Brightness Falls

by Jay McInerney

  come in."

  "That's right," his buddy agreed. "I'm just saying, Where's my ship?

  That's all I'm saying, Dan'l Boone. I want my piece the fuckin' pie."

  "Goddamn right you do. That's what my friend's saying, Mr. Hillbilly.

  He wants to know, Where's his damn ship?"

  "Whoa, there she blows, man. Lookit there."

  "That ain't your ship. That Miss Corrine. She a married lady."

  "I've had me plenty married ladies. You trying to say I can't get me

  no married lady?"

  Hurrying down the Bowery from Cooper Union in her Belgian loafers, Corrine assessed the line outside the mission. Like restaurants, the missions and soup kitchens each had their distinct clientele, the patronage here mainly male, divided equally between black and white, the majority wearing their Sunday manners because the food was decent and the space limited. A few, most of whom she recognized, talked loudly, complaining, bragging, challenging their neighbors on small points of etiquette or credulity—"You don't think I could get a job with the city just like that if I wanted to, you calling me a goddamn liar? I'm talking about a good job"—preserving in their mendicant state something of the air of boxers before a fight, the demeanor of hustlers about to scam a free meal from an unsuspecting authority, this stance answering the needs of their residual dignity. Others waited quietly to accept whatever might be given. A few were drunk, trying not to show it. Some, whacked out on their own internal chemicals, barely knew where they were: schizophrenics with eyes shuttered against the outer world, an autistic man in a white jumpsuit who compulsively paced out four steps that might have been a foxtrot. The queens coveyed up near the front of the line, shrill and animate as tropical birds, plumed with elaborate coiffures and gaudy scarves—the dandies of the street life.

  "Hey girlfrien'!" Co-reen!

  "Our lady of perpetual dee-light."

  Corrine waved generally and slipped in the door, where the smell of food mingled with the heavy institutional odor of disinfectant on lino- leum. The other volunteers were setting the tables with plastic utensils, bowls of grape jelly and baskets of fluffy white bread.

  "You want to scatter the manna," asked Irene Goldblum, handing Corrine a roll of yellow tickets. A harried social worker with salt-and-pepper hair, she had tended to the poor, tired and huddled misfits of the Lower East Side since graduating from Barnard in 1969; the exhaustion of the effort showed on her face. To Corrine she seemed cynical about her chosen calling—but Corrine visited the Lower East Side only twice a week, and that for just the past year.

  "You're a wet one, bubeleh," Irene had said after, on her first day, Corrine had given away all her cash to the patrons of the mission, instigating a riot in the process. "You'll be more help to them and us if you don't feel too sorry for them. Two-thirds of these men are substance abusers and ninety percent of them are con artists, so watch out your heart doesn't bleed too freely."

  Maybe she was wet, but Corrine believed her compassion had a logical foundation. Living in the city, she felt bound up in a delicate, complex web of interdependence and she was determined to play her part. The misery as well as the vitality of the metropolis seeped into her psyche. After all these years in the city she had yet to develop a nonporous shell.

  The line tensed and shifted as Corrine appeared outside the door. Grimy, cracked palms were extended. This was the moment that fights broke out, although the line tended to police itself when one of the female volunteers handled the tickets. Corrine was especially popular with the regulars.

  The queens slapped each other's hands away and examined Corrine's wardrobe with professional disinterest.

  "That a Chanel suit, girl?"

  "I wish."

  "Who does your hair, honey—I got to come uptown and get me some ofthat."

  "Girl goes to that fancy Gore Vidal salon."

  Farther down the line, a handsome, streetworn man said: "My hostess with the mostest." This was Ace, Corrine's recent party guest. For several weeks now he had been telling the other men in line about the party in increasingly fanciful detail, lately conveying the impression of an intimate acquaintance with Corrine and her stylish uptown friends. The VCR was never mentioned. "Got my appetite with me today. I'm off the crack and off the juice and I'm in God's hands and that's the truth."

