Brightness Falls (53 page)

"It was a mistake I've regretted ever since, and I always prayed you wouldn't find out, Russ, and I've tried in so many ways to make it up to you even when you didn't know."

"How many times did this comforting ceremony take place?"

"Russell, don't."

They talked for an hour. Frigid with scorn at first, Russell became angry; later he cried. Corrine cried, too, and for a time they seemed to be trying to console each other, as if they were old friends who had suffered separate, unrelated tragedies.

"I have your mink," he said at one point, when he couldn't think of anything else.

"Keep it. Maybe you can sell it."

"It's yours."

"I don't want it. It suddenly seems like a ridiculous thing to have."

"Thanks," he said.

"I'm sorry. I just mean almost everything about my life has been so frivolous and stupid. A mink coat. Jesus. I don't know, it's like, what were we thinking of?"

After a long pause he said, "I still can't believe it." But what made it worse, finally, was that he could. At the time, years before, he couldn't have believed it, but evidently his convictions had gradually become more sophisticated. He wanted to say he couldn't live without her, but he was afraid that somewhere along the line he might have lost the romantic fanaticism of innocence which allowed him to host such absolute beliefs. Suddenly that loss seemed almost as large as the other. By the time she hung up he felt dull and heavy, uncertain of anything except, perhaps, that his heart would never be as simple again.

43

The big, rolling lawn was ratty with the neglected growth of Indian summer and littered with the curled, browning shrapnel of exploded oak and maple leaves, the season changing as Corrine watched, nature pressing on with its heartless agenda. The last of the elm trees by the front gate looked sick, having finally succumbed to the plague that had wiped out its family. Corrine walked down to the pond over the wet morning lawn and spooked a flock of migrant mallards. Though it was only the middle of October she could feel the sharp chill on the morning air. Winter in New England, a season of confinement, darkness and incest.

Almost from the moment she arrived, Corrine regretted going home. If it seemed natural to return to the nest after a fall, this particular nest was broken and nothing was quite the way it should have been. Her mother wanted to help and comfort her, but she also required company in her own chronic misery.

Corrine had grown up in this house, a white Greek Revival with black shutters, peeling paint and sagging roof, impregnated with familiar smells and memories. And yet now it seemed as if someone had moved all the furniture almost imperceptibly and fiddled with the dimensions of the rooms. Instead of shrinking, as she'd heard the settings of childhood usually did, it had grown larger in the absence of the family. Her father's absence, especially, opened space in the middle of the drafty rooms. Though Corrine had been coming back throughout the five years since her father left, she noticed it all over again now.

The homing instinct that drew her here was accompanied by an equal and opposite reaction that made her resent the intended source of comfort. Almost from the start she was testy with her mother. Having come for a sympathetic ear, she found herself reluctant to confide all. When she looked at her mother she saw too much of herself, and this made her frightened and angry. She did not want to commiserate on the awfulness of men, or share in the sisterhood of failure. This she imagined to be her mother's perspective, and so it was what she responded to, unable to see that her mother's position was tinged with nobler motives. Refusing to identify with anyone else, Corrine insisted on the uniqueness of her own marital problems. As bad as things might appear to her now, she clung to the belief that her marriage to Russell was a special case.

Chain-smoking at the kitchen table with
Jeopardy
on the television set on the far counter, Jessie Makepeace was trying to get the story straight for perhaps the fifth time, going over the ground again as if, it seemed to Corrine, to savor someone else's unhappiness. Over the phone, the week before, Corrine had told her about calling Frankfurt and discovering another Mrs. Calloway registered to Russell's room. Since arriving home she hadn't divulged much, and she had yet to tell her mother about her recently revealed history with Jeff. Deeply remorseful and ashamed, she wanted only sympathy at the time.

Jessie said, "I never pegged Russell as the type."

"I wouldn't say he was the
type,"
Corrine said, a note of defensiveness creeping into her voice as she straddled separate loyalties. "It just happened."

She was still angry with Russell, but she felt that in his absence she had to present his side of the case. It was time to tell her mother the rest.

