Bright, Precious Days Read Online Free Page A

worse. Their marriage was seaworthy, if not exactly
buoyant.
Better off, surely, than the republic, bulging at the waist and spiritually enervated, fighting two wars and a midterm election, all of which seemed endless.
    Or maybe not.
    At least they’d had sex last night, the first time in God knows how long. She wished they didn’t have to go out tonight, but they had a gala benefit: the third this month. How had she let herself get talked into this one? Her friend Casey had insisted, and it had seemed harmlessly distant a month ago, plus she owed Casey for buying a table for the Nourish New York benefit. That was how the system worked. She couldn’t remember what tonight’s worthy cause was. Something to do with South Africa? Russell was leaving from the office, where he kept his tux, because these benefits were almost always uptown, in the traditionally patrician district, despite the fact that money continued to migrate down the island; happily this one was nearby, at the Puck Building in SoHo.
    She sat at her vanity, which doubled as her desk, applying eyeliner with a sense of fatalism, knowing full well that at some point in the evening it would end up on her upper lids, which had sagged over the years. Would an eye lift be a total betrayal of her principles? If she could even afford it. It kind of sucked, being nearly fifty, discovering a new laugh line that you’d at first imagined to be a crack in the mirror.
    She was getting more than a little sick of black-tie benefits. Even though they usually attended as guests, rather than ticket buyers, she didn’t have the wardrobe to do full formal all that often. The Upper East Siders, like Casey, her girlhood friend and prep school roommate, went to two or three a week and never repeated a dress. The younger society girls borrowed from the designers and the jewelers, but their mothers spent the equivalent of a Range Rover on dresses every month. Associating with the rich was inevitably expensive, even when they were ostensibly paying. You paid one way or another. Corrine was going to have to wear one of the two long dresses in her closet, the Ralph Lauren probably, the one she’d bought for less than half retail at the sample sale, the same thing she’d worn to the Authors Guild benefit, and hope that no one remembered it. But then, why would they? It wasn’t as if the party photographers immortalized her fashion choices. And she didn’t feel like she was getting all that much masculine attention, either. She examined the satin bodice in the mirror. Was it tight? Tighter than a month ago? And what about shoes and a bag? More things she wished she could afford to indulge in. She settled on the silver Miu Miu pumps to sort of go with her grandmother’s silver mesh clutch.
    Corrine tottered out of the bedroom, taking care with her heels on the undulant antique oak floor of the loft, with its treacherous gaps. God, she was
so
over loft living—that was one of the things they fought about, her desire to move; the fact that the kids could get a better education outside Manhattan, since it didn’t look like they could afford private school tuition for both next year, after the kids graduated from PS 234. They’d be positively well-off if they lived almost anywhere outside this wealthy, skinny island. It was always about money, somehow—except when it was about sex. Young idealists, Ivy League sweethearts, they’d followed their best instincts and based their lives on the premise that money couldn’t buy happiness, learning only gradually the many varieties of unhappiness it might have staved off. Russell liked, especially after a few drinks, to divide humanity into two opposing teams: Art and Love versus Power and Money. It was kind of corny, but she was proud that he believed it, and of his loyalty to his team. For better and for worse, it was her team, too.
    The kids were on the couch, watching the new
Shrek
video. Jean, the nanny, meanwhile oblivious, distraught,