Brightness Falls

by Jay McInerney

  "I have a meeting, Russell."

  "Can you promise me a review, at least?"

  "I'll see what I can find out from the books people."

  "Loved the cover story on Michael Jackson, by the way. Hard-hitting stuff."

  "Jesus, Russell. I said I'll try."

  Russell detached the receiver from his ear and lifted it overhead, then made the sound of an airplane falling out of the sky as the instrument traced a series of descending loops ending with a loud crash on his desktop.

  From outside his office a nasal female voice called out: "Any survivors?"

  "That's a negative."

  After six years of Reagan and almost as many in publishing, Russell thought of himself—though he was alone in this perception—as a fairly jaded character. But when this manuscript came across his desk he knew it was one of the books he'd been waiting to publish. It seemed to him a shameful characteristic of the era that the liberal press lacked all con- viction while the yahoos were full of passionate insensitivity. For two years the author had followed the story of the secret war in Nicaragua from El Salvador to Israel to Cuba to Washington to Managua to Little Havana. He'd talked to gunrunners and drug runners, contras and Sandinistas, slept in jungles and had his life threatened, and Russell seemed to be the only one who was terribly interested. For weeks he'd been trying to get the big papers and magazines to pick up some of the more sensational revelations. He'd sent galleys to national-affairs editors, followed up with phone calls, and lunched every contact he had, this last one an alleged friend, an editor at a so-called newsweekly.

  Righting his tilted chair, he fired off three darts at the opposite wall, missing Elliott Abrams, three points, assistant secretary of state, but catching Oliver North right on the chin, for five points, with the third dart. Various politicians, book reviewers and indignitaries served time on the dartboard when their behavior earned Russell's disapproval.

  On the facing wall were photographs of friends, family and heroes: snapshots of Corrine, his mother and father; a framed, already yellowing page from the Sunday New York Times, the review of Jeff's book; a poster of the Karsh portrait of Hemingway circa The Old Man and the Sea; a photograph of bearded, bleary John Berryman, chin and cigarette in hand; another of Keith Richards, onstage with tongue out, dripping toxic sweat; a publicity still of Jack Nicholson, signed "To Russ, who gives good book—Jack," souvenir of a movie tie-in edition; as well as the usual author photos and book posters.

  The phone trilled—neither a ring nor a buzz but a kind of exotic birdcall.

  "Incoming," Donna called out. "Victor Propp."

  Russell glanced wistfully at the First World War German infantry helmet on his desk, a trophy his grandfather had picked up in the Argonne Forest in 1918, shortly before losing half of his eyesight to mustard gas.

  Punching in the speaker phone, he said, "Victor, how goes life and literature?"

  "Life is short and brutish, Russell. Full of S and F, et cetera. Literature—truly endless."

  Russell took the latter to mean that the book wasn't finished, hardly a surprise. Victor had been working on it for about twenty years, the deadline for delivery receding gradually into a semi-mythical future. In this unfinished condition it, and its author, had become a local literary legend, the locale in this case being a literary/academic republic encompassing patches of Cambridge, New Haven and Manhattan's Upper West Side.

  "Did you see that piece on Roth in the TransAtlantic? A very snide reference to me—'unlike those rococo goldsmiths who worry the surfaces of their bibelot sentences...

  Russell decided he just might need the helmet. "Victor, I don't necessarily read that as a reference to you."

  "Russell, my dear boy, every literary intellectual in America scans that sentence and says, 'For "rococo goldsmiths," read "Victor Propp."

  "Not to worry, Victor. There are only three or four literary intellectuals left in the whole goddamn country." It wasn't that Victor didn't have his detractors; just that he nicely illustrated Delmore Schwartz's maxim that even paranoids have enemies.

  "Despite your considerable intelligence, Russell, you are remarkably naive. Do you suppose it has anything to do with coming from the Midwest? Not that it's an unattractive quality. It's very American. The thing about real Americans ..."

