Brightness Falls (32 page)

"Who buys those," Russell asked.

"Collectors," said the proprietor of this display, squatting on the sidewalk smoking a joint.

"People collect them?"

The vendor sucked a final hit out of the roach and snubbed it out between his fingers. "Shit, I hope so."

Down the Bowery, near Corrine's mission, an army in uniform black leathers occupied the sidewalk in front of CBGB, armed with beer cans and jagged haircuts, temporarily displacing the winos.

It was nearly noon when he arrived at Jeff's loft on Great Jones Street and pressed the button labeled "Sweetness & Lite, Inc.," among the cluster of jury-rigged buzzers beside the door. He rang several times. Eventually Jeff projected himself horizontally from a third-floor window—a disheveled gargoyle. Not so shortly after he disappeared, Russell was buzzed in.

The elevator was a relic from the Industrial Revolution. It made you wonder how the machines had won, Jeff said; it also made you nostalgic for stairs. Russell uncaged himself on the third floor and knocked on the door. Taped at eye level was an old cookie fortune: "You will attract cultivated and artistic people to your home."

Hair akimbo, white limbs comically overflowing the apertures of a black kimono, Jeff eventually held the door open.

"We're going to the baths," Russell said, his voice echoing in the sepulchral space.

Jeff rubbed his eyes with a droopy sleeve. "I don't actually
feel
like going to the baths."

"Why not?"

"Call me hydrophobic."

"It's been months. Come on, it'll wake you up. What are you going to do, go back to bed?"

"Why should I go to the baths if I don't want to?"

"Because I'm asking."

Jeff surveyed the immediate area like a man who has awoken into strange surroundings. Sighing, he said, "All right," and shuffled off to the bathroom.

The open floor of the loft suggested a campground recently worked over by bears. Just beyond the kitchen was a long picnic table with benches. Cans, bottles, butts and the odd shred of clothing were visible on the wide plank floor; at the far end a wrecked bed. Leaning against the wall was a life-sized painting of a man in a suit, frozen in a racked, unnatural posture suggestive of a falling heart-attack or gunshot victim —a picture worth Russell's annual salary. He wandered over to Jeff's work space with vague intentions of spying. A wall of books rose fifteen feet to the ceiling. An amber monitor glowed blankly on the steel fire door that served as Jeff's desk, and Russell took as a hopeful sign the fact that books and paper were piled everywhere, as if in use.

"Okay, let's go," said Jeff, emerging brightly from the bathroom.

"You could sell the painting and endow a maid," Russell suggested.

"I just sold it," Jeff said, "and endowed a lost weekend."

As they started along Great Jones, Jeff pointed to a sign in the window of the building next door: danger hollow sidewalk. "Now that's a good title," he said. "Sort of confirms the vague suspicion you get wandering the streets. Treacherous surfaces."

"That last would be a good title for your recent
Granta
offering," Russell said. "Treacherous surfaces indeed." Jeff didn't exactly flinch, but neither, for a change, did he have a smart-ass retort. They walked over to 10th Street, where the old "Russian Baths" sign was still hanging, peeling and faded, a relic encroached upon by incipient art galleries. "The trouble with art," Jeff told Russell, "is the kind of company it attracts. Art tending to be sluttish, inevitably inviting Money up to see its etchings."

They hadn't been to the bathhouse in months; Jeff had wondered if it would still be there. Buildings disappeared overnight in the city, like black rhinos from the African savanna. In the morning only a smoking pile of brick and mortar would be left, the skin and bones; the next day a Pasta Fasta, or a Younique Boutique.

They paid at the door, stashed their keys and wallets in the safe and picked up locker keys. Old men with proud bellies and withered muscles hanging from their limbs strutted between the locker room and the deli counter, slapping their thighs and chests, moving with exaggerated unconcern, speaking through various tongues and accents with the same stagy gruffness, in accordance with the international rules of fraternal male nudity. Jeff and Russell undressed and walked downstairs, wearing heirless green robes and oversized flip-flops. Outside the steam room the masseur pounded a body lying prostrate on a wooden catafalque, obscured beneath a mound of Ivory soap lather. "Hey, boys," bellowed Sidney the masseur, his voice wobbling in the humid air. "Any takers for a wash and a rubdown later?"

