Brightness Falls (8 page)

Glenda knew photography and she didn't think people should have their picture taken until puberty. Immaturity being unflattering in any light. As of this very minute she was definitely telling her agent—No more baby work. Glenda Banes did
not
need this. But right now there was a cranky baby in her studio, and a bratty model, and she had to cope.

Like a huge, vaguely malevolent sea gull, Glenda Banes hovered over the surface of her loft, which in its whiteness extended indeterminately in all directions, flapping her rangy extremities as she seemed nearly to alight on the tripod that rose from the white floor like a piling from a tidal flat, touching her eye briefly to the aperture of the boxy Hasselblad and then lifting off again, squawking, borne away on an angry thermal.

"Give me a reading and unshine her face," she shouted. Two young men dressed in black leaped up from behind a screen, like ballboys at a tennis match, and raced in the direction of the Madonna and Child at whom the camera was aimed.

The model was Nikki Christianson, very hot right now, Glenda had shot her only about a million times and the camera loved her, that big healthy, horsey look which had been coming on the last couple of years. She was fine except for the language barrier, she didn't really understand English, although the gossip columns said she was born and raised in Wyoming, so presumably it was the closest thing she had to a native language. She could be counted on to be sexy no matter what she'd been doing the night before, but here she was supposed to look maternal, which required a little thespian skill on her part. Impersonating a normal, caring mother was work for Nikki, and her union seemed to have a rule against that.

But she was looking good, no question, her waist more pronounced and waspish since she'd had that operation all the models were having now which removed the bottom two ribs of the rib cage. After Adam had gone to all the trouble of lending one of his own. And while she was under the knife anyway, she had had the fat removed from her knees, the other fashionable new operation.

So it was a standoff here in Glenda's loft. No matter how hard Glenda screamed at her four assistants to move the lights, take new readings and reload the film, no matter how sweetly she cooed soothing monosyllables to Nikki and the just about equally sentient year-old baby, it simply wasn't coming together. Nikki had a twitch in her eye, which probably originated in her nose, and in between takes she handed the baby off to the Filipina baby handler as if it were a bundle of rancid fish—which Glenda couldn't really blame her for—while the baby's agent walked over on prissy little Ralph Lauren tiptoes to offer worthless oral memos of anal-retentive advice. The score was three yowling jags and two diaper changes for the baby, one tantrum for Nikki, five milligrams of Valium for Glenda.

Meanwhile, a sneaky, idolatrous kid in red Converse sneakers was pointing an autowind thirty-five at Glenda, photographing one of her photographic sessions for a spread in some German magazine, portrait of the famous photographer at work, kind of like a play within a play or like the cereal box with a picture of a man holding up a cereal box with a picture of a man holding up a cereal box. Click buzz click ... If she heard that autowind behind her back one more time she was going to stuff his camera somewhere he wouldn't get a light reading.

"Give her some more of those blue eyedrops," Glenda said to the hair-and-makeup kid. "I'm still seeing red."

"Francesco told me they're bad for you," Nikki whined.

"Sacrifice for your art, Nikki. We all do." Besides which, if you were on the goddamn health-and-clean-living program to begin with, we wouldn't need the fucking eyedrops, would we?

"What?" said Nikki.

What
what? wondered Glenda. One never knew how far back to go with Nikki's questions. Start with basic definitions of the words, or what? Take it back to the Big Bang and gradually work up to the part where the fish crawled up on dry land, grew long legs and long hair, moved to New York and got discovered by the Ford agency?
Sacrifice
was probably the word she didn't understand, or maybe
Art.
Glenda had not slept in three days, having gone from L.A. to Rio, then directly from the airport to her studio yesterday morning; with two more shoots scheduled for this afternoon, she was sure as shit suffering for something. At the very least for her new summer house on the beach in Sagaponack.

"This chef Carême cooked for Talleyrand and for the emperors of Austria and Russia," Glenda said, not really for Nikki's benefit but for the porky German reporter who had accompanied the squirrelly little photographer. Give him a quotable. "The coal gas they used for cooking was supremely unhealthful. But when Talleyrand or somebody told him not to work so hard, take care of his health and all, he said, 'Shorter life, longer fame.' "

The chubby little reporter hadn't even lifted his pen, she couldn't believe it.

