Corrine tried to reassure Victor about Jeff's reliability. Russell was not so sanguine. He kept meaning to do something or say something, while systematically avoiding the issue of drug abuse even in the privacy of his own mind.
"Frankly, I imagined this bad-boy thing was just a literary persona," Victor protested. "I mean, he comes from a respectable New England family, doesn't he?"
Russell called Jeff's number and shouted at the answering machine, to no avail. Mathilde pulled hard on alternate ponytails, tipping from side to side. "This has never happened before," she said. "Even with Dylan Thomas." Her associates hopped like sparrows between backstage and the auditorium. At eight-twenty everyone agreed there was no choice but to begin without Jeff. Russell offered to give the introduction in his place.
"I can't go out there," Victor insisted. "I'm not going to make a fool of myself." His long forehead creasing with worry, he plucked at the hairs in his beard.
"John Berryman called from a bar on Third Avenue a few minutes before he was scheduled to read," Mathilde recalled. "We sent a delegation to fetch him."
"What should I do?" Propp demanded of Camille, who was sitting browsing through a copy of TriQuarterly, rather, it struck Russell, as if shopping through a catalogue for a new companion.
"You'll either have to go on or cancel the reading," she answered sensibly. Her response drove Victor to despair.
Russell massaged his shoulders. "Calm down, Victor. They're your fans," he said. "This isn't really Jeff's crowd."
"I don't have any fans, there are only ten people in the country who understand what I'm doing." Victor was nearly in tears. "They've turned out for some kind of freak show, to see the Boo Radley of American letters. ... I won't even consider going through with this... this disaster."
Propp ripped himself out from under Russell's grip and ran, bolting out the backstage door through a tunnel that bypassed the auditorium. Russell gave chase and reached the sidewalk in time to see him disappear in a cab.
Moments after the announcement of cancellation, Bernie Melman charmed his way backstage with the assistance of his bodyguards.
"What is this shit?" he barked at Russell. "We're going to pay this asshole... how much? and he can't even get up and read out of his own fucking book? Now I've got fifty people coming to my house for dinner, right, to celebrate this fucking calamity. What the hell am I supposed to tell them?"
"Artists are temperamental," Russell offered.
"Well, so am I temperamental. And right now I'm in a real bad temper. Hey, I wonder," he said, turning to the two bodyguards. "Do you think that makes me an artist? Christ, what kind of fucking business is this?"
"Have you met my wife," Russell asked, thrusting Corrine forward in the spirit of throwing oil on raging waters.
"How do you do?" Bernie said, suddenly calm, looking her up and down with an air of thorough appraisal. "I'm very pleased to meet you."
"Russell," Corrine demanded, refusing to play her role, "we've got to find Jeff."
"And this is Camille Donner," Russell said. Camille was more obliging than Corrine, postponing her flight to her lover's side. When Russell and Corrine exited, she was deep in conversation with the tycoon.
"Let's just go down there," Corrine said, when they had returned to their apartment. She'd already called three times.
Russell was not so certain, afraid of what they might find.
"We still have a key," she said. "Don't we?"
"I'll go."
"I'm coming," she said, reaching for the portable phone, pressing the redial button. "Corrine, there's something you—"
A shriek from Corrine abbreviated this thought.
"Can you believe it, he fell asleep," Corrine said, after she finally hung up, her exasperation leavened with relief. Looking at Corrine. Russell could imagine the justice of the charge she would make when he told her what he'd seen at Minky Rijstaefel's party. The next time Jeff didn't show up somewhere he might not be able to answer the phone. He wanted to tell her, but he couldn't shake the indefensible notion that in his silence he was protecting both of the people he loved best.