  The mention of the deity seemed to set off a chain reaction. Intimates of weather and natural disasters, the men of the streets inclined strongly toward religion, particularly the fateful, fundamentalist strains of Christianity.

  "You people don't eat no pork, does you," asked the next man, walleyed and angry. "Just once I'd like me some nice pork chops." The mission was run by a yeshiva, and many of the men felt obliged to bite the hand that fed them, particularly since it was Jewish.

  "Them Jews didn't recognize our savior," said the next man in line, who clutched his shopping cart as if he suspected Corrine of intending to steal it. "They failed to recognize him yea even like the woman who anointed his feet with oil and they put him to death."

  "Her name's Calloway," insisted Big George, a stately old black man who was also called the Mayor in deference to his long tenure on the Bowery. "That's a Catholic name."

  "My husband's, actually," said Corrine.

  "You—you're what they call an Aryan from Darien," George said.

  "Where are you living, George," Corrine asked.

  "Oh, I got my mobile home. Sleeping on the E train."

  "Catholics just as bad," said the walleye. "You know why's the delay in the New Jerusalem? It's because of the pope and his troops, they robbed the streets of gold and ransacked the city of glass. It's all inside the Vatican now—and he built hisself a throne of gold, saith the Lord. Now they waiting for the reimbursement on the insurance policy for the New Jerusalem. But the day is coming when the righteous they shall be lifted up into God's bosom and the unrighteous shall be cast into the outer darkness."

  "It's the people have to rise up for themselves and overthrow the bankers and the lawyers and the real estate interests," insisted the ponytail. "This city, this neighborhood, belongs to the people, but the sushi eaters are gobbling it up with their designer—"

  "The who eaters?"

  "You mean the Japs?"

  "No, man, not them ..."

  Corrine pressed a ticket on the foxtrot man, whose feet traced an invisible set of instructions on the sidewalk. Farther down the line a debate was in progress about the existence of a rogue leopard, at large in the streets of Manhattan. Several men claimed to have seen the beast, and one said a friend of his had been attacked and mauled.

  Reaching the end of the line Corrine saw a familiar tall figure hunched in conversation with two bikers down the street. In his ragged prep surplus he looked like a scarecrow planted on the Bowery to frighten off the pigeons. The bikers sat sidesaddle on their Harleys, parked at rakish, fuck-you angles against the curb; the Manhattan headquarters of the Hell's Angels was just around the corner and Jeff lived a few blocks away in a loft on Great Jones Street. As she watched, one of the Angels reached up and poked his finger into Jeff's chest. Her first instinct was to rush over, but she held back. Jeff eventually exchanged the brothers' handshake with both men and shambled away up the street, almost passing before he recognized her.

  "Corrine! Christ... what are you..."He swept his limp blond bangs away from his surprised face. "How are you?"

  "I'm fine. You all right?"

  "As right as usual. What, this is your day to expiate?"

  "Yup, I've brought my teaspoon down to bail the ocean of human misery." She nodded toward the Angels. "What are you doing— research?"

  They drifted along the sidewalk back toward the mission. Looking down at her feet, Corrine saw a graffito she had seen elsewhere, a martini glass with a slash through it.

  "I'm abandoning the New England family novel for gritty urban realism." He looked at
her with an almost bashful smile.

  "That you boyfriend, Krin?" someone called from the line.

  "I seen his picture somewhere. He's that actor."

  "Hey, brotherman, I seen you over to Reagantown, ain't I?" said Ace, shivering in a hooded Columbia University sweatshirt worn under a shiny tuxedo jacket.

  "One of my doubles," Jeff said.

  "Hey, if I can tell you exactly where you got them gloves, will you give 'em to me?"

  "Exactly where," Jeff asked, looking at his pigskinned hands, trying to remember himself where they had come from. Ace was slapping his arms for warmth. "The exact very place."

  "You're on," said Jeff.

  "You got 'em on you hands, sucka. Am I right, or am I right?"

  "You gotta admit, he's right," said the man beside Ace. The crowd seemed to agree.

  Jeff immediately removed his gloves and handed them over. The recipient looked almost as surprised as Corrine.

