Brightness Falls (46 page)

Russell turned on the bedside lamp, rolled out of bed, flipped off the covers and scooped Corrine up in his arms.

"You'll hurt your back," she protested as he carried her like a baby across the room and lowered her legs to the floor.

"Look at yourself!" he shouted, standing her in front of the full-length mirror and ripping her nightgown open from the neck with both hands, peeling it away from her body as she struggled against him. She dug her fingers into his cheek as he yanked one of her arms from its sleeve. When he twisted her arm so far she thought it would break, she sank her teeth into his shoulder, drawing blood. Though in all her fury Corrine was no match for him.

"Look." The pink nightgown lay shredded on the carpet at her feet, her arms pinned behind her back. One hand encircling her wrists, he grabbed the back of her head with the other and forced her to face the mirror. She tried to shake her head free.

"What do you see?"

She closed her eyes tightly, opalescent flashes of color swelling in the darkness behind the lids like globules of fat floating slickly on the water in a saucepan.

"What do you see? Go on, look at yourself."

She was spinning. She held her eyes shut until she felt herself disappearing into a pit of nausea and blackness.

"What do you see, goddamnit?"

"A monster," she said, facing her own reflection at last, seeing in Russell's grasp an anonymous form that resembled a supermarket turkey, plump and white and plucked.

"There's hardly anything to see," he said.

"An unlovable monster."

Russell released her then. He picked her up again and carried her gently back to the bed. Suddenly she felt weightless and insubstantial in his arms, as if he were not so much lifting her up as holding her down, keeping her from drifting up and dissolving into the night like a snowflake caught in a thermal.

"One of us has to get smaller," she whispered. "You take up more and more room in the house, so much space. I feel like there's none left for me."

As he lay her down on her own side of the bed, the right side, which had always been hers since they started sharing a bed years before, the sensation of heaviness reasserted itself and she sank through the coiled-spring whirlpools of her mattress into a dreamless sleep.

Russell woke at seven twenty-seven, oversleeping by nearly an hour. After starting the coffee in the kitchen, he hurriedly showered and shaved. At eight he tried to wake Corrine. He kissed her cheek, shook her warm, bony shoulder gently for fear it would break off in his hands. A thick strand of blond hair encircled her neck like a gold choker. "Corrine?" He continued to shake her. She issued a faint syllable of protest and tried to turn away from him.

Finally he succeeded in getting her to open her eyes. She scanned his face fearfully. "Rise and shine."

She closed her eyes and shook her head.

"Please."

"I don't feel shiny."

He stroked the hair away from her forehead. "Well, even if you don't, you still have to go to work."

"I don't ever want to go to work again."

"That's a little extreme, isn't it?"

She opened her eyes to glare up at him. Russell had seen this look before and it frightened him. "I never wanted to be a stupid stockbroker anyway. You made me do it."

"I
made
you do it?"

"You let me know in your own none too subtle way that we needed to bring in more money. I wanted to get my certificate and teach. I hate my job. I hate the people I work with. I feel like a con artist. I hate the whole—"

"I didn't know you felt this way."

"You didn't want to know. You wanted me to keep bringing home a stupid paycheck."

"I'm not that venal, am I?"

"No, you went into a noble profession. You didn't want to dirty your soul grubbing after money. You're a sensitive soul. Fucking Maxwell Perkins, that's you. Russell Calloway, friend and patron of literature. But you didn't mind turning your wife into a capitalist, sending her out into the marketplace. Whoring her out to the yuppies."

"In case you haven't noticed, I've been doing a little money-grubbing myself lately."

"You bet I've noticed. And it's not very becoming, honey."

"Neither is this mood of yours. You do what you want. I'm going to work."

"I gave notice last week," she said as his pin-striped back disappeared out the door. She thought he hadn't heard, hoped he hadn't heard, till he reappeared in the bedroom doorway.

"You did?"

"I told you I was going to," she said contritely. "You said you understood."

He sat down on the bed beside her, ran his hands repeatedly through his already slicked-back hair, brushing it off his forehead. He nodded. "That's okay," he said. "If that's what you want."

"It is?"

"I don't want you doing something you hate."

