Brightness Falls

by Jay McInerney

  They jabbered through lunch at Spat's, filling the ashtray and emptying wineglasses. They talked about everything—he had been only half right about her summer, Nantucket and sailing, along with six weeks as a Red Cross volunteer helping build an airstrip for a remote village in southern Oaxaca. The airstrip might have been on one of the moons of the planet Saturn—he couldn't stop looking at her mouth, watching her lips on her cigarette, the dense clouds of smoke that she exhaled seeming to him the visible trace of inner fires. Still smoking and talking, they found themselves by late afternoon in Russell's dorm room, where they suddenly fell on each other—a crisis of lips and tongues and limbs that somehow stopped short of the desired conclusion. She was still going with Kurt, and he was involved with a girl named Maggie Sloan.

  Their romance fell dormant for almost two years, till Corrine called up one night and asked in her slightly hoarse voice if she could come over. When she arrived she said she had broken up with Kurt, although she had failed, evidently, to make this clear to him; soon after Corrine holed up he began calling, then coming over to shout drunken threats across Keeney quad. Russell savored the atmosphere of siege, which lent an extra dimension of urgency to their union, an element of danger and illegitimacy which was profoundly stimulating. He ditched Maggie over the phone. Maggie cried and appealed to the weight of tradition—two years of going out. With Corrine at his side—all over him, in fact— Russell was sympathetic but firm, righteous in the heedless cruelty of new love.

  Outside the dorm it was a prematurely cold New England fall; red and yellow leaves slipped from the trees and twisted in the wind. For five days they left the room only to get food, staying in bed most of the time, drinking St. Pauli Girls, smoking Marlboros, talking, learning how to make love all over again. In the mornings, Corrine told Russell her dreams in minute detail. Her imagination was curiously literal. She remembered everything—what people were wearing, inconsistencies and illogic which surprised and annoyed her a little, as if she expected dreams to conform to quotidian standards. Her view of the waking world, though, was somewhat fantastic. Certain dates and names were fraught with unlikely significance for her, and more than Russell, the poet, she believed in the shamanistic power of words. She had the kind of faith in hearing herself declared loved, in the physical fact of the words being spoken, the syllables being pronounced out loud, that her heroine Franny Glass had in the repetition of the Jesus Prayer. When, much later, Russell proposed to her long-distance, Oxford, England, to New York, New York, she made him promise never to say the word "divorce."

  He mouthed the word now: divorce. Nothing happened. He couldn't imagine her not being around; even now, still angry, he could feel himself starting to worry about her. They were both hung over—that was one problem. And he was tense about the situation at work. The Nicaragua book was about to be stillborn and Harold wouldn't even speak to him. Having until a month before been heir apparent, Russell was going to have to think seriously about getting a new job, or something.

  After listlessly cruising the circuit of Painting and Sculpture, Russell came upon Giacometti—first Spoon Woman, in which a visual analogy is made between the female torso and the bowl of a spoon, suggestive of fertility, maternity, the triumph of the feminine principle. He glanced at it briefly, then stopped short in front of its opposite, a bronze he'd been mesmerized by several times, a sprawl of limblike appendages en- titled Woman with Her Throat Cut. Whenever he'd come upon this piece in Corrine's company he had always hurried past it, feeling guilty, embarrassed, a participant in all the crimes against her sex throughout history, his guilt stemming from a fascination and attraction he felt for the object, the bronze woman with a wedged declivity in her larynx, arching her back and thrusting her splayed legs upward into space. Although he would not exactly admit it to himself, this piece made him feel he might be capable of evil.

  Looking up suddenly, he found himself facing the Frenchwoman, who smiled at him.

