Bright, Precious Days (40 page)

“Where the fuck would she get that kind of money?”

“She told me it was an inheritance.”

“What inheritance? Her father left what little money he had to his second wife.”

“So maybe she had a rich uncle.”

Russell shook his head, because suddenly, it was perfectly clear. “No, but she does have a boyfriend who's rich as Croesus.”

“That would be whack. I thought it was over and done.”

“Where else could she find that kind of cash?”

“Does it really matter?”

“Of course it matters. Why do you think she didn't want me to know it was from her?”

“Because she's good people. And because she was afraid you wouldn't take it if you knew it was coming from her.”

“She knew I wouldn't take it because it's from that asshole.”

“Either way, Crash, the salient point is, she wanted to save your ass.”

His first inclination was to give the money back; the option of accepting a bailout from Corrine's lover was completely unacceptable. Walking through an icy Union Square, he contemplated the situation. The company was out of cash and his personal savings would last another month at best. If he returned the money, his employees would be out of work in a couple of weeks and he and his children would be on the street within months. At the moment, it was nothing less than a lifeline, and he waffled over it for the next few days, alternately grateful to Corrine and furious at her for putting him in this position, his vast relief that his company had been saved eroded by the feeling that he'd been compromised.

They spoke frequently, their conversations focused on the minutiae of household finances and the logistics of shuttling Storey and Jeremy hither and yon. Corrine's attempts to initiate discussions about their marital issues had inevitably ended in the same dead end.

The day before Valentine's Day, after they'd worked out the schedule for the coming weekend, he asked, “What are you doing tomorrow night?”

“Nothing,” she said.

“No romantic dinner?”

“For God's sake, Russell. With whom would I have a romantic dinner?”

“I'd prefer not to say his name.”

“I haven't seen him in five months. I told you, I broke it off in September.”

“He didn't give you half a million dollars?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Does Art and Love, LLC, ring a bell? Wash told me.”

“Told you what?”

“That the money came from you. But, I asked myself, where the hell would you get five hundred K?”

“I sold a painting.”

“That's a good one. We don't have a painting worth five
thousand.
”

“
We
didn't, maybe. But I did.” She paused. “Twenty-plus years ago, when you were in Frankfurt, Tony Duplex gave me a painting….”

“Why would Tony Duplex give you a painting?”

“Because I did him a big favor.”

“What favor—you fucked him?”

“If that's what you want to think,” she said before hanging up on him.

He was looking over the sales figures for
Youth and Beauty
the next morning at work when Gita brought in an envelope messengered over from Corrine's office. Inside were two handwritten sheets on Corrine's crisp stationery, and several sheets of yellowing, brittle onionskin:

February 14, 2009

Dear Russell:

When I was at my mother's house for Thanksgiving, I found this letter pressed inside my old copy of
House of Mirth.
Reading it all these years later made me cry. (Your letter, not
House of Mirth.
) It made me incredibly sad to think of all the years that have passed, and all that we've shared since you wrote this, and sad most of all to think that our story might be over, and that I would spend the rest of my life with the guilt of knowing that I was to blame. Perhaps you can't forgive me, or ever be able to entirely trust me again. But isn't it possible that even in this diminished form, our marriage is still worth preserving, that however damaged, it's better than most other marriages at their best, that ours is still one of the great love stories, especially if we can survive this crisis? I've never forgotten that quote from your thesis, was it from
Julius Caesar
? “…when the sea was calm, all boats alike/show'd mastership in floating…” Which I take to mean that nobody should get undue credit for doing well during the good times. It's the storms that truly test us.

I'm sorry that I sailed us into a storm. You didn't deserve it. And I don't deserve to be forgiven, but I hope you will anyway.

I love you.

I'm sorry.

Corrine.

PS. You would have written this letter a few years before I got the painting. Jeff and Tony were in a jam with a drug dealer and I sacrificed a few of my grandfather's twenty-dollar gold pieces to bail them out. I should have told you at the time. I'm sorry. On the other hand, it turned out to be a pretty good investment.

He carefully unfolded the brittle onionskin, recognizing his own loopy youthful cursive script.

