Brightness Falls (56 page)

One night she was clearing dishes when news began to circulate among the men that the police were massing in an empty lot on Avenue D for an assault on the shantytown where many of them slept. A forcible eviction had been threatened for weeks, the winter cold having failed to depopulate the future site of middle-income condominiums. Many of the men hurriedly bolted the last of their food.

"They got bulldozers and tanks and shit," Ace told Corrine, hyper-bolically, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and stashing an apple in the pocket of Russell's old parka.

Corrine stripped off her apron. "I'm coming too," she said.

"It's gonna get ugly," he warned, but Corrine thought it might be less ugly if people like herself were on hand, hoping that her business suit and general appearance would offer some small measure of protection. She followed Ace and a dozen others out into the street, shivering in a wind that carried the smell of acrid smoke, the smudged night sky glowing to the east.

The shantytown was brilliantly illuminated from within and without: dozens of fires burning among the tepees and lean-tos; fierce spotlights trained on the camp from across the street. The bulldozers, four in all, were backing down from two flatbed trucks, diesels drowning the shouts of the squatters, who waved lumber and bricks at the blue phalanx of riot-helmeted policemen. Ace and Corrine pressed through the crowd of spectators. The yellow bulldozers lurched and wheeled around, turning their implacable blank faces toward the mob. A brick arced across the night sky and struck the helmet of one of the policemen, knocking him backward.

As Corrine's group approached, a detachment of cops broke away at a right angle to cut them off from the camp; the rest of the force moved forward behind shields, their billy clubs held aloft. The idling bulldozers rumbled and belched smoke. Half of the squatters melted away as the police advanced into a volley of projectiles. Corrine watched three cops run toward her. One in particular seemed to have singled her out; his lips were drawn tight beneath a dark mustache, and he fixed her with a look of simple hatred. She was frozen by that look, unable to believe it was directed at her. Ace grabbed her hand and yanked as the billy club descended, grazing the edge of her hip, sending an electric current of pain into the bone. She might have screamed, but the air was full of the noise of pain and anger and she could not distinguish her own voice. Looking back over her shoulder she saw cops flailing wildly at the crowd.

They fled west, Ace towing her by the hand, hurting her arm as he raced through the streets. "In here," he said, pulling her through a hole in a chain-link fence, her dress catching on a hook of wire before ripping free. The lot was strewn with garbage and the debris of deconstruction. Hands on Corrine's hips, Ace shoved her down behind a discarded Christmas tree. Lying on the cold littered ground she could hear the clatter of flight, the heavy jangling pursuit of the police, screams and curses. She pressed her face into the earth. Ace lay close, breathing rapidly.

As she lay in the dirt staring at the limbless torso of a plastic doll, Corrine envisioned the violence spreading and consuming the entire city, an orgy of rage and destruction. There was nothing left to stop it—no compassion, no law, no common purpose. "It's a fucking war, man," Ace said, more excited than afraid, after a detachment of helmeted policemen had clattered past. She was so cold that her hands and feet were beginning to go numb. "Let's blow," Ace said, when she told him.

After ducking back through the fence, they encountered a mob of ragged men wielding sticks, pipes and bottles. For a moment Corrine thought they were about to charge, but some of them recognized Ace.

"The pigs clubbed my lady, man. Can you believe this shit?"

The mob roared and suddenly she found herself absorbed into the group, the men seeming to accept her protection as part of their mission.

"Let's get out of here," Corrine said.

"It's a lot safer with these dudes," Ace said. "Situation like this—you on your own, you're just meat."

The would-be juggernaut lurched west in search of a target, competing voices calling out prospective destinations and plans. Corrine was so cold and dazed she could hardly interpret the noise around her. She kept smelling gasoline. Suddenly there was a focused burst of energy, a hush falling over the group as they arrived in front of a seemingly abandoned building, the door of which had been replaced by a crude steel panel. One of the men walked up and pounded on it; the man who opened it was knocked down, and within a moment the group was surging up the dark, narrow staircase.

