Bright, Precious Days (30 page)

“I was almost tempted to say Masseto,” Tom said, teasing out the conclusion, “but on second thought I think it's '82 Pétrus.”

The other man was crestfallen. “Shit, you saw the bottle.”

“Not easily done, that, when you had Don wrap a napkin around it.” Indeed, Russell observed that the bottle on the table across the way was swathed in white linen.

“Impressive, Reynes.”

“How did you guess?” Russell asked after the banker rejoined his friends.

“I know these guys. After my wine, I knew they'd have to try to top me. They don't know Burgundy, so that means a First Growth Bordeaux from a great year. There are eight first growths, if you count the unofficial three on the Right Bank, and Pétrus is the only one that's a hundred percent Merlot.”

“Still, I'm impressed.”

“As a matter of fact, I probably
would
've nailed it,” Tom said. “But I didn't leave it to chance.” After glancing over at the Goldman table, he lifted up the cocktail napkin that the sommelier had placed under his glass, on which
82 Pet
was scribbled. “I tip him much better than they do. Plus, I'm an investor in this place.” He seemed very pleased with himself. “In life, in business, you need an edge. Information is power, Russell. You try not to leave anything to chance. I never make a trade unless I think I know more than the other guy does. That's what I was saying to you earlier.”

“I'm not sure whom I could bribe to find the next best-seller.”

“If you're confident in your ability to spot literary talent, if you have an edge in that area, then use it.”

Over the course of the next two hours, the exigencies of his professional life faded away as they progressed through a seven-course tasting menu and several bottles of exceptional wine, his anxieties anesthetized until, near the end of dinner, he wondered whether he'd be expected to split the bill, which undoubtedly would be larger than any he'd ever seen in his life.

Men in blue and gray suits stopped by the table from time to time to chat with Tom, to inquire after his golf game and his wife, to share their wine. It was a nice club to belong to, if only for the night. They were all brothers in the big-ticket buzz. Expensive winos. Wait, Russell thought, what was that from? It came to him: Keith Richards's side project.

After yet another of these well-tailored acolytes of Mammon and Bacchus returned to his table, Russell asked, “So where
do
you go for sex, if not home?”

“Usually to a town house on East 73rd.”

“You have a girlfriend there?”

“I do. In fact, I was just thinking I might stop by tonight. You should join me.”

“We're talking about…a whorehouse?”

“Well, that's a rather inelegant term. I prefer to think of it as a gentlemen's club.”

Russell realized that he was serious, and couldn't help being fascinated by the idea of such places. Of course he knew they existed—every year or two you read about another busted bordello in the
Post
—but he'd never known anyone with firsthand experience, or at least he didn't think he had, until now.

“Seriously, you should try it.”

“Even if I put aside all other considerations, I'm sure I couldn't afford it.”

“Tonight's on me. Dinner and a hooker. If we're going into business together, we need to trust each other.”

Russell couldn't imagine himself crossing that line, paying for sex, which was precisely what made the prospect so intriguing. It wasn't as if he'd never been unfaithful to Corrine, and the ongoing sexual drought at home seemed like an ameliorating circumstance. Under the influence of at least a liter of insanely expensive wine, the prospect seemed not entirely unappealing—even without the suggestion that Tom's investment in his company was contingent on his participation.

“Russell, you're killing me here. Don't tell me you've been perfectly behaved all these years?”

He shook his head.

“This is a guilt-free zone, dude. An exchange of cash for services. On the emotional level, you remain entirely faithful, which is what women really care about.”

The notion that Tom imagined he knew what women really wanted was so comical that Russell couldn't help snickering, choking on his water in a fit of intoxicated hilarity.

“What's so funny?”

“Nothing,” Russell said. He didn't want to offend his host and couldn't help wondering if it wouldn't be ungrateful, not to mention impolitic, to turn down Tom's generous offer. And wouldn't he be cheating himself, in a sense, out of an archetypal adventure? What man hasn't fantasized about that experience, even those, like Russell, who'd grown up in the era of feminism and considered themselves fellow travelers—which made the potential guilt metaphysical as well as personal.

