Brightness Falls (6 page)

Last night Russell's colleagues had given a party for a departing editor. So after work Corrine schlepped uptown to Russell's office—subway up to 23rd, twirl around till you figure out you came out of the subway some strange new way and had set off in the wrong direction—then stood around smiling foolishly in a stuffy conference room where impoverished editorial assistants surreptitiously devoured the canapés, gratefully calculating what they were saving on dinner, while the senior staff huddled virtuously in aloof constellations, checking their watches until they could slip off for serious cocktails and fashionable dinners on expense account. Harold Stone with his pained scowl showed up just long enough to convey the impression that fraternizing with his colleagues was slightly less pleasant than catheter insertion, poor Crash still worried that Harold would drop the boom on him; Corrine's comment being, if they wanted privacy why the hell didn't they lock the door? Finally a group of them had gone uptown to Elaine's for an endless, boozy dinner with heaping portions of inside publishing dope...

Now, after a few hours of sleep, Corrine had to go to work. Russell was still in bed. Publishing didn't start until ten; she tried to be in her office by seven forty-five so she could do some research before the staff meeting at eight-fifteen, when the senior brokers would pick issues, analyze the performance of the market the day before, discuss what had happened on the Tokyo exchange. Although today she'd be lucky to make the meeting.

After her shower she still felt exhausted. In the dressing area off the bedroom was a vanity; she sat down with a cup of coffee and turned on the little portable television. God, what a wreck of a face, she thought, looking in the mirror. Methuselah, who turned men to stone. Or was it Medusa? She decided to absolutely stop drinking for a while. Robbing her skin of its youth. Mainline collagen instead.

Applying moisturizer, she listened to an interview with Madonna, who seemed to be claiming that she was the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe. You wish, honey. Marilyn Monroe probably wished
she
was Marilyn Monroe. Being gorgeous hadn't done much for her self-esteem. Still, Corrine thought she'd like to try it on for size... 36C or whatever. Russell would be pleased. Hey, there, big boy... two inches and one letter bigger. Come up sometime and see me—no, that was Mae West. Inspire him to come to bed a little earlier, with romantic inclinations. Not just pass out. Be nice if, like men, they would get big for sex—so the boys could play with and admire them—and then shrink back down again so they wouldn't get in the way. Why not? Another example of men getting the better deal. Nature was misogynist. She smoothed foundation over the pale skin, lingering on a thin blue vein under her cheek. The night after her birthday party was the last time, almost two weeks before. Could it be that long? Other men seemed to find her attractive enough. On the street, on the subway, at parties. Always at parties.

A tiny mole on her chin that her mother called a beauty mark and her father wanted to have removed. Dab, dab. Cover it up, cover girl. Hopeless. Paper-bag-over-head time. A simple grocery bag for work and around the house, a Saks or Bergdorf bag for evening wear.

Color fix around the eyes. Looking at the raccoon circles underneath. She wondered if all those names starting with M on TV just now had made her think of Medusa. MTV. Was that publicly held? Must check. Marilyn and Madonna and Medusa. With regard to the market she secretly believed in omens. Not by themselves, but if everything else looked right. You started with the numbers, but in the end sometimes you needed one more piece. But what was the significance of this M motif? Buy Monsanto? Sell Mobil? She needed more input. More M-put. Sometimes she relied on her dreams, but she was so tired she couldn't remember her dreams this morning.

Sibyl. That was what she needed. A dream reader. Did anybody still read entrails? Messy. Like this hair. Was Medusa the one with snakes for hair? Corrine's looked distinctly snakelike this morning. Nest of vipers. Forked-tongue split ends. Sibilant. What she needed was the new, improved shampoo with miracle conditioner that untangles your hair, erases your wrinkles, firms and lifts your breasts and makes your husband want to shave before he comes to bed and fuck you till the cows come home. Lather, rinse, repeat. Daily. Every morning she vowed she would cut all her hair off, it was a pain, and besides, wasn't it girlish to have hair past your shoulders? But Russell would never forgive her. Men have this thing about hair and women. Want lots on your head, hardly any elsewhere.

Still looking like hell, she went out to the kitchen for another cup of coffee. Russell's camel-hair coat tossed over the back of the couch. Once upon a time she would have found this cute. This morning it just pissed her off.

