Brightness Falls

by Jay McInerney

  "Catch that buzz," she shouted, over the din. As he poured the last of the champagne, which she declined, Duane suddenly became serious. Taking advantage of the privacy afforded by the mob, he said he had to get something off his chest. Corrine wanted to stop him before he got started, but the champagne seemed to have robbed her of her will; she felt like a creature of the savanna stung with a tranquilizing dart, stunned, gazing out from glazey eyes as the biologist scurried in to perform his tasks...

  He told her that she was the finest and most beautiful and intelligent woman he'd ever met and that he was in love, even though, sure, he knew he shouldn't be. "I don't know, I'm just saying I'm in love with you and I'd do anything to be with you," he concluded pathetically. She was touched by his sweet adulation. But she had to be firm and she was, pulling away from him and raising the last of the champagne to her lips. She was finally a little more stern than she felt, for part of her was grateful because she suddenly realized she'd needed to feel the way she did when he was saying those wonderful things, and in this celebratory, demi-Dionysian atmosphere it seemed almost appropriate to strip off your clothes and give yourself over to the spirit of the moment.

  He was embarrassed, of course, but she summoned her will again and led him gradually out into the clear light of a daytime world in which she was older and married and they were colleagues with an office to return to. But meanwhile she wanted to assuage his hurt pride and show him she wasn't offended, so she ordered another bottle of champagne, though she was going to lay off drinking the next day for sure, and by the time that was gone she felt quite happy with Duane and with everyone around her, part of the great celebration in which she didn't quite believe. Outside, when Channel 4 stuck a microphone in her face, she said, "I don't know, I think basically the emperor's got no clothes. But at the moment he has a pretty good body."

  As the champagne wore off in the taxi she realized that it was her night to work at the soup kitchen. She'd completely forgotten. She looked at her watch. There was time to help with the cleanup, but she felt too guilty and disgusted with herself to think about scouring a vat caked with hot-dog stew as a champagne hangover set in.

  Russell had left a message on the machine; he was finishing drinks with an author, then dinner with the agent at a restaurant called Cambodia.

  Feeling immensely fat and full of high-calorie fermented grapes, Cor-rine decided not to eat; but eventually she went out and picked up a fruit salad at the Korean market and lay on the couch watching stupid television shows, nurturing the warm sleepy feeling of being wanted, which had stayed with her through the afternoon, but which otherwise had been in rather short supply.

  At eleven-ten she was astonished to see her face on TV as she flipped through the channels—a pretty good body.

  Oh God, some horrible blowsy fat tramp two and half sheets to the wind, and there was Duane with a sort of precoital grin hovering over her shoulder. She was glad Russell hadn't been around to see it.

  She was half asleep when he tiptoed in, breathing awkwardly, a little after one. He undressed in the dark and slipped between the sheets. She wanted to let him know she was awake, wanted to hear about his evening, but she wasn't quite sure how she was feeling about Russell: she had a right to be angry, although somehow she was too distant to be really upset.

  And then he started to snore.

  Nobody ever tells you things, she thought groggily, like about dating, how you are treated as a prize, something rare and special, and that it ends with marriage.

  Why don't they tell you things like that?

