Bright, Precious Days (26 page)

“If I were risk-averse, I'm sure my life would be very different,” he said with evident relish.

An SUV was waiting for them just beyond the ramp. Luke signed for it, shook hands with the pilot and tipped the man who loaded their bags into the back.

“Are you ever going to tell me exactly where the hell we're going?” she said as they drove out through the gate.

“Wouldn't you rather be surprised?”

“I guess I'm not really an adventurer at heart. I like to know what's coming around the corner.”

“Well, I'm grateful that you were adventurous enough to come along with me.”

“It's totally out of character, I assure you.”

“Good.”

“Can you at least tell me what that big obelisk was that I saw while I was praying for my life to be spared? Or was that a hallucination?”

“That was a monument built to commemorate the Battle of Bennington during the Revolutionary War.”

“I got into Bennington,” she said, “but I decided it was a little too far-out for me.”

“I dated a Bennington girl once,” Luke said. “She was a real wildcat.”

“I want to hear about all the other girls in your life.”

“It's not like this huge list.”

“Then it'll be easy for you to tell me.”

“I don't pretend to be an expert, but in my experience when women say they want to hear about their romantic predecessors, they don't really mean it.”

“I'm not like those other bitches,” she said.

“Indeed you're not.”

After driving south through the valley for ten minutes, they got off the highway and followed a road up into the hills, turning into a long driveway that culminated in a rambling white farmhouse with green shutters that crowned a snowy hilltop. A decrepit red gambrel-roofed barn came into view behind the house as they shimmied up the driveway, the tires spinning and spitting snow.

“I can only assume you have a golden retriever waiting to complete the picture.”

“I don't even know if you're a dog person.”

“I'm a ferret person, actually. Though I grew up with terriers.”

“I didn't know there
were
ferret people.”

“We like to root around, uncovering things and bringing them to light.”

He pulled up in front of the house and said, “Shall I carry you over the threshold?”

“That might be premature. Where are we, anyway?”

“Pownal, Vermont. A friend's house.”

“It looks as if we'll have plenty of privacy.”

The interior had a shambolic, layered quality that suggested decades of slow accretion, faded and frayed carpets, surfaces covered with books and magazines and journals, shelves sagging with the weight of more books, treasures and oddities, split logs and newspapers stacked beside the brick fireplace. Off the living room was a small overstuffed library. The master bedroom had a fireplace, wallpaper in a trellis and vine pattern, a telescope and a four-poster bed that almost touched the low, sagging ceiling.

“I love this place,” Corrine said.

“It belongs to my favorite history professor. I've been visiting for years. He's in an assisted-living facility in Williamstown now, about ten miles down the road.”

“I forgot you went to Williams.”

“But I remember your telling me about a weekend you spent there your sophomore year.”

“God, yes. Tod Baker, homecoming weekend, 1977. Did I really tell you about that?”

“You did.”

“And you thought it would be romantic for me to revisit the scene of my humiliation?”

He suddenly looked worried. “As I recall, it sounded idyllic.”

“Well, yes, except for the part where I puked in his lap.”

“You neglected to mention that detail.”

“But otherwise, yes, idyllic.”

Luke had packed two coolers of food, and that night, while she sneaked off to the library to call home, he laid out a spread of caviar and foie gras and cheese, along with an array of premade salads. “I don't actually cook,” he said when she came into the kitchen and found this feast laid out on the table.

“Thank God for that,” she said, kissing him.

Sex with Luke had been thrilling from the beginning, but she'd never felt so adventurous or voracious as she did over the next forty-eight hours. Her ardor was informed by a sense of transience, an awareness not only of the hours ticking away on the hilltop but of the gradually unwinding spring of her own vitality. She would probably never feel this kind of desire again; with Russell she had far too much history to ever again experience the thrill of discovery. She had a fervent desire to do everything with Luke, to have a store of memories to draw on in the cold nights to come.

That night, she lay back on the bed as he started to play with her, and gently guided his hand. She was amazed how quickly she came under the gentle thrum of his finger. As the tremors subsided, she released her grip on his forearm and moved her hand down his body. Finding him thoroughly hard, she was seized with a sudden inspiration. “I want you to put it in my ass.”

This was not a sentence she'd ever uttered before, and she was only slightly less surprised than he was, although he didn't object or try to debate the point. She reached over to the bedside table for the bottle of Kiehl's body lotion.

She tried to imagine it from his point of view as he slowly advanced, the deferral of gratification as he paused and gently pressed again, pausing at her sudden intakes of breath.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes,” she said.

It must have been difficult for him to go so slowly when his instinct was to thrust ahead. There was a last spasm of painful resistance and then suddenly she yielded and he was inside of her and the pain metamorphosed into something that increasingly resembled pleasure. She hadn't even been sure that she would enjoy this, her initial desire more symbolic than physical. It had been years, a few times long ago when she and Russell were new, but she wanted to do this with him, to have this intimacy, and now she felt more connected to him than ever and wanted to always remember this feeling.

“I want to remember what you smell like,” she said, lying on his chest afterward.

“I'm right here,” he said. “No remembering required.”

But perversely, she felt the night and the weekend slipping away. She couldn't help it—she was already thinking ahead to missing him later.

That morning, she woke to the smell of bacon frying, the bed beside her empty. Please God—not another man who wants to feed me breakfast, she thought, although on second thought she realized she was actually hungry. She put on the silk robe she'd packed, peed, brushed her teeth and hair, dabbed on some lip gloss. Seeing his Dopp kit open on the sink, she couldn't resist glancing at its contents, particularly the prescription bottles: Lipitor, Ambien, Cialis and Adderall. She couldn't help being slightly disappointed about the Cialis, preferring to imagine that his sexual stamina was a tribute to her, but the Adderall was more surprising. Half the kids in Manhattan were taking it for attention deficit disorder, real or alleged, the other half for weight loss or the sheer speedy buzz of it. Was he taking it to treat himself or to fuel himself? Did it matter? ADD would certainly explain some of his tics, his sometimes manic demeanor.

