Jean was standing at the elevator door to present her grievances. “The kids is hungry, and Miss Corrine, she stay late at the office, and I got my choir practice tonight I’m gonna be late for.”
Jeremy looked up from his laptop. “What’s for dinner?”
“Good question.”
“Don’t forget it’s meatless Monday,” Storey called from the couch. She’d recently become a vegetarian, out of ethical concerns, and while she couldn’t convert the family entirely, they’d agreed to forgo animal products once a week. Even Mario Batali was doing it, she pointed out. Although Corrine worried about Storey getting the right kind of nutrients, she was thrilled that she’d lost ten pounds in the past six months, even as she’d grown two inches. Now, like her mother, she worried about calories and assiduously studied the ingredients labels of all packaged foods.
Reading the back label on the jar of Rao’s marinara sauce, which Russell was heating while waiting for the pasta water to boil, she announced, “It’s gluten-free and cholesterol-free. But the pasta has tons of gluten. I mean, pasta is like pure gluten. We should think about getting brown rice pasta.”
“I can assure you,” Russell said, “it will be a cold day in hell before you see brown rice pasta in this kitchen. Besides, it’s meatless Monday, not gluten-free Monday.”
“Dad, you said hell.” At one time, Jeremy had said things like this with a genuine sense of reproach, but it was now ironic, a kind of joke between them, based on their mutual recognition of Jeremy’s new twelve-year-old sophistication, with him poking fun at his younger self.
“Call me when dinner’s ready,” he said. “I’m going to finish my geometry.”
“Aunt Hilary phoned me,” Storey said after he’d drifted off to his room.
“What? She called you? Why?”
“She does sometimes.”
“What do you talk about?”
“Not much. Girl stuff. I think she’s kind of lonely.”
“Have you told your mother?”
Storey shook her head. “No way. I don’t think Mom would approve.”
“You’re probably right.”
“Don’t tell her, promise?”
“I promise.”
“You don’t like her very much, do you?”
“Hilary? I don’t know. Let’s just say I’m grateful to her when I see how beautiful you’ve become.”
He turned up the volume on All Things Considered: “A defiant Hillary Clinton heralded her campaign victories and boasted of her millions of supporters last night—conceding nothing to Barack Obama even as her rival crossed the critical delegate-number threshold to secure the Democratic nomination….”
—
He couldn’t help noticing that Storey ignored her mother when she got home a few minutes later, in contrast to her brother, who bounced around her like a puppy while describing his day.
“And what about you?” Corrine asked Storey, who was sitting on the couch with a schoolbook. “How was your day?”
“Same old.”
Corrine was taking a week off from drinking, so over dinner Russell finished a bottle of Gigondas by himself, pouring the last glass at the table while Corrine helped Jeremy with his math. He was about to reach for a manuscript, when he remembered Jack’s letter, which he retrieved from the kitchen counter.
Russell,
Damn, man, this is about the hardest letter Ive ever had to write and Ive got halfway into a bottle of vodka to work up the balls to do it. I hoped we could work this out so I wouldnt have to, but its got to the point where I got to say what Ive got to say. Nobody knows better than me how much I owe you and I will always be grateful for that. (Or maybe Im supposed to say “No one knows better than I,” you could tell me, I know, so just ignore the fucking grammar for once OK.) You discovered me and put me on the map. You put your reputation on the line for me. And I won’t forget it. But at the risk of sounding like some fucking new age twat I have to be myself and I feel like you want me to be some idea of me that you want to put out there, you want me to be the redneck version of you. I’m not saying my sentences are always perfect or even always grammatical but sometimes when you get finished with them I dont even hear myself in them anymore. I have my sound and I like to think some kind of music in the prose but when you start rebuilding my sentances I feel like the tune and the rhythm gets lost. Maybe its just a tin whistle but its my tin whistle. I think you look at a story and think its a machine that can be improved but I think a story is more like an animal. Its like your performing taxadermy on a living thing. You might make it look better by your lights but youve done kilt it in the meantime. And why is shorter always better? Its like sure you can save five words but whose fucking counting. It’s not like I’m charging you by the word but sometimes that’s what it feels like. I tried to tell you all this maybe I didnt try hard enough but its hard for a high school dropout cracker like me to stand up to his hotshot New York Ivy League editor you know. Youre Russell fucking Calloway. Which is good and bad. I let you push me to much and if I don’t push back really hard than it will be true. Its just time for me to move on you know. Its like life or death for me. I know youll think its about me signing with Briskin but its not. Ive been thinking about this for a good long while and its what I need to do for myself. And Im way fucking greatful for everything. I love you, man. And I value your friendship. And I hope we can still be friends but I know youll hate me after this and I wouldn’t half blame you.
Jack
PS. Really really sorry about your feret
34
WHEN SHE LEFT HER OFFICE THAT NIGHT, a fierce rain was falling—slanting, in fact—angling at the behest of heavy gusts of wind, which lifted Corrine’s umbrella and turned it inside out. She was soaked through long before she escaped into the subway.
