Brightness Falls (27 page)

A new entrance seemed to have excited the general interest, a big ponytailed man in army surplus togs standing in the doorway of the ballroom, flanked by two muscular black men in T-shirts.

"Hey, that's Paul Rostenkowski, the homeless guy," exclaimed a female voice behind her. "He lives in this tepee downtown, I saw him on TV the other day."

Minky swept over to congratulate this new guest on his arrival.

It was a curiously self-referential affair. People kept asking each other their opinion of the party, comparing it with past events, querying each other on future invitations. Looking for Corrine, Russell spotted Jeff across the room, but Russell's path was blocked by two young social lions.

"Were you at Pablo's dinner on Tuesday," asked one.

"I was at Constantine's and then we went to Club A."

"Why is Minky having a party for Uri?"

"He had one for her wisdom teeth last year."

"Wisdom
teeth?
Minky?"

"Wasn't that the actor—the one with the funny tie. What's his name, Johnny something."

"Actually, he's a look-alike Minky hired for the party. The bartender told me."

"Is she getting
that
desperate?"

"Johnny Mannequin."

"That's it."

Buzzed, and a little bored, Russell saw Jeff slip into a bathroom at the back of the parlor floor and made his move to follow. He collided with a model. "Do I know you," she asked. He knew she was a model because she had
model
written in tall, thin letters stretching from the toes of her highly arched feet to the thrusting blades of her clavicles. Beneath an open leather jacket, the lace of her black bra winked at him. The long, straight hair breaking on her shoulders; the unlined, angular face. Only models wore blue jeans to black-tie events. She was the perfect example of her type, and his heart suddenly ached at the thought that he was wedlocked, that this girl and all the other girls in the world in their incredible variety and identity would forever remain strange.

"I mean," she added, "aren't you somebody?"

"I'm a self in the limited, Humean sense," Russell proposed. It was established that Marina, although in fact a model, was in the poetry program at NYU, which nearly provided a slender justification for the ensuing exchange of phone numbers.

"I'll take you out for lunch sometime," he said in parting, immediately wondering why he had offered. Suddenly he wanted to see Jeff, with whom, at least, he could share the dilemma of being a male
Homo sapiens.

The bathroom door was closed. Russell knocked once and then pushed the door, which unexpectedly yielded. Jeff was sitting on the sink. Swiveling slowly at the neck, he turned on Russell a milky, distant look that betrayed faint recognition. His bow tie was cinched around his bare left arm, and a drop of blood had run from its source just below his bicep to the hollow inside his crooked elbow. In his other hand a syringe dangled lightly between two fingers like a cigarette.

"Christ, Jeff."

A dazed smile gradually bloomed on Jeff's face. "Russell," he said. Russell locked the door and watched, transfixed, as Jeff untied the bow tie and rolled down his sleeve. "You used to do drugs in bathrooms with me," Jeff said, a note of reproach in his voice.

"Not... like this."

"No, it was all just good, clean recreation." Jeff tilted his head back and closed his eyes, exhaling a sigh of animal contentment. He mumbled, "Day tripper." Eventually he lowered his head and opened his eyes, as if performing a languid perceptual experiment. He seemed mildly surprised to see Russell. "Would you, uh, believe me if I said I was a diabetic? Not enough sweetness in my life, a dearth and deficiency of sweetness. Or is it too much? And you? What's your excuse? What are you? Let's see—how about
dilettante?"

"Are you all right?" Russell felt stupid as soon as he asked, not even sure what he meant.

"Just peachy. At this exact moment I am absolutely right with the world."

"Let's get out of here," Russell said, coming up behind Corrine. And suddenly, remembering she was angry with him, she said, "Who was that brunette you found so fascinating?"

"Some poet I met somewhere," he said, his manner a little too studied, it seemed to her, as he steered her down the stairs.

"Poet?"
She didn't want to let this pass unchallenged, but Russell seemed distracted, upset. "You okay," she asked.

He nodded unconvincingly.

"God, that was Eurotrash hell," she said as they stepped into the street.