She found herself in a small room furnished only with a filthy bathtub and loose cushions. A sharp medicinal odor made her eyes tear. Three of the men had pinioned a fat white man wearing a Billy Idol T-shirt against the wall, while two black teenagers stood cowering beside another steel door. As Corrine watched, a panel on the door slid open. The leader of their merry band rushed forward and slammed a pipe into the opening. Others surged forward, obscuring her view, the smell of gasoline overpowering the other, unfamiliar smell. A flame sprouted from the neck of a wine bottle, and then, suddenly, the flow of movement was reversed as she heard a hollow thump that sent them tumbling back down the stairs and out into the street, the men howling and whooping as they ran, Ace still pulling her along, his eyes glazed.

After that she saw a pink-haired kid in a black leather jacket knocked to the ground and kicked silly, a car set on fire, starbursts of shattering glass. As they looted a
bodega,
someone shouted that he had cornered a mountain lion in the adjacent lot. The mob flowed toward this promising rumor. Ace drew her up near the front of the pack; standing on her toes she saw a feline cowering in the corner between the brick wall and the chain-link fence, emaciated and filthy, its spots just barely visible in the torchlight. "It's an ocelot," she said, not certain how she knew. For a moment all were silent. Then someone hurled a stick, and the men raced after the cat with their clubs, Corrine screaming.

Ace carried her off as someone shouted "Cops!" The two of them broke into a run down Avenue C to Houston, where Corrine flagged a cab, almost unable to believe that this minor article of the social contract had survived intact.

"My God, we were almost killed," she said to the cabbie. She needed a witness, someone from the real world to tell her she was not crazy.

"Where to," he inquired blandly.

Corrine gave the address of her building. Ace put his arm around her, but she could not stop shivering. There was blood on the sleeve of her shirt. She was afraid to be alone after what she'd seen, and afraid that no one else would believe her if she tried to describe it.

Ace followed her up to her apartment and watched TV while she took a shower. When she came out of the bathroom he stood up and put his arms around her. She hugged him briefly but tried to extract herself when he forced his knee between her legs.

"What's the matter?" he said. "You can't deal with a black man?"

Corrine was unable to speak. Fear had made her mute, but she was determined not to show it. "A black
homeless
man. You come down the Bowery twice a week and serve up some fucking stew doing that charity thing, then get on back to your nice little white girl life?"

"It's not—" she managed to blurt, but he cut her off.

"I'm tired of white motherfuckers telling me color's got nothing to do with the shit. 'Hey, you negroes, we be keeping you down and killing you with dope and locking you up and shit. But it ain't 'cause you a nigger, nigger. Ain't nothing personal.' "

"It's just ... I miss my husband," Corrine said.

Ace pushed her away. She was almost certain he was going to strike her, but suddenly he looked down at the floor and shook his head. "Just for once I want somefhin' nice. You know what I mean?"

He turned and left, slamming the door behind him.

Corrine was astonished to find no mention of the events on the Lower East Side in any of the papers either the next day or the day after, when she noticed, buried in the
Post,
an item about the murder of an alleged crack dealer on East 3rd Street. A mob of disgruntled customers had reportedly poured gasoline in the slot of the reinforced door through which he conducted business, and then matched it, the steel fortress behind the door becoming an oven in which the dealer was incinerated. Three hours later, according to the police, the walls were still glowing red in spots.

She went to the mission a few nights later, but Ace didn't appear. The following night he was standing across the street from her apartment when she returned from work. She started to walk toward him, but something in his expression made her retreat. He did not attempt to follow her inside or speak to her, and she was too frightened to say anything herself. He was still there an hour later. She called Jeff, but by the time he showed up Ace was gone. Several months later someone at the mission claimed he was dead. "It was the AIDS got him," the man said; at any rate she never saw him again.

