Brightness Falls (20 page)

"Sometimes I think I'm the smartest guy in the world, the best in the business. Then some mornings I wake up and I know I'm a complete fraud, that everything I've done is pure dumb luck and I've just lost the luck. I'm sitting here with bad cards and I can't even remember the rules. Harold's just calling my bluff. I thought I was the hottest thing going for a while, and now... Have you ever heard that thing somebody, some critic said—Not only does the emperor have no clothes, he has bad skin. Well, that's how I've been feeling lately. Like a naked eczema case."

She rubbed the back of his head. "Hey, Harold's just being an asshole. You've just got to stand up for—"

"I know, I know. That's what's bothering me. I've either got to leave, or fight."

"How can you fight?"

"I can buy the company."

"Go to sleep, Russell."

13

If her brother looked exactly like someone who was at least the third of his kind, the spawn of gentrified, self-perpetuating capital, Leticia Corbin appeared to have sprung from different loins altogether, seeming to have invented herself several times over with an eye toward erasing the trail of her pedigree along the way. Where Trip Corbin was bibulously ruddy beneath a perpetual tan, Tish's cultivated ghoulishness was accentuated by white pancake makeup, the ancestral country-club pinks and greens abandoned for bohemian noir, with the odd touch of crimson showing in, say, a slash of makeup.

The other sister, Candace Corbin van Duyn, of Palm Beach and Southampton and New York, was much more in the Corbin mold, if somewhat more publicly visible than the run of her breed, a well-married horsewoman and hostess whose moves between houses and between parties were authoritatively reported by Town &
Country
and
Women's Wear Daily.
Tish, on the other hand, was frequently seen in what passed for the demimonde press, usually in harshly lit nighttime group photos with thrash rockers, performance artists and East Village fashion designers, always managing to convey the impression of yawning widely with her mouth stoically closed. She was rumored to be a junkie.

A quick walk from Russell's office, her townhouse was on Gramercy Park, in one of Manhattan's last romantic precincts. Encrusted with woody vines, the Italianate mansion was shedding an old coat of mustard-colored paint. Russell pressed the buzzer and waited. He was about to ring again when the door was opened by a young light-skinned black man in a waistcoat. "Please follow me," he said in a chiseled, vaguely British accent. Trailing him up a long, musty staircase from the parlor floor to the second floor, Russell had a good chance to take in the laced knee-high boots and the jodhpur pants that bloomed above them. Led into a dark salon in the front of the house, he was invited to take a seat. "I'll tell Miss Corbin that you're here," he was told.

The room was lugubrious. Opaque brocaded draperies sealed off the front windows; much of the scarce light within was provided by candles. Issuing from an invisible source, Mozart's Requiem pervaded the room, like incense, with its funereal pomp. The decor was a mélange of Oriental, Art Deco and SoHo contemporary, with an overall aspect of Opium Den. A huge Warhol portrait of Leticia had the place of honor over the carved marble fireplace. A moment later the original entered, wearing a black kimono and red slippers. The long, pale face seemed too suggestive of the skull underneath, and the dark rings under her eyes appeared to have been painted there. Her unnaturally black hair was severely cut, reminiscent of Louise Brooks and the Chinese Red Guard.

"Hello, Russell Calloway."

"Hello ..."

"Call me Tish. In the sixties I called myself Serenity but I got tired of that—like everybody else. It wouldn't be much of a name for the eighties, would it? Sit down, Claude will get us some refreshments. I don't suppose you'd remember the sixties, would you, Russell Calloway?"

"I gather they came right before the seventies." Scanning the room for seating, Russell noticed an iron chair that might have been inspired by the Crown of Thorns, a spiky affair one could only hope wasn't meant to be functional.

"Fun, isn't it," she said, observing the direction of his gaze. "That's for my brother, should he ever come to visit."

Russell sat on the edge of an upholstered chaise while Tish sank into an armchair across from him, lighting up a long brown cigarette.

"Smoke," she asked.

"Quit."

"God, how boring. I don't want to hear about it. I suppose you exercise, too. Belong to a gym and all that. Wear condoms and brush after every meal."

