Bright, Precious Days (37 page)

STILL STUNNED BY THE NEWS
about Jack Carson, Corrine was peeling off her jogging clothes in the bedroom when she noticed her bra hanging from the laptop, which seemed odd. She remembered putting it away last night. Lifting it up, she saw that the cup was torn. Hasty as it had been, her disrobing at Luke's hadn't been violent, and she recalled it was intact when she'd taken it off again, later, at home.

She glanced at the computer screen and saw a new message from Luke:
Last night was amazing.
When had
that
come in? It hadn't been there when she'd logged on. And how could she have forgotten to log off? She erased Luke's e-mail, even as she realized that it was probably too late. How else to explain the bra on the laptop?

Had Russell seen that message? Oh God, please don't let him have.

She'd attributed his dazed aspect to Jack's death, but now she saw, to her horror, another explanation—but it was too terrible to consider. What was she supposed to do? How could she possibly face him? She couldn't. It seemed preferable to throw herself out the window.

She tried to think of an innocent explanation for the e-mail. Could she just deny? She'd been lying for so long, why not just keep on? And yet she knew she couldn't. It was over. The only way she could possibly even
start
to redeem herself was to begin telling the truth. Or at least stop lying, which was significantly different. If she told him the whole truth, she was afraid their marriage wouldn't stand a chance.

But what to do right now, at this moment? She couldn't imagine walking out there and facing him now that Washington was gone. Or was he? If Wash was still here, she could at least get out the door without a confrontation, and then consider her options.

She slunk across the hall to the bathroom, not seeing anyone, hearing only the beeps and chirps of a video game. In the shower, she wept, and curled into a ball on the tiles, wishing she could dissolve and disappear down the drain, to be spared the shame and the mortification, the horror of facing Russell and seeing the accusation and the hurt in his eyes. She prayed for a brief respite, a postponement of the inevitable. She hoped to escape the loft without incident, so that she could have time to formulate a response while going about her business at the Greenmarket, though she wondered how she could possibly concentrate on the simplest of tasks, much less present a socially viable front.

Ten minutes later, she thought her knees would buckle as she came upon him in the living room, sitting motionless in the armchair beside the couch, watching a football game, which was strange, since he seldom watched sports. Seeing the look on his face when he glanced at her, she realized it wasn't so much his expression as the sense that he was clearly trying to suppress his feelings, that his contemptuous smirk was a mask that barely concealed more frightening emotions.

“I'll be back in a few hours,” she said.

He turned back to the television without answering.

Arriving at Union Square in a daze after missing her subway stop, she tried to immerse herself in the simple tasks of schmoozing the farmers and herding the volunteers, but throughout the afternoon she felt almost paralyzed with remorse and dread. Though she tried to convince herself that Russell knew nothing, she couldn't help believing the opposite. Not knowing was agony. At one moment she wanted to plead illness and rush home and the next she wanted to postpone her return for as long as possible.

Finally unable to bear it another second, she deputized one of the volunteers to finish the rescue and grabbed a cab downtown.

When she arrived home, Russell was sitting alone at the kitchen counter. As soon as she saw his face, she knew she was busted.

“The kids are with Washington and Veronica. I didn't want them around for this.”

She didn't even have the heart to ask what
this
meant? She stood with her head bowed, waiting.

“Are you having an affair?”

Even though she knew this was coming, Corrine thought her knees would buckle beneath her.

“I was.”

“You
were.
”

“Russell, I can't even begin to tell you how sorry I am, and ashamed.”

“Who's Luke?”

“Does it matter?”

“Of course it fucking matters.”

“You met him at the benefit for his charity at the Waldorf. Luke McGavock. He started the Good Hope Foundation.”

“Jesus Christ, that was, like, two years ago. Has it been going on all that time?”

“He was living in South Africa. I only saw him a few times.”

“
Saw him.
It sounds like you did a hell of a lot more than see him.”

“Russell, I'm so so sorry.”

“I want you to leave.”

“Can't we talk about this?”

“We just did. I want you out. Pack a bag. I don't want you under this roof.”

“Russell…”

“I mean it. Get out.”

She hardly remembered packing the small bag she was carrying when she arrived at Luke's building. It hadn't occurred to her to wonder what she'd do if he wasn't there.

“Oh, Luke,” she said, starting to sob when she saw his face.

“What's happened?” he asked, taking her in his arms.

When she finally gathered the composure to blurt out her story, he seemed nonplussed. “I suppose it was inevitable,” he said.