47

Russell and Corrine talked almost every night, though he was careful not to inquire too closely into her affairs or her feelings. Still angry, he didn't know what he wanted from her or how the damage to their marriage might be repaired, and so he waited for something to happen, as if for a new drug to be invented that would heal this particular disease of the heart, in the meantime treating their marriage as one would treat a patient in critical condition, for whom any strenuous exertion might prove fatal.

He sensed that she was angry, too. Usually they confined their conversation to the concrete details of financial and minor social matters. They had to decide whether to sublet the apartment; Corrine had taken the studio in Chelsea and refused to move back into the old place with its memories. She and her lawyer had finally been reasonably satisfied that Russell had not stashed away heaps of loot, but the legal expenses entailed in proving that he was broke had pushed him even further into debt and added an entirely new constraint to their communication; suddenly there was a structure of officiai censorship between the damaged channels of their hearts. And Russell, when he stopped to think about it—when he received a lawyer's bill, for instance—was furious at Corrine for having put things on this legal footing.

He was making more money than before, but Corrine's new internship paid a token salary and he still faced litigation with regard to the collapsed Corbin, Dern deal. Bernard Melman had come back with a lower, refinanced offer; he had sold off several divisions in advance and enlisted Harold and some of the old management to run the firm. Donald Parker was an editorial consultant. The upshot of Russell's takeover attempt was that Corbin, Dern had been cut up into pieces, thirty or forty people had lost their jobs, and a man who was already too rich had turned a ridiculous profit. Whitlock had taken a job at Random House, and Trina was said to be specializing in something called turnaround—restructuring deals that had gone sour.

For Russell and Corrine, the apparatus of a joint life remained intact until they were prepared to dismantle it actively; forwarded bills, invitations and postcards from those corners of the world to which news of their domestic strife had not penetrated continued to require their attention. Their joint checking and savings accounts needed to be fed. Almost daily they were confronted with small questions that required consultation and allowed them to avoid the larger ones. They had to decide what to do about the house in St. Barts, on which they had made a deposit for the first week of March.

"I don't think I can get away," said Russell. "Maybe we should just swallow the loss."

"I sent my sister a birthday present from both of us," Corrine said one night in February, a week before Valentine's Day. "A little brooch from the twenties I found in that thrift shop on First Avenue. It was only twenty dollars," she said, as if concerned that he would think her unthrifty. "I signed the card from both of us."

Russell had heard about the brooch two nights before, and though he still was not sure what a brooch was, he said, "How is Hilary?"

"She's fine. She sends her love. How's your dad?"

"He's all right, I guess. I'm a little worried. As far as I can tell he just sits around the house all day. I don't think this retirement deal is his idea of fun."

"You know, we still haven't gotten Colin and Anne a wedding present. "

In this way they took pains to assure each other that nothing had really changed, that it was perfectly normal to be conducting a marriage at a distance of three thousand miles.

Like a diligent student, Russell attempted to learn everything he could about the business. Where he might once have believed that this discipline was not worthy of serious study, he now found satisfaction in the very notion of humbling himself. Old habits dying hard, he read screenplays and books about cinema. He also attended every screening to which he was invited, and haunted the theaters in Westwood, where he could watch new movies in the company of the youthful audiences for whom they were intended.

On the one hand he felt he had no right to his snobbery, and on the other he never let go of it, telling himself that, having failed at a higher calling, he deserved no better. Like so many before him, he had come to Los Angeles to start fresh, to reinvent himself, but he carried his past with him in such a way that he could not help sometimes revealing himself not as the eager immigrant but as a jaded exile.

If occasionally he couldn't help disparaging his environment, he was often embarrassed by the large salary he received despite his relative ignorance. Then there were days when he would drive to a meeting with the top down believing himself lucky to be where he was and even lucky to be alive.

At lunch with a famous young actor, he could feel jadedly superior to the gawking diners—not, he told himself, because he was impressed with himself for lunching with the actor, but because he believed that unlike them he could take it or leave it. It was just business. And it was something to tell Corrine, for a hoot, precisely because she wouldn't be impressed, either, and they could both look down on the culture at large.