“He was a minister?”
He nodded. “Yeah, a pastor. He died last year.”
“Do you miss him?”
He shrugged. “I left my job three weeks later.”
Of course, he had made the connection before, but hearing himself say it now, it sounded so obvious.
“I’m sorry about the sandwich,” she said, leaning over and kissing his cheek. “But I’m glad you told me.” She kissed him again, this time on the lips. Suddenly, grudgingly, he registered a commotion from the direction of the green.
Jerry’s Pathfinder was parked on the cobblestones outside the tent; half a dozen vividly painted, pneumatic women in tight T-shirts and halters were climbing out, strippers recruited from the club where Jerry’s girlfriend worked.
“The girls are back,” Corrine said.
“I guess we should resume our posts.”
“Oh, now you’re suddenly feeling the call of duty.”
For a moment, she seemed genuinely jealous.
“Do you go to those places?” she demanded.
“Once in a while, I used to. It was a client entertainment thing. Honestly, it doesn’t do it for me.”
“Are you just saying that because it’s what you think you’re supposed to say?”
“No, really. I find it awkward. And frustrating. Generally speaking, I fail to find it stimulating—and if it was, what exactly am I supposed to do with my…”
“Erection?”
“I was going to say ‘excitement.’”
“No need for euphemism.”
“But, yes, exactly. I mean, what is the fucking point of that?”
“Svetlana tells me at her club there’s a special Boom Boom Room where you can relieve the pressure, so to speak.”
“That’s good to know.”
“Have you ever been with a prostitute?”
“I can’t believe you’re asking me this.”
“Well, who else am I going to ask? I’m curious about these things. It’s not like I can ask my friends’ husbands. I’m a middle-aged mother. I don’t know why, but talking to Svetlana, I just suddenly realized there’s a whole secret world of male sexuality I know nothing about.” She looked up at him expectantly. “So?”
“I’m not going to answer that.”
“So you have?”
“No, I—”
“Was it exciting? Or just sleazy?”
“For most of us, sleazy is exciting. That’s kind of the whole point.”
“Have you done it more than once?”
“I didn’t say I’d done it at all. I was merely pointing out that sleazy, dirty, nasty, whatever you want to call it—that’s the appeal of professional sex.”
“Are hookers really better at it than the rest of us?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“Come on.”
He sighed. Her curiosity was amusing, even stimulating. What the fuck, he thought. “Once,” he said. “In Hong Kong. On a business trip.”
“And?”
“Honestly? It was great.”
She slapped his shoulder hard, playfully. “She was good?”
He nodded.
“What did she do that was so special?”
“I’m not going into detail.”
“Why not? Did she blow you?”
“You’re unbelievable.”
“No, I’m just curious.”
“Have you ever heard the expression ‘She could suck a golf ball through a garden hose’?”
“Wow… I mean, no. But that sounds good, I guess. Actually, it sounds painful, but I assume that’s really good. From the guy’s point of view, I mean. So you think sex is like, say, tennis or chess—practice makes perfect?”
“Well, why wouldn’t it be? One thing I can tell you is that young women are highly overrated. They don’t know shit.”
“Being middle-aged, I’m glad to hear it.”
Holding her gaze, he felt the urge to lean over and kiss her.
“I think we better go back to the tent,” she said.
11
The bomb scare came as a relief. Cocooned within two and a half walls of books, his office window framing the towers of midtown—a dozen vertical targets in the sky—Russell was sitting at his desk, in front of his computer screen, when his assistant, Roger, rushed in to announce that the building was being evacuated. Disruption and uncertainty were the new norms. The Dionysian gods enshrined in picture frames on his walls suddenly seemed almost quaint: bleary, bearded John Berryman; Keith Richards sweating onstage; the signed publicity still from The Shining (“To Russ, who gives good book, Jack”) and the author’s photo of his long-lost friend Jeff Pierce, the doomed look in his eyes even then, an expression that seemed appropriate to the mood of the moment.
He’d spent a good part of the morning answering E-mails from around the globe—assuring everyone that he’d survived. He’d deleted five copies of Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” and three of Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” as well as two copies of an E-mail labeled “SATAN’S FACE?”—an image of smoke pouring from one of the towers, a scene in which it seemed possible to descry a grinning demonic visage. And yet another image, supposedly taken from the observation deck of the north tower, allegedly recovered from the rubble, with a tourist posing against the endless vista while behind him a plane headed straight for the tower.
The city had never seemed so fragile. Bomb threats, chemical scares, viruses biological and virtual. The sound of sirens had become endemic, or was it just that he noticed them now? No rumor was implausible. Last Thursday, the wind had shifted and carried the smoke uptown, well into the Fifties, and the sense of stunned relief that had seemed to prevail among those who found themselves alive on Wednesday had given way to anxiety and public craziness, as if the electrical-fire, oven-cleaner smell carried with it some psychotropic substance—Russell saw people shouting on street corners, talking to themselves, couples fighting bitterly on the sidewalks. It reminded him of 1979, when he’d arrived in a nearly bankrupt city that felt on the verge of collapse, fraught with trash and peril.
