Brightness Falls (28 page)

"What do you suppose your mother would say," Russell's father suddenly asked.

"She'd see that I had to do this," Russell said. "She'd trust us both to do what we had to do."

His father nodded, looking up at the ceiling, cigarette smoke pluming from his nostrils. "You know," he said, his voice a little wobbly, "it wasn't because I was mean that I made you kids earn all your spending money. She used to think I was too hard on you. Especially that summer in college when you wanted to go to Europe with Jeff."

"God, I was mad at you."

"I just wanted you to know that ... I wanted you to be able to take care of yourself. "

"I understand," Russell said a little curtly, for he had heard this before.

"Do you know what I mean," his father asked, as if he hadn't heard.

"Yeah, I know. Don't worry. I'm not going to hate you if you don't invest any money. We've got a commitment from this guy Melman. I just wanted you to know what I was going to do, and I thought you might want an opportunity to buy into the deal."

"And there's your brother to consider. It wouldn't be fair to just hand the estate over to you."

"I'd cut him in, too." As soon as he had said this, Russell cringed at his own grand manner. "What a guy, huh?"

His father watched the smoke unfurl from the tip of the cigarette. That was one of the harder things for Russell about giving up smoking, the pleasant distraction of having a toy at your disposal, something to do with your hands. "I'm not telling you to be like your old man and collect your salary from a big corporation all your life. Because you know what?" He suddenly lowered his gaze and looked hard at Russell. "They're bastards. They don't really give a goddamn about human beings in the end. That's what my father told me, a UAW man all the way, working the line, seeing from the bottom up, and I thought I was a lot smarter than him. But he was right."

Russell was afraid he was about to see his father cry. And so he said, as lightly as he could, "Trouble at the office, Dad?" As much as he wanted to understand his father, he was afraid that real intimacy after all the years of cautious proximity would reveal some frightening genetic secret in himself.

"I'm taking early retirement. Their decision, not mine."

"You have no choice?"

He shook his head.

"Shit."

"Nicely put," his father said after a moment, the spell of gloom dissipating. He pushed the TV tray forward and walked to the kitchen with their plates.

"I can see how you might want to be conservative with your assets now," Russell said, trailing behind.

"Maybe. Either that or go for broke. Let's have a nightcap."

20

Sleeping alone was like death. Even from inside her dreams she could sometimes feel Russell's body or its absence. As if something terrible had once happened that she'd forgotten, she had dreams of being chased, dreams of being cut with razory metal, and when she awoke from such dreams, being alone was like a second injury. All the years with Russell hadn't entirely eased her sense that she might be abandoned at any moment. Her mother used to disappear, the first time when Corrine was six—Corrine and her sister, Hilary, playing in their room, suddenly the door flung open and her mother with a fierce red look in her eyes screaming at them, they were terrible girls, they had ruined her life, tearing the pictures off the wall and scattering toys and clothes. Corrine and Hilary huddled in the corner until she disappeared, as suddenly as she had come. That time they didn't see her for three days. Their father, who didn't like little girls who asked too many questions, said nothing. When she reappeared she was fine, the good mother who played cards and watched TV with them. And every morning Corrine would leap from bed and race downstairs to see if her mother was still among them.

Waking up on a Saturday morning without Russell, she wondered if he missed her when they were apart. Somehow she imagined it was almost a relief to him, a break from her constant presence, her smothering attention.

She lay in the warm cocoon beneath the quilt staring at the thin slice of dusty sunlight that entered the room where the curtains joined, heavy chintz drapes she had bought when the English-country look took over Manhattan a few years back. Russell thought they were girlish but he conceded the bedroom to her, and she had made it into a nest lined with white wicker and floral fabrics, while the living and dining rooms had a dark, masculine feeling of leather couches and sturdy chairs. Lying in bed she noticed the peeling paint on the ceiling. The whole place needed painting.

