Brightness Falls (15 page)

"Cure for what?"

"That's the name of the band, Corrine."

"How do you know that?"

"I just do."

"Well, I don't." It upset her when she discovered these discrepancies in their knowledge of the quotidian world, as if in going through his pockets she had come across tricornered napkin scraps inscribed with lipsticked numbers and cryptic notes. Married five years, dating on and off five before that... how did he get to know these new things without her? Didn't they have the same lives? Did they?

The night before, sitting in the big, drafty house drinking wine and playing Trivial Pursuit, Corrine had been filled with admiration and envy for life as practiced by their host and hostess, yet at the same time it didn't seem quite real to her. If she was not entirely happy with her existence in the city, she didn't think that this one—woodstoves and vegetable gardens—was available to her anymore. Two roads diverged in the wood, and I ... I didn't even notice until just now. Russell reciting Frost last night. Out Far and In Deep. Then two more roads diverging, and two more, and suddenly here you are in the middle of...
somewhere,
pretending you know where you're going.

Waking this morning at six-thirty in the killingly white guest room without curtains, sick with vegetarian chili and cheap red wine. Russell insisting the Bloody Mary would help. Nothing red, please God. Better dead than red. So she had a screwdriver.

"Why," asked Russell, emerging from miles of silence.

"Why what? Why am I quitting drinking?"

"Yeah."

Something important lurked behind the decision, but the thought of trying to explain it was exhausting. "I don't know. Just a health thing, mainly."

After another ten miles, the salt-blanched road unspooling like gray ribbon between walls of dirty beige snow, she turned to him. "Don't worry. I won't get righteous on you. Okay?"

"Good," he said. "And try not to be boring, either."

Sunday nights were the worst, he thought. Driving in wet ski clothes, Corrine asleep now beside him, he felt the familiar dread closing in on him—hurtling toward the city, the office, the stifling sense of enclosure, abetted by a new sense of anxiety about his standing with Harold. He knew it was a matter of time. He'd lost his momentum at Corbin, Dern, probably even before he opened that door on Harold and Carlton. He had to make a move before he turned into the sort of lame-duck editor whose career was moribund at forty.

It used to be school he dreaded. After the Sunday tortures of itchy gray pants for church and the visiting of relatives, the specter of unfinished homework and some kid who promised to beat you up. Spend your childhood wanting to be an adult and the rest of your life idealizing your childhood. Mondays. Every week cold-starting the engine again. That song about the kid who brought a rifle to school, blazed away at his classmates, said he didn't like Mondays when they asked him why. I hear you, man. Radical, though. Corrine a little radical, too—this new temperance. They'd already quit smoking, for Christ's sake. Two summers before, a nightmare. Everybody leaving the inconvenient vices behind. The new puritanism. Sloth, gluttony, recreational drugs were out. Narcissism, blind ambition and greed by contrast were free of side- or aftereffects, at least in this life, and who was counting on the other anymore?

Corrine lifted her head, looked out at the featureless road. "Where are we?"

"The Taconic."

"Do you still love me?" she said sleepily.

"Let me think about it."

"Russ."

Why she required a verbal confirmation every few days he didn't understand. A girl thing, or a Corrine thing? By now he had trouble making the distinction.

"Yes, I believe I do."

"How much?" This was a game between them, but it was not unserious. He wedged his legs up against the steering wheel and held his hands apart as far as they would go within the car. "About this much."

"Okay." She lay down in his lap and fell asleep again, then woke up with a policeman's flashlight in her eyes and blue light pulsing in the rearview mirror—Russell's second speeding ticket in three days.

"Russell, why are you always in such a hurry?"

"Because at my rear I always hear time's fuel-injected, turbo-charged hearse hurrying near."

"You do not. You don't even
believe
in your own mortality. You act like you're going to live forever." He'd been skiing like that all weekend, flat-out, crashing spectacularly once—splayed across a mogul, the snow he'd churned up settling like a cloud of smoke over his colorful corpse. The blue light continued to flash ominously behind them.

"You have to fool yourself into believing you're not going die. Otherwise you'd be miserable."

