Brightness Falls

by Jay McInerney

  "You take checks?"

  "Get out my face, Jack."

  The panel slammed shut. The boy slumped back against the wall with his hands over his face.

  Ace could relate to that, having just finished his last, having run through forty bucks. Six left, which was as good as nothing, unless he split a dime with one of these disgusting dope fiends. Looking down at his feet he wondered what anybody might pay for a pair of reasonably new high-top Ponys.

  The sounds coming from the bathtub were really getting under his skin. Was he imagining it, or was there really a rat or some other beast in there? Either way it was nasty. He glanced at the foot of the bathtub, a claw wrapped around a ball, squeezing the ball, crushing the life out of the poor helpless fucking ball.

  A skinny white girl with raccoon eyes crawled over in Ace's direction. "I'll do you for twenty," she said.

  Ace shook his head carefully, economically, not wanting to feel it coming loose from his neck. "Ten."

  "Fuck off," he said, the head-shaking having proved painful, trying to think how he could score. Last thing he didn't need was no trip to no oval office, anyways.

  She crawled over to the fat man at the door. "How 'bout you?"

  "I'm working," he said.

  Looking up at his overstuffed rock star T-shirt, she said, "I spent three days with Billy Idol in Nassau." She'd said this several times already in Ace's hearing. It was definitely the high point of her life, getting done by Billy Idol, even though it was a total lie for sure.

  "Yeah?" said the fat man. "He came into this bar where my cousin used to work at. Drank vodka and tonic."

  "That's what he drinks," the girl said with solemn conviction.

  "He just walked in, you know, like he could be anybody, and just kind of sat down. You know?"

  "That's what he's like," the girl said.

  They meditated silently for a moment on their separate, coincident visions of Billy Idol, she sprawled on the floor and he perched on the stool that had every right to collapse underneath him, while Ace tried to figure how to get some money to scratch this maddening itch.

  "What's your cousin, a bartender?"

  "Dishwasher. But he got fired."

  "Oh, that's too bad."

  Ace wanted to scream. Either he was completely losing his mind, or he had heard this conversation twenty minutes before, or maybe it was the day before. Maybe it was some other fun couple.

  "Listen, I'll do you real good for twenty bucks."

  "You already did me for ten, you stupid slut."

  "I did? When?"

  Nodding toward the bathtub, the fat man said, "Catch that rat I'll give you ten bucks. But you got to do it with your hands. And kill it," he added, his eyes disappearing into the fat horizontals of his face as he smiled.

  The girl crawled gamely for the bathtub.

  Seeing in her desperation an acute version of his own, Ace was suddenly overcome with disgust. The buzz was gone, replaced by an insatiable void. He stood up and lurched past the fat man and down the stairs. On the way out he passed a ravaged cowboy staggering on the staircase, carrying in his arms a VCR wrapped up in its own outlet cords, looking down at his burden warily, as if it were a roped calf that might suddenly explode into motion.

  In the open air, the dead buzz sputtered into a rage that hissed and crackled within the clouds of his brain, like an incipient lightning bolt ready to blast the highest object on the landscape. But nothing was moving on Avenue D, except for Ace and the bugs under his skin. He told himself they weren't really there; last time he binged, he ripped his arms all up trying to scratch them out.

  It was dark, probably early morning; he'd traded his Swatch for a vial hours before. Couldn't even get a scam going at this time of night.

  Spotting a seriously fucked-up white man in a tuxedo shambling toward him, he considered rolling the guy, though as the dude approached his height began to look formidable. Ace was still considering a move when he recognized Corrine's friend, the writer. All things considered, Ace decided to appeal formally.

  "Hey, man, met you up to Corrine's place. You shouldn't be wandering around down here, not this time of night."

  Jeff stared down on him. "Is that a threat?"

  "No, man, no way." Though the tall man could hardly stand up, Ace sensed a reckless menace in the dark, glassy stare. He shuffled off again before Ace had found the words to hit him up for money.

