Brightness Falls

by Jay McInerney

  "If we go ahead with this thing we'll hang a book from the rafters, put your name on the cover," Melman suggested. He then identified for Russell a couple of other corporate chieftains with inferior table positions. "All along the front wall here is the gold coast. Over there"—he pointed to the two other rooms—"that's Siberia."

  Visibility was the single desirable quality in a table. At this time in the history of dining this was true generally, though in the speakeasy days, when gamblers and bootleggers had been among the elect and the aura was one of illegal commerce and clandestine pleasures, the desirable tables at '21' had been in the remotest corners of the far room. Movie stars conducting extramarital affairs, under the influence of long-abandoned codes of conduct and primitive, Manichaean notions of publicity, once chose their tables on the same principle. But this was an era of exhibitionism.

  "If you ever come here without me, you make sure they remember you—use my name. Don't let them send you to the salt mines."

  If this concern with the pecking order might have seemed obsessive and parvenu to the clinical gaze, Bernie's boyish enthusiasm was disarm- ing, and Russell's critical faculties were somewhat dulled in this shrine to the masculine romance of old New York, where sacramental cocktails with names like Manhattan and Sidecar were still served by uniformed old men who had never attended an acting class, and cigar smoke rose like incense on the altar of power and money.

  For Russell the restaurant had naively romantic connotations courtesy of his father, who had traveled to New York on business and brought back to Michigan tall tales about the metropolis in the East, not the shortest being an account of the fancy tavern with a number for a name where a hamburger cost nine dollars. This, in Russell's mind, took its place alongside giant alligators in the sewers and sidewalk-fried eggs among the primary legends of the city that he gradually came to identify as the setting of his dreams.

  Russell ordered the hamburger, which cost twenty one-fifty now and lacked a top bun. Linder ate chicken hash and said little. "He always has the chicken hash," Melman observed.

  "You got a problem with my chicken hash?"

  "You should diversify your intake of protein, for Christ's sake. Eat some fish."

  "I don't like fish."

  "It's good for you."

  "If it doesn't have at least two legs I don't want to eat it."

  "How's that for a principle?" Bernard Melman declared. "Anybody says Carl Linder isn't an honorable man, you tell him the guy has scruples, he won't eat anything with less than two legs, right? No poor fucking defenseless one-legged creatures, no amputee chickens. So what do you think—" he said to Russell. "You think I don't have principles?"

  His mouth full of ground beef, Russell suddenly realized that the banter had given way to substance.

  "Why would I think that?"

  "You're a good liberal intellectual, you probably think I'm the devil incarnate." He reached down, lifted a shoeless foot up to the table. "Look, no cloven hoof."

  "Some of us are trying to eat," Linder complained.

  "A lot of people don't understand what I do. And it's easy to despise what you don't understand, especially when the rewards are so great. Capital is supposed to flow where it's most needed, like water. But our economy is full of bottlenecks and dams and stagnant backwaters that nobody's visited recently. I'm like the Army Corps of Engineers. I dredge the silt out of the waterways."

  Given the environmental record of that agency, Russell thought this an unfortunate metaphor, but he did not want to interrupt a speech to say so.

  "Most corporations are run by salaried managers with no ownership stake, right? Do they look out for the stockholders? No. Do they stay innovative, develop new products and services to serve the public? Some do, the good ones. But a lot of them stagnate. Management gets lazy, falls into habits, looks at the short-term earnings to cover their asses, instead of the long term. What do they care about the long term? They don't own stock, they've got their retirement plans. They protect their own interests and salaries, and the shareholders get screwed. That's when I put them on notice. I go in and offer the shareholders an instant premium. I say, 'Five'll get you ten,' and I bet you I'll still make a profit in the end. I'm the guy who hikes in from another village and says, 'What, you're only getting ten cents for your coconuts? Over in my village they're worth twenty. So I'll give you fifteen.' "

  "You give them ten and a half," Linder said.

