Brightness Falls

by Jay McInerney

  Corrine lifted her head, looked out at the featureless road. "Where are we?"

  "The Taconic."

  "Do you still love me?" she said sleepily.

  "Let me think about it."

  "Russ."

  Why she required a verbal confirmation every few days he didn't understand. A girl thing, or a Corrine thing? By now he had trouble making the distinction.

  "Yes, I believe I do."

  "How much?" This was a game between them, but it was not unserious. He wedged his legs up against the steering wheel and held his hands apart as far as they would go within the car. "About this much."

  "Okay." She lay down in his lap and fell asleep again, then woke up with a policeman's flashlight in her eyes and blue light pulsing in the rearview mirror—Russell's second speeding ticket in three days.

  "Russell, why are you always in such a hurry?"

  "Because at my rear I always hear time's fuel-injected, turbo-charged hearse hurrying near."

  "You do not. You don't even believe in your own mortality. You act like you're going to live forever." He'd been skiing like that all weekend, flat-out, crashing spectacularly once—splayed across a mogul, the snow he'd churned up settling like a cloud of smoke over his colorful corpse. The blue light continued to flash ominously behind them.

  "You have to fool yourself into believing you're not going die. Otherwise you'd be miserable."

  "If you don't realize it could end at any minute you won't value it properly. Sometimes I worry that you don't feel things very deeply."

  "Division of labor. You do it for me." He squeezed her knee and kissed her as the policeman slammed his car door and tromped back toward them on the shoulder of the highway. "Try not to be quite so serious all the time."

  "Why don't you give it a try," she countered. "Just once."

  It seemed only minutes later that she was in the office, Monday morning, hand on the phone receiver. For a moment she'd gone completely blank—she couldn't remember whom she was going to call, what she'd been doing before—and then she heard Duane Peters's voice a few feet away:

  "I'm predicting this stock could double before the end of the year... No, forget that. Biotech you don't want to know from. Thank your lucky stars I got you out of that in time. That was a Dunkirk. Bodies all over the beach. What's happening now is health and leisure. I'm calling you first on this one..."

  Listening to Duane made her feel even gloomier. Her face green in the glow of her Quotron, she looked down at a list of names in front of her: certified public accountants in the greater metropolitan area. Accountants were a hard sell—conservative, tight and inconveniently knowledgeable.

  She started with Ablomsky, Leon. A woman answered, her voice scratchy and querulous.

  "May I please speak to Mr. Ablomsky?"

  On the other end there was silence.

  "Hello, is Mr. Ablomsky there?" When there was still no response she said, "This is Corrine Calloway from Wayne, Duehn. Do you expect him back?"

  "No." A choked syllable.

  "No, you don't expect him soon?"

  "He died two weeks ago."

  She felt herself go all cold along her spine and at the tips of her ears, as if a wind had poured out of the receiver from Brooklyn. "Oh God, I'm sorry," she said, but after that she felt powerless to speak, or to hang up.

  The silence on the other end gave way to a rising intake of breath, which finally broke into a sob. When Mrs. Ablomsky began to speak, her voice was dry and brittle, like an old letter recovered and preserved after a season of rain and snow.

  "He's gone. Murdered. We come into the city once a month... once a month we dressed up and took the train... he was wearing his brown jacket... we went to Macy's... and then a boy came up behind and grabbed my purse... It was too much for Leon. He'd already had one coronary. Keeled over in the street... I'm... I'm so..."

  "Thirty-two years. I'm sorry, I shouldn't, I just thought... your voice, a girl's voice but serious. I mean, you don't sound silly. Do you smoke? You sound like a smoker."

  "I used to. I quit."

  "That's good," she said. "I'm glad. Don't smoke."

  She started to weep again.

  What could Corrine possibly say? "Did the police ..."

  "The police! What do they know?"

  "Are you ... all right? Is there anything I can do for you?"

  "He was a good husband, a good provider. He'd just bought me a new pair of gloves at Macy's, I'd put them on in the store. We used to go to Gimbels before it... before it closed... Leon was very upset when they closed Gimbels, he took it hard..."

  Trailing shirttails and shoelaces, Jeff appeared in Russell's office as if from bed, his shirt more frayed than usual, the button-down collar unbuttoned and upturned, knees showing through his ripped chinos. Only the blue blazer imparted a precarious note of formality. Adjusting the bill of his cap, inscribed with the motto "Save Me from What I Want," he disheveled himself onto Russell's couch and plucked the Posr from Russell's desk.

  " 'Wild Cat Terrorizes City,' " he read.

  "Who is this person," Russell asked Donna.

  "Your lunch date."

  "Your meal ticket, actually," Jeff said.

  Washington Lee was just sliding out to lunch with an agent when his assistant announced a call from Donald Parker. The lunch hour, or rather the lunch two and a half hours, had already begun, in Washington's opinion, and normally he considered the institution sacrosanct; but Donald Parker did not call every day. Fortunately. "I'll take it," he said, warily retreating to his office.

  "Donald. What can I do for you, my man?"

  "Washington, it's like this—I thought we should have this little talk about how come you're not getting with the program, not taking care of your own people."

