Brightness Falls (55 page)

Though lost, Russell was not unwilling to learn, to admit that the old principles had failed him, to try to suspend judgment until he could exercise it again—the sun and the apparent formlessness of life here at the edgeless edge of the continent reminding him of lines from Stevens: "You must become an ignorant man again / And see the sun again with an ignorant eye / And see it clearly in the idea of it. " He had an ignorant eye and the sun was certainly shining, but even after several months it was still just glare.

Work had the virtue, at least, of shiny novelty, and Russell had always been an enthusiastic starter. He optioned two books in the first week, and began to talk to directors and actors. The directors were easy to tell from the actors—they all wore beards, conceiving themselves the intellectuals of the community. Russell arrived in town trailing a vague legend of success from the East, and Zac amplified it considerably; everyone wanted to have lunch with him. The fact that his attempt to take over a publishing company had failed did not, finally, register as much as the fact that he had done
something.
His days were full, and the notion of the movie business as a languid affair conducted mainly at poolside was quickly discarded. The day began at seven-thirty with a breakfast meeting at one of the big hotels and proceeded unabated through a business dinner at seven-thirty. At times it occurred to Russell that his schedule reflected the illusion of activity rather than accomplishment, but he was grateful it didn't allow him too much time to think.

For all the hours of work, the community was infused with a sense of its own glamour. The end product of all their labors cast a reflected glow back onto the meanest laborers in the industry. The typist was animated by the consciousness that her drudgery transmitted lines that might be spoken by stars on screen, while agents and producers, driving their expensive cars to important meetings, were understandably tempted to believe
they
were the stars of the real drama, of which the public saw only the puppet version.

Having once pictured the enterprise as a shark tank churning with blood, Russell was surprised at how much free-floating goodwill and bonhomie he encountered. A childlike glee prevailed at having discovered not just an unlocked candy store but the actual factory where all of the sweets were produced. Like children, the inside players were capable of sudden cruelty and violence to their own, but there was so much wealth to go around that the predominant spirit seemed generous, the politics gentler than those in a graduate English department, where there was so much less plunder to be divvied up. A lucrative, unofficial socialism was practiced; if you lost one job, another would be offered elsewhere at a higher salary.

There were rules, of course. In the wake of a hedonistic binge earlier in the decade, a curious puritanism held sway in Babylon West. Zac had run Russell through the drill at one of their early lunches at a casual expensive restaurant on Melrose. The tented dining room was like a shrine to healthful simplicity, with pastel-colored patrons and menu offerings of grilled fishes and raw vegetables.

Zac had been reverentially cataloguing the sexual malpractices of those at neighboring tables. Suddenly he asked, "How was your dinner with Packard the other night."

"We got on fine. He was eager to let me know that he'd read several books in his life, and I tried to assure him that I liked movies."

Zac nodded thoughtfully. "He said you were pounding drinks."

"Jesus Christ. I had a martini and two glasses of wine, for God's sake."

"A lot of people did too much of everything in the early eighties, and now there's a kind of collective hangover. In the fifties they had the Red Scare, now we got the White Scare. That's how Jeff really queered himself out here. And you being associated with Jeff, you know ..."

"I'm guilty by association?"

"I'm just trying to explain, guy. There's this competitive health thing now. So your lunch partner waits for you to order the tuna and then he'll order three pieces of arugula and call it a meal, giving you to believe that you are a monstrous glutton and therefore not spiritually streamlined. When you order a glass of white wine he'll tell you about his personal trainer, who drives to the house every morning at five in a semi full of Nautilus equipment for a private workout before his breakfast of three strawberries and one piece of dry whole wheat toast. Anyway, one thing about AA, it's the best pickup scene in town."

Solomon encouraged him to look for a house, offering to guarantee the financing, but Russell remained in the hotel, clinging to his transience for security. After almost two months alone in the New York apartment, he was becoming accustomed to a life without cozy domestic touches and to the blandly reassuring babble of an unwatched TV set.

