Brightness Falls (30 page)

After Whitlock ventured off in search of the men's room, Washington asked Russell if he'd told Jeff what was afoot.

"Not yet."

"I wouldn't let him hear it from anyone else," he said, as Whitlock reappeared.

A tiny elfin figure passed in front of their booth, a young blond man dressed entirely in black, his long, pale face bisected by heavy dark glasses. He fluttered a hand at Washington.

"Aren't
we
important tonight," he said.

"Every night," Washington said.

To Russell: "Still looking over my book proposal?"

"We're looking hard at it," said Russell. Who
was
this guy?

"I'm thrilled."

"Who was that," Whitlock asked. "I thought Truman Capote was dead."

"Got reincarnated as a gossip columnist," said Washington.

"What," asked Whit.

"That's Johnny the Baptist. Chronicler of quips that pass in the night."

"Shit—
that
guy," Russell muttered. "I think I lost his proposal."

"Is he going to write about us," Whit asked. "What if Harold hears about this?"

Washington rolled his eyes. "About what? Three guys nobody's ever heard of who work together having dinner? Stop the presses. Anyway, don't worry, he never writes about anybody who dresses like you."

Fearing that Whit was becoming isolated, Russell took the black linen sleeve of Washington's Versace jacket between his fingers and said, Speaking of dress, did they let you wear clothes like this up at Harvard? Didn't they teach you about oxford cloth and tweed?"

"They tried. And I tried to teach them how to dance."

"Obviously a standoff."

"Yeah, but we always had girls from Brown to console us," Washington countered. "They used to cruise up from Providence just desperate for real male companionship."

"You were welcome to most of them," Russell said.

"Very chivalrous of you."

When Washington excused himself, Russell leaned closer to Whitlock. "Listen, on top of everything else we've talked about, I can promise you one percent of equity if the deal goes through and a flat hundred thousand if it doesn't. I'm making it real easy for you, Whit. You're getting a free ride."

"It doesn't feel easy."

But as dinner progressed, Whitlock relaxed. He warmed to the role of innocent abroad, refusing to take his surroundings for granted, complaining about the brightness of the light and the delicate size of the portions. He kept asking the waitress for a pair of sunglasses and an electron microscope; for dessert he facetiously requested three and a half grams of sorbet. But he snapped to attention and earnestly pumped the hand of Julian Heath when the elegant, distracted owner of the restaurant came over to say hello. Whitlock understood, despite his relative social innocence, that the owner of a fashionable restaurant was a personage whose importance was roughly equivalent to that of a magazine editor, a symphony conductor or a painter with a one-man show at the Whitney, although as it happened this one wished to be known for his sculpture and bitterly resented having to be civil to sculptors and painters who did not own restaurants, as well as filmmakers, rock stars, novelists and the fashion lemmings who followed them around. Doing a restaurant was something Heath had backed into, practically, a way of paying the rent until his sculpture took off, but now the place he'd opened a few years back for the SoHo art crowd had become so successful that he was stuck with it, stuck with a five-year lease and the label of restaurateur. This, his second restaurant, was even hotter than the first. It didn't seem fair to him: if it had failed he'd have been in his studio right now hammering steel instead of stopping here to schmooze with Washington Lee, though Washington was okay, he had spent a lot of money in Julian's restaurants, was good-looking and amusing and a spade to boot, and he usually brought the same kind of people with him—at least until tonight. It was policy at the restaurant to hide the suits in the back corner. What the hell was this crew doing at the front booth?

"Okay, okay," Whitlock said as Heath escaped, having succeeded in igniting small fires of self-satisfaction in the breasts of the three publishing colleagues. "I surrender. Order champagne. You knew I'd say yes, so let's get it over with."

23

The buzz enters through his lungs and spreads like an electric current into the bloodstream, passes Go and collects two million dollars, rockets up the spine, deposits it at the back of the skull, where it explodes in a burst of white phosphorescence—that prickly feeling in the scalp is what it feels like to step onstage in front of the screaming people, plugged into the main source, tapping into power absolute and burning with that pure, white light...

