Brightness Falls (18 page)

As if to escape these anxieties by ignoring them, she began hunting for shells in the rocks at the far end of the crescent of sand. She came upon a conch, still pink and opalescent inside, which she grudgingly allowed Russell to examine when he came to retrieve her.

Accustomed to the flash floods of Corrine's emotional landscape, Russell gave her a few minutes to calm down. While technically innocent, he was guilty in principle. He wanted to fuck Simone a hundred different ways, immediately. And yet he had been slightly abashed when Corrine talked about giving him head. Their sex life together marked the apogee of his experience and yet lately he found his lust directed toward strangers. Walking down the beach to fetch his wife, he decided it was just a phase.

After they had taken a swim Russell wanted to go snorkeling. They walked over to the edge of the beach where the reef started, and swam out, Corrine suppressing her fear, not of anything in particular but of something unknown in the depths. Suddenly they were surrounded by the brilliant, oddly shaped fish and she forgot to worry.

After a while she told him she was going in. He said he'd stay out a little longer. As she lay on the sand reading, a French guy tried to pick her up. Cute, very wiry and tan, muscles like knots, and a thin Gallic face. When he asked her where she was staying and whether he could see her, she laughed and told him she was married, her earlier jealousy almost forgotten.

"So are many people," he said, letting sand sift from a small opening in his fist as he squatted beside her.

"But some of us," she said, "are happy." Unfazed, he smiled and said he'd see her around.

"Who was that," Russell asked, tossing his wet snorkel and fins down beside her.

"One good Frog deserves another," she answered coolly.

"You should see your back," he said.

She could already feel the heat building under her skin, the burn rising up from within.

"I saw a shark," he said happily. It was important to him in some deep masculine way to imagine there was danger in the vicinity.

"I wanted the first night to be romantic," she complained, feeling the burn.

"Last night was our first night," Russell said.

"Not really. This is our first full day and night."

"Anyway, we've got seven more," he said.

"Only six," she corrected, sounding miserable.

The next morning Corrine was still a little sun sick, so they stayed around the house. Russell was sweet, spraying her with Solarcaine and reading to her from her smutty book, but she could see he was still in New York, part of him anyway.

"Did you ever ask Harold about the raise," she asked over lunch.

"He said we'd taken some heavy losses last year on big books that flopped, and pointed out that the company stock was way down, as if I didn't know. I own some of the shit."

"Your books did great," Corrine said. "Didn't you tell him that?" A lizard shot up the wall behind Russell's head. He was reading again, book flattened beside his plate. When he failed to answer she said, "Well, I don't know how the company's doing overall, but their price-to-earnings ratio looks great. I've been looking into it. I think they're way undervalued. In fact, Whitlock told me they were."

He looked up from his plate, having mutilated a piece of grouper. "When?"

"At my birthday party."

Nodding reflectively, he said, "Let's go to Gustavia."

In town, they bought T-shirts that said "Sorry, No Phone." Devotees of the island were proud of this technology gap, which kept away the worst people from Hollywood and Wall Street. Corning out of the T-shirt shop they ran into Simone, her body partially covered up for a change. She walked the street as if it had been family property for generations. There was also something proprietorial about the way she greeted Russell. She languidly introduced them to a friend, recommended a bar in town. Corrine didn't like her any better with her clothes.

"This place is getting a little too fashionable for me," Corrine observed later that night, after they'd been seated next to a very loud Neo-Expres-sionist painter and his entourage. But Russell failed to acknowledge her complaint. Proximity to the glamorous, it seemed to Corrine, confirmed in Russell some sense of his own entitlement.

"Russ? Why couldn't we—not right away but sometime—have, you know, a baby." She'd been waiting for an hour to find the moment to say this, and now, having blurted it out over dessert, when she received no immediate response from Russell, she wondered if she had once again only imagined saying it. He was studying the wine label and she couldn't even be sure he was listening. Finally he looked up at her.