  Russell looked at his watch as Victor started sermonizing about the land of the freaks and home of the slaves. Eleven-forty. He wet his finger with saliva and polished the crystal. Scanning a report on his desk, he was pleased to discover that Scavengers and Birds of Prey, a selected edition of the Audubon plates, was going into another printing. He had guessed correctly that the fiercer birds would be popular in the current climate. He tuned in on a rising interrogatory note in the great man's voice, though Victor's questions were usually rhetorical.

  "... doesn't he? That is to say, Jeff has this very granitic, Yankee quality in his prose which I quite like, the natural thing that Salinger had to work at so obsessively, being a Jew—believe me, I know. But I wonder how to account for all the press on his book?"

  Russell tried to remember if he'd ever told Victor that Corrine once had lunch with Salinger, but decided to leave well enough alone.

  "I like Jeff's prose quite a bit, its wonderful loopy vitality, but I'm wondering if we shouldn't be working on getting me more press at this point in my career."

  "Victor, you don't have a book, number one, and number two, you don't exactly write for the People magazine crowd. Don't worry about this shit. Remember what Bob Dylan said, 'He's got everything he needs, he's an artist, he don't look back.' "

  Victor probably was an artist, one of the few in Russell's wide and arty acquaintance, but he didn't seem to have anything he needed and he was constantly looking back, down, around—as if in a maze or a conspiracy. Not trusting the evidence of his senses, he wasn't about to take reality for granted.

  "What I'm saying, Russell, is that I think we ought to work on raising my visibility."

  "Let's have lunch and talk about it..." Russell found an opening in his datebook ten days away and was able to hang up just a few minutes later.

  Donna slouched in with the mail, her haircut reminiscent of a Punic War-era Roman helmet. Clad in black spandex, wearing an "Eat the Rich" button, Donna was a token punk here in a landscape of tartan and tweed. She had a streetwise sense of humor and a hard-boiled telephone manner, which usefully intimidated importunate authors and agents and infuriated Russell's colleagues. She occasionally irritated even her admiring boss with third-hand anarchist posturing. Punk was already a historical fashion, a reified sensibility—the safety pin through the earlobe only slightly less dated than love beads, and now even love beads seemed on the verge of a comeback. Russell was sometimes tempted to tell her the whole scene was middle-aged by the time he arrived in Manhattan about a hundred years before, in 1980, tell her the meaning and origin of épater la bourgeoisie. But nothing very interesting had come along in the way of a counterculture since then, unless you counted a recent infestation of titled Europeans, and having Donna around made him feel in touch with the tonsorial practices and the music around St. Mark's Place.

  "What do the rich taste like, do you suppose," he asked her.

  "Huh?" Donna stopped in the doorway of the office to consider the question. She shrugged, a chronic gesture. "The ladies taste like tuna fish, I guess. The gentlemen taste kind of like baked brie."

  "Jesus. You're a very nasty person. Forget I asked."

  "I'm going to lunch," she said.

  "I'll warn Donald Trump."

  * * *

  Before his own lunch Russell called his broker, a hustler at Corrine's firm named Duane Peters.

  "Got some new sophisticated financial instruments you might be interested in," Duane said. "A very hot new commodities futures index."

  "Tell me about it," Russell said. He liked the idiom of the financial world, the evocative techno-
poetry of the arcane slang. Sophisticated instruments. Mezzanine financing. Takeover vehicles... Lately it seemed almost as interesting as the more familiar dialect of lit crit. In college he had scorned the econ majors who lined up for the bank recruiters senior year, and only a few years before now he had been horrified to learn that two-thirds of a graduating Yale class had interviewed for a slot at one of the big investment banks. He had cited this statistic over a dozen dinner tables to illustrate vague theses about the Zeitgeist and had commissioned a book called The New Gilded Age, an anthology of jeremiads by economists and sociologists decrying the greed and selfishness of the eighties. At that time he began to read the financial publications. And then, rather like a research chemist experimentally injecting himself with the virus he has isolated, he began investing small amounts. With his encouragement, Corrine had started as a broker after quitting her good-girl job at Sotheby's—after a stressful year and a half at Columbia Law School—and his new hobby had gradually become more and more interesting. It seemed so easy. He was winning on paper, though his total capital amounted to only a few thousand.

