Brightness Falls

by Jay McInerney

  After one of those long, coded, largely silent contract negotiations that constitute married life, they came to an implicit agreement that seemed lopsided in his favor: She'd be quiet and he'd be nice. She would go along with him in return for future consideration. It was like one of those corporate debt restructuring deals where you had to accept unredeemable paper in the hope that it might be worth something someday and because you had no choice.

  Corrine had advised against pursuing the deal, but that didn't mear she was immune to the thrill of the attempt, or happy about being 1er out. Home alone again, she flipped through magazines, too restless to read a book. In an hour she had run through a pile consisting of Architectural Digest, Self, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Elle, Details and Manhattan, inc. She felt exhausted. Reading magazines was like going to a cocktail party, a series of three-minute conversations. Having skipped dinner, she'd gone on to eat an entire bag of potato chips, which was really disgusting. She now weighed nine hundred thirteen pounds.

  Eleven o'clock. Corrine turned on the TV, turned up the air conditioner. In the kitchen she found a Snickers bar. Soak up some of that disgusting oil and salt from the chips ... it felt as if a supertanker had run aground on her duodenum.

  She wondered if she should call again. Why didn't he call?

  The Odd Couple on TV, Felix cooking dinner for Oscar. Corrine realized she wouldn't be so hungry if she had eaten a proper dinner. Back in the kitchen she found a Lean Cuisine lasagna dinner. Less than three hundred calories—that was sensible. But tomorrow, she decided, she would go on a real diet. Fast. Really starve herself. Being fat in the summer was horrible. Nuking the lasagna, she observed its progress through the door of the microwave as the Honeymooners theme drifted in from the living room. "Chef of the Future." Russell's favorite show. Corrine didn't like it so much, she thought all the poverty and bickering was sad. But sometimes she watched when Russell wasn't home, imagining him slapping his palms against the coffee table and hooting as she tried to figure out what was so funny.

  Somebody she knew, she forgot who, once said that missing people was a way of spending time with them.

  After The Honeymooners she snooped around in the freezer for something sweet and turned up a DoveBar, feeling herself getting fatter with every bite. It was twelve-thirty. She watched Star Trek, trying to remember her Platonic theory from college. What was it? Spock was intellect, McCoy was emotion, and Kirk the integrating, ruling factor, what Plato called the Spirited Element. The importance of a liberal education demonstrated, QED.

  When the show was over she ate the other DoveBar because it was there, sitting in its perfect wrapper in the freezer, calling out to her, shivering her name. At one-thirty she went into the bathroom, put a finger down her throat and threw up.

  * * *

  At three-thirty Washington found himself down on the Lower East Side, on a street of burned-out, boarded-up tenements. Nothing was happening anywhere in the city so far as he could discover. A white Toyota with Jersey plates rounded the corner and slowed in front of him. A white face efflorescent with acne called out, "You selling?"

  "Not even holding, goddamnit," Washington yelled back.

  A few doors away a couple of kids who had been huddled in a doorway rushed into the street and waved the car forward. Washington crouched down and knocked on a rusty freight door set into the sidewalk. A minute later the door opened up, and a head popped out and nodded at Washington, who descended the treacherous iron stairs underground. He walked uncertainly along a dank, vaulted passageway and pounded on a steel door.

  When his eyes had adjusted to the smoky dimness of the cellar, he descried Juan Baptiste and Leticia Corbin among the wounded bodies and twisted faces at the bar. He waved in slow motion. You knew you were really hurting when you were glad to see these underworld shades. "Good to see you, my man," he said to Juan, kissing the frigid white cheek of Leticia, who said she was celebrating her brother's imminent downfall. Washington raised an eyebrow and hinted that there were wheels within wheels, that it wasn't over till it was over, that he was in fact an integral part of top-secret negotiations which were in progress at this very moment, watching with interest the couple who were silently fucking in the corner.