Zac lived several hundred feet above him, up the canyon, in a house of indeterminate style that clung to its quarter-acre of the hillside; behind the house, set into a cliff like a flat gem, a redwood deck framed a shimmering oval of turquoise that seemed to defy the antique notion of water seeking its own level. Zac threw a party at the house a week after Russell's arrival to introduce him to the local fauna. These included producers, studio executives, agents and lawyers, as well as a smattering of actors and actresses. The women were of two types, industry professional and strictly ornamental. In terms of a contemporary standard of female beauty, the process of natural selection of the species, reinforced by cosmetic surgery, had reached in Los Angeles an acute level of refinement. There was an obvious surplus of young blonde women in jeans and breathtaking stretch tops who identified themselves as actresses, all of whom
acted
very glad to have Russell in town. One of these women became his companion.

Katrina Ostrom was an aspiring actress from Denver, sweet-natured beneath the fresh, still wet lacquer of apprentice professional glamour, not yet twisted and deformed by the hard lessons she was learning in this profession. So far she had played a dead body in a made-for-TV movie and had two lines in an upcoming feature. Just a few months more acclimated than Russell, she took him to parties and drove up to Santa Barbara with him on the weekends, but he would not let her spend the night in his room. He knew it was a flimsy scruple at best, but he could not bear the possibility that Corrine might call in the middle of the night while someone else slept beside him. Curiously, Katrina didn't find this fastidiousness particularly offensive or surprising. Although he didn't inquire too closely, he gathered that the recent men in her life had treated her as a minor accessory.

If he was not as cynical as Zac, who referred approvingly to their liaison as a low-maintenance relationship, Russell was certainly not looking for a soulmate. At first, he'd been astonished and grateful that he was able to perform the act with anyone else, let alone a beautiful girl of twenty. After more than a decade with Corrine it seemed nothing short of miraculous; and now for the first time in his life he was conscious of being older than the twenty-year-olds. But as pleasant as it might be, he couldn't help comparing, and at times the idea of making love was unbearably sad and he would find himself unable to go through with it. When this happened he would become short-tempered and impatient. One night at Katrina's tiny, messy studio in a converted motel in east Hollywood, he had begun to kiss her until suddenly overcome with a wave of revulsion, perhaps brought on by the tang of onion on her breath. "This place is a pigsty," he said.

She rose from the bed and started to pick up the clothing scattered around the bedroom. Suddenly, the sight of a flimsy silk teddy held up to the light between her long fingers filled him with remorse.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm absolutely unbearable. I don't know how you can stand me." He jumped from the bed and held her close against him.

"You're not so bad. In fact, you're the nicest guy I've met out here."

But he could become only worse, like the others, faced with such meager expectations. In what he took to be a gesture of noble renunciation, he told her they shouldn't see each other anymore; he subsequently broke his resolution twice in the course of three weeks, calling her late at night and asking if he could come over. The third time he called she said, "I'm sorry, Russell."

"Is somebody there," he asked.

In an exasperated whisper she said, "I can't just sit around hoping you'll call."

He was almost relieved that the opportunity for further damage had been removed, knowing that he had behaved badly. Drifting like a leaf on the current, Russell felt incapable of making hard decisions on his own.

