Brightness Falls (12 page)

"What if I gave a reading," Victor asked, stroking his strong, cleft chin contemplatively. "Do you think we could purvey it as a major literary event? I haven't given one in New York in seven years."

"I think there'd be a lot of interest," Russell said. "Do it up at the East Side Y. Could be big."

"What if Jeff introduced me?"

"Jeff? That wouldn't have been my first pick."

"It's precisely the unexpectedness of it that appeals to me, the disjunctive conjunction. Pierce and Propp. What if we were to do a joint reading? Combining our constituencies, so to speak?"

"I'll see what I can do."

"But do you really think it's a good idea?" Victor demanded, as if Russell had been responsible for generating the notion, and proceeded to enumerate the drawbacks and potential dangers of the plan. After fifteen minutes of solo dialectic he agreed with himself that they would proceed cautiously. In the meantime he had spread out in front of his plate a battery of pills and capsules—nine in all, to be taken in a predetermined sequence. "Bellow put me onto these," Victor explained, popping two. "Saved his love life," he confided. "Lowered my cholesterol twenty points. You send away to this company in Connecticut."

"You should talk to Jeff," Russell muttered. "He has a keen interest in pharmacology."

"What does your wife say about the market," Victor asked later, upon the arrival of his cuttlefish risotto—a dish associative, he suggested, of Ionic poets and scribes: white rice stained in a broth of black ink. Victor had his own broker, but he second-guessed him as he second-guessed the weatherman and the conventional wisdom, as he would second-guess Russell Calloway. Nothing was simple, nothing what it seemed to be.

"She's cautious."

"Women
are
cautious," Victor said, cutting, in his trademark fashion, from this highly specific observation directly to the realm of the universal. "Men are the great romantics, the dreamers and fools. Women are realists. Like Jane Austen."

"What about
Jane Eyre?"

Victor waved a large, definitive hand as if at an invisible buzz. "A product of sexual repression," he said impatiently. "Brontë me no Brontës, that's kid stuff. But I'm interested in Corrine's perspective. This could be the first business cycle in history where we have a female perspective, a feminine influence in the financial community. Will it introduce moderation, flatten out the testosterone surges of the market, as the introduction of girls at an old New England prep school reduces the incidence of broken glass and food fights... overlay some other kind of lunar, tidal, menstrual rhythm? Somebody should be working on a computer model for this, or at least a monograph."

"The market hasn't shown much restraint the last couple years. Even though there are plenty of women around."

"Everybody's getting rich, Russell," Victor confided, leaning forward and engaging him with that toilet-plunger gaze, which was unsettling and flattering in equal measure. "Every remotely sentient being except for you and me. If you were in any other business right now, you'd be making twice, ten times what you do now. You're clever. And I know what they pay you..."

This was Russell's cue to blush. He probably did know, the son of a bitch.

"A mind like yours, at the top of your field for your age. Look at the books you published last year. You're practically famous. And me. It gives me more pain than pleasure to contemplate the fact that I am perhaps the only writer of my era who has the capacity to reinvent the novel. Do you realize the kind of responsibility that entails? All the while thinking—I don't have to tell you—that if I'd gone into business I would be a millionaire many times over. Why should I live in poverty? I understand the stock market better than my broker. But I don't have capital. I need more money. I deserve more. So do you."

"Are you telling me you want to renegotiate your contract?"

"I think we should both renegotiate our contracts," Propp said flatly, popping down three orange pills in quick succession.

"I don't think Master Harold and Company are going to appreciate that idea," Russell said, not unhappily.

"I want more money. You know I can get more if I go elsewhere. You want to publish this book. It's going to make our reputations, yours as well as mine. I flatter myself that you're my natural ally, Russell. Harold is the, if you will forgive the cliché, stumbling block. I want to go around Harold. Harold's tired, for him everything has already happened. He believes he is at the end of the whole Hegelian daisy chain of history. He seems to think he
is
the end. The old bastard can't get it up for anything new."

"I wouldn't go quite that far," Russell said, recalling Harold on the couch with Carlton. But he was pleased to hear Victor expressing the same doubts that he'd been eager but unable to introduce into the conversation.