When Corrine had finished confessing her own transgressions, Jessie whistled theatrically, like an old broad in a black-and-white movie, smoke escaping from between her pursed, cracked lips. "Of all the people you could've picked, honey." Jessie liked Jeff nearly as much as she liked Russell. He had been here to the house, had been Russell's best man at the wedding. Jessie clipped out reviews and articles about him and renewed a long-lapsed subscription to
The New Yorker
after it published one of his stories. She had never felt that Caitlin was good enough for Jeff, in the years they were together, and several times she had banteringly suggested that Corrine picked the wrong friend.

"It was a long time ago," Corrine said, eyeing her mother's cigarettes longingly. "Corrine, there's no statute of limitations on sleeping with a man's best friend. Men are about forty percent testosterone and the rest is all pride, and you really kicked him right in the old pride when you slept with Jeff."

"I know."

"Boy, you really did it!"

"Thanks for that confirmation, Mom."

At least now, Corrine had the satisfaction of knowing that her mother couldn't say that it was just like what had happened to her, or that men were all alike.

"So how
is
Jeff," Jessie asked.

"I wish you wouldn't ask like that."

"Like what?"

"As if you're secretly enjoying the soap opera."

"Corrine, I was only asking how he was. You know I'm crazy about Jeff."

"He's still in the hospital. They let him out in another week. I don't know, I don't imagine these are the best times of his life."

"I don't understand," Jessie said. "Jeff had everything going for him. How does somebody like that get hooked on drugs?"

If Corrine hadn't solved this mystery, it was not for lack of trying. At different moments she believed that Jeff's unhappiness stemmed from guilt about his success, such as it was, guilt about his feelings for her, sadness about his breakup with Caitlin. And yet she'd sensed there was something doomed about Jeff when she'd first met him. Like hers, his family history was not reassuring; for all of their diluted class entitlement they recognized that sense of loss in each other. But Jeff's adolescent unhappiness, more acute than her own, seemed to her to have some grand, universal component. Life
was
insupportably sad, and gazing at Jessie's scotch glass sweating on the windowsill she could almost understand Jeff's search for oblivion, if that's what it was.

"I remember Jeff saying once," she said, "that what really separates us from the other animals is an instinct for self-destruction."

"You know, you're always quoting Jeff." Jessie sucked hard on the last half-inch of her cigarette and stubbed it out in a corner of the overflowing ashtray. "So are you in love with him?"

"I've always been a little," Corrine said. "Maybe a lot."

"Why do we all like the bad boys, I wonder?"

"Not so much bad as wounded. Russell's so open and strong, Jeff's sort of dark and tortured." Russell had been in England and Jeff seemed to need her; there was a brief moment when she'd almost convinced herself to believe that loving Jeff was another way of loving Russell. It happened more than once, though not for long. "But now it's over."

"Then go back to Russell."

"I don't know if he'll have me. I don't even know what I want."

"Why don't you stay here for a while?" Jessie said.

"I don't know."

"I was thinking we could open a business together. Antiques, maybe."

"I've applied for a job with the District Attorney's Office. There's an internship on the task force investigating insider trading."

"You only have one year of law school, honey," her mother said, putting her drink down. "Isn't that a problem?"

"They've got plenty of lawyers, but they need people who know securities."

"Muckraking, huh? Your father's father would be pleased, the old bleeding heart." Though she could have used a slice of the family money that this old gentleman had given away, Jessie had a soft spot for the man who had disliked his son, her ex-husband, enough to deprive him of an inheritance.

