Brightness Falls (16 page)

And indeed, Corrine had second thoughts, as soon as she hung up; she couldn't imagine telling anyone that she was going off to have lunch with a keening widow she'd inadvertently surprised on a cold call. Before eleven-thirty she started to call the number three times to cancel, but she didn't think she could bear to hear that voice say, "It's all right, I understand."

When Corrine arrived she scanned the coffee shop, in which at least five candidates fit her notion of widowhood. Then the door opened behind her, and a woman who wasn't nearly old or decrepit enough cocked her head and whispered, "Are you Corrine?" She wore a hazel mink, which if not of the latest cut or color—younger women including Corrine were buying the rich, dark colors, cut below the knee—was of obvious quality and fit her beautifully. Her face was lined, but not unattractive, her eyes bright and only a little sunken. Corrine almost said, You must have been very beautiful.

They shook hands awkwardly and eventually seated themselves at a booth where each of them elaborately removed and folded her coat, adjusted her skirt and checked her purse. When Corrine patted her purse a second time, just as Mrs. Ablomsky was doing the same, they both acknowledged their discomfort with a laugh and a shrug.

"You can call me Muriel," she said. "You're probably thinking this is the craziest thing you ever let yourself in for."

"No, no..."

"I understand. It's all right. But for me, sitting around that house... Well, I had nothing to lose."

"It must be—"

Muriel nodded. "It is." Her gaze turned inward, and Corrine felt constrained to be silent until she reappeared from the depths of her reverie.

"Shall we order?" she said, looking up and forming a deliberate smile.

"Great, yeah, let's order," Corrine said, opening the huge vinyl- jacketed menu as though it were something she'd been dying to read since college.

"What are you reading," Russell asked, chewing beef as ketchup dripped between his fingers.

"Catalogues. I subscribe to all of them. It's just amazing what you can buy in this country, an alarm clock that projects a beam of light onto the ceiling so you can see the time without lifting your head. Orthopedic pet beds, crocodile golf bags." Jeff's lamb chops were chilling on his plate while he finished his drink. "Reading some Cheever, actually."

"Angst in the suburbs," Russell said dismissively. Once, he might have liked Cheever, but since the writer had been canonized he considered it his job to defy the conventional wisdom. As a member of the white educated middle class he felt condescending toward his own kind whenever he encountered them in fiction.

"You think truth and beauty are exclusive to the foul slums and the frozen wind-scoured steppes, the bazaars and the trenches? The gates of heaven and hell are yawning right out there in the backyard, Jack."

This sounded to Russell like Jeff making a case for his own stories.

"Other than that, I don't know. I have trouble reading these days. There's something so... You have to sit in one place, right? It all seems so inauthentic, and I don't just mean the bad stuff. The artifice of sitting down, the way language implicates you in the lie right off. 'April is the cruelest month.' Yeah? Bullshit. How about February? But once you start, you're inside the thing; the rhetoric has you, do you know what I mean?" He picked up a lamb chop by the bone and shook it three times in Russell's direction like a baton.

"Actually, I haven't got a fucking clue."

"I once heard a story about a lecture by J. L. Austin," he said, after he'd dropped the chop back on his plate and wiped his hands. "The language philosopher. Austin was speaking somewhere, yammering away and then he says, 'It is interesting to note that while in most languages two negatives make a positive, it is never the case that two positives make a negative.' And then, from the very back of the room, this guy says, in a sneering tone, 'Yeah, yeah.' I'm with him—I'm with that guy. I say,
Yeah, yeah."

* * *

Sipping a Bloody Mary in the Grill Room at The Four Seasons, Washington pretended to listen to the agent pitch a book. Though this was hardly his scene, he was none too thrilled with his table position in the middle of the room, right about where Nebraska would appear on the map—the power tables being the banquettes that lined the room, facing in so that all the players could see one another. Harold Stone and all the other big publishing dicks.

