Brightness Falls (47 page)

"Russell's dying to get out there and play. He was the big hero at the artists' and writers' game in East Hampton."

Russell shook his head in an approximation of modesty. They were standing behind the backstop, watching a young man being coaxed into the batter's box by his nurse and several teammates. A thirty-five-year-old who looked sixteen, Rick had tufts of hair that conjured up a palsied barber, and eyes like cloudy liquid within the fishbowl lenses of his glasses. Rick was a severe case of something, Jeff told them under his breath, and was, in fact, about to be transferred to a more appropriate facility. When Jeff first met him he'd introduced himself as the president of the United States. His identity changed frequently, particularly when he was watching TV. "That's me," he'd say, when an actor caught his fancy. "I'm that guy."

The bearded doctor showed him how to hold the bat in front of his body for the bunt. Making no concession to athletic fashion, Jeff's friend Mickey was on the mound for the addicts, funereally chic in his black suit and pointy King's Road shoes. He underhanded a pitch, which struck Rick's bat and dribbled to a stop a few feet from the plate. The depressives huddling on the sidelines suddenly cheered and screamed, urging him toward first base.

Rick took off. As he neared the base he veered off into foul territory and kept going. His attendant, a strapping matron built for power rather than speed, waddled after him. Rick broke to the right and bolted for the road, a well-traveled rural highway that curved blindly into the woods just beyond the main driveway. The depressives were still cheering, while the bearded doctor-coach scuttled back and forth, rodentlike, between home plate and the edge of the batting cage, uncertain of what to do. Rick ran without grace, like a toddler, stumbling twice, losing one of his sneakers, but his enthusiasm was unbounded and he easily outstripped the nurse.

Russell launched into a run and raced across the grass toward the road. Though he ran fast, Rick did not run straight, his somewhat erratic trajectory tending to arc toward the point where the road looped back into the trees, and Russell cut him off at the curve just after a red Volvo station wagon had swerved past, horn blaring. Russell spun Rick back onto the lawn, held him around the waist while he flailed and cackled with laughter, and finally turned him over to the winded nurse.

Both teams had fallen silent as the two runners converged at the road.

"Another save for Calloway," said Jeff. "One more and we can put him up for canonization."

As they walked back, Rick and Russell were greeted with equal enthusiasm, as if they constituted a winning team. Jeff had disappeared. Up at the main house, the nurse told them that he had retreated to his room with a headache and that he would call them later.

38

Corrine had always loved autumn, and nowhere more than in New York. Exiles returned from their weekend and summer refuges, and the half-melted skyline snapped to attention in the breeze as the limp, fetid city regenerated itself.

When Corrine was at prep school this was the season of cotillions and balls and boys with hip flasks in the pockets of their first tuxedos. And later, of triumphal urban reunions with old friends newly hatched from New England campuses, and the evolution of new alliances, all of which seemed, on the old academic rhythm, to begin in the crisp leafy air of September. Far from conjuring thoughts of mortality, the falling leaves seemed like confetti pouring down on the festivities. Autumn was one long Advent season leading inevitably to the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center and holiday parties and robin's-egg-blue gift boxes with red bows from Tiffany.

This year, though, the equinox provided no lift. The city seemed to her to have lost its poetry. The headlines were ugly, the party invitations looked like tickets to limbo or worse, and the leaves were aptly dying. The men at the soup kitchen added new layers of old clothing, grimly anticipating the cold; every week there were more of them. Her depression felt symptomatic of a general malaise, and she resented it when Russell implied it was the miscarriage, resenting at the same time how little it seemed to have affected him.

The week after visting Jeff, Russell flew to Frankfurt, where the international publishing tribe gathered once a year; he'd been revved up about the trip for weeks. She hoped, without grounds, that he would calm down upon his return. Among their friends and class, single-minded devotion to one's career was considered the cardinal virtue, but in Corrine's view fanaticism was heavy upon the land. Broadly construed so as to include eating, drinking and talking on the phone with authors, agents and editors, work claimed all of Russell's energies, and it was making him a dull boy with respect to his wife, though no doubt Trina Cox thought he was just mahvelous. Maybe it was a function of her new sobriety or her impending unemployment, but increasingly Corrine sensed that—gossip aside—most of what passed for conversation in this noisy city was only shoptalk.