  That night Corrine had a dream. She is in the shower. It is a big communal bathroom like the one at summer camp on Lake Winnipe-saukee, except she is all alone and it is many years after her childhood. She is a widow now, although her naked body is still young and fresh. Her husband is dead. He died in the Cola Wars. She is all alone in this white-tiled chamber full of warm steam, washing herself with a white bar of soap. A bar of Ivory soap. Washing all over. She shouldn't be washing herself. For some reason she thinks that is her husband's job. But he's dead in the Cola Wars. She is rubbing herself with the bar of soap, up and down her arms, her hips, up and down, from her toes all the way up her legs, one leg and the other leg and in between. In the naked steam she rubs the soap along the inside of her thighs. It moves up and down because it's so slippery. She feels guilty washing herself, but there's no one else, and then there is someone else. It's Johnny Monocle. He is there in the bathroom with her and he says, I'll wash you. He seems to have only one eye, but he is very distinguished-looking with his black patch and sharkskin suit. Corrine is naked. He washes her up and down as she closes her eyes. He has a beautiful touch that makes her think of butterflies brushing her with their wings. Up and down and back and forth all over her body Johnny Monorail makes tracks. The bar of soap is actually his tongue. They are in bed now. Johnny has taken off his suit and he is naked now too as he travels across her body and suddenly she realizes her husband is alive after all but it's too late because Johnny has grown a penis and something needs to be done about it. She can't very well just ask him to take care of it himself. But they can hear the sounds of her husband coming back from the Cola Wars. Not Russell, some other husband, she doesn't know who. Still, they have to escape. It's a very long penis Johnny has, and a smooth one, smooth as ivory. She compliments him on it and he says thank you. But they have to hide it. It is too big to hide under the sheets, and it keeps getting bigger as she talks about it and touches it. It's so big that it disappears over the edge of the bed and out the window. Come on, quick, says Johnny Monolith. He isn't in the bed now, he's calling from far away, from the other end of the penis, which stretches away into the darkness like an ivory banister. She hears footsteps approaching, the footsteps of her husband, returning from the wars. She crawls to the edge of the bed and straddles the smooth banister, then pushes off, sliding down, floating off into the lovely darkness... and awoke tingling and guilty, the red numbers of the clock glowing in the dark, her husband asleep beside her, making small holes in the silence with his prickly breath.

  In the morning, when she awoke again, she didn't tell Russell about her dream.

  4

  Glenda Banes hated working with babies. Not that she was entirely wild about encountering them in her leisure hours; she didn't care to think about how many of her friends had recently succumbed to the you're-less-fhan-a-whole-woman-if-you-don't form of propaganda, under the duress of an alleged biological clock—it's just a clock, for Christ's sake, not a bomb. Lately Glenda was finding herself at dinner tables from which everyone was jumping up to call home to the baby-sitter instead of the drug dealer, and conversation often degenerated into discussions of private nursery schools and the plague of nanny-napping—Can you believe our wonderful Jamaican nanny... hijacked by some unscrupulous yuppie parent while she was in the park strolling little Brendan, they offered her an obscene wage and a green card and a room with a view and a new VCR, it's just incredibly unethical... Sometimes people actually hauled out pictures of their offspring. It was enough to send you racing to the bathroom for a discreet puke and a quick blast of mood freshener, although Glenda had quit that almost a year before.

  Glenda knew photography and she didn't think people should have their picture taken until puberty. Immaturity being unflattering in any light. As of this very minute she was definitely telling her agent—No more baby work. Glenda Banes did not need this. But right now there was a cranky baby in her studio, and a bratty model, and she had to cope.

  Like a huge, vaguely malevolent sea gull, Glenda Banes hovered over the surface of her loft, which in its whiteness extended indeterminately in all directions, flapping her rangy extremities as she seemed nearly to alight on the tripod that rose from the white floor like a piling from a tidal flat, touching her eye briefly to the aperture of the boxy Hasselblad and then lifting off again, squawking, borne away on an angry thermal.

  "Give me
a reading and unshine her face," she shouted. Two young men dressed in black leaped up from behind a screen, like ballboys at a tennis match, and raced in the direction of the Madonna and Child at whom the camera was aimed.

  The model was Nikki Christianson, very hot right now, Glenda had shot her only about a million times and the camera loved her, that big healthy, horsey look which had been coming on the last couple of years. She was fine except for the language barrier, she didn't really understand English, although the gossip columns said she was born and raised in Wyoming, so presumably it was the closest thing she had to a native language. She could be counted on to be sexy no matter what she'd been doing the night before, but here she was supposed to look maternal, which required a little thespian skill on her part. Impersonating a normal, caring mother was work for Nikki, and her union seemed to have a rule against that.

  But she was looking good, no question, her waist more pronounced and waspish since she'd had that operation all the models were having now which removed the bottom two ribs of the rib cage. After Adam had gone to all the trouble of lending one of his own. And while she was under the knife anyway, she had had the fat removed from her knees, the other fashionable new operation.

