Brightness Falls (39 page)

"How does it look," Washington asked.

"It's a slam dunk," said Russell.

"Is it that good," Washington asked, half ingenuously.

"Yeah, it means, you know ..."

"When do we know if we got our fucking jobs?"

"Should be sometime tonight."

"I'll check back," Washington said. "Meantime I want you white boys to keep working on your long putts."

Emerging from the elevator downstairs, he called, "Later, Guido," to the no-neck who'd given him shit. Seven limousines of various lengths were docked at the sidewalk, idling. Washington climbed into a black Lincoln.

He looked at the startled driver in the rearview mirror. "You're or. account for Fried, Flotte and Cadwallader, right?"

The driver nodded.

"Let's roll, then. Fifty-eighth between Park and Madison."

"You got a voucher," the driver asked.

"I'll need one, thank you."

The car slipped into gear and angled out of its berth into Fifth Avenue.

"I'll take the chopper back," Washington said, when they pulled up :n front of Au Bar, where the doorman said hello and lifted the velvet rope to let him pass. No great triumph—the place was half deserted, a sprinkling of Greek shipping-money scions and last year's debutantes. He had a drink and picked up a girl who claimed she'd met him in the spring. He wondered, in this case, about the extension of the verb "to meet." He didn't remember her, but he should have; she was definitely doable, an English girl busting out of her gold-sequined bustier. Said her name was Samantha. "Let's go somewhere, Sam," he said. "This place is beat."

She said she was waiting for some friends, an answer he hated.

"Let's meet them downtown," he suggested, needing to purge himself of something he'd picked up in Melman's office, the odor of polite white greed that clung like a bad after-shave. You just can't shake that stench on the Upper East Side.

"There's a party over on Seventy-seventh and Park."

These negotiations did not look promising. Lack of enthusiasm on the part of the principals: he didn't want to stay and she didn't want to go. In the final analysis, he didn't feel that he absolutely had to have it. So he cabbed solo to Nell's and ran into a few acquaintances there, but not the person who would seem, if only for a few hours, like the reason he'd launched himself out when he could have been home banging away on the Frantz Fanon book.

Waiting at home for word on the offer, Corrine resented her absentee role. Before Russell had acquired a team of advisors, she'd walked him through the numbers. They'd stayed up late every night for a week. She had been the first to tell him it was theoretically possible to buy the company, to work out how much it might actually be worth, to map out a possible scenario. Which didn't mean she thought he
should.
She thought it was crazy.

Just because something could be done didn't require that you do it. Russell had no sense of the fragility of life, of the boundaries that might be crossed if you reached too far. Growing up for Russell had been as smooth as a series of promotions, and his mother's death ten years before had seemed to him a cruel exception to the general bounty of nature.

For several days Corrine tried to talk some sense into him. "This is just some dumb male thing between you and Harold. Why don't you guys just go to the men's room tomorrow and measure each other, declare a winner."

"So maybe all of history is some dumb male thing."

"Russell, listen to yourself. Stop while you still have a sense of humor."

"Since when is ambition a crime?"

"When it's excessive."

"You're the one that wants to have kids," he said.

"W
⁷
hoa! Time out for non sequitur."

"Well, do you want to raise your kid in a one-bedroom apartment?"

"I can't believe your shamelessness." Countering the disparagement of his own sex with an appeal to what he took to be a feminine susceptibility. "You mean, if I go along with your crazy project, you'll condescend to get me pregnant?"

When it was clear that he wouldn't be talked out of it, she had surrendered and tried to support him. Maybe people who didn't know that they couldn't accomplish certain tasks sometimes succeeded out of sheer naivete, like bumblebees, which had never heard they were aerody-namically incapable of flight. Besides, he was so excited it was like watching him bloom again after a long, loveless winter. Aware of her reservations, he would often woo her with flowers and impromptu gifts. She wanted to encourage that, though it sometimes seemed sad to her that what he wanted from life was so different. She wanted the kind of home she'd never known as a child, the delicate illusion of which had been finally shattered with her parents' divorce. She couldn't understand why Russell needed to rule the world, or why he thought it was a big deal when they got their picture in a magazine.