  Ace didn't want to cope with the shantytown hustlers, so he headed for an empty lot over on 3rd Street, then ducked through a hole in the wire-mesh fence and plunged through the garbage toward the back of the lot. Something was moving in the brush against the building back there, like a flashback to the fucking bathtub with the rat—or maybe it was somebody else crashing out in his spot. He kicked a piece of plywood experimentally and it seemed to explode. A snarling fur coat materialized from the mess—a big spotted cat, which rocketed over the debris and disappeared through the hole in the fence.

  Astonishment and fear soon modulated to economic speculation. If he'd been quicker he might have picked something up and whacked the fucker over the head. Hey, somebody'd pay thirty, forty dollars for the skin, easy.

  24

  Harold Stone received the news in Washington, D.C. He was at National Airport, on his way back to New York after lunching with a senator who wanted to do a book. The lamb chops in the Senate dining room were better than the proposal: confessions of a reformed liberal, a genre stretching back at least to St. Augustine, which had enjoyed a spectacular revival in the past seven or eight years, during which time liberals had had nothing much to do except reform and write books about the process. Still, he might have to publish it, Harold had decided, if only as part of a publishing gestalt that kept the channels of information and power open between Washington and New York and Cambridge. The senator's book would lose money, but it might pay off in other ways, although Harold would have felt better about the proposition if this self-professed statesman had not looked baffled at a conversational reference to Metternich.

  With fifteen minutes until the next shuttle departure, he called the office, wondering as he punched the number what he was going to do about Carlton, who had outlived her bloom as a lover but remained his assistant. The relationship would continue on for a while, lingering like a patient on life support, but essentially it was over. Probably he would have to promote her to get rid of her, shuffle her off to another floor or at least to the other side of the eighth. Of course, some were gracious enough to seek employment elsewhere, and he was always good for a reference. But the last, Judy Setsenbaum, had made noises about legal action and they'd had to kick her upstairs at a substantial increase in salary, which prompted Kleinfeld, the little bastard, to lecture him about shitting where he ate. He was remembering what Judy Setsenbaum looked like, when he finally connected with Carlton.

  "Harold," she said. "I've been trying—"

  Kleinfeld was suddenly on the line. "Harold, your goddamn little protégés down the hall have put the goddamn company into play. They've got six percent of the stock. They filed a Thirteen-D today. The little pricks are trying to buy our asses out."

  "Who is?" As astonishing as this sounded, Harold couldn't help wondering how a man who barely cleared the dashboard of his Mercedes could be so free with the diminutives.

  "Calloway, Washington and Whitlock."

  "Whitlock? Jesus."

  "That's right, they got our CFO. But Calloway's the ringleader."

  "They're kids, for Christ's sake."

  "Tell it to their bankers, Harold. They've got Bernie Melman and probably Drexel behind them. Can you fucking believe this?"

  "I'm just getting on the shuttle. Where's Corbin?"

  "He's fishing in Belize or some goddamn place. We're trying to find him."

  By the time Harold got to the office the young conspirators had gone home.

  "First thing
, we'll have their offices cleared and locked," Kleinfeld said. "If they have the balls to show up tomorrow morning they'll find themselves shut out. I called security and made sure they didn't take anything out but the clothes on their backs. If I had my way, they'd have walked out naked."

  "I'm sure they already have whatever they need, Jerry. They didn't hatch this up yesterday over lunch."

  They were in Kleinfeld's office surrounded by pictures of his famous friends. Of the less recognizable faces Harold had always suspected that one or two were probably mobsters.

  "I warn you now, I'm not going to let this happen," Kleinfeld said, as if he suspected Harold's determination. Hours after he had first heard the news he was still deranged and bitter, like a man who has just discovered his wife's infidelity. "Can you believe what Calloway said to me this afternoon? He says, 'Nothing personal.' I told him, 'You better believe it's personal, you little cocksucker. Before this is over I'm going to personally fucking demolish you.' "

  "How'd they get to Bernie Melman, anyway?" In recent years Harold had devoted much effort to studying the ways of a system he'd made his reputation knocking, and he was well aware of Melman's position and power.

