Brightness Falls

by Jay McInerney

  Outside the windows, the eastern sky went from pewter to pink to pale blue. Baby blue, he said to himself, experimentally.

  As the Dow dipped on news of a falling dollar, Corrine wondered if the life growing within her could possibly be unmarked by the turmoil of the past few weeks. Between job and marriage, her anxiety level was running at an all-time high: working fourteen-hour days, fights with Russell. And didn't she smoke part of a joint at that party in Steve Kopek's loft? Tears came to her eyes as she thought of all the joints she had smoked in college; she imagined singed and twisted chromosomes. And then, in the summer—she panicked, remembering the summer, and phoned Russell, insisting that Donna break in on his other call, her voice so high and quavering that he could hardly understand her at first.

  "Remember," she said, "we took all that ecstasy out on Fishers Island."

  "We took it maybe three times, Corrine. "

  "Oh, Russ, why did we do it?"

  "Because it was fun. I'm amazed you didn't get pregnant back then," he said, recalling those sensual molten exed-out nights.

  "So you're not worried?"

  "I didn't say that."

  "You are worried, I can tell by your voice. I can tell you're really worried and disappointed."

  "Let's face it, babe, it's hell being married to a junkie."

  "Russell!"

  "I didn't mean it." Clearly he needed to attune himself, he thought, to this new superliteral frame of mind. When he heard her sniffling on the other end he said, "Why are you crying?"

  "I was just thinking of Jeff when you said that word."

  "He'll survive."

  "Maybe we shouldn't have a baby."

  "I thought you wanted to be pregnant." He realized immediately that his voice betrayed his exasperation and wondered if it would be like this for the next eight months. "Corrine?" When she didn't respond he said, "Look, we'll talk to the doctor about it, okay? Have you made the appointment yet?"

  "I go in on Monday."

  "Fine, till then drop a Valium and relax."

  "Russell!"

  "Whoops, not funny. Just try to chill out, and I'll be home early."

  Russell next took a call from a literary agent who had once been his coke dealer, who had transferred his sales activity to the taxable sector after marrying. He still tried to maintain a sense of clandestine activity in his new profession, to invest his literary products with an aura of contraband.

  "I have something you might like to taste," he said, after the prelim- inaries had been dispensed with. "Great stuff. Fiction. Some would call it roman à clef, but in my view that's selling it way short. Of course, I don't know if you can handle it or not, given your association with a certain novelist who some people may—mind you, I'm just saying may—identify with a certain less than sympathetic character in this book. But I hear he's dumped you for Simon and Schuster. "

  "What the hell are you trying to say, Irwin?"

  "Can I trust you absolutely to keep this to yourself?"

  "Yeah, sure," Russell said.

  "Camille Donner."

  It took Russell a moment to contextualize the name. "Propp's girlfriend."

  "Everybody's girlfriend. She's finally written the book."

  "And Victor's in it?"

  "We're talking dignity in tatters. We're talking leave town in the middle of the night with bag over head. Make that two bags. The auction's next week. I'm looking for six figures to open."

  "Deal me out." Although he might have lost Victor's book, because of Bernie's caution and Propp's manipulation, he didn't want any part of this.

  "I understand. But just between you and me, if you're waiting for Victor's big novel, word I hear—it's a fictional entity. A mere figment of our imaginations. Straight from the lady's mouth. There's nothing there."

  It did not take Russell long to get over his promise to Irwin, for whom secrets were a thoroughly liquid commodity. But when he called Victor there was no answer, and then he had a meeting with the bankers.

  Shakier for Russell's reassurances, Corrine stared blindly at her Quotron. The sins and carelessness of the parents, she knew, were visited on the fetus. She had seen the movies and read the books, had watched the transgressing expectant mother tumble down the staircase, had heard the doctor say, I'm sorry we couldn't save the child.