  Near dawn, he was in a cab headed uptown. He was reluctant to inspect his suit too closely, having ridden on the back of a garbage truck from Delancey up to 14th, that being the only vehicle moving in the early-morning wasteland of the Lower East Side. Then two cabs had sped past him, a young black man on a deserted street, one cabbie shouting, "Fucking walk!" from the window.

  Inside the lobby of Melman's office building a couple of uniformed goons impeded his inexorable progress toward the elevators. Weren't these the same assholes he'd dealt with earlier? Always hard to tell with white people. They certainly didn't seem to recognize him.

  "May I help you?" A wide guy in a badly tailored suit, neckless and virtually lipless, was doing an imitation of a defensive line, stepping between Washington and the elevator.

  "Not unless you got a cigarette."

  "Sorry. Authorized personnel only."

  All this hassle was making Washington tired and thirsty. Hoping he had a squirt or two left, he reached in his jacket pocket...

  "Watch out! He's got a gun!"

  Suddenly there were real guns everywhere, a big .45 right in his face and another coming upside his head...

  Near dawn the phone rang.

  "Say hello to the new editor in chief," Russell said. "What?" She had been asleep, dreaming that she was asleep and waiting for him to come home from a date with the vampire Leticia Corbin. "We got it. We won."

  32

  "I can't believe I'm up and walking around at seven-thirty on a Saturday morning. Do I have any clean socks?"

  "Russell, don't sniff your socks. It's gross."

  "Gotta do that sniff test when the drawer's empty. Maybe I'll prep out and skip socks. As a member of a lynch mob, do you suppose it's bad form to be sockless?"

  "It's not a lynch mob, Russell. You're trying to save his life. Why can't you get straight on this—instead of identifying with his problem?"

  "Is that a coy allusion to the fact that I have a hangover?"

  "I didn't—"

  "I wouldn't wish this on my ... I wouldn't even wish this on Harold."

  When Zac Solomon called from California to say that Jeff had nodded off in the middle of a pitch to studio execs, Russell had finally decided to share with Corrine his suspicions about Jeff's drug consumption. Furious with him for not telling her sooner, she quickly turned practical, investigating detox programs and hospitals, calling Jeff's parents. Jeff was back in New York, and Zac had flown in the night before to supervise the intervention. He was a veteran of these missions, being a reformed abuser of substances and having recently intervened on a screen star who was freebasing his way into the John Belushi Hall of Fame. He also had a professional interest in Jeff's rehabilitation, having bought screen rights to two stories from Jeff's book.

  At eight a.m. the group convened at a coffee shop on Lafayette. The gruffness of the Greek counterman, the sullen resentment of the early- morning working people, the jaded resignation of a couple in matching black leathers and black-dyed, spiked-out coifs seeking sanctuary from the sudden daylight—everything contributed to Russell's air of gloom. He kept putting himself in Jeff's shoes, imagining how he would feel. He could picture the signs and the forks in the road that had led Jeff to the bathroom at Minky's. Russell had read the same books, listened to :he same music. If he hadn't married Corrine he might have been the one who made a laboratory of himself, mixing all the chemicals together. Opening doors marked DO not enter.

  But Christ, he thought, you weren't supposed to take it so literally. They'd grown up with drugs, just close enough to the sixties almost to believe in pot and acid as the sacraments of a vague liberation theology but not so close that they didn't soon take them for granted. Not lon
g ago, as putative adults, they were doing coke together at parties and imagining they'd discovered the pleasure principle. Not so long before that they were editing the college literary magazine, going to keg parties, reading Baudelaire.

  Jeff's parents arrived, anomalously together, though they had the easy fit of people who have come to dislike each other over the years and who derive great pleasure from their fighting—after all these years their aim and timing were perfect. Jeff's mother, Bev, was a tall, tan, elegant brunette with the look of a wealthy sportswoman—a habitué of tennis courts and marinas. She'd flown in from Santa Fe, where she had recently opened a crafts shop.