Cloisters Attic

Oxford

March 2, 1979

Dear Corrine,

Feeling very restless tonight. It's already spring here, one of those days when you can smell the earth thawing, the ferment of the soil, when you can almost hear the dormant vegetable life awakening, stirring and thrusting upward, and unlike some of the uniquely Limey odors of recent experience, like that of the fish and chip shop on the High Street, this is the universal scent of renewal and change and migration—and it inspires the desire to get out and do something, to go go go, like Kerouac's Dean Moriarty. I am so restless, but unlike the south-wintering birds, whose instincts are urging them northward to their summer breeding grounds, I don't know what it is I want to do. I certainly don't want to be sitting here reading Coleridge's
Biographia Literaria,
no offense to that august gentleman, but I can't concentrate tonight. “Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife,” as his friend and bookish colleague Wordsworth said. Not usually, but that's how I feel right this moment. In fact, I do know where I want to go. Hearing of you and Jeff and Caitlin and everyone in New York, I feel that you're all moving ahead without me, while I'm back in school, in a backwater eddy, stuck in the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, Jeff writes to tell me that he met Norman Mailer at the Lion's Head and they thumb-wrestled while arguing about Hemingway. I feel my life is passing me by. I miss you. I want to come home tonight and crawl into your bed. I want to be inside of you. Enough. Enough of this allegedly fond-making absence. What are we waiting for? I want my life to start now. I knew the first time I saw you at the top of that staircase at the party at Phi Psi that my life would be lived for you. You were like a goddess looking down from Olympus, not unbenevolently, but with a certain amused detachment at the roiling mob of beer-soaked mortals, of which I was a part. The Aphrodite of Phi Psi. I vowed at that moment that I would find out who you were and I would spend the rest of my days at Brown pursuing you. It wasn't easy, but then, I wouldn't have wanted it to be. Nothing truly worthwhile is easy, and nothing in my life has ever been so worthwhile as loving you. I would have waited for you for as long as it took to win your affections, and yet tonight I'm so restless, and even fearful, worrying suddenly that perhaps this is the night that your heart finally begins, out of weariness, to drift away or that you lose faith in our intertwined destinies or that you'll meet someone in New York who has the unfair advantage of physical proximity, and I can't stand it, it makes me crazy. Yes I've had a few drams of Bushmills tonight, but I've never been so certain of anything as I am of my devotion to you. Tell me you'll wait, and I will be able to last this term out, though I want to fly to you now. I'm going to stick this out for the year, but I don't have it in me to come back for a second year. I hope you won't think less of me, but I've thought long and hard about this, and among other things I realize that I don't want to teach; I don't want to spend five or six more years in grad school in Cambridge or Palo Alto (if I'm lucky) in the hope of getting an assistant professorship in Duluth or Des Moines, only to hope at the end of another five or six years that I might get tenure and the privilege of spending the rest of my life there—and hope that's something you might be willing to do. I don't want to spend a decade writing yet another scholarly study of some minor aspect of Keats that nobody but my thesis advisers will read. I want to go to New York and start my life with you and I want to be a part of the history and literature of my time. By that I mean not only that I want to be to my era what Max Perkins was to his but I want to be part of the greatest love story of our time, of all time. Corrine and Russell. Russell and Corrine. Forget Troilus and Cressida or Romeo and Juliet, or Pyramus and Thisbe with their tragic fates. Ours will have a happy ending. We'll create a love story for the ages. So please wait for me. A few short months and then we will have the rest of our lives.

“Grow old along with me. The best is yet to be.”

All my love,

Russell

When he finished reading, he realized there were tears in his eyes. He didn't know if he had ever felt so bereft in his life—perhaps when his mother died of cancer, almost thirty years before, slipping away when Russell was only twenty-three. He was so sad, now, to think that she'd never gotten to meet her grandchildren. He was sad for the innocence he'd lost since he wrote that letter, for the ways he'd been careless with his life and of his romance with Corrine, and for all the damage it had sustained. Remembering the boy who'd written that callow and idealistic letter, he felt acutely that he'd let him down somehow, just as he'd failed to live up to all the sweet sentiments expressed in it. He was sad that the girl to whom that letter was addressed had betrayed him, and that he'd never feel quite the same way about her again. But the storm had passed. Maybe, or, in fact, definitely, it was time to try to patch the leaks in the ship and sail onward.

For a long time Russell stared out the back window at the naked trees in the courtyard and then he turned back to his desk, found a piece of stationery in the top drawer and started to write.

14 February, 2009

Dear Corrine,

The quote was from
Coriolanus,
actually, not
Julius Caesar,
but your reading of the line was spot-on….

GOING OUT OF BUSINESS
signs on Madison—not the fake, permanent signs on the electronics stores on Fifth Avenue, catnip to tourists. These were real, right here in the retail heart of the plutocracy, Madison in the 70s, the high street of the haute monde, where the acquisitive wives of the titans of finance could find four-figure pairs of shoes, five-figure purses and six-figure watches. Luke knew as well as anyone how badly things stood in the markets, but still, this came as a bit of a surprise; he'd somehow expected the Upper East Side to remain as he remembered it from the fat days of his first marriage, years that were prosperous, if not entirely blissful. It made him melancholy, this feeling that his city was gone.

In between meetings, he'd decided to take in the Georgia O'Keeffe show at the Whitney, that great granite bunker of modernism plunked down in the midst of the stately brick apartment towers, where he found himself standing behind a woman with strawberry blond hair who immediately attracted his interest. When she turned her head to take in the canvas from another angle, he was astonished to see that it was Corrine, standing there just a few feet away from him.

He felt paralyzed, uncertain whether to greet her or try to slip away unnoticed.

“Oh my God, Luke. What are you doing here?” she asked, blushing as she walked over, smiling and finally kissing him to cover her confusion. Drawing back, cocking her head to examine him more closely, she said, “I didn't know you were a Georgia O'Keeffe fan.”

“Who isn't?” he said.

“You look great,” she said after an awkward pause.