"Does anybody around here speak English?" Glenda screamed.

"All right, let's try again here, shall we?" Glenda said, after her boys had set up the shot and the baby handler had calmed the infant and Nikki had come back from the bathroom.

Nikki would later claim that she thought the baby handler had a good grip on the kid, but the woman had already retreated a few steps out of the frame when the baby hit the floor. One minute Nikki was holding the baby and the next she was fixing her neckline with both hands...

The soft, yielding thud of impact stunned them all into silence until the Filipino woman screamed.

"What happened?" said Nikki, looking down.

The autowind clicked and buzzed...

"It's not moving," said the agent, crouched over the infant client.

"Somebody call nine-one-one," Glenda screamed.

"Oh, God," the agent muttered. "This has never happened to me before."

It was unbelievable—the kinds of things that happened to Glenda. The month before she'd been shooting a fashion spread with an ocelot. First the fucking cat had bitten the model and then it had escaped out the open window. God knows where it was now, but the job was certainly right down the toilet.

Uptown it was lunchtime, but in the East Village, Jeff Pierce breakfasted on a chocolate egg cream and half a blueberry blintz at Kiev.

"Do you know why they call them
egg
creams," he asked the waitress.

"I giff up," she said. Big strong girl with biceps and virgin blond underarm hair, Eastern European accent, trace of Genghis Khan and Company in the Mongol cheekbones. "Why?"

"I don't know. I'm asking you. Where do the eggs come into it?"

"I don't know nothing about that. You want something else?"

"It's not on the menu," he said.

Walking up Second past the B & H Dairy Bar, scene of his first attempted breakfast as a fledgling New Yorker, having driven down ten years before from tired old Massachusetts to his new tenement on Bowery with most of his possessions. Not even the discovery that his old 2002 had been stolen sometime in the night had blunted his wonder at waking up in his own apartment in New York. Wandering the steamy malodorous Lower East Side summer streets, moving quickly so as not to seem new, uncool, wanting to eat but somehow afraid to walk into a restaurant or stop long enough to show his uncertainty, afraid of betraying his freshness in the city, afraid he would unwittingly violate some unposted metropolitan code, until he saw this sign, dairy bar, with its rural, mammary intimations. He took a stool at the counter and watched an old man flipping eggs on the grill, talking over his shoulder with customers. Finally Jeff asked for a menu. "You want a menu?" Old misshaven face, hairs sprouting from the nose, eyes veined like bad egg yolks looking him over. Jeff nodding, old guy saying, "Kid wants a menu?" to the room at large. The other diners finding this hilarious. Jeff tried to cling to the belief, that requesting a menu was not a provincial custom despite mounting evidence to the contrary. "Tell you what," said the old man. "You tell me what you want, I'll tell you if we got it." Jeff nodded cautiously. "Eggs over easy." His host seemed tolerant. "Side of bacon." Then the rube alarm had gone off again. "Bacon!" The old man raising his wild eyebrows for his appreciative audience. "Kid wants bacon." After milking the other customers for laughs he finally said, "This is a
dairy
restaurant," as if that explained everything. Delivering the eggs he asked, "You ever been in a restaurant before. " Three months later—a Jewish girl having in the meantime explained the fundamentals of kosher dining—he returned to the B & H Dairy Bar, and when, finally, the old man asked him if he'd ever been in a restaurant, Jeff answered, "I don't know— you ever worked in one?" After that he was a New Yorker.

Cruising up Second Avenue now a decade later, he admired a sign that said industrial hair. Nice notion, nice oxymoronic ring. What did it mean? Did they shave machines? Not quite an oxymoron. And what would
moronoxy
mean—the faith of morons, the beliefs they all shared? Except for those morons who were heterodox. Dropping some change in the cup of the legless Rican. Buy yourself a joint, my man. And the Ukrainian man who ran the shoe repair taping a "Back in 5 min" sign on his door and locking up, hobbling down the street in beat-up shoes. Cobbler, heel thyself.

Writers, he thought, are people who think of the right retort long after they get home. Retarded riposters. Across St. Mark's Place, secondhand clothing and record stores, secondhand attitudes on the street—tough kids from the suburbs doing the Sid Vicious shamble.

