Brightness Falls

by Jay McInerney

  "Yeah," his little girlfriend said.

  "Nice mouth," Russell muttered, walking on.

  Moments later a parent materialized beside Russell, a fit, prosperous specimen in a pink and gray warm-up suit. "Did you threaten to hit my kid?"

  "I suggested," Russell said reasonably, "that he stop throwing sticks at defenseless animals."

  "Pick on someone your own size."

  "Yeah, you big jerk," said the son, standing at a safe distance, eager for spectacle and vengeance.

  "Instead of a six-year-old kid."

  Fearless with self-loathing, Russell said, "How about I pick on you?"

  "Just try it," the man answered, forming a fist with his right hand and slapping it rhythmically, like a ball, into the open mitt of his left.

  Without pausing to think, Russell smashed his own fist straight into the man's face. The boy howled as his father sank to his knees, tenaciously grasping Russell's thigh, and a screaming band of reinforcements assembled on the asphalt trail. Desperate to free himself, Russell launched his knee into the man's chin and knocked him backward, feeling in his kneecap the violent collision of upper and lower teeth.

  "Stop him!" shouted a wifely ponytailed blonde in chinos and pink cardigan. "Hit him."

  "Kill him!" howled the little boy.

  Three others, two men and a woman, rushed up and hovered indignantly above the fallen champion of the nuclear family. "Let's get him," said one of the men, but something in Russell's face gave them pause. Bent over the downed man, the wife let out a piercing, pitiful scream, which sounded like the death cry of a small animal.

  Russell turned, almost colliding with a fat man wearing headphones, and ran past a mother with two preschoolers in a twin stroller, up an incline and over a rocky outcropping. He dodged through a wooded grove, followed a bike path down through an underpass, skirted the woods around the edge of the great pond past Strawberry Fields and emerged onto West 72nd Street.

  After turning south on Columbus, he threaded the languid pedestrians drugged with brunch and shopping, ducked into a bar and ordered a shot of Jack Daniel's, his hands trembling with adrenaline and rage. Standing at the bar he had two drinks, chewed his ice cubes and savored his bleak isolation. He couldn't think of anyplace he wanted to go, or anything he wanted to do, without Corrine. He wanted to tell her about the indignity he had suffered. To whom would he narrate the events of his life, if she were to disappear from it? Who would listen to his stories? As the whiskey soaked in, it occurred to him that a spouse was the person who listened to the story of your life and who, making certain allowances, chose to believe you.

  Sunday night she called again. Russell was microwaving frozen pizza and watching sports, afraid to miss her.

  "I got your letter," she said.

  "Please come back."

  "I don't know." She paused. "You've wrecked something. It's going to take me a while to figure out what's left."

  "We love each other," he insisted.

  "If we didn't," she said, "we wouldn't be speaking. I'm going to my mom's house in a few days. I have some thinking to do. You do, too. I don't know if you even want to be married to me anymore."

  "Of course I want—"

  "Russell, you wouldn't be able to admit it to yourself even if it was true. You're loyal in your own way and you wouldn't let yourself think it, but I think you want excitement and freedom and glamour and action more than you ever wanted me. Think about it while I'm gone."

  "What about dinner with the Shermans tomorrow night?" he said plaintively, hoping that the maintenance of social appearances would seem as important to her as it suddenly did to him. A week before, Russell would have blown the Shermans off at the slightest excuse, but now it seemed grossly irresponsible to cancel on a mere twenty-four hours' notice. "And then there's the museum benefit, isn't that Wednesday night? We can't just ..." All at once he felt he understood the purpose of decorum, manners and hypocrisy. From the outside, marriage was merely a set of habits; going through the motions was sometimes the only way to keep going.

  "The four hundred other people at the museum will just have to take up the slack, Russell." Her tone of voice was hard and faceted.

  "I got in a fight in the park today," he said. "I almost got killed by a mob."

  "I've got to go. I don't know what I'm going to do, Russell. But remember, if I hear anything about you, if you're so much as seen in the same room with Trina, I'm calling a lawyer. In the meantime, try not to drink too much."

