Brightness Falls (37 page)

After the car stereo was stolen one night when they left the Jeep outside their building for five minutes, they installed a removable model and Russell hand-lettered onto a piece of Chinese-laundry shirt cardboard the words NO radio. This practice served only to remind Corrine of the disparities around her. To her it seemed like the smug slogan of a club to which she didn't want to belong, a mantra of frightened privilege. When she drove by herself she didn't put the sign in the window.

On one occasion they made the trip out to the Island in Bernard Melman's helicopter, after lifting off from the bank of the East River and watching the skyline, spiky as a bed of nails, fade behind them in the haze. Everything felt so heavy, Corrine didn't see how the helicopter could possibly get them aloft and keep them there. Her body was like a bladder full of some dense, foul-smelling substance. She hadn't felt like eating at all, lately. But once they were out of sight of the city she usually began to feel better.

They entertained frequently in the country—"country" being the term applied by Manhattan dwellers to the region of densely populated villages at the eastern tip of Long Island. Their parties acquired a small reputation because they were an attractive new couple in the Hamptons, because they were younger than most of the people who took houses east of Westhampton, because Russell was on the verge of becoming important in the sphere of which this spit of sand was the summer outpost, because in their innocence they mixed people in unexpected configurations.

Within days, it seemed, Russell's circle of acquaintance had grown exponentially. Having spent a few moments in the press, he found himself neighborly with the people who actually lived there—on the pages of magazines. Pop stars, literary lions and business moguls were occasionally among those at the dinner table. Russell didn't question his new social position, and he became annoyed with Corrine if she referred to the sudden change in circumstances, which she suspected was partly a function of the relaxed social conditions of the season and the place, or of the patronage of Bernard Melman, who summered nearby at a huge waterfront house in Southampton that everyone wanted to see from the inside, if only to share in the indignation that swept the Hamptons after he had gutted the ninety-year-old Stanford White mansion in order to seal and insulate it for central air conditioning.

When Corrine worried about the extravagance of their socializing Russell insisted that he was surreptitiously conducting business; many summering writers had, in fact, signed the Villa Pommes de Terre guest book. One night at the Calloways', after seven vodka martinis and a bottle of Chardonnay, a six-foot-four Pulitzer-winning novelist, who looked like a great blue heron with Albert Einstein's hair, offered to leave his wife for Corrine, his manner so lugubriously courtly that she had to try very hard not to burst out laughing. Russell mentioned to a second visiting literary totem, a compact athlete of fifty who wrote best-selling comic epics, that he'd played some baseball in college, and was promptly invited to play shortstop in the annual writers' and artists' softball game, in spite of intense competition from many of the local elite who neither wrote nor painted—the owners of media empires, galleries and movie studios whining, pleading and threatening the respective coaches for a turn at the plate.

While Corrine and several hundred vacationers watched, Russell hit two doubles and a triple, caught three flies and tagged two runners, his workaday awkwardness banished. He was actually an athlete, Corrine recalled proudly, watching him, almost graceful when he narrowed his concentration to the physical realm. A gallery owner in right field who was being sued for fifteen million by the widow of a dead Abstract Expressionist was heard to bitch about the ringer on the writers' team.

There was a legend about a hot novelist, the toast of the literary season one previous autumn, who had disgraced himself in his sole appearance at this game. Thereafter his career had foundered—a series of bad breaks and bad reviews in a spiral of increasing obscurity—and most of the literati attributed this fate to his hapless performance on the field. Su-perstitiously, Russell took his own game to bode well for the future.

Tan and triumphant, sitting on the porch back at the shingled house with a gin and tonic on his knee, Russell said, "Baseball, she been bery, bery good to me." It was hard not to share his good spirits, but when he added, "Life is good," Corrine feared he'd jinxed them and she rapped her knuckles on the door frame, which proved to be metal rather than wood.