  Corrine was superstitious. Although her mind was disciplined and scientifically inclined, she believed in correspondences between things seen and things unseen that had not yet been unveiled by science; she believed in the power of words to stir and shape events in the world, so for much of the afternoon she tried to block out a word that described her worst fear, scrambling it when it raced up on her, mouthing other words and phrases like mismanage, misnomer, mystery dance.

  That night, she dreamed she was skiing. The ski slope in her dream is peculiar in that it goes up and down like a roller-coaster track. Corrine, bulging huge with child, schusses down and up a chain of hills. Russell passes overhead on a chairlift, shouts down to her, but with the wind in her ears she can't hear what he's saying. She comes to the top of two parallel slalom courses. Jeff is at the top of one of them. Let's race, he says. What about the baby? Corrine says. Don't worry, Jeff says. They shoot side by side down the parallel slalom courses, and after that they go to the lodge, where the bartender gives them some ecstasy and Corrine realizes she isn't pregnant anymore. Where's the baby? she screams, and Jeff says, I think you left it back there.

  On the other side of the bed Russell performed erratic swim strokes sleeplessly. Biology was not working for him as it was for Corrine; he wanted to catch up with her, become physically transformed into a father. While making love to her the night before, he felt the ancient imperatives of blood and the race, but now he was locked out again and he knew nothing but anxiety. Debating whether he had the courage to ask Corrine if she was sure the time was right, he felt guilty for even thinking such a thing. He knows that once asked, the question could never be taken back, that no matter how she responded Corrine would remember it forever...

  But the long night exhausted his doubts and fears, and in the morning he was strong and eager for his new role, full of love for the woman asleep beside him. He rose shortly after dawn and imagined himself in future fatherly postures as he prepared a breakfast tray and woke her a few minutes before her alarm.

  It made perfect sense to Russell, confirmed his sense of Corrine's superb eccentricity, that she got morning-sick at night. The Sunday night before her examination was particularly bad. She threw up during 60 Minutes and again during Murder, She Wrote; in between she complained that Diane Sawyer changed outfits three times during one segment, and then asked Russell if he thought Diane was prettier than she was. In the morning, still feeling awful, she called in sick to work, deciding to rest before her afternoon appointment.

  Shortly after lunch, Corrine called Russell at the office. Her voice was weak and raspy.

  "Are you all right," he asked.

  "I lost it, Russell."

  "What do you mean, you lost it?" he said, although from the tone of her voice and the sinking dive of his heart he knew exactly what she meant. And though she sounded too weary and sad to bother with the details, he had to hear everything in order to try to understand how just at the moment when he had begun to believe in a miracle it was suddenly rescinded.

  In the aftermath Russell treated her with extreme solicitude. Corrine took the week off from work, and he stayed home with her the first two days, feeding her, coddling her as one would a privileged invalid. She had lost a lot of blood and her hormones were in a state of chaos; the doctor told her it would be a couple of months before her body was back to normal. Although he also said that this was a common event, that many pregnancies terminated in the first trimester, she could not help feeling guilty. Somehow Russell understood this and tried to convince her that she was blameless, that this was nature's way of te
lling you. At first she was angry with him, too, reminding him of the many times he'd said they weren't ready for a child, but eventually she saw how deeply he also felt the loss. And when he told her that he felt guilty because he had briefly wondered whether they could afford the baby, and had considered the alternative, she was able to reassure him and put her own sense of blame in perspective.

  That Saturday, Russell took her for a walk; he tied a scarf around her neck, although it was relatively warm even for September. Walking over to the park, Corrine was a little shaky on her legs; she held Russell's arm for support, and suddenly she had a vision of the two of them creeping along together as an ancient couple, wizened and bent with the years, holding each other up, and for a moment she felt better.

  But the park was full of babies, babies in strollers, babies in those backpack rigs, babies on their father's shoulders. She was the only one, it seemed, without a baby.

