Bright, Precious Days (13 page)

“My friends,” she began, “thank you so much for coming. And thank you for supporting the Wildlife Society.” A few of the children tittered, seemingly amused by her fluty patrician voice. “I'm particularly pleased for the opportunity to introduce these young people to our group. It's crucial that we preserve our wildlife so that you will inherit an earth where humans and animals live in harmony. Imagine a planet with no lions or tigers or elephants. If not for our society, there might have been no American bison left. Do you children all know what the bison is?”

“It's a buffalo.”

“We have bison burgers when we go to Jackson Hole. Mom says they're superhealthy.”

“That's gross.”

Minky frowned. “What you children may not know is that by the end of the last century the bison had been hunted almost to extinction. In 1907, our founder, William Temple Hornaday, sent fifteen bison from the Bronx Zoo to a reserve in Wichita, Kansas, where the buffalo had once roamed in the millions, and gradually the species recovered in some of its natural habitats. Today we're working to save other endangered species. Who here has visited the Central Park Zoo?”

A unanimous chorus of cheers and huzzahs.

“And the Bronx Zoo?”

Only a trickle of affirmations followed this query.

“Well, today we have a very special visitor from the Bronx. Please welcome Lionel the Liger and his trainer, Dr. Michael Jost.”

All eyes turned toward the hallway, which was empty. A disembodied voice was exhorting the star attraction: “Lionel…Lionel?”

Necks were craned; feet were scuffed. The tension was broken, briefly, by a pigtailed preschooler in a tartan jumper: “Come on, Lionel, don't be afraid.”

Trainer and beast finally appeared at the top of the stairway, eliciting a collective gasp and assorted squeals, the liger resisting the pressure on his leash, batting at the silvery chain links and shaking his head back and forth. It was a very big animal, much bigger than Corrine had expected. The man holding the leash, though fairly solid, wouldn't stand a chance against a cat that must've outweighed him by a factor of three or four.

The squeals rose in volume as he succeeded in leading it into the library. After some coaxing and pushing, he managed to get the big cat to sit on its hind legs.

“Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Dr. Jost, from the Bronx Zoo, and this is Lionel, who's visiting us from his home at an animal refuge in South Carolina.”

“Isn't he from Africa?”

“No, he's not, but I'm glad you asked that. Lions and tigers don't live near each other in the wild. The Bengal tiger lives in Asia and the lion is native to Africa.”

“So how did the lion have sex with the tiger?” shouted one of the older boys.

Dr. Jost waited patiently for the uproar to subside.

“Well, in the case of Lionel's mom and dad, they were living together at the game refuge. His father was a lion and his mother was a tiger. And, in fact, the liger shares traits with both of his genetic parents. Like tigers, they like to swim, and like lions, they're very sociable. But they're significantly bigger than either lions or tigers. They can grow almost twice as big.”

Whatever his parentage, Corrine didn't like the way this animal was looking at Jeremy. At first she thought it was just her imagination, but when she studied her son, his eyes were locked on those of the cat, who was staring back at him disconcertingly.

A late-arriving mother and son were standing in the doorway, and Corrine decided to use this opportunity to get Jeremy out of the liger's direct line of sight by moving over to occupy empty seats near the end of the row. But the cat's gaze was still fixed on Jeremy when they settled into their new chairs, a fact that the trainer seemed to register.

“Stop tracking,” he said, whacking it on the side of its neck.

After shaking its huge head and yawning, Lionel returned his gaze to Jeremy. It was terrifying, and Jeremy seemed a little freaked-out himself.

“Mom, why's the liger staring at me?”

“I'm not sure, honey.”

Dr. Jost continued his spiel: “What we do know is that ligers are missing the growth-inhibiting gene that keeps them at a normal size. They can weigh up to nine hundred pounds and the skulls are forty percent larger than a Bengal tiger's. Lionel,
stop tracking.
”

He whacked the cat again, and that was enough for Corrine. She grabbed Jeremy's hand and started to lead him out. As they crossed in front of the liger, it crouched and seemed to take aim for a lunge, at which point Dr. Jost tugged hard on its leash. “Behave yourself, Lionel.”

Corrine shoved Jeremy ahead as she watched over her shoulder, the liger stationary but shaking its head against the straining collar. In the hallway, she took his hand and together they ran down the stairs.