  "What you talking about?"

  "Talking about your company not publishing Afro-American literature. Talking about a respected Afro-American author being insulted and assaulted in your very own office, bro'."

  "Don't give me that shit, that nigger's a headcase. Came in my office and threatened me. "

  "Not the way I heard the story."

  "You're hearing jive." Indignant as he was, Washington was also nervous. Parker was an activist with a hyperactive sense of racial injustice, the bald black avenger. He and Washington had a nodding acquaintance, and though he didn't make a point of saying so in front of his white friends, Washington occasionally admired the lawyer's guerrilla media theatrics. Whenever one of his own ran spectacularly afoul of the system, Parker's picture was in the tabloids the next day, his naked forehead wrinkled with concern, a furious scowl emerging from his beard, surrounded by a posse of angry supporters. If the accused was black, he was counsel for the defense, scourge of police and prosecution, skeptical of the legal system; whenever a black appeared to be the victim of white violence he unequivocally demanded swift, harsh justice. Parker was capable of summoning a thousand supporters into the street at the drop of a racial epithet. Even if you didn't like him, there was no percentage in saying so. Washington sent a check to his youth organization every year.

  "This is not a big thing," Washington said calmly, "and it's not a color thing."

  "Everything's about color, Lee. For example, if you happened not to be black, Jamal would be suing your ass for assault with a deadly weapon, but I convinced him that it would just cloud the issue going after the brother."

  "It was a squirt gun. Gray in color, as I recall."

  "Says you."

  "The brother can't write, Donald. A disability he shares with most of the fucking populace. That's all. End of story. Sad but true."

  "Maybe your judgment's been a little colored—or should I say, bleached—hanging out around all those tweedy white folks. Way I hear, you don't have any time for people of color. Seems like you're forgetting your obligations."

  "I didn't get elected to this fucking
job. I was hired my own self. I didn't see you there cheerleading at my job interview. "

  "Maybe not. But if not for Malcolm and Martin and a thousand others, they wouldn't let you in the motherfucking door. As it is, you got hired as house nigger. And you got to answer to your people. We have a list of demands," Parker said.

  "I thought editors were supposed to take successful authors out to The Four Seasons or something," Jeff observed, looking around the saloon on 18th Street. "They wouldn't let you in. But I'm sure your movie friends will take you to the Russian Tea Room if you ask them nicely."

  Jeff's long, thin gaze finally speared the waitress; he ordered a Bloody Mary, in which Russell declined to join him. Thinking about what Solomon said, looking at Jeff's—was he imagining it?—haggard face.

  "I hear you're going to L.A. this week," Russell said, hearing also a note of irritation in his own voice. Was he annoyed that he'd learned about it from someone else, or annoyed at the actual idea? He liked to think he was bigger than those literary fundamentalists for whom working in the movies was equivalent to damnation.

  "Call me Faust," Jeff said.

  "Hey, I didn't say it was a bad idea. It does get you out of New York. You could use a little sun."

  "Would you buy a book from an author with a tan?"

  "Hemingway," Russell said.

  "Hemingway doesn't count."

  "So how's it going," Russell asked, casting a large net, the holes of which were big enough to let anything unpleasant slip through. It was a principle with Russell not to ask Jeff about his work; when he was ready he would show it. They both believed that books could be talked away. Russell was afraid that Jeff wasn't writing, but he couldn't come out and ask.

  "Shining days."

  Between them there was a delicate etiquette of masculine stoicism which was suspended only under extreme emotional duress or drunkenness, two conditions that were often coincident. Russell did what he could, which was to observe the forms of the ritual that insulated them from extremes of emotion.

  "I think I will have that drink," Russell said.

  "You animal, you."

  Thirty blocks south, Corrine was sitting in a booth at a Greek coffee shop with Mrs. Leon Ablomsky. Corrine had arrived early—lest Mrs. Ablomsky get there before she did and confirm her belief that their appointment was a whim Corrine would repent, that a young girl with such a refined voice who worked for a big brokerage house would probably have a million other engagements, that something would surely come up in the interval between Corrine's inviting an elderly widow like herself to lunch and the time it took her to take the subway in from Brooklyn, though she would understand perfectly, she'd just have her cup of soup and some cottage cheese and maybe subway up to see the skaters at Rockefeller Center, which Leon used to enjoy doing so much.

  And indeed, Corrine had second thoughts, as soon as she hung up; she couldn't imagine telling anyone that she was going off to have lunch with a keening widow she'd inadvertently surprised on a cold call. Before eleven-thirty she started to call the number three times to cancel, but she didn't think she could bear to hear that voice say, "It's all right, I understand."

  When Corrine arrived she scanned the coffee shop, in which at least five candidates fit her notion of widowhood. Then the door opened behind her, and a woman who wasn't nearly old or decrepit enough cocked her head and whispered, "Are you Corrine?" She wore a hazel mink, which if not of the latest cut or color—younger women including Corrine were buying the rich, dark colors, cut below the knee—was of obvious quality and fit her beautifully. Her face was lined, but not unattractive, her eyes bright and only a little sunken. Corrine almost said, You must have been very beautiful.