46

Corrine's New Year's resolution was to date. She knew she owed it to herself to get over Russell, or at least her friends insisted she did—but every time a stranger tried to put his tongue in her mouth it seemed either comic or tragic. Duane Peters got as far as the hook on her bra before she started to laugh. Casey Reynes fixed her up with a blind date. Her friend was a Makepeace, after all, and her candidate for Corrine's bed, and hand, was Christian Howorth, of the Memphis Howorths, Yale '77, whose endowments and accomplishments took Casey fifteen minutes to relate, the most pertinent being that he had inherited money, had made a great deal more in arbitrage and had bailed out before the market collapsed. When he arrived at her door on a run-down street in Chelsea in a tastefully understated town car with driver, he was as handsome as billed. At the theater and later at Lutèce he proved an engaging and fertile raconteur. He was a three-time member of the U.S. equestrian team, a skier and a gentleman, standing to hold her chair when she returned from the ladies' room, leaving her at her door that night with a delicate kiss. His taste seemed impeccable insofar as women were concerned: he sent roses with a sweet note the following morning and called for another date that afternoon. She went out with him twice more, the last time to the Reyneses' ski house in Vermont. He was great in every way except that he wasn't Russell. When she finally told him she really wasn't ready to date yet, Casey was furious. "God knows I tried to help her," Casey told friends, in a tone that suggested Corrine was now fornicating with German shepherds and shooting heroin like her friend Jeff Pierce.

Jeff took her to dinner on her birthday. Though they had talked on the phone frequently, she hadn't seen him since he'd been released from the hospital a few months before. He looked too thin and tired, and there was a new awkwardness between them. The conversation was strained until she reminded him of her last birthday, when he had brought that teenager with the tits to their apartment, and Corrine had thrown water on him, and he and Crash had knocked over the vase.

"Jesus, was that only a year ago?" he said. "Everything before the hospital seems like old black-and-white television. I was ripped that night. In fact, I shot up in your bathroom."

"God, Jeff," was all Corrine could say.

Jeff told her that later, when he'd returned to his loft with the model, she had suddenly lifted her head up from the pillow and told him, caveat emptor, that her tits were
enhanced
—just so he wouldn't, like, be all
shocked
or anything—and he'd been so surprised by this earnest, urgent revelation that he was unable to stop laughing, much less to perform. Hearing him tell it, Corrine laughed herself, a lately unaccustomed exercise of facial muscles.

"Story of my life. Nothing turned out to be real," he said, grinning sheepishly until he saw that Corrine was crying.

"Please don't say that, Jeff. "

Offering up his napkin, he observed that it was stained with marinara sauce. After patting down his pockets in search of a handkerchief, he ripped the pocket from his shirt and handed her the piece of blue oxford cloth.

"You're not eating," she chided, when she'd regained her composure. "You look like a skeleton."

"Look who's talking."

"I've gained weight," she insisted.

"How is he," Jeff asked as she dipped a fork ostentatiously into her angel-hair.

"I think he's seeing someone. He hasn't told me but I feel it."

"And you?"

"I can't picture being with anyone else. I keep
trying,
goddamnit, but I just can't feature it."

He fired up a cigarette and scratched at his wrist, which, she saw, was splotched with some kind of plum-colored rash. She wondered if he was back on the needle. "I still love you," he said.

"What's that on your arm?" she said abruptly, then laughed nervously at her own non sequitur. Pulling on a strand of hair draped over her

shoulder, she said, "Sorry. I love you too, but it's no use to either of

us."

"Utility be damned. I've never exactly been the practical type."

"No. But I suppose when it comes right down to it, I am. " She reached

over and touched his mottled hand. "Aren't I?"

One night, looking for her birth certificate to verify her existence to her new employer, she came upon a limp, folded piece of lined paper, with a poem written in Russell's backward-leaning hand:

Let the Muses sing and the Graces dance

Not at their wedding only but all their days long

So couple their hearts that no ill ever befall them.

Let him never call her other than my Joy! My Light!

And she never call him other than Sweetheart.

And when they must depart this earth

Because they have sweetly lived together

Let one die not a day before the other

But he bury her, she him, with even fate

One heart let jointly separate

O happy both!

Russell had chosen the poem, one of his grad school Elizabethan treasures, that best man Jeff had read at their wedding in Stockbridge more than six years before. So perfect then, it was almost unbearable now, bringing home for the first time the possibility that they might not end their days together.

Between crying jags she went to work at the DA's Office downtown, sifting through mind-numbing mountains of documents in search of evidence of securities fraud, twice a week taking the number 6 train up to Bleecker to work at the mission.