  "I give 'em ten and three-quarters, and they're happy to take it. So I go to another fucking village where they got wampum sitting around idle, right? So I borrow a few belts to buy up the coconut plantation. I say, What are you getting, eight-percent interest from the old established planters and their banks? I'll give you twelve percent.' Okay, ten, maybe. But everybody wins, right? Capital flows where it's needed. I rationalize the process and everything works better. Overthrow the oppressive old regimes. What I really am, I'm a corporate revolutionary. I'm the Che Guevara of the boardroom."

  Melman had asked him earlier, as they were walking over from his office, not to speak about the potential deal in public. As they waited for coffee he leaned forward and said quietly, "If anybody asks, you and I met at a party, and I wanted your advice about a book I'm thinking about writing. Because, believe me, when I go out to lunch with somebody, a stock can go through the ceiling before the closing bell."

  He leaned even closer, his genial lunchtime expression having disappeared. "I think you've got the junkie sister in your pocket. That's just a guess—nobody's told me anything. Am I right, Carl?"

  "We have not received any information regarding the disposition of shares in any corporation."

  "So maybe I could take her out to dinner myself, buy her some heroin or cocaine or whatever. And maybe she likes me for one reason or another, decides to sell her shares to me. Meantime, I've bought up four-point-nine percent on the open market. So what do I need with you?"

  "With all due respect," Russell said, "books aren't air conditioners or carburetors."

  "Not from where you sit, maybe."

  Melman's turkey-vulture gaze was obscured in a great cloud of cigar smoke, and when the smoke cleared he was smiling pleasantly.

  Back at his office, Russell inserted a piece of company stationery in his old IBM and composed a letter. "Dear Jeff," he wrote:

  I have just finished reading the Cranta story and I wish I could say I loved it. I always told you your best stories were the ones fully imagined, in which you had departed furthest from the actual circumstances of your immediate experience. So I don't think it's being hypocritical to say I don't appreciate your casual appropriation of my experience. And I would be lying if I said I didn't feel betrayed.

  Your embellishments seem uniformly unflattering and hurtful, particularly in ascribing an act of betrayal to "Connie." Which is, I take it, what the elliptical ending of the story is intended to reveal.

  Am I meant to infer that you know something I don't—i.e., that Corrine slept with Duane Peters—or simply that you are resentful of what you so clearly believe to be our fool's paradise? I don't think we ever hung out a sign billing ourselves as the world's perfect couple. God knows we have our problems, but they're our problems. I don't recall asking you to comment on them in print...

  For some reason he hadn't told Corrine about the story, perhaps because he was bothered by the implications. He didn't really believe Jeff knew something he didn't know, and simply to raise the subject at home would be unpleasant.

  * * *

  "It's for you," Corrine said, a few nights later, holding the receiver out to him as if it were one of his nasty-smelling tennis shoes. Russell was prone on the couch, reading a manuscript.

  "Melman's going to back us," Trina announced.

  When Russell whooped, Corrine glanced up from the book she was reading with calculatedly restrained irritation.

  "I don't want to say any more over the phon
e," Trina said.

  "What are we, spies?"

  "Meet me for a drink."

  Russell looked over at Corrine, who was watching, book in her lap, from the armchair. "It's practically eleven," he said.

  "If we're going to go ahead with this thing you better give up any ideas you have about normal business hours. And ditto for your wife."

  Indeed, Corrine didn't understand why she couldn't come. "Haven't I been helping you all along," she asked.

  "Trina's got this big thing about security," Russell explained.

  "I think she's got this big thing about you."

  "It's business, Corrine." He was irritated at her for his own guilty sense that it wasn't, in fact, just business. "Look, I'll be back soon and I'll tell you all about it."

  "Don't do me any favors," she said, turning away. "I'll probably be asleep. Unless I'm out with one of my attractive male associates." That set Russell to brooding again, as he descended in the elevator, on the subject of Jeff's story.