"You should be running the house."

"If wishes were Porsches, poor boys would drive."

"My dear boy, at this point in American history I daresay that wishes are Porsches. I feel that we in this insane city are living in an era in which anything can happen. Do you remember what Nick Carraway said as he was driving into Manhattan in Gatsby's big car and the skyline of the city came into view over the Queensboro Bridge? As they cross into the city, Nick says, 'Anything can happen now that we've slid over this bridge... anything at all.' "

Russell nodded on cue, though he wasn't sure he
exactly
remembered, word for word; but "sort of" was not a phrase one wanted to use with Propp. One presumably had Gatsby and other key texts committed to memory.

Victor rubbed his chin in contemplation. "My sources tell me that your star is falling at Corbin, Dern. Perhaps it's time for a youthful coup d'état," he said, his dark eyebrows rising like the shadows of twin hawks on the sheer cliff of his forehead.

"As someone once said about the pope—I have no army."

"Do you have a banker?"

"Only a cash machine."

"Why don't you buy the company?" Propp said suddenly, as if it were the obvious solution, which had inexplicably eluded them till now.

"I can't even afford to buy an apartment, Victor."

"That doesn't matter. Look around you, Russell. All you need is ambition, imagination and leverage."

"So far as I know, the laws of nature have yet to be revoked."

"You haven't been reading the papers recently." In fact, the idea was not so wild or remote that it had not occurred to Russell, but he was surprised, almost embarrassed, to hear the older man describe his fantasy.

Victor leaned across the table and put his huge hand on top of Russell's. "Credit, Russell, the philosophers' stone of our era. You can turn the lead of wage slavery into golden destiny—if you have the courage."

"Could I count on you, Victor?"

"My dear boy, haven't I made that clear already?" said the older man, the sharp blades of his lips pressed together in a conspiratorial smile.

8

"I always dream about winning the lottery, man, but I don't never buy no ticket."

"That's like the ad says—you gotta play to win."

"I know I gotta play to win. All you need's a dollar and a dream, like the man says. Well, I got the dream, all right. Now I just need the damn dollar."

"'Sail I'm saying. Got to lay down your one dollar."

Waiting in line outside the mission, the two conversants exhibited the moist camaraderie of new drinking buddies, temporarily at ease after jointly solving a conundrum of logic. Both were underdressed for the cold, hunched into themselves as if around the embers of fading internal combustion. One sported a knit hat with a tassel and the legend "Ski Mad River Glen," the other a baseball cap inscribed "Drexel Burnham Lambert Bond Conference '86," which he had insulated and waterproofed with an inner lining fashioned from a green plastic garbage bag.

A voice down the line said, "The lottery's a regressive tax foisted on the classes that can least afford it by the fascist state."

Like athletes conserving energy, the two winos turned slowly and economically to regard the speaker—a pimpled face and neck sprouting from a fringed buckskin jacket with an "Eat the Rich" button on the lapel; the long hair, drawn back in a ponytail, conveyed the impression of a coonskin cap.

"It's a trick of the ruling classes to hide the economic realities of the fascist state from the paling masses. You think rich people play the lottery? You think Donald Trump buys lotto tickets?"

"He don't need to," said the man in the Drexel cap. "His ship already

come in."

"That's right," his buddy agreed. "I'm just saying, Where's my ship?

That's all I'm saying, Dan'l Boone. I want my piece the fuckin' pie."

"Goddamn right you do. That's what my friend's saying, Mr. Hillbilly.

He wants to know, Where's his damn ship?"

"Whoa, there she blows, man. Lookit there."

"That ain't your ship. That Miss Corrine. She a married lady."

"I've had me plenty married ladies. You trying to say I can't get me

no married lady?"