  Dioramas of late-twentieth-century Manhattan chieftains and their women, the windows at Bergdorfs displayed extravagantly costumed mannequins in the postures of revel and feasting. Having swindled the original inhabitants out of the land and then exterminated them, this tribe flourished until shortly before the millennium... Pausing in her commentary, Corrine, as anthropologist of the future, tried to decide what form of doom had befallen—would befall—her own. For lately it seemed to her that the horsemen of the apocalypse were saddling up, that something was coming to rip huge holes in the gaudy stage sets of Ronald McDonald Reaganland. Meanwhile she was selling stocks, a glorified Fuller Brush girl. Hi, I'm Corrine, can I interest you in a sexy growth stock or maybe a cute little annuity?

  Must be hung over. Of course. Why else run crying from the museum, not that Russell hadn't been horrible. Pompous ass. She was almost mad enough to go into Bergdorfs and charge up one of these nice Donna Karan ensembles with all the accessories. If it were open.

  She kept walking, past the fountain in front of the Plaza—called the Fountain of Abundance, dry now. She always thought of this as the navel of the slender island on which she and Russell had camped for five years, having come together as newlyweds with duffel bags and dreams, after their Wanderjahre and grad schools and their halfhearted, experimental attempts to live without each other. Coming here to be grown-ups, she starting Columbia Law, so as to fight injustice in its many guises; he still thinking of himself as a writer then, the publishing job as a temporary expedient, a way of paying the rent till he became a famous poet. And though those two dreams quietly expired, she usually believed she and Russell were happy, that the city had been good to them, that they had been good to each other.

  Approaching the apartment building she saw an ancient man attacked by two kids. One kid held him up while the other slapped and punched his face. As they fled, Corrine rushed forward. Having struggled up to a sitting position, the man was holding his hand to his bloodied face. Corrine held out her own hand. "Are you all right?"

  "I don't want help," he said, not looking up at her.

  "Take my hand. Do you want an ambulance?"

  "Go away."

  "You're bleeding."

  "Can't you see I don't want your help? Leave me alone!" Tears of rage were streaming from his eyes. When Corrine reached down once more he swung his cane around and whacked her hip, flailing at her until she retreated out of range.

  "Leave me alone," he screamed.

  When Corrine looked back from the next corner he was on his knees, struggling furiously to attain his feet before anyone else offered help.

  Her name was Simone. Russell didn't ask what had happened to her friend, and she didn't allude to his wedding band, though she certainly noticed it, just as he noticed the heavy gold tank watch beneath the sleeve of her sweatshirt. On the weekends there were two ways to determine someone's tax bracket: watch and shoes.

  Sitting across from her in the museum café, Russell talked about his job—she had heard of Jeff and another of his authors, and had a Gallic as opposed to an American view of the profession of letters, which is to say she wasn't disappointed to find that he was not an investment banker or a soap opera star. She didn't seem to be the kind of person who ever had to settle on any one thing in terms of employment, but most recently she'd worked as a wildlife photographer on an expedition in Tanzania. "I am thinking of joining an expedition up the Amazon," she said, her English flawless though accented, a little more precise than a native speaker's, and it turned out she was one of those people who'd been reared in the middle of the Atlantic—as much a New Yorker as a Parisian. "But I don't know. I think I'd like to do something completely different this time, you know?"

  Russell had been imagining the viscous tropical air of the jungle, the screech of gaudy birds overhead, Simone straddling the bow of a tub reminiscent of the African Queen, a profane figurehead with tan thighs scanning the underbrush with a zoom lens... tan thighs misted with blond hairs glistening l
ike gold in the bottom of a prospector's pan, tailings from the golden city of El Dorado.

  He saw now why his opinion of her charms had varied over the course of an hour; she was not indisputably beautiful in stasis, but the slightest speech or motion exposed a sexual essence.

  "Do you like Giacometti," she asked.

  He nodded.

  "My father has one." She paused and then said, "Maybe you'd like to come over and see it," looking directly into his eyes with just enough intensity to indicate that modern art was only one of her passionate interests.

  "That might be nice," he said, trying to clear his throat of a sudden dry constriction. "And what does he do?" he added, to cover his confusion, knowing this was an underbred question but curious about the class of people who owned Giacomettis.

