Brightness Falls (34 page)

Lurching like a drunk in his terror, he nearly collapsed on the pale peach runner stretched between door and stairs. To minimize the potential for further indignity, he scooped the watch from his pocket and handed it to the bald man, muttered something about finding it on the carpet and fled into the welcoming night.

27

By show time the house was nearly, if heterogeneously, full: students in blue jeans and practical cottons surreptitiously studied the downtown aesthetes in black leather, who were unhappy to find themselves among so many suits, those hip real estate lawyers and media execs who hadn't had time to change after work, including one young free-lance social critic in blue pinstripes who stood in the ticket line and complained, "This place is full of yuppies." There were also widows who lived on Sutton Place and in Bar Harbor who came to all of the readings and contributed generously to the support of poetry magazines and experimental theaters; gaunt twenty-two-year-olds who worked at bookstores and publishing houses and ad agencies when not laboring on their first novels. Harold Stone was here—with one of the young literature students—as were the chiefs of half a dozen publishing houses and magazines. The press was present to verify the reality of the occasion. Juan Baptiste, happily settled into his uptown gossip column in one of the tabloids; a stringer from the Cleveland
Plain Dealer;
a feature writer from the
Times.

Defying the summer heat, a man in a giant hooded green parka was camped out amidst a sprawl of books, papers and bags in the front row. A correspondent of Victor Propp's, he possessed a complete collection of the author's periodical publications and many related and marginal materials, stacked in cardboard boxes inside his tiny walk-up apartment in Jamaica, Queens. Others with a similarly hungry if less proprietorial air loitered in the aisles—those wild-eyed men and women who haunt literary events hoping to receive some impossible, healing message from the laureate, the wise man in whose words they have discovered the unique private significance, or whose words they may not have read yet but fully intend to, in the meantime seeking a sign—a word, a blessing, the telephone number of a good agent. Bernie Melman arrived late, with Sasha towering blondly at his side, along with two of his bodyguards, and took his reserved seat in the front row beside the man with the green parka, who defensively rearranged his own empire of paper.

Russell had primed the pump by inducing a friendly journalist to write a short piece titled "Who the Hell Is Victor Propp?" for the front section of
New York
magazine. Bernie Melman's wife had planned a "little supper" at their home after the reading, which the
Post's
society column had that morning declared the "hottest invite in town."

Russell and Corrine were waiting backstage with Victor and his companion, Camille Donner, a celebrated lover of litterateurs. A thirtyish beauty with famous red hair, she had lived with two other novelists before moving in with Propp. In addition to her amuletic function, she attended to the quotidian details of life, which Victor found impossible, serving as housekeeper, secretary and treasurer—though it was difficult for most observers to envision Camille with a mop in her hands. She, too, was said to be writing a novel. Harold Stone had introduced her to Russell years before at a publication party; as she looked through him, his body at that time having the low-density, transparent quality common to editorial assistants and others of negligible position, she had nevertheless taken the time to ask him who he thought was the best novelist in America. When, partly out of a young man's desire to purvey unconventional opinions, Russell had proposed dark horse Victor Propp, she'd been surprised enough to focus her green eyes on her interlocutor for a moment and size up his conviction. "Who," she'd asked, scribbling a mental note to double-check this seemingly eccentric opinion with higher authorities. Pleased to have captured her attention, Russell had ardently described the work of his cultishly obscure hero while trying to cope with waves of mind-scrambling lust—a conversation that he doubted she would wish to be reminded of, and that he had never mentioned to Victor. Now she stood beside the great man, her lover, serene with the conviction of the beautiful woman who has no need to make strident claims on the notice of any gathering.

Victor was pacing the floor of the hospitality room, increasingly ner- vous. Only slightly less agitated was Mathilde Fortenbrau, the benevolently schoolmarmish representative of the Y, who began tugging on her steel-gray pigtails at seven forty-five. "Perhaps we should call him again," she murmured over and over. Russell had planned to meet Jeff for a drink downtown first, but when he called to confirm a woman with a Spanish accent had answered and announced he was busy and would come directly to the reading instead.

Corrine tried to reassure Victor about Jeff's reliability. Russell was not so sanguine. He kept meaning to do something or say something, while systematically avoiding the issue of drug abuse even in the privacy of his own mind.

