Brightness Falls (38 page)

"Can you see it," she asked, just as a great silvery-blue crescent rose over the tops of heads like a streaming sliver of moon and they were almost knocked backward in the general retreat.

"Come on," said Russell, his face boyish with excitement. He tugged her forward until they broke out of the crowd at the edge of the high-tide shelf of sand on the beach.

The creature was thrashing in the shallows, half out of the water, a man-sized fin standing almost upright on its exposed flank, dwarfing the humans submerged to their waists in the surf. Churning the foam and sand. it was trying to swim onto the shore, as if it had given up on its watery life and hoped to emulate the remote ancestor it shared with these puny, agitated terrestrials. A powerful stench filled the air—something ancient, retrieved from the bottom of the ocean. "Go back," Corrine whispered. Looking into the huge black eye, above the gray furrows of the belly flesh, she felt herself drawn into an abyss of sadness.

Russell stripped off his shirt and plunged into the water to join the men who were trying to push the whale back, away from the shore.

"Watch the tail!" someone screamed.

Several times they managed to nudge the animal out a few yards, but the incoming waves and the animal's own struggle to beach itself were relentless. Russell was up to his waist in the water shouting directions and throwing his weight against the slippery doomed bulk. As darkness fell, a Coast Guard cutter appeared a hundred yards offshore. Nine or ten policemen were shifting around helplessly in the sand when Russell finally emerged from the water.

The party had achieved an acute focus; all of the guests were veterans of the charity fund-raising circuit, and now a crisis had been laid right at their feet. No one knew what to do. A man from First Boston was already taking up a collection to save the whale, walking along the beach with a silver champagne bucket.

"It's horrible," Corrine said. "I know." Russell was less ebullient now, winded and shivering. "You want to take the car?" he said. "I'm going to stay."

"Jeff's here."

"He is? I thought he melted in sunlight."

"Try to get him to come to the house tonight, okay? He's holed up in a dark room with that creepy Tony Duplex."

"I'll try. But don't hold your breath. He's got a lot in common with this goddamn fish."

She'd guessed Russell would stay to the end, do what he could do. He couldn't bear to think something exciting was happening without his participation, and the sunny, pragmatic tint of his character allowed him to believe that he would have some positive effect on the outcome. But she had seen the doomed look in the whale's eye, and she didn't want to see any more.

The man taking up the collection, red-faced and glassy-eyed under his Mets cap, thrust the champagne bucket under her nose.

"Say the whale, say the whale."

"How?"

"How?"

"What are you planning to do with the money?"

His jaw slowly worked loose from the rest of his face and hung slack. The question, evidently, had not occurred to him before.

31

On Sunday nights a hundred-mile strand of red tail- and brakelights unspooled between Montauk and Manhattan, like a string of melancholy beads signifying the end of the weekend, Russell and Corrine's among them.

The night after Bernie Melman's party they were listening to WINS news radio for progress reports on the beached whale as they motored slowly toward the city. By eleven it was pronounced dead. The music stations, meanwhile, all played the same lugubrious U2 songs over and over—"With or Without You" and "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking for," real Save the Whales music. Phil Collins was bound to whine into earshot any minute now. It seemed to Corrine that rock and roll was more fun when they had first come to New York, when they used to stay out half the night dancing. Whatever happened to Blondie, the Cars, the Clash?

"I wonder," she said, "whose job it is to pronounce whales dead?"

Russell was taking this defeat personally. There was little fatalism in his makeup, scant suspicion that animal flesh was merely the helpless vessel of tyrannical amino acids, that human destinies were written indelibly by a capricious deity. Corrine thought he lacked a sense of evil and for this reason was ill equipped to go into business.

As if to demonstrate his inability to read her mind, Russell suddenly said, "I like Bernie. He's turned out to be a really decent guy."

"You think everybody's a really decent guy." For all of his intelligence, Russell had always been a little dumb about people, always erring on the side of trusting the guy with the waxed mustaches. She told him about her conversation on the veranda with Bernie. "I don't know how far you can trust him. He's funny and everything, but it was almost like he was propositioning me."