  After a dreadful sleep he dragged himself to the office Monday morning, forgetting until he was in the elevator that his office keys were somewhere in Frankfurt. He browsed through the papers in the Greek coffee shop downstairs, finding nothing more on Propp, then sat in the hall with a manuscript and waited for Donna, who arrived after an hour.

  Carl Linder called a few minutes later.

  "We tried to get hold of you in Frankfurt on Friday."

  "Some domestic problems developed."

  "So you just hop on a plane and leave things hanging at the book fair?"

  "Washington took care of things."

  "Mr. Lee's not running the company, and he does not enjoy Bernie's full confidence. He's been threatening to sue, you know, which for his sake I hope he doesn't. So what Bernie wants to know is, are you on the team, or not?"

  "Which team is that?"

  "Think about it. Meantime he was asking about this guy Propp's manuscript. As far as we know, he died before he signed with Simon and Schuster, which leaves us publisher of record. If there's something there, it's ours, lock, stock and barrel. But before we make a stink, Bernie thought it would be nice to know if quote it's any fucking good unquote. Get back to us on this."

  Russell had already made an appointment with Victor's lawyer to visit the West Village apartment and go over the writer's effects, but he found the vulturish interest of Carl's call off-putting enough that he didn't mention any of this.

  Juan Baptiste called a few minutes later. "I've got this zany idea for an item: Jeff Pierce in detox. Call me silly, but I think it has wheels. What do you think?"

  "Sounds too easy," Russell managed to say, his headache really kicking in.

  "You're denying?"

  "I don't confirm or deny. Never have."

  "You don't confirm. You do deny."

  "All right," Russell said uneasily. "Of course I deny."

  "Jeff's not in detox?"

  "Where do you get this shit?" Russell said, uneager to continue lying.

  "You know I don't give sources."

  "In lieu of ethics—professional ethics."

  "Let's keep it mercantile," Juan said. "Let's trade. Hey, I'm not even asking about your friend Propp. But a little bird did say there was a big empty bottle of Tuinals in the bathroom."

  "I've got nothing to swap. " Russell didn't know what else to say.

  "Where is Jeff?"

  "He disappears to write. New York is very distracting, you know. He doesn't like people to know where he is." If Juan had anything solid, Russell thought, he would have tried it by now. "Fishing season's over."

  "Let's go back to this idea of a trade," Juan proposed. "I hear you're in trouble. Authors abandoning ship in droves, horrified that a grand old publishing house has been sacked by the understudies for the cast from The Young and the Restless. "

  "We've lost a couple writers. It's been amply noted in the press."

  "But I'm not talking flesh wounds, I'm talking cerebral hemorrhage. In the same way I hear Jeff is in rehab, a little bird is telling me Bernie Melman's considering a pullout, et cetera. The common law of buzz, or rumor, which after all is commonly known as half-truth, declares that fifty percent of the smut and innuendo that reaches my ears is true. So in this case I calculate that half of my current dish is bankable. One: Jeff is in rehab. Two: Corbin, Dern and Kids is on the skids. If you don't confirm one, I will h
ave to assume, mathematically, that the other is entirely true."

  He paused. Russell wasn't biting. "I'll give you one for free," Juan said. "Bernie Melman has canceled all his social engagements for the past two weeks because he is under a doctor's care at his home on Long Island, suffering from acute depression."

  Russell realized that he hadn't talked to Melman since before the fair, but he didn't need to tell Baptiste this.

  "What about this persistent rumor that Mrs. Melman is a transsexual?"

  "Sounds extremely plausible, but I told you, I've got nothing to swap."

  "The corollary to the notion that any rumor is at least half true, is that any half-truth, repeated often enough, becomes entirely true. If I write that a nightclub's dying, it sometimes happens that it's up for sale the next week. Cause and effect? You be the judge. I'd hate to be the one to say that you're stretched out on a slab with a sheet over your body. So tell me about Jeff. "

  "Jeff is hard at work on his next book."

