“Jesus, that’ll be must-see TV. What, exactly, are her qualifications?”
“Don’t forget, she appeared on two episodes of Law & Order.”
“So has everybody else we know.”
Desperate to change the subject, she said, “Kohout was quite the conquering hero at Declan’s. He must’ve enjoyed that.”
“Well, why not. He’s earned his moment in the spotlight, I’d say.”
“And he’s soaking it up big-time.”
“What have you got against him, anyway?”
“I don’t know, I’ve always thought he’s very full of himself. I just don’t think he’s a good guy. Plus, I don’t like the idea of your risking all this money on his book.”
“You’ve got to risk it to make it.”
“Your whole business model is based on finding books that the big publishers aren’t chasing. You’re niche, remember?”
“So maybe I want to broaden the niche.”
“What’s that, a paradox? A niche is by definition—”
“Yes, Corrine, I’m aware of the definition.
“Shall we hear the specials?” he asked, turning to beam at the waitress, who’d appeared beside the table.
Corrine excused herself, feeling her period arrive all at once, and walked gingerly to the ladies’ room. For better, and worse, she was still in the game, despite her dear friends’ eagerness to perform last rites on her womanhood.
21
“ONE DAY I WAS A TEACHING ASSISTANT in Iowa City,” Phillip said, “and then suddenly my picture was in the Times Book Review and I’m on the Today show.”
They were at KGB, an East Village bar known for its literary readings and authentically rude, Russian-style service. Russell had invited him to hear Jack Carson read, and afterward, as the rising star disappeared into the throng of admirers, Phillip was garrulously apologizing to Russell for his long-ago breach of contract while revisiting the days when he, too, had been a celebrated new fiction writer.
“As soon as the semester ended, I moved to Manhattan, flew to Hollywood on a first-class ticket and hung out with River Phoenix at the Viper Room three nights before he croaked out on the sidewalk. On the one hand, it all seemed perfectly natural, my just deserts, a slightly belated recognition of my innate talent and hard work. Of course, I’d always believed I was an unappreciated genius. On the other hand, I felt like a complete fraud, overpraised and unprepared for the role I’d been thrust into: a wunderkind, the voice of a new generation. And I wondered why it wasn’t me who’d OD’d outside the Viper Room, given the amount of coke I’d snorted that night. I’d dabbled in coke before, but now that I had money and a modicum of celebrity, I was hitting it way hard. The first time I ever did coke, I knew I’d found my drug, my own best self. I felt normal, like I could walk into a room and imagine that I belonged among other humans without any degree of self-consciousness. So it seemed in the beginning, and for years to come. Eventually you figure out it makes you more self-conscious and cleaves you entirely from the great majority of your fellow humans, who are not doing coke all the time, and forces you to lie reflexively and incessantly, calling your agent at ten in the morning to cancel a lunchtime reading in Philadelphia because, you claim, you have a sudden attack of diverticulitis, not because you’ve been awake all night doing blow with a waitress from Bar Tabac. Eventually you’re lying before the fact, bailing on any event that isn’t likely to involve coke, and lying after the fact, apologizing for the missed dinner, the missed birthday, the missed deadline.”
Russell could see a group of young women registering Kohout’s presence; they were too cool to fuss about it, though he could sense they were annotating the sighting among themselves.
“Still, I was maintaining, in a way. You tell your agent and your putative editor the second book’s going great. Pages soon, any day now, really good stuff. It’s amazing how many people are willing to be lied to. It takes a village, right? It almost makes you believe in the innate goodness of humanity, experiencing the credulity of the species. The more famous you are, the more your mendacity will be indulged. Women—you hate to say it; it sounds sexist, but fuck it—seem to be particularly afflicted with the will to believe, with the capacity for gratuitous hope, particularly with regard to promises of reform.”
Glancing over at the other side of the room, beneath the Soviet-era posters, Russell could see a ripple of hilarity passing through the scrum of bodies around Jack.