Back in the bedroom she went to work on her eyes. Windows of the soul. Well, windows needed frames and drapes, didn't they? Brushing on eye shadow. Shutters by Chanel. A nice copper shade on the crow's-feet. The bird with the coppery, keen claws. Who was that... Wallace Stevens? A thing about birds, that guy. Looked like Hitchcock, too. Parrots, parakeets, flocks of pigeons. Complacencies of the peignoir—she could use a little of that this morning. Her robe was beat—a total rag.

We're
here this morning with Johnny Moniker, the latest star on the fashionable downtown scene...

Corrine looked up at the TV set. Guy looked familiar, kind of cute. She hadn't quite caught the name—Johnny Monologue? She was almost sure he'd been at the apartment a few weeks before. Dark, nasty good looks... She'd seen him with Jeff, maybe.

Corrine scuttled over to the bed and prodded Russell.

"There's this guy on TV we've seen somewhere," she said. "Who?"

"That's what I want to know." She bounced childishly on the bed. "Johnny something."

"Johnny got his gun, shot his wife. Because she woke him up."

"No. Come look."

"Somebody we know?" he said, still refusing to budge.

"Not really. We just met him for a minute."

"Johnny we hardly knew ye."

By the time she got him to the TV they were showing spring fashions from Milan.

"Why am I awake," Russell asked.

Sighing, Corrine went to the bathroom for the aspirin. Only Corrine, Russell thought,
would
be surprised to see someone vaguely familiar on TV. That was the whole point of TV, to make everything familiar. It was like her dreams. Almost every morning she would wake him with the words, "I had the strangest dream, " as if she expected dreams somehow to be less dreamlike. She was relentlessly logical, like a child. Her superstition, which seemed when he had first met her to be at odds with the general cast of her character, was actually a corollary of this logical bent. She didn't believe in random events, so if the number eleven swam into her ken several times in the course of a morning she felt certain that there must be a good reason, some deep structure of which this was a coordinate, even if she couldn't figure out exactly what it was. As it turned out, the combination of mathematical genius, tenacity and a superstitious nature made her an excellent reader of the stock market.

He climbed back into bed.

"How do I look," Corrine asked after she handed him the aspirin. He shook three out of the bottle and looked up.

"Fabulously gorgeous."

"I do not."

"Yes you do. Got something going at the office? Something on the side?"

"I should. Can't seem to get a rise out of you lately."

"Hey, I'm sorry. Literally working my balls off. Plus all this goddamn socializing. We'll stay home tonight."

"Promise?" She knelt beside the bed and stroked his forehead. "Let's order in and have a fire."

"Shit." He frowned. "I've got dinner with an agent."

"Cancel it." She buried her head in his neck and began to tickle his earlobe with the tip of her tongue.

"I'd do it in a minute, honey, but he's going back to L.A. tomorrow."

"What's all this L.A. stuff?"

"I'm being sucked into the entertainment business, like the rest of the country."

She stood up abruptly and straightened her blouse.

"He's got a client I want to sign for a book. Tomorrow night we'll stay home." Russell sat all the way up in bed to demonstrate good faith. "Promise."

"The check's in the mail," Corrine said. "And I won't come in your mouth." That would put a little blush on his face. She blew him a kiss, turned and walked out with a haughty, rhythmic deployment of her buttocks.

"Great ass," Russell called after her.

"None for you," she responded.

Across the hall, Mrs. Oliver opened her door as far as the chain would stretch and peered out, her pruney face framed between door and jamb, the brass chain pressed above her lip like a mustache, her Yorkie yipping behind her. Since her husband had passed on to that old men's club in the sky, Mrs. Oliver spent her waking hours standing behind the door, waiting for the sound of a footstep on the stairs, as if it were her fondest wish to be a prosecution witness before she departed this crime-ridden world. All day long she opened and closed the door like a bivalve drawing nutrients from the ocean. Corrine waved.

Downstairs, Roger held the door for her and smiled. "Good morning, Mrs. Calloway." Watching her pass, the doorman felt a flutter of desire that was like a shot of helium in his lungs, lifting him up, making him weightless with the exhilaration of her presence, which for one moment he shared with no one else, and when she had passed he felt sad and lumpish with desire.