  That night Russell took her to Raoul's, where she drank a glass of wine and laughed when he described his assistant's latest outfit, her latest button and her latest telephone conversations with her latest boyfriends.

  A fine drizzle was falling as they left the restaurant, Corrine carrying a doggie bag with the remains of her steak—the doctor had prescribed red meat for her iron deficiency. The hunched, hooded figure rooting through the garbage can at the curb almost bolted when she touched his arm, but she held out the bag and said, "Please, take it, it's practically a whole steak. " He cautiously accepted the bag and slipped off down Prince Street, like a dog, Russell thought, who does not want to tempt fortune by remaining at the scene of the windfall.

  Back uptown, they prepared for bed. Corrine put on a nightgown, an infrequent event, but one he understood and accepted. She was deeply preoccupied.

  "I'm going to quit my job," she said, her voice strident, after the lights were out. "I've been thinking about it all week. I know it's going to be tough, but I'm sorry, I want to do something useful with my life."

  "It's all right." He wrapped his arm under her shoulders and pulled her toward him.

  A few minutes later, in a voice filled with sleep, she said, "We can try again, can't we?"

  "Of course," he answered, feeling beneficent in this abstract promise at the same time that he was troubled with a twinge of guilt over the fact that he really didn't mind waiting.

  35

  The limousine rolled up the long hedge-lined driveway and stopped in the cul-de-sac in front of the administration building. Before the driver had a chance to walk all the way around, the far passenger door popped open. Like a groggy pupa struggling to awaken, falling back, failing to free itself from its clinging shell in its initial attempt, a man in tuxedo emerged, holding a magnum of champagne by its neck.

  Smoking his first cigarette of the day, Jeff watched from the window of his room as the man listed from one foot to the other, dazed in the brassy morning light. From this distance he looked almost familiar in his comic dishevelment. As the driver approached him he darted away and began to twirl and dip like someone who wished to finish the dance which had been so rudely interrupted by an unexpected car trip. His arms open in a posture of yearning, he glided toward a blue spruce tree at the edge of the driveway, waltzed straight into the branches and fell backward onto the pavement. A figure in white emerged from the administration building and, in concert with the driver, coaxed the failed dance: to his feet.

  The fat nurse rapped on Jeff's door and called, "Time for your breakfast, honey."

  Always the same old shit, he thought. Every morning breakfast. Then it's time for lunch. Then dinner. It all tasted like cardboard and cigarettes. and it didn't satisfy, because it wasn't what you really wanted. You wanted something else and you thought about it all the time, and these other approved channels of desire and fulfillment seemed hopelessly second- rate. At night, every night, he dreamed of white powder deliquescing in a spoon, turning milky clear above an ice-blue flame. Going downtown in his dreams.

  This, apparently, was the way it was going to be for the rest of his life, the fucking diurnal shuffle. Ella, the nurse, though—there was a girl who enjoyed her pancakes and eggs. Three hundred pounds, give or take, and the white uniform made her look even bigger. An improvement if they would dress the help in black, perhaps. Little black uniforms. Slim them down a little.

  "Couldn't we change the order, at least. Start with dinner, say?"

  "You being silly, now."

  "Silly? Is that a technical term?" he called after Ella's retreating bulk. "Are you trying to confuse me with that psychological jargon?"

  The impeccably groomed lawn had turned silvery-gray overnight, dusted with the first frost of the season. Winter is icumen in, Ihude sing goddamn. Going outside was still a shock, the world appearing new, not quite real, like something wrapped in an invisible layer of plastic, or possibly like a brand-new yet inexplicably stale planet from which the plastic had just been removed. He hadn't been straight in a year, and now, with his pupils at normal size and his brain stem detoxified, everything looked different.

  For those not restricted to their rooms, meals were taken in the dining room of the big house, which resembled a cheerful country inn—a white Georgian colonial sitting on a hill amidst acres of lawn and satellite buildings. Jeff trudged up the footpath from Glover House, his residence for the past two weeks. Just like being back in prep school, except that it wasn't. Different curriculum: group therapy, AA, biofeedback, arts and crafts, individual therapy and more AA.