“So do you,” he said, though in fact she looked a little older than he remembered, her eyes webbed with tiny lines.

“Are you still in SoHo?”

“I'm still renting the loft, but I've been in Europe and Africa the last few months.”

All at once, they seemed to have run out of things to say. She lifted the corners of her mouth in an exaggerated smile before turning back to the painting in front of them, surging waves of gorgeous pink and yellow and turquoise. “It's amazing that she was painting pure abstractions so early,” she said. “I mean Kandinsky was still painting figuratively when she did this. Have you seen the Kandinsky show at the Guggenheim?”

He shook his head.

“You should; it's great. Although even with these abstract O'Keeffes, there's a way in which they
suggest
the figurative. Of course, maybe that's just us, our tendency to seek the familiar, to find meaning, pattern. This one's kind of intrauterine.” She laughed nervously. “I'm sorry, am I babbling? I'm babbling.”

He shook his head. “No, it's…great. I always loved listening to you hold forth on subjects that inspire you.” As soon as he said this, he wondered if it was true. Listening to her extemporize, he initially felt a fond rush of nostalgia, which was almost immediately tempered by a rising irritation. While these free-associative flights of erudition had once been unequivocally charming, he now found himself losing patience—the eccentricities cherished in a lover transformed into character flaws in those we're no longer sleeping with.

He was studying her, Luke realized, with the critical eye of a scorned lover, of a man presently dating a woman twenty-three years his junior. She was still beautiful, in his eyes, though; he was surprised to feel the stirring of the old desire, a visceral response to her proximity, despite the visible arc of her decline. He could imagine the changes to come, the inevitable sagging and shriveling, as if he were fast-forwarding through time. But he was aging, as well—perhaps he also looked older to her. He was sixty. They were both getting older, and they would continue to do so, separately, shrinking and wrinkling, as would their store of collective memories—becoming less and less real to each other all the while. Though for months he'd been crushed by her rejection and at times almost hated her, he had to admit that what had seemed unbearable at first had become tolerable, until finally he'd convinced himself it was for the best.

“How's the foundation?” she asked.

“Limping along. Donations cratered last year, but we're hanging on. How about yours?”

“Same. More hungry people, fewer benefactors. Contributions down thirty percent. We've laid people off. It's scary. Surely the economy's got to recover, right? I mean, it won't be like this forever, will it?”

“It'll come back, sooner or later,” he said. “It always does. How's Russell?” He needed only to utter the name of his former rival to prove it held no power over him.

“He's fine,” she said. “We're fine.”

This declaration sounded halfhearted and even rueful, though Luke supposed she wouldn't have been eager to sound too goddamn happy. He waited.

“We moved,” she said. “To Harlem.”

His face must have betrayed his concern, his supposition that the move was indicative of severe economic distress.

“No, it's great, actually. We have a nice house, an Italianate brownstone with amazing architectural details. Well, actually it's kind of a wreck, but we're fixing it up slowly. It'll be great when we finish sometime in the next century or two. We're renting out the bottom floor to defray the mortgage. But it's really so much better than our old loft. I mean, it's so great to have so much space, and the neighborhood is really cool. You'd be surprised. You should—” She stopped short, laughed mirthlessly.

“Come for a visit?”

“Well, I nearly said that, but obviously, I don't think…” She sighed theatrically. “This is awkward on so many levels, isn't it?”

He nodded. “Yes, it is.”

She shook her head sadly.

He was at a loss for parting words. For months after she left his loft that night, he'd yearned to talk to her, to woo her back, or at least to hear her explain her abrupt change of heart. Not used to being thwarted in his desires, he'd been hurt and confused and angry, and he'd felt he deserved an explanation. But now, more than a year later, he realized the futility of that wounded compulsion. The heart didn't have explanations, any more than the painting hanging in front of them did; it had impulses, tides and currents.

“How's Ashley?”

“She's good. Applying to grad schools.” He would not tell her about the relapse, the rehab, the nightmare of having to negotiate the crisis with his ex-wife. They were no longer on those terms.

“Your kids are well?” he asked.

“Except for the fact that they're teenagers.”

He remembered her once saying that asking after someone's kids was the highest form of social banality. He still found himself recalling these things she'd said, still thought fondly of her, and missed her for many, various reasons, though he understood that now he would miss her a little less intensely and supposed that was a good thing.

“Do you want to grab a coffee or something?” she asked.

“I'd love to, but I've got a meeting downtown.” In truth, there was time before the meeting, but the prospect of sitting down with her and exchanging small talk depressed him.

Their parting cheek-grazing kiss was a pale imitation of earlier kisses.

“Take care, Luke.”

“You, too.”

Neither one of them seemed to know what to do next; they were in the middle of the gallery, where, under normal circumstances, they would have continued a leisurely perusal of the paintings; before he could decide what to do, she waved, smiling ruefully, and bolted from the room, leaving him with a feeling that he'd failed to be as gracious as he might have been, a sense that would nag at him in the years to come when he thought about Corrine.

That night, at dinner, he was short-tempered with his girlfriend, bringing tears to her eyes; he broke up with her a few days later.