Out in the air, she started to feel better. Crisp, excoriating January cold. The sky was bright and clear, having, unlike Corrine, gone to sleep at a sensible hour. Joggers passing in bright colors, damn them. Someday she intended to start exercising again. Three Pekingese inspected a fragrant crack in the sidewalk in front of a brownstone while their mistress stood patiently tethered on three leashes, blue-haired, wearing an empty plastic baggie on her free hand.

At Lexington, Corrine smelled pot; two men in suits walking ahead of her were sharing a joint. The phrase "Cola Wars" drifted back to her with the smoke: ad guys, jump-starting inspiration.

After buying the
Journal
outside the subway entrance, she plunged underground into the briefcase-toting army of the employed and stood jam-packed with a thousand other New Yorkers on the platform, thinking that although they looked featureless together, their inner lives seethed beneath the worsted wool—scores of them cheating on their spouses and their taxes, dreaming of murder and flight. If she were to ask she would find herself connected through friends and acquaintances with many of them; if a catastrophe were to strike they would all find themselves linked and bonded, but now they stood silent and remote. The phrase find the cure stenciled on the post beside her. How many people on the platform had it? What was that old poem Russell had written about at Oxford? "Journal in Time of Plague"? Something about light falling from the air...

She lifted her paper and disappeared into the columns of newsprint, to emerge ninety blocks downtown, borne up to the surface by the heavily bundled throngs, pumped out onto Wall Street, which marked the northern frontier of New Amsterdam and was named for the seventeenth-century log wall that had protected the Dutch settlers from the Indians and the British. Shunning the contemporary female custom of wearing running shoes between home and office, Corrine clicked along on calf pumps just outside the limits of the invisible ancient wall, high-stepping over buried ceramic pipe bowls and wine jugs, bent nails, broken glass and brick fragments, partially fossilized pig, chicken and sheep bones, and other detritus that had been regularly tossed over the wall three centuries before, her route so familiar that she was as oblivious to it as she was to what was underneath the pavement, not really seeing the towering temples to Mammon as she walked toward the one in which she toiled, reading her paper in the available light that found its way to the canyon floor.

* * *

"So, people, this could be the day. The big day, the historic day. The market's looking good, it's looking fit and ready. I think we're going to hit two thousand. The big two-oh-oh-oh. And I think we want to use this as our selling point, particularly in our cold-calling situation."

"Go, team," Corrine whispered to Duane.

"We want to say, 'Mr. John Q. Doctor, you've been missing out here, history's being made today, and your neighbors are getting rich. How about you?' "

Sitting beside her in the overheated conference room, Duane Peters involuntarily nodded in agreement, his yellow tie bobbing up and down on his chest like something meant to attract fish. These yellow ties were too much in the morning—Duane and the supervisor both. So was the pep talk.

It was all too much. The Dow Jones would probably hit two grand today, but Corrine thought it was crazy. The economy was in dreary shape, inventories high, GNP slow, but the Dow kept shooting up. It was a kind of mass hypnosis. Castles in the air.

She had to be careful what she said around the office. Wall Street was pumped up. It was like a cocaine jag. Everyone grinning fiendishly, talking too fast, not quite focusing on anything. The clients, too. Especially the clients. Corrine tried to moderate their greed, urging them to look for real value. Though she wasn't above listening to her superstitions, her basic resource was simple math. If an established company was selling at ten times earnings, it was probably a better bet than an upstart going for fifty times earnings. But everybody wanted instant gratification. They wanted to be junior arbitrageurs. They wanted risk without downside. Big beta factors and guaranteed return. They wanted to get in on a takeover prospect right before it went into play and double their money in three days. They wanted whatever was in the headlines that week, preferably on margin. They wanted to be able to tell their dinner guests they sold short on a turkey. They wanted sex and drugs and rock-and-roll.

Russell was the worst. When he and Corrine finally agreed to divide their tiny investment capital in half, he started trading frequently with Duane. Lately Russell had mentioned he wanted to get into options. She told him she didn't want to hear about it. Her portion, less than two thousand—very big deal—stayed in the money market.