"Just because Tom and Casey are having a baby—"

"Russell, this has nothing to do with Tom and Casey."

"They can afford a baby."

"You think only rich people have babies?"

"Where would we put it?"

"We'd put it in a cardboard box beside our bed. I don't know. What does that matter? Why are you always such a jerk about this? You always focus on these irrelevant side issues. Is it possible there are other apartments in New York besides ours—bigger apartments, for instance?"

"They cost more money."

"We could get a two-bedroom in a less fancy building. You're always saying you want to live downtown, we could look down there. Find a loft, maybe."

"I hate lofts."

"God, you're so—"

"You know how much I make, Corrine. Without your salary and with one extra mouth—"

"So we do without some things. It's a question of priorities. I thought you
wanted
children."

"I do. Just not... now."

"When, with your second wife?" Corrine seemed more startled than Russell by what she'd said. Looking at her, he could see what was happening in her mind; already her words were becoming fleshed in imagination—the dissolution of their marriage taking place, the lonely nights of the divorcee.

He grabbed both of her hands in his and shook her out of her reverie. "Listen, just let me think about it a little, okay? Maybe I'll go talk to Kleinfeld about the raise."

"I'm getting old, Russell," she said mournfully.

"You've still got a couple years before we have to shoot you."

Over the next few days they established a routine of beach and lunch, beach and dinner, which seemed by the end of the week, even to Russell, to be a birthright, along with the rented house and the brilliant weather and the rooster calls entwined with the thinner music of seldom seen birds which at moments brought them back, like certain songs, to the dawn of their marriage and filled them both with sudden desire. Later they would both look back on those few days with a sense of wonder and regret—timeless afternoons of long lunches and naps, dreaming and making love on chaises longues. Then, just as they had rediscovered the basic principles of pleasure, it was time to pack and go home.

12

The inhabitants of Manhattan tended to become inured to street demonstrations. Blue police barricades would sprout overnight in front of embassies and corporate headquarters. Aggrieved Irish or union members, angry Arabs or Jews—marching, chanting slogans, waving placards— were a feature of the landscape, like the invisible homeless. Such an environment dictated a degree of willful obliviousness, and Russell Calloway could be even more oblivious than most in the course of moving about the city. He frequently navigated the crowded sidewalks reading a book or magazine, occasionally bumping into signposts or other pedestrians. When he returned from the islands, however, he was fleetingly sensitized to the peculiarities of urban life, briefly conscious of the fantastic web of mundane conventions composing this outlandishly complex organism: the system of signs whereby, for instance, he raised his arm toward an approaching yellow car on Second Avenue which then stopped beside him, or the interplay of signals regulating the dynamic mesh of human and vehicular traffic at rush hour as several million people flowed to or from places of work. Even the kamikaze bicycle messengers tracing anarchic paths through the grid were part of the design. These millions on their unconscious individual tracks through the maze—after a week of white sand and blue-green water, the density of humanity seemed overwhelming. Likewise Russell was intrigued by the chanting, picketing crowd on the street as he approached the office, though not quite so alert as to notice that these efforts were directed at his own employer.

Several dozen protesters, mostly black, marched within the police barricades on the sidewalk in front of his office building, carrying signs: Russell recognized the notorious black activist whose name he could never remember among them, his head an inversion of the average male's, his full beard ending right where the sideburns might normally begin, his head shaved smooth and shiny black. He dressed like a lawyer, which he was, an impeccable chesterfield on his back at the moment. Emoting fiercely into a reporter's outstretched microphone. The great sacramental pose of the era—a reverse image of the king knighting subject with his sword.

"Hold on," called a technician, "I need a level on sound."

"Why don't we change the battery while we're at it," said the reporter—a briskly attractive, demographically correct blonde.

Suddenly the protesters relaxed, like actors on a break, and Russell slipped into the building.

The receptionist appeared surprised when Russell stepped out of the elevator, as if the idea of a device that ascended a hundred feet in seconds and dispensed a human being into the eighth-floor reception area were entirely new to her.

