Brightness Falls (5 page)

"Two things you got to remember about Harold," Washington said now. "First, he
used
to be a big liberal. Got that? Look at the people he hangs out with now, socialites and neo-con economists, leveraged-buyout dudes. You think they're jamming about Marcuse and Malcolm X at dinner? Social justice and third-world revolutions are definitely not what is happening. Not on Park or Madison, anyway. Nobody wants to change the world anymore. They just want to own it. Harold's no dummy. All that stuff he did in the sixties, it was chic and it paid. Revolution was good business."

"Easy to say now."

"Doesn't make it any less true. Second, don't assume he wants your books to succeed."

This had occurred to Russell. But it was also important not to take Washington absolutely at face value. Though he almost always
intended
to be on Russell's team, he was a man of facets and intrigues so complex they were not always comprehensible even to himself. A good editor, Washington would have been an even better double agent.

"The world is divided into three kinds of people as far as this shit is concerned," Washington said, on a roll. "There's the good people like you, who are surprised and indignant that, whoa, hey, stop the presses, the government's up to no good. There are the people like me, who aren't surprised at all. Who already fucking knew. Then there's the majority, and they don't
want
to know about it, Jack." Washington pointed his Walther at Russell, who opened his mouth for a squirt. "By the way—how do you know the brother who was at your party the other night?"

"What brother?"

"How many
were
there, man?"

"I didn't notice."

"Jesus." Washington had seen other examples of Russell's obliviousness to his environment, though this seemed extreme. But he was not necessarily sorry in this case. He had been to grade school with the dude, and it had disconcerted him to encounter him there, among the white folks, in Russell's apartment. He did not necessarily like the idea of Russell's knowing about his other life in the old neighborhood, so he let it slide. Some shit don't mix.

Distasteful as it was, Russell felt he owed it to his author to grovel. That was the only chance he had to light a fire under this book. He had to go to the great Harold Stone, who was believed by some to have invented publishing, who taught the alphabet to Gutenberg, whose blessing called forth glowing reviews, serious essays, Guggenheim fellowships. Who was
there
when Jesus Christ had his moment of doubt and whatever. Doubt and shame? Doubt and pain? Or doubt and hate? Next rhyme was "fate." If anybody could wire it, Harold could.

Russell padded down the ancient hall carpet to the editor in chief's corner office. For three years he had been right next door to his mentor in a narrow cubicle. But when he had finally been promoted and a bigger office had become available a few months back, Russell had moved a hundred feet away. It was something like leaving home for college. Suddenly he felt awkward when he encountered Harold in the men's room; he would clear his throat, hold his dick and stare at the eye-level tiles. He wasn't sure how this had come about, whether he only imagined a change. But today he realized he hadn't spoken to Harold in almost a week.

"Nice pearls," he said to Carlton, Harold's blonde and toothy assistant, who sat importantly erect, guarding the portal to the chief, like a girl sporting a broomstick internally, flush against her spinal column. A year out of Radcliffe, she wore the regulation turtleneck and strand of pearls and believed totally in Harold Stone's divinity. She held up one hand in a traffic-cop gesture while cradling the phone in the other. "I'll tell him, I'm sure he will." When hell freezes over, Russell thought. Harold was notorious for not returning calls, and he had stopped writing letters some years before.

"Is he expecting you," Carlton asked when she'd hung up the phone.

Russell stuck his head inside the office; Harold looked up from a magazine he was reading. "Now he is." He refrained from adding,
And do try not to be an officious bitch.
Until recently she'd been meek around Russell, but now she projected an aura of self-importance befitting a senior officer in the company. Still, Harold had always valued Russell's enthusiastic lack of tact, an unusual quality in the timid precincts of book publishing.

Years before, Russell had decided Harold looked like a great horned owl (a member of Strigiformes Strigidae, as depicted by Audubon, plate 236), and the resemblance seemed only to increase over time. Looking up, his yellow-brown eyes blinking irritably through horn-rimmed glasses, he simulated something awakened out of a bad sleep in the crotch of a dead maple; he nodded and made a faintly interrogatory sound. His lack of the recommended minimum social graces seemed a matter of principle, as if charm, manners and the other lubricants of interpersonal contact betokened a lack of high seriousness. He seldom looked anyone in the eye, shunned greetings, ignored questions—behavior that his inferiors tended to read as arrogance, admirers as the gangly awkwardness of genius. His manner of dress had been adopted in Cambridge years and never revised, button-down shirts and chinos, a jacket when he had to, seldom a tie.