After one of those long, coded, largely silent contract negotiations that constitute married life, they came to an implicit agreement that seemed lopsided in his favor: She'd be quiet and he'd be nice. She would go along with him in return for future consideration. It was like one of those corporate debt restructuring deals where you had to accept unredeemable paper in the hope that it might be worth something someday and because you had no choice.

Corrine had advised against pursuing the deal, but that didn't mear she was immune to the thrill of the attempt, or happy about being 1er out. Home alone again, she flipped through magazines, too restless to read a book. In an hour she had run through a pile consisting of
Architectural Digest, Self, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Elle, Details
and
Manhattan, inc.
She felt exhausted. Reading magazines was like going to a cocktail party, a series of three-minute conversations. Having skipped dinner, she'd gone on to eat an entire bag of potato chips, which was really disgusting. She now weighed nine hundred thirteen pounds.

Eleven o'clock. Corrine turned on the TV, turned up the air conditioner. In the kitchen she found a Snickers bar. Soak up some of that disgusting oil and salt from the chips ... it felt as if a supertanker had run aground on her duodenum.

She wondered if she should call again. Why didn't he call?

The Odd Couple
on TV, Felix cooking dinner for Oscar. Corrine realized she wouldn't be so hungry if she had eaten a proper dinner. Back in the kitchen she found a Lean Cuisine lasagna dinner. Less than three hundred calories—that was sensible. But tomorrow, she decided, she would go on a real diet. Fast. Really starve herself. Being fat in the summer was horrible. Nuking the lasagna, she observed its progress through the door of the microwave as the
Honeymooners
theme drifted in from the living room. "Chef of the Future." Russell's favorite show. Corrine didn't like it so much, she thought all the poverty and bickering was sad. But sometimes she watched when Russell wasn't home, imagining him slapping his palms against the coffee table and hooting as she tried to figure out what was so funny.

Somebody she knew, she forgot who, once said that missing people was a way of spending time with them.

After
The Honeymooners
she snooped around in the freezer for something sweet and turned up a DoveBar, feeling herself getting fatter with every bite. It was twelve-thirty. She watched
Star Trek,
trying to remember her Platonic theory from college. What was it? Spock was intellect, McCoy was emotion, and Kirk the integrating, ruling factor, what Plato called the Spirited Element. The importance of a liberal education demonstrated, QED.

When the show was over she ate the other DoveBar because it was there, sitting in its perfect wrapper in the freezer, calling out to her, shivering her name. At one-thirty she went into the bathroom, put a finger down her throat and threw up.

* * *

At three-thirty Washington found himself down on the Lower East Side, on a street of burned-out, boarded-up tenements. Nothing was happening anywhere in the city so far as he could discover. A white Toyota with Jersey plates rounded the corner and slowed in front of him. A white face efflorescent with acne called out, "You selling?"

"Not even holding, goddamnit," Washington yelled back.

A few doors away a couple of kids who had been huddled in a doorway rushed into the street and waved the car forward. Washington crouched down and knocked on a rusty freight door set into the sidewalk. A minute later the door opened up, and a head popped out and nodded at Washington, who descended the treacherous iron stairs underground. He walked uncertainly along a dank, vaulted passageway and pounded on a steel door.

When his eyes had adjusted to the smoky dimness of the cellar, he descried Juan Baptiste and Leticia Corbin among the wounded bodies and twisted faces at the bar. He waved in slow motion. You knew you were really hurting when you were glad to see these underworld shades. "Good to see you, my man," he said to Juan, kissing the frigid white cheek of Leticia, who said she was celebrating her brother's imminent downfall. Washington raised an eyebrow and hinted that there were wheels within wheels, that it wasn't over till it was over, that he was in fact an integral part of top-secret negotiations which were in progress at this very moment, watching with interest the couple who were silently fucking in the corner.

Near dawn, he was in a cab headed uptown. He was reluctant to inspect his suit too closely, having ridden on the back of a garbage truck from Delancey up to 14th, that being the only vehicle moving in the early-morning wasteland of the Lower East Side. Then two cabs had sped past him, a young black man on a deserted street, one cabbie shouting, "Fucking walk!" from the window.