Riding home on the number 1 train, reading The Reluctant Fundamentalist, she looked up and spotted Russell way down the car, drenched and bedraggled in his old Burberry. On second glance she almost thought it wasn’t Russell, but someone who looked like him—an older, worn-out version of her husband. But it was Russell, and she was shocked by his slumped comportment, his slack demeanor, even by the gray in his hair. Did he actually have that much gray? When had that happened, and why hadn’t she noticed it? He looked like one of those exhausted souls she saw every day on the subway, men she imagined stuck in jobs they hated, going home to wives they didn’t love, or perhaps to an empty room somewhere out near the end of the subway line, to heat a can of soup on the hot plate and watch TV. What was most surprising was that he wasn’t reading—Russell was always reading. But now he was standing, staring at the empty window, holding the overhead rail, swaying with the motion of the car. She was so unsettled by his appearance that she slipped out the door at the Houston Street stop and waited for the next train before continuing on to Canal Street.
When she got home, he was sitting on the couch with Jeremy, watching Lost, a flagrant violation of house rules on a school night. Neither of them even glanced up until she stepped between them and the TV, at which point Jeremy yowled, “Mom!”
Russell looked up at her with mild interest. He didn’t seem quite so haggard and affectless as he had on the subway, but neither did he seem like his normal self. It was as if he’d aged while she wasn’t paying attention, becoming thoroughly middle-aged. Unnerved all over again, she walked away without speaking to either one of them, retreating to their bedroom, where she promptly burst into tears.
—
That night, while she was helping Jeremy with his homework, he asked, “What’s the matter with Dad?”
“Why do you think anything’s wrong with Dad?” she asked.
“He doesn’t seem happy. He doesn’t tell jokes and funny stories at dinner.”
“I think maybe he’s working too hard.”
“Is he still depressed about that fake memoir?”
“Well, probably.”
—
It was 3:32 a.m. when she woke up
suddenly, alone in their bed. She found him in the living room, watching an infomercial for an exercise machine.
“Are you all right?”
“I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t want to disturb you.”
She was disturbed, though, that he was watching an infomercial, but it seemed too embarrassing to allude to, almost as awkward as if she’d caught him watching porn. She remembered at least a dozen times when he’d flipped around the channels at night or on the weekends, saying, “What kind of losers actually watch these things?” Now he was actually watching a bunch of aging athletes demonstrating some stupid machine. Russell played tennis and skied but hated exercise for its own sake. The only possible excuse she could think of was the cute blonde in the blue leotard with the spectacular bod who was providing the narration.
“Why don’t you come to bed?
“I’ll be in soon.”
“Russell, what’s wrong? Is something worrying you?”
“Just the usual.”
He continued to stare at the screen. The chick in the blue leotard was chatting with some washed-up boxer.
“Would you tell me if something were really wrong?”
He nodded without looking away from the screen.
“Have I done anything to make you unhappy?” This was as close as she could come to asking him if he suspected anything.
He shook his head.
After a few minutes, when it became clear he wasn’t going to move, she said good night and waited for him in the bedroom.
She wondered if her own absorption in her romance with Luke had prevented her from noticing her husband’s decline. Was it possible he’d discovered something, overheard some conversation between them? Could he have gotten into her e-mails and found one from Luke? But no, few as they were, she scrupulously, unsentimentally erased them as soon as she’d read them and discouraged that form of communication. She’d heard of too many others discovering affairs that way. It was possible that Kip had told Russell about running into her with Luke at Teterboro. On reflection, though, she thought it more likely that he was still suffering from the fallout of the Kohout scandal. It had been a terrible blow both to his pride and the balance sheet of the business, although he hadn’t been very forthcoming about the latter, and she hadn’t pressed him very hard on this. She knew he’d rather not tell her if he didn’t have to.
When he finally came back to bed, she pretended to be asleep, though she remained awake beside him, sensing that he, too, was awake but incapable of breaking the silence between them.
35
ONCE UPON A TIME, Washington’s kids had been thrilled to go to the Museum of Natural History—the dinosaurs, the dioramas of cavemen and American Indians and African wildlife, the giant blue whale floating like a zeppelin over the great hall, the planetarium—but they’d complained bitterly when he’d proposed it this Saturday morning, and he’d been forced to improvise, ending up at the Calloways’. While it would be an exaggeration to say that Jeremy and Mingus were close friends, they were brothers in arms when playing Halo 3, trading roles between the Master Chief and the Arbiter, nuances of personality disappearing in the pursuit of their roles within this alternate universe. The situation with the girls was more complicated; Zora was a year older than Storey and several rungs above her in the intricate social hierarchy of junior high, a fact somehow understood and acknowledged by both, despite the fact that they attended different schools. Although it was a warm, sunny spring day, the air cleansed and refreshed by yesterday’s downpour, outdoor activities weren’t up for consideration—they’d reached the age where their habits began to resemble those of the vampires who were becoming so popular in television shows and young adult fiction. Both girls were deliriously excited about the first Twilight movie, hitting theaters in the fall, and had instructed their parents, who were sometimes invited to screenings and premieres, to be on the lookout. In the meantime, they were willing to settle for Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
Russell, who seemed deeply out of sorts, begged off, citing a pile of unread manuscripts, so Washington took the girls up to the multiplex at Union Square.