  "One can only hope he will have a publisher when it's finished." In retrospect, Russell could see that rejecting Juan Baptiste's book might have been an error in judgment.

  The next night he was sitting in front of the TV when the doorman buzzed, announcing Colin and Anne Becker. "Send them up," Russell said without enthusiasm. He was not eager for company.

  "Happy Birthday!" they shrieked when he opened the door.

  "My birthday's tomorrow."

  "The party's tonight," Anne said uncertainly, as she surveyed the eerie apartment. "Are we the first?"

  "Corrine organized it for tonight because of the museum thing tomorrow," Colin insisted, barging right in. "We just got in from the airport from Santa Fe."

  "Probably there's a message on your machine," Russell said.

  Colin placed Russell's hand around the neck of a bottle wrapped in silver paper, while Anne presented him with a large coffee-table book titled Mushrooms of the World. "I hope you don't have it," she said. "It's hard to buy books for you." Russell opened the book to a glossy color close-up of a giant morel. Suddenly he remembered that he and Corrine still owed the Beckers a wedding present; the oversight at this moment seemed terribly poignant.

  "Corrine's mom is sick," he said. "Nothing serious, but we had to postpone the party." He assured them it was nothing serious, thanked them for the gifts.

  "We're not about to let you stay home on your birthday," Colin said. "We'll take you out to dinner." Russell begged off, claiming he wasn't feeling well himself. An hour later, after they had finished the champagne and he had trundled the tenacious Beckers out the door, Washington appeared, direct from Frankfurt.

  "As long as nobody's waiting up for you," he said, "you might as well come join me for a cocktail." He looked as if he hadn't slept in days, and his hands were shaking.

  "I don't feel like going out. And you don't look like you should."

  "Give yourself a break. You'll go crazy hanging around here."

  "Are you all right?"

  Weaving from side to side as he did so, Washington nodded his head emphatically.

  "We could go to Heaven," Russell said.

  "Nobody goes to Heaven, man."

  "What do you mean? I thought it was the new place." Russell didn't keep up the way he used to, but two weeks before this particular club had been the dead center of hip consciousness, at least according to Juan Baptiste's column. "I thought everybody went."

  "Only the meek, the halt and the lame, child. Heaven turned bad real quick, quicker than I've ever seen it happen. Used to be it took a few months, sometimes six months. But this was like, Monday the hordes were throwing themselves at the door, begging to be chosen, Tuesday the badmouth had started going around, and by Thursday they were hiring barkers from Times Square to drag people in off the streets, free admission, free drinks, free drugs, free love. Friday you couldn't give away the lease on the place, and the owners turned down an offer of three mill' right after it opened. Feature that, I mean, where did that three million disappear to?"

  They went to a new club that didn't have a name, which to Russell's dismay occupied the premises of the former bathhouse patronized by him and Jeff. Little had changed; most of the fixtures remained intact. No one was waiting at the ropes to get in, and those inside had the air of tourists furious to discover themselves among others of their kind. The former changing room served as a dance floor. Washington tried hard to find trouble, but the smart and interesting people were somewhere else —most likely home, thought Russell, who recalled many happier nights of this sort spent in Jeff's company—and the two young women who asked them to dance looked like a high-risk group unto themselves, with their lace bustiers and leather miniskirts.

  "What are you—in school," Russell asked the brunette, having declined to dance, watching Washington shake it up with the blonde.

  "I'm an actress now, I guess. Why not? I was an investment analyst at Salomon Brothers until last week, when they laid me off."

  Washington caught up with Russell at the door as he was leaving. "What's your problem, Jack?"

  "I can't do this. I'm leaving."

  "No problem. We'll take our show on the road."

  They made it back to Russell's apartment shortly after four, by which time the conversation had turned to mush, although the two friends remained upright for another hour, pledging eternal friendship and solving the Corrine problem and puzzling over Propp, though the next morning Russell couldn't recall the fine print.

  In a lucid interval Russell asked, "Whatever happened with the meeting you were supposed to set up between Parker and Melman."

