“Isn’t it a Tuesday?”
“Maybe.”
“Which would be…a weekday?”
“I guess,” he said, not looking away from the screen, where the little red man traversed a tropical island.
“And are we supposed to play video games on weekdays?”
“I thought it was like a holiday.”
“It’s Election Day, which is not a holiday. Holidays are when you don’t have school. Now turn that off before I take the controller away.”
“Let me just save it.”
“What’s to save? That’s what you always say when you want to keep playing for another five minutes.” She still wasn’t sure if this “saving” gambit was legitimate or not.
When he appeared to keep playing, she walked over to the bed and took hold of the control unit in his hand. Ferdie, snakelike, opened his eyes and regarded her languidly.
“Okay, okay.”
“I don’t want to come back and find this going again. What’s the homework situation?”
“I’m done with everything except math.”
“Well, let’s do math, then.”
She left before he’d actually turned the game off, weary of the struggle. At the same time, enacting these little family rituals was reassuring; she’d felt thoroughly unsettled these last few days, after seeing Luke, and eager to convince herself that she was over him, that he had no bearing on her actual life.
Storey was sitting on the couch with Jack, pointing out a passage in her book. “Are you a Democrat?” she asked. “My dad says friends don’t let friends vote Republican. That’s a joke; it comes from that ad that says friends don’t let friends drive drunk. Everybody we know is a Democrat.” The buzzer rang before Corrine could hear the answer.
“It’s Hilary and Dan.” Two Republicans, in fact. Just barely audible on the crackling intercom. Corrine’s younger sister and her fiancé, the ex-cop, who’d finally gotten divorced from his devoutly Catholic, supremely bitter wife a few months ago. Arguing that Hilary had been with Dan for five years now, Corrine had finally gotten Russell to stop referring to her as “your slutty little sister.”
“Who’s that?” Russell asked, approaching from the kitchen.
“Hilary and Dan.”
“Ah, your formerly slutty little sister and her police escort.”
“Jesus, Russell.” She nodded toward the couch.
Chagrined, Russell glanced over to see the blond crown of Storey’s head just visible above the couch cushions. “Sorry.”
They listened to the elevator rattling upward and finally shuddering to a stop, the doors groaning open.
Kisses and handshakes…
“Happy birthday, sis,” Hilary said. “Oh shit, I forgot we’re not allowed to mention your birthday.” She held a finger to her lips. “Top secret.”
“Not so secret now, thanks,” Corrine said. She’d insisted that this was not a birthday party, having no desire to commemorate the fact that she was turning fifty, unlike Russell, who’d had a big bash a few months ago to celebrate his own semicentennial.
“Where are my little chickadees?” Hilary chirped.
Corrine glanced over at her husband, who was studying her ruefully. He knew how much it pissed Corrine off when her sister used the possessive adjective with reference to the kids, as if determined to reiterate her maternal claim and give them hints about their complicated origins, whether they were ready for this knowledge or not.
Storey rose from the couch and marched over to greet the newcomers.
“There she is!” Hilary lifted Storey in her arms without losing her grip on the Pinot Grigio. “How’s my favorite girl?”
“Good.” It warmed Corrine’s heart to see how Storey stiffened and struggled in her grasp. Hilary was one of those people who just couldn’t connect with children, who seemed unable to speak their language, having spent all her adult energy learning the idiom and gestures of seduction. She’d been a professional girlfriend for years, a concubine without portfolio, a groupie.
Dan rescued Storey from Hilary’s awkward embrace, hugged her and set her down again. “How’s my storybook princess? And where’s your stinky brother?”
“I’m good. He’s playing video games even though it’s a weekday.”
“We’d better go make a citizen’s arrest,” Dan said.
The buzzer interrupted this interdiction, followed by the crackling baritone of Washington Lee on the intercom. The elevator soon debouched Washington and his wife, Veronica, Russell’s best friend natty in a black suit and crisp white shirt; his wife, who worked for Lehman Brothers, wearing a businessy charcoal suit. Russell dragged Jack into the group, introducing him to all as the author of the most brilliant collection of short stories he had ever had the privilege to publish.
What about Jeff? Corrine thought. What about our dead friend?
“Jack’s from Fairview, Tennessee,” Russell said, relishing, she knew, the idea of gritty Americana. Much as Russell liked his adoptive home, this slender, crowded island at the eastern edge of the continent, he believed in his heart that America was elsewhere, off in the South or the West, the big sprawling vistas beyond the tired ramparts of the Appalachians; that the country’s literature was about the strong, silent men and women of the hollows and the heartland—although to judge from Jack’s stories, which showcased babbling, toothless speed freaks, they were no longer necessarily silent.
“So did you vote for the cracker or the brother?” Washington asked him.
“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 l
oft 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.”
5
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.