Brightness Falls

by Jay McInerney

  "Smile when you say that, darling, or I shall have to insist that you marry me."

  Russell had to wonder which qualification interested her the most.

  "Though I must say, please don't take offense, but you do look terribly predictable, fashionwise."

  "Thomas Mann said, Dress like a bourgeois, think like a revolutionary." Who was Morticia Addams here, Russell wondered, to be giving him a fashion critique, even as he felt uncool.

  "Did he really? Did he actually say it, darling, or did he simply write it down? I always wonder about all these wonderful things people supposedly said. I think you should get extra credit if you actually say them at the dinner table instead of after, sitting at a desk in some stuffy room with all the time in the world to think. Truman would just blurt those things right out, and Andy, well, he did, too, not that he was terribly verbal. Poor Andy." She sighed. "So, we can see how you're dressed. Do you think like a revolutionary, is the obvious question. And if so, how can you possibly work for my brother, Mortmain Corbin, at that excruciatingly dreary publishing house?"

  "I find myself faced with the drab necessity of making a living."

  "Do you like your job?"

  Russell was not sure if candor was prudent, but there was something very purposeful about the question. "I can't say I'm entirely happy with the way things are being run."

  Leticia squinted at him through a great cloud of smoke. "Go on."

  "There are things I'd do diff—"

  "Let me tell you a story," Leticia interrupted. She went on to describe a friend who was a poet and an artist and a photographer, a Berliner and "one of the most fascinating creative minds in all of New York." Russell nodded when he heard the vaguely familiar name. "A real poet in the largest sense of the word. The man was a genius. Andy said so. To the ends of his fingertips, and he had extremely long fingernails. Well, I sent him to Trip. What do you suppose happened?"

  "What?" said Russell, fixating on her cigarette, fighting the sudden urge to bum one.

  "Trip turned down his proposal. Can you imagine how embarrassing that was for me? I own thirteen and two-thirds percent of the house. And Trip says he doesn't quite see the potential. Well, I can't say I was surprised. Trip couldn't see the end of his nose if he didn't paint it red every night. It's such a waste. Corbin, Dern meant something once. When my grandfather founded it, his model was the Crosbys' Black Sun Press. Harry Crosby was a friend of his, did you know that? Till he killed himself, of course, in that delicious double love suicide. In any event, Gramps wanted to bring the avant-garde home to America. Did you know the first person he published was André Breton? Not to mention that he can't even keep the price of the stock up where it should be. Between us, darling, I doubt he can keep anything up anymore."

  It took Russell a moment to figure out that the last two sentences referred to Whitney Corbin III and that they had moved back to the present. Or at least to that region of the present where Tish Corbin lived.

  'Why is it, Mr. Russell Calloway, that in the middle of what I am told is the greatest bull market in history, my Corbin, Dern stock has declined in value? I hear doormen at clubs talking about the money they're making in the market."

  "You should ask your brother."

  When she lifted the cigarette to her lips, the sleeve of her kimono slid back on her arms; without being too obvious about it, Russell inconclusively scanned her arm for tracks.

  "I despise my brother. We have not spoken in three years."

  The knee-booted Claude returned, bearing a tray with a heavy Georgian tea service and assorted pastries.

  "My brother was eleven when I was born. When I was a year old he tried to suffocate me with a pillow, a memory which I finally unearthed after many expensive years in analysis. When I was four my father bought me a llama, which was my dearest companion for two years, until my brother shot and killed it."

  "Will there be anything else," Claude asked, after laying out the tea.

  A llama?

  "My feet."

  "Yes, ma'am."

  Claude knelt down in front of her, removed one of her slippers and began massaging her foot. Russell tried not to appear startled. In his inner ear the theme from The Twilight Zone started up.