"Can we talk about the Rappaport book?"

"The Nicaragua thing?" Harold said.

"Yeah.
The Secret War,"
Russell said, irritated that Harold would forget, or affect to forget, the author's name. Harold had encouraged Russell to buy this book.

"I'm still not crazy about the title."

"I'm having trouble getting it out there. "

Harold shrugged. Russell sat down on the edge of the long desk. Though Harold had occupied it for ten years, the office didn't look like it belonged to anyone in particular, which said more about its tenant than the clutter of photos, postcards and memorabilia in adjoining offices said about theirs.

"People aren't reading books anymore," Harold observed, looking out the window, which showed a slice of the Flatiron Building to the west and the Empire State to the north. Russell was reminded of a night several months before when he and Harold had stayed late and polished off a bottle of Armagnac. It was the only time Russell had ever seen his mentor drunk or heard him talk about his marriage, his wife's repeated hospitalizations and suicide threats. And later, when Russell had flattered him shamelessly, Harold had waved it off, saying that he'd been living off his intellectual capital for years, that he felt like the man married young to a ravishing beauty, long sated with her charms, who takes his pleasure from the hungry looks of other men. That, he insisted, was how he felt about most of the books he published. It had all been done. At that time, Harold had seemed to Russell like a stoic hero. Now Russell was beginning to think Harold regretted his candor. From that day on, a certain chilliness had seemed to prevail.

Russell stood up and surveyed the neat spines in the bookshelves, which looked like mere display cases for company product. It was impressive in a way, how Harold stood aloof from his immediate physical environment. Only two photographs adorned the lair; one of Harold and Saul Bellow, some twenty years younger, sitting uncomfortably side by side at a dinner table, Harold thinner, almost gaunt, but otherwise the same; and one of Robert Kennedy, smiling at a frowning Harold, friendly politician's hand on the editor's stiff shoulders. Considering the range of Harold's acquaintance among the famous and distinguished, Russell often wondered what process or lack of it had resulted in the selection of these two photographs to represent Harold's life and career.

"I was hoping you could think of somebody outside the book press who might want to do a news story."

Harold nodded thoughtfully, noncommittally, staring just slightly to the left of Russell's ear.

"It's not as if I think we need to hype this. If we can just get it noticed—"

"What's happening with Propp?" Harold interrupted.

After five years Russell still wasn't sure if these non sequiturs of Harold's were part of a conscious strategy for unsettling interlocutors or an innocent eccentricity.

"He mostly wants to know why I can't get him on the
Today
show."

"Is he ever going to finish the goddamn book?"

"Hey, give the guy a break. It's only six years overdue."

"Seven."

"Harold, what do I need to get the Rappaport book out there? Take hostages? Shoot the president?"

"When's Jeff going to deliver a manuscript?"

"Whenever he finishes."

"Is he writing at all? Seems like he's out screwing every model in New York. Maybe he doesn't have another book in him. Some don't."

"Jeff's got plenty of books in him."

Harold had been extremely supportive when Russell—a little embarrassed because the author happened to be one of his best friends—had first showed him the manuscript three years before. He encouraged Russell to buy it, talked it up among his friends in the literary world and, Russell suspected, wired a review or two. Not even Harold could
make
a book happen, but he could help, and he had. The early succès d'estime was followed by an uncommonly large sale for a collection of short stories, pushing it onto the
New York Times
best-seller list for a few weeks. Two of the stories had been optioned for the movies, and the translation had just won a literary prize in France. The rising arc of Jeff's star had lifted Russell's, and now Harold's attitude toward the book seemed complicated, as if he'd let the kids use the garage to build a go-cart and they'd emerged with the prototype for a Formula 1 race car. His attitude appeared to waver between wanting his name on the hood as a sponsor and hoping that it would crash and burn in the early laps.

"What's your wife say about the market?"

"Waiting for a correction. Next couple months."

Harold pursed his lips and seemed to weigh this notion.