  "How the fuck do I know? Maybe they met him at Le Cirque."

  "Do we pay them enough to eat at Le Cirque?"

  "Nobody pays for anything anymore, that's the fucking problem. They're totally leveraged. Bridge loans, junk bonds, whatever. The money's out there. Money's cheap. The banks used to be like convent girls, you couldn't get a feel without a marriage license. Then Drexel started to practically give it away, and now they've all got red lights on over the door."

  Harold was weary of Kleinfeld's simpleminded, ahistorical views on capitalism, not to mention his proclivity for carnal similes. He had long before concluded that if figures of speech based on sports and fornication were suddenly banned, American corporate communication would be reduced to pure mathematics.

  Partly out of strategic habit and partly to meditate, Harold looked out the window and let the silence build, absently calculating the span of Kleinfeld's patience. Through a window across the street he watched the fat hindsection of a woman in a babushka pushing a vacuum—Eastern European, probably Polish. He thought of Isaac Babel, Victor Propp's putative forebear, shot by Bolsheviks; wondered how as a young Stalinist he had been able to wish away all those brutal facts, though even in his youthful folly he felt superior to the Kleinfelds of the world, who'd never possessed the imagination to be that callow. While Harold was sitting in Greenwich Village cafés prepping for the revolution, Kleinfeld was schlepping around the Midwest with a trunkful of books as a college rep. Theirs had been an uneasy alliance, since Kleinfeld came in as publisher to stanch the company's chronic hemorrhage of cash. But the former marketing manager and the former radical intellectual Wunderkind had managed to accommodate each other. Now they would have to strengthen the alliance.

  "I don't think we need to panic," Harold said finally. "If they can raise fifty we can raise a hundred. To these fresh-faced world-beaters like Russell, everything's ad hoc. They don't see that this is a city of nets— if you don't know the ropes you're likely to trip."

  "Yeah, yeah. All I know is they're halfway there already, Harold. They didn't storm the Bastille—they called Bernie Melman."

  "So we hire Wasserstein and Perella at First Boston."

  "How about the Gambino family?"

  "Careful," Harold said, absently putting a finger to his lips, half of his attention focused on the Carlton situation. A student of history, of Gibbon and Carlyle and for that matter of Ecclesiastes, he could already see that this, too, would pass. Somehow he knew they weren't going to lose the company.

  Kleinfeld, in his taut corporate commando mode, spun his head in both directions in a gesture of reconnaissance. "You think they bugged the place?"

  "Don't be ridiculous, Jerry." Harold hated using Kleinfeld's first name, but sometimes it was unavoidable. "I meant, in general let's be circumspect. But no, I don't think electronic surveillance is exactly Calloway's style. Whitlock's the biggest problem. Does he have an employment contract? We can throw a bunch of legal motions at him straight off about violating the terms of his contract. We'll bury them in motions."

  "I'm surprised at Washington. I thought he'd be savvy enough to come to us first looking for a better offer."

  "Well, maybe we should go to him."

  Harold nodded thoughtfully, appreciating for the first time how useful his colleague, basically a street fighter, might be in this kind of battle.

  They talked about lawyers and investment bankers for another half-hour. Between them they were acquainted with many of the best in the city, and this knowledge calmed both of them. The lawyer who had invented the poison-pill defense against hostile takeovers was a lunch partner of Jerry's. They put together a list of calls for Carlton, who was waiting eagerly outside Harold's office when the two men emerged.

  "Are you going to the Whitney tonight," Kleinfeld asked.

  "I don't know," Harold said, for Carlton's ears, because he really didn't want to take her along. Tonight he felt like being with the grown-ups.

  "I just can't believe those guys," Carlton whined, putting a hand on Harold's shoulder after Kleinfeld was gone. "I mean, who do they think they are?"

  "Oh, do shut up," Harold said.