  "My brother is a killer, Russell Calloway. He would like to kill me, no doubt. But for the laws, which make it difficult, he would. Candace—my older sister—is just like him, a bimbo, and she doesn't give him any trouble, but they'd love to get rid of me. I have reason to believe a nearly fatal car wreck I was involved in some years ago was not..." As her voice trailed into a whisper, Leticia Corbin appeared to be concentrating on some deep, primal experience. Finally, she looked up, her expression mournful. "The spirits of the animals he slaughters will probably haunt my family for generations to come. I see you wear leather shoes," she said, this theme of feet becoming general. "There are many attractive alternatives to animal products. I'd like to give you some literature before you leave."

  "You said you had a proposal for me." This was all getting a little too weird for Russell.

  "A proposal? Perhaps. Perhaps that's what you'd call it." Claude had switched feet now. "What I had in mind is something larger than a book proposal. I wonder if I can trust you?"

  Russell spread his hands wide and shrugged to indicate that this was entirely up to her and of rapidly decreasing interest to him.

  "I'm thinking of starting my own press. Something small and tasteful. But also crazy and daring. Philosophy, fashion, aesthetics, some of Andy's unrealized projects ..."

  Russell could just imagine.

  "Is that better," Claude asked.

  "A tiny bit, thank you, Claude. It's just something I have to live with. Unless those idiotic doctors finally locate the source of the pain. I lie awake half the night in pain and they say it's imaginary. Of course, I have no experience in the technical side of the publishing business. My brother never let me near the company. So I would need help."

  "Do you have capital?"

  "I intend to sell my shares in Corbin, Dern."

  "Your brother won't like that. The family holdings significantly reduced—it might even lead to somebody else taking over."

  "That's one of the things I like best about the idea, Russell Calloway. Sticking it to big brother."

  Maybe the flakiness was infectious, but suddenly Russell's interest was fully engaged.

  "You've got to be careful how you sell a big block of stock like that. A company as small as this—you can't just throw thirteen-odd percent of it on the over-the-counter market. You'd probably want a single buyer. "

  "You seem to know a lot about these things," she said, with an arch smile.

  "I'm just beginning to learn. But I like to think I'm a quick study."

  "Are you? You look too innocent to me."

  "I guess we'll just have to see about that, won't we?"

  "Do you know someone who could buy my stock?" Russell stayed for another hour, Claude dispensing Lapsang souchong from the elaborate sterling tea service as they discovered, for all their fashion differences, a patch of common turf. By the time he left, Russell had convinced himself that she had some excellent instincts and Leticia had come to the conclusion that despite the dull wardrobe this was a quite brilliant young man.

  They had a dinner date for the following week.

  14

  Trina just barely made the nine-twenty Concorde out of Heathrow, which would put her in New York by eight-thirty the same morning and at her desk just an hour later than usual, virtually without loss of workday. She handed her hanging bag to the stewardess, slid past a beautiful Eurasian-looking woman she thought she recognized from the fashion magazines, and dropped into her seat beside a male blue-suit approximately her own age. Hermès tie, pinstripes, face meticulously reproduced from a recent Dartmouth yearbook.

  He looked at his watch, a butter-and-sugar Cartier tank, and sighed. "I
f this plane is just about one minute late it could definitely screw me up but good," he said, seeming to address the pink pages of his Financial Times.

  Trina nodded noncommittally.

  "If I had all the goddamned time in the world I'd fly Air-India or something."

  He seemed eager to talk—albeit in brusque, self-important bursts— which was entirely against the rules of serious business flying. But then, she was wearing her Giorgio Sant'Angelo dress, suitable for late nights at Tramps and Annabel's, so she wouldn't totally wrinkle the business suit she'd change into in the limo from Kennedy. So of course, he probably didn't think she was a business flyer. Thought she was an airborne international slut.

  "Bradley Seaver," he said, suddenly turning as if he had just that moment noticed her.

  "Trina Cox."

  "Pleasure," he said. He shook his head savagely, looked at his watch again as if it were a very badly behaved personal accessory indeed. When she continued to ignore him, he muttered theatrically, "Christ, I better make this meeting."

  Trina started to look through her bag for an annual report.

  "I'm an investment banker at Morgan," he said. "M and A. That's mergers and acquisitions."

