Brightness Falls (25 page)

"For my purposes he's an angel of mercy. Christ, does this tie look all right?"

"Wear the burgundy with the little fleurs-de-lis."

"What does he want with a seventy-million-dollar publishing house? That's petty cash for him."

"He probably wants the cachet. Think of it as money-laundering."

This term, with its associations of gangsters and drug dealers, rang true in Corrine's secret estimation. Disloyally, she hoped that this scheme of Russell's would die of its own accord. She had been so busy lately she hadn't had the energy really to challenge him.

"Can we please stay home tomorrow night?"

"God, yes. I don't know. Check the datebook."

"I hate this dress," she shouted. "I look huge. I'm like the queen of the cholesterol festival. I can't go looking like this." She walked to her closet and flung back the door, then thumbed through the rows of fabric shoulders, past the sensible business suits and colorful prints from Laura Ashley to her inadequate selection of evening and cocktail dresses in black and red and green and black again. "Corrine, if you were any skinnier the dress would fall right off. Besides, we're late."

"Don't sigh like that."

"Like what?"

"In that condescending way you have like you're dealing with a child or a household pet."

"Sorry," Russell said, holding his breath. With Corrine, dressing for a party could be a traumatic event. She became violently critical of her own appearance and her wardrobe. The process could end in tears and threats of violence.

"You're still doing it."

"Doing what?"

"Looking at me that way." She took a deep breath. "Okay, I'll go like this. If you want you can tell people I'm your fat, ugly cousin from out of town."

"I've been doing that for years."

When they were in the cab she said, "Are you going to meet with Melman?"

"I'm seeing him tomorrow."

"You wanted to publish more poetry and political books. Now you're meeting with Bernie Melman, the man who gave greed a bad name. Do you see anything ironic about this?"

But Russell was perfectly able, at this juncture, to suppress his sense of irony.

Early the next afternoon Bernard Melman pointed a fork at Russell's sternum as he ventilated some of his ideas about money. With his balding pink head, fierce eyes and well-cut black suit he put Russell in mind of a turkey vulture (Falconiformes Cathartidae, Audubon, plate 87).

"J. P. Morgan used to say the only thing he considered when he was loaning money was the character of the applicant."

Russell Calloway considered this notion. "Would he have backed St. Francis of Assisi on a chain of animal hospitals?"

The reference either escaped Melman or failed to engage him. "The vet my wife takes her spaniels to over on Lex, the guy grosses three or four million a year. I'd lend this guy money whatever his name is. So what are you, Catholic?"

"Lapsed."

"How tall are you?"

"Six-one."

"Get outta here. You know what the average height is for men in this country? The average height is five-six. You thought it was more, didn't you? But that's average. Five-six. If you factor in the rest of the world it's much shorter. In some countries I could play professional hoop. So you're sticking to this six-one story, huh? Okay, fine. I gotta tell you, though, it's my experience that tall guys generally have smaller dicks, bigger the guy, smaller the tool, it's kind of an inverse-ratio sort of thing, don't you think?"

"I haven't made a real
study
of it, myself."

"Ouch, I think I just got zinged," Melman said. "Carl, did I just get zinged, or what. I think this ex-altar boy is calling me a homo."

Carl Linder grunted incoherently.

"Forgive Carl, he's kind of distracted. Waiting on a phone call from the Queen of England announcing his fucking knighthood.
Sir Carl.
Sounds nice, doesn't it?" Melman summoned the maître d' and explained that if the Queen of England called she was to be told that Carl was busy eating shepherd's pie and couldn't come to the phone.

"So don't worry," he told Russell after Carl had failed to fight back. "I don't hold a man's height against him. But I tell a lot about him from the way he walks. Just watching you walk over from the office, I said, Here's a guy who's awfully sure of himself. You've got this wide-open, confident stride, and you don't carry yourself defensively, like a guy expecting a shot from an unexpected corner, or for the ground to open up at his feet and swallow him. You've obviously never been kicked in the balls, am I right? You can see it even in the way you're sitting."

