Brightness Falls (58 page)

Though he briefly considered honoring Jeff's prohibition against a memorial service, Russell decided that those who were left behind required some sort of farewell. Corrine strongly disagreed, but in light of recent history she decided not to press her claims on Jeff's memory.

Caitlin sat in the second row, having flown back from London for the memorial, stoic beside her banker fiancé. Walking up the aisle, Corrine was taken aback, like nearly everyone else, at the sight of a beautiful girl with big lemur eyes, wearing what appeared to be a wedding dress, sitting alone with a potted jade plant in her lap. Corrine wondered if she herself could have been that thin, back when she had almost stopped eating, when eating seemed to be the only thing she could control.

Sitting in the front beside Bev and Wick Pierce, Corrine was only intermittently aware of what anyone, including Russell, was saying. He was speaking now, trying to maintain his composure. Russell and the other men—they were all men up there at the altar, as usual—were talking in their imperial masculine way about what Jeff had accomplished in the world, how he had left his words behind. And Russell had solemnly informed her that the new book, written in the last few months, "was Jeff's
Ivan Illyich."
As if that alleviated the sting and made everything okay. "It's sort of about all of us," Russell said, when she asked. She didn't know if she was ready for that. Listening to all of the fulsome eulogizing, Corrine became more and more annoyed at this secular consolation, this idea that leaving behind a stack of pages or a pile of stones with your name on it redeemed the life that no longer was being lived. Russell had almost left their marriage behind in
his
quest to build some kind of monument. Piling up stones, he had forgotten all about mortar. Concerned with everything except the most important thing, like the man in the joke who lost his arm and mourned his Rolex.

When they talked about what had gone wrong during the past year, Russell and Corrine were always telling two different stories. In his history of their world, the battle for control of a publishing company and the stock market crash of 1987 would feature prominently, stirringly; in hers these were footnotes in tiny print. These public events—like the death of a loved one from a communicable disease, like a financial collapse— revealed like a lightning flash, for a split second, how connected and interdependent each of them was at all times, their well-being intimately bound up with the fate of those around them.

She didn't think she could remotely explain what she was thinking to Russell, and for a moment she almost despised him again. But she loved him in spite of this, and that was the whole point. She once dreamed of a perfect communion between souls, believed she had achieved it with Russell. Now she was willing to fight for something less.

Finally an old poet, bearded and calm, a friend from one of Jeff's other lives, one of the lives Corrine was not familiar with, was reading Nashe's "A Litany in Time of Plague" in a voice both sonorous and nasal.

Rich men, trust not in wealth, Gold cannot buy you health; Physic himself must fade, All things to end are made. The plague full swift goes by...

Russell had read her the poem years before, when he still read poetry aloud to her.

Beauty is but a flower Which wrinkles will devour; Brightness falls from the air; Queens have died young and fair; Dust hath closed Helen's eye. I am sick, I must die. Lord, have mercy on us!

She had asked Russell what the line "Brightness falls from the air" actually
meant.
She'd always been more comfortable with math and science, with their relative certainties. Russell had told her a scholar proposed that the word was "hair," and that the
h
had disappeared as the result of an Elizabethan printer's error. But he preferred "air. " And when she pressed him he just said, "Think about it." And now, suddenly, she could picture it clearly: brightness and beauty and youth falling like snow out of the sky all around them, gold dust falling to the streets and washing away in the rain outside the church, down the gutters into the sea.

And yet for her own tribute she would have taken a more modest sentiment, from a children's book. "It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer."

And then it was over. The mourners shuffled out into the drizzle outside St. Mark's, posing or refusing to pose for the several photographers, talking about Jeff, about mutual friends and about the details of lives that they were about to resume now that this encounter with death was over, the panhandlers who lived in the churchyard working the well-dressed and spiritually tenderized crowd. Russell shook hands with Washington and then they embraced, slapping each other's backs.

"Did we do something wrong," Russell asked.

"Undoubtedly."

"Still, it's hard to believe you're working for Melman."

"Hey, chief, it's simple: he needs a guy like me, and I need a job. It's the perfect basis for a relationship."

Russell smiled ruefully, as if he finally understood a joke that he was the last to get. He nodded when Washington put an arm around his shoulder and suggested they go somewhere for a drink.

Russell spent the first night back in New York in Corrine's studio, the old apartment having been sublet. After that he stayed on, although it was only after a week that they dared talk about the future and acknowledge this new arrangement. He didn't know what he wanted to do, Russell told Zac, but he didn't think he would be returning to Los Angeles; Zac told him to take a month to think about it. Although they couldn't really afford it, Russell and Corrine had decided to take their vacation after all, to give themselves a chance to get to know each other again.

