Brightness Falls

by Jay McInerney

  Colin Becker, who was not a member of one of the agented professions, was talking to Jeff's date now about architecture, while Russell considerately entertained Anne, who was a corporate lawyer and thankfully never talked about it. Corrine suddenly remembered they owed the Beckers a wedding present.

  Abruptly, Washington Lee arrived, saying, "Guess who's come to din- ner," as he inevitably did. His eyes like crazy marbles, all shiny and bright—Corrine had a feeling this was going be a late one. "Sorry," he announced. "Got caught in a crossfire on Broadway. Bank-robber dudes trying to escape over the rooftops, they had the cops pinned down, traffic stopped cold, spraying the street with automatic fire." Either because they made allowances for Washington's hyperbole or because they were inured to the violence of the city, none of them chose to challenge the statement or ask for elaboration.

  Reverting to a primitive male condition, Jeff and Russell hooted at the sight of their buddy, slapping hands and backs.

  "It's the Righteous Brothers," said Washington.

  "Now that you're here," Jeff said, "we're the Temptations."

  "We resist anything but," Washington responded.

  Corrine sat Washington between Jeff's girlfriend and Casey Reynes, her freshman roommate, whose husband was out of town. Washington immediately put his arms around both of them, to the obvious annoyance of Casey, who flexed her beautiful-rich-girl hauteur.

  "So what's the buzz?"

  "How come we never talk about politics," asked Nancy, tossing her hair and reaching across the table to put her hand on Washington's arm. "I'll bet you have some interesting views," she added, in a tone of voice generally reserved for lewd propositions. Corrine suddenly wondered if they'd ever slept together.

  "Shucks, ma'am, I just minds my own business and leaves politics to the white folks."

  "Don't get Russell started," Corrine said quickly, knowing how Washington liked to exploit these moments. "We'll be up all night. Russell's greatest regret is that he basically missed the sixties. He's been trying to make up for it ever since."

  "I didn't miss the sixties," Russell countered. "I watched them on television."

  "Russell's for Gary Hart," Washington sneered.

  "Hart and sole?" Jeff sighed, pushing his plate away. "Other topics? Please?"

  "Who else is there?"

  "Gary Hart and his new ideas," said Washington. "What new ideas? Tell the dude to read Ecclesiastes."

  Soon they were arguing about Nicaragua. As he was publishing a book about the covert war against the Sandinistas, Russell was armed with facts and dates. A Republican, Zac relied on epigrams and lighthearted xenophobia. Parnassian Jeff disdained politics. Washington, who probably knew more than anybody, preferred to play dumb, strategically letting others betray themselves with earnestness. Jeff's girlfriend looked increasingly bewildered—and it wasn't a strategy—almost frightened by this excursion into foreign terrain. It wasn't her fault she was in over her head, Corrine realized. The breasts and the big pouty lips weren't her fault, either. At least she didn't think they were. Corrine was just enough of a prodigy herself to know that this was like inheriting a pile of money at puberty without a trust officer in sight, like climbing behind the wheel of a Ferrari for your first driving lesson. Some generations the little boys got sent to the jungle or the trenches with nothing but a gun, and that was the only way they'd ever begin to have a fucking clue about what it was like to grow up a pretty girl with big tits. If you were lucky you didn't get to New York or Los Angeles until you'd made the tutelary mistakes.

  Not that she'd ever had breasts like that. Jesus, Jeff. Were they real? These days, hard to say. Reminded her of a girl at prep school who was voted best couple in the yearbook. Without stopping to think, Corrine said, aloud, "I heard a story that if you have breast implants and you take the Concorde they can explode." Was it her imagination, or did Jeff's date look worried?

  "Party tits," said Washington.

  Over at the stereo, Russell cued up Roxy Music's Avalon and looked over his shoulder to see if Corrine had noticed. She blew him a kiss. "Soundtrack album of our first year of matrimonial bliss," she explained.

  Jeff's girlfriend turned to Washington. "Are you married?"

  Washington looked at her as if she were insane; Jeff coughed red wine onto the tablecloth.

