Jack found himself seated next to Madison, who smelled really good and liked to emphasize her points by squeezing his knee.
She was now explaining how much she liked his story about the moonshining brothers. “What was that one called?” Every time she leaned forward, he was treated to a glimpse of her nipples.
“It’s called ‘Shine,’ ” Jack said.
“Oh God, of course. Duh!”
Russell overheard this and said, “That’s one of the greatest stories of the last quarter century. Although I did have to persuade Jack not to spell out what happens to the older brother in the end.”
“Yeah, I don’t know what I was thinking,” Jack said. “I’d be nothing without my editor. Everything I am today, I owe it all to Russell.”
“That was very tacky of you, Russell,” Corrine said.
“I didn’t mean to take credit for anything major,” Russell said, taken aback by the reaction to his remark. “I mean, I knew it was a great story the first time I read it.”
“Then that’s what you should’ve said the first time,” Corrine said.
“You’re lucky, Jack,” Nancy said. “My editor’s barely literate. Last week she told me my protagonist wasn’t likable enough and not to use so many big words.”
The conversation subdivided again. Madison told Jack about the first time she’d gotten drunk on shine when she was twelve, and then Nancy joined in from the other side, telling a story about her first drunk, when she’d vomited in her purse during a high school football game. Russell orbited the table, filling wineglasses, slapping Jack on the back as he passed.
“Hey, sorry, buddy. Didn’t mean to be a douche bag.”
“No big thing,” Jack said.
At the other end of the table, they were talking about September 11.
“It’s like it never happened,” Washington was saying. “We were all going to change our lives, and in the end we’re the same shallow, grasping hedonists we used to be.”
“Some people changed,” Corrine said, all of a sudden seeming very sad.
“Like the poor bastards who got sent to Iraq,” Russell said.
“I, like, barely remember it,” said the child actor.
“That’s because you were eight when it happened,” said the painter.
“Nuh-uh. I was…twelve.”
Corrine said, “I think for anyone who was here, it’s a wound that’s just barely scabbed over. When you hear a low-flying plane, you tense up in a way you never did before. And let’s not forget we lost a friend, Jim Crespi.”
“Poor fucking Jim,” Washington said.
“If you weren’t here, you have no idea,” the artist said. “But I don’t think anyone who was here then will ever get over it.”
“Give me a fucking break,” Washington said. “New Yorkers aren’t capable of dwelling on the past. When was the last time we talked about Jim? I can’t even remember what I did last night.”
Russell said, “Not everyone drinks as much as you do, Wash.”
“God, I just remembered the weirdest thing,” Nancy said. “I think I slept with two firemen that week. They’d been working at Ground Zero for like three days and they came up to Evelyn’s, all sooty and exhausted, and everyone was buying them drinks, and I ended up taking them home.”
“You slept with both of them at the same time?” Corrine asked.
“It was a weird time,” Nancy said. “We were all fucked-up.”
Jack didn’t have much to contribute to this, having been at home in Fairview. He’d been cranking the night before in a friend’s hunting cabin, then slept through the next day and hadn’t even heard about it till late that night. Since everybody at the table was still yammering about September 11, he decided to take the opportunity to go the bathroom and do some more drugs.
He wiped the top of the toilet tank to make sure it was dry and laid out a bag of the H, cutting and snorting two rails. He was planning to do the coke afterward, but he found his legs getting a little rubbery, so he sat down on the toilet seat, and when the door opened, he was afraid he’d been in there a long time.
Madison was in the doorway, and instead of retreating, she came in and closed the door behind her. “Got anything for me?” she said.
“I got some blow,” he said, not wanting to mention the other. “Just give me a minute to get my shit together here.”
If he could just focus a little and remember how to use his limbs, he’d be fine, but he needed the coke in order to get volitional. It was a vicious circle. Before he could make any progress, Madison got down on her knees and unzipped his jeans and took his cock in her mouth, which made focusing even more difficult. He closed his eyes and tried to enjoy it even as he worried about whether he could get hard or not, but it turned out he could.