  "Oh, he invests the money for my family."

  "Good work if you can get it."

  "Are you interested in finance?"

  "I dabble. I'm afraid I'm vastly undercapitalized."

  "Talk to my father. He has too much money."

  "It's very sad."

  "Yes. I think I'd like you to feel very sorry for me."

  Just as Corrine was about to give up on him and cancel for dinner he arrived home buoyant and apologetic. He hugged her, running his tongue along the edge of her ear.

  "I'll admit that Cezanne's a little chilly," he said, "if you'll grant that Chagall is a wimp."

  "Have I done something recently," she asked. "Have you just lost interest in me?"

  "I'm an ungrateful bastard," he said. "But as of this moment I promise to improve my character. Close your eyes—I've got a present for you. Okay, put out your hand."

  Her fingers closed around a postcard, a photo of Matisse's Dance inscribed on the other side: "I'm sorry. I love you. P.S. This postcard entitles the bearer to romantic dinner tonight at expensive restaurant of choice. Mystery Dance to follow—informal attire." She smiled at the private joke, a reference to a favorite Elvis Costello song.

  "You're sweet—in fact, I don't know if I quite recognize this romantic boy who just swept into my apartment. But we've got Colin and Anne tonight, remember?"

  "Shit."

  "I'm holding on to this, though," she said, slipping the postcard down the front of her shirt and winking.

  They returned home after midnight. Corrine was exhausted, but Russell was in the mood so she took advantage. He was very passionate, and attentive, too—sometimes he seemed to forget she was there during sex, as if she were a car he was driving to a private destination.

  She fell asleep almost immediately, contented.

  Russell lay awake for several minutes thinking idly about a boat chugging up a jungle river, but his conscience was almost clear, in fact it was more than clear. This morning his fidelity had been untested of late, while tonight he was a man who had turned down an invitation to see another woman's etchings—or rather, her father's Giacometti. The narrowness of his escape, the degree to which he had been aroused by the idea had rebounded to Corrine's advantage, the nearness of his infidelity having erotically charged his cells; he'd watched Corrine all through dinner, couldn't wait to get her home, and the happiness he found in this vision of himself as an upright husband had increased his appreciation of the wife for whom he performed this heroic feat of abnegation.

  He was barely troubled by the thought that Simone had given him her phone number, since he knew he would never use it.

  7

  Was it invariably true—a natural law, like the conservation of matter—that there was no free lunch?

  Cabbing from the West Village to the Sherry-Netherland in order to partake of the midday meal with his editor, Victor Propp mulled the question from many angles, the chalky cliff of his forehead corrugated in cerebration. Literally speaking, writers never paid for lunch. Agents, editors and journalists did. That was the way of the world, a social convention which approached the status of a universal truth. It was necessary, in Victor's view, that as an artist one remained a child in some sense, spoiled and dependent; a porous, needy, oral creature—a sucking mouth; a monstrous ego for whom all objective reality is composed of mirrors and nipples.

  No free lunch. Who said it first? he wondered. It had the pithy quality of a Ben Franklinism. But wasn't that really what it meant to be an American, to believe above all in the free lunch? Dialectically opposed to the Puritan ethic and every bit as firmly fixed in the national psyche was the bedrock belief in something for nothing, the idea that five would get you ten. The free lunch was Marx's Surplus, the bonus of labor that capital claimed for itself. It was the gratuitous vein of gold, the oil gusher, the grabbed land, the stock market killing, the windfall profit, the movie sale. Europeans believed in the zero sum game, that one man's feast was his neighbor's fast. But here the whole continent had been free, almost, for the taking. Or so it seemed to Victor Propp, American novelist.