  "They haven't invented the right kind of marriage for me yet," Washington said calmly. "See, I don't understand why there's got to be just one kind of marriage. When you need a place to live it's like you can get a floor of a brownstone, or a loft, or a few rooms in a big shiny tower with a health club, depending on how you want to live, but when it comes to marriage there's just this one basic variety. You're supposed to live together monogamously. You see what I'm saying? One size fits all? No way. Why can't we have different brands of marriage. Color-coded... the red kind of marriage, say, where you spend four nights a week together and cruise the other nights, or the green marriage, where you have kids together and lend them out to your impotent relatives and—"

  "What color do you want," asked Casey, whose own marriage was, like ancient currencies, based on the gold standard. She was half British and half Du Pont, her husband a venture capitalist from the same registered social circle in Wilmington, Delaware. Russell thought they were snobs, and referred to Mrs. Reynes as "Her Majesty"; Corrine's loyalty had more to do with memories of the leveling storm of adolescence than to current compatibility.

  "Please, don't tell us, Wash," Corrine said. "We've just eaten."

  "Marriages need a certain amount of slack. A lot of fond-making absence," said Casey, whose husband traveled incessantly on business.

  Nancy said, "All men need just four things. Food, shelter, pussy... and strange pussy."

  "I can't vouch for the first two," Washington confessed. The other men around the table looked embarrassed, it seemed to Corrine—as if they'd just been caught out.

  In a sudden panic, she glanced across the table at Russell. Looking flustered, he shrugged sheepishly.

  Jeff helped clear the dishes. In the kitchen Corrine said to him, "I don't think she's quite your type."

  "Is that understatement?"

  "Diplomacy, Jeff."

  He put his arms around her. They were old friends from similar worlds, Jeff the late spawn of a dusty Yankee family whose capital, like the soil of his native Massachusetts, was largely depleted. There was an air of unfinished business between them. She'd always thought him attractive, six-three and bone-thin, slightly hunched with the self-consciousness of those sensitive tall people who prefer not to tower.

  "What you mean," Jeff suggested, "is that you're sorry to report that she's exactly my type and that I am therefore demonstrably a scumbag."

  She looked into his eyes, as though she might read the health of his soul there. The kind of eyes that might belong to a villager in the Middle East, someone encountered on the banks of the Tigris or the Euphrates, the dark eyes of an old soul. Russell had boyish wide blue eyes and was born the day before yesterday.

  Dodging her gaze, he said, "The trouble with girls who are my type is that I don't find them attractive."

  Corrine laughed. "What?" All at once she realized she was buzzed. Felt good. "I thought you found all women attractive."

  "Or else I find them attractive but they're married."

  "Sometimes they're attractive because they're married."

  That, she thought, was a good, sensible response. Deflecting trouble, like a good wife and hostess. Where did she find that? "Are you working? I don't want to know what you're working on, just if you are."

  "Writing a screenplay for Zac, but I'd hardly call that work."

  "Then why are you doing it?"

  "You're a stockbroker, Corrine. Why do I have to be pure?"

  Corrine twisted away, feeling dizzy for a moment, almost losing her balance as he let go of her. She moved to the sink and turned on the water.
It was true, she sold stocks, bonds, annuities. But in her actual heart she was someone entirely different. A lover and a student of life. God, she couldn't believe she was thirty-one. What had happened to the last ten years?

  Filling up the coffeepot with water, she felt Jeff still standing behind her. "Some of us had to become regular people so you could have readers." She turned. "You arrogant shit," she said, doused him with the contents of the pot, and then—she didn't know why—sank to the floor in convulsions of hilarity.

  "I was just about to ask for some water," he said, his scraggly hair and long, untucked shirttails dripping.

  She laughed harder. Until finally she coughed, then paused to say, '"Just once I think it would be good for you to be at a loss for words."

  "Happens all the time," he said. "Whenever I sit down in front of my word processor." Patting himself down with a wad of paper towels, he added, "by the way, I haven't wished you a happy birthday."

  "Damn you, that's a secret."

  "Thirty-one, n'est ce pas?"

  "If you say anything I'll kill you."

  "What did Russell give you?"

