Brightness Falls (7 page)

The supervisor was messianic on the subject of phone technique. This part Corrine tuned out. After the meeting, Duane walked her back to their adjoining work stations. He was blond, athletically proportioned, a man of his times, and his predominant mood was up. He, too, was a little too much in the morning.

"Any hot ones today, beautiful," he asked.

Corrine shook her head. They walked down a long aisle flanked with work stations, computer terminals with video screens glowing green with numbers. They had been through the training program together and now shared a secretary. Corrine liked their bantering camaraderie, although she was afraid she might have to throw a little cold water on him soon. The problem with Duane, it seemed to her, was that someone had once told him that he was dashingly handsome, and he'd taken it to heart. There was a kind of self-consciousness to his insouciant gestures and his attention to dress that made him seem comic. Maybe it was just youth. He was almost five years younger, having arrived here straight out of Dartmouth—-all the kids now rushing headlong into professions they'd chosen in the cradle. Whatever happened to trying things out? Corrine had tried Europe, law school and Sotheby's and felt like the last of a species—almost the oldest broker at her firm. No country for old men, this business.

Duane was talking about a hot tip, biotech.

"Have you checked it out," she asked, just to say something.

"Looking real good, numberwise." As an analyst he was a little flighty, though he was doing well in the current flighty market.

She stopped in front of her own station, demarked by flimsy partitions on three sides, a token of her seniority. "Cold-calling," Duane asked.

"Eventually." She sighed. It was what she hated most about the business, ambushing strangers on the phone, trying to sell them something they didn't know they wanted. At first that was all she did, but now she at least had a roster of regular customers, though not yet enough that she could afford to stop soliciting.

"Look what I have," Duane said, extracting a stapled sheaf of papers from a folder. He held it between his fingers, dangling it like a treat, and made the cooing sound of a pigeon.

"What is it?"

"Only an up-to-the-minute mailing list of every dentist in New York State."

"Where did you get that?" Doctors and dentists, wealthy and financially unsophisticated, were the preferred diet of the small broker. He brushed the edge of the partition with his fingers and checked them for dust before leaning against it.

"Sorry. Can't divulge my sources. However, if you would join me for lunch today, I could maybe shave off a few of these names with home and office numbers for you. The Q's and the X's, say?"

"Give me the M's."

"Come to lunch."

"Deal."

He handed her several sheets and disappeared, then called from the other side of the partition, "Where, by the way, is the lissome Laura?" His head reappeared. "Isn't she supposed to be our full-time secretary? Or am I mixed up on this?"

"She'll be in by ten," Corrine said.

"Wish J could keep banker's hours." He withdrew again.

Corrine didn't want to tell him that Laura was on a go-see. Although she wore a size fourteen and had a troublesome complexion, Laura dreamed of Paris runways and magazine covers and had been attending a modeling academy at night. The brochure claimed to guarantee success in the world's most glamorous career; by the time Laura showed it to Corrine it was too late for her to say anything. Corrine did not expect to lose Laura to the Ford agency, and she covered for her so Laura would have a job to come back to when her dream faded away. Duane, on the other hand, would have been a bit cruel about the whole thing.

Corrine looked at the
Journal,
punched up numbers on some stocks she'd been watching. At about nine-thirty, she began calling.

When Laura returned, she seemed dispirited and said nothing about the go-see. Delivering the mail later, she said to Corrine, "Did you see Johnny Moniker on TV this morning?"

"Yeah, but who
is
he?" Corrine demanded.

"I don't know. I see him in the magazines."

And then a morning of painful dental work.

When the market closed at 2,003, a cheer went up around the trading room. Duane waltzed around the partition and swept Corrine into his arms, taking advantage of the situation to slip her a little tongue.

Corrine was on the phone with a client and twisted her head away. The client was upset because Corrine had him in a stock that had grown only nineteen percent for the first six months of the year, and he had just read in
Forbes
that the market was up twenty-two percent for the same period. She suggested that if he averaged in the dividend he would find himself way ahead of the game. Duane stood off to one side, absently adjusting the gold stickpin that held the two sides of his collar together. She rolled her eyes for him, held up one finger. Corrine didn't think anybody under forty should wear stickpins.