"What about Rappaport?"

"I'll think about it."

"If you would," Russell said sarcastically.

"Hey, talk to that assistant of yours, will you?" Harold said as Russell was leaving. "Kleinfeld was down here this morning and almost called the cops when he saw her at the Xerox machine. Wearing some T-shirt that said Tuck the Rich.' "

"It was a button that said—"

"Whatever," Harold said. "Tell her to lose it."

"Why?"

"Don't be cute. You're a big boy now, Russell."

Walking back to his office, Russell thought about sending the editor in chief a copy of a widely anthologized essay about the Berkeley free speech movement written by a fiery young polemicist named Harold Stone. Being a big boy presumably meant stifling that kind of impulse.

* * *

A junior associate of the old
Partisan Review
gang, Harold Stone had become known as a Wunderkind even before he came down from Harvard with an essay titled "Bakunin and the Idea of an Avant-Garde." He took a job at Knopf, shared a girl with Bellow and got his glasses broken by Mailer, thereby sealing his reputation. At increasing intervals, he published essays and book reviews that were much discussed in the closing days of the last literary establishment in New York. Along the way he had married a young Waspy debutante who now led an entirely separate existence in New Canaan, Connecticut, though they remained married.

Fresh from the suburban Midwest, Russell had devoured Harold's editions of Sartre and Camus and Gramsci in college; he had read Harold's essays on Lukacs and Kafka. When he arrived in Manhattan after graduate work at Oxford, Russell had been fortunate to find a job at the venerable publishing house where Harold reigned, and to come to the older man's attention by way of some poems he had had published in a quarterly. Perhaps Harold had felt nostalgic for the idea of literary young men coming to the city, grateful for the idea that young men were still writing poetry at all, in the manner of his friends from the Village days so long past; curious to know what the smart young men were reading nowadays; guilty possibly, because as likely as not he was about to have lunch at The Four Seasons with a millionaire author of espionage thrillers. At any rate, Harold had seen something in the poems. He first took Russell out to lunch and later took him under his prickly, owlish wing.

At seven, as he was leaving for the day, Russell stopped by Dave Whitlock's office. Whitlock was staring gloomily at his computer terminal. He was the numbers man: the numbers always seemed to make him unhappy.

"Don't fret, Whit. I've got an anthology of Serbo-Croatian poetry in the works that should turn us around."

"Not today, please," said Whitlock, waving him off.

Russell's age, he had been at Wharton learning econometric models while Russell was at Oxford reading Blake, and had arrived at the firm almost the same day as Russell. Whitlock's great tragedy as a businessman was that he actually read books. Four years before, he could have started with a consulting firm or an investment bank for twice as much money as he was now making in publishing.

"Sorry about the Rappaport book."

"What about it?"

"You didn't hear? Harold cut the print run down to ten thousand this morning."

"I was just in there today. The son of a bitch didn't say a word."

Harold's door was closed and Carlton wasn't at her station. Russell simultaneously rapped and pushed the door open. Harold was sitting on the couch; Carlton was sitting on Harold. In the moment after they registered Russell's presence, both turned to monitor and cover their immediate exposure, banging heads audibly. In raising a hand extracted from Carlton's blouse, Harold spilled her onto the floor. Their faces betrayed them more than the flash of white cotton and flesh: surprise modulating rapidly through guilt to gross indignation.

In the days that followed Russell Calloway was left to imagine what the prevailing emotion would be. But from the first instant, he was fairly certain that opening Harold's door had not been one of the all-time great career moves.

3

Corrine was getting so tired of parties: dinner parties, birthday parties, publication parties, housewarming parties; holiday and theme parties; opening-night parties, closing-night parties; gallery openings; junior committee benefits for the American Ballet Theater and the Public Library; benefits for the Democratic candidate, the Society for the Facially Disfigured, the Coalition for the Homeless, the American Medical Foundation for AIDS Research; at nightclubs, at the Plaza and the Temple of Dendur in the Metropolitan Museum of Art; in honor of someone named Alonzo, this being his entire name, who is a professional fundraiser and party-giver ... a party for Pandy Birdsall, who was moving to L.A. because she'd slept with everybody in New York. "Partying is such sweet sorrow," Jeff said that night.