  "The Whitney Biennial is a periodic attempt to irritate everyone in the art world and confuse those outside of it," Victor Propp announced to Juan Baptiste—hoping to be quoted, the two of them swaying like buoys as the crowd surged around them in the museum lobby.

  The show had been open for a month, but the publishing world was only now taking it in, at a party hosted by The New York Review of Books. Everyone was talking about the video installations, the basketballs-floating-in-the-aquarium, and the photo collages done by a pair of twins, the new new work framed between familiar names, and speculating about

  whether the de Koonings were "appropriations" or outright forgeries, which would at least have invested them with novelty.

  Up on the third floor, Russell was mesmerized in front of a painting that consisted entirely of obscene words stenciled at different angles across the canvas. He was fascinated because the "artist" had submitted a novel to him a year or two before, a thriller set in Berlin in the thirties. "And now here he is in the Whitney?" he complained to Corrine. "Pull a few words—granted, colorful words—out of your manuscript, paint them on a canvas, and bingo, you're a famous painter."

  "It's kind of funny," Corrine said.

  "It's scary, is what it is. And you're a philistine if you say so. Look at these people."

  "Shhh."

  "Ever since the twenties nobody wants to be one of the boors who booed Stravinsky or Duchamp. That's the great legacy of modernism— the fear of being a rube."

  "Calm down," she said, though she could see he was having a good time in his own fashion, working off the anxiety of the day.

  She reached over and straightened his black bow tie, tucking it under the wing collar of his shirt. "If you're going to be a captain of the publishing industry you've got to look the part." She was immediately sorry she'd said anything; Russell's posture became rigid again as he remembered after a few moments of amnesia everything that had been making him intolerably anxious over the last few weeks. She could see that he was expecting someone to come up and acknowledge today's announcement of intent to buy the company, the stock running up three and a half points. The night before, he'd been unable to sleep. She had tried to talk him out of proceeding, but now that it was too late to turn back she just wanted him to relax.

  The perennially single Nancy Tanner swam into their vicinity, kissing Russell, tossing her head in such a way as to lash the man behind her with her abundant blond hair.

  "Isn't that Johnny Moniker," she asked, "over there by the Julian Schnabel? I'm dying to meet him, I haven't had a date in weeks. Ever si
nce I quit drinking I can actually see these mutts I meet at midnight and it's so—"

  "I quit drinking too," Corrine said.

  "Oh, yeah? Which meeting do you go to?"

  "I, uh, I don't actually go to meetings. I just quit."

  "You're not in the program?" She looked at Corrine as if she weren't sure it counted if you quit on your own. "I go to the one in the basement at this church over between Park and Madison, it's really cool. You've got to come. The guys are to die for."

  Russell had drifted away; when Corrine caught up with him he was standing in front of a huge color photograph of a group that looked as if it might be IBM's board of directors.

  "You know," he said, "I really think we should consider buying some photographs."

  "I think you're really silly." Ever since he'd contemplated the purchase of a seventy-million-dollar company Russell had been acting like a man undaunted by lesser purchases. Contemplating these negative millions, he had become very chummy with the four- and five-digit numbers. The week before, he'd proposed they take a summer house in Southampton that went for ten thousand a month, when, as far as she knew, they didn't have a liquid nickel. "Anyway, I came to give you a Harold alert. Recent sighting in the vicinity."

  "Where?"

  "Over by the wire sculpture."

  "Maybe I should get this over with."

  "Maybe we should just get out of here. We're going to be late for dinner." Moving with the prevailing tide, they had almost reached the elevator when a cross-current brought Harold and Carlton within inches of them, Harold suddenly so close that Russell could smell his breath, his eyes as they focused on Russell's like talons sinking into flesh, filling the younger man with fear and shame. If the contest between them had been an ancient dispute over leadership of the clan, Russell might have lost it in that moment, facing the older chieftain. He would have turned and fled into the woods beyond the circle of firelight.

  "I'm surprised you'd show yourself in public," Carlton said, breaking the spell.

  "I don't think Russell has anything to be ashamed of," Corrine said.