Russell watched the Iran-contra hearings on TV, bellowing with indignation at what he took to be the perfidy of the Reagan administration. Washington watched with him for several hours one Friday afternoon. Far from being indignant, he seemed pleased to have his sense of endemic official skulduggery confirmed. "This shit goes on all the time," he explained to Russell. "They just got caught this time." Washington had been particularly pleased when Russell's candidate, Gary Hart, tripped over his own pantlegs, which happened to be down around his ankles, and had to withdraw from the race. Joseph Biden, too, would later drop out, when he was caught with someone else's words in his mouth.

In town and country, Bernard Melman entertained on an imperial scale, and the Calloways attended several of his parties at the beach house, which they, like many of the guests, secretly found a little
too
overblown, and even more secretly enjoyed.

As he walked to work in the city one morning in July, cocooned in his scrum of sweating bodyguards in black suits, Bernie Melman was considering his upcoming party, the centerpiece of his season. Among the respondents to the hand-delivered invitations were three senators, three cabinet members, five movie stars, two network anchormen, a former quarterback, two princesses, a baron, two dukes and a marchioness, three gossip columnists, innumerable fashion models, a pop singer and seventeen of the Forbes Four Hundred. The usual suspects. Among those who had sent regrets, once again, were his parents.

Melman
père
owned a carpet-cleaning service; Bernie's older brother was a surgeon, his younger brother a patent attorney. The three of them together didn't make half a million a year, but the brothers had gone into respected professions, whereas Bernie, no matter how much money he made, could not allay his parents' suspicion that he was some kind of con man. In fact, they almost disapproved of his wealth. Just the week before, his father had sent along a clipping from
The Plain Dealer
sharply critical of leveraged buyouts. Moreover, Bernie's parents had yet to forgive him for divorcing his first wife, whom they loved and who spent holidays with them, and were barely civil to the new one, whom they referred to as "the Queen."
Divorce
was not a word in their vocabulary, except insofar as it referred to a lurid Gentile practice.

Only recently had they shown any interest in his acquisitions. When he told them he was buying a publishing company, his father asked if he was going to publish Saul Bellow. "Not yet," Bernie responded.

"Hmmm," said his father, an absent hum that indicated to his son his mind had just stepped out for a long, solitary walk.

"There's no reason why I can't publish him in the future," Bernie said, adding, "Have you heard of Victor Propp?"

"What's he published?" The old man had him there. "I'll find Saul Bellow, all right?" And indeed Bernie had tried, approaching the Nobel laureate through official and private channels, so far without success. Meantime, he'd offered to send his private jet to Cleveland—his parents could come to the party and be back home in Chagrin Falls that night. The social, political and business elite of the country were coming to Bernie Melman's summer house, some of them flying from as far away as Los Angeles, but his mother was unwilling to miss her bridge club.

One humid Saturday evening a few weeks after Russell's group had made the first tender offer, Corrine found herself on a back porch of the Melman summer house, scanning the lawn for Russell after having disengaged herself from a trio of younger Kennedys down from Cape Cod for the party. Fifty yards away, the ocean throbbed against the beach; on the lawn, waiters in tuxedos darted like pilot fish around CEOs in jeans and polo shirts. She caught sight of Sasha Melman, a head taller than most of the company. Corrine had talked to her earlier in the afternoon. She was like something constructed on specifications for a rich man, encased in jewelry, dermatologically taut. As Corrine pondered the mysteries of tall, rich women, she spotted something—was it the blow spout of a whale?—out just beyond the surf.

Retreating inside in search of a bathroom, Corrine ascended a back staircase to avoid the crush downstairs. After the sun and the noise outside, the cool upstairs hallway was sepulchral and eerie. Hearing music and voices behind a door on the second floor, she crept forward and listened, recognizing Jeff's voice above the lugubrious rock. When she knocked, the conversation stopped abruptly. "Shit," said the other voice.

It was too late to retreat gracefully, so Corrine identified herself and eventually Jeff opened the door.

She stepped cautiously into the room. The initial ambience was that of a bar at closing time, the air heavy with smoke, sweat and beer, although the room faced the ocean and was bright with tropical fabrics and white wood. But, the shades were down and the air hadn't been stirred in hours. Tony Duplex, the neo-expressionist painter, was sprawled on the unmade bed.

