Read Bright, Precious Days for Free Online Page A

would, of course, be an interrogation, reminders about bills and tuition, admonitions about charity beginning at home. It was going to wreck their budget for the next few months, probably. They gave, when they could, five hundred to Brown, their alma mater, five hundred to Oxfam and Meals on Wheels and the Henry Street Settlement, two fifty to PEN and the ASPCA. And they gave every day, in a sense, to Nourish New York, since as an executive director of that organization, Corrine was paid about half of what she would have been paid in a private-sector job; plus, they wrote a check every year for the gala. But they’d
never
given this much to any single charity. She hardly knew why she’d done it—on an impulse, as a kind of ontological squeal, a cry of “I’m here” directed at her former lover? But on reflection she was glad, and she thought she could justify it, smooth it over at home.
    She had a strong suspicion that Russell was going to get lucky tonight. For him that was the good news; the bad was that she was afraid she’d be thinking of someone else.

3
    STILL ON THE AFRICAN CLOCK, Luke woke up a few hours after he’d fallen asleep, thinking about Corrine. He checked the markets in Europe, cleared his e-mail and talked to his vineyard manager. Baboons harassing the pruning team—normally only a problem near the harvest, in March, when the grapes were ripe. Something they didn’t have to deal with in Napa or Bordeaux. The workers threw rocks at them and the apes started throwing them back. His manager had put in an early order for lion dung from a local game park, which was effective as a deterrent.
    He’d known that he would see Corrine the night before last, but he hadn’t really known how he would react. Three years ago, after yet another post-breakup rendezvous, he’d taken himself to the other side of the world in no small part to get away from her.
    He met Giselle at a garden party in Franschhoek, a pretty girl in a white dress crouching in the courtyard, talking to a giant tortoise with a ring dangling from a hole in its shell, feeding it an orange wedge from the drink in her hand. “We’re old friends,” she said when she looked up and caught him watching her. And indeed, her little gold nose ring hinted at a certain affinity. He was immediately attracted to her; only later did he become conscious of her resemblance to Corrine.
    Twenty-nine years old, she’d recently broken off a long engagement with a man she’d known since childhood. That first afternoon she told him quite frankly that she was tired of all the young men in her insular social circle and that she was thinking of moving to London or the States. She’d done some modeling in Paris as a teenager, traveled in her early twenties, and ended up back home in Cape Town, where she fell in with an old family friend, who’d eventually proposed.
    Luke told her about his recent divorce from Sasha, about his daughter, who’d be joining him for her summer vacation, but he never mentioned Corrine. Before proposing to Giselle, he’d gone back to New York and spent a month at the Carlyle, somehow imagining that he’d run into Corrine somewhere. He felt that if he did, it would be a sign. A few days after he returned to South Africa, he ran into Giselle at a cocktail party.
    At seven-thirty the breakfast cart was delivered and he woke Giselle, who was flying back to Cape Town that morning. “All packed?” he asked as she lingered over tea in her fluffy white bathrobe.
    “I think so,” she said. “I’m sorry to leave you here alone.”
    “I’ll be busy,” he told her, “and you can’t very well miss your cousin’s wedding.”
    After the bellman finally came for the luggage, he walked her down to the car. “I’ll miss you,” she said.
    “I’ll miss you, too,” he agreed, though in fact for the first time he could recall he was impatient for her to leave.
    After the car disappeared into traffic, he scrolled to Corrine’s number