  So it was a standoff here in Glenda's loft. No matter how hard Glenda screamed at her four assistants to move the lights, take new readings and reload the film, no matter how sweetly she cooed soothing monosyllables to Nikki and the just about equally sentient year-old baby, it simply wasn't coming together. Nikki had a twitch in her eye, which probably originated in her nose, and in between takes she handed the baby off to the Filipina baby handler as if it were a bundle of rancid fish—which Glenda couldn't really blame her for—while the baby's agent walked over on prissy little Ralph Lauren tiptoes to offer worthless oral memos of anal-retentive advice. The score was three yowling jags and two diaper changes for the baby, one tantrum for Nikki, five milligrams of Valium for Glenda.

  Meanwhile, a sneaky, idolatrous kid in red Converse sneakers was pointing an autowind thirty-five at Glenda, photographing one of her photographic sessions for a spread in some German magazine, portrait of the famous photographer at work, kind of like a play within a play or like the cereal box with a picture of a man holding up a cereal box with a picture of a man holding up a cereal box. Click buzz click ... If she heard that autowind behind her back one more time she was going to stuff his camera somewhere he wouldn't get a light reading.

  "Give her some more of those blue eyedrops," Glenda said to the hair-and-makeup kid. "I'm still seeing red."

  "Francesco told me they're bad for you," Nikki whined.

  "Sacrifice for your art, Nikki. We all do." Besides which, if you were on the goddamn health-and-clean-living program to begin with, we wouldn't need the fucking eyedrops, would we?

  "What?" said Nikki.

  What what? wondered Glenda. One never knew how far back to go with Nikki's questions. Start with basic definitions of the words, or what? Take it back to the Big Bang and gradually work up to the part where the fish crawled up on dry land, grew long legs and long hair, moved to New York and got discovered by the Ford agency? Sacrifice was probably the word she didn't understand, or maybe Art. Glenda had not slept in three days, having gone from L.A. to Rio, then directly from the airport to her studio yesterday morning; with two more shoots scheduled for this afternoon, she was sure as shit suffering for something. At the very least for her new summer house on the beach in Sagaponack.

  "This chef Carême cooked for Talleyrand and for the emperors of Austria and Russia," Glenda said, not really for Nikki's benefit but for the porky German reporter who had accompanied the squirrelly little photographer. Give him a quotable. "The coal gas they used for cooking was supremely unhealthful. But when Talleyrand or somebody told him not to work so hard, take care of his health and all, he said, 'Shorter life, longer fame.' "

  The chubby little reporter hadn't even lifted his pen, she couldn't believe it.

  "Does anybody around here speak English?" Glenda screamed.

  "All right, let's try again here, shall we?" Glenda said, after her boys had set up the shot and the baby handler had calmed the infant and Nikki had come back from the bathroom.

  Nikki would later claim that she thought the baby handler had a good grip on the kid, but the woman had already retreated a few steps out of the frame when the baby hit the floor. One minute Nikki was holding the baby and the next she was fixing her neckline with both hands...

  The soft, yielding thud of impact stunned them all into silence until the Filipino woman screamed.

  "What happened?" said Nikki, looking down.

  The autowind clicked and buzzed...

  "It's not moving," said the agent, crouched over the infant client.

  "Somebody call nine-one-one," Glenda screamed.

  "Oh, God," the agent muttered. "This has never happened to me before."

  It was unbelievable—the kinds of things that happened to Glenda. The month before she'd been shooting a fashion spread with an ocelot. First the fucking cat had bitten the model and then it had escaped out the open window. God knows where it was now, but the job was certainly right down the toilet.

  Uptown it was lunchtime, but in the East Village, Jeff Pierce breakfasted on a chocolate egg cream and half a blueberry blintz at Kiev.

  "Do you know why they call them egg creams," he asked the waitress.

  "I giff up," she said. Big strong girl with biceps and virgin blond underarm hair, Eastern European accent, trace of Genghis Khan and Company in the Mongol cheekbones. "Why?"