She lifted herself on her elbow and kissed him. "I just couldn't do it a minute longer. Life's too short."

He nodded. "Don't worry about it. You're absolutely right."

"I didn't know who I was anymore. And I felt like our marriage was falling apart, too, like it was going to die if somebody didn't start paying attention."

Russell shook his head. "Don't worry about that. So when do you finish?"

"The ninth. You're sure you're not angry?"

"I'm sure. I'll take you out to dinner to celebrate when I get back from Frankfurt. "

"I forgot about Frankfurt."

"I'll be gone less than a week," he said.

"Who's going with you?"

"Just me, Washington and the sub-rights director. "

"Not Trina?" She watched his eyes. He always turned away from her gaze when he told a lie.

"Why would Trina come?" Not until he had finished the sentence did his eyes cut away. Did that mean he was telling the truth, or that he was getting better at lying? But he seemed innocent enough, checking his pocket for keys and then hunting through his top drawer for the dry-cleaning slip, knocking his stud box to the floor. As she speculated about Russell's sexual waywardness, Corrine was somehow reassured to see the shaving soap on his earlobe.

37

Russell and Corrine drove up on the Saturday of the last softball game. Jeff had moved to the main house at the top of the hill—progress of a sort. The administration presumably wanted inmates to know that it was all uphill. From this modest summit he watched them pull up in their Jeep, Delia sitting beside him, her nurse standing at a discreet distance. Russell had the top down and Corrine was riding with her hand on top of her head as if to keep her hair from flying away. After he parked, Russell loped around the front of the Jeep and offered his arm to Corrine, who bounced out of her seat and shook out her wind-tossed hair like a golden retriever emerging from water. Jeff didn't know if he was ready to face their frisky cheer. America's fun couple visits the funny farm. He had yet to forgive them for landing him in this place, and it didn't necessarily make him feel any better that they looked so good. "Here's the Prince and Princess in their six-horse carriage," Delia said.

As they always did when they were tense from fighting, Russell and Corrine tended to become broad and vaudevillian in their attempts to put on a good show and to spare others their unhappiness. After fixing her hair, Corrine curtsied archly and locked her arm in Russell's. She hadn't particularly wanted to ride all the way to Connecticut with the top down, not on a chilly morning in early October. "We shall not," he'd said, "be tyrannized by the calendar." Well, bully for us, she thought, wondering all the way up why with Russell she could never just come right out and say what she meant, ask for what she wanted, in this case to put the top up. But what she really wondered was why after all these years Russell couldn't be more sensitive to her moods and desires, more adept at picking up hints. Why did she have to take out a damn billboard every time she needed something? Russell blurted out his whims and desires as they occurred to him. It wouldn't occur to him that she might communicate less directly.

By the time they got lost outside of Darien she was seething. And Russell simply would
not
stop to ask for directions, reminding her exactly of her father, who would drive in circles for hours rather than reveal ignorance in front of a stranger. Then when she'd suggested that Jeff might still be a little upset with them, Russell responded, "No shit." She didn't like his implication that they hadn't done the right thing, so she had asked him straight out if he would rather have let Jeff go on killing himself, and he came out with, "It's his life." He'd actually gone on to say that there were worse things than being a junkie, that maybe Jeff couldn't be like everybody else. She burst out of the Jeep at a red light and crossed three lanes of traffic to ask for directions at a gas station, which she then conveyed to him in terse snippets, and otherwise they did not speak again until they pulled up in the parking lot of the hospital.

Jeff started down the hill to meet them. Corrine ran the last twenty yards and leaped on him. It was the rare visitor who wasn't self-conscious here; Russell's ruddy vitality made him seem especially out of place, his awareness of this fact making him even more awkward. As soon as he saw Jeff he began to smile like a child who has been commanded to do so for a camera or a frightening relative. What remained of his midwestern Catholicism was embarrassed by the very idea of a mental hospital, and he still felt culpable for Jeff's rude incarceration. Recently he'd been troubled with memories of small betrayals and abdications. He saw that as the world had come knocking on Jeff's door he had gradually drawn away and slipped out the back, out of some perverse sense of emotional economy if not outright jealousy. At first Jeff's triumph had been his own—the respectful reviews, the best-seller lists. His star had risen with his best friend's. But at some point he grew tired of being referred to as Jeff Pierce's editor and annoyed by what he imagined to be the perception that his success was the lucky strike of his friendship with a talented writer. To the degree that he had stifled and domesticated his own appetites, he resented Jeff's sudden license to gratify his wishes almost indiscriminately. He hadn't just walked the dog, he'd let it run free to gorge and fight and fuck the bitches.

