Brightness Falls (9 page)

"Do you give lollipops," Jeff asked.

"We give whatever you want."

"Save me," Jeff said, "from what I want." When the model for the underwear shoot arrived, Glenda demanded that he remove his pants and shirt. "I think we're going to shave your chest," she said to the dismayed model, who was led off whimpering to a dressing room and emerged twenty minutes later in a pair of jockey shorts, smooth of torso and puffy-eyed. It looked to Jeff as if he'd been crying.

"Nice pecs," said Glenda. "Are they real?"

Jeff went to the bathroom, nodded off on a couch in the corner of the loft till Glenda was ready for him.

"I think we're going to light you from the left side to start. You'll want some of these eyedrops, I think the eyedrops are definitely in order here, having a little trouble locating your pupils in there, big fella... Do you want anything to drink, Jeff?"

"Chocolate egg cream..."

"Call the deli, somebody..."

"With maybe a little shot of vodka."

"Absolutely."

"Make it a double and hold the egg cream."

One of the assistants seated Jeff in an old wooden school chair, while another wheeled up an antique Remington on a rickety typewriter stand. The retro writer look. From behind, somebody rubbed mousse into his hair. If there was one thing Jeff hated, it was mousse, except when it was for dessert and chocolate. But Jeff gradually disappeared. He had long since learned that his actual presence was not required at these sessions. At one time his face would clench with the self-consciousness of the unwilling photo subject, but gradually he had worked toward a state of Oriental indifference accelerated in this instance by the vodka. Each time his image was reproduced he looked less and less like himself, the flash bulbs progressively bleaching the map of his soul out of his face. With enough exposure he would look like someone else entirely— the perfect disguise for a writer.

Two brand-new models showed up at the studio looking for portfolio shots and Glenda decided to mix them into Jeff's shoot. He was too stunned to protest; they were the kind of mythic feminine creatures rarely encountered in three dimensions. The stylist dressed the blonde in a man's pin-striped suit and gave her a cane. The black girl they stripped and wrapped in plastic ivy. Jeff gathered it was supposed to be laurel. Not being a visual artist, he didn't quite catch the concept. The girls vogued and posed around him like inhabitants of a dream, making him dizzy with fear and yearning.

Somehow he had not envisioned this part of the job, back when he'd decided to be a writer.

A phone rang and presently one of Glenda's functionaries whispered in her ear. "The kid's all right," Glenda announced. "Maybe have a little trouble with algebra down the road, but he's kicking and screaming. So, are we all set here?"

But Jeff was asleep, his elbow propped on the typewriter, his head nestled in the cup of his palm, his breath whistling softly through the cavern of his open mouth.

5

While Russell was in the bathroom Corrine pulled on the new bustier she'd bought at The Pleasure Chest, which lifted her breasts higher than they'd been since she was about seventeen, and nearly spilled them right back over the top of the scalloped translucent black lace cups. She climbed into the unfamiliar garter belt, then stepped into the garters, slid the black fishnet stockings up her calves to her thighs, where she succeeded with some difficulty in attaching them to the garters. The faucet in the bathroom was still singing like a teakettle. Next she pulled her hair back, bobby-pinned it down as quickly as she could, and ran to the closet for the wig box. Adjusting the stiff copper tresses of the Tina Turner wig, she looked around frantically for the lipstick, yanking the tops from several of her old tubes and scattering them, finally finding the new one, a lurid, supernatural shade of red which she hoped never to encounter in real life. A slathering of mascara and she was finished, just as the bathroom door opened.

She ran to the bed, threw herself down across it, and struck an indecent odalisque pose. Emerging naked from the bathroom, Russell was startled to find a strange woman in his bed. But she could see, quite explicitly, that it didn't take him long at all to get the idea.

Once inspired, he didn't require instructions. After all, it was Valentine's Day, or had been until midnight. Russell had risen early and brought her breakfast in bed with bagels and cream cheese and Scottish salmon, and spilled orange juice—very sweet, though she hated to eat in the mornings—along with a card and bottle of Chanel No. 5 on the tray. Inside the card he had written: Black velvet hairbands and French scented candles John Stuart Mill and supermarket-tabloid scandals The song Van Morrison sings These foolish things Remind me of you.