"Get me out of here," she moaned when she finally hung up.

They walked over to Harry's, a basement saloon favored by the boozier traders and brokers and by the news media whenever the market was news, as it was today. A crowd had formed around the entrance; pitchers of beer were being handed around on the sidewalk. Like a flock of fearless panhandlers wielding outstretched paper cups, representatives of the electronic press thrust microphones at every passing face.

"Everybody here seems pretty happy," said a glamorous blonde who aimed her microphone at Corrine.

"Let's hope they're not hung over tomorrow or the next day," Corrine said.

"What do you mean by that? Do you think the market's peaked?"

"I hope not," she said judiciously, as Duane yanked her forward.

Eventually Duane managed to get a bottle of champagne, with which he sprayed himself and some of their neighbors.

"You're that excited about the market?"

"This is actually to celebrate our anniversary," he said.

"What anniversary," she asked suspiciously.

"Two years since we entered the training program."

"You're sweet."

"So are you," he said earnestly, his big blond eyebrows nearly meeting in the middle. She could see an attack of sincerity coming on him like a sneeze. "In fact, you're the sweetest girl I've ever met."

She laughed and tapped his glass, and threw back her own. "You must know a lot of citrus queens. So how'd you do today," she asked, and his face lit up as he described a coup, how he'd heard about a company that was about to go into play. "The buzz was takeover and the buzz went out on the wire and the stock went up. Rumor becomes fact. Even if the stock wasn't in play before, it is now. God bless America." He poured another glass.

"Catch that buzz," she shouted, over the din. As he poured the last of the champagne, which she declined, Duane suddenly became serious. Taking advantage of the privacy afforded by the mob, he said he had to get something off his chest. Corrine wanted to stop him before he got started, but the champagne seemed to have robbed her of her will; she felt like a creature of the savanna stung with a tranquilizing dart, stunned, gazing out from glazey eyes as the biologist scurried in to perform his tasks...

He told her that she was the finest and most beautiful and intelligent woman he'd ever met and that he was in love, even though, sure, he knew he shouldn't be. "I don't know, I'm just saying I'm in love with you and I'd do anything to be with you," he concluded pathetically. She was touched by his sweet adulation. But she had to be firm and she was, pulling away from him and raising the last of the champagne to her lips. She was finally a little more stern than she felt, for part of her was grateful because she suddenly realized she'd needed to feel the way she did when he was saying those wonderful things, and in this celebratory, demi-Dionysian atmosphere it seemed almost appropriate to strip off your clothes and give yourself over to the spirit of the moment.

He was embarrassed, of course, but she summoned her will again and led him gradually out into the clear light of a daytime world in which she was older and married and they were colleagues with an office to return to. But meanwhile she wanted to assuage his hurt pride and show him she wasn't offended, so she ordered another bottle of champagne, though she was going to lay off drinking the next day for sure, and by the time that was gone she felt quite happy with Duane and with everyone around her, part of the great celebration in which she didn't quite believe. Outside, when Channel 4 stuck a microphone in her face, she said, "I don't know, I think basically the emperor's got no clothes. But at the moment he has a pretty good body."

As the champagne wore off in the taxi she realized that it was her night to work at the soup kitchen. She'd completely forgotten. She looked at her watch. There was time to help with the cleanup, but she felt too guilty and disgusted with herself to think about scouring a vat caked with hot-dog stew as a champagne hangover set in.

Russell had left a message on the machine; he was finishing drinks with an author, then dinner with the agent at a restaurant called Cambodia.

Feeling immensely fat and full of high-calorie fermented grapes, Cor-rine decided not to eat; but eventually she went out and picked up a fruit salad at the Korean market and lay on the couch watching stupid television shows, nurturing the warm sleepy feeling of being wanted, which had stayed with her through the afternoon, but which otherwise had been in rather short supply.

At eleven-ten she was astonished to see her face on TV as she flipped through the channels—
a pretty good body.