When he heard what sounded like someone rattling the door handle, he opened his eyes again. Young Jeremy was standing there staring in wonder at the sight of Madison’s mane bouncing up and down in Jack’s crotch. It might have been five or fifteen seconds before he closed the door.
Jack knew he was in deep shit, but he felt the reckoning could wait; right now he just really wanted to finish what Madison had started.
He realized once he stepped into the hall that the bathroom door was visible from the dining table, where his own seat and Madison’s were conspicuously vacant. After cleaning himself off and giving her some of the coke, he’d suggested she wait for a few minutes after he returned to the table, though at this point he wasn’t sure why he’d bothered.
No one seemed to take any notice as he sat down, until Nancy looked at him and said, “Did you two have fun in there?”
Jack shrugged and filled his mouth with some of whatever it was Russell had cooked, some kind of fucking meat in a sauce. From her side of the table, Corrine looked resigned.
A few minutes later, after Madison had returned to her seat, twitching like a madwoman and chewing on her lower lip, Storey appeared and tugged on Corrine’s shoulder. “Jeremy saw two people having oral sex in the bathroom,” she announced.
Glaring at Jack, Corrine stood up and walked with her daughter back to the bedrooms, presumably to check up on her emotionally scarred son.
“Well,” Nancy said, “I guess now we know what you guys were doing.”
Russell didn’t seem to know how to react. He shook his head and poured half a bottle of red wine into his glass. Jack flashed what he hoped was a rueful grin, insofar as he was able to control the muscles of his own face.
Jack felt something rubbing against his ankle just before Madison screamed.
“Fuck—a rat!” She pushed her chair back from the table and jumped to her feet. Jack stomped the furry creature with the heel of his boot.
“That’s Ferdie,” Russell said, leaping to his feet and circling to their side of the table.
“That was Ferdie,” Nancy said.
“What the fuck’s a ferdie?” Madison said.
Whatever it had been, it was now a bloody mess on the floor.
“Jesus, Jack. Fuck! That was our fucking pet ferret,” Russell said, crouching down to examine the carnage. The creature gave one last quiver.
“I’m sorry, man, I thought it was a rat.”
“Rats don’t have furry tails,” Russell said, gingerly touching the thing with his finger. “Poor little Ferdie. Oh Jesus.” He sounded as if he were about to cry.
Corrine reappeared. Taking in the scene, she turned pale and asked, “What happened?”
“It’s Ferdie,” Russell said, still kneeling there.
Approaching closer, she put her hand to her mouth when she saw the squashed pet. “Oh my God, is he—”
“He’s dead,” Russell said, standing up and heading her off, throwing his arms around her shoulders.
“What happened?” she asked.
“Damn, I’m really sorry, you guys,” Jack said. “It was an accident.”
Storey, who had crept over to see, started howling.
“Oh my
God,” Corrine said, looking at him with horror.
“I think you should go,” Russell said.
“Oh my…Jesus,” Corrine said, her voice breaking, barely audible over Storey’s wails. “You killed him? You killed Ferdie? What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“He thought it was a rat,” Madison explained.
“You’re right, I’ll go,” Jack said, retreating to the elevator door and standing to wait as the car rattled upward from the first floor, listening to Corrine sobbing on Russell’s shoulder while the other guests sat helplessly at the table.
Madison glanced back and forth between the Calloways and Jack before joining him just as the elevator arrived.
“That party’s definitely over,” she said as the doors finally closed.
“I can’t believe I killed their ferret.”
“I can’t believe they had a ferret.”
“This is bad.”
“Well, you probably won’t get invited back for the Memorial Day party.”
“Jesus.”
“He’ll have to forgive you. You’re too good a writer.”
“You don’t understand. I was going to fire him.”
“What?”
“I was gonna tell him this week.”
“Why are you firing him?”