  They shook hands awkwardly and eventually seated themselves at a booth where each of them elaborately removed and folded her coat, adjusted her skirt and checked her purse. When Corrine patted her purse a second time, just as Mrs. Ablomsky was doing the same, they both acknowledged their discomfort with a laugh and a shrug.

  "You can call me Muriel," she said. "You're probably thinking this is the craziest thing you ever let yourself in for."

  "No, no..."

  "I understand. It's all right. But for me, sitting around that house... Well, I had nothing to lose."

  "It must be—"

  Muriel nodded. "It is." Her gaze turned inward, and Corrine felt constrained to be silent until she reappeared from the depths of her reverie.

  "Shall we order?" she said, looking up and forming a deliberate smile.

  "Great, yeah, let's order," Corrine said, opening the huge vinyl- jacketed menu as though it were something she'd been dying to read since college.

  "What are you reading," Russell asked, chewing beef as ketchup dripped between his fingers.

  "Catalogues. I subscribe to all of them. It's just amazing what you can buy in this country, an alarm clock that projects a beam of light onto the ceiling so you can see the time without lifting your head. Orthopedic pet beds, crocodile golf bags." Jeff's lamb chops were chilling on his plate while he finished his drink. "Reading some Cheever, actually."

  "Angst in the suburbs," Russell said dismissively. Once, he might have liked Cheever, but since the writer had been canonized he considered it his job to defy the conventional wisdom. As a member of the white educated middle class he felt condescending toward his own kind whenever he encountered them in fiction.

  "You think truth and beauty are exclusive to the foul slums and the frozen wind-scoured steppes, the bazaars and the trenches? The gates of heaven and hell are yawning right out there in the backyard, Jack."

  This sounded to Russell like Jeff making a case for his own stories.

  "Other than that, I don't know. I have trouble reading these days. There's something so... You have to sit in one place, right? It all seems so inauthentic, and I don't just mean the bad stuff. The artifice of sitting down, the way language implicates you in the lie right off. 'April is the cruelest month.' Yeah? Bullshit. How about February? But once you start, you're inside the thing; the rhetoric has you, do you know what I mean?" He picked up a lamb chop by the bone and shook it three times in Russell's direction like a baton.

  "Actually, I haven't got a fucking clue."

  "I once heard a story about a lecture by J. L. Austin," he said, after he'd dropped the chop back on his plate and wiped his hands. "The language philosopher. Austin was speaking somewhere, yammering away and then he says, 'It is interesting to note that while in most languages two negatives make a positive, it is never the case that two positives make a negative.' And then, from the very back of the room, this guy says, in a sneering tone, 'Yeah, yeah.' I'm with him—I'm with that guy. I say, Yeah, yeah."

  * * *

  Sipping a Bloody Mary in the Grill Room at The Four Seasons, Washington pretended to listen to the agent pitch a book. Though this was hardly his scene, he was none too thrilled with his table position in the middle of the room, right about where Nebraska would appear on the map—the power tables being the banquettes that lined the room, facing in so that all the players could see one another. Harold Stone and all the other big publishing dicks.

  Not a whole lot of brothers here in the Grill Room, it went without saying—a soaring rosewood-paneled stage with no distracting props or décor to detract from the entrances and exits of notable white boys. A clean, well-lighted place for doing biz, but Washington couldn't concentrate on biz—or the wine list for that matter—with Donald Parker hanging over his head. Parker was going to jam up his shit in a serious way, and it was infuriating. Nobody was on Russell's case to advance the cause of white people. Parker wanted a quota of books by and about black Americans, and he wanted more personnel; he'd decided to target Corbin, Dern because of its prestige, and because of the alleged mistreatment of the lunatic who'd invaded Washington's office. Now Washington had the choice of trying to convince management that Parker's demands were reasonable or maybe having t
he son of a bitch get way out in front of him and leave him looking like a lackey. Even in the lily-white publishing world— especially in the lily-white publishing world—Washington could not afford to lose his cred and cachet. His colleagues in publishing counted on him to be right-thinking and fabulously cool. What he really didn't need was to have his program called into question. If the brothers started hollering Oreo he might actually have to start coming to work on time.

  "Girls today, I guess you didn't have to go through what we did. I used to hate it, and then when I finally got to where I loved it he wasn't interested anymore. I felt gypped, I can tell you. You never stop missing it. But after a while a marriage is about something else."

  The conversation had shifted in the middle of Muriel's chicken cutlet, Corrine's attempts at commiseration yielding to Muriel's advice on marriage. "I wish we could've had children," Muriel said. "Are you planning to?"

  "I hope so."

  "Don't wait too long, honey."

  "I'm ready, but he isn't."

  "So surprise him."

  She definitely couldn't tell Russell about this lunch. It would only confirm certain ideas he had of her—what he called her Mother Teresa syndrome.

  Observing the waitress as she shimmied off toward the kitchen, Russell asked, "What happened to that girl you brought to our place on Corrine's birthday. The model, the one with the—"