Holding her arm as if she were an invalid, he walked her over to the couch. The financial news channel was blaring from the big TV on the wall. A crawling banner at the bottom of the screen read:
LEHMAN STOCK IN FREE FALL
,
MARKETS IN TURMOIL
. He picked up the remote from the coffee table and muted the volume.

“Tell me exactly what happened, my love,” he said, taking a seat beside her.

As she started talking, he glanced up at the television screen. And later, she would realize that was the moment he lost her. Not that he'd actually possessed her up until then, or that she even for a moment had considered what the recent crisis meant for her relationship with Luke, but as they spoke, it became clear that he had, that in his eyes the exposure of the affair was an opportunity rather than a calamity. Later, she could think of a fistful of reasons why she couldn't be with Luke; he was a man who was used to having his way, a man who moved from conquest to conquest. She believed he loved her, but she didn't necessarily believe in the durability of that love. He was
Déjeuner sur l'Herbe
and she was
Interior at Arcachon.
Ultimately, she would understand and enumerate her reasons for giving him up—the most elementary one being that he wasn't Russell, but also because at that crucial moment he'd turned away from her and was looking instead at the television screen.

She would stay for another hour, and Luke would try to convince her that, painful as it might be for Corrine and her family, Russell's discovery was as the lancing of a boil, a slicing of the Gordian knot, a fortuitous resolution of a lingering quandary. Now, he suggested, the primary obstacle between them had been cleared away, and while, yes, it wouldn't be an effortless transition, he was here to make it as painless as possible. He spoke words of solace and comfort, holding her and expanding on their future, and through her agony she heard him distantly, his voice fading in and out of her consciousness, as if he were speaking to her across a body of water buffeted by intermittent gusts of wind.

RUSSELL TOOK A SORT OF
perverse satisfaction from the economic crisis, feeling that his own personal misfortunes mirrored those of the nation, glancing at the banner headline of
The Wall Street Journal:
CRISIS ON WALL STREET AS LEHMAN TOTTERS
,
MERRILL IS SOLD
,
AIG SEEKS TO RAISE CASH
. And flipping through the
Post,
a headline closer to home:
DRIVE FAST
,
DIE YOUNG
:
BAD BOY ARTIST & AUTHOR IN FIERY CRASH
. The night before, after Corrine had left with her suitcase, weeping, and the kids, whom Washington had brought back home, had gone to sleep, Russell sprawled on the couch, watching the controlled hysteria of the commentators on CNBC. He raised a tumbler of Maker's Mark to the screen and toasted: “Let it all come down, baby.”

In the morning, he woke up on the couch with a dry mouth and a piercing, almost unbearable awareness of Corrine's betrayal. He lay there, paralyzed with self-pity, until Jeremy came out to roust him and interrogate him about his mother's absence.

“Will she come home tonight?”

“We'll see. Now get dressed, or we'll be late for school.” Russell wasn't emotionally prepared to discuss the situation this morning.

After taking the kids uptown to school in a taxi, he took the subway back down to the office. He didn't expect to accomplish much, but neither could he bear the thought of being alone in the loft all day. His staff, sensing his misery, attributed it to Jack's death, and after expressing their sympathy, they gave him a wide berth. He tried to imagine what he was supposed to do. He wanted to call Corrine and berate her, demand that she explain herself. He also wanted to punish her with silence, to make her suffer the agonies of wondering what he was thinking. In the meantime, the company's accountant called to tell him he needed cash by the end of the month, that their line of credit was tapped out. His best and perhaps only hope was Tom Reynes, with whom he had a meeting that afternoon.

As he hung up, Jonathan Tashjian appeared in the doorway. “Is this a bad time?” he asked, prompting Russell to laugh mirthlessly.

“Yes, it is,” he said, “but come in anyway.”

“I'm sorry about Jack.”

“Not like we couldn't see it coming.”

“You've got a lot of requests for comments and interviews.”

“I'm really not in the mood today. Tell them to call Knopf. They're the official publisher now.”

“We're the publisher of his first and so far only book and you're the guy who discovered him. Not to mention the fact we got more than three thousand orders this morning.”

The effect of Jack's death on sales hadn't occurred to Russell until this moment. The inevitable spike might, if nothing else, buy the company some time. And talking to the press could raise McCane, Slade's profile and bolster the illusion that it was solvent, and relevant.

“Let's go through the requests,” he said as Gita buzzed and announced that Phillip Kohout was on the line.

Jonathan's expression reflected his own feelings: distaste and disbelief. He hadn't spoken to Kohout once since the day the
Times
broke the story, though there had been many conversations with his agent, and his lawyers.