  Packaged in a tight pink coatdress, Trina was gobbling mixed nuts at a table in the Oak Bar. "They asked me in this very snotty way if anyone was joining me," she said. "Apparently they decided I was a hooker. They used to have a rule against unescorted women at the bar. What are you drinking?"

  Russell tried to order a glass of white wine but Trina insisted he drink a real drink. "We're about to enter another dimension. Soon we'll be living in deal time. And only the tough survive."

  "You have a peanut skin on your lip," he said.

  "Where, here?" She brushed at the wrong side of her lip. "Show me.'" Russell reached over and nudged the brown speck from her pink lip. She puckered and then kissed the air between them.

  "Thanks, hon'. So aren't you excited?"

  "I think so."

  "'Come on." She reached down and squeezed Russell's thigh. "Melman's going to raise a war chest of a hundred mill' for us. And he's setting me up in my own firm."

  The waiter arrived to inform Trina that she had a telephone call. While she was gone Russell tried to survey the spongy tundra of his feelings. He wasn't sure he wouldn't prefer to leave everything as it was before, tell Trina he was just kidding. Who did he think he was, taking over a publishing house? A stranger was going to lend him a hundred million dollars. The whole concept was a lethal cocktail of hubris and temporary insanity. He could see that now, and he was scared silly, prematurely nostalgic for the scale and the texture of his current life, the one that was just about to end, with its mundane certainties and decencies. The idea of Corrine sitting at home made him sad, as if he were flirting with a destiny that might somehow eventually exclude her. He could stand up right now and walk out before Trina returned, throw down a twenty and leave his unfinished drink sweating beside hers on the table. If he stayed here and finished this drink, he was afraid he would commit himself to an inexorable progression of events.

  A head-turning, heart-stopping redhead appeared in the door, snug in a tiny black strapless dress. She scanned the room purposefully and at that moment Russell would have considered trading his kingdom to be the man she was seeking. She caught him staring and suddenly smiled and waved, as if he was, in fact, the very person she'd been searching for all along. With mounting exhilaration and fear he watched her walk toward him.

  "Hi."

  "Hello."

  "I wouldn't mind a glass of champagne."

  "Do I know you?" Although he imagined himself passably good-looking, he was not so accustomed to the attentions of beautiful strangers as to be jaded.

  She leaned forward, looking into his eyes, unnerving him. "Do you want to?"

  Russell found himself unable to articulate an answer. She leaned still closer, put her lips against his ear, and whispered, "I'll do absolutely anything you want for three hundred dollars."

  Finally understanding, he blushed at his own naive vanity at the same time that he found his imagination wandering into the dizzying space opened up by the word "anything."

  She wet her pursed lips with the tip of her tongue.

  His own lips were dry, his throat constricted and parched. "Actually I'm with somebody," he croaked. "She's just making a phone call."

  "Too bad," she said, sliding gracefully to the adjacent stool and turning her attention to a pinkly balding man who was thoughtfully stirring the cubes in his scotch. He nodded and smiled politely when she said hello.

  "Anything," he asked a moment later, loudly enough for Russell to overhear.

  Her red hair rose and fell across her bare back as she nodded, licking the back of her dress like an inverted flame.

  The pink man reached inside his jacket for his wallet. He mouthed the question again and she nodded, this time with her chest as well as her head. He slid some money across the bar and placed her hand on top of it. Then, clearly and distinctly, pausing between each word, he commanded: "Paint... my... house!"

  "I want to go dancing, celebrate," Trina said, on her return. "Finish your drink, already."

  "You won't believe what just happened," he whispered.

  "I know, you got hit on by a hooker. Congratulations. Now take a real woman dancing."

  "I can't go out dancing," he said, though the idea did seem appealing, suddenly; after his brief encounter with the redhead he was worked up, his hormones boiling.

  She reached over and palmed his cheek. "Russell, we're going to be spending a lot of time together from now on. You can't be afraid of little old me."

  "I'm not afraid. I could beat you up with one hand tied behind my back."

  "Show me."

