Bright, Precious Days (6 page)

“Are we to assume you're inquiring about the Senate race in Tennessee?” Russell asked.

“Indeed, Corker versus Ford,” Washington said.

“I think they both suck,” Jack said, catching everyone by surprise.

“Well, sure, but there are degrees of suckiness,” Washington said. “Last time I checked, Ford wasn't running ads that implied Corker fucked black girls.” Typical Washington, Corrine noted, making assumptions about racism based on accent. Come to think of it, the kid
could
be a racist, for all she knew. But if he acted like one, Washington would eat him alive. He'd always relished playing the race card, using his blackness when it suited him; the only thing he enjoyed more than twisting liberal white people into pretzels of self-consciousness was messing with unreconstructed racists.

“Wash,
please,
” Corrine said.

“Hey, I got no secrets,” Jack said. “I wrote in Kid Rock.”

Corrine laughed, relieved at how neatly he'd defused the situation. It was a pretty funny joke—even funnier if it was true.

Jeremy had emerged from his room, as if intuiting the arrival of Dan, with whom he had an easy rapport, and asked to see his gun, as he inevitably did.

“I thought you told me you were a Democrat,” Dan said.

“So what?” Jeremy said.

“Well,” Dan said, directing an impish look at Corrine, “if the Democrats win, nobody will be allowed to carry guns except criminals.”

Jack said something that sounded like “Wut chu packin?”

“A Sig P226.”

“That's a great gun,” Jack said. “I was shooting one a few days ago with my buddy. Let me check it out.”

Corrine refrained from protest as Jeremy, Jack and Dan lovingly examined the lethal black-and-silver pistol, though she hovered at the edge of the group, ready to pounce if anyone let Jeremy touch it.

Nancy Tanner showed up just as Chef Russell was complaining about her tardiness. Nancy was back in the city after a stint in Los Angeles, working as a producer on a Showtime adaptation of her last book. She looked better than ever, thin and sculpted, and Corrine couldn't help wondering if she'd had any work done out there.

“How are my favorite preppy bohemians?” Nancy said, kissing Corrine on both cheeks, and then, to Washington and Veronica: “And how's life in Cheever country?” They'd fled to New Canaan in the wake of September 11, then moved back to the city this summer in time for the school year, buying a loft a few blocks away in a converted tool and die factory, although this news hadn't yet reached Nancy.

“I think we found out why Cheever drank so much,” said Washington.

“It was horrible,” Veronica said. “We thought we were doing it for the kids, but if anything, they hated it even more than we did.”

“And everyone thought I was the help,” Washington said.

“Now you're exaggerating, Wash.”

“Fucking dudes in madras shorts trying to hire me to cut the lawn.”

“Stop it.”

“ ‘Hey,
boy,
can you carry my golf clubs?' ”

“He's only slightly exaggerating. Even the dog hated it.”

“And Mingus got Lyme disease.”

“Who knew the yard was lousy with ticks.”

“The
dog
got Lyme disease.”

“Everybody up there has it. It's like this fucking epidemic.”

“Give me roaches any day. Way better than ticks.”

“I was so happy when we moved back to the city and I spotted a roach in the sink.”

“I could've told you it was a mistake to move to the suburbs,” Nancy said. “I grew up there.”

“Didn't everybody?” Hilary said.

“We were city kids,” Washington said, “Veronica and I. We both grew up in fucking Queens, man. The dream was to trade the tenement for a house with a yard. And it's like we had to live out our parents' immigrant dream of escape to the suburbs. It was encoded in us, ever since Veronica's mother fled Budapest after the revolution and my mom stowed away on a boat from Port of Spain:
Go to America, work hard, eat shit, scrub floors, and someday your children will live in Westchester.
And Veronica's mom—ever since she was a little girl she wanted her daughter to live in New Canaan. Anyway, it's over, our little American dream turned nightmare. We're back, baby. Solid concrete and asphalt underfoot. Skyscrapers and everything. Just like I pictured it. Yellow limos at my beck and call. Doorman standing at attention, building superintendent at the other end of the intercom whenever you blow a fuse or a fucking lightbulb. City life's the life for me.”

“I don't know,” Russell said after a slug of champagne, “nobody loves New York more than I do, but I feel like the city's getting suburbanized itself. Less diverse, less edgy. It's more like New Canaan than like the city we moved to.”

