Bright, Precious Days (14 page)

“I'm Corrine,” she said. “It's a real pleasure to meet you.” While she considered herself immune to the charms of vapid celebrities, that wasn't how she felt at this moment. Perhaps it was the fact that this was the man who would play Jeff on-screen. Except, of course, it was more than that. “Actually, I'm working on the
Youth and Beauty
screenplay with Cody Erhardt.”

“That's cool,” he said. “Love Cody.”

Somewhat taken aback, expecting some kind of follow-up or acknowledgment, she explained that there were bars inside and out, and told them to make themselves at home. She was only slightly surprised to see Russell bound off the porch and greet Tug like an old friend. Russell was nothing if not gregarious, and if she sometimes thought he was indiscriminate in collecting people, she also couldn't help sometimes admiring the breadth of his acquaintance and his enthusiasm for new people, as well as his conviction that there were still friends to be made at an age when most men were consolidating their portfolios of names and faces. After all these years he still had a boyish love of parties, and a provincial's wonderment at the social spectacle of New York, with all its bright stars and unlikely juxtapositions—and this was undoubtedly New York, with a sprinkle of Hollywood, spread out on the browning lawn beside the old shingled farmhouse.

Cody, meanwhile, was chatting up one of the gorgeous young things who'd showed up with Tug. “I'm just saying every novel's unique, a reinvention of the form. A screenplay has conventions that need to be observed—action, dialogue, three-act structure.”

“What's three-act structure?”

“Boy meets girl, boy and girl get into pickle, boy gets pickle into girl.”

She giggled, raising her hand to her face to cover a crooked tooth.

“I haven't heard that one,” Tug said, returning with three drinks in hand, one of which he handed off to her. “So I see you've met the great Cody Erhardt.”

“Cody who?”

Cody looked miffed, of course.

“Shit, that just shows what's happened to this business,” Tug said. “Cody here's the man. He did all these amazing movies in the seventies. Part of that Scorsese-Schrader clique.
American Ninja, Death by a Thousand Cuts.
”

The great man himself, who had tried at one time to get his pickle into Corrine, bowed in acknowledgment of the compliment.

“Oh right,” the girl said. “I loved
American Ninja.
”

Burly, bearded Rob Klemp, the painter, in paint-stained cargo shorts, was talking to reedy Jillian Simms, the fashion designer, angelic in white jeans and white T-shirt, her blond hair flat against her skull, pulled back in a ponytail. What were they talking about? Sometimes Corrine wondered how these people knew one another, and how the hell
they
knew them. As she got closer, she heard them arguing.

“Come on, Obama has no résumé,” Jillian said. “I mean, he's been a senator for, what? Three minutes?”

“Long enough to be right about the war in Iraq.”

“Hillary's got substance. Face it, Obama's a lightweight.”

Russell had loaded up a special iPod for the occasion, which seemed to Corrine to consist of Don Henley's “Boys of Summer,” the Go-Go's “Vacation,” the Motels' “Suddenly Last Summer,” “Summertime Blues” by various artists, “Margaritaville,” plus pretty much all of the Beach Boys catalog. Thankfully, he'd skipped “Big Girls Don't Cry” and “Umbrella,” the ubiquitous anthems of the summer.

“Oh my God,” Corrine said, spotting a newcomer. “That's Tony Duplex.”

“Yeah,” Rob said. “He came with Gary Arkadian. Tony's got a new show going up this fall at Arkadian's gallery.”

“I haven't seen him in years,” Corrine said. Tony looked very much out of place in a tight black suit over a shirt as white as his complexion.

“He disappeared up a crack pipe for most of the nineties, but apparently he's back.”

“I remember,” she said. He'd been great friends with Jeff, in fact.

Not surprisingly, he looked frail for his years. They were almost surely the same age, but he looked much older, his face pitted and canyoned. He showed no sign of recognition when Russell came over and introduced him to Corrine. One of those downtown bad boys who failed to leave the party while the getting was good, he'd managed to sustain his drug habit well into the nineties, by which time his critical reputation had crashed and his drug of choice had gone out of fashion. As she recalled, there'd been some kind of fight with a collector who held dozens of his paintings, and the guy dumped them on the market all at once, right before Robert Hughes wrote a withering review of his latest show. She hadn't heard his name for years; then, recently, she'd seen a picture of him at a party in
New York
magazine, and she seemed to recall a mention of his resurrection in the
Post
's Page Six.

