Brightness Falls (19 page)

"Those are receivables," Whit said. "They won't show up for a year or two. The bad year we're seeing now actually happened about two years ago, when we were the B-One squadron of the industry, dropping all those big dud bombs into the stores."

"Is that why my profit-sharing plan's worth squat?"

"Basically." When Russell turned to leave, Whitlock added, "Don't make it a showdown—this thing with Harold. It's not worth it."

Back in his office, Russell took a call from Leticia Corbin, the weird sister of the company's chairman. He couldn't remember exactly how it was she'd turned up at his place a couple of months before; it seemed she was part of Jeff's entourage. "I have a proposal that might interest you," she said. "I wonder, could you come by my house tomorrow to discuss it with me?" Russell was not in the habit of dropping by the houses of prospective authors at their express convenience, but Leticia Corbin owned thirteen percent of the company and anyway it was right around the corner. She was a satellite of the late Andy Warhol, and it was remotely possible she was peddling a memoir. He'd died just a few weeks before, and the vultures were all landing. It was also possible that her brother somehow figured in this request, though Russell gathered they didn't get along.

Washington slouched in, smoking meditatively. "Man, that girl of yours had some mouth. Some of the shit she was screaming when she got the boot—it was like to turn me white. Meantime I have to figure out a way to chill that Parker."

"What's
that
shit all about," Russell asked, although his mind was elsewhere, his purview already narrowing around his own immediate concerns within an hour of returning to the office.

By the time Harold arrived, Russell had tamed his anger to the point of calculating the most he could salvage from his loss. He had transferred the engraving of the great horned owl from his east wall to the dartboard, but without the prospect of Donna's coming in, he realized, at least half the point was lost.

He had also called Corrine in full rage, and she'd pointed out that there wasn't much to be gained by confrontation. All Russell could hope was that, having cut him, Harold might throw a bandage his way in the form of help on the Rappaport book. By late afternoon that hope had diminished, when Russell learned that even before he had left for vacation the print run had been cut by another twenty-five hundred copies.

At four twenty-five Russell ascended the interior staircase, which linked disparate realms. Topside was corporate, the putative brain that animated the bodies on the floors below. The cubicles of the editorial, production and design departments combined, in various ratios, aspects of garage sale and office furniture showroom decor; on the ninth floor, by contrast, certain strict zoning laws seemed to have been on the books since the twenties, when the company had been founded. Framed dust jackets of ancient best-sellers and Pulitzer winners competed for wall space with hunting prints in the chestnut-paneled reception area, the latter reflecting the equestrian tastes of Whitney Corbin, Sr., the founding genius of Corbin, Dern and Company. These hunting prints were distributed throughout the hallways on the floor, although the chestnut paneling extended only into the generous office of Whitney "Trip" Corbin III, grandson of the founder, fiftyish and seldom seen on the premises, preferring golf clubs and cocktail shakers to Dictaphones and computers. Since the company had gone public back in the go-go years of the late sixties, the value of the Corbin family holdings had substantially increased, while the responsibilities of the eponymous "chairman" had correspondingly decreased. It happened that he was in today and, staring out the door with his feet on his desk, was in a perfect position to spot Russell passing in the hallway.

"Calloway," he bellowed, as if calling across the fairway. "Get in here."

Russell framed himself in the doorway, hoping he wouldn't need to go farther. "Hello, Whitney. You're looking industrious."

Corbin was holding the butt of a fly rod in his hand, winding line onto the reel from a spool, which leaped and danced on the carpet as he cranked.

"Shit, hold this damn thing for me, will you." He handed Russell a pencil and directed him to stick it through the spool of fly line as an axle. "And tell me what's going on downstairs."

"We're just sort of acquiring manuscripts and trying to sell them as books." The spool of fly line spun rapidly on the pencil as Corbin reeled. "'Trying' is a good word—definitely the right word in this case. Been a shit season. You fish?"

"Only for compliments."

The line snagged somewhere on the spool; Russell untangled it while Corbin waited patiently, rod in hand.