  "... buy stock on margin and then cover the stock with futures, the ideal being to hedge and bet so you're covered either way, cowboy. If the stock goes up you make money. If the stock goes down you make money. So whatever happens, you win."

  Is that possible? Russell wondered. Duane's explanation sounded too good to be true; it sounded, in fact, like a free lunch. But he didn't have the ante to play this particular game. Russell wished he could give Corrine his business, but his hunches and tips made her crazy.

  Two doors down from Russell's office, Washington Lee received a call from the receptionist announcing a visitor. There was nothing on his calendar, and unscheduled visitors struck fear into Washington's heart. He feared a certain wronged husband in particular, discarded girlfriends and rejected authors in general. His occasional inability to remember absolutely every detail of an evening's activities tended to sharpen his fear of the unknown caller. Two years before he had received an advance to write a critical biography of Frantz Fanon, which was still in the outline stage, and while he didn't really expect the publisher to send thugs over to collect the manuscript, this small festering patch of guilt only added to his sense of having dodged the bullet when another day ended without a major confrontation. The name that his assistant gave him now had a faint echo, but all these Muslim names sounded sort of familiar. Everybody had a story to tell, and if they were black they eventually sent the story to Washington.

  "Say who?"

  There was a mumbled conference at the other end of the line. "Rasheed Jamal, the author," the receptionist explained.

  Washington's hope went south. All in all, he would rather get a surprise visit from the FBI. Three stacks of unread, unsolicited manuscripts towered in the far corner of his office, Rasheed Jamal's possibly among them. Or else he had thoughtfully brought his precious manuscript with him, hand-delivery, the true story of his life ... a thousand single-spaced pages complete with crabbed corrections that would make them both millions and reveal the true killers of JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr. It was possible, too, that Washington had already read the book and turned it down. Authors who came to argue their merits in person were the worst.

  "I'm in conference," Washington proposed. "Probably won't be available for the rest of the day."

  "I'll tell him."

  Now he would have to cower in his office until the coast was clear. If the siege lasted past lunch, he could slip up the internal staircase to the ninth floor and take the elevator down to the street.

  "I'm not in," he shouted out to his assistant. "You see anybody heading this way with a manuscript under his arm, tell him Mr. Lee has moved to Zimbabwe."

  He was on the phone talking to an agent when a fat bearded man in a sweatsuit announced from the doorway that no white bitch was going to tell him where he couldn't go.

  "I just wanted to see what color you were," the speaker said, a scowl deranging his chipmunk features. He clutched a manuscript box out in front of his huge belly, holding it like a shield as he advanced into the office. Experiencing a rapid liquefaction of his internal organs, Washington attempted to appear cool.

  "What's your problem, Jack?"

  "My problem is I'm a black artist. I'm, like, twice removed from this American fascist racist so-called culture. And I'm trying to create an Afro-American literature which the white man does not want to know about and the white establishment wants to suppress." Washington's assistant had disappeared. He could only hope she was fetching some serious help.

  "What's this got to do with me, bro'?"

  The author reached into the half-zipped front of his sweatshirt, pulled out and unfolded a limp, ragged piece of paper and recited, without consulting the text: " 'Dear Mr. Jamal, thank you for letting us see your manuscript. I'm sorry to say that the editorial board has concluded that we cannot publish your work at this time. We wish you luck in finding another publisher. Sincerely, Washington Lee.' What kind of fucking letter is that? Sincerely? I show you my life's fucking work, the true story of the Black Experience in Babylon exile, and that's all the answer I get? And what's this 'we' shit? I sent my book to one man, dude called Washington Lee I heard was a brother, not the house nigger on some editorial board."

