Brightness Falls (52 page)

Walking across town he felt ill, liable to vomit at any moment. At a newsstand he bought a pack of cigarettes for the first time in more than two years. The blind vendor asked him the denomination of the bill, a ten in fact—But what if it had been a single? Russell thought. The blind man would never know. Indeed, the vendor's weathered face seemed to display an expression of wounded skepticism. The notion that he could pick up a magazine and walk off with it made Russell furious at the man's vulnerability. Didn't he know they stole everything in this city? Trust was just a word sometimes conjoined to
Bank.

Tiny shards of glass embedded in the sidewalk ignited as he passed, walking west. Russell believed that he was as aware of his own weaknesses as one could be without systematically attacking them or profoundly disliking oneself, and it had never been that difficult for him to imagine himself as the potential villain, the adulterer, the quitter in the marriage. To comprehend Corrine in this role was staggering. Standing beside a sign that said no standing anytime, he slipped a cigarette between his parched lips and stared down at the matchbook the vendor had given him. Imprinted with a pair of splayed female thighs and genitalia, it bore the legend "Dial 990-FUCK." As he stepped out of the elevator, Russell nearly tripped over two fat orange cords running from his office to the utility closet in the common hallway. Dance music throbbed from the open door. During the night, it seemed, his office suite had been transformed into a nightclub; it was now bristling with hip young men and women in black clothing, and high-tech lights.

"I've been trying to call you," Donna said, seeing his puzzlement. "You didn't forget about the photo shoot?"

Glenda Banes emerged from a thicket of telescoped aluminum saplings. "I hate shooting on location," she said. "I certainly hope you're getting a bigger office once your deal is finished."

He kissed her proffered cheek.

"My goodness, had a hard night, did we?" She held him by the shoulders and examined his face, then said cheerfully, "You look like shit. Carlotta—have we got a fucking makeup job for you!"

Violently nauseated, Russell fled for the bathroom, passing Whitlock, who stood at the door of his own office shaking his head at the spectacle.

Russell leaned against the tiled wall with his eyes closed; there was a knock on the door.

"Are you okay in there," Donna asked nervously.

"Not really."

"You want coffee?"

When he didn't answer she said, "If you're
really
hung over I can get you a chocolate shake."

"Do you have anything for pain?"

"I got some Percodan in my desk. And maybe a Darvocet."

She returned with a yellow pill, which he swallowed, sucking water from the sink to wash it down.

Russell sat in a chair as he was powdered, combed, brushed and moussed. After half an hour of this he was handed over to the stylist, a young man with a crisp brush-cut who wished to dress him.

"Couldn't I just wear my own clothes?" Russell said.

The stylist regarded him with pity, his blue blazer with contempt.

"We want people to think you're hip," Glenda said.

From the rack of startling clothing they'd brought along Russell finally selected a suit and shirt that were not so bold as to further aggravate his queasy stomach.

"What's the matter, you don't like the Replacements? We can change the music. You go for hip-hop?"

Finally they placed him behind his desk and turned on the lights. With great difficulty Russell was able to keep his eyes open in the glare. Simply to pretend that he was not physically ill and emotionally wrecked required a heroic effort; to smile was beyond his overtaxed capabilities. Glenda screamed orders at her staff and wooed Russell with honeyed suggestions. "Think about something that makes you happy. Think about sex. "

Russell suppressed a bitter laugh at this suggestion.

After an hour she was exasperated. "Jesus, Russell, you look like you just lost your best friend."

The assistants fluttered, tugging and pulling at his clothing, patting his clammy face dry and adjusting his hair. He had sweated through three shirts by the time Glenda stopped shooting.

After two hours, which seemed like eight, the crew began to fold up camp, and Russell fled the office for lunch. In the lobby, he met Washington coming in.

"Have some lunch?" Russell said, happy to see someone who might feel, at least physically, as bad as he did.

"You're the boss."

Once they were seated at the Japanese place across the street Washington said, "You want to talk about it?"

"I don't know." It was not their habit to talk about the things that mattered most.

"That's cool, it's up to you."