Corrine said, “Let's not get nostalgic for the era of muggings and graffiti and crack vials in the hallway.” She'd almost said AIDS but stopped herself in time. She didn't want to scratch that scar right now, in the opening hour of a dinner party with strangers in the house. She wasn't about to talk about Jeff. But it was too late—he was here in the room with her, with his tobacco-inflected scent—back then almost everything smelled like tobacco, Jeff only a little more so, layered over a leathery smell that she'd never encountered since. Everyone has an olfactory signature, if only we're attuned to it, and she'd been attuned to his. What they called chemistry, she suspected, had mostly to do with smell. She'd felt it again, the other night, with Luke. When we form a snap judgment, and don't know why. We're animals first. And she'd loved Jeff's scent, even though he was Russell's best friend. It had only happened on a couple of occasions. But the eventual revelation had almost wrecked their marriage. Eighteen years now—he'd died in '88, in the great epidemic.

To break the spell, she said, “Remember those sidewalk paintings that looked like crime-scene silhouettes—how you couldn't tell if it was graffiti or a homicide? Who was that artist?”

“What about stepping on crack vials?” Washington added. “On the Upper West Side it was like acorns in a goddamn forest.”

“New York in the eighties,” Jack said. “That must've been rad.” And at that moment something in his manner, his youth, his slouching posture reminded her of Jeff.

“We didn't know it was the eighties at the time,” Washington said. “No one told us until about 1987, and by then it was almost over.”

THE SUMMER AFTER GRADUATION,
Jeff is subletting a
loft
in SoHo. The word itself seems as raffish and bohemian as the neighborhood, half-deserted, inhabited mainly by painters and sculptors in search of cheap studio space. The district is zoned for light industry and it's illegal to actually
live
here, which only adds to its mystique. Jeff is cat-sitting for a girl he knows who's touring with her band for three months, and who, in turn, sublets the place illegally from a painter living in Berlin. It's just the kind of convoluted and jerry-rigged yet serendipitous situation in which Jeff inevitably seems to find himself, or, more accurately, in which he manages to place himself.

Having recently graduated from Brown, Corrine lives on the Upper East Side and works at Sotheby's. To her, SoHo is terra incognita, a mysterious southern region of the island allegedly inhabited by artists and who knows who. No one who's gone to Miss Porter's, certainly. It seems a little eerie to her, almost deserted, as she emerges from the subway at Prince Street and walks west, her shadow inching out across the buckling sidewalk, the ornate, soot-stained facades of the buildings that had once been sweatshops and factories. She passes a heavily bearded man in overalls sitting on a stoop, smoking; she would guess he's homeless except for the paint caked on his fingers and his OshKosh overalls. For all she knows, he could be James Rosenquist or Frank Stella.

She can't help feeling very adventurous coming down here on her own, almost tingling with anticipation as she approaches Greene Street. Jeff offered to come uptown, but she insisted on seeing his place. Later she will cross-examine herself about her motives.

Russell's at Oxford on his fellowship, studying Romantic poetry. He writes her long letters about his reading and the quirkiness of the Brits and the horrors of Marmite, letters that inevitably culminate in declarations of love. They can't afford to talk long-distance more than once or twice a month. In his mind they're already engaged, but she's been very specific in telling him to see how he feels after eight months apart. It's been six weeks, and already he's worried that she'll meet someone else. She hasn't met anyone, and visiting Russell's best friend feels like a way of being closer to him.

She finds the building, with its elaborately ornamented cast-iron facade—grimy columns framing tall, arched windows, the rust showing in patches through the layers of once-white paint and city grit. Corrine, an art history major, can't help noticing that Corinthian, with its fluted columns and complicated acanthus leaves and scrolls, was the classical order favored by the nineteenth-century architects who created the neighborhood. On the sidewalk in front of the building is a splattered black human silhouette that looks like it might be a crime-scene outline of a body.

At the door, a cluster of mismatched buzzers is mounted on a sheet of plywood, one of them labeled with a scrap of yellow legal paper on which the initials J.P. are scrawled. She presses the button and waits, eventually looking up when a window above rattles open and Jeff's head emerges.

“You sure you want to come up?”

“Absolutely,” she says. “I've never seen an artist's loft.”

“It ain't pretty.” He dangles something from his fingers. “Catch.”

A key attached to a piece of dirty balsa wood clatters to the sidewalk.

“Fifth floor,” he calls. “Can't miss it.”

