Brightness Falls

by Jay McInerney

  "She went the way of all flesh."

  "She died?"

  "No, she just paled. Had to trade her in for a new model."

  "God, I hate you," Russell said admiringly. "Could I borrow your life for a while?"

  "You want to trade?"

  "Would you?"

  Jeff issued a wavering ring of smoke from his pursed lips. "Sure thing." This was just one of the things Russell missed about smoking, the way it could be used for italics and punctuation. "I always thought you'd be the writer," Jeff said. "You were better than me."

  "I'm not enough of a gambler. Plus we got married." Russell thought about it, shook his head. "Sometimes I wish I'd waited a little longer, taken a chance." Russell felt that Jeff would understand he was conflating several yearnings—the notion of the writer's vocation being tied up with a certain attitude of going for broke, a categorical refusal to admit or accept the conventions. Whenever he thought of the road not taken he imagined himself as Dylan Thomas or Scott Fitzgerald or Hunter Thompson, never as a college professor with car payments, though the latter was the more likely form of a contemporary American literary career.

  "You wait too long, you spoil," Jeff said. It sounded like something they'd said in college, but they were both past thirty now, and Russell, at least, was having to discard some of his more extravagant youthful conceits. The tragic view, the rebellious posture became less tenable. Lately he thought Jeff was taking himself a little too seriously as a figure and not seriously enough as a writer, but he didn't want to piss him off by saying so. And he dimly suspected that Jeff performed a vital role in his own ecosystem, following the road Russell hadn't taken and thereby saving his best friend the trip.

  Back at the office, Russell took a call from Corrine.

  "What's up?" he said.

  "Just wanted to say hi. Are you all right?"

  "Fine, I guess."

  "Russ, I'd just die if anything happened to you."

  "What brought this on?"

  "I don't know—I just suddenly got a scared feeling."

  "Nothing to be scared about, Corrine."

  "That's not true—look around you."

  Her parents' divorce, Russell thought, had made Corrine a little apocalyptic. After he'd calmed her down and hung up, Donna came in with the afternoon mail and dumped it on his desk.

  "You see Harold shot down your genius poet?" She pointed to a manuscript on the pile with a note from Harold attached. Though in abandoning his own poetry Russell was required to devalue its importance in the larger scheme of things, he retained a sense of affection, a guilty admiration as though for the noble little woman he'd left behind to come to the big city. The collection in question struck him as the best he'd seen in years, and he had an unspoken understanding with Harold that he could publish a volume every year or so. Or at least he thought he did.

  Harold's note said: "This is probably good enough to be published somewhere but I don't see why we need to do it."

  Later that night Russell quoted the note for Corrine. "I'm going to have to find a new job," he said. "You'll get a better job."

  "And then there's Jeff," Russell said, refusing to be consoled. "He's in a very weird frame of mind." They were sitting on the floor in front of the television with their plates on the coffee table.

  "Why? About what?"

  "I don't know."

  "You don't know?" She laid down the fork on which she had just twirled a mouthful of pasta and looked at him. "You had lunch with your best friend and you don't know what's wrong with him?"

  "I said he was in a weird mood. You don't necessarily pry into somebody's moods, Corrine." He poured more wine into his glass and looked at the level in the bottle. "If you're really serious about not drinking, I'll end up having the whole bottle myself every night. "

  "The cork works both ways." She picked it up and held it for his inspection. "You can put it back in and save the rest for another night."

  "It doesn't taste the same."

  "What about Jeff? What did he say?"

  "He complained about how cheap I am. Very sensitive and poetic of him."

  "I can't believe your best friend's having a nervous breakdown practically and you don't even talk about it. "

  "He's not having a nervous breakdown. He's just tired. His work's not going well. Mine's not either, and I'm not making half the money he is. Do you realize he made a couple hundred thousand last year? I don't always like going to work but I do it. Jeff's eventually going to have to go back to work, too."