“Meantime, the screenplay’s gone through three drafts and a dozen script conferences and your Hollywood agent is taking longer and longer to return your calls. Eventually, of course, there’s the intervention. You remember that, I guess?”
Russell nodded. How could he forget? Ambushing Phillip at ten in the morning at his apartment. For Russell, it was an eerie and unwelcome reminder of his first such operation, though the paraphernalia was different, rolled-up bills and razor blades instead of needles and spoons, heroin having been Jeff’s poison. In the end they’d failed to save Jeff, but only because he was already infected with HIV, and the thought that he could have acted earlier tormented Russell through the years, which was one of the reasons he consented to take part when Phillip’s brother had called him. Russell, Marty Briskin, Phillip’s former girlfriend, Amy, who had the key to let them in, the brother and his roommate from Amherst, plus the drug counselor, an earnest bearded empath in Birkenstocks and hemp trousers. Russell could imagine the horror, through Phillip’s eyes, of being awakened after just a few hours of ragged sleep, to find this jury of his peers ensconced in the wreckage of his apartment, which still reeked of cigarettes and spilled vodka, the coffee table cloudy and streaked with coke residue. A waking nightmare for sure. The brother was the point man, shaking him awake, first gently and then more vigorously. When he realized that they weren’t going away, he staggered into the bathroom and spent fifteen minutes in the shower. The Hollywood agent weighed in for precisely nine minutes on speakerphone, talking about doing coke with various movie stars before clicking off to get on a call with another movie star. Phillip denied everything, of course. He didn’t have a problem. A little recreational use. The assembled company shared terrible stories of perfidy and malfeasance; carrots and sticks were deployed, and eventually he agreed to the two-month stay at Silver Meadows.
“It was actually a relief,” Phillip said, “when it all came crashing down, and all my undeserved success had been punished. Once I detoxed, I saw the experience as the subject of my next book. And even though you had the right of first refusal, we all knew I could get more money elsewhere, and honestly, I knew you were too much of a gentleman to hold me to my contract.”
“Is that supposed to be flattering?”
“I’m just trying to explain—no, I’m trying to apologize. In the end, you were lucky you didn’t have to publish that piece of shit, although I have no doubt you would’ve made it a better book. As it was, my so-called editor at HarperCollins didn’t edit at all. The problem was, I didn’t believe in the redemption I was selling. My commitment to sobriety was more tactical than spiritual. And I’d failed to notice the rise of the memoir as the preeminent literary form of the nineties.”
“If you’d called it a memoir,” Russell said, “it might have done better.”
“It would have. Look at James Frey. People wanted to think the degradation was real, never mind that memory’s totally unreliable—an addict’s memory most of all—that addicts are liars first and foremost, the fact that most novels are memoirs and most memoirs are actually novels.”
A young woman crashed into their table, spilling most of her drink on Phillip. She gaped at him and said, “I know who you are.”
“If only I could say the same,” he said.
Jack Carson sat down at the table, having divested himself of his fans, and after a few minutes, Phillip got up and disappeared with the young woman.
“Be right back,” he said.
“That guy’s so full of shit,” Jack said.
Russell was beginning to fear that this was indeed the case. There was no sign of Kohout when he bailed twenty minutes later.
22
TURNING EAST ON SPRING STREET, Corrine marveled anew at the upscale boutiques that had infested SoHo ever since Prada invaded—Chanel and Longchamp and Burberry—wondering when, exactly, Manhattan had become a collection of luxury brands and franchise outlets: Dubai on the Hudson. She stopped briefly to look in the window of Evolution—an exception to this depressing trend—Russell’s practically favorite store, which sold fossils and bear skulls and meteorites and other twelve-year-old schoolboy desiderata. On a stucco wall a few doors up the street was a drippy graffito: FIGHT TERROR WITH GLAMOUR.