Over the weekend Corrine had raked leaves and read
Franny and Zooey
for about the seventeenth time. She thought about the day she'd unwittingly had lunch with an older man she met in the stacks at the Dartmouth library. She was a freshman at Brown, visiting a boy whose name she could no longer remember, who'd been completely drunk and obnoxious from the moment she arrived Friday night. Saturday morning, after sleeping on his couch, she retreated to the library, and this nice old guy named Jerome had started to talk to her about the book she was reading—D. T. Suzuki on Zen—and then invited her to lunch, and for some reason she had trusted him. They drove out to the country to his house, which had a high chain-link fence around it. They lunched on grains and beans and vegetables, and all he talked about was vitamins and herbs and macrobiotics. He said he'd been working on a book about diet and spiritual health for years. After lunch he showed her the cinder-block bunker where he did his writing, and only then did she realize it was Salinger. He dropped her back at the library and never once mentioned fiction. Jeff and Russell had often tried to wring more out of her, but that was it. A man obsessed with vitamins.

Corrine was raking leaves again on Monday when her mother came out on the back porch with a mug of coffee and a cigarette.

"You picked a good time to leave your job. I was just listening to the news—the stock market's going completely down the drain."

Corrine rushed inside and turned on the TV in the family room. Flipping among channels she learned that the market was down three to four hundred points, no one knew for certain; the tape was running at least an hour behind the market because of the huge number of transactions.

She called Russell at his office.

"I know, I know," he said. "I've been trying to get Duane on the phone to see what I can sell, but the lines are jammed. I can't find out what's happening on NASDAQ. It's total fucking chaos."

"How much do you have in?" she demanded.

"You don't want to know."

"Did you sell that block you bought with your credit card?"

"I was going to. This week, in fact."

"Jesus, Russell. You could end up owing more money than we have."

"I'm acutely aware of this, Corrine. Anyway, Corbin, Dern should hold its value. The tender offer's in place."

"If the market collapses, the deal goes right along with it. Your financing will evaporate. You don't get this stuff at all, do you?"

Then Corrine tried to reach Duane, but without success. Eventually there was nothing to do except watch the news and count the bodies. It felt absurd, after more than two years on the Street, to be watching this apocalypse on television in the family room in Stockbridge. Two hours or so after the market closed, the damage was finally tallied. It was 1929, no matter what channel you turned to. One of the broadcasts was live outside a crowded Harry's bar, brokers shaking their heads and acting stricken for the cameras. Feeling left out, Corrine watched eagerly for familiar faces. The satisfaction she might have been entitled to, having anticipated disaster, was diluted by the sense that she'd been cheated of a ringside seat on a historical event, and by guilt about having left her former colleagues holding the bag.

"I hope your father lost his goddamn shirt," said Jessie, stirring the fresh ice in her glass of scotch with her pinkie. "My lawyers couldn't find it, but I know he had a big trading account somewhere."

Corrine thought about her conversation with Russell and suddenly wondered if he wasn't positioning himself for the future. She really had no idea what kind of money he'd been playing around with in recent months. Maybe he'd already sold that stock. For all she knew, he might have a bank account offshore. It didn't seem like Russell—secrecy being alien to his nature—but neither did it seem like Russell to check into a hotel with another woman. And Trina Cox would be more than capable of hiding money, she might have seen the crash coming—the two of them planning all along for an eventual divorce. Corrine had always trusted Russell in everything; now that trust was fractured and she didn't know if she could believe anything. It suddenly seemed that even the stock market crash was part of the intricate conspiracy against her happiness, and the feeling was confirmed when Nancy Tanner called later that night from New York. She didn't mean to butt in, Nancy said, and it really wasn't any of her business, but she thought Corrine ought to know that she had seen Russell and Trina Cox having dinner a few nights before.

"It was really embarrassing, she was like, all over him. I mean, I didn't know what to do, I think you guys are such a great couple and all, I feel terrible, but I just thought you deserved to know."

"That's really nice of you, Nancy. I've always admired your desire to share information."

"I just thought ..."

"Think again, Nancy. Next time you have this impulse to pick up the phone, don't. Okay?"

Though she did not give Nancy the satisfaction of seeing it, her worst fears were now confirmed. Finally it was all over. She had specifically forbidden him to see Trina. The fact that he'd immediately returned to her, and done it so flagrantly, demonstrated that Trina was more than just a fling, that they
had
planned everything, that Corrine was a complete fool.