The more he thought about it, the more he found the prospect frightening, and thrilling.

Reappearing after a short absence, Tom said, “It's all arranged.” He reached across the table and put a yellow pill down in front of Russell.

“What's this?”

“Cialis,” he said. “Let's face it, we've had a lot to drink and we're not twenty anymore.”

Even as he swallowed the pill, Russell wasn't certain if he could go through with this.

When the bill arrived, Tom waved off his tentative hand and slapped down his black American Express Centurion card, the one reserved for cardholders who spent more than a million a year, which clanked like real currency against the silver metal tray cradling the innocent-looking slip of paper that itemized the staggering tab.

A black Lincoln Town Car was waiting for them outside. Tom gave the driver an address on East 73rd. Russell couldn't quite believe he was doing this. He kept thinking that he should ask the driver to stop, tell Tom that he'd changed his mind. It was crazy. He couldn't do this. But the car wafted uptown on Madison, and Tom kept talking about how hot the girls were.

“Don't you worry about the place getting busted?”

“The madam's married to a cop in the Tenth precinct and she has everybody paid off all the way up the line.”

They pulled to the curb in front of a somewhat drab brownstone in the middle of the block. Two Town Cars, identical to their own, were idling there already. And it occurred to Russell that just as he'd begun to question his own faith in the inexhaustible mystery of the city, he was being initiated into a new corner of it. For as long as he'd lived here, apparently there were parts of it he still wasn't aware of—unknown universes behind closed doors, new republics around the corner and up the block, all awaiting discovery.

They ascended the steps and Tom rang the buzzer, which was presently answered by a slim middle-aged blonde in a maroon kaftan, whom he introduced to Russell. Gretchen had the lined, leathery face of a heavy smoker and looked very much like the chatelaine of an Upper East Side town house, accepting a kiss on the cheek from Tom and leading them into a front parlor that was redolent of cigarette and cigar smoke, which failed to mask the tang of mildew. It was furnished haphazardly with sofas and chairs upholstered in disparate fabrics, like the living room of a second-rate sorority house. Framed etchings of scenes from mythology hung on either side of the fireplace, the busiest of which appeared to depict the rape of the Sabine women, but most of the walls were bare, showing veins of cracked plaster and peeling paint. Russell had been expecting something more tasteful and expensive, or far tackier, whereas this was merely drab.

A slender redheaded beauty appeared in the doorway, draped in a blue silk robe. Tom lit up as she glided across the room and embraced him; obviously they were well acquainted.

“I'm afraid I don't know anything about your friend's tastes,” Gretchen said as she turned from Tom to Russell, who felt his heart pounding in his chest, “But I think you'll be very pleased with your date,” she said, taking his right hand and rubbing it between her palms. “In fact, here's Tanya now.”

Russell turned and saw, framed in the arched doorway, wearing a leopard print robe, his sister-in-law, Hilary.

CORRINE WAS ALREADY LATE
when she arrived at the Grand Concourse and 149th Street, having just missed her subway after dropping the kids at school, shouting for someone to hold the door and watching as the train pulled away, the man with the stupid hat with earflaps staring at her moronically with his arms pinned to his sides. After waiting fifteen minutes for the next train, she found herself fighting a headwind on 149th Street, and she was half an hour late by the time she turned onto Morris Avenue.

The line of clients—so they called them—stretched from the parking lot back around the corner some fifty deep up the avenue, supplicants in parkas and fleeces, ski caps and babushkas and African head wraps—tropical splashes of color against the drab pregreen cityscape, the scene reminding her of the view outside her mother's kitchen window on a winter morning, blue jays and cardinals and towhees clustered around the bird feeder. One man wore a bright orange vest and cap, as if he'd just come from an early-morning deer hunt; another was in full army camo, skulking near the back of the line.