The late-autumn chill, the turning season, reminded her of all she wanted to accomplish, and of all those past vows of seasonal renewal, awakening a vague but powerful sense of yearning exacerbated by a new note of desperation at the thought that she had fewer Novembers ahead of her than behind. And now, as if to provide an object to that inchoate sense of longing, Luke had reappeared.
If she didn’t tell Casey about it, she felt that her date with Luke that night might seem less real, or at least less of a betrayal. As much as she loved confiding in her friend, this seemed like an even greater violation of Russell’s trust; and she had vowed not to sleep with Luke, which Casey would find hard to believe. Since it was Casey’s turn to come downtown they were meeting at Balthazar, which her friend liked because it reminded her of Paris, although she could never refrain from saying that it wasn’t La Coupole.
Casey was waiting up front, wearing her version of downtown attire, a black velvet biker jacket with epaulets and silver chains over a white T-shirt and skintight black leather jeans, along with some kind of quilted black leather boots. She was visibly unhappy to be jostled by the walk-ins and out-of-towners crowded around the door. After she gave Corrine a full complement of three kisses on the cheek, Corrine managed to get to the maître d’, a tall, svelte Eurasian beauty, and claim her reservation.
They followed the woman’s spectacularly long legs past the row of booths reserved for VIPs—although Corrine didn’t actually recognize any of them today, just a bunch of very self-satisfied downtown potentates—and sat down at a nice little table.
“All the times you come here,” Casey said, “you’d think they’d give you a booth.”
“Russell always gets one, but it never occurs to me to ask.”
“It’s just that they’re more comfortable,” Casey said, which might have been true, although Corrine suspected that comfort had little to do with her desire to be seated conspicuously in a booth. “I could get Washington to make the reservation next time if you don’t want to bother Russell.”
It took Corrine a moment to process this. “Oh my God, don’t tell me…”
Casey couldn’t help smirking. “I ran into him last week at the Literacy Partners benefit, I’m on the board, actually, and Tom was out of town, as usual, and I guess Veronica was home with the kids.”
“So you decided you might as well get a room?”
“Well, come on, it’s not like there isn’t a lot of history there.”
“You used to say it was chemistry.”
“Whatever it is, we found out we still have it.”
“How did this happen?” Corrine asked, though she knew their affair had begun back in the eighties.
“One cocktail at a time. Then one, um, button at a time. Do you really need me to spell it out?”
“So you just suddenly decide to jump into bed?” Strangely, she wanted to know all the preliminary details. Even after engaging in an affair of her own, it still seemed amazing to her that married adults could end up in bed with people who weren’t their spouses.
“We flirted and then later we went to a bar around the corner. And then we got a room.”
“Where?”
“Some hotel on the West Side.”
“How am I supposed to feel about this? You know that Washington and Veronica are almost our closest friends.”
Casey’s skin looked great; Corrine wondered what exotic new peel or process had burnished it.
“You’ve always known about, well, our little infatuation.”
“I thought it was over.”
“It was, but I guess the embers were still smoldering. And it’s not like you and Veronica are all that close.”
“We’re having dinner with them tomorrow night. How am I supposed to act?”
“Don’t pretend you don’t have any experience here.”
“You’re implying that I’m a hypocrite?”
“Well, now that we’ve alluded to the topic, what’s going on with Luke?”
Corrine had been hesitant to bring this up with Casey, since she wasn’t quite certain how she felt about Luke’s marital dissolution and she was fairly certain what her friend’s reaction would be. Even so, she couldn’t help wanting to share the news. Plus, she needed an alibi for tonight, and Casey was the only friend she had who was complicit. “He’s back. I’m seeing him tonight.”
“That’s great. Where are you meeting?” she asked eagerly—an aficionado of the discreet Manhattan rendezvous. If you didn’t know better, it might be easy to imagine that there would be countless refuges in the teeming city where lovers could meet, anonymous in the crowd, but anyone who had lived in Manhattan for long knew that it was essentially a village, and that your roommate from prep school or your husband’s business partner was always accosting you on the sidewalk in Chelsea, or from the next table at the little out-of-the-way trattoria in the East Eighties.