Russell lit a cigarette while Washington ordered two beers.

"Jeff slept with Corrine."

Nodding his head gravely, Washington spewed Delphic plumes of smoke from his nostrils.

"What, you knew about this?"

"No, it just makes sense in retrospect. There's always that thing between friends and lovers. Taboo and jealousy crossed with the desire to share everything. A blind dude could see the chemistry between them."

"I'm glad it seems so unremarkable to you."

"When did it happen?"

"Five, six years ago. I don't know."

"Before the holy bonds of wedlock?"

"I think so."

"Let it go then."

"The major calamity of my life, and you want me to shine it on?"

"I'm just saying it happened a long time ago. There are worse things. You think the good marriages are the ones where everybody's all faithful to the end? I think maybe the best ones, if there are any, survive the big shit. The bard say, 'When the sea was calm, all boats alike showed mastership in floating.' "

"You're
telling
me
about marriage?"

"Just telling you about life."

"It's a measure of how low I've sunk that I'm listening to you." Like everything, the cigarette was starting to taste really bad.

"I don't think I can stomach raw fish right now," Washington said, examining the menu. "Don't forget," he added, allowing himself a smile, "you did the nasty thing to her, too."

"I'm scared, Wash."

"That's what it's like being single, chief."

"I wonder if Jeff's told her he told me."

"Probably."

"Why doesn't she call, then?"

"Why do you think? She's ashamed. You both need some time."

"I don't know if there's enough time in the world," Russell said, shuffling together the packets of sugar and Sweet 'n Low in the sugar jar. Wondering if things could get any worse, he recalled a line from Lichtenberg, that you can't really say conditions are going to truly improve, but they certainly have to if they're going to be any good.

Back at the office, Donna was reading
Blitz,
her black work boots up on the desk. She informed Russell that both Carl Linder and
The Wall Street Journal
were trying to reach him. He shoveled the piles of books and manuscripts off the couch and onto the floor, and stretched out full length. With his marriage in ruins, all that tethered him to the planet was his work; and the fate of a company was more or less in his hands. But right now he couldn't face so much as his mail.

Donna barged in, bearing a gift. "Happy Birthday," she said, humming a few notes of the song through her nose. "Et cetera, et cetera." Suddenly she was blushing; sentiment and ceremony flustered her. "I never know what to get you," she said defensively as he tore open the silver paper. Russell prepared to feign enthusiasm.

He lifted up a length of soft red and black rope in his hand. "A tie?" There were three other pieces of tasseled cord in the package.

Then he noticed the brochure, "Love Ties," which featured a photograph of a nude woman tied spread-eagle to a four-poster bed.

"For you and Corrine," Donna chirped. "I figure married life might get a little dull sometimes, so I thought ..."

Perhaps these, he thought, were the famed bonds of matrimony.

"My boyfriend, Gus, he loves them."

"I can imagine." Russell leaned forward and kissed her awkwardly. "Thanks a lot."

"I didn't figure anybody else would think of that."

"Only you, Donna."

Later Russell asked Donna if she had heard any rumors about the company.

"Nothing specific," she said, "but according to the graffiti downtown, the whole capitalist system's going to collapse pretty soon and be replaced by an anarchist utopia."

"That's good news," Russell said.

At five o'clock Russell called Casey and Tom's and got their answering service—"Reynes residence"—a snotty voice informing him no one was home.

He imagined that Jeff had talked to Corrine and that she was avoiding him. He still hoped she would deny everything in some convincing way, that Jeff would plead temporary insanity, or wishful thinking, with regard to his confession. A few weeks before, he had complained to Russell over the phone about the propensity of his fellows in the program to invent and exaggerate past crimes.

The phone rang intermittently, but Donna took care of it, informing him among other things that the
Times
wanted to talk to him about Propp. "Tell them to talk to his friend and editor Harold Stone," he called out. When, eventually, he lifted his arm from the couch to look at his watch, it was six-twenty. He stood up and walked to the window; outside, the big yellow cat's eyes were coolly surveying the street.