“Thanks for having me,” he said, shaking her hand limply. Obviously he had no memory of the night she'd met him on the Lower East Side, ransoming him and Jeff from a shortchanged drug dealer with a handful of gold coins.

Kip Taylor emerged from the throng, with one hand raised in greeting, the other perched on his wife's shoulder, accompanied by Luke and Giselle McGavock. Corrine tried to mute her shock as the group approached, to compose her features as Kip and Vanessa hugged her in turn, at which point the question of how to greet Luke presented itself. He answered it quickly by kissing her cheek, as did Giselle.

“I hope you don't mind us crashing your party,” Luke said. “We're staying with Kip and Vanessa this weekend.”

“You're more than welcome,” Corrine said, hoping she sounded less flustered than she felt.

“I told them it was the party of the season,” Kip said.

“Hardly that,” Corrine said.

Luke grazed her with a rueful, apologetic glance.

Ten minutes later he found her alone in the kitchen, where she'd quickly retreated.

“I didn't mean to sneak up on you,” he said. “Kip only mentioned that we were coming here an hour ago.”

“Why should I mind?” she said, realizing immediately that her tone was peevish. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm just—I just wasn't expecting to see you.”

“I thought about calling. I didn't know if I should. But I'd love to see you.”

“Here I am.”

“I mean alone.”

“We head back to the city on Monday,” she said.

“I'll be there next week.”

“And your wife?” She wasn't sure which designation she liked least, her name or her title.

“She flies back on Wednesday. On Saturday, Ashley's coming down from Poughkeepsie to join me in the city.”

“Call me,” Corrine said, not at all certain whether she wished to encourage or dismiss him, their conference punctuated by the arrival of a waiter looking for more ice.

As they stepped outside, she spotted her husband engaged in what looked like a heated discussion with a pale, chubby stranger, who seemed to be cowering.

She hurried over as the guests, increasingly, turned to observe the scene.

“It's my job to express an opinion,” the man was saying.

“It's your job to attract attention to yourself by doing hatchet jobs on your betters, you fucking troll.”

“Who's being ad hominem now?”

“Damn right I am. You just turn around on your Birkenstocks and get your fat ass off my lawn.”

Steve Sanders, who looked like a young Trotsky and wrote for the
Times,
had been hovering at the edge of the battle. “Russell,” he said, “let's be reasonable.”

“Fuck you, Steve,” he said. “There's nothing reasonable about his bitchy little tirades. I can't stop him from writing them, but I sure as hell don't have to put up with his company at my own party.” The man in question was retreating with tattered dignity under the gaze of half the partygoers.

“I didn't know he'd attacked one of your authors, or I never would've brought him.”

“I'm sure you wouldn't have,” Russell said, his rage dissipating as its object retreated.

“What was all that about, my love?” she asked a few minutes later, drawing him away from the party, toward the potato barn.

“That was Toby Barnes.”

“Who?”

“The little twat who wrote that nasty review of
Youth and Beauty
in
Details.
”

“For God's sake, Russell, that had to be fifteen years ago. It was another lifetime.”

“I remember it like it was yesterday. The headline was ‘Uncouth and Snooty.' ”

She thought it was kind of magnificent that Russell was still defending Jeff after all these years, if not very politic. “Is it wise to humiliate him like that? Now you've made a real enemy.”

“Fuck him, he was already my enemy.”

“Well, don't forget that you publish a lot of authors who might not want to be on Barnes's shit list.”

“They'd be glad to know that I'd fight for them just like I fought for Jeff.”

“Well, let's see if we can salvage this party, slugger. Smile and laugh and show them that all's well,” she said, taking his arm and leading him back into the crowd.

Russell's outburst, far from dampening spirits, seemed to give the party a new source of energy. He was congratulated by half a dozen of the guests, most of them artists or writers, all of them at one time or another the recipients of nasty reviews. The drama provided grist for dozens of conversations about art and criticism and hospitality, and was reported the following Tuesday in a gossip item on Page Six.