Inside, she's confronted with a vast creaking stairway composed of ancient oak planks that recedes as it ascends ahead of her, each floor taking her farther back into the building, until finally she finds herself on the top floor, where the door stands ajar. “Not exactly a stairway to heaven,” Jeff says, bowing deeply and ushering her in, hunching slightly to make his height less daunting. He's wearing his standard outfit, an untucked Brooks Brothers button-down shirt over a pair of ripped jeans.

“Please don't say ‘Welcome to my humble abode.' ”

“I was going to say my cleaning lady died, but I don't actually have one.”

“It's very…lived-in.”

“I was also going to say this is where the magic doesn't happen.”

It's a mess—clothes and books and overflowing ashtrays everywhere, but the space itself is grand, with a soaring pressed-tin ceiling supported by more columns, and huge arched windows on either end. One wall is dominated by a long graffiti mural, all swirls and distorted letters and fanciful animals, by an artist friend of his, he explains when she asks about it, who painted it recently after partying all night in the loft.

“That's such a stupid verb,
partying,
” she says. “I mean, really, don't you think? It's so coy. What does it mean—does it mean drinking? Doing drugs? Having sex? All of the above?” This sounds prissy and pedantic even to her and she realizes she is nervous, though she isn't sure why, exactly.

At one end of the room, a mattress floats on the wide floorboards like a dilapidated barge, the bedding in disarray. At the other end, a door rests on two filing cabinets—a makeshift desk with a big beige IBM Selectric perched between stacks of books. Russell has been jealous of Jeff's typewriter for years—the ultimate writing machine. In between, an island of decrepit furniture suggests a living area: a brown legless couchlike object, a beanbag chair, and in the role of coffee table, a surfboard supported on either end by cinder blocks.

“Originally, Seventy-seven Greene Street was one of New York's most notorious cathouses,” Jeff tells her. “When that building burned down, this came next and housed a corset factory for many years.”

“Unfettered wantonness yielding to the creation of feminine fetters.”

“Relentless,” Jeff says, “the march of civilization.”

For all its shabbiness, the sheer expanse and the architectural details give it the aura of a place where great deeds should be performed, great paintings painted, or even a great novel written—and that, she knows, is his sole ambition, though he carries himself with a self-deprecating cynicism and has so far published only a single short story in
The Paris Review.
But it's his whole identity: Jeff Pierce, the writer, the
poète maudit.
When he read
The Sun Also Rises
at the age of thirteen, his destiny was revealed. Robert Lowell is some kind of distant uncle. At Brown he walked around with a copy of
Ulysses
under his arm and studied with John Hawkes, the avant-garde novelist, who vouched for his genius. He was one of the few non–New Yorkers at Brown who visited Manhattan frequently, eschewing the traditional landmarks of his classmates—Trader Vic's and ‘21' and Dorrian's Red Hand—in favor of poetry readings and punk-rock clubs downtown. Somewhere along the line, he became acquainted with William Burroughs, who, he says, now lives in a former YMCA gym on the Bowery.

A black-and-white cat appears and rubs itself fervently against Jeff's leg. She remembers this about him—animals always like him. “That's Kurt Weill,” Jeff says as the cat slides away.

“I might have known,” she says.

He offers her a Marlboro, and lights it, and then his own, with a Zippo. It gives them something to do together, and something to do with their hands. They all smoke, all the time, everywhere—at home and in bars and restaurants, in movie theaters and on airplanes.

“Why do you always have the collars of your button-downs unbuttoned?” she asks. “Have you ever thought of getting the regular kind of collars, without buttons? It seems like it would be easier. I mean, if you're not going to button them anyway.”

“Not really. I like having the option.”

She's just making conversation, knowing this is one of his signatures, like his grandfather's old gold Longines, which he wears with the face on the inside of his wrist. Not that he would ever tell you himself; he does his best to distance himself from his heritage, but Jeff comes from one of those old New England families that view the Pilgrims as arrivistes. They wear threadbare blazers with Wellingtons and drive shit brown Oldsmobiles. Some have lots of money, others only the memory of it. Even those who've escaped the gravity of Boston tend in the summers to cluster in rambling shingled houses on the rocky Protestant coast of Maine, occasionally traversing the pebbly beaches to dunk themselves in the frigid waters of the Atlantic, more often sailing the surface in wooden boats. But Jeff has come to downtown Manhattan to reinvent himself from scratch, or so he likes to believe, though he's likewise determined to remain true, in some sense, to his roots, to be at once authentic and unique. His grandfather's watch might seem to complicate the self-invention narrative; on the other hand, it distinguishes the wearer from the aspiring bohemian herd. Just as William Burroughs, the famous junkie and wife killer, dresses in three-piece suits.

