Jeff scooped up a rock and heaved it toward the surf, then lit another cigarette. "And I was angry with you for slowly abandoning me before that, letting friendship slip away while you were taking care of business."
Russell nodded. "I know."
"I was even mad at you for being married to Corrine. I could tell you that what happened with Corrine and me was addictive behavior or something. It's this big relief to say you've been helpless against alcohol and drugs, to have an excuse for all the rotten things you've done." He cupped his hand over the cigarette to protect it from the wind, then took a long, reflective drag.
"Did it ever happen when we were married?"
"Once," Jeff said.
"When?"
"You don't want all the sordid details, do you?"
"Maybe not."
"I've been in love with Corrine since the beginning. I could hardly help that. We've always loved the same things, Crash. I remember at school everyone was always telling me I had to meet you, how you and I were so much alike. Which of course made me hate you. Then later, after you suddenly had Corrine Makepeace living in your room, that almost made me want to hate you all over again."
"I didn't know you were that interested."
"From the beginning it was too late to tell you. God, I was jealous. Especially in New York."
"You?"
"No, my fucking doppelgänger. Who do you think?" Laughing mirthlessly through his nose, he scooped up a handful of sand and let it trickle through his fist onto his sneakers. "I sometimes think of everything I've done since college as an inverse image of your life. Parallel lives. You settled down with Corrine, became the editor. So I did the other thing. All the other things."
"You're blaming me?" Russell had meant this lightly, but he could hear the accusation in his voice.
"Sometimes I thought that if I'd married Corrine I would have lived your life and you would have done some of the awful shit I ended up doing." He took a deep breath and clenched his fist around a ball of sand. "I think we both convinced ourselves it was a weird way of being closer to you—I know that sounds like the worst kind of rationalization. So okay, it is. It was. But you were in England and we were both lonely. Or Corrine was lonely and I'd always wanted her."
"Where does Caitlin fit into this?"
"Caitlin knew—I think that's why she finally left. Not that I didn't give her some other reasons. In the end, though, Corrine loved you and she stayed, right? And she did the right thing. I couldn't have been what you were for her. It turns out we're not interchangeable at all."
Jeff coughed violently, scattering sand as he raised his hand to his face. When the attack had subsided he wiped his lips with the back of his arm and shook his head violently. Russell wondered if he was supposed to be drinking.
When he regained his voice, Jeff said, "I felt entitled to take anything I wanted, do anything I wanted. I was a writer, right? The rules didn't apply. Anyway, I'd like to go back and do everything differently. But I can't. We can't."
Before Jeff had even started this speech Russell discovered he wasn't angry anymore. Unimaginable things happen and we are forced to comprehend them. Before your best friend sleeps with your wife, you would say that it is the unforgivable crime, but only when you're faced with it do you learn what you can live with.
"Are you asking for forgiveness?"
"No, actually I was really hoping you'd keep hating me."
Russell extended his hand and Jeff clasped it. Later he would wish that he had hugged him, for it was his move to make, but it seemed then that there would be time, and at that moment on the beach his sense of holding back was overshadowed by a vast surge of relief, which accompanied the realization of how much trying to hate Jeff had taken out of him.
"What's that shit on your wrist?" Russell said.
"Age spots." Jeff lit another cigarette, cupping his hands over the beleaguered flame of the lighter. "Forgive her, Russell."
"I want to," he said, though he wondered why this seemed more problematic. Sitting there in the cold sand, it made him sad to realize that he understood Jeff far better than he ever would understand Corrine, that the one kind of love was ruled by a different set of laws from those that ruled the other. Because no matter how much you pretended, one kind was exclusive and the other was not. And it made him sad, too, to realize that in spite of this, something was lost between them. "I see us," he said, as if to compensate himself for this insight, "as cranky old men in stained cardigans playing cribbage and silently cursing the pretty nurses."
"No, I see you as the old fart on the front porch, in a rocking chair next to Corrine. Despite your little lapse in Frankfurt, you're basically the guy who asks the hooker to paint his house."
"Who does that make you," Russell asked, as Jeff collapsed in a fit of violent coughing. He held one hand over his mouth and propped himself up with the other.
"I'm the guy," he croaked, then cleared his throat, "who can't help believing that getting the hooker to do something else will lead me to an ecstatic merger with the raw stuff of the universe. And who ends up with the clap."
"Aren't you supposed to be healthy now," Russell asked when the coughing jag finally subsided.
"It takes a body a long time to recover from what I did to mine," Jeff said, looking out over the ocean.
"You are clean?"
He nodded, poked his cigarette out in the sand.
"You know, I was jealous of you and your nasty, freewheeling life. All the way, right up to the hospital door, part of me wanted to go along for the ride."
"It wasn't that much fun."
The last light was draining into the ocean now.
"At least Washington landed on his feet," Jeff said. "You heard he's back at Corbin, Dern, working for Harold and that corporate pirate of yours?"
"Yeah, he called me. He seems so predictable, and then he always manages to surprise you."