"Maureen, I've only been gone ten days," he said.

"Your messages are on your desk," she answered, as though apologizing for not having them waiting on a silver salver.

So where else would they be? he thought. "What's going on outside?"

"A demonstration," she answered helpfully.

Donna's desk was unoccupied and inexplicably neat. It usually looked like a sidewalk on the Lower East Side, covered with scraps of paper, periodicals and empty beverage containers. Odd piles of books and correspondence had sprung up all over his own desk. He called upstairs and asked Kleinfeld's assistant if he could come up in ten minutes; after making him hold, she announced Kleinfeld would expect him at four-thirty. Unready to face the mail, Russell wandered off to the coffee station. An editorial assistant named Kate something-or-other seemed to recoil at his approach.

"What's been happening around here," he asked. They were between pots, Kate having started a new batch. "Who's sleeping with whom?"

"I guess, uh, you know about Donna," she said.

"Who's
she
sleeping with," he asked enthusiastically, watching the pot fill—the thin stream of brown water. "I mean
about
her. Maybe you didn't hear."

"About
what?"

Harold wasn't in his office. Russell didn't bother to greet Carlton or even pretend he wanted her permission to go in.

"He'll be in at eleven," she said, in an even, neutral tone.

"Be so fucking good as to tell him I stopped by," Russell said.

Washington had yet to come in—it was only ten—so Russell backtracked to Whitlock's office.

"What do you know about Harold's firing my assistant?"

After taking one last look at the amber numbers on his computer screen, Whitlock spun his chair around to face the door. "If we didn't own the damn building I don't think we'd even have a net worth." He rolled his chair away from the desk—a rare indication that he could spare a few minutes away from the burden of having to account for the lavish expenditures of flaky editors. "So how do you like our protesters," he asked.

"What's that about?"

"Washington rejected some guy's book, I don't know. Everybody's going crazy around here."

Russell sank into the gray leather couch: Whit's office was the second biggest on the floor—the publisher and big corporate suits residing upstairs—and looked more like the center of power than Harold's, with tastefully framed posters from MoMA and a matching Italian leather couch and chair. "So—Donna. Not a pleasant scene," Whit said, a certain morbid pleasure flickering through his concerned expression, like silver through worn vermeil. "Harold sent Carlton over to tell Donna to take that button of hers off. Apparently she spit on her. "

"Who, Donna spit on Carlton?"

"Yeah. Something of a cat fight ensued."

"Jesus." Russell leaned his head back on the cold leather and stared at the ceiling. "What are the chances that—"

"Forget it, Russ. Harold's not real pleased about this. I heard he told you to take care of it. "

"He did."

"And?"

"I didn't."

"This is a corporation, Russell."

"Oh, is that what it is? This is a fucking publishing house. If I wanted to work for a
real
corporation I would've gone to business school for Christ's sake." He stopped and sighed. "Sorry, but you know what I mean."

"Yeah, I know, I know." Whitlock stood up and walked to the window. "It meant a lot to me getting this office. But sometimes it doesn't mean shit, you can see through the whole thing. Sometimes when Donna walked by in her black leather I'd feel silly wearing this suit. Maybe that was the problem—she was one of those people who made the grownups feel like they were faking it."

"Nice suit," Russell said, trying to lighten the mood. When Whit got personal, it was a little like seeing your father cry. Stiff as Whit could be, it seemed to Russell that he might just possibly melt into a puddle at your feet if you didn't watch the conversational temperature.

"Paul Stuart."

"You
are
making more than me."

"Not that much," Whit said, and he would know, being the financial officer. "And I'm still paying off loans from school." He got that personal look again. "Guess who just got turned down for a raise?"

"You too?"

Whit nodded. "My building's going co-op. I'd like to buy my place, but right now I couldn't buy the bathroom."

Russell stood up. "I don't understand this. I had three six-figure paperback sales last year and I know of about ten others—so how come we supposedly had such a bad year?"