They left New York in a snowstorm, after sliding in a school of filthy yellow fishtailing cabs up the FDR Drive along the East River. Five hours later they were in the tropics. It was a commonplace of life in the age of air travel, but the transition seemed miraculous to them both as they walked off the plane in St. Maarten holding hands. Soon they were riding bumpy thermals above the multicolored, lightly corrugated Caribbean. "There it is," said Corrine, as she always did, when the island came into view.

Looking down at the water, she saw a ghostly shape against the dark green background of a reef, a huge blue lozenge on the sea floor, which appeared to be the hull of a large boat. Several buoys on the surface marked the location of the wreck. She tried to point it out to Russell, on the aisle seat, but by the time he looked out the tiny window they were over the ridge above the airstrip.

There were phones on the island now, and it seemed to them more crowded and noisy than they remembered. The restaurants were prohibitively expensive, though probably no more expensive than before, and after their second night they bought groceries in town so they could economize on meals. Their third night they made love again for the first time in half a year. Both of them were shy and awkward; each experiencing a kind of double vision, as if they were watching themselves making love in a dream, knowing the other's body so intimately and yet finding it new and strange. In the morning they were taken for newlyweds by shopkeepers and waiters.

Later they heard that the wreck Corrine had seen was J. P. Haddad's yacht, lost in a big storm earlier in the winter, now eighty feet down. It had taken eight hours for it to sink. The crew had successfully reached shore, but some claimed that Haddad himself had gone down with the ship. Certainly no one knew his whereabouts. A voluble American told them, one night in a bar, that all the sea cocks had been opened, the intake tubes slashed. "You know," the man confided, "he lost everything in the crash." The blue hull was still out there under the water when they flew back to New York, and sometimes in later years the image would bob up into Corrine's consciousness—when she first heard, more than a year later, about the collapse of Melman's empire, for instance —an enigma somehow associated with that time of their lives, just as men in yellow ties conjured the preceding period.

New York is chilly and curiously quiet when they return. Feeling cramped and restless in the small studio the first night back, they go out to eat at a bistro in SoHo. When they leave the restaurant, a fine snow is falling.

Walking over to West Broadway for a cab they pass a young boy sitting huddled in a shadowed doorway. Russell exerts coaxing pressure on Corrine's arm as she slows; he feels her missionary impulse kicking in, imagines the look of concern crossing her face, which is turned toward the boy.

"Wait," she says, disengaging her arm and walking over to the boy, then crouching down beside him. "Are you okay," she asks him. Russell's instinct is to protect her from the con, but coming closer, he can see what she sees. So young, barely a teenager, the pale face frightened and pathetic.

"I'm cold," the boy whispers.

Corrine takes off her scarf and wraps it around him, then turns to look imploringly at Russell. He reaches into his coat pocket, extracts the three dollars' change from the coat check, hands it to her. She gives it to the boy, then lingers. Russell has to exert gentle pressure on her arm to move her away. In the cab, she wonders aloud how such a young boy would come to be shivering in a doorway and what might be done to help. She is still brooding as they go up the stairs, as they undress for bed. Although he knows he will be able to forget the boy's face and sleep tonight, he understands that Corrine cannot, and he is almost proud of her for it. He looks out the window at the falling snow, then turns and takes his wife in his arms, feeling grateful to be here even as he wonders what he is going to do with his life in strictly practical terms. For years he had trained himself to do one thing, and he did it well, but he doesn't know whether he wants to keep doing it for the rest of his life, or even, for that matter, whether anyone will let him. He is still worrying when they go to bed.

As Corrine drifts off to sleep, she rolls toward him in the bed and mumbles, "Thanks." Russell isn't sure if she means for tonight, or for coming home.

Feeling his wife's head nesting in the pillow below his shoulder, he is almost certain that they will find ways to manage. They've been learning to get by with less, and they'll keep learning. It seems to him as if they're taking a course in loss lately. And as he feels himself falling asleep he has an insight he believes is important, which he hopes he will remember in the morning, although it is one of those thoughts that seldom survive translation to the language of daylight hours: knowing that whatever plenty befalls them together or separately in the future, they will become more and more intimate with loss as the years accumulate, friends dying or slipping away undramatically into the crowded past, memory itself finally flickering and growing treacherous toward the end; knowing that even the children who may be in their future will eventually school them in the pain of growth and separation, as their own parents and mentors die off and leave them alone in the world, shivering at the dark threshold.