Brightness Falls (36 page)

Victor Propp, still working on his second book, was among the prizes being contested. He was critically sniffing a honey-colored glass of Mon-trachet at The Four Seasons one afternoon when Harold Stone said, "I assume we can count on you, Victor. We've had our differences, but I can't believe you... Let's face it—Russell's relatively unproven and Bernie Melman is a ruthless philistine, for all his Post-Impressionists."

"He does own a Cézanne I'd dearly love to see."

"How's the book," Harold asked curtly.

"It develops new layers almost seasonally," Victor confessed, sucking through his teeth to aerate the wine. "I've come to think of it as a palimpsest, but not without linear narrative. I even dare to think it could be a contribution to our literature. Of course, I'd like to think that my publisher, whoever that might be, shares my guarded optimism."

"We do. We always have. That's why we have a
contract
with you, Victor."

Propp cited the case of a literary rival who had recently extracted a seven-figure advance from another publisher, which amount struck Victor as an authentic vote of confidence.

"Be realistic, Victor."

"The times have outstripped realism, Harold. Try to cultivate a touch of absurdity. It might help you to catch up. Do you think the Montrachet is a bit acidic?"

Two days later Victor lunched with Russell, Trina and Washington at The White Room.

"Is that a rock-and-roller," he asked about a greasy-haired diner at the next table.

"Hair model," said Washington.

"What's Harold's pitch," Russell asked.

"He gave me a nice lunch."

"What did he offer," Trina asked.

"It was my understanding that he would give me a million to stay with him." Victor put his hand on Trina's thigh in token of something or other. Whatever the attractions of the other side, he clearly liked Russell's investment banker.

"We'll give you a million and a quarter," Trina proposed. "Half cash, half paper."

"Nice high-yield, low-calorie paper," observed Washington.

"Junk bonds? I hardly think so, ladies and gentlemen. I'm a writer, after all, and I daresay I know all about worthless paper."

"It's called risk," Trina said. "Like we're taking with you and your invisible novel."

"I want equity."

"The guy's meshugge," Trina said, turning to Russell. "Where'd you find him?"

Late into the warm weekday nights, Trina, Chip Rockaby and Dave Whitlock huddled in her new office suite in Rockefeller Center, consulting green figures under Russell's anxious gaze, seeking to justify a higher tender offer, in case their first was rejected by the board. Melman checked in by phone, as did Victor Propp, who had no formal role in the takeover but couldn't bear to be left out or, apparently, to face the blank screen of his word processor. Fascinated by the financial arcana, Russell wanted to observe everything, although when Corrine complained about his hours he conveyed—without quite intending to deceive—the sober air of a man weary and burdened by new responsibilities. For the number crunchers, a spirit of necessary optimism prevailed in calculating future earnings, and the value of the individual divisions on the auction block. The more bullish the projections, the higher the price they could offer. It was essential to look on the bright side, which suited Russell's temperament as well as the times. Prices had been going up for years; what looked expensive today would be cheap by next week. Whit-lock was something of a drag in this regard. He kept objecting to rosy prognostications, pointing out the cyclical nature of the business, but Russell was impressed with the manner in which Trina coaxed him along.

It was ten o'clock one summer night when they finally quit. Sustaining energy had become such a habit that Russell knew he wouldn't wind down for hours. He suggested dinner. The lawyers had already gone home. Outside on the sidewalk, Chip decided he was too exhausted to go anywhere. He collapsed into a taxi. Which left the, to Russell's mind, somewhat ungainly troika of Whitlock, Trina and himself.

"Where do you want to go," Trina asked.

"The White Room?"

"It's such a production," Trina said.

Whitlock followed the exchange with interest, sweating eagerly in the heat radiating up from the sidewalk, while Russell groped for a channel of communication to which he wouldn't be tuned.

"I'm pretty beat, anyway," said Trina, glancing ruefully at Russell, who nodded.

"Come on, you guys," Whitlock urged. "Let's grab a bite."

"I should get home," said Russell.

Over Whitlock's protests he flagged a cab for Trina, and kissed her cheek, reading a friendly challenge in her raised eyebrows.