“Because he treats me like a baby. Because he thinks he knows how to write my stuff better than I do. Because he thinks he made me. You heard him tonight, talking about how he changed the ending of ‘Shine.’ ”
“So what’re you going to do?”
“The thing is, I like the guy. And I sure can’t fire him now.”
The elevator stopped at the ground floor.
“Where to?” she said.
“I don’t care. Anywhere—just so long as we can do more drugs. I don’t know if there are enough goddamn drugs in the world to make me forget that fucking dinner party, but I’m sure as shit gonna try.”
32
THE FIRST FRIDAY OF EVERY MONTH was the food giveaway at the Grant Housing Project in Harlem. Carol, the realtor, was among those who showed up for the volunteer orientation.
“I was going to call you,” she said, her unruly salt-and-pepper hair pulled back in a ponytail with a scrunchie. “I don’t know if you’re still looking, but there’s been a price reduction at that town house on West 121st. The bank’s threatening foreclosure and the owner’s desperate. It looks like they’re going to do a short sale.”
Much as this announcement piqued Corrine’s interest, she couldn’t help feeling this wasn’t the time or place for that conversation, though she had loved the house Carol had showed her two months earlier. Most of the families in the crumbling housing project were on some sort of public assistance, and the median income for a family of four, of which there were very few, was around twenty thousand.
“Let’s talk afterward,” Corrine said before setting up the separate stations for turnips, carrots and acorn squash.
They’d met here after Carol first volunteered a year ago, and within minutes Corrine had heard the whole story: “We were the perfect couple, Upper West Side liberal Jewish intelligentsia version. He taught political science at Columbia. Culturally we were Jewish—we did the bar mitzvah and the bat mitzvah—but basically we were nonobservant. We were secular humanists, and proud of it. We thought that religion was divisive; superstition, the opiate of the masses. Fast forward to 9/11: Howard’s brother worked for Cantor Fitzgerald; he’s on the one hundred and fifth floor when the first plane hits. They were close, so Howard’s on the phone with him when the tower collapses. And he goes into a funk. We all go into a funk, right? But Howard doesn’t come out of his, and he turns to religion. He starts going to synagogue and then he joins this Orthodox shul, and I try it a few times, but my heart’s not in it. I tell him, ‘Hey, honey, it’s your thing.’ He becomes ultra-Zionist and insists we keep kosher, and he wants to send the kids to Hebrew school, and eventually he quits his job and moves out of the house and joins this Hasidic sect in Brooklyn. Suddenly I’ve got no husband and no income. So that’s how I got into real estate.”
When she heard that Corrine was thinking about moving, Carol had talked up the virtues of the far Upper West Side, the high eighties and nineties, where they looked at several three-bedroom apartments in a nice prewar building. But Corrine’s price range kept driving them north, till Carol said, “For about the same money you could get a town house in Harlem. The housing stock is incredible—block after block of late-nineteenth-century town houses. As recently as five years ago, I wouldn’t have advised someone like you to consider it. I mean, I wouldn’t want that on my conscience. Now, I’d say jump before it’s too late. Sure, it’s still rough around the edges, but you’re already seeing features in New York magazine. You don’t want to be the last white people through the door.”
“I’d hate to think we were displacing the…local residents.”
“It’s not you; it’s the economy. Market forces. The neighborhood has already been ravaged. It was heroin in the sixties and seventies; then the crack wars in the eighties and nineties wiped out what was left of the middle class. A lot of these properties—the best values, really—are abandoned foreclosures. Boarded-up town houses used as drug dens for the last couple of decades. And the others are already renovated. Those are getting pricey. I’m not sure you could swing that. It’s funny, though, the kind of white people who consider moving to Harlem—I don’t count the speculators, of course—are precisely the kind most prone to liberal guilt.”
“What about, you know, crime?”
“Oh God, SoHa, it’s totally safe.”
“SoHa?”