  "Head," she answered, laughing uproariously at her improvisation. I must, she thought, be drunk. "About time," Jeff said.

  "Believe it or not," she said, standing up and brushing her dress off with exaggerated strokes of her fingers, "other men are more than capable of making women happy. Some of them are so good they just take our little breaths away."

  "That's more or less what Caitlin said before she split," he said.

  Dave Whitlock, a colleague of Russell's, turned up with a blonde Brazilian named Elsa who worked as a scout for Mondadori. At least Corrine thought that's what she said; it was curious that a Portuguese-speaker would screen books in English for an Italian publisher. Others arrived, people they'd invited for after dinner. The evening broke up into smaller pieces, a mosaic of shiny and oddly shaped fragments grouted with alcohol. Or so it seemed to Corrine the next day. A party is like a marriage, she decided: making itself up while seeming to follow precedent, running on steel rails into uncharted wilderness while the promises shiver and wobble on the armrests like crystal stemware.

  House phone to his ear, Russell asked, "Do you know somebody named Ace? The doorman says he says you know him."

  "It's okay, send him up," Corrine said, blushing. Ace was a homeless man she knew from the soup kitchen where she was a volunteer; buying mixers for the party at Food Emporium in the afternoon, she'd met him redeeming cans and bottles from a noisy garbage bag, the assistant manager looking weary and pissed off as he helped count them into a cardboard box; Ace explained his appearance in her neighborhood by saying that he liked to spread his business around. "Having a party," Ace asked, seeing her purchases. On a sudden guilty inspiration she asked him if he wanted a job helping with the cleanup. And here he was. She was pleased with herself and with Ace for taking her at her word, but Russell made fun of what he called her Mother Teresa complex. In this case he didn't particularly notice or remark on Ace's arrival, though he was hardly inconspicuous—an unwashed black man in a Mets cap and unlaced Nike high-tops, asking the guests if they were finished with their beer bottles. Corrine saw him drink off the residue of a bottle he had liberated from Jeff.

  "Used to be," Russell was declaiming, "you'd read a good short story somewhere, call up the author in his hovel, you'd offer him a couple thou' for a collection and a novel, and he'd dedicate his books to you, offer you his mistress, Eskimo style, promise you his firstborn. Now you've got to transfer a six-figure advance to a numbered Swiss bank account just to get a first look at some creative writing student's senior thesis. And his agent's still all over your back."

  "Used to be," said Jeff, "only dweebs, dorks and geeks went into publishing. Second sons and Sarah Lawrence grads. I'm sorry to report that this is still the case."

  Each with glass in hand, they clenched in an ambiguous bear hug. Corrine watched as the two friends drifted southward across the carpet, this migrating arc finally intersecting the sideboard, Russell's butt glancing it, unbalancing and toppling a blue-and-white Oriental vase, which fell to the floor, narrowly missing the edge of the rug, and shattered on the parquet floor.

  Russell's face betrayed his knowledge of this object's dynastic label and long association with Corrine's family—a wedding present. But Corrine rushed in to say it was nothing, she'd get the dustpan, watch out for the pieces.

  "Crash Calloway," Jeff said, using the nickname Russell had borne almost since he could walk, fall or knock things over.

  At the time of night when guests become disk jockeys, sifting through the library of records and tapes, the stereo becomes a time machine, stuck in reverse. Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush" blasted abruptly from the speakers. Washington was dancing with Jeff's date, and Ace swayed on his feet like a sailor in a six-foot sea, his hand on Zac Solomon's reluctant shoulder, talking about his plans to cut a rap demo.

  Casey Reynes drew Corrine aside on her way out and announced she was pregnant. "It's a secret, Tom doesn't want me telling anyone yet."

  Corrine embraced her. "I'm so happy for you," she said, though her happiness was tinged unexpectedly with envy.

  Elsa, the Brazilian with the Italian connection, was tugging at Corrine's sleeve. Had she seen David Whitlock, her date?

  "How far can he get?" Russell called over. "There's only three rooms."

  "I'll call you tomorrow," Corrine said to Casey.

  Jeff's date was also missing, according to the insistent Elsa.

  "He's probably feeding the dog," Russell said.