In the living room she turned on the TV for company, made coffee and read the
Times.
Saturday paper—no big horror shows on the front page. Jim and Tammy Bakker scandal. Gary Hart momentum. Bush eating pork rinds to atone for Andover and Yale. Just plain folks—who summer in Kennebunkport. Cautious optimism in the business section. Foresee continued growth and stable interest rates in the blah blah... Crossword puzzle, God, she thought, why does 4 down have to be "adulterous"? At least nobody trying to force-feed her this morning. She hated to eat breakfast, but Russell was always after her to choke something down, as if he wanted her to blimp up or something, just because she'd had a little problem when she was a teenager a few thousand years before. All the girls she knew went through that stage, practically. A prep school thing, like Fair Isle sweaters and silly nicknames. Miss Anorexia Nervosa 1972—Corrine Makepeace. Fighting against the body's sudden ripening. When only the year before prep school she'd chanted with the other girls in the junior high locker room, rhythmically squeezing palms together to work the chest muscles the way the boys did to make farting sounds:

We must, we must, we must increase our bust. The bigger the better, the tighter the sweater...

Katie Petrowski already with big ones and Corrine with her training bra. Clearing the table, last night's Chinese cookie fortune: "If wishes are modest they will come true." Save to show Russell. Reality check. Earth to wheeler-dealer Calloway.

She returned
Jules and Jim
to the video store and walked over to Madison to meet Casey Reynes at Marigold, where they lunched on Diet Cokes, Casey big with heir. Corrine thought she looked wonderful and said so.

"Please. If I just
survive
I'll be happy. They had the most gorgeous suits at Armani, and me big as a townhouse. Don't you think it would be thoughtful of Tom the Fourth to vacate the premises a few weeks early so Mom could get on with redecorating?"

Corrine would have gladly traded places. Sucking on her lemon slice, she said, "I think it would be a relief to not have to be glamorous. You have this dispensation. I'm so tired of picking an outfit in the morning. I'm tired of
dressing.
I think I just want to be barefoot and pregnant."

"I'll show you a dress at Valentino that will change your mind about that."

Despite her condition Casey had already been shopping, and she displayed some linen sheets she'd bought at Pratesi for her guest room. "So much better for you than cotton," Casey claimed. "Don't even talk to me about blends." Casey's husband was a trader and seemed to make more money than even she could spend, though she tried very hard. Commerce aside, he was worth millions the day he was born. Shopping was Casey's primary occupation. After lunch they went to Valentino and Versace, where Casey bought a suit and a belt and Corrine restrained herself. Vicarious shopping. Casey bought and Corrine watched. A blouse she admired was almost a month's rent. If they had not been former roommates, Corrine would have judged Casey superficial and decadent, but she retained a historical impression of a fat girl with a beautiful singing voice whose idol was Sylvia Plath, which made the Madison Avenue Casey seem more substantial than she could possibly appear to a recent acquaintance.

They stopped in at the Whitney, and the visit might have seemed to indicate a remission of Casey's acquisitive fever, but after only a few minutes she turned to Corrine and said, "Tom and I are thinking of buying a Fischl," as if the procession of canvases on the walls reminded her of nothing so much as shop windows.

"Let's have tea at the Plaza," Casey said suddenly, turning away from a Hopper painting.

They took a cab there, sliding along the border of the park past the line of idled horse-drawn carriages waiting, the blinkered horses chewing blindly in their feed bags. Like many other inhabitants of the city the horses looked more attractive from a distance—Corrine loved the
idea
of a romantic carriage ride through the park, the moon and the turrets of apartment buildings around the park appearing and disappearing above the feathery treetops. With her socially correct shopping bags, Casey marched through the dazed tourists in the Plaza lobby, leading Corrine up an aisle of potted greens and Easter lilies to the clearing in the greenery where the thin strains of a string quartet competed with the clatter of silverware and the mostly feminine voices of those seated at tables—women of a certain age, with chemically lightened hair and sun-darkened skin, older versions of Casey.

Tea at the Plaza—this was one of the things Corrine had always wanted to do but never gotten around to. Always too busy. It would be a wonderful city to live in if you had three different bodies. One to work like a fiend, getting ahead, the second to lunch at Café des Artistes and take in auctions at Sotheby's and exhibitions at the Met and poetry readings at the Y. The third body to wake up late in the afternoon and stay out till dawn. Work, play and live: with just one body it's impossible, except when you're very young and you first come here and then it's magical for a short period when you get your first job and discover the city like an explorer and you never need to sleep, but suddenly you find you're older and you realize you don't have any money compared with everyone else in the city, or maybe when you get a few dollars you become older and by then you've lost the ability to be three people at once. Or else you're rich, like Casey, and all the rules are suspended.