The orientation meeting was just breaking up, the volunteers scattering to their stations, Luke McGavock among them, so out of context that for a moment she didn't even register the surprise. She hadn't spoken to him for a week, and it had been two months since she'd laid eyes on him. She was taken aback, after these long intervals, by her reaction to his presence, by the quickening of her metabolism, a kind of mental flush that made her feel simultaneously light-headed and keenly focused. She could go for days without thinking of him, and after a time she could imagine that seeing him wouldn't affect her. He was dressed down in jeans and fleece. Catching sight of her, he stopped in the middle of the parking lot, shrugging his shoulders and flashing a rueful, boyish grin. Sometimes the things we love most in our adored ones can become, like that grin, the things we hold against them. She kissed him as she would a friend—on the cheek. He was freshly shaven, and her resolve to be businesslike was eroded by the scent of his skin.

“I was afraid you might not show up,” he said.

“In other words, you didn't come here out of the goodness of your heart to help distribute food to the needy.”

“My motives weren't entirely pure.
Mixed
would be the charitable way to describe them. But I think motives are usually mixed, don't you?”

“I'm not sure if you thought this was a good time to catch up, but I have three hours of work ahead of me here.”

“I understand and I'm here to help. I'm on carrots today.”

“An important station. If anyone asks, tell them that beta-carotene is partly metabolized into vitamin A, which can improve vision, though it won't enable you to see in the dark. That was a rumor started by the RAF during World War I, disinformation to disguise why their pilots were shooting down so many German planes at night. The cover story was that it was due to high carrot consumption among the gunners, when in fact it had to do with the development of radar.”

She realized she was babbling out of nervousness, which must have been painfully obvious.

He was looking at her fondly, as if she were a familiar, harmless lunatic.

“When did you get back?” she asked.

“A few days ago. I thought maybe we could have lunch after we finish up here.”

“It's possible. Let's see how the morning goes.”

“Well, you know where to find me,” he said, jogging off to his station.

For once, their supplies held out till the end and the morning passed without incident. Corrine was painfully aware of Luke's presence, even as she tried to pretend she wasn't; if anything, she visited the carrot tent less often than the others. Luke seemed to be performing his duties cheerfully and efficiently, getting along well with the women working alongside him, at least one of whom was annoyingly attractive.

“So, I assume you have a car?” she asked him after she'd finished her duties.

He shook his head.

“You took the subway?”

“No, but I let the car go. It seemed sort of, I don't know, it just didn't seem quite right having a Town Car standing by for three or four hours while I handed out carrots at a housing project.”

On the one hand, she gave him credit for his decency; on the other, she'd been looking forward to a ride downtown. She was getting a little weary of trying to live within her means. “I guess we're taking the subway. It's a kind of underground train.”

“Genius idea.”

They could, of course, have had lunch in Manhattan, but wanting to see how he reacted, she took him instead to a Salvadoran restaurant on 149th that Doreen, one of the clients, had introduced her to last year.

“You come here often?” he asked after she led him to a Formica table for two.

“Occasionally,” she said.

“I'm not sure I buy that,” he said, taking a seat across from her. “What do you order?”

“They do a chicken dish I like,” she said. At least that's what Doreen ordered, although for the life of her she couldn't remember what it might be called.

“You're sure you want to eat here?”

“Absolutely,” she said, despite having second thoughts about the venue and not feeling particularly hungry. Only two other tables were occupied—a Hispanic couple with a toddler and a pretty, solitary young African-American woman in light blue medical scrubs, reading
Us
magazine.

An obese waitress waddled over and tossed two plastic-coated menus between them, sending Luke's empty water glass spinning like a top toward the edge of the table, but he grabbed it and prevented it from sailing to the floor. The waitress's lack of concern, before she turned and swayed back toward the counter, seemed to indicate this sequence of events was strictly routine.

“Kind of ironic, those poor girls I was working with today from the Bear Stearns back office team—they'll be needing handouts themselves.”

“How so?”

“Bear Stearns went under last month. The shorts were in a feeding frenzy and the New York Fed reneged on a line of credit. They were out of business in days.”

She'd read something about it; for a moment she thought of Veronica, but, no, she was at Lehman Brothers. “Should the rest of us be worried?” she asked.

“I am. The subprime mortgage market's melting down,” he said. “I'm basically bearish.”