  Tears in her eyes, she embraced Russell, then kissed Corrine on one cheek; she had once explained to Russell, with the solemn air of one for whom these things mattered, that only pretentious arrivistes and Europeans kissed both. Wiping her eyes, she said, "I brought you two a little prez," and handed Russell a gift-wrapped package about the size and shape of a collapsed fly rod. Emitting a sibilant, tinkling sound, it seemed to involve some kind of liquid. "It's a rain stick," she explained, as Russell cautiously peeled away the wrapping on a fat, varnished stick. "It's filled with little shells and beans and pebbles, and when you turn it over it sounds like rain."

  "What an extremely useful and tasteful gift," said Wick Pierce.

  "Wick is upset because we haven't yet been able to mimic the sound of scotch splashing on ice," she said, not missing a beat.

  "I've changed, Bev. It's been years since I bothered with ice."

  "I get them made for me in Mexico," she explained to Corrine, who was trying out the stick. "I tested it out in the lobby of the hotel as I was leaving, and a little boy standing there with his father said, 'Daddy, I have to go to the bathroom.' Isn't that too cute?"

  "No home complete without one," said Wick, whose handsome, once chiseled features were slightly smudged with the bloat and flush of drinking. After graduating from Amherst, Wick had moved to Greenwich Village to be a Stanislavskian actor until Bev, a senior at Smith, had become pregnant, prompting him to move back to Massachusetts and take a job teaching English at Deerfield. It was supposed to be a temporar} thing while Wick wrote his play, but the play never got written and Wick had come into his trust fund at the age of twenty-five. Wick came from an old New England textile family, and while the fortune had been subdivided many times before it reached him, his own share was just large enough to smother ambition. He embarked on the curious but not unprecedented life of the casual New England academic whose salary barely covers the liquor bills. Bev, who came from a moderately prosperous middle-class family, rose to this life of faculty club and country club, keeping horses and lording it over the less fortunate teachers and spouses. Jeff had grown up with art and tennis lessons and a live-in cook, in a style that Russell had much admired when he first visited, freshman year, the year Jeff's parents were divorced. Wick still lived in Deerfield. with his second wife, a Jennifer—Jeff having once remarked that all young second wives were named Jennifer. To a degree that seemed excessive to Russell, he acted contemptuous of this background and of his family, which had served as the basis for the eccentric clan portrayed in his stories, though he liked to imply in interviews that he'd been born on the streets and raised by mad dogs.

  Russell had been afraid, before the collection was published, that Jeff's parents would never speak to him again—not that there was a lot of communication taking place at that time. Insofar as they recognized themselves, each seemed to think the other came off worse, and any residual hard feelings faded when people began to ask them if they were related to Jeff Pierce, the writer.

  "Can you believe it," said Bev, shaking her hair out from her scarf. "I catch this one drinking a Bloody Mary in the hotel bar this morning. Of all mornings."

  "I told you, goddamnit, it was a virgin."

  "Of course, Wick. And so was Jennifer."

  Zac Solomon arrived a moment later, tan and robust.

  "I just want you to know," he said after introductions, "I think your son is a genius. He's got a great future ahead of him—once he cleans himself up."

  "We certainly appreciate your help," Bev said. "Russell tells us you've done this before. You know, I was reading in People about this young actor who freebased right before he shot the antidrug commer—"

  "Jesus Christ, Bev."

  "For your information this actor happens to be someone Jeff met while he was out in Hollywood, in fact I believe they actually spent some time together, and I just thought it was an interesting point of comparison."

  "My ex-wife once fancied herself an actress," Wick explained apologetically.

  "And my ex-husband is a failed writer, unlike his talented son."

  Corrine put her arm around Bev. "We're all a little tense, Bev."

  "I just want Mr. Solomon to know that Jeff's father is an alcoholic. I think it's like, what do you call it? Carrying coals to Newcastle. I mean, Jeff probably wouldn't even have this problem if he'd learned moderation from his father. It seems a little hypocritical—"

  "The main thing here," Zac said, "is that Jeff sees that the people who love him are aware of his problem and willing to help him. So let's start there. I want you to know this is definitely not going to be a day at the beach. He's going to be angry and wounded and strung out. He's going to lash out at all of us. We can't be offended by anything he says or does in the next few hours. So are we ready, guys?"