  "What dog," Elsa asked.

  "Check the bathroom," said Jeff. "Until recently, the bathroom was always the center of any good party, as the homely kitchen had been in earlier cultures."

  Soon Elsa was pounding on the locked door of the bathroom. When she hurled her glass against it, Russell wobbled over to calm her.

  "Broom and dustpan are right inside the closet," Corrine called out to Russell, thinking of Casey, the same age as she.

  A few minutes later Jeff was passed out on the couch. Strange, Corrine thought. He usually drank everybody under the table. Then she giggled aloud, remembering what Russell had said about under the table. She was recumbent in an armchair, gathering her strength, when the doorman rang. Wearily she picked up the house phone.

  "Black guy down here's trying to carry a VCR out the door. Says he's going to repair it. You want me to call the cops?"

  "That must be Ace," Corrine said. "Just ask him to leave it with you, Roger. Tell him we changed our minds about the repair." Then she realized she hadn't paid him and asked the doorman to give him a twenty and not to mention anything to Russell.

  What's-her-name, Jeff's date, breasts in tow, emerged from the bathroom, a trifle sheepish, and a moment later so did Washington. Uh-oh. Guilty of something. Elsa, who watched as Russell cleared up the broken glass, said, "Where's David?" then began pounding the bedroom door, which had gotten closed and locked somehow. Finally Nancy Tanner popped out of the room. Elsa started screaming at Whitlock. It sounded like a real scuffle in there. "London Calling," high volume, made Corrine think briefly about the financial markets; also, fleetingly, about the neighbors. But no, she didn't care to think about the markets right now, thank you very much, and the neighbors would have to speak for themselves. How can you like the Clash, punk-socialist band, and sell corporate equity at the same time? That was the inexplicable mystery of being Corrine Calloway at the age of thirty-one.

  Russell wandered over and put his arm around her. "Another successful party," he said.

  * * *

  "Where's the jelly," Russell asked, groping in the drawer of the nightstand.

  "Hell with the jelly," Corrine said, rolling him onto his back. "Don't you think it's kind of a sexy idea, doing it without protection? Wouldn't it be sort of incredibly sexy to make me pregnant?"

  He
stopped moving. "No."

  "No, really."

  "Yes, really. Are you nuts?"

  "Nuts?" She rose to her knees and looked down on him. "Nuts? What's that supposed to mean?"

  "It means crazy. As in, not in your right mind. Not in your sane self."

  "How dare you," she said, punching the side of his head with a half-clenched fist, hurting her knuckles. She stood up, tore the quilt off the bed and retreated to the living room.

  "Corrine, I'm too tired to argue," he called after her.

  "Good," he heard faintly.

  He meant to go out and get her, but woke a few hours later, at seven, with a bad case of cottonmouth and a vast headache, feeling more or less like a porcupine turned inside out. When he turned to look for Corrine, she wasn't there. It took him several minutes to remember it was a weekend, and to figure out where his wife was. Walking out to the living room, he couldn't remember what they'd fought about, but there she was, on the couch amid the debris of her secret birthday party, pictures askew, dead soldiers standing at attention. Corrine curled into a ball under a corner of the quilt. It was not often Russell saw his wife in repose. Usually still talking when he fell asleep, and awake at some hour, like this one, which he preferred not to hear about.

  He picked her up and carried her back to bed. "Where were you?" she murmured, as he bumped down the hall with her. "I was lost in this crowd, a big party, and I kept calling you and you weren't there. It was so real. It started out this wonderful party, all our friends and all these interesting new people, and then we lost our friends and I lost you and the party became ugly and sad."

  "I'm here," he said, laying her down in bed, where she immediately returned to sleep.

  2

  "You don't think it's news that the administration's been running drugs? What do you call news over there?"

  "We just think there's nothing real new in the story, Russ. These allegations have surfaced before."

  "Don't tell me about allegations. I'm talking evidence, documentation, smoking guns out the wazoo. This book's got assassination, dope-dealing, money-laundering, and all of it leading straight to the front door of the White House. Nixon got chased out for less. So what does it take with you guys, a game-show angle?"