Brightness Falls (50 page)

"Your friends Russell and Corrine are made for it."

"I don't think it's always so easy for them."

"I once played Ophelia," she said. People like Delia elided the connective tissue of their thoughts the way others dropped consonants, though Jeff found he understood her more and more. "Do you think other people feel the things we do?"

"I don't know."

"I thought you were smart."

"I used to think so."

"My mom gave me her wedding dress, the only thing she ever gave me. I'll show it to you sometime."

She unfolded her legs, climbed off the bed and walked over to the window almost stealthily, as if she were stalking a bird on the windowsill. She dug with her fingers in the soil of a potted jade plant.

"Will you take this for me," she asked, handing him with no little sense of ceremony a long sliver of glass.

Jeff held the shard in his hand, looking at it without at first comprehending what it was. He stroked his right index finger across the sharp crescent, then lifted a tiny flap of white skin from the neat incision, which slowly filled with blood. He looked up at Delia, tears welling in his eyes. He could not identify the source of the sadness he felt rising within him and overflowing. Imagining Delia's grief, he had inadvertently tapped his own.

He began to sob. It seemed impossible that he could have contained this sadness for so long without bursting, without even recognizing the pressure of it for what it was. All the sealed-off cells of pain and remorse were suddenly exposed; he felt the cumulative pain of all his hurts, all of the slights, indignities, embarrassments, insults and rejections he had ever suffered, which he thought he had forgotten—none of which could yet begin to account for this sorrow he was feeling, which was far too vast to be merely his own, but which connected him with the bottomless reservoir of human suffering, most of all with the people
he
had hurt in his short, reckless life. All the harm he'd visited on others came back to him; he felt the shame of a hundred cruel, arrogant, careless things he had thought or said or written. Every word he'd written was false, puffed with conceit and elegant malice. And he could hardly bear to think of Caitlin, her long, failed struggle to love him as she suffered his silences and lies and his fierce resistance to love, her grief at their parting. He thought of poor Russell, and he looked up through cloudy eyes at Delia, who felt so terrible she thought of killing herself. Sobbing violently, he wondered how the race had survived so much grief.

Unperturbed, Delia sat beside him on the bed, lifting his injured finger and inserting it in her mouth, licking away the blood, calmly sucking his finger as he cried.

41

The apartment was empty. Nothing was immediately noticeably missing, but to Russell the rooms had the ominous resonance of a crime scene once the chatty assistant super with his jangling, hip-slung key ring had disappeared. A search of the premises failed to yield a note; Corrine's drawers and closet were partially empty. The doorman observed that it was a wonder the young couples these days ever saw each other—alluding to the fact that Corrine had left with her bags late the night before and here was Russell just returning from his trip.

Over Chinese food and television, surrounded by photographs of the life they'd made together and the artifacts they had assembled, he tried to imagine where she would go, postponing the search in the hope that he might outlive his hangover and his jet lag, or that he might not. On the flight he had drafted versions of what he was going to say, the truth seeming, as usual in such cases, too potent. In the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, he still clung to a ragged conviction about the purity of his intentions, but he did not expect his wife to share his faith.

His heart seized up when the phone rang. He waited through three rings before answering. It was Washington, calling from Germany, ostensibly reporting on the day's business but in fact avid for details about the disaster of Russell's personal life, recent events that confirmed all of Washington's basic assumptions about human nature. His enthusiastic sympathy implied a bond that Russell was not necessarily eager to acknowledge; on the other hand, his emphasis on tactics over ethics was, at this moment, quite helpful.

"It's simple, Crash, you say Trina blew into town unexpectedly so you chivalrously let her stay in your room and you stayed with me in mine."

"She's not going to believe that."

"What choice does she have? She can't afford not to forgive you."

When Russell called Jeff at the hospital, he was sympathetic but utterly devoid of advice. The story Russell told him had been lightly edited, though he wasn't entirely aware of the process—the automatic flick of the pencil deleting an adjective here, a comma there, although the essential nouns and verbs remained intact.

"So did you or didn't you? The way you tell it, we're somewhere between the idea and the act."