"Frankly, I imagined this bad-boy thing was just a literary persona," Victor protested. "I mean, he comes from a respectable New England family, doesn't he?"

Russell called Jeff's number and shouted at the answering machine, to no avail. Mathilde pulled hard on alternate ponytails, tipping from side to side. "This has never happened before," she said. "Even with Dylan Thomas." Her associates hopped like sparrows between backstage and the auditorium. At eight-twenty everyone agreed there was no choice but to begin without Jeff. Russell offered to give the introduction in his place.

"I can't go out there," Victor insisted. "I'm not going to make a fool of myself." His long forehead creasing with worry, he plucked at the hairs in his beard.

"John Berryman called from a bar on Third Avenue a few minutes before he was scheduled to read," Mathilde recalled. "We sent a delegation to fetch him."

"What should I do?" Propp demanded of Camille, who was sitting browsing through a copy of
TriQuarterly,
rather, it struck Russell, as if shopping through a catalogue for a new companion.

"You'll either have to go on or cancel the reading," she answered sensibly. Her response drove Victor to despair.

Russell massaged his shoulders. "Calm down, Victor. They're your fans," he said. "This isn't really Jeff's crowd."

"I don't have any fans, there are only ten people in the country who
understand
what I'm doing." Victor was nearly in tears. "They've turned out for some kind of freak show, to see the Boo Radley of American letters. ... I won't even consider going through with this... this
disaster."

Propp ripped himself out from under Russell's grip and ran, bolting out the backstage door through a tunnel that bypassed the auditorium. Russell gave chase and reached the sidewalk in time to see him disappear in a cab.

Moments after the announcement of cancellation, Bernie Melman charmed his way backstage with the assistance of his bodyguards.

"What is this shit?" he barked at Russell. "We're going to pay this asshole... how much? and he can't even get up and read out of his own fucking book? Now I've got fifty people coming to my house for dinner, right, to celebrate this fucking calamity. What the hell am I supposed to tell them?"

"Artists are temperamental," Russell offered.

"Well, so am I temperamental. And right now I'm in a real bad temper. Hey, I wonder," he said, turning to the two bodyguards. "Do you think that makes me an artist? Christ, what kind of fucking business is this?"

"Have you met my wife," Russell asked, thrusting Corrine forward in the spirit of throwing oil on raging waters.

"How do you do?" Bernie said, suddenly calm, looking her up and down with an air of thorough appraisal. "I'm very pleased to meet you."

"Russell," Corrine demanded, refusing to play her role, "we've got to find Jeff."

"And this is Camille Donner," Russell said. Camille was more obliging than Corrine, postponing her flight to her lover's side. When Russell and Corrine exited, she was deep in conversation with the tycoon.

"Let's just go down there," Corrine said, when they had returned to their apartment. She'd already called three times.

Russell was not so certain, afraid of what they might find.

"We still have a key," she said. "Don't we?"

"I'll go."

"I'm coming," she said, reaching for the portable phone, pressing the redial button. "Corrine, there's something you—"

A shriek from Corrine abbreviated this thought.

"Can you believe it, he fell asleep," Corrine said, after she finally hung up, her exasperation leavened with relief. Looking at Corrine. Russell could imagine the justice of the charge she would make when he told her what he'd seen at Minky Rijstaefel's party. The next time Jeff didn't show up somewhere he might not be able to answer the phone. He wanted to tell her, but he couldn't shake the indefensible notion that in his silence he was protecting both of the people he loved best.

The reaction to the nonevent at the Y was curiously mixed and ultimately satisfied those who initially had the most reason to be unhappy. Victor Propp's dusty, enigmatic legend grew immeasurably, burnished with a shiny coat of scandal, while Jeff's performance was in persona. In the absence of an official explanation, the rumors that circulated were much more interesting than any possible response to an actual reading. The two were alleged to have duked it out backstage. The teetotaling Propp was supposed to have passed out in the classic novelist's manner. Many sympathized with the reports of the sensitive artist and recluse, palsied backstage with agoraphobic terror or overcome with stage fright. Others considered the cancellation a deliberate piece of strategy on the part of the notoriously strategic Propp, the nonreading an extension of his policy of nonpublishing. In his new column, Juan Baptiste subscribed to this theory, concluding: "Also a no-show was best-selling novelist jeff pierce, who later in the evening was healthy enough, if not necessarily
compos mentis,
to attend the after-opening party for tony duplex at Nell's." A week later, in an essay published in a downtown weekly, a fashionable critic was uncharacteristically fulsome in his appreciation of Propp as "the quark and the black hole of contemporary American literature, a nearly theoretical entity whose size and shape and importance can be deduced only partly from visible manifestations," and concluded that "Derrida having made the author obsolete in favor of an endles; scrim of
écriture
and intertextuality, Propp apparently means to erase even the text with his long silences, punctuated by glimpses of dazzling prose—the silence itself assuming legendary proportions, the long-unfulfilled promise of the novel, which we register in pieces, like glimpses of flesh beneath a hem, this deferred gratification perhaps the very point of the enterprise."