  No one said anything.

  "This is where he lives?" said Bev, as they turned on Great Jones Street, her tone of voice implying that the neighborhood might be the cause of his problem, or that at the very least it was an appropriate setting for drug addiction. To Russell it seemed only slightly rattier than the average Manhattan street, certainly better than some. A bum asleep in a doorway, garbage in the street, the building fronts peeling and crumbling. But there were million-dollar lofts behind these dirty windows. He felt obliged to explain this to Bev, almost adding that a famous artist lived in the building next door to Jeff's, before he remembered that the artist was also a notorious junkie.

  "Why anyone would choose to live in this city is beyond me."

  Nobody, this morning, was in the mood to enlighten her on this point.

  "Here we are." Russell was not entirely happy to find that his key still fit the front door lock. It just seemed brutal to corner a man in his la:: this way, at this hour of the morning. The group piled into the antique steel cage of the elevator. "Isn't this supposed to have an inspection sticker," Corrine asked nervously. Everyone listened intently to the tinkle of the rain stick Russell was carrying. They stepped into the dimly lit third-floor hallway. Beside Jeff's door stood the front fork and handlebars of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, like a cyclopean sentry, the headlight staring squarely at them. The brown fedora wedged between the handlebars atop the headlight accentuated the effect of anthropomorphism. Russell bowed deferentially to this talisman and tried the key in the Medeco lock.

  "Are we ready," he asked.

  The loft was dark, except for the amber glow of a computer screen on the other side of the room. The air was acrid and stale, residual tobacco smoke mingling with laundry rot and a sharp, medicinal odor. Russell found the light switch.

  The landscape confirmed them in their mission. It was much worse than it had been on Russell's last visit, even worse than anyone expected—the wide-planked floors strewn with clothes, paper cups, food cartons, cigarette butts—at the same time that it exactly answered the notion of a junkie's apartment. Which is what it was, Russell realized, finally accepting what he had been unable quite to believe about hi friend.

  "My God," said Bev.

  "Let's confront," said Zac, nodding to the bed at the far end. "Ladies, you sure you can do this?"

  Bev shook her head but joined the group sneaking through the wreckage to the bed, where Jeff was knotted into the sheets, lying on his right side. breathing laboriously
through his nose. A used syringe and a bloodstained washcloth lay on the milk crate that served as a bedside table.

  Russell called his name in a voice that sounded to its owner false, high and stilted. Jeff opened his eyes. After surveying the scene he closed them and turned his head into the pillow. He burrowed deep into the mattress.

  "Jeff, we're not going to go away." Zac tapped his shoulder.

  "This is a fucking nightmare," Jeff said. "Tell me this is a nightmare."

  "You know why we're here, son," said Wick, who had been rehearsed.

  "You've got a problem, guy," Zac said.

  Russell was speechless.

  "I don't fucking believe this is happening," said Jeff.

  "We're here to help you," said Wick.

  "We're here because we love you," said Bev.

  "Hold the fucking violins," Jeff said. "I think I'm going to be sick."

  Corrine said, "We're going to take you somewhere where you can beat this."

  "Go away!" he screamed.

  "We're not leaving without you," Zac said.

  Looking up again, Jeff said, "If I'd known you were coming I would've dusted."

  Zac persisted. "You know what we're talking about, big guy."

  Unthinkingly, Russell twirled the rain stick in his hand. At that moment it sounded like an entire waterfall.

  "What the fuck is that?" Jeff said.

  "It's a rain stick," explained Bev.

  Jeff sat up in bed, glaring at the object in Russell's hands as though it were responsible for this horrible wake-up call. "I can't handle this without a fix. " In a temporary gesture of modesty he raised the sheet around his waist. Then he threw it aside, saying, "What the hell, you've all seen it before," and walked naked to the bathroom.

  Russell looked up at Corrine, who avoided his eyes, wiping her own.

  The five of them stood helplessly around the bed, frozen in position. "Isn't somebody going to stop him," Bev asked.