The party continued on for several hours, until finally the guests melted away and Corrine found herself sitting alone on the front porch, smelling the primal brine of the invisible ocean, listening to the waves rolling in beyond the dunes and the brittle song of the crickets, who seemed to be eulogizing the summer, the chill in the air a melancholy premonition of fall. Far away, from somewhere inside the house, she could intermittently hear Russell's muffled baritone as he regaled some straggler. Farther away, Luke was doing who knew what. Maybe she'd had too much to drink, but she suddenly felt terribly sad. Instead of being reassured by the familiarity of these sensations, she was depressed by them. The first time she'd felt the autumn approach across the dunes from this very spot, she'd been a young woman. Summer was over and she was fifty years old, her life going by so fast that the fog drifting in over the grass seemed like an omen.

NO LESS THAN THE FARM,
the city is attuned to the rhythms of the seasons, although here the autumn, rather than the spring, is the season of rebirth and renewal—the start of a new year for Gentiles no less than for those who celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the time to shake off the torpor and idleness of August and send the children back to school, where they will start fresh, make new and interesting friends and perform even better than last year; a season of restaurant and gallery openings; the time when the fashions of the following year are unveiled on the runways as the gingko leaves turn yellow, Fashion Week giving way to the New York Film Festival, the opening of the Metropolitan Opera and the Philharmonic and City Ballet, the big charity galas and later the art auctions at Christie's and Sotheby's and Phillips de Pury, which will tell us how rich the rich are feeling this year. It's also, less profitably, the season when publishers roll out their biggest and most promising titles.

Before leaving for lunch, Russell stopped in to see Jonathan, who was just across the hall. “When do we see the
Times
?”

“Any minute now.”

Jonathan's office was sparsely decorated, the walls bare except for the poster advertising Carson's book and another for Arcade Fire.

“You heard anything?”

“My source tells me we'll be happy.”

They were waiting for their advance copy of the following Sunday's
New York Times Book Review,
which reportedly featured a review of Jack's book. The fact that they'd sent a photographer to take his picture in Tennessee two weeks ago was a positive sign, and Jonathan had been told the reviewer was a novelist of stature, which was also a good sign, although Russell wasn't entirely thrilled that he was a southerner; it was like the way the
Times
almost inevitably assigned women to review other women.

“In the meantime, he's missed his last two interviews.”

“Did you call the hotel?”

Jonathan nodded. “Not picking up.”

“I probably should've seen this coming.”

“Maybe this could work for us,” Jonathan said. “The whole bad-boy,
poète maudit
angle.”

“We're trying to get people to write about the work,” Russell said. “About what's on the page. We're trying to sell literature here.” He realized even as he said it how pretentious this sounded, but he believed it. He just wasn't sure if he could convey the concept to this twenty-eight-year-old, who was wearing a vintage
Naked Lunch
T-shirt under an open flannel shirt. “I don't want Jack branded as some meth-addled cracker right out of the gate. He's already susceptible to the inevitable stereotyping: Southern writers are almost always relegated to their own ghetto of exotic decadence.”

In a more general sense, Russell objected to the cult of personality, to the fake idea of
authenticity,
to the notion that the intensity of the life somehow certified the work, all the holy drunk/genius junkie bullshit that equated excess with wisdom, cirrhosis with genius. Blake had a lot to answer for, in his opinion. The road of excess leads to rehab, or the boneyard, more often than it leads to the palace of wisdom. He believed that literature was accomplished in spite of excessive behavior, not because of it.

“I'm fucking tired of this idea that getting drunk and/or doing smack turns an MFA candidate into a genius.”

“But you've got to admit, chief, a lot of writers and artists are drunks and junkies.”

“I don't admit that at all. I don't think the proportion of literary alcoholics runs any higher than that of alcoholic plumbers.” Not for the first time he wondered where Jonathan found such tight jeans—were they sold like that, or did he have them taken in? And how did you get into the damn things?

“I don't know,” Jonathan said. “Jesus, I could make you a list, starting with Christopher Marlowe. Most of the writers we both like were drunks or addicts or both. Just look at the modernists—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner. Raving alkies. Not to mention the Beats. Most of the writers on
our list
are pretty fucked-up and emotionally unstable.”