Victor Propp himself particularly liked this essay, and he carefully clipped it and added it to the heavy leather-bound scrapbook he had purchased in Florence some years before in anticipation of the reviews that would greet his novel, which scrapbook now was nearly filled with articles in anticipation of that blessed event.

28

Jessie Makepeace had always gotten along well with her son-in-law— better, it sometimes seemed to Corrine, than with her older daughter. The first time she and Russell had met they stayed up together half the night in the kitchen in Stockbridge, killing a bottle of vodka while Corrine slept in her old bedroom. Russell said she was ballsy, intending it as a compliment. "Like a house on fire" was the phrase Jessie used to describe their happy conspiracy... though as an idiom for amity it seemed pretty inexplicable to Corrine, who could always spare a little worry for the strange lumps embedded in the language, as if, like nodes in the breast, they might bode ill or conceal dangerous truths.

"She was the little girl who always asked why. Used to drive me crazy," Jessie said, rattling the cubes in her drink. " 'Why, why, why'... You were the most curious little girl anybody ever did see."

Jessie was sitting cross-legged on the living room floor with her back against the fold-out couch that was her bed when she visited Russell and Corrine in New York. "Drove her teachers crazy, didn't know what to do with her. And when they tested her IQ it went right off the chart."

Why did it seem to Corrine that her mother made this fact sound like a defect, a genetic mutation that had fortunately proved relatively harmless, Corrine having, by general consensus, turned attractive after a homely childhood and having managed to get married? Her mother had been here only ten minutes but already Corrine could feel herself becoming brittle and humorless.

"What's so bad about being curious? Or smart?"

"We're just teasing you, honey," Jessie said, lighting up a Pall Mall. We? Corrine thought, while Russell went to the kitchen for an ashtray.

"I'm dying to hear your news, Russell," said Jessie. "When's my son-in-law going to take over his own publishing house? Did I tell you we even read about it in our
Berkshire Eagle?
I've got the clipping in my suitcase, remind me."

With his usual enthusiasm Russell was happy to summarize and even embellish recent events in the drama, making it sound like a cross between
High Noon
and
Paradise Lost:
the staggering amounts of money, the night of the wine hurling, capsule biographies of the various contestants.

"I don't think you're being really fair to Harold," Corrine interrupted. "He's done an awful lot for you."

"And I've given a lot back to him, and to the company," Russell said. "Doesn't mean I have to stand by and watch Harold and the others run it into the ground, strangle new ideas and new talent. The question is, What's Harold doing for the shareholders and the reading public?"

Russell's manner of speaking had changed in the last month. Resorting to phrases like "the reading public," he'd gone pontifical, talking about the rights of shareholders and the stagnation of American business. Of course, he'd picked a lot of it up from Bernie Melman and that twit Trina Cox. Corrine had noticed it in some of their college friends—the way they started talking like their jobs. Men more than women. Speech was the early-warning sign, the canary in the mine. Over dinner you're having a perfectly reasonable conversation about art or the sex lives of celebrities and suddenly the word "prioritize" would come out of someone's mouth like a wad of gristle coughed up onto the tablecloth. Educated people started using nouns as verbs—"access" and "impact." The ideas and the politics soon followed. "Say what you want about Reagan, but ..." Maybe there was something wrong with her, that she hadn't been able to turn into an actual stockbroker with a stockbroker's haircut and wardrobe and way of looking at the world. Some childish recalcitrance. There were days when she almost believed she was doing something useful— helping her people get a decent return on their money. Then she'd go into a sales meeting where they would talk about customers like lambs to the slaughter, to be loaded up with a lot of high-commission packaged junk, and she would realize she actually
was
a sleazebucket.