  "God, I don't believe it." She was holding her fork halfway to her mouth, leaning away from him as if to get a better look. "At that moment you know who you sounded like, exactly? I mean down to the last inflection?"

  "Who?"

  "Your father."

  He knew she was right, though he was not any happier with her for seeing the justice of the observation.

  She thought it was cute; what really scared her was when he reminded her of her father. "Getting a little pot there, too," she said, patting his rounding belly.

  He brushed her hand away. "Just because I'm sitting down."

  "Yeah, and if I were suspended from the ceiling facedown my boobs would stick out more." Then she said, "I have a job, too, you know, and I had a hard day. Plus I just made this big decision about my health that I'm trying to stick with, and you might be a little more supportive about it."

  He put his arm around her, pulling her in close against his ribs. "We both need a vacation. Another week and we'll be on Colombier beach." He nodded toward the television set. "What is this shit we're watching?"

  "I got a video. Hannah and Her Sisters."

  Russell grimaced. "Angst in the penthouse."

  Corrine set up the VCR. "It got great reviews."

  "Exactly. What's wrong with Blue Velvet?"

  "You've seen it five times."

  Halfway through the movie she said, "If you slept with my sister—"

  "It's just a movie, Corrine." Whenever they saw a film dealing with adultery, Corrine became gloomy and suspicious, anticipating the eventuality. Partly to divert her, Russell complained about the great apartments in the movie. "This is what I really hate about Woody Allen," he said. "Look at this, everybody lives in two-million-dollar apartments with no credible means of support. Here's a starving artist—right?—with a loft in SoHo the size of Shea Stadium." He viewed the screen, as was his sometimes habit, one-eyed through a tube that had once lived inside a roll of paper towels.

  "Russell, don't do that, you're going to ruin your eyes or something. You know that drives me crazy, but you still do it."

  "It makes it more challenging," he explained.

  "Retarded development," she countered; he had, she decided, a ten-year-old boy's appreciation of props. If there was anything remotely hat-shaped in the room, Russell would sooner or later put it on his head. Corrine either loved this or hated it, depending. At first you loved all the idiosyncrasies of the one you loved; then, one by one, they became slightly annoying.

  An hour later, having finished the bottle of wine, he was asleep, his head back against the couch, his mouth open, like a baby bird trying to suck nourishment from the sky. Unfortunately, this reminded her of her own father, a man also prone to fall asleep in front of the television set —leaving the women behind with all of the things they wished to say. He had finally moved out after Corrine went off to college, but he'd already been gone for years.

  Like the city around her, Corrine was wide awake. Turning off the VCR, she heard a siren on Second, car horns, voices and music. She went to the window and looked out at the lights, like stars, each one a different world. If, down the avenue, someone in that big new tower were looking north and saw this light, what would they think? They wouldn't think anything. She felt a slow ooze of panic, uncertain whether she had a place in this frozen galaxy, whether she even existed at this moment.r />
  "Russ, wake up," she said, shaking his arm. He yawned, shook his head and stood up.

  "What?" he said. "What is it?"

  She felt foolish now, but a moment before, she had felt that she was about to disappear. "Nothing," she said, squeezing his hand, looking for herself in his eyes.

  11

  "So how's the weather," Zac Solomon asked, with morbid relish, phoning Russell in Manhattan to renew his offer of a job.

  Producers, agents, lawyers, managers, promoters and account executives in California, when calling their counterparts, clients, lovers and victims in New York in wintertime, would inevitably work around to this question of weather, which they imagined to be a long, arduous struggle against hostile, arctic elements—as if they'd never heard of central heating or woolen clothing, picturing their poor northeastern cousins shivering around fires in smoky caves, gnawing frozen bones for marrow. All statistics confirmed that the ranks of those living at this elemental level of survival were indeed swelling, but for Russell and Corrine and their tribe the New York seasons were somewhat abstract, having more to do with the cycle of holidays, fiscal year and fashion than with nature.