"Can't afford you, Sid," said Jeff.

"Be a lot more expensive you end up at the doctor's office with hypertension, or at the shrink for nerves." Sidney believed himself to be engaged in a venerable branch of preventive medicine; indeed, many of his customers seemed to have lived far beyond the biblical threescore and ten, or whatever passed for a natural life span these days.

"You take Blue Cross," asked Jeff, to which the masseur answered:

"I take the long green."

As they stripped to shower Russell glanced at Jeff's arms, unable to see much except that the left was mottled near the crook of his elbow. They plunged into the steam amidst six or seven of the regulars, who fell silent as they entered, appeared to be melting into the wooden benches. The young men were reconnoitered and soon the conversation resumed.

"So the driver of this vehicle is a paraplegic. Doesn't even have a license. He shouldn't have been in that car." This was Abe, a senior citizen with blotchy pink-and-white flesh who was the unofficial patriarch of the steam.

"What happened to the other guy," someone asked.

"What, the bus driver?"

"No, the guy that got hit." There were several grunts of assent, as if many were confused on this point.

"Like I was saying," Abe said, "the paraplegic, who has no business driving that car, he hits the pedestrian, hits him pretty good, and he goes flying across the street. Then he gets run over by the bus."

Abe stood up, doused himself with a bucket of cold water.

"Who got run over by the bus, the paramedic?"

"Paraplegic. That means he's paralyzed."

After a long pause, someone asked, "How'd he get out of the car if he's paralyzed."

Abe groaned. "No, it was the guy he hit that got run over by the bus. The paraplegic was driving."

The steamers fell silent, looking at Abe through the mists to see if there would be a moral, some edifying coda to this story. After a few minutes he started to talk about a Brooklyn school superintendent who was discovered in a closet with an eight-year-old girl. "Said he was playing hide-and-seek."

"How about that panther's been attacking people?" said another, seeking to seize the news initiative.

"Not a panther," snorted Abe. "It's got spots."

"Well, whatever it is. Tiger, leopard, whatever."

The damp, lolling bodies noticeably stiffened and shrank as three burly figures swaggered into the steam room. Where there had been no room on the benches a moment before, a long stretch of empty wood suddenly manifested itself. The new arrivals claimed their territory, the smallest of them sprawling, on the bench while the other two sat formally on either side. The small one resembled a keg of beer with hair. He let out a large, self-satisfied sigh and began to sing a song in Russian. The melody, if any, was obscure, but the audience was rapt, and anyone who might have been thinking about leaving the steam room postponed his departure until the performance was over.

Russell lay back in the breath-tightening steam and found himself thinking about sex with women who weren't his wife. From imagining the Frenchwoman at the museum he found his thoughts sliding con-cupiscently toward Trina Cox. When the song was over and his body warm he stood up and left the room, and plunged himself into the ice-cold pool outside the door, mortifying the flesh. The organ that would offend, if it could, retreating and shrinking.

"That was Ivan Matlovich," Jeff said, once they had dressed and taken a table at the snack bar. "Emigrated from Odessa seven years ago and made his first million in eighteen months. In Little Russia, over in Brighton Beach, the guy's a legend. Started with protection and extortion rackets, moved into chop shops that strip stolen cars down to their component parts in a matter of hours, eventually branched out into hijacking and gasoline-tax skimming."

Jeff often surprised Russell with these detailed accounts of the back alleys of New York, drawing on what seemed an inexhaustible store of anecdotal lore of the low life. Russell chalked it up to
nostalgie de la boue.

"These chop shops in Brooklyn, they cut cars up with blowtorches and sell the innards to an auto-parts wholesaler in North Carolina, who eventually sells them back to a Chevy dealership in Queens. The junkie thief gets a hundred and fifty dollars, but through the agency of some loaves-and-fishes kind of economic-miracle deal the parts are worth three times what the vehicle itself is worth. With that kind of math operating it seems amazing that there are any automobiles left intact on the streets. Cars are obviously inefficient, economically nonviable. Sort of like what's happening on Wall Street. Ivan Matlovich being the unpolished version of your new pal Bernard Melman, the well-known corporate chop-shop king."