"If you don't realize it could end at any minute you won't value it properly. Sometimes I worry that you don't feel things very deeply."

"Division of labor. You do it for me." He squeezed her knee and kissed her as the policeman slammed his car door and tromped back toward them on the shoulder of the highway. "Try not to be quite so serious all the time."

"Why don't you give it a try," she countered. "Just once."

It seemed only minutes later that she was in the office, Monday morning, hand on the phone receiver. For a moment she'd gone completely blank—she couldn't remember whom she was going to call, what she'd been doing before—and then she heard Duane Peters's voice a few feet away:

"I'm predicting this stock could double before the end of the year... No, forget that. Biotech you don't want to know from. Thank your lucky stars I got you out of that in time. That was a Dunkirk. Bodies all over the beach. What's happening now is health and leisure. I'm calling you first on this one..."

Listening to Duane made her feel even gloomier. Her face green in the glow of her Quotron, she looked down at a list of names in front of her: certified public accountants in the greater metropolitan area. Accountants were a hard sell—conservative, tight and inconveniently knowledgeable.

She started with Ablomsky, Leon. A woman answered, her voice scratchy and querulous.

"May I please speak to Mr. Ablomsky?"

On the other end there was silence.

"Hello, is Mr. Ablomsky there?" When there was still no response she said, "This is Corrine Calloway from Wayne, Duehn. Do you expect him back?"

"No." A choked syllable.

"No, you don't expect him soon?"

"He died two weeks ago."

She felt herself go all cold along her spine and at the tips of her ears, as if a wind had poured out of the receiver from Brooklyn. "Oh God, I'm sorry," she said, but after that she felt powerless to speak, or to hang up.

The silence on the other end gave way to a rising intake of breath, which finally broke into a sob. When Mrs. Ablomsky began to speak, her voice was dry and brittle, like an old letter recovered and preserved after a season of rain and snow.

"He's gone. Murdered. We come into the city once a month... once a month we dressed up and took the train... he was wearing his brown jacket... we went to Macy's... and then a boy came up behind and grabbed my purse... It was too much for Leon. He'd already had one coronary. Keeled over in the street... I'm... I'm so..."

"Thirty-two years. I'm sorry, I shouldn't, I just thought... your voice, a girl's voice but serious. I mean, you don't sound silly. Do you smoke? You sound like a smoker."

"I used to. I quit."

"That's good," she said. "I'm glad. Don't smoke."

She started to weep again.

What could Corrine possibly say? "Did the police ..."

"The police! What do they know?"

"Are you ... all right? Is there anything I can do for you?"

"He was a good husband, a good provider. He'd just bought me a new pair of gloves at Macy's, I'd put them on in the store. We used to go to Gimbels before it... before it closed... Leon was very upset when they closed Gimbels, he took it hard..."

Trailing shirttails and shoelaces, Jeff appeared in Russell's office as if from bed, his shirt more frayed than usual, the button-down collar unbuttoned and upturned, knees showing through his ripped chinos. Only the blue blazer imparted a precarious note of formality. Adjusting the bill of his cap, inscribed with the motto "Save Me from What I Want," he disheveled himself onto Russell's couch and plucked the Posr from Russell's desk.

" 'Wild Cat Terrorizes City,' " he read.

"Who is this person," Russell asked Donna.

"Your lunch date."

"Your meal ticket, actually," Jeff said.

Washington Lee was just sliding out to lunch with an agent when his assistant announced a call from Donald Parker. The lunch hour, or rather the lunch two and a half hours, had already begun, in Washington's opinion, and normally he considered the institution sacrosanct; but Donald Parker did not call every day. Fortunately. "I'll take it," he said, warily retreating to his office.

"Donald. What can I do for you, my man?"

"Washington, it's like this—I thought we should have this little talk about how come you're not getting with the program, not taking care of your own people."

"What you talking about?"

"Talking about your company not publishing Afro-American literature. Talking about a respected Afro-American author being insulted and assaulted in your very own office, bro'."