“Tell him to fuck off,” Russell said.

He kept thinking Corrine would call at some point, but at the end of the day he was still waiting. Not that, if he were in her position, he'd know what to say. But it was her role to try, to beg for understanding and forgiveness.

A beautiful woman on the sidewalk, her shapeliness nicely defined by tight-fitting black yoga togs and a tank top in honor of Indian summer, turned out to be Hilary, lying in wait for him as he left the office. Russell paused in mid-step, mouth agape, unable to mask his surprise.

“You haven't returned my calls.”

“I've got a lot going on, Hilary, in case you haven't heard.”

“Yes, I'm sure you do.”

“And I'm about to be late for an appointment.”

“We need to talk.”

“I think I said everything I wanted to say the last time we talked. I thought we agreed that it was a one-off. I gave you a month's rent. I thought you were going to get a job.”

“I've been trying. That's one of the things I wanted to talk to you about. I'm applying for a job in PR at HBO and I need a recommendation. I know you know people there.”

“I suppose I could do that.”

“But I really need a loan in the meantime.”

“Is that what you call it—a loan?”

“I'm desperate,” she said, catching his wrist. “I'm going to be evicted.”

“I'm desperate, too,” he said. “You have no idea, Hilary. I'm at the end of my fucking rope. My friend Jack Carson just died and my wife's been fucking another guy for I don't know how long. I kicked her out of the loft, and the kids are a mess. My business is about to go under. And in case you've had your head up your ass and haven't heard, the whole global economy's headed into a meltdown.”

The pedestrians were giving them a wide berth, glancing briefly at the shouting, gesticulating man in the blue blazer before veering away.

“Oh my God. Corrine's having an affair?”

“You didn't know?”

“I had no idea.”

“So I don't really care if you tell her about my little peccadillo or not.”

“Please. I'm just asking for a little help to see me through.”

Russell reached for his wallet and removed two one-hundred-dollar bills, leaving only a twenty and some ones. “Here, that's it. That's most of my remaining net worth. Now piss off. I've had enough of the Makepeace girls to last a lifetime.”

She seemed genuinely hurt, and as she turned away, he felt a twinge of guilt. Even now, as he watched her walk away, he was astonished, and mortified, that he still found her alluring. He'd always been attracted to her, but the fact that he could feel anything resembling lust in the wake of his crushing humiliation was practically miraculous, if not perverse.

Russell took the subway to 51st Street, just a short walk from the venerable Brook Club, on 54th between Park and Lex. He'd been there only a few times—very blue-blood, old New York. George Plimpton had taken him there for lunch a few years ago, when they'd been working on an anthology of travel writing together that was unlikely to break even, much less cover the $35,000 advance. But it was an affordable gamble that he felt brought honor to his imprint as well as an opportunity to collaborate with one of the last American men of letters. When Plimpton failed to wake up one morning not long afterward, Russell was almost envious of the grace with which he'd departed, out with friends to a couple of cocktail parties, followed by dinner at Elaine's, slipping away in his sleep like a guest ducking out of the party without bothering anyone. A gentleman to the end, not wanting to make a fuss, or put anyone out, though several thousand souls took time out of their workday to attend his memorial at Saint John the Divine. And how many would come for me? Russell wondered. What Raymond Carver said in that poem of his
—to be beloved.
“And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.”

Russell did not feel beloved on the earth.

Inside the lobby of the Brook, he presented himself to the liveried gent at the front desk, who told him that Mr. Reynes would meet him on the third floor. He took the circular staircase, noting an air of geriatric decorum—or was it gloom?—among the members on the second floor. On the third floor, making his way to the front parlor, he detected a distinct undercurrent of melancholy in the murmuring convocation, several groups of two and three scattered around the room, sunken deeply into the sofas and club chairs, a faint honking akin to a flock of geese in the distance across a cornfield, the unmistakable whine of privileged white men with the blues. Russell suspected that most of them had lost a lot of money today, and that few of them were going to vote for Obama in November. Tom waved to him from a small table in the corner.

“Thanks for coming,” he said. “Hell of a day. I'm going right back to the office after this, but I figured I needed a break. The fallout from this Lehman situation is brutal. Dow's down five hundred plus. Would you like a drink?” He looked tired, though by no means dispirited; indeed, he seemed cheery, as if invigorated by crisis.

He waved to the ancient server framed in the doorway.