"Actually, I'm a bisexual junkie with bad hygiene and a strong interest in bondage."

"Smile when you say that, darling, or I shall have to insist that you marry me."

Russell had to wonder which qualification interested her the most.

"Though I must say, please don't take offense, but you do look terribly predictable, fashionwise."

"Thomas Mann said, Dress like a bourgeois, think like a revolutionary." Who was Morticia Addams here, Russell wondered, to be giving him a fashion critique, even as he felt uncool.

"Did he really? Did he actually
say
it, darling, or did he simply write it down? I always wonder about all these wonderful things people supposedly said. I think you should get extra credit if you actually say them at the dinner table instead of after, sitting at a desk in some stuffy room with all the time in the world to think. Truman would just blurt those things right out, and Andy, well, he did, too, not that he was
terribly
verbal. Poor Andy." She sighed. "So, we can see how you're dressed. Do you think like a revolutionary, is the obvious question. And if so, how can you possibly work for my brother,
Mortmain
Corbin, at that excruciatingly dreary publishing house?"

"I find myself faced with the drab necessity of making a living."

"Do you
like
your job?"

Russell was not sure if candor was prudent, but there was something very purposeful about the question. "I can't say I'm entirely happy with the way things are being run."

Leticia squinted at him through a great cloud of smoke. "Go on."

"There are things I'd do diff—"

"Let me tell you a story," Leticia interrupted. She went on to describe a friend who was a poet and an artist and a photographer, a Berliner and "one of the most fascinating creative minds in all of New York." Russell nodded when he heard the vaguely familiar name. "A real poet in the
largest
sense of the word. The man was a genius. Andy said so. To the ends of his fingertips, and he had extremely long fingernails. Well, I sent him to Trip. What do you suppose happened?"

"What?" said Russell, fixating on her cigarette, fighting the sudden urge to bum one.

"Trip turned down his proposal. Can you imagine how embarrassing that was for me? I own thirteen and two-thirds percent of the house. And Trip says he doesn't quite see the potential. Well, I can't say I was surprised. Trip couldn't see the end of his nose if he didn't paint it red every night. It's such a waste. Corbin, Dern meant something once. When my grandfather founded it, his model was the Crosbys' Black Sun Press. Harry Crosby was a friend of his, did you know that? Till he killed himself, of course, in that delicious double love suicide. In any event, Gramps wanted to bring the avant-garde home to America. Did you know the first person he published was André Breton? Not to mention that he can't even keep the price of the stock up where it should be. Between us, darling, I doubt he can keep anything up anymore."

It took Russell a moment to figure out that the last two sentences referred to Whitney Corbin III and that they had moved back to the present. Or at least to that region of the present where Tish Corbin lived.

'Why is it, Mr. Russell Calloway, that in the middle of what I am told is the greatest bull market in history, my Corbin, Dern stock has declined in value? I hear doormen at clubs talking about the money they're making in the market."

"You should ask your brother."

When she lifted the cigarette to her lips, the sleeve of her kimono slid back on her arms; without being too obvious about it, Russell inconclusively scanned her arm for tracks.

"I despise my brother. We have not spoken in three years."

The knee-booted Claude returned, bearing a tray with a heavy Georgian tea service and assorted pastries.

"My brother was eleven when I was born. When I was a year old he tried to suffocate me with a pillow, a memory which I finally unearthed after many expensive years in analysis. When I was four my father bought me a llama, which was my dearest companion for two years, until my brother shot and killed it."

"Will there be anything else," Claude asked, after laying out the tea.

A llama?

"My feet."

"Yes, ma'am."

Claude knelt down in front of her, removed one of her slippers and began massaging her foot. Russell tried not to appear startled. In his inner ear the theme from
The Twilight Zone
started up.