“That was pretty scary,” Jeremy said.

Corrine nodded. She didn't want to overdramatize, but she'd been terrified.

“Was it just me, or did that liger look like it wanted to eat me?”

“Well, let's just say I didn't like the way it was looking at you.”

Standing outside on the sidewalk on a warm spring afternoon, she wondered if she'd let her imagination run wild. Just across from the town house was a large trailer towed by a pickup truck with a Bronx Zoo logo. They crossed Fifth Avenue and walked down the park side, under the porous canopy of just-leafing tree branches. She could predict the call from Casey, who would accuse her of being a crazy, overprotective mother, but she really didn't care.

In fact, when Casey finally did call, it seemed that the Calloways' premature exit was overshadowed by subsequent events. The story that gradually emerged was that Lionel, while being led to his trailer from the door of the town house, had pounced on a passing jogger, who was now in stable condition at Lenox Hill Hospital.

THEN IT WAS MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND
and the Calloways were packing up the borrowed Land Rover and joining the exodus from Manhattan, funneling out of the Midtown Tunnel into the so-called expressway, joining the hundred-mile-long queue of vehicles creeping toward the outer reaches of Long Island, the traffic eventually congealing like melted butter turning cold at the lower end of the lobster claw of the South Fork late Friday afternoon. Every year they left TriBeCa earlier and every year the drive was longer, or so it felt to Corrine.

The old farmhouse they'd rented for so many years, and the two acres that remained of a once-vast empire of corn and potatoes, within sniffing distance of the ocean, was on the market for $4.9 million. Even in this booming market it seemed unlikely the Polanskis would get that much, and, in fact, it had been listed for nine months when Sara Polanski had called Corrine and offered to rent it one more time if the Calloways agreed to show it, her native thrift triumphing even on the verge of the avalanche of cash that would be hers when the house sold. Already the Polanskis, who'd farmed the land for more than a century, were wealthier than some of the second-home owners from the city, after years of selling off acreage by the sea. Certainly much richer than Russell and Corrine, who'd been instrumental in getting Becca Polanski into Brown, the first alumnus of Bridgehampton High School to matriculate there, and Corrine sent Christmas and birthday cards, while Russell sent books that might appeal to one family member or another—none of which had hurt when it came time to negotiate a deal each spring.

The first weekend in June, they quietly observed their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, as they had less significant ones, at the Old Stove Pub, a steak house on the highway. Neither seemed inclined to make a big fuss about it, sensibly agreeing to save energy and resources for their big Labor Day party; in the end, they included Tom and Casey, whose own silver jubilee was just a few months off.

Russell took the jitney from the city Thursday evenings and went back into the city every Monday morning, while Corrine, on hiatus from her job, stayed out with the kids and adhered rigorously to the South Beach diet. Russell talked to the children every day during the course of the week; toward the end of July, he and Jeremy camped out at the Books of Wonder bookstore in Chelsea, where they communed with live owls and several hundred fans waiting for the midnight release of the final Harry Potter novel. That summer, except for a few John Edwards partisans, everyone was divided into Hillary and Obama camps, and the arguments were heated around the pools and fire pits.

Tom and Casey had lent them their old Land Rover, a stylish, if not terribly reliable, vehicle in regulation hunter green, and thus they were able to spend yet another season beside the ocean, going to movie premieres in East Hampton with the actors and directors, arranging play dates with the children of a media mogul, playing grass-court tennis in Southampton with the spawn of great American robber barons. It was a life they'd been living for years, and therefore unremarkable to them, until some minor dislocation or embarrassment highlighted its absurdities. Storey's desire to keep a horse at the nearby stable, as some of her friends did, had to be thoroughly discouraged. The proximity to so much wealth could be infectious; only last year Russell had talked about buying into a bankrupt vineyard. Likewise, unless they were included by someone who'd purchased a table, they had to find clever excuses for declining invitations to the charity benefits that had spread east to the Hamptons in recent years, some of which ran to a thousand bucks a head. And yet, many of their friends and their children's friends were here, and over the years they'd carved out a place for themselves in the Darwinian social fray without violent effort or expenditure. They were well liked, and their parties fashionable—the kind of gatherings that mixed what was left of the literary and artistic communities with some of the Southampton blue bloods and the East Hampton Democratic Party politicos and the Amagansett
Saturday Night Live
crowd.