“Have you told your friend Obama about this?”

“He's got more immediate problems right now—this Reverend Wright thing is dogging him.”

Before Corrine could respond to this, the waitress heaved back up and leaned over to fill the water glasses, overfilling Corrine's, water flowing over the Formica and soaking her napkin. “You ready to order?” she asked.

“What do you recommend?” Luke asked.

She shrugged. “For your skinny ass, maybe
chicharrón de pollo con tostones.
”

“Sounds delicious. Shall we get two of those?”

“Just a
café con leche
for me,” Corrine said.

The waitress rolled her eyes.

“One
café con leche
and one
chicharrón de pollo.
”

After she walked off, Luke said, “If you have doubts about the food, please warn me now.”

“No, it's not that. I'm just not hungry.”

“I find it a little odd that someone with—how to put this delicately?—an ambivalent attitude toward food would become involved in feeding the masses.”

“You're not the first person to say that. But you should know better than anyone that it all started when we were working at the soup kitchen. The cops and the rescue workers weren't starving, but it was still gratifying to feed them, and I started thinking about how many people in the city actually had trouble feeding themselves and their families. And I also saw how
badly
those people were eating, the kind of crap that they were putting in their bodies. And the more I looked into it, the more I learned about how difficult it is for lower-income people to get basic nutritional information, not to mention access to fresh, healthy food.”

“I didn't mean to sound critical, Corrine.”

“And besides, I resent that remark about food issues. I have issues with gluttony and gourmandism. It's like chefs have become gods and restaurants have become the new nightclubs. Our friends talk about truffles the way they used to talk about cocaine. My daughter watches the Food Network, for Christ's sake. That there
is
a Food Network is a little hard for me to fathom. When did that happen? Foodie culture has become the newest cult of conspicuous consumption, and I find it annoying as hell. The pursuit of
bottarga
is just as superficial as the pursuit of the latest Kelly bag. Neither one fills a basic need.”

She paused, realizing she needed to get hold of herself. “Sorry, I'm ranting.”

“Maybe you're just avoiding the other subject.”

“What other subject?”

“Us.”

“Are we a subject?”

“Imagine if instead of just handing out vegetables you could be handing out millions of dollars.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We could have our own foundation. You could really make a difference in the world.”

“Are you proposing to me?”

“I just want you to think about what life could be like.”

“You already have a foundation.” It seemed like a peculiar objection, but she was flummoxed.

“We'd subsume it under the umbrella of the Corrine and Luke McGavock Foundation.”

“Wow,” she said, stunned. “I'm not sure I've ever heard a statement that so thoroughly intermixed noble and selfish intentions.”

“They're always intermixed, Corrine.”

“I don't believe that. What about the hopes we have for our kids?”

“An interesting example, that. You could say that in caring for our kids we're promoting our own genes. But if you really care about the welfare of your children—and I know you do—maybe you should consider what I could provide for them. The opportunities they don't have now.”

“That's so not fair,” she said, although she'd sometimes allowed herself to wonder what it would be like—not to run a foundation or to indulge fantasies of wild consumption, but to be freed from the hard choices of allocating scarce resources. Even if money couldn't buy happiness, it could redeem a great many sources of unhappiness. She saw now that for a long time she'd underestimated the importance of financial security and that in doing so she had circumscribed her prospects and those of her children. And yet she still subscribed to the values on which she'd based her life, still believed that the acquisitive instinct was one of the lower impulses on the scale of human values. Was it just some residual cultural snobbery that made her feel that Mammon worship was boorish? And would her children thank her when she explained that she'd left Russell in order to improve their material well-being?

All at once she spotted a flaw in his argument. “I thought the big reason you split up with Giselle was that you didn't want children.”

“I didn't want to start a new family with
her.
”

“But I don't understand why you want to take on a broken family with me. What the hell's wrong with you?”

“You're right,” he said, just before his lunch was slapped in front of him, chicken parts drowning in an orange swamp beside a mesa of yellow rice. “It doesn't make sense. It must be love, I guess.”