Free Bright, Precious Days by Jay McInerney Page A

was also going to say this is where the magic doesn’t happen.”
    It’s a mess—clothes and books and overflowing ashtrays everywhere, but the space itself is grand, with a soaring pressed-tin ceiling supported by more columns, and huge arched windows on either end. One wall is dominated by a long graffiti mural, all swirls and distorted letters and fanciful animals, by an artist friend of his, he explains when she asks about it, who painted it recently after partying all night in the loft.
    “That’s such a stupid verb,
partying,
” she says. “I mean, really, don’t you think? It’s so coy. What does it mean—does it mean drinking? Doing drugs? Having sex? All of the above?” This sounds prissy and pedantic even to her and she realizes she is nervous, though she isn’t sure why, exactly.
    At one end of the room, a mattress floats on the wide floorboards like a dilapidated barge, the bedding in disarray. At the other end, a door rests on two filing cabinets—a makeshift desk with a big beige IBM Selectric perched between stacks of books. Russell has been jealous of Jeff’s typewriter for years—the ultimate writing machine. In between, an island of decrepit furniture suggests a living area: a brown legless couchlike object, a beanbag chair, and in the role of coffee table, a surfboard supported on either end by cinder blocks.
    “Originally, Seventy-seven Greene Street was one of New York’s most notorious cathouses,” Jeff tells her. “When that building burned down, this came next and housed a corset factory for many years.”
    “Unfettered wantonness yielding to the creation of feminine fetters.”
    “Relentless,” Jeff says, “the march of civilization.”
    For all its shabbiness, the sheer expanse and the architectural details give it the aura of a place where great deeds should be performed, great paintings painted, or even a great novel written—and that, she knows, is his sole ambition, though he carries himself with a self-deprecating cynicism and has so far published only a single short story in
The Paris Review.
But it’s his whole identity: Jeff Pierce, the writer, the
poète maudit.
When he read
The Sun Also Rises
at the age of thirteen, his destiny was revealed. Robert Lowell is some kind of distant uncle. At Brown he walked around with a copy of
Ulysses
under his arm and studied with John Hawkes, the avant-garde novelist, who vouched for his genius. He was one of the few non–New Yorkers at Brown who visited Manhattan frequently, eschewing the traditional landmarks of his classmates—Trader Vic’s and ‘21’ and Dorrian’s Red Hand—in favor of poetry readings and punk-rock clubs downtown. Somewhere along the line, he became acquainted with William Burroughs, who, he says, now lives in a former YMCA gym on the Bowery.
    A black-and-white cat appears and rubs itself fervently against Jeff’s leg. She remembers this about him—animals always like him. “That’s Kurt Weill,” Jeff says as the cat slides away.
    “I might have known,” she says.
    He offers her a Marlboro, and lights it, and then his own, with a Zippo. It gives them something to do together, and something to do with their hands. They all smoke, all the time, everywhere—at home and in bars and restaurants, in movie theaters and on airplanes.
    “Why do you always have the collars of your button-downs unbuttoned?” she asks. “Have you ever thought of getting the regular kind of collars, without buttons? It seems like it would be easier. I mean, if you’re not going to button them anyway.”
    “Not really. I like having the option.”
    She’s just making conversation, knowing this is one of his signatures, like his grandfather’s old gold Longines, which he wears with the face on the inside of his wrist. Not that he would ever tell you himself; he does his best to distance himself from his heritage, but Jeff comes from one of those old New England families that view the Pilgrims as arrivistes. They wear