“I couldn’t really think of a place. He’s staying at the Carlyle, so we’ll just order room service.”
“That’s brilliant. It certainly saves a step.”
“There’s something else.” She paused and lowered her voice: “He’s getting a divorce.”
“Oh my God.”
“Well, yes.”
“That’s huge.”
“I know. But I don’t know what to think about it.”
Casey, uncharacteristically at a loss for words, reached over and clutched her friend’s hand.
Corrine was relieved when the waitress turned up to ask, “Have you had a chance to look at the menu?”
“No, but we’ll have the Balthazar salads and split an omelette,” Corrine told her, reverting to custom.
“Actually, I’m on this new diet,” Casey said. “Could I just get some maple syrup and lemon juice with hot water?”
“I don’t know if we have maple syrup.”
“Well, can you ask? And also some cayenne pepper.”
Corrine studied her. “Is that what’s making your skin look so good?”
“You have to try it. I’ve lost five pounds in three days. I can’t believe you didn’t notice.” Once the waitress walked away, she said. “I can’t believe Luke’s getting divorced. Are you completely freaked-out?”
Corrine nodded.
“What happened? Was it his idea? Do you think it had anything to do with you?”
“We’ve only talked briefly, but he said it had to do with his not wanting any more kids. She really wanted them.”
“That’s something these guys should take into account before they marry young bimbos.”
“He sounded really sad,” Corrine said.
“Well, of course he’s sad. But that doesn’t mean that part of him isn’t happy.”
“I don’t want it to be about me,” Corrine said. “It can’t be about me.”
“If you say so,” Casey said.
The waitress returned to report that maple syrup was available.
“The hell with it, I’m absolutely starving,” Casey said, “so we’ll just have the Balthazar salads and the omelette.”
“Just one omelette?”
“That’s correct. And two glasses of Chardonnay.”
“Is the Mâcon all right? Or would you rather the Chablis? They’re both made from Chardonnay.”
&n
bsp; “Fine, whichever, the Mâcon,” Casey said, and after the waitress left with the menus, she muttered, “I hate it when they act like not ordering two courses per person is some kind of fucking faux pas.”
“I always feel like I should get the steak frites,” Corrine said, eyeing a plate at the next table with a shiny, charred lozenge of beef and paper cones of french fries. “But I also think it’s kind of gross. I mean, who could eat that in the middle of the day?”
“Speaking of eating issues, how’s Storey doing?”
Corrine wished she’d never brought up the issue of her daughter’s weight gain. She should have realized it would give Casey another chance to compare Storey unfavorably to her own perfect daughter, who, on top of everything else, spoke Mandarin.
“I’m hoping it’s a phase. Russell thinks it might have something to do with the whole Hilary mess. He thinks she started gaining right after that incident, which is true. She was always a skinny little chicken, and then it’s like she started eating at Thanksgiving dinner and hasn’t stopped. You won’t believe her favorite TV show. Barefoot Contessa.”
“That fat-ass who used to have the pricey food store in the Hamptons?”
“That’s the one. Now she’s on TV, demonstrating how to inject butter directly into your thighs, and for some reason my daughter finds it fascinating.”
“I told you, you should take her to my nutritionist.”
“I don’t want to call attention to it. She’s self-conscious enough already.”
“Believe me, even if you don’t, her peers will. This is no town for fatties.”
“You’ve got to be careful what you say, or next thing you know you’re dealing with bulimia.” Much as Corrine hated to see Storey overweight, she was terrified that she might transmit her own issues to her daughter. She knew, in moments of clarity, that she had to be careful. When she was at Miss Porter’s, she’d been hospitalized with bulimia, and she still struggled against the occasional purging impulse. Or rather, still succumbed, occasionally. Hardly ever, though. It had been months.
As if reading her mind, Casey said, “There are worse things than the occasional voluntary puke. It’s just one of those basic feminine specialties, like faking an orgasm.”
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