"How's your friend who wrote that marvelous book of stories for us? Pierce, that's the one. His father went to St. Paul's with me—did I ever tell you that? When are we going to see his follow-up?"

"Soon, I hope."

"So, what brings you up here," he asked, once the bird's nest was finally untangled and the fly line safely spooled onto the reel.

"Meeting with Jerry."

"Good man. Plays a very fair game of golf. Three handicap. You don't play, do you?"

Whitney Corbin, offshoot of a midwestern dry-goods fortune, and Frederick Dern, the son of a Columbia history professor, had started the company in the spring of 1925 after the twenty-three-year-old Corbin returned from a
Wanderjahr
in Europe with a nasty venereal infection and, not unrelatedly, many new contacts in the expatriate literary community. Dern, his former Princeton classmate, was working as a junior editor at Scribner's. They started on a modest stake from Corbin's father. The company carved out a niche specializing in European modernist texts, surviving from year to year and eventually thriving, on the modest scale of publishing success, as some of their authors and titles became classics; and the Corbin, Dern name became an imprimatur, a kind of brand name for serious literature. If Corbin, Dern had been a car it would have been a Bentley; if a fish, as Whitney Corbin sometimes liked to imagine, it would have been the brown trout: aloof and sulky, with European manners, not the biggest or toughest fish in the water, but perhaps the hardest to get on the line.

Corbin bought out his childless partner in the forties and passed the enterprise along to Whitney Jr., who expanded into children's books and started a profitable line of travel guides just as the American middle class began to travel. He brought the company public in the sixties, retaining forty-one percent of the stock in the family. Whitney Jr. was more interested in the financial side of the enterprise than the literary, hiring others, among them Harold Stone, to take care of what he called proesy and pose. Junior's heirs had taken little interest in the business; Leticia was interested, it seemed to her father, mainly in male homosexuals, including "that son of a bitch who painted soup cans," while her sister, Candace, was devoted to squandering his money in the conventional manner. The son, Whitney III, was most concerned with the sporting life—golf, fly fishing and waterfowl hunting being his primary occupations. After his father's death, he appeared in the office at intervals, leaving the business side in the hands of his publisher, Jerry Kleinfeld, the proesy and pose to the legendary Harold Stone.

Kleinfeld had worked his way up through the sales force and prided himself on being approachable and more or less one of the guys. In contrast to Harold's, his office contained a photographic history of the occupant's life and career, including scores of chummy photographs of Kleinfeld with celebrities from the worlds of politics, show business and sports—any one of whom, you got the impression, might be about to call on business more important than you were bringing into the office.

"What's up, fella?" he said by way of greeting. In his late forties, extensively bald, Jerry Kleinfeld had the impatient, almost manic air of a younger man—or of someone who had realized long before that he wasn't young anymore and therefore didn't have a second to waste. In the relatively slow-motion world of book publishing he was considered a gadfly.

Before Russell could answer, he said, "Can you believe this shit outside? We do more third-world crap than anybody in the fucking business, we pay not only Washington's exorbitant salary but his goddamned monumental world-record expense account, and now we're supposed to form an Afro-American imprint, hire more blacks and pay blackmail to Parker's Committee for Lining the Pockets of Media-Savvy Niggers. Jesus Christ!"

"Listen, Jerry, I'm worried about the Rappaport book," Russell said, despairing in advance of the other subject. "We're sending the wrong signals cutting the print run. I know this book can break out if we get behind it."

"I'm gonna tell you something I wish it wasn't true," Kleinfeld said, leaning back in his chair and lifting one leg in the air to inspect his loafer briefly, distorting, ethnicizing his syntax as if to certify his artlessness. "I think that book ought to shake the government to its fucking foundations. That's the first thing. The second thing is, it's obvious nobody gives a shit, Russ. We're not getting the newsbreaks, we're not getting bubkes. I'm sorry, but that's the way it looks from here. I'm not gonna bullshit you, buddy. And I have to go with Harold on this one. Can you believe I get these fucking shoes custom-made for me in Italy by Artioli and the damn things don't fit right." He lowered his leg. "What else?"