“So,” she says, inhaling a lungful of smoke. “What does one do downtown?”

“Drugs,” he says.

“Very funny.”

“You asked.”

His demeanor is a blend of boyish and smug, and she sees that he is actually serious. Serious, but also amused at his own cleverness, his knowingness. He wants to shock her, even as he wants to invite her into the circle of forbidden knowledge. She's smoked pot with him before, so she knows it isn't that.

“What, cocaine?”

He beams. “Ever tried it?”

She shakes her head.

“Want to?”

Of course she doesn't want to seem like a—what, a wimp, a prude, uncool? But still…
cocaine
? She knew some kids at Brown did it, city kids who went back to Manhattan on weekends and hung at Studio 54 and Xenon, then bragged about it back in Providence. But Corrine isn't that kind of girl, is she?

“No pressure,” he says.

“What are you saying?” she says. “That we would, like, do it…now?” She seems unable even to name the drug, and knows that she is stalling for time, trying to decide what she feels about this totally unexpected proposition.

“Well, yeah.”

She trusts Jeff and doesn't think he'd lure her into anything really dangerous. On the other hand, that's the whole thing about Jeff; he
is
more reckless than the rest of their crowd at Brown, the guy who wrapped an Austin-Healey around a telephone pole outside of Providence and walked away unscathed. That's one of the reasons they're all attracted to him.

“You have some?”

“I wouldn't offer you any if I didn't have it.”

“Will I like it?”

“I personally guarantee it.”

She shrugs. “Okay.” This is definitely one way to cut through the awkwardness of the moment. “I don't even know how you do it,” she says.

She follows him over to the makeshift desk; he clears books and papers away and picks up a framed picture, an almost-familiar sepia-toned image of a beautiful boy with flyaway hair and sleepy eyes, in disheveled Edwardian garb. Suddenly, it comes to her. “Rimbaud?”

He nods and lays the frame flat, unfolding a rectangle of shiny paper on the glass, as if creating some sort of origami.

After tipping the contents of the unfurled packet onto the glass, he chops it up with a one-edged razor blade and lays out eight identical lines of white powder.

She can't help giggling when he hands her a short plastic straw. “Are we really going to do this? I'm not sure I know how. Why don't I watch you do it first?”

He takes the straw and leans over the glass, neatly inhaling one of the white lines and then, moving the straw to his left nostril, another.

“Wow, you're good at that.”

“It's like anything else. Like how you get to Carnegie Hall.”

“What?”

“Practice.”

“Oh, right, sorry.” Why is she suddenly feeling so slow-witted?

“Your turn.”

She takes the straw and bends down over the desk. As she leans forward, Jeff gathers the hair around her neck and holds it, which seems very sexy to her and also makes the thing she is about to do seem less dangerous.

She can only manage to inhale half of a line the first time. It's a very weird sensation, a not entirely unpleasant burning in her nasal passages, and then, a few minutes later, a bittersweet drip at the back of her throat. After several tries, she consumes two of the lines and feels very pleased with herself. Having been a little afraid and uncertain, she now congratulates herself on being brave and going for it. Nothing scary here. She feels almost normal, except better than normal.

“I think I'm feeling it, but I'm not sure,” she says. “I feel good but not, like, stoned. You know, I've never really liked pot, to tell you the truth, that feeling of not being myself, of being kind of slowed down and dumbed down. That
dopey
feeling. No wonder they call it dope, right? But now I feel like myself. But sort of, I don't know, a really upbeat version of myself. Is that the cocaine? Because actually I feel pretty great. I feel like, I don't know, like
doing
something.”

Jeff smiles and nods.

“Say something.”

“
Something.
”

“You're teasing me. Am I talking too much? I'm talking too much, aren't I? Is that the cocaine? Is that what it does?”

“It comes with the territory.”

“But why aren't you talking as much as I am?”

“Be careful what you wish for.”

Jeff leans down and snorts another line, then kneels down to riffle through a stack of LPs on the floor beside the stereo, selecting a record and placing it on the turntable.

“I like that,” Corrine says of the wailing guitars and whining, world-weary vocals.

“It's Television,” Jeff says.

She looks back down at the stereo, wondering if that was a joke. She often feels this way in Jeff's company, as though she is missing out on some inside reference. Maybe the drug is messing with her perception, although, in fact, she feels incredibly clearheaded and sharp at the moment.