Inside the lobby of Melman's office building a couple of uniformed goons impeded his inexorable progress toward the elevators. Weren't these the same assholes he'd dealt with earlier? Always hard to tell with white people. They certainly didn't seem to recognize him.

"May I help you?" A wide guy in a badly tailored suit, neckless and virtually lipless, was doing an imitation of a defensive line, stepping between Washington and the elevator.

"Not unless you got a cigarette."

"Sorry. Authorized personnel only."

All this hassle was making Washington tired and thirsty. Hoping he had a squirt or two left, he reached in his jacket pocket...

"Watch out! He's got a gun!"

Suddenly there were real guns everywhere, a big .45 right in his face and another coming upside his head...

Near dawn the phone rang.

"Say hello to the new editor in chief," Russell said. "What?" She had been asleep, dreaming that she was asleep and waiting for him to come home from a date with the vampire Leticia Corbin. "We got it. We won."

32

"I can't believe I'm up and walking around at seven-thirty on a Saturday morning. Do I have any clean socks?"

"Russell, don't sniff your socks. It's gross."

"Gotta do that sniff test when the drawer's empty. Maybe I'll prep out and skip socks. As a member of a lynch mob, do you suppose it's bad form to be sockless?"

"It's not a lynch mob, Russell. You're trying to save his life. Why can't you get straight on this—instead of identifying with his problem?"

"Is that a coy allusion to the fact that I have a hangover?"

"I didn't—"

"I wouldn't wish this on my ... I wouldn't even wish this on Harold."

When Zac Solomon called from California to say that Jeff had nodded off in the middle of a pitch to studio execs, Russell had finally decided to share with Corrine his suspicions about Jeff's drug consumption. Furious with him for not telling her sooner, she quickly turned practical, investigating detox programs and hospitals, calling Jeff's parents. Jeff was back in New York, and Zac had flown in the night before to supervise the intervention. He was a veteran of these missions, being a reformed abuser of substances and having recently intervened on a screen star who was freebasing his way into the John Belushi Hall of Fame. He also had a professional interest in Jeff's rehabilitation, having bought screen rights to two stories from Jeff's book.

At eight a.m. the group convened at a coffee shop on Lafayette. The gruffness of the Greek counterman, the sullen resentment of the early- morning working people, the jaded resignation of a couple in matching black leathers and black-dyed, spiked-out coifs seeking sanctuary from the sudden daylight—everything contributed to Russell's air of gloom. He kept putting himself in Jeff's shoes, imagining how he would feel. He could picture the signs and the forks in the road that had led Jeff to the bathroom at Minky's. Russell had read the same books, listened to :he same music. If he hadn't married Corrine he might have been the one who made a laboratory of himself, mixing all the chemicals together. Opening doors marked DO not enter.

But Christ, he thought, you weren't supposed to take it so literally. They'd grown up with drugs, just close enough to the sixties almost to believe in pot and acid as the sacraments of a vague liberation theology but not so close that they didn't soon take them for granted. Not long ago, as putative adults, they were doing coke together at parties and imagining they'd discovered the pleasure principle. Not so long before that they were editing the college literary magazine, going to keg parties, reading Baudelaire.

Jeff's parents arrived, anomalously together, though they had the easy fit of people who have come to dislike each other over the years and who derive great pleasure from their fighting—after all these years their aim and timing were perfect. Jeff's mother, Bev, was a tall, tan, elegant brunette with the look of a wealthy sportswoman—a habitué of tennis courts and marinas. She'd flown in from Santa Fe, where she had recently opened a crafts shop.

Tears in her eyes, she embraced Russell, then kissed Corrine on one cheek; she had once explained to Russell, with the solemn air of one for whom these things mattered, that only pretentious arrivistes and Europeans kissed both. Wiping her eyes, she said, "I brought you two a little prez," and handed Russell a gift-wrapped package about the size and shape of a collapsed fly rod. Emitting a sibilant, tinkling sound, it seemed to involve some kind of liquid. "It's a rain stick," she explained, as Russell cautiously peeled away the wrapping on a fat, varnished stick. "It's filled with little shells and beans and pebbles, and when you turn it over it sounds like rain."