  "I don't know. I'm asking you. Where do the eggs come into it?"

  "I don't know nothing about that. You want something else?"

  "It's not on the menu," he said.

  Walking up Second past the B & H Dairy Bar, scene of his first attempted breakfast as a fledgling New Yorker, having driven down ten years before from tired old Massachusetts to his new tenement on Bowery with most of his possessions. Not even the discovery that his old 2002 had been stolen sometime in the night had blunted his wonder at waking up in his own apartment in New York. Wandering the steamy malodorous Lower East Side summer streets, moving quickly so as not to seem new, uncool, wanting to eat but somehow afraid to walk into a restaurant or stop long enough to show his uncertainty, afraid of betraying his freshness in the city, afraid he would unwittingly violate some unposted metropolitan code, until he saw this sign, dairy bar, with its rural, mammary intimations. He took a stool at the counter and watched an old man flipping eggs on the grill, talking over his shoulder with customers. Finally Jeff asked for a menu. "You want a menu?" Old misshaven face, hairs sprouting from the nose, eyes veined like bad egg yolks looking him over. Jeff nodding, old guy saying, "Kid wants a menu?" to the room at large. The other diners finding this hilarious. Jeff tried to cling to the belief, that requesting a menu was not a provincial custom despite mounting evidence to the contrary. "Tell you what," said the old man. "You tell me what you want, I'll tell you if we got it." Jeff nodded cautiously. "Eggs over easy." His host seemed tolerant. "Side of bacon." Then the rube alarm had gone off again. "Bacon!" The old man raising his wild eyebrows for his appreciative audience. "Kid wants bacon." After milking the other customers for laughs he finally said, "This is a dairy restaurant," as if that explained everything. Delivering the eggs he asked, "You ever been in a restaurant before. " Three months later—a Jewish girl having in the meantime explained the fundamentals of kosher dining—he returned to the B & H Dairy Bar, and when, finally, the old man asked him if he'd ever been in a restaurant, Jeff answered, "I don't know— you ever worked in one?" After that he was a New Yorker.

  Cruising up Second Avenue now a decade later, he admired a sign that said industrial hair. Nice notion, nice oxymoronic ring. What did it mean? Did they shave machines? Not quite an oxymoron. And what would moronoxy mean—the faith of morons, the beliefs they all shared? Except for those morons who were h
eterodox. Dropping some change in the cup of the legless Rican. Buy yourself a joint, my man. And the Ukrainian man who ran the shoe repair taping a "Back in 5 min" sign on his door and locking up, hobbling down the street in beat-up shoes. Cobbler, heel thyself.

  Writers, he thought, are people who think of the right retort long after they get home. Retarded riposters. Across St. Mark's Place, secondhand clothing and record stores, secondhand attitudes on the street—tough kids from the suburbs doing the Sid Vicious shamble.

  Cabbing up to the Photo District. Ambulance shrieking at the traffic behind him but no one inclined to make way. Sirens and alarms routine now in the city. The photographers had made a little ghetto for themselves in the vicinity of 20th and Sixth. Jeff imagined them going next door to borrow a cup of developing solution, wondered why writers didn't cluster. Only when free drinks were involved. Once he'd been to a writers' colony in New Hampshire, but they asked him to leave after he brought some locals back from a bar for a late-night swim. The other writers, in their beds of inspiration, were not amused. Especially outraged about alleged skinny-dipping among interloping philistines. Jeff censured and excommunicated by his peers. Big solemn meeting—all very humiliating, thanks.

  Buzzed into the small, dirty lobby, he pressed the elevator button and listened to the sinister rattle of chains and pulleys as it descended toward him. All in all he would rather go to the dentist than have his picture taken. Give me lollipops, novocaine, gas—whatever you've got, please. But Russell said this was important, some big-deal magazine article.

  Two policemen were standing in the hallway when the doors opened. Caught at last. Jeff stood rooted to his spot, fists clenching involuntarily. Looking for him since he was born, charge of original sin. Numerous additional crimes since—repeat offender. But the cops ignored him, waddling into the elevator. He leaped out just before the doors closed.