  "You didn't have to do that," said Corrine.

  "A bet's a bet."

  "You're weird, Jeff. Where are you going?"

  "Nowhere special," he said. "See a man about a dog."

  "You want to have a drink afterward?"

  He seemed to hesitate. "Okay, I'll meet you at Great Jones."

  He kissed her at the door. The queens howled as he slouched away. "Hey there, long and slim. Come on back here."

  Jeff seemed even thinner than usual, Corrine thought, as she brought another half-loaf of bread to one of the tables; he could almost pass in a soup line.

  "More bread, please, miss." Especially in winter, they asked for bread until they were cut off, loading carbohydrates against the cold. And jelly—they layered Smucker's on everything, for the sugar.

  At table three a fight broke out over extra sugar packets, one man trying to strangle Ace with his scarf. They toppled to the floor. Here near the bottom of the food chain, sugar was the basis of a primitive system of exchange. Mrs. Goldblum swooped down and scared the combatants into a truce. Ace managed to keep two extra packets of sugar in the articles of agreement that ended the scuffle.

  Ace felt hot, the mojo was on him tonight for certain. Feinting at shadows with his new gloves, he paused on the Bowery, trying to feel his luck. Like many men on the street, Ace was a fatalist. Whatever was going to be would be. You just had to try not to get in the way of it. Coming up on a dude in a suit, he asked for a quarter. The man passed him by like he was the Invisible Man, but Ace was used to that, people not hearing him and not seeing him, the normal citizenry equipped with that streamlined New York tunnel vision—eyes straight ahead and fo- cused on the next stop lest the gaze get snagged on something ugly— equipped with radar that registered his presence as an obstacle to be avoided like a rock or a pile of dog shit. It could be such a bitch that sometimes you almost yearned for the straight thing, and yet he found a certain romance in this business of pure subsistence, foraging and hunting like the early pioneers in a hostile landscape, that was far more exciting than flipping burgers, humping furniture, riding his ass all over the city on a bike delivering messages.

  He drifted over to the bandstand at Tompkins Square Park and found some of the boys smoking that crack, but he had no green, so he moved right along, cruising down Avenue C to the big lot in which a squatter's camp had sprouted in the rubble of a demolished tenement block, a makeshift urban encampment of tepees constructed after a truck carrying bolts of fabric had overturned on Houston. The members of an ad hoc drinking club which had formed around a bottle of Night Train, having discovered the driver unconscious, pried open the back and found bolts of silk and cotton tapestry depicting scenes of knights on horseback in pursuit of unicorns, which looked much too valuable to leave in the gutter, so the men had rolled the cargo up to the empty lot in which they'd been sleeping. The next day the first tepee went up. Now there were a dozen, the once scarlet material bedraggled and fading in the rain and sun and snow, covered over with plastic garbage bags and aluminum foil. Shanties of plywood and sheet metal had risen among the tepees, and other settlers had squatted the abandoned tenement next door. A huge mural painted on the exposed, windowless side of the building portrayed an idealized, Edenic version of the community under the title the new Jerusalem, but most people called it Reagantown. Altogether several hundred citizens had taken refuge here, among them families with children and pets; many more, such as Ace, passed through, looking for food, parties and shelter. A giant Vietnam veteran named Rostenkowski informally ruled the community, doling out the donated food, selling lean-to space for a buck a night and overseeing the drug trade.

  The night air was smudged with smoke and heavily freighted with smells of food, sweat and urine. Campers were huddled around the burning trashcans, sharing bottles and cigarettes. Looking over at Ros-tenkowski's tepee Ace saw Corrine's friend, the tall dude who'd given him the gloves, step out and gaze up at the sky as if he were trying to get his bearings from the stars. Ace, he was looking for a girl named Sally Sweet.

  "Gone visit the oval office," asked a man called Sixtoe, who actually had eleven toes in all.

  "Just like the president," said Ace.

  Then someone told him that Rostenkowski had thrown her out, told her not to come back, because her arms broke out all purple and Rostenkowski said it was the AIDS.