“They'd be better and more productive if they got their shit together.
Tender Is the Night
would've been a better book if its author hadn't been drunk half the time and wired on Dexedrine the other half.”

“If you say so, Dad.”

“Hey, I'm not moralizing. I'm just saying let's not confuse cause and effect.”

“What about Burroughs?”

“His
subject
was drugs and derangement, so I guess we have to make an exception there. Ditto Hunter Thompson.”

“So what do we do about the fuckup in question? About Jack?”

“Keep calling. If you can't reach him, I'll go over to the hotel room after lunch.” He realized that if he sounded a little vehement on this topic, even overwrought, it probably had a lot to do with Jeff, who'd been slouching at the back of his mind all morning: His dead best friend, the genius junkie, was posthumously developing a cult all his own. Sales of his books were steadily climbing. It seemed like such a damn waste. Sometimes, still, it would hit Russell hard, how much he missed him. How angry he was at him still for not being around. No one had ever completely replaced him. Corrine said he should go to therapy. But then, she had Jeff issues of her own.

After lunch he searched his file cabinets and found the article that had so enraged him about
Youth and Beauty,
although, despite the fact that it had been his practice to make carbons of all his letters, he couldn't find the copy of his seething epistolary response. The clipping was from the April 1991 issue of
Details:

Those who imagine that the guardians of high culture sit in the clouds, like gods, disinterestedly paring their fingernails while passing judgment on the literary offerings laid before them, should consider the canonization of Jeff Pierce as his posthumous novel,
Youth and Beauty,
slouches into bookstores. August voices from
The New York Times,
The New York Review of Books
and
The Village Voice
have all breathlessly retailed a version of the archetypal tabloid narrative: young, talented, tortured artist, too sensitive for this world. Listen carefully to the faux-stentorian tones of critical consensus and you can hear, underneath, the screaming of teenage girls at a pop concert. (Of course, Pierce helped shape the narrative with his Keatsian title.) Nowhere in print, until now, will you find the opinion that he was a preppy junkie whose worldview was doubly circumscribed, by privilege and by addiction….

“Can I talk to you about the party?” Jonathan asked, leaning in the doorway.

“How's it shaping up?” Russell asked, relieved to set this screed aside.

“Getting bigger by the minute.”

Russell didn't really believe in publication parties, or at least he didn't believe in paying for them, because he didn't think they helped to sell books; basically, it was just a sop to the author's ego. But Jonathan had talked him into doing one for Jack after his reading at 192 Books, and now that the TBR promised to come in strong, it looked as if it was going to be the event du jour. The reading and party would take place on Monday, the day after most civilians would see the
Times.
All week, people had been begging to be added to the list, and Jonathan was now worried that both of their chosen venues might prove to be too small. The bookstore wasn't much bigger than the bathroom at Nobu, and the party room above the Fatted Calf, a kind of speakeasy for friends of the owners, which Russell had managed to book at an insider's price, was even smaller than the bookstore, but Russell thought it was perfect.

“It should be a fucking zoo,” Jonathan said.

“That's fine,” Russell said. “Far better than a half-empty room. Let's put on an extra bartender, though. Nobody minds being jammed up against a bunch of their peers or literary celebrities unless they can't get a drink.”

“Richard Johnson from Page Six RSVP'd this morning.”

“That's surprising.”

“I think a lot of this is coming from the Web, Gothamist and Gawker and some of the bloggers. And then, strangely enough, there's a Web site called Tweakers.com that serves the speed-freak community, and they seem to have registered the fact that a couple of the stories deal with meth. They just posted the details of the reading.”

“Methheads have their own Web site?”

“Several,” Jonathan said, shaking his head as he walked to the door.

“Jesus. Who knew?”

For twenty-five years, Russell had been trying to understand and channel that mysterious force alternately known as buzz or word of mouth, and now it seemed to have mutated into this new digital form.

It was always a little mysterious, what made some books pop and others evaporate. This week he'd sold rights in Spain, Germany and Italy, which basically meant that Jack's advance was covered and everything from here on was profit. Exactly how Russell liked to do it.

Jonathan rushed back into the office, waving several sheets of paper. “I've got it!”

“And?”