"Well," Russell resumed, after a short, air-conditioned silence, "I can't say I blame him."

"That's all you have to say?"

"What do you want me to say?"

It wasn't until that moment that Corrine admitted to herself what she really wanted was for him to give it all up—renounce his dealings with Melman, forget about buying the company. They were in over their heads. That's what she'd been feeling at the party. And so, though she hadn't particularly been offended at the time by Melman, she persisted in exaggerating the offense.

"You'd do business with a man who wants to sleep with your wife?"

"Jesus, Corrine, lighten up. Some of my best friends want to sleep with you." He thought this a witty compliment, but when he looked across at her she was staring into the glare of the windshield, shaken, wondering which best friends he had in mind.

Suspended between the red lights in front and the white lights behind, they rode in silence the rest of the way into Manhattan. On his side, Russell brooded on what he took to be Corrine's Manichaean nature: she was so goddamn extreme that anything she couldn't love she feared. The extremes were becoming more pronounced of late. And she was getting too thin, her eating habits verging on the anorexic—a problem that had recurred intermittently with her since prep school. When she didn't feel she could satisfactorily control other aspects of her existence she decided to chastise her body.

He tried to resume the conversation several times, as if nothing had happened, but she answered in clipped monosyllables.

The
Daily News
headline read: "Whale Crashes Shark's Party." The
Post:
"Whale of Guest at Hampton Beach Bash." The humpback whale was thought to be the largest leviathan to wash up on Long Island in this century. A day later, the
Times
ran two column inches beneath the headline "Whale Beached in L.I." A
Village Voice
columnist charged that Melman had dumped several gallons of whale pheromone off his beach the day before the party, a claim that a Melman spokesman called "ridiculous," citing the evidence of several marine biologists who derided the concept. Much later, in a valedictory essay about the eighties published in
Harper's,
the party at which Bernie Melman had exhibited a captured whale was cited as a signal instance of the decade's egregious excesses.

That summer Corrine still took the subway downtown to her office and back from Monday to Friday, but everything else had changed. Russell had always had too much of a desire to please, in her opinion, and his campaign to take over Corbin, Dern had almost transformed him into a politician. He needed to be collégial with Dave Whitlock, Washington Lee and Leticia Corbin; he needed to smile for the stockholders and the outside members of the board, to feed and stroke the writers. No one but Corrine's husband, apparently, could do it. He also needed to spend an inordinate amount of time with Trina Cox. And apparently he had to drink a lot of liquor in order to take care of everyone, because he usually came home all flushed and slurry, having first called from a telephone booth to say the group had moved from one location to another and did she want to join them. Not being a drinker anymore, she didn't like those all-night dinners quite so much; it was like being a foreigner at the table, and anyway it was usually shoptalk, so she mostly stayed home waiting for him to roll in.

In the early part of the summer he would arrive home amorously charged, as if he'd undergone some kind of testosterone transfusion, and at times she wondered just whom he was fucking... He seemed to be taking over the world through the vessel of her body. By July he seldom had the energy even to kiss her good night. The wife, apparently, was the one who didn't need any extra attention, perhaps on the principle that she would always be there.

The first tender offer had been rejected by the board of directors after weeks of acrimonious debate. To ward off the Melman group, a poison pill was adopted by the board; Melman's lawyers filed suit in Delaware, asking the court to declare the poison pill measures "invalid and unlawful." Corbin, Dern filed a countersuit. Jerry Kleinfeld found a white knight, a German publisher who agreed to back them and who sweetened the pot by two dollars a share. Then J. P. Haddad, the offshore investor whose boat Russell and Corrine had seen in the Caribbean that March. called in an offer almost identical to that of the German-backed management group. Because of the difficulty of comparing the bids, which combined hard and soft money in varying proportions, the board called for one more round of bidding. Russell was dejected but Trina was sanguine. After taking the call from Whitney Corbin in the offices of Melman's lawyers, Trina called Melman in Southampton and put him on the speaker phone. He had known about the Germans but not about Haddad. "That prick. He beat me out on the last deal, and no way I'm going to let that lunatic have this one. Let's go sudden death. How high can we go, Trina?"