  "How come the white man always get to be the fucking landlord?"

  "You better go get yourself a test, brother."

  "If you gonna go, you gonna go," Ace observed, tautologically, but he felt bad about Sally, she was only sixteen.

  After cleanup at the mission Corrine met Jeff at the Great Jones Café, a small crowded juke-joint that was one of his hangouts.

  "If I can tell you exactly where you bought that shirt, will you take it off," he asked the bartender, a bleached blonde in a tight black camisole.

  "My girlfriend stole it from this place she used to work."

  "That's exactly what I was going to say. Off with it—now!"

  The bartender sauntered away. Jeff seemed almost relaxed here. Never easy to locate, in recent years he'd become more distracted and elusive than ever. There must have been a moment, she thought, after he finished his book, when he unwound, but his contentment seemed to diminish in proportion to its success. Russell said that as an elitist and a misanthrope, Jeff couldn't help hating himself after so many people had liked his book. After sticking with him for three years through the hard times, his girlfriend, Caitlin, packed it in once he finally succeeded. She didn't like all the new competition, she said. "Do you hear anything from Caitlin," Corrine asked.

  "I hear she's engaged to an investment banker. You don't think it will ever happen to someone you actually know, and then—wham! Just like that. A lesson for us all. I guess it's a reaction to three years of me."

  "Well, I'm a stockbroker, as you so kindly reminded me on my birthday."

  The bartender, who might have moonlighted as a female wrestler, directed at her one of those feminine surveys of suspicious appraisal.

  "You're not really a broker. Some people turn into their jobs. Not you."

  "Does that make me a hypocrite, doing something I don't believe in?"

  "You're like ... a missionary to the dark continent of Wall Street, bringing a little sweetness and light to the financial sector. What do you want, a beer?"

  "Just a diet something."

  "Diet something," the blonde simpered, clutching the pistol grip of the soda gun fiercely. She managed to convey the impression that it was beneath her professional dignity to serve soft drinks, let alone diet soft drinks, and that she was doing so only because Corrine was, inexplicably, a friend of Jeff's.

  "You given up drinking? Manhattan social life will be revealed in all its tawdry horror and you'll come to despise us all."

  "Maybe we should all move."

  "We should. But where is there?"

  "We have to live her
e but you could live anywhere. I like to think of you on a New England campus, smoking a pipe and fly-fishing."

  "I'm a fisher of women."

  "Have you ever slept with her?" she whispered, once the bartender had finally rolled out of earshot. "She looks at me as if she'd like to stick me in the blender headfirst."

  "Actually, I think she'd like to put you in feet first and work down very slowly for maximum pain."

  "You didn't answer my question."

  "You're right, I didn't." He stared her down,

  She sipped, licked the carbonation sting from her lips. "Do you ever wish you'd married Caitlin?"

  "We were as married as anybody—I liked to think of it as a marriage of inconvenience. We fought as much as any married couple... made ourselves expert on each other's weaknesses... I think that counts as marriage, doesn't it?"

  "You know I know you just pretend to be cynic."

  "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

  "—Vonnegut. "

  "Yes, very good. Though I think Aristotle said it first."

  "Well, you seemed like a good couple."

  "It's easy to seem like a good couple," Jeff said ruefully. "I was always waiting for you."

  "I don't feel like I've really talked to you lately." Corrine didn't want to encourage this line of speculation. "Don't you ever want to settle down?"

  "That's your job. Someone's got to drink these drinks and fuck these sleazy girls so you can live a normal life."

  "You used to talk about your feelings, Jeff. Not just joke about them."

  "Basically," he said, "I think men talk to women so they can sleep with them and women sleep with men so they can talk to them."

  "Where does that leave us," she asked lightly.

  "In a Zen garden. Green and yellow mosses, raked gravel. Silence."

  She nodded in frustration, and looked away. "Come have dinner with us," she said, finally.

  "Sorry. Booked."

  "Walking the dog?"

  "Something like that." He fired up a cigarette.

  "Try not to forget the old friends," she said coyly.