Free Bright, Precious Days by Jay McInerney

zoned for light industry and it’s illegal to actually
live
here, which only adds to its mystique. Jeff is cat-sitting for a girl he knows who’s touring with her band for three months, and who, in turn, sublets the place illegally from a painter living in Berlin. It’s just the kind of convoluted and jerry-rigged yet serendipitous situation in which Jeff inevitably seems to find himself, or, more accurately, in which he manages to place himself.
    Having recently graduated from Brown, Corrine lives on the Upper East Side and works at Sotheby’s. To her, SoHo is terra incognita, a mysterious southern region of the island allegedly inhabited by artists and who knows who. No one who’s gone to Miss Porter’s, certainly. It seems a little eerie to her, almost deserted, as she emerges from the subway at Prince Street and walks west, her shadow inching out across the buckling sidewalk, the ornate, soot-stained facades of the buildings that had once been sweatshops and factories. She passes a heavily bearded man in overalls sitting on a stoop, smoking; she would guess he’s homeless except for the paint caked on his fingers and his OshKosh overalls. For all she knows, he could be James Rosenquist or Frank Stella.
    She can’t help feeling very adventurous coming down here on her own, almost tingling with anticipation as she approaches Greene Street. Jeff offered to come uptown, but she insisted on seeing his place. Later she will cross-examine herself about her motives.
    Russell’s at Oxford on his fellowship, studying Romantic poetry. He writes her long letters about his reading and the quirkiness of the Brits and the horrors of Marmite, letters that inevitably culminate in declarations of love. They can’t afford to talk long-distance more than once or twice a month. In his mind they’re already engaged, but she’s been very specific in telling him to see how he feels after eight months apart. It’s been six weeks, and already he’s worried that she’ll meet someone else. She hasn’t met anyone, and visiting Russell’s best friend feels like a way of being closer to him.
    She finds the building, with its elaborately ornamented cast-iron facade—grimy columns framing tall, arched windows, the rust showing in patches through the layers of once-white paint and city grit. Corrine, an art history major, can’t help noticing that Corinthian, with its fluted columns and complicated acanthus leaves and scrolls, was the classical order favored by the nineteenth-century architects who created the neighborhood. On the sidewalk in front of the building is a splattered black human silhouette that looks like it might be a crime-scene outline of a body.
    At the door, a cluster of mismatched buzzers is mounted on a sheet of plywood, one of them labeled with a scrap of yellow legal paper on which the initials J.P. are scrawled. She presses the button and waits, eventually looking up when a window above rattles open and Jeff’s head emerges.
    “You sure you want to come up?”
    “Absolutely,” she says. “I’ve never seen an artist’s loft.”
    “It ain’t pretty.” He dangles something from his fingers. “Catch.”
    A key attached to a piece of dirty balsa wood clatters to the sidewalk.
    “Fifth floor,” he calls. “Can’t miss it.”
    Inside, she’s confronted with a vast creaking stairway composed of ancient oak planks that recedes as it ascends ahead of her, each floor taking her farther back into the building, until finally she finds herself on the top floor, where the door stands ajar. “Not exactly a stairway to heaven,” Jeff says, bowing deeply and ushering her in, hunching slightly to make his height less daunting. He’s wearing his standard outfit, an untucked Brooks Brothers button-down shirt over a pair of ripped jeans.
    “Please don’t say ‘Welcome to my humble abode.’ ”
    “I was going to say my cleaning lady died, but I don’t actually have one.”
    “It’s very…lived-in.”
    “I