"Don't give me that shit, that nigger's a headcase. Came in my office and threatened me. "

"Not the way I heard the story."

"You're hearing jive." Indignant as he was, Washington was also nervous. Parker was an activist with a hyperactive sense of racial injustice, the bald black avenger. He and Washington had a nodding acquaintance, and though he didn't make a point of saying so in front of his white friends, Washington occasionally admired the lawyer's guerrilla media theatrics. Whenever one of his own ran spectacularly afoul of the system, Parker's picture was in the tabloids the next day, his naked forehead wrinkled with concern, a furious scowl emerging from his beard, surrounded by a posse of angry supporters. If the accused was black, he was counsel for the defense, scourge of police and prosecution, skeptical of the legal system; whenever a black appeared to be the victim of white violence he unequivocally demanded swift, harsh justice. Parker was capable of summoning a thousand supporters into the street at the drop of a racial epithet. Even if you didn't like him, there was no percentage in saying so. Washington sent a check to his youth organization every year.

"This is not a big thing," Washington said calmly, "and it's not a color thing."

"Everything's about color, Lee. For example, if you happened
not
to be black, Jamal would be suing your ass for assault with a deadly weapon, but I convinced him that it would just cloud the issue going after the brother."

"It was a squirt gun.
Gray
in color, as I recall."

"Says you."

"The brother can't write, Donald. A disability he shares with most of the fucking populace. That's all. End of story. Sad but true."

"Maybe your judgment's been a little colored—or should I say, bleached—hanging out around all those tweedy white folks. Way I hear, you don't have any time for people of color. Seems like you're forgetting your obligations."

"I didn't get elected to this fucking job. I was hired my own self. I didn't see you there cheerleading at my job interview. "

"Maybe not. But if not for Malcolm and Martin and a thousand others, they wouldn't let you in the motherfucking door. As it is, you got hired as house nigger. And you got to answer to your people. We have a list of demands," Parker said.

"I thought editors were supposed to take successful authors out to The Four Seasons or something," Jeff observed, looking around the saloon on 18th Street. "They wouldn't let you in. But I'm sure your movie friends will take you to the Russian Tea Room if you ask them nicely."

Jeff's long, thin gaze finally speared the waitress; he ordered a Bloody Mary, in which Russell declined to join him. Thinking about what Solomon said, looking at Jeff's—was he imagining it?—haggard face.

"I hear you're going to L.A. this week," Russell said, hearing also a note of irritation in his own voice. Was he annoyed that he'd learned about it from someone else, or annoyed at the actual idea? He liked to think he was bigger than those literary fundamentalists for whom working in the movies was equivalent to damnation.

"Call me Faust," Jeff said.

"Hey, I didn't say it was a bad idea. It does get you out of New York. You could use a little sun."

"Would you buy a book from an author with a tan?"

"Hemingway," Russell said.

"Hemingway doesn't count."

"So how's it going," Russell asked, casting a large net, the holes of which were big enough to let anything unpleasant slip through. It was a principle with Russell not to ask Jeff about his work; when he was ready he would show it. They both believed that books could be talked away. Russell was afraid that Jeff wasn't writing, but he couldn't come out and ask.

"Shining days."

Between them there was a delicate etiquette of masculine stoicism which was suspended only under extreme emotional duress or drunkenness, two conditions that were often coincident. Russell did what he could, which was to observe the forms of the ritual that insulated them from extremes of emotion.

"I think I will have that drink," Russell said.

"You
animal,
you."

Thirty blocks south, Corrine was sitting in a booth at a Greek coffee shop with Mrs. Leon Ablomsky. Corrine had arrived early—lest Mrs. Ablomsky get there before she did and confirm her belief that their appointment was a whim Corrine would repent, that a young girl with such a refined voice who worked for a big brokerage house would probably have a million other engagements, that something would surely come up in the interval between Corrine's inviting an elderly widow like herself to lunch and the time it took her to take the subway in from Brooklyn, though she would understand perfectly, she'd just have her cup of soup and some cottage cheese and maybe subway up to see the skaters at Rockefeller Center, which Leon used to enjoy doing so much.