Bright, Precious Days Read Online Free

perfect hamburger wine.”
    “Would you think I was really decadent if I asked for another?”
    “As a gentleman, I would probably have to join you so as not to make you feel self-conscious.”
    He asked her about school, about her classes and her reading. She asked him about New York, publishing and the eighties. He couldn’t help liking her, a beautiful young girl interested in him and the things he loved, full of wine and vodka and admiration for his accomplishments, his worldliness, to the point that she actually seemed to find him sexually attractive. Outside the restaurant, she took his arm and said, “Let’s get a room at the Chelsea Hotel.”
    He looked at her, stunned; her impish expression read to him like a challenge, a dare.
    He considered it for a moment. The temptation was almost overwhelming. “I can’t tell you how much it means to me that you suggested that,” Russell said. “Even though I know you didn’t really mean it.”
    “I did, actually,” she said, leaning over and kissing him on the lips.
    “I’ll live on that for the rest of the year.”
    “Let me know about the manuscript,” she said.
    —
    Later, walking back to the office after putting her in a cab, he felt amazed that he’d been so sensible, proud of himself but also a little sad to think that he might never again experience the incomparable thrill of exploring a foreign body.
    This sense of erotic possibility stayed with him throughout the day, and that night, when he got into bed after consuming most of a bottle of Pinot Noir over dinner, the feeling drew him closer to his wife. As she read beside him, he began to kiss her neck and fondle her breasts. At first she ignored him but gradually succumbed.
    He couldn’t even remember the last time they’d made love, but now, for the first time in months, he found himself aroused, and worked himself on top of her. “Wait,” she said, reaching into the drawer of the bedside table, fussing with some kind of lubricant that she applied even as he felt himself deflating, reaching for him, guiding him inside. They found their rhythm and he found himself succumbing to this slow, mounting pleasure. As good as it felt, it kept getting better and more insistent. Apparently he’d had just the right amount of wine to loosen his inhibitions and his quotidian anxiety without quite physically disabling him. They had slipped into a mutually satisfactory rhythm that gradually accelerated.
    All at once he felt a shortness of breath that became more acute, until he was afraid that he might pass out at any moment, or worse. Even as he gasped for air he continued to thrust his hips; the term
death throes
came to mind. He was going to die in the saddle, like Nelson Rockefeller.
He thought he was coming, but he was going.
With a racing heart and a rising sense of despair, he struggled to fill his lungs. He was filled with the dread of his own eventual demise. This is how it would feel as he lost his grip on the world, this breathless dread. Even if he managed to pull back this time, it would come for him again. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, cheated of the final glory at least of an orgasm…
    He tried to tell Corrine that he was in distress, but he was unable to speak, unable to bid farewell to the love of his life; and then, just when he was convinced he would die on top of her, he began to recover his breath and his panic gradually subsided. He faked an orgasm with several violent hip thrusts accompanied by a series of moans before rolling off of her, his anxiety subsiding to an almost manageable level, leaving him with a residue of dread, his relief tempered with a hopeless sense that he had just caught a glimpse of oblivion.

2
    THE BEST MARRIAGES, like the best boats, are the ones that ride out the storms. They take on water; they shudder and list, very nearly capsize, then right themselves and sail onward toward the horizon. The whole premise, after all, was for better or for