That night he had dinner with Tim Calhoun at The White Room. Much as he wished to entertain the man, who expected his semiannual night on the town, Russell could barely summon the energy for conversation. When the novelist went off to the men's room Russell called for the check. Nancy Tanner waved to him from a big table on the other side of the room as a thin pair of arms faintly redolent of Shalimar and cigarettes wrapped themselves around his neck, and a tongue belonging, like the arms, to Trina Cox probed his left ear, bringing back sense memories that were all the more unwelcome for being extremely arousing. All at once pieces of their night together came back to him. Brimming with champagne, Trina declared that she forgave him for his cruel mistreatment and insisted he go out dancing with her party. She climbed into his lap and tried to resume her exploration of his ear. When Calhoun returned, Russell managed to palm him off on Trina, who was more than willing to show him the town.

"Package for you, Mr. Calloway," the doorman said, bringing a fat, squishy garment bag out of the package room—Corrine's mink. Apparently the fur vault in which it spent the summer returned it on a prearranged schedule, unaware of any interruption in the Calloway domestic calendar.

Russell and Corrine had purchased the coat two or three years before, when they couldn't afford it; they had gone to the store just to look, lured by an ad in the paper. Outside it was August, but the furrier's showroom was chilly, sepulchral, haunted by small skinless ghosts, faintly tinged with musk and the coniferous tang of northern forests. Gliding out of the underbrush as if on figure skates, a salesman had given them an introductory course on furs, starting Corrine out in Russian sable. She giggled nervously at the feel of the satin lining slipping over her bare arms. After that, of course, the advertised special was a bit of a letdown—male skins sewn together by palsied, half-blind, underpaid sweatshop apprentices, apparently. When they finally found a coat that looked as if it had been tailored for Corrine, it cost twice as much as they'd planned to spend. She had just begun her job as a broker and Russell was making less than almost everyone they knew. They couldn't possibly. But goddamnit, Russell had decided, that was why they were going to. His mouth was dry, his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth as he said, "We'll take it." Corrine protested, already removing the coat, shaking her head, but Russell insisted in spite of, or perhaps precisely because of, the syncopated flutter of his heartbeat, the hollow vertiginous feeling in his stomach, the sweat on the palms of his hands.

He threw the garment bag on the dining room table and fixed himself a large birthday vodka. Once upon a time he would have considered it romantic to try to drink away his grief. Now it seemed just analgesic.

Bernie Melman was not returning Russell's calls. On Friday the price of Corbin, Dern over the counter dropped from nineteen to eighteen, which was odd, given the outstanding tender offer of twenty-one and a half. Nearly everything dropped on Friday, the Dow losing a record 108 points, and Juan Baptiste's Friday-morning item certainly didn't help the price of Corbin, Dern.

That
was
boy-wonder publisher Russell Calloway dancing his cares away on the floor of Jonestown the other night. He has
beau
coups de
worries these days, what with rumors of shaky financing for his buyout of Corbin, Dern, the veddy distinguished old-boy publishing house—not to mention the suspicious demise of CD author Victor Propp. But who was the blonde, in conference on Russell's lap? Not wife corrine. An aspiring editorial assistant, no doubt...

P.S. Anybody seen New Englandy author jeff pierce? Sources report he is brushing up on his arts and crafts at an exclusive Connecticut hospital.

For almost a week he'd kept himself awake at night rehearsing angry interrogations interspersed with self-rebukes, but when Corrine finally called Sunday night from her mother's house, Russell was temporarily depleted, as if the many practice conversations had exhausted the possibilities of her actual response. "How do you
think
I am?" he said, in answer to her nervous inquiry. "I'm sorry."

"Jeff's excuse is he was drunk, which apparently passes for an explanation in AA. What's yours?"

"It was years ago, Russ, before we were married. You were in England and we were arguing all the time over the phone. It was like you asked me to marry you just so I'd wait for you, and then I didn't really think you wanted to and I was so scared. I thought you'd met someone over there and Jeff just tried to comfort me."

"Comfort is not an emotion that needs to be administered vaginally."