"Case closed on the Nicaragua book?"

"You drum up some press and we'll print more books. Case closed till then. What else?"

As economically and pragmatically as he could, Russell introduced the subject of poetry, emphasizing the intangible benefits that resulted from the publication of serious literature, important writers such as X, Y and Z—the kind of great authors who had put Corbin, Dern on...

Kleinfeld waved this hot air away with his stubby, three-ringed hand. "I know that fucking speech, Russell. I hear it from all you guys. Cut to the chase."

Russell performed a short, tough pitch for his poetry manuscript, while Kleinfeld looked off into space and flogged the surface of his desk with a length of telephone cord. After half a minute he interrupted.

"Tell you what, I'll read it myself, okay? Personally. Meanwhile you get me some blurbs from the heavy-hitters, all right? I can't do better than that."

"Okay," Russell agreed, not satisfied but aware that his time was up. By now he was too demoralized even to bring up the subject of his raise.

"You're doing a good job for us, fella," Kleinfeld said, rising and planting a hand on Russell's shoulder, then escorting him out into the hall. "We all lose a few now and then. But I'll see what I can do for you on these poems. I like your commitment. Half of those deadbeats down there are so busy trying to find the next best-selling exercise book they wouldn't recognize Ernest Hemingway if he unzipped his fly and plunked his big dick right down on their desks."

When he arrived home Russell was distracted, though he didn't seem as upset as Corrine was afraid he might be—just very far away, like a saint undergoing a vision. He flipped on the news while she went through the mail. In the evolution of a marital division of labor, mail duty had devolved to Corrine. Tonight there were two credit card bills, which she opened first, then two credit card offers—it seemed like every day they were invited to open another Visa or MasterCard account.

Invitations to a benefit for the American Museum of Natural History and an opening for an artist she hadn't heard of, and a heavily engraved invitation to a party at Minky Rijstaefel's house in honor of Count Eurotrash.

"Do we know Minky something?"

"We've met her somewhere," Russell said. "I think Jeff slept with her once." He had become morose again. "Want to go to her party?"

"Could be good. Weird, anyway. Why not?"

Corrine reached for her datebook and wrote it in. "How about dinner at the Museum of Natural History?" She didn't tell him the invitation came with a note from Casey Reynes, who was on the junior committee.

"How much?"

"Hundred and fifty a head."

"Unless we're
out
of our heads let's be busy that night."

Corrine ripped that one up. Since neither of them had heard of the artist she noted the event with a question mark.

After that the real mail, always meager by comparison—tonight only a postcard from Jeff, which showed an armored Spaceman standing at a urinal, captioned:
Rest Break, New World Pictures.
Corrine read it for Russell, skipping "Dear Corruss,"—his acronym for a couple he thought of as being just a little
too
married.

Everything you've heard about the movie biz & the weather is true so I'll skip that. Which doesn't leave much to tell except everybody's in bed by ten o'clock—but not with me. Written 6 script pages in two weeks. & that's mostly white space. Told Solomon I'd write faster if he rents me a Ferrari. Tic tac toe—Jeff

When she finished, Corrine read it again silently. "I'm going to call him," she said. "Don't you think? He doesn't sound good. Russell?" He held up a finger, poring over his legal pad. She went into the bedroom to call Jeff, but there was no answer.

When she came back out Russell looked up. "Do you know how to read profit-and-loss statements?"

"Yeah, I read a pretty good P and L." And then she proceeded to prove it, walking him through a stack of papers as well as a basic history of corporate finance. Hours later, sensing his agitation from inside her own sleep, Corrine woke up and massaged the stiff muscles in his neck.

"Russell?"

"What?"

"Did you sleep with her?"

"Who?"

"Donna. Is that what this is about?"

"Hell, no." His voice carried a fairly convincing degree of indignation.

"So this isn't some nookie competition between you and Harold?"

"I can't
believe
you'd think that."

"I'm just trying to figure out why you're acting so strange. Talk to me, Russell."

"I don't want you to worry."

"You don't think I know when you're upset?" For several minutes she listened to his breathing.