"I did, but I don't actually remember much."

"And you want
me
to tell you that doesn't
count?"

"What should I do, Jeff?"

"The field of monogamy is not exactly my specialty. I flunked that class."

After a long silence, Jeff suddenly blurted, "Did you hear about Propp? I just saw it today in the
Times.
Evidently the cleaning lady found him slumped over his Macintosh. The computer was still running."

"Jesus! What happened?"

"I don't think they know yet."

Russell was dumbfounded, this tragedy seeming to add its weight to his own.

"Wait a second," Jeff said, "aren't you the executor?"

Where
would
she go? More of a man's woman, Corrine didn't have that many girlfriends. He called her sister in Philadelphia, then her friends in New York. Eventually he tried Casey and Tom Reynes, the only friends he could think of who had an apartment big enough for boarders. A member of the household staff eventually summoned Casey, whose manner was suspiciously colder than usual although she claimed not to know Corrine's whereabouts.

He wanted to get the
Times,
for Victor's obituary, but he was afraid to leave the phone. He fell into a leaden but unrestful sleep on the couch in front of the TV, and was awakened in the middle of the night by the explosion of the phone.

"I'd just like to hear your story."

"Corrine, I didn't know she was coming to Frankfurt. "

"I don't believe you."

Russell tried for something between the truth and his own best version of himself. His story included unexpected last-minute business in Frankfurt for Trina and concluded with a false image of Russell sleeping on the other twin bed.

"How dare you," Corrine said.

"How dare I what," he asked.

"I'm staying at Casey and Tom's place for now. I'm going to look for an apartment. I'll be drawing on our checking account until I find another job. I wouldn't have quit my fucking job if I'd known you were—" Corrine—

"Don't say anything, you bastard. I don't think I can stand to hear you lie again. This is just the culmination of everything you've been wanting to do. You've been playing on the power-and-money team for a while now, and Trina fits right into the agenda. I kept thinking once this deal was over I'd get you back, that you'd start being a husband again, that you'd remember my existence, even. And then, after... after ..." She didn't complete the thought but he knew what that was in reference to. If she attributed their troubles to his absorption in business, it seemed to him that the miscarriage had blighted their happiness. "You obviously want your freedom, so I'm giving it to you. Good-bye. And good fucking luck."

Moments later the phone rang again.

"Corrine?"

At first he heard only the transatlantic static, then: "Hey, brother, is that you?" The voice weird and slurry.

"Wash?" Russell looked over at the clock in the kitchen. It was five a.m. in Frankfurt. "Are you all right?" Not that he was too worried, a five-a.m. phone call from Washington Lee being not unheard-of in Russell's circle.

"Just wanted to say hi, man. You hear about Propp?"

The apartment that weekend was a monument to everything he had forgotten he loved, an echo chamber of recrimination. He couldn't sleep in their bed, redolent of Corrine and domestic carnality. Leaving the TV on for company and distraction, he slept for a few hours on the couch. All of Sunday stretched out endlessly in front of him into a bleak and companionless future. Driven from one end of the apartment to another by the prickling eczema of guilt, he found that he could not sit still or read so much as a magazine. Finding it impossible to work it out in his mind, he sat down and wrote a long letter to Corrine in which he begged for another chance. After three drafts he didn't know whether to mail it immediately or burn it in the fireplace.

He went out and saw that the leisured city was now composed of couples, where only days before it had been populated largely by sleek, predatory women. Like a man with a hangover, Russell had lost the layers of skin and shell that protected him from his environment; now everything—the chilly air and the raspy light of October, the voices and the traffic, as well as the casual glances of strangers—rubbed against the exposed ganglia of his nervous system. Cut off from the glib social order disporting itself around him, he felt disowned by the great city he thought had adopted him.

He eventually located a copy of the previous day's paper and took a stool in a coffee shop. Peering at the captive pastries beneath plexiglass, he imagined a future of solitary meals and coffee refills among the ageless ladies asking "What's the soup?" and picking suspiciously at their chicken salad, the remains of which they would have wrapped to take home for the Yorkie. The waiter, a young Greek with girl troubles, worried the toothpick in his mouth and refused to take geriatric conversational bait, ignoring, for the moment, the old girl with the red tam signaling from the back booth who left a quarter tip every day.