  "Sounds very interesting," said Trina, sliding the annual report back into the bag and dripping a little southern honey into her voice.

  "You'd be surprised. It is really interesting."

  "Actually—" she began, but he was caught up in his globe-altering vision.

  "I buy and sell billion-dollar companies practically every day, and hardly anybody in the whole damn country understands the magnitude of what's going on. The government doesn't even understand. They don't have a clue. Which is actually just fine with us." He went on to explain how he and his colleagues were attacking bloated corporations, overthrowing corrupt and sybaritic management, slaying the dragons of inefficiency and complacency, carving up the slothful kingdoms into streamlined pieces and selling them off in the marketplace.

  After years of inflation someone had noticed that the equity of corporate America, as reflected in stock prices, was undervalued. A new, pro-business president said it was morning in America, inflation subsided, and smart shoppers began to wake up and call their brokers. The financial-services industry grew like an oil town in full boom. And if buying stocks on margin in a rising market could double your rate of return, buying companies outright with borrowed money and reselling the parts seemed to be the fastest way anybody had ever thought of to get fabulously rich. Interest payments were tax-deductible, so it was just dumb not to borrow as much as possible and buy everything in sight. Debt was good, equity boring. He toiled, said Bradley Seaver, in the most lucrative field of his era.

  "What do you do?" he paused to ask, after about twenty minutes.

  "I'm in M and A at Silverman," she said, her own firm being a far more significant player in the field than his.

  Flushing deep pink, Bradley Seaver donned his headphones and fiercely ignored her for the rest of the flight. An hour out of New York, Trina walked back to the restroom. The model she'd recognized earlier was waiting for a "Vacant" sign, peering nervously down the front of her blouse. "Do you know anything about implants," she asked Trina. "Because they feel kind of funny, like they're kind of expanding or something." The woman reached up and squeezed one of her own breasts, wincing piquantly.

  She looked up with an expression that seemed to invite Trina to feel for herself, an experiment Trina chose not to perform.

  "I don't know, I just got them last week and I just remembered this guy telling me a couple months ago about some girl whose implants like exploded on the Concorde. So I'm kind of worried."

  "I didn't see any warnings on my ticket," Trina said.

  "Really?" Appearing somewhat reassured, she glanced down at Trina's chest. "Are they real?"

  A few hours later, Trina was getting the paisley tan in her midtown Manhattan office, soaking up radiation from her computer screen as she pored over a spread sheet. Hunched over the keyboard, she leaned into the monitor as though preparing to plunge into the emerald labyrinth of numbers. Since she'd hit the Street her eyesight had gone from twenty-twenty to something that sounded like her blood pressure, and now her eyes were watering behind her contacts, but given what had happened to her income over the same period she wasn't looking for sympathy. Just trying, at this moment, to figure out the cash flow on a division of a sportswear empire that management was taking private. Since the announcement of the tender offer, two other bidders had jumped in, driving up the price and effectively depriving Trina of another week of sleep. She leaned back and stretched her neck, stole a gulp of caffeinated primordial slime from her Harvard Business School mug.

  Her assistant, Christopher, knocked and entered, bearing several garment bags draped over his outstretched arms with almost ceremonial delicacy. Christopher had excellent taste and a semiprofessional expertise in clothing, courtesy of the Fashion Institute of Technology, so she sent him out every season to pick some new suits. "I think you're really going to love these," he said, laying the bags out on Trina's couch and stroking them flat. "The new lines are fabulous. The Chanel especially."

  "I'm sure they're terrific," Trina said as the phone buzzed. "Can you get that?"

  Christopher walked stiffly over to the desk and picked up the receiver. He was still sulking when he said, unexpectedly, "Russell Calloway?"

  It had been years since she'd seen him. Besieged as she felt, she was intrigued enough to take the call. "Hello, Russell? Is this a time warp, or what?"

  "It has been a while," he agreed. "Gene Fisher's wedding a couple years back?"