But the light fades. The light always fades, the buzz modulating into raspy static; the tingle that started on the inside of his skull has moved deep into the folds of his brain. Ace leaned back and rubbed his head against the wall as if that might soothe the sudden itch—a fiery, subcutaneous rash which must at all costs be scratched.

Holding a blackened glass pipe, he was sitting on a warped linoleum floor in a room with five other people, three men and two women. There was an old bathtub in the middle of the room, painted green long before and flaking now, filled with soda and beer cans, cigarette butts, plastic wrappers, glass vials and organic refuse. From within came the rustle of paper, sounds of scratching and mastication. Claws.

Oh,
man,
he thought.
Ugly.

At one end of the dim, narrow room, a fat man in a distended Billy Idol T-shirt perched on a tall chrome stool that appeared to have been uprooted from an old luncheonette, filling the doorway with his bulk. At the other end of the room was a second, closed door. The steel had been crudely blowtorched at chest level and fitted with a sliding panel. Behind the door a sweating homeboy huddled like an astronaut inside an armored capsule, a former bedroom also paneled in steel; a shoulder-wide triple-bolted steel hatch opened to a hole punched through the brick wall of the adjoining tenement, providing a handy escape route.

Two brothers in fishnet shirts slouched in the corner, looking psychotic—Ace glanced away real quick, lest they think he was dissing them. A white boy gazed longingly at the oracular glass pipe in his hand: in his football jersey he looked as if he'd just driven in from the suburbs, a boy who was going to be late for geography class the next day. After staring for several minutes at the blackened, empty tube, he stood up, tacked over to the rear door and, with all the dignity he could muster, knocked on the little steel panel. The panel slid back and a voice barked. "Yeah?"

"You take checks?"

"Get out my face, Jack."

The panel slammed shut. The boy slumped back against the wall with his hands over his face.

Ace could relate to that, having just finished his last, having run through forty bucks. Six left, which was as good as nothing, unless he split a dime with one of these disgusting dope fiends. Looking down at his feet he wondered what anybody might pay for a pair of reasonably new high-top Ponys.

The sounds coming from the bathtub were really getting under his skin. Was he imagining it, or was there really a rat or some other beast in there? Either way it was nasty. He glanced at the foot of the bathtub, a claw wrapped around a ball, squeezing the ball, crushing the life out of the poor helpless fucking ball.

A skinny white girl with raccoon eyes crawled over in Ace's direction. "I'll do you for twenty," she said.

Ace shook his head carefully, economically, not wanting to feel it coming loose from his neck. "Ten."

"Fuck off," he said, the head-shaking having proved painful, trying to think how he could score. Last thing he didn't need was no trip to no oval office, anyways.

She crawled over to the fat man at the door. "How 'bout you?"

"I'm working," he said.

Looking up at his overstuffed rock star T-shirt, she said, "I spent three days with Billy Idol in Nassau." She'd said this several times already in Ace's hearing. It was definitely the high point of her life, getting done by Billy Idol, even though it was a total lie for sure.

"Yeah?" said the fat man. "He came into this bar where my cousin used to work at. Drank vodka and tonic."

"That's what he drinks," the girl said with solemn conviction.

"He just walked in, you know, like he could be anybody, and just kind of sat down. You know?"

"That's what he's like," the girl said.

They meditated silently for a moment on their separate, coincident visions of Billy Idol, she sprawled on the floor and he perched on the stool that had every right to collapse underneath him, while Ace tried to figure how to get some money to scratch this maddening itch.

"What's your cousin, a bartender?"

"Dishwasher. But he got fired."

"Oh, that's too bad."

Ace wanted to scream. Either he was completely losing his mind, or he had heard this conversation twenty minutes before, or maybe it was the day before. Maybe it was some other fun couple.

"Listen, I'll do you real good for twenty bucks."

"You already did me for ten, you stupid slut."

"I did? When?"

Nodding toward the bathtub, the fat man said, "Catch that rat I'll give you ten bucks. But you got to do it with your hands. And kill it," he added, his eyes disappearing into the fat horizontals of his face as he smiled.