Freeing her serviette from its ring, Casey said, "You will absolutely not believe what the father-to-be did the other day. You know the Good-harts, don't you? He's English, practically grew up at Blenheim. Anyway, they're off to Kenya for a month and they were afraid they'd miss the baby, I guess, so they come over for dinner with two little Tiffany boxes. So I put one of them on Tom's plate. And he opens the box and says, 'Hey, I've always wanted one of these.' And we all look at him and finally I say, Tom, darling, it's not for you. It's a rattle for the baby.' 'A rattle?' he says, blushing. Well, it turns out my darling husband thought the baby's rattle was a cock ring."

The waitress arrived and deposited a tea service and a sort of silver shelf of little pastries and crustless sandwiches that looked too pretty to eat.

"It's terrible, always wanting to eat," Casey said. "And my doctor keeps telling me I need to put on more weight. And then there's sex. You start to feel so unattractive..."

"Has Tom lost interest," Corrine asked, opening a tiny sandwich like a book to check the contents, prepared to be indignant at the perfidy of the other sex. Patres unfamilias.

"Actually, I wasn't really thinking of Tom."

Corrine looked up from her slim volume of buttered cucumber, a little bit shocked, a reaction that Casey, despite her artfully jaded tone, seemed to have anticipated.

"Well, don't tell me in all these years you've never ... I mean, Tom is away half the time and it's not like I don't have a sex drive. Marriage isn't about sex, anyway. The Europeans know that."

Fascinated, Corrine leaned forward. "Aren't you worried about—"

"That AIDS thing is so overhyped," Casey said, taking a smug swallow of tea. "Honestly now, how many heterosexuals do you see splotched up with Kaposi's sarcoma?"

"I meant, about the baby?"

"Well, it's safe right up to the last month, and believe it or not, some men find it kind of a turn-on."

"But what if... what if it's not Tom's?"

"It's his. If I'd had any doubts about that, I wouldn't have even told him. I already had two Hooverings when I wasn't sure."

Corrine felt wicked just listening to this. "I can't believe ... I mean, how do you manage?"

"Simple. Pay for the room in cash, and by all means don't take home any of those telltale little shampoos."

21

After work Trina walked the few blocks down Park to the Racquet Club, a pink stone fortress that squatted in the Bauhaus glass thickets of lower Park Avenue like a waistcoated Edwardian banker waiting patiently amidst the rabble in a bus terminal.

Arriving at the office that morning she had found that Aldridge was in Cincinnati for the day; but he'd left word for one of the senior partners that he would be in the grill at the Racquet Club at seven, and despite the rule barring women from the club, or perhaps because of it, Trina decided to call on him. She'd planned to ask for him, but the flinty-faced Irishman at the front desk disappeared into the cloakroom with a large package as she walked in; she slipped past the desk and ducked into the elevator before he returned. While she was trying to decide which floor to push, the elevator began to ascend, slowly and noisily. As if of their own volition, the doors opened on the third floor; just beyond the door nude men loitered on benches, drifted through the steam, hailing each other in unnaturally hearty voices. No one noticed her as she punched the "Close Door" button, but a gray flannel voice commanded, "Hold that elevator," as the doors began to close, while from the other side of the damp hallway a young, classically proportioned athlete/banker whom Trina had been eyeing turned suddenly, catching just a peripheral glimpse of her, which at the time he would dismiss, and which later, after the sighting was confirmed, he would recall for the benefit of his friends in the grill room: I
feel like someone's watching me
—you
know that feeling?
—
and I look toward the elevator, the doors are just closing, and I swear I see this girl, and I mean a damn good-looking girl, in the elevator, hut I say, Naw, can't be.
Stepping out on the second floor, Trina found herself in a cavernous world of dark wood, old varnish and cracked leather upholstery that seemed to be perfumed with the essence of some long-extinct masculine hair tonic. The walls were hung with sporting prints, ancient wooden rackets and mounted brass plaques inscribed with the names of tournament winners and dates stretching into the last century, the names of several of Nicky Aldridge's forebears among them. A number of the plaques were devoted to competitions in an obscure form of indoor tennis that survived here and in a handful of places in the Old World. A sepulchral hush prevailed, the common rooms being unpopulated. It occurred to Trina, who lived in a one-bedroom condo in a five-year-old skyscraper on Second Avenue, that if Aldridge's great-grandfather were to be time-transported to Manhattan in 1987, this was one of the few places in the city he would recognize, and feel at home in.