Cabbing up to the Photo District. Ambulance shrieking at the traffic behind him but no one inclined to make way. Sirens and alarms routine now in the city. The photographers had made a little ghetto for themselves in the vicinity of 20th and Sixth. Jeff imagined them going next door to borrow a cup of developing solution, wondered why writers didn't cluster. Only when free drinks were involved. Once he'd been to a writers' colony in New Hampshire, but they asked him to leave after he brought some locals back from a bar for a late-night swim. The other writers, in their beds of inspiration, were not amused. Especially outraged about alleged skinny-dipping among interloping philistines. Jeff censured and excommunicated by his peers. Big solemn meeting—all very humiliating, thanks.

Buzzed into the small, dirty lobby, he pressed the elevator button and listened to the sinister rattle of chains and pulleys as it descended toward him. All in all he would rather go to the dentist than have his picture taken. Give me lollipops, novocaine, gas—whatever you've got, please. But Russell said this was important, some big-deal magazine article.

Two policemen were standing in the hallway when the doors opened. Caught at last. Jeff stood rooted to his spot, fists clenching involuntarily. Looking for him since he was born, charge of original sin. Numerous additional crimes since—repeat offender. But the cops ignored him, waddling into the elevator. He leaped out just before the doors closed.

Glenda Banes's studio looked like the other lofts he'd been photographed in over the past two years, only more so—a lunar landscape dotted with strange equipment on leggy tripods. Earnest young men ran around tending to all this equipment and to the tall, gangly woman in a white jumpsuit and high-top sneakers whom he recognized as Glenda Banes.

"Is that him, finally?" she said, swiveling in Jeff's direction and focusing. "Let's move it, we're late." She walked over and examined Jeff skeptically. "Are you here for the session?"

He nodded, thinking this a reasonable deduction.

"Will somebody please order some sushi before I collapse?" she shouted without removing her eyes from Jeff. "Jesus, this is the best the agency could do?" she said. "So take off your pants."

"Is this a date," Jeff asked.

"Don't be cute. I need to see your legs."

"Okay." Still wearing his sunglasses, Jeff unbuckled his belt and climbed out of his jeans.

"With these legs I'm supposed to sell underwear?" He had to admit they looked like albino wax beans with hair. Reminding him of why, through his long adolescence—still in progress, actually—he had always refused to wear shorts.

"What the fuck are those?" she said, pointing to the whales on his boxer shorts.

"Whales."

"Why?"

He shrugged. "For purposes of planting a subtle subliminal association in the minds of female viewers who are about to see them removed," he suggested, although the real reason was that some dopey New England relative had given them to him for Christmas.

"Call the agency," Glenda commanded.

"I think there's been a mistake here," Jeff said.

"Your booking agent took some bad drugs?"

"I'm not a model."

"No, so what are you?"

"I'm here to get my picture taken."

"You're here to get your picture taken but you're not a model. Is this a riddle?"

"Well, I'm Jeff Pierce. If that helps."

"Jeff Pierce the writer?"

He nodded.

"Oh my God, Jeff, I'm sorry." Her chagrined expression turned rapidly angry as she looked around the studio for someone to blame. "Why didn't somebody fucking tell me this was Jeff Pierce." And then, turning back: "I didn't recognize you with your shades on. Sorry, I thought you were some stupid model or something. You want a drink? Corona? Perrier? Will somebody get us a goddamn Coke over here, please? Sorry if I was a little... abrupt. But we were expecting you yesterday. "

"You were?"

"Weren't we supposed to shoot Jeff yesterday?" she hollered.

"Yeah, Tuesday, one p.m.," somebody answered.

"What's today," Jeff asked hopefully.

"Wednesday, actually. Wednesday three-fifteen p.m. Eastern Standard Time. All our instruments agree. Isn't that right, people?"

An enthusiastic chorus of lackey assent echoed through the loft.

"Traffic was pretty bad," he offered. Jeff wondered which day he'd lost along the way. Usually he was only a few hours off, though longish stretches of his recent life remained unaccounted for.

"Maybe we can do you today," Glenda said. "We've already had a pretty unbelievable day here. Nikki Christianson—you know Nikki, right? inventor of the silicon microchip?—she dropped this baby on its head in the middle of the shoot so now we're waiting to hear from the hospital to see if it's alive and then I've got this underwear shoot that the model is twenty minutes late for but if you don't mind sticking around ..."