  Somehow this sounded to him very much like the word "anything" as it had been uttered a few moments before.

  "Take me to Au Bar. One drink." He looked at his watch: midnight. Russell's sense of gallantry prevailed over domestic loyalty. They had a drink at the bar and then sat down with some friends of Trina's. By the time he got home it was nearly two o'clock. He could tell from Corrine's breathing on the other side of the bed that she was awake, but since she was pretending to be asleep he decided to collaborate in the fiction, though it was possible that she might know that he knew she was only pretending and might thereby become even angrier. He felt guilty for coming in so late, and indignant at being made to feel guilty. Corrine, he told himself as he fell asleep, was going to have to loosen up a little.

  18

  Minky Rijstaefel acquired her nickname shortly after coming out, at age seventeen, when Town & Country announced that she owned twenty-three furs. Minky was one of the young transatlantic set, which, in its more expansive moments, brushed up against some of the indigenous population groups—like one of the kisses with which members greeted each other. The kiss was actually two kisses, one on each cheek, or rather, two simulated kisses, actual physical contact being avoided in the interest of makeup preservation and of easing the strain of performance in the case of those who actually couldn't stand the sight of each other. The kiss had come via the continent, as had a third of the guest list for Minky's party. About ten percent were English, while the American contingent was divided between social young Upper East Siders, and downtown freaks and personalities for piquancy.

  Corrine wore a black Calvin Klein that she was afraid required more pour le décolleté than she could give it, maybe right before her period she could pull it off, but Russell insisted it looked good—in a tone that really meant, Hurry up and get dressed. Russell wore his tux. She loved him in the tux, which she'd helped pick out four years earlier—a Christmas present financed by his father. Russell had been thrilled and pretended not to be as he first debated the store—Brooks Brothers, Paul Stuart, Barneys—then wrestled with the thorny issue of notched versus shawl lapel with the salesman at Barneys, Russell trying to convey the impression of a man who had already worn out three or four tuxes in his life.

  "Oh, Russell, you're such a nut," she said, turning away from the vanity mirror and looking over at hi
m sitting on the bed struggling with his suspenders. And very handsome, she thought. Accustomed to these inexplicable exclamations, Russell stood and asked her if she would insert his cuff links—a request that inevitably followed his struggle to do it himself. He used to put them in first, before donning his shirt, but his hands had grown too big. She always savored this moment in their joint toilet, amused at Russell's frustrated helplessness.

  Twenty minutes later they stepped out of a cab in front of a mansion on East 72nd Street. On the sidewalk an informal reunion was taking place as blonde women in dark raiment embraced and kissed air while their escorts pumped hands. Inside, an aging vassal took their wraps and then pointed out both the staircase and an elevator.

  "Oh yes, by all means let's take the elevator," said Corrine, suddenly breaking into a limp and giggling.

  Another uniformed retainer ushered them into the elevator, modest in size but lavishly paneled in rich, burled wood, trimmed in brass, where they were joined by an Italian-speaking group whose competing fragrances made the elevator seem very close. The elevator man slid the gate shut. With a barely perceptible hum they ascended one floor and emerged into a ballroom rife with chilly blondes with high-rise cheekbones and bobbed noses, and dark men, trim in their cummerbunds. The Italians began waving as soon as the elevator door opened.

  "God, this looks awful," Corrine whispered.

  They headed for a bar across the room, where they heard the bartender tell one of the guests, "I think the Dow has at least another five hundred points in it." Jesus, Corrine thought, when the bartenders become experts you know it's time to get out.

  Their hostess suddenly materialized, a blonde of middle height who would have looked teenaged with her round cheeks and cute, tumescent mouth if not for the fierce green eyes, which appeared to have previously belonged to some antique Borgia assassin. She had a full, rounded body that men seemed to like, though Corrine was inclined to apply the word "chubby. " And in her opinion somebody ought to tell Minky she should not be wearing that pouf skirt which was so very hot right now, half the women here in them. Get thee to a spa, honey. Big bubble around the ass.