Not a whole lot of brothers here in the Grill Room, it went without saying—a soaring rosewood-paneled stage with no distracting props or
décor
to detract from the entrances and exits of notable white boys. A clean, well-lighted place for doing biz, but Washington couldn't concentrate on biz—or the wine list for that matter—with Donald Parker hanging over his head. Parker was going to jam up his shit in a serious way, and it was infuriating. Nobody was on Russell's case to advance the cause of white people. Parker wanted a quota of books by and about black Americans, and he wanted more personnel; he'd decided to target Corbin, Dern because of its prestige, and because of the alleged mistreatment of the lunatic who'd invaded Washington's office. Now Washington had the choice of trying to convince management that Parker's demands were reasonable or maybe having the son of a bitch get way out in front of him and leave him looking like a lackey. Even in the lily-white publishing world— especially in the lily-white publishing world—Washington could not afford to lose his cred and cachet. His colleagues in publishing counted on him to be right-thinking
and
fabulously cool. What he really didn't need was to have his program called into question. If the brothers started hollering Oreo he might actually have to start coming to work on time.

"Girls today, I guess you didn't have to go through what we did. I used to hate it, and then when I finally got to where I loved it he wasn't interested anymore. I felt gypped, I can tell you. You never stop missing it. But after a while a marriage is about something else."

The conversation had shifted in the middle of Muriel's chicken cutlet, Corrine's attempts at commiseration yielding to Muriel's advice on marriage. "I wish we could've had children," Muriel said. "Are you planning to?"

"I hope so."

"Don't wait too long, honey."

"I'm ready, but he isn't."

"So surprise him."

She definitely couldn't tell Russell about this lunch. It would only confirm certain ideas he had of her—what he called her Mother Teresa syndrome.

Observing the waitress as she shimmied off toward the kitchen, Russell asked, "What happened to that girl you brought to our place on Corrine's birthday. The model, the one with the—"

"She went the way of all flesh."

"She
died?"

"No, she just paled. Had to trade her in for a new model."

"God, I hate you," Russell said admiringly. "Could I borrow your life for a while?"

"You want to trade?"

"Would you?"

Jeff issued a wavering ring of smoke from his pursed lips. "Sure thing." This was just one of the things Russell missed about smoking, the way it could be used for italics and punctuation. "I always thought you'd be the writer," Jeff said. "You were better than me."

"I'm not enough of a gambler. Plus we got married." Russell thought about it, shook his head. "Sometimes I wish I'd waited a little longer, taken a chance." Russell felt that Jeff would understand he was conflating several yearnings—the notion of the writer's vocation being tied up with a certain attitude of going for broke, a categorical refusal to admit or accept the conventions. Whenever he thought of the road not taken he imagined himself as Dylan Thomas or Scott Fitzgerald or Hunter Thompson, never as a college professor with car payments, though the latter was the more likely form of a contemporary American literary career.

"You wait too long, you spoil," Jeff said. It sounded like something they'd said in college, but they were both past thirty now, and Russell, at least, was having to discard some of his more extravagant youthful conceits. The tragic view, the rebellious posture became less tenable. Lately he thought Jeff was taking himself a little too seriously as a
figure
and not seriously enough as a writer, but he didn't want to piss him off by saying so. And he dimly suspected that Jeff performed a vital role in his own ecosystem, following the road Russell hadn't taken and thereby saving his best friend the trip.

Back at the office, Russell took a call from Corrine.

"What's up?" he said.

"Just wanted to say hi. Are you all right?"

"Fine, I guess."

"Russ, I'd just die if anything happened to you."

"What brought this on?"

"I don't know—I just suddenly got a scared feeling."

"Nothing to be scared about, Corrine."

"That's not true—look around you."

Her parents' divorce, Russell thought, had made Corrine a little apocalyptic. After he'd calmed her down and hung up, Donna came in with the afternoon mail and dumped it on his desk.

"You see Harold shot down your genius poet?" She pointed to a manuscript on the pile with a note from Harold attached. Though in abandoning his own poetry Russell was required to devalue its importance in the larger scheme of things, he retained a sense of affection, a guilty admiration as though for the noble little woman he'd left behind to come to the big city. The collection in question struck him as the best he'd seen in years, and he had an unspoken understanding with Harold that he could publish a volume every year or so. Or at least he thought he did.