Today, just when some resumption of the normal rhythms seemed possible, the computers had gone crazy; Roger had explained that a new kind of virus was rampaging through the Internet, infiltrating their system—whether another prong of the terrorist attacks or the work of opportunistic hackers, no one was certain, although, sadly, the system had been working well enough at 3:17 this morning to receive the E-mail now frozen on his screen:
Haven’t heard from you since the 11th & can’t help wondering if you would ever have made the effort to find out if I was alive if I hadn’t called you that day. Just because I survived doesn’t mean I’m okeydokey. Or that I can sleep at night or that I don’t listen for the next explosion & the sirens. Or that I don’t wait every night for you to ring my buzzer. Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t that you who used to buzz after you’d been out to dinner at Balthazar with Susan Minot or cocktails on the Upper East Side with John Guare or the National Book Awards dinner with your wife (whose name I’m not supposed to mention—I can see how you wince when I do, like it’s the name of God in some religion where they aren’t allowed to speak it). Wasn’t that you who used to stagger up the stairs & expect me to service you without so much as a “Hey, Trish, how you doing? How was your day?” It sure looked like you, but then I was down on my knees and my angle was bad, so maybe I was wrong. Maybe that was somebody else. Maybe that guy got crushed under the rubble. The fact that you are not returning my calls or E-mails makes me question the depth of your feelings for me, not to mention your basic human decency. Would you treat a friend or business associate this way? I even began to worry, stupid me, that something had happened to you afterward, like maybe you’d been hit by a taxi or you’d been a mensch and gone down to Ground Zero to help with the rescue effort and fallen into a hole or something, but then I saw you throwing back martinis and being terribly witty & charming with that ugly wrinkled redhead at the Fou
r Seasons, so I guess not. I’m still hanging on by a thread, thanks for asking.
I have feelings, too, you know. And given all that’s happened, I am rethinking my life and the role of the people in it, and I was stupid enough to hope that maybe you were, too. That maybe you were finally going to admit that you weren’t happy in your present situation.
I’m tired of being treated like a no-maintenance sexual resource. I’m tired of waiting for your call, waiting for you to show up at the door, never knowing if I will see you again. I don’t plan to wait forever. I think you know me better than that, although I’m beginning to wonder if you know me at all.
Trish had been his assistant for a brief period a couple of years ago, and though he’d resisted her overtures and her air of lubricious availability for as long as she was sitting outside his office, he succumbed one night after a long, drunken PEN dinner when Corrine was visiting her mother and the nanny was spending the week with the kids, calling her at midnight and climbing the five flights to her tiny walk-up on McDougal Street. This had established the pattern, and while he always regretted it in the morning, he somehow learned to live with the guilt, as we get used to any hardship through repetition, and would find himself calling her again a few weeks later or simply showing up on her doorstep after a night of public festivity. But his behavior seemed truly appalling to him now, when he was forced to calculate the value of his spiritual and emotional resources, which had never before felt so fragile or essential.
He could easily have been in the mall underneath the World Trade Center, picking up his reading glasses—it was the location of his oculist, and the Gap where they outfitted the kids, their regular destination for many of life’s necessities—or standing in the plaza, hit by a jumper, or simply gaping when it all came down on top of him. Or for that matter, he might have rushed down after the fact, as Jim had done, to see if he could offer help. He oscillated between feeling grateful for being spared and feeling guilty that at no point in the hour or so between the impact of the first plane and the collapse of the first tower had he experienced that altruistic impulse, though he’d been only ten blocks away from the disaster. He would have liked to believe it was a concern for his family that had kept him riveted at his window, watching the spectacle. These days, his job seemed fairly stale and pointless, the sum of his accomplishments far smaller than he’d once imagined it would be. What seemed worth preserving was his family.
He’d been meaning to write or call and tell Trish as much, but he was afraid of her reaction—knowing all too well her obsessive nature and the violence of her passions—the very qualities that made her so sexually enthralling.
Washington appeared at the door. “Let’s bail, chief.”
Their building seemed an unlikely target—an undistinguished office tower in midtown, home to a publishing conglomerate owned by Germans, a brokerage house, two accounting firms, and an ad agency, but he looked around the office, wondering what, if anything, he should take with him. His first editions were all at home. And at this point, his collected correspondence made for a pretty bulky set of files.
Empty-handed, he followed his colleagues down the hall toward the elevator. The evacuation was orderly, everyone waiting patiently for the elevator, speaking in undertones, trading rumors: Anthrax at Cond Nast… Special Forces in Afghanistan… Gold bullion at Ground Zero… Nimbda virus in the E-mail…
“Yo, man, tune in.” Washington was tugging at his arm.
“What?” Russell said.
“I said, ‘How are the kids holding up?’”
“They’re doing okay. Yours?”
“We’ve had a few nightmares. They call it ‘the big fire,’ good neutral nomenclature. Basically, they’re taking their cues from us. The kids who are hysterical are the ones whose parents are shoving them under the bed every time they hear a plane overhead. Kids are sponges, basically. Incredibly absorbent, ridiculously expensive sponges.” He paused, looked up at the floor indicator over the elevator. “Fuck it, let’s take the stairs.”