"My brother is a killer, Russell Calloway. He would like to kill me, no doubt. But for the laws, which make it difficult, he would. Candace—my older sister—is just like him, a bimbo, and she doesn't give him any trouble, but they'd love to get rid of me. I have reason to believe a nearly fatal car wreck I was involved in some years ago was not..." As her voice trailed into a whisper, Leticia Corbin appeared to be concentrating on some deep, primal experience. Finally, she looked up, her expression mournful. "The spirits of the animals he slaughters will probably haunt my family for generations to come. I see you wear leather shoes," she said, this theme of feet becoming general. "There are many attractive alternatives to animal products. I'd like to give you some literature before you leave."

"You said you had a proposal for me." This was all getting a little too weird for Russell.

"A proposal? Perhaps. Perhaps that's what you'd call it." Claude had switched feet now. "What I had in mind is something larger than a book proposal. I wonder if I can trust you?"

Russell spread his hands wide and shrugged to indicate that this was entirely up to her and of rapidly decreasing interest to him.

"I'm thinking of starting my own press. Something small and tasteful. But also crazy and daring. Philosophy, fashion, aesthetics, some of Andy's unrealized projects ..."

Russell could just imagine.

"Is that better," Claude asked.

"A tiny bit, thank you, Claude. It's just something I have to live with. Unless those idiotic doctors finally locate the source of the pain. I lie awake half the night in pain and they say it's imaginary. Of course, I have no experience in the technical side of the publishing business. My brother never let me near the company. So I would need help."

"Do you have capital?"

"I intend to sell my shares in Corbin, Dern."

"Your brother won't like that. The family holdings significantly reduced—it might even lead to somebody else taking over."

"That's one of the things I like best about the idea, Russell Calloway. Sticking it to big brother."

Maybe the flakiness was infectious, but suddenly Russell's interest was fully engaged.

"You've got to be careful how you sell a big block of stock like that. A company as small as this—you can't just throw thirteen-odd percent of it on the over-the-counter market. You'd probably want a single buyer. "

"You seem to know a lot about these things," she said, with an arch smile.

"I'm just beginning to learn. But I like to think I'm a quick study."

"Are you? You look too innocent to me."

"I guess we'll just have to see about that, won't we?"

"Do you know someone who could buy my stock?" Russell stayed for another hour, Claude dispensing Lapsang souchong from the elaborate sterling tea service as they discovered, for all their fashion differences, a patch of common turf. By the time he left, Russell had convinced himself that she had some excellent instincts and Leticia had come to the conclusion that despite the dull wardrobe this was a quite brilliant young man.

They had a dinner date for the following week.

14

Trina just barely made the nine-twenty Concorde out of Heathrow, which would put her in New York by eight-thirty the same morning and at her desk just an hour later than usual, virtually without loss of workday. She handed her hanging bag to the stewardess, slid past a beautiful Eurasian-looking woman she thought she recognized from the fashion magazines, and dropped into her seat beside a male blue-suit approximately her own age. Hermès tie, pinstripes, face meticulously reproduced from a recent Dartmouth yearbook.

He looked at his watch, a butter-and-sugar Cartier tank, and sighed. "If this plane is just about one minute late it could definitely screw me up but good," he said, seeming to address the pink pages of his
Financial Times.

Trina nodded noncommittally.

"If I had all the goddamned time in the world I'd fly Air-India or something."

He seemed eager to talk—albeit in brusque, self-important bursts— which was entirely against the rules of serious business flying. But then, she was wearing her Giorgio Sant'Angelo dress, suitable for late nights at Tramps and Annabel's, so she wouldn't totally wrinkle the business suit she'd change into in the limo from Kennedy. So of course, he probably didn't think she
was
a business flyer. Thought she was an airborne international slut.

"Bradley Seaver," he said, suddenly turning as if he had just that moment noticed her.

"Trina Cox."

"Pleasure," he said. He shook his head savagely, looked at his watch again as if it were a very badly behaved personal accessory indeed. When she continued to ignore him, he muttered theatrically, "Christ, I better make this meeting."

Trina started to look through her bag for an annual report.

"I'm an investment banker at Morgan," he said. "M and A. That's mergers and acquisitions."

"Sounds very interesting," said Trina, sliding the annual report back into the bag and dripping a little southern honey into her voice.