Her last week of work, Corrine watched the stock market drift downward. She called all of her clients and explained that she was leaving, advising them to move some of their capital into cash. Many she turned over to Duane's care, but she advised Mrs. Leon Ablomsky, the widow, to move totally into cash. "The market's getting strange," she explained. "I'd be worried about you if you stayed in."

Mrs. Ablomsky was more worried about her new friendship than her money. "I suppose I'll never hear from you again."

"I promise I'll stay in touch."

"You young people have your own busy lives. Pretty soon you'll be having a family, God willing, and you won't have time for me."

God willing, Corrine thought with a pang.

On Tuesday morning, October 6, some kind of panic broke out like subterranean fire and suddenly everybody was selling. By the end of the day, the market had lost a record ninety-two points on 176 million shares and Corrine's colleagues were dazed by the rout. Everyone retreated to Harry's for a postmortem, blaming higher German rates, program trading, looming budget and trade deficits. Although Corrine had been as frantic as anyone during the day, she now felt detached. The next day the Dow dipped thirty and then caught a thermal to close up two points. Nobody had a clue about what was going on.

On Thursday the market dropped thirty-four points. Bearish humor prevailed at Corrine's farewell party the following day, where she was complimented for her sense of timing. Among the parting gifts were two teddy bears. Her boss, who'd given her a pack of tarot cards in token of her renowned superstitions, suggested that the market was falling in anticipation of her departure and that she owed it to the rest of them to stay. Duane's gift of
The Interpretation of Dreams
was inscribed "To a Dream Girl, with Love, Duane." As the party was breaking up he asked her to dinner, knowing that Russell was in Frankfurt. She lied and said she had plans, and invited him over to the apartment for dinner the following week.

She was planning a surprise dinner party for Russell's birthday. She had been resisting the idea of inviting Trina Cox, but she realized it would look deliberate and peevish. From her desk she called Trina's office. A male secretary answered, told her Trina was out of the country for a few days.

"Out of the country," she asked, barely able to speak.

"Brussels," the secretary said. "To be precise."

Corrine felt herself go limp with relief. Brussels was okay.

"Hold on a moment... Sorry, she
was
in Brussels yesterday but today she's in Frankfurt."

"Oh, God."

"Do you have that number?"

"Is it the Frankfurter Hof?"

"I beg your pardon. I didn't hear you."

"Is she staying at the Frankfurter Hof?"

"Let me... yes, that's right. Would you like to leave a message here in the meantime?"

A howling storm of wind and noise seemed to wash over her, and when it receded she was holding the receiver to her face and a voice was saying, "Would you like to leave a message?"

"No message."

She misdialed twice before successfully completing the second sequence of numbers. There was no answer in Russell's room, which didn't really surprise her; she was almost relieved. After all, he might have a satisfactory explanation as to what Trina Cox was doing in Frankfurt, at his hotel, though he had specifically denied that she would be going. Irrationally, she imagined that this grace period would give him a chance to come to his senses and undo whatever damage he might have done. The desk clerk came back on the line asking if she would like to leave a message. "Yes, I would."

"You will be leaving this message for Mr. or Mrs. Calloway?"

"Mrs. Calloway? You have a Mrs. Calloway?"

"You wish to leave her a message?"

"No. A message for Mister. From Corrine. From Mrs. Calloway... the real Mrs. Calloway... Tell him... The message is... Oh, Jesus ..."

She didn't think she would make it to the ladies' room, past all the work stations, past the wide bodies of strangers and the white faces that swiveled like gun turrets tracking her flight.

In the bathroom she sat huddled in a stall with her face against the cold metal partition, clutching the toilet paper dispenser, trying to ride out the alternate waves of anguish and nausea.

She had no idea how much time had passed before the door opened, admitting a gust of shrill conversation accompanied by the ticking of high heels across the tiled floors.

"She calls your house?"

