions that make my mother look good and thereby increase her chances of getting asked to be on the board of the Wildlife Society, which is the only reason we're here. I don't even know why you want to be on the stupid board anyway. You don't even like animals.”

“We're all animals, Amber. Let's go upstairs and get a seat, shall we?”

Rows of folding chairs had been set up in the library on the third floor. Jeremy insisted on taking a seat in the first row. Corrine sat, reluctantly, beside him, with Casey on her right. At the end of their row, a cameraman and a soundman were setting up under the supervision of Trina Cox, one of cable TV's Money Honeys, not to mention Russell's former partner in the failed attempt to takeover Corbin, Dern, the publishing company where he'd been working at the time. Russell had somehow conceived the idea of a leveraged buyout of his employer after learning that he was on the verge of getting fired, and Trina had been the investment banker who advised him and, quite possibly, slept with him. They might have succeeded in the takeover if the stock market crash hadn't derailed them. It was the eighties. Stranger things had happened.

Now Trina was one of several babes employed by the cable stations in the past decade to deliver business and economic news, the collective bet being that the audience for such, as with sports, was largely hetero male. Corrine had to admit she looked good. Though she hadn't been a raving beauty back in the days when she was seducing Russell—call her crazy, but Corrine certainly didn't think so—she was one of those women who'd actually grown more attractive in her thirties and forties, her face losing baby fat and gaining definition. Still, this seemed like quite a comedown from delivering the monthly jobs report on CNN. She was alternately standing in front of the camera, mike in hand, and checking the playback.

“Jesus Christ, I look like Kathy Bates in
Misery.
Can we do something with the fucking lights, please?”

“Excuse me….”

One of the moms raced over and tapped Trina on the shoulder. “
Excuse me,
this is an event for
children,
as you can plainly see, and we would all appreciate it if you'd refrain from inappropriate language.”

“Sorry,” Trina said, turning back to the cameraman. “I meant to say ‘Could we please do something with these
fornicating
lights?' ”

The buzz of conversation subsided when Minky wafted into the room, her gold caftan flapping like a sail. Even as a debutante she'd been more zaftig than her peers, and the years had only added to her volume. Surrounded by stick figures, she seemed to be serenely comfortable in her flesh, untroubled by the neuroses and eating disorders of the lesser rich. Her blond bob was kept in check by a black velvet headband and she was bedizened with enormous jewels.