When she went downstairs to the kitchen, he put down his spatula, embraced and kissed her, his day-old beard rasping her face, then returned to his cooking, humming what sounded like “Rehab.” Was it just her imagination, her new knowledge, or was he way too alert and energetic at this early hour? “I thought you didn't cook?”

“Only breakfast.”

“Do we have plans today?” she asked, taking a seat at the kitchen table.

“We do. After breakfast we're getting in the car.”

“To go where?”

“That's a surprise.”

After polishing off a poached egg on toast, Corrine went upstairs to dress.

They drove down Route 7 to Williamstown, a place she hadn't laid eyes on in three decades, the campus an attractive architectural mélange of Federal, Gothic, Romanesque and various flavors of modernism.

“Did you love it?” she asked as they turned up the driveway of what appeared to be a white marble Doric temple.

“Mostly,” he said. “Do you know where we are?”

“Not exactly,” she said.

“The Clark Art Institute. I've arranged for a private tour.”

A young man was waiting at the main entrance, and he led them inside. She remembered now—she'd spent a hungover morning here, hiding from her date among the Renoirs and Monets. The guide was explaining that the Clarks had been wealthy New York collectors who, fearing that nuclear apocalypse might wipe out Manhattan, had built this museum in the Berkshires to house their collection, thereby greatly disappointing the trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“Hard to believe that they could have accumulated a collection of this magnitude in a single generation,” Luke said.

“You sound jealous,” Corrine said.

He shrugged.

“Is there anything in particular you'd like to see?” their guide asked.

“Could you show us
Interior at Arcachon
?” Luke said.

“Oh, certainly. That's one of my favorites.”

Luke looked at Corrine expectantly.

“The Manet,” she said after a pause, remembering.

“You told me it was your favorite painting,” he said, looking disappointed, as they followed their guide across the marble corridor.

“I can't believe you remembered that.” More to the point, she couldn't believe she'd almost forgotten it. She
had
said that, and it was true, or at least it probably was true when she told him that it was, though she'd forgotten in the interim. Had it really been her favorite painting in the long years between first viewing it as a college student and talking to Luke about art in the days after 9/11? It seemed more likely that the turmoil of that time had, like an earthquake or a volcanic eruption, thrust up buried memories and emotions, that this particular memory had been reawakened in the aftermath. What was most significant to her, at this moment, was the fact that Luke had remembered. This whole trip, she saw, had been organized around the impulse to reunite her with her putative favorite painting.

And here it was: a small gray-brown canvas, an intimate interior, a young man smoking a cigarette while an older woman across the table, his mother, looks up from her writing to take in the view of the sea through the open French windows. At the time, decades ago, she'd been hard-pressed to understand why the painting made such an impression on her, having none of the heroic eroticism of his
Olympia,
or the tragic grandeur of
The Execution of Emperor Maximilian.
But the sense of calm—and restfulness—was mesmerizing; the gray of the walls and the sea was the color of afternoon, of contemplation.

“I know it's just a small domestic scene,” she said, feeling obliged to explain her esteem for the painting. “But back then it made me incredibly wistful and nostalgic, I think because my own family was in such a state of perpetual conflict.”

“Manet had just returned from the Franco-Prussian War,” the guide said, “and you can feel how deeply he relished this peaceful family vignette. The ease and serenity are palpable.”

“Why don't you meet us in about ten minutes in front of the Piero della Francesca,” Luke told him.

“I can't get over your remembering this,” Corrine said as the young man slunk off. “Or that you brought me here. It's very…I'm impressed. And touched.” She kissed his stubbly cheek.

“It is a lovely Manet,” he said.

“Had you noticed it before? You were probably disappointed when I told you that this little canvas was my favorite painting.”

“I don't remember noticing it when I was at Williams, but I came up here after you told me that to see it.”

They contemplated it together until he said, “Of course, my favorite Manet would have to be
Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe.
”

“But of course. Heroic scale, clothed men, nude women—what's not for an alpha male to love?”

He chose to ignore her taunt. “When I was growing up in Tennessee, I had these godparents, not actual godparents but kind of spiritual godparents, the Cheathams. They were friends of my parents and I used to fantasize that they were my real parents. They were very sophisticated and collected modern art, this in a place where everyone hung hunting prints and family portraits. Joleen Cheatham took me to museums and taught me about art. They had this drawing or maybe a print, a late Picasso called
Le Déjeuner sur L'Herbe,
which entranced me. I didn't know at the time it was a riff on Manet's painting, but I was fascinated by the composition, two nude women among clothed men. I also had a serious crush on Joleen—we're talking erotic dreams and fantasies, and it all got mixed up together, my feelings for Joleen and art and my early interest in sex. Then later, as a student, when I saw Manet's
Déjeuner sur l'Herbe,
it was like stumbling on the key to the tortured mysteries of my adolescent sexual development.”

“You don't seem all that tortured to me,” she said.

“I sublimate like hell.”

“Perhaps,” she said, “I owe this Joleen a debt of gratitude.”

They strolled through the galleries, browsing, grazing on the treasures—the gemlike Piero, the seascapes by Turner and Homer. Afterward he showed her scenes of former triumphs and failures—the freshman dorm on the quad, where he'd lost his virginity; the stately Federalist classroom building, where he'd defended his thesis on income distribution; the Gothic chapel, where he'd married Sasha. He left her at the library while he went to visit his old professor at the nursing home, and afterward he took her to lunch at a restaurant on a hillside south of town.