The reaction to the nonevent at the Y was curiously mixed and ultimately satisfied those who initially had the most reason to be unhappy. Victor Propp's dusty, enigmatic legend grew immeasurably, burnished with a shiny coat of scandal, while Jeff's performance was in persona. In the absence of an official explanation, the rumors that circulated were much more interesting than any possible response to an actual reading. The two were alleged to have duked it out backstage. The teetotaling Propp was supposed to have passed out in the classic novelist's manner. Many sympathized with the reports of the sensitive artist and recluse, palsied backstage with agoraphobic terror or overcome with stage fright. Others considered the cancellation a deliberate piece of strategy on the part of the notoriously strategic Propp, the nonreading an extension of his policy of nonpublishing. In his new column, Juan Baptiste subscribed to this theory, concluding: "Also a no-show was best-selling novelist jeff pierce, who later in the evening was healthy enough, if not necessarily compos mentis, to attend the after-opening party for tony duplex at Nell's." A week later, in an essay published in a downtown weekly, a fashionable critic was uncharacteristically fulsome in his appreciation of Propp as "the quark and the black hole of contemporary American literature, a nearly theoretical entity whose size and shape and importance can be deduced only partly from visible manifestations," and concluded that "Derrida having made the author obsolete in favor of an endles; scrim of écriture and intertextuality, Propp apparently means to erase even the text with his long silences, punctuated by glimpses of dazzling prose—the silence itself assuming legendary proportions, the long-unfulfilled promise of the novel, which we register in pieces, like glimpses of flesh beneath a hem, this deferred gratification perhaps the very point of the enterprise."
Victor Propp himself particularly liked this essay, and he carefully clipped it and added it to the heavy leather-bound scrapbook he had purchased in Florence some years before in anticipation of the reviews that would greet his novel, which scrapbook now was nearly filled with articles in anticipation of that blessed event.
28
Jessie Makepeace had always gotten along well with her son-in-law— better, it sometimes seemed to Corrine, than with her older daughter. The first time she and Russell had met they stayed up together half the night in the kitchen in Stockbridge, killing a bottle of vodka while Corrine slept in her old bedroom. Russell said she was ballsy, intending it as a compliment. "Like a house on fire" was the phrase Jessie used to describe their happy conspiracy... though as an idiom for amity it seemed pretty inexplicable to Corrine, who could always spare a little worry for the strange lumps embedded in the language, as if, like nodes in the breast, they might bode ill or conceal dangerous truths.
"She was the little girl who always asked why. Used to drive me crazy," Jessie said, rattling the cubes in her drink. " 'Why, why, why'... You were the most curious little girl anybody ever did see."
Jessie was sitting cross-legged on the living room floor with her back against the fold-out couch that was her bed when she visited Russell and Corrine in New York. "Drove her teachers crazy, didn't know what to do with her. And when they tested her IQ it went right off the chart."
Why did it seem to Corrine that her mother made this fact sound like a defect, a genetic mutation that had fortunately proved relatively harmless, Corrine having, by general consensus, turned attractive after a homely childhood and having managed to get married? Her mother had been here only ten minutes but already Corrine could feel herself becoming brittle and humorless.
"What's so bad about being curious? Or smart?"
"We're just teasing you, honey," Jessie said, lighting up a Pall Mall. We? Corrine thought, while Russell went to the kitchen for an ashtray.
"I'm dying to hear your news, Russell," said Jessie. "When's my son-in-law
going to take over his own publishing house? Did I tell you we even read about it in our Berkshire Eagle? I've got the clipping in my suitcase, remind me."
With his usual enthusiasm Russell was happy to summarize and even embellish recent events in the drama, making it sound like a cross between High Noon and Paradise Lost: the staggering amounts of money, the night of the wine hurling, capsule biographies of the various contestants.
"I don't think you're being really fair to Harold," Corrine interrupted. "He's done an awful lot for you."
"And I've given a lot back to him, and to the company," Russell said. "Doesn't mean I have to stand by and watch Harold and the others run it into the ground, strangle new ideas and new talent. The question is, What's Harold doing for the shareholders and the reading public?"