  Warily passing Carlyle House, from which he had recently graduated—the setting of his hellish withdrawal, where the tuxedoed new arrival would wake up sweating tomorrow. Abandon dope, all ye who enter here. Jeff dubbed it the Wildlife Refuge. New inmates often arrived at the end of long benders, still drunk and stoned from the party, whacked out when they started the tests, drawing blood, checking blood pressure, separating out the pill and scag freaks from the coke and booze people. Pharmaceutical downs were allegedly the hardest, but downtown was none too fucking easy. When Jeff really started to get sick they kept waking him up to check his pulse, the handy green plastic bucket always there beside his bed in anticipation of the violent revolution of his outraged cells. A real sickness unto death, walking between two nurses up and down the hall to keep the heart moving, that beat-up old heart. DTs, of course, and the taste like living metal at the back of the mouth. Phenobarbital for seizures and Clonidine to get rid of cramps. At one point he suffered a vision of Russell and Corrine coming after him with Henckel's kitchen knives, slicing his guts into pink and blue ribbons— the cause of this horrible pain.

  For forty years a discreetly famous dry-out tank for Park Avenue drunks, Carlyle House had been a small, lucrative colony of the main psychiatric facility. But detox admissions had doubled and trebled in recent years; depression was showing steady growth, but substance abuse was booming. Some of the inmates were double threats—depressed addicts. Jeff admired the manic-depressives, believing that they were most closely attuned to the roller-coaster spirit of the age/state of the nation.

  Depressives and addicts mixed freely at meals. Jeff had his little group of misfit toy friends. Dropping his tray of rubber eggs and cellulose toast this morning between Delia and Mickey. Beautiful, skinny Delia with her insane raccoon eye makeup sat motionless in front of her tray, the former cover girl of the year, looking out the bay window while her nurse exhorted her to eat. Delia fit every category of pathology covered by the establishment.

  "Want to hear my dream?" Mickey said, lighting a cigarette and dropping the match in his orange juice. Mickey was a seventeen-year-old crack addict. Though he had been in for three months and was presumably clean, he always arrived at breakfast dressed for the nightlife, his long, stringy hair unwashed, his black linen jacket wrinkled and stained, reminding Jeff of the bad old mornings of his recent past.

  "I'm in my car—I don't even have my driver's license yet, right?— but anywa
y, I'm in a car cruising down the West Side Highway way down in the Village. Around the Meat District, you know where that is? I can tell that's where it is, too, because there are these, like, sides of beef hanging on hooks all over the place. And I'm cruising in my car. So like I see this transvestite hooker, you know, one of those horrible creatures that work the orifices between Manhattan and its colonies, you know, I mean, isn't that what a tunnel is—it's like a hole, think of what that does to you, driving into a hole every day to go to your shitty little work cubicle in the city and then driving back out the hole to return to this aluminum-sided box where your wife is waiting. The really hilarious thing is, a lot of these transvestite hookers are saving up for operations so they can be real women and get married and live in some shitty little subdivision in Jersey. Do you know that most transsexuals get married and more than half don't tell their husbands?"

  Jeff suddenly recalled a rumor he'd heard, that Bernie Melman's wife was a transsexual. He couldn't remember where he'd heard it.

  "So anyway, I cruise past one of these fake chicks and then I'm slowing down my car but I'm kind of looking in from outside my dream and saying, Whoa, wait a minute, this is a dude, as in a male-type person. And then I wave the guy over—he's still dressed like a girl, right?—and he gets in the car and starts going for my zipper. I notice his makeup's melting. It falls away from his face like skin and I'm expecting to see this guy and instead it's my mother, man. My mother disguised as a guy disguised as a hooker. I mean, how twisted can you get? Taylor's gonna love it."