"Some kind of hell," Russell muttered.

"Are you all right?"

"I just need some air."

She was happy, and surprised, that he was ready to go. Usually she needed a block and tackle to haul him out of a good party, but he seemed played out.

Behind them, the party was still going strong. An hour later the English journalist discovered a woman in the bathroom with her wrists slashed. An ambulance arrived. Eventually everyone learned that it was Delia, no last name, who had been the girl of the moment a few years before. The English journalist would write about her. His article would appear several months later in
Vanity Fair.
And Minky Rijstaefel would have a party celebrating the publication of the issue.

19

At Detroit Metro, Russell rented a car, one of the local products, which nowadays seemed as generic and bland as the mechanical walkways that had conveyed him from his gate to the baggage claim. The big automakers displayed their sexiest models in the terminal, mounted on squat pedestals in the middle of the floor like taxidermied specimens of an endangered species, this being the hometown of American transportation. At the rental counter it had not occurred to him to ask for a General Motors car, although this had been the policy of his family since before he was born, at a hospital heavily endowed by that company— bundled home in a Chevy convertible, with fins, to a house in Birmingham whose mortgage was paid for by his father's GM salary. Not till he was out on I-94 did he notice that he was driving the competition.

This was the first time home since Labor Day, eight months before. The featureless sprawl of the roadside landscape reminded him of the comment of a New York/Exeter kid in his Freshman dorm: "I visited the Midwest once. There was nothing to see and nothing to keep you from seeing it. " At that moment he hated all New Yorkers and all snobs. So he tried to imitate them, telling Corrine when he first met her that he was from Grosse Pointe—the expensive, pedigreed suburb of Detroit, which even the eastern preppies had heard about. Thank God, she didn't seem to remember, not that she would've cared. In the car he grunted loudly and shook his head at the memory of this earlier self, then flipped on the radio, trying to remember the call numbers for the university station, looking at the landscape through eastern, urban eyes almost fifteen years after he'd left, and finding it wanting in interest and beauty. Turning north on 24, he tried to imagine the ruins of the city to his right. When he was very young they'd go in once in a while to Hudson's, to a ball game, before the riots of '68, which they'd watched on the local and national news. He couldn't remember being downtown after that until he went in with his high school friends to buy pot and get drunk in Greektown. He thought of Stein's remark on—what was it? Oakland? No there there. Or Chrissie Hynde on Akron. My city was gone. Except it had never been his city. He'd grown up about as close to Motown as any other white kid who had ever listened to Marvin Gaye and the Supremes.

He took the Birmingham exit, and stopped at a liquor store to buy a bottle of Glenfiddich. His father was a scotch drinker but bought himself the cheap stuff, a habit that seemed absurd to his son, as did the practice of driving to the next town to save three cents a gallon on unleaded premium. These little tics of false economy provided a great deal of satisfaction to the old man and drove both Russell and his brother up the wall. Browsing through the wines he found a surprising bottle of '79 Lynch-Bages and picked it up for dinner, which would certainly be some cut of red meat his father had picked up at Price Chopper on sale several months before, pulled out of the freezer and thawed under the broiler.

After turning off the commercial highway he passed through neighborhoods green with shrubbery, four- and five-bedroom homes on acre lots subdivided out of farms after the war. He turned into a dead-end lane. The white colonial in which he had lived for much of his life came into view behind the spiky red leaves of the Japanese maples he and his father had planted in a row along the street. Russell working the hose, filling the deep holes with water, his father wrestling the burlap-wrapped packages of roots into position.

Today his father was watching the street, and he came to the door as Russell climbed out of the rental car. They embraced on the driveway, an awkward male hug, uttering words of greeting. When they stepped apart his father looked at the car, while Russell looked his father over— grayer, thinner of face. But Russell was relieved that he didn't see an old man. He still retained the basic features of a handsome middle age.

"What's with the Plymouth, young man?"

"Is that what it is?" Russell said. "How can you tell? I thought it was a Chevy."

"Still a smart aleck, I see." He tried to cuff Russell playfully on the back of the head, but he wasn't quick enough.