  He did not think of his own mind as being particularly American, however, though he was spawned in Boise, Idaho, the product of a taciturn Swedish mother and a Russian Jewish father who taught high school English and claimed kinship with the great story writer Isaac Babel. Victor had not remotely felt at home in Boise and had begun to find his place in the world only when he arrived at Yale at the age of sixteen and discovered Europe in the comp lit department. While he did not, like fellow Idahoan Ezra Pound, remove himself across the ocean, he did imagine that he stood outside the culture, critical and aloof, quarantined at an Ellis Island of the spirit with the disease of his art. A hundred years after Henry James had fled the raw continent, Victor mused, the consciousness of his native land remained barely half forged. Americans were still radical materialists. More innocent than Kalahari bushmen, who were adepts at reading signs and symbols, Americans took everything at face value—words, signs, rhetoric, faces—as if reality itself were so much legal tender. For Victor it was a treacherous text composed by a necromancer, diabolically resistant to analysis. Even the phrase "face value" suggested to a mind like Victor Propp's a labyrinth of interpretation, of masks and falsity and deceit, divergences of appearance and reality, rancorous divorces between signifier and signified, the apparent solidity of the words collapsing underfoot, feathering out and deliquescing into Derridean twilight, surfaces giving way suddenly, like the street along which Victor's taxi was bucking at this very moment, ripped up and peeled back after a gas main explosion to reveal networks of pipe and wire and rat-infested tunnel.

  In a small notebook, Victor wrote Free Lunch... Manifest Destiny... American Mind. This brought his total output for the morning to some forty words, the past three hours having been devoted to the fashioning of a thirty-three-word sentence fragment and six parenthetical phone calls. Writing was self-inflicted torture, déjeuner a blessed relief.

  Young Calloway was paying for today's lunch. Propp was intrigued by Calloway's mind precisely because it was so American, so different from his own, standing as if on firm ground where Victor descried quicksand. Calloway reminded Victor of those cartoon characters who were able to walk on the air so long as they didn't know there was an abyss underneath them. Naive, in a word—but an interesting, almost exemplary naivete, having to do with youth and an admirable brashness. Like an athlete, he had a pure, practical kind of knowledge upon which Victor wished to draw. He had launched the careers of Jeff Pierce and several other not insignificant writers at an age when most publishing slaves were still typing letters. Approaching sixty, Propp often worried that he had waited too long to make his decisive literary move, and he was reassured by the rapt interest of the bright young man. Harold Stone and his peers still ran the show, but Propp knew which generation would pass judgment on his own. And in his darker moments he suspected he had exhausted Harold's faith in his genius, as well as his patience. Russell might just accomplish something noteworthy or even spectacular, particularly if given a push, and Victor had an idea he wished to set into motion. Having renounced th
e world for his priestly vocation, Victor cultivated a Jesuitical interest in the mechanics of power.

  As for the price of lunch, Calloway and his employers expected Propp someday to deliver the book on which he had been working for twenty years; in the meantime the young man considered himself amply rewarded with the company and conversation of the legendary novelist, while Victor tried to probe Russell's innocence, his representative nature as one of the best and brightest of a barbaric native culture. It was a pleasantly disguised system of exchange and credit in which, by Victor Pröpp's reckoning, he came out way ahead. Propp estimated he had dined five or six hundred times with editors in the course of writing his second novel.

  For Russell, the planning and execution of lunch could consume half a day. He didn't doubt that early hunter-gatherers had had it easier— step outside the cave and pick some berries, impale a mammoth on your spear, wait for lightning to strike a nearby tree in order to provide cooking fire, no problem. The late-twentieth-century editor, by contrast, faced daunting logistical problems. If you were the instigator of the meal you had to choose a restaurant—not as easy as it might sound, questions of the status, expectations and physical location of the diners arising at every turn. Also questions of your own ability to command a reservation. Although Victor Propp lived fairly modestly, he was a snob when it came to spending other people's money, and he'd put in a specific request today for the local branch of Harry's Bar in Venice, located in the Sherry-Netherland hotel, which he liked for its Levantine literary associations and its Himalayan prices.