“South Harlem. Get it? It’s SoHo for the aughts. I’m not saying it’s the Upper East Side, but it’s safer than the Upper West Side was when I was growing up. We lived on Riverside, and my mother wouldn’t let me walk to Central Park because Amsterdam and Broadway and Columbus were so dangerous. You’ve heard of Needle Park, right? They made that film with Al Pacino. That was Broadway and 72nd. You had these well-to-do Jewish upper-middle-class families on the river and on the park, but everything in between was the freakin’ Wild West. Junkies, muggers, perverts in raincoats. Broadway was lined with SROs full of released mental patients. The good old days. Hah! Compared to that, Harlem, today, it’s gotten to the point where it’s hard to score drugs, so they tell me. The trade’s mostly moved uptown to Inwood.”
—
Harlem. It was a heady concept. Russell had a completely irrational dislike of the Upper West Side, but Harlem, upper as it was, might just appeal to his sense of urban romance. She hadn’t even told him she was looking yet. She wanted to find something and present him with the whole package. A town house in Harlem was an evocative phrase, charged with tension, contradiction, vibrating between poles of domesticity and urban menace. Corrine had a tenuous ancestral tie to the neighborhood, her grandfather having fallen under its spell after being taken to a jazz club by his friend Carl Van Vechten, and he’d told her many stories about those visits.
The idea had grown on Corrine after she took a tour with Carol two months ago. They’d focused their search south of 125th, as close as possible to the kids’ new school on East 94th, looking at duplexes and town houses, whole and divided, including a few that were boarded up and derelict, fetid, the walls covered in graffiti, crack vials underfoot, some of them mere shells and others with century-old decorative flourishes intact: elaborate moldings and fireplaces, magnificent staircases and monumental arches.
She’d been completely and utterly smitten by the last house of the day, an Italianate brownstone on West 121st Street that had been partially renovated by the owner, who’d bought it in 2006 and quickly run out of money. This was the house that Carol wanted to talk about now. The parlor floor was composed of two theatrical rooms with fourteen-foot ceilings and egg and dart molding, joined by a soaring arch. The front room had been restored to its former glory, with Carrara marble fireplaces flanked by Ionic columns. �
��This kitchen wasn’t even here; it used to be downstairs. Look at this,” Carol said, on the day of the tour, beckoning her to the back room, a huge kitchen and dining area. “Sub-Zero, Miele dishwasher, granite countertops, the works.” Corrine could see Russell getting excited about this. “Plus the boiler and the roof are new,” Carol had added. “After that, well, it gets a little rough.” The rooms on the upper floors were in various states of disrepair, but by no means unrecoverable. Many of the windows were boarded up or bricked over, and the top floor was a junkyard, but Corrine was absolutely giddy, given the space, the sheer number of rooms, and the fenced-in backyard. “If she’d finished the job, this place could easily go for one five, one seven, but that’s the beauty of it. You can finish it yourself, and you’ve got a motivated seller.”
“It’s still a stretch,” Corrine had said wistfully.
“It would be easy to seal the lower stairs and rent out the basement apartment for income to defray the mortgage.”
She pictured herself here, in a house, with her family: Russell reading in front of the fireplace, the children playing with their friends in the backyard. It seemed almost attainable, and yet she knew that it was more than their present circumstances would allow. And then—she couldn’t help it—just for a moment, she wondered what Luke would think of the place.
“I’m pretty sure we can get it for one point one,” Carol said to Corrine now, after the last cabbage had been distributed.
She’d never been one to yearn beyond her means, but she desperately wanted this house and told herself if she could only find a way to get her family there, she would be happy with her lot, and with the man she’d married, and never wish for more.
33
ARRIVING HOME SHORTLY BEFORE SEVEN, Russell collected the mail, finding among the bills and cards from realtors a slim envelope addressed to him in Jack’s loopy, backward-leaning hand. This aroused his curiosity, an actual physical letter from one of his authors, as if they were Perkins and Hemingway in 1927. Why the hell would Jack be writing him a letter?
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