Melman's own posture, it seemed to Russell, reflected a precarious triumph of stasis; he seemed ready to spring into the air at any moment.

"I've been going over your list," Melman said. "You've published some great books."

"I publish what I like," Russell answered coolly, determined not to kiss Melman's ass.

"You've got taste. I admire taste," Melman enthused, as though he were far too successful on the only scale that truly mattered to deny other men their particular virtues.

They were dining at '21,' the world's most expensive former speakeasy. The man whose job it was to welcome people at the door had greeted Melman in an ecstatic manner and led him to another greeter, who in turn escorted the party into the dining room, where they were handed off to the maître d', who lubricated the last few steps of their progress into the banquette immediately inside the front door of the saloon. The two bodyguards were given a place at the bar.

The restaurant kept an orthopedically customized chair standing by for Melman's use, fitted with a coccyx-level pad to support the lower back. Another corporate raider whose weight fluctuated between four hundred and five hundred pounds had a double-wide model waiting for him—Bernie dubbed it a self-love seat—whenever he flew in from Los Angeles. Hanging from the rafters of the first-floor saloon was a collection of toys, models and pennants suggestive of a prosperous thirteen-year-old boy's bedroom, each signifying the ascent of a regular to a top corporate position—a football for the customer who bought himself an NFL team, an airplane for the patron named chairman of an airline. Melman pointed out his own trophies, including a pennant inscribed with the name of his fashion empire and a plastic butcher knife signifying his capture of a meat-packing concern.

"If we go ahead with this thing we'll hang a book from the rafters, put your name on the cover," Melman suggested. He then identified for Russell a couple of other corporate chieftains with inferior table positions. "All along the front wall here is the gold coast. Over there"—he pointed to the two other rooms—"that's Siberia."

Visibility was the single desirable quality in a table. At this time in the history of dining this was true generally, though in the speakeasy days, when gamblers and bootleggers had been among the elect and the aura was one of illegal commerce and clandestine pleasures, the desirable tables at '21' had been in the remotest corners of the far room. Movie stars conducting extramarital affairs, under the influence of long-abandoned codes of conduct and primitive, Manichaean notions of publicity, once chose their tables on the same principle. But this was an era of exhibitionism.

"If you ever come here without me, you make sure they remember you—use my name. Don't let them send you to the salt mines."

If this concern with the pecking order might have seemed obsessive and parvenu to the clinical gaze, Bernie's boyish enthusiasm was disarm- ing, and Russell's critical faculties were somewhat dulled in this shrine to the masculine romance of old New York, where sacramental cocktails with names like Manhattan and Sidecar were still served by uniformed old men who had never attended an acting class, and cigar smoke rose like incense on the altar of power and money.

For Russell the restaurant had naively romantic connotations courtesy of his father, who had traveled to New York on business and brought back to Michigan tall tales about the metropolis in the East, not the shortest being an account of the fancy tavern with a number for a name where a hamburger cost nine dollars. This, in Russell's mind, took its place alongside giant alligators in the sewers and sidewalk-fried eggs among the primary legends of the city that he gradually came to identify as the setting of his dreams.

Russell ordered the hamburger, which cost twenty one-fifty now and lacked a top bun. Linder ate chicken hash and said little. "He always has the chicken hash," Melman observed.

"You got a problem with my chicken hash?"

"You should diversify your intake of protein, for Christ's sake. Eat some fish."

"I don't like fish."

"It's good for you."

"If it doesn't have at least two legs I don't want to eat it."

"How's that for a principle?" Bernard Melman declared. "Anybody says Carl Linder isn't an honorable man, you tell him the guy has scruples, he won't eat anything with less than two legs, right? No poor fucking defenseless one-legged creatures, no amputee chickens. So what do you think—" he said to Russell. "You think I don't have principles?"

His mouth full of ground beef, Russell suddenly realized that the banter had given way to substance.

"Why would I think that?"

"You're a good liberal intellectual, you probably think I'm the devil incarnate." He reached down, lifted a shoeless foot up to the table. "Look, no cloven hoof."