Hurrying down the Bowery from Cooper Union in her Belgian loafers, Corrine assessed the line outside the mission. Like restaurants, the missions and soup kitchens each had their distinct clientele, the patronage here mainly male, divided equally between black and white, the majority wearing their Sunday manners because the food was decent and the space limited. A few, most of whom she recognized, talked loudly, complaining, bragging, challenging their neighbors on small points of etiquette or credulity—"You don't think I could get a job with the city just like that if I wanted to, you calling me a goddamn liar? I'm talking about a
good
job"—preserving in their mendicant state something of the air of boxers before a fight, the demeanor of hustlers about to scam a free meal from an unsuspecting authority, this stance answering the needs of their residual dignity. Others waited quietly to accept whatever might be given. A few were drunk, trying not to show it. Some, whacked out on their own internal chemicals, barely knew where they were: schizophrenics with eyes shuttered against the outer world, an autistic man in a white jumpsuit who compulsively paced out four steps that might have been a foxtrot. The queens coveyed up near the front of the line, shrill and animate as tropical birds, plumed with elaborate coiffures and gaudy scarves—the dandies of the street life.

"Hey girlfrien'!" Co-reen!

"Our lady of perpetual dee-light."

Corrine waved generally and slipped in the door, where the smell of food mingled with the heavy institutional odor of disinfectant on lino- leum. The other volunteers were setting the tables with plastic utensils, bowls of grape jelly and baskets of fluffy white bread.

"You want to scatter the manna," asked Irene Goldblum, handing Corrine a roll of yellow tickets. A harried social worker with salt-and-pepper hair, she had tended to the poor, tired and huddled misfits of the Lower East Side since graduating from Barnard in 1969; the exhaustion of the effort showed on her face. To Corrine she seemed cynical about her chosen calling—but Corrine visited the Lower East Side only twice a week, and that for just the past year.

"You're a wet one, bubeleh," Irene had said after, on her first day, Corrine had given away all her cash to the patrons of the mission, instigating a riot in the process. "You'll be more help to them and us if you don't feel too sorry for them. Two-thirds of these men are substance abusers and ninety percent of them are con artists, so watch out your heart doesn't bleed too freely."

Maybe she was wet, but Corrine believed her compassion had a logical foundation. Living in the city, she felt bound up in a delicate, complex web of interdependence and she was determined to play her part. The misery as well as the vitality of the metropolis seeped into her psyche. After all these years in the city she had yet to develop a nonporous shell.

The line tensed and shifted as Corrine appeared outside the door. Grimy, cracked palms were extended. This was the moment that fights broke out, although the line tended to police itself when one of the female volunteers handled the tickets. Corrine was especially popular with the regulars.

The queens slapped each other's hands away and examined Corrine's wardrobe with professional disinterest.

"That a Chanel suit, girl?"

"I wish."

"Who does your hair, honey—I got to come uptown and get me some ofthat."

"Girl goes to that fancy Gore Vidal salon."

Farther down the line, a handsome, streetworn man said: "My hostess with the mostest." This was Ace, Corrine's recent party guest. For several weeks now he had been telling the other men in line about the party in increasingly fanciful detail, lately conveying the impression of an intimate acquaintance with Corrine and her stylish uptown friends. The VCR was never mentioned. "Got my appetite with me today. I'm off the crack and off the juice and I'm in God's hands and that's the truth."

The mention of the deity seemed to set off a chain reaction. Intimates of weather and natural disasters, the men of the streets inclined strongly toward religion, particularly the fateful, fundamentalist strains of Christianity.

"You people don't eat no pork, does you," asked the next man, walleyed and angry. "Just once I'd like me some nice pork chops." The mission was run by a yeshiva, and many of the men felt obliged to bite the hand that fed them, particularly since it was Jewish.

"Them Jews didn't recognize our savior," said the next man in line, who clutched his shopping cart as if he suspected Corrine of intending to steal it. "They failed to recognize him yea even like the woman who anointed his feet with oil and they put him to death."

"Her name's Calloway," insisted Big George, a stately old black man who was also called the Mayor in deference to his long tenure on the Bowery. "That's a Catholic name."

"My husband's, actually," said Corrine.

"You—you're what they call an Aryan from Darien," George said.

"Where are you living, George," Corrine asked.

"Oh, I got my mobile home. Sleeping on the E train."