Russell followed him to the stairwell.
“Veronica wants to leave the city,” he said, holding the door for Russell.
“That was Corrine’s first reaction.”
“Maybe it’s time.”
“You? In the suburbs?”
“It’s not about me anymore. It’s about the kids, Russell.”
Voices echoed through the stairwell as they descended.
“Actually, I’ve been thinking about it myself,” Russell said. Which, incredibly, was true, although for years the burbs had been for him and Washington alike, as for most of those who’d grown up there, a punch line that required no introduction, one they continued to laugh at even after marriage and parenthood had domesticated them. Among the simple articles of their faith, along with a disdain for commerce in its purest forms, was the belief that lawn care and commuting were incompatible with the higher pursuits, that the metropolis was the source of the life force.
Washington nodded. “This shit isn’t going to stop. It’s only a matter of time before they hit the water supply or the subway.”
Their progress was slowed by a clot of office workers on the eleventh floor, including a hysterical woman whose voice reverberated through the vertical labyrinth of concrete.
“For the love of God, what do these people want? What did we do to them?”
When they finally reached the sidewalk, the block was teeming with displaced office workers; cops with megaphones were directing them away from the building. The crowd parted before a twisted figure in a wheelchair, for a police van nosing in from Third. The mood was one of disciplined retreat, the general crisis seeming for the moment to have instilled a sense of collective identity and purpose on the anarchic impulses of the urbanites. The enforced intimacy of sweating bodies was strangely comforting. Russell found himself pressed against a beautiful, nameless girl he recognized—dark and delicate, of Indian extraction, he imagined—from shared trips on the elevator, enveloped in her musky scent. Was this to be the legacy: wartime couplings, sudden intimacies, frenzied couplings in stairwells and broom closets? Suddenly, inexcusably, he felt the same erotic possibility hovering in the smudged air as he once had when he was in his twenties, even as the dark woman was sheared away from him.
They joined the pedestrian current flowing east along Fifty-first toward Second, and, as if by instinct, went straight to Billy’s, a smoky, wood-paneled former speakeasy and a frequent refuge from the purple-white fluorescence of the office. Russell was surprised to hear Washington order a martini; he’d been on the wagon for almost three years.
“Desperate times.”
“Carpe diem,” Russell said, not knowing how else to react.
“No word on Jim?”
Russell shook his head.
“You want to talk about it?”
Russell shook his head again. “What’s to say?”
“I know how tight you guys were. Sometimes I think he filled the hole Jeff left behind.”
Russell nodded, determined to keep his composure.
“I expect Judy’s enjoying her role as widow and martyr.”
“Jesus, man. That’s harsh.” Russell would never allow himself to express this sentiment, at least not now, although he had to admit he’d felt it on the several occasions he’d talked to her in the last several days. And he was grateful, at that moment, for the blasphemy.
“The poor bastard.”
“Maybe it’s not the worst way to go.”
“I wasn’t thinking about his death,” Washington said. “I was thinking about his life.”
Their drinks arrived.
Washington held his up to the light, sniffed it, and sipped. “How’s Corrine?”
“I don’t know. I’ve barely seen her. She’s working at this soup kitchen down at Ground Zero.”
“She always had that Florence Nightingale thing going on.”
“I’m about to remind her that charity begins at home.”
“This is why you’re moving?”
“Veronica wants to get me out of here. I don’t really have a choice. Not if I want to save my marriage.” His face assumed a slightly comical, hangdog expression.
“What happened?”
“Came home at three-thirty the other night, redolent of whiskey and pussy.”
“Ouch.”
“Or so I’m told. Memory doesn’t quite serve. I went out for dinner with Slansky and he’s looking at the wine list and I thought, Fuck it, I could be chopped meat tomorrow. Why not eat, drink, and be merry? Two bottles and a few hours later, I found myself at Evelyn’s, sitting on a bar stool next to Nancy Tanner.”
“You fucked Nancy?”
“A gentleman doesn’t fuck and tell.”
“Was that the first time?”
“First I remember.”
“God, after all these years. How was it?”
“As best I can remember, pretty good.”
“Does Veronica know it was Nancy?”
“No. Not that it matters much. I’ve been pure as the driven snow going on three years, but there’s a lot of history here, and Veronica’s just been waiting for me to slip.” In the old days, Russell had been fascinated by his friend’s unself-conscious philandering. Despite his recent hiatus, Washington still liked to say that men had four needs: food, shelter, pussy, and strange pussy. Whereas Russell believed there were two kinds of men—those who cheated, and those who felt guilty afterward—and that he was irrevocably one of the latter. Until Trisha, he’d strayed only once, but he was endlessly curious about this bottomless subject of marital infidelity in its myriad variations. For years, he’d counted on Washington to provide him with a sense of his own comparative virtue.
“So Veronica gave you an ultimatum?”
He nodded. “It’s been a topic for a long time now, but recent catastrophic events, personal and historical, seem to have converged.”
The Good Life Page 12