As she was dressing after breakfast, she'd noticed the wig box in the closet and remembered the night when they had come home from the Halloween party the year before—how he'd leaped on her while she still had the wig on and how afterward he had confessed that it was like fucking another woman, and she hadn't minded because it was her, after all, and she had been excited by the idea of
being
the other woman.

Not that she had time for this, she thought, as Russell, sated and exhausted from his tumble with Tina, began to snore. But that was the whole point: When it was new you didn't have time for anything else, and after ten years you never had the time. There was always something else, work, sleep, the final chapter of a book. Though it was Sunday, she had to wake up early for a christening, and now she couldn't sleep, thinking about lost ardor and about that terrible story she'd heard ' from Jeff.

They'd given their annual Valentine's party; at dinner Russell had served a wine called Les Amoureuses, which she had thought was very cute of him until she noted the outrageous price on the tag still attached to one of the bottles. After dinner Jeff had arrived with an entourage of downtowners and demi-celebs, club people, lowlife and highlife types who never went to an office in the morning—a gossip columnist named Juan Baptiste who wanted to talk to Russell about a book; Leticia Corbin, heiress of the publishing family; Glenda Banes, the photographer. After Glenda left, Jeff told a horrible story about a model who'd dropped and killed a baby during a photo shoot. Once the bereaved parents had consulted a lawyer, Jeff said, the modeling agency hired a private investigator, who came up with solid evidence of past marijuana use and probable cocaine use, which the agency threatened to reveal to the father's employer unless the parents settled for a reasonable amount of cash. Fifty thousand, as it turned out, which was tax-deductible for the agency.

Corrine wanted to do something, call up
The New York Times,
organize a boycott. Hours later, she was still so upset that she had to find out if it was really true. She slipped out of bed, padded out to the living room, toxic with smoke and boozy residues, and punched Jeff's number. She wanted to talk, and she was never afraid of waking him up. The machine picked up; she whispered into the receiver for a minute, because he always screened his calls, but he wasn't picking up. "This is your married Valentine calling to check up on you," she said. His night was probably still young. They had all been on that schedule once. Dawn patrol.

But where did Jeff meet these people, she wondered, as she slipped back into bed, and how had his life become so weird, so different from theirs? Apparently once you were sort of famous they sent you a membership card. And the girls, the modules and actress slash waitresses. The piquantly slutty young things who were not without interest for Russell, and whose presence invigorated all of the intoxicated thirtyish men in the smoky apartment.

Socializing was aphrodisiac for Russell. He got excited being charming for strangers. Those few nights when they stayed at home, nights into which Corrine sometimes tried to inject romance, Russell read manuscripts or watched TV, as if unwilling to crank up his engine for her alone. She had decided to take advantage of his exuberance tonight, dust off the lingerie and tease up the wig. She just wondered how long it would be before he got tired of Tina Turner.

6

Sunday is the day of restlessness, dedicated to stale news, guilt and culture. The city lies stunned from its excesses and the inhabitants, when they finally venture out, walk the streets without, for once, appearing to have any immediate destination or purchase in mind.

Dans le musée:
Amidst the rocks and trees of Cezanne's Provence, this French girl was shaped like something dreamed by Brancusi, Russell thought, a piece that would be called
Sex Moving Through Space,
this notion provoking a nagging inner voice acquired via the
Times
op-ed and the higher media, progressive girlfriends and old New England schools:
You shouldn't entertain such thoughts, being ostensibly enlightened, liberal, and married besides. Treating women like objects; making low similes out of High Art.
Two violations. Still, it happened. Even here in the Museum of Modern Art, where a not-so-very-;eune
fille
in blue jeans was standing in front of Cezanne's
The Bather
whispering to her friend in the artist's native tongue—even when we should be admiring
he Château Noir,
usually one of our favorite paintings.

"At least Cézanne doesn't let his ego into the painting," Corrine said.

"Say what?" Russell often had occasion to note his wife's gift for abruptly going public with her interior monologues, plunging him into the middle of a debate the subject of which was still a mystery.