"What really happened with Victor's book," Jeff asked. "Someone told me last week there were thousands of pages of gibberish."
As darkness settled around them, Russell explained how before leaving New York he'd gone to Victor's apartment in the Village, accompanied by a suspicious and proprietorial Corbin, Dern attorney. They spent two days going through Victor's file cabinets, uncovering multiple copies of the pages published in magazines and journals, annotated over and over again in different-colored inks, most of the pages so dense with longhand scrawl as to be entirely illegible. Some of them were nearly black, and fragile as ancient parchment. Apparently Victor had been reworking the same half-dozen chapters for some twenty years. His safety deposit box contained a birth certificate and three thousand in cash. That was it, as Russell had reported back to Corbin, Dern in a stiff, unpleasant meeting with Harold. But Camille Donner, who had previously hinted that the book was a myth, had lately assumed the mantle of grieving widow. In her new version of their life together, she had left his side only temporarily, to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair. Since then, she had hastily rewritten the last chapters of her roman a clef and had opined in an interview that the masterwork, which she had seen with her own eyes, was hidden in a cellar or vault. Conspiracy theorists reported that Corbin, Dern actually had the manuscript and was hyping it with mystery. But the majority concluded that there was nothing there, and that there never had been. Smart New York buzzed with the judgment of fraud, the news humming across the same wires that years before had carried the early rumors of Propp's genius. He became a symbol of false promise and hyped expectations, though Russell chose to consider this a case of noble failure. Failure being something Russell believed he was beginning to understand.
48
Like a man inside a dream who sees himself lying asleep on the bed, Russell felt for a long time that he was waiting to be awakened from the melancholy coma of his days. When, a few weeks after Jeff's visit, the phone rang into the stillness of five in the morning, Sunset B
oulevard eerily silent outside the windows of his hotel room, he knew that a summons was at hand.
"Corrine," he said, sitting up in bed, "what's the matter?"
"It's Jeff."
Russell seemed already to know what she was going to tell him, though he'd begun to hope that this particular doom had passed by somehow, dispersed harmlessly into the atmosphere like a storm that breaks up before reaching land.
"What happened?"
"He was in the hospital. Nobody knew. I didn't know until I read in the paper this morning that he'd checked into St. Vincent's. It was pneumonia. I'm at the hospital." Russell waited. On her end Corrine seemed unable to continue, and he was willing to wait indefinitely rather than hear her finish.
"He died fifteen minutes ago."
"You don't die of pneumonia," Russell said, even as he realized that many, many people did die of pneumonia these days, like characters in nineteenth-century novels. Lately it was in all the obituaries.
"I think ... I think he was very sick. He'd been sick for a while."
"Did he tell you?" Neither of them seemed willing to name the disease. "Did the doctors say anything?"
"He knew he was dying," she said. "I should've known. He looked terrible when I saw him—we had dinner... I should have done something."
"There's nothing you could've done."
"I feel like this is all my fault," she sobbed.
"I'll get there as soon as I can."
"Come home," she said.
In the will he'd made out a week before he died, Jeff asked to be cremated. He did not want a funeral. After the various hospitalizations the estate was modest, but royalties and what money he had left were to be divided equally between medical and cultural charities. In his loft, which was neat and scrubbed, a manuscript addressed to Russell lay on the desk beside the word processor. For the second time in less than six months Russell found himself the literary executor of a dead friend.
Though he briefly considered honoring Jeff's prohibition against a memorial service, Russell decided that those who were left behind required some sort of farewell. Corrine strongly disagreed, but in light of recent history she decided not to press her claims on Jeff's memory.
Caitlin sat in the second row, having flown back from London for the memorial, stoic beside her banker fiancé. Walking up the aisle, Corrine was taken aback, like nearly everyone else, at the sight of a beautiful girl with big lemur eyes, wearing what appeared to be a wedding dress, sitting alone with a potted jade plant in her lap. Corrine wondered if she herself could have been that thin, back when she had almost stopped eating, when eating seemed to be the only thing she could control.
Sitting in the front beside Bev and Wick Pierce, Corrine was only intermittently aware of what anyone, including Russell, was saying. He was speaking now, trying to maintain his composure. Russell and the other men—they were all men up there at the altar, as usual—were talking in their imperial masculine way about what Jeff had accomplished in the world, how he had left his words behind. And Russell had solemnly informed her that the new book, written in the last few months, "was Jeff's Ivan Illyich." As if that alleviated the sting and made everything okay. "It's sort of about all of us," Russell said, when she asked. She didn't know if she was ready for that. Listening to all of the fulsome eulogizing, Corrine became more and more annoyed at this secular consolation, this idea that leaving behind a stack of pages or a pile of stones with your name on it redeemed the life that no longer was being lived. Russell had almost left their marriage behind in his quest to build some kind of monument. Piling up stones, he had forgotten all about mortar. Concerned with everything except the most important thing, like the man in the joke who lost his arm and mourned his Rolex.