  "You're making me feel very old, but at least you'll always be older than me. Fat and balding yet?" And are you drumming up money for the alumni fund? she speculated. But Russell wasn't the alumni-fund type.

  "I'm told I'm well preserved. I was wondering if I could buy you lunch."

  This sounded like a come-on. Was it possible that he had split up with the beautiful and perfect Corrine Makepeace?

  "Love to," she said, the doubtful sincerity of this statement accompanied by a reflexive surge of native southern intonation. "But I'm kind of busy for the next three or four years. I've had to cancel like six of my last seven nonbusiness dinner dates, which makes me real popular, as you can imagine..."

  But she was curious enough to flip through her datebook, searching the end of April for an open day. Normally Christopher would tell her if she had a lunch free, but he had retreated in a bit of a huff.

  "How about next Tuesday? It'll have to be somewhere close. You know Smith and Wollensky? If I don't call to cancel I'll see you at twelve-thirty."

  He must have seen the article puffing her as one of the top women in M&A, Trina decided, though he didn't seem the type to read Fortune. But she didn't have time to speculate right now. She didn't have time for a love life right now, either, but it was important to feel the buzz of sexual tension once in a while, keep the frequency open just in case she met somebody really wonderful on a plane when her laptop was down and the bathroom happened to be vacant.

  Russell had been a year ahead of her. They hadn't known each other well, and if memory served, she disliked him almost as much as she sort of liked him. She ran with the jocks and the kids whose last names were on the dorms and the classroom buildings. He seemed scornful of all that—a midwesterner determined to be arty and political. She remembered him smoking those French cigarettes that smelled like asphalt, sitting over coffee in the snack bar conspiring about literature with Jeff Pierce, that slouching bad boy whose grandfather had built the gym, with whom Trina would've liked to have gotten sweaty.

  Never very bohemian, Trina Cox had gone into investment banking on graduating, just as a frenzy was beginning. As a trainee, she had fortunately found herself in mergers and acquisitions at First Boston, where the new game was being invented. Her department advised corporate clients on tak
eovers and helped arrange financing in exchange for fees in the millions; soon it was clear that the bank was missing out on the big action by merely serving as bridesmaid for these multimillion-dollar unions. First Boston started to put its own cash into the deals. Bliss it was in that dawn to be in finance, but to be in M&A was heaven.

  After two years as an analyst she did the mandatory MBA; from business school, Cox took her nascent expertise to a white-shoe investment bank that was itching to get in on the new M&A action, but which, much to her irritation, remained reluctant to dirty its hands with hostile takeovers. She was trying to get them to loosen up.

  Being a girl had not made it easier; the Fortune piece was sort of a joke, since Trina was one of about three women in M&A. The locker-room, dick-waving ethos of Wall Street had as much to do with the fact that half the guys were former nerds and dweebs as with the fact that the other half had actually played contact sports and belonged to fraternities. Knowing this gave a woman leverage. Trina herself was far from being a nerd, and had the kind of feminine self-confidence that can instantly pierce the armor of male posturing. Her voice, perennially hoarse and raspy, had the authority of money and breeding; and in the manner of men who are said to undress women with their eyes, Trina had the ability to make certain men recall every instance of sexual dysfunction they'd ever experienced. Her sexual appeal was more a function of vitality than of raw beauty, her cheeks having a fullness that made her look too much younger than she was, her hair an inconspicuous shade of brown; she was seldom the most attractive woman in a crowded room, but she was usually in the running. Born in Virginia of what is still called, without irony, a good family, she might have married well and ridden to foxes, as her mother and her older sister had done. Reacting against the trust-funded languor of her father, a gentleman ornithologist who tripped off to the Amazon to look for new parrots and grebes, she followed earlier generations of empire-building male Coxes to Wall Street. It didn't hurt that she was a better rider, skier, wing shot and tennis player than most of the men she worked with—accomplishments that mattered more to them than to her. A man had a harder time treating you like a bimbo if you'd hammered him at squash the week before. He might hate you, or he might want to marry you, but he would surely stop asking you to fetch him a cup of coffee.