Harold's note said: "This is probably good enough to be published somewhere but I don't see why we need to do it."

Later that night Russell quoted the note for Corrine. "I'm going to have to find a new job," he said. "You'll get a better job."

"And then there's Jeff," Russell said, refusing to be consoled. "He's in a very weird frame of mind." They were sitting on the floor in front of the television with their plates on the coffee table.

"Why? About what?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know?" She laid down the fork on which she had just twirled a mouthful of pasta and looked at him. "You had lunch with your best friend and you don't know what's wrong with him?"

"I said he was in a weird mood. You don't necessarily pry into somebody's moods, Corrine." He poured more wine into his glass and looked at the level in the bottle. "If you're really serious about not drinking, I'll end up having the whole bottle myself every night. "

"The cork works both ways." She picked it up and held it for his inspection. "You can put it back in and save the rest for another night."

"It doesn't taste the same."

"What about Jeff? What did he say?"

"He complained about how cheap I am. Very sensitive and poetic of him."

"I can't believe your best friend's having a nervous breakdown practically and you don't even talk about it. "

"He's not having a nervous breakdown. He's just tired. His work's not going well. Mine's not either, and I'm not making half the money he is. Do you realize he made a couple hundred thousand last year? I don't always like going to work but I do it. Jeff's eventually going to have to go back to work, too."

"God, I don't believe it." She was holding her fork halfway to her mouth, leaning away from him as if to get a better look. "At that moment you know who you sounded like, exactly? I mean down to the last inflection?"

"Who?"

"Your father."

He knew she was right, though he was not any happier with her for seeing the justice of the observation.

She thought it was cute; what really scared her was when he reminded her of
her
father. "Getting a little pot there, too," she said, patting his rounding belly.

He brushed her hand away. "Just because I'm sitting down."

"Yeah, and if I were suspended from the ceiling facedown my boobs would stick out more." Then she said, "I have a job, too, you know, and I had a hard day. Plus I just made this big decision about my health that I'm trying to stick with, and you might be a little more supportive about it."

He put his arm around her, pulling her in close against his ribs. "We both need a vacation. Another week and we'll be on Colombier beach." He nodded toward the television set. "What is this shit we're watching?"

"I got a video.
Hannah and Her Sisters."

Russell grimaced. "Angst in the penthouse."

Corrine set up the VCR. "It got great reviews."

"Exactly. What's wrong with
Blue Velvet?"

"You've seen it five times."

Halfway through the movie she said, "If you slept with my sister—"

"It's just a movie, Corrine." Whenever they saw a film dealing with adultery, Corrine became gloomy and suspicious, anticipating the eventuality. Partly to divert her, Russell complained about the great apartments in the movie. "This is what I really hate about Woody Allen," he said. "Look at this, everybody lives in two-million-dollar apartments with no credible means of support. Here's a starving artist—right?—with a loft in SoHo the size of Shea Stadium." He viewed the screen, as was his sometimes habit, one-eyed through a tube that had once lived inside a roll of paper towels.

"Russell, don't do that, you're going to ruin your eyes or something. You know that drives me crazy, but you still do it."

"It makes it more challenging," he explained.

"Retarded development," she countered; he had, she decided, a ten-year-old boy's appreciation of props. If there was anything remotely hat-shaped in the room, Russell would sooner or later put it on his head. Corrine either loved this or hated it, depending. At first you loved all the idiosyncrasies of the one you loved; then, one by one, they became slightly annoying.

An hour later, having finished the bottle of wine, he was asleep, his head back against the couch, his mouth open, like a baby bird trying to suck nourishment from the sky. Unfortunately, this reminded her of her own father, a man also prone to fall asleep in front of the television set —leaving the women behind with all of the things they wished to say. He had finally moved out after Corrine went off to college, but he'd already been gone for years.