Climbing into another cab, Russell gave his own address. A clouded bulletproof Lexan barrier separated him from the driver, and also from the life-giving air conditioning, which leaked feebly through the tiny holes theoretically allowing him to communicate with the driver—if indeed he spoke English. The presence of the barrier was justified by a perfect circle of logic; steaming in the malodorous backseat, Russell certainly felt the urge to strangle the chilled and insulated cabbie.

He felt himself in the grip of one of those extreme moods that come upon city dwellers, his spirit hemmed in by walls as it was agitated with the static charge of the desperate social and mercenary activity around him. He needed to expel this nervous energy from his body, talk it out or shake it out on, say, a loud, crowded dance floor.

Corrine would be worn-out from her day, perhaps already asleep. Full of schemes, he wanted to talk about the deal that had absorbed all of his attention for weeks. But she was tired of hearing about it. He didn't suppose he blamed her, but she shouldn't blame him. He would settle down again soon enough, but at the moment he wanted to stake a claim on the attention of the larger world, beyond the private realm of his family and friends. If he were to die at this moment, in this miserable steaming coffin of a cab, he would leave nothing behind: he'd published some books, on the sufferance of Harold Stone, most of which would have been published anyway, marginally improving them with his blue pencil. The thought that only his friends, his father and Corrine would miss him made him angry. He had great faith in his own abilities, but he did not have the power to exercise them.

Sometimes he wondered if he had blunted his ambition in marrying so early. Corrine accepted and loved him as he was. By not demanding more of him, perhaps she'd held him back. He had never developed that predatory, competitive edge. Sexual appetite suddenly seemed like a corollary of the will to power and creation; he pictured himself as a house-broken creature, lulled into slippered complacency. Why should he go home, goddamnit, when he didn't feel like it?

Two blocks away from his house, he leaned forward and barked a change of address at the ventilated plexiglass; a few minutes later he was deposited in front of Trina's building, a new luxury tower on Second Avenue. He had dropped her off here a few weeks before. Now he followed a red carpet through a green grove of potted foliage and announced himself to the doorman, who asked, "Is she expecting you."

This routine question discomfited him, implying a certain level of conspiracy in Russell's ostensibly whimsical decision to stop by: the ethical dimension threatening to assert itself.

"Quite possibly," he said.

"I'm
so
glad you came over," Trina said southernly. "I just couldn't quite handle old Whitlock tonight, but I'm definitely not ready to crash. God, excuse the mess..." Although the apartment was by no means neat, it was essentially empty. The living room was devoid of furniture except for a single director's chair, a stationary bicycle, and an old Vuitton trunk stacked with magazines, newspapers, annual reports and empty food cartons. A collection of Perrier and Diet Coke bottles nested in a corner outside the open kitchen area. Russell walked over to the picture window, which looked out over the East River to the semiurban sprawl of Queens.

"How long have you lived here?"

"I don't know. A year? Maybe two, actually. I know, I know—I've got to get some furniture. You want to go out somewhere?"

"Sure."

"Or we can have a drink here."

"Okay."

"I think I've got a bottle of Dom some client gave me."

She retrieved the bottle and then looked around for a suitable place to drink it. "The bed's the only real furniture. You don't mind, do you? We can sit in there and be comfortable."

Russell thought it would be priggish to object, two colleagues having a drink. So what if it was the bedroom? The limited decor was gender-neutral—a pair of skis leaning against the wall, a framed poster from the van Gogh show at the Met. They sprawled out on the bed, Russell asking about the financing, the soft-money options of a higher bid.

"So the beta factor," Trina explained, "is the risk factor of a given investment. It's the multiple, beyond the T-bill rate, that you use to calculate the required return on equity. Is this incredibly boring?"

"No, absolutely not."

"I know—I'm like the investment banker from hell. Shut up, Trina, for Christ's sake."

"No, really."

"Well, anyway, a beta of one is the market rate. Oops, little spillage, here." Licking her wet wrist, she said, "A high beta, like two, indicates high risk and a higher required rate of return. See?"

Russell nodded earnestly, grasping a small portion of the concept. A bottle of Möet appeared suddenly on the bedside table. Trina was easy to talk to, and it seemed to him she talked like a man, relating war stories from her days at Silverman, sketching grotesque portraits of her colleagues. He felt more and more relaxed. That Corrine could object to this—sitting around shooting the shit, hanging out, like the guys—was absurd, though he should call her soon. Christ, it was already eleven-thirty. But they were just sitting here, side by side on a piece of furniture that just happened to be a bed.