  "Maybe I could take another look at it," Washington said, playing for time. He had no idea if he'd read it to begin with. He looked at hundreds of manuscripts a year, and sometimes looking was all he had time for. Being one of only two black adult trade book editors in New York, he was expected to be an advocate for his ostensible community, which, in his experience, wrote no better as a rule than any other group. Washington was as willing and eager as any man could possibly be to discover the next Invisible Man, but being black and writing a book didn't necessarily make you Ralph Ellison.

  Not a moment too soon, security arrived: two uniformed, deracinated white men who stood sheepishly in the doorway.

  "Get this fucking maniac out of here," Washington suggested.

  "Don't you touch me," the author screamed.

  The security men hung back, helpless in the face of what they took to be an internecine dispute. Only when the enraged author hurled himself across Washington's desk did they intervene. Rasheed Jamal threw one of the guards to the floor and was wrestling with the other, larger one when Washington said, "Freeze, motherfucker." He pointed a shiny gray Walther automatic at the fat man's belly.

  The security guards, recovering themselves, seemed uncertain of their own role in relation to the firearm, till Washington said, "What've I got to do, carry him out my own fucking self?" Each seizing an arm, the security men pulled Rasheed Jamal to the door, then turned sideways to extract him from the office.

  "You ain't no black man," he screamed at Washington.

  "And you ain't no writer," Washington responded, having finally remembered reading several chapters of the thousand-page-plus novel that lay in two boxes on his desk. It was only through the exercise of enormous willpower that he restrained himself from pulling the trigger until the so-called author was gone. "And haul your garbage out with you," he shouted, knocking the boxes to the floor. Shaken, he aimed the gun at his own mouth and treated himself to several tranquilizing squirts of vodka.

  lost our lease said the sign in a window down the block from the office. Lot of those signs popping up lately. On the walk back from lunch with an agent, Russell paused for a moment in front of the window to examine the sale carpets, cheery kilims, a jaded Hariz. Russell's office was located in one of those interstitial regions of the city which until recently had been nameless. It was between Gramercy Park and Chelsea, south of midtown but not properly downtown—an area of century-old eight- and ten-story office and warehouse buildings given over largely to light industry, the Oriental carpet trade and downmarket photographers. The Carpet District, he called it, but lately the rug traders had been folding up their tents. Fa
shion and the kind of money that traveled light—hip retail and restaurants—had found the area and named it the Flatiron District, after its most famous building. Lunch had certainly become easier. Two years before he had had to get into a taxi to find food that wouldn't offend literary agents. Now they were willing to come down to check out the latest Piedmontese trattoria they'd read about in the Times. The Corbin, Dern Building stood in the middle of its block, on real estate that had quadrupled in value since Russell had been hired, a parking lot on one side and a small brownstone on the other. The publishing house occupied the top four of nine floors. The century-old structure had been copied from a nearby McKim, Mead & White building, and had been occupied since the twenties by the trade publishing firm of Corbin, Dern and Company. For writers and readers and reviewers, Corbin, Dern was a resonant dactyl, an invocation of the muses, a top-shelf cultural brand name.

  After lunch Russell stopped in on Washington, who was conducting business in his habitual fashion, leaning back in his ergonomic Italian chair, stretched full length, cowboy boots on the edge of his desk, hands clasped behind his head. He put Russell in mind of a big cat, speed and claws concealed beneath a tropical manner. You seldom saw him run or pounce, but in the dry seasons he brought back prey. Just when it seemed there was no choice but to fire him for some radical breach of decorum, he dragged in a best-seller or one of his obscure Eastern European novelists suddenly won the Nobel Prize.

  Waving to Washington's assistant, Russell did not wait for permission to clump in and lie down on the couch; unconsciously he mimicked his friend's position, picking up a copy of the Post from the coffee table. Homeless MAN attacked by giant CAT. He glanced up at Washington, then turned to page three, where he learned that a leopard or possibly a cheetah was terrorizing the Lower East Side, mauling winos and other street people.