"Yeah, I remember," he said, in answer to her nervous greeting, with that reflexive solipsism of the famous. "You didn't tell us you were coming out," she said to Jeff.

"Tony made me come along. " Jeff looked like he always did, boyishly aging, his lanky frame draped in jeans and oxford cloth and, in honor of the season, a badly rumpled off-white linen jacket.

"My fucking dealer made me come, and I wasn't about to face this alone," Duplex explained. Hair pulled back in a ponytail, he was wearing shades and a black T-shirt, his face an important new shade of white.

"Your dealer?"

"Yeah. That asshole Melman owns about half of my work, so I have to go to his parties. My dealer's afraid he'll start selling short if my attitude doesn't improve. So here I am in the fucking Hamptons for the fucking weekend. I dragged Jeff along."

"The devil's in the Hamptons," Jeff observed.

Tony reached over and cranked up the volume on the boom box on the bedside table, from which an adenoidal voice whined: "If you ask me why I hate you, I'll try to explain..."

"You like the Cure?" Tony shouted to Corrine, suddenly hospitable now that he was sure she was leaving.

"Cure for what?"

"The cure for fucking Phil Collins," Jeff said.

"Are you coming down," she asked Jeff.

"I'll be down."

"Why don't you stay at our place tonight?"

"I'm probably going back in. But I'll call you."

Outside the door, Corrine turned to Jeff. "Please come." She stood on her toes and threw her arms around his neck. "Don't push us away."

"I'll try," he said.

Back on the porch, she was about to walk down the steps and plunge into the crowd, when she realized Bernie Melman was standing next to her. To Corrine's eyes he looked a little ridiculous in casual attire, with his hairy arms and his belly swelling out over a pair of kelly green trousers. Some people were simply not meant to be seen out of uniform. Feeling she was being unfair to him, she said, "It's a nice party. Thanks for having us."

"Having a good time?"

She nodded. "How can you tell?"

Corrine shrugged helplessly.

"You should get out there and mingle, meet your second husband," he said, smiling impishly. "Some of the richest men in America are out on that lawn in their Bermuda shorts, and at least three of them have already asked about you. I said you were married, but these guys, they think when they see something they like they can have it. They wanna open charge accounts for you at Bulgari and Bendel's, you name it. Personally, I can't vouch for any of these mutts," he said, seeing she was just
barely
amused. "In fact, if you want I'll have them hauled off the premises immediately. Just say the word. One word. Whoosh. Into the fucking ocean, right? You met my man, Ralph, over there," he asked, indicating a dark shadow on the corner of the veranda. "Ralph's way beyond black belt, he's got a fucking platinum belt in some Korean martial art you never even heard of, it's so secret. Hey, hey, Ralphie boy... what's the name of that kung fu you do?"

"Tae kwon do, Mr. Melman," the adept called back.

"Right, whatever. Listen, he could get killed for even saying that out loud. Secret stuff. Once some moron actually tried to mug me, and Ralph threw him all the way across Fifth Avenue, all four lanes, right into a fucking pushcart. Pretzels flying everywhere. So say the word, he'll put these guys into orbit. Or anybody you want. Like that little number down there hitting on your husband. Boom! She's outta here."

Down on the lawn, Russell was indeed engaged in conversation with a distressingly thin brunette with the coltish features and theatrical gestures standard to models.

"Or
him,
maybe," Melman added, winking.

"I should think you'd be a little more loyal to your new business partner."

"Russell, hey, I love Russell. He's a great guy. Smart, good-looking. But I wouldn't exactly call him a business partner. For him it's business, for me it's more like charity."

There was some kind of disturbance out on the lawn and beyond, a noisy riptide of agitation that seemed to be drawing bodies down toward the sea. Registering danger, Ralph moved in closer to Melman, who looked up toward the newly excited pitch of voices coming from the ocean. They walked down to the beach together, following what was left of the crowd down the lawn. Shouts and squeals were drifting back from the water's edge over the roar of the surf, and some of the people up front were now surging backward, creating an undertow to the predominant beachward trend. Corrine kept pressing forward and suddenly found herself thrown against Russell, who took her hand.