Oh God, some horrible blowsy fat tramp two and half sheets to the wind, and there was Duane with a sort of precoital grin hovering over her shoulder. She was glad Russell hadn't been around to see it.

She was half asleep when he tiptoed in, breathing awkwardly, a little after one. He undressed in the dark and slipped between the sheets. She wanted to let him know she was awake, wanted to hear about his evening, but she wasn't quite sure how she was feeling about Russell: she had a right to be angry, although somehow she was too distant to be really upset.

And then he started to snore.

Nobody ever tells you things, she thought groggily, like about dating, how you are treated as a prize, something rare and special, and that it ends with marriage.

Why don't they tell you things like that?

That night Corrine had a dream. She is in the shower. It is a big communal bathroom like the one at summer camp on Lake Winnipe-saukee, except she is all alone and it is many years after her childhood. She is a widow now, although her naked body is still young and fresh. Her husband is dead. He died in the Cola Wars. She is all alone in this white-tiled chamber full of warm steam, washing herself with a white bar of soap. A bar of Ivory soap. Washing all over. She shouldn't be washing herself. For some reason she thinks that is her husband's job. But he's dead in the Cola Wars. She is rubbing herself with the bar of soap, up and down her arms, her hips, up and down, from her toes all the way up her legs, one leg and the other leg and in between. In the naked steam she rubs the soap along the inside of her thighs. It moves up and down because it's so slippery. She feels guilty washing herself, but there's no one else, and then there
is
someone else. It's Johnny Monocle. He is there in the bathroom with her and he says, I'll wash you. He seems to have only one eye, but he is very distinguished-looking with his black patch and sharkskin suit. Corrine is naked. He washes her up and down as she closes her eyes. He has a beautiful touch that makes her think of butterflies brushing her with their wings. Up and down and back and forth all over her body Johnny Monorail makes tracks. The bar of soap is actually his tongue. They are in bed now. Johnny has taken off his suit and he is naked now too as he travels across her body and suddenly she realizes her husband is alive after all but it's too late because Johnny has grown a penis and something needs to be done about it. She can't very well just ask him to take care of it himself. But they can hear the sounds of her husband coming back from the Cola Wars. Not Russell, some other husband, she doesn't know who. Still, they have to escape. It's a very long penis Johnny has, and a smooth one, smooth as ivory. She compliments him on it and he says thank you. But they have to hide it. It is too big to hide under the sheets, and it keeps getting bigger as she talks about it and touches it. It's so big that it disappears over the edge of the bed and out the window. Come on, quick, says Johnny Monolith. He isn't in the bed now, he's calling from far away, from the other end of the penis, which stretches away into the darkness like an ivory banister. She hears footsteps approaching, the footsteps of her husband, returning from the wars. She crawls to the edge of the bed and straddles the smooth banister, then pushes off, sliding down, floating off into the lovely darkness... and awoke tingling and guilty, the red numbers of the clock glowing in the dark, her husband asleep beside her, making small holes in the silence with his prickly breath.

In the morning, when she awoke again, she didn't tell Russell about her dream.

4

Glenda Banes hated working with babies. Not that she was entirely wild about encountering them in her leisure hours; she didn't care to think about how many of her friends had recently succumbed to the you're-less-fhan-a-whole-woman-if-you-don't form of propaganda, under the duress of an alleged biological clock—it's
just
a clock, for Christ's sake, not a
bomb.
Lately Glenda was finding herself at dinner tables from which everyone was jumping up to call home to the baby-sitter instead of the drug dealer, and conversation often degenerated into discussions of private nursery schools and the plague of nanny-napping—
Can you believe our wonderful Jamaican nanny... hijacked by some unscrupulous yuppie parent while she was in the park strolling little Brendan, they offered her an obscene wage and a green card and a room with a view and a new VCR, it's just incredibly unethical...
Sometimes people actually hauled out
pictures
of their offspring. It was enough to send you racing to the bathroom for a discreet puke and a quick blast of mood freshener, although Glenda had quit that almost a year before.