"I don't see how we can justify more than another buck a share."

"Let's think about bumping it up two-fifty a share, and make it a two-tier offer."

A day later Trina and the number crunchers had put together a bid that would add four million to the cost of the company, on the basis of a somewhat optimistic assumption about what they could get for spinning off the textbook division. Melman returned to the city in his helicopter. Over drinks with Russell, Washington came in with a valuable piece of information: The Germans were prepared to go to twenty-one.

"How do you know this," Russell asked.

"I've got my sources."

"That's not good enough. I have to know for sure."

"Pillow talk, my man."

Demonstrating one of his occasional bouts of obtuseness, Russell held up his hands in bafflement.

"The name Carlton ring any bells?"

"You're doing Carlton? Harold's squeeze?"

"Hey, chief, we all got to do our part."

"Jesus. Can we trust her?"

"This is the revenge scenario, all right? Harold's dating some new bimbo, and Carlton's still sitting right outside the door when he meets with his boys to discuss business."

"I don't
believe
you, Washington."

"Sometimes even
I'm
amazed."

* * *

The deadline for the final bids had passed six hours before, and the Melman group was waiting to hear from the law firm representing the Corbin, Dern board. Upon returning to the city, Bernie had graciously insisted that the negotiating team camp out in his offices. They had been hanging out now for thirteen hours, talking, ordering food in from '21,' periodically taking calls from lawyers and wives, knocking pink golf balls across the lush gold-and-peach-hued expanse of the Aubusson carpets of the main conference room into upended wineglasses.

They were living in deal time, where an adrenaline camaraderie prevailed. Each of them seemed smarter and funnier than usual to the others. Two topics predominated: the deal and sex. There was the joke about the lion and the monkey; about the shipwrecked sailor, the Doberman and the sheep; the Frenchman, the Englishman and the Jew. The Jews told Jewish jokes, Russell Irish jokes, the lawyers lawyer jokes.

Trina told the one about Dennis Levine, the investment banker convicted of insider trading: "Guy must be a retard, took him eleven trades to make a lousy eight million." Melman's repertoire was encyclopedic, and he always got the biggest laughs. Russell was half delirious with exhaustion and passive smoke inhalation. "I used to stay up half the night just for fun," he said to Rockaby.

"It's more fun to do it for money," Rockaby answered.

Melman's bankers seemed to thrive on this ritualized, heightened form of sleeplessness, but Russell was impressed that Trina could more than hold her own against this expensive crew.

Although his presence was neither required nor entirely appropriate, Washington had stopped by after his dinner to catch some of the deal buzz. He arrived on the fifth floor with his disposition slightly ruffled beneath his Comme des Garçons suit; the security men in the lobby— one of whom he was almost certain he recognized from the night of his ignominious retreat from Casa Melman—had given him a hard time, at first refusing to call upstairs, threatening instead to call the police.

"I'm thinking of filing a suit against your thugs," he told Melman, "for incivility against my civil rights." Washington had never explained his disappearance from Melman's dinner, fearing that the subject, once raised, might prove endlessly embarrassing. He sent a conventional thank- you note to Sasha Melman and arranged the meeting with Donald Parker as instructed, something he might not have done otherwise.

"Have a brandy/' said Bernie. "You want a brandy? You want a cigar? Carl, get the man a brandy, for Christ's sake. You like art," he asked as Washington surveyed the paintings on the wall.

"The Dubuffet's boring, but I like the Duplex."

"I've got the biggest collection of that asshole's stuff in the country. At least for another day or two. He almost burned up my summer house a couple weeks ago. Look around, I gotta make some calls here."

Russell was schmoozing some suits in the outer office. Washington found it impossible to distinguish their names or faces. This, Russell said, was the law team. Three pink-faced guys in blue suits, one of them holding a putter. Not straight white bread, a touch of rye—slightly balder, and shorter, than the average member of the Harvard Club. How did these boys tell themselves apart, anyway? Would their wives notice if they switched cars at the train station in Chappaqua and drove to the wrong houses? Honey, you look shorter tonight—tough day at the office?