“It's a rave….I've only skimmed it, but it's basically a blow job. Here, listen to this: ‘Jack Carson's characters are the demon spawn of Faulkner's Snopes family and Carver's lumpen proles, the descendants of Walker Evans's Depression-era subjects, trapped deep in the sunless hollers of Tennessee and Kentucky. Their American dream is a nightmare of cruelty and inbreeding compounded by privation; moonshine and meth their only escape, and yet Carson manages to invest their struggle to survive with a kind of stoic grandeur, and even, at times, to celebrate their inchoate yearning toward the light….' ”

“Jesus, let me see that,” said Russell, practically tearing the review from Jonathan's hands.

The afternoon before the party, Russell was looking over the reorders for the book, which were strong, when Corrine called, all worked up about a hard day with the bureaucrats at the New York City Housing Authority. She was trying to get permission to set up a food giveaway in the parking lot of a housing project in Brooklyn. “I don't know whether to be somewhat encouraged or thoroughly discouraged.”

“Well, if you don't know, honey, I'm not sure how I would.”

“Do you realize you call me
honey
when you're exasperated with me? I think you do it because you feel guilty that you're exasperated and it assuages your conscience.”

“I can't say I'm aware of this alleged tic, nor do I believe it.”

“All right, I'll stop bugging you. I'll see you at home.”

“Not till late. Tonight's Jack's book party, remember?”

“Oh, right. Do you want me to come?”

“If I were you, I'd skip it. Looks like it's going to be a real hipster ratfuck. I won't be too late, I hope. If he wants to go out afterward, I'll send Jonathan.”

In hopes of getting the guest of honor to the church on time, Russell decided to pick him up at the hotel himself. He arrived at the Chelsea just before six; when Jack didn't answer the call from the lobby phone, he asked at the desk, where they had no information on Mr. Carson's whereabouts. Why, Russell wondered, had he put him up in the same hotel where Sid Vicious had murdered Nancy Spungen? He turned and walked out the door and down the street to the Trailer Park Lounge, where he found the missing person huddled over a drink, looking exceedingly mournful sitting on his stool.

“I don't guess this was a real good hidin' spot,” he said when Russell sat down beside him. His hair pointed in several directions and he had a greenish pallor. The kitschy bar and grill with its Elvis memorabilia had become Jack's home away from home in the city. It was his kind of joke: a real redneck in a fake redneck bar.

“You've done better, certainly.”

“I don't think I can do this.”

“Sure you can.”

“I can't get up and read my stories to a bunch of smart-ass New Yorkers.”

“Just look at it this way—most of the characters in your stories could kick their asses all the way to New Jersey.”

“Most of my characters are dumb crackers.”

“I wouldn't call them dumb. They actually seem very savvy to me. If they were competing on
Survivor,
these New Yorkers wouldn't stand a chance. They'd get kicked off the island in a heartbeat by your boys and girls. I'll tell you a secret about smart-ass New Yorkers; ninety percent of them are former hicks who landed here utterly clueless after being the least popular kids in their high schools. The popular ones stayed back home, where they were wanted.”

“Just fuckin' shoot me now.”

“Have another drink.”

“Don't mind if I do.”

After another vodka, he seemed slightly less terrified.

“What are you going to read?”

“I have no fuckin' idea.”

“Well, let's think of something. Read the story you think is least likely to go over with this audience, and I bet you it'll bring the house down.”

“I need some blow,” he said.

“Well, sorry, but I used up my last gram about twenty years ago.”

“Somebody's comin',” he said. “I have to wait.”

“A dealer?”

“A friend,” Jack said.

Russell pointed out that the reading started in ten minutes, but Jack wouldn't budge until his friend arrived—a petite, voluptuous brunette with a gold nose ring who introduced herself as Cara.

“You got the stuff?” Jack asked.

“Come on,” she said, walking off toward the bathrooms.

Russell finally got them both into a taxi ten minutes after the reading was supposed to have started, somewhat fretful about Jack's condition. He seemed just as drunk as before, only now he was twitching and chewing his lower lip. As they approached the bookstore on Tenth Avenue, they could see a milling throng on the sidewalk. The chatter of the crowd subsided as Jack emerged from the cab and shuffled through the gauntlet, Russell guiding him with a hand on his shoulder, apologizing as they pushed forward into the mob. “Got the reader here. Sorry, coming through. Excuse us….”