The girl crawled gamely for the bathtub.

Seeing in her desperation an acute version of his own, Ace was suddenly overcome with disgust. The buzz was gone, replaced by an insatiable void. He stood up and lurched past the fat man and down the stairs. On the way out he passed a ravaged cowboy staggering on the staircase, carrying in his arms a VCR wrapped up in its own outlet cords, looking down at his burden warily, as if it were a roped calf that might suddenly explode into motion.

In the open air, the dead buzz sputtered into a rage that hissed and crackled within the clouds of his brain, like an incipient lightning bolt ready to blast the highest object on the landscape. But nothing was moving on Avenue D, except for Ace and the bugs under his skin. He told himself they weren't really there; last time he binged, he ripped his arms all up trying to scratch them out.

It was dark, probably early morning; he'd traded his Swatch for a vial hours before. Couldn't even get a scam going at this time of night.

Spotting a seriously fucked-up white man in a tuxedo shambling toward him, he considered rolling the guy, though as the dude approached his height began to look formidable. Ace was still considering a move when he recognized Corrine's friend, the writer. All things considered, Ace decided to appeal formally.

"Hey, man, met you up to Corrine's place. You shouldn't be wandering around down here, not this time of night."

Jeff stared down on him. "Is that a threat?"

"No, man, no way." Though the tall man could hardly stand up, Ace sensed a reckless menace in the dark, glassy stare. He shuffled off again before Ace had found the words to hit him up for money.

Ace didn't want to cope with the shantytown hustlers, so he headed for an empty lot over on 3rd Street, then ducked through a hole in the wire-mesh fence and plunged through the garbage toward the back of the lot. Something was moving in the brush against the building back there, like a flashback to the fucking bathtub with the rat—or maybe it was somebody else crashing out in his spot. He kicked a piece of plywood experimentally and it seemed to explode. A snarling fur coat materialized from the mess—a big spotted cat, which rocketed over the debris and disappeared through the hole in the fence.

Astonishment and fear soon modulated to economic speculation. If he'd been quicker he might have picked something up and whacked the fucker over the head. Hey, somebody'd pay thirty, forty dollars for the skin, easy.

24

Harold Stone received the news in Washington, D.C. He was at National Airport, on his way back to New York after lunching with a senator who wanted to do a book. The lamb chops in the Senate dining room were better than the proposal: confessions of a reformed liberal, a genre stretching back at least to St. Augustine, which had enjoyed a spectacular revival in the past seven or eight years, during which time liberals had had nothing much to do except reform and write books about the process. Still, he might have to publish it, Harold had decided, if only as part of a publishing gestalt that kept the channels of information and power open between Washington and New York and Cambridge. The senator's book would lose money, but it might pay off in other ways, although Harold would have felt better about the proposition if this self-professed statesman had not looked baffled at a conversational reference to Metternich.

With fifteen minutes until the next shuttle departure, he called the office, wondering as he punched the number what he was going to do about Carlton, who had outlived her bloom as a lover but remained his assistant. The relationship would continue on for a while, lingering like a patient on life support, but essentially it was over. Probably he would have to promote her to get rid of her, shuffle her off to another floor or at least to the other side of the eighth. Of course, some were gracious enough to seek employment elsewhere, and he was always good for a reference. But the last, Judy Setsenbaum, had made noises about legal action and they'd had to kick her upstairs at a substantial increase in salary, which prompted Kleinfeld, the little bastard, to lecture him about shitting where he ate. He was remembering what Judy Setsenbaum looked like, when he finally connected with Carlton.

"Harold," she said. "I've been trying—"

Kleinfeld was suddenly on the line. "Harold, your goddamn little protégés down the hall have put the goddamn company into play. They've got six percent of the stock. They filed a Thirteen-D today. The little pricks are trying to buy our asses out."

"Who is?" As astonishing as this sounded, Harold couldn't help wondering how a man who barely cleared the dashboard of his Mercedes could be so free with the diminutives.

"Calloway, Washington and Whitlock."