"I was thinking about Hemingway saying he learned how to write from Cézanne," she said. "His descriptions of nature have that same solidity and depth, but it's like all the trees in Hemingway's forest have his initials carved in them, and his brooks burble 'Me! Me! Me!' ' Russell didn't think "Me! Me! Me!" was burbling, and was annoyed at this shopworn revisionism. "Jesus, Corrine, that's so stale."

"It isn't stale to me, Russell, I just noticed it for myself, and if you've heard it before I'm sorry. I'm not a literary critic, okay?"

"And what do you mean,
'at least
Cézanne doesn't blah blah blah'?"

The Frenchwoman looked over, Russell noticed, then slipped into the other room. This made him even madder.

"I just meant," Corrine said, "technically it's great, but Cézanne is so, you know, cold."

"The whole twentieth century couldn't have happened without him," Russell insisted.

"Well, maybe that would've been a good thing."

"Jesus
Christ,
Corrine."

"Russell, will you please not shout. I don't know what your problem is, but you've been snapping my head off over every little thing."

"When was the last time you read 'Big Two-Hearted River'?" Russell boomed, his voice filling the small gallery. Feeling absurd even as he spoke—defender of truth, the mot juste and American literature. "Read it and weep. Then tell me about ego."

"How
old
are you?" Corrine demanded. She turned and fled. Russell watched her go, as did everyone else in the room. Then they looked at him—this philistine in their midst, tormenter of that lovely girl.

Why do we even come here? Russell wondered. Though they'd never had a problem with the Post-Impressionists before. Usually they made it to Synthetic Cubism before they started to argue.

Russell observed the Frenchwoman for a while, conferring with her friend about Rousseau's
Sleeping Gypsy,
but now that Corrine was gone she didn't look quite so hot.

He drifted through the hushed chambers thinking about his wife. He could picture her achingly clearly in her absence, whereas sometimes when she was
right there
he just couldn't see her—the virtues so visible to him now becoming blurred with her actual presence. Smart, funny —the best-looking girl in the room, he thought, though she'd never imagine it, always saying,
I've got to lose a few pounds I felt so dumpy at the party standing next to Gloria she's so thin,
when in fact Corrine is whippet-thin and the lady in question is built along the lines of the pyramid of Cheops.

He remembered the first time he caught sight of her: she was standing at the top of a fraternity house staircase, leaning forward over the banister with a cigarette held exquisitely between her fingers, like a blonde in a thirties movie, gazing down on a party that until that moment had seemed to Russell the climax of his recent escape from home, parents and the Midwest. He'd been drinking everything in sight, huddling with his new roommates, flashing his wit, or so he imagined, at the expense of girls he was still working up the courage to talk to.

Then he saw Corrine at the top of the stairs. He felt he recognized her, took in at a glance everything essential about her character. He stifled his first impulse to point her out to his roommates, not wishing to share the vision, not sure they would see what he saw. Russell believed in his own secret aristocracy, a refinement of soul and taste that he knew he must keep to himself, which much later he would almost forget to believe in. Later, too, he would realize that most of us believe, as he did at that moment, in our ability to read character from physiognomy. While she failed to notice him and his nobility of soul from her aerie atop the staircase, he read intelligence in her gaze, breeding in her slightly upturned nose, sensuality in her lips, and self-confidence in her languid pose. Only in this last would he find he was wrong. As he watched, a boy he recognized as a campus figure appeared on the landing behind her, along with another, radiant couple. She turned, and though Russell could not see her expression, though they did not touch, the air of familiarity and possession between her and the boy was unmistakable; and then the two couples disappeared from view, retreating to the real party, the actual heart of the world, an action that suddenly revealed the event on the lower floor to be a beer brawl—a congress of the second-rate, the meek and halt and lame.

The social accomplishments of his first semester, unknown to Corrine, were committed in her name. He did not have to sleuth hard for news of her; Corrine was a legend in her own right and formed part of the group everyone talked about, which made her seem more desirable and less accessible, as did her liaison with Kurt Sinclair, a basketball star and druggie—a combination that at that time in history made him a formidable competitor. Tall, lanky and slightly bowlegged, he was alleged to be good-looking, although Russell disputed this judgment. Russell bided his time. He had four years, and Sinclair would be gone in three.