  Still, there came a moment in February when the gray sky seemed to drop so low it brushed the top of one's hair, while the slush reached over the tops of shoes and the dry skin on one's face felt as if it were being stretched on a rack and cured for glove leather. Love itself seemed old and worn-out, like the shoes bleached white and brittle from the salt. This was the day that newcomers to the city called a travel agent, the old hands already holding tickets to warm islands.

  Russell and Corrine had their own favorite island, where they rented a house for a week. Corrine's grandfather once had a villa there, and though he'd sold it years before, Russell and Corrine had returned every year since their honeymoon. For most of its history the island was a casual secret: inhabited first by Swedes and then by Bretons, refuge of pirates, smugglers and sail bums, a soccer field serving as landing strip for infrequent charter planes. They liked the fact that there were few Americans, that the French colonists and visitors were not too French, the rock stars not too numerous, that there were no big hotels and no casino. For their honeymoon they had rented a one-bedroom cottage. Later they started bringing their friends and renting bigger places; the year before, it had begun to feel way too much like New York for Corrine, with nine of them and a big bag of mushrooms in what had suddenly become the high season, and she made Russell promise they would go alone this year.

  Toward the middle of March—and not a moment too soon, for either of them, they boarded a 747 at Kennedy, wearing light clothing under winter coats. While passing a cargo terminal they observed two police cars racing after a red van that sideswiped a forklift and fishtailed out of sight behind a hangar—or rather, Corrine observed it, for Russell was, as usual, reading; the van had disappeared before she got him to look up. A few hours later they were in St. Maarten, where the heat and sunlight as they stepped onto the runway seemed to burn off the filmy residue of anxiety they'd carried from New York. They boarded a small twin-engine plane, holding hands as they looked out the window at the blue-green water mottled with dark green patches of reef, Corrine watching as the smaller island came into view, a jagged green dinosaur back poking up out of the blue water. Below the shuddering wing a huge vanilla yacht was anchored outside the harbor, the scale provided by the smaller sailboats tacking respectfully around it. A satellite dish cupped skyward from the topmost deck, which bristled with electronic antennae. "Look at that," she said to Russell, but suddenly the plane dove precipitously like a gaming falcon for the short runway painted on a patch of sand between a sharp, rocky ridge and the ocean.

  Everything was unchanged, including the comical little jeeps, which were the principal transportation; they rented one at the airport and drove out to the house in which they'd spent their honeymoon—three rooms and a terrace cantilevered out from a steep hillside overlooking a shallow bay and the Caribbean beyond.

  "I'd forgotten how steep the hills are," Corrine said.

  "It's a volcanic island," Russell explained, as they wound around the last hairpin bend toward the driveway. She liked the fact that he knew things like that. "Why can't we live here," she asked that night as they sat in a familiar restaurant in town. Their waiter was an American about their own age who had first arrived as crew on a motor sailer and had married a Frenchwoman he met in a dockside bar. Although once a New Yorker, he now manifested a bronzed, tropical serenity.

  "Because neither one of us was born rich," Russell said, very happy with his second pina colada, feeling a little naked being in a restaurant in a short-sleeve shirt without a jacket. Not a natural man of leisure, he made an obscure principle out of the idea that dining out at night called for a sports coat if not necessarily a tie, and it was a victory for Corrine that he had come out tonight without one. "At least J wasn't born rich, and your damn grandfather gave all the money away. I still don't understand why he had to give it all away." They had passed the old Makepeace compound earlier and Russell was feeling the loss as if it were fresh.

  "I told you—he was mad at my dad for marrying my mom. And he hated his southern in-laws. When George Wallace tried to keep that black guy out of the University of Alabama, he decided to give it all to this black college which just happened to be a mile away from Grand-mom's ancestral home."

  Despite Corrine's preference for this colorful version, which made her grandfather sound merely cranky, Russell knew that Corrine's family, on her father's side, had a tradition of patrician philanthropy, and he was vicariously proud of it. Still, he didn't see why Gramps couldn't have just hung on to the vacation house on the mountainside.