Even when she twisted over on top of Russell to pour him another glass and kissed him instead, as if merely because she chanced to be in the immediate vicinity—this was harmless enough. Why should anybody object to this pressing together of lips, which felt so good, after all? Why should pleasure be a zero-sum commodity, when the store of it could be so easily expanded, the wealth increased by sharing?

Everything seemed perfectly natural up to a certain point, but eventually, at about the moment that his hand almost inadvertently discovered a breast, his conscience began to awaken from its champagne daze.

"I've got to go," he said, pulling himself free and rolling to the far edge of the queen-sized bed. This attempt at an assertion had a quavering, experimental ring to it; if she'd attacked him at that very moment he might have surrendered.

But instead she simply said, "Are you
sure?"

In another half-minute he was sure, or at least sufficiently convinced to stand up and say good night.

"Don't tell me you've been faithful to Corrine all these years," she asked, as he was leaving.

Actually, he had, but this confession would sound unbelievable, and slightly shameful, so he merely winked as he waved good-bye. Maybe he was a low-beta kind of guy, after all. In the elevator, plummeting downward, he felt a flutter of guilt. But once he was out of the building in the warm night air, he decided that the salient and final point was that he
hadn't
done anything, and he strode briskly along the avenue toward home.

30

The weather was a leveling element: all seemed equal under its sway, although the homeless proliferated that summer like tropical greenery pressing up through the cracks in the sidewalk, while immigrants camped till long after nightfall on tenement stoops outside purgatorial rooms, playing dominoes and percussive dance music from home on new portable stereos. The only sound that emanated from inside the insulated towers of money was the constant, ubiquitous hum and drip of air conditioning. The wealthy stayed walled inside thermal fortresses, or they went to the beach.

For the first time, the Calloways had taken a house of their own for the summer: a wood-shingled nineteenth-century farmhouse on the edge of a potato field near the ocean. From their bedroom at night they heard the waves, and when on cloudy days the sea was not visible there was the compensation of the sunset, spread out over the flat horizon like a cooling ingot of molten gold glowing rosily through the cumulus. Mature hedgerows and several well-placed maples shielded them from most of the million-dollar vacation homes that sprouted brazenly amidst the spuds, the fruit of new fortunes made on Wall Street and Madison Avenue. Reckless experiments in solid geometry vied with gargantuan imitations of indigenous Shingle Style cottages. Situated between the traditionally fashionable towns of Southampton and East Hampton, the potato fields had become reversely chic in recent years. When Russell joked that the location made him feel closer to his Irish roots, Corrine pointed out that they could
buy
a house in Ireland for twenty thousand dollars—the tariff for the ten-week season in the Hamptons. Despite her reservations she liked the farmhouse, which in contrast to its self-conscious new neighbors had a certain ramshackle charm.

David Whitlock and Washington Lee were frequent guests, sharing a bathroom with the occasional midwestern novelist recuperating from a semester's teaching, or East Village poet deeply suspicious of sunlight and physical recreation. Tim Calhoun, who had once said that the only good poet was a dead poet, had come up from Georgia to deliver his new novel, pledge allegiance to Russell's new enterprise and drink some bourbon; one Saturday night he'd started shooting rabbits in the front yard with an unregistered .44 Magnum revolver. Victor Propp lasted nearly a day before he leaped up in the middle of dinner, tormented by sudden inspiration, and commanded the smoldering, compliant Camille Donner to drive him back to his desk in the city. Despite repeated invitations Jeff remained in the city, and when Corrine pressed him he said, "The devil's in the Hamptons."

To get to their summer house and back they acquired a Jeep, this being the requisite transport for youthful urban warriors that year, taking its place alongside the already cliché BMWs and Saabs in East Side garages—and also on the meaner streets of The Bronx and Queens, where it was the ride favored by the better-heeled crack dealers and where its martial pedigree and rugged-terrain capabilities made more sense. The Calloways had never been able to afford a car before, much less the three-hundred-dollar monthly garage fee standard in their neighborhood. But given the seventy- or eighty-odd million dollars of debt that Russell was about to partake in—and a large advance on salary from Melman —the car loan seemed, like the cost of the rented house, proportionally minuscule.