“Hell of a weekend all round. All the big swinging dicks of banking huddled down at the Fed all weekend, trying to save Lehman and themselves. I lived through the crash of '87 and the dot-com bust, but I've never seen anything like this. Gonna get much much worse before it gets better.”

The waiter hovered. Tom ordered a Bloody Mary and Russell decided it was probably a mistake to order a Negroni here. “I'll have a bullshot,” he said—a manly, Waspy club drink to steel the nerves in the face of this onrushing bear market.

“I'm sorry about your, uh, situation,” Tom said. “I ran into Corrine when I was picking up Amber. It seems she's staying with Casey.”

“I asked her to leave,” Russell said.

Tom leaned forward, nodding, uncharacteristically sympathetic and engaged. Or perhaps he was just curious to know what had happened.

“She's been having an affair. I just found out about it.”

“God, I'm sorry.”

Russell felt a sudden welling of emotion, a tightening of his facial muscles.

“What are you going to do?” Tom asked.

Russell shook his head. “Don't know yet. So what about you? Are you still getting divorced?”

Tom nodded. “Trying like hell to. It was a long time coming. But in the end, it just happened. Boom! Walk out a door straight into your future. You know as well as anyone that I wasn't so well behaved. But the really weird thing, the thing I wasn't expecting, I actually fell in love. It didn't even occur to me it was possible. And I can't tell you how great it feels. It was a huge relief, really, to find out Casey had been cheating on me. I mean, we have a lot of history together, and kids, and she's not a bad person, really, but I don't think anyone would accuse her of being deeply sentimental. That was part of the problem. I felt like our marriage was a business arrangement. Our parents grew up going to the same schools and belonging to the same clubs; we didn't have to bother to get to know each other, because we already did. I'm not sure I ever felt for Casey what I feel for Laura. In fact, I'm pretty sure I was never in love. Who knew you could discover love in your forties? Well, fifty-two, whatever.”

Russell raised his glass, which the waiter had just placed in front of him. “Cheers, then. I'm happy for you.”

“Thanks. She's an amazing woman. You should meet her sometime.”

“Is it possible we already met? Or rather, that I saw her across a room?”

“It's possible,” he said. “Though if you had, I trust I could count on your discretion not to say anything.”

“Absolutely.”

So Tom had fallen in love with a hooker.

“The thing is, this divorce could get messy, since we don't have a prenup. Can you believe it? Very old-fashioned. Or dumb. But Casey has money of her own and I'm hoping I can get her to be reasonable, though I have a feeling she's not going to make it easy. Anyway, long story short, my assets are pretty much frozen for the foreseeable future, not to mention the fact the economy has just turned to shit. Lehman's just the start of it. Money is going to get incredibly tight after this long binge of credit. The hangover is going to be heinous. I guess you see where I'm going with this. Sorry to say I can't make any kind of personal investments at this point. Anyway, I wish you every success and I wish I could be along for the ride.”

Up until the last couple of sentences, his monologue had been surprisingly heartfelt and revealing. Only at the end, as the subject turned from love to money, had it become cliché-ridden and stilted.
Along for the ride?
Until a few moments ago, the collapse of a major investment bank had seemed somewhat remote, but now he felt a sinking, sickening feeling in his gut as he understood that he was collateral damage. He'd often told himself that he inhabited a world apart, that the machinations and fluctuations of the financial markets had nothing to do with him, and he was shocked to realize that he was deeply entangled in the current crisis. He'd always been a little scornful of that other world, the world of suits and money, but it turned out that devoting your career to letters didn't give you immunity.

“I always liked Corrine,” Tom said before draining his drink and setting the glass down on the table. “I used to wonder how she put up with Casey.”

“Now she's got no choice,” Russell said bitterly.

As he was walking back to the subway Corrine called, her name on the screen of the cell phone surprising him, as if it were unfamiliar. He debated whether to answer.

“Yeah,” he barked.

“It's me.”

“I know. No surprises anymore.” Did he have to explain mobile phone technology to her?

After a long pause, she said, “I just wanted to arrange to see the kids.”

“When?”

“Maybe I could get them from school tomorrow, take them out for a bite.”

“Fine,” he said. “I'll tell Jean.”

He thought about hanging up then, but he couldn't quite bring himself to do so.

“Russell?” she said, finally.

“Yeah?”

“I'm so sorry.”

“Me too,” he said, before closing his phone.

“I don't understand why Mom's staying with Casey,” Jeremy said, brandishing a nubbly golden chicken finger. Russell had cooked his favorite childhood meal in the vague hope of normalizing a painfully abnormal domestic situation.