Propp was eulogized in several columns notable for the scrupulous balance of their accountancy: testimony to his greatness was weighed against the reservations of those who suggested he was the slick purveyor of the cultural equivalent of a pyramid scheme. Harold Stone, identified as his friend and editor, split the difference, calling Propp, "one of our great literary eccentrics." The crucial piece of evidence, the manuscript of the novel, was at present unaccounted for. The cause of death was said to be unknown.

Russell stopped at a florist's on Madison and bought two dozen red roses, then dragged over to Casey and Tom's apartment on 72nd and left the flowers and his letter for Corrine after the doorman informed him no one was home
chez
Reynes.

In his bereavement he invested every vista with gratuitous symbolism and tragic import. The merchandise in the store windows seemed pointless and grotesque—fur and feathers of the mating ritual, the smug equipment of domestic life. On 57th and Madison he passed three young ballerinas in leotards, on the cusp of adolescence, their hair pulled back into fierce buns so that it seemed to stretch the already taut, unlined flesh of their faces back over their skulls—as if they were rehearsing, far in advance, the face-lifts inevitably to come.

Walking through Central Park, he passed a well-groomed old woman in a tailored suit sitting on a bench, her skirt hiked up, a stream of urine coursing audibly through the dust between her sensible loafers. She looked straight ahead. Farther along, a group of tiny children were heaving sticks at a terrified squirrel trapped in the upper branches of a small tree. "How would you like it if I threw sticks at you," Russell asked the little boy who was leading the attack.

"Fuck you," said the boy, a four-foot tyke in a Ghostbusters jacket.

"Yeah," his little girlfriend said.

"Nice mouth," Russell muttered, walking on.

Moments later a parent materialized beside Russell, a fit, prosperous specimen in a pink and gray warm-up suit. "Did you threaten to hit my kid?"

"I suggested," Russell said reasonably, "that he stop throwing sticks at defenseless animals."

"Pick on someone your own size."

"Yeah, you big jerk," said the son, standing at a safe distance, eager for spectacle and vengeance.

"Instead of a six-year-old kid."

Fearless with self-loathing, Russell said, "How about I pick on you?"

"Just try it," the man answered, forming a fist with his right hand and slapping it rhythmically, like a ball, into the open mitt of his left.

Without pausing to think, Russell smashed his own fist straight into the man's face. The boy howled as his father sank to his knees, tenaciously grasping Russell's thigh, and a screaming band of reinforcements assembled on the asphalt trail. Desperate to free himself, Russell launched his knee into the man's chin and knocked him backward, feeling in his kneecap the violent collision of upper and lower teeth.

"Stop him!" shouted a wifely ponytailed blonde in chinos and pink cardigan. "Hit him."

"Kill him!" howled the little boy.

Three others, two men and a woman, rushed up and hovered indignantly above the fallen champion of the nuclear family. "Let's get him," said one of the men, but something in Russell's face gave them pause. Bent over the downed man, the wife let out a piercing, pitiful scream, which sounded like the death cry of a small animal.

Russell turned, almost colliding with a fat man wearing headphones, and ran past a mother with two preschoolers in a twin stroller, up an incline and over a rocky outcropping. He dodged through a wooded grove, followed a bike path down through an underpass, skirted the woods around the edge of the great pond past Strawberry Fields and emerged onto West 72nd Street.

After turning south on Columbus, he threaded the languid pedestrians drugged with brunch and shopping, ducked into a bar and ordered a shot of Jack Daniel's, his hands trembling with adrenaline and rage. Standing at the bar he had two drinks, chewed his ice cubes and savored his bleak isolation. He couldn't think of anyplace he wanted to go, or anything he wanted to do, without Corrine. He wanted to tell her about the indignity he had suffered. To whom would he narrate the events of his life, if she were to disappear from it? Who would listen to his stories? As the whiskey soaked in, it occurred to him that a spouse was the person who listened to the story of your life and who, making certain allowances, chose to believe you.