When they talked about what had gone wrong during the past year, Russell and Corrine were always telling two different stories. In his history of their world, the battle for control of a publishing company and the stock market crash of 1987 would feature prominently, stirringly; in hers these were footnotes in tiny print. These public events—like the death of a loved one from a communicable disease, like a financial collapse— revealed like a lightning flash, for a split second, how connected and interdependent each of them was at all times, their well-being intimately bound up with the fate of those around them.
She didn't think she could remotely explain what she was thinking to Russell, and for a moment she almost despised him again. But she loved him in spite of this, and that was the whole point. She once dreamed of a perfect communion between souls, believed she had achieved it with Russell. Now she was willing to fight for something less.
Finally an old poet, bearded and calm, a friend from one of Jeff's other lives, one of the lives Corrine was not familiar with, was reading Nashe's "A Litany in Time of Plague" in a voice both sonorous and nasal.
Rich men, trust not in wealth, Gold cannot buy you health; Physic himself must fade, All things to end are made. The plague full swift goes by...
Russell had read her the poem years before, when he still read poetry aloud to her.
Beauty is but a flower Which wrinkles will devour; Brightness falls from the air; Queens have died young and fair; Dust hath closed Helen's eye. I am sick, I must die. Lord, have mercy on us!
She had asked Russell what the line "Brightness falls from the air" actually meant. She'd always been more comfortable with math and science, with their relative certainties. Russell had told her a scholar proposed that the word was "hair," and that the h had disappeared as the result of an Elizabethan printer's error. But he preferred "air. " And when she pressed him he just said, "Think about it." And now, suddenly, she could picture it clearly: brightness and beauty and youth falling like snow out of the sky all around them, gold dust falling to the streets and washing away in the rain outside the church, down the gutters into the sea.
And yet for her own tribute she would have taken a more modest sentiment, from a children's book. "It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer."
And then it was over. The mourners shuffled out into the drizzle outside St. Mark's, posing or refusing to pose for the several photographers, talking about Jeff, about mutual friends and about the details of lives that they were about to resume now that this encounter with death was over, the panhandlers who lived in the churchyard working the well-dressed and spiritually tenderized crowd. Russell shook hands with Washington and then they embraced, slapping each other's backs.
"Did we do something wrong," Russell asked.
"Undoubtedly."
"Still, it's hard to believe you're working for Melman."
"Hey, chief, it's simple: he needs a guy like me, and I need a job. It's the perfect basis for a relationship."
Russell smiled ruefully, as if he finally understood a joke that he was the last to get. He nodded when Washington put an arm around his shoulder and suggested they go somewhere for a drink.
Russell spent the first night back in New York in Corrine's studio, the old apartment having been sublet. After that he stayed on, although it was only after a week that they dared talk about the future and acknowledge this new arrangement. He didn't know what he wanted to do, Russell told Zac, but he didn't think he would be returning to Los Angeles; Zac told him to take a month to think about it. Although they couldn't really afford it, Russell and Corrine had decided to take their vacation after all, to give themselves a chance to get to know each other again.
They left New York in a snowstorm, after sliding in a school of filthy yellow fishtailing cabs up the FDR Drive along the East River. Five hours later they were in the tropics. It was a commonplace of life in the age of air travel, but the transition seemed miraculous to them both as they walked off the plane in St. Maarten holding hands. Soon they were riding bumpy thermals above the multicolored, lightly corrugated Caribbean. "There it is," said Corrine, as she always did, when the island came into view.
&nbs
p; Looking down at the water, she saw a ghostly shape against the dark green background of a reef, a huge blue lozenge on the sea floor, which appeared to be the hull of a large boat. Several buoys on the surface marked the location of the wreck. She tried to point it out to Russell, on the aisle seat, but by the time he looked out the tiny window they were over the ridge above the airstrip.
There were phones on the island now, and it seemed to them more crowded and noisy than they remembered. The restaurants were prohibitively expensive, though probably no more expensive than before, and after their second night they bought groceries in town so they could economize on meals. Their third night they made love again for the first time in half a year. Both of them were shy and awkward; each experiencing a kind of double vision, as if they were watching themselves making love in a dream, knowing the other's body so intimately and yet finding it new and strange. In the morning they were taken for newlyweds by shopkeepers and waiters.
Later they heard that the wreck Corrine had seen was J. P. Haddad's yacht, lost in a big storm earlier in the winter, now eighty feet down. It had taken eight hours for it to sink. The crew had successfully reached shore, but some claimed that Haddad himself had gone down with the ship. Certainly no one knew his whereabouts. A voluble American told them, one night in a bar, that all the sea cocks had been opened, the intake tubes slashed. "You know," the man confided, "he lost everything in the crash." The blue hull was still out there under the water when they flew back to New York, and sometimes in later years the image would bob up into Corrine's consciousness—when she first heard, more than a year later, about the collapse of Melman's empire, for instance —an enigma somehow associated with that time of their lives, just as men in yellow ties conjured the preceding period.
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