  "We could get jobs here," Corrine said. "New York seems so awful when I think about it right now."

  "Bored out of our minds inside a month."

  Even if her notion was impractical, she didn't see why he had to be so brutally realistic. Why wouldn't her company be enough for him to thrive on forever? But Russell seemed to miss the buzz of New York, the friends and shoptalk; it had been her idea to come alone this year, without Jeff and Washington, et al.

  Corrine asked the waiter about the big yacht anchored outside the harbor.

  "That's J. P. Haddad's two-hundred-six-foot Feadship. Been anchored out there for two weeks. Never comes ashore."

  "J. P. who," asked Russell. "You've heard of him," Corrine said. "He only owns about half the world."

  "Hasn't touched dry land in three years," the waiter insisted. "Just cruises between the islands buying and selling companies over the radiophone. One of his men was in here a few nights ago, says he never leaves his cabin, ever. Got a crew of nineteen, not one of them's ever laid eyes on him. Weighs about eighty pounds, they say, and white as a corpse."

  Over the following week they would hear more about Mr. J. P. Haddad, little of it probable or verifiable. The only thing that was certain about Haddad was what he owned—great chunks of corporate America. Corrine remembered hearing that his nautical seclusion had been reinforced by the arrest of Ivan Boesky, and that the feds had a warrant for him if he ever set foot in the States. On the island, it was said that he stole ashore at night in disguise. They heard that a very famous female movie star lived on board with him. A young gay couple they met on the beach one afternoon assured them that a very close male friend of theirs was his lover and that they had seen him in a gay bar in the port. Corrine nodded credulously, overearnestly, as one of these two naked strangers, a sort of perfect male android whom she recognized as a model, described Haddad as tall, muscular, sailorly. There was very little to worry about on the island, and the presence of J. P. Haddad's yacht provided a conversational theme with which to hail naked strangers.

  Their first morning they awoke early to the dissonant music of testosterone-crazed roosters, with which the island was infested. They breakfasted on their terrace in the warm turquoise light, looking down
on the sea, the salt air laced with floral essences. Lizards stirred the dry leaves in the garden, reminding Corrine of their honeymoon, when they'd found one in the bed. She had cried the first morning after the wedding, without really knowing why, poor Russell baffled and chagrined, asking what was wrong.

  After breakfast they drove out to the beach. Corrine insisted that Russell not bring any manuscripts along, at least for the first day. Neither would she approve the two novels he'd brought along—both serious, New York Review of Books-approved—or a dense exposé of CIA malfeasance, in galleys. "This is vacation," she said. "You should read something really trashy." They combed through the musty-smelling, swollen paperbacks and Reader's Digest Condensed novels on the living room shelves, the discards of a thousand vacations, compromising on a James M. Cain thriller for him and for her a fat best-seller that had been on all the beaches a few summers back, a tale of sisters screwing and clawing their way to great heights of power and glamour while secretly yearning for Mr. Right.

  "You slut," Russell said, holding the book at a distance.

  "I'll read you the wet parts."

  "My wife reads S-and-F novels," he said mournfully.

  She looked at him quizzically.

  "Shopping and fucking," he explained.

  Almost alone when they arrived at the crescent-shaped beach, they set out their towels and arranged their lotions, bottles of sunscreen numbered according to degree of protection, a tube of sunblock for nose and lips. Corrine, particularly fair and thin-skinned, spent ten minutes on her preparations for sun worship, calling for Russell's assistance on her back.

  "Should I leave my top on," she asked.

  Russell shrugged inconclusively; at times he seemed possessive on this score and at other times he seemed almost to want to show her off—as when he encouraged her to wear sleazy low-cut dresses in the city. Now she wondered if he was indifferent. Had he ceased to see her as a sexual creature? Maybe she hadn't been at her sexiest recently... She removed her top...

  "Let's make it a really romantic vacation," she said.