Russell's manner of speaking had changed in the last month. Resorting to phrases like "the reading public," he'd gone pontifical, talking about the rights of shareholders and the stagnation of American business. Of course, he'd picked a lot of it up from Bernie Melman and that twit Trina Cox. Corrine had noticed it in some of their college friends—the way they started talking like their jobs. Men more than women. Speech was the early-warning sign, the canary in the mine. Over dinner you're having a perfectly reasonable conversation about art or the sex lives of celebrities and suddenly the word "prioritize" would come out of someone's mouth like a wad of gristle coughed up onto the tablecloth. Educated people started using nouns as verbs—"access" and "impact." The ideas and the politics soon followed. "Say what you want about Reagan, but ..." Maybe there was something wrong with her, that she hadn't been able to turn into an actual stockbroker with a stockbroker's haircut and wardrobe and way of looking at the world. Some childish recalcitrance. There were days when she almost believed she was doing something useful— helping her people get a decent return on their money. Then she'd go into a sales meeting where they would talk about customers like lambs to the slaughter, to be loaded up with a lot of high-commission packaged junk, and she would realize she actually was a sleazebucket.
Russell was explaining the gospel of the LBO to Jessie as though he were reciting the Declaration of Independence. "And you do this all on borrowed money?" Jessie said with guileless admiration, getting right to the heart of the matter.
Russell winked. "That's the beauty of it. Buy now, pay later."
"You know, I wanted to ask you—now that the house is mine, I've been thinking of taking out a second mortgage."
"There are definite advantages."
Wait a minute, Corrine wanted to scream, who is it that actually works in the financial sector in this household? She also wanted to bum a cigarette, two years later. Instead she asked, "Have you talked to Dad since... recently."
"We talk through lawyers," Jessie said. "It's more hygienic. Why, has Mr. Second Youth been in touch with you? I didn't think so. Man's got the paternal instincts of a reptile. You know that two hours after you were born he played a round of golf? Did I ever tell you that story, Russell?"
"You look like you could use another drink before we head out," said Russell, who was now aware of the precariousness of Corrine's mood.
"And when I asked him—sure, if we've got time I'd love another—I asked him what we should name Corrine, he said, 'It's up to you.' Can you believe that? The proud father. Up to me. Thanks very much."
Corrine stood up and stalked into the bedroom. Just before the door slammed shut behind her she heard her mother ask, "What'd I say."
She knew her father was a neglectful bastard who seemed incapable of love, but she didn't necessarily want to hear it said aloud. It wasn't as if Jessie had been Mother of the Year. Sometimes her childhood seemed to Corrine like one long wound, the recent divorce a knife that had laid the scar wide open again.
She lay facedown on the bed, too angry to realize that she was crying. A few minutes later she heard the door open and felt Russell sit on the bed.
"She doesn't mean to—"
"That's the trouble, she's so goddamn insensitive."
He stroked her hair. "We've got to get going, Corrine."
"You go."
"I don't want to go without you."
"You two, you'll have a great time. She'd rather be with you anyway."
"Corrine..." He said this in the adult way that was supposed to recall her to her senses and remind her of her responsibilities. "I don't want to see Cats again." He ran his finger behind her ear. "I'm a dog person." He was trying to get her to laugh now. "Here I lower my snotty aesthetic standards because your mom wants to go see this furry Muzak-al spectacle, and you won't even come along to ease the burden. What if someone I know sees me going into the theater?"
"Tell them you're thinking of buying it. That won't surprise anyone who knows you."
"Come on, we're going to be late." Impatient now.
"I'm not going."
He exhaled violently, in exasperation. A minute later he rose from the bed. The bedroom door opened and closed, and then a few minutes later :he outer door. She heard faint laughter in the hall, the shudder and squeak of cable and pulleys from the adjacent elevator shaft, and then she was alone.
"Always had that temper," Jessie said in the elevator. "When she was good, she was very, very good, but when she was bad she was awful. She'd fall into these black moods for days and then she'd suddenly be so happy you'd want to strangle her. What's with this teetotaler bit, anyway?"