It wasn't his fault that Jeff was an addict, but he knew he hadn't helped.

The two men shook hands. "Welcome to Bedlam," Jeff said.

"We brought you a few things," Corrine said, rustling the Bergdorf bag on her arm.

Jeff raised his hands to fend her off. "I'm afraid this merchandise will have to be submitted for a Good Nuthousekeeping seal of approval," he said, beckoning them inside, where he presented them with arch ceremony to the people on duty at the nurses' station. "Are you approved for chocolate," asked the nurse, holding a foot-long Toblerone bar aloft. Jeff nodded. "I'm just a junkie," he explained cheerfully. Some of the depressed patients were on medication that virtually exploded in combination with certain enzymes in chocolate. The books and cigarettes passed inspection, but the bottle of Geo. F. Trumper Extract-of-Lime aftershave was confiscated. "Glass," explained the nurse, shaking her head. "And
alcohol,"
she added, reading the label.

"There goes my chance," Jeff said, "to smell like a gin and tonic."

Stifling her dismay, Corrine asked to see his room. There wasn't much to see, but she commented favorably on the view and on the light from the two windows. With its private bathroom and stained pine furniture verging on the antique, the room would have made a perfectly decent single at a New England bed-and-breakfast.

"It's lovely," Corrine said.

"Neither bars on the windows, nor straps on the bed," Jeff said, knowing that Corrine was relieved not to find any hint of the clinical, semipenal nature of the institution reflected in the interior decor. "They had both at Carlyle House, where I detoxed."

Corrine linked arms with Russell and Jeff as they walked down the big lawn through the fecund smell of a recent mowing, the leafy tang of autumn in the air. "I love the fall," Corrine said. "Taking your sweaters out of mothballs, raking leaves and college football games—all that stuff. Summer is overrated. I was the weirdo who couldn't wait for school to start again. Had my pencils all sharpened in my pencil box and my notebooks labeled."

"We hated girls like you," said Russell.

Jeff saw Delia lurking in the shadow of the big elm. When he waved, she disappeared behind the tree.

"Corrine actually
liked
math," Russell added.

"I know," Jeff said.

"Can you imagine?"

"That's Carlyle House," he said, pointing at what appeared to be a handsome white Georgian mansion. "Scene of fiendish tortures supervised by Medical Inquisitors and Latter-Day Puritan Clerics disguised as nurses."

"Well," she said, "thank God you're through with that." They walked in silence down a shaded path. Corrine sniffed the air dramatically and squeezed the arms of her escorts. "You know what this reminds me of? That gorgeous day at the beginning of senior year when the three of us skipped Transcendentalism seminar and smoked a joint on top of the observatory. "

"Very transcendent," Russell said. Jeff was about to say he didn't remember, when he looked over at Corrine and saw that she was crying. Neither of the men could think of an appropriate reaction, so they continued walking.

Wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, she asked, "Why does it seem like just yesterday when it was really such a horribly long time ago."

They drifted toward the softball field, where the athletic director, a bearded young intern from the state hospital, was racing around blowing his whistle. The players themselves seemed unnaturally subdued, leaving the coach to do the pep talk for both sides: "Hey, hey, pitcher's got a rubber arm... Knock it out of the park... Heads up in the outfield..."

"Why aren't you playing," Corrine asked.

"The worst moments of my youth," Jeff said, "were associated with baseball. The smell of leather and bubble gum still makes me nauseous. My father dragged the happy family off to England on an exchange program, and when we got back all the kids were playing baseball. I struck out my first seventeen at bats and after that I only got worse. One time in junior high I got on first base with a walk, so I decided to distinguish myself by stealing second. Which I did. Trouble was, one of my teammates was already
on
second. He had to go for third and we both got thrown out."