  Trying to hold the tip of his cigarette still while introducing it to the flame from his lighter, Washington said, "Watch for a new, high salary, low-stress job title on the payroll. Something like Minority Affairs Consultant."

  Russell's father called him promptly at seven-thirty to wish him a happy birthday. Russell could never be certain whether it was an innocent habit or a perverse desire to impose his own schedule on his older son, but he inevitably called at this hour. Waking up with the sun seemed to be, in his eyes, a necessary if not a sufficient condition of responsible adult life. While fending off his father's curiosity Russell tottered around the apartment clasping the portable phone to his head like an ice pack, discovering Washington fully clothed and inert on the bed.

  "The big three-two," his father said.

  "The big three-two," Russell repeated.

  "I'm very pleased with the way everything's coming together for you."

  "Everything coming together."

  "When do you sign the papers?"

  "Papers?" At that moment in the history of his mental associations the phrase suggested divorce. Then he realized his father was talking about the deal.

  "Uh, probably within a couple weeks."

  "I'm very proud, son."

  "Thanks, Dad."

  "So how does it feel?"

  "Feel?"

  "Did you celebrate?"

  "Sure. Yeah. Celebrated. Little hung over."

  His father chuckled knowingly. "You take care of yourself, son. And keep up the good work."

  He slept for another hour on the couch, phone in hand, until it chirped again.

  "I wanted to do this before I lost my fucking nerve," Jeff said.

  "Do what?"

  "Apologize."

  "What, for waking me up? Where are you?"

  "Still at the hospital." There ensued a long pause, which Russell did not feel capable of filling. Finally Jeff said, "Part of the program here is, you know... admitting your mistakes and owning up to them. I've done a lot of things I'm not proud of."

  "Join the club. Forget it."

  "You have to acknowledge your mistakes and ask forgiveness of the people you've hurt," Jeff said, in a language that was not quite his own; you could almost hear the rustle of semislick inspirational br
ochure paper. Russell was glad Jeff had stopped shooting heroin, but he was unnerved to hear him talk this way.

  "Consider yourself forgiven. What are friends for?"

  "I feel like I have to say this. It's about me and Corrine."

  Russell was instantly, dreadfully alert, as though he had slept all night and never had a drink in his life. "Corrine?"

  "It was a long time ago."

  "What are you saying, Jeff?"

  "Basically, it was when you were in England on that fellowship, before you guys got married..."

  42

  Finally Russell staggered to work, while Washington crawled home to change. Russell did not have the slightest interest in going to the office, but the apartment, which earlier had been merely haunted, now seemed thoroughly fouled. Like a suburbanite who has learned, after years of rich domesticity, that his home is situated on a toxic waste dump, he felt retroactively poisoned, memories wrecked along with his future.

  Walking across town he felt ill, liable to vomit at any moment. At a newsstand he bought a pack of cigarettes for the first time in more than two years. The blind vendor asked him the denomination of the bill, a ten in fact—But what if it had been a single? Russell thought. The blind man would never know. Indeed, the vendor's weathered face seemed to display an expression of wounded skepticism. The notion that he could pick up a magazine and walk off with it made Russell furious at the man's vulnerability. Didn't he know they stole everything in this city? Trust was just a word sometimes conjoined to Bank.

  Tiny shards of glass embedded in the sidewalk ignited as he passed, walking west. Russell believed that he was as aware of his own weaknesses as one could be without systematically attacking them or profoundly disliking oneself, and it had never been that difficult for him to imagine himself as the potential villain, the adulterer, the quitter in the marriage. To comprehend Corrine in this role was staggering. Standing beside a sign that said no standing anytime, he slipped a cigarette between his parched lips and stared down at the matchbook the vendor had given him. Imprinted with a pair of splayed female thighs and genitalia, it bore the legend "Dial 990-FUCK." As he stepped out of the elevator, Russell nearly tripped over two fat orange cords running from his office to the utility closet in the common hallway. Dance music throbbed from the open door. During the night, it seemed, his office suite had been transformed into a nightclub; it was now bristling with hip young men and women in black clothing, and high-tech lights.