"I don't know, she sure didn't get it from me." Then, feeling disloyal, Russell said, "I think the divorce has been tough on her."
"Hey, tell me about it," Jessie said, taking his arm as they walked past the doorman into the street. "Love your building, but don't you think you kids need a bigger place? Now that you practically own a company."
"Actually, we're just starting to look," Russell said.
"You kids are so lucky. Got the world by the tail, haven't you?"
"Maybe just a little piece of it," Russell said, though he didn't think she was half wrong. If Corrine would just cheer up and get with the program. She was in one of her troughs—her inner barometer down and dropping, like her weight—just when he felt he'd reached the Memorial Day weekend of his own life's calendar. But she just got that way sometimes; her mother was right about that. A year after they moved to New York she'd had a bad spell, and quit law school abruptly. A crisis of conscience or confidence which she'd never been able to articulate. She stayed home watching old movies, sleeping half the day, reading Kier- kegaard, eating chocolate ice cream and potato chips, somehow losing weight. The turnaround was gradual, its trigger as inexplicable to Russell as the cause of her depression. One evening when he arrived home she ' announced, "You know, I've been trying to decide why we need to be physical entities. I mean, why do we have to be in these bodies that half the time don't really feel like they belong to us, anyway, and I finally decided—well, how else am I going to be able to wear all my clothes?" She did not go back to law school; though she had excelled, she hadn't enjoyed it, and Russell encouraged her to do something less stressful, the job at Sotheby's being a sort of educational convalescence.
Corrine kept listening for his return. Surely he would not be able to sit through a play, knowing how insensitive and cruel he'd been, knowing she was back here all alone, as she had always feared she would be ever since the first time her mother in an incomprehensible rage had driven off into the trackless night. For weeks on end Jessie would pack the lunches and read bedtime stories; then suddenly one night she would appear in the bedroom to rip the pictures off the walls and tell Corrine she was a terrible, awful girl, before driving away. The morning after, her father was silent behind the newspaper as she and her sister ate their cereal.
Not only did Russell sit through the play—he took Jessie out for a drink afterward. By the time they returned, Corrine was miserably asleep.
The next morning Russell announced that they were going shopping, with the
air of a despot declaring a national holiday. Corrine needed a sexy new bathing suit for the Hamptons, he suggested, and maybe a new summer dress. "And I think I need me an ole Big Daddy white linen suit on account of it being so hot and me being impo'tant, and maybe some nice crocodile loafers, and Jessie will surely find something she just can't live without."
A guest at the breakfast table would have found a mother and daughter almost excessively chummy and affectionate. Russell, who had some experience in this area, was still a little amazed at the way Corrine started in, giving her mother an impromptu neck rub while they exchanged gossip about friends and neighbors back in Stockbridge, clearly more accomplished than Russell at this kind of willful amnesia. The acute critic might have detected some overacting, three people projecting to the last row in the house.
For her part, Corrine woke up repentant, determined to harmonize with her mother and her husband, and in this spirit was able almost immediately to suppress her skepticism about Russell's plan of therapeutic shopping, and about the larger program of which this was a part. She wanted to lighten up; she really did. She had decided to try to be enthusiastic about the Corbin, Dern takeover, and the summer house and everything else, if only on the principle that if her husband was marching over a cliff she didn't particularly want to be left standing alone on a smug precipice.
So they went shopping, strolling over to Madison, beginning at the new Ralph Lauren store, which looked, Russell said, like the world according to Whitney Corbin III, a fantasyland for would-be Anglo-Saxons of all ages, races and creeds. But Russell proved no more immune to the fantasy than dozens of other Saturday shoppers competing for sale items and the attention of clerks, even as he remarked knowingly that everything in the place was plagiarized from Brooks Brothers and Savile Row. With less hesitation than he usually brought to a purchase, as if warming up for bigger things to come, Russell bought the desired loafers with the encouragement of the two women, smart crocodile mocs that looked so expensively casual.
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