Even the hedge funders who'd bought up most of the oceanfront and the dentists and dermatologists whose houses dotted the former potato fields had a soft spot for the founding myth of a seaside arts colony, for the days when Pollock and de Kooning had lurched around the same sand dunes as Capote and Albee. The Calloways somehow managed to inherit this tradition; one of the many glossy giveaway publications that chronicled the summer scene had recently compared them to Gerald and Sara Murphy, the great host and hostess of the Lost Generation, which delighted Russell, who'd published a book about them, though Corrine considered the comparison imperfect on the detail of the Murphys' inherited wealth.

Their Friday-before-Labor-Day party had become a fixture on the Hamptons calendar, and Corrine was always amazed to find herself being courted during the summer by those who hoped to get invited. They tried to hold the guest list to a hundred, but last year at least twice that many had showed up. Certainly no one came for the food, although Russell seemed proud of the chili and cornbread and salad he made with the help of a local chef, the bulk of the budget going to booze, wine and beer. They hired three bartenders and three servers and hoped it wouldn't rain, since the crowd inevitably overflowed the house, and a tent was beyond their means. It was exhausting, but it would kill Russell to give it up.

“It's bigger than we are,” he once told Corrine when she complained about the effort and the expense. She wondered if it was the kind of institution that could survive uprooting; this year's gathering would have a valedictory feeling, almost certainly their last in the old farmhouse.

That week, Cody Erhardt, the director, was staying with them. Once upon a time he'd been a notorious badass, a hard-drinking, skirt-chasing American ninja—also the title of his best-known movie—but at this point in deep middle age he was fairly unprepossessing, doughy and overfed, with thinning hair and a mottled pink complexion. Although he'd played a version of himself in a Godard film, no casting agent would have, at this date, tried to sell him as a macho hip director. It was strange to see him—so clearly an indoor creature, a native of editing studios and screening rooms—out here at the beach. Cody was, if not exactly an old friend, at least an old acquaintance, an avatar of the brief, lamented renaissance of American film that flared up around 1969 in the wake of
Easy Rider.
Russell had published a collection of three of his screenplays and he'd later, briefly, been attached to Corrine's adaptation of
The Heart of the Matter
after it had been bought by New Line. Though that film got made by someone else and ultimately played in only a few theaters, it was still a hot project when she managed, with Russell's help, to get herself assigned to do the script for
Youth and Beauty.
Tug Barkley, or someone who worked for him, had discovered Jeff's novel. After going silent for two years, his production company had recently renewed the option, and Corrine was working on yet another draft with Cody. The development process had been, from her point of view, painfully protracted and convoluted, though no more so, Cody assured her, than the average movie; he'd been trying to make Kerouac's
Dharma Bums
for seventeen years.

Although she liked to give the impression that she'd adapted
The Heart of the Matter
on a whim, that she'd never expected anything to come of it, she had worked on it tirelessly and was thrilled when her screenplay was optioned, pleased to have forged an identity in the Hobbesian cultural landscape of Manhattan after a stint as a stay-at-home mom, resentful of any insinuation that Russell's connections had played a part, and secretly crushed when the film disappeared without a trace. She'd thrown herself into the job at Nourish New York on the rebound. She loved the work, but when she was given another chance on
Youth and Beauty,
it felt like a new lease on life. Corrine desperately wanted to see it made, and succeed, though she would be hard-pressed to say whether it was herself or Jeff she was hoping to redeem.

She and Cody had been working during the day and then the three of them would make the rounds in the evening. As August progressed, the social pace had become ever more frenzied; it would have been impossible to honor even half of their cocktail and dinner party invitations, even if the traffic hadn't been so clotted as to make it necessary to plot out one's course in advance, calculating likely time of transit and distance between points, weighing the relative desirability of events that were unrealistically far apart. Russell actually enjoyed this crazy whirl, at least up to a point, and Corrine was grateful that Cody was here to accompany him, allowing her to spend a few nights with the kids.

For their latest powwow, she had forced Cody to accompany her to the beach, which she hadn't seen in three days, and he'd covered himself up like a mummy, swathed in gray sweats, with a towel on his head.