"Some of us are trying to eat," Linder complained.

"A lot of people don't understand what I do. And it's easy to despise what you don't understand, especially when the rewards are so great. Capital is supposed to flow where it's most needed, like water. But our economy is full of bottlenecks and dams and stagnant backwaters that nobody's visited recently. I'm like the Army Corps of Engineers. I dredge the silt out of the waterways."

Given the environmental record of that agency, Russell thought this an unfortunate metaphor, but he did not want to interrupt a speech to say so.

"Most corporations are run by salaried managers with no ownership stake, right? Do they look out for the stockholders? No. Do they stay innovative, develop new products and services to serve the public? Some do, the good ones. But a lot of them stagnate. Management gets lazy, falls into habits, looks at the short-term earnings to cover their asses, instead of the long term. What do they care about the long term? They don't own stock, they've got their retirement plans. They protect their own interests and salaries, and the shareholders get screwed. That's when I put them on notice. I go in and offer the shareholders an instant premium. I say, 'Five'll get you ten,' and I bet you I'll still make a profit in the end. I'm the guy who hikes in from another village and says, 'What, you're only getting ten cents for your coconuts? Over in my village they're worth twenty. So I'll give you fifteen.' "

"You give them ten and a half," Linder said.

"I give 'em ten and three-quarters, and they're happy to take it. So I go to another fucking village where they got wampum sitting around idle, right? So I borrow a few belts to buy up the coconut plantation. I say, What are you getting, eight-percent interest from the old established planters and their banks? I'll give you twelve percent.' Okay, ten, maybe. But everybody wins, right? Capital flows where it's needed. I rationalize the process and everything works better. Overthrow the oppressive old regimes. What I really am, I'm a corporate revolutionary. I'm the Che Guevara of the boardroom."

Melman had asked him earlier, as they were walking over from his office, not to speak about the potential deal in public. As they waited for coffee he leaned forward and said quietly, "If anybody asks, you and I met at a party, and I wanted your advice about a book I'm thinking about writing. Because, believe me, when I go out to lunch with somebody, a stock can go through the ceiling before the closing bell."

He leaned even closer, his genial lunchtime expression having disappeared. "I think you've got the junkie sister in your pocket. That's just a guess—nobody's told me anything. Am I right, Carl?"

"We have not received any information regarding the disposition of shares in any corporation."

"So maybe I could take her out to dinner myself, buy her some heroin or cocaine or whatever. And maybe she likes me for one reason or another, decides to sell her shares to me. Meantime, I've bought up four-point-nine percent on the open market. So what do I need with you?"

"With all due respect," Russell said, "books aren't air conditioners or carburetors."

"Not from where you sit, maybe."

Melman's turkey-vulture gaze was obscured in a great cloud of cigar smoke, and when the smoke cleared he was smiling pleasantly.

Back at his office, Russell inserted a piece of company stationery in his old IBM and composed a letter. "Dear Jeff," he wrote:

I have just finished reading the
Cranta
story and I wish I could say I loved it. I always told you your best stories were the ones fully
imagined,
in which you had departed furthest from the actual circumstances of your immediate experience. So I don't think it's being hypocritical to say I don't appreciate your casual appropriation of
my
experience. And I would be lying if I said I didn't feel betrayed.

Your embellishments seem uniformly unflattering and hurtful, particularly in ascribing an act of betrayal to "Connie." Which is, I take it, what the elliptical ending of the story is intended to reveal.

Am I meant to infer that you know something I don't—i.e., that Corrine slept with Duane Peters—or simply that you are resentful of what you so clearly believe to be our fool's paradise? I don't think we ever hung out a sign billing ourselves as the world's perfect couple. God knows we have our problems, but they're
our
problems. I don't recall asking you to comment on them in print...

For some reason he hadn't told Corrine about the story, perhaps because he was bothered by the implications. He didn't really believe Jeff knew something he didn't know, and simply to raise the subject at home would be unpleasant.