So there
was
a moral to this story, Russell discovered. "I wanted to tell you," he said.

"But you didn't," Jeff reminded him, sharpening the tip of his cigarette against the lip of an ashtray.

"I couldn't."

"Somebody tied you up and gagged you?"

"More or less. There was a lot at stake here. I couldn't just follow my own inclinations. The whole deal could've gone down the tubes."

"What did you think, I'd call the press? Time was, you would've told me the moment you thought of it. You would have asked me what I thought before you decided what to do."

"Life gets more complicated as we get older, Jeff."

"I liked it better when you just followed your inclinations. Pretty soon, Crash, you're just going to be a job title in a fucking suit."

Not wanting to unscroll his own list of grievances, Russell sipped his coffee.

"Did it occur to you that I have something at stake here, too?"

"Hey—I'm sorry."

"So I get to read about it in the newspapers, like everybody else?"

"I tried to call you before the announcement. You haven't exactly been available recently."

"Washington managed to find me."

"He told you?"

"Let's say he tried to prepare me."

Russell stored this item away while Jeff drained his beer.

"I don't understand why you're doing this. Tell me how Bernie Melman is different from our singing gangster friend Ivan Matlovich."

"Grow up, Jeff."

"I think you're getting old enough for both of us."

"What's your great plan: Shoot smack, die young, stay pretty?"

Russell knew he should pursue this line—that lurid scene in the bathroom still vivid in every particular—but he was afraid of pushing Jeff out of reach, and uncertain of his rights. He didn't know how to weigh Jeff's transgression of the rules of health and clean living against his own betrayal of the adolescent verities of Romantic poetry and rock-and-roll. And for all of the excellent reasons he could muster for not having confided his plans, he recognized the validity of Jeff's complaint. He should have told his best friend. But he'd been faced with two conflicting imperatives, and honoring one trust seemed to entail violating another. What did Kant have to say about a situation like that?

Russell ordered a beer and bummed a cigarette—indirect gestures of comradeship. He hadn't smoked a cigarette in two years. Jeff handed over a Marlboro, lit it from his Bic. Smoking was once one of their shared avocations—endless discussions of sex and literature, wreathed in smoke. When they first met, Jeff was besotted with Joyce, infatuated with Ireland and Catholicism. Russell, an Irish Catholic from the Midwest come to a rich man's college, secretly wanted to be a preppy from an old family so he could afford to be as careless and cynical as Jeff. They shared a dissatisfaction with their native clay and a belief in the metamorphic agency of literature.

Russell felt high after three drags, groping for articles of truce.

"Have you decided what you're going to read next week at the Y?"

"I thought I might read your recent letter."

"Not one of my best efforts. Written in haste."

"Point taken."

They both puffed, pacifically, on their cigarettes. "Victor's been driving me crazy," Russell said, "calling up to try out passages on me. Reading over the phone."

"And when does he plan on finishing the great masterpiece?"

Russell shrugged, thinking he might well turn the question around. Like alcoholics, blocked writers were always morbidly curious about their peers. It had been more than three years since Jeff finished his first book, and Russell had no idea at all how far he was into his second.

Switching to casual acquaintances and celebrity scandals, they ordered two more beers, abandoning their duel without further comment, on the understanding that old friendships require mutual undeclared acts of amnesty and a certain stoic willingness to bear wounds. They drifted out into the street, the warm viscous air of the early-summer afternoon draining them of ambition. It was a day for drinking beer. They decided to buy a six-pack and shoot pool at Julian's, a ritual that went back to the days before Russell got married, when they had briefly shared Jeff's old apartment on the Bowery after Russell returned from Oxford. Later, after Jeff's book hit, they'd swagger into the pool hall with a gram of coke and play for hours between trips to the bathroom. Straight pool, eight ball, nine ball and cowboy... Pool was something he'd picked up from Jeff, who'd grown up with a table in his house, though he pursued the game, Russell believed, for its lowlife ambience and associations.

"Remember when we were broke," Russell said, his memory triggered by the stench of garbage and urine fermenting on First Avenue, "Saturdays we'd sneak up to Corbin, Dern and raid the out boxes for books, haul them to the Strand. Twenty-five cents on the dollar, some days it seemed like a fucking fortune."