"She calls my house and says, 'This is Mrs. Townsend. Harlan's wife.' She really emphasizes the word 'wife,' big fucking deal, like this'll impress me. You know? What's she want, a medal? Just 'cause she managed to let herself get knocked up ten years ago. So, I'm like, 'Who?' '

"No. You said that?"

"I say, 'Who?' Just like that. Just like I'm saying it to you now. Playing it totally cool, you know. Like I'm not going to give her the satisfaction. Keep my dignity, you know, let her make a fool out of herself. I go, 'Who?' And she goes, 'I know who you are.' I mean,
really.
Like she's caught me in the act or something."

"She can't prove anything."

"That's what I say. It's not like she's got photographs or anything. So I say, 'I don't know what you're implying here, but I don't have anything to feel ashamed of, and anyway, if you're unhappy at home, then don't go blaming it on me, and furthermore—' "

"I do blame you," Corrine said, emerging violently from the stall.

"So who are you," asked the frightened woman who had handled Mrs. Townsend so deftly, as Corrine approached like the avenger of matrimony.

39

Trina arrived in Frankfurt at noon, having finished business in Brussels early. Neither of them had exactly planned a meeting in Frankfurt—a plan inferred a contract—but when she suggested she might stop off for a day, Russell said it might be fun, full of admiration for the fact that she casually hopped planes between European cities, for the generous purview and reach that this implied. It was difficult, lately, to get Corrine to take a taxi downtown.

Certainly Trina had not intended to stay with Russell, but when she arrived she discovered there was not a single room to be had in the entire city, let alone in Russell's grand hotel, one of the few prewar structures left downtown and currently the humming center of the European book world. Mr. Calloway was not in his room, and the red-jacketed desk clerk, martial in bearing, had no idea when he was expected. Trina was sweaty and tired and there was this incredibly annoying piece of gristle stuck in her back teeth from the sausage she'd eaten for breakfast. Hanging around the lobby—however sprawlingly replete with overstuffed armchairs and couches—was not Trina's idea of fun, and she was not the kind of girl who meekly submitted to fate.

"I'm Mrs. Calloway," she said. "Could you please show me to our room?"

If the clerk was skeptical, Trina's hauteur carried the encounter. He summoned a bellhop with a guttural bark. As she turned away he said, "May I record your passport number, Mrs. Calloway?"

"Certainly." She dipped into her shoulder bag and produced the document. As he opened it, she added, "My maiden name, of course."

* * *

When Russell returned to his hotel room to dress for dinner, he discovered Trina doing sit-ups on the floor, ankles hooked beneath the footboard of the bed. "I bought you some chocolates in Brussels," she said, "but then I decided to deliver them myself."

After back-to-back drink appointments, Russell was disoriented by the sight of his investment banker in filmy gym shorts and clingy T-shirt with a fresh patina of sweat over her limbs and face. Her kiss was relatively restrained, merely a greeting, perhaps to compensate for the presumption of commandeering his room. But the animal scent of her body permeated the air in such a way as to make the outcome of the evening seem, for Russell, almost a foregone conclusion—even before she complained that she'd never before failed to get a goddamned hotel room. For months he'd imagined and rehearsed this encounter; now he drew back and looked for a reprieve from his desire at the very moment that its consummation had become inevitable. Uneager to confront his impending dilemma, Russell uncorked a bottle of champagne from the minibar and entertained Trina with gossip from the fair: Harold Stone was haunting the event as minister without portfolio and Ghost of Frankfurts Past. "Poisoning my well, no doubt." Washington was juggling three different women. Camille Donner, Victor Propp's former squeeze, had turned up, flogging the foreign rights of her roman à clef and incidentally shopping for a new mate. A bootlegged chapter of the book circulating at the fair sketched a portrait of a certain middle-aged contender to the Great American Novelist title as being impotent in bed and at his writing desk. "Poor devil," Russell concluded loyally, regretting a certain zest in his account of the gossip.

"We are all strong enough to bear the misfortunes of our friends."

"What a terrible thing to say," said Russell, who admired her toughness but couldn't help thinking of Jeff.

"I think I stole it from Montaigne." Trina had not been made privy to what Washington called the perils of Pierce.