"Still driving that Buick," Russell asked.

"Yeah, and just between you and me I wish to hell I could drive a Mercedes."

"Go for it," Russell said.

"I just might do that," he said grimly, as Russell retrieved his overnight bag from the shotgun seat. "Traveling light," he observed, Russell hearing a trace of disappointment in his voice. In fact, he'd planned to spend only one night, though he had been vague with his father over the phone. Maybe he could manage one more night, he thought.

"Corrine's well," his father asked as they proceeded automatically to the kitchen at the back of the house.

"Great. She had a friend coming in from Denver, or she would've joined me," Russell said.

"So it's not trouble between you?" his father said, alluding to the purpose of Russell's sudden visit.

"No, I told you, nothing bad. Quite the opposite."

"That's a relief. She's a great gal."

He handed his father the bottle of Glenfiddich.

"My wealthy son."

"A simple thank you is the traditional polite response," Russell observed, thinking perhaps the scotch had been a tactical mistake.

"Join me in a cocktail," asked his father, already reaching in the freezer for the ice.

This was one of the things Russell loved about his father, the slightly formal way in which he delivered these ritual incantations,
Join me in a cocktail?
or
What's your pleasure, young man?
Nodding his acceptance, Russell scrutinized his surroundings with a vague air of suspicion. "Why does the kitchen seem so much smaller?"

"You don't notice any change," his father asked coyly.

"Something's different. "

"New floor and cabinets," his father said proudly. "The wood's darker than before. That's what you noticed. Scotch?"

"Sure. Why'd you do that?"

"We've had the same kitchen since we moved here."

"Seems like kind of a waste," Russell said. "I happen to live here, young man."

"Sorry, I forgot."

"I noticed."

"I've been incredibly busy, Dad. And it's not like you haven't seen us in the city."

They both sipped their drinks experimentally, and then his father hoisted his in conciliatory manner. They touched glasses.

"I thought we'd stay in, thaw a couple of steaks."

"Sounds good."

"We should be eating fish," his father said, and Russell thought he was alluding to calories and cholesterol. "Remember Fish Stick Fridays," he asked, referring to the ancient Catholic practice of abstaining from meat every Friday, until the immutable laws of the Church had changed.

"It sounds pretty crazy to me," his father said, after they had finished dinner and Russell had revealed his plan. He wanted not so much his father's capital as his blessing.

"I know. I mean, it must. New business ideas always sound wild." Russell hadn't expected it to go down easy. His father had grown up during the Depression, worked on salary for the same company all of his life, risen steadily through the corporate ranks and invested in blue-chip stocks which had over the years rewarded his patience. The idea of buying out one's own employer had to seem radical.

His father smiled. "I never thought I'd hear my left-wing son lecturing me about new business ideas. I remember arguing in this room about Watergate, young man. You thought Nixon should have been escorted directly to the guillotine."

"I still think so," Russell said, but now they were both grinning. Several times in the past they had nearly come to blows over politics, Russell's mother intervening to preserve some semblance of peace.

Returning to his earlier tack, Russell said, "So what have you got? Two hundred thousand in GM stock that's not going to go anywhere in your lifetime. It's a dog. I'll double it for you in three months."

"There's absolutely no guarantee you can pull this off."

"Even if we fail, the stock will shoot up as soon as we declare intent. At worst we walk away from the table with a big pile of chips."

"At least GM
makes
something. Maybe it's not the most efficiently managed company in the world. Maybe we're dinosaurs. But there's something wrong with the economy when it rewards the speculators and lawyers and bankers without producing anything. No wonder the Japs are killing us."

Scowling fiercely, his father lit a cigarette. Russell remembered how that scowl used to terrify his friends. And Russell himself at one time. Now he felt solicitous—almost, it occurred to him, as if he were the concerned parent. And in the familiar setting of the den, as he sat on the old couch, which had grown softer over the years, he became infected with some of his father's doubt. He had grown up here, and even as he struggled against it, he had absorbed something of his father's worldview as unconsciously as he had inhaled his cigarette smoke.