In the popcorn-redolent theater he sat next to Zora, who poked him awake twice during the movie, hissing that he was snoring. As he was dozing off again, he was roused by his text message signal. Furtively checking his phone, he saw it was from Casey Reynes: Suite at Lowell. Under name of Lily Bart. Come ASAP.
He met Russell and Corrine for an early dinner with the kids at Bubby’s—ignoring several texts from Casey—before returning his own kids to his former home. The loft looked particularly appealing, so vast and opulent in comparison to his sublet studio in West Chelsea and yet so homey and familiar—the old family seat. There was his favorite reading perch, the Arne Jacobsen egg chair with its soft cinnamon leather in the corner by the southeast windows, and his vintage McIntosh sound system with its luminescent blue-green dials nestled in its zebrawood console with all his old vinyl, the Miles and the Coltrane, the Dizzy and Bird LPs. Somewhere among them was a copy of Charles Mingus’s Pithecanthropus Erectus, the only possession of his father’s that had passed down to Washington, left behind when he abandoned him and his mother in Trinidad. For years he’d thought if he could decode the title, he would discover his father, or at least his essence, titillated by what the priapic Erectus suggested.
Veronica appeared, greeting the children, falsely cheerful and haggard of mien, listening as they narrated the day’s adventures, while Washington waited just inside the door.
“How are you?” she asked after the children had melted away to their rooms.
He shrugged. “You?”
“Things have been pretty scary at work. Rumors flying and the stock’s taken a beating. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but our college fund is half what it was last month.”
“It’ll come back,” he said, though he had no information about the situation at Lehman Brothers; he was just trying to reassure her.
“Let’s hope.”
—
Watching for a cab on Greenwich Street, he got another text: Where the hell r u? About to call concierge for Rent-a-Hunk. He told himself that if he didn’t see a cab in the next three minutes, he’d text back that he’d been unavoidably detained, but just then one of those new cabs that looked like a tiny school bus pulled over.
He wondered if he was up for this—still under the spell of nostalgia for a lost domesticity brought on by his visit to the loft, feeling the old protective instinct in response to Veronica’s distress—even as the driver hurtled uptown, braking and accelerating, leaving Washington vaguely nauseous by journey’s end. Debating whether to stop at the desk or stride boldly to the elevator, he could already detect that extra level of scrutiny from the little pink-faced twerp behind the counter and the bellman poised by the elevator, both of them white. He still found it hard to believe that people were giving the brother better than even odds of winning the election. He didn’t see that happening.
“I’m here to see Lily Bart,” he said, wondering if the man behind the desk was a Wharton fan. “I believe she’s expecting me.”
“Ah, yes, Miss Bart mentioned she might have a visitor and asked me to tell you that she’s just gone across the street to—oh, I believe that’s Miss Bart now.”
He turned around to see Casey coming through the door, looking very slinky in a black leather jacket over a silver shirt.
“I’d almost given up on you,” she said, taking his arm and leading him to the elevator. “I went to Bilboquet for a cocktail.”
“I had the kids,” he said.
“Can’t you just hardly wait to ship them off to boarding school?”
“First I’d have to convince their mother,” he said, though in fact he had no intention, or desire, to send his kids away to school. As a weekend dad, he missed them already.
She attacked him even before the elevator doors swooshed closed, grabbing his collar, smashing her lips against his and thrusting her tongue in his mou
th, her breath hot with alcohol, tinged faintly with juniper.
“I’ve been so waiting for you,” she said, panting and pushing her hair back from her face as the doors slid open.
She took his hand and led him down the corridor, their progress abruptly checked by someone emerging from a room in front of them, a man in a Barbour jacket and red wide-wale cords, who looked as if he was en route to his hobby farm in Millbrook.
“Oh my God,” she said.
“Casey?”
The man—Casey’s husband, Washington was by now pretty certain—seemed puzzled, whereas she was clearly dumbfounded.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded.
“I just had a meeting,” he said, although the real answer to the question became apparent as the door from which he’d emerged opened, revealing a peppermint ice-cream cone of a girl in a white terry-cloth bathrobe: long pink legs and red locks.
“That’s your fucking meeting?”
“Well, yes, as a matter of fact. And what, might I ask, are you doing here?”
Casey emitted several short exhalations before finally finding speech. “Who is this bitch? Your new secretary?”
“Actually,” Tom said, “she’s my girlfriend. Laura, this is Casey, my wife. Casey, Laura.”
Washington had to hand it to Tom, who seemed very much in control of the situation, the least flustered person in the corridor. The girl was flabbergasted, her face, already pink, flushing even deeper as the seconds ticked past.
“As long as we’re on the subject, perhaps you’d introduce me to your friend.”
“You know Washington.”
“Apparently not nearly as well as you do.”
“We were just…” Casey couldn’t seem to conjure a suitable predicate to complete the sentence.
Looking at Washington, Tom said, “Better you than me.”