The ending of Jeff's novel had always posed a problem. In the book, the Jeff surrogate—a successful neo-Expressionist painter—dies of a heroin overdose, presumably accidental, although the possibility of suicide isn't far-fetched; he is, after all, hopelessly in love with his best friend's wife. Just to complicate matters further, his best friend is his gallerist. Corrine had originally adhered closely to the novel, but the studio execs had balked once they read the first draft, and in the next draft a car accident took the place of the heroin overdose. Lately, a consensus had been building that the protagonist shouldn't die at all.

“Back in the day, the studios would have let us get away with that,” Cody said one morning, “the hero dying of an overdose; they would have let us show it, for God's sake—the syringe in the arm, the trickle of blood—then pulled back on the dude gradually turning blue. After
Easy Rider,
Five Easy Pieces,
Mean Streets
and
Death by a Thousand Cuts,
they realized they didn't have a clue, and for a little while they let the kids have the keys to the candy store. But eventually the marketing department took over, and now they call the shots. No way they're going to let us kill off our fucking protagonist.”

“Well, his death does resolve the whole love triangle thing pretty nicely.”

“Hey, maybe we have all three of them move in together, remake
Jules and Jim,
which I'm pretty sure none of the marketing morons ever heard of—except it probably won't pass muster with the PG-13 police, either. So, tell me, really, did you actually fuck the guy, or was that wishful thinking on his part?”

“I'm just going to leave it up to your overheated, lecherous imagination, Cody.”

“Am I the only one who thinks it's weird that Russell edited the novel?”

“It was remarked on somewhat.”

“I mean, doesn't that make you cringe a little bit?”

“It was a long time ago,” she said.

The day of the party dawned brilliantly clear, and the weather held, the heat of the day moderated by the ocean—audible just over the dunes all day—fading to perfect shirtsleeve temperature by six.

“We're sorry to be so unfashionably early,” said Judy Levine, who, with her husband, Art, was the first to arrive. “But we can only stay a minute. We've got to go to the Aldas' and then on to the Michaelses' for dinner.” Corrine could imagine that Judy must have thought herself very clever to apologize in a manner that allowed her to drop these names, which could only suggest to the hostess that it was she and her husband who were not quite fashionable enough to merit a later arrival, that the Levines were only stopping by on their way to grander events.

“At least now we'll get a chance to talk before all the fashionable people show up,” Russell said, parrying the thrust. Corrine tried not to smile. He was a good host, but he was nobody's patsy. Art was kind of interesting, a writer and director from the golden age of television, though of that generation of men for whom women were anything but equals, and Judy was just a silly, social-climbing twit who couldn't possibly have improved his opinion of their gender over the course of a thirty-year marriage.

The guests came mostly in pairs, some early birds with a child in tow, others with houseguests—a new divorcée or a single friend from the city. Some of the couples came with a gay friend, and some of the gay couples had a straight friend in tow. They all observed certain sumptuary laws of the time and place; an observer of the cars lining the street might have guessed there was a prohibition on American automobiles, and the people climbing out were dressed in a style best described as expensive casual: polo shirts, jeans, driving shoes. Socks were universally shunned by the men, as were ties—although late in the evening an interloper from Southampton, obviously lost, appeared on the lawn wearing a seersucker suit and a pink tie with a sailboat motif, clutching a bottle of Macallan by the neck.

The women wore sundresses and sandals, and the early arrivals were hidden behind big sunglasses—Tom Ford was the frame of the moment—which they pushed to the tops of their heads after the sun went down in a way that they hoped was reminiscent of Jackie O. Corrine was wearing a stretchy turquoise paisley Pucci that she'd bought when Russell took her to Capri for a literary conference, and she was wondering if it wasn't just a little too tight.

She was always surprised that she knew almost every single person, except for the houseguests, who were inevitably profuse in thanking her for allowing them to come. She wasn't aware that Tug Barkley had been invited until she saw him amble up the drive wearing nothing but cargo shorts and a wifebeater, flanked by two glamazons in tiny white dresses. Tug's interest had revived the long-dormant production of
Youth and Beauty,
though she'd never actually met